The Classical World (60 page)

With hindsight, various omens and warnings were remembered, but there had never been any shortage of them. Up by the Rubicon, however, the horses whom Caesar had left free were said to be refusing to eat.
²⁴
How right the horses were: Caesar had even dismissed his bodyguards in Rome. It was not that he was courting death, surely: it was a confident sign that he was supreme. When the senators had come to honour him extravagantly, he failed (as a dictator could) to rise to greet them: deep down, he felt they were common little men, many of whom were his own creations. However, he promptlyregretted his rudeness and alleged, wrongly, that he had been struck by stomach problems at the time.

The lifelong dictatorship, the imminent cult: these signs were intolerable to those senators who minded deeply about liberty. One was the impetuous Cassius, praetor for the year (with Brutus) but a proven soldier as well as a man with Epicurean philosophic interests: his ancestors, like those of Brutus, had once issued coins with the caption ‘Liberty’. He was also Brutus’ brother-in-law, married to his half-sister. Other men, inevitably, felt personal slights or disappointments, sustained in a system of honour which increasingly depended on Caesar’s ‘grace and favour’. There was also the unresolved question of kingship. It was said to be about to come up again, on the strength of a Sibylline oracle which apparently stated that Parthia could only be conquered by a ‘king’.
²⁵
On the Ides of March 44, amid routine warnings, Caesar went nonetheless to a meeting of the Senate, only to confront an insistent group of senators, among whom was Marcus Brutus. Sixtysenators or so were in the plot, but no more than five or six of them could have rushed at Caesar and stabbed him, while his fellow consul Mark Antony was detained outside. Caesar’s body fell, streaming blood. Twenty-three wounds were later noted on it, and the conspirators left him to lie till nightfall. It is probably only a
legend that Caesar’s last words were ‘You too, Brutus?’, but it is probably true that Brutus called out the name of the one senator whom the conspirators had excluded from the plot for fear that he was too indiscreet: Cicero! By hints, however, and in private letters, Cicero had contrived, most admirably, to protest throughout at Caesar’s despotism. Now Caesar was dead, and he lay in the temple adjoining Pompey’s Theatre, where the Senate had been about to meet, within yards of a statue of Pompey himself.

Liberation Betrayed

As for the boy Caesar (Octavian), his natural worth and manliness are extraordinary. I only pray that I may be able to govern and hold him when he is in the full flush of honours and favour as I have done so far. That is more difficult, it is true, but still I do not despair. The young man is persuaded (most of all, through me) that our survival is his business
…

Cicero to Marcus Brutus,
c
. 21 April 43
BC

The events after Caesar’s murder are the supreme chapter in the story of freedom in ancient Rome. The days and months are wonderfully evoked for us by partisan survivors, and by Cicero’s contemporary letters and speeches. Cicero’s aims failed, but he was not always deceived. Despite moments of fear and retreat, he seldom fell below the level of events, although he was sixty-two years old. His faults were the same as always, and venially fatal: his wit and polemic against other big men’s failings and his habit of seeing events as he himself wished them to be.

In Cicero’s view, the golden chance was lost: as soon as Caesar lay dead, the Senate should have been called to the scene and the people summoned at once to liberty. In fact, like many tyrant-slayers in Greek history, the conspirators did nothing more: one of them hoisted a ‘cap of freedom’ on a spear and the corpse was left lying, ‘lawfully slain’ and fit only for throwing into the Tiber.
¹
In fact, three slaves took it home. The surviving consul, Mark Antony, had fled, but that very evening, it seems, Antony’s plans were already being feared as the ‘very worst, the most treacherous’.
²
Above the Forum, noble Brutus
had addressed an audience on the Capitol hill, but his speech, in Cicero’s view, was too elegant and too short of fire.

When Alexander the Great died his officers faked his ‘last plans’ to ensure that they were publicly rejected. When Caesar died Mark Antony took what he claimed were Caesar’s plans and two days later, on the 17th, artfully urged reconciliation at a meeting of the Senate. Caesar’s murderers, he proposed, were not to be avenged: that, at least, was a relief. Caesar’s plans, however, and his actions, past, present and future, were all to be ratified. It was a crucial moment. So many of the senators owed their rank and prospects to Caesar’s recent decisions that the measure was sure to be passed. In case they hesitated, armed soldiers, Caesar’s veterans, were already present to clarify their minds. So the senators agreed. They also agreed that Caesar’s body should have a funeral, a public funeral indeed, on the urging of his father-in-law.

‘Liberty’, Cicero’s option, was beset with difficulties. Almost all the legions across the world were loyal to Julius Caesar; many of his veterans were still at large, waiting to be paid off; vast spoils, booty and revenues could be dispensed from his personal sources by his political successors; Rome’s common people plainlypreferred Caesar to yet more ‘concord’ and ‘liberty’ for the upper classes. ‘Things which Caesar would never have done or allowed’, Cicero would soon remark, ‘are now being brought forward from his forged “plans” ’, the papers which Caesar had left and which Antony now controlled and, no doubt, doctored.
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Yet Caesar’s armies, the money and the people’s loyalties made it hard to turn the clock back as if he had not existed.

On the Ides of March, Cicero would write, they had left a fine ‘banquet’ unfinished: there were still the ‘leftovers’, Mark Antony. How right he proved to be: if only Antony had been killed too, the Republic really could have had a good chance of restoration. But he was not to be carved up and although Cicero wanted him killed, he was a consul still in office with an obvious technique of appeal. On 20 March he gave a taste of it. Caesar’s will was opened and he was found to have left his gardens to the public and a cash sum to each citizen at Rome. It was time for Caesar’s public funeral, an occasion which Cicero rightly dreaded. After the body had been brought up
through the Forum with an escort of actors and singers, Antony raised the tempo by addressing the assembled people in the Forum. There are two main versions of what he said to those ‘friends, Romans, countrymen’, as Shakespeare memorably puts it, who lent him their ears. One, which many scholars have preferred, is that he said only a few words after a proclamation bya herald. Another, which arguably goes back to a contemporary, is more compelling and builds on what we can infer from Cicero.
⁴
The body on its ivory couch was set in a gilded shrine modelled on the shrine of mother Venus. After speaking of Caesar’s deeds, Antony began to work with the rising emotions of the crowd (the ‘pathetic praise’, surely, on which Cicero comments). He chanted a lament of his own and began to weep. He held up Caesar’s bloodstained toga on a spear; as feelings rose, he then displayed a wax model of Caesar’s wounded corpse. Songs of lament are said to have followed from the crowd, in which Caesar himself appeared to be speaking. Evidently, Antony had mobilized actors and theatre-groups to orchestrate the occasion, people who are such an important element in crowd-scenes in Rome. This staged dialogue with the crowd caused them to erupt. Caesar’s body had been supposed to be taken off to the Campus Martius, but it was carried by the people up to the Capitol, turned back by the priests and then cremated in the Forum by popular action. There was even an attempt to burn the houses of the ‘Liberators’. The people’s potential had been stirred, a warning to Antony’s opponents.

For the moment, there was an obstacle. Caesar’s plans had been upheld, but he had left the command of northern Italy to one of the men who had then murdered him (Decimus, not Marcus, Brutus) and he was believed to have booked Syria and Macedonia, two provinces with armies, for Brutus and Cassius.
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Antony needed to alter these allotments and also to maximize his own. While he waited, Cicero began to treat Antony’s aims more lightly. On 9 April he writes: ‘Antony is more interested in the make-up of his dinner than in planning any mischief.’
⁶
Antony had even proposed that the dictatorship should be abolished for all time, a sharp comment on why Caesar had been murdered. In the same month, however, some of the plebs made moves of their own. A pillar was put up in the city in Caesar’s honour and had to be demolished. Briefly, even Antony was
outmanoeuvred, by the reappearance of one Amatius who had already been a thorn in Julius Caesar’s side. Rumour spread that Amatius was Marius’ grandson, a real populist echo of the past. Amatius probably had strong links with the ‘colleges’ or associations among the people of Rome, trouble-spots which Caesar had alreadyhad to regulate. He was rapidly put to death, and then Antony turned to the outstanding problem, the demobilization and settlement of Caesar’s veterans in Italy.

By mid-April, however, a new presence appeared, Caesar’s adopted heir by will, the eighteen-year-old Octavian who had been abroad in north-west Greece at the time of the murder. He was Caesar’s favoured great-nephew, but as his great modern historian, Sir Ronald Syme, reminds us, he was by birth merely the ‘grandson of a municipal banker’.
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An unknown, unproven quantity, he was not even a senator. Yet he was to show a cool ruthlessness, a calculation and a lack of heroics which were to carry him eventually to forty-five years of supreme power. The recent stirrings among the plebs were a good omen for his prospects.

On arriving at Brindisi, in south Italy, Octavian seized one of the two most important commodities, money, and then used it to win over the other, some of Caesar’s soldiers. It was a bold start, and as the young man travelled up Italy in spring 44 he stopped at the Bay of Naples and stayed in the next-door house to Cicero’s. He is ‘totally devoted to me’, Cicero wrote at the time; ‘extremely friendly and extremely respectful’.
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But the boy was already calling himself ‘Caesar’, which Cicero did indeed dislike. And how could he remain a sound citizen, ‘one of us’, when he reached Rome? It is one of history’s great meetings, the senior statesman, so often so wrong, and the most dangerous eighteen-year-old in the world. Scarcely a month later, Cicero would already be writing that he ‘did not like the look of Octavian’s games, nor his agents’; in mid-May Octavian was already trying to have funeral games held. The problem was that Antony was even worse. On 1 June, with further help from armed supporters, Antony‘legitimized’ bya vote of the ‘people’ in Rome the exchange of provincial commands on which he was to rely for his power-base. He also set up a commission to distribute lands to Caesar’s veterans which his brother, usefully, would head. Brutus and
Cassius were insulted by their unjust treatment and prepared to leave Italy for harmless jobs abroad; Antony had taken northern Italy for himself. Cicero was left to complain that there was ‘nothing planned, nothing thought out, nothing organized’. The Liberators’ ‘resolve had been manly, but their policies were childlike’.
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He himself had spent these weeks giving lessons in oratory to prominent pupils, including the next year’s consuls. He reproached himself for it, but he had done it nonetheless. After news of Antony’s laws, he planned to leave Italy, to visit his son in Athens and to see if he was making progress in his studies abroad.

At Rome, meanwhile, Octavian moved where Antony, so far, had feared to tread. He announced that, as Caesar’s heir, he would avenge Caesar’s murder; he paid the cash left to each member of the urban plebs, as ordered in Caesar’s will; he then tried to have Caesar’s notorious golden throne brought back into public view. In late July he personally held the ‘Games in Honour of Caesar’s Victory’ which had been denied official celebration. During them a comet burned in the sky for seven days. The Roman people hardly needed to be encouraged to think that this ‘star’ symbolized Caesar’s divine status. Caesar and Alexander the Great are the only rulers in antiquitywhose divinity was widely believed in. The young Octavian had already changed his name and was calling himself ‘Caesar’ too; he placed symbols of the star on coins and on a statue of Caesar which was dedicated in the Forum. The comet had overtones of a ‘new age’, but ‘inside, he himself rejoiced in the sign of the star to which he himself would ascend’.
¹⁰
His actions put important pressure on Antony: if Caesar’s loyal family-heir was making such running, surely Antony, his political ‘heir’, must raise the tempo too? So Antony began to claim that it was he, not Octavian, whom Caesar had adopted and to denounce the Liberators, Brutus and Cassius. In late July the two of them left Italy, but answered back in a fine, restrained letter sent on 4 August. ‘We wish to see you being a great and honoured man in a free republic,’ they told him. ‘We are not fastening any quarrels on you; however, we value our freedom more than your friendship.’
¹¹
Other Romans were to rank these priorities differently.

In earlyAugust Cicero set sail for Athens and his son, but the winds detained him and, fortunately, he could turn back to Rome on hearing
better news. For at last, attacks on Antony’s unduly Caesarian stance had begun in the Senate. Even so, Antony’s biggest problem was not this opposition, but that the real Caesarian, Octavian, might steal his pre-eminence. As tension mounted between the two of them, veteran soldiers actually intervened to oblige Caesar’s two heirs to sink their differences and make things up. Cicero reached Rome on 31 August, to be greeted by open hostility from Antony: once again, he was threatened with demolition of his house in Rome. But Cicero still had authority, as a speaker and a moral voice. In early September, he lent his pen to the senatorial fray, by composing the first of his fourteen powerful
Philippics
against Antony’s character and conduct. By doing so, Cicero was not creating an enemy out of a possible ‘moderate’. Antony had already reshuffled the provinces to take the most important for himself and he could not continue to be ‘moderate’ after Octavian’s rival star dawned: as if to prove it, on 2 October Antony told a public meeting in Rome that the Liberators were conspirators and that Cicero had been the ringleader. Cicero still kept out of the public eye. In late October he began to write
On Moral Duties
(the
De Officiis
, or ‘Offices’). It stresses that luxury is a vice (a worse one in old age), justice is the crowning virtue (it upholds private property, not socialism) and Julius Caesar was a criminal who had deserved to be killed.
¹²
On the strength of it, posterity has praised Cicero as a ‘pagan Christian’. But the work was based on the texts of Greek Stoic philosophers. It was only written in his one last interval from life’s real business, political affairs.