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Back to section ix of this chapter II. Scipio, Rome, 219 - 218 B.C. x Massilia!
Scipio’s maiden voyage into the wider world. He’d never felt his every nerve
quiver so with such unassuageable curiosity. Massilia beckoned to him, full of
exotic promise. Scipio
and Marcus Livius accompanied Scipio’s father and Uncle Gnaeus, who was now
turning the tables of four years ago by serving as his younger brother’s
senior tribune, in practical terms the consul’s most trusted lieutenant, and
nearly a co-equal commander, as they made formal calls upon Massilia’s elected
magistrates and the leading citizens. The Romans found a hearty welcome, with
banqueting and entertainment for several days. All of this was enough like Roman
political socializing that, except for the tangy flavor injected by the
foreignness of the place, Scipio found it only mildly intriguing. Far less so
than the city herself. At
some four hundred years, Massilia was almost as old as Rome. A trading colony
founded in a Celto-Ligurian part of the Gallic coast by the Greek city of
Phocaea, Massilia had grown to dominate trade in the wealth of Spain, though
Carthage had later wrested the silver of Spanish Tartessos away from the
Phocaean Massiliotes and even now still controlled that silver tributary. Having
lost Tartessos, Massilia turned to trade up the Rhodanus in Gaul. She even
founded her own colonies, principally Emporion in northeastern Spain and several
local colonies, among them Citharista, Athenopolis, and Heraclea Caccabaria,
nearer the mouths of the Rhodanus than Massilia—for Massilia’s excellent
harbor and bay lay a day’s sail from those mouths. And she had long been an
ally of Rome. By
this time, the consul’s party knew that Hannibal had crossed the Ebro in
mid-June, where he was busy fighting the Ilergetes and the Indigetes of northern
Spain. At this point, his moves were ominous enough, for he was at the very
least working to conquer most of Spain, a formidable base—though not without
its problems, as he must garrison the newly conquered areas to keep the tribes
in line. The big question on everyone’s mind was: Will he cross the Pyrenees,
and if so, what then? Scipio
agreed completely with his father’s decision to wait and see what happened,
relying on the Massiliotes for most of his intelligence in this place so foreign
to Roman experience. The general quartered his troops in a bustling camp
northeast of the city, where their much-needed training now commenced at the
most rapid pace. These were largely green recruits, salted lightly with
veterans, hurriedly gathered after Publius Scipio handed over his original
legions for service in restive Italian Gaul. They had taken ship almost
immediately after he enrolled them in the army, and only limited kinds of
training had been possible during the short voyage. Now the centurions worked
from dawn to after dusk, drilling their centuries, who labored in the muggy
Quinctilis weather at swords, threw their hastae over and over at straw
targets, ran miles a day with heavy packs and full armor.
Scipio
toiled in their midst, still finding things to learn after years of drills on
the Campus Martius, and finding that even a fit lad such as himself could become
much fitter. The legionaries were allowed limited time off on a rotating basis
that kept the numbers in town at any time manageably small. Uncle Gnaeus oversaw
training for those on duty as well as peacekeeping between the townspeople and
those on liberty. With tight discipline, he kept incidents to an acceptable
level, primarily as a courtesy to their hosts. Scipio
mostly used his free time to explore the city, finding it refreshingly Greek, of
a Massiliote flavor. He visited the temples, those to Artemis and Apollo
especially majestic in their clean lines compared to Rome’s rather cramped and
dowdy houses for the gods. He prowled the heights for the views—the
Mediterranean to the southwest with Spain beyond, and, unseen but ominously
present in the northeast, the Alps. The water reflected broad sheets of almost
painful silver light in late afternoon, yet this was his favorite time. The
river itself, the wide Rhodanus, lay well to the west of the city, the nearest
of her numerous mouths coming to the sea more than thirty miles along the coast,
the farthest seventy. The city herself commanded the eastern shore of a wide
bay, but her port, the Lacydon, lay in a deep harbor running southwest to
northeast inland of the city, entered through a narrow inlet on the city’s
south. But
it was what lay beyond Massilia that pulled at him most strongly. The
farther he looked into the deep north and west, the darker the world became, a
place full of strange, barbarian peoples whose way of life was alien to the one
he knew. His imagination took him far into vast forests thick with great, dark
trees and peopled with wolves and darker, more mysterious creatures. Down long,
narrow aisles his mind flew in shadows. Now out popped a band of pale tribesmen
clad in exotic garments, running in single file, intent on some unguessable
destination, some unknowable errand. Around a bend in the forest path he
encountered a great stag, tossing its massive antlers in the gloom. He shivered
with a sense of foreboding that gripped his heart and stopped his breath. Something
not the fantasy of a beguiled mind was waiting for him out there in the great
dark world. Yet
soon he shook off the depression such thoughts dropped over him and continued
his explorations. But not without a continuing anxiety, almost dread, hanging in
the background of his thoughts. His mood had changed. Perhaps it was the
waiting. Sometimes
Marcus Livius accompanied him on his restless excursions, but if Scipio led
toward the water, Marcus Livius frequently found something else to do. “Does
the sea frighten you, Marcus?” Scipio asked. “No.” “Then
come along today.” “No.
No, thanks.” In
truth, Marcus Livius had found something else to occupy his time. For almost as
long as Scipio had known him, Marcus had dreamed of becoming an orator. Many a
practice speech had Scipio endured. “You
know I want a great career in the law courts, Scipio. I’m not a natural
soldier like you.” “You
handle yourself well on the drill fields, Marcus.” “Well
enough, I suppose. But I don’t dream of battles and triumphs the way you
do.” In
fact, Marcus Livius was in love. Scipio
had seen great public speakers become powerful men, with their ability to sway
juries and equally to move crowds in the Forum. As an advocate, Marcus Livius
might apply his skills to the balance of justice—indeed, a gifted orator could
define justice, at least in a given place and time. As a legislator, he
might win support with honeyed words and bold defenses. Scipio delighted in the
thought that men might come to hear—and see—Marcus speak, standing in awe of
his powers, content to be entertained for hours at a time as he paced before
them declaiming the rightness of his cause. As if he were a famous gladiator at
the Circus. Marcus
Livius was in love with rhetoric, with advocacy, with persuasion. Gifted
in letters as a child, Marcus Livius had sung them out before his tutor, sitting
with his siblings, slate upon his knee, stylus in hand, and unlike his ordinary
brothers, he had reveled in the repetition and drill of his early schooling. In
secondary education, he had committed Homer, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and the few Latin poets to memory and clamored for more. Scipio himself was more
at home on the Field of Mars than in learning by heart the Twelve Tables of the
Roman law, though like Marcus Livius he had been trained in memoria and
could at least hold his own (besides loving the great tales of Greek tragedy
well enough to beat many passages into his skull). But Marcus Livius could often
be found in the Forum studying the more recent laws engraved there on bronze
tablets, enthralled, bursting with exclamations of excited discovery. In
inventio, Marcus Livius excelled at recalling the standard topics of
Aristotle—if you would calm a man, soothe his fear that he is being treated
unjustly, and so on. But he also found himself gifted at finding novel lines of
argument in the events around him and the topics of the day. In collocatio,
he grew skilled at laying out long chains of irrevocable logic to lead his
audience to the conclusion he wished them to draw. In elocutio, he owned
the talent of sweet phrases and a pleasing style, never at a loss for the
precise word. In actio, Marcus Livius possessed wonderful control over
his facial expressions and physical gestures, and a power over his vocal
registers that made him splendid to hear, even to one such as Scipio who was
normally all but immune to fine words and dramatic gestures. Nor could many
drape a toga as pleasingly as could Marcus Livius, who counted dress almost as
valuable to his cause as deportment. As
if all this were not enough, Marcus Livius now dashed to the house of his
Massilian rhetor, Callisthenes, as soon as he returned to his tent from
the drill fields outside the city. Still dripping sweat, he planted himself at
Callisthenes’ feet and embarked upon as many hours of rapt attention as
Callisthenes was willing to spend before him. “Callisthenes,”
Marcus Livius said adoringly, “you appear to favor a plain style of speaking,
yet I note that some of the orators of whom you speak with admiration are known
widely for the ornateness of their speech. How would you resolve such a
discrepancy?” And
Callisthenes, a surprisingly jolly fellow with a booming voice and a vastly
capacious quiver of jokes at his disposal, fond too of puns, lifted his cup and
beamed upon this rare gem before him—a student enamored of his subject as much
as of his mentor. For
Marcus Livius was in love with Callisthenes. On
the occasions when Scipio accompanied Marcus Livius at least long enough to pay
quick respects to Callisthenes, the young warrior found the rhetor
fascinating. Callisthenes had been a boxer in his youth, a stocky, once-muscular
man, skilled at delivering stinging jabs and crosses, his knuckles wrapped in
leather. His face—with its respectably large, oft-broken nose below a
thoroughly bald pate and above a generous, smiling mouth surrounded by a small
beard—bore the scars of his early profession, but now it was his verbal
opponents who bore scars. Now it was his tongue that ought to have been wrapped
to soften the sting of its jabs. “Massilia
is a beautiful city, Callisthenes,” Scipio told him one day. “From
what angle, young Roman? Do you see her from above or below the waist?” Scipio
went away grinning, as much because Marcus Livius was in love as because he
relished the little metaphorical nicks and bruises with which he left the old
boxer’s house. No, Marcus Livius was no pederast’s victim, nor was he
addicted to love between men. His was a love of the mind. In
Scipio’s opinion, Marcus Livius’s only serious weakness, as with Scipio’s
brother Lucius—though from time to time Scipio remembered Marcus’s
difficulty aboard ship—was his deep superstition. Faced with a crow on the
windowsill or a “drowned wolf” in the Tiber, Marcus Livius lost his smooth
self-control, his glib tongue, and melted into an incoherent puddle. It was
really comical to watch, and if Scipio were feeling mischievous on a given day,
he could easily dissolve Marcus Livius with a casual remark about the latest
lightning strikes or the nearest fountain running blood. Not that Scipio often
succumbed to this streak in himself, for he valued Marcus Livius deeply and
respected Marcus’s path as much as he knew Marcus respected his own. With
or without Marcus Livius, Scipio spent much of his time wandering the port,
fascinated by the endlessly long docks, resting on massive, weathered pilings,
strong enough to stand up to hard winter storms. A scarlet storefront for an
importer caught his eye. A stack of yellow crates and bales at least ten men
high. Sails in the harbor in white, orange, black, and ten other colors. The
noise of stevedores, of men building or repairing boats. Old, stained, worn
buildings beside new ones sided with raw lumber. The sight of old boats
weathering away in neglect. Swamping the brisk sea air, a few mounds of
malodorous garbage full of dead fish and empty shells. Most
of the Roman fleet stood at anchor outside the harbor, with lighters running
back and forth to carry men and supplies. Soldiers and sailors swarmed ships and
docks. He
wandered, unable to stick with any one thing for long. Was it Hannibal causing
it? Or something else? Scipio
watched as work crews unloaded cargo ships by the hundreds, large and small,
bringing in grain, fine wines, fancy foodstuffs, blocks of marble, and carrying
away amphorae of olive oil, figs, wines, pottery, meat and fish packed in
ice, most of these products either transshipped from elsewhere or brought in
from the Gallic interior. Sometimes
Scipio even pitched in to help when the spirit moved him, unbelievably full of
energy thanks to the drills and physical training he went through on most days.
Toting huge grain sacks or hefty amphorae beside the slaves and
poor freedmen who peopled these crews, he was happy, for the moment distracted
from his unease. Many cargo vessels came and went every day, and the logistics
of managing them and their cargoes fascinated him. He asked questions about
everything he saw, seeking out the harbor master, ships’ masters, tax men, and
dock hands alike, exploring every aspect and cranny of the place. He
drifted through the days, as all the Romans did, working hard, yet suspended in
anticipation of—what? Next section of II. Scipio, Rome, 219 - 218 B.C.
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