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The mud squelched beneath the farmer's feet.

The campus Martius was always muddy this time of the year, as winter gave way to spring, but never more so than when thousands upon thousands of men trekked in from the countryside.

There were the consuls, formally dressed in their togas, with their staff of young military tribunes

and a smattering of hardened career soldiers.

Experienced eyes looked over the assembled mass of the Roman people and evaluated them,

searching for the telltale signs of valuable experience in the army. Crowns and laurel wreaths

awarded for valor, easy familiarity with sword and shield, and scars left behind by spears,

javelins, and arrows in years past.

There were many with such souvenirs standing near the farmer, and they bore them proudly.

So did the farmer, though he wasn't sure whether the crooked nose he'd received from a thrown roof tile in Sicily was particularly glorious.

He lived less than a day's walk from the city, on a small farm in the Agar Veyantanus, the land that had once belonged to the ruined city of Veyi.

He knew that his ancestors had once fought the people of Veyi, just as his father had speared Samnites and Greeks, and he himself had stained the Sicilian dirt red with Carthaginian blood.

The farmer was proud of that.

So were his neighbors who had all gathered together to walk into the city with him.

There was no place in the Roman Republic for men who wouldn't fight.

Back in Sicily, the farmer remembered, a military tribune had slit the throat of a campaignian who ran during a skirmish.

Nobody had batted a nigh.

One of the tribunes, a clean-shaven man with a notch in his eyebrow and a missing front

tube, started questioning the group of neighbors. Were they married? Did they have small

children? Who was available to work the land if they were enrolled in the Legion?

...