6. The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  5

  At the end of May they were back in Alexandria to find the rubble entirely cleared away, and new houses going up everywhere. Mithridates of Pergamum had shifted himself to a comfortable palace with his wife, Berenice, and their daughter, Laodice, and Rufrius was busy building a garrison for the wintering troops to the east of the city near the hippodrome racetrack, thinking it prudent to quarter his legions adjacent to the Jews and Metics. Caesar was full of advice and reminders. "Don't be stingy, Cleopatra! Spend your money to feed your people, and don't pass on the cost to the poor! Why do you think Rome has so little trouble with its proletariat? Don't charge admission to the chariot racing, and think of a few spectacles you can put on in the agora free of charge. Bring companies of Greek actors to stage Aristophanes, Menander, the more cheerful playwrights the common people don't like tragedies because they tend to live tragedies. They prefer to laugh and forget their troubles for an afternoon. Put in many more public fountains, and build some ordinary bathhouses. In Rome, a frolic in a bathhouse costs a quarter of a sestertius people leave in a good mood as well as clean. Keep those wretched birds under control during summer! Hire a few men and women to wash the streets, and put in decent public latrines anywhere there's a running drain to carry the sewage away. Since Alexandria and Egypt are riddled with bureaucracies, institute citizen rolls that count heads as well as nobility, and establish a grain list that entitles the poor to one medimnus of wheat a month, plus a ration of barley so they can brew beer. The money you receive as income has to be distributed, not kept to molder if you hoard it, you cause the economy to crash. Alexandria has been tamed, but it's up to you to keep it tamed." And on, and on, and on. The laws she should pass, the bylaws and ordinances, the institution of a public auditing system. Reform Egypt's banks, owned and controlled by Pharaoh through a creaking bureaucracy that wouldn't do, just would not do! "Spend more money on education, encourage pedagogues to set up schools in public places and markets, subsidize their fees so more children can learn. You need bookkeepers, scribes and when more books come in, put them straight into the museum! Public servants are a lazy lot, so police their activities more stringently and don't offer them tenure for life." Cleopatra listened dutifully, felt a little like a rag doll that nodded its head every time it was jiggled. Now into her eighth month, she dragged herself around, couldn't stay far from a chamber pot, had to endure Caesar's son beating and battering her from inside while Caesar beat and battered her mind. Willing to endure anything except the thought that very soon he would be leaving, that she would have to live without him.

  Finally came their last night, the Nones of June. At dawn Caesar, the 3,200 men of the Sixth Legion and the German cavalry would march for Syria on the first leg of a thousand-mile journey. She tried hard to make it a pleasant night, understanding that, though he did love her in his way, no woman could ever replace Rome in Caesar's heart, or mean quite as much to him as the Tenth or the Sixth. Well, they've been through more together. They are entwined among the very fibers of his being. But I too would die for him I would, I would! He is the father I didn't have, the husband of my heart, the perfect man. Who else in this whole world can equal him? Not even Alexander the Great, who was an adventuring conqueror, uninterested in the mundanities of good government or the empty bellies of the poor. Babylon holds no lure for Caesar. Caesar would never replace Rome with Alexandria. Oh, I wish he would! With Caesar by my side, Egypt would rule the world, not Rome. They could kiss and cuddle, but lovemaking was impossible. Though a man as controlled as Caesar isn't put out by that. I like the way he strokes me, so rhythmic and firm, yet the skin of his palm is smooth. After he goes, I will be able to imagine those hands, so beautiful. His son will be just like him. "After Asia, will it be Rome?" she asked. "Yes, but not for very long. I have to fight a campaign in Africa Province and finish the Republicans for good," he said, and sighed. "Oh, that Magnus had lived! Things might have turned out very differently." She experienced one of her peculiar insights. "That's not so, Caesar. Had Magnus lived, had he reached an accommodation with you, nothing would have been different. There are too many others who will never bend the knee to you." For a moment he said nothing, then laughed. "You're right, my love, absolutely right. It's Cato keeps them going." "Sooner or later you'll be permanently in Rome." "One of these days, perhaps. I have to fight the Parthians and get Crassus's Eagles back fairly soon, however." "But I must see you again! I must! I had thought that as soon as your wars against the Republicans were over, you would settle to rule Rome. Then I could come to Rome to be with you." He lifted himself on one elbow to look down at her. "Oh, Cleopatra, will you never learn? First of all, no sovereign can be away from their realm for months at a time, so you can't come to Rome. And secondly, it's your duty as a sovereign to rule." "You're a sovereign, but you're away for ages at a time," she said mutinously. "I am not a sovereign! Rome has consuls, praetors, an array of magistrates. A dictator is a temporary measure, no more. The moment I as the Dictator set Rome on her feet properly, I will step down. Just as Sulla did. It's not my constitutional prerogative to rule Rome. Were it, I wouldn't be away from Rome. Just as you can't absent yourself from Egypt." "Oh, let's not quarrel on our last night!" she cried, her hand clasping his forearm urgently. But to herself she was thinking, I am Pharaoh, I am God on earth. I can do whatever I want to do, nothing constrains me. I have Uncle Mithridates and four Roman legions. So when you have vanquished the Republicans and take up residence in Rome, Caesar, I will come to you. Not rule Rome? Of course you will!

  II

  The March of Catos Ten Thousand

  From SEXTILIS (AUGUST) of 48 B.C. until MAY of 47 B.C.

  Labienus brought the news of Pompey the Great's defeat at Pharsalus to Cato and Cicero; riding hard, he reached the Adriatic coast of Macedonia three days after the battle, his tenth horse on its last legs. Though he was alone and still in his dowdy, workmanlike war gear, the sentries at the camp gates did not need a second glance to recognize that dark, un-Roman countenance; Pompey's commander of cavalry was known and feared by every ranker soldier. Assured that Cato was in the general's quarters, Labienus slid from his exhausted animal's back and strode off up the Via Principalis toward the scarlet flag stretched rigid in a stiff sea breeze, hoping against hope that Cato would be on his own. Now was not the moment to suffer Cicero's histrionics. But that was not to be. The Great Advocate was within, his perfectly chosen, formally phrased Latin issuing out of the open door just as if it were a jury he addressed, rather than the dour, unimpressionable Cato. Who, Labienus saw in the instant that he crossed the threshold, was confronting Cicero with an expression that said his patience was being sorely tried. Startled at this abrupt invasion, Cato and Cicero both jumped, mouths open to speak; Labienus's face silenced them. "He trounced us in less than an hour," Labienus said curtly as he went straight to the wine table. Thirst made him drink the beaker's contents at a gulp, then he grimaced, shuddered. "Why is it, Cato, that you never have any decent wine?" It was Cicero who did the squawking, the horrified trumpeting, the agitated flapping. "Oh, this is shocking, terrible!" he cried, tears beginning to course down his face. "What am I doing here? Why did I ever come on this hideous, ill-fated expedition? By rights I should have stayed in Italy, if not in Rome there I might have been of some use here, I am an impediment!" And more, and more. Nothing was known that could stem the spate of this wordsmith's verbosity. Whereas Cato stood for many moments without a thing to say, conscious only of a numbness creeping through his jaws. The impossible had happened: Caesar was victorious. But how could that be? How? How could the wrong side have proven itself right? Neither man's reaction surprised Labienus, who knew them too well and liked them too little; dismissing Cicero as a nothing, he focused his attention on Cato, the most obdurate of all Caesar's countless enemies. Clearly Cato had never dreamed that his own side the Republicans, they called themselves could be beaten by a man who had contravened every tenet of Rome's unwritten constitution, who had committed th
e sacrilege of marching on his own country. Now Cato was the bull struck by the sacrificial hammer, down on his knees without knowing how he had gotten there. "He trounced us in less than an hour?" Cato finally said. "Yes. Though he was heavily outnumbered, had no reserves and only a thousand horse, he trounced us. I've never known such an important battle to take so little time. Its name? Pharsalus." And that, Labienus vowed to himself, is all you're going to hear about Pharsalus from me. I generaled for Caesar from the first to the last year of his exploits in Long-haired Gaul, and I was sure I could beat him. I had become convinced that without me, he couldn't have begun to conquer. But Pharsalus showed me that whatever he used to give me to do was given in the certainty that a skilled subordinate could not fail. He always reserved the strategy for himself, just turned Trebonius, Decimus Brutus, Fabius and the rest of us into tactical instruments of his strategic will. Somewhere along the way between the Rubicon and Pharsalus I lost sight of that, so when I led my six thousand horse against Caesar's mere thousand Germans at Pharsalus, I deemed the battle already won. A battle I engineered because the great Pompeius Magnus was too worn down by the strife inside his own command tent to think of anything beyond self-pity. I wanted battle, his couch generals wanted battle, but Pompeius Magnus wanted Fabian warfare starve the enemy, harry the enemy, but never fight the enemy. Well, he was right, we were wrong. How many pitched battles has Caesar fought in? Very often, literally fought in, shield and sword among his front-line troops? Near enough to fifty. There is nothing he hasn't seen, nothing he hasn't done. What I do by inspiring fear nay, terror! in my soldiers, he does by making his soldiers love him better than they love their own lives. A surge of bitterness drove him to crack his hand against the almost empty wine flagon, send it flying with a clang. "Did all the good wine go east to Thessaly?" he demanded. "Is there no drop worth drinking in this benighted place?" Cato came to life. "I neither know nor care!" he barked. "If you want to swill nectar, Titus Labienus, go somewhere else! And," he added, with a sweep of his hand toward Cicero, who was still carrying on, "take him with you!" Without waiting to see how they took this, Cato walked out his front door and made for the snakepath leading to the top of Petra hill.

  * * *

  Not months, but scant days. How many days, eighteen? Yes, it is only eighteen days since Pompeius Magnus led our massive army east to fresh ground in Thessaly. He didn't want me with him does he think I don't know how my criticisms irk him? So he elected to take my dear Marcus Favonius with him in my stead, leave me behind here in Dyrrachium to care for the wounded. Marcus Favonius, best of my friends where is he? If he were alive, he would have returned to me with Titus Labienus. Labienus! The butcher to end all butchers, a barbarian in Roman skin, a savage who took slavering pleasure in torturing fellow Romans simply because they had soldiered for Caesar rather than Pompeius. And Pompeius, who had the hubris to nickname himself "Magnus" "Great" never even made a token protest when Labienus tortured the seven hundred captured men of Caesar's Ninth Legion. Men whom Labienus knew well from Long-haired Gaul. That is the nucleus of it, that is why we lost the critical confrontation at Pharsalus. The right cause has been pursued by the wrong people. Pompeius Magnus is Great no longer, and our beloved Republic has entered its death throes. In less than one hour. The view from the heights of Petra hill was beautiful; a wine-dark sea beneath a softly misty sky and its watery sun, lush verdant hills that soared in the distance toward the high peaks of Candavia, the small terra-cotta city of Dyrrachium and its stout wooden bridge to the mainland. Peaceful. Serene. Even the miles upon miles upon miles of forbidding fortifications, bristling with towers and duplicating themselves beyond a scorched no-man's-land, were settling into the landscape as if they had always been there. Relics of a titanic siege struggle that had gone on for months until suddenly, in the space of a night, Caesar had vanished and Pompeius had deluded himself he was the victor. Cato stood on Petra's pinnacle and looked south. There, a hundred miles away on Corcyra Island, was Gnaeus Pompeius, his huge naval base, his hundreds of ships, his thousands of sailors, oarsmen and marines. Odd, that Pompeius Magnus's elder son should have a talent for making war upon the sea. The wind whipped at the stiff leather straps of his kilt and sleeves, tore his long and greying auburn hair to fluttering ribbons, plastered his beard against his chest. It was a year and a half since he had left Italy, and in all that time he had neither shaved nor cut his hair; Cato was in mourning for the crumbled mos maiorum, which was the way Roman things had always been and the way Roman things should always be, forever and ever. But the mos maiorum had been steadily eroded by a series of political demagogues and military marshals for almost a hundred years, culminating in Gaius Julius Caesar, the worst one of all. How I hate Caesar! Hated him long before I was old enough to enter the Senate his airs and graces, his beauty, his golden oratory, his brilliant legislation, his habit of cuckolding his political enemies, his unparalleled military skill, his utter contempt for the mos maiorum, his genius for destruction, his unassailably noble patrician birth. How we fought him in the Forum and the Senate, we who called ourselves the boni, the good men! Catulus, Ahenobarbus, Metellus Scipio, Bibulus and I. Catulus is dead, Bibulus is dead where are Ahenobarbus and that monumental idiot, Metellus Scipio? Am I the only one of the boni left?

  When the perpetual rains of this coast suddenly began to fall, Cato returned to the general's house, to find it empty save for Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion. Two faces he could greet with genuine gladness. Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion had been Cato's pair of tame philosophers for more years than any of them could remember; he boarded and paid them for their company. None but a fellow Stoic could have endured Cato's hospitality for more than a day or two, for this great-grandson of the immortal Cato the Censor prided himself on the simplicity of his tastes; the rest of his world just called him stingy. Which judgement did not upset Cato in the least. He was immune to criticism and the good opinion of others. However, Cato's was a household as much addicted to wine as to Stoicism. If the wine he and his tame philosophers drank was cheap and nasty, the supply of it was bottomless, and if Cato paid no more than five thousand sesterces for a slave, he could say with truth that he got as much work out of the man he would have no women in his house as he would have from one who cost fifty times that. Because Romans, even those lowly enough to belong to the Head Count, liked to live as comfortably as possible, Cato's peculiar devotion to austerity had set him apart as an admired even treasured eccentric; this, combined with his quite appalling tenacity and incorruptible integrity, had elevated him to hero status. No matter how unpalatable a duty might be, Cato would perform it with heart and soul. His harsh and unmelodic voice, his brilliance at the filibuster and harangue, his blind determination to bring Caesar down, had all contributed to his legend. Nothing could intimidate him, and no one could reason with him. Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion would not have dreamed of trying to reason with him; few loved him, but they did. "Are we housing Titus Labienus?" Cato asked, going to the wine table and pouring himself a full beaker, unwatered. "No," said Statyllus, smiling faintly. "He's usurped Lentulus Crus's old domicile, and scrounged an amphora of the best Falernian from the quartermaster to drown his sorrows." "I wish him well of anywhere except here," Cato said, standing while his servant removed the leather gear from him, then sitting with a sigh. "I suppose the news of our defeat has spread?" "Everywhere," Athenodorus Cordylion said, rheumy old eyes wet with tears. "Oh, Marcus Cato, how can we live in a world that Caesar will rule as a tyrant?" "That world is not yet a foregone conclusion. It won't be over until I for one am dead and burned." Cato drank deeply, stretched out his long, well-muscled legs. "I imagine there are survivors of Pharsalus who feel the same Titus Labienus, most definitely. If Caesar is still in the mood to issue pardons, I doubt he'll get one. Issue pardons! As if Caesar were our king. While all and sundry marvel at his clemency, sing his praises as a merciful man! Pah! Caesar is another Sulla ancestors back to the very beginning, royal for seven
centuries. More royal Sulla never claimed to be descended from Venus and Mars. If he isn't stopped, Caesar will crown himself King of Rome. He's always had the blood. Now he has the power. What he doesn't have are Sulla's vices, and it was only Sulla's vices prevented him from tying the diadem around his head." "Then we must offer to the gods that Pharsalus is not our last battle," Statyllus said, replenishing Cato's beaker from a new flagon. "Oh, if only we knew more about what happened! Who lives, who died, who was captured, who escaped " "This tastes suspiciously good," Cato interrupted, frowning. "I thought given this dreadful news, you understand that just this once we wouldn't infringe our convictions if we followed Labienus's example," Athenodorus Cordylion said apologetically. "To indulge oneself like a sybarite is not a right act, no matter how dreadful the news!" Cato snapped. "I disagree," said a honeyed voice from the doorway. "Oh. Marcus Cicero," Cato said flatly, face unwelcoming. Still weeping, Cicero found a chair from which he could see Cato, mopped his eyes with a crisp, clean, large handkerchief an indispensable tool for a courtroom genius and accepted a cup from Statyllus. I know, thought Cato with detachment, that his impassioned grief is genuine, yet it offends me almost to nausea. A man must conquer all his emotions before he is truly free. "What did you manage to learn from Titus Labienus?" he rapped, so harshly that Cicero jumped. "Where are the others? Who died at Pharsalus?" "Just Ahenobarbus," Cicero answered. Ahenobarbus! Cousin, brother-in-law, indefatigable boni confrere. I shall never see that determined countenance again. How he railed about his baldness, convinced his shiny dome had set the electors against him whenever he ran for a priesthood . . . Cicero was rattling on. "It seems Pompeius Magnus escaped, along with everybody else. According to Labienus, that happens in a rout. The conflicts which see men die on the field are those fought to a finish. Whereas our army caved in upon itself. Once Caesar shattered Labienus's cavalry charge by arming his spare cohorts of foot with siege spears, it was all over. Pompeius left the field. The other leaders followed, while the troops either dropped their weapons and cried quarter, or ran away." "Your son?" Cato asked, feeling the obligation. "I understand that he acquitted himself splendidly, but was not harmed," Cicero said, transparently glad. "And your brother, Quintus, his son?" Anger and exasperation distorted Cicero's very pleasant face. "Neither fought at Pharsalus brother Quintus always said that he wouldn't fight for Caesar, but that he respected the man too much to fight against him either." A shrug. "That is the worst of civil war. It divides families." "No news of Marcus Favonius?" Cato asked, keeping his tones suitably hard. "None." Cato grunted, seemed to dismiss the matter. "What are we going to do?" Cicero asked rather pathetically. "Strictly speaking, Marcus Cicero, that is your decision to make," Cato said. "You are the only consular here. I have been praetor, but not consul. Therefore you outrank me." "Nonsense!" Cicero cried. "Pompeius left you in charge, not me! You're the one living in the general's house." "My commission was specific and limited. The Law prescribes that executive decisions be taken by the most senior man." "Well, I absolutely refuse to take them!" The fine grey eyes studied Cicero's mutinous, fearful face why will he always end a sheep, a mouse? Cato sighed. "Very well, I will make the executive decisions. But only on the condition that you vouch for my actions when I am called to account by the Senate and People of Rome." "What Senate?" Cicero asked bitterly. "Caesar's puppets in Rome, or the several hundred at present flying in all directions from Pharsalus?" "Rome's true Republican government, which will rally somewhere and keep on opposing Caesar the monarch." "You'll never give up, will you?" "Not while I still breathe." "Nor will I, but not in your way, Cato. I'm not a soldier, I lack the sinew. I'm thinking of returning to Italy and starting to organize civilian resistance to Caesar." Cato leaped to his feet, fists clenched. "Don't you dare!" he roared. "To return to Italy is to abase yourself to Caesar!" "Pax, pax, I'm sorry I said it!" Cicero bleated. "But what are we going to do?" "We pack up and take the wounded to Corcyra, of course. We have ships here, but if we delay, the Dyrrachians will burn them," Cato said. "Once we reach haven with Gnaeus Pompeius, we'll get news of the others and determine our final destination." "Eight thousand sick men plus all our stores and supplies? We don't have nearly enough ships!" Cicero gasped. "If," Cato said a little derisively, "Gaius Caesar could jam twenty thousand soldiers, five thousand noncombatants and slaves, all his mules, wagons, equipment and artillery into less than three hundred battered, leaky ships and cross ocean water between Britannia and Gaul, then there is no reason why I can't put a quarter of that number aboard a hundred good stout transports and sail close to shore in placid waters." "Oh! Oh, yes, yes! You're quite right, Cato." Cicero rose to his feet, handed his beaker to Statyllus with trembling fingers. "I must start my own packing. When do you sail?" "The day after tomorrow."