Colleen McCullough - 6. The October Horse - A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

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 dispersed.