It gave Gabinius much to think about as they all trooped up the winding Clivus Capitolinus, past the restored Archive, up to the crest of the Capitoline Hill. First the lictors with their fasces, preceding the senior magistrates—the consuls and the praetors—followed by the lesser officials, the priests, then the rest of the Senate, and last of all the great mass of citizens.
As they stood upon the great terrace before the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Gabinius pondered upon this new phenomenon: the Roman warlord. For that was what they were, he knew. The younger Titus Norbanus with his fanatically loyal soldiers—men loyal to Norbanus himself rather than to Rome. His father, now with the other great military command, leading the new family bloc in the Senate and the assemblies and now sure to woo the Italian communities as they gained limited citizenship rights through military service. There was justice in that, Gabinius knew. It was the bullheaded members of his own peers, the old families, who were so stubbornly prejudiced against the Italians, as if a dispute between great-grandfathers had the same immediacy as the present war with Carthage.
And then there was young Scipio, who had no Roman soldiers at his command, but who was a potent force nonetheless. Gabinius had a great fondness for young Scipio and that whole remarkable, irascible family, but the boy was making his own foreign policy in Egypt and playing some dangerous game with the Princess Selene. And that redoubtable woman was playing manipulative games of her own. Word had long come back to Rome, whispered by his many enemies, of Scipio's dalliance with the Egyptian princess. There were strange stories of statues erected in villages and cities all up and down the Nile—statues of Marcus Scipio adorned with the curling ram's horns of Zeus-Ammon. These were attributes of divine kingship.
Alexander the Great had had just such statues erected to himself, to remind people of his divine and royal status.
A Roman god-king? The idea was unthinkable! What had the boy got himself into? But the position of young Norbanus was far more worrying. As he looked about him, Gabinius could see how the people's faces lit up at mention of Norbanus, how they spoke that name with near reverence. He was acquiring something close to divine regard.
Gabinius tried to puzzle it out. Perhaps there was no explaining such things. The boy had come out of nowhere and wangled himself an unearned army command. He had performed a truly remarkable march that was little more than a plundering expedition, meddling in the affairs of Eastern kings. He had fought a cleverly managed battle and turned in a victory. And now the people thought he was a son of Mars. Men who had campaigned hard all their lives, fought in many battles, won greater victories and saved the Romans from dangers far greater, simply had not won such adulation from the citizens.
Young Norbanus, he knew, had some gift. It was a thing some men had and it could not be explained. It was something that made men want to serve him loyally, made others want to worship him, made them regard him as something more than human, whatever his real deserts. Alexander had had such a gift. The Macedonian golden boy had taken the superb army forged by his father and attacked the rotten, tottering old Persian Empire, and it fell into his hands like overripe fruit. He'd fought a few battles with the incredibly inept Darius and gained half the world, then had gone on a pointless march all the way to India, taking land he hadn't a prayer of governing. He'd acted like a drunken fool and murdered close friends, and in the end his own once fanatically loyal soldiers rebelled. Now, more than two hundred years later, men still worshipped him as a god.
For generations we fought Gauls and Germans to carve for ourselves an empire in the North, Gabinius thought. For all those generations we brooded on the insult Carthage had done us and plotted our return. All we thought about was defeating barbarians and destroying Carthage. How ironic that now, on the verge of victory against all our foreign enemies and regaining our old empire on the Middle Sea, we should discover that the real threat, the real enemy, is Roman.
Marcus Scipio studied the map he had ordered made. It depicted the whole world around the Middle Sea and what was known of the lands farther east: India and the land of the Silk People and the islands rumored to lie beyond. It showed Arabia and the land mass of Africa down to coastal Punt. It even had the legendary Tin Isles to the north. He had wanted a large map, perhaps ten feet wide and covering a wall. Selene had had it made in the typically overdone Alexandrian fashion, covering a floor fifty feet by one hundred feet, everything inlaid in mosaic. It was so large that he needed a platform made so that he could take it in all at once. Just now, though, he didn't need the whole map. He was concentrating on Spain. Spain was where the next great chapter of this epic would unfold. As soon as word of the naval battle had arrived, the artisans had torn up a section of mosaic depicting that part of the sea and created a picture of hundreds of little ships fighting, sinking and burning. The site of the land battle was also marked, with a Roman sword wrapped in laurel.