The Horse Changer

by Craig Smith

  To Octavian’s credit, which I give grudgingly, he appeared hardly to notice Antony’s bluster; he certainly showed no respect for it. There was a child-like peevishness in his tone at the start of the meeting, which no one could admire. In fact, at his worst moments during the meeting, Octavian seemed like a screeching, spoiled brat. Nor did it help that his toga made him look utterly ridiculous, especially as neither Antony nor Dolabella bothered with anything more than belted tunics. The day was quite hot, the very worst occasion for a man to bother with a toga.

  Octavian’s first order of business was to demand to know why Caesar’s murderers had walked freely about in the city after their crime. Dolabella took this question. He explained that the assassins had surrounded themselves with their clients. ‘You had the entire city under your authority,’ Octavian responded. ‘They had murdered a consul of Rome. You did nothing. Were the two of you in on it?’

  ‘I’ll not have talk like that!’ Antony bellowed. He seemed to cool down once his two brothers made a show of taking his arms. ‘You were not here, lad,’ he added in a quieter tone. ‘You cannot possibly understand the desperate nature of the situation. True, they had murdered one consul, but most thought they intended to kill the other as well.’

  ‘And after him,’ Dolabella added, ‘any of the senate who had ever voted with Caesar’s faction.’

  ‘And what are your plans for them now that you have let these murderers escape?’

  ‘If you want to know the truth,’ Antony answered, ‘I encouraged the senate to provide them with immunity from prosecution.’

  This excited more youthful outrage, though I was fairly certain from watching Cilnius Maecenas it was not fresh news. It occurred to me, actually, that Octavian was following some kind of script, as an actor does. I shrugged off the notion, for it seemed utterly ridiculous, but in fact much of his later life followed a script written by another; in those early days Maecenas and much later his wife. He only acted his role. My assessment from this remove? Maecenas did indeed write this bit of theatre and Octavian recited his lines. The strategy, apparently, was to push Antony to folly. As a hothead, Antony needed only a bit of encouragement.

  This theory credits a great deal to children, I know. But as those same children never seemed to take the advice of more experienced men in the years that followed, I think it is exactly what happened. Octavian pretended emotional outrage. Antony and Dolabella, eager to acquit themselves in the court of public opinion, sought to justify their behaviour.

  The chief advantage of granting immunity to Caesar’s assassins, according to Dolabella, was the agreement which had allowed Caesar a state funeral. His corpse would otherwise have been tossed into the Tiber, befitting a traitor’s death. As Dolabella explained the matter, he sounded quite reasonable. The next point he made was equally praiseworthy: Antony’s truce with the assassins had saved all the reforms that Caesar’s government had accomplished, especially the acts granting land to retiring legionaries. It was at this moment that Maecenas struck.

  ‘Your deal with the assassins protected Antony’s status. It also got you promoted to consul without the bother of an election.’

  ‘The government needed to continue with as little change as possible,’ Dolabella answered. His face remained impassive, but there was tension in my patron’s voice. I could see Maecenas’s shot had struck its mark.

  Octavian rose to Dolabella’s comment like an actor responding to his cue. ‘In other words, you were only interested in profiting from my father’s murder.’

  ‘If you want justice, go find the assassins yourself!’ Antony roared. ‘As for us, we have dealt with the matter as men do. We have averted war. We have saved the Republic!’ Antony’s fury could hardly obscure the fact that Octavian was right. When one came right down to it, neither Antony nor Dolabella cared a whit about honouring the corpse of Caesar; they certainly cared nothing about land reform for the plebs. For that matter neither man had acted as if he wanted to avert a war or save Rome. The deal with Caesar’s assassins was all about Antony and Dolabella protecting their own interests.

  ‘Rest assured, Antony,’ Octavian answered, ‘I intend to hunt down the assassins. Every last one of them. If that means war, so be it. But that brings me to my second concern. In order to pursue these criminals I am going to need my inheritance. From what I am told, the two of you arranged with Lepidus to take possession of my father’s treasury. I assume you are holding it for me?’

  ‘We have taken possession of nothing,’ Dolabella answered. He kept his tone civil, for he was in fact a very skilled liar.

  Antony spoiled the effect by trying to explain what they had actually done. It came about as close to a confession as I ever heard. ‘After Caesar’s murder,’ he said, ‘Dolabella, Lepidus, and I came here to Caesar’s house. We intended to secure Caesar’s fortune from looters, but as it happened all we found were Caesar’s papers. What Caesar had not spent in the form of payroll for his legions he wasted on spectacles for the mob. There was no gold. No money at all.’

  ‘What he possessed in abundance was debt,’ Dolabella added.

  The voice of Antony’s brother, Lucius, broke from the crowd of Antony’s clients. ‘If I may be so bold as to offer you a bit of advice, Octavian… ’

  ‘My name is Caesar!’ the boy screeched.

  Antony’s crowd rumbled derisively at Octavian’s peevishness on this point. Within the year we would all embrace the name of Caesar and think nothing of it. A man is what he calls himself after all, but at that moment Caesar was more title than name. No one in Rome was quite ready to call this little sissy Julius Caesar. He might stamp his feet and screech as long as he liked: there was only one man deserving that name.

  ‘My advice, lad,’ Lucius Antony continued, once the jeering had died down, ‘is the same that your mother and stepfather gave you some weeks ago. Repudiate Caesar’s will. If you accept it, you will bankrupt yourself trying to pay off his debts.’

  Octavian turned to the senators present, his witnesses, speaking quite calmly now. ‘If Antony and Dolabella and Lepidus insist on stealing my father’s money…’

  ‘How dare you call me a thief, you little twit!’ Antony’s voice boomed with rage. He stepped forward with his great fists doubled. And he meant it.

  ‘A thief and now a liar too.’

  Antony’s brothers pulled him back at this point, and there was no acting this time. Had they failed to do so there would have been violence. To give Octavian his due, he neither pretended to want to fight nor displayed the first tremor of fear. Struggling fiercely against his own men, Antony pointed a menacing finger at Octavian. ‘Don’t imagine you and I are finished, pretty. I’ll see you cut to pieces and fed to the plebs for a banquet!’

  Octavian turned his attention again to the witnesses. ‘Let it be known I intend to pay out all of Caesar’s legacies with my own money, including the three hundred sesterces Caesar’s will promised every citizen of Rome.’

  Antony cursed the boy as a fool. ‘You make a promise that will ruin you, lad. Don’t think we are not witnesses to your folly. I shall tell the whole city what you have promised!’ I could discern nothing in Octavian’s expression as Antony launched his threat, but Maecenas seemed actually pleased, as if Antony had taken some kind of bait.

  ‘Shall I tell you what my father said to me in Marseille, Antony?’ Octavian had his feet under him now; his voice betrayed a strange confidence.

  ‘Your father or your lover, sweetheart?’

  ‘He said he thought it was better to bring you inside his carriage for the journey to Rome; otherwise one morning you were bound to be too drunk to ride and you’d end up falling off your horse and breaking your ugly neck.’

  Antony went for the boy once more, but Octavian’s bodyguards stepped forward. I recall my first impression of Marcus Agrippa at this moment. He had roguish good looks, calm eyes, and quite obviously the heart of a man who isn’t afraid to use his fists. Even against a consul of Rome. />
  Antony and Dolabella consoled themselves with drink and talk after the meeting. Of the two, Antony was decidedly more animated. He called Octavian’s promise of paying out Caesar’s legacies ‘a fatal miscalculation’. Antony said he wanted everyone to know the promise the boy had made. He signalled to one of his men, who withdrew and set about publishing this news to the plebs. ‘Three hundred sesterces for every citizen,’ Antony muttered, as if trying to calculate the sum. ‘That is something like…’

  ‘Fifty million sesterces,’ I answered.

  Antony glared at me, for I was not expected to speak, certainly not to him. He repeated the figure, however, as if checking my arithmetic, then quite suddenly howled with delight. ‘Don’t think the plebs are going to hear a promise like that and forget about it. When they don’t see their money they’ll hang our Little Caesar by his prick!’

  ‘He can borrow on the value of Caesar’s estates,’ Dolabella answered.

  ‘He may think so, but we have only to threaten encumbrances on the properties. Some question about the validity of the will is enough; no one will dare advance money to the boy until the will is settled, and that won’t happen until Rome has new consuls. If he can’t sell or use his property as security for a loan, all he can do is try to explain to the plebs why he hasn’t got their money. Personally, I’d rather steal cubs from a lioness. At least a cat would be quick about it!’

  Octavian, as it happened, had not made a frivolous promise. He was in the Forum next day with a league of his clients in attendance, all of them about the business of paying every citizen of Rome the three hundred sesterces promised in Caesar’s will. Dolabella was as furious as Antony when he learned about it. It was impossible for Octavian to possess that much cash and yet he had it in hand and paid it out like a magistrate going about his public obligations. As for the propaganda that ought to have come with it, he said nothing at all. Antony had already made sure that everyone knew Caesar’s bequest was to be paid from Octavian’s own private funds.

  In terms of political genius it surpassed all expectations. It certainly left Octavian’s enemies gasping in confusion. Where had the money come from? That mystery was solved some days later when Dolabella’s informants reported that Octavian had appropriated the treasure Caesar had sent to Brindisi to finance his Parthian campaign. I can still recall Antony’s look of confusion when Dolabella told him about it. Of course both Antony and Dolabella had known about that money, but with a fortune in Rome to be purloined they had not bothered securing it as well. Besides, it was money set aside to pay for the services of sixteen legions. Sacrosanct – or so they had thought.

  ‘Seven hundred million sesterces,’ Dolabella announced, although both he and Antony knew the precise figure. At the time I was quite sure they regretted their failure to confiscate the money themselves, but I think now their real concern was Octavian. The lad had not only flanked their position in his first political outing, he had routed them in the aftermath.

  After the funeral riots Antony had believed the mob was his to manipulate; suddenly both he and Dolabella had been exposed to the citizenry as thieves of Caesar’s fortune, a fortune Caesar had intended to share with the plebs. Worse still, Octavian’s subsequent propaganda branded them both as conspirators in Caesar’s murder.

  VI

  ANTONY

  Rome: Summer, 44 BC

  Judah informs me that I have said very little about Mark Antony’s personal appearance and the qualities of his character. Large and going to fat hardly covers it for a man of Antony’s fame. Judah is of course correct. Not everyone knows about Antony these days. Once upon a time his effigies abounded, but his death is now thirty-five years past. In Rome one cannot even find his image. The young know how he came to his end but not all that happened before that. In the year of Julius Caesar’s death Antony was forty. He was fit enough for a hard march and still a perfect terror in battle, but anyone could see that fondness for debauchery of every sort had begun to take its toll. In his youth Antony lifted weights to build his strength. After a day or two of feasting and recovery, he would plunge into his manic exercises again, lifting for hours on end.

  The effect was said to be quite extraordinary. No one in Rome could lay claim to such a physique as his, and in fact it was a commonplace for people to call him Hercules. I am told he did actually resemble the figurines of the legendary strongman that one sees so often in houses. As a young man Antony liked the comparison so much he took to wearing an unfashionable beard to enhance the effect. He would even arrive at parties wearing a lion skin and carrying a club.

  Atop this muscular figure was an aristocrat’s face: long, serene and noble in character. The neck actually was a bit longer than normal, but I know of no one other than Octavian who ever called it ugly. Antony’s family had risen in the world a generation or so earlier, but by bloodline he came from pleb stock, the same as Octavian’s father’s family did. Neither man liked to admit his plebeian origins, though it was hardly a secret, and in my opinion their discomfort with their common blood drove them both to the heights of patrician affectation. As to his character Antony was a creature of impulse, which perhaps explains both his genius and folly. He was a generous patron. Better than most, I would say. He had enjoyed the best education money could buy. He was especially skilled in speechmaking. Perhaps it was the discovery of brains inside that beautiful physique, but whenever he spoke at some length he thoroughly affected both men and women. He had a deep golden voice, but that was only part of it. He possessed an actor’s skill and was not ashamed to lay it on thick. He could weep on command or cut loose with a series of jests, jokes, and puns. More than once I saw him turn a sombre gathering into a riot of laughter.

  The stories that were told about Antony were always outrageous. Everyone who knew him could tell some awful tale, always of the same genre, though never quite the same incident. These began differently but ended with Antony vomiting into his toga, over an altar, into a matron’s lap, on the Forum’s speaker platform, or across the senate house floor. He was the last dignitary anyone wanted to see presiding at an official celebration and yet his prestige often required his attendance. He despised Roman pomp, claiming it always smacked of sham, and so he got himself roasted for the great festivals. After that, he either threw up or fell down.

  Antony’s chief virtue as a commander was his principal deficiency as well: he faced his fears head-on. He was unafraid of low ground in a fight and so had no instinct for avoiding military disaster. His considerable political skills were quite as easily compromised for the same reason. He did not care that all of Rome whispered stories of his sexual predilections, which were essentially boundless. It never occurred to him to enjoy his vices more quietly and thereby avoid political attack. Nor could he anticipate that others might be quite as clever as he was. His failure in this respect had less to do with his natural talents than with his lack of preparation, as for instance on the occasion of his interview with Octavian.

  Grab his hand in salutation and you knew the legendary strength of his youth had not departed. Trap him in a corner and you would discover a man cut from Homer’s cloth. Let him bask in glory and taste good wine, as he did in the days after Caesar’s murder, and you would soon discover a fool having a run at the nearest cliff.

  Enough? Judah is silent.

  Not long after Octavian had paid out Caesar’s legacy to the citizens of Rome, Cicero, the grand old man of the senate, delivered a speech before his colleagues. In it he charged Mark Antony with political corruption, theft and, for good measure, sexual immorality ‘of a nature too vile for a decent man to describe’. Antony would have done well to ignore the matter. Cicero had no power beyond his own moral authority; certainly no party claimed him as its champion. He was simply a great man. Much admired, very little loved. But Antony, being Antony, thought he could put Cicero in his place. Launching into a diatribe against Cicero that reached back to scandals over two decades before, Antony struck with a fulsome broads
ide of half-truths and innuendoes. The worst of it came when he attended to Cicero’s personal life, namely two divorces of recent date. The first was to a wife of many years so that he might marry an adolescent. The second divorce came soon after Cicero’s new bride ‘begged release from her vows’. When Antony had finished with Cicero’s domestic tribulations, Cicero looked like an old fool besotted with youth. This was of course a road down which many old men had gone before. Hardly high crimes and treason. Antony had less success with his insinuations that the noble Cicero had helped himself to money from the public treasury, but Antony only wanted to stir Cicero’s passions.

  The strategy Antony employed can work quite brilliantly even against a talented orator. It is especially potent when one can charge an opponent with being an old man or accuse him of crimes he has most assuredly not committed. In either case the accused will become indignant and thereby look guilty. Cicero, however, failed to take the bait. Instead, he proceeded as the pedagogue does, with a detailed critique of Antony’s rhetorical shortfalls. After a painstaking illustration of Antony’s discordant logic Cicero proceeded to excuse the consul his excesses. Antony had not, after all, engaged his intellect in forming an argument since his schoolboy days. Any speech delivered without the aid of a few sacks of wine, he added, must be a terrible ordeal for one whose brain had rotted away from constant inebriation.

  And so forth. It might have played out as comic theatre in less tumultuous times. As it happened the game was deadly serious. Cicero intended to pave a road by which Brutus and Cassius, the chief assassins of Caesar, might return triumphantly to Rome. Instead, his assault on Anthony gave young Octavian an opening.

  Octavian, imagining Antony was down and out, proceeded into the city with his newly purchased legions, every man paid at five times the going rate. His judgment was sound in one respect; there was no one capable of opposing him, but Octavian made the mistake of establishing his military camp in the Forum. At once he lost much of the goodwill his money had bought him with the plebs, for they had no more love of tyranny than the aristocrats.