Aulus was cheered inwardly at the memory of the protest that accusation had set off, with the very people both he and Lucius knew to be the most venal, the loudest in their denials. He recalled the magisterial look on his friend’s face then, one that made him proud of their close association. Lucius appeared his best at moments like these, his eyes alight, face mobile enough to match his rich and varied voice, driving home his point, his tone just the right side of mocking. Privately, he might have become a touch tiresome of late, irritable and impatient even with his close friends and adherents, hardly surprising given the workload he undertook, but when it came to the collective pulse of the Senate, Lucius was the man who could feel and respond to it. Aulus gave special attention to examining the faces of those men he and Lucius rated as allies, those senators who shared their political views, yet had expressed themselves troubled at his friend’s recent imperious behaviour. He wanted to say to those who carped, ‘Observe this, and ask yourself, given this body, the Roman Senate, disparate, fractious with more scoundrels on its benches than upright individuals, could you command it with half the ability of this man?’
‘The task outlined by the Senate,’ Lucius continued, ‘demands no conquest, only that the Celtic-Iberian tribes should be defeated, dispersed and sent back into the mountains from which they came. There is therefore little glory to be garnered on this campaign, only hard fighting and the risk of death. Given that, I demand to know who else would volunteer?’
He was answered only by silence; that he expected from those who supported him. It was his enemies and the uncommitted he was challenging, the latter the key to a majority. Lucius stopped short of calling them cowards, though not very far short. He clinched their support by reminding them that he, in his second term as a reigning consul, had the right to command the army, but, just as he had for the war in Macedonia, he was willing to put aside his claim, as was his junior colleague, to secure a quick victory as well as a return to normality by sending to Spain, as proconsul, the man he trusted most with a military command. Lucius took Aulus’s hand and raised him so that he could consent to the agreement of his peers, knowing his friend would, in humility, stammer his acceptance. The Senate was not the natural arena for Aulus: he liked simple chains of command, orders given and obeyed. Not for him, thought Lucius, the balancing of political weight, or the need to persuade or terrorise a reluctant senator so that he could see where his best interests lay.
Aulus did surprise Lucius by adding one stipulation; that, as he was going to a Roman province with proconsular powers to contain a rebellion, his family, including his young wife, should accompany him. Everyone now looked to the man who had moved the motion to give him the command to see if he would demur. Privately, Lucius had made quite a few salacious jokes about the way that his old friend was smitten, had even secretly admired the pornographic graffiti with which the slum dwellers of Rome were wont to tell their betters what they thought of their actions. Personally he found Claudia gauche and the sight of Aulus drooling over her embarrassing, but he saw no harm in the notion and nodded his assent. After the drubbing the doubters had just received none in the Senate had dared protest at a general taking his family on campaign. In reality forbidden, it seemed a small price to pay to secure his services.
Besides, matters were serious and time was short; these barbarians must be both punished and pushed back, forced to make peace or die. Aulus, once the Senate had approved his appointment, took ship for the southern coast of Gaul to join the four legions, two Roman, the others auxiliaries made up of Italian allies, already marching towards Iberia. Within two weeks he crossed into the province of Hither Spain, accompanied by his sons, the youngest, Titus, riding alongside him, mounted on a small white cob; Claudia was with the baggage train between the two auxiliary legions, comfortable in a litter, surrounded by her husband’s personal bodyguard. Quintus, his eldest son, a year older than Claudia, rode ahead with Nepos, the cavalry legate in command of the advance guard. Within a week they would be in the provincial capital of Saguntum, ready to begin the task of defeating Brennos. At that moment, everything in his life seemed perfect, his happiness unassailable.
Aulus, trusting his horse not to stumble or leave the roadway, closed his eyes tightly as less pleasant memories surfaced, recollections of a truth he had ignored. A slave had stood behind him in his war chariot as, face painted red, dressed in the deep purple toga of a victorious general, he rode down the Via Triumphalis responding to the cheers of the crowd gathered to celebrate his Macedonian victories. The man was there to remind him, by whispering in his ear, that all glory was fleeting: that he needed to beware of the sin of hubris; that the gods would bring low any man who dared to forget he was a mere mortal, that they would not be mocked.
Doing battle with barbarians was very different from engaging the disciplined army of a state like Macedonia. Formal combat, in which he would confront the entire enemy host was not something Aulus expected, despite their numerical superiority. His informants confirmed that the Celt-Iberians, at his approach, had withdrawn from the coastal plain and taken to the hills. This underlined his belief that it would be a war of ambush and raid. He had set himself for a difficult task, with his legions broken up, operating in centuries and cohorts, trying to destroy the means by which the rebels sustained themselves. They would need to be ruthless and cruel, burning villages and destroying pasture and crops, taking hostages and enslaving women and children if the insurrection was to be brought under control. He in turn would need to be tough, to prevent his troops from descending into a rabble, if required, killing some to maintain discipline. Necessary in Macedonia, such measures, in Spain, would be even more indispensable.
That whispering slave who had stood behind him had been right! It was foolish to assume anything in war, to be so sure that his enemies would wait in the hills for him to attack, just as it was unwise to rely upon his reputation to fight his battles for him. His name meant little to the Celt-Iberians and nothing to this Brennos, who was clever, and more powerful than the Romans had imagined. Somehow he had achieved what they thought impossible, the welding together of the notoriously cantankerous Celts into a single fighting unit. He had no intention of leaving Aulus to march peacefully to his base camp, appearing suddenly at the head of a multitude of braying tribesmen to attack an army that had not even begun to pursue him, an army strung out on the march.
By their disordered tactics, really just a melee in which those who could engage did so, the Celt-Iberians had managed to split his forces, separating the auxiliary legions from the Roman troops. With his command structure shattered, disaster threatened, so putting himself at the head of his heavy infantry Aulus had ridden to the rear, cutting his way through, and rallied the Italian allies under his personal command. Now his experience and legionary drill told. Facing them about in copybook fashion, he fought his way back to join the remainder of his Romans so that they could present a united front to their adversaries. Nepos, well to the fore and out of touch with Aulus, had shown both courage and good sense when he declined to force-march his advance guard, which included the legion’s Numidian cavalry, back towards the main body. That would have brought him into contact with a massive screen of tribal warriors waiting to engage him.
Instead he took his cavalry in a great arc, into the very foothills from which this Brennos had attacked, catching the Celt-Iberians unawares. An irresistible charge on their rear, with his son Quintus well to the fore, had broken the order of the attackers. Aulus now formed his whole army into a cohesive whole, ready to advance in any direction and engage, but a loud horn blew twice and the enemy evaporated, with a discipline no Roman fighting a Celtic army had ever encountered, leaving him no one to fight. Worse still, his baggage train had been plundered and in the process he had lost his wife. He had to march past the site of that as he sought to pursue the enemy, forced to gaze on the broken wagons, scattered possessions and the dead from the engagement. His position, the on-going battle and the need to appear in control debarred any notion that he could stop and examine the wreckage to see if the body of Claudia was amongst the dead. Only later, as the sun sank low in the west, was he able to establish that she was gone and that every man in his Praetorian Guard had died trying to defend her. That evening he received private word that she was alive, the personal prisoner of Brennos, who demanded no less than the withdrawal of the Roman legions as the price for her freedom.
That was a bargain he could not even begin to accept. If her life was to be forfeit, then so be it. He called his sons to him, swore them to secrecy, then told them of the demand and of his decision. Quintus, too old to have much attachment to his stepmother, did not even allow himself the flicker of an eyelid as he agreed. Titus, younger, and less the stern Roman, assented with tears in his eyes, but both were obliged to attend the ceremonies that followed, in which the auguries were taken in an attempt to see what the future held, even pious Aulus surprised by the positive signs they revealed.
A despondent Aulus Cornelius had achieved more than he knew. His enemies had anticipated an easy victory and had convinced themselves that they would destroy his army and leave their bones to bleach in the sun. His prompt action in uniting his force, plus the steadfast defence of the legions, had destroyed that illusion, which forced the Celts back to their usual tactics of raid and ambush. Yet this Brennos seemed capable of inspiring the varied tribes to an unprecedented level of resistance and it took two campaigning seasons to bring them to heel. No
