The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  “Stall the bloodsuckers for the moment, and get some money out of the Senate. Now that Caesar’s dead, his dictate about who can pull money out of the Treasury will have to go—you do agree, I hope, Dolabella?”

  “Definitely,” Dolabella said cheerfully. “I owe money too.”

  “And what about me?” Lepidus asked ominously.

  “Pontifex Maximus, for a start,” Antony said.

  “Oh, that will please Junilla! I can sell my house.”

  “What are we going to do about the assassins? Do we know yet how many of them there are?” Dolabella asked.

  “Twenty-three, if you include Trebonius,” Antony said.

  “Trebonius? But he—”

  “Stayed outside to keep me out, and therefore you out. No lictors inside. They carved the old boy into mincemeat. Why don’t you know any of this? Lepidus has come from Veii, and he knows.”

  “Because I’ve been shut in my house!”

  “So have I, but I know!”

  “Oh, stop arguing!” said Lepidus. “Knowing Cicero, he’s been to see you already, am I right?”

  “You’re right. Now there’s a happy man! He wants an amnesty for all of them, of course,” Antony said.

  “No, a thousand times no!” Dolabella shouted. “I’m not going to let them get away with murdering Caesar!”

  “Calm down, Publius,” said Lepidus. “Think, man, think! If we don’t handle this in the most peaceful way possible, there’s certain to be another civil war, and that’s the last thing anybody wants. We have to get Caesar’s funeral over and done with, which means convoking the Senate—he’ll have to have a state ceremony. Have you seen the crowds in the Forum? They’re not angry, but the numbers are growing in leaps and bounds.” He got up. “I’d best get out to the Campus Martius and deploy my men. When for the Senate meeting? Where?”

  “Tomorrow at dawn—next door in Tellus. We’ll be safe,” said Antony.

  “Pontifex Maximus!” Lepidus said gleefully. “Wasn’t it odd?” he asked at the door. “When we were talking about the way to die at my dinner. ‘As long as it’s sudden,’ he said. I’m rather glad he got his wish. Can you imagine Caesar dying by inches?”

  “He’d fall on his sword first,” Dolabella said gruffly, and winked away tears. “Oh, I shall miss him!”

  “Cicero told me that the assassins—they call themselves the Liberators, can you believe it?—are wrecks,” said Antony. “That’s why we ought to go easy on them. The more we try to persecute them, the angrier men like Decimus Brutus might get—he can general troops. Softly, softly, Dolabella.”

  “For the time being” was as far as Dolabella was prepared to go. “When I have half a chance, Antonius, they’ll pay!”

  Cicero was pleased with everything except the sad performance of the Liberators in oratory. Twice that day he had persuaded Brutus to speak, the first time from the rostra, the second from the steps of the temple—dismal, doleful, ineffectual, silly! When he didn’t ramble in circles about privately owned land being given to the veterans, but how much he loved the veterans, he was maintaining that the Liberators had not forsworn their oaths to safeguard Caesar, because the oaths were invalid. Oh, Brutus, Brutus! Cicero’s tongue itched to take over, but his instinct for self-preservation was stronger, and kept him silent. He was also, truth to tell, miffed that they hadn’t taken him into their confidence beforehand—if he had known, this shocking mess would not exist, and most of the First Class would not be locked inside their Palatine houses fearing revolution and murder.

  What he did do was spend a lot of time talking to Antony, Dolabella and Lepidus, pushing them gently into admitting that, after all, the assassination of Caesar Dictator wasn’t the worst crime ever committed.

  When the Senate met in the temple of Tellus on the Carinae at dawn of the second day after Caesar’s death, the Liberators were not in attendance; they were still living in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, still refusing to come out. Most other senators were there, but not Lucius Caesar, not Calvinus, and not Philippus. Tiberius Claudius Nero opened proceedings by asking that special honors be granted to the Liberators for freeing Rome from a tyrant, which provoked howls of outrage from the pedarii.

  “Sit down, Nero, no one asked you for your opinion on anything,” Antony said, and swept on into a very reasonable, dulcetly phrased speech that acquainted the conscript fathers with the way the Roman wind was going to blow from the curule dais: the deed was done, the deed could not be undone, and yes, it was misguided, but no, there could be no doubt that the men who slew Caesar were as honorable as they were patriotic. By far the most important aspect, Antony kept hammering, was that government should continue with himself, the senior consul Marcus Antonius, in command. If some stared at Dolabella in astonishment, Dolabella simply nodded agreement.

  “That is what I want, and that is what I must insist upon,” Antony said in no-nonsense tones. “However, it is essential that the House should confirm Caesar’s laws and dictates, including those he intended to pass, but didn’t.”

  Many grasped the tenor of that: that whenever he needed to do something, Antony would pretend that Caesar was going to bring it into law later, hadn’t gotten around to it before he died. Oh, how Cicero yearned to dispute that! But he couldn’t, he had to devote his speech to a plea for the Liberators, who were well intentioned and honorable, must be excused their zeal in killing Caesar. Amnesty was essential! His only reference to Caesar’s unpromulgated laws and dictates came at the end, when he protested that he didn’t think it was wise to consider things Caesar had not yet mooted.

  The meeting broke up with the resolution that government should continue under the aegis of Marcus Antonius, Publius Cornelius Dolabella and the praetors; and a senatus consultum that the Liberators, all patriotic men, should go unpunished.

  From the temple of Tellus the senior magistrates, together with Aulus Hirtius, Cicero and some thirty others, walked to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There Antony informed the dirty, un-shaven Liberators that the Senate had decreed a general amnesty, that they were perfectly safe from retribution. Oh, the relief! Then the whole party ascended the rostra and publicly shook hands with each other under the sullen eyes of the enormous crowd, watching silently. Not for, but not against. Passive.

  “To cement our pact,” said Antony as they left the rostra, “I suggest that each of us ask one Liberator to dinner today. Cassius, will you be my guest?”

  Lepidus asked Brutus, Aulus Hirtius asked Decimus Brutus, Cicero asked Trebonius, and so on, until every Liberator had an invitation to dinner that afternoon.

  “I can’t believe it!” whooped Cassius to Brutus as they toiled up the Vestal Steps. “Home free!”

  “Yes,” said Brutus absently; he had just that moment remembered that Porcia might be dead. This was the first moment since he had left the slave to walk into the Curia Pompeia that he had even thought of her name. But of course she was alive. Were she dead, Cicero would have been the first to tell him.

  Servilia met him just beyond the porter’s lodge, standing as Klytemnestra must have done just after killing Agamemnon. All she lacked was the axe. Klytemnestra! That is who my mother is.

  “I’ve locked your wife up,” she greeted him.

  “Mama, you can’t do that! This is my house,” he bleated.

  “This is my house, Brutus, and it will be until the day I die. That monstrous incubus is no concern of mine, including at law. She drove you to murder Caesar.”

  “I freed Rome from a tyrant,” he said, wishing with every fiber of his being that he could—just this once!—gain the better of her. Wish on, Brutus, that will never happen. “The Senate has decreed an amnesty for the Liberators, so I am still the urban praetor. I still have my wealth and estates.”

  She started to laugh. “Don’t tell me you believe that?”

  “It is a fact, Mama.”

  “The murder of Caesar is a fact, my son. Senatorial decrees are not worth the paper
they’re written upon.”

  Decimus Brutus’s mind was in a turmoil so chaotic that he wondered about his sanity. He had panicked! Surely that fact alone said his thought processes were quite unhinged. Panic! He, Decimus Junius Brutus, to panic? He, the veteran of many battles, of many life-threatening situations, had looked down at Caesar’s body and panicked. He, Decimus Junius Brutus, had run away.

  Now he was going to dine with another veteran of the Gallic War: the clerkly warrior Aulus Hirtius, as good with a pen as with a sword, inarguably Caesar’s loyalest adherent. Next year Hirtius would be consul with Vibius Pansa if Caesar’s dictate held up. But Hirtius is a peasant, a nobody. I am a Junius Brutus, a Sempronius Tuditanus. Loyalty is something I owe first and foremost to myself. And to Rome, of course. That goes without saying. I slew Caesar because he was ruining the Rome of my ancestors. Knitting up a Rome none of us wanted. Decimus, stop deluding yourself! You are going mad! You killed Caesar because he outshone you so brilliantly that you realized the only way that men would ever remember your name was if you killed him. That is the truth. You’ll be in the history books, thanks to Caesar.

  It was hard to meet Hirtius’s eyes, a nondescript shade of grey-blue-green, peaceful yet stern; the sternness was uppermost, but Hirtius extended his hand cordially and drew Decimus into his very nice house—bought, like Decimus’s own, out of the spoils from Long-haired Gaul. They dined alone, a great relief for Decimus, who had dreaded the presence of others.

  Finally, the last course and the servants gone, the wine and water remaining, Hirtius turned himself on his end of the couch so that he could see Decimus more comfortably.

  “This is a shocking mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” he said as he poured unwatered wine.

  “Why say that, Aulus? The Liberators have been granted a general amnesty, things will go on as they always have.”

  “I’m afraid not. Things have been started that can’t go on as they were, because they didn’t exist. They’re entirely new.”

  Startled, Decimus spilled a little of his wine. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Come with me, I’ll show you.” Hirtius swung his legs off the couch, slid his feet into backless slippers.

  Bewildered, Decimus followed suit, walked with Hirtius through the atrium and out on to the loggia, which had a fine view of the lower Forum. The sun was still well up, the sea of people manifest. As far as the eye could travel, masses and masses of people. Just standing there, hardly moving, hardly talking.

  “So?” Decimus asked.

  “There are plenty of women there, but look at the men. Look at them properly! What do you see?”

  “Men,” said Decimus, bewilderment growing.

  “Decimus, is it really so long ago? Look at them! Half of the men in that crowd are old soldiers—Caesar’s old soldiers. Old in terms of soldiering, but not old in years. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, no more. Old, yet still young. The word is spreading up and down Italy that Caesar is dead, murdered, and they’ve come to Rome for his funeral. Thousands of them. The House hasn’t even discussed a date for the funeral yet, but look at how many of them there are already. By the time that Caesar is burned, Lepidus’s men will be hopelessly outnumbered.” Shivering, Hirtius turned. “It’s cold. We can go inside again.”

  Back on the couch, Decimus downed half a goblet of wine, then stared at Hirtius very levelly. “Do you want my blood, Aulus?”

  “I grieve deeply for Caesar,” Hirtius answered. “He was my friend as well as my benefactor. But the world can’t run backward. If we who are left don’t stick together, there’ll be another civil war—and that, Rome can’t afford. But,” Hirtius went on with a sigh, “we’re educated, wealthy, privileged, and to some extent detached. It’s the veterans you have to worry about, Decimus, not men like me or Pansa, much though we loved Caesar. I don’t want your blood, but the veterans will. And if the veterans want it, then those in power will have to oblige them. The moment the veterans start baying for your blood, so will Marcus Antonius.”

  Decimus broke into a cold sweat. “You’re exaggerating.”

  “No, I am not. You served with Caesar. You know how his soldiers felt about him. It was a love affair, pure and simple. Even the mutinies. Once the funeral’s over, they’ll turn ugly. So will Antonius. Or if not Antonius, someone else with power. Dolabella. That slippery eel, Lepidus. Or someone we haven’t taken into account as a power because he’s waiting in the wings.”

  More wine, and he felt better. “I’ll stick it out in Rome,” Decimus muttered, almost to himself.

  “I doubt you’ll be let stick it out in Rome. The Senate will renege on its amnesty because the people and the veterans will insist it does. The ordinary people loved him too—he was a part of them. And once he rose high, he never forgot them, always had a cheerful word for them, stopped to listen to their woes. What does the abstract concept of political liberty mean to a man or woman of the Subura, Decimus, tell me that? Their votes don’t even count in an election of Centuries, People, or Plebs. Caesar belonged to them. None of us ever have or ever will.”

  “If I leave Rome, then I admit that I did wrong.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Antonius is strong. He’s been remarkably decent to us.”

  “Decimus, don’t trust Marcus Antonius!”

  “I have very good reason to trust him,” Decimus said, knowing what Hirtius could not know: that Marcus Antonius had contrived at the murder of Caesar.

  “I believe that he wants to protect you, yes. But the people and the veterans won’t let him. Besides, Antonius wants Caesar’s power, and any man who aspires to that courts the same fate as Caesar. This assassination has set a precedent. Antonius will begin to fear that he’ll be the next man cut down.” Hirtius cleared his throat. “I don’t know what he’ll do, but whatever it is, take it from me, it won’t benefit the Liberators.”

  “You’re hinting,” Decimus said slowly, “that the Liberators should find honorable, legitimate excuses to leave the city. For me, that’s easy. I can go to my province at once.”

  “You can go. But you won’t keep Italian Gaul long.”

  “Nonsense! The House moved that Caesar’s laws and dictates be upheld, and Caesar himself gave me Italian Gaul to govern.”

  “Believe me, Decimus, you’ll keep your province only as long as it suits Antonius and Dolabella.”

  * * *

  The moment he got home Decimus Brutus sat and wrote in haste to Brutus and Cassius, told them what Hirtius had told him, and, back in that blind panic again, announced that he intended to quit Rome and Italy for his province.

  As he wrote, the letter grew more and more garbled, talked wildly of a mass migration of the Liberators to Cyprus or the most remote regions of Spanish Cantabria. What could they do except flee? he asked. They had no general like Pompeius Magnus to lead them, not one of them had any clout with the legions or foreign rulers. Sooner or later they were going to be declared public enemies, which would cost them their citizenship and their heads, or at best they would be tried and sent into permanent exile without the funds to live. In the midst of which he was begging them to work very hard on Antonius, assure him that no Liberator had any designs on the state or intention of killing the consuls.

  He ended by asking that the three of them meet around the fifth hour of night at a place of their choosing.

  So they met at Cassius’s house, speaking in whispers with the shutters closed in case some servant grew curious. Brutus and Cassius were stunned by the extent of Decimus’s mania, and therefore were not convinced that he knew what he was talking about. Perhaps, Cassius suggested, Hirtius was, for reasons of his own, trying to frighten them into bolting? For the moment they left Rome, they were admitting they had committed a crime. So no, Brutus and Cassius wouldn’t leave Rome, and no, they refused to start gathering their liquid assets together either.

  “Have it your own way,” Decimus said, rising. “Go or stay, I don’
t care anymore. I’m off to my province as soon as I can make arrangements. If I’m well entrenched in Italian Gaul, then Antonius and Dolabella might decide to leave me alone. Though I think I’ll safeguard myself by doing a little secret recruiting of troops among the veterans up there. Just in case.”

  “Oh, this is terrible!” Brutus cried to Cassius after the obsessed Decimus had gone. “My mother has ill-wished me, Porcia hasn’t said two sensible words—Cassius, we’ve lost our luck!”

  “Decimus is wrong,” Cassius said confidently. “I’m the one who had dinner with Antonius, so I can assure you that he’s totally wrong. It struck me that Antonius was thrilled to see the end of Caesar.” His teeth flashed in a grin. “Except, that is, for the contents of Caesar’s will.”

  “Are you going to the Senate meeting tomorrow?” Brutus asked.

  “Very definitely. We all should—in fact, we must. And don’t worry, Decimus will be there too, I’m sure.”

  Lucius Piso had called the meeting to discuss Caesar’s funeral. Entering the dilapidated interior of Tellus’s hesitantly, the Liberators met with no overt hostility, though not one of the backbenchers would go near them in case he should inadvertently touch them. Caesar’s obsequies were fixed for two days hence, the twentieth day of March.

  “So be it,” said Piso, and looked at Lepidus. “Marcus Lepidus, is the city secure?” he asked.

  “The city is secure, Lucius Piso.”

  “Then isn’t it time you read Caesar’s will publicly, Piso?” Dolabella asked. “I gather it contains a public bequest.”

  “Let us go to the rostra now,” said Piso.

  With one accord the House rose and walked to the rostra amid that sea of people. Shrinking, haunted, shuddering, Decimus noted how right Aulus Hirtius was: many of those present were veteran soldiers, more today than yesterday. There were also professional Forum frequenters present, men who knew every prominent face in the First Class. When Brutus and Cassius mounted the rostra with Antony and Dolabella, the Forum frequenters whispered among their less knowledgeable neighbors. A growl began in one throat after another, ominously swelling; Dolabella, Antony and Lepidus made a great show of friendliness toward Brutus, Cassius and Decimus Brutus until the growling eventually died away.