Decimus Brutus's mind was in a turmoil so chaotic that he wondered about his sanity. He had panicked! Surely that fact alone said his thought processes were quite unhinged. Panic! He, Decimus Junius Brutus, to panic? He, the veteran of many battles, of many life-threatening situations, had looked down at Caesar's body and panicked. He, Decimus Junius Brutus, had run away. Now he was going to dine with another veteran of the Gallic War: the clerkly warrior Aulus Hirtius, as good with a pen as with a sword, inarguably Caesar's loyalest adherent. Next year Hirtius would be consul with Vibius Pansa if Caesar's dictate held up. But Hirtius is a peasant, a nobody. I am a Junius Brutus, a Sempronius Tuditanus. Loyalty is something I owe first and foremost to myself. And to Rome, of course. That goes without saying. I slew Caesar because he was ruining the Rome of my ancestors. Knitting up a Rome none of us wanted. Decimus, stop deluding yourself! You are going mad! You killed Caesar because he outshone you so brilliantly that you realized the only way that men would ever remember your name was if you killed him. That is the truth. You'll be in the history books, thanks to Caesar. It was hard to meet Hirtius's eyes, a nondescript shade of grey-blue-green, peaceful yet stern; the sternness was uppermost, but Hirtius extended his hand cordially and drew Decimus into his very nice house bought, like Decimus's own, out of the spoils from Longhaired Gaul. They dined alone, a great relief for Decimus, who had dreaded the presence of others. Finally, the last course and the servants gone, the wine and water remaining, Hirtius turned himself on his end of the couch so that he could see Decimus more comfortably. "This is a shocking mess you've gotten yourself into," he said as he poured unwatered wine. "Why say that, Aulus? The Liberators have been granted a general amnesty, things will go on as they always have." "I'm afraid not. Things have been started that can't go on as they were, because they didn't exist. They're entirely new." Startled, Decimus spilled a little of his wine. "I don't understand what you're saying." "Come with me, I'll show you." Hirtius swung his legs off the couch, slid his feet into backless slippers. Bewildered, Decimus followed suit, walked with Hirtius through the atrium and out on to the loggia, which had a fine view of the lower Forum. The sun was still well up, the sea of people manifest. As far as the eye could travel, masses and masses of people. Just standing there, hardly moving, hardly talking. "So?" Decimus asked. "There are plenty of women there, but look at the men. Look at them properly! What do you see?" "Men," said Decimus, bewilderment growing. "Decimus, is it really so long ago? Look at them! Half of the men in that crowd are old soldiers Caesar's old soldiers. Old in terms of soldiering, but not old in years. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, no more. Old, yet still young. The word is spreading up and down Italy that Caesar is dead, murdered, and they've come to Rome for his funeral. Thousands of them. The House hasn't even discussed a date for the funeral yet, but look at how many of them there are already. By the time that Caesar is burned, Lepidus's men will be hopelessly outnumbered." Shivering, Hirtius turned. "It's cold. We can go inside again." Back on the couch, Decimus downed half a goblet of wine, then stared at Hirtius very levelly. "Do you want my blood, Aulus?" "I grieve deeply for Caesar," Hirtius answered. "He was my friend as well as my benefactor. But the world can't run backward. If we who are left don't stick together, there'll be another civil war and that, Rome can't afford. But," Hirtius went on with a sigh, "we're educated, wealthy, privileged, and to some extent detached. It's the veterans you have to worry about, Decimus, not men like me or Pansa, much though we loved Caesar. I don't want your blood, but the veterans will. And if the veterans want it, then those in power will have to oblige them. The moment the veterans start baying for your blood, so will Marcus Antonius." Decimus broke into a cold sweat. "You're exaggerating." "No, I am not. You served with Caesar. You know how his soldiers felt about him. It was a love affair, pure and simple. Even the mutinies. Once the funeral's over, they'll turn ugly. So will Antonius. Or if not Antonius, someone else with power. Dolabella. That slippery eel, Lepidus. Or someone we haven't taken into account as a power because he's waiting in the wings." More wine, and he felt better. "I'll stick it out in Rome," Decimus muttered, almost to himself. "I doubt you'll be let stick it out in Rome. The Senate will renege on its amnesty because the people and the veterans will insist it does. The ordinary people loved him too he was a part of them. And once he rose high, he never forgot them, always had a cheerful word for them, stopped to listen to their woes. What does the abstract concept of political liberty mean to a man or woman of the Subura, Decimus, tell me that? Their votes don't even count in an election of Centuries, People, or Plebs. Caesar belonged to them. None of us ever have or ever will." "If I leave Rome, then I admit that I did wrong." "That's true." "Antonius is strong. He's been remarkably decent to us." "Decimus, don't trust Marcus Antonius!" "I have very good reason to trust him," Decimus said, knowing what Hirtius could not know: that Marcus Antonius had contrived at the murder of Caesar. "I believe that he wants to protect you, yes. But the people and the veterans won't let him. Besides, Antonius wants Caesar's power, and any man who aspires to that courts the same fate as Caesar. This assassination has set a precedent. Antonius will begin to fear that he'll be the next man cut down." Hirtius cleared his throat. "I don't know what he'll do, but whatever it is, take it from me, it won't benefit the Liberators." "You're hinting," Decimus said slowly, "that the Liberators should find honorable, legitimate excuses to leave the city. For me, that's easy. I can go to my province at once." "You can go. But you won't keep Italian Gaul long." "Nonsense! The House moved that Caesar's laws and dictates be upheld, and Caesar himself gave me Italian Gaul to govern." "Believe me, Decimus, you'll keep your province only as long as it suits Antonius and Dolabella."
* * *
The moment he got home Decimus Brutus sat and wrote in haste to Brutus and Cassius, told them what Hirtius had told him, and, back in that blind panic again, announced that he intended to quit Rome and Italy for his province. As he wrote, the letter grew more and more garbled, talked wildly of a mass migration of the Liberators to Cyprus or the most remote regions of Spanish Cantabria. What could they do except flee? he asked. They had no general like Pompeius Magnus to lead them, not one of them had any clout with the legions or foreign rulers. Sooner or later they were going to be declared public enemies, which would cost them their citizenship and their heads, or at best they would be tried and sent into permanent exile without the funds to live. In the midst of which he was begging them to work very hard on Antonius, assure him that no Liberator had any designs on the state or intention of killing the consuls. He ended by asking that the three of them meet around the fifth hour of night at a place of their choosing. So they met at Cassius's house, speaking in whispers with the shutters closed in case some servant grew curious. Brutus and Cassius were stunned by the extent of Decimus's mania, and therefore were not convinced that he knew what he was talking about. Perhaps, Cassius suggested, Hirtius was, for reasons of his own, trying to frighten them into bolting? For the moment they left Rome, they were admitting they had committed a crime. So no, Brutus and Cassius wouldn't leave Rome, and no, they refused to start gathering their liquid assets together either. "Have it your own way," Decimus said, rising. "Go or stay, I don't care anymore. I'm off to my province as soon as I can make arrangements. If I'm well entrenched in Italian Gaul, then Antonius and Dolabella might decide to leave me alone. Though I think I'll safeguard myself by doing a little secret recruiting of troops among the veterans up there. Just in case." "Oh, this is terrible!" Brutus cried to Cassius after the obsessed Decimus had gone. "My mother has ill-wished me, Porcia hasn't said two sensible words Cassius, we've lost our luck!" "Decimus is wrong," Cassius said confidently. "I'm the one who had dinner with Antonius, so I can assure you that he's totally wrong. It struck me that Antonius was thrilled to see the end of Caesar." His teeth flashed in a grin. "Except, that is, for the contents of Caesar's will." "Are you going to the Senate meeting tomorrow?" Brutus asked. "Very definitely. We all should in fact, we must. And don't wo
rry, Decimus will be there too, I'm sure."
Lucius Piso had called the meeting to discuss Caesar's funeral. Entering the dilapidated interior of Tellus's hesitantly, the Liberators met with no overt hostility, though not one of the backbenchers would go near them in case he should inadvertently touch them. Caesar's obsequies were fixed for two days hence, the twentieth day of March. "So be it," said Piso, and looked at Lepidus. "Marcus Lepidus, is the city secure?" he asked. "The city is secure, Lucius Piso." "Then isn't it time you read Caesar's will publicly, Piso?" Dolabella asked. "I gather it contains a public bequest." "Let us go to the rostra now," said Piso. With one accord the House rose and walked to the rostra amid that sea of people. Shrinking, haunted, shuddering, Decimus noted how right Aulus Hirtius was: many of those present were veteran soldiers, more today than yesterday. There were also professional Forum frequenters present, men who knew every prominent face in the First Class. When Brutus and Cassius mounted the rostra with Antony and Dolabella, the Forum frequenters whispered among their less knowledgeable neighbors. A growl began in one throat after another, ominously swelling; Dolabella, Antony and Lepidus made a great show of friendliness toward Brutus, Cassius and Decimus Brutus until the growling eventually died away. Lucius Calpurnius Piso read Caesar's will out in full. Not only did it name Gaius Octavius as his heir, it also formally adopted him as Caesar's son, to be known henceforward as Gaius Julius Caesar. Murmurs of amazement rose from the crowd; no one knew who this Gaius Octavius was, the Forum frequenters able to give his origins, but unable to describe his appearance. When Decimus Brutus was mentioned as a minor heir, another growl went up, but Piso nimbly hopped to the bequest of most interest three hundred sesterces to every Roman citizen man, and public use of Caesar's gardens across the Tiber. The news was greeted with an alarming silence. No one cheered, no one threw objects into the air, no one applauded. After Piso concluded by announcing the date of the funeral, the Senate left the vicinity of the rostra very quickly, each member escorted by six of Lepidus's soldiers.
It was as if the whole world waited for Caesar's funeral, as if no man or woman in Rome was prepared to make a judgement until Caesar's last rites were over. Even when Antony told the Senate the next day in Jupiter Stator 's that he was permanently expunging the office of dictator from the constitution, only Dolabella reacted with enthusiasm. Apathy, everywhere apathy! And the crowds grew thicker, denser. After dark the whole of the Forum and the streets leading to it were ablaze with lights from lamps and campfires; worried residents in the surrounding insulae didn't sleep for fear of fire. A relief then, when the day of Caesar's funeral dawned. A special shrine had been erected on an open piece of ground slightly down-Forum from the side of the Domus Publica and the little round aedes of Vesta; it was an exact but smaller replica of the temple of Venus Genetrix in Caesar's Forum, made from wood painted to look like marble. Atop it was a platform accessed by steps to one side, its supports made to look like pillars too. After long consultation with the Senate, the two in charge of the funeral arrangements, Lucius Caesar and Lucius Piso, had decided that the rostra was just too dangerous a site for the public display of the body and the eulogy. This site at mid-Forum was safer. From it, the funeral procession could turn straight into the Vicus Tuscus and the Velabrum without invading the nucleus of the crowd. Once the cortege reached the Circus Flaminius, it would enter and proceed down its length; as this circus held fifty thousand spectators in its bleachers, Rome's citizens would have a good opportunity to mourn Rome's most beloved son. And from there it would be on to the Campus Martius, where the body would be burned, several hundred litters of aromatics bought at state expense to fuel the pyre. The procession commenced at the fringes of the Palus Ceroliae swamps, where there was room for every participant to gather. Caesar's bier would join it as it passed the Domus Publica. All Lepidus's two thousand soldiers kept the crowds off the Sacra Via itself, and defended a space around the viewing and eulogy site large enough to accommodate the huge pageant. Fifty gilded black chariots drawn by pairs of black horses carried the actors wearing the wax masks of Caesar's ancestors from Venus and Aeneas and Mars through Iulus and Romulus to his uncles by marriage, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla down from the Velia to stand in a triple semi-circle in front of the platformed shrine. One hundred of the many hundreds of litters piled with frankincense, myrrh, nard and other costly, burnable aromatics were stacked as a fence between the back row of chariots and the crowd, with shoulder-to-shoulder soldiers as an additional barrier. Interspersed with the chariots and litters as the procession came down from the Velia were black-robed professional mourners beating their breasts, tearing their hair, emitting eldritch wails and keening dirges. The crowd was gigantic, the greatest number of people since the famous gathering of Saturninus. When Caesar appeared on his bier from out of the doors to the vestibule of the Kings, a moan went up, a sigh, a tremble as of a million leaves. Lucius Caesar, Lucius Piso, Antony, Dolabella, Calvinus and Lepidus carried him, each clad in a black tunic and toga. Behind it the masses closed in. The soldiers standing with their backs pressed against the fence of litters started to look at each other uneasily, feeling the litters begin to wobble and creak as the crowd behind them pushed inexorably. Their worry communicated itself to the chariot horses, which grew restive, and that in turn had the actors shivering. Caesar sat upright upon the black cushions of the bier in the glory of his pontifical robes, head crowned with the corona civica, face serene, eyes closed. He rode on high like a mighty king, for all six of his pallbearers were imposingly tall, and looked the great noblemen they were. The pallbearers climbed the steps smoothly; Caesar hardly moved as they compensated for the slope. The bier was set down upon the platform so that Caesar was on full display. Mark Antony went to the front of the edifice and looked out across that ocean, a corner of his appalled mind noting the many Jews with their corkscrew curls and beards, the foreigners of all descriptions and the veterans, who had chosen to wear a sprig of laurel on their black togas. What was always a white crowd, for Romans at public affairs were togate, had become a black crowd. Fitting, thought Antony, intending to give the greatest speech of his career to the greatest audience any speaker since Saturninus had ever owned. But it was never given. All Antony managed to say were the opening words inviting Rome to mourn for Caesar. Screams of terrible grief erupted from countless thousands of throats, and the crowd moved as if seized by a single convulsion. Those in the forefront of the crush laid hands upon the hundred litters of aromatics as the chariot horses began to plunge and rear, the actors to scramble for their lives. Suddenly the air was full of chunks of flying wood, bark, resin, raining down on the platform, thrown inside the shrine, around it in growing heaps. The pallbearers, including Antony, fled down the platform steps and ran for the Domus Publica. Someone threw a torch, and the whole area burst into a pillar of flames. Like his daughter before him, Caesar burned at the wish of the people, not by decree of the Senate. And after so many days of silence, the crowd shouted for the blood of the Liberators. "Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!" on and on and on. Yet there was no riot. Thundering for Liberator blood, the masses stood watching the platform, bier and shrine dissolve into a wall of solid fire, not moving again until the blaze died away and the whole of Rome was filled with the dizzying, beautiful smell of burning aromatics. Only then did anger erupt into violence. Ignoring Lepidus's soldiers, the masses raced in all directions looking for victims. Liberators! Where were the Liberators? Death to the Liberators! Many poured up on to the Palatine, where doors were bolted in anonymous rows down dozens of narrow alleys and no one knew behind which one lived a Liberator. A Forum frequenter, crazed with grief, spotted Gaius Helvius Cinna, poet senator, running like one possessed, and mistook him for the other Cinna, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who had once been Caesar's brother-in-law and was rumored to be a Liberator. Innocent of any wrongdoing, Helvius Cinna was literally torn into small pieces. With night falling, and balked of any other positive prey, the weeping, anguished mobs di
spersed.
6. The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra Page 60