"We shall see if their lawyers are as formidable as their soldiers."
The road took them first to Tarentum, only two days' travel from Brundisium, a journey that would have taken them at least four on the goat-path roads of Greece. Tarentum had been the Carthaginian capital, heavily fortified, its citadel located on a spit of land jutting into the harbor. Yet the Romans had taken it bloodlessly, moving so swiftly that the lethargic authorities scarcely knew that they had arrived.
Here the Romans had shown they had craft and guile as well as iron discipline, for they had spoken mildly of trade and diplomatic relations while their legions poured through the mountain passes. They had agreed to hire out as mercenaries (they had insisted on calling themselves allies) for Hamilcar's Egyptian war and thus had insinuated their soldiers into the city. Soon they were in control of the gates and the city was theirs.
Interesting as this was, the two paused only long enough to speak with some citizens and take notes, then they proceeded north. The next major town was Vehusia, then Beneventum, then splendid Capua, once capital of beautiful Campania. Here they rested for a few days and admired the graceful town. Campania had the richest farmland in Italy and it swarmed with Roman merchants and officials overseeing the change of ownership. Here they hired a freedman fluent in both Greek and Latin to teach them the rudiments of the Roman language.
Zeno found the language far easier to learn than Persian, its many cognate words proving it to be related to Greek, unlike Syrian or Egyptian or Phoenician. Predictably, Izates grumbled at learning a "barbarian" language, but he learned anyway. A man who grew up on Aramaic and Hebrew, he said, should find a simple-minded language like Latin to be child's play.
The freedman was named Gorgas, and he proved to have an adventurous past. As a boy he had served a Greek merchant who traded in Noricum. In that land he was sold to a Roman family, with whom he lived for a number of years, employed as a clerk. His master, a military tribune, had taken him along on the trek to Italy. The tribune had fallen sick of the. illness common to the marshy parts of Italy and had freed Gorgas in his will.
"My legal name is now Marcus Fulvius Bambalio, same as my former master's," he had explained, "but that's for legal documents and my tombstone. I still go by Gorgas."
They engaged Gorgas to accompany them to Rome and teach them along the way. For the much-traveled former slave this was a mere outing. Along the way Zeno questioned him about Noricum, but the man could not tell him much.
"I worked on a big estate. What I heard was mostly slave gossip. The master's family were important, but not of the highest rank. They were what the Romans call equites. That means they were rich but none of them had ever held office as high as praetor."
"Equites," Zeno said. "The word means 'horseman,' doesn't it?"
"Exactly. Once, it meant someone wealthy enough to bring his own horse and serve in the cavalry when the army was called up. Now it's just a property assessment. But near as I understand it, the equites are as important as the senators in a lot of ways. My master's family served in the lower offices, what they call quaestors and other things. They aren't judges but they form the juries, and a lot of the junior officers in the legions are equites."
"Some of the Greek cities had similar arrangements," Zeno observed to Izates.
"Why does that not surprise me?" Izates said.
"Your manumission," Zeno said, "is that common among Romans?"
"Very. What happened to me is what they call a 'testamentary manumission.' That means being freed in a will. Important Romans will free hundreds of slaves in a will, just to show off how important they are. But Romans free slaves all the time. In fact, only really stupid and unskilled people stay slaves for life. And when we're freed, we have almost full citizenship rights. We just can't hold public office. But our sons can, as long as they weren't born while we were in service."
"Amazing," Zeno said.
Izates cleared his throat. "Actually, my own people have such a custom. Bond servitude is for only seven years. After that, the slave must be freed unless he chooses to remain in bondage."
"I'll bet your freed bondservants don't have full citizen rights," Gorgas said.
Izates shrugged. "Few have that anyway."
"Tell me about Roman citizenship," Zeno said.
In this way they passed their journey from Capua to Rome.
The city lay in a bend of the river Tiber. It was not a great river, and the city itself would not have been impressive had it not been for the frenetic level of activity to be seen everywhere. On a field northwest of the city walls troops drilled to the snarl of trumpets. The sounds of hammer, saw and chisel could be heard in all directions. Outside the walls large farmhouses were under construction. Slave gangs worked on roads, bridges and aqueducts.