2 The Grass Crown by Chuck Darwin

Author:Chuck Darwin [Darwin, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

While Lucius Caesar licked his wounds in Teanum Sidicinum, Gaius Papius Mutilus In crossed the Volturnus River and then the Calor River. When he reached Nola he was greeted with hysterical joy. The town had managed to overthrow a two-thousand-strong garrison the moment Lucius Caesar left, and proudly showed Mutilus a makeshift prison where the Roman cohorts had been put. It was a small paddock inside the walls where sheep and pigs had been kept before slaughter, now fenced in by a very high stone barricade topped with broken sherds, and patrolled constantly. To keep the Romans docile, said the Nolans, they were only being fed once every eight days, and watered every third day.

"Good!" said Mutilus, pleased. "I'll address them myself."

To deliver his speech he used the wooden platform from which the Nolans threw bread and water to the captives in the mire below. "My name," he shouted, "is Gaius Papius Mutilus! I am a Samnite. And by the end of the year I will be ruling all Italy, including Rome! You don't stand a chance against us. You're weak, worn out, used up. Townspeople overcame you! Now here you are, penned up like the animals which used to be kept in the same place, but crowded in worse than those animals were. Two thousand of you in a paddock that used to hold two hundred pigs. Uncomfortable, isn't it? You're sick. You're hungry. You're thirsty. And I'm here to tell you it's going to get worse. From now on you don't get fed at all, and you'll get water every five days. There is an alternative, however. You can enlist in the legions of Italia. Think it over."

"There's nothing to think over!" cried Lucius Postumius, the garrison commander. "Here we stay!"

Papius climbed down, smiling. "I'll give them sixteen days," he said. "They'll surrender."

Things were going very well for Italia. Gaius Vidacilius had invaded Apulia and found himself in a bloodless theater of war—Larinum, Teanum Apulum, Luceria and Ausculum all joined the Italian cause, their men flocking to enlist in the Italian legions. And when Mutilus reached the coast at Crater Bay, the seaports of Stabiae, Salernum and Surrentum declared for Italy, as well as the river port of Pompeii.

Finding himself the owner of four fleets of warships, Mutilus decided to carry the campaign onto the water by launching an attack upon Neapolis. But Rome had had a great deal more experience at sea. The Roman admiral, Otacilius, successfully beat the Italian ships back to their home ports. Determined not to yield, the Neapolitans stoically beat out the fires caused by Mutilus's bombardment of the waterfront warehouses with oil-soaked, blazing missiles.

In every town where the Italian populace had succeeded in forging an alliance with Italia, the Roman populace was put to death. Among those towns was Nola; Servius Sulpicius Galba's courageous hostess perished with the rest. Even when apprised of this, the starving garrison of Nola held out until Lucius Postumius called a meeting, not a difficult thing to

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