The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
“Who,” he asked suddenly, “died today?”
“Hemicillus,” Rhascupolis said into the darkness. “Young Marcus Porcius Cato, fighting very gallantly. Pacuvius Labeo, by his own hand, I believe.”
“Livius Drusus Nero,” said Volumnius.
Brutus burst into tears, wept into the silence while the rest stayed very still, wishing they were elsewhere.
How long he wept, Brutus didn’t know, only that when the tears dried, he felt as if he had emerged from a dream into a far wilder, more beautiful and fascinating dream. On his feet now, he walked to the middle of the clearing and lifted his head to the sky, where the clouds had dissipated and the stars shone in their myriads. Only Homer had the words to describe what his eyes and his dazzled mind took in, awestruck.
“‘There are nights,’” he said, “‘when the upper air is windless and the stars in heaven stand out in their full splendor around the bright moon; when every mountain top and headland and ravine starts into sight, as the infinite depths of the sky are torn open to the very firmament.’”*
It marked a transition, all of them knew it, stiffening and pricking as their round eyes, long adjusted to the inky gloom, followed the shadow of Brutus walking back to them. He went to the bundles of belongings, picked up his sword and pulled it from its scabbard. He extended it to Volumnius.
“Do the deed, old friend,” he said.
Sobbing, Volumnius shook his head and backed away.
Brutus held out the sword to each of them in turn, and each of them refused to take it. Last was Strato of Epirus.
“Will you?” asked Brutus.
It was over in an instant. Strato of Epirus took the weapon in a blur of movement, seemed to prolong the gesture in a sudden lunge that saw the blade go in up to its eagle hilt under Brutus’s rib cage on the left side. A perfect thrust. Brutus was dead before his knees hit the leafy ground.
“I’m for home,” said Rhascupolis. “Who’s with me?”
No one, it seemed. The Thracian shrugged, found his horse, mounted it and disappeared.
When the wound had done bleeding—a very little only—there was a leap of flame in the west; Statyllus had kindled the camp beacon. So they waited as the constellations wheeled overhead and Brutus lay very peacefully on the pungent carpet, his eyes closed, the coin in his mouth—a gold denarius with his own profile on its obverse side.
Finally Dardanus the shield bearer stirred. “Statyllus is not coming back,” he said. “Let us take Marcus Brutus to Marcus Antonius. He would wish it so.”
They loaded the limp body across Brutus’s own horse and, as dawn broke faintly in the east, commenced the plod back to the battlefield of Philippi.
A prowling cavalry squadron conducted them to Mark Antony’s tent, where the victor of Philippi was already up and about, his robust health more than equal to the feast of last night.
“Put him there,” said Antony, pointing to a couch.
Two German troopers carried the very small bundle to the couch and laid it down gently, straightened its limbs until once more it assumed the form of a man.
“My paludamentum, Marsyas,” said Antony to his body servant.
The scarlet cape of the general was brought; Antony shook it out and let it flutter to cover all but Brutus’s face, stark and white, the scars of those decades of acne pitting its skin, the lank black curls crowning his scalp like silky feathers.
“Have you money to go home?” he asked Volumnius.
“Yes, Gaius Antonius, but we would like to take Statyllus and Lucilius too.”
“Statyllus is dead. Some guards caught him in Brutus’s camp and thought he was there to loot. I’ve seen his corpse. As for the false Brutus—I’ve a mind to keep Lucilius in my own service. Loyalty is hard to find.” Antony turned to his body servant. “Marsyas, arrange passes for any of Brutus’s people who wish to go to Neapolis.”
Which left him alone with Brutus, mute company. Brutus and Cassius dead. Aquila, Trebonius, Decimus Brutus, Cimber, Basilus, Ligarius, Labeo, the Casca brothers, a few more of the assassins. That it should have come to this, when it all might have blown over and Rome gone on in its same old slipshod, imperfect way! But no, that hadn’t satisfied Octavianus the arch-manipulator, the nightmare Caesar had conjured up out of nowhere to exact a full and bloody revenge.
As if the thought were father to the reality, Antony looked up to see Octavian standing in the light-filled triangle of the tent flap, with his impassive, stunningly handsome coeval Agrippa right behind him. Wrapped in a grey cloak, that hair glittering in the lamp flames like the tumbled surface of a pile of gold coins.
“I heard the news,” Octavian said, coming to stand beside the couch and gaze down at Brutus; a finger came out, touched the waxen cheek as if to assess its substance, then withdrew to be wiped fastidiously on the grey cloak. “He’s a wisp.”
“Death shrinks us all, Octavianus.”
“Not Caesar. Death has enhanced him.”
“Unfortunately that’s true.”
“Whose paludamentum is that? His?”
“No, it’s mine.”
The slight frame went rigid, the big grey eyes narrowed and blazed cold fire. “You do the cur too much honor, Antonius.”
“He’s a Roman nobleman, the commander of a Roman army. I’ll do him even greater honor at his funeral later today.”
“Funeral? He deserves no funeral!”
“My word rules here, Octavianus. He’ll be burned with full military honors.”
“Your word does not rule! He’s Caesar’s assassin!” Octavian hissed. “Feed him to the dogs, as Neoptolemus did Priam!”
“I don’t care if you howl, whine, screech, whimper or mew,” Antony said, little teeth bared, “Brutus will be burned with full military honors, and I expect your legions to be present!”
The smooth, beautiful young face turned to stone, suddenly so much the face of Caesar in a temper that Antony took an involuntary step backward, appalled.
“My legions can do as they please. And if you insist upon your honorable funeral, then conduct it. But not the head. The head is mine. Give it to me! To me!”
Antony looked on Caesar at the height of his power, saw a will incapable of bending. Thrown completely off balance, he found himself unable to tower, to roar, to bully. “You’re mad,” he said.
“Brutus murdered my father. Brutus led my father’s assassins. Brutus is my prize, not yours. I will ship his head to Rome, where I will impale it on a spear and fix it at the base of Divus Julius’s statue in the Forum,” said Octavian. “Give me the head.”
“Do you want Cassius’s head too? You’re too late, it’s not here. I can offer you a few others who died yesterday.”
“Just the head of Brutus,” Octavian said, voice steel.
The advantage lost, he didn’t honestly know how, Antony was reduced to pleading, then to begging, then to exhortations in his best oratory, then to tears. He ran the gamut of the softer emotions, for if there was one thing this joint expedition had shown him, it was that Octavianus the weakling, the sickly ninny, was impossible to cow, dominate, overwhelm. And with that shadow Agrippa always just behind him, unkillable too. Besides, the legions wouldn’t condone it.
“If you want it, then you take it!” he said in the end.
“Thank you. Agrippa?”
It was done in the time it took lightning to strike. Agrippa drew his sword, stepped forward, swung it and chopped through the neck clear to the cushions beneath, which parted and spat a shower of goose down. Then Octavian’s coeval caught the black curls in his fingers and let the head hang by his side. His face never changed.
“It will rot before it reaches Athens, let alone Rome,” said Antony, nauseated and disgusted.
“I commandeered a jar of pickling brine from the butchers,” Octavian said coolly, walking to the tent flap. “It doesn’t matter if the brain melts to a runny mess, as long as the face is recognizable. Rome must know that Caesar’s son has avenged hi
Agrippa and the head disappeared, Octavian lingered. “I know who’s dead, but who has been taken prisoner?” he asked.
“Just two. Quintus Hortensius and Marcus Favonius. The rest chose to fall on their swords—it’s not hard to see why,” Antony said, flicking one hand at Brutus’s headless body.
“What do you intend to do with the captives?”
“Hortensius gave the governorship of Macedonia to Brutus, so he dies on my brother Gaius’s tomb. Favonius can go home—he’s completely harmless.”
“I insist that Favonius be executed immediately!”
“In the name of all our gods, Octavianus, why? What has he ever done to you?” Antony cried, clutching at his hair.
“He was Cato’s best friend. That’s reason enough, Antonius. He dies today.”
“No, he goes home.”
“Execution, Antonius. You need me, my friend. You can’t do without me. And I insist.”
“Any more orders?”
“Who got away?”
“Messala Corvinus. Gaius Clodius, who murdered my brother. Cicero’s son. And all the fleet admirals, of course.”
“So there are still a few assassins to bring to justice.”
“You won’t rest until they’re all dead, eh?”
“Correct.” The flap parted; Octavian was gone.
“Marsyas!” Antony bellowed.
“Yes, domine?”
Antony plucked at the scarlet cape to twitch a fold over the grisly neck, oozing fluid. “Find the senior tribune on duty and tell him to have a funeral pyre prepared. We burn Marcus Brutus today with full military honors—and don’t let anyone know that Marcus Brutus no longer has his head. Find a pumpkin or something that will do, and send ten of my Germans to me now. They can put him on his bier inside this tent, put the pumpkin where the head ought to be, and pin the cape down firmly. Understood?”
“Yes, domine,” said the ashen Marsyas.
While the Germans and the shivering body servant dealt with the corpse of Marcus Brutus, Antony sat turned away, nor said a word. Only after Brutus was gone did he stir, blink away sudden, inexplicable tears.
The army would eat until it got home, there was so much food in the two Liberator camps, and more by far in Neapolis; the admirals had sailed the moment they heard the result of Second Philippi, leaving everything behind. A house full of silver one-talent sows, stuffed granaries, smokehouses of bacon, barrels of pickled pork, a warehouse of chickpea and lentil. The haul would amount to at least a hundred thousand talents in coin and sows, so the promised bonuses could be paid. Twenty-five thousand of the Liberator troops had volunteered to join Octavianus’s legions. No one wanted to join Antonius’s, though it was Antonius had won the two battles.
Calm down, Marcus Antonius! Don’t let that cold-blooded cobra Octavianus sink his fangs into you. He’s right, and he knows it. I need him, I can’t do without him. I’ve an army to get back to Italy, where the three Triumvirs have it all to do again. A new pact, an extended commission to set Rome in order. And it will give me great pleasure to dump all the dirty work on Octavianus. Let him find land for a hundred thousand veterans and feed three million Roman citizens with Sextus Pompeius owning Sicily and the seas. A year ago I would have said he couldn’t do it. Now, I’m not so sure. Agents, for pity’s sake! He’s hatched a small army of snakelets to whisper, and spy, and promulgate his causes, from the worship of Caesar to securing his own position. But I can’t live in the same city with him. I’m going to find a more congenial place to live, more congenial things to do than wrestle with an empty Treasury, hordes of veterans, and the grain supply.
“Is the head snugged down for its passage home?” Octavian asked Agrippa when he entered his tent.
“Perfectly, Caesar.”
“Tell Cornelius Gallus to take it to Amphipolis and hire a seaworthy ship. I don’t want it traveling with the legions.”
“Yes, Caesar,” said Agrippa, turning to leave.
“Agrippa?”
“Yes, Caesar?”
“You did superbly at the head of the Fourth.” He smiled, his breathing light and easy, his pose relaxed. “Brave Diomedes to my Ulysses. So may it always be.”
“So will it always be, Caesar.”
And today I too won a victory. I faced Antonius down, I beat him. Within a year he’ll have no choice but to call me Caesar to the whole Roman world. I will take the West and give Antonius the East wherein to ruin himself. Lepidus can have Africa and the Domus Publica, he’s no threat to either of us. Yes, I have a stout little band of adherents—Agrippa, Statilius Taurus, Maecenas, Salvidienus, Lucius Cornificius, Titius, Cornelius Gallus, the Coccei, Sosius…The nucleus of an expanding new nobility. That was my father’s great mistake. He wanted to preserve the old nobility, wanted his faction adorned by all the great old names. He couldn’t establish his autocracy within an ostensibly democratic framework. But I won’t make that mistake. My health and my tastes don’t run to splendor, I can never rival his magnificence as he stalked through the Forum in the garb of the Pontifex Maximus with his valorous crown upon his head and that inimitable aura of invincibility around him. Women looked on him, and swooned. Men looked on him, and their inadequacies gnawed at them, their impotence drove them to hate him.
Whereas I will be their paterfamilias—their kind, steady, warm and smiling daddy. I will let them think they rule themselves, and monitor their every word and action. Turn the brick of Rome into marble. Fill Rome’s temples with great works of art, re-pave her streets, deck her squares, plant trees and build public baths, give the Head Count full bellies and all the entertainment they could wish for. Wage war only when necessary, but garrison the peripheries of our world. Take the gold of Egypt to revitalize Rome’s economy. I am so young, I have the time to do it all.
But first, find a way to eliminate Marcus Antonius without murdering him, or going to war against him. It can be done: the answer lies in the mists of time, just waiting to manifest itself.
*Homer’s Iliad, Book VIII, 558. Prose translation by Dr. E. V. Rieu, Penguin Classics.
3
When no ship’s captain in Amphipolis could be prevailed upon to take a fat fee and put out into winter seas bound for Rome, Cornelius Gallus brought the big, swilling jar back to the camp at Philippi to find the army still mopping up.
“Then,” said Octavian, sighing, “take it all the way across to Dyrrachium and find a ship there. Go now, Gallus. I don’t want it traveling with the army. Soldiers are superstitious.”
Cornelius Gallus and his squadron of German cavalry arrived in Dyrrachium at the end of that momentous year; there he found his ship, its master willing to make the voyage across the Adriatic to Ancona. Brundisium was no longer under blockade, but there were many fleets roaming, their Liberator admirals rudderless as they debated what to do. Mostly, join Sextus Pompey.
It was no part of Gallus’s orders to accompany the jar; he handed it over to the captain and rode back to Octavian. But someone in his party whispered what the cargo was before he left, for it had generated much interest. A whole ship, hired at great expense, just to ferry a big ceramic jar to Italy? It hadn’t made any sense until the whisper surfaced. The head of Marcus Junius Brutus, murderer of Divus Julius! Oh, the Lares Permarini protect us from this evil cargo!
In the middle of the sea the merchantman encountered a storm worse than any the crew had ever experienced. The head! It was the head! When the stout hull sprang a bad leak, the crew was sure that the head was determined to kill them too. So the oarsmen and sailors wrested the jar from the captain’s custody and threw it overboard. The moment it vanished, the storm blew into nothing.
And the jar containing the head of Marcus Junius Brutus sank like the heavy stone it was, down, down, down, to lie forever on the muddy bottom of the Adriatic Sea somewhere between Dyrrachium and Ancona.
FINIS
Author’s Afterword
Marking as it does the passing of the last g
Octavius/Octavian/Augustus more properly belongs to the Imperium than to the Republic, so, having dealt with his childhood and his emergence on to the stage of world affairs, I think it is appropriate to call a halt to what has been an enormously enjoyable creative exercise: breathing life into history without distorting it more than the limitations of my scholarship make inevitable.
Provided that history is adhered to and the writer can resist the temptation to visit his or her own modern attitudes, ethics, morals and ideals upon the period and its characters, the novel is an excellent way to explore a different time. It permits the writer to climb inside the characters’ heads and wander the maze of their thoughts and emotions: a luxury not permitted to professional historians, but one that can render understandable events that are otherwise inexplicable, mysterious or incongruous. During the course of these six books, I have taken the external events of some very famous lives and attempted to create rounded, believable human beings endowed with all the complexities common sense dictates they must have possessed.
What attracted me to the period was threefold: first of all, that it hadn’t been done to death by other writers; secondly, its relevance to modern western civilization in that so much of our own systems of justice, government and commerce stem out of the Roman Republic; and, last but by no means least, that rarely have so many extraordinarily gifted men walked history’s stage in close enough temporal proximity to one another to have known one another as living men. Marius, Sulla and Pompey the Great were all known to Caesar, and all, in one way or another, shaped the course of his life, as did other famous historical figures like Cato Uticensis and Cicero. But by the end of The October Horse they are all gone, including Caesar. What remains is their legacy to the ongoing Roman experience: Caesar’s great-nephew, Gaius Octavius, who was to become Caesar Imperator, and then Augustus. If I don’t stop now, I never will!