by Augustus?”
Jack nodded. “Pretty good for an Egyptologist. I remember your boyhood passion was the Roman army in Germany. But this wasn’t Augustus as emperor. He raised the legion in his earlier guise as Octavian, adoptive successor of Julius Caesar. The Fifteenth Apollinaris that he raised dates from 41 BC, soon after Caesar’s assassination. That’s twelve years after the Battle of Carrhae. Over the next three centuries it spent a lot of its time in the eastern frontiers of the empire fighting the Parthians. One theory has the inscription carved by a legionary captured by the Parthians and used as a border guard, on the far eastern edge of the Parthian Empire.”
“But?” Costas said.
“I’ve never bought the idea of prisoners of war being used as border guards, let alone one of them making an inscription. Katya and I brainstormed it one day walking the walls of Merv, and came up with another hypothesis. This line from the Periplus gives it just that little bit more weight.”
“Spill it, Jack.”
“At the time of Crassus, most legions were raised for specific campaigns and usually disbanded after six years. We know very few of these legions by number or name, and the same numbers might be used repeatedly. Plutarch and Dio Cassius, the main sources for Carrhae, don’t tell us the names of the legions involved. But already a few legions were gaining legendary status, the legions that had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul and Britain in the years before Carrhae. Several of those legions survived to become the most famous of the Imperial army, cherished by Augustus because of their association with Caesar. The Seventh Claudia, the Eighth Augusta, the Tenth Gemina.”
“You’re suggesting the Fifteenth was one of these?”
“The Fifteenth was founded in 41 BC, right? That’s only a couple of years after Caesar was assassinated. The young Octavian was trying to consolidate his strength, and anything that harked back to his illustrious father was seized upon. The historians tell us that a thousand of the cavalry at Carrhae were veterans of Caesar’s campaigns. Why not one of the legions too? Our theory is that the Fifteenth Apollinaris wasn’t founded in 41 BC, it was re founded. We’re suggesting that Octavian deliberately reconstituted one of Caesar’s revered legions, one that had been shamefully lost by the incompetence of Crassus. It would have been a massive show of confidence and of reverence for past glory, exactly the kind of thing Octavian would have done.”
“Not so glorious for the surviving legionaries, chained up in Merv,” Costas said. “It would have written them off.”
“It was too late for them anyway,” Hiebermeyer said. “Even if people knew the defeat was caused by the incompetence of Crassus, the survivors still couldn’t hold their heads high. They would already have been marching with the dead, looking forward only to finding death with honor so they could join their brothers-in-arms in Elysium.”
“But you’re suggesting that some escaped prisoner was not above inscribing the name of his legion in a cave on the trek east,” Costas said.
“For the survivors, the name of the legion would still have been their binding force, even with the sacred eagle standard gone.”
“So they were still loyal to Rome.”
“They had fought for themselves, for their comrades, as soldiers always have done. They were proud of being citizen-soldiers, of having civilian professions. They were proud to fight for a commander if they respected him, if he was one among them, primus inter pares. They fought for Caesar. They fought for their families. Whether they would have fought for Rome as an empire is another matter.”
“And the legion?” Costas asked.
“The legion was sacred,” Hiebermeyer replied. “That was where loyalties lay. And within it, the cohort, the century, the contubernium, the squad of ten or twelve men who even called each other br other, frater”
“So losing the eagle was bad, big-time,” Rebecca cut in.
“The worst. A battle they could lose, Crassus they couldn’t care less about. But losing the eagle? A legion that lost its eagle would have been a legion of the dead, never able to show themselves in Rome again. Even to their families.”
“Do you think they fragged him, Crassus?” Costas said.
“Crassus signed his own death warrant as soon as he committed them to battle. They probably would have called it assisted suicide.”
“These men, if they really did survive and escape, must have been the toughest of the tough,” Aysha said.
“There are always a few,” Jack said. “Those who escape execution, who survive the beatings and the torture, who have the mental strength to endure. And some of the legionaries with Crassus were men who had been recruited five years before and fought with Caesar in Gaul. They may have been citizen-soldiers, but they were among the most ruthless killers the world has ever known. Men who killed with the spear, the sword, with their bare hands.”
“And with the legion a hollow memory, there are no checks, no controls,” Costas said.
Jack nodded. “Some of these guys in the late republic saw much more action than the professional legionaries of the empire, and the idea of their civilian lives, their jobs, became a kind of myth. But if you spend your life killing, who knows where the boundaries are? When the time comes, if it ever does, how do you know when to stop being a soldier, and become a citizen again?”
“An age-old problem,” Hiebermeyer murmured.
“If they did escape, word would have passed on the Silk Route,” Jack said. “That was bandit country, but even there the Romans’ reputation would have preceded them. You would not have wanted to encounter these guys.”
“What about the Silk Route?” Costas asked. “Are there any more inscriptions?”
“Katya’s spent the last couple of seasons roaming the mountains and passes of central Asia, searching. A lot of it’s still unexplored territory.”
“And still bandit country,” Hiebermeyer said.
“I seem to remember Katya knows how to use a Kalashnikov,” Costas murmured.
Jack opened his notebook again. “A few months ago she hit pay dirt at a place called Cholpon-Ata, on the western shore of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. That’s hundreds of miles east along the northern Silk Route from the place with the Fifteenth Legion inscription, on the edge of the Tien Shan Mountains and the pass that leads down to the Taklamakan Desert and China. For years now archaeologists have known about this place, a desolate boulder- strewn landscape where there are hundreds, probably thousands of petroglyphs, shallow-cut rock carvings of ibexes, other animals, hunters. Most were carved by Scythian nomads. But it would also have been a staging post along the Silk Route for traders who had survived the trek from the west, and before embarking on boats toward China.”
“How big is the lake?” Rebecca asked.
“It’s the second biggest mountain lake in the world after Lake Titicaca. There are many stories of sunken settlements, of treasure. There’s a lot to be found. The Soviets used the lake as a submarine and torpedo testing site.”
“Can we go?” Rebecca said. “I want to meet Katya.”
Jack smiled. “It’s on the cards. Last year, Katya stumbled across a boulder there that might have an inscription on it. The boulder was almost entirely buried, and the permit for an excavation had only just come through at the time of the conference. She’s out there now.”
“Not alone, I hope,” Aysha said.
“She has Kyrgyz collaboration,” Jack said. “That means one guy and a creaky old tractor, as far as I can tell.”
“You’ve spoken to her recently?” Costas eyed Jack.
“This morning.”
Costas grunted. “So we might be able to join some dots.”
“There’s another thing. A really fascinating idea.”
“Fire away.”
“Well, the dots might not just lead east. They might also throw a curveball south.”
“Map, Jack,” Costas said.
