The Roman Traitor, Vol. 2

by Henry William Herbert

Unsupplied with magazines, or any regular supply of provisions, his army like a flight of locusts had stripped the country bare at every halting place, and that wild hill country had few resources, even when shorn by the licentious band of his desperadoes, upon which to support an army. The consequence, therefore, of his incessant hurrying to and fro, was that the valleys of the mountain chain which he had made the theatre of his campaign, were now utterly exhausted; that his beasts of burden were broken down and foundered; and that the line of his march might be traced by the carcasses of mules and horses which had given out by the wayside, and by the flights of carrion birds which hovered in clouds about his rear, prescient of the coming carnage.

His first attempt was to elude Metellus Celer, who had marched down from the Picene district on the Adriatic sea, with great rapidity, and taken post at the foot of the mountains, on the head waters of the streams which flow down into the great plain of the Po.

In this attempt he had been frustrated by the ability of the officer who was opposed to him, who had raised no less than three legions fully equipped for war.

By him every movement of the conspirator was anticipated, and met by some corresponding measure, which rendered it abortive. Nor was it, any longer, difficult for him to penetrate the designs of Catiline, since the peasantry and mountaineers, who had throughout that district been favorable to the conspiracy in the first instance, and who were prepared to favor any design which promised to deliver them from inexorable taxation, had been by this time so unmercifully plundered and harassed by that banditti,[pg 207] that they were now as willing to betray Catiline to the Romans, as they had been desirous before of giving the Romans into his hands at disadvantage.

Fully aware of all these facts, and knowing farther that Antonius had now come up so close to his rear, with a large army, that he was in imminent danger of being surrounded and taken between two fires, the desperate traitor suddenly took the boldest and perhaps the wisest measure.

Wheeling directly round he turned his back toward Gaul, whither he had been marching, and set his face toward the city. Then making three great forced marches he came upon the army of Antonius, as it was in column of march, among the heights above Pistoria, and had there been daylight for the attack when the heads of the consul's cohorts were discovered, it is possible that he might have forced him to fight at disadvantage, and even defeated him.

In that case there would have been no force capable of opposing him on that side Rome, and every probability would have been in favor of his making himself master of the city, a success which would have gone far to insure his triumph.

It was late in the evening, however, when the hostile armies came into presence, each of the other, and on that account, and, perhaps, for another and stronger reason, Catiline determined on foregoing the advantages of a surprise.

Caius Antonius, the consul in command, it must be remembered, had been one of the original confederates in Catiline's first scheme of massacre and conflagration, which had been defeated by the unexpected death of Curius Piso.

Detached from the conspiracy only by Cicero's rare skill, and disinterested cession to him of the rich province of Macedonia, Antonius might therefore justly be supposed unlikely to urge matters to extremities against his quondam comrades; and it was probably in no small degree on this account that Catiline had resolved on trying the chances of battle rather against an old friend, than against an enemy so fixed, and of so resolute patrician principles as Metellus Celer.