She clapped her hands like a child. “Wonderful! They all know you. We can count on their support.” Then she frowned. “But men who’ve spent years in Gaul won’t be in the jury pool.”
“What form is the trial to take?”
“You’re to be tried before the concilium plebis, with a jury of three hundred equites.” Very large juries were the rule at that time. It was thought to be difficult to bribe so many people.
“When?”
“On the third day from this.”
“What? We only found the bugger dead this morning! It’s customary to give an accused man ten days to get his defense together.”
“Do you want to be praetor or not? They could delay the election no longer than that. Conviction or acquittal, the election goes ahead in four days.”
That was that. Nothing to be done about it. “What was the mood of the crowd? Did your sources say?”
“It’s a sideshow to the general spectacle of the elections. You’re a popular man with the plebs and nobody knew Fulvius, so there was no crowd baying for your blood. Some good people spoke up for you, and the ones demanding a trial appealed to hatred of the aristocrats.”
“Running according to form then,” I said, refilling my cup. “What about the Tribune, Manilius? Was he rabble-rousing?”
“From what I heard, he conducted it well, shutting up anyone who spoke too long, putting a quick stop to shouting matches.”
“I wonder which side he’s on,” I said.
“That one is easy,” she said. “Until he proves otherwise, consider him your enemy.”
6
BY MORNING NO LICTORS HAD APpeared to arrest me, so I presumed I was free to go around as I pleased, which I proceeded to do.
That morning featured a new distraction for the citizens, the arrival of Caesar’s men on the Campus Martius. For the moment I was forgotten as everyone flocked out through the northwestern gates to the old drill field to welcome the heroes of Gaul. Being under arms they could not enter the City, but elections were held on the Campus Martius so they didn’t have to.
The field had become greatly built up in the last generation, with the homes and businesses around the Circus Flaminius and Pompey’s theater complex, which was practically a village in itself, but there was still plenty of ground devoted to military drill. By the time I got there, at least two cohorts’ tents were already pitched, and more soldiers were arriving, an endless stream of them coming down the Via Flaminia.
They were veterans and they looked it. Their arms were dingy, their shield covers weather stained, their helmet crests and plumes drooping, their cloaks every shade of red from scarlet to rust brown. But their boots and swords were immaculate, and if their equipment wasn’t spruced up for parade, it was in perfect battle order. They looked supremely competent and dangerous.
I went out through the Fontinalis Gate with a knot of fellow senators I’d joined in the Forum.
“Jupiter protect us!” said one, as we caught sight of them. “I am glad to know that Caesar is still north of the Rubicon!”
For some reason, we never feared a Roman army as long as its general was somewhere else. Caesar’s imperium ended at the Rubicon. If he crossed it, he would be just another citizen. Or so we thought.
A good-sized fair was taking shape on the Campus Martius that morning, as the itinerant vendors and mountebanks descended upon this cornucopia of soldiery, marched all the way from Gaul with their pay in their purses.
The men themselves were from all over Italy and Sicily, from the tip of Calabria to the northern edge of Umbria. They were the men of the villages and countryside, from towns that had borne Roman citizenship for centuries and others whose fathers had been at war with Rome within living memory. Most of them probably had never laid eyes on Rome.
That was getting to be more and more common of late. In Hannibal’s day, the consuls had been able to whistle up ten legions within a day’s march of the City, so densely was Latium peopled with prosperous peasant families. Now we had to scour the whole peninsula for enough men to fill that many legions, and few real Romans served except as officers. Perhaps Caesar was right, and someday we would have to recruit Gauls. If he didn’t kill them all first, that is.
I searched for familiar faces, but in an army so vast I knew only a relative handful of men. Most of my time in Gaul I had spent in command of auxilia or else working in Caesar’s headquarters. The first soldiers to arrive belonged to legions that hadn’t even been in Gaul when I was last there. The war, originally a fairly modest campaign to support our allies and drive the Germans back beyond the Rhenus, had turned into a vast war of conquest that had spread out to reach the obscure island of Britannia.