Even as the girl spoke, a group of off-duty soldiers walked in and took a table. The girl went to serve them, smiling brightly. Zeno noted that they did not swagger or speak loudly, but there was nothing diffident in their bearing. They seemed to have perfect self-assurance. They spoke to the girl in halting, broken Greek and spoke among themselves in a language Zeno supposed must be Latin. It lacked the beautiful liquidity of Greek, but he found its hard-edged sound pleasing. Like everything else about the Romans, even the language sounded soldierly.
"Those look like dangerous men," Jzates said, his habitual mockery subdued for once. "They don't have to strut like bullies. They radiate menace as the sun radiates light."
"Very true," Zeno said. He had seen soldiers in many lands, but none like these, who seemed to have been whelped by the very dam of war itself. Something caused the soldiers to laugh, and the sound made both men start slightly.
Ifthe human voice, can sound like swords clashing against shields, Zeno thought, it is in this Roman laugh.
The next morning they set off along the Via Appia, leading a donkey laden with their belongings and provisions. The countryside was beautiful and they passed through well-cultivated fields where sheep and cattle grazed amid a landscape that seemed taken from a pastoral poem. Most impressive, though, was the road itself. Although built more than a hundred years before, it was as solid and perfect as upon the day of its completion. The pavement was of cut stone subtly sloped to drain water. It was perfectly straight and level, with bridges over gorges, viaducts over marshy ground and, every few miles, way stations where travelers could rest and messengers could get fresh mounts. These latter were in the process of restoration and remanning by the Romans.
"What a marvelous road!" Zeno said after they had been on it for most of the morning. "There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. Everywhere else roads are just laid atop the ground if they are paved at all. This is more like the top of a buried wall."
"They learned the art from the Etruscans," Izates said.
Once they had to step off the road as a military detachment marched past, every man in step as if the army were a single animal. Each man carried his own equipment and the army seemed to have only a minimum of noncombatant slaves to manage its heavy gear and animals. Even the slaves wore uniform and marched under military discipline.
"We should have stayed at sea," Izates groused when they stopped at noon. "We could have set ashore within a few miles of Rome instead of walking half the length of Italy."
"That would have meant sailing between Italy and Sicily. Those waters are dangerous now that Rome and Carthage are fighting over the island."
"An unsafe voyage is quicker and easier than this trudging, no matter how fine the road."
Zeno grinned at him. "It is beneath a philosopher's dignity to notice such things."
Izates made another of his rude noises. "I'm a Cynic, not a Stoic."
They could see that the countryside had been arranged in the common Carthaginian style, cut into huge plantations with few farmhouses but many slave barracks. Now, though, numerous surveying teams were at work, apparently dividing the huge tracts into smaller plots.
"Do you think they intend to restore peasant cultivation?" Zeno said.
"If they do, they've a job ahead of them," Izates observed. "There will be endless squabbling over who owns what. And what about the people who own the land now? It won't just be dispossessed Carthaginians."
"We shall see if their lawyers are as formidable as their soldiers."
The road took them first to Tarentum, only two days' travel from Brundisium, a journey that would have taken them at least four on the goat-path roads of Greece. Tarentum had been the Carthaginian capital, heavily fortified, its citadel located on a spit of land jutting into the harbor. Yet the Romans had taken it bloodlessly, moving so swiftly that the lethargic authorities scarcely knew that they had arrived.
Here the Romans had shown they had craft and guile as well as iron discipline, for they had spoken mildly of trade and diplomatic relations while their legions poured through the mountain passes. They had agreed to hire out as mercenaries (they had insisted on calling themselves allies) for Hamilcar's Egyptian war and thus had insinuated their soldiers into the city. Soon they were in control of the gates and the city was theirs.
Interesting as this was, the two paused only long enough to speak with some citizens and take notes, then they proceeded north. The next major town was Vehusia, then Beneventum, then splendid Capua, once capital of beautiful Campania. Here they rested for a few days and admired the graceful town. Campania had the richest farmland in Italy and it swarmed with Roman merchants and officials overseeing the change of ownership. Here they hired a freedman fluent in both Greek and Latin to teach them the rudiments of the Roman language.
Zeno found the language far easier to learn than Persian, its many cognate words proving it to be related to Greek, unlike Syrian or Egyptian or Phoenician. Predictably, Izates grumbled at learning a "barbarian" language, but he learned anyway. A man who grew up on Aramaic and Hebrew, he said, should find a simple-minded language like Latin to be child's play.
The freedman was named Gorgas, and he proved to have an adventurous past. As a boy he had served a Greek merchant who traded in Noricum. In that land he was sold to a Roman family, with whom he lived for a number of years, employed as a clerk. His master, a military tribune, had taken him along on the trek to Italy. The tribune had fallen sick of the. illness common to the marshy parts of Italy and had freed Gorgas in his will.
"My legal name is now Marcus Fulvius Bambalio, same as my former master's," he had explained, "but that's for legal documents and my tombstone. I still go by Gorgas."
They engaged Gorgas to accompany them to Rome and teach them along the way. For the much-traveled former slave this was a mere outing. Along the way Zeno questioned him about Noricum, but the man could not tell him much.
"I worked on a big estate. What I heard was mostly slave gossip. The master's family were important, but not of the highest rank. They were what the Romans call equites. That means they were rich but none of them had ever held office as high as praetor."
"Equites," Zeno said. "The word means 'horseman,' doesn't it?"
"Exactly. Once, it meant someone wealthy enough to bring his own horse and serve in the cavalry when the army was called up. Now it's just a property assessment. But near as I understand it, the equites are as important as the senators in a lot of ways. My master's family served in the lower offices, what they call quaestors and other things. They aren't judges but they form the juries, and a lot of the junior officers in the legions are equites."
"Some of the Greek cities had similar arrangements," Zeno observed to Izates.
"Why does that not surprise me?" Izates said.
"Your manumission," Zeno said, "is that common among Romans?"
"Very. What happened to me is what they call a 'testamentary manumission.' That means being freed in a will. Important Romans will free hundreds of slaves in a will, just to show off how important they are. But Romans free slaves all the time. In fact, only really stupid and unskilled people stay slaves for life. And when we're freed, we have almost full citizenship rights. We just can't hold public office. But our sons can, as long as they weren't born while we were in service."
"Amazing," Zeno said.
Izates cleared his throat. "Actually, my own people have such a custom. Bond servitude is for only seven years. After that, the slave must be freed unless he chooses to remain in bondage."
"I'll bet your freed bondservants don't have full citizen rights," Gorgas said.