As Arsinoe slowly drew nearer below us, I looked from her face to that of Cleopatra. They appeared to wear the same expression, despite the difference in their situations. Cleopatra watched her sister's march to oblivion without showing the least sign of regret or rejoicing. Arsinoe moved toward her fate with no more expression than if she were gazing at the slow, steady, unending flow of the Nile. Of what stuff were these Ptolemies made?
What had Caesar presumed would happen, when he decided to parade a helpless young woman in his triumph? He had presided over the rape of many cities; he had seen the merciless reaction of his soldiers to the sight of tender females stripped of all protection. Did he think the Roman mob would react in the same way at the sight of Arsinoe in chains, allowing a desire to revel in her debasement to overcome any impulse toward pity?
I would not have been surprised to see the onlookers pelt Arsinoe with fruit, cruelly aiming for her breasts, and taunt her with lascivious remarks and perhaps even reach out to strip the remaining rags from her body, forcing her to walk naked to her death.
But that was not what happened.
Instead, the crowd, which had been so eager to jeer at the captured military men and ministers of state, fell silent as Arsinoe passed by. Foulmouthed men became speechless.
In the sudden quiet, the soft clinking of Arsinoe's chains was the only sound. Then a murmur passed through the crowd. I could not make out any words, only a low grumbling, but its tone was clear. This was not right. What we were seeing was improper, indecent, wrong-perhaps an affront to the gods. The murmur grew louder, the crowd more uneasy.
It was Rupa who took action.
He was sitting next to me. When he stood, I thought he was getting up for some other reason-to go relieve himself or simply to stretch his legs. But something about the urgency of his movements caught my eye as he stepped over the spectators and made his way to the nearest aisle. Others saw him as well and took notice; there was a resoluteness about his demeanor that drew attention, especially amid that uncertain, suddenly anxious crowd.
He reached the bottom of the stands, and then, looming taller than everyone around him, he elbowed his way through the standing spectators. He stepped onto the triumphal path. He ran toward Arsinoe.
There were gasps of surprise and cries of apprehension. Rupa was so much larger than the princess, and his movements so determined, that some people must have thought he was about to attack her. Instead, before he reached Arsinoe, he turned and raised his hands, waving them in the air to catch the crowd's attention. At the same time, he opened his mouth and made a strange braying noise, a plaintive cry that echoed around the Forum.
His behavior excited cries from the crowd.
"Who is that big fellow?"
"Awfully good-looking-"
"And what does he want?"
"He's trying to say something-"
"Can't you see? He must be mute."
"Makes a loud noise, though."
"What's he up to?"
"Looks big enough to do whatever he wants with the little princess!"
Caesar's lictors, preceding the triumphal chariot, were not far behind Arsinoe. Seeing Rupa, the foremost among them broke from the processional file and rushed toward him. My heart lurched in my chest. Like everyone else in the stands, I jumped to my feet.
Amid the sudden tumult, a few voices rang out more clearly than the rest.
"The lictors will protect the princess!"
"From what? The mute won't hurt her. He means to escape with her!"
"Escape where? She's heading straight for the Tullianum, along with her pet eunuch!"
This last comment referred to Ganymedes. Realizing that something was transpiring behind him, he had turned. With a look of alarm on his wrinkled face, he was frantically shambling back toward Arsinoe, as if he could somehow protect her despite his shackles.
But Arsinoe was in no danger. With every eye fixed upon him, Rupa turned toward the princess. For a moment, he loomed over her. Then he dropped to his knees and bowed deeply. With a great flourish of his outspread arms, he touched his lips to one of her bare feet.
Throughout the entire episode, Arsinoe's expression, or lack of expression, had remained unchanged. But when Rupa's lips touched her big toe, a smile lit her face, transforming it completely. It was like the face of Alexandros's Venus of Milos-serene and aloof, sublime and majestic.
The reaction of the crowd was instantaneous and overwhelming, like a thunderbolt from Jupiter. People raised their hands in the air, giddy with excitement. They laughed, squealed, roared, shouted. Some of them mimicked the plaintive noise that Rupa had made, not mocking but paying homage.
I looked at Cleopatra across the way. Had she ever met Rupa? I thought not, and there was nothing to indicate that she realized who was kissing her sister's toe while all Rome watched. But on her face was a frown as dark as her sister's smile was dazzling.
Ganymedes, reaching Arsinoe and seeing that she was in no danger, fell to his knees beside Rupa. Awkwardly, because of his chains, he bowed deeply and kissed the princess's other foot.
The crowd became even more jubilant.
The lictors yanked Rupa to his feet. I held my breath, fearing the worst, but the lictors only threw him back into the crowd, where he sent spectators tumbling in all directions, like a boulder hurled from a catapult.
The lictors reached for Ganymedes. Flailing against his chains, the eunuch managed to thwart them and remained on his knees, abasing himself before Arsinoe.
"Spare the princess!" someone shouted.
"Yes, spare the princess!" cried others.
The cry quickly became a chant: "Spare the princess! Spare the princess! Spare the princess!"
"But what about the eunuch?" shouted someone.
"Kill the eunuch!" came the answer, followed by a roar of laughter.
This was added to the chant: "Spare the princess, kill the eunuch! Spare the princess, kill the eunuch!"
Ganymedes was finally pulled to his feet and shoved forward, with blows from the lictors' rods to speed him along. On his face was a look of both triumph and despair. Arsinoe, her head held high, the smile still lighting her face, resumed her mincing forward progress.
The princess passed from view, and the long file of lictors paraded before us, but still the chanting continued: "Spare the princess, kill the eunuch! Spare the princess, kill the eunuch!"
By some magic of group mentality, the crowd spontaneously split the chant between the two sides of the triumphal pathway. Those opposite the Capitoline Hill shouted, "Spare the princess!" Those on the other side responded, "Kill the eunuch!" The two sides competed to see which could yell the loudest. In the middle of this deafening crossfire came Caesar in his triumphal chariot. The chants roared back and forth, like volleys from rival catapults.
"Spare the princess!"
"Kill the eunuch!"
"Spare the princess!"
"Kill the eunuch!"
Caesar looked vexed and confused, and doing a poor job of trying not to show it, much as he had appeared in the Gallic Triumph when his soldiers teased him for his youthful liaison with Nicomedes. I saw him lift his gaze to the dignitaries' box and exchange a look of consternation with Cleopatra. These two should have been sharing the afterglow of the crowd's reaction to the golden statue of the queen; instead, they were being subjected to acclamations for Arsinoe.
Up in the stands, we were all on our feet, and my own family members had joined in the chant. Fortunately, we were on the side calling to spare the princess; I doubt that my wife, daughter, or daughter-in-law would have joined in calling for the death of Ganymedes, but Davus might have done so, and the bloodthirsty slave boys would not have hesitated. I myself remained silent.
As if trying to make sense of the crowd's fervor, Caesar ran his eyes slowly over the reviewing stands, looking from face to face. He saw my family, chanting with the rest; he saw me, standing silent. For an instant, his eyes met mine. He had no way of knowing tha
t it was my adopted son who had set off the crowd's reaction.
The triumphal chariot eventually passed from view, followed by rank upon rank of veterans from the Egyptian campaign. Infected by the crowd's enthusiasm, even the soldiers took up the deafening chant: "Spare the princess, kill the eunuch! Spare the princess, kill the eunuch!"
"Oh, Rupa!" I whispered to myself. "What have you done?"
XIV
"Rupa, what were you thinking? You could be dead right now! The lictors could have dragged you up to the Carcer along with those wretched Egyptians and dropped you into the Tullianum, and we would never have seen you alive again!"
The sun had set. The moon had risen. Occasionally, here in my lamplit garden, I could hear snatches of music and revelry from the Forum, where the feast that followed the triumph still continued, with endless Egyptian delicacies on offer. But I was in no mood to eat and drink. Every time I thought of the terrible risk Rupa had taken that day, my blood ran cold.
"But, Papa," objected Diana, "what did Rupa do that was against the law?"
"I'm pretty sure that a citizen is not allowed to interrupt the progress of a triumph."
"He didn't interrupt it. He took part in it! People do that sort of thing all the time. They run onto the path to taunt the prisoners, or to get a closer look at some trophy, or to plant a kiss on a soldier's cheek. We've all seen such things. Unless Caesar has passed some law against kissing a girl's toe-"
"Rupa embarrassed the dictator!"
"I'm pretty sure that's not against the law, either, Papa. Caesar's not a king. We don't live and breathe at his pleasure."
"Not yet," I muttered.
"And nothing untoward happened. The lictors came running, they threw Rupa off the pathway, he disappeared back into the crowd, and that was the end of it. Apparently, Caesar doesn't even know it was Rupa who saved the princess."
"Saved the princess!" I uttered the statement incredulously, amazed at the enormity of it. Arsinoe had been spared, and Rupa was the man most responsible for saving her. "A foreign-born freedman does not go about thwarting the will of a Roman dictator and nullifying a death sentence ordered by the Roman state. Such things do not happen!"
"But apparently they do, Papa."
"It was a mad act."
"I think it was terribly heroic," insisted Diana.
"So do I," said Bethesda.
The two of them converged on Rupa and planted kisses on his cheeks. He had been frowning and staring at the ground while I lectured him, but now he smiled and hugged himself. All my admonishments were for nothing.
"Besides," said Diana, "Rupa acted purely on impulse. There was nothing deliberate about what he did. He couldn't possibly foresee the outcome of his actions."
I was not so sure about this. In earlier days, Rupa and his sister, Cassandra, had been street performers in Alexandria. He was not an actor, just a mime, playing burly silent parts; nevertheless, he must have learned how to anticipate and manipulate the reactions of an audience. Bowing before Arsinoe and kissing her foot had played adroitly upon the crowd's sentiment, and the result had been just what Rupa desired. At the conclusion of his triumph, Caesar had bowed to the will of the people; criers announced that the princess would be spared and sent into exile, while Ganymedes and the other captives were duly executed.
I gazed hard into Rupa's unblinking eyes. His wits were on the simple side of average, that was certain, but because he was a mute, and brawny as well, had I underestimated his native intelligence? He might not possess the verbal capabilities of a Cicero, able to sway a jury with well-chosen words, yet he had proven himself able to rouse a multitude with a single, bold, perfectly timed gesture.
"Besides, Papa, you wanted to see Arsinoe spared, just like everyone else. Admit it!"
"The poor girl!" Bethesda shook her head. "An Egyptian princess, at the mercy of those Roman brutes-terrible!" More than ever since our return from Egypt, my wife loved to play the part of the cosmopolitan Alexandrian appalled by Roman barbarity.
"Poor girl?" I threw up my hands. "Arsinoe is a conniving royal brat, responsible for hundreds, maybe thousands, of deaths back in Egypt. She put one of her own generals to death! She's a viper, no less than her sister."
"Even so, Caesar had no business threatening to execute the child, just to show off," insisted Bethesda. "It did him no credit. It made him look bad, parading that poor girl in chains."
I had to agree. And, when all was said and done, I was not sorry that Rupa had acted on his impulse.
"Let us speak no more of the matter," I said. "And let there be no boasting about this to the other women in the market, do you understand? You may praise Rupa all you like here in the privacy of our home, but you're not to whisper a word of this to anyone else. If Caesar were to find out…"
"Yes, Papa?" said Diana. "What might the big, bad dictator do?"
"Let's pray that we don't find out."
Caesar had survived his first two triumphs. The only damage he had sustained was to his dignity, and that was minor. The teasing from his soldiers only served to endear him to them all the more, while his clemency to Arsinoe made him appear not weak and vacillating but decisive and wise, and won him even greater favor with the crowd.
If not from the Gauls or the Egyptians, or from disaffected Antony or ambitious Fulvia, or from love-addled Cicero or glib Brutus, then from what quarter came the threat to Caesar that Hieronymus had hinted at? Rather than feeling relieved that the dictator had survived his first two triumphs unscathed, I felt more anxious than before. What danger might Caesar face in the next two triumphs?
First would come the celebration of his recent victory in Asia, where King Pharnaces of Pontus had taken advantage of the civil strife between Pompey and Caesar to reclaim the kingdom of his father, the great Mithradates. Pharnaces's ruthlessness had been shocking, at least to Roman sensibilities; in conquering city after city, he not only plundered the property of a great many Roman citizens but also made a practice of castrating all the youngest and best-looking males, including Roman citizens, before selling them into slavery. News of these atrocities caused outrage throughout the Roman world, but Pharnaces's successes had gone unchecked until Caesar himself, after settling affairs in Egypt, moved to reassert Roman rule in the region. Pharnaces was routed at the battle of Zela, fled for his life, and was eventually captured and killed by one of his own treacherous underlings.
With Pharnaces dead and largely unmourned, it was hard to imagine who might choose the Asian Triumph as a venue to try to kill Caesar. But hadn't Hieronymus speculated that danger would come from an unexpected quarter?
Late that night, looking through Hieronymus's writings for links to the upcoming Asian Triumph, I came across a passage in his private journal I had not read before:
And what of this speculation one hears about young Gaius Octavius, Caesar's grandnephew? Antony repeats the tale with great zest, and for all I know the rumor originated with him (if, indeed, it is only a rumor). I realize that Antony is piqued at Caesar, but why should he spread salacious gossip about Octavius, unless he thinks Caesar intends to make the boy his heir, and Antony imagines that he himself deserves that honor (even though he has no blood tie to the dictator). Or… could the tale be true? I decided to see the boy with my own eyes, to judge whether he might tempt a man like Caesar. The meeting was easy to arrange. Octavius is a bright lad, easily bored, always looking for distraction; he was quite fascinated by me.
Is he a match for Caesar? Well, I suppose he's pretty enough, though not to my taste; his face is too broad and his eyes are too sharp-I should think a man would more likely cut himself on those eyes rather than become lost in them. But who knows what Caesar may have gotten up to with the boy? Octavius is ambitious, and ambitious boys are pliable. Caesar bestrides the world like the Colossus of Rhodes, but even giants long for lost youth, and I must admit the boy has a certain engaging freshness to him. As Antony says, Caesar gets to play Nicomedes, and Octavius gets to play Caesar.<
br />
Or is Antony making it all up? Antony loves to gossip more than any man I've ever met, and Cytheris constantly eggs him on…
This tale was new to me. Clearly, Hieronymus was of two minds whether to give it credence. On its face, the idea that Caesar might seek sexual favors from a younger man did not strike me as unlikely. I believed that Caesar had sought such a relationship with Meto, though I did not know and had never asked to know the exact details. I had reason to believe that Caesar had done the same with young King Ptolemy in Egypt, with whom he shared a most intimate relationship before they turned irrevocably against each other and Caesar finally chose to side (and share his bed) with Ptolemy's sister Cleopatra. And, for all I knew, Caesar might have shared such an intimacy with Brutus; that might explain the enduring but strangely volatile nature of their relationship.
I had never met Gaius Octavius. I tried to recall what I knew about him.
He was Caesar's grandnephew, being the grandson of one of Caesar's sisters. He had been born in the year that Cicero served as consul (and put down the so-called conspiracy of Catilina); that would make Octavius about sixteen now.
His father had been a New Man, like Cicero, the first of the family to become a senator; the elder Gaius Octavius was a banker and financier and began his political career by distributing bribes to gangs on election days. His chief claim to fame had been tracking down a band of runaway slaves made up of the last remnants of the long-destroyed armies of Spartacus and of Catilina. For as long as thirteen years some of these fugitives had remained at large, living by their wits and eluding capture. In the vicinity of Thurii, the elder Octavius managed to round up these ragged runaways and put them all to death. Thus he established his credentials as a serious proponent of law and order, and seemed destined for a particularly ruthless political career, but after a year as provincial governor of Macedonia he died of a sudden illness.
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