The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  By the time Antony rode for Rome, all these investigations had yielded nothing. No train of wagons had been seen anywhere, no ships had put out. The war chest had disappeared off the face of the earth, or so it seemed.

  Since it was too late in the day to summon Gaius Octavius, Antony soaked his sore rump in a mineral bath, then had a lusty all-over bath with Fulvia, saw the sleeping Antyllus, ate a huge meal washed down by plenty of wine, then went to bed and slept.

  Dolabella, he was informed at dawn, had gone out of town for a few days, but Aulus Hirtius arrived as he was breaking his fast and didn’t look in a good mood either.

  “What do you mean, Antonius, bringing fully armed soldiers into Rome?” he demanded. “There are no civil disturbances, and you don’t have Master of the Horse privileges. The city is alive with rumors that you intend to arrest the Liberators still here—I’ve had seven of them visit me already! They’re writing to Brutus and Cassius—you’re provoking war!”

  “I don’t feel safe without a bodyguard,” Antony snarled.

  “Safe from whom?” Hirtius asked blankly.

  “That snake in the grass Gaius Octavius!”

  Hirtius flopped on to a chair. “Gaius Octavius?” Unable to stifle it, he laughed. “Oh, come, Antonius, really!”

  “The little cunnus stole Caesar’s war chest in Brundisium.”

  “Gerrae!” said Hirtius, laughing harder.

  A servant appeared. “Gaius Octavius is here, domine.”

  “Let’s ask him, then,” said the scowling Antony, temper not improved at Hirtius’s patent disbelief. The trouble was that he didn’t dare antagonize Hirtius, the loyalest and most influential of Caesar’s adherents in Rome. Carried huge weight in the Senate, and would be consul next year too.

  The high-soled boots came as a surprise to Hirtius and Antony both, and didn’t contribute to metaphors like snakes in the grass. This demure, togate youth with his odd pretensions, a danger? Worthy of an escort of several hundred armed troops? Hirtius threw Antony a speaking, mirthful glance, leaned back in his chair and prepared to observe the clash of the titans.

  Antony didn’t bother to rise or extend his hand. “Octavius.”

  “Caesar,” Octavian corrected gently.

  “You are not Caesar!” Antony bellowed.

  “I am Caesar.”

  “I forbid you to use that name!”

  “It is mine by legal adoption, Marcus Antonius.”

  “Not until the lex curiata of adoption has been passed, and I doubt it ever will be. I’m senior consul, and I’m in no hurry to convene the Curiate Assembly to ratify it. In fact, Gaius Octavius, if I have anything to do about it, you’ll never see a lex curiata passed!”

  “Go easy, Antonius,” said Hirtius softly.

  “No, I will not! You stinking little pansy, who do you think you are, to defy me?” Antony roared.

  Octavian stood expressionless, eyes wide and completely opaque, nothing in his pose betraying fear or even tension. His hands, left cuddling folds of toga, right by his side, were curved in a relaxed manner, and his skin was free of sweat.

  “I am Caesar,” he said, “and, as Caesar, I wish to have that part of Caesar’s fortune intended to go to the People of Rome as their inheritance.”

  “The will hasn’t been probated, you can’t have it. Pay the people out of Caesar’s war chest, Octavius.” Antony sneered.

  “I beg your pardon?” Octavian asked, allowing himself to look astonished.

  “You stole it from Oppius’s vaults in Brundisium.”

  Hirtius sat up, eyes gleaming.

  “I beg your pardon?” Octavian repeated.

  “You stole Caesar’s war chest!”

  “I can assure you that I didn’t.”

  “Oppius’s manager will testify that you did.”

  “He can’t, because I didn’t.”

  “You deny that you presented yourself to Oppius’s manager, announced that you were Caesar’s heir, and requested the thirty thousand talents of Caesar’s war chest?”

  Octavian began to smile delightedly. “Edepol! Oh, what a clever thief!” He chuckled. “I’ll bet he didn’t produce any proof, because even I didn’t have any in Brundisium. Perhaps Oppius’s manager stole it himself. Dear, dear, what an embarrassment for the state! I do hope you find it, Marcus Antonius.”

  “I can put your slaves to torture, Octavius.”

  “I had only one with me in Brundisium, which will make your task easier—if you charge me. When did this heinous crime take place?” Octavian asked coolly.

  “On a day of terrible rain.”

  “Oh, that exonerates me! My slave was still prostrate from seasickness, and I from asthma and a sick headache. I do wish,” said Octavian, “that you would accord me my due and call me Caesar.”

  “I will never call you Caesar!”

  “I must serve you notice, Marcus Antonius, since you are the senior consul, that I intend to celebrate Caesar’s victory games after the ludi Apollinares, but still during Julius. That is why you see me this morning.”

  “I forbid it,” Antony said harshly.

  “Here, you can’t do that!” Hirtius said indignantly. “I’m one of Caesar’s friends prepared to contribute funds, and I would hope you’ll be contributing yourself, Antonius! The boy’s right, he’s Caesar’s heir and has to celebrate them.”

  “Oh, get out of my sight, Octavius!” Antony snapped.

  “My name is Caesar,” said Octavian as he departed.

  “You were intolerably rude,” said Hirtius. “What possessed you to rant and rave at him? You never even asked him to sit down.”

  “The only thing I’d ask him to sit down on is a spike!”

  “Nor can you deny him his lex curiata.”

  “He can have his lex curiata when he produces the war chest.”

  That set Hirtius to laughing again. “Gerrae, gerrae, gerrae! If someone did indeed steal the war chest, then it had to be an undertaking that must have been nundinae in the planning and execution, Antonius, as you well know. You heard Octavianus, he’d only just arrived from Macedonia, and he was ill.”

  “Octavianus?” asked Antony, still scowling.

  “Yes, Octavianus. Whether you like it or not, his name is Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. I shall call him Octavianus. No, I won’t go so far as to call him Caesar, but Octavianus gives him his due as Caesar’s heir,” said Hirtius. “He’s remarkably cool and clever, isn’t he?”

  When Hirtius walked out into the peristyle of the palace on the Carinae, he found Antony’s veteran escort gathered in it, apparently waiting on the senior consul’s orders. And there in the middle of them was Octavianus, smiling Caesar’s smile, moving his hands like Caesar, it seemed capable too of Caesar’s wit, for they were all laughing at whatever he was saying in that deep voice that sounded more like Caesar’s every time Hirtius heard him.

  Before Hirtius reached the group, Octavianus was gone with a Caesarean wave.

  “Oh, he’s lovely!” sighed one old stager, wiping his eyes.

  “Did you see him, Aulus Hirtius?” another asked, eyes equally misty. “Caesar’s image, young Caesar!”

  What game is he playing? wondered Hirtius, heart sinking. Not one of these men will be in the ranks by the time Octavianus comes into his own, as he certainly will. It must be their sons he wants. Is he capable of that much planning?

  The loss of Caesar’s war chest had a profound effect upon Antony’s plans, plans he wasn’t prepared to outline in full to men like Aulus Hirtius. Land for the veterans wasn’t an insuperable problem; it could always be legislated away from private ownership and put into the ager publicus. Even the most powerful knights of the Eighteen, who would be the victims of all such laws (along with many senators), were lying low and not doing too much complaining since the death of Caesar. Nor were his own debts what worried Antony most.

  Since Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, another factor had crept into being, escalating to the point where every sol
dier in every legion expected to be paid hefty bonuses for fighting. Ventidius was recruiting two new legions in Campania, and every enlisting man wanted a cash gift of a thousand sesterces simply to join up. Not only was it going to cost the state the inevitable sums for equipment, it was going to cost ten million sesterces in cash, payable immediately. The six crack legions still in Macedonia had held together, but their representatives were now in Teanum dropping hints. With the loss of the Parthian spoils, was it going to be worth soldiering? Would the Dacian spoils be equal to the Parthian? How could Antony tell them that there were not going to be any Dacian spoils either, because they were coming back to Italy to shore up the consul’s power? Before he gave them that news, he had to find them ten thousand sesterces each in cash bonuses payable on landing in Brundisium. Leaving out the extra money their centurions would cost, that was three hundred million sesterces.

  But he didn’t have the money, and he couldn’t get the money. The provincial tributes had to cover a great many ordinary governmental expenses apart from the cost of legions. With Caesar dead, no man alive could hold legionary loyalty without cash bonuses; if his exertions in Campania had told him nothing else, they had told him that.

  “What about the emergency hoard in the temple of Ops?” asked Fulvia, to whom he confided everything.

  “There isn’t one,” Antony said gloomily. “It’s been raided by everybody from Cinna and Carbo to Sulla.”

  “Clodius said it was paid back. If he hadn’t managed to pass his law to annex Cyprus to pay for the free grain dole, he planned to garnish the money from Ops. After all, she’s Rome’s plenty, the fruits of the earth, so he considered Ops a properly legal source for free grain. As it was, his law passed, so he never needed to raid Ops.”

  Antony swooped on her and kissed her thoroughly. “What would I do without you, my own personification of Ops?”

  Opsiconsiva’s temple on the Capitol was only moderately old; though she was numen and therefore faceless, disembodied, belonging to the days when Rome first emerged, her original temple had been burned to the ground, and this one erected by a Caecilius Metellus a hundred and fifty years ago. It wasn’t large, but the Caecilii Metelli had kept it painted and clean. The single cella contained no image, nor was it the site of sacrifices to Ops, for she had an altar in the Regia of more importance to the state religion. Like all Roman temples, Ops of the Capitol stood atop a tall podium because these basements were sacrosanct, protected by the deity above, therefore were often used to store precious objects and items, including money or bullion.

  Moving after dark and accompanied only by his henchmen, Mark Antony forced the door to Ops’s basement and let his lamp play across the great stacks of tarnished silver sows, breath suspended. Ops had been paid back with interest! He had his money.

  Which he proceeded to remove in broad daylight, not all at once and not very far. Just across the Capitol, through the Asylum, and into Juno Moneta’s basement, where the mint was located. There, day and night, the silver sows were converted into silver denarii. He could pay his legions for a long time to come, and even pay off his debts. Ops had held twenty-eight thousand silver talents—seven hundred million sesterces.

  Things moved into place for the Kalends of June, when he would ask the Senate to exchange his provinces. And after that, he would have brother Lucius use the Plebeian Assembly to strip Italian Gaul off Decimus Brutus at once.

  A letter from Brutus and Cassius had him snarling.

  It would please us greatly to be present in the Senate on the Kalends of June, Marcus Antonius, but we must seek assurances from you that we will be safe. It grieves us that, though we are the two senior praetors, neither you nor any other magistrate keeps us informed about what is happening in Rome. We appreciate your concern for our welfare, and thank you once again for your many accommodations since the Ides of March. However, it has come to our attention that the city is full of Caesar’s old soldiers, and that they intend to re-erect the altar and column to Caesar which the consul Dolabella so rightly dismantled.

  Our question is: will we be safe if we come to Rome? Please, we humbly beg, give us assurances that our amnesties remain in place, and that we will be welcome in Rome.

  Feeling very much better now that his financial worries were a thing of the past, Antony replied to this almost obsequious plea with scant consideration for Liberator sentiments.

  I cannot give you assurances of safety, Marcus Brutus, Gaius Cassius. It’s true that the city is full of Caesar’s old soldiers, who are holidaying here while they wait for their land or debate whether to re-enlist in the legions I am recruiting in Campania. As to their intentions regarding what I call Caesar-worship, you may have assurances from me that Caesar-worship will not be encouraged.

  Come to Rome for the meeting on the Kalends of June, or do not come. The choice is entirely yours.

  There! That would tell them what their place was in the Antonian scheme of things! And also tell them that, should they decide to take advantage of Samnite discontent, there would be legions in the neighborhood to put rebellion down. Yes, by Ops, excellent!

  His mood plummeted on the Kalends of June when he entered the Curia Hostilia to find attendance so thin that he had no quorum. Had Brutus, Cassius and Cicero been there, he would have scraped in, but they were not.

  “All right,” he said to Dolabella through his teeth, “I’ll go straight to the Plebeian Assembly. Lucius!” he called to his brother, leaving arm in arm with Gaius Antonius. “Convoke the Plebeian Assembly for two days hence!”

  The Plebeian Assembly, also thinly attended, had no quorum regulations. If one member of each tribe turned up, the meeting could proceed, and two hundred–odd had turned up, spread across the thirty-five tribes. The pace was fast and Antony’s mood furious, so none of the Plebs was prepared to argue with Lucius Antonius, and none of his fellow tribunes of the plebs were prepared to interpose a veto. In short order the Plebs awarded Italian Gaul and Further Gaul minus the Narbonese province to Marcus Antonius for a period of five years with unlimited imperium, then went on to award Syria to Dolabella for five years with unlimited imperium. This lex Antonia de permutatione provinciarum went into immediate effect, which meant that Decimus Brutus was stripped of his province.

  The Plebeian Assembly’s work wasn’t done; the first fruits of Antony’s deal with the legions became evident when Lucius Antonius brought in yet another law, this one providing a third type of juror to staff the courts: high ranking ex-centurions, who were not required to have a knight’s income to qualify for jury duty. Antony’s youngest brother followed this up with another land bill, this one to distribute ager publicus to the veterans through the medium of a seven-member commission comprising Mark Antony, Lucius himself, Dolabella, and four minions who included the Liberator Caesennius Lento, busy smarming to Antony.

  If Hirtius had heard rumors that King Deiotarus of Galatia was bribing Antony, he saw those rumors confirmed when Armenia Parva was taken off Cappadocia and added to Galatia.

  The two consuls had found their feet and proclaimed their style of government: corruption and self-service. A brisk trade in tax exemptions and privileges dated from the Kalends of June, and all those permanently banned from the citizenship by Caesar after he discovered that Faberius was selling the citizenship now could buy it after all. While the mint kept on coining silver sows from Ops.

  “What,” asked Antony of Dolabella, “is power for, if not to use to one’s own best advantage?”

  The Senate met again five days into June, this time with a quorum present. To the astonishment of Lucius Piso, Philippus and the few on the front benches, Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus Senior sat there among them. Sulla’s greatest friend and political ally, Vatia Senior had been retired from public life for so long that most had quite forgotten his existence; his Roman house was occupied by his son, Caesar’s friend at present returning from governing Asia Province, while Vatia Senior contemplated the beauties of Nature, Art and Lit
erature in his villa at Cumae.

  Once the prayers were said and the auspices taken, Vatia Senior rose to his feet, the sign that he wished to speak. As the most senior and august among the consulars, it was his entitlement to do so.

  “Later,” said Antony curtly, to a chorus of gasps.

  Dolabella turned his head to glare ferociously at Antony. “I hold the fasces in June, Marcus Antonius, therefore this is my meeting! Publius Vatia Senior, it is an honor to welcome you back to the House. Please speak.”

  “Thank you, Publius Dolabella,” Vatia Senior said, voice a little thready, but quite audible. “When do you mean to discuss provinces for the praetors?”

  “Not today,” Antony answered before Dolabella could.

  “Perhaps we should discuss them, Marcus Antonius,” Dolabella said stiffly, determined not to be overridden.

  “I said, not today! It is postponed,” snarled Antony.

  “Then I ask that you give special consideration to two of the praetors,” said Vatia Senior. “Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. Though I cannot condone their taking the law into their own hands to kill Caesar Dictator, I am concerned for their welfare. While ever they remain in Italy, their lives are threatened. Therefore I move that Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius be voted provinces at once, no matter how long the other praetors must wait. I further move that Marcus Brutus be awarded the province of Macedonia, since Marcus Antonius has relinquished it, and that Gaius Cassius be awarded the province of Cilicia, together with Cyprus, Crete and Cyrenaica.”

  Vatia Senior stopped, but didn’t sit; an imperfect silence fell, disturbed by ominous mutters from the top tiers, where Caesar’s appointees had no love for Caesar’s assassins.

  Gaius, the praetor Antonius, rose to his feet, looking angry. “Honored consuls, da-de-da the rest,” he shouted impudently, “I agree with the consular Vatia Senior, in that it is high time we saw the backs of Brutus and Cassius! While ever they remain in Italy, they represent a threat to government. Since this House voted them an amnesty, they can’t be tried for treason, but I refuse to see them given provinces while innocent men like me are told we must wait! I say, give them quaestor’s duties! Give them commissions to buy in grain for Rome and Italy. Brutus can go to Asia Minor, Cassius to Sicily. Quaestor’s duties are all that they deserve!”