Scipio Read online

  SCIPIO

  ROSS LECKIE

  τίζ γὰρ οὓτωζ ὑπάρχει ϕαûλοζ ἢ ῤᾴθνμοζ ὰνθρώπων ὃζ οὐκ ἂν βούλοιτο γνŵναι πŵζ καὶ τίνι γένει πολιτείαζ ἐπικρατηθέν-τα σχεδὸν ἅπαντα τὰ κατὰ τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν οὐχ ὅλοιζ πεν-τήκοντα και τρισὶν ἔτεσιν ὑπὸ μίαν ἀρχὴν ἔπεσε την Ῥωμαίων, ὃ πρότερον οὐχ εὑρίσκεται γεγονόζ;

  Surely no one can be so worthless or apathetic as not to want to know by what means and under what system of government the Romans, in less than fifty-three years [220–167 BC], succeeded in bringing under their rule almost the entire inhabited world, an achievement without parallel in human history?

  POLYBIUS, Histories 1.5

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Forming

  Proving

  Doing

  Epilogue

  Chronology

  PROLOGUE

  The deep drums throbbed as the senators, their togas white, their faces grave, filed past us to their seats. My brother and I stood straight, still, on the platform in the centre of the chamber, looking forward, arms by our sides, in the way we had agreed. I could feel Cato, I could smell him as, last as usual, he approached. I had promised myself not to look at him. But as he passed, I had to meet his eyes. I saw hate in their deadly blue, pure aquamarine – who could doubt his bastard Celtic blood? – under those beetling brows, the low, bald, peasant head.

  Our eyes met, and he sneered. Walking past, he raised the index finger of his right hand. The sign for victory. He thought that he had won.

  The drums stopped. The senators sat down. The voice of Fabius Pulcher, father of the house, rang out. ‘Patres et conscripti, senators of Rome, the trial of the brothers Scipio is resumed.’

  One hundred senators sat in silent rows around us. Behind them, their armour shining, at attention, the soldiers of the senatorial guard ringed the room. Many of them had served me, or my brother. They had fought for me, as I had fought for Rome, in the mountains of Celtiberia and Asia, under far and foreign skies, in the valleys and plains of Gaul and Italy, in the marshes of Macedonia, across Africa’s desert sands.

  I was never beaten. I saved Rome from the vengeance of Hannibal, and Carthage from the vengeance of Rome. I defeated Philip of Macedon, and Antiochus whom they called the Great. I brought honour to my stock. I gave Rome her army. I sought, as had my forefathers beyond men’s memory, to serve the Republic of Rome. Under my hand, Rome has mastered the world. From being a city state, nearly destroyed by Hannibal, Rome has become the city and the world, and all this I gave to her because Rome has been my life, my love, my song.

  Now, those who owe me their very power of speech have used it to impeach me. The people say I am a god, my peers but a man. I know that is what I am. And as a man I feel utterly alone. The injustices of life, the absurdities, buzz in my brain like flies, fetid, black. I have lived life to the full, and now I know the tears of things.

  Fabius stood up. The silence was chilling. The light from the high cupola was strong. I saw, on this last day of our trial, a new adornment of the court. On a low table beside the prosecutor’s lectern sat the voting urn, and before it in neat rows a hundred small tablets of boxwood, covered in wax. On these, in time, my peers would write one letter with styluses: L for libero, acquittal, C for condemno, condemnation – two lives to be determined by two letters.

  ‘Senators,’ Fabius called out. ‘What is the charge today, and who brings it?’

  Cato moved with his crab-like limp from the benches to a lectern on our right. He claims to have been wounded in some war. I did not see him there, and there have been no wars in our lifetime without me. I believe the story that he was, in fact, kicked by a mule. That is how he broke his hip.

  What a runt, I thought. You can hardly see him above the lectern from which he will prosecute his case. That vulgar voice. After all these years in Rome, his accent is still strong.

  ‘The last of the charges, Fathers, is extortion, and I, Marcus Porcius Cato, bring it, on behalf of the Senate and people of Rome.’

  ‘Whom,’ asked Fabius, ‘do you accuse?’

  ‘These two men before you, Lucius Cornelius and Publius Cornelius Scipio – whom,’ he said with contempt, looking straight at me, ‘they call’ – he spat out the word – ‘Africanus.’

  ‘And what penalty do you ask for?’

  ‘From the evidence I have already brought you, Fathers, and from what I will tell you today, there can be only one penalty. That, as the law demands, is death, by strangulation.’

  ‘Very well, begin.’

  That was almost a month ago. We are waiting for judgment, on our bond not to flee from Italy, I here at my villa on the coast at Liternum, my brother at his house in Rome. The bond was the final insult. ‘I have never fled from anything,’ I said. ‘Shall I now flee from Rome?’

  I might hear the verdict tomorrow. It might take months. The Senate must heed the voice of the people. But through almost thirty years as a soldier, I have learnt to live life without fear. By sickness or sword – or strangulation – no one can tell when it will end.

  My brother seeks in wine a black oblivion. My solace is in my farm here, and this account that I am dictating to Bostar, my secretary and my friend. The Senate, or the gods, will take my life from me. But this account they cannot kill. Bostar will copy it when I have finished, and see the copies safe.

  Even without it, I shall not wholly perish. Neither time nor man, not famine, tempest or disease can destroy what I have done. The deeds of Scipio are his marred, magnificent memorial. What you now read is their account. A building up, a breaking down: the life of Scipio before, soon, it is time for him to die.

  Forming

  Nostra autem res publica non unius esset ingenio, sed

  multorum, nec una hominis vita, sed aliquot constituta

  saeculis et aetatibus.

  But our state was founded on the genius not of

  one man, but of many; not in one generation,

  but through long years and many lives.

  CICERO, De republica, 11, 1.2

  The leaves are turning now. I see from where I sit how the season, cold, is blighting their veins sere and yellow, passing soon to brown. And so it is with me. I feel age upon me; the ache of damp, of wounds, of long days and short nights, of too much turning in my mind. I feel the weight of memories, calling me from far away. And as I wait for the judgment of the Senate and the people, I feel old and cold and weary.

  The moon grows and dies and comes again, the sun, the grass. Does man grow and die and never come again? I wonder what I have made. Or Hannibal. He forced me to perfect what he meant to destroy. It is said that he’s alive still, in Bithynia. They will send for him; Cato will see to that. But Hannibal will not come. I think only of how much love he must have lost to hate so much.

  Hannibal hated. I have loved. Loved Rome, loved life, loved the beauty to be found in proportion. These thoughts and things console me. Consider, for example, this chair in which I sit. Consider from this the manner of man I Scipio, I Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, am.

  This is no ordinary chair. It is not a simple, unadorned frame of beech from Andalucia. It came from the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicilia, one of the fruits of the sack of that city by my cousin Claudius Marcellus twenty-eight years ago. I was in Celtiberia then. That I missed the siege is one of the few things I regret. They killed Archimedes then, you know. Some damn fool legionary just chopped his head off. He was drawing, apparently, in the sand, and wouldn’t be arrested until he had finished the theorem he was working on.

&nbsp
; What we could have made of that man! For two years he defied Marcellus with his ingenious machines. ‘Give me a firm place to stand on and I will move the earth,’ he said. Well, at Syracuse he invented a huge crane. From behind the city walls, it plucked Marcellus’ galleys from the water. His catapults sank many others. Each time Marcellus moved his ships back, Archimedes adjusted his catapults to throw further.

  Although a mathematician – I have several of his works in my library here – he perfected the science of mechanics. We Romans may take pride in ourselves as mechanics and engineers, but the truth is that this too we learnt from the Greeks.

  My accusers, especially Cato, say that such observations prove me to be a Hellenist, and not a true Roman. That’s nonsense. It should be no insult to be philhellene. At the same time as I acknowledge our debts, I observe that only a people such as ours could have formed of them that which we have made. Yes, our craftsmen could not have made a chair such as this on which I sit, its feet of lions’ heads, its back carved with winged sphinxes, its seat of inlaid ivory and lapis lazuli. But only we have the power, through war, to make a peace. And it is in peace, not war, that painters paint and weavers weave, that poets polish.

  To get this chair to its perfect position I had to move it perhaps two inches forwards before I sat down. I used to remonstrate with Aurio, my body-slave, as I still think of him, though I gave him his freedom many years ago. Each time he cleans this room – I let only him and Bostar come in here – he moves this chair and never puts it back on the right spot.

  ‘Aurio, Aurio, no, no!’ I always used to say to him. ‘Come and sit here yourself.’ And he would come shuffling forward, his eyes fixed on the ground.

  ‘Sit down.’ As usual, he hesitated. ‘Go on! Now, sit the way I do. Yes, back straight. That’s it. Now, look out of the window.’ I always had to move aside for that. Aurio would not look up if, in doing so, he could see me. ‘Aurio, what do you see?’

  ‘I see your garden, master.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but what else? Can you see the quince trees?’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  And each time, so many times, I asked him, ‘And how many can you see?’

  ‘Three, master, three.’

  ‘No, Aurio, no!’

  And Aurio would stand up and move away, sandals shuffling, shuffling across the face of Minerva, the mosaic on the floor. And I would move the chair forwards and sit in it and see. Five quince trees forming a quincunx, where Aurio, the chair too far back, his view blocked by the window-sill, saw only three.

  I gave up this game perhaps a year ago. There are some things that cannot be changed. Now I move my chair myself.

  The quince has always been my favourite tree. Stock from Cydon in Crete, I planted these before me now to mark my fiftieth year. They first flowered three years ago, and soon each day I will see their bursting flowers, creamy white and richly red, through the greyness of the winter’s cold. And then as well there is their fruit, astringent, aromatic, strong. I love a little added to the apple pies that Mulca, my cook here, makes so well. All this from a tree so small. Few men give forth both flower and fruit, and some neither.

  So here it is I sit and look upon my quincunx. I think and dream and I remember. And I dictate to Bostar.

  I love this man. I loved him in his prime and now I love him in his twilight, in his pain and anger, in his shame. Of course I have never told him, never will. Saying something gives it life and death. Besides, love is polymorphic, and language not. Not Latin, anyway. Would ‘amo, I love’ be a description or a definition? Greek has six words for ‘love’. Perhaps I could use the right one, and tell him in Greek. But he would understand.

  I have served Scipio for almost twenty years. I will serve no one else now. I am as old boots, formed to his feet, and I will fit no more. We have lived here at Liternum for two years. In that time, we have been to Rome only for the trial, since which we have resumed our ordered life. Mulca serves breakfast early, warm milk and pastries, fresh bread, cheese and, in season, fruit. She must get up very early, even if she leaves the dough rising as we sleep. I like that thought, of dough rising in the house of Scipio each night as we sleep.

  Until mid-morning, Scipio is with his bailiff, Macro, seeing to the land and often working on it too. I know what he’s going to do when I see what he’s got on. To ride round the estate, he wears a blue cotton shirt, white Gaulish trousers and knee-length doeskin boots. ‘The herms are fine, Bostar,’ he says to me when he gets back from such an outing. Yes, herms, Greek herms. He had them placed, crude statues of strange country gods, at regular intervals round the boundary of the estate.

  We often discuss boundaries. ‘I mark them when and where I can,’ he told me once. ‘That is why I mark my boundaries here. So much cannot be bound.’

  ‘But why place boundaries, Scipio? Everyone knows what’s your land. And your life has hardly known boundaries.’

  ‘Ah, but it has. You must understand, Bostar, that I have only been able to break boundaries when I have known where they were.’

  But he does not only check his herms. He rides round his land to ensure he knows what is going on: which stream is dry, which pastures are green, which orchards need manure. He is keen on manure, Scipio, especially at this time of year. He likes to see the land lying through the winter covered in manure. He threatens to write a treatise on dung. I can think of other subjects more worthy of his pen. Anyway, will he have time? We may hear the judgment any day.

  But if only others were like him, there would be less trouble ahead. Too many patrician Romans exploit their land. They increase rents; they terrorise their tenants and neither know nor care whether their farms are growing millet or maize – so long as it pays.

  Scipio is different. He is very interested in agriculture and, when he returns, always tells me what’s going on. ‘Stone-clearing in the Quintucia fields today, Bostar,’ or ‘The wheat’s lodged in the night. There must have been heavy rain, but I didn’t hear it,’ or ‘The cowherd Stultus is down with a fever. I’ll send Aurio to him.’ And then, with these mundanities around us and behind us, knowing that the rhythm of the land goes on, unchanging, Scipio sits down in the chair where he is now and, in time, begins.

  I sit at this table behind him. I always have at least ten tablets ready, and spare styluses. I have perfected a system of shorthand of which I am proud. I call it tachygraphy, but Scipio thinks I should re-name it brachygraphy from the Greek brachus for short, as opposed to tachus for swift: that’s the sort of word-game we enjoy. Anyway, whatever it’s called it allows me to record Scipio at the same speed as he speaks. I must write an account of my system. Soon, soon.

  For a while, we each sit alone with our thoughts. Aurio brings marjoram tea, sweetened with a little honey from the beehives on the hills where the wild thyme grows. Then for two hours or more, without interruption until the midday meal, Scipio dictates and I record, record the life of Scipio.

  In the afternoons, I transcribe my notes. Later, not from notes but from my memory, I add what I have known and, at times, I record the present, not just the past. The two are one and form, of course, our future. This is an account, then, of two lives in one, two pasts, two presents. I shall let the two merge and mingle, like the shifting sea.

  I can see the sea here in Liternum. I have always loved to look at the sea. Perhaps it was my childhood, the winter storms breaking on our door and walls. And I would get up, shivering in my blanket, and slip out and stand and watch and feel and hear the crashing of the waves’ undying beating on the beach. In the sea are all the colours, green and blue and black and red and grey. I have seen in it vermilion, ochre, jade. In it are all emotions, the rising and the settled and the spent. I have heard the sea whisper like lovers and roar like lions, caress the land, attack. In the sea all these things are one as they have been at times, I thought, in Hannibal. I can see the sea again now. As boy, so old man, one who has served two men who tried to change the world and found the world to have a
balance of its own.

  And so I move now to my memories. I shall begin with those of things that happened long before I first met Scipio, or served him. When I can, I shall continue them. In recording Scipio’s life, I shall perhaps account also for mine.

  I stood until I saw his ship slip out of sight, until my arm, raised, palm held out in valediction, benefaction, ached and shook and I could hold it up no more. And then I sat where I had stood upon a beach in Italy and looked out to the sea bearing Hannibal home. Still, he will go on searching until he learns, I thought. Then he will make the final journey and he will ask of the gods a judgment. Who knows what they will say?

  I had joined Hannibal as a mapmaker in Celtiberia, before he crossed the Alps and invaded Italy, almost twenty years ago. Until the hatred in his heart consumed him, I was by his side. Now he had sailed back to Carthage because, unable ever to defeat him in Italy, the Romans had invaded Africa. At last, Hannibal heard from Carthage. They called him home. But where he was going, I knew I could not help him. Only the dead ever see the end of a war. Hannibal had left Italy. I stayed, alone.

  Darkness gathered about me where I sat like a hen with folded wings. There is nothing more gentle than the slow coming of the dark. Man rests. The earth rests. Much renews. Wrapped in my cloak, I lay back and waited for sleep, my thoughts filling with the swelling of the sea. My dreams were of him, as they so often are. That night I dreamed that Hannibal was a meteor, brilliant, coruscating, flaming, not a dull and distant star.

  On the dew of golden morning I walked away, inland, north. I had only my satchel with my maps and some few things inside, and the clothes I wore.