The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
“I understand everything you’ve said, Caesar, and I thank you more than you can ever know. It is absolutely sensible advice, and I will follow it to the letter.”
“Then, young man, you will survive.” Caesar’s eyes twinkled. “I’ve noticed, by the way, that though we’ve flown around all of Further Spain throughout this spring, you haven’t suffered one attack of asthma.”
“Hapd’efan’e explained it,” said Octavius, who felt lighter, more confident, shriven. “When I’m with you, Caesar, I feel safe. Your approval and protection wrap around me like a blanket, and I experience no anxieties.”
“Even when I speak on distasteful subjects?”
“The more I know you, Caesar, the more I regard you as my father. My own died before I needed him to talk about men’s cares and difficulties, and Lucius Philippus—Lucius Philippus—”
“Lucius Philippus gave up the duties of fatherhood at around the time that you were born,” said Caesar, absurdly delighted at the result of a conversation he had dreaded. “I too lacked a father, but I was better served with my particular mother. Atia is all a mother. Mine was as much a father. So if I can be of help in paternal matters, I’m pleased to be of help.”
It isn’t fair, Octavius was thinking, that I should get to know Caesar so late. If I had known him like this when I was a child, perhaps I wouldn’t suffer the asthma at all. My love for him is boundless, I would do anything for him. Soon we will be done in the Spains, and he’ll go back to Rome. Back to that awful woman across the Tiber, with her ugly face and her beast-gods. Because of her and the little boy, he won’t touch Egypt’s wealth. How clever women are. She has enslaved the ruler of the world and ensured the survival of her kingdom. She will keep its wealth for her son, who is not a Roman.
“Tell me about the treasure vaults, Caesar,” he said aloud, and turned big grey eyes, filled with innocence, to his idol.
Relieved to have a new subject, Caesar obliged. It was a subject he couldn’t air to any Roman save this one, a mere lad who thought of him as a father.
3
To Cicero, that first properly calated year went from one sorrow and misery to another.
Tullia gave birth to a sickly, too-premature child early in January; baby Publius Cornelius received the cognomen of his grandmother’s branch of the Cornelii—Lentulus. It was Cicero who suggested it; as Dolabella had skipped off to Further Spain to join Caesar, he wasn’t present to insist that his son bear his own cognomen. A way of getting back at Dolabella, who had gone without paying Tullia’s dowry back.
She ailed, wasn’t interested in her baby, refused to eat or exercise; midway through February she quietly died, it seemed to all who knew her of unrequited love for Dolabella. For Cicero, a terrible grief made worse by the indifference of her mother and the rather pettish behavior of his new wife, Publilia, who could not begin to understand why Cicero wept, mourned, ignored her. Publilia was, besides, quite disillusioned with this marriage to such a famous man, as she was quick to tell her mother and her underage brother whenever they came to visit. Visits that the wildly grief-stricken Cicero came to dread so much that he found reasons to be elsewhere the moment his in-laws arrived.
The letters of condolence came flooding in, one from Brutus in Italian Gaul written just before he left to return to Rome; Cicero had opened it eagerly, sure that this man, so close to him in philosophy and political leanings, would find exactly the right words to heal his battered animus. Instead, he found a cold, passionless, stereotyped expression of sympathy that in effect informed him that his grief was too florid, too excessive, too intemperate. A blow rendered more telling when Caesar’s letter came and held all the exquisite comfort Cicero had wanted from Brutus. Oh, why had the wrong man written the right letter?
The wrong man, the wrong man, the wrong man! A viewpoint reinforced when he received a curt communication from Lepidus, who, as senior patrician in the Senate, was its leader, the Princeps Senatus. It demanded to know why Cicero wasn’t attending meetings of the House, and reminded him that under Caesar’s new laws, a man had to attend on pain of forfeiting his seat. Since the founding of the Republic, the oligarchs of the Senate had enjoyed the title of senator without ever needing to sit in the House or serve on a jury unless they wanted to. Now it was different. Senators had to serve on juries when they were told, and had to be physically present in the House. If illness were Cicero’s reason for absenting himself, then he would have to obtain three affidavits from three senators to that effect.
Illness was the only valid excuse for absence if a senator was in Italy. Further, a senator now had to petition the House to leave Italy! Everywhere a man looked, there were rules and regulations that insulted his entitlements as a member of Rome’s most august governing body—oh, it was intolerable! Half dazed by grief, half fuming with anger, Cicero was forced to seek out three fellow senators and ask them to swear to Lepidus that Marcus Tullius Cicero was incapable of assuming his seat in the House due to severe illness of long-standing duration.
To add insult to injury, having decided that Tullia must have a glorious monument set in public gardens, Cicero discovered that the ten-talent tomb designed by Cluatius the architect would cost him twenty talents; Caesar’s sumptuary laws stipulated that whatever a tomb cost must also be paid to the Treasury. That one, the lawyer found a way to avoid: all he had to do was call Tullia’s tomb a shrine, and it became tax-free. Therefore Tullia would have a shrine, not a tomb. Sometimes those thirty years of marriage to Terentia paid off—she knew how to avoid any tax even a Caesar could dream up.
Of course there were palliatives for his misery, particularly the very favorable reception his “Cato” had received. A letter from Aulus Hirtius, governing Narbonese Gaul for Caesar, told Cicero that Caesar was planning to write an “Anti-Cato”—oh, do, Caesar, please do! It will damage your dignitas immeasurably.
News from Further Spain trickled in; so slow was it that Hirtius, writing from Narbo on the eighteenth day of April, did not know that Gnaeus Pompey had been found and his head severed. But Munda was known, and it was a fact that all of Rome had to accept. Republican resistance was permanently over, there was nothing to stop Caesar enacting his disgraceful laws aimed at the First Class. Even Atticus, so long fair-minded about Caesar, was worried. Though he was still working to make sure that the Head Count poor were not going to be shipped to Buthrotum, he could get no absolute assurances that they would go elsewhere. Caesar’s staff refused to commit themselves.
“We’ll have to wait until Caesar comes home,” said Cicero. “One thing is certain—shipping the Head Count overseas isn’t done in an hour, no one will sail before Caesar comes home.” He paused. “You’ll have to know, Titus, so better now. I’m going to divorce Publilia. I can’t stand her or her family a moment longer.”
Titus Pomponius Atticus eyed his friend with wry sympathy. A great aristocrat of the gens Caecilia, he could have had an illustrious public career, risen to the consulship, but the love of his heart was commerce, and a senator could not indulge in business unconnected to land ownership. A discreet lover of young boys, he had earned the nickname “Atticus” because of his devotion to Athens, a place which found no fault with this kind of love; he had made it his second home, and limited his activities to his time there. Four years older than Cicero, he had married late, to a cousin, Caecilia Pilia, and had produced his heir, his much-loved daughter, Caecilia Attica. His ties to Cicero went deeper than friendship, for his sister, Pomponia, was married to Quintus Cicero. That union, a stormy one, teetered perpetually on the brink of divorce. All in all, he reflected, the two Cicerones had not had happy marriages; they had been obliged to marry for money, to heiresses. What neither brother had counted on was the tendency of Roman heiresses to control their own money, which the law did not stipulate they had to share with their husbands. The pity of it was that both women loved their Cicerones; they just didn’t know how to show it, and were, besides, frugal women who deplored the Ciceronian ten
“I think it’s wise to divorce Publilia,” Atticus said gently.
“Publilia was so unkind to Tullia when she was sick.”
Atticus sighed. “Well, Marcus, it’s very difficult to be more than ten years younger than your stepdaughter. Not to mention how hard it is to live with a legend older than your grandfather.”
Baby Publius Cornelius Lentulus died at the beginning of June, just six months into his tenuous life. Born on the cusp between seven and eight months in utero, he had sufficient of Dolabella’s strength to try to live, but his wet nurses found his scrawny, red little person repulsive, couldn’t love him the way his mother might have, had she not loved his father to the exclusion of all else. So he gave up the fight as quietly as Tullia had, passing from a nightmare to a dream. Cicero mingled his ashes with his mother’s and resolved to inter them in the shrine together—if he could only find the right piece of land for this monument.
In an odd way the child’s death sealed the chapter of Tullia in Cicero’s mind; he began to recover, a process accelerated when he finally got his hands on a copy of Caesar’s “Anti-Cato.” It had not yet been published, but he knew the Sosius Brothers were about to do so. Cicero found it malicious, spiteful, plain nasty. Where had Caesar obtained some of his information? It contained juicy tales of Cato’s unrequited love for Metellus Scipio’s wife, Aemilia Lepida, snippets of the abysmally bad poetry he had written following her rejection of him, excerpts from his (never filed) lawsuit against Aemilia Lepida for breach of promise, a highly evocative recounting of Cato’s telling his two young children that they would never be allowed to see their mother again. Even Cato’s most intimate secrets were revealed! As Caesar was the man with whom Cato’s first wife had committed adultery, it was the height of impropriety for him to divulge the sordid details of Cato’s lovemaking techniques! The man was dead!
Oh, but the prose! Why, Cicero asked himself miserably, am I incapable of prose half that good? And Caesar’s poem, “Iter,” was being hailed as a masterpiece by everyone from Varro to Lucius Piso, a great literary connoisseur. It isn’t fair that one man should be so gifted, so I am glad that his hatred for Cato has gotten the better of him.
Then Cicero found himself having to side with Caesar, not a comfortable position. One, however, that justice demanded.
Marcus Claudius Marcellus, whom Caesar had pardoned after his brother, Gaius Marcellus Minor, went down on his knees and begged, had left Lesbos and gone to Athens, where he was murdered in the Piraeus. Certain persons who were well known to detest Caesar began to bruit it abroad that Caesar had paid to have Marcus Marcellus murdered. Acalumny that Cicero could not condone, for all his own detestation of Caesar. Hating having to do it, he announced publicly to all and sundry that Caesar could not have had anything to do with the murder. Caesar was a murderer of character, witness his “Anti-Cato,” but never one who murdered in mean back alleys. Cicero’s stand went a long way toward scotching the rumor.
By now the tale of Gnaeus Pompey’s severed head was all over Rome, complete with its sequel. The decapitator, Caesennius Lento, had been an up-and-coming man on Caesar’s staff, but when Caesar had received the head from the disgusted Gaius Didius, Caesennius Lento was immediately stripped of his share of the booty and sent back to Rome with Caesar’s caustic dressing down still ringing in his ears. There would be no advancement up the cursus honorum for such a gross barbarian; in fact, Caesennius Lento would find himself expelled from the Senate when Caesar had time for the censor’s duties he had inherited along with many other honors.
So there you had Caesar, thought Cicero: on the one hand, scrupulously civilized; on the other, a deliberate traducer of virtue. But a man who would pay to murder? Never. Thus Cicero displayed some understanding of Caesar; just not enough. What Cicero could never be brought to see was that it was his own impulsive and thoughtless gyrations that antagonized Caesar most. Had he refrained from traducing Caesar in his “Cato,” Caesar would not have traduced Cato in his “Anti-Cato.” Cause and effect.
4
Where did the money go? Though Mark Antony’s share of the Gallic booty had amounted to a thousand silver talents, when he set out to pay his creditors he discovered that he owed more than twice that much. His debts amounted to seventy million sesterces, and Fulvia didn’t have the cash reserves to pay them, having already outlaid thirty million before they married. The trouble was that Caesar’s confiscated property auctions had reduced the price of prime land for the time being, and to sell prime land was the only way she could raise cash until more income flowed in. This third husband was an expensive one.
Fulvia’s massive fortune had originally been set up by her great-grandmother, Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi, a Roman woman of the old kind. Her granddaughter, who was Fulvia’s mother, had seen no reason to change the arrangements. Thus Fulvia’s many properties and businesses were buried in sleeping partnerships or nominally held by someone else. So selling capital assets wasn’t easy, took a lot of time, and was opposed by her banker, Gaius Oppius, who knew perfectly well where the cash was going.
“The trouble is that I didn’t get to Gaul soon enough,” said Antony gloomily to Decimus Brutus and Gaius Trebonius.
The three of them were sitting in Murcius’s tavern atop the Via Nova, having encountered each other on the Vestal Steps.
“That’s right, you didn’t arrive until after Vercingetorix rose,” said Trebonius, who had been with Caesar for five years, and had received ten thousand talents. “Even then,” he added with a grin, “you were late, as I remember.”
“Oh, the pair of you should talk!” Antony growled. “You were Caesar’s marshals, I was a mere quaestor. I’m always just a bit too young to come into the real money.”
“Age has nothing to do with it,” Decimus Brutus drawled, one fair brow flying upward.
Antony frowned. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“I mean that our age no longer gives us a fighting chance at being elected consul. My election as a praetor this year was as big a farce as Trebonius’s was three years ago. We have to wait on the Dictator’s dictate to see when we’ll be allowed to be consuls. Not the electors’ choice, Caesar’s choice. I’ve been promised the consulship in two years’ time, but look at Trebonius—he should have been consul last year, but he isn’t consul yet. People like Vatia Isauricus and Lepidus have more clout and have to be placated first,” said Decimus Brutus, the drawl lessening as his temper built.
“I didn’t know you felt so strongly,” Antony said slowly.
“All real men do, Antonius. I’ll grant Caesar anything you like when it comes to competence, brilliance, a gigantic appetite for work—yes, yes, the man’s a total genius! But you must know how it feels to be overshadowed when your birth says you ought not to be. You’re half Antonius and half Julius, I’m half Junius Brutus and half Sempronius Tuditanus—we both have the blood, we should both have a fighting chance to get to the top. Out there in our chalk-whitened togas smarming to the voters, promising them the world, lying and smiling. Instead, we wait on Caesar Rex, the King of Rome. What we receive is by his grace and favor, not by our own endeavors. I hate it! I hate it!”
“So I see,” Antony said dryly.
Trebonius sat and listened, wondering if Antonius and Decimus Brutus had any idea what they were actually saying. As far as he, Trebonius, was concerned, it didn’t matter a rush what a man’s ancestors entitled him a fighting chance to do, because he didn’t have any ancestors. He was wholly Caesar’s creature, could never have gotten a tenth so high without Caesar there to push him. It had been Caesar who bought his services as a tribune of the plebs and bribed him into that office; it had been Caesar who spotted his military potential; it had been Caesar who trusted him with independent maneuvers during the Gallic War; it had been Caesar who gave him his praetorship; it had been Caesar who awarded him the governorship of Further Spain. I, Gaius Trebonius, am Caesar’s man, bought and paid for a t
“Did you really try to murder Caesar, Antonius?” he asked now.
Antony blinked, turned his head Trebonius’s way. “Um—yes, as a matter of fact,” he said, and shrugged.
“What inspired you?” Trebonius asked, intrigued.
Antony grinned. “Money, what else? I was with Poplicola, Cotyla and Cimber. One of them—I don’t remember which—reminded me that I’m Caesar’s heir, so it seemed like a good idea to come into Caesar’s money then and there. Didn’t come to anything—the old boy had guards posted everywhere around the Domus Publica, so I couldn’t get in.” He snarled. “What I want to know is who gave me away, because someone did. Caesar said in the House that I was seen, but I know I wasn’t. My guess is Poplicola.”
“Caesar’s your close kinsman, Antonius,” said Decimus Brutus.
“I know that! At the time I didn’t care, but Fulvia wormed the story out of me after Caesar mentioned it in the House, and made me promise that I’d never lift a hand against him again.” He grimaced. “She made me swear on my ancestor Hercules.”