The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
He provided the crowd with more than this, however; as soon as he came into sight people screamed and swooned deliriously, for alone among the luperci he had made no attempt to cover his genitalia with the piece of hide; the most formidable penis and the largest scrotum in Rome were there for all to see, a treat in itself. Everybody loved it! Oh, oh, oh, strike me! Strike me!
Nearing the finish of the run, the luperci streamed down the hill to the lower Forum with Antony still in the lead; ahead, sitting on his curule chair atop the rostra, was Caesar Dictator, for once not immersed in paperwork. He too was laughing, making jokes and exchanging pleasantries with the people thronging the whole area. When he saw Antony he made some remark—directed at Antony’s exposed genitals, it was obvious—that had men and women falling on the ground in mirth. Witty mentula, Caesar, no one could deny it. Well, Caesar, take this flail!
As he reached the bottom of the rostra Antony stretched out his left hand, took something from a hand in the crowd; suddenly he leaped up the steps and was behind Caesar, was tying a white ribbon around Caesar’s head, already crowned with oak leaves. Caesar acted like lightning. The ribbon came off without marring the oak leaves, and on his feet, the diadem in his right hand, held on high, he cried out in a huge voice:
“Jupiter Optimus Maximus is the only king in Rome!”
The crowd began to cheer deafeningly, but he held up both his hands to hush them.
“Quiris,” he said to a young, togate man below him, “take this to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and lay it at the base of the Great God’s statue as a gift from Caesar.”
The people cheered again as the young man, clearly overcome at the honor, ascended the rostra to accept the diadem. Caesar smiled at him, said a few words to him that no one could hear, then, dazed and uplifted, the Quiris descended and began the walk up the Clivus Capitolinus to the temple.
“You haven’t finished your run yet, Antonius,” Caesar said to Antony, standing with chest heaving and a slight erection that had women whimpering. “Do you want to be the last man at the Regia? After you’ve had a bath and covered yourself, you have another job to do. Convene the Senate for dawn tomorrow in the Curia Hostilia.”
The Senate met, shivering in dread, to find Caesar looking his usual self.
“Let it be inscribed on bronze,” he said levelly, “that on the day of the Lupercalia in the year of the consulship of Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius, the consul Marcus Antonius did offer Caesar a diadem, and that Caesar did refuse it publicly, to great applause from the people.”
“Well played, Caesar!” said Antony heartily as the House went off about other business. “Now the whole of Rome has seen you refuse to wear a diadem. Admit that I’ve performed a great service for you.”
“Kindly leave your philanthropy at that, Antonius. Otherwise one of your heads might part company from your body. My problem is, which head holds your thinking apparatus?”
Twenty-two was not a very large number, but getting twenty-two men together under one roof for a meeting of the Kill Caesar Club was depressingly difficult. None of the members—they did not think of themselves as conspirators—had a big enough dining room to accommodate so many diners, and it was too wintry for chats in a peristyle or public garden. Guilt and apprehension contributed to their reluctance to be seen together, even before a meeting of the Senate.
Had Gaius Trebonius not been a distinguished tribune of the plebs in his day and maintained an interest above and beyond the normal in the history of the Plebs, the club may well have foundered for the lack of a safe place to meet. Luckily Trebonius was archiving the records of the Plebs, which were stored under the temple of Ceres on the Aventine Mount. Here, in what was held to be Rome’s most beautiful temple, the club could meet unnoticed after dark, provided that said meetings were not held frequently enough to make a nosy female curious as to where her spouse or son or son-in-law was going.
Like most temples, behind its exquisite façade of columns on all four sides, Ceres was a windowless building with close-fitting double bronze doors; once they were shut, no lights showed to indicate that anyone was inside. The cella was huge, dominated by a twenty-foot-high statue of the goddess, arms full of sheaves of emmer wheat, clad in a gloriously painted robe patterned in summer’s beauties from roses to pansies and violets. Her golden hair was crowned by a wreath of flowers, cornucopias overflowing with fruits clustered at her feet. However, the most striking feature of the temple was a gigantic mural depicting a priapic Pluto carrying Proserpina off to rape and exile in Hades, while a tearful, disheveled Ceres wandered a sere, blasted winter landscape searching vainly for her beloved daughter.
All the members came on the night that fell two days after Caesar’s dictate that his rejection of the diadem be recorded on a bronze tablet. They were edgy and irritable, some to the point of mild panic; telling over their faces, Trebonius wondered how he was ever going to keep them together.
Cassius charged into speech. “In less than a month, Caesar will be gone,” he said, “and so far I’ve not seen a particle of evidence that any one of you is really serious about this business. It’s all very well to talk! What we need is action!”
“Are you getting anywhere with Marcus Brutus?” Staius Murcus asked waspishly. “There’s more at stake than action, Cassius! I’m supposed to have left for Syria already, and our master is looking at me sideways because I’m still in Rome. My friend Cimber can say the same.”
Cassius’s touchiness was a direct consequence of his failure with Brutus; between his extraordinary passion for Porcia and the war that Porcia and Servilia were pursuing relentlessly, Brutus had time for so little else that even his cherished but illicit commercial activities were suffering.
“Give me another nundinum,” Cassius said curtly. “If that doesn’t do it, count him out. But that’s not what’s worrying me. Killing Caesar isn’t going far enough. We have to kill Antonius and Dolabella as well. Also Calvinus.”
“Do that,” Trebonius said calmly, “and we’ll be declared nefas and sent into permanent exile without a sestertius—if we keep our heads. Civil war isn’t possible because there are no legions in Italian Gaul for Decimus to use, and every legion camped between Capua and Brundisium is on the move to Macedonia. This isn’t a conspiracy to overthrow Rome’s government, it’s a club to rid Rome of a tyrant. As long as we confine ourselves to Caesar, we can claim that we acted rightly, within the law and in keeping with the mos maiorum. Kill the consuls and we’re nefas, make no mistake.”
Marcus Rubrius Ruga was a nonentity of a family that had produced a governor of Macedonia unlucky enough to have to cope with a young Cato; of morals, ethics and principles he had none. “Why,” he asked now, “are we going through all this? Why don’t we simply waylay Caesar in secret, kill him, and never tell?”
The silence hung like a pall until Trebonius spoke. “We are honorable men, Marcus Rubrius, that’s why. Where’s the honor in a simple murder? To do it and not admit to it? No! Never!”
The growls of agreement that erupted from every throat had Rubrius Ruga shrinking into a dark corner.
“I think Cassius has a point,” said Decimus Brutus with a glance of contempt for Rubrius Ruga. “Antonius and Dolabella will come after us—they’re too attached to Caesar not to.”
“Oh, come, Decimus, how can you say that of Antonius? He pecks at Caesar remorselessly,” Trebonius objected.
“For his own ends, Gaius, not our ends. Don’t forget that he swore an oath to Fulvia on his ancestor Hercules that he’d never touch Caesar,” Decimus countered. “Which makes him doubly dangerous. If we kill Caesar and leave Antonius alive, he’ll start to wonder when his turn will come.”
“Decimus is right,” Cassius said strongly.
Trebonius sighed. “Go home, all of you. We’ll meet here again in one nundinum—hoping, Cassius, that you bring Marcus Brutus with you. Concentrate on that, not on a bloodbath that would see no one left to sit on the curule dais,
Since he held the key, Trebonius waited until the others had departed, some in groups, some singly, then went around snuffing the lamps, the last one in his hand. It’s doomed, he thought. It’s doomed. They sit there listening, hopping and leaping at the slightest noise, they offer not one word of encouragement, they have no opinions worth listening to—sheep. Baa, baa, baa. Even men like Cimber, Aquila, Galba, Basilus. Sheep. How can twenty-two sheep kill a lion like Caesar?
The next morning Cassius went around the corner to Brutus’s house and marched him into his study, where he bolted the door and stood glaring at the stupefied Brutus.
“Sit down, brother-in-law,” he said.
Brutus sat. “What is it, Gaius? You look so strange.”
“As well I might, given Rome’s condition! Brutus, when is it going to occur to you that Caesar is already the King of Rome?”
The round shoulders slumped; Brutus looked down at his hands and sighed. “It has occurred to me, of course it has occurred to me. He was right when he said that ‘rex’ is just a word.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Do about it?”
“Yes, do about it! Brutus, for the sake of your illustrious ancestors, wake up!” Cassius cried. “There’s a reason why Rome at this very moment owns a man descended from the first Brutus and Servilius Ahala both! Why are you so blind to your duty?”
The dark eyes grew round. “Duty?”
“Duty, duty, duty! It’s your duty to kill Caesar.”
Jaw dropped, face a mask of terror, Brutus gaped. “My duty to kill Caesar? Caesar?”
“Can you do nothing other than make what I say into questions? If Caesar doesn’t die, Rome is never going to be a republic again—he’s already its king, he’s already established a monarchy! If he’s let continue to live, he’ll choose an heir within his lifetime, and the dictatorship will pass to his heir. So there are some of us determined to kill Caesar Rex. Including me.”
“Cassius, no!”
“Cassius, yes! The other Brutus, Decimus. Gaius Trebonius. Cimber. Staius Murcus. Galba. Pontius Aquila. Twenty-two of us, Brutus! We need you to make it twenty-three.”
“Jupiter, Jupiter! I can’t, Cassius! I can’t!”
“Of course you can!” a voice boomed. Porcia strode in from the colonnade door, face and eyes alight. “Cassius, it is the only thing to do! And Brutus will make it twenty-three.”
The two men stared at her, Brutus confounded, Cassius in a stew of apprehension. Why hadn’t he remembered the colonnade?
“Porcia, swear on your father’s body that you won’t say one word about this to anyone!” Cassius cried.
“I swear it gladly! I’m not stupid, Cassius, I know how dangerous it is. Oh, but it’s a right act! Kill the king and bring back Cato’s beloved Republic! And who better to do the deed than my Brutus?” She began to stride up and down, shivering with joy. “Yes, a right act! Oh, to think I can help to avenge my father, bring back his Republic!”
Brutus found words. “Porcia, you know that Cato wouldn’t approve—would never approve! Murder? Cato, condone murder? It is not a right act! Through all the years that Cato opposed Caesar, never once did he contemplate murder! It would—it would denigrate him, destroy the memory of him as liberty’s champion!”
“You’re wrong, wrong, wrong!” she shouted fiercely, coming to loom over him like a warrior, eyes blazing. “Are you craven, Brutus? Of course my father would approve! When Cato was alive, Caesar was a threat to the Republic, not its executioner! But now Caesar is its executioner! Cato would think as I think, as Cassius and all good men must think!”
Brutus clapped his hands over his ears and fled the room.
“Don’t worry, I’ll push him to it,” Porcia said to Cassius. “By the time I finish with him, he’ll do his duty.” Her lips thinned, she stood frowning. “I know exactly how to do it, I really do. Brutus is a thinker. He’ll have to be hunted into doing, he can’t be given a moment to think. What I have to do is make him more afraid not to do it than do it. Hah!” she trumpeted, and walked out, leaving Cassius standing fascinated.
“She’s Cato’s image,” he breathed.
“What on earth is going on?” Servilia demanded the next day. “Look at it! Disgraceful!”
The bust of the first Brutus, archaically bearded, wooden of expression, was covered with a graffito: BRUTUS, WHY HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME? I BANISHED ROME’S LAST KING!
Pen in hand, Brutus emerged from his study prepared for the hundredth time to make peace between his wife and his mother, to find no sign of the one and the other indignant for an unrelated reason. Oh, Jupiter!
“Paint! Paint!” said Servilia wrathfully. “It will take a bucket of turpentine to remove it, and the proper paint will come off too! Who did this? And what does it mean, ‘why have you forgotten me?’ Ditus! Ditus!” she called, marching away.
But that was only the beginning. When Brutus went to the urban praetor’s tribunal in the Forum accompanied by a host of clients, he found it daubed with graffiti too: BRUTUS, WHY DO YOU SLEEP? BRUTUS, WHY ARE YOU FAILING ROME? BRUTUS, WHAT SHOULD YOUR FIRST EDICT BE? BRUTUS, WHERE IS YOUR HONOR? BRUTUS, WAKE UP!
The statue of the first Brutus that stood next to the statues of the kings of Rome bore the words BRUTUS, WHY HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME? I BANISHED ROME’S LAST KING! And the statue of Servilius Ahala, close by, said BRUTUS, DON’T YOU REMEMBER ME? I KILLED MAELIUS WHEN HE TRIED TO BE KING!
The stall in the general marketplace which sold turpentine ran out of it; Brutus had to send servants all over Rome to buy up turpentine, its price suddenly soaring.
He was terrified, mostly because he was sure that Caesar, who noticed everything, would notice those graffiti and query their purpose, which to Brutus’s appalled eyes was glaringly apparent: he was being urged to kill the Dictator Perpetuus.
And at dawn on the following day when Epaphroditus let in his clients, not only was the original graffito back on the faded, ruined bust of the first Brutus, but his own bust now said STRIKE HIM DOWN, BRUTUS! all over it, and the bust of Servilius Ahala said I KILLED MAELIUS! AM I THE ONLY PATRIOT IN THIS HOUSE? Neatly printed across a tesselated panel on the atrium wall was CALL YOURSELF BRUTUS? UNTIL YOU STRIKE, YOU DO NOT DESERVE THAT ILLUSTRIOUS, IMMORTAL NAME!
Servilia was screeching and stamping around, Porcia was in fits of wild laughter, the clients were huddled bewildered in the atrium, and poor Brutus felt as if some dreadful lemur had escaped from the underworld to haunt him into madness.
Not to mention Porcia’s perpetual nagging. Instead of the sweet bliss of her body against his in their bed, he lay next to a yapping, harping termagant who never let up.
“No, I refuse!” he shouted over and over and over. “I will not do murder!”
Finally she literally dragged him into her sitting room, dumped him in a chair, and produced a small knife. Thinking she meant to use it on him, Brutus shrank away, but she yanked up her dress and plunged the blade into her white, fleshy thigh.
“See? See? You may be afraid to strike, Brutus, but I am not!” she howled, the wound gushing blood.
“All right, all right, all right!” he gasped, ashen. “All right, Porcia, you win! I’ll do it. I’ll strike.”
Porcia fainted.
And so it came to pass that the Kill Caesar Club gained its precious figurehead, Marcus Junius Brutus Servilius Caepio. He was too intimidated to go on refusing, and too horribly aware that the longer Porcia’s campaign of nagging and graffiti went on, the more Rome talked.
“I am not blind and I am not deaf, Brutus,” Servilia said to him after the surgeon had ministered to Porcia. “Nor am I stupid. All this is an attempt to murder Caesar, isn’t it? Whoever is plotting the deed needs your name to do it. Having said that, I insist upon every detail. Talk, Brutus, or you’re dead.”
“I know of no plot, Mama,” Brutus managed to say, even looked into her eyes as he said it. “Someone is
“Matinius?” she asked blankly. “Your own business director?”
“He’s been peculating. I fired him several days ago, but I neglected to tell Epaphroditus that he wasn’t to be admitted to the house.” He smiled sheepishly. “It’s been a little hectic.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Now that Epaphroditus knows, Mama, I think you’ll find that the graffiti will cease,” Brutus went on, growing more and more confident. It was true that Matinius had peculated and been fired, that was the lucky part. “What’s more, I shall see Caesar this morning and explain. I’ve hired ex-gladiators to watch my tribunal and the public statues night and day, so that should be the end of Matinius’s campaign to get me in trouble with Caesar.”
“It makes sense,” Servilia said slowly.
“Nothing else does, Mama.” He tittered nervously. “I mean, do you honestly think I’m capable of murdering Caesar?”
Her head went back, she laughed. “Honestly? A mouse like you? A rabbit? A worm? A spineless nonentity under the thumb of an atrocious monster of a wife? I can credit she’d murder him, but you? It’s far easier to believe in flying pigs.”
“Quite so, Mama.”
“Well, don’t stand there looking like a moron! Go and see Caesar before he has you charged with plotting his murder.”
Brutus did as he was told—well, didn’t he always? In the end, it was the best alternative.
“So that’s what happened, Caesar,” he said to the Dictator Perpetuus in his study at the Domus Publica. “I apologize for the worry it must have caused you.”
“It intrigued me, Brutus, but it didn’t worry me. Why should the thought of death worry any man? There’s little I haven’t done or achieved, though I trust I’ll live long enough to conquer the Kingdom of the Parthians.” The pale eyes were permanently washed out these days, the pressure of work almost too much even for a Caesar. “If it isn’t conquered, our western world will rue it sooner or later. I do confess I won’t be sorry to leave Rome.” A smile lit the eyes. “Not the right thing for a man who aspires to be king to say, is it? Oh, Brutus, what man in his right mind would want to king it over a contentious, fractious, prickly lot of Romans? Not I!”