The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
“I hope so. I detest having to appear in the House looking blue around the gills and wheezing, but appear I must. Though I do think the terrible attacks are less frequent.”
“I’ll offer to Salus.”
“I do, every day.”
“The harvest?” Agrippa prompted, heeding the message: he too must offer to Salus every day.
“It seems there literally won’t be one. What grain there is will fetch huge prices, so Quintus Pedius is going to have to bring some emergency measures into law forbidding the sale of grain to private vendors ahead of the state. That’s why I can’t strip the Treasury. It’s no part of my strategy to impoverish business, but grain will have to be a special case. Despite my father’s colonies for the urban poor, there are still a hundred and fifty thousand free grain chits issued, and that must continue. Cicero and Marcus Brutus wouldn’t agree with me, but I value the esteem of the Head Count. It gives Rome most of her soldiers.”
“Why not pay the legion bonuses in wood, Caesar?”
“Because there’s a principle involved,” Octavian said in tones that brooked no argument. “Either I run the Senate, or the Senate runs me. Were it a body of wise men, I’d be grateful for its counsel, but it’s nothing but factions and frictions.”
“Do you plan to abolish it?” Agrippa asked, fascinated.
Octavian looked genuinely shocked. “No, never! What I have to do is re-educate it, Agrippa, though that won’t be done in a single day—or a single consulship. The Senate’s proper function is to recommend decent laws and leave executive government to the elected magistrates.”
“What about the wagons of wood, then?”
“They stay where they are. Things are going to get worse long before they get better, and I want a reserve of money against far more daunting situations than a drought and Marcus Antonius. This time tomorrow I become Caesar Filius in law, the lex curiata will be passed. That means I’ll have Caesar’s fortune—minus his gift to the people, which I’ll pay immediately. But I don’t mean to squander anything I have from my father, be it wood or investments. For the moment I have Rome to myself, but do you think I don’t realize that must end? The contents of the Treasury are going to have to pay for everything while wastrels like Antonius exist.” He stretched contentedly, smiling Caesar’s smile for Agrippa’s eyes alone. “I wish,” he remarked, “that I had the Domus Publica as an office. My house is too small.”
Agrippa grinned. “Buy a bigger one, Caesar. Or hold a proper election and get yourself voted in as Pontifex Maximus.”
“No, Lepidus can stay Pontifex Maximus. I have my eye on a bigger house, but not the Domus Publica. Unlike my father, I have no desire to make a huge splash in Rome’s pond. He reveled in magnificence because it suited his nature. He enjoyed notoriety. I do not,” said Octavian.
“But,” Agrippa objected, still haunted by the specter of legionary bonuses, “you have over three hundred million to pay the legions. That’s twelve thousand talents of silver. I don’t see how you can do it, Caesar, without using wood.”
“I don’t intend to pay all of it,” Octavian said nonchalantly. “Just half of it. I’ll owe them the rest.”
“They’ll change sides!”
“Not after I talk to them and explain that payment over time guarantees a future income. Especially if there’s ten percent interest payable on it. Do not fret so, Agrippa, I know what I’m doing. I’ll talk them into it—and keep their loyalty.”
He will too, thought Agrippa, awed. What a plutocrat he’d make! Atticus would have to look to his laurels.
Two days later Philippus held a family dinner in honor of the new consuls, shrinking at the prospect of having to inform them that his younger son, Quintus, was making overtures to Gaius Cassius in Syria. Oh, for a life devoted to the pleasures of the table, of books, of a beautiful, cultured wife! Instead, he had been inflicted with a juvenile power grabber who apparently had no brakes. That, he remembered vaguely, was what Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, had always said about her Caesar: he had no brakes. Nor did this second edition. Such a charming, inoffensive, quiet, sick little boy he had been! Now it was he, Philippus, who was sick. That long ambassadorial journey to Italian Gaul during the depths of winter had not only killed Servius Sulpicius; it was threatening to kill him and Lucius Piso too. Piso’s ailment was pulmonary, his was rotting toes. The frostbite he had suffered had turned to something so unpleasant that the physicians shook their heads and the surgeons recommended amputation, which Philippus had rejected with horror. So the Philippus who greeted his guests wore slippers over socks stuffed with sweet-smelling herbs to disguise the stench of his blackened toes.
The men outnumbered the women because three of the men were bachelors—his elder son, Lucius, who stubbornly refused every bride Philippus suggested—Octavian—and Marcus Agrippa, whom Octavian had insisted upon bringing. When Philippus set eyes on this unknown Agrippa, his breath caught. So handsome, yet so much a man! Nearly as tall as Caesar had been, shoulders like Antonius, a soldierly bearing that endowed him with massive presence. Oh, Octavianus! cried Philippus within his mind, this young man will take it all off you! But by the time the dinner concluded, he had changed his mind. Agrippa belonged whole and entire to Octavianus. Not that he could level a charge of unchastity or indecency; they never touched, even when they walked together, and cast each other no caressing or languishing looks. Whatever this natural leader of men saw in Octavianus, it completely negated his own ambitions. My stepson is building a faction among men in his age group, and more shrewdly than Caesar, who always stood apart, held himself aloof from intimate friendships with men. Well, that old canard about King Nicomedes had done it, of course, but if Caesar had had an Agrippa, no one could have murdered him. My stepson is far different. He doesn’t care about canards, they bounce off him like stones off a hippopotamus.
For Octavian the dinner was a delight because his sister had come. Of all the people in his life, including his mother, Octavia lay closest by far to his heart. How she had bloomed! Her fair beauty shone Atia’s down, though her nose wasn’t as lovely, nor her cheekbones as high. It was all in her eyes, the most wonderful eyes any woman had ever owned, wide apart, widely opened, the color of an aquamarine, as revealing as his were shut away. Her nature was entirely love and compassion, and it looked out of her eyes. She only had to appear in the Porticus Margaritaria to shop, and everyone who saw her loved her at a single glance. My father had his daughter, Julia, as a conduit to the common people; I have Octavia. I will treasure her and shelter her for all my days as my good spirit.
The three women were in a merry mood, Atia because her darling son was proving such a prodigy—why had she never suspected it? After nearly twenty years of worrying herself to the point of illness over someone she had thought too frail to hang on to life, she was beginning to discover that her little Gaius was a huge force to be reckoned with. For all his wheezing, it came as a shock to realize that he would probably outlive everyone, even that magnificent Marcus Agrippa.
Octavia was in a merry mood because her brother was there; his affection for her was fully returned. She was three years older than he, and wonderfully healthy herself; he had always been a superior kind of doll, toddling around in her wake beaming at her, plying her with questions, seeking haven with her when their mother fussed and clucked too unbearably. Octavia had always seen what Rome and her family were only now beginning to see: the strength, the determination, the brilliance, the ineradicable sense of specialness. She supposed that all of these were his Julian inheritance, but understood too that he possessed a hardheaded, frugal, down-to-earth side from their blood father’s impeccably Latin stock. How composed he is! My brother will rule the world.
Valeria Messala was in a merry mood because suddenly her life had opened up. The sister of Messala Rufus the augur, she had been wife to Quintus Pedius for thirty years, given him two sons and a daughter; one son was grown, the younger of contubernalis age, and the girl sixteen. Her chie
Oblivious to the masculine conversation, the women chattered about babies. Octavia had borne a girl, Claudia Marcella, last year, and was pregnant again. This time, she hoped, with a son.
Her husband, Gaius Claudius Marcellus Minor, found himself in a curious position for one whose family had so obdurately and persistently opposed Caesar. He had retrieved his expectations—and preserved his large fortune—by marrying Octavia, whom he loved passionately because one couldn’t not. But who would ever have dreamed that his wife’s little brother would be senior consul at nineteen? And whereabouts was it all going to go? Somehow, he thought, to dizzying heights. Octavianus radiated success, though not in the flamboyant style of his great-uncle.
“Do you think,” Marcellus Minor asked Octavian and Pedius, “that it’s the right time to prosecute the Liberators?” He caught the red look in Octavian’s eyes at his use of this detested name, and amended it hastily. “The assassins, I mean, of course. Most of Rome uses ‘Liberator’ as an ironical device, not sincerely. But to go on with what I was saying, Caesar Octavianus, you have Marcus Antonius and the western governors to deal with, so is this the right time for trials, which are so drawn out?”
“And from what I hear,” said Philippus, coming to Marcellus Minor’s rescue, “Vatinius isn’t going to contest Marcus Brutus in Illyricum, he’s coming home. That strengthens Brutus’s position. Then there’s Cassius in Syria, another threat to peace. Why try the assassins and exacerbate the situation? If Brutus and Cassius are tried and found guilty, they’re outlaws and can’t come home. That might tempt them into war, and Rome doesn’t need yet another war. Antonius and the western governors are war enough.”
Quintus Pedius listened, but had no intention of answering. A most unhappy man, he was permanently embroiled in the affairs of the Julii, and hated it. His nature he had inherited from his country squire father, but his fate he had inherited from his mother, Caesar’s eldest sister. All he wanted was a quiet life on his vast estates in Campania, not the consulship. Then his eyes fell on his wife, so animated, and he sighed. Patricians will always be patricians, he reflected wryly. Valeria loves being the consul’s wife, talks of nothing but hosting the Bona Dea.
“The assassins must be prosecuted,” Octavian was saying. “The scandal lies in the fact that they weren’t prosecuted the day after they did the deed. Had they, the present situation could never have arisen. It’s Cicero and the Senate responsible for legalizing Brutus’s position, which rather flows on to Cassius’s, but it’s Antonius and his Senate that didn’t prosecute.”
“Which is my point,” Marcellus Minor said. “If they weren’t prosecuted immediately afterward—indeed, were given a general amnesty—will people understand?”
“I don’t care if people don’t, Marcellus. Senate and People have to learn that a group of noblemen can’t excuse the murder of a fellow nobleman in a legal office on patriotic grounds. Murder is murder. If the assassins had reason to believe that my father intended to make himself King of Rome, then they should have prosecuted him in a court of law,” said Octavian.
“How could they possibly have done that?” Marcellus asked. “Caesar was Dictator Perpetuus, above the law, inviolable.”
“All they had to do was strip him of his dictatorship—it was voted to him, after all. But they didn’t even try to strip him of it. The assassins voted in favor of Dictator Perpetuus.”
“They were afraid of him,” said Pedius. He had been too.
“Nonsense! Afraid of what? When did my father ever take a Roman life except in battle? His policy was clemency—a mistake, but a reality nonetheless. Pedius, he had pardoned most of his assassins, some of them twice over!”
“Still and all, they were afraid of him,” said Marcellus.
The young, smooth, beautiful face hardened, took on the mien of a cold, mature purveyor of terror. “They have more reason to be afraid of me! I won’t rest until the last assassin is dead, his reputation in ruins, his property confiscated, his women and children paupers.”
A queer silence fell upon the men. Philippus broke it.
“There are fewer and fewer to prosecute,” he said. “Gaius Trebonius, Aquila, Decimus Brutus, Basilus—”
“But why,” Marcellus interrupted, “is Sextus Pompeius to be prosecuted? He wasn’t an assassin, and he’s now officially Rome’s proconsul of the seas.”
“His proconsular status is about to end, as you well know. I have a dozen witnesses to testify that his ships raided the African grain fleet two nundinae ago. That makes him a traitor. Besides, he’s Pompeius Magnus’s son,” Octavian said flatly. “I will be rid of all Caesar’s enemies.”
His auditors knew that the Caesar he meant was himself.
The trials of the Liberators came on within the first month of the consulship of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus and Quintus Pedius; even though there were twenty-three separate hearings (the dead were tried too), the whole process was over within one nundinum. The jurors unanimously condemned each Liberator, who was declared nefas. All his property was confiscated by the state. Those Liberators like the tribune of the plebs Gaius Servilius Casca who were still in Rome fled, but pursuit was slow. Suddenly Servilia and Tertulla were homeless, though not for long. Their private fortunes had always been invested with Atticus, who bought Servilia a new house on the Palatine and took a great deal of undeserved credit for supporting the two women.
When the subsidiary prosecution convicted Sextus Pompey of treason, one of the thirty-three jurors returned a tile marked A for ABSOLVO; the rest obediently said C for CONDEMNO.
“Why did you do that?” Agrippa asked the man, a knight.
“Because Sextus Pompeius is not a traitor” was the answer.
Octavian filed away the name, rather pleased at the size of the man’s fortune. He would keep.
The bequests were distributed to the people, and Caesar’s parks and gardens thrown open; Romans from all walks of life loved to stroll and picnic in verdant but tamed places. Octavian was pleased to hire Cleopatra’s palace out to ambitious members of the First Class desirous of giving large feasts for their clients. Their names went into his “Items of Interest” file too.
He secured the election of two intimates as tribunes of the plebs: Marcus Agrippa and Lucius Cornificius, for with Casca’s flight, the College held two vacancies. Publius Titius, already a tribune of the plebs and anxious to stand high with Octavian, saved Octavian’s life when the foreign praetor, Quintus Gallus, tried to murder him. Gallus was stripped of his office, the galvanized Senate condemned him to death without a trial, and the ordinary people were allowed to loot his house. Tiny shock waves were radiating through the First Class, who now began to ask themselves if Octavianus was any better than Antonius?
True to his word, the new senior consul took enough money from the Treasury to pay his original three legions ten thousand sesterces each. Their representatives had readily agreed to his proposal that the other half should wait and accrue interest as a guarantee of future income. Though, with centurion extras, this amounted to less than four thousand talents, he took six thousand—as much as he dared with grain prices spiraling—and split the remainder up among his three later legions. He also recruited sixty humble rankers in each legion to work as his private agents, one man per century; their job was to spread word of Caesar’s generosity and constancy, and also report any troublemakers
* * *
On the twenty-third day of September, which was his twentieth birthday, Octavian took eleven legions and marched north to contend with Mark Antony and the western governors.
With him he took the tribune of the plebs Lucius Cornificius, an extraordinary action—to care for the interests of his troops, all plebeians, he explained. Behind him in Rome he left Pedius to govern, with his two other tribunes of the plebs, Agrippa and Titius, to push Pedius’s laws through the Plebeian Assembly. His more invisible helper, Gaius Maecenas, remained in Rome on less obvious business, chiefly concerned with recruiting innovative men of the lower classes.
Agrippa hadn’t liked abandoning Octavian. “You’ll get into trouble if I’m not with you,” he said.
“I’ll manage, Agrippa. I need you in Rome to gain experience in unwarlike matters, and learn about lawmaking. Believe me, I stand in no danger on this campaign.”
“But you’re taking a tribune of the plebs,” Agrippa objected.
“One less known to be my loyalest follower,” said Octavian.
The march was fairly leisurely and ended at Bononia, where Octavian made camp and sent to Mutina for the six legions of raw recruits Decimus Brutus had deemed so hopeless that he left them behind when he chased Antony westward. Salvidienus was charged with drilling and training all recruits remorselessly while the army waited for Mark Antony to find it.