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

"Restless spirit, do not distress yourself with thoughts of me! No man sends me into the underworld untimely; yet no man can escape his fate either, be he coward or hero. Go home and look after your sort of work, loom and spindle. Supervise your servants so they spin and weave too. War is men's work, and the men of Troy must cleave to it, especially me."

Brutus laughed. "Oh, come, Cicero, you don't expect me to say that to Cato's daughter, do you? Porcia is the equal of any man in courage and high intent." Her face lighting up, Porcia turned to Brutus and pulled his hand against her cheek, which embarrassed him in front of Cicero; yet he made no move to take his hand away. Eyes blazing rather madly, Porcia said: "I have no father and mother now. ... So you, my Brutus, are father and mother both to me, as well as my most beloved husband." Brutus detached his hand and left her side, gave Cicero a tight grimace that seemed the closest he could get to a smile. "You see how erudite she is? She's not content to paraphrase she picks the eyes out of eyeless Homer. No mean feat." Laughter booming, Cicero blew a kiss to Andromache in the painting. "If she can pick the eyes out of blind old Homer, my dear Brutus, then you and she are well matched. Goodbye, my two epitomators, and may we meet again in better times." Neither waited at the door to watch him enter his litter. Toward the end of Sextilis, Brutus took ship from Tarentum to Patrae in Greece; he left Porcia behind with Servilia.

Mark Antony sent a message to Cicero, arrived in Rome, that he was to present himself in the Senate for the obligatory first-day-of-the-month meeting. When Cicero didn't turn up, an irate Antony left for Tibur to attend to some urgent business. With Antony safely out of town, Cicero went to the Senate the next day; the House had prorogued its meeting to finish its early September agenda. And in its chamber the vacillating, vainglorious consular Marcus Tullius Cicero finally found the courage to embark upon what was to be his life's work: a series of speeches against Marcus Antonius. No one expected this first speech; everyone was staggered, and many were frightened out of their wits. The softest and most subtle of the series, the first was the most telling, in part because it came out of the blue. He started kindly enough. Antony's actions after the Ides of March had been moderate and conciliatory, said Cicero; he hadn't abused possession of Caesar's papers, had restored no exiles, had abolished the dictatorship forever, and suppressed disorder among the common people. But from May onward, Antony began to change, and by the Kalends of June a very different man stood revealed. Nothing was done through the Senate anymore, everything was done through the People in their tribes, and sometimes even the will of the People was ignored. The consuls-elect, Hirtius and Pansa, did not dare to enter the Senate, the Liberators were virtually exiled from Rome, and the veteran soldiers were actively encouraged to seek fresh bonuses and fresh privileges. Cicero protested at the honors being paid to Caesar's memory and thanked Lucius Piso for his speech on the Kalends of Sextilis, deploring the fact that Piso had found no support for his motion to make Italian Gaul a part of Italy proper. He condoned the ratification of Caesar's acts, but condemned the ratification of mere promises or casual memoranda. He went on to enumerate those of Caesar's laws that Antony had transgressed, and made much of the fact that Antony tended to transgress Caesar's good laws, uphold the bad ones. In his peroration he exhorted both Antony and Dolabella to seek genuine glory rather than dominate their fellow citizens through a reign of terror. Vatia Isauricus followed Cicero and spoke to the same effect just not nearly as well. The old master was back, and the old master had no peer. Significantly, the House dared to applaud. With the result that Antony returned to Rome from Tibur to find a new mood in the Senate and all kinds of rumors circulating in the Forum, where the frequenters were abuzz with discussions about Cicero's brilliant, timely, most welcome, very brave speech. Antony reacted with a towering temper tantrum and demanded that Cicero be present in the House to hear his answer on the nineteenth day of September; but Antony's rage contained palpable fear, had an element of bluster no one had seen or heard before. For Antony knew that if two consulars as prestigious as Cicero and Vatia Isauricus dared to speak out openly against him in the House, then his ascendancy was waning. A conclusion reinforced midway through the month when he put a new statue of Caesar, star on its brow, in the Forum bearing an inscription which denied that Caesar was a god of any kind. The tribune of the plebs Tiberius Cannutius spoke against the inscription to a crowd; suddenly, Antony realized, even the mice were growing fangs. If he blamed the change in attitude on anyone in particular, it was on Octavian, not on Cicero. That sweet, demure, fetching boy was working against him on all fronts. Starting on the day when he had been forced by the centurions to apologize publicly to Octavian, Antony had come to understand that he was not dealing with a pretty pansy he was dealing with a cobra. So when the House met on the nineteenth day of September, he thundered a tirade against Cicero, Vatia, Tiberius Cannutius and everyone else who was suddenly presuming to criticize him openly. He didn't mention Octavian that would have been to make a fool of himself but he did get on to the subject of the Liberators. For the first time, he condemned them for striking down a great Roman, for acting unconstitutionally, for doing outright murder. This change of face didn't go unremarked; the balance was beginning to tip against the Liberators when even Marcus Antonius found it necessary to speak against them. For which Antony blamed Octavian and no one else. Caesar's heir was saying unequivocally to all prepared to listen that while ever the Liberators continued to go unpunished, Caesar's shade was unappeased. Didn't the stella critina say with the force of a clap of thunder that Caesar was a god? A Roman god! Of massive power and moment to Rome, yet unappeased! Nor did Octavian limit his categorical statements to the common people. He said them to the upper classes too. What were Antony and Dolabella going to do about the Liberators? Was overt treason to be condoned, even extolled? The months since the Ides of March, said Octavian to all and sundry, had seen nothing but a permissive passivity; the Liberators walked around free men, yet had killed a Roman god. A god who received no official sacrifices, and was unappeased. Toward the end of the first nundinum in October, Antony's mushrooming sense of persecution caused him to purge his bodyguard of veteran soldiers. He arrested some of them on the charge of attempting to assassinate him, and went so far as to allege that Octavian had paid them to assassinate him. A highly indignant Octavian got up on the rostra in front of a suspiciously large audience and denied the allegation passionately. In a very good speech. Everybody listening believed him completely. Antony got the message, had to content himself with dismissing the men he had accused; he didn't dare execute them. Did he, he would do himself irreparable harm in the eyes of soldiers and civilians alike. The day after Octavian's address, fresh deputations from the legions and the veterans came to see him and inform him that they wouldn't stand for Antony's harming one single hair of Octavian's darling golden head. Somehow, though it was a mystery to Antony quite how, Caesar's heir had become a talisman of the army's good luck; he had fused himself into legionary worship alongside the Eagles. "I don't believe it!" he cried to Fulvia, pacing up and down like a caged beast. "He's a a child! How does he do it, for I swear he has no Ulysses whispering in his ear how to do it!" "Philippus?" she suggested. Antony blew a derisive noise. "Not he! He's too careful of his skin, and it runs in that family for generations. There's no one, Fulvia, no one! The artfulness, the guile they're him! I don't even understand how Caesar saw what he is!" "You're boxing yourself into a corner, my love," Fulvia said with conviction. "If you stay in Rome, you'll end in massacring everyone from Cicero to Octavianus, and that would be your downfall. The best thing you can do is go and fight Decimus Brutus in Italian Gaul. A victory or two against the prime mover among the Liberators, and you'll retrieve your position. It's vital that you retain control of the army, so put your energies into that. Face the fact that you're not by nature a politician. It's Octavianus who is the politician. Draw his fangs by absenting yourself from Rome and the Senate."