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

by Colleen McCullough

  It was Caesar's position as Pontifex Maximus that entitled him to live in the closest public building to a palace that Rome owned. Improved and enhanced first by Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and then by Caesar Pontifex Maximus, it was a huge structure at the very center of the Forum, and had a peculiar dichotomy: on one side lived the six Vestal Virgins, on the other side the Pontifex Maximus. One of Rome's highest priest's duties was to supervise the Vestals, who didn't live an enclosed life, but whose intact hymens represented Rome's public well-being indeed, Rome's luck. Inducted at six or seven years of age, a girl served for thirty years, then was free to go into the community at large, even marry if she so desired. As had Fabia, to Dolabella. Their religious duties were not onerous, but they also served as the custodians of Roman citizen wills, and at the time that Caesar returned to Rome, this meant that they had upward of three million documents on hand, all meticulously filed, numbered, regionalized. For even the poorest Roman citizens were prone to make a will, lodge it with the Vestals no matter whereabouts in the world they lived. Once the Vestals took your will, you knew it was sacrosanct, that no one would ever get their hands on it until came proof of death and the person authorized to probate it. Thus when Dolabella presented himself at the Domus Publica, he went not to the Vestal side, nor to the ornate main entrance with the new temple pediment Caesar had erected over it (the Domus Publica was an inaugurated temple), but to the private door of the Pontifex Maximus. All the old folk from the days of Aurelia's insula in the Subura were dead, including Burgundus and his wife, Cardixa, but their sons and daughters-in-law still administered Caesar's many properties. The third of them, Gaius Julius Trogus, was in the steward's quarters at the Domus Publica, and admitted Dolabella with a slight bow. This brought his head down to the visitor's; a tall man, Dolabella wasn't used to being made to feel small, but Trogus dwarfed him. Caesar was in his study, clad in the glory of his pontifical robes, a significant fact, Dolabella knew, but why escaped him. Both toga and tunic were striped in alternating bands of purple and crimson; in this room, brightly lit from a window and myriad lamps, the magnificent raiment echoed the color scheme of crimson and purple, its plastered cornices and ceiling touched with gilt. "Sit down," Caesar said curtly, dropping the scroll he was reading to pin Dolabella on those awful eyes, cold, piercing, not quite human. "What have you to say for yourself, Publius Cornelius Dolabella?" "That things got out of hand," Dolabella said frankly. "You recruited gangs to terrorize the city." "No, no!" Dolabella said earnestly, his blue eyes wide and innocent. "Truly, Caesar, the gangs were not my doing! I simply promulgated legislation for a general cancellation of debts, and the moment I did so, I discovered that most of Rome was so badly in debt people were desperate for it. My proposed bill gathered a following in much the same way as as a snowball rolling down the Clivus Victoriae." "Had you not proposed this irresponsible legislation, Publius Dolabella, it would never have snowed," said Caesar without humor. "Are your own debts so massive?" "Yes." "So your measure was intrinsically selfish." "I suppose so. Yes." "Did it not occur to you, Publius Dolabella, that the two members of your tribunician college who opposed the measure were not about to let you legislate?" "Yes. Yes, of course." "Then what was your tribunician duty?" Dolabella blinked. "Tribunician duty?" "I can see where your patrician birth must make it difficult for you to understand plebeian matters, Publius Dolabella, but you do have some small political experience. You must have known what your duty was once Gaius Pollio and Lucius Trebellius proved so obdurate in vetoing." "Er no." The eyes never seemed to blink, they just kept boring into Dolabella's mind like two painful drills. "Persistence is a most admirable virtue, Publius Dolabella, but it goes only so far. When two of your own college members veto your every contio for three months, the message is plain. You withdraw your proposed legislation as unacceptable. Whereas you kept it going for ten months! There's not a scrap of use sitting there looking like a penitent child, either. Whether or not you were responsible for the organization of street gangs in the old Clodius manner or not, once they existed you were very happy to take full advantage of them including standing by while they physically assaulted two men who are protected by the old plebeian tenets of inviolability and sacrosanctity. Marcus Antonius threw twenty of your fellow Roman citizens off the Tarpeian Rock, but not one of them was a hundredth as guilty as you are, Publius Dolabella. By rights I ought to order the same fate for you. So, for that matter, should Marcus Antonius, who had to know who was responsible. You and my Master of the Horse have been holding each other's pricks to piss for twenty years." A silence fell; Dolabella sat with teeth clenched, feeling the sweat on his brow, praying the drops didn't roll into his eyes and force him to wipe them away. "As Pontifex Maximus, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, it is my duty to inform you that your adoption into the Plebs was illegal. It did not have my consent, and it must under the relevant lex Clodia. You will therefore lay down your tribunate of the plebs immediately, and withdraw entirely from all public life until the Bankruptcy Court is back in session and you can apply to it to sort your affairs out. The Law does have mechanisms for situations like yours, and since the jury will be your peers, you should get off more lightly than you deserve. Now go." The head went down. "That's all?" Dolabella asked incredulously. A scroll was already between Caesar's hands. "That is all, Publius Dolabella. Do you think me stupid enough to apportion blame where it doesn't belong? You're not the prime mover in this, you're a simple cat's-paw." Smarting yet relieved, the simple cat's-paw got up. "One more thing," Caesar said, busy reading. "Yes, Caesar?" "You are forbidden all congress with Marcus Antonius. I have my sources of information, Dolabella, so I suggest that you don't try to infringe that prohibition. Vale."

  Two days later the Master of the Horse arrived in Rome. He came through the Capena Gate at the head of a squadron of German cavalry, riding the Antonian Public Horse, a big, showy beast as white as Pompey the Great's old Public Horse. Antony had gone one further than Pompey's scarlet leather tack; his mount wore leopard skin. As indeed did he, a short cloak slung around his neck on a golden chain, one side thrown back to reveal a scarlet lining the same as his tunic. His cuirass was gold, contoured to cuddle his magnificent pectoral muscles, and worked with a scene of Hercules (the Antonii traced their origins back to Hercules) slaying the Lion of Nemea; the scarlet leather straps of sleeves and kilt were emblazoned with gold medallions and bosses, and fringed with gold bullion. His gold Attic helmet with its dyed scarlet ostrich plumes (they had cost ten talents, for they were very rare in Rome) sat linked around the left posterior horn of his leopard skin saddle, for he wanted his head bare so that his gaping audience was in no doubt as to who was this powerful, godly figure. To add to his conceit, he had equipped his squadron of Germans with full scarlet tack for their uniformly black horses, and clad them in real silver with lion skins; the heads were draped over their helmets, the empty paws knotted across their chests. Any woman in the crowd clustered to watch him ride through the Capena market square might have debated the question of his handsomeness: was he beautiful, or was he ugly? Opinions were usually evenly divided, for the body's height and musculature were beautiful, whereas the face was ugly. Antony's hair was very thick and curly, a good auburn in color, his face heavyset and roundish, his neck both short and so thick that it looked like an extension of his head. His eyes, the same auburn as his hair, were small, deep in their orbits and too close together. Nose and chin tried very hard to meet across his small, full-lipped mouth, one curving its beak downward, the other upward; women whom he had honored with his amorous attentions likened kissing him to being nipped by a turtle. What no one could deny was that he stood out in any crowd. His fantasies were rich and fabulous; true of many men, but the difference between Antony and other men lay in the fact that Antony actually lived his fantasies in the real world. He saw himself as Hercules, as the new Dionysus, as Sampsiceramus the legendary eastern potentate, and he contrived to look and act like a combination of all three. Though his riotously lu
xurious mode of living dominated his thoughts, he was neither stupid like his brother Gaius nor quite an oaf; inside Mark Antony was a shrewd streak of self-serving cunning which, when needed, had extricated him from many a precarious predicament, and he knew how to make his staggering masculinity work for him with other men, especially Caesar Dictator, who was his second cousin. Added to this, he possessed his family's ability to orate oh, not in Cicero's or Caesar's class, but very definitely superior to most of the Senate. He did not lack courage or bravery, and he could think on a battlefield. What he lacked most was a sense of morality, of ethical behavior, of respect for life and human beings, yet he could be outrageously generous and tremendously good company. Antony was a bull at a gate, a creature of impulse and the flesh. What he wanted out of the noble life he had been born into was two-headed: on the one hand, he wanted to be the First Man in Rome; on the other hand, he wanted palaces, bonhomie, sex, food, wine, comedy and perpetual entertainments. Since returning to Italy with Caesar's legions almost a year ago, he had been indulging himself in all these areas. As the Dictator's Master of the Horse, he was constitutionally the most powerful of all men in the Dictator's absence, and had been using that power in ways he knew very well Caesar would deplore. But he had also been living like an eastern potentate, and spending a great deal more money than he had. Nor had he cared about what a more prudent man would have understood right from the beginning that the day would come when he would be called to account for his activities. To Antony, sufficient against the day. Except that now the day had arrived. Politic, he decided, to leave his friends behind in Pompey's villa at Herculaneum. No point in upsetting Cousin Gaius more than necessary. Men like Lucius Gellius Poplicola, Quintus Pompeius Rufus the Younger and Lucius Varius Cotyla were known to Cousin Gaius, but not liked by Cousin Gaius. His first stop in Rome was not the Domus Publica, or even Pompey's enormous mansion on the Carinae, now his abode; he went at once to Curio's house on the Palatine, parked his Germans in the garden attached to Hortensius's house, and strolled in asking to see the lady Fulvia. She was the granddaughter of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus through her mother, Sempronia, who had married Marcus Fulvius Bambalio, an appropriate alliance considering that the Fulvii had been Gaius Gracchus's most ardent supporters, and had crashed too. Sempronia had taken her grandmother's huge fortune with her, despite the fact that women were forbidden to be major heirs under the lex Voconia. But Sempronia's grandmother was Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi, powerful enough to procure a decree from the Senate waiving the lex Voconia. When Fulvius and Sempronia died, another senatorial waiver had allowed Fulvia to inherit from both her parents. She was the wealthiest woman in Rome. Not for Fulvia, the usual fate of heiresses! She chose her own husband, Publius Clodius the patrician rebel, founder of the Clodius Club. Why had she chosen Clodius? Because she was in love with her grandfather's demagogic image, and saw in Clodius great demagogic potential. Her faith was not misplaced. Nor was she a stay-at-home Roman wife. Even swollen in late pregnancy, she could be found in the Forum screaming encouragement at Clodius, kissing him obscenely, generally behaving like a harlot. In private life she was a full member of the Clodius Club, knew Dolabella, Poplicola, Antony and Curio. When Clodius was murdered she was heartbroken, but her old friend Atticus persuaded her to live for her children, and in time the terrible wound healed over a little. Three years into her widowhood she married Curio, another brilliant demagogue. By him she had a naughty little red-haired son, but their life together was cut tragically short when Curio died in battle. At the time that Antony strolled through her door she was thirty-seven years old, the mother of five children four by Clodius, one by Curio and looked no more than twenty-five. Not that Antony had much chance to assess her with his keen connoisseur's eye; she appeared in the atrium doorway, shrieked, and launched herself at him so enthusiastically that she bounced off his cuirass with a clang and fell on the floor laughing and crying together. "Marcus, Marcus, Marcus! Oh, let me see you!" she said, his face between her hands, for he had followed her down. "You never seem to grow a single day older." "Nor do you," he said appreciatively. Yes, as desirable as ever. Seductively big breasts as firm as when she had been eighteen, trim little waist she was not one to conceal her sexual assets no lines to mar that lovely clear-skinned face, with its black lashes and brows, its huge, dark-blue eyes. Her hair! Still that wonderful ice-brown. What a beauty! And all that money too. "Marry me," he said. "I love you." "And I love you, Antonius, but it's too soon." Her eyes filled with tears not joy at Antony's advent, but grief at Curio's going. "Ask me again in a year." "Three years between husbands as usual, eh?" "Yes, it seems so. But don't make me a widow a third time, Marcus, I beg you! You constantly spoil for trouble, which is why I love you, but I want to grow old with someone I remember from my youth, and who is there left except you?" she asked. He helped her up, but was too experienced to try to embrace her. "Decimus Brutus," he said, grinning. "Poplicola?" "Oh, Poplicola! A parasite," she said scornfully. "If you marry me, you'll have to drop Poplicola, I won't receive him." "No comment about Decimus?" "Decimus is a great man, but he's oh, I don't know, I see a light of ineradicable unhappiness around him. And he's too cold for me. Having Sempronia Tuditani for a mother ruined him, I think. She sucked cock better than anyone else in Rome, even the professionals." Fulvia was not a mincer of words. "I confess I was pleased when she finally dieted herself to death. So was Decimus, I imagine. He never even wrote from Gaul." "I hear Poplicola's mother died too, speaking of fellatrices." Fulvia pulled a face. "Last month. I had to hold her hand until it went stiff ugh!" They walked through to the peristyle garden, for it was a wonderful summer's day; she sat on the side of the fountain pool and played with the water, while Antony sat on a stone seat and watched her. By Hercules, she was a beauty! Next year . . . "You're not popular with Caesar," she said abruptly. Antony blew a derisive noise. "Who, old Cousin Gaius? I can handle him with one hand tied behind my back. I'm his pet." "Don't be too sure, Marcus. Well do I remember how he used to manipulate my darling Clodius! While ever Caesar was in Rome, there wasn't one thing Clodius did that Caesar hadn't planted in his mind first, from Cato's trip to annex Cyprus to all those weird laws governing the religious colleges and religious law." She sighed. "It was only after Caesar went to Gaul that my Clodius began to run amok. Caesar could control him. And he will insist on controlling you too." "He's family," Antony said, unperturbed. "I may get a tongue-lashing, but it won't be anything worse." "You'd better offer to Hercules for that, Marcus."