The Governor: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S2E13

(60 BCE · Gadir/Gades, Rome, & the Sea Between)

The Narrator sails someone from Further Spain to Rome in under sixteen days. As a result, that man went on to become arguably one of the most famous people who ever lived. 

Based on Chapter 13 of Middle by Geoff Micks.

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

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In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last ice age bought a tape recorder. And over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit, who he believes will finally be the death of him. Hello again, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season two, episode thirteen of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy. I sailed the length and breadth of the Mediterranean over and over again, back and forth, but I never tried to make a home for myself in a humbled Carthage. She went on without me, and among the heavy burdens Rome placed on her was a demand for war reparations of two hundred silver talents a year, every year, for fifty years. Now one talent was roughly sixty pounds, the weight a trained porter is supposed to be able to carry all day across level ground without exhausting himself. Two hundred of those worked out to about six tons of silver a year, every year, for half a century. My people worked hard to pay their debt, and through grit and determination they found a way. This, of course, made the Romans very unhappy. They would have preferred to see their beaten foe crushed and writhing beneath their hobnailed sandals for generations. As the years went on with this extravagant tribute paid on time in full without fail, a Roman politician named Cato, remembered today as Cato the Elder, made a point of ending every speech in the Senate with and furthermore, it is my opinion that Carthage should be destroyed. This was an especially powerful conclusion, when the subject of his speech had nothing whatsoever to do with Carthage. The year after Carthage made her final payment to Rome, Cato's words at last persuaded his countrymen that the time had come. Why should the Carthaginians be allowed to live in peace and prosperity now that there was no more money to be made from them? Rome said to Carthage, Give us three hundred of your most well born children as hostages, and there will be no war. Carthage complied, happy to have peace. Rome then landed an army of eighty thousand at Utica, the rival Phoenician colony just up the coast who had always been jealous of Carthage's success. Now Rome said, Utica tells us you rebuilt your army since we last marched in Africa. This threatens our Utican friends, who we must defend. Give us all your arms and armor, and there will be no war. Well, Carthage certainly surrendered a lot of arms and armor, enough to persuade the Roman generals that the grandchildren of Hannibal were defenseless. Now Rome said, Move all your people half a day's march inland and build a new city away from the sea. This new city must never have a port. When you have done that, we will level old Carthage until not one stone sits upon another. Do this and there will be no war. Well, you can imagine how that went. The city Elishatini built was populated by the greatest sailors and merchants and traders in the world. To be denied access to the sea was worse than death, especially when Rome was clearly not interested in peace at all. So it was war. The war my people called our doom. For three aching years Carthage endured a siege. It ended in six days of hard fighting, as the Romans pushed the starving Carthaginian defenders off their walls, and then block by block back through the city to the sea. In the end, the fifty thousand Carthaginians who survived the fighting, and who were unable to escape by ship were all sold into slavery. The Romans then took seventeen more days to burn every building in Carthage that would burn, tear down every wall still standing, even overturn every gravestone that marked the resting place of the honored dead. When the Romans were done, Carthage was done. The only thing the Romans did not do was salt the earth so nothing would ever grow again. That was a flight of fancy invented a couple of centuries ago by a historian with a touch of the poet about him. No, Rome liked Carthage's farms just fine, and all that arable land became Roman land. Our wheat fed their poor slum dwellers. So be it. I was bitter then, very bitter. Today I can say so be it, but at the time I was so furious with fate that I left the Mediterranean altogether and made my home in the ancient Tyrian colony of Gadir in Spain on the Atlantic coast. Of course, the Romans ruled Carthage's old territories there too, and they did not care for the Phoenician name, so the place came to be called Gades. Today the Spaniards call it Cadiz. Whatever you want to call it, I had owned some property there since the earliest days of the settlement, and I made up my principal home base just as Carthage and Tyre were before. It was the same, but everything was different. The house of Canmi survived, but I was merely rich instead of enjoying the gargantuan wealth and power I had commanded in the heyday of Carthaginian supremacy. So be it. I passed the next hundred years or so as I pleased. I bought tin from the Cornish and copper from the Irish a few times, even though there were easier, cheaper places to do that. I wanted to see what my friend Pythius had seen. I sailed down the African coast as far as the Gulf of Guinea from time to time to buy gold and ivory from the locals there. I wanted to remember my days circumnavigating Africa on Faroonaku's orders. I worked on my recipe for garum. Fish sauce again. There was something about the fish caught off gay deer that was better than anything I had worked with during my time entire. Something about the cold Atlantic waters, perhaps. I did a little horse trading, I did a little money lending. I learned to play the lyre. Mostly I was just bored. This brings us to my next story, I suppose. When did I stop being bored? It is a short episode, but I think about it often. I had sulked for almost a hundred and fifty years after the Battle of Zama ended my time in Carthage, and then one day my friend Balbus came looking for me. Now Balbus was an excellent Phoenician banker, born and raised in Gadir like his father and his father's father's father's father before him. Gadir, or Gades, if I must call it that, was not a big place, and my friend found me just where he expected me to be. I was at my favourite dockside tavern where I could watch the ships and the people come and go all day if I wanted to. I often wanted to in those years of boredom. Ah, Can me, I was hoping I would find you here, he said, coming up to my table. I raised my cup to him in salute. And here I am, Balbus. What a happy coincidence. He frowned at me. How many is that for you? Oh more than a few, less than too many, I joked. I need your advice, Can me, and I need it to be clear headed. I set down my cup and pushed it away. Then you shall have it. Good. You know I've become friends with this year's governor. I agreed that I did. A financier of Balbus's ability made a point of befriending every governor the Romans sent out to us here in further Spain, but this year's governor was better than most. He believed in hiring locals onto his staff, and so Balbus had spent the previous spring and summer serving as a quartermaster general and camp prefect for the governor's campaigns against the Lusitanian hill tribes, both jobs normally given to Roman aristocrats to enrich themselves with. I wonder now how much Balbus feathered his own nest while doing the job. A little graft and corruption was the cost of doing business in those days, just as it is in these ones, and if our prosperous banker had to leave his home for six months to raise an army and fight a small war, who could begrudge him some compensation for his trouble? Anyway, Balbus continued, I am privy to many of the governor's political plans, and I can tell you he has received a letter from Rome that troubles him very deeply. It seems his opponents in Rome have changed the rules for the next election, such that all candidates must be inside the city by the end of the month in their best chalk white togas to declare themselves as candidates in person, or they cannot run. That's sixteen days from now? I asked. My dates often blurred together in those lethargic days. Yes, Balbus agreed in a grave tone. Well, then our governor can't make it in time to stand for consul. Will he get his governorship extended an extra year until the next election then? I asked. It was customary for a governor to serve only for a single year after his term as praetor or consul ended, but exceptions were not unheard of. This current official had come to rule us after serving as praetor. He seemed a more capable chap than most from everything I had heard, so why should he not stick around if he could not make it back to Rome in time to be elected to the next job up the ladder? His enemies in the Senate have changed the rules to try to keep him from becoming consul. They have timed it so he cannot even celebrate a triumph for his war against the Lusitaniae. They're not likely to extend his power here as a consolation prize, are they? No, his term is up in the new year, and with it his immunity from prosecution. Prosecution? I asked. For debts, Balbus explained. Winning the elections that led him to becoming our governor cost him fortunes that were not his own. His family is as old and respected in Rome as yours is in Tyre and Carthage and Gades, but forgive me, like you, the family fortune is all in the past. Every denarius he has spent to climb up through the ranks of Roman public office was borrowed. As an elected official or governor, he cannot be prosecuted for his debts. As soon as he is a private citizen again, the people who want to destroy him will legally declare him a bankrupt, strip him of his citizenship, and banish him. That would see him legally denied fire or water within five hundred miles of Rome. That will be the end of our governor. Now if that seems a little extreme to you, dear listeners, let me tell you that chief among the governor's political enemies was a Roman named Cato, remembered by history as Cato the Younger. The Cato family knew a thing or two about persecuting their enemies over the course of a lifetime, and our governor was the current Cato's enemy. I pulled my wine cup back and looked into it to collect my thoughts. Could you loan him enough to stay afloat? Pay off the creditors for him? I don't have that kind of money. If every banker and merchant in further Spain pooled our resources together, we could not gather enough to keep his head above water. I looked up at that. Exactly how much money does this man owe? I asked. Balbus looked me square in the eye. twenty five million cesirstes, at least. Twenty five million cesursties, I roared my disbelief. Keep your voice down, Baldus hissed, looking around the mostly empty tavern. Twenty five million Cicerstes, I shout whispered my incredulity. A Cicerste was a small silver coin. Four of them made up a denarius, and a skilled worker might expect to be paid one denarius for a full day's work. I was telling you earlier about Carthage paying Rome two hundred talents of silver a year? Well, twenty five million sisters worked out to about thirteen hundred talents of silver. It was a stupefying amount of money. How did any one man accumulate such debt? What kind of man could even get that much money loaned to him, let alone find a way to spend it all? I suppose I must have been gaping like a fish pulled from the water, because Balbus snapped at me. If you're quite done stammering, I came here to ask your advice. I closed my mouth and pushed my drink away again. Well, go on then. How can I help a man who owes twenty five million sisters today? How do I get him to Rome by the end of the month? Balbus asked. Ah, I said, understanding why I was being made privy to this situation at last. Well, go on, then. You're the best sailor in Gades, Canmi. You're as good a sailor as any of the legends of the House of Canmi. I liked when Balvis tried to remind me of the glory days of our Phoenician ancestors. Of course he did not realize that I was all those legendary sailors of the House of Canmi. Still, he had my full attention when he sought to flatter me with my own exploits. I replied Well, it will have to be by ship, obviously. Even with fresh horses every few hours, no one can ride the length of Spain, over the Pyrenees, across southern Gaul, through the Alps, and then halfway down Italy in half a month. Even if by some miracle he could, his legs would be splayed out like a wishbone. No one is going to vote for a candidate who looks like he's about to give birth standing up. Of course, Balbus agreed, not laughing at what I thought was a pretty fair jest. I took my cue from that, and continued seriously. So he needs a ship, a small, fast ship. She would need both oars and sails, and nothing else. Strip her for wait, just enough food and water to keep her rowers going. I trailed off, thinking it through. Balbus nodded to encourage me. He wouldn't have time to hug the coast either. Even sailing around Sardinia or Corsica would be a waste of time. Better to go from the Balerics straight between those two islands, and then try to make landfall in Italy as close to Ostia as possible, I said, naming Rome's port town. Fine. Can it be done? Balbus demanded. Not without the right wind, and this is the wrong time of year for a steady wind out of the west, I said, my tone perhaps too dismissive for my friend's tastes. Well then you will have to pray for luck as you go, Balbus snapped. That surprised me. Wait, you want me to go with him? With you at the steering oar, and the governor aboard, you cannot fail. Our governor is famous for his luck. He is one of Fortuna's favorites, Balbus said, naming the Roman goddess of luck. I remember thinking at the time he was picking up too many foreign customs from his new friends. A Phoenician should invoke the name of Astarte, or Asherah, or Baal, or Melkart. I don't care whose favorite he is, I lied. Why would I leave this tavern and try to make it to Rome in under sixteen days? Balbus put his hands on my shoulders. Can me, you are my friend, and so is this governor. I don't have enough to buy his debts, but I can buy him the best sailor in the city. Name your price, I will not haggle with you. Balbus was my friend too. I named him a fair price, and he smiled his thanks at my kindness, promising me twenty percent more than I had asked. At that price I would have taken the job without a murmur of protest. We grasped forearms and shook on it, and then Balbus settled my tab with a wave of his hand to the bartender. We walked together along the harbour road, examining each ship in turn until we found one I liked, small enough to be fast, but big enough to sail on the open sea for an extended period of time. She had a large square sail, ten oars to a side, and at only two years old her hull was proven without being overly wormed or fouled. Balvas was a man of considerable resources, and I was known as an honest trader and an excellent sailor from a famous old, rich, and respected family. It did not take long to persuade the ship's master to rent us his vessel for two months at a generous rate, with a promise of a new ship if we defaulted on our terms in any way. I quickly hired a crew of experienced rowers and had them make our little ship ready, while Balbus went to tell the governor what we were up to. Before my men and I were done laying in our provisions, the governor and a single servant appeared, each with a simple ditty bag over a shoulder. If I had not already had my sea chest ready and waiting in my home, I could not have packed faster. When do we sail, shipmaster? The governor asked me politely in Fair Phoenician. With the tide, I replied, surprised he spoke our language. He took one look at the breakwater to note the high water mark, and nodded. The man knew something of the sea. That was a rare quality indeed in a Roman aristocrat. Are your crewmen slaves or free men? All Gadatean citizens, I replied. I did not believe in hiring slaves to work an oarbench. Then a miraculous thing happened. The governor took the Diddy bag off his shoulder, handed it to his servant, took a step forward, threw his arms out to either side, and he captured the total attention of every man or woman who could see him. It was like a spell, a magic trick as impressive as anything I had ever seen Deddy do. People froze and turned to better hear what this Roman had to say. I too was mesmerized. Good men of Gades, this voyage we are about to make together matters more to me than my very life. Indeed, my very life depends on our safety and speedy arrival in Rome, a city I love as much as you love Gades. On this journey with you, I will take my turn, rowing as often as you. Eat what you eat, drink what you drink, sleep as little as you sleep. Our hardships we will endure together, and when I get to Rome before next month begins, my joy will be your joy, my happiness will be your happiness. In addition to the generous wage our noble shipmaster has already offered you, I offer a bonus of a hundred silver pieces per man, five hundred for the officers, and while in Rome you will enjoy a great feast in your honor. I will offer a bull upon the altar of the temple of Hercules, which is our name for your great god Melkart. He lowered his arms, and the cheering was immediate, sustained, and heartfelt. In a single short speech, in a language not his own, the governor had made common cause with us and offered us enormous rewards, all while honoring our city and our city's patron god. That was how a leader inspired men. The governor and his servant joined my crew in outfitting the ship, working just as hard as any of us now racing to both earn our bonuses and also to please him. When we put to sea he was as good as his word, rowing as well as any man, leading us in song, a smile ever on his face, a positive energy wrapped around him like an invisible magical cloak. When it was not his turn at the oars, or his turn to sleep, he amused the whole crew by telling stories in a voice trained to carry over the sound of a crowd. And the whole time, the whole time the fickle west wind blew true. When he was on the bench, it blew on his heaving shoulders. When he was in the stern, it blew his thinning golden hair around in a wild halo. When he slept, it blew across his smiling, upturned face. He lay uncomplaining on that hard wooden deck, without even a blanket, asleep only when gazing up at the stars above could no longer hold his attention. We rounded Spain, past the Balarics, shot through the treacherous strait between Corsica and Sardinia without incident, and crossed the Trinian Sea, all driven by an unseasonably strong and steady west wind. Only once did I pluck up the courage to ask him about his debts. I understand if you do not make it to Rome in time, you owe a lot of people a lot of money. He made eye contact with me. His eyes were blue with a black rim, piercing. For all his sunny ways there was a cold steal in that gaze. He spoke in Latin with me now that he knew I understood his native tongue. Politics is an expensive business. What I need but do not have, I borrow. It is only money. Money comes and goes. I won enough money fighting the Lusitani E last summer to pay back the most bloodthirsty of my creditors if it comes to that. But it will not. Money does not matter, except that with enough money comes the power to do whatever you want to do. I had felt that way myself when the House of Canmi was a force to be reckoned with, but even at my most powerful, owing thirteen hundred talents of silver was not a debt I would have ever been casual about. And what do you want to do? I asked. The Governor's eyebrows went up, and a winning smile broke across his face. Fix things, he said in a tone that was friendly while also declaring the topic of conversation closed. We made it to Ostia two days before our deadline, and when he was sure beyond a doubt that Fortuna had blessed him once again, he produced a shiny bronze coin stamped with her likeness from his ditty bag, kissed it joyously in front of all of us, and then hurled it out into the sea, shouting his triumph as he did so. In the time it took us to enter the harbour, he thanked each of us by name, shaking a hand here, patting a back there. Every man was singled out for some kind of honest praise based on something the governor had noticed in our journey together. My compliments. Which I still cherish was an elaboration on what Balbus himself had said. And you, noble Canmi, are a true descendant of the great sailors who made this sea their own before my countrymen ever heard waves crash upon a beach. I have watched you guide us night and day out of sight of land, by wind, by wave, by sun, by star, by moon, by cloud, by flight of bird. If the gods themselves were to draw a line from the Balarics to Rome, that was our course. Your talent is so obvious a blind man could see it. Thank you. Now I believe the next man he singled out was the one who prepared the ship's morning porridge, and no doubt that fellow took to his grave the notion that adding water to ground grain to make a nourishing mush was something destiny had chosen for him to excel at. But I do not begrudge any man a kind word of recognition from Gaius Julius Caesar, the first Roman to ever be called a god. I have already said many times I am deeply suspicious of men who call themselves gods, but I do not think Caesar ever thought that of himself. I can see why others had their suspicions, though. If ever there was a person remarkable enough for me to say there was a small touch of the divine in him somewhere, Caesar is the closest I ever met. We made landfall at Ostia, and Caesar was as good as his word with the feast and the sacrifice in Rome, and the bonuses paid out in full. I never saw him again, but I certainly heard his name. Oh yes. You see, Gaius Julius Caesar, or Caius Iulius Caesar, did arrive in Rome in time to run for consul, despite the best efforts of his political opponents like Cato the Younger. He won the election easily, and even though strictly speaking they were supposed to be two consuls ruling Rome, with each year being named for the pair of them, people referred to what today we think of as the fifty nine years before the birth of Christ as the year of Julius and Caesar. Caesar's colleague in the consulship was so thoroughly outmaneuvered by the man as to become a political non-entity in the grand scheme of things. I have it on good authority Caesar even slept with the fellow's wife just so people would know who was boss. After his consulship, Caesar's political enemies tried to give him boring backwater provinces to the north of Rome to rule during his postconsular governorship. Caesar found an excuse to march into Gaul, modern France, and over the next eight years he conquered all three of the major parts of Gaul, as well as mounting military expeditions into Germany and Britain as well. By some estimates, a million Celtic people died during those campaigns, and another million were sold into slavery. All this warfare made Caesar the richest man in the world, and this drove his enemies in Rome crazy, especially Cato the Younger. They declared Caesar a criminal, and how could he not be? He was a governor for eight years in a row when two was unusual, and in all that time he had fought wars of conquest against people who had not raised a sword against Rome in generations before he marched into their homelands. Now he would not surrender his armies and come home to face a trial? Criminal Well, might makes right. Caesar marched on Rome with just a fraction of his army, and his enemies fled before him. He then chased them around the known world for most of the rest of his life. He never lost a battle. Truly he was one of Fortuna's favorites. Cato the younger had the self respect to fall on his own sword in Utica, not too far from the ruins of Carthage, when he knew Caesar was unbeatable. Meanwhile, the one Caesar's caught and pardoned eventually murdered him to thank him for his mercy. Brutus and the rest could not stand to live under the rule of a man powerful enough to beat them and then pardon them. The Roman aristocracy always were suspicious of one great man trying to rule the rest of them, and Caesar was a great man indeed. Caesar's political heirs hunted his assassins for still more years before turning on each other after all his murderers were dead. The one who came out on top eventually took to calling himself Caesar Augustus, and for the next two thousand years most emperors and kings and warlords in Europe have tried to work some variation of Caesar or Kaiser or Tsar into their name to borrow just a little bit of the glory Gaius Julius Caesar amassed for himself. His very name means power. Ironically, Caesar is an old Etruscan word meaning full head of hair, something Gaius Julius Caesar himself did not enjoy. The great man's hair was thinning when I met him, and from the boss made once he became famous, I gathered he was almost completely bald a quarter of a century later when his enemies stabbed him twenty three times and left him to bleed out. Anyway, I appreciate I just walked through decades of Roman wars and bloodshed in a few sentences there. I was not really involved in any of that. I was safe and sound in Gades, paying my taxes and keeping my head down. I have always tried to avoid both wars and Romans, and with the exception of fighting for my poor lost Carthage, I have been mostly successful. Still, I want to say that before he was the most powerful man in the world, Gaius Julius Caesar needed to get from Gades to Rome in less than sixteen days, or none of what followed ever would have happened. I got him there. That is one of my life's accomplishments, one of my great contributions to the story of humanity, and I do look back on those couple of weeks fondly, despite everything, good and evil that came from it. Okay, so that is a I met one of the most famous men in history before he was famous, and without me you would never have heard of him story. Now let me see how quickly I can skip over all the rest of the bloody Roman emperors who took his name as their title. Let me pour myself another drink before I take a stab at it, though. If I am going to vent my spleen about the Romans at the peak of their power, I will want something to keep the taste of bile out of my mouth. You've been listening to the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast, and there is a lot more to come. Here are a few ways you can help support this program. First, if you are enjoying it, tell someone about it. Audio dramas live and die on word of mouth, so please help spread the word. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix, available on Amazon. If you want to read ahead or just have a copy of this story on your shelves, that would be so appreciated. Fourth, I have a link to a typeform survey in the show's notes for each episode. Tell me a little about yourself and feel free to ask me some questions. I will be doing a QA mailbag bonus episode at some point. Finally, while I don't want to break up the episode with ads, I do have a Patreon account with extra content for those of you willing to support this channel with a donation. A link to that is also in the show notes. With that said, thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to you enjoying the next episode soon.