The October Horse (52 page)

A very well-known name; the other two looked impressed.

“An Epicure,” said Salvidienus, more knowledgeable than young Agrippa. “Consular too. No wonder you have enough gear for a senior legate.”

Octavius looked embarrassed. “Oh, that's my mother,” he said. “She's always convinced I'm going to die, especially when I'm away from her. I don't honestly need it or use it. Philippus may be an Epicure of the Epicures, but I'm not.” He gazed about at the untidy, impoverished room. “I envy you,” he said simply, then sighed. “It's no fun being delicate.”

•      •      •

“Did you have an enjoyable time?” Caesar asked when his contubernalis returned, aware that he gave the lad little chance to mingle with his fellows.

“Yes, I did, but it made me realize how privileged I am.”

“In what way, Octavius?”

“Oh, plenty of money in my purse, everything I need, your favor,” said Octavius frankly. “Agrippa and Salvidienus have neither money nor favor, yet they're two very good men, I think.”

“If they are, then they'll rise under Caesar, rest assured. Ought I to take them on the Parthian campaign?”

“Definitely. But on your own staff, Caesar. With me, since I won't be old enough to run Rome in your absence.”

“You really want to come? The dust will be frightful.”

“I still have much to learn from you, so I'd like to try.”

“Salvidienus I know. He led the cavalry charge at Munda, and won nine gold phalerae. A typical Picentine, I suspect—very brave, a superior military mind, capable of plotting. Whereas Agrippa I can't place. Tell him to be present when we leave in the morning, Octavius,” said Caesar, curious to see what kind of confrere Octavius would choose as a friend.

Meeting Agrippa was a revelation. Privately Caesar thought him one of the most impressive young men he had ever seen. Had he been homelier, there was a great deal of Quintus Sertorius in him, but the good looks put him in a category all his own. If he had gone to a big Roman school for the sons of knights, he would inevitably have been the head prefect. The sort you could trust always to give of his best— infinitely reliable, utterly devoid of fear, athletic, and extremely intelligent. A stalwart. A pity his education hadn't been better. Also his blood, very mediocre. Both would retard any hope of a public career in Rome. One reason why Caesar was determined to change Rome's social structure sufficiently to permit the rise of men as eminently capable as the seventeen-year-old Agrippa promised to be. For he wasn't a prodigy like Cicero, nor did he have the ruthlessness of a Gaius Marius, two New Men who had gotten there. What he would need was a patron, and that Caesar himself would be. His great-nephew had an eye for choosing good men, a comfort.

While Agrippa stood stiffly to attention and answered Caesar's pleasant but probing questions, Octavius, observed Caesar out of the corner of his eye, stood and stared at Agrippa adoringly. Not the same kind of adoring looks he gave Caesar by any means. Hmmm.

Sometimes a secretary traveled with them in their gig, but this morning Caesar elected that he and Octavius should be alone. Time for that talk, postponed because Caesar wasn't looking at all forward to it.

“You like Marcus Agrippa very much,” Caesar commenced.

“Better than anyone I've ever met,” said Octavius instantly.

When you have to lance a boil, cut deep and cruelly. “You're a very pretty fellow, Octavius.”

The startled Octavius didn't take that as a compliment. “I hope to grow out of it, Caesar,” he said in a small voice.

“I see no evidence that you ever will, because you can't exercise long enough and hard enough to develop Agrippa's kind of physique—or mine, for that matter. You're always going to be much as you look now—a very pretty fellow, and rather willowy.”

Octavius's face was growing red. “Do you mean what I think you mean, Caesar? That I appear effeminate?”

“Yes,” Caesar said flatly.

“So that's why men like Lucius Caesar and Gnaeus Calvinus eye me the way they do.”

“Quite so. Do you cherish any tender feelings toward your own sex, Octavius?”

The red was fading, the skin now too pale. “Not that I have noticed, Caesar. I admit that I might look at Marcus Agrippa like a ninny, but I—I—I admire him so.”

“If you cherish no tender feelings, then I suggest that the ninny looks cease. Make sure you never do develop tender feelings. Nothing can retard a man's public career more effectively than that particular failing, take it from one who knows,” said Caesar.

“The accusation about King Nicomedes of Bithynia?”

“Precisely. An unjustified accusation, but unfortunately I hadn't endeared myself to my commanding officer, Lucullus, or to my colleague Marcus Bibulus. They took great delight in using it as a political slur, and it was still haunting me at my triumph.”

“The Tenth's song.”

“Yes,” said Caesar, lips thin. “They have paid.”

“How did you counter the accusation?” Octavius asked, curious.

“My mother—a remarkable woman!—advised me to cuckold my political rivals, the more publicly, the better. And never to befriend any among my colleagues with that rumor around them. Never, she said, give anyone the tiniest particle of evidence that the accusation was more than spite,” said Caesar, looking straight ahead. “And don't, she said, spend time in Athens.”

“I remember her very well.” Octavius grinned. “She terrified the life out of me.”

“And out of me too, from time to time!” Caesar reached to take Octavius's hands, clasp them strongly. “I am passing her advice on to you, though in a different vein, as we are very, very different sorts of men. You don't have the kind of appeal to women that I did when I was young. I made them yearn to tame me, to capture my heart, while making it all too plain to everyone that I could not be tamed and had no heart. That you can't do, you don't have the arrogance or self-assurance. Deservedly or not, you do exude a slight air of effeminacy. I blame it on your illness, which has worried your mother into cosseting you. It has also prevented your attending the boys' drills regularly enough to permit your peers to know you well. In every generation there are individuals like your cousin Marcus Antonius, who deem all men effeminate if they can't lift anvils and sire a bastard every nundinum. Thus Antonius actually got away with kissing his boon companion Gaius Curio in public—no one could ever credit that Antonius and Curio were genuine lovers.”

“And were they?” Octavius asked, fascinated.

“No. They just liked to scandalize the stuffy. Whereas if you did that, the response would be very different, and Antonius would be your first accusator.”

Caesar drew a breath. “Since I doubt you have the stamina or the physical presence to make a reputation as a great philanderer, I recommend a different ploy. You should marry young, and build a reputation as a faithful husband. Some may deem you a dull dog, but it works, Octavius. The worst that will be said of you is that you are un-adventurous and under the cat's foot. Therefore choose a wife with whom you can enjoy domestic peace, yet a woman who gives onlookers the impression that she rules the roost.” He laughed. “That's a tall order and one you may not be able to fill, but keep it in mind. You're far from stupid, and I've noticed that you usually manage to get your own way. Are you following me? Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“Oh, yes,” said Octavius. “Oh, yes.”

Caesar released his hands. “So no looking at Marcus Agrippa with naked adoration. I realize why you do, but others won't be so perceptive. Cultivate his friendship, by all means, but always remain a little aloof. I say cultivate his friendship because he is exactly your own age, and one day you'll need adherents like him. He shows great promise, and if he owes his advancement to you, he'll give you his complete loyalty because that's the kind of man he is. I say remain at a slight distance from him because he should never gain the impression that he is an intimate of yours on equal terms with you. Make him fides Achates to your Aeneas. After all, you have the blood of Venus and Mars in your veins, whereas Agrippa is a Messapian Oscan of no ancestry. All men should be able to aspire to be great and do great things, and I would build a Rome that allowed them to fulfill their destinies. But some of us have the additional gift of birth, which endows us with an additional burden—we must prove ourselves worthy of our ancestors, rather than found an ancestry.”

The countryside was rolling by; shortly they would cross the Baetis River on their long journey to the Tagus River. Octavius stared out the window, not seeing a thing. Then he licked his lips, swallowed, and turned to look directly into Caesar's eyes, which were kind, sympathetic, caring.

“I understand everything you've said, Caesar, and I thank you I more than you can ever know. It is absolutely sensible advice, and I will follow it to the letter.”

“Then, young man, you will survive.” Caesar's eyes twinkled. “I've noticed, by the way, that though we've flown around all of Further Spain throughout this spring, you haven't suffered one attack of asthma.”

“Hapd'efan'e explained it,” said Octavius, who felt lighter, more confident, shriven. “When I'm with you, Caesar, I feel safe. Your approval and protection wrap around me like a blanket, and I experience no anxieties.”

“Even when I speak on distasteful subjects?”

“The more I know you, Caesar, the more I regard you as my father. My own died before I needed him to talk about men's cares and difficulties, and Lucius Philippus—Lucius Philippus—”

“Lucius Philippus gave up the duties of fatherhood at around the time that you were born,” said Caesar, absurdly delighted at the result of a conversation he had dreaded. “I too lacked a father, but I was better served with my particular mother. Atia is all a mother. Mine was as much a father. So if I can be of help in paternal matters, I'm pleased to be of help.”

It isn't fair, Octavius was thinking, that I should get to know Caesar so late. If I had known him like this when I was a child, perhaps I wouldn't suffer the asthma at all. My love for him is boundless, I would do anything for him. Soon we will be done in the Spains, and he'll go back to Rome. Back to that awful woman across the Tiber, with her ugly face and her beast-gods. Because of her and the little boy, he won't touch Egypt's wealth. How clever women are. She has enslaved the ruler of the world and ensured the survival of her kingdom. She will keep its wealth for her son, who is not a Roman.

“Tell me about the treasure vaults, Caesar,” he said aloud, and turned big grey eyes, filled with innocence, to his idol.

Relieved to have a new subject, Caesar obliged. It was a subject he couldn't air to any Roman save this one, a mere lad who thought of him as a father.

To Cicero, that first properly calated year went from one sorrow and misery to another.

Tullia gave birth to a sickly, too-premature child early in January; baby Publius Cornelius received the cognomen of his grandmother's branch of the Cornelii—Lentulus. It was Cicero who suggested it; as Dolabella had skipped off to Further Spain to join Caesar, he wasn't present to insist that his son bear his own cognomen. A way of getting back at Dolabella, who had gone without paying Tullia's dowry back.

She ailed, wasn't interested in her baby, refused to eat or exercise; midway through February she quietly died, it seemed to all who knew her of unrequited love for Dolabella. For Cicero, a terrible grief made worse by the indifference of her mother and the rather pettish behavior of his new wife, Publilia, who could not begin to understand why Cicero wept, mourned, ignored her. Publilia was, besides, quite disillusioned with this marriage to such a famous man, as she was quick to tell her mother and her underage brother whenever they came to visit. Visits that the wildly grief-stricken Cicero came to dread so much that he found reasons to be elsewhere the moment his in-laws arrived.

The letters of condolence came flooding in, one from Brutus in Italian Gaul written just before he left to return to Rome; Cicero had opened it eagerly, sure that this man, so close to him in philosophy and political leanings, would find exactly the right words to heal his battered animus. Instead, he found a cold, passionless, stereotyped expression of sympathy that in effect informed him that his grief was too florid, too excessive, too intemperate. A blow rendered more telling when Caesar's letter came and held all the exquisite comfort Cicero lad wanted from Brutus. Oh, why had the wrong man written the right letter?

The wrong man, the wrong man, the wrong man! A viewpoint reinforced when he received a curt communication from Lepidus, who, is senior patrician in the Senate, was its leader, the Princeps Senatus. It demanded to know why Cicero wasn't attending meetings of the house, and reminded him that under Caesar's new laws, a man had to attend on pain of forfeiting his seat. Since the founding of the Republic, the oligarchs of the Senate had enjoyed the title of senator without ever needing to sit in the House or serve on a jury unless they wanted to. Now it was different. Senators had to serve on juries when they were told, and had to be physically present in the House. If illness were Cicero's reason for absenting himself, then he would have to obtain three affidavits from three senators to that effect.

Illness was the only valid excuse for absence if a senator was in Italy. Further, a senator now had to petition the House to leave Italy! Everywhere a man looked, there were rules and regulations that insulted his entitlements as a member of Rome's most august governing body—oh, it was intolerable! Half dazed by grief, half fuming with anger, Cicero was forced to seek out three fellow senators and ask them to swear to Lepidus that Marcus Tullius Cicero was incapable of assuming his seat in the House due to severe illness of long-standing duration.

To add insult to injury, having decided that Tullia must have a glorious monument set in public gardens, Cicero discovered that the ten-talent tomb designed by Cluatius the architect would cost him twenty talents; Caesar's sumptuary laws stipulated that whatever a tomb cost must also be paid to the Treasury. That one, the lawyer found a way to avoid: all he had to do was call Tullia's tomb a shrine, and it became tax-free. Therefore Tullia would have a shrine, not a tomb. Sometimes those thirty years of marriage to Terentia paid off—she knew how to avoid any tax even a Caesar could dream up.

Of course there were palliatives for his misery, particularly the very favorable reception his “Cato” had received. A letter from Aulus Hirtius, governing Narbonese Gaul for Caesar, told Cicero that Caesar was planning to write an “Anti-Cato”—oh, do, Caesar, please do! It will damage your dignitas immeasurably.

•      •      •

News from Further Spain trickled in; so slow was it that Hirtius, writing from Narbo on the eighteenth day of April, did not know that Gnaeus Pompey had been found and his head severed. But Munda was known, and it was a fact that all of Rome had to accept. Republican resistance was permanently over, there was nothing to stop Caesar enacting his disgraceful laws aimed at the First Class. Even Atticus, so long fair-minded about Caesar, was worried. Though he was still working to make sure that the Head Count poor were not going to be shipped to Buthrotum, he could get no absolute assurances that they would go elsewhere. Caesar's staff refused to commit themselves.

“We'll have to wait until Caesar comes home,” said Cicero. “One thing is certain—shipping the Head Count overseas isn't done in an hour, no one will sail before Caesar comes home.” He paused. “You'll have to know, Titus, so better now. I'm going to divorce Publilia. I can't stand her or her family a moment longer.”

Titus Pomponius Atticus eyed his friend with wry sympathy, A great aristocrat of the gens Caecilia, he could have had an illustrious public career, risen to the consulship, but the love of his heart was commerce, and a senator could not indulge in business unconnected to land ownership. A discreet lover of young boys, he had earned the nickname “Atticus” because of his devotion to Athens, a place which found no fault with this kind of love; he had made it his second home, and limited his activities to his time there. Four years older than Cicero, he had married late, to a cousin, Caecilia Pilia, and had produced his heir, his much-loved daughter, Caecilia Attica. His ties to Cicero went deeper than friendship, for his sister, Pomponia, was married to Quintus Cicero. That union, a stormy one, teetered perpetually on the brink of divorce. All in all, he reflected, the two Cicerones had not had happy marriages; they had been obliged to marry for money, to heiresses. What neither brother had counted on was the tendency of Roman heiresses to control their own money, which the law did not stipulate they had to share with their husbands. The pity of it was that both women loved their Cicerones; they just didn't know how to show it, and were, besides, frugal women who deplored the Ciceronian tendency to spend money.

“I think it's wise to divorce Publilia,” Atticus said gently. “Publilia was so unkind to Tullia when she was sick.” Atticus sighed. “Well, Marcus, it's very difficult to be more than ten years younger than your stepdaughter. Not to mention how hard it is to live with a legend older than your grandfather.”

•      •      •

Baby Publius Cornelius Lentulus died at the beginning of June, just six months into his tenuous life. Born on the cusp between seven and eight months in utero, he had sufficient of Dolabella's strength to try to live, but his wet nurses found his scrawny, red little person repulsive, couldn't love him the way his mother might have, had she not loved his father to the exclusion of all else. So he gave up the fight as quietly as Tullia had, passing from a nightmare to a dream. Cicero mingled his ashes with his mother's and resolved to inter them in the shrine together—if he could only find the right piece of land for this monument.

In an odd way the child's death sealed the chapter of Tullia in Cicero's mind; he began to recover, a process accelerated when he finally got his hands on a copy of Caesar's “Anti-Cato.” It had not yet been published, but he knew the Sosius Brothers were about to do so. Cicero found it malicious, spiteful, plain nasty. Where had Caesar obtained some of his information? It contained juicy tales of Cato's unrequited love for Metellus Scipio's wife, Aemilia Lepida, snippets of the abysmally bad poetry he had written following her rejection of him, excerpts from his (never filed) lawsuit against Aemilia Lepida for breach of promise, a highly evocative recounting of Cato's telling his two young children that they would never be allowed to see their mother again. Even Cato's most intimate secrets were revealed! As Caesar was the man with whom Cato's first wife had committed adultery, it was the height of impropriety for him to divulge the sordid details of Cato's lovemaking techniques! The man was dead!

Oh, but the prose! Why, Cicero asked himself miserably, am I incapable of prose half that good? And Caesar's poem, “Her,” was being hailed as a masterpiece by everyone from Varro to Lucius Piso, a great literary connoisseur. It isn't fair that one man should be so gifted, so I am glad that his hatred for Cato has gotten the better of him.

Then Cicero found himself having to side with Caesar, not a comfortable position. One, however, that justice demanded.

Marcus Claudius Marcellus, whom Caesar had pardoned after his brother, Gaius Marcellus Minor, went down on his knees and begged, had left Lesbos and gone to Athens, where he was murdered in the Piraeus. Certain persons who were well known to detest Caesar began to bruit it abroad that Caesar had paid to have Marcus Marcellus murdered. A calumny that Cicero could not condone, for all his own detestation of Caesar. Hating having to do it, he announced publicly to all and sundry that Caesar could not have had anything to do with the murder. Caesar was a murderer of character, witness his “Anti-Cato,” but never one who murdered in mean back alleys. Cicero's stand went a long way toward scotching the rumor.

By now the tale of Gnaeus Pompey's severed head was all over Rome, complete with its sequel. The decapitator, Caesennius Lento, had been an up-and-coming man on Caesar's staff, but when Caesar had received the head from the disgusted Gaius Didius, Caesennius Lento was immediately stripped of his share of the booty and sent back to Rome with Caesar's caustic dressing down still ringing in his ears. There would be no advancement up the cursus honorum for such a gross barbarian; in fact, Caesennius Lento would find himself expelled from the Senate when Caesar had time for the censor's duties he had inherited along with many other honors.

So there you had Caesar, thought Cicero: on the one hand, scrupulously civilized; on the other, a deliberate traducer of virtue. But a man who would pay to murder? Never. Thus Cicero displayed some understanding of Caesar; just not enough. What Cicero could never be brought to see was that it was his own impulsive and thoughtless gyrations that antagonized Caesar most. Had he refrained from traducing Caesar in his “Cato,” Caesar would not have traduced Cato in his “Anti-Cato.” Cause and effect.