The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  “Is my couch solid?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Is God solid?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And did Zeno think the Soul was solid?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Which came first of all solid things?”

  “Fire.”

  “And after fire?”

  “Air, then water, then earth.”

  “What must happen to air, water and earth?”

  “They must return to fire at the end of the cycle.”

  “Is the Soul fire?”

  “Zeno thought so, but Panaetius didn’t agree.”

  “Where else can we look for the Soul than Zeno and Panaetius?”

  Young Cato floundered, looked for help to Statyllus, who was gazing at Cato in growing consternation.

  “We can look at Socrates through Plato,” Statyllus said, his voice trembling. “Though he found great fault with Zeno, Socrates was the perfect Stoic. He cared nothing for his material welfare, nor for heat and cold, nor for passions of the flesh.”

  “Do we look for the Soul in the Phaedrus or the Phaedo?”

  Statyllus spoke, drawing a gasping breath. “The Phaedo. In it, Plato discusses what Socrates said to his friends just before he drank the cup of hemlock.”

  Cato laughed, flung his hands out. “All good men are free, all bad men are slaves—let’s look at the Paradoxes!”

  The subject of the Soul seemed forgotten as the three embarked upon one of Cato’s favorite subjects. Statyllus was deputed to adopt the Epicurean point of view, young Cato the Peripatetic, while Cato, true to himself, remained a Stoic. The arguments flew back and forth amid laughter, a quick give-and-take of premises so well known that each answer was automatic.

  A growl of distant thunder came; Statyllus got up and went to look out the south window at the mountains.

  “A terrible storm is coming,” he said; then, more softly, “A terrible storm.” He reclined again to take up the cudgels about freedom and slavery on behalf of the Epicureans.

  The wine was working insidiously on Cato, who hadn’t noticed its creeping effects. Suddenly, violently, he pitched his goblet out the south window. “No, no, no!” he roared. “A free man who consents to slavery of any kind is a bad man, and that’s that! I don’t care what form the slavery takes—lascivious pleasure—food—wine—punctuality—making money—the man who enslaves himself to it is a bad man! Wicked! Evil! His Soul will leave his body so fouled, so encrusted with filth that she sinks down, down, down to Tartarus, and there she stays forever! Only the good man’s Soul can soar into the aether, into the realms of God! Not the gods, but God! And the good man never succumbs to any kind of slavery! Any kind! Any kind!”

  Statyllus had scrambled up during this impassioned speech, gone to huddle next to young Cato. “If you get a chance,” he whispered, “go to his sleeping room and steal his sword.”

  Young Cato jumped, turned terrified eyes on Statyllus. “Is that what all this is about?”

  “Of course it is! He’s going to kill himself.”

  Cato ran down, sat shuddering and glaring at his audience. Without warning he lurched to his feet and reeled to his study, where the two sitting on the couch could hear him rummaging among his pigeonholes of books, throwing scrolls around.

  “Phaedo, Phaedo, Phaedo!” he was calling, giggling too.

  Eyes rolling in his head, young Cato gaped at Statyllus, who gave him a push.

  “Go, Marcus! Steal his sword now!”

  Young Cato dashed to his father’s roomy sleeping quarters and snatched the sword, hanging by its baldric from a hook on the wall. Back to the dining room, where he saw Prognanthes standing with the wine flagon in his hand. “Here, take this and hide it!” he said, giving the steward Cato’s sword. “Hurry! Hurry!”

  Prognanthes left just in time; Cato reappeared with a scroll in his hand. He threw it down on the lectus medius and turned in the direction of the atrium. “It’s coming on dusk, I have to give the password to the gate sentries,” he said curtly, and vanished, shouting for a waterproof sagum; it was going to rain.

  The storm was drifting closer; flashes of lightning began to bathe the dining room in glowing blue-white flickers, for no one had yet lit the lamps. Prognanthes came in with a taper.

  “Is the sword hidden?” young Cato asked him.

  “Yes, domine. The master won’t find it, rest assured.”

  “Oh, Statyllus, he can’t! We mustn’t let him!”

  “We won’t let him. Hide your sword too.”

  Some time later Cato returned, threw his wet cape into a corner, and picked up the Phaedo from the couch. Then he went to Statyllus, embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks.

  After that it was young Cato’s turn. How utterly alien, the feeling of his father’s arms around him, those dry lips on his face, his mouth. Inside his mind were only memories of the day he had howled into Porcia’s rough dress when his father had called them to his study to inform them that he had divorced their mother for adultery with Caesar, and that they would never, never see her again. Even for a moment. Even to say goodbye. Little Cato had wept desolately for his mama, and his father had told him not to unman himself. That to unman himself for such a paltry reason was not a right act. So many memories of a hard father, one who inflicted his own pitiless ethic upon all those around him. And yet—and yet—how proud he was to be the great Cato’s son! So now he unmanned himself and wept.

  “Please, Father, don’t!”

  “What?” Cato asked, eyes widening in surprise. “Not retire to read my Phaedo?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Young Cato mourned. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The Soul, the Soul, whom the Greeks thought female. How right it seemed, listening to the storm outside, that the natural world should echo the tempest within his—heart? mind? body? We do not even know that, so how can we know anything about the Soul, her purity or lack of purity? Her immortality? I need to have her proved to me, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt!

  Several multiple lamps burning, he sat down in a chair and opened the scroll between his hands, reading the Greek slowly; it was always easier for Cato to separate the words in a Greek text than a Latin one, why he didn’t know. Reading the words of Socrates as he asked Simmias one of his famous questions: Socrates taught by asking questions.

  “Do we believe in death?”

  “Yes,” said Simmias.

  “Death is the separation of Soul and body. To be dead is the end result of this separation.”

  Yes, yes, yes, it must be so! What I am is more than mere body, what I am contains the white fire of my Soul, and when my body is dead, my Soul is free. Socrates, Socrates, reassure me! Give me the strength and purpose to do what I must do!

  “To enjoy pure knowledge, we must shed our bodies…. The Soul is made in the image of God, and is immortal, and has intelligence, and is uniform, and cannot change. She is immutable. Whereas the body is made in the image of humankind. It is mortal. It has no intelligence, it has many shapes, and it disintegrates. Can you deny this?”

  “No.”

  “So if what I say is true, then the body must decay, but the Soul cannot.”

  Yes, yes, Socrates is right, she is immortal! She will not dissolve when my body dies!

  Enormously relieved, Cato put the book in his lap and looked at the wall, his eyes seeking his sword. At first he thought what he saw was the aftereffect of the wine, then his mortal eyes, so filled with false visions, acknowledged the truth: his sword had gone. He transferred the book to his side table and rose to strike a copper gong with a muted hammer. The sound thrummed away into the darkness, torn by lightning, enhanced by thunder.

  A servant came.

  “Where is Prognanthes?” Cato asked.

  “The storm, domine, the storm. His children are crying.”

  “My sword is gone. Fetch me my sword at once.”

  The servant bowed and vanished. Some time later, Cato s
truck the gong again. “My sword is gone. Fetch it at once.”

  This time the man looked afraid, nodded and hurried off.

  Cato picked up the Phaedo and continued to read it to its end, but the words didn’t impinge. He struck the gong a third time.

  “Yes, domine?”

  “Send every servant to the atrium, including Prognanthes.”

  He met them there and looked angrily at his steward. “Where is my sword, Prognanthes?”

  “Domine, we have searched and searched, but it cannot be found.”

  Cato moved so fast that no one actually saw him stride across the room to punch Prognanthes, just heard the crack! of Cato’s fist against the steward’s massive jaw. He fell unconscious, but no servant went to help him, just stood shivering, staring at Cato.

  Young Cato and Statyllus erupted into the room.

  “Father, please, please!” Young Cato wept, throwing his arms about his father.

  Who shook him off as if he stank. “Am I a madman, Marcus, that you deny me my protection against Caesar? Do you deem me incompetent, that you dare to take my sword? I don’t need it to take my own life, if that’s what’s worrying you—taking my own life is simple. All I have to do is hold my breath or dash my head against a wall. My sword is my right! Bring me my sword!”

  The son fled, sobbing wildly, while four of the servants took hold of the inanimate Prognanthes and carried him away. Only two of the lowliest slaves remained.

  “Bring me my sword,” he said to them.

  The noise of its coming preceded it, for the rain had died to a gentle murmur; the storm was passing out to sea. A toddling child brought it in, both hands around its ivory eagle hilt, the tip of the blade making a scraping sound as the little fellow dragged it doggedly behind him across the floor. Cato bent and picked it up, tested its point and edges; still razor sharp.

  “I am my own man again,” he said, and returned to his room.

  Now he could reread the Phaedo and make sense of it. Help me, Socrates! Show me that my fear is needless!

  “Those who love knowledge are aware that their Souls are no more than attached to their bodies as with glue or pins. Whereas those who do not love knowledge are unaware that each pleasure, each pain is a kind of nail fastening the Soul to the body like a rivet, so that she emulates the body, and believes that all her truths arise from the body…Is there an opposite to life?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Death.”

  “And what do we call the thing that owns no death?”

  “Immortal.”

  “Does the Soul own death?”

  “No.”

  “Then the Soul is immortal?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Soul cannot perish when the body dies, for the Soul does not admit of death as a part of herself.”

  There it is, manifest, the truth of all truths.

  Cato rolled and tied the Phaedo, kissed it, then lay down upon his bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep while the storm muttered and grumbled into a profound calm.

  In the middle of the night his right hand woke him, stabbing, throbbing; he gazed at it in dismay, then struck the gong.

  “Send for the physician Cleanthes,” he told the servant, “and summon Butas here to see me.”

  His agent came with suspicious celerity; Cato eyed him with irony, realizing that at least a third of Utica knew that its prefect had demanded his sword. “Butas, go down to the harbor and make sure that those trying to board vessels are all right.”

  Butas went; outside he paused to whisper to Statyllus. “He can’t be thinking of suicide, he’s too concerned with the present. You imagine things.”

  So the household cheered up, and Statyllus, who had been on the point of fetching Lucius Gratidius, changed his mind. Cato wouldn’t thank him for sending a centurion to plead with him!

  When the physician Cleanthes arrived, Cato held out his right hand. “I’ve broken it,” he said. “Splint it so I can use it.”

  While Cleanthes worked at an impossible task, Butas returned to inform Cato that the weather had played havoc with the ships, and that many refugees were in a state of confusion.

  “Oh, poor things!” said Cato. “Come back at dawn and let me know more, Butas.”

  Cleanthes coughed delicately. “I have done the best I can, domine, but may I remain in your house a while longer? I am told that the steward Prognanthes is still unconscious.”

  “Oh, him! His jaw is like his name—a rocky shelf. He broke my hand, a wretched nuisance. Yes, go and tend him if you must.”

  He was awake when Butas reported at dawn that the situation on the waterfront had settled down. As the agent left, Cato lay down on his bed.

  “Close the door, Butas,” he said.

  The moment the door shut, he took the sword from where he had propped it against the end of his narrow bed and attempted to maneuver it into the traditional position, drive it upward under his rib cage into his chest just to the left of the sternum. But the broken hand refused to obey, even when he tore the splint off it. In the end he simply plunged the blade into his belly as high as he could, and sawed from side to side to enlarge the rent in his abdomen wall. As he groaned and hacked, determined to succeed, to liberate his pure and unsullied Soul, his traitorous body suddenly snatched control from his will, jerked massively; Cato fell off the bed and sent an abacus flying into the gong with a clatter and a huge, sonorous boom.

  The household came running from all directions, Cato’s son in the lead, to find Cato on the floor in a spreading lake of blood, entrails strewn around him in steaming heaps. The grey eyes were wide open, unseeing.

  Young Cato was howling hysterically, but Statyllus, too far into shock to weep, saw Cato’s eyes blink.

  “He’s alive! He’s still alive! Cleanthes, he’s alive!”

  The physician was already kneeling beside Cato; he glared up at Statyllus. “Help me, you idiot!” he barked.

  Together they gathered up Cato’s bowels and put them back inside his abdomen, Cleanthes cursing and pushing, shaking the mass until it settled and he could draw the edges of the wound together comfortably. Then he took his curved needle and some clean linen thread and sewed the awful gash tightly, each stitch separate but in close proximity; dozens of them.

  “He’s so strong he might live,” he said, standing back to review his handiwork. “It all depends how much blood he’s lost. We must thank Asklepios that he’s unconscious.”

  Cato came up out of a peaceful place into a terrible agony. A hideous wail of pain erupted, neither shriek nor groan; his eyes opened to see many people crowded around him, his son’s face repulsive with tears and snot, Statyllus emitting whimpers, the physician Cleanthes turning with wet hands from a bowl of water, and clusters of slaves, a crying babe, keening women.

  “You will live, Marcus Cato!” Cleanthes cried triumphantly. “We have saved you!”

  The cloud cleared from Cato’s eyes. They traveled downward to the bloody linen towel across his middle. His left hand moved, twitched, pulled the towel away to see the Tyrian purple, distended expanse of his belly gashed from side to side in a ragged tear, now neatly sewn up with crimson embroidery.

  “My Soul!” he screamed, shuddered, and screwed up every part of himself that had always fought, fought, fought, no matter what the odds; both hands went to the stitches, ripped and tore with frenzied strength until the wound was gaping open, then he began to pull the shiny, pearly intestines out, fling them away.

  No one moved to stop him. Paralyzed, his son and his friend and his physician watched him destroy himself piece by piece, his mouth gaping silently. Suddenly he spasmed hugely. The grey eyes, still open, took on the look of death, irises fled before the expanding black pupils; finally came a faint gold sheen, death’s ultimate patina. Cato’s Soul was gone.

  The city of Utica burned him the next day on a huge pyre of frankincense, myrrh, nard, cinnamon and Jericho balsam, his body wrapped in
Tyrian purple and cloth-of-gold.

  He would have hated it, Marcus Porcius Cato, the enemy of all ostentation.

  He had done as much as he could, given the shortness of the time at his disposal to prepare for death; there were letters for his poor devastated son, for Statyllus, and for Caesar, gifts of money for Lucius Gratidius and Prognanthes the steward, still inanimate. But he left no word for Marcia, his wife.

  When Caesar rode into the main square mounted on Toes, his scarlet paludamentum carefully draped across the handsome chestnut horse’s haunches, the ashes had been collected from the pyre, but the pyre itself still sat, a blackened, aromatic heap, in the midst of a silently watching populace.

  “What is this?” Caesar asked, skin crawling.

  “The pyre of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis!” shrilled the voice of Statyllus.

  The eyes were so cold they looked eerie, inhuman; without any change of expression Caesar slid from the horse to the paving stones, his cloak falling behind him gracefully. To Utica, he looked every inch the conqueror.

  “His house?” he asked Statyllus.

  Statyllus turned and led the way.

  “Is his son here?” Caesar asked, Calvinus entering behind him.

  “Yes, Caesar, but very upset by his father’s death.”

  “Suicide, of course. Tell me about it.”

  “What is there to tell?” Statyllus asked, shrugging. “You know Marcus Cato, Caesar. He would not submit to any tyrant, even a clement one.” A fumble inside the sleeve of his black tunic produced a slender scroll. “He left this for you.”

  Caesar took it, examined the seal, a cap of liberty with the words M PORC CATO around it. Not a reference to his own fight against what he saw as tyranny, but a reference to his great-grandmother, the daughter of a slave.

  I refuse to owe my life to a tyrant, a man who flouts the Law by pardoning other men, just as if the Law gave him the right to be their master. The Law does not.

  Dying to read it, Calvinus despaired that he would ever get the chance. Then the strong, tapering fingers crushed the note, threw it away. Caesar looked down at his fingers as if at a stranger’s, drew a breath that was neither sigh nor growl.