Augustus
Page 6
We may guess that Philippus visited Rome with Atia and Gaius and was present at Senate meetings as one of the few ex-consuls in Italy. So at some time during these eleven action-crammed days during the late autumn of 49 B.C., a momentous but inevitably brief encounter may have taken place between a busy fifty-one-year-old man at the height of his fame and his powers and an unknown teenager in his fifteenth year. Caesar would have had no time to make a considered judgment of Gaius, except perhaps for noting that he seemed a bright boy who had promise.
Then Caesar was off again—down to Brundisium and overseas to seek out his great rival Pompey.
Rome reverted to its default setting of worried waiting. Once again, the news seesawed. Letters traveled unpredictably back to Italy through messengers dispatched by participants, whether by the northern land route or, once spring had set in, over the dangerous seas.
In mid-August of 48 B.C., astonishing reports reached the city. Pompey’s army had been utterly defeated in a great battle near the town of Pharsalus in central Greece. Fifteen thousand of his legionaries were dead, against only two hundred of Caesar’s. The Republic’s commander in chief had survived, but promptly disappeared, presumably making his way eastward. Caesar followed. For the moment, no one knew where either man was.
In Rome, the immediate reaction was to accept that Caesar had become the first man in the state. He was awarded unprecedented honors and powers. In the middle of September, within a few weeks of the battle, Caesar was nominated dictator for a year (the usual limit was six months), and Mark Antony was proclaimed his deputy as magister equitum, master of the horse.
It emerged that Pompey had fled to Egypt, where he hoped that the boy pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, would give him refuge and a base from which he might be able to recruit a new army in Asia Minor and raise the resources to pay for it. The king’s advisers, feeling that it was far too dangerous to become implicated in someone else’s civil war on what looked like the losing side, and wishing to ingratiate themselves with the winner, had the defeated general killed even before he landed on Egyptian soil.
Caesar arrived in Alexandria on October 2 in hot pursuit. To his public disgust, but also his private relief, he was presented with Pompey’s head. He refused to look at it and shed a well-judged tear; but he accepted the dead man’s signet ring as evidence to send to Italy. Roman public opinion was saddened, but not surprised, when it learned a month later of the death. As Caesar remarked of Pompey during the campaign in Greece, “He does not know how to win wars.”
It was at this high point of his great-uncle’s career that Gaius stepped out from the shadows of childhood and joined the adult community.
III
A POLITICAL MASTER CLASS
48–46 B.C.
* * *
The ceremony was a crucial rite of passage. Before leaving his house, Gaius dedicated a key symbol of his childhood to the lares, the divine spirits that protected a home. This symbol was the bulla, an amulet, usually made of gold, that hung around his neck. After the dedication, he offered the lares a sacrifice at the small altar and shrine in their honor in the main hall, or atrium.
Surrounded by his family, friends, and supporters, the young man stepped out of doors and walked to the Forum, Rome’s main square in the city center, where he exchanged his boy’s toga with the red stripe for the pure white gown of manhood, the toga virilis. (Only if he was elected to the Senate or to a priesthood would a man again be entitled to sport the red stripe.)
While Gaius was putting on the toga, he tore his undertunic on both sides, so that it fell to his feet, leaving him naked except for a loincloth. On the face of it this was a bad omen, but with some presence of mind, he quipped: “I shall have the whole Senatorial Order at my feet.” This boyish comeback is almost certainly an invention, although it has a certain astuteness characteristic of the man into whom he grew.
Gaius had been taught to understand the importance of religious ritual; he would grow up to become a devout and superstitious traditionalist. For the Romans, religion had little to do with individual spirituality or with theological doctrine; rather, its task was to ensure that the gods were not offended and that their intentions were identified and publicized. The chief mechanism for these purposes was a complex web of rituals, including animal sacrifice.
It is hard to exaggerate the centrality of the ceremonial killing of animals to Roman religion. Animal sacrifice was a common feature of daily life, the means by which anyone could give thanks to the gods, ask them for a favor, or find out what their wishes were. Domestic animals—lambs, or young steers, or chickens—were killed in large numbers, their throats slit with a special knife and their blood gathered in a shallow dish for pouring on the altar. The meat was cooked, formally offered to the relevant god, and then eaten. Altars swam in the detritus of death.
Religious ceremonies had to be conducted with absolute accuracy; if a mistake was made or if there was some interruption—for example, if a rat squeaked or a priest’s hat fell off—the entire procedure had to be repeated.
In the earliest times, the Romans were animists; that is, they believed that numina, spirits, lived inside all natural objects—trees, rivers, dwellings. As time passed, they settled on a list of named deities, who looked and behaved like humans. Most of them were taken to have counterparts in the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. Rome’s Jupiter was the same as Zeus; Juno, Hera; Minerva, Athena; Mercury, Hermes; Venus, Aphrodite; Mars, Ares; and so on. Apollo was the same in both languages. As the Republic’s horizons expanded, equivalences were found with the deities of other, non–Greco-Roman cultures.
There were few corners of a Roman’s life—whether public or private—that were not governed by ritual. Every home had a shrine to its lares and to its penates, the deities of the household stores.
In public life, a priest-king, the rex sacrorum (literally, “king of holy things”), performed sacrifices that had once been the king’s duty. Beneath him there were two colleges of priests—the pontifices, or pontiffs, and, in second place, the augurs. There was no separate class of “religious” specialists, like vicars or bishops; all the priests (except for the rex sacrorum) were practicing politicians.
The pontifices decided the dates of annual festivals and kept a record of the major events of every year, the Annals. Some days were believed to be lucky (fasti) and some accursed (nefasti). Public business could be conducted only on a lucky day, and the pontifices decided which days fell into which category.
On major public occasions, the augurs took the “auspices,” a word that originally meant “signs from birds.” The augur searched for signs in the song or flight of birds, in thunder and lightning, or in the movement of animals, which he would then interpret. Portents could also be detected by consulting the Etruscan priests called haruspices, who examined the intestines of sacrificed animals for anything irregular or unusual. Finally, public records were kept of prodigies, extraordinary natural or supposedly supernatural events, which could range from a temple being struck by lightning to “blood” raining from the sky.
At one end of the Forum stood the circular temple of Vesta, goddess of the fire on the domestic hearth. In the temple, a sacred flame burned; in the large building behind it lived the Vestal Virgins, noble-born women sworn to chastity, who tended the flame. And adjacent the Domus Publica, Public House, was the official residence of the chief priest, or pontifex maximus (a title to be assumed centuries later by the Roman Catholic pope). He was the Vestals’ guardian and the chairman of the college of pontiffs.
The current pontifex maximus was Julius Caesar. There was a vacancy in the college, and it was surely at his instance that his great-nephew was appointed to fill it on the day of his coming of age, a high honor. Immediately putting aside his brand-new toga virilis, Gaius assumed the garments of priestly office—a conical hat made of undressed leather, and a red-striped toga—and then conducted a public sacrifice for the first time in his life. Although the procedure was famil
iar, the strain on him will have been intense. Animals do not always behave predictably and, of course, every detail of the ceremony had to be correctly observed.
Gaius then made his way up the winding road that led from the Forum to the Capitol, Rome’s citadel, where a great temple of Jupiter stood. Chief of the Olympian divinities, Jupiter was, above all, the god of the civic community, into which he welcomed the new citizen.
As an adult, Gaius was referred to as Octavius, the first of a number of name changes during his life, and that is what he will now be called.
Octavius had matured into a most attractive youth. He was not very tall, perhaps only five feet, six inches, but, writes Suetonius, “with body and limbs so beautifully proportioned, one did not realize how small a man he was, unless someone tall stood close to him.” He had near-blond, curly hair, small teeth, and clear, bright eyes. His eyebrows met above a Roman nose, and his ears were of average size. Birthmarks on his chest and stomach resembled the Big Dipper. His health was delicate and he was prone to illness, although the ancient sources do not reveal what sort.
Nicolaus writes: “He attracted many women because of his good looks and, as a member of the Julian clan, good birth.” Atia was well aware of her son’s charms and, alarmed at what uninvited attentions he might attract, from men as well as from women, continued to keep Octavius firmly under her thumb. Also, thanks to the fact that his great-uncle now held the Republic in his sole control, Octavius was a personality of some importance, who might be able to exert influence on Caesar. He could easily fall victim to every kind of blandishment from those eager to court his favor, and through him that of the all-powerful dictator.
So although Octavius was now officially an adult, his mother would not allow him to leave the house any more freely than he had as a child. She kept him under strict supervision and made him sleep in the same nursery apartment as before. A Roman’s life was circumscribed by numerous rituals, and Octavius attended the temples of the gods on the appropriate days, but he did so after dark to escape attention. According to Nicolaus, who knew him personally in later years, “he was of age only by law, and in other respects was taken care of as a child.” Atia’s fears were rational enough, but it is hard to escape the impression of a woman reluctant to see her son grow up.
Octavian was obedient, but he may have agreed with a friend of later years, the poet Horace, who observed in one of his Epistles:
The year
Drags for orphan boys in the strict care of their mothers.
Caesar had been mysteriously silent for more than six months until at long last, in the summer of 47 B.C., letters from him were delivered from Alexandria. He was safe and sound, but had a most curious story to tell, which had its roots in the past relationship between Egypt and Rome.
The once proud and still fabulously rich Ptolemaic kingdom had become one of the Republic’s client states, theoretically independent but subject to political interference by the Senate and leading politicians. Egypt was of special importance to Rome because it was a major exporter of grain.
The ruling dynasty was not of native stock, but descended from one of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian commanders, Ptolemy. When Alexander unexpectedly died at the early age of thirty-three, he had completed the conquest of the Persian empire but had made no effective arrangements for the succession. So a huge territory, stretching from Egypt to the gates of India, was divided up among his generals. Ptolemy grabbed Egypt; he also hijacked the dead king’s embalmed body on its long journey back to Macedon and installed it in a gold and glass coffin in the center of Alexandria, which the new pharaoh made his capital city. He and his successors saw themselves as Greek and showed little interest in their indigenous subjects, except as a source of wealth.
When Caesar arrived at Alexandria with a handful of troops in 48 B.C., a boy king, Ptolemy XIII, had succeeded to the throne. One of the conventions that the Macedonian Ptolemies picked up from their Egyptian predecessors was for pharaohs to marry their sisters. A habit of incest could in the long run be genetically damaging, but it had the great advantage of keeping power strictly within the family.
Ptolemy XIII was only eleven years old and not in a position to exercise power. He wedded his sister Cleopatra, who was twenty-one or twenty-two, clever, ambitious, and eager to take the reins. The court hierarchy in the palace at Alexandria was not so keen. They preferred to run the country themselves; the queen was driven out, and the pharaoh married another of his sisters, Arsinoe. Civil strife beckoned.
Caesar offered his impartial adjudication, and Cleopatra realized she needed to make her way into his presence through a ring of troops loyal to her brother if she was to influence his verdict. Together with a friend from Sicily, a merchant called Apollodorus, she embarked on a small boat and landed at the royal harbor when it was getting dark. She stretched herself out full-length inside a bed-linen sack; Apollodorus tied up the bag and carried it indoors to Caesar (in another version of the story she wrapped herself inside a carpet). According to Plutarch, “this little trick of Cleopatra’s, which first showed her provocative impudence, is said to have been the first thing about her which captivated Caesar.”
Caesar soon announced his judgment. Cleopatra and her brother were to reign jointly, with equal rights; while appearing equitable, in practice this shifted the balance of power from the latter to the former. Her opponents called in the royal army—an experienced force of twenty thousand soldiers—which laid siege to Caesar in the royal palace at Alexandria.
Eventually, long-expected reinforcements arrived, and on March 27 Caesar destroyed the royal army in a set-piece battle at the delta of the river Nile. The pharaoh boarded a boat to make his getaway, but the vessel was overturned by panicking soldiers trying to clamber aboard from the water. The hapless boy drowned.
It might have been supposed that, having extricated himself from a very difficult situation brought on by arrogance and carelessness, the dictator of Rome would immediately leave Egypt to conclude the civil war at home and establish his rule on a permanent basis. Nothing of the kind occurred.
Caesar, the fifty-two-year-old womanizer, had fallen for Cleopatra and they began an affair. The queen was attractive, although perhaps not conventionally beautiful. Plutarch reports:
As far as they say, her beauty was not in and for itself incomparable, nor such as to strike the person who was just looking at her; but her conversation had an irresistible charm; and from the one side her appearance, together with the seduction of her speech, from the other her character, which pervaded her actions in an inexplicable way when meeting people, was utterly spell-binding. The sound of her voice was sweet when she talked.
Her appearance on coins of the period ranges from the witchlike to the radiant but does little to confirm this account of a woman whose charm was at its most powerful when she was moving or talking. However, the eyes and lips of a fine marble bust in the Berlin State Museum, which has been identified as being a portrait of her, reveal a fresh, sensuous willfulness.
The queen was very much more than a pretty face. She was highly intelligent and must have received a good education, for she was fluent in many languages, among them Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syrian, the languages of the Medes (who lived in Babylonia, or today’s Iraq) and Parthians, and (above all) Egyptian. In an interesting aside, which reveals how seriously Cleopatra took her role as queen, Plutarch notes: “Many rulers of Egypt before her had never even troubled to learn the Egyptian language, and some of them had even given up their native Macedonian dialect [in favor of regular Greek].”
Traveling with a flotilla of four hundred ships, Caesar went for a long cruise up the Nile in Cleopatra’s company to look at the country, and, writes Appian, he “enjoyed himself with her in other ways as well.”
Caesar left Egypt in June 47 B.C. to deal with a revolt in Asia Minor a few weeks before Cleopatra gave birth to a son, Ptolemy Caesar, derisively nicknamed by the Alexandrian mob Caesarion, or Little Caesar.
Caesar acted fast. First, he dismissed Antony and, with cold brilliance, faced down his troops. Caesar’s relationship with his men was almost that of a love affair. Although from time to time they had lovers’ tiffs, the soldiers adored him and he in turn was utterly loyal to them. Few deserted from his legions. This link of trust and affection to many thousands of soldiers was a political fact of the highest importance and a crucial guarantee of his power.
What is more, many of Caesar’s men came not from Roman Italy but from the provinces of Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul. Mostly they were not Roman citizens (as in principle they should have been). They had no compunctions about invading Italy and fighting Romans. They might complain about their length of service, but never about where or against whom their commander was leading them.
It was during this visit to Rome that Octavius definitely met Caesar, if he had not already done so. Caesar made up his mind quickly about people. He was impressed by Octavius, who was growing into a thoughtful and prudent young man, and detected great promise in him. He arranged for the boy to be enrolled as a patrician. The patricians were Rome’s original aristocracy and were distinguished from the plebeians, who made up the rest of the population. They may originally have been the city’s founding citizens; or possibly an “aristocracy of invaders” who lorded it over the native population; or a grouping of royal appointees when Rome was a kingdom. Whatever the truth of the matter, patrician status became a nobility of birth.