The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  Octavius squared his narrow shoulders. “Such are my reasons for thinking him a suitable husband for my sister.”

  Caesar burst out laughing. “Good for you, young man! Not even Caesar could have been more dispassionate. I see that when I call the Senate to a meeting, I’ll have to make much of Gaius Claudius Marcellus Minor, crafty enough to pretend illness, shrewd enough to buy his brother’s and his first cousin’s property, and enterprising enough to cement his position with Caesar Dictator by a politic marriage.” He straightened on the couch. “Tell me, Octavius, if the situation were to change and an even more desirable marriage offer for your sister were to surface, would you break off the engagement?”

  “Of course, Caesar. I love my sister very much, but we take pains to make our women understand that they must always help us enhance our careers and our families by marrying where they are instructed to marry. Octavia has wanted for nothing, from the most expensive clothes to an education worthy of Cicero. She is aware that the price of her comfort and privilege is obedience.”

  The wheezing was dying away; Octavius had come through his ordeal relatively unscathed.

  “What’s the gossip?” Caesar asked Philippus, who had sagged in relief.

  “I hear that Cicero is at his villa in Tusculum writing a new masterpiece,” Philippus said uneasily. This had not been a restful dinner, and he could already feel a need for laserpicium.

  “I detect a note of ominousness. The subject?”

  “A eulogy on Cato.”

  “Oh, I see. From that, I deduce that he still refuses to take his place in the Senate?”

  “Yes, though Atticus is trying to make him see sense.”

  “No one can!” said Caesar savagely. “What else?”

  “Poor little Varro is beside himself. While Master of the Horse Antonius used his authority to strip Varro of some of his nicer estates, which he put in his own name. The income is handy now that he isn’t Master of the Horse. The moneylenders are dunning him for repayment of the loan he took out to buy that monument to bad taste, Pompeius’s palace on the Carinae.”

  “Thank you for that snippet of information. I will attend to it,” Caesar said grimly.

  “And one other thing, Caesar, which I think you should know about, though I’m afraid it will come as a blow.”

  “Deal the blow, Philippus.”

  “Your secretary, Gaius Faberius.”

  “I knew something was wrong. What’s he done?”

  “He’s been selling the Roman citizenship to foreigners.”

  Oh, Faberius, Faberius! After all these years! It seems no one save Caesar himself can wait one or two months more for his share of the booty. My triumphs are imminent, and Faberius’s share would have earned him knight’s status. Now he gets nothing.

  “Is his graft on a grand scale?”

  “Grand enough to buy a mansion on the Aventine.”

  “He mentioned a house.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call Afranius’s old place a mere house.”

  “Nor would I.” Caesar swung himself backward on the couch and waited for the servant to slip on his shoes, buckle them. “Octavius, walk me home,” he commanded. “Calpurnia can stay to talk to the women a little longer—I’ll send a litter for her. Thank you, Philippus, for the welcome home party—and for the gossip. Most illuminating.”

  The awkward guest gone, Philippus donned backless slippers and shuffled to his wife’s sitting room, where he found Calpurnia and Octavia examining piles of new clothing while Atia watched.

  “Did he settle down?” Atia whispered, coming to the door.

  “Once Octavius spoke his piece, his mood became sanguine. Your son is a remarkable fellow, my dear.”

  “Oh, the relief! Octavia really does want this marriage.”

  “I think Caesar will make Octavius his heir.”

  Her face went to stark terror. “Ecastor, no!”

  As Philippus’s commodious house lay on the Circus Maximus side of the Palatine and looked more west than north, Caesar and his companion, both togate, walked down to the upper Forum, then turned at the shopping center corner to descend the slope of the Clivus Sacer to the Domus Publica. Caesar stopped.

  “Tell Trogus to send a litter for Calpurnia, would you?” he asked Octavius. “I want to inspect my new additions.”

  Octavius was back in a moment; they resumed their walk down into the gathering shadows. The sun was low, bronzing the arched stories of the Tabularium and subtly changing the colors of the temples encrusting the Capitol above it. Though Jupiter Optimus Maximus dominated the higher hump and Juno Moneta the Arx, which was the lower hump, almost every inch of space was occupied by a temple to some god or aspect of a god, the oldest among them small and drab, the newest glowing with rich colors and glittering with gilding. Only the slight depression between the two humps, the Asylum, contained any free ground, planted with pencil pines and poplars, several ferny trees from Africa.

  The Basilica Julia was completely finished; Caesar stood to regard its size and beauty with great satisfaction. Of two high stories, his new courthouse had a façade of colored marbles, Corinthian columns separated by arches in which stood statues of his ancestors from Aeneas through Romulus to that Quintus Marcius Rex who had built the aqueduct, and Gaius Marius, and Sulla, and Catulus Caesar. His mother was there, his first wife, Cinnilla, both Aunts Julia, and Julia, his daughter. That was the best part about being ruler of the world; he could erect statues of whomever he liked, including women.

  “It’s so wonderful that I come to look at it often,” said Octavius. “No more postponing the courts because of rain or snow.”

  Caesar passed to the new Curia Hostilia, home of the Senate. The Well of the Comitia had gone to make room for it; he had built a new, much taller and larger rostra that faced up the full length of the Forum, adorned with statues and the columns that held the captured ships’ beaks from which the rostra had gotten its name. There had been mutters that he was disturbing the mos maiorum with so much change, but he ignored them. Time that Rome looked better than places like Alexandria and Athens. Cato’s new Basilica Porcia remained at the foot of the Hill of the Bankers because, though it was small, it was very recent and sufficiently attractive to warrant preserving.

  Beyond the Basilica Porcia and the Curia Hostilia was the Forum Julium, a huge undertaking that had meant resuming the business premises facing on to the Hill of the Bankers and excavating the slope to flatness. Not only that, but the Servian Walls had intruded upon its back, so he had paid to relocate these massive fortifications in a jog that went around his new forum. It was a rectangular open space paved in marble and surrounded on all four sides with a colonnade of splendid Corinthian pillars of purple marble, their acanthus leaf capitals gilded. A magnificent fountain decorated with statues of nymphs played in the middle of the space, while its only building, a temple to Venus Genetrix, stood at the back atop a high podium of steps. The same purple marble, the same Corinthian pillars, and atop the peak of the temple’s pediment, a golden biga—a statue of Victory driving two winged horses. The sun was almost gone; only the biga now reflected its rays.

  Caesar produced a key and let them into the cella, just one big room with a glorious honeycombed ceiling ornamented by roses. The paintings hung on its walls made Octavius catch his breath.

  “The ‘Medea’ is by Timomachus of Byzantium,” Caesar said. “I paid eighty talents for it, but it’s worth much more.”

  It certainly is! thought the awed Octavius. Startlingly lifelike, the work showed Medea dropping the bloody chunks of the brothers she had murdered into the sea to slow her father down and enable her and Jason to escape.

  “The Aphrodite arising from the sea foam and the Alexander the Great are by the peerless Apelles—a genius.” Caesar grinned. “However, I think I’ll keep the price I paid to myself. Eighty talents wouldn’t cover one of Apelles’s seashells.”

  “But they’re here in Rome,” Octavius said fervently. “That a
lone makes a matchless painting worth the price. If Rome has them, then Athens or Pergamum don’t.”

  The statue of Venus Genetrix—Venus the Ancestress—stood in the center of the back wall of the cella, painted so well that the goddess seemed about to step down off her golden pedestal. Like the statue of Venus Victrix atop Pompey’s theater, she bore Julia’s face.

  “Arcesilaus did it,” Caesar said abruptly, turning away.

  “I hardly remember her.”

  “A pity. Julia was”—his voice shook—“a pearl beyond price. Any price at all.”

  “Who did the statues of you?” Octavius asked.

  A Caesar in armor stood to one side of Venus, a togate Caesar on the other.

  “Some fellow Balbus found. My bankers have commissioned an equestrian statue of me to go in the forum itself, on one side of the fountain. I commissioned a statue of Toes to go on the other side. He’s as famous as Alexander’s Bucephalus.”

  “What goes there?” Octavius asked, pointing to an empty plinth of some black wood inlaid with stones and enamel in most peculiar designs.

  “A statue of Cleopatra with her son by me. She wanted to donate it, and as she says it will be solid gold, I didn’t like to put it outside, where someone enterprising might start shaving bits off it,” Caesar said with a laugh.

  “When will she arrive in Rome?”

  “I don’t know. As with all voyages, even the last, it depends on the gods.”

  “One day,” said Octavius, “I too will build a forum.”

  “The Forum Octavium. A splendid ambition.”

  Octavius left Caesar at his door and commenced the uphill battle to Philippus’s house, never more conscious of his chronic shortness of breath than when toiling uphill. Dusk was drawing in, a chill descending; day’s trappings going, night’s coming, thought Octavius as the whirr of small bird wings was replaced by the ponderous flap of owls. A vast, billowing cloud reared above the Viminal, shot with a last gasp of pink.

  I notice a change in him. He seems tired, though not with a physical weariness. More as if he understands that he will not be thanked for his efforts. That the petty creatures who creep about his feet will resent his brilliance, his ability to do what they have no hope of doing. “As with all voyages, even the last”—why did he phrase it so?

  Just beyond the ancient, lichen-whiskered columns of the Porta Mugonia the hill sloped more acutely; Octavius paused to rest with his back pressed to the stone of one, thinking that the other looked like a brooding lemur escaped from the underworld, between its tubby body and its mushroom-cap hat. He straightened, struggled on a little farther, stopped opposite the lane that led to the Ox Heads, certainly the worst address on the Palatine. I was born in a house on that lane; my father’s father, a notorious miser, was still alive and my father hadn’t come into his inheritance. Then before we could move, he was dead, and Mama chose Philippus. A lightweight to whom the pleasures of the flesh are paramount.

  Caesar despises the pleasures of the flesh. Not as a philosophy, like Cato, simply as unimportant. To him, the world is stuffed with things that need setting to rights, things that only he can see how to fix. Because he questions endlessly, he picks and chews, gnaws and dissects, pulls whatever it is into its component parts, then puts them together again in a better, more practical way.

  How is it that he, the most august nobleman of them all, is not impaired by his birth, can see beyond it into illimitable distances? Caesar is classless. He is the only man I know or have read about who comprehends both the entire gigantic picture and every smallest detail in it. I want desperately to be another Caesar, but I do not have his mind. I am not a universal genius. I can’t write plays and poems, give brilliant extemporaneous speeches, engineer a bridge or a siege platform, draft great laws effortlessly, play musical instruments, general flawless battles, write crisp commentaries, take up shield and sword to fight in the front line, travel like the wind, dictate to four secretaries at once, and all those other legendary things he does out of the vastness of his mind.

  My health is precarious and may grow worse, I stare that in the face every day. But I can plan, I have an instinct for the right alternative, I can think quickly, and I am learning to make the most of what few talents I have. If we share anything in common, Caesar and I, it is an absolute refusal to give up or give in. And perhaps, in the long run, that is the key.

  Somehow, some way, I am going to be as great as Caesar.

  He started the plod up the Clivus Palatinus, a slight figure that gradually merged into the gloom until it became a part of it. The Palatine cats, hunting for mouse or mate, slunk from shadow to shadow, and an old dog, half of one ear missing, lifted its leg to piss on the Porta Mugonia, too deaf to hear the bats.

  Gaius Faberius, who had been with Caesar for twenty years, was dismissed in disgrace; Caesar convened a meeting of the Popular Assembly to witness the destruction of the tablets upon which the names of Faberius’s false citizens were inscribed.

  “Due note has been taken of these names, and none will ever receive our citizenship!” he told the crowd. “Gaius Faberius has refunded the moneys paid to him by the false citizens, and said moneys will be donated to the temple of Quirinus, the god of all true Roman citizens. Furthermore, Gaius Faberius’s share of my booty will be put back into the general pool for division.”

  Caesar took a stroll across his new, taller rostra, went down its steps and escorted the tiny figure of Marcus Terentius Varro on to its top. “Marcus Antonius, come here!” he called. Knowing what was coming, the scowling Antony ascended, stood to face Varro as Caesar informed the listening assembly that Varro had been a good friend to Pompey the Great, but never involved in the Republican conspiracy. The Sabine nobleman, a great scholar, received the deeds of his properties back, plus a fine of one million sesterces Caesar levied against Antony for causing Varro such distress. Then Antony had publicly to apologize.

  “It’s not important,” Fulvia crooned when Antony stalked into her house immediately after the meeting. “Marry me, and you’ll have the use of my fortune, darling Antonius. You’re divorced now, there’s no impediment. Marry me!”

  “I hate to be obligated to a woman!” Antony snapped.

  “Gerrae!” she gurgled. “Look at your two wives.”

  “They were forced on me, you’re not. But Caesar’s finally set the dates for his triumphs, so I’ll be getting my share of the Gallic booty in less than a month. Therefore I’ll marry you.”

  His face twisted into hate. “Gaul first, then Egypt for King Ptolemy and Princess Arsinoë, then Asia Minor for King Pharnaces, and finally Africa for King Juba. Just as if Caesar’s never heard of the word Republicans! What a farce! I could kill him! I mean, he appoints me his Master of the Horse, which cuts me out of any of the booty for Egypt, Asia Minor or Africa—I had to sit in Italy instead of serving with him! And have I had any thanks? No! He just shits on me!”

  An agitated nursemaid hurried in. “Domina, domina, little Curio has fallen over and hit his head!”

  Fulvia gasped, threw her hands in the air and was off at a run. “Oh, that child! He’ll be the death of me!” she wailed.

  Three men had witnessed this rather unromantic interlude: Poplicola, Cotyla and Lucius Tillius Cimber.

  Cimber had entered the Senate as a quaestor the year before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and supported his cause in the House. Unlike Antony, he could look forward to a share of the Asian and African booty, but they were nothing compared to what Antony would collect for Gaul. His vices were expensive, his association with Poplicola and Cotyla of some years’ duration, and his acquaintance with Antony had burgeoned since Antony’s return to Italy after Pharsalus. What he hadn’t realized until this illuminating scene was the depth of Antony’s hatred for his cousin Caesar; he truly did look as if he could do murder.

  “Didn’t you say, Antonius, that you’re bound to be Caesar’s heir?” Poplicola asked casually.

  “I’ve been saying it for yea
rs, what’s that to the point?”

  “I think Poplicola is trying to find a way to introduce the matter into our conversation,” Cotyla said smoothly. “You’re Caesar’s heir, correct?”

  “I have to be,” Antony said simply. “Who else is there?”

  “Then if it irks you to depend on Fulvia for money because you love her, you do have another source, not so? Compared to Caesar, Fulvia’s a pauper,” Cotyla said.

  Arrested, eyes gleaming redly, Antony looked at him. “Are you implying what I infer, Cotyla?”

  Cimber moved quietly out of Antony’s line of sight, drawing no attention to his presence.

  “We’re both implying it,” Poplicola said. “All you have to do to get out of debt permanently is kill Caesar.”

  “Quirites, that’s a brilliant idea!” Antony’s fists came up, clenched in exultation. “It would be so easy too.”

  “Which one of us should do it?” Cimber asked, inserting himself back into the action.

  “I’ll do it myself. I know his habits,” Antony said. “He works until the eighth hour of night, then goes to bed for four hours and sleeps like the dead. I can go in over the top of his private peristyle wall, kill him and be out again before anybody knows I’m there. The tenth hour of night. And later, if there are any enquiries, the four of us will have been sitting drinking in old Murcius’s tavern on the Via Nova.”

  “When will you do it?” asked Cimber.

  “Oh, tonight,” Antony said cheerfully. “While I’m still in the mood.”

  “He’s a close kinsman,” said Poplicola.

  Antony burst into laughter. “What a thing for you to say, Lucius! You tried to murder your own father.”

  All four men laughed uproariously; when Fulvia returned, she found Antony in an excellent humor.

  Well after midnight Antony, Poplicola, Cotyla and Cimber staggered into old Murcius’s tavern very much the worse for wear, and usurped the table right at the back with the excuse that it was handy to the window in case anyone wanted to vomit. When the Forum watchman’s bell announced the tenth hour of night, Antony slipped out of the window while Cotyla, Cimber and Poplicola clustered around their table and continued their rowdy banter as if Antony were still a part of it.