They were all terrified.
“Come with me, Quintus Asinius Pollio,” he said to the condemned man. “You have been found guilty of treason.” Meanwhile, the baby was crying uncontrollably as his terrified mother rocked him in an attempt to calm him down. The three children gathered around their father, who was hugging them.
“No. I haven’t done anything,” replied Asinius Pollio.
Gaius stepped towards him. The man suddenly moved towards the window, grabbing the mother’s arm and dragging her into a position between him and the centurion. Gaius knew what he was planning to do: the jump from the first floor wasn’t particularly risky and he was counting on getting away with it. Before the man could jump, though, the centurion drew his sword, rushed over to the woman and shoved her aside. In that moment, he jerked his blade forward and ran his quarry through just before he could disappear through the window.
The woman fell, smashing her head against the edge of a table before dropping the baby and collapsing lifeless to the floor, while the newborn screamed along with the rest of the family. The husband ran over to pick him up. The baby was crying and was conscious, but the mother wasn’t moving, and a pool of blood was forming around her head. The man, still holding his small son in his arms, knelt sobbing and gently lifted her head. Gaius looked at them: he had been on battlefields, and he could recognise death when he saw it. He pulled his sword out of Asinius Pollio, whose blood mingled on the floor with that of the woman. Gaius looked at his sword, which was dripping with blood. Huddled in the corner of the room he saw three children staring at him in terror.
Not their defender, but their persecutor.
“Now you’ve got to give me the reward, Centurion. Take me to the triumvir.” The informer’s voice rang in his ear, as objectionable to him as the scene he was witnessing. He turned and slapped the man with all his strength, and the slave staggered and bumped into the soldiers who had appeared in the apartment’s doorway.
No. He wouldn’t do this again, he told himself as he walked down to the street, a moment before a fire that had broken out a few dozen yards away attracted his attention.
*
It had to be done, Quintus Pedius told himself as he positioned the town criers he’d decided to bring with him and his escort on the street corners. Stars were just beginning to appear in the sky above the roofs of the city buildings, the first oil lamps were being lit in windows, and torches flickered in the semi-darkness, illuminating small groups of people, their faces contorted with terror.
“They’ve destroyed my house! Help me, Consul, I beg you!” yelled an old man, his elegant clothes torn and his face swollen, who was trying to approach him until one of his soldiers drove him back. Pedius made an instinctive gesture of irritation and turned away before repenting and lowering his head in embarrassment. After all, as a member of the sect of Mars Ultor who had pushed for the agreement, it was also his fault that the poor fellow had been through the wringer. The leaked news of the agreement in Bologna between the three new triumvirs had plunged Rome into chaos, and many were exploiting the situation to settle old scores and get rid of personal enemies or launch petty vendettas. It was surprising to see how ferocious men could become in the absence of moral or legal constraints.
The forces of order had lost their hold and for the whole afternoon the city had been out of control. Many of those who were linked to Caesar’s killers in one way or the other had remained in Rome rather than following them East, in the certain belief that Octavian and Antony would never reach an agreement, but when news arrived of the establishment of the triumvirate, along with that of the imminent proscriptions, all hell had broken loose. He’d been so busy issuing instructions to his assassins about the twelve Senators to be eliminated straightaway that he hadn’t realised what was going on – he had remained shut up in the Curia awaiting await news of the executions and hadn’t concerned himself with anything else.
Shortly before darkness had fallen, though, he had no longer been able to ignore the violence that had erupted in the city. His men had only reported four summary executions, all people they’d managed to surprise in their homes, when his cousin Lucius Pinarius had told him about the looting and indiscriminate killings. For a long time, Pedius had done nothing as he tried to decide how best to stem the carnage and panic without exposing himself to Octavian’s disapproval for failing to comply with his orders. Perhaps the triumvirate hadn’t foreseen that by not publishing the proscription lists immediately they would plunge Rome into chaos, or perhaps Octavian actually wanted to sow panic, to serve as a warning and make it clear to the Romans who was in charge. Yet he hadn’t specified anything in his letter other than the names of the people to be immediately executed.
“Get out there now with some town criers and declare publicly who the twelve condemned men are!” Pinarius had urged. “That way we’ll put everyone’s minds at rest and they won’t flee. And anyone wishing to exploit the situation to take revenge upon their enemies will no longer have an excuse for doing so.”
“But if I announce the names, the ones we haven’t yet found will escape…” he had replied.
“So be it! Do you want to be remembered as the consul who couldn’t stop a massacre? Tonight will be wholesale slaughter! What will Octavian think of you?”
“And what will he think of me if I let the people he instructed me to execute escape?”
“How do you know that it was actually he who chose those names? Maybe the other two forced them upon him. Anyway, who cares: we can kill them later, like everyone else.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not the consul! You don’t have to take these sort of decisions!” he snapped, closing the discussion and preventing Pinarius from tormenting him further. He was already suffering enough as it was, and in that moment, he wished Octavian had chosen his cousin and not him as senior consul.
More senators had arrived. They’d thrown themselves at his feet and begged him to tell them if they were among the targets. Some had asked him directly to spare them, even though as far as he knew they hadn’t been charged with anything. But when he heard talk of fires breaking out in several neighbourhoods he capitulated and, having hurriedly prepared a proclamation, called for an escort and his lictors and went out onto the streets to announce the damned names.
“These people, and only these people, are responsible for the civil wars,” one of the lictors charged with reading declaimed loudly. He’d already listed the condemned men for the umpteenth time to a meagre audience in the hope that he would also have been heard by the people looking out of their windows. “We therefore call on the populace to have no fear for their safety, and we order the immediate cessation of all violence. If that does not happen, the soldiers of Consul Quintus Pedius will act to restore order.”
Pedius saw one of the teams of legionaries and troops entrusted with combing the city to flush out the condemned men pass by. He watched as the squad broke into an insula a few yards away, followed immediately by the sound of screams of terror coming from the building. He sighed disconsolately, wondering how he could reconcile his proclamation with the actions of the legionaries who were simply following his orders. Yes, it would be a shocking night, he said to himself, as the crier’s words rang hollow in his ears.
*
A fire. A fight. Two women on the ground. Gaius Chaerea felt dirty, disgusted: he’d just killed a good man in cold blood and in doing so had also killed an innocent woman. He’d trampled over a mother with a newborn baby in her arms just to kill a man who was no threat to him.
And now, seeing the dramatic scene that was unfolding just a few dozen yards from him, the centurion felt he had the immediate opportunity to, if not redeem himself, then at least to partially cleanse himself for what he’d done. He leapt forward without even checking that his soldiers were following: he needed to save someone, desperately, and it didn’t occur to him for one moment that he would be better able to do that with the help of his men. In a few
seconds, he’d covered the ground that separated him from the scuffle, which from where he was looked as though it was surrounded by a ring of fire.
Flames flickered between him and the desperate people. He saw two men on the ground, covered in blood and apparently dead, and it didn’t take his officer’s eye long to understand the situation: their two surviving companions were fighting with their bare hands against people armed with knives, trying to defend two women who were hiding inside a litter and who occasionally appeared from behind the curtains. The aggressors could have escaped the fire, but evidently thought they could overpower the surviving slaves and cart off the two women, who were obviously upper class, before the flames got to them. He took off his regulation cloak and used it as a shield to get him through the flames.
The garment ignited as he rushed through them, but it enabled him to reach the other side unscathed. He rid himself of it and drew his sword, positioning himself between an aggressor and a slave with an injured shoulder.
His opponent hadn’t noticed his presence and seemed disorientated, so Gaius took the opportunity to land an immediate blow, striking him squarely in the abdomen. The man doubled over with a scream as blood spurted everywhere, even splashing the centurion’s face. Chaerea felt a sense of nausea wash over him, and suddenly recalled the earlier scene, when he’d stabbed the condemned man and immediately afterwards seen the dead woman with her despairing baby beneath her. Shaken and dazed, he stumbled and lost hold of his sword: irrationally, he expected to see a corpse and a crying babe appear at his feet, even now.
Too late he realised that a second attacker, who’d just got rid of one slave, had noticed. The man took a few steps towards him, sneering as he brandished a dagger: he couldn’t believe he had the chance to kill an unarmed soldier. Gaius looked down and saw his sword on the ground surrounded by flames.
He was unarmed and, because of the fire, couldn’t escape his enemy’s attack.
The thug gave a cry of triumph and leapt towards him. Gaius heard a woman’s voice shout, “No!” then saw his adversary lose his balance and fall forward. A woman had thrown herself against the aggressor, causing him to fall. The man ended up by Gaius’s feet, and the centurion instantly kicked him in the nape of the neck with his hobnailed boots. The man’s head smashed into the cobblestones and his accomplices fled as the other soldiers arrived. Chaerea went to pick the woman up from the ground, and when he saw her face he froze in astonishment.
Octavia.
“This time… this time I saved you, my love, while you were trying to save me. Can’t you see how closely we’re tied?” she murmured, without even checking that she was alright, still in shock from what had happened.
Gaius stood there immobile, bewildered not only by the matron’s presence and gesture but above all by her words.
My love.
She really did still love him, in spite of everything. Even his apparent disinterest.
IX
Octavian turned to gaze upon the praetorian cohort which followed him. There were also Agrippa, Rufus and Maecenas, flanked by Ortwin and Veleda, and from his saddle, he tried to imagine how the spectacle must look to the hundreds of Romans who were leaning out of windows and lining the sides of the road that passed through the Porta Flaminia Argiletum towards the Forum. He looked with satisfaction at the Servian wall and at the gate, through which the three legions the triumvirate had agreed to bring to the city were passing.
He wondered what his fellow citizens thought of that parade and of the ones which had preceded it. At the very least, he had managed to go from being an outgoing consul to being the last to enter Rome – that way, people would think he was the most important of the triumvirate. It did not matter what they thought of the other two, he was the one with the clearest ideas and the grandest ambitions, and thus he considered himself the association’s co-ordinator, just as Caesar had been with Pompey and Crassus before him. And he wanted to make sure that was how the citizens saw things too. More often than not, in politics – as he was beginning to understand all too well – illusions were more powerful than reality.
The agitators he had planted in the crowd didn’t have to work too hard to get the public cheering and chanting his name. It was a success, not least because – as he had been informed by his staff – the Romans had not given Lepidus and Mark Antony such an enthusiastic welcome. The latter would have noticed the difference, and would have hated him even more, but even that treacherous blockhead had now realised he had no choice but to co-operate with him if he wanted to survive politically.
It was extraordinary that they applauded him. Their enthusiasm was a measure of how much he was loved by the mere fact of being the son and heir of Caesar. That would always be his extra weapon, his advantage over his associates and enemies. From what his cousins had told him, things in Rome had been terrible since the news of the agreement and the imminent proscriptions had become known three days previously. They should have hated him for what he had put the city through, without clear dispositions or official decrees. The law now existed, and there was an initial list of outlaws to be affixed to the walls of the city, but in the prevailing uncertainty, all had something to fear.
Which was just what he – and the other two triumvirs – wanted.
And yet they loved him nevertheless. Evidently, they continued to see him as the only bulwark against Mark Antony’s tyranny and the anarchy and treason perpetrated by men like Brutus and Cassius, and they were even willing to tolerate a regime of terror as long as he was there to give them the illusion that, sooner or later, institutional stability and peace would return.
It was beneficial and profitable to be illuminated by Caesar’s reflection, of course, but Octavian was determined to shine in his own light. He was, he felt sure, Rome’s best possible hope.
The parade he led arrived at the Forum, where the senators were deployed near the two basilicas, the Basilica Aemilia, still being renovated, and the Basilica Julia, which Caesar had rebuilt on the foundations of the Basilica Sempronia but which had not been finished in time for him to inaugurate it. In the middle of the platform, the tribune Publius Titius stood ready, properly coached by the triumvirate to rapidly propose and approve the institution of a five-year judiciary for the re-organisation of the state.
A huge step forward from the private agreement of the first triumvirate. Absolute power enshrined in the Constitution. On the podium with the tribune was the senior consul Quintus Pedius, who to Octavian’s eyes seemed to have aged, even though it had only been a few weeks since he had last seen him. He was not cut out for the huge responsibilities which had fallen upon his shoulders, and it was no coincidence that Caesar had used him but little. That was fine, however: he had no desire to stand in the shadow of any member of his family – he and only he must be the undisputed representative of the gens Julia.
Awaiting him next to the podium of the Rostra were Lepidus and Mark Antony, to the side of whom stood his wife Fulvia with their daughter Clodia Pulchra – his betrothed. Octavian did not remember having ever paid much attention to the little girl whom he had met briefly at the home of Mark Antony once while Caesar was still alive. She was fourteen years old now, and, looking carefully at her as he approached, he realised that she had become a girl who might live up to the pretentious name her parents had given her. She looked as though she might one day be really beautiful, and perhaps he would be happy that he had taken her as his wife, as Pompey the Great had when he married Julia, Caesar’s daughter, only to later fall in love with her.
But it was a fleeting thought, which he dismissed immediately. He had no time for it now, and perhaps did not even really care. He realised that, since he had learned he was Caesar’s heir, the female world had not held much interest for him. He had too many important things to think about in the meantime, and too many ambitions had been aroused in him after the dictator’s death for him now to feel compelled to waste time seeking futile, carnal satisfaction from women. Along with Agri
ppa and Rufus he had sought it in the past, but now it was time to think about serious things, and love was not one of them. He felt certain that he could never fall in love. A man like him, upon whose shoulders the fate of an empire rested, could not afford to waste time and energy.
That little girl, then, was simply a bargaining chip and perhaps, when his alliance with Mark Antony was finished, he might even get rid of her. He saw her smile affectionately at him, and felt pity for her. He knew that he had a certain effect on girls, and had no doubt that Clodia Pulchra was already fantasizing about their union.
He dismounted and shook hands with Mark Antony and Lepidus, who looked at him again with that air of superiority which came from their conviction that they had cheated him and managed to exploit his popularity. Poor fools, they didn’t realise that it was quite the opposite! Each of the three was hoping to gain leverage from their alliance in order to obtain tyrannical power, but he was the one with the winning dice in his hand. He bowed deferentially at Fulvia, realising immediately that she had eyes only for Agrippa, who stood right behind him, and then nodded politely at Clodia Pulchra, who gave him an embarrassed smile as a lively blush tinged her already rouged face.
He sat next to the two triumvirs and nodded at them. Mark Antony glanced at the senior consul who, in turn, authorized the tribune of the people to initiate the procedure. Publius Titius did not make them wait long – he was a venal man upon whom one could count as long as he was able to live in luxury, and now there was no lack of money to pay him with. Meanwhile, the square of the Forum had filled up. It seemed that all of Rome had gathered there, thanks to the news released by order of the triumvirate: given the emergency there would be the voting for the approval of the law that same day, notwithstanding the constitutional practice which proscribed seventeen days between the proposal and its approval. The pens of the Saepta which divided up the citizens according to their tribe and allowed them access to the forum to vote were all ready and well manned by Mark Antony and Lepidus’s soldiers. The presence of the legionaries would guarantee, Octavian was sure, some kind of plebiscite in favour of the new judiciary.
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