‘What a shameless pair of grave-robbers,’ Cicero whispered to me, ‘and how typical of that harpy to be here. Why is she, in fact? Even the widow isn’t here. What business of Fulvia’s is the reading of Caesar’s will?’
But that was Fulvia. More than any other woman in Rome – more even than Servilia, Caesar’s old mistress, who at least had the grace to operate behind the scenes – Fulvia loved meddling in politics. And watching her move from visitor to visitor, ushering them towards the room where the will was to be read, I felt a sudden sense of unease: what if hers was the brain behind Antony’s skilful policy of reconciliation? That would put it in a very different light.
Piso stood on a low table so that everyone could see him, and with Antony on one side and the Chief Vestal on the other, and with all the most prominent men of the republic listening in the audience, he first displayed the wax seal to show that it had not been tampered with, then broke it open and started to read.
To begin with, its meaning buried in legal jargon, the will seemed entirely innocuous. Caesar left his whole estate to any son that might be born to him after the drawing up of the document. However, in the absence of such a son, his wealth passed to the three male descendants of his late sister: that is to Lucius Pinarius, Quintus Pedius and Gaius Octavius, to be divided in the proportions one eighth each to Pinarius and Pedius and three quarters to Octavius, whom he now adopted as his son, henceforth to be known as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus …
Piso stopped reading and frowned, as if he was not sure what he had just announced. An adopted son? Cicero glanced at me, screwed up his eyes in an effort at memory and mouthed, ‘Octavius?’ Antony meanwhile looked as if he had been struck in the face. Unlike Cicero, he knew at once who Octavius was – the eighteen-year-old son of Caesar’s niece Atia – and for him it must have been a bitter disappointment as well as a total surprise: I am sure he must have hoped to be named as the Dictator’s main heir. Instead, he was merely mentioned as an heir in the second degree – that is, one who would inherit only if the first heirs died or turned down their legacy – an honour he shared with Decimus, one of the assassins! In addition, Caesar bequeathed every citizen of Rome the sum of three hundred sesterces in cash, and decreed that his estate beside the Tiber should become a public park.
The meeting broke up into puzzled groups, and afterwards, walking home, Cicero was full of foreboding. ‘That will is a Pandora’s box – a posthumous poisoned gift to the world that lets loose all manner of evils amongst us.’ He was thinking not so much of the unknown Octavius, or Octavian as he was now restyled, who promised to be a short-lived irrelevance (he was not even in the country but was in Illyricum); it was the mention of Decimus combined with the gifts to the people that troubled him.
All through the remainder of that day and throughout the next, preparations went on in the Forum for Caesar’s funeral. Cicero watched them from his terrace. A golden tabernacle, built to resemble the Temple of Venus the Victorious, was erected on the rostra for the body to lie in. Barriers were put up to control the crowds. Actors and musicians rehearsed. Hundreds more of Caesar’s veterans began to appear on the streets, carrying their weapons: some had travelled a hundred miles to attend. Atticus came round and remonstrated with Cicero for having allowed such a spectacle to go ahead: ‘You and Brutus and the others have all gone mad.’
‘It’s easy for you to say that,’ replied Cicero, ‘but how was it to be prevented? We control neither the city nor the Senate. The crucial mistakes were made not after the assassination but before it – a child should have foreseen the consequences of simply removing Caesar and leaving it at that. And now we have the Dictator’s will to contend with.’
Brutus and Cassius sent messages to say that they intended to remain indoors throughout the day of the funeral: they had hired guards and advised Cicero to do the same. Decimus with his gladiators had barricaded his house and turned it into a fortress. Cicero, however, refused to take such precautions, although he prudently decided not to show himself in public. He suggested instead that I might attend the funeral and report back to him.
I did not mind going. No one would recognise me. Besides, I wanted to see it. I could not help feeling a certain secret regard for Caesar, who over the years had always been civil to me. Accordingly I went down into the Forum before dawn (this was now five days after the assassination – it was hard, amid the rush of events, to keep track of time). The centre of the city was already packed with thousands, women as well as men – not so much the polite citizenry but mostly old soldiers, the urban poor, many slaves, and a large contingent of Jews, who revered Caesar for allowing them to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. I managed to work my way around the vast crowd to the corner of the Via Sacra, where the cortège would pass, and a few hours after daybreak I saw in the distance the procession start to leave the official residence of the chief priest.
It paraded right in front of me, and I was amazed by the planning that had gone into it: Antony and I am sure Fulvia had left out nothing that might be relied upon to inflame the emotions. First came the musicians, playing their haunting plangent dirges; then dancers dressed as spirits from the Underworld, who ran up shrieking to the front of the crowd striking poses of grief and horror; then came household slaves and freedmen carrying busts of Caesar; then not one but five actors went marching past representing each of Caesar’s triumphs, wearing masks of the Dictator fashioned from beeswax that were so incredibly lifelike one felt he had risen from the dead five-fold in all his glory; then, carried on an open litter, came a life-size model of the corpse, naked except for a loincloth, with each of the stab wounds, including that to his face, depicted as deep red gashes in the white wax flesh – this caused the spectators to gasp and cry and some of the women to swoon; then came the body itself, lying on an ivory couch, carried on the shoulders of senators and soldiers and shrouded from view by covers of purple and gold, followed by Caesar’s widow Calpurnia and niece Atia, veiled in black and holding on to one another, accompanied by their relatives; and finally came Antony and Piso, Dolabella, Hirtius, Pansa, Balbus, Oppius, and all the leading supporters of Caesar.
After the cortège had passed, there was a strange hiatus while the body was taken to the steps behind the rostra. Neither before nor afterwards did I ever hear such a profound silence in the centre of Rome in the middle of the day. During this ominous lull the leading mourners were filing on to the platform, and when at last the corpse appeared, Caesar’s veterans began banging their swords against their shields as they must have done on the battlefield – a terrific, warlike, intimidating din. The body was placed carefully into the golden tabernacle; Antony stepped forward to deliver the eulogy, and held up his hand for silence.
‘We come to bid farewell to no tyrant!’ he declared, his powerful voice ringing round the temples and statues. ‘We come to bid farewell to a great man foully murdered in a consecrated place by those he had pardoned and promoted!’
He had assured the Senate he would speak with moderation. He broke that assurance with his opening words, and for the next hour he worked the vast assembly, already aroused by the spectacle of the procession, to a pitch of grief and fury. He flung out his arms. He sank almost to his knees. He beat his breast. He pointed to the heavens. He recited Caesar’s achievements. He told them of Caesar’s will – the gift to every citizen, the public park, the bitter irony of his honouring of Decimus. ‘And yet this Decimus, who was like a son to him – and Brutus and Cassius and Cinna and the rest – these men swore an oath – they made a sacred promise – to serve Caesar faithfully and to protect him! The Senate has given them amnesty, but by Jupiter what revenge I should like to take if prudence did not restrain me!’ In short he used every trick of oratory that the austere Brutus had rejected. And then came his – or was it Fulvia’s? – masterstroke. He summoned up on to the platform one of the actors wearing Caesar’s lifelike mask, who in a rasping voice declaimed to the crowd that famous speech from Pacuvius’s tragedy T
he Trial for Arms:
That ever I, unhappy man, should save
Wretches, who thus have brought me to the grave!
The impersonation was uncannily good. It was like a message from the Underworld. And then, to groans of horror, the manikin of Caesar’s corpse was raised by some mechanical contraption and rotated full circle so that all the wounds were shown.
From that point onwards Caesar’s funeral followed the pattern of Clodius’s. The body was supposed to be burned on a pyre already prepared on the Field of Mars. But as it was being borne down from the rostra, angry voices cried out that it should instead be cremated in Pompey’s Senate chamber, where the crime was committed, or on the Capitol, where the conspirators had taken refuge. Then the crowd, with some collective impulse, changed its mind and decided that it should be burned on the spot. Antony did nothing to stop any of this but looked on indulgently as once again the bookshops of the Argiletum were ransacked and the benches of the law courts were dragged into the centre of the Forum and stacked in a pile. Caesar’s bier was set upon the bonfire and torched. The actors and dancers and musicians pulled off their robes and masks and threw them into the flames. The crowd followed suit. They tore at their own clothes in their hysteria and these along with everything else flammable went flying on to the fire. When the mob started running through the streets carrying torches, looking for the houses of the assassins, I finally lost my nerve and headed back to the Palatine. On my way I passed poor Helvius Cinna, the poet and tribune, who had been mistaken by the mob for his namesake the praetor Cornelius Cinna, whom Antony had mentioned in his speech. He was being dragged away screaming with a noose around his neck, and afterwards his head was paraded around the Forum on a pole.
When I staggered back into the house and told Cicero what had happened, he put his face in his hands. All that night the sounds of destruction went on and the sky was lit up by the houses that had been set on fire. The following day Antony sent a message to Decimus warning that the lives of the assassins could no longer be protected and urging them to withdraw from Rome. Cicero advised them to do as Antony suggested: they would be more useful to the cause alive than dead. Decimus went to Nearer Gaul to try to take control of his allotted province. Trebonius travelled by a circuitous route to Asia to do the same. Brutus and Cassius retreated to the coast at Antium. Cicero headed south.
XV
HE WAS FINISHED with politics, he said. He was finished with Italy. He would go to Greece. He would stay with his son in Athens. He would write philosophy.
We packed up most of the books he needed from his libraries in Rome and Tusculum and set off with a large entourage, including two secretaries, a chef, a doctor and six bodyguards. The weather had been unseasonably cold and wet ever since the assassination, which of course was taken as yet another sign of the gods’ displeasure at Caesar’s murder. My strongest memory of those days spent travelling is of Cicero in his carriage composing philosophy with a blanket over his knees while the rain drummed continuously on the thin wooden roof. We stayed one night with Matius Calvena, the equestrian, who was in despair over the future of the nation: ‘If a man of Caesar’s genius could find no way out, who will find one now?’ But apart from him, in contrast to the scenes in Rome, we found no one who was not glad to see the back of the Dictator. ‘Unfortunately,’ as Cicero observed, ‘none of them has control of a legion.’
He sought refuge in his work, and by the time we reached Puteoli on the Ides of April, he had completed one entire book – On Auguries – half of another – On Fate – and had begun a third – On Glory – three examples of his genius that will live for as long as men are still capable of reading. And no sooner had he got out of his carriage and stretched his legs along the seashore than he began sketching the outline of a fourth, On Friendship (With the single exception of wisdom, I am inclined to regard it as the greatest of all the gifts the gods have bestowed upon mankind), which he planned to dedicate to Atticus. The physical world might have become a hostile and dangerous place for him, but in his mind he lived in freedom and tranquillity.
Antony had dismissed the Senate until the first day of June, and gradually the great villas around the Bay of Naples began to fill with the leading men of Rome. Most of the new arrivals, like Hirtius and Pansa, were still in a state of shock at Caesar’s death. The pair were supposed to take over as consuls at the end of the year, and as part of their preparation they asked Cicero if he would give them further lessons in oratory. He didn’t much want to – it was a distraction from his writing, and he found their doleful talk about Caesar irritating – but in the end he was too easy-going to refuse. He took them on to the beach to learn elocution as Demosthenes had done, by speaking clearly through a mouth full of pebbles, and to learn voice projection by delivering their speeches into the crashing waves. Over the dinner table they were full of stories of Antony’s high-handedness: of how he had tricked Calpurnia on the night of the assassination into giving him custody of her late husband’s private papers as well as his fortune; of how he now pretended these documents contained various edicts that had the force of law, whereas in fact he had forged them in return for enormous bribes.
Cicero said, ‘So he has his hands on all the money? But I thought three quarters of Caesar’s fortune was supposed to go to this boy Octavian?’
Hirtius rolled his eyes. ‘He’ll be lucky!’
Pansa added, ‘He’ll have to come and get it first, and I wouldn’t give much for his chances.’
Two days after this exchange, I was sheltering from the rain in the portico, reading the elder Cato’s treatise on agriculture, when the steward came up to me to announce that L. Cornelius Balbus had arrived to see Cicero.
‘Then tell the master he’s here.’
‘But I’m not sure that I should – he gave me strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed, no matter who came to call.’
I sighed and laid aside my book: Balbus was one man who would have to be seen. He was the Spaniard who had handled Caesar’s business affairs in Rome. He was well known to Cicero, who had once defended him in the courts against an attempt to strip him of his citizenship. He was now in his middle fifties and owned a huge villa nearby. I found him waiting in the tablinum with a toga-clad youth I took at first to be his son or grandson, except when I looked more closely I saw that he couldn’t be, for Balbus was swarthy whereas this boy had damp blond hair badly cut in a basin style; he was also rather short and slender, pretty-faced but with a pasty complexion pitted by acne.
‘Ah, Tiro,’ cried Balbus, ‘will you kindly drag Cicero away from his books? Just tell him I have brought Caesar’s adopted son to see him – Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus – that ought to do it.’
And the young man smiled shyly at me, showing gapped uneven teeth.
Naturally Cicero came at once, overwhelmed by curiosity to meet this exotic creature, seemingly dropped into the tumult of Roman politics from the sky. Balbus introduced the young man, who bowed and said, ‘It is one of the greatest honours of my life to meet you. I have read all your speeches and works of philosophy. I have dreamed of this moment for years.’ His voice was pleasant: soft and well educated.
Cicero fairly preened at the compliment. ‘You are very kind to say it. Now please tell me, before we go further: what am I to call you?’
‘In public I insist on Caesar. To my friends and family I am Octavian.’
‘Well, since at my age I would find another Caesar hard to get used to, perhaps it could be Octavian for me as well, if I may?’
The young man bowed again. ‘I would be honoured.’
And so began two days of unexpectedly friendly exchanges. It turned out that Octavian was staying next door with his mother Atia and his stepfather Philippus, and he wandered back and forth quite freely between the two houses. Often he appeared on his own, even though he had brought an entourage of friends and soldiers over with him from Illyricum, and more had joined him at Naples. He and Cicero would talk in the villa
or walk along the seashore together in the intervals between showers. Watching them, I was reminded of a line in Cicero’s treatise on old age: just as I approve of the young man in whom there is a touch of age, so I approve of the old man in whom there is some flavour of youth … Oddly enough, it was Octavian who sometimes seemed the older of the two: serious, polite, deferential, shrewd; it was Cicero who made the jokes and skimmed the stones across the sea. He told me that Octavian had no small talk. All he wanted was political advice. The fact that Cicero was publicly aligned with his adopted father’s killers appeared to be neither here nor there as far as he was concerned. How soon should he go to Rome? How should he handle Antony? What should he say to Caesar’s veterans, many of whom were hanging around the house? How was civil war to be avoided?
Cicero was impressed: ‘I can understand entirely what Caesar saw in him – he has a certain coolness rare in one of his years. He might make a great statesman one day, if only he can survive long enough.’ The men around him were a different matter. These included a couple of Caesar’s old army commanders, with the hard, dead eyes of professional killers; and some arrogant young companions, two in particular: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, not yet twenty but already bloodied by war, taciturn and faintly menacing even in repose; and Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, a little older, effeminate, giggling, cynical. ‘Those,’ said Cicero, ‘I do not care for at all.’
On only one occasion did I have an opportunity to observe Octavian closely for any length of time. That was on the final day of his stay, when he came to dinner with his mother and stepfather, along with Agrippa and Maecenas; Cicero also invited Hirtius and Pansa; I made up the nine. I noticed how the young man never touched his wine, how quiet he was, how his pale grey eyes flicked from one speaker to another and how intently he listened, as if he was trying to commit everything they said to memory. Atia, who looked as if she might have been the model for a statue commemorating the ideal Roman matron, was far too proper to voice a political opinion in public. Philippus, however, who certainly did drink, became increasingly voluble, and towards the end of the evening announced, ‘Well if anyone wants to know my opinion, I think Octavian should renounce this inheritance.’
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