I heard Crassus say, in a low voice, "What an opportunity!" Something in his tone made me uneasy.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I mean, here we are, the whole Senate. And there he is, and all around us are his armed troops. He could massacre the lot of us right now and not a thing we could do about it."
"It would certainly be the crowning achievement of an extraordinary career," I said. I spoke flippantly, but the sweat began to spring out on my scalp. Surely, I thought, not even Pompey would be so bold. I would not feel safe until I was back within the walls of Rome. It taught me something else: that Crassus might very well seize such an opportunity, should it ever come his way. I determined that, should he ever be encamped outside the city awaiting a triumph, and should the Senate be summoned to go deliver him the good news, I would beg off on account of a sudden illness.
"The augurs," Hortalus went on when the soldiers were quiet, "will take the omens and determine the will of the gods concerning a propitious day for the triumph."
"No need," Pompey said. He gestured toward his Etruscans. "My haruspices have already worked their art, and they have proclaimed the third day from today to be most pleasing to the gods."
I could see that Hortalus was furious, but he was a man of great experience and knew that he would cut a ridiculous figure trying to argue points of ritual in such a setting, where Pompey had arranged things to emphasize his own majesty. There was no dignified way to argue with such high-handedness, so Hortalus acceded gracefully.
"So shall it be proclaimed in the Forum," he said. Now Pompey rose. "I give you all freedom of my camp, and I invite you to partake of some refreshment with me."
And so we ended up being Pompey's guests for lunch. He had laid out tables under an immense tent-roof, which also sheltered some of the more fragile items destined to grace his triumph: paintings and other works of art, fine furnishings, fabrics, brocades, even models of the besieged cities and forts carved from ivory and shell. The food wasn't bad either. I got pleasantly tipsy since I saw no good reason not to. Happily stuffed, I got up from the table and wandered among the treasures, admiring as always our wonderful Roman talent for acquiring other people's property. Pompey had acquired a good many of the people as well. In one tent were enemy princes and nobles, tastefully fettered in golden chains. Another vast marquee sheltered some of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.
"Scandalous," clucked another senatorial inspector. It was Cato, naturally. "A triumph should not be made into a brothel."
"I don't know," I said. "These look like good stock. Who wants to be surrounded by ugly slaves?"
"Nonsense!" he retorted. "Within ten years half of them will be freed, living in the slums and spawning babies to be a further burden on the state." There was some justice to that. Reluctantly, I left the entrance of the tent. Several Senators were crowding in behind me.
"Come on," I said, "let's go see the elephants." Grumbling, Cato accompanied me. I disliked Cato greatly, but he was fun to have around on such occasions. He had no sense of humor whatever, and that made it easy to insult him without his noticing.
In a nearby field we found score upon score of the immense beasts, with their drivers putting them through their paces. Some were being trained to carry various trophies in procession. Others had platforms erected on their backs, bearing images of the gods. Still others carried small forts, and these were manned with slaves dressed to resemble the enemies Pompey had conquered.
There was another compound, heavily guarded, which held captive warriors. These were fierce men, too dangerous to leave at home and unsuitable for ordinary slave work. Most of them were destined for the arena, where a few of them might win their freedom at the whim of the crowd. Besides the legionaries, wooden towers at intervals around this compound were manned by expert Cretan archers with arrows fitted to their strings.
"Here, at least," Cato proclaimed, "Pompey hasn't let his men get too slack, even though he's had to employ those Cretan hirelings."
"He doesn't have much choice," I said. "Romans are swordsmen and spearmen, not archers."
"Did you see those idle louts as we entered the camp?" Cato all but hissed. "I cannot believe that those were Roman soldiers. I have heard of how slack his legions are, but I never guessed the extent of their indiscipline."
"All the more reason," I said, "that we should prevent him from ever getting command of Roman soldiers again."
Cato nodded. "You are right. In the future, I shall apply myself to blocking his attempts at further military commands." He mused for a while. "And those foreign soothsayers! What he did was an affront to the gods of our ancestors! I suppose it's what you might expect from a man whose father was killed by lightning." I did not argue with this.
As I walked back toward the camp entrance I passed the praetorium and heard voices speaking in a strange language. I thought it probably the conversation of Asiatic slaves and was about to pass on when some half-forgotten familiarity in the sound of the language stopped me. Slowly, I stepped nearer the great tent.
Just within one of the entrances I saw the soothsayers huddled. Theirs was the voices I had heard. I suppose I must have heard Etruscan spoken before, probably in the form of prayers or chants. It was a dying language, but was still spoken in some of the more remote parts of Tuscia. One of the men looked up and caught sight of me. He said something and they all fell silent and glared at me.
I had no idea why they thought I was eavesdropping on their conversation, since nobody on Earth except Etruscans could understand their incomprehensible gibberish. Ill-mannered foreigners. If Pompey was cultivating such as these, he was welcome to them.
With a few other Senators as companions, I walked back to the city. None of them were Pompey's supporters, so I was not constrained in my speech. Everyone agreed that Pompey's arrogance had grown intolerable. Nobody, however, had any good propositions as to what to do about it. After listening to a number of futile suggestions, I decided that our best course was probably that put forth by Cicero: Let time, the absence of promising wars and Pompey's own political ineptitude bring him down.
I had one major apprehension about this policy, though. I feared that Pompey's downfall would probably come about because he would be replaced by men more unscrupulous than he.
It was barely midafternoon when I reached the Forum. There were several hours left before sunset, when I would meet Julia at the Temple of Castor. I wondered what she might have discovered, but that was not the foremost thing on my mind. I was more excited just to be meeting Julia again. Too many women had inserted themselves into my life in recent days: Clodia, Fulvia, even Purpurea. In the company of these mysterious and dangerous women, Julia seemed positively wholesome, even if she was Caesar's niece.
The Forum is always a good place to idle, so I idled. I talked to friends and acquaintances, and got braced by more publicani than I had known to exist. Most of these were angling for public contracts out in the provinces, because virtually all the builders in Rome were going to be engaged for the next couple of years on Pompey's new theater. Not only was the theater itself to be immense, but it was to be but the centerpiece of a veritable minor forum out on the Campus Martius. It would have galleries and gardens, a new voting-compound for the popular assemblies and a Senate house. It seemed that there was a sort of public-works rivalry between Pompey and Lucullus, and the city was doing well out of it. Lucullus, though, gave better parties.
As I ambled around the periphery of the Forum, I came upon one of those crowds that assemble wherever something ghastly has happened. With a sinking heart, I went to investigate. I could already see that they were gathered before a booth, one decorated with fortuneteller's symbols. I pushed my way through the gawkers and into the booth. Inside I found a man in a purple-bordered toga dictating to a pair of secretaries who stood with styluses and wax tablets poised.