CHAPTER XXIV
THE MASSACRE
Retrospectively, Cleander is talked of, if at all, chiefly as having been brutish, dull, stupid, venal, avaricious and cruel. Cruel and avaricious he certainly became; venal and brutish he certainly seemed; but dull or stupid I cannot admit that he ever was. Indubitably, at the time of his appointment to be Prefect of the Praetorium, he possessed some qualities fitting him, as he later was, to be entrusted by his self-indulgent master with the administration of the whole Empire. Certainly he was quick- thinking, prompt, ingenious, incredibly persuasive, resolute and ruthless, which qualities go far towards equipping a ruler. Without these characteristics he could not have conceived or adopted the plan which he successfully executed.
Commodus caught Cleander's eye, nodded to him and sat down. Confident and smiling, Oleander stepped forward to the platform's railing and addressed us.
"As Prefect of the Praetorium, I am charged with the care of the personal safety of our Prince in his Palace, in the City and wherever he may be. Among measures for his personal safety I rate high the maintenance of discipline and loyalty among his frontier garrisons or their reëstablishment if impaired. By his command you are to return speedily whence you came and tell your fellows of the complete success of your mission. I must be sure that your report will satisfy them, that you set out on your return fully satisfied yourselves. Are you satisfied? I ask your senior sergeant to act as spokesman. After he has spoken I shall give all who desire it the opportunity to speak."
Sextius Baculus at once replied that they were not satisfied while the post of Procurator of Illyricum was held by the eldest son of Perennis, or while he held any office, or, in fact, while he was alive.
Cleander, in a loud, far-carrying voice, apprized the entire assemblage of what Baculus had said, and replied to him:
"From now on I am in charge of all matters pertaining to the personal safety of Caesar, including the apprehension and execution of all traitors and potential traitors. You may rely implicitly on me without suggestions from anyone to take all measures which may be necessary in all such cases. In this case you may feel assured that I have already initiated measures which will infallibly lead to the traitor's return to Italy, without any unsettlement of the loyalty of the Illyrian garrisons, to his being quietly arrested and as quietly executed. Are you satisfied?"
The answer was a roar of cheers, roar after roar. When the cheering subsided Cleander, three separate times, urged anyone who wished to speak up. No man spoke. Then he said:
"I am commissioned by Caesar to repeat to you explicitly what he has himself partly expressed to you twice today: his appreciation of your fealty and good intentions, his thanks for your good order on your march from Britain and for your having saved him from unsuspected peril, and his gratitude. But please take note and remember that Caesar specially commissions me to say to you that no similar deputation from Britain or from anywhere else will ever be permitted to reach Rome, to enter Italy or even to set out from the posts assigned to its members. Any attempt at such a deputation will be treated, not as well-meant effort to help our Sovereign, but as sacrilegious rebellion against him.
"Also please note that, whereas he has accepted your advice and acted upon it, any further expression of advice from any of you or any future attempt of any legionaries to advise the Emperor will be regarded as an unbearable act of insolence and presumption and dealt with as such. Caesar commands you to be silent and obey.
"Through me he notifies you that your stay at Rome is to be short, that you are, within a few days, under officers appointed by him, to set out on your return march to your Gallic port, there to reëmbark for Britain, there to guard the frontier or keep order in the provinces. As a preparation, for your return march he bids you rest and feast; and, that all may feast, he has lavishly provided food and wine, which you will find ready at your quarters, and with that provision an ample force of cooks and servitors to prepare and distribute your banquet. Caesar now goes to dine and bids you disperse to dine. I have spoken for Caesar. Obey!"
Less heartily, perhaps, but universally, this haughty speech was responded to by loud, tumultuous and long-lasting cheers. More cheers saluted the Emperor when he stood up and followed him till he had vanished with his retinue, at full gallop. The men even continued to cheer until Cleander's wife and Marcia had entered their gilded carriages and been driven off in the wake of the Imperial cortege.
Our evening meal was truly, as Cleander had called it, a feast and a banquet. When we reached our quarters the food was ready and just ready and our repast began at once. It was calculated, in every particular, to induce gluttonous gorging and guzzling. Before our hunger was really satisfied, before we had more than barely begun to drink the temptingly excellent wine, Agathemer whispered in Greek:
"This banquet is an attempt to make all of us sleep far too soundly. Every man of us will be surfeited with food and fuddled with wine. You and I must be exceptions. Be sure to eat less than you want and to make a mere show of drinking. We must keep awake."
We did, and, in our tent, discussed in whispers our situation.
"North of Nuceria," Agathemer said, "I judged that we should be safer by ourselves than with these fools and rabble, but they kept such close watch on us that the risks of escape were too great. South of Narnia I have judged us better off where we were than if wandering alone. Now whatever the risks of an attempt to escape, whatever the perils we may encounter if we escape, try to escape we must. I have an intuition that this camp is, tonight, the most dangerous spot in all Italy."
We peered out of the tent at intervals; without hindrance or danger, for our tent-mates were utterly asleep. The night was windless and warm. A moon, more than half full, rose about midnight and, as it climbed the sky, shed a pearly light through a veil of mist which deepened and thickened. Near the ground the mist was so thick that it made escape easy, though blundering likely.
We tried to judge our time so as to start a full hour before the first streak of dawn. We traversed unhindered a camp sunk in sleep, where we heard no sound but crapulous snorings. Northward, towards the Mulvian Bridge, we sneaked out into the tomb-lined meadows. Through or above the dense fog we could spy the pinnacles of several vast and ambitious mausoleums glittering in the moon-rays.
We were not a hundred yards from the camp when I dimly perceived ahead of us through the fog something like a wall or stockade about two yards high. A step or two further, at the same moment at which I made out that it was a serried rank of helmetted men, a challenge rang out, sharp and peremptory.
Instantaneously we dropped on our hands and knees and crawled back to camp.
"I told you I had a suspicion that this was a dangerous locality," Agathemer whispered when we had stood up and gotten our breath. "Those were regular infantry of some sort. We can only hope that they are on that side only. Let's try towards Rome."
There, at about the same distance we were similarly challenged.
In camp again Agathemer said:
"Those were Praetorian infantrymen, and they were standing shoulder to shoulder. This looks bad. But I believe in taking every possible chance. Let's try towards the road."
Eastwards also we encountered the like obstacle.
Back we crawled unpursued. As we skurried through the snoring camp, unperceived by the sodden sleepers, Agathemer said, aloud:
"This looks increasingly bad. The Praetorians are standing with interlocked elbows; they look unpleasantly like samples of a complete cordon round the camp. The mounted Praetorians are behind them not two horse-lengths and less than that apart. I divined some sort of troops massed behind the cavalrymen. I feel frightened."
Out we raced towards the broad Tiber, towards it we crept through fog across the meadow. Again we were challenged. The cordon was, apparently, complete.
As we regained the camp Agathemer said:
"If we are to escape alive we need all our craft, and we must be quick."
We sprinted, not to our quarters, but to those of the British veterans.
Into each tent we peered.
Every tent was empty!
Agathemer, plainly, felt in a desperate hurry, yet he took time to glance into the most of the hundred and fifty tents, tearing along past the lines of them. He also took time, after our brief inspection was finished, to pause, get his breath and say:
"This looks worse than bad. I miss my guess if many of these slumberers wake alive. Strip!"
We stripped of everything except our amulet bags.
Then, at full run, stark naked, our unsheathed sheath-knives in our hands, we raced through the fog, now glimmering with the first forehint of coming dawn, along the inner edge of the veterans' tents, till we were opposite the quarters of the tumultuary century formed from the outpourings of the ergastulum, at Nuceria.
Into one of the veterans' tents we went.
"Knife in teeth!" said Agathemer.
The tents were lavishly provided with unsoldierly comforts, a double allowance of blankets and mattresses stuffed with dried reeds or sedge. Motioning me to help, Agathemer doubled a mattress and pressed on it till it lay so. Then he doubled another and set it so that the two were about a yard apart, with their folds towards each other. Another pair he set similarly so that the interval between the folds was over two yards long. Then we roofed the interval, so to speak, with two mattresses laid flat, and laid two more on each of these. Not yet satisfied Agathemer led me out four times to drag in, from the near-by tents, mattresses, two of which we laid lengthwise over the triple mattress-roof, the others we heaped over the end of the roofed tunnel furthest from the opening of the tent.
Then we went outside yet again and cut the ropes of the two adjacent tents and of the one above the pile of mattresses. We threw our knives far away and bunched up the collapsed canvas of that tent so that it formed a sort of continuation of the mattress-roofed tunnel. Then we crawled, feet first, into the tunnel, taking with us two full water-bottles which Agathemer had found in one of the tents and a quarter loaf of bread, left over from the banquet. It smelt appetizing.
We wriggled into the tunnel side by side, until our heads were well under the mattress-roof. We could see out under the huddled, crumpled canvas. Full in our limited view lay, in the middle of the camp street, a fat Nucerian, the outline of his big chest and prominent paunch dimly visible in the increasing light. His gurgling snores were plainly audible.
Agathemer broke off two fragments of the bread and we munched ruminatively.
We had hardly swallowed three mouthfuls when Agathemer exclaimed:
"Just in time! I can hear the arrows already! Listen!"
We listened. I could hear a sound as of hail on roofs. And, just above us, I could hear the arrows plunge into our protecting mound with a swishing, rending thud.
"We ought to be safe," Agathemer whispered. "But we may get skewered even as we are. Volleyed arrows drive deep."
I heard many a volley and, after the first, since I was listening for it, I heard faintly before each volley the deep boom of thousands of powerful bows, twanging all at the same instant.
As the light increased I could see the drunken Nucerian with his hummocky outline emphasized by five feathered arrows planted in his body. He must have been killed by any of the five.
When we saw living men pass across our outlook, their legs looked like those of some sort of foreign auxiliaries. I made the conjecture, from their movements, that they were killing the merely wounded. Certainly, one of them drove his long sword through the prostrate, arrow-skewered Nucerian; and, sometime later, another, with quite a different type of leg-coverings, did the like.
After daylight we saw pass by the legs of many Praetorian infantrymen and of some cavalrymen. From the second hour we saw only legs of some novel sort of regular soldiery whose trappings neither of us could recognize.
It grew hot in our hiding place. We talked in whispers; while talking we seemed more indifferent to the heat.
Agathemer said:
"All this must have been planned beforehand and carefully and very skillfully carried out. It took ingenuity, minutely detailed arrangements and great skill to arrange that banquet so as to get all the tumultuary additions to the deputation surfeited and dead drunk and yet keep the veteran legionaries near enough to being sober to be waked up, marshalled and marched out. And it took amazing eloquence to wheedle their centurions into abandoning their invited associates. The whole thing is a miracle. I can't see through it."
I may interpolate here, what I learned more than four years later, after Cleander's downfall and death and after my return from Africa, that Agathemer's conjectures, as we talked the matter over in our nook, were correct. Perennis had formulated the plan and had prepared for it and given the preliminary orders. His was the policy of allowing the mutineers to march all the way to Rome unhindered. He, without consulting the Emperor and with every care to prevent him from suspecting what was afoot, imported a thousand archers from Crete, and as many mounted bowmen from Numidia, from Mauretania and from Gaetulia. He planned the banquet-feast, he made arrangements for the cordon of Praetorians. The massacre was his idea.
Cleander must have known of all this; he could not, like Commodus, be kept in ignorance. Either before he came to our camp, or, perhaps, in his elation at his rival's ruin and his own success, he adopted the ready plan. Most likely the separation from their fellows of the veteran mutineers was all his own idea; Perennis was not the man to carry out so bold a stroke nor so much as to conceive of it. Indubitably, after dark, the eighteen veteran sergeants were secretly called to a meeting with Cleander. The fellow must have possessed superhuman powers of persuasion. Certainly he made a long speech in which he convinced the leaders of the mutineers that their having associated with themselves tumultuary recruits in Gaul and the liberated inmates of ergastula in Italy was inconsistent with their expressed loyalty to Caesar and the Commonwealth; that by such action, they had gravely imperilled the very existence of the Republic and the safety of their Emperor. He won them over so completely that they acceded, without hesitation, to his dictum that they ought to do all in their power to repair the ill effects of their error of judgment; that the only way was to abandon their associates, to leave them for him to deal with and to march with all speed back to Britain to reassure their fellow- insurgents and reclaim Britain to effective loyalty.
So completely were they under his spell that they returned to their camp, roused their men without waking any of their tumultuary associates, and marched the whole body of veterans, in the night, across the Mulvian Bridge and on all day to a prepared camp near Careiae, where they spent the night. From there they marched in two days the forty-six miles to Cosa; whence they followed the Aurelian road to Marseilles, as we had ridden it, and from there marched across Gaul to Gessoriacum and shipped for Britain, all in half the time in which they had come.
Agathemer and I spent the whole day in our hiding place, suffering terribly from the heat, for the day was hot, muggy and breezeless, so that the still sultry air was stifling. We spared our water-bottles and made their contents last. Our bread we munched relishingly after noon.
Before sunset we were discovered and unearthed by some of the infantry whose trappings were unknown to us. We found out later that they belonged to the newly-enlisted Viarii, cohorts created from picked young men judged agile, alert, intelligent and loyal, to act as a special road-constabulary to deal with robbers and especially with the bands obeying the King of the Highwaymen and with him.
Our captors did not treat us roughly, though they bound our hands behind us effectually. They laughed over our device for escaping the arrows and commented on our cleverness. Our amulet-bags they ignored, being more interested in our brand-marks and scourge-scars. Their sergeant asked us where we were from.
"Do you think it likely," Agathemer laughed, "that we would tell you; can't you read on our backs that, wherever we came from it is the last place on earth we want to go back to?"
The sergeant laughed genially.
"Mark 'em 'unidentified'," he ordered.
They clothed us in tunics innocent of any blood-stains, but which, we felt sure, had been taken from the corpses of our late associates.
"Put 'em with the rest," the sergeant ordered.
With the rest, some three hundred survivors out of more than three thousand tumultuaries, we were herded inside a convoy of constabulary and marched in the dusk and dark to our former camp at Rubrae. There we were liberally fed on what was, apparently, the leavings from the entertainment afforded the mutineers there on their down-march.
Next morning we were lined up and inspected by a superior officer with two orderlies and two secretaries. As he passed down the rank in which Agathemer and I stood he eyed us keenly. After a time he returned and said:
"These two rascals are trying to keep together. Separate them!"
Thereafter I saw no more of Agathemer for over four years.
I do not wish to dwell on my wretchedness, after we were parted. Alone among riffraff, I was very miserable. I mourned for the faithful fellow and knew he mourned for me. I longed for him as keenly as if he had been my twin-brother.
I and my fellows were marched on under close convoy, up the Flaminian
Highway and the batch among which I was, was cast into the ergastulum at
Nuceria.
There I passed a miserable winter. Our prison was not unlike the ergastulum at Placentia; ill-designed, damp, cold, filthy, swarming with vermin and crowded with wretches like myself. I was despondent in my loneliness and found harder to bear my shiverings, my fitful half-sleep in my foul infested bunk, the horrible food, the grinding labor, the stripes and blows and insults of the guards and overseers and the jeers of my inhuman fellow-sufferers. This time I had no chance of becoming cook's- helper or of easing my circumstances in any other manner. I spent the entire winter haggard for sleep, underclad, underfed, overworked, shivering, beaten and abused.
Conditions in that ergastulum were more than amazing. It was so utterly mismanaged that, in fact, very little effective work was done, though the inmates were roused early, set to their tasks before they could really see, lashed all day, given but a very brief rest at noon and released only after dusk. Half the prisoners judiciously directed could have ground twice as much grain. As it was, the superintendent and overseers had far less real authority than a sort of dictator elected or selected or tolerated by the rabble. He had a sort of senate of the six most ruffianly of the prisoners. These seven ruled the ergastulum and their power was effective for overworking and underfeeding, even more than the generality, those whom they disliked, and for diminishing the labors and increasing the rations of their favorites. The existence of this secret government among the rabble was in itself astonishing, its methods yet more so.
Unlike the ergastulum at Placentia the watch at the ergastulum at Nuceria was very lax and haphazard. It was effective at keeping us in; there were but three escapes all winter. But communication with the outside world was fairly easy and was kept up unceasingly. Many of the inmates had friends among the slaves of Nuceria. The gate-guards were so remiss that, daily, one or more outsiders entered our prison and left when they pleased. The henchmen of the dictator even managed to slip out and spend an hour or more where they pleased in the city. This, however, was possible only if they returned soon, for the superintendent was keen on calling us over three times a day.
Through the activities of those inmates who arranged to get out and return, and of their friends who entered and left, since the weighers of the grain and flour were careless and their inspectors negligent, the dictator and his friends drove a regular and profitable trade in stolen flour, which they exchanged for wine, oil, dainties, stolen clothing and such other articles as they desired; they even sold much of it for cash, and not only the dictator but each of the six senators had a hoard of coins, not merely coppers, but broad silver pieces.
In this traffic and its advantages I had no share. In fact, of all his fellows, I think the dictator hated me most; certainly he bullied me, made my lot harder in countless petty ways, and abused and insulted me constantly.
After mid-winter I became aware of a traffic not only in dainties and wine, but in implements and weapons. Many daggers and knives were smuggled into the ergastulum, not a few files. The senators had a small arsenal of old swords, regular infantry swords, rusty but dangerous. Gradually I heard whispers of a plot. The conspirators were to file through the bars of more than one window, plastering up the filed places with filth and earth to conceal the filing, leaving a thread of metal to hold the filed bars in place. Then, when all was ready, they planned to murder the guards, overseers and superintendent, break out, sack the town-arsenal, loot shops and mansions, and then, well-clad and fully armed, take to the mountains and join the bands of the King of the Highwaymen. Two of the senators claimed to have been men of his before their incarceration and promised to lead the rest to the haunts of his brigands.
The date set for their attempt was the fourteenth day before the Kalends of April, a few days before the Vernal Equinox. My gorge rose at the idea of the burning and sacking of Nuceria, even at the slaughter of our cruel guards, overseers and superintendent. The more I thought the matter over the less I liked the prospect. I had every reason to hate the dictator and senators. I saw no likelihood of betterment for myself if I were carried off with these riffraff as one of a band of looters, murderers and outlaws, loose in the forests.
I contrived to disclose the plot to the prison authorities. As a result the ergastulum was entered by the town guards, rigorously searched by the aldermen and their apparitors, under the aldermen's eyes, all the sawn bars, files, knives, daggers and swords discovered, the suspected men tortured till the ring-leaders were identified, the dictator and his senators flogged and manacled, and the management of the ergastulum renovated.
I was conducted from the prison, given a bath, clothed in a clean, warm tunic and cloak, provided with good shoes, abundantly fed and put to sleep in a clean bed in the house of a freedman who watched closely that I did not escape, but did everything to make me comfortable.
The next day the chief alderman of Nuceria interrogated me at the town hall, praised me, declared that I had saved the town many horrors and much damage and loss, and asked me what reward I craved.
I answered, boldly, that what I craved was what all slaves craved: freedom.
He replied that, in his opinion, I had merited manumission; but that I was not the property of the municipality of Nuceria, but of the fiscus; [Footnote: See Note B.] I was, in short, part of the personal property of the Emperor and could be manumitted only by the Emperor, or by one of his legal representatives. Such a manumission would be difficult to arrange and its arrangement would take a long time. He would set to work to try to arrange for it. Meantime, could I not ask some reward within their power to grant?
I at once replied that I desired above all things never to be returned to that ergastulum.
This he promised immediately, saying that recommitment there would be equivalent to a sentence of torture and death, since my late associates, infuriated at my treachery, as they named it, would certainly inflict on me all the torments their malignity could suggest and keep on till I died. He added that he and the other aldermen had never meant to recommit me; deliverance from that ergastulum. they considered part of my reward and that the least part of it. What else did I desire?
"If," said I, "I must remain a slave and, remaining the property of Caesar, must be employed as the administration of the fiscus direct, at least try to arrange that I be employed out of doors far from any town, on a slave farm, or at herding or wood-cutting or charcoal-burning. I have heard that many of Caesar's slave-gangs are busy afield, on farms, or pasture-lands or in the forests."
"That," said the alderman, "will be easy. Afield you shall go—even far afield. Do you like horses? Can you manage horses?"
"I love all animals," I said, "and most particularly horses."
"Then," said the alderman, "I have already in mind the very place for you, where none of your rancorous late associates can ever find you, on an Imperial stock-farm or breeding-ranch in the uplands, among the forested mountains. Would you consider it a reward, would you consider it the fulfillment of your wish to be transferred from our town ergastulum, where you were as an Imperial slave rented out to our city, to such an Imperial estate, where you will be directly under the employees of the fiscus?"
"I certainly should feel rewarded," I said, "by such a transfer."
"In addition," he concluded, "we shall present you with a new tunic and cloak and new shoes, also an extra tunic, and with a purse containing ten silver pieces."