The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  They ended their tour at the massive bronze doors in the side of the very tall podium supporting the temple of Saturn, wherein lay the Treasury. After a very long, pounding assault, one leaf of the door finally opened a crack to reveal the frightened face of Marcus Cuspius, tribunus aerarius.

  “Answering in person, Cuspius?” Caesar asked.

  “Caesar!” The door was flung wide. “Come in, come in!”

  “I can’t see why you were so terrified, Cuspius,” Caesar said as he walked up the dimly lit passageway leading to the offices. “The place is as empty as a bowel after an enema.” He stuck his head into a small room, frowning. “Even the sixteen hundred pounds of laserpicium are gone. Who’s been busy with the clyster?”

  Cuspius did not pretend to be dense. “Marcus Antonius, Caesar. He has the authority as Master of the Horse, and he said he had to pay the legions.”

  “All I took to pay for a war were thirty million sesterces in minted coins and ten thousand silver talents in sows. That left twenty thousand talents of silver and fifteen thousand talents of gold,” Caesar said evenly. “Sufficient to tide Rome over, I would have thought, were there two hundred legions to pay. More to the point, I had some rough calculations in my head that took into account what I estimated would be in the Treasury when I inspected it. I did not expect it to be empty.”

  “The gold is still here, Caesar,” Marcus Cuspius said nervously. “I shifted it to the other side. A thousand talents of the silver were commissioned as coin during the consulship of Publius Servilius Vatia.”

  “Yes, I coined,” Vatia said, “but only four million were put into circulation. The bulk came back here.”

  “I did try for some facts and figures, truly!”

  “No one is blaming you, Cuspius. However, while the Dictator is in Italy, no one is to remove one sestertius unless he is present, is that clear?”

  “Yes, Caesar, very clear!”

  “You may expect a shipment of seven thousand talents of gold and a great many gold crowns the day after tomorrow. The gold is the property of the Treasury, and will be stamped thus. Hold the crowns against my Asian triumph. Good day to you.”

  Cuspius shut the door and sagged against it, gasping.

  “What is Antonius up to?” Vatia asked the Caesars.

  “I intend to find out,” said Caesar Dictator.

  Publius Cornelius Dolabella came from an old patrician family that had sunk into decay, a not uncommon story. Like another Cornelian, Sulla, Dolabella lived on his wits and little else. He had been a charter member of the old Clodius Club during the days when Clodius and his equally wild young cronies had set the more prudish elements of Rome by the ears with their scandalous goings-on. But almost seven years had elapsed since Milo had met Clodius on the Via Appia and murdered him, which had marked the disintegration of the club.

  Some Clodius Clubbers went on to enjoy distinguished public careers: Gaius Scribonius Curio, for instance, had been Caesar’s brilliant tribune of the plebs and was killed in battle just when his star was in ascendancy; Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, always known as Decimus Brutus, had graduated from generaling Clodius’s street gangs to generaling for Caesar with even greater genius, and was at present governing Long-haired Gaul; and, of course, Mark Antony had done so splendidly under Caesar that he was now the second-ranking man in Rome, the Dictator’s Master of the Horse.

  Whereas nothing grand had happened for Dolabella, who always seemed to be somewhere else when Caesar was handing the good jobs out, though he had declared for Caesar the moment the Rubicon was known to be a fact.

  In many ways he and Mark Antony were very alike—big, burly, obnoxiously egotistical, loud-mouthed. Where they differed was in style; Dolabella was smoother. Both were chronically impoverished, both had married for money; Antony to the daughter of a rich provincial, and Dolabella to Fabia, the ex–Chief Vestal Virgin. The rich provincial died in an epidemic, Fabia proved too long a virgin to be a satisfactory wife, but the two men had emerged from their first essays into marriage considerably wealthier. Then Antony married Antonia, his own first cousin, daughter of the revolting Antonius Hybrida; she was as famous as her father for torturing slaves, but Antony soon beat it out of her. Whereas Dolabella had married the second time for love, to Cicero’s quite bewitching daughter, Tullia—and what a letdown that had been!

  While Antony worked as a senior legate for Caesar, commanding the embarkation in Brundisium and then in the field in Macedonia and Greece, Dolabella commanded a fleet in the Adriatic and was defeated so ignominiously that Caesar never bothered with him again. In fairness to Dolabella, his ships had been tubs and the Republican fleet composed of Liburnians, the best combat ships of all. But did Caesar take that into account? No. So while Mark Antony soared ever upward, Publius Dolabella moped aimlessly.

  His situation became desperate. Fabia’s fortune had long gone, and the dowry installments he had thus far received from Cicero never seemed to last one drip of the water clock. Living the same kind of life as Antony (if on a more modest scale), Dolabella’s debts piled up and up. The moneylenders to whom the thirty-six-year-old rake owed millions began to dun him so persistently and unpleasantly that he hardly dared show his face in the better parts of Rome.

  Then, at about the moment that Caesar vanished from the face of the earth in Egypt, Dolabella realized that the answer to his woes had been staring at him for years; he would take an example from Publius Clodius, founder of the Clodius Club, and seek election as a tribune of the plebs. Like Clodius, Dolabella was a patrician, and therefore not eligible to stand for this most eye-and ear-catching of public offices. But Clodius had gotten around disbarment by having himself adopted by a plebeian. Dolabella found a lady named Livia, and proceeded to have her adopt him. Now a bona fide plebeian, he could run for election.

  Dolabella wasn’t interested in using the office to cement political fame; he intended to legislate a general cancellation of debts. Given the current crisis, it wasn’t as straw-plucking as it sounded. Groaning under the privations a civil war always brought in its train, Rome was filled with debt-ridden individuals and companies only too anxious to find a way out of their predicament that did not involve the payment of money. Dolabella ran on a platform of the general cancellation of debts, and came in at the top of the poll. He had been given a mandate.

  What he hadn’t taken into account were two other tribunes of the plebs, Gaius Asinius Pollio and Lucius Trebellius, who had the gall to veto him during the first contio he called to discuss his measure. Contio after contio, Pollio and Trebellius vetoed.

  Dolabella reached into his grab bag of Clodian tricks and pulled out the street gang; the next thing the Forum Romanum was rocked by a wave of terror that ought to have driven Pollio and Trebellius into a self-imposed exile. It did not. They remained in the Forum, they remained on the rostra, they remained adamant. Veto, veto, veto. No general cancellation of debts.

  March came, and the stalemate in the Plebeian Assembly continued. Until now Dolabella had kept his gangs under some degree of control, but clearly worse violence was needed. Knowing Mark Antony of old, Dolabella knew perfectly well that Antony was even more heavily in debt; it was very much in Antony’s interests to see the general cancellation of debts pass into law.

  “But the thing is, my dear Antonius, that I can’t very well let my bully-boys loose in a serious way while the Dictator’s Master of the Horse is in the neighborhood,” Dolabella explained over a bucket or two of fortified wine.

  Antony’s curly auburn head went down; he burped hugely and grinned. “Actually, Dolabella, the legions around Capua are restive, so I really ought to hie myself down there and do some investigating,” he said. He pursed his lips to touch the tip of his nose, an easy trick for Antony. “It may well be that I’ll find the situation so serious that I’ll be stuck in Capua for—um—as long as it takes for you to pass your legislation.”

  And so it was arranged. Antony proceeded to Capua on his rightful busines
s as Master of the Horse, while Dolabella unleashed havoc in the Forum Romanum. Trebellius and Pollio were physically mauled by the gangs, savagely manhandled, drubbed unmercifully; but, like other tribunes of the plebs before them, they refused to be intimidated. Every time Dolabella called a contio in the Plebeian Assembly, Pollio and Trebellius were there to veto, sporting black eyes and bandages, but also being cheered. The Forum frequenters loved courage, and the gangs were not made up of Forum frequenters.

  Unfortunately for Dolabella, he couldn’t possibly allow his bully-boys to kill—or even half kill—Pollio and Trebellius. They were Caesar’s men, and Caesar would return. Nor would Caesar be in favor of a general cancellation of debts. Pollio in particular was dear to Caesar’s heart; he had been there when the old boy crossed the Rubicon, and was busy writing a history of the last twenty years.

  What Dolabella hadn’t expected was a militant surge of strength on the part of the Senate, not populous enough these days to form a quorum. Knowing this, Dolabella had entirely dismissed the senior governing body from his calculations. And then what did Vatia Isauricus do? Called the Senate into session and forced it to pass the Senatus Consultum Ultimum! Tantamount to martial law. None other than Mark Antony was directed to end violence in the Forum. After waiting vainly for six months for the general cancellation of debts, Antony was fed up. Without bothering to warn Dolabella, he brought the Tenth into the Forum and set them loose on the gangs—and hapless Forum frequenters caught in the eye of the storm. Just who the men were Antony executed, Dolabella had no idea, and could only presume that Antony—typical!—simply grabbed the first fifty he saw in the alleyways of the Velabrum. Dolabella had always known that Antony was a butcher—and that he would never implicate one of his own class and inclinations.

  Now here was Caesar back in Rome. Publius Cornelius Dolabella found himself summoned to the Domus Publica to see the Dictator.

  It was Caesar’s position as Pontifex Maximus that entitled him to live in the closest public building to a palace that Rome owned. Improved and enhanced first by Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and then by Caesar Pontifex Maximus, it was a huge structure at the very center of the Forum, and had a peculiar dichotomy: on one side lived the six Vestal Virgins, on the other side the Pontifex Maximus. One of Rome’s highest priest’s duties was to supervise the Vestals, who didn’t live an enclosed life, but whose intact hymens represented Rome’s public well-being—indeed, Rome’s luck. Inducted at six or seven years of age, a girl served for thirty years, then was free to go into the community at large, even marry if she so desired. As had Fabia, to Dolabella. Their religious duties were not onerous, but they also served as the custodians of Roman citizen wills, and at the time that Caesar returned to Rome, this meant that they had upward of three million documents on hand, all meticulously filed, numbered, regionalized. For even the poorest Roman citizens were prone to make a will, lodge it with the Vestals no matter whereabouts in the world they lived. Once the Vestals took your will, you knew it was sacrosanct, that no one would ever get their hands on it until came proof of death—and the person authorized to probate it.

  Thus when Dolabella presented himself at the Domus Publica, he went not to the Vestal side, nor to the ornate main entrance with the new temple pediment Caesar had erected over it (the Domus Publica was an inaugurated temple), but to the private door of the Pontifex Maximus.

  All the old folk from the days of Aurelia’s insula in the Subura were dead, including Burgundus and his wife, Cardixa, but their sons and daughters-in-law still administered Caesar’s many properties. The third of them, Gaius Julius Trogus, was in the steward’s quarters at the Domus Publica, and admitted Dolabella with a slight bow. This brought his head down to the visitor’s; a tall man, Dolabella wasn’t used to being made to feel small, but Trogus dwarfed him.

  Caesar was in his study, clad in the glory of his pontifical robes, a significant fact, Dolabella knew, but why escaped him. Both toga and tunic were striped in alternating bands of purple and crimson; in this room, brightly lit from a window and myriad lamps, the magnificent raiment echoed the color scheme of crimson and purple, its plastered cornices and ceiling touched with gilt.

  “Sit down,” Caesar said curtly, dropping the scroll he was reading to pin Dolabella on those awful eyes, cold, piercing, not quite human. “What have you to say for yourself, Publius Cornelius Dolabella?”

  “That things got out of hand,” Dolabella said frankly.

  “You recruited gangs to terrorize the city.”

  “No, no!” Dolabella said earnestly, his blue eyes wide and innocent. “Truly, Caesar, the gangs were not my doing! I simply promulgated legislation for a general cancellation of debts, and the moment I did so, I discovered that most of Rome was so badly in debt people were desperate for it. My proposed bill gathered a following in much the same way as—as a snowball rolling down the Clivus Victoriae.”

  “Had you not proposed this irresponsible legislation, Publius Dolabella, it would never have snowed,” said Caesar without humor. “Are your own debts so massive?”

  “Yes.”

  “So your measure was intrinsically selfish.”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “Did it not occur to you, Publius Dolabella, that the two members of your tribunician college who opposed the measure were not about to let you legislate?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Then what was your tribunician duty?”

  Dolabella blinked. “Tribunician duty?”

  “I can see where your patrician birth must make it difficult for you to understand plebeian matters, Publius Dolabella, but you do have some small political experience. You must have known what your duty was once Gaius Pollio and Lucius Trebellius proved so obdurate in vetoing.”

  “Er—no.”

  The eyes never seemed to blink, they just kept boring into Dolabella’s mind like two painful drills. “Persistence is a most admirable virtue, Publius Dolabella, but it goes only so far. When two of your own college members veto your every contio for three months, the message is plain. You withdraw your proposed legislation as unacceptable. Whereas you kept it going for ten months! There’s not a scrap of use sitting there looking like a penitent child, either. Whether or not you were responsible for the organization of street gangs in the old Clodius manner or not, once they existed you were very happy to take full advantage of them—including standing by while they physically assaulted two men who are protected by the old plebeian tenets of inviolability and sacrosanctity. Marcus Antonius threw twenty of your fellow Roman citizens off the Tarpeian Rock, but not one of them was a hundredth as guilty as you are, Publius Dolabella. By rights I ought to order the same fate for you. So, for that matter, should Marcus Antonius, who had to know who was responsible. You and my Master of the Horse have been holding each other’s pricks to piss for twenty years.”

  A silence fell; Dolabella sat with teeth clenched, feeling the sweat on his brow, praying the drops didn’t roll into his eyes and force him to wipe them away.

  “As Pontifex Maximus, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, it is my duty to inform you that your adoption into the Plebs was illegal. It did not have my consent, and it must under the relevant lex Clodia. You will therefore lay down your tribunate of the plebs immediately, and withdraw entirely from all public life until the Bankruptcy Court is back in session and you can apply to it to sort your affairs out. The Law does have mechanisms for situations like yours, and since the jury will be your peers, you should get off more lightly than you deserve. Now go.” The head went down.

  “That’s all?” Dolabella asked incredulously.

  A scroll was already between Caesar’s hands. “That is all, Publius Dolabella. Do you think me stupid enough to apportion blame where it doesn’t belong? You’re not the prime mover in this, you’re a simple cat’s-paw.”

  Smarting yet relieved, the simple cat’s-paw got up.

  “One more thing,” Caesar said, busy reading.

  “Yes, C
aesar?”

  “You are forbidden all congress with Marcus Antonius. I have my sources of information, Dolabella, so I suggest that you don’t try to infringe that prohibition. Vale.”

  Two days later the Master of the Horse arrived in Rome. He came through the Capena Gate at the head of a squadron of German cavalry, riding the Antonian Public Horse, a big, showy beast as white as Pompey the Great’s old Public Horse. Antony had gone one further than Pompey’s scarlet leather tack; his mount wore leopard skin. As indeed did he, a short cloak slung around his neck on a golden chain, one side thrown back to reveal a scarlet lining the same as his tunic. His cuirass was gold, contoured to cuddle his magnificent pectoral muscles, and worked with a scene of Hercules (the Antonii traced their origins back to Hercules) slaying the Lion of Nemea; the scarlet leather straps of sleeves and kilt were emblazoned with gold medallions and bosses, and fringed with gold bullion. His gold Attic helmet with its dyed scarlet ostrich plumes (they had cost ten talents, for they were very rare in Rome) sat linked around the left posterior horn of his leopard skin saddle, for he wanted his head bare so that his gaping audience was in no doubt as to who was this powerful, godly figure. To add to his conceit, he had equipped his squadron of Germans with full scarlet tack for their uniformly black horses, and clad them in real silver with lion skins; the heads were draped over their helmets, the empty paws knotted across their chests.

  Any woman in the crowd clustered to watch him ride through the Capena market square might have debated the question of his handsomeness: was he beautiful, or was he ugly? Opinions were usually evenly divided, for the body’s height and musculature were beautiful, whereas the face was ugly. Antony’s hair was very thick and curly, a good auburn in color, his face heavyset and roundish, his neck both short and so thick that it looked like an extension of his head. His eyes, the same auburn as his hair, were small, deep in their orbits and too close together. Nose and chin tried very hard to meet across his small, full-lipped mouth, one curving its beak downward, the other upward; women whom he had honored with his amorous attentions likened kissing him to being nipped by a turtle. What no one could deny was that he stood out in any crowd.