The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  And how dare you accuse me publicly of saying that you’ve tried to tamper with my Macedonian legions? Why on earth should I start those sorts of rumors, tell me that? Shut up and pull your heads in, or you’ll be in even bigger trouble than you already are.

  On the fourth day of Sextilis, Antony had a reply from Brutus and Cassius, addressed to him privately. He had expected profuse apologies, but he didn’t get them. Instead, Brutus and Cassius stubbornly maintained that they were legal praetors, could legally issue any edicts they wanted to issue, and could not be accused of anything other than consistently working for peace, harmony and liberty. Antony’s threats, they said, held no terrors for them. Hadn’t their own conduct proved that their liberty was more precious to them than any friendship with Marcus Antonius?

  They ended with a Parthian shot: “We would remind you that it is not the length of Caesar’s life that is the issue, but rather, the briefness of his reign.”

  What had happened to his luck? wondered Antony, feeling more and more that events were conspiring against him. Octavian had publicly forced him into a corner which had informed him that his control of the legions wasn’t as complete as he had thought; and two praetors were busy telling him that it lay in their power to end his career in the same way they had ended Caesar’s. Or so he took that defiant letter, chewing his lips and fuming. The briefness of a reign, eh? Well, he could deal with Decimus in Italian Gaul, but he couldn’t deal with a war on two fronts, one with Decimus in the far north and another with Brutus and Cassius south in Samnite Italy, always ready to have another go at Rome.

  Octavian could have told him why he had lost his luck, but of course it never occurred to Antony to enquire of his most gnatlike enemy. He had lost it on that first occasion when he had been rude to Octavian. The god Caesar hadn’t liked it.

  Time then, Antony decided, to concede enough to Brutus and Cassius to be rid of them so that he could concentrate on Decimus Brutus. So he convened the Senate the day after he received their letter and had the Senate award them a province each. Brutus was to govern Crete, and Cassius to govern Cyrenaica. Neither place possessed a single legion. They wanted provinces? Well, now they had provinces. Goodbye, Brutus and Cassius.

  5

  Cicero despaired, grew gloomier with every day that passed. This, despite the fact that he and Atticus had finally managed to evict the urban poor from Caesar’s colony at Buthrotum. They had applied to Dolabella, who was very happy, after a long talk with Cicero, to take a huge bribe from Atticus that ensured the survival of the leather, tallow and fertilizer empire in Epirus. Atticus had needed some good news, for his wife had come down with the summer paralysis, and was gravely ill. Little Attica mourned because no one would let her see her mother, who had to stay in Rome while Atticus sent his daughter and her servants to isolation in his villa at Pompeii.

  Money had again become a terrible problem for Cicero, due in large measure to young Marcus, still on his Grand Tour and perpetually writing home for additional funds. Neither of the Quintuses was speaking to him, his brief marriage to Publilia hadn’t yielded as much revenue as he had thought thanks to her wretched brother and mother, and Cleopatra’s agent in Rome, the Egyptian Ammonius, was refusing to pay the Queen’s promissory note. And after he had gone to so much trouble to have all his speeches and dissertations copied on the best paper, complete with marginal illustrations and exquisite script! It had cost him a fortune that her promissory note clearly said she was willing to refund him. Ammonius’s grounds for refusing to pay up: that Caesar’s death had caused her to decamp before the collected Ciceroniana was delivered! Then here it is, send it to her! was Cicero’s reply. Ammonius just raised his brows and retorted that he was sure the Queen, home again safely in Egypt (the rumored shipwreck hadn’t happened), had better things to do than read thousands of pages of Latin prating. So here he was with the finest edition of his entire works ever made, and no one willing to buy it!

  What he wanted to do, he had decided, was to leave Italy, go to Greece, confront young Marcus and then wallow in Athenian culture. His beloved freedman Tiro was working indefatigably toward this end, but where was the money to come from? Terentia, sourer than ever, was busy piling up the sesterces, but when applied to, had answered that at last count he had owned ten fabulous villas from Etruria to Campania, all stuffed with the most enviable art works, so if he was strapped for cash, sell a few villas and statues, don’t write asking her to pay for his ridiculous follies!

  His encounters with Brutus went round and round without ever seeming to go anywhere; Brutus too was thinking of going to Greece. What he absolutely refused to do was to accept a grain-buying commission! Then the silly fellow sailed off with Porcia to the little island of Nesis, not far from the Campanian coast. Whereas Cassius had elected to take up his grain commissionership in Sicily, and was busy assembling a fleet; harvest was nearing.

  Then Dolabella, delighted at the promptness with which Atticus had paid his bribe, agreed to give Cicero permission to leave Italy—how disgraceful, to think that a consular of his standing had to apply for permission to go abroad! Such was Caesar’s dictate, which the consuls had not rescinded. Swallowing his ire, Cicero sold a villa in Etruria he never visited; now he had the money to go as well as the permission.

  What thrust him into actually going was the change in name of the month Quinctilis to the month Julius. When receiving letters dated Julius became utterly intolerable, Cicero hired a ship and sailed from Puteoli, where Cassius’s grain fleet was assembling. But nothing was intended to proceed smoothly! Cicero’s ship got as far as Vibo, off the coast of Bruttium, and couldn’t make further headway because of high, contrary winds. Taking this as a message that he was not destined to leave Italy at this time, Cicero disembarked at the fishing village of Leucoptera, a hideously stinking, awful place. It was always the same; somehow the moment leaving Italy arrived, he couldn’t bear to go. His roots were just too deeply implanted in Italian soil.

  Tired and in need of real hospitality, Cicero turned in at the gates of Cato’s old estates in Lucania, expecting to find no one there. The lands had gone to one of Caesar’s three ex-centurion crown-winning senators, who hadn’t wanted estates so far from his home ground of Umbria, and sold them to an unknown buyer. It was the seventeenth day of Sextilis when Cicero’s litter entered the gates; this awful summer was wearing down at last. Once inside, he saw that the lamps dotting the gardens were lit—someone was home! Company! A good meal!

  And there at the door to welcome him was Marcus Brutus. His eyes suddenly brimming with tears, Cicero fell on Brutus’s neck and hugged him fervently. Brutus had been reading, for he still had a scroll in his hand, and was very taken aback at the effusion of Cicero’s greeting until Cicero explained his odyssey and its pain. Porcia was with her husband, but didn’t join them for supper, a relief as far as Cicero was concerned. A very little Porcia went a very long way.

  “You won’t know that the Senate has granted Cassius and me provinces,” said Brutus. “I have Crete, Cassius has Cyrenaica. The news came just as Cassius was about to sail, so he decided not to be a grain commissioner, and handed his fleet over to a prefect. He’s in Neapolis with Servilia and Tertulla.”

  “Are you pleased?” Cicero asked, warm and content.

  “Not very, no, but at least we do have provinces.” Brutus gave a sigh. “Cassius and I haven’t been getting along together lately. He derided my interpretation of the reception of the Tereus, could talk about nothing except young Octavianus, who tried Antonius’s temper dreadfully over those victory games in Caesar’s honor. And of course the stella critina appeared over the Capitol, so all Rome’s teeming hordes are calling Caesar a god, with Octavianus egging them on.”

  “The last time I saw young Octavianus I was startled at the change in him,” Cicero contributed, burrowing comfortably into his couch. How wonderful to enjoy a cozy meal with one of the few civilized men in Rome! “Very sprightly—very witty—very sure of himself. Phil
ippus wasn’t at all happy, confided to me that the young fool is becoming hubristic.”

  “Cassius deems him dangerous” was Brutus’s comment. “He tried to display Caesar’s gold chair and wreath at his games, and when Antonius said no, he stood up to the senior consul as if he were Antonius’s equal! Quite unafraid, extremely outspoken.”

  “Octavianus won’t last because he can’t last.” Cicero cleared his throat delicately. “What of the Liberators?”

  “Despite our being granted provinces, I think the prospects are grim,” Brutus said. “Vatia Isauricus is back from Asia and fit to be tied, between Caesar’s death and his father’s suicide—Octavianus is insisting that the Liberators must be punished—and Dolabella is everybody’s enemy, as well as his own worst enemy.”

  “Then I shall go on to Rome at dawn,” said Cicero.

  True to his word, he was ready to depart at first light, not really pleased that Porcia was there to farewell him too. He knew perfectly well that she despised him, considered him a braggart, a poseur, a man of straw. Well, he considered her a mannish freak who, like every other woman, had formed no opinions that hadn’t belonged to a man first—in her case, her father.

  Cato’s villa was not pretentious, but it did have some truly magnificent murals. As they stood in the atrium, the increasing light fell upon a wall filled by a tremendous painting of Hector saying farewell to Andromache before going out to fight Achilles. The artist had caught Hector in the act of giving his son, Astyanax, back to his mother, but instead of looking at the child, she was gazing piteously at Hector.

  “Wonderful!” Cicero cried, drinking in the painting avidly.

  “Is it?” asked Brutus, staring at it as if he had never seen it until that moment.

  Cicero began to quote:

  “Restless spirit, do not distress yourself

  with thoughts of me! No man sends me

  into the underworld untimely;

  yet no man can escape his fate either,

  be he coward or hero.

  Go home and look after your sort of work,

  loom and spindle. Supervise your servants

  so they spin and weave too. War

  is men’s work, and the men of Troy

  must cleave to it, especially me.”

  Brutus laughed. “Oh, come, Cicero, you don’t expect me to say that to Cato’s daughter, do you? Porcia is the equal of any man in courage and high intent.”

  Her face lighting up, Porcia turned to Brutus and pulled his hand against her cheek, which embarrassed him in front of Cicero; yet he made no move to take his hand away.

  Eyes blazing rather madly, Porcia said:

  “I have no father and mother now…. So you, my Brutus, are father and mother both to me, as well as my most beloved husband.”

  Brutus detached his hand and left her side, gave Cicero a tight grimace that seemed the closest he could get to a smile. “You see how erudite she is? She’s not content to paraphrase—she picks the eyes out of eyeless Homer. No mean feat.”

  Laughter booming, Cicero blew a kiss to Andromache in the painting. “If she can pick the eyes out of blind old Homer, my dear Brutus, then you and she are well matched. Goodbye, my two epitomators, and may we meet again in better times.”

  Neither waited at the door to watch him enter his litter.

  Toward the end of Sextilis, Brutus took ship from Tarentum to Patrae in Greece; he left Porcia behind with Servilia.

  Mark Antony sent a message to Cicero, arrived in Rome, that he was to present himself in the Senate for the obligatory first-day-of-the-month meeting. When Cicero didn’t turn up, an irate Antony left for Tibur to attend to some urgent business.

  With Antony safely out of town, Cicero went to the Senate the next day; the House had prorogued its meeting to finish its early September agenda. And in its chamber the vacillating, vainglorious consular Marcus Tullius Cicero finally found the courage to embark upon what was to be his life’s work: a series of speeches against Marcus Antonius.

  No one expected this first speech; everyone was staggered, and many were frightened out of their wits. The softest and most subtle of the series, the first was the most telling, in part because it came out of the blue.

  He started kindly enough. Antony’s actions after the Ides of March had been moderate and conciliatory, said Cicero; he hadn’t abused possession of Caesar’s papers, had restored no exiles, had abolished the dictatorship forever, and suppressed disorder among the common people. But from May onward, Antony began to change, and by the Kalends of June a very different man stood revealed. Nothing was done through the Senate anymore, everything was done through the People in their tribes, and sometimes even the will of the People was ignored. The consuls-elect, Hirtius and Pansa, did not dare to enter the Senate, the Liberators were virtually exiled from Rome, and the veteran soldiers were actively encouraged to seek fresh bonuses and fresh privileges. Cicero protested at the honors being paid to Caesar’s memory and thanked Lucius Piso for his speech on the Kalends of Sextilis, deploring the fact that Piso had found no support for his motion to make Italian Gaul a part of Italy proper. He condoned the ratification of Caesar’s acts, but condemned the ratification of mere promises or casual memoranda. He went on to enumerate those of Caesar’s laws that Antony had transgressed, and made much of the fact that Antony tended to transgress Caesar’s good laws, uphold the bad ones. In his peroration he exhorted both Antony and Dolabella to seek genuine glory rather than dominate their fellow citizens through a reign of terror.

  Vatia Isauricus followed Cicero and spoke to the same effect—just not nearly as well. The old master was back, and the old master had no peer. Significantly, the House dared to applaud.

  With the result that Antony returned to Rome from Tibur to find a new mood in the Senate and all kinds of rumors circulating in the Forum, where the frequenters were abuzz with discussions about Cicero’s brilliant, timely, most welcome, very brave speech.

  Antony reacted with a towering temper tantrum and demanded that Cicero be present in the House to hear his answer on the nineteenth day of September; but Antony’s rage contained palpable fear, had an element of bluster no one had seen or heard before. For Antony knew that if two consulars as prestigious as Cicero and Vatia Isauricus dared to speak out openly against him in the House, then his ascendancy was waning. A conclusion reinforced midway through the month when he put a new statue of Caesar, star on its brow, in the Forum bearing an inscription which denied that Caesar was a god of any kind. The tribune of the plebs Tiberius Cannutius spoke against the inscription to a crowd; suddenly, Antony realized, even the mice were growing fangs.

  If he blamed the change in attitude on anyone in particular, it was on Octavian, not on Cicero. That sweet, demure, fetching boy was working against him on all fronts. Starting on the day when he had been forced by the centurions to apologize publicly to Octavian, Antony had come to understand that he was not dealing with a pretty pansy—he was dealing with a cobra.

  So when the House met on the nineteenth day of September, he thundered a tirade against Cicero, Vatia, Tiberius Cannutius and everyone else who was suddenly presuming to criticize him openly. He didn’t mention Octavian—that would have been to make a fool of himself—but he did get on to the subject of the Liberators. For the first time, he condemned them for striking down a great Roman, for acting unconstitutionally, for doing outright murder. This change of face didn’t go unremarked; the balance was beginning to tip against the Liberators when even Marcus Antonius found it necessary to speak against them.

  For which Antony blamed Octavian and no one else. Caesar’s heir was saying unequivocally to all prepared to listen that while ever the Liberators continued to go unpunished, Caesar’s shade was unappeased. Didn’t the stella critina say with the force of a clap of thunder that Caesar was a god? A Roman god! Of massive power and moment to Rome, yet unappeased! Nor did Octavian limit his categorical statements to the common people. He said them to the upper classes too. Wh
at were Antony and Dolabella going to do about the Liberators? Was overt treason to be condoned, even extolled? The months since the Ides of March, said Octavian to all and sundry, had seen nothing but a permissive passivity; the Liberators walked around free men, yet had killed a Roman god. A god who received no official sacrifices, and was unappeased.

  Toward the end of the first nundinum in October, Antony’s mushrooming sense of persecution caused him to purge his bodyguard of veteran soldiers. He arrested some of them on the charge of attempting to assassinate him, and went so far as to allege that Octavian had paid them to assassinate him. A highly indignant Octavian got up on the rostra in front of a suspiciously large audience and denied the allegation passionately. In a very good speech. Everybody listening believed him completely. Antony got the message, had to content himself with dismissing the men he had accused; he didn’t dare execute them. Did he, he would do himself irreparable harm in the eyes of soldiers and civilians alike. The day after Octavian’s address, fresh deputations from the legions and the veterans came to see him and inform him that they wouldn’t stand for Antony’s harming one single hair of Octavian’s darling golden head. Somehow, though it was a mystery to Antony quite how, Caesar’s heir had become a talisman of the army’s good luck; he had fused himself into legionary worship alongside the Eagles.

  “I don’t believe it!” he cried to Fulvia, pacing up and down like a caged beast. “He’s a—a child! How does he do it, for I swear he has no Ulysses whispering in his ear how to do it!”