by C C Taylor
So there he was getting closer to the city centre, the traffic getting thicker, then houses of stone that are hardly houses at all, where the dust and dried mud tracks show some signs of hardening into rutted roads. Skip stayed around in the suburbs a while in order to pick up some more of their ways and the customs, and more importantly, the latest news from Rome. “And the food was good,” he said. “Nice and cheap and fresh.”
At risk of complicating my tale…but you did ask, and I find it necessary… I should also tell you what was happening just then both here and in Hispania. Ever heard of the battle of Munda? No, of course not. It was a dirty little thing. Whatever Hanno thought he might find in Hispania, in actual fact there was no more than a handful of Africans. Hispania Ulterior was pretty much in the hands of the occupying Roman armies. In the end, it was Rome against Rome and that’s why we prefer not to remember it. Labienus was there, and both of Pompey’s sons still gnawing at the bone…they’d met up in the Baleares and sailed over from there. But as for Carthaginians, if you could really call them that as Hanno did, the few that bothered to join in what was essentially none of their business, well, I heard they were taken captive and that’s the last we heard of them. And almost the last of their elephants.
The chronicles say their seventy thousand men, many of them once on Caesar’s side, faced Caesar’s rapidly assembled forty thousand who had marched overland from Rome. That’s fifteen hundred miles, young Marcus, imagine that! In less than a month. He only marched with the two old veteran legions and a couple of newly-formed ones but JC was a great recruiting sergeant amongst all his other attributes and he picked up support from many thousands on the way. Octavian was supposed to join them, but, guess what? He was a bit poorly and only arrived in time to pick the bones of the carcass; something he got to be quite good at later on.
As they got further into what was supposed to be enemy territory, they found that even some of the cities in the south of the Land of the Hyrax were for Caesar. While Labienus holed up in Cordoba, JC’s army took over a small town and decided to winter there. Rumours flew around and more soldiers defected to Caesar. Finally, they met in open battle where the only African legion present, Bogud’s Mauretanian cavalry, fought with Caesar and not against him.
Pompey’s sons Gnaeus and Sextus fled again and Labienus finally bit the dirt. Fourteen thousand of the enemy were captured alive and brought back to Rome. How do I remember all this? Because Caesar rubbed our faces in it when he returned. It was the saddest thing you ever saw. We lined the streets to ‘celebrate’ this victory, but instead of seeing our proud eagles triumph over weird monsters from Asia or brutes from the British Isles, all we were treated to was dead Roman after dead Roman. As if to remind us of the social wars. As if Caesar was saying, ‘Look what I can do!’ People only cheered when JC’s chariot was near. For the most part, people looked at each other in sorrow and aghast. Was that supposed to be Cato up there on that carriage with his guts spilling out? What awfully poor taste.
Then…and I don’t want to bore you with politics, young ’un…but then when JC got back, he got it into his head to write a reply to Cicero’s praise of Cato. The anti-Cato it was called. It didn’t go down very well!
And you see that wall over there? The other side of the square? That’s where they pinned old Cicero up in pieces…a hand here, a leg there, and that was where his head was nailed up, right there, a ghastly sight…but that was some years later, under Octavian, whom we must now call the Lord God Augustus Ruler of Everything, or whatever’s the latest title he’s decided to stick on the end of the ones he already has.
Cleopatra was here too, at that time. You must have heard of her! Here she was swanning around with her own luxurious court, filling Caesar’s head with conspiracies and plots. This was when JC had elected himself ‘Director of Public Morals’, a title which, I can assure you, had us all in hoots. The randy old goat fucked more than Pan on a feast day. Don’t tell your mother this stuff, remember, not that it was any kind of a secret.
Then, rather incredibly, the Great One takes to grubbing around everywhere for more money. You see, he’s a soldier, not an accountant…he kindly explained to us. Which meant, they could take what they fancied for the ‘War Effort’, apparently. I was at your other great-uncle’s house one day, soldiers came in and looted the place. Took the jewels, some of our best clothes and even the fucking table. A beautiful thing, made of green marble from Egypt…they just took everything. It’s good that you don’t remember these times. Caesar grew too godlike. And, er…don’t tell your mother or indeed anyone that I just said that, vale?
But there was no doubt he was getting too big for his boots. I saw him at the games one winter in his special gold box. I’d had a run of successful cases, so I treated myself to a holiday in Campania to coincide with what promised to be a spectacular show…nets against javelins, quite a lot of foreign prisoner slaves and beasts from Africa and the northern forests. Well, nobody remembers the show much. And certainly not Caesar; he didn’t look at the combats once. He was too busy signing decrees and giving instructions. All the while people were chanting ‘Gaius, look at us’ and such like…and he never once glanced in our direction. People began to notice. Not least the soldiers who’d been promised lands and farms (as if they had any fucking idea how to turn a spade, but a lot of them did, you’d be surprised…that bean-seller who comes in, the gimpy one, he was a soldier in the Tenth!), well they start asking themselves, ‘where’s our money? I hope it’s not the same money that’s been spent on shipping these menageries from the corners of the earth? Or paying the wages of the flute-players and the gladiator schools?’
So when Marc Antony came running through the streets dressed as a wolf…what? Yes, of course it was Lupercalia, when else would he be half naked and draped in a wolf-hide? Your mother got hit on the head one Lupercalia…ha ha ha, the silly woman…they used to run in front of the ‘wolves’ and try to get hit by their thongs. Why? Well, to get pregnant, of course…or to bring about a birth more rapidly, there are all kinds of stories…
So anyway, MA comes running up towards the Big Cheese, who, let it be said, by this time doesn’t even rise to meet any senators that approach him! Ooh! Look at him! And sort of offers him a crown… I say ‘sort of’, because no one really knows.
People saw JC make to take it, then look around shiftily, read a few faces and then he comes out with ‘Oh no, no crown for me, deary me, no. I have no ambitions to be king’ and similar donkey shite. So it was no surprise when a couple of his ex-buddies ganged up on him and stabbed him twenty three times, like this…aargh! Aargh! Have at thee!
How do I know it was exactly twenty three wounds? Because they put his body on display and you could count the wounds. Twenty three. Well…it was a wax effigy, but they were at pains for us to see it. It hung there for a good long while with everybody gawping up at it.
And that’s when it became obvious that his death had not gone down well with the populus. Sure, he was a bit distant lately and the showy stuff with the crown was pathetic, but this was Caesar! The one we worship as a god now. That Caesar. And suddenly everyone remembered that he was one of us, fought with his men, never gave up…all the old stories and memories.
So two of the murderers who could see the storm clouds gathering – that is, Brutus and Cassius – high-tailed off to the east to gather armies. And that left Marc Antony as good as in charge. Well, we’ve already seen his civic administration skills in action…ludi incipiant!
Of course, what Marc Antony didn’t know before the assassination, was that JC had named his successor already. He was off to Parthia soon and took the precaution of naming his precocious nephew as his heir… I say nephew, I think he was his aunt’s cousin or something…and that, of course, was Octavian (now our lord almighty Augustus…are you keeping up?) who heard the news that he’d been catapulted up the ladder of power and came hurrying back from some sub-Grecian promontory where he was studying.
&nbs
p; So then, Marc Antony tries one last roll of the dice and accepts Octavian, but says to him, ‘I dunno, eighteen’s a bit young, isn’t it, to sort of be emperor and stuff?’ and is alarmed to hear Octavian say, ‘Oh no, this gig’s mine’. So he has to chew on that.
So now we have a ‘triumvirate’ again! After all that Grecian muddling about with senates and democracy, we end up with a Caesar, this time of the Augustan kind. And though he pretends otherwise, he has cunningly mutated into an Emperor. And a new emperor must have…??? Come on??? Yes, you’ve guessed it! Games!!!
But MA holds the purse strings, and won’t let go. So Octavian borrows and borrows and borrows, then Cicero Junior – the soldier, not the torn-apart poet, that was his dad – weighs in and says, ‘Grow some balls, Octavian! Stand up to that Antony chap!’ and the senate agree, so they kick MA’s ass all the way out of Italy (Don’t worry. He came crawling back soon enough). And the senate say, ‘Let’s make Octavian a consul!’ and they do. A consul at that age? Fresh out of nappies, hasn’t even finished his ABC and there he is, sitting on top of the pile.
So, Marcus, that’s what was going on over here. In a short couple of years. What times!
Meanwhile, to continue with our tale, there’s our hero mostly oblivious to all of this, somehow starting a new life in Greece and getting snippets of folklore from soldiers and travellers, putting it all into his clowning acts. He did an excellent sketch of old Cato’s death, I have to say. I saw him do it very cleverly for us in the tavern. He’s lying on his death bed, slits himself open to kill himself and all his innards fall out, but then people run to put them back in again and when they leave the room again – he did all this in mime, himself, it was quite brilliant – then he slits himself open again and his guts fall open again, and they run in and try to save him, and maybe he did it a third time for comic effect, but this all went down a storm, pity you never saw him. That, plus Caesar falling onto the wet sand in Africa, plus a bit of flute playing and slapstick. When he wanted to be, he…but I’m wandering again!
In a few short months, he’s already charmed enough money to be able to rent a room in the suburbs, probably one of those rickety shacks I told you about, but things are about to get better for your great, great uncle once removed. He spends the next few years making contacts, getting work where he can, and agreeing to take money to and from Hamilcar every now and again to change for bangue, which he’d never come across in Rome. And another thing was that, as Roman artists had been telling him for years, the artist was far more appreciated here in Art-land. No one lived from acting alone, hardly…that was a very privileged position, but you could make good money on top of another job. One could live well.
Not so back home. After Caesar died, the power had to be shared out between Lepidus, Augustus and…oh, Marc Antony’s back on the scene. So that was, they told us, some kind of republic. And at the victory games, as he gazes up into the night sky following the smoke from the funeral pyre, some drunken idiot swears that he’s seen JC’s soul ascending into the heavens as a hairy star, which proved that Julius was a god also. That was the evidence they used to declare JC a god, believe me. Some half-blind, old pisshead imagined seeing a comet and thought on his feet…I think he got a thousand gold pieces for it from Octavian. By Jupiter’s great hairy balls I was in that crowd at the time. If only it had occurred to me. I was certainly bladdered enough, as I remember.
So, to go on with the necessary history lesson, do they teach you any of this at school? They ought to…Et continue;
The constant battles that raged between the remaining bands of armies, were brought to Macedonia by Brutus and Cassius, missing Athens by a long way, fortunately for Skip, and only arriving in the capital in the form of news, gossip and rumour. As you must have calculated, B and C got their asses kicked somewhere along the line and that was the end of them. Now I shouldn’t say this to you, young Marcus, as we’re all supposed to be behind our great Lord Augustus, but Rome has always been split into two. There are many of us here who would have preferred the ‘traitors’ to have won. Don’t ever say that I am one such, I’m just telling you, so you understand. If you’re interested, you can go and read about it in Titus Livius works, but it’s as boring as one of Genassus’ plays, so I’ll save you the trouble. In short;
When Brutus and Cassius died that was the end of any hopes of restoring the republic. But (I’ll whisper this…what does it say on the standards? The Standards! The Eagles…The letters! That’s right… SPQR. Four letters that made the barbarian world shit itself. And what’s the R for? Don’t they teach you? Well Brutus and Cassius were fighting for a return to the Res Publica, which is what we had in the good times. When the senate was in charge. When people had to agree. Instead, we have Augustus making himself not just an emperor now, but a god. No, I have to keep my voice low…shush and listen…)
Octavian didn’t get to be a god at first. Even when he closed the doors of the temple of Janus, which was the sign that it was safe for Skip to return to Rome…I mean, it wasn’t done just for Skip, obviously; it was the sign that Rome was no longer at war with anyone. Not strictly true, but it meant Skip felt safe enough to pass through Rome on his way west to Tárraco in Hispania. You’ll see why.
But it was in the year that the doors of the temple were closed that Octavian had the whole road to himself. Again, he pretended not to be omnipotent but even at the beginning, with Lepidus and Marc Antony, he’d ordered hundreds of citizens to be arrested and massacred. I knew some of them, Marcus, and we were lucky to escape ourselves. Anyone who saw that night through alive was lucky! It was carnage let loose. But we cowered behind our doors again till it all died down.
Lepidus, in case you want to know, got all uppity and had a crack at emperor for himself. But lost. And got banished for his pains. Yes, banished, not killed. There seems to be another set of laws for the powerful. While the foot soldiers die in the mud or are swindled out of their pensions, Rome’s mortal enemies are tickled under the chin as punishment. It is a sad world.
And Marc Antony, well he got royally stitched up by crafty Octavian who produced MA’s will one day (probably a forgery but who’s counting?) where it seemed he was planning to carve Africa up for himself and move Rome piece by piece and statue by statue to Alexandria. Well that didn’t go down well with either the senate or the populace at large. Add to that the fact that he couldn’t resist the urge to stick his dick in Cleopatra in the end, and then got mixed up with the Alexandrians, it seems he was always fated to end up on the losing side. His navy was hounded all the way up the west coast of Greece, thereby passing dangerously close to Skip’s lodgings. But by then, Skip was a known face and passed for part of the normal day-to-day, arousing no suspicion despite his garbled version of the Attic tongue. So once again, war passed close by but did not touch.
When Cleo saw that MA’s ships didn’t stand much of a chance against Octavian’s, she forgot all the stuff about eternal love and hearts beating as one and fucked off sharpish back to Egypt. Luckily, Octavian decided to follow her ass and harass that part of the world rather than Greece – probably to track down and kill the son Cleo had borne JC…which they did – so day to day life in Athens was unaffected. Rather than raise another army, Marc Antony conveniently did himself in. As did Madam Luxurious once she saw the game was up. Pricked herself with a snake, they say. And… Skip thought, Finally! I can get some peace and start thinking about making back to Rome.
Considering that he spent so many years in old Hellas, you might be wondering what his other job was. Because he’ll tell you, as all actors will, that they live by their art alone, but it is almost never so. Well Skip, after many prayers and libations to gods he hadn’t bothered with previously, now had a new lease of life and a place in society. In the artistic community, he found he was not the only one to prefer the African smoking drug to some of the wines on offer, and with judicious balancing of money, building up of confidences, and juggling one thing with another, Skip was able
to save money up (which was a completely new feature of his life, from what I remember), and over the succeeding years of travelling back to the obscure port west of Delphi many times, he managed to set himself up as a purveyor of the herb, and was eagerly awaited when news escaped that he had left town once again to supervise the transit of cartloads of the Phonaecians’ ancient seeds and powders.
After many years of this, he entrusted the journeys to others and continued to make profits while sitting on his arse and preening around on skenes, because, yes, in the Big City, over the months he had met people, who knew people, who knew people and even had minor parts in some of the grander plays. And there would have been a woman or two along the way as well. I’m sure, but he said nothing of this when we met. Not surprising, under the circumstances…
However – and this he did confess to me – for all his comfortable life abroad (which surprised him greatly), in the back of his mind, even after those ten years had passed, there was always the thought of home. Of course, he said to himself, Rome will still be full of soldiers who might recognise him. Even after the passing of so many years, he rightly reasoned, his visible birthmark would still give him away with ease, but as he was a master of the skill of dice games (so he fancied, though here his opinion of himself did not bear up to reality), he calculated that after all this time, the chances of that were slim. Then, he thought of his ‘mark’ again and never could bring himself to risk the journey.
Meanwhile, back over here in the centre of the world and hereabouts, for the next ten years. Octavian’s wars rumble on. The top dogs try marrying each other’s enemies’ daughters and such games, but that doesn’t work, so for now there are still a couple more years till he closes the temple of Janus, and those are the years I will tell you of. This coincides with the last year of Skip’s life in Hellas, just before he set out on the journey that brought him home once more, albeit briefly.
