The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
Lucius Calpurnius Piso read Caesar’s will out in full. Not only did it name Gaius Octavius as his heir, it also formally adopted him as Caesar’s son, to be known henceforward as Gaius Julius Caesar. Murmurs of amazement rose from the crowd; no one knew who this Gaius Octavius was, the Forum frequenters able to give his origins, but unable to describe his appearance. When Decimus Brutus was mentioned as a minor heir, another growl went up, but Piso nimbly hopped to the bequest of most interest—three hundred sesterces to every Roman citizen man, and public use of Caesar’s gardens across the Tiber. The news was greeted with an alarming silence. No one cheered, no one threw objects into the air, no one applauded. After Piso concluded by announcing the date of the funeral, the Senate left the vicinity of the rostra very quickly, each member escorted by six of Lepidus’s soldiers.
It was as if the whole world waited for Caesar’s funeral, as if no man or woman in Rome was prepared to make a judgement until Caesar’s last rites were over. Even when Antony told the Senate the next day in Jupiter Stator’s that he was permanently expunging the office of dictator from the constitution, only Dolabella reacted with enthusiasm. Apathy, everywhere apathy! And the crowds grew thicker, denser. After dark the whole of the Forum and the streets leading to it were ablaze with lights from lamps and campfires; worried residents in the surrounding insulae didn’t sleep for fear of fire.
A relief then, when the day of Caesar’s funeral dawned.
A special shrine had been erected on an open piece of ground slightly down-Forum from the side of the Domus Publica and the little round aedes of Vesta; it was an exact but smaller replica of the temple of Venus Genetrix in Caesar’s Forum, made from wood painted to look like marble. Atop it was a platform accessed by steps to one side, its supports made to look like pillars too.
After long consultation with the Senate, the two in charge of the funeral arrangements, Lucius Caesar and Lucius Piso, had decided that the rostra was just too dangerous a site for the public display of the body and the eulogy. This site at mid-Forum was safer. From it, the funeral procession could turn straight into the Vicus Tuscus and the Velabrum without invading the nucleus of the crowd. Once the cortege reached the Circus Flaminius, it would enter and proceed down its length; as this circus held fifty thousand spectators in its bleachers, Rome’s citizens would have a good opportunity to mourn Rome’s most beloved son. And from there it would be on to the Campus Martius, where the body would be burned, several hundred litters of aromatics bought at state expense to fuel the pyre.
The procession commenced at the fringes of the Palus Ceroliae swamps, where there was room for every participant to gather. Caesar’s bier would join it as it passed the Domus Publica. All Lepidus’s two thousand soldiers kept the crowds off the Sacra Via itself, and defended a space around the viewing and eulogy site large enough to accommodate the huge pageant.
Fifty gilded black chariots drawn by pairs of black horses carried the actors wearing the wax masks of Caesar’s ancestors—from Venus and Aeneas and Mars through Iulus and Romulus to his uncles by marriage, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla—down from the Velia to stand in a triple semi-circle in front of the platformed shrine. One hundred of the many hundreds of litters piled with frankincense, myrrh, nard and other costly, burnable aromatics were stacked as a fence between the back row of chariots and the crowd, with shoulder-to-shoulder soldiers as an additional barrier. Interspersed with the chariots and litters as the procession came down from the Velia were black-robed professional mourners beating their breasts, tearing their hair, emitting eldritch wails and keening dirges.
The crowd was gigantic, the greatest number of people since the famous gathering of Saturninus. When Caesar appeared on his bier from out of the doors to the vestibule of the Kings, a moan went up, a sigh, a tremble as of a million leaves. Lucius Caesar, Lucius Piso, Antony, Dolabella, Calvinus and Lepidus carried him, each clad in a black tunic and toga. Behind it the masses closed in. The soldiers standing with their backs pressed against the fence of litters started to look at each other uneasily, feeling the litters begin to wobble and creak as the crowd behind them pushed inexorably. Their worry communicated itself to the chariot horses, which grew restive, and that in turn had the actors shivering.
Caesar sat upright upon the black cushions of the bier in the glory of his pontifical robes, head crowned with the corona civica, face serene, eyes closed. He rode on high like a mighty king, for all six of his pallbearers were imposingly tall, and looked the great noblemen they were.
The pallbearers climbed the steps smoothly; Caesar hardly moved as they compensated for the slope. The bier was set down upon the platform so that Caesar was on full display.
Mark Antony went to the front of the edifice and looked out across that ocean, a corner of his appalled mind noting the many Jews with their corkscrew curls and beards, the foreigners of all descriptions—and the veterans, who had chosen to wear a sprig of laurel on their black togas. What was always a white crowd, for Romans at public affairs were togate, had become a black crowd. Fitting, thought Antony, intending to give the greatest speech of his career to the greatest audience any speaker since Saturninus had ever owned.
But it was never given. All Antony managed to say were the opening words inviting Rome to mourn for Caesar. Screams of terrible grief erupted from countless thousands of throats, and the crowd moved as if seized by a single convulsion. Those in the forefront of the crush laid hands upon the hundred litters of aromatics as the chariot horses began to plunge and rear, the actors to scramble for their lives. Suddenly the air was full of chunks of flying wood, bark, resin, raining down on the platform, thrown inside the shrine, around it in growing heaps. The pallbearers, including Antony, fled down the platform steps and ran for the Domus Publica.
Someone threw a torch, and the whole area burst into a pillar of flames. Like his daughter before him, Caesar burned at the wish of the people, not by decree of the Senate.
And after so many days of silence, the crowd shouted for the blood of the Liberators.
“Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!” on and on and on.
Yet there was no riot. Thundering for Liberator blood, the masses stood watching the platform, bier and shrine dissolve into a wall of solid fire, not moving again until the blaze died away and the whole of Rome was filled with the dizzying, beautiful smell of burning aromatics.
Only then did anger erupt into violence. Ignoring Lepidus’s soldiers, the masses raced in all directions looking for victims. Liberators! Where were the Liberators? Death to the Liberators! Many poured up on to the Palatine, where doors were bolted in anonymous rows down dozens of narrow alleys and no one knew behind which one lived a Liberator. A Forum frequenter, crazed with grief, spotted Gaius Helvius Cinna, poet senator, running like one possessed, and mistook him for the other Cinna, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who had once been Caesar’s brother-in-law and was rumored to be a Liberator. Innocent of any wrongdoing, Helvius Cinna was literally torn into small pieces.
With night falling, and balked of any other positive prey, the weeping, anguished mobs dispersed.
The Forum Romanum lay deserted under a pall of sweet smoke.
On the morrow the undertakers searched for Caesar’s ashes, put what tiny fragments of charred bones they could find into a gem-studded golden urn.
And on the following day, dawn revealed that the blackened flags where shrine and platform had been were covered with little bunches of early spring flowers, and little woollen dolls, and little woollen balls. Soon the little bunches of flowers, the little woollen dolls and the little woollen balls lay a foot thick. Those who left the flowers were women; those who left the dolls were Roman citizen men; and those who left the balls were slaves. The offerings had specific religious significance, and showed how far love for Caesar percolated through every stratum of the city. Of all five Classes, only the First had not universally loved him. And the Head Count, too lowly to have a Class at all, had loved him most. Slaves had no heads
Who can tell why some men are loved, and others not? To a very angry Mark Antony, it was a mystery he had no hope of solving, though, had he asked Aulus Hirtius, Hirtius would have said that all who set eyes on him remembered Caesar, that he radiated some powerfully attractive force impossible to define, that, perhaps, he was simply the personification of the legendary hero.
An angry Antony ordered the removal of the flowers, dolls and balls, but it turned out to be an exercise in futility. For every lot hauled away, twice as many appeared. Baffled, Antony had to give up, to close his eyes to the hundreds upon hundreds of people who were always there around the place where Caesar had burned to pray to him, to offer to him.
Three days after the funeral, the dawn light revealed a magnificent marble altar on the spot where Caesar had burned, and the flowers, the dolls and the balls spread right down the Forum to the rostra.
Eight days after the funeral, a twenty-foot-high column of pure white Proconnesian marble reared alongside the altar. All done in the night marches. Lepidus’s soldiers hadn’t seen a thing, they protested; they loved Caesar too. Caesar, who was being worshiped as a god by almost all of Rome.
Lucius Caesar didn’t stay in Rome to witness most of this. He came down with pain in every limb, climbed laboriously into a litter and set off for his villa near Neapolis. On the way, he visited Cleopatra.
The palace had become a sparsely furnished desert of bleak polished stone and wooden crates; the barges were already moving things downstream to Ostia.
“Are you so ill, Lucius?” she enquired anxiously.
“I am ill in the spirit, Cleopatra. I just couldn’t bear to be in a city that allows two blatant murderers in purple-bordered togas to go about their praetorian business.”
“Brutus and Cassius. Though I believe that they haven’t yet had the courage to go about their praetorian business.”
“They daren’t until the veterans have left Rome. You heard that poor Helvius Cinna was killed? Piso is desolate.”
“Instead of the other Cinna, yes. Was the other Cinna truly one of the assassins?”
“That ingrate? No. He merely thanked Caesar for recalling him from exile by stripping off his praetorian insignia in public because Caesar gave them to him. It gave him a day in the sun.”
“It’s the end of everything, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Either an end, or a beginning.”
“And Caesar adopted Gaius Octavius.” She shivered. “That was brilliant of him, Lucius. Gaius Octavius is very dangerous.”
Lucius laughed. “An eighteen-year-old boy? I think not.”
“At eight. At eighty.”
She looks, Lucius thought, blighted yet entire. Well, she was reared in a cruel nest. She will survive.
“Where’s Caesarion?” he asked.
“Gone with his nursemaids and Hapd’efan’e. It’s not politic to put two Ptolemies aboard the same ship, or even in the same fleet of ships. We go in two segments. I shall wait another two nundinae. Charmian and Iras have remained, and Servilia visits. Oh, Lucius, how she suffers! She blames Porcia for Brutus’s share in it, probably with justice. But it’s Caesar’s death eats at her. She loved him more than anyone.”
“More than you loved him?”
“Past tense? No, always present tense. Her love is different from mine. I have a country to care for, and Caesar’s blood son.”
“Will you marry again?”
“I will have to, Lucius. I am Pharaoh, I must have issue to nurture Nilus and my people.”
So Lucius Julius Caesar went on his way to Neapolis, feeling the grief of Caesar’s going more now than in the beginning. Matius is right. If Caesar, with all his genius, could not find a way out, who is there left to try? An eighteen-year-old? Never. The wolves of Rome’s First Class will tear Gaius Octavius into tinier bits than the Head Count did Helvius Cinna. We of the First Class are our own worst enemies.
IX
Caesar’s Heir
From APRIL until DECEMBER of 44 B.C.
1
Legates, military tribunes and prefects of all ranks, even contubernales, since they came from families with clout or had distinguished themselves in some way, were not subject to the restrictions and disciplines placed on ranker soldiers and their centurions; it was, for instance, their right to leave military service at any time.
Thus, having arrived in Apollonia at the beginning of March, Gaius Octavius, Marcus Agrippa and Quintus Salvidienus were not obliged to live in the enormous leather-tented camps that stretched from Apollonia all the way north to Dyrrachium. The fifteen legions Caesar had assembled for his campaign went about their camping business indifferent to the presence of the upper-class men who would later assume a sometimes purely nominal command of their battle activities. Save for battle, the twain rarely met.
For Octavius and Agrippa, accommodation was not an issue; they went to the house in Apollonia set aside for Caesar and moved into a small, undesirable room. The penurious Salvidienus, eight years their senior and unsure of his duties or even his rank until Caesar defined them, reported to the quartermaster-general, Publius Ventidius, who assigned him to a room in a house rented for junior military tribunes not yet old enough to stand for election as tribunes of the soldiers. The problem was that the room already had a tenant, another junior military tribune named Gaius Maecenas, who went to Ventidius and explained that he didn’t want to share his room or his life with another fellow, especially a Picentine.
The fifty-year-old Ventidius was another Picentine, and had a personal history more ignominious by far than Salvidienus’s. As a little boy he had walked as a captive in a triumphal parade Pompey the Great’s father had celebrated for victories over the Italians in the Italian War. Childhood afterward had been a parentless ordeal, and only marriage to a wealthy widow from Rosea Rura country had given him a chance to rise. As the Rosea Rura bred the best mules in the world, he went into the business of breeding and selling army mules to generals like Pompey the Great. Thus his contemptuous nickname, Mulio, “the muleteer.” Lacking education and the proper background, he had hungered in vain for a military command, knowing in his bones that he could general troops. By the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon he was well known to Caesar; he attached himself to Caesar’s cause and waited for his chance. Unfortunately Caesar preferred to give him quartermaster’s duties than command of a legion, but, being Ventidius, he applied himself to this organizational job with dour efficiency. Be it regulating the lives of junior military tribunes or doling out food, equipment and arms to the legions, Publius Ventidius did it well, still hoping in his heart for that opportunity to general. It was getting closer. Caesar had promised him a praetorship next year, and praetors commanded armies, didn’t serve as quartermasters.
Understandably, when the wealthy, privileged Gaius Maecenas came complaining about a squalid Picentine moving into his room, Ventidius was not impressed.
“The answer’s easy, Maecenas,” he said. “Do what others in the same situation do—rent yourself a house at your own expense.”
“Do you think I wouldn’t, if there were any to rent?” gasped Maecenas. “My servants are living in a hovel as it is!”
“Hard luck” was Ventidius’s unsympathetic reply.
Maecenas’s reaction to this lack of official co-operation was typical of a wealthy, privileged young man: he couldn’t keep Salvidienus out, but nor was he prepared to move over for him.
“So I’m living in about a fifth of a room that’s plenty big enough for two ordinary tribunes,” Salvidienus said to Octavius and Agrippa in disgust.
“I’m surprised you haven’t just pushed him into his half and told him to lump it,” said Agrippa.
“If I do that, he’ll go straight to the legatal tribunal board and accuse me of making trouble, and I can’t afford to earn a reputation as a troublemaker. You haven’t seen this Maecenas—he’s a
“Maecenas,” Octavius said thoughtfully. “An extraordinary name. Sounds as if he goes back to the Etruscans. I’m curious to meet this Gaius Maecenas.”
“What a terribly good idea,” said Agrippa. “Let’s go.”
“No,” said Octavius, “I’d rather fish on my own. The pair of you can spend your day on a picnic or a nice long walk.”
So when Gaius Octavius strolled alone into the room in one of the junior military tribunes’ buildings, Gaius Maecenas glanced up from his writing with a puzzled frown.
Four-fifths of the space was crammed with Maecenas’s gear: a proper bed with a feather mattress, portable pigeonholes full of scrolls and papers, a walnut desk inlaid with some very good marquetry, a matching chair, a couch and low table for dining, a console table that held wine, water and snacks, a camp bed for his body servant, and a dozen large wood-and-steel trunks.
The owner of all this clutter was anything but a martial type. Maecenas was short, plump, quite homely of face, clad in a tunic of expensive patterned wool, with felt slippers upon his feet. His dark hair was exquisitely barbered, his eyes were dark, his moist red lips in a permanent pout.
“Greetings,” said Octavius, perching on a trunk.
Clearly one look had informed Gaius Maecenas that he confronted a social equal, for he got up with a welcoming smile. “Greetings. I’m Gaius Maecenas.”
“And I’m Gaius Octavius.”
“Of the consular Octavii?”
“The same family, yes, though a different branch. My father died a praetor when I was four years old.”