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

Here's your chance to do Caesar that favor, Mithridates. No doubt by now you're as alarmed as the rest of us over your half brother's invasion of Pontus and the atrocities he has committed in Amisus. A disgrace, and an affront to all civilized men. War is a necessity, otherwise it would not exist, but it is the duty of a civilized commander to remove civilians from the path of the military machine and shelter them from physical harm. That civilians may starve or lose their homes is simply a consequence of war, but it is a far different thing to rape women and female children until they die of it, and torture and dismember civilian men for the fun of it. Pharnaces is a barbarian. The invasion of Pharnaces has left me in a bind, my dear Mithridates, but it has just occurred to me that in you I have an extremely able deputy in formal alliance with the Senate and People of Rome. I know that our treaty forbids you to raise either army or militia, but in the present circumstances I must waive that clause. I am empowered to do so by virtue of a proconsular imperium maius, legally conferred by the Dictator. You will not know that Caesar Dictator has sailed for Egypt with too few troops, having asked me to send him two more legions and a war fleet as soon as possible. Now I find that I can spare him only one legion and a war fleet. Therefore this letter authorizes you to raise an army and send it to Caesar in Alexandria. Whereabouts you can find troops I do not know, as I will have picked the whole of Anatolia bare, but I have left Marcus Junius Brutus in Tarsus under orders to start recruiting and training, so you should be able to acquire at least one legion when your commander reaches Cilicia. I also suggest that you look in Syria, particularly in its southern extremities. Excellent men there, the best mercenaries in the world. Try the Jews.

When Mithridates of Pergamum received Calvinus's letter, he heaved a huge sigh of relief. Now was his opportunity to show the new ruler of the world that he was a loyal client! "I'll lead the army myself," he said to his wife, Berenice. "Is that wise? Why not our son Archelaus?" she asked. "Archelaus can govern here. I've always fancied that perhaps I inherited a little of my father the Great's military skill, so I'd like to command in person. Besides," he added, "I've lived among the Romans and have absorbed some of their genius for organization. That my father the Great lacked it was his downfall."

2

Oh, what bliss! was Caesar's initial reaction to his sudden removal from the affairs of Asia Province and Cilicia and from the inevitable entourage of legates, officials, plutocrats and local ethnarchs. The only man of any rank he had brought with him on this voyage to Alexandria was one of his most prized primipilus centurions from the old days in Long-haired Gaul, one Publius Rufrius, whom he had elevated to praetorian legate for his services on the field of Pharsalus. And Rufrius, a silent man, would never have dreamed of invading the General's privacy. Men who are doers can also be thinkers, but the thinking is done on the move, in the midst of events, and Caesar, who had a horror of inertia, utilized every moment of every day. When he traveled the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles from one of his provinces to another, he kept at least one secretary with him as he hurtled along in a gig harnessed to four mules, and dictated to the hapless man nonstop. The only times when work was put aside were those spent with a woman, or listening to music; he had a passion for music. Yet now, on this four-day voyage from Tarsus to Alexandria, he had no secretaries in attendance or musicians to engage his mind; Caesar was very tired. Tired enough to realize that just this once he must rest think about other things than whereabouts the next war and the next crisis would come. That even in memory he tended to think in the third person had become a habit of late years, a sign of the immense detachment in his nature, combined with a terrible reluctance to relive the pain. To think in the first person was to conjure up the pain in all its fierceness, bitterness, indelibility. Therefore think of Caesar, not of I. Think of everything with a veil of impersonal narrative drawn over it. If I is not there, nor is the pain.

What should have been a pleasant exercise equipping Longhaired Gaul with the trappings of a Roman province had instead been dogged by the growing certainty that Caesar, who had done so much for Rome, was not going to be allowed to don his laurels in peace. What Pompey the Great had gotten away with all his life was not to be accorded to Caesar, thanks to a maleficent little group of senators who called themselves the boni the "good men" and had vowed to accord nothing to Caesar: to tear Caesar down and ruin him, strike all his laws from the tablets and send him into permanent exile. Led by Bibulus, with that yapping cur Cato working constantly behind the scenes to stiffen their resolve when it wavered, the boni had made Caesar's life a perpetual struggle for survival. Of course he understood every reason why; what he couldn't manage to grasp was the mind-set of the boni, which seemed to him so utterly stupid that it beggared understanding. No use in telling himself, either, that if only he had relented a little in his compulsion to show up their ridiculous inadequacies, they might perhaps have been less determined to tear him down. Caesar had a temper, and Caesar did not suffer fools gladly. Bibulus. He had been the start of it, at Lucullus's siege of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos, thirty-three years ago. Bibulus. So small and so soaked in malice that Caesar had lifted him bodily on to the top of a high closet, laughed at him and made him a figure of fun to their fellows. Lucullus. Lucullus the commander at Mitylene. Who implied that Caesar had obtained a fleet of ships from the decrepit old King of Bithynia by prostituting himself an accusation the boni had revived years later and used in the Forum Romanum as part of their political smear campaign. Other men ate feces and violated their daughters, but Caesar had sold his arse to King Nicomedes to obtain a fleet. Only time and some sensible advice from his mother had worn the accusation out from sheer lack of evidence. Lucullus, whose vices were disgusting. Lucullus, the intimate of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Sulla, who while Dictator had freed Caesar from that hideous priesthood Gaius Marius had inflicted on him at thirteen years of age a priesthood that forbade him to don weapons of war or witness death. Sulla had freed him to spite the dead Marius, then sent him east, aged nineteen, mounted on a mule, to serve with Lucullus at Mitylene. Where Caesar had not endeared himself to Lucullus. When the battle came on, Lucullus had thrown Caesar to the arrows, except that Caesar walked out of it with the corona civica, the oak-leaf crown awarded for the most conspicuous bravery, so rarely won that its winner was entitled to wear the crown forever after on every public occasion, and have all and sundry rise to their feet to applaud him. How Bibulus had hated having to rise to his feet and applaud Caesar every time the Senate met! The oak-leaf crown had also entitled Caesar to enter the Senate, though he was only twenty years old; other men had to wait until they turned thirty. However, Caesar had already been a senator; the special priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was automatically a senator, and Caesar had been that until Sulla freed him. Which meant that Caesar had been a senator for thirty-eight of his fifty-two years of life. Caesar's ambition had been to attain every political office at the correct age for a patrician and at the top of the poll without bribing. Well, he couldn't have bribed; the boni would have pounced on him in an instant. He had achieved his ambition, as was obligatory for a Julian directly descended from the goddess Venus through her son, Aeneas. Not to mention a Julian directly descended from the god Mars through his son, Romulus, the founder of Rome. Mars: Ares, Venus: Aphrodite. Though it was now six nundinae in the past, Caesar could still put himself back in Ephesus gazing at the statue of himself erected in the agora, and at its inscription: GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR, SON OF GAIUS, PONTIFEX MAXIMUS, IMPERATOR, CONSUL FOR THE SECOND TIME, DESCENDED FROM ARES AND APHRODITE, GOD MADE MANIFEST AND COMMON SAVIOR OF MANKIND. Naturally there had been statues of Pompey the Great in every agora between Olisippo and Damascus (all torn down as soon as he lost at Pharsalus), but none that could claim descent from any god, let alone Ares and Aphrodite. Oh, every statue of a Roman conqueror said things like GOD MADE MANIFEST AND COMMON SAVIOR OF MANKIND! To an eastern mentality, standard laudatory stuff. But what truly mattered to Caesar was ancestry, and ancestry was something that Pompey the Gaul from Picenum could never claim; his sole notable ancestor was Picus, the woodpecker totem. Yet there was Caesar's statue describing his ancestry for all of Ephesus to see. Yes, it mattered. Caesar scarcely remembered his father, always absent on some duty or other for Gaius Marius, then dead when he bent to lace up his boot. Such an odd way to die, lacing up a boot. Thus had Caesar become paterfamilias at fifteen. It had been Mater, an Aurelia of the Cottae, who was both father and mother strict, critical, stern, unsympathetic, but stuffed with sensible advice. For senatorial stock, the Julian family had been desperately poor, barely hanging on to enough money to satisfy the censors; Aurelia's dowry had been an insula apartment building in the Subura, one of Rome's most notorious stews, and there the family had lived until Caesar got himself elected Pontifex Maximus and could move into the Domus Publica, a minor palace owned by the State. How Aurelia used to fret over his careless extravagance, his indifference to mountainous debt! And what dire straits insolvency had led him into! Then, when he conquered Long-haired Gaul, he had become even richer than Pompey the Great, if not as rich as Brutus. No Roman was as rich as Brutus, for in his Servilius Caepio guise he had fallen heir to the Gold of Tolosa. Which had made Brutus a very desirable match for Julia until Pompey the Great had fallen in love with her. Caesar had needed Pompey's political clout more than young Brutus's money, so...