The symbolism of Octavius’ promotion was significant. Caesar, as a Julius, was a patrician, but an Octavius, albeit connected through his mother to the Julii, was not. Without going so far as to adopt him, Octavius’ great-uncle was hinting that he regarded Octavius as an honorary member of the Julian clan.
Another signal honor was conferred on the teenager: appointment as praefectus urbi (city prefect) during the Feriae Latinae, the Latin Festival. This important ceremony was conducted at a shrine on the Alban Mount (today’s Monte Cavi) some twenty miles south of Rome. The Feriae was originally a celebration of the unity of the Latin League, an alliance of the Latin communities in Latium (Lazio); the Romans took it over for themselves when the league was incorporated into the Republic.
The festival was accompanied by a sacred truce: no battle could be fought while it was taking place. Both the consuls headed a procession from the city to the Alban Mount, on the top of which stood a very ancient shrine to Jupiter. An ox was sacrificed to the god and the victim’s flesh distributed among the towns and cities that made up the community of Latins. Individual towns also offered lambs, cheeses, milk, or cakes. A symbolic game, called oscillatio, or swinging, was played and, back in Rome, a four-horse chariot race took place on the Capitoline Hill, the winner of which received as his prize a drink called absynthium, or essence of wormwood (perhaps like the absinthe of modern times mixed with wine).
In theory, the praefectus was in charge of the city during the consuls’ absence, but the role was temporary and purely symbolic. Octavius presided over a ceremony in the Forum, where he sat on a speaker’s tribunal. According to Nicolaus, many people turned up “for a sight of the boy, for he was well worth looking at.”
Early in December, Caesar was to sail across to the province of Africa, where Cato and ten Pompeian legions were at large. The dictator hoped it would be his final campaign. Now in his seventeenth year, Octavius asked permission to accompany his great-uncle so that he could gain military experience. Atia opposed the idea. He said nothing by way of argument and dutifully agreed to remain at home. Caesar, too, was unwilling for him to take the field. He was worried about his great-nephew’s physical fitness and feared that “he might bring on illness to a weak body through such a sharp change of life-style and so permanently injure his health.”
The African campaign was by no means a walkover. Caesar quickly got into trouble, but fought his way out of it, decisively defeating the enemy near the port of Thapsus. Cato, standard-bearer of the Republic but no military man, had played little direct part in the campaign. Realizing the hopelessness of the situation, he now decided to take his own life. In this way he would avoid the humiliation of falling into Caesar’s hands and, worse, having to endure a pardon. After spending the night reading the Phaedo, Plato’s great dialogue about the last days of Socrates, he stabbed himself.
For all his intransigence and incompetence when alive, Cato’s death had an enormous impact on public opinion. People remembered his principled incorruptibility, not his blunders. His shining example unforgivingly illuminated Caesar’s selfishness and ambition, which threatened to destroy the centuries-old Republic.
The modern reader may be intrigued by the elite Roman’s propensity to kill himself in adverse circumstances, and indeed, despite undercurrents of popular and religious disapproval, the classical world’s attitude toward suicide was very different from today’s.
People killed themselves in many different ways and for many different reasons, as they have done throughout history. But there was, at least among the upper classes and in military circles, what could be called a culture of suicide. In certain circumstances it was the honorable thing to do, and had about it a certain gloomy glamour.
The two main justifications for a “noble” suicide were desperata salus (no hope of rescue or deliverance) and pudor (shame). Julius Caesar in his account of his wars in Gaul gives a spectacular example of the former. Roman survivors of an ambush “had hard work to withstand the enemy’s onslaught till nightfall; in the night, seeing that all hope was gone, every single man committed suicide.”
In feeling pudor, a Roman meditating self-destruction did not so much suffer from guilt at some bad thing he had done (although this could be the case) as recognize a catastrophic collapse in his social or political standing. Such reversals of fortune happened from time to time, and for a senior politician suicide was a recognized professional hazard. It was pudor that did for Cato.
In July of 46 B.C., Caesar returned to Rome. Most people—including critics such as Cicero—were relieved that peace and, above all, certainty had returned. There was a widespread expectation that, if they had won, the republicans would have massacred their opponents, and even those who had been neutral in the civil war. Caesar’s famous clemency, although regarded with some suspicion, contributed to an atmosphere of calm.
The Senate offered the victor new, extravagant, and unprecedented honors, which he accepted. In return Caesar followed a policy of reconciliation. According to Dio, he promised not to “take any cruel action simply because I have conquered, and am able to say exactly what I like without being called to account, and have complete freedom to do whatever I choose.” He needed the cooperation of the surviving optimates to help him run the empire. He could not undertake this task singlehanded, but many of his leading followers were inexperienced and unreliable. That Antony was the best of them indicates the abilities of the rest.
In fact, Caesar felt impatient and thwarted. Behind adulation, he detected dumb insolence, a reluctance to award him true loyalty. When talking to his associates, he was less than discreet. “The Republic is nothing,” he said crossly, “a mere name without form or substance.”
IV
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
46–44 B.C.
* * *
He kept up with his old school friends, and, now that he had regular and free access to Caesar, he was able to do one of them a signal favor. Agrippa’s brother had been made a prisoner of war during the African campaign. Evidently he had fought on the republican side before and been pardoned, for Caesar tended to punish repeat offenders. Fearing for his brother’s life, Agrippa asked Octavius to put in a good word for the man. Octavius hesitated, for he had never yet used his special position in this way and knew Caesar’s anger with those who abused his clemency. Taking his courage in both hands, he made the request, which Caesar granted. This not only bound Agrippa to his friend, but won Octavius a reputation for loyalty.
Toward the end of September there were eleven days of victory celebrations, during which Caesar held an unprecedented four triumphs on four days. The Roman “triumph” was a military procession held by a general to mark outstanding success in a campaign against a foreign enemy. The dictator planned to mark the conquest of Gaul, the brief Egyptian war, the even briefer Asian war, and the defeat of Juba, the king of the northern African kingdom of Numidia. Juba was a stand-in for Cato and the republican army, Caesar’s real opponents: a fact that could not be openly admitted because they had been Roman citizens, with whom it was forbidden to go to war.
It so happened that Octavius’ seventeenth birthday fell during this festival of triumphs, on September 23; to honor his great-nephew, Caesar invited Octavius to accompany him in the parade for the African war and awarded him service medals as if he had actually served on his staff during the campaign. The day of the triumph will have been one of the most exciting in Octavius’ life so far. Here were fame and glory manifest, the ultimate prize to which a Roman could aspire.
The ceremony opened in the Campus Martius, the field of the war god, Mars, an open space northwest of the city (stretching roughly from today’s Piazza Venezia to Vatican City). This was originally the exercise ground of the army, but a number of important public buildings now dotted the area. One of these was the temple of Bellona, goddess of war and sister of Mars. The Senate met there to receive the victorious commander before following his triumphal procession into the city.
On the day of the triumph, Caesar arrayed himself in some of the attributes of Jupiter, king of the gods and protector of Rome. His face was smeared with the same red paint that covered the great statue of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. Underneath an embroidered toga, he wore a purple tunic interwoven with gold and embroidered with palm leaves, a symbol of victory.
After making a speech and presenting military awards and decorations, Caesar reviewed the troops. These were then marshaled in column of route, and Caesar mounted a gilded chariot. A slave stood on the chariot with him, to hold a golden crown above his head and say in his ear that he was mortal. Octavius rode proudly behind on a horse.
The procession moved off in the direction of the city. The Senate led the way, after which came trumpeters and garlanded white oxen with gilded horns; the oxen would be sacrificed later. Then followed the spoils of war and floats with tableaux and paintings illustrating highlights of the African campaign. These caused outrage, Octavius noticed. One of the paintings carried on the floats depicted the republican general Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio stabbing himself in the chest and then throwing himself into the sea; in another, worse still, Cato was shown tearing himself apart like a wild animal. It would have been far wiser to avoid any mention of battles fought by Romans against Romans, but Caesar had still not forgiven his old opponent Cato for evading his forgiveness. As the floats were driven along the narrow city streets the crowd, too intimidated by the soldiery to do more, groaned.
Finally, Caesar and his legions arrived. The soldiers, carrying sprays of laurel, exercised their traditional privilege of singing satirical and sometimes ribald songs about their commander. They had a good deal to say about his reputation for philandering.
On the Capitoline, the ceremonies drew to a close with a mass sacrifice of the oxen, followed by a banquet in the Temple of Jupiter. To the sound of flutes, Caesar was escorted home to the Domus Publica, the official residence of the pontifex maximus.
The triumphs were interspersed with a varied diet of extremely costly spectacles, including theater and dance performances and chariot races in a stadium called the Circus Maximus beneath the Palatine Hill. The most popular attraction in a crowded program of events was a gladiatorial contest. Such contests were usually held in the Forum, where a temporary wooden arena was erected above a network of tunnels beneath the pavement. In these tunnels the gladiators would wait for their turn in the arena.
It is very hard to understand the appeal of killing human beings as entertainment. In the developed world, few people regularly encounter physical violence, but in premodern societies, as in the developing world today, pain, disease, and the frequency of sudden or premature death were routine and expected. Against this background, Rome’s imperial success rested on a culture of military prowess. War was glorious. Young men were trained to inflict and to endure violent death, and to value personal heroism above most other virtues. Indeed, virtus, from which the English word derives, not only encompassed manliness and moral excellence but conjoined these to the concept of physical courage.
The gladiatorial shows had originated centuries before, as human sacrifices, conducted in the community’s most sacred space, the Forum. Before it became a public square, the Forum was a marshy area where the villagers who lived on the surrounding hills buried their dead; perhaps a faint memory of this primary function survived in people’s minds. The victims’ blood sank between the flagstones to slake the thirst of the manes, the spirits of the dear departed who lived a sad, otherwise bloodless life in the underworld.
Most gladiators (the name comes from the Latin for sword, gladius) were slaves, but some citizens joined a gladiatorial troupe of their own free will. The profession gave asylum to social outcasts, the dispossessed, the bankrupt, and men on the run. Free fighters were much sought after, presumably because they performed with more zest than those who did so under compulsion. A volunteer won a bonus if he survived to the end of his contract. The contract was a fearsome document, threatening any who broke it with burning, shackling, whipping with rods, and killing with steel. In effect, it made a temporary slave of the signatory.
Successful gladiators became household names. On the one hand, they were the lowest of the low, ranking alongside male prostitutes and the worst categories of criminal, such as the parricide, and had lost all their dignitas as human beings. On the other hand, they were sexy pinups, as the graffiti at Pompeii show: Celadus the Thracian was “a girl’s heart throb and shining delight,” and Crescens the retiarius (net fighter) “every virgin’s doctor in the night.”
Some promoters were proud of allowing no losers to escape death, although this would make the games much more expensive; these contests were called munera sine missione, games without quarter. The death rate in the gladiatorial profession is unknown, but it was probably lower than blood-thirsty descriptions would imply. There is evidence of fighters surviving many bouts, eventually receiving their freedom (symbolized by a wooden sword) and retiring into provincial respectability. In this sanguinary form of live theater, an imaginative impresario could stage-manage suspense and copious blood without excessive mortality.
Another spectacle that drew the crowds was the wild-beast hunt, or venatio. All kinds of animal were captured in different corners of the empire and brought back to Rome to end their lives in the arena. Thousands could be killed in a day. Men armed with spears, bows, daggers, and even firebrands, and sometimes accompanied by packs of hounds, battled with terrified and enraged panthers and lions, leopards and tigers. Red cloths were waved in front of bulls, in a precursor of the modern Spanish bullfight. Other creatures that were hunted, if more rarely, included hippopotami, ostriches, and crocodiles. Caesar staged five venationes during the festivities, in one of which he pitted elephants against each other. In addition, he imported six hundred lions and four hundred other large cats.
It was widely noticed that at the theatrical events and public banquets, Octavius was invariably in attendance on his great-uncle, who treated him as affectionately as if he were his own son. At sacrifices and when entering temples for religious rituals, he kept the young man by his side and he arranged for others taking part in these public occasions to give him precedence.
Increasingly, suppliants approached Octavius and asked him to intercede for them with Caesar in one way or another. His success with Agrippa’s brother and his growing familiarity with the dictator gave him the courage to put forward requests, which seem to have been invariably granted. This was, in large part, because of the tactful approach he adopted. Nicolaus observes: “He took care never to ask a favour at an inopportune moment, nor when it was annoying to Caesar.”
Caesar decided it was time to give the young man some administrative experience. He turned over to him the responsibility for managing the theatrical program of the triumphal celebrations. Keen to show his commitment, Octavius stayed to the end of all the performances, even on the hottest and longest days. This strained his already delicate health and he fell seriously ill.
Caesar was beside himself with anxiety and, to cheer him up, visited the sufferer every day or sent friends in his place. Doctors were in permanent attendance. On one occasion a message came while he was dining that Octavius had suffered a serious relapse and was in danger of dying. The dictator leaped up at once and ran barefooted to the house where Octavius lay. Frantic and deeply upset, he cross-examined the doctors about their patient’s prognosis and then sat down by the boy’s bedside. Gradually Octavius recovered, but he remained weak for some time.
The nature of Octavius’ illness on this occasion is not known; it may have been a severe bout of sunstroke.
The triumphs were quickly followed by Cleopatra’s arrival in Rome as Caesar’s houseguest. Her journey from Egypt was delayed until after the Egyptian triumph. One of the captives in the procession had been her sister Arsinoe, who had been briefly recognized as queen by the Alexandrians before falling into Caesar’s hands, but, although she loathed her, Cleop
atra had not wished to witness her sibling led in chains and her kingdom presented as a vanquished power.
The queen was accompanied by the youngest of her brothers, and new husband, the fifteen-year-old Ptolemy XIV, and, it may be assumed, a substantial retinue. Doubtless she was accompanied by her baby son, Caesarion. Caesar lodged them all in his mansion set in lovely gardens (his hortus) on the other side of the Tiber near the southeastern corner of the Janiculum Hill. Here Cleopatra held court and received Rome’s senior politicians. Her airs and graces of royalty did not go down well among Rome’s determinedly republican elite, even when accompanied by lavish presents and cultivated entertainments. Men like the orator Cicero cordially disliked her, for all the queen’s efforts to ingratiate herself.
It may be surmised that Cleopatra returned the compliment, with equal cordiality. Her mind-set was irredeemably autocratic. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the noisy bear pit of Roman politics and for competing aristocrats who refused to acknowledge that anyone was superior to them. Back in Alexandria her response to dissent was to use force and she must have been bewildered by Caesar’s policy of clemency.
Neither Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, nor the convalescent Octavius has left a recorded opinion of the Egyptian interloper, but neither can have been pleased by the presence of a rival for both his affections and his limited time.
It turned out, maddeningly, that the fighting was not over after all. The two sons of Pompey the Great, Gnaeus and Sextus, aged about thirty and sixteen respectively, had extricated themselves from the African debacle and made their way to Spain, where their father had had a large and faithful clientela.
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