The room was spacious, freshly painted and even featured a small balcony with potted plants, overlooking the Via Nova, one of the few streets in Rome wide enough for two-way wheeled traffic.
Zeno walked out onto the balcony, leaned on the handrail and surveyed the street below. "Do you know what is missing?" he said.
"What?" Izates asked. "I mean, what besides culture, beauty and learning?"
"Everywhere we've gone since we arrived in Italy there have been soldiers. I've seen none since we entered Rome."
"Armed soldiers are forbidden to enter the city," Gorgas informed them. "Even a general in command of troops has to stay outside the city walls. When the Senate must confer with the military, they have to meet in one of the temples outside the walls."
"That is a wise policy," Izates conceded. "I suppose that even the Romans must have good ideas upon occasion."
"I noticed some fairly grand temples standing just without the city walls," Zeno said. "Most cities have their finest temples in prominent places."
"It's another Roman thing," Gorgas said. "Certain of their gods are what the Romans call 'extramural.' That means they have all their temples and shrines outside the walls. Mars is one of them. He's their war god, sort of like Ares, except he's also an agricultural deity. His great festival is called the Martialis and it's actually a harvest festival, having nothing to do with battle."
"I can see that Roman religion must be a study that will require its own volume," Zeno said.
"Why bother?" Izates asked.
After a leisurely meal they walked out to see the sights. Just off the northernmost corner of the Forum they came to a rather modest brick building. The only thing fine about it was a handsome marble stair and portico with pillars in the severe Doric style. They might have passed it by without another glance, but Gorgas informed them that this was one of the most important landmarks in Rome.
"It's the Curia, where the Senate meets."
"There!" Zeno said, gesturing toward the unassuming facade. "Does that satisfy you? This is where the Romans have held their most important, most solemn debates. This is where their consuls have been entrusted with the powers of war, where policies of diplomacy and foreign relations have been fashioned, yet it is as plain as a Spartan barracks."
"Not what one would have expected," Izates admitted. "Let's take a closer look."
They walked toward the Curia and as they did Zeno declaimed, "A visitor once described the Roman Senate as an 'assembly of kings.' Their dignity and assurance was famed the world over. It is the quality the Romans called gravitas, meaning a great and profound seriousness. I will-" As they drew nearer, his words tapered off.
"That's more like it," Izates said, grinning at the sounds coming from within the Curia. They carried no impression of the solemn debate of an assembly of kings.
It sounded like there was a street brawl going on inside.
CHAPTER TWO
"Scipio is a traitor!" shouted a red-faced senator. "He directed the defense of Alexandria when a Roman force was a part of the army besieging the city! He must be recalled and tried for treason!"
Another senator rushed over and shook a fist in the man's face. "That besieging army was led by the king of Carthage! Is a Roman a traitor for fighting Carthage? That alliance was never anything but a sham, anyway! It was done only to get intelligence of Hamilcar s army and tactics."
"Scipio was never given permission to open relations with Egypt, much less to frolic with the Egyptian queen and take charge of her army!" yelled a senator whose blond hair proclaimed his northern ancestry. "He wants to be a king in his own right!"
The uproar threatened to break into open violence until the presiding consul ordered the lictors to separate all the belligerents and restore order. When matters had settled a bit, he stood. The consul was a soldierly, fierce-faced man named Quintus Cornelius Scipio and the person being charged with treason was his son.
"Conscript fathers," he began, "this bickering is unseemly and advances our cause not at all. I remind you that my son was given a far-ranging commission with wide powers of discretion. If his methods have been unorthodox, does any man here deny that the reports he has sent to us have been invaluable? Has he not given us the city of Carthage as if we had built it ourselves?" He gestured toward the detailed model of the city that occupied a corner of the curia, constructed according to the reports and drawings of the expedition young Scipio had led. "Furthermore," here he glared around him at the assembled senators, "does any man here dare say that a Scipio has ever betrayed Rome? if so, I stand ready to lay down my imperium and meet that man, or those men, on the Field of Mars, on horseback or afoot, with sword, spear and dagger."
Amid the uneasy silence an older man stood. He was Publius Gabinius, the princeps senatus, empowered to speak first on all matters. "Gentlemen," he said calmly, "are we primitive tribesmen, to resort to arms over matters of personal honor? The gods forbid it! We are the Senate of Rome and we have raised ourselves to mastery over other nations because we prize reasoned debate, intelligent planning, compromise and discipline above brute ferocity. Rome is now embarked upon a campaign of unprecedented magnitude. Now is not the time for such unseemliness. Moderate your tone or I may be forced to expel some of you." He gazed around him, waiting for the proper moment. "And let me remind you that the Princess Selene is not queen of Egypt but merely the sister of the boy-king Ptolemy. Egypt is a nation with which Rome has no cause for hostility. In fact, as the implacable enemy of Carthage, we should seek alliance with that country."
Another senator stood. "Nonetheless, Honored Princeps, the fact remains that four of our legions are now lost somewhere in Egypt, and we can ill afford such a loss at this time."
"They are not lost, just missing," Gabinius said, hiding his own misgivings. "That force is led by the son of our other consul. Let us hear his thoughts on this matter."
"I yield the floor to my colleague," the Consul Scipio said, resuming his seat on his curule chair.
The Consul Titus Norbanus, elder of that name, stood. "That my son is in command of the missing expedition is of no consequence. A Roman soldier serves his country, without regard to parentage or family affiliation, and the highest officer is no more sacred than the commonest legionary."
There were many shouts of approval for this patriotic sentiment, and the Princeps Gabinius smiled and nodded cynically, thinking: He neatly sidesteps the fact that his boy got the command without ever having held a higher office, as the constitution requires.
"And while I cannot approve of young Scipio's actions in Alexandria," Norbanus went on, "the fact remains that those legions were stranded in Egypt when we, the Senate, meeting in this very chamber, voted to invade Sicily, thus declaring war upon Carthage."
As if in answer to a plea for an omen, the sound of clattering hoofbeats from without silenced even the low murmur in the room. A horse galloping across the Forum could mean only one thing: an army messenger with important dispatches.
"Clear the doorway, there!" called the princeps. Immediately, lictors made a pathway from the door to the consuls' podium. The hoofbeats ceased, and moments later a man in military belt, tunic and boots, travel-stained and exhausted, strode in. Looking neither right nor left, he went to the consuls' podium and held out a bronze tube.
"Dispatches for the honored Senate from the Proconsul Norbanus."
The presiding consul waved it away. "My colleague should read this first."
Norbanus took the message tube, forcing his hands to be steady. He examined the seal, then broke it and twisted the cap off the tube. He withdrew some sheets of Egyptian papyrus, unrolled them and began to read.