The Horse Changer (22 page)

Cassius of course had hoped to see the end of Antony, but he was not especially disturbed by this odd turn of events. Cassius imagined that Antony and young Caesar would bash into one another for a second round of fighting, with Antony probably winning this time. In either case, enough corpses would litter their battlefield that the assassins might hope to return to Italy and collect the spoils.

But then young Caesar executed another of his remarkable pirouettes. As a newly elected consul, Caesar left Rome and joined his legions in the north. Rather than fight Antony and Lepidus, as everyone expected him to do, he asked for a meeting.

They convened on a small island in the River Lavinius in northern Italy. This was not far from where they had fought only a few months before. Elements of their respective armies lined either side of the river. Hostages were exchanged as per custom. Lepidus, in his role as Pontifex Maximus, played the negotiator. The three of them very quickly divided the empire, that is the empire that still remained in their power: Sicily, Gaul, western Africa, and Spain. They all agreed to share and share alike in the plunder of Italy. Their map would prove to be of no consequence a year later, for after their victory over Cassius and Brutus, the Triumvirs, as they called themselves, drew up a new map. Still, the first map is telling in one detail: they grabbed all the provinces of the empire as their own and left nothing for others.

Their map drawing finished, Caesar and Antony turned to the more troubling issue of how to pay for the legions they commanded. The wages for a fighting man had reached unimaginably high levels, five or six times the amounts paid only two years before; even the divine Julius Caesar’s purloined fortune was insufficient to carry them forward. In later years Caesar blamed Antony for the idea of the proscriptions. This is our august leader at his best, for he has always held that any lie told often enough becomes the prevailing reality, if not exactly the truth. The truth is quite simple. Caesar proposed murdering the aristocracy and seizing their fortunes. Estates were to be sold at auction even as the bodies of the murdered aristocrats cooled. For the better part of the next two years, murder created a steady stream of cash for army payrolls. All of it Caesar’s idea, though he never owned up to it.

Antony told me some years later he could not speak when young Caesar made the proposition. It was not the idea of mass murder that astonished him; Sulla had employed proscriptions when Antony was still a boy. ‘It was the serene manner with which the little twit proposed it, as one speaks of raising taxes or selling slaves.’ Antony was quite good at mimicking ‘the little twit’ and often performed a pitch-perfect recitation of Caesar’s proffer. I think his astonishment was genuine; Antony was capable of any abomination, but for that he needed wine to fuel some bit of mania that he kept buried in his soul. Caesar committed his abominations in the clutches of a chilling sobriety.

Of course, Antony always finished his version of the story at the proffer. He claimed that, after Cicero, he had no grudges. The truth is once he got his voice back, if one can believe anything would ever rob Antony of his speech, he realised he actually had quite a few old grudges to settle. Rumour has it, from slaves and attendants at that infamous congress, the Triumvirs divided the world within an hour but spent the next two days negotiating The List. Lepidus stayed out of it mostly, or claimed as much in later years; I expect, however, he too managed to name a few of the men who had scorned the manner by which he had won the office of Pontifex Maximus. It is only human nature to want revenge, and on such a long list, what mattered a few names more?

With a sack of wine for his inspiration Antony eventually rattled off a few hundred family patriarchs who had irritated him at one time or another; he even threw in a few freedmen of great fortune who had loaned him millions and still held his mortgages. He admitted this to me once but claimed he offered their names by way of negotiation. He quarrelled for none of them. Only one man was essential for Antony. He wanted Cicero. More specifically, he wanted Cicero’s right hand and tongue nailed to a stake beneath his accursed head and set upon the speaker’s platform for everyone to see until Cicero’s flesh rotted to oblivion. The other names were only bargaining chits to that end. For his part, young Caesar made sure he named every patrician who had snubbed him on his first journey from Brindisi to Rome. By chance this did not include Cicero. So a head, hand and tongue for Antony, the fortunes of the wealthiest patriarchs of Rome for young Caesar. I am told both men eventually gave up friends and family for the sake of keeping their most cherished rivals on the lists.

Having posted their list and then, subsequently, several versions of an expanded list in the Forum of Rome, Caesar, Antony and Lepidus were finished with the worst of that business. They had simply to make sure the estate auctions followed in a timely fashion. The actual murders were conducted by gangs of bounty hunters. These fellows were required by law to deliver the head of a proscribed man in order to earn their fee. Yes, it was all sanctioned by the divine name of the law. The slaughter was quite indiscriminate. If any man assisted someone on the list he was fair game as well, and naturally, as a traitor to Rome, there was a bounty for his head once his property went to auction. Blood eventually stained every family of any reputation before the killing ended. And not only patriarchs. Mothers and children perished in great numbers during the proscriptions, for the gangs cared nothing about the details of their task. Having killed the father legitimately they raped the rest for the pleasure of it. After that the usual policy was to leave no witnesses.

There are tales about a few loyal wives and sons – and even slaves – who dared to hide men named on that fatal list. Even strangers would sometimes spare a desperate nobleman on the run. Humanity is not always as morally bankrupt as the worst of our kind would have us believe. On the other side of it, lest we get too sentimental, quite a few sons brought the heads of their fathers into Rome for the sake of the bounty. With no patrimony, they thought at least to gain a few coins for the old boy’s head. Then there were the neighbours who denounced gentry not originally on the lists. Denunciations of treason were never examined with much care. Once the charge was made, it was treason. And so men expanded their fine estates by buying the land of their neighbours at auction.

Our Caesar, so beloved these days that we build temples to him throughout the empire, earned his divine status in the worst way imaginable: trading the lives of friends and even family for the fortune he stole. What astonishes me still is that he so cleverly managed to shift the full blame of it to Antony. But of course that is the enduring genius of our princeps. He has always been able to dress others in his own most egregious crimes and take wholesale the virtues of better men.

Roman officers brought me out of my cell and ordered slaves to wash me, trim my nails, and cut my hair and beard. Finally, pale and shivering in my nakedness, the officers instructed these same slaves to slip a plain tunic over my head, the customary purple stripe of an eques quite forgotten for the likes of me.

I spent some days at the coastal town of Tyre before being pushed into a carriage and taken to the marbled suburb of Daphne on the outskirts of Antioch. Daphne is where the Roman proconsul to Syria makes his home.

While I was still in Tyre one of my guards befriended me. He informed me of a good many details about developments in the world since my imprisonment; this came like casual gossip from a bored attendant. I would learn later that the part this fellow played was for my rehabilitation. First I learned Allienus had surrendered my legions. Then I heard about the proscriptions. I did not even think about my father. How could he be affected? My guard was less certain about this matter but promised to find out if his name appeared on the list.

Both Cassius and Brutus had gone to great lengths to learn the fates of men who had not escaped Italy’s new tyrants, and this fellow had only to approach one of his superiors for a glimpse of the latest proscription list. Eventually, my friendly guard returned to tell me my father’s name was on the list. He promised to ask his prefect if anything else was known.

I had some days of worrying about my father’s fate before learning that his head did indeed decorate the speaker’s platform in Rome’s Forum.

So I came first to worry and then fell at last to mourning. Of course my guard knew everything even from the beginning. I was only being manipulated so that I might rage all the more against the Triumvirate of Antony and Caesar and Lepidus. When I had finally got the full news I did not even weep. Instead, I recalled Octavian baiting Antony into a rage at their first meeting, the sly Maecenas standing beside him like a playwright watching his work being acted out. They were children with their schemes, incapable of empathy.

And so I moved from disgust for our young Caesar’s impertinence to loathing him for the sake of his indifference to the lives of the innocent; almost fifty-years later I still want Caesar’s blood for the crime he committed against my father. I want it, but I do nothing. In all our decades together since that time, I have thought about killing Caesar every time I stood before him. For all that, I bow and call him by his title, just as everyone else does.

Well, isn’t it the same with the gods? They sit by and watch nations burn and men of character murdered. They are quiet while the innocent are raped, and yet still we come before them whispering our adoring salutations and secretly loathing their indifference.

To my inexperienced eyes Cassius Longinus seemed a great man: silver-haired and handsome with a dignified voice and the cool assurance of one long familiar with power. He was then some forty-five years of age, a veteran of a great many campaigns. At first glance he appeared to be a far more impressive figure than Julius Caesar had been when I saw him in Spain.

I would know Cassius better a few months later, when indecision and obstinacy characterised his every decision. In a palace, with no enemy to threaten him, he was the epitome of the old Roman imperator.

At my appearance in his praetorium Cassius announced, almost conversationally, ‘I am told you nearly burned Alexandria to the ground, Dellius.’ This remark came without so much as a handshake.

‘Only its museum, Imperator.’

Cassius liked this. At least he laughed. ‘Caesar set fire to it as well.’ He spoke as if he had been fond of the man he had murdered.

‘Let me make this easy for you, Imperator,’ I answered. ‘I was the one who murdered Gaius Trebonius. I made it a fair fight, my fists against his knife, but it was murder all the same.’

‘I know you did. I also know about the vows you swore to Artemis. She will not forget that you used her name for your crime, Dellius. But that is between you and the goddess. What I want to know is how you persuaded Allienus to give you command of his army?’

‘Allienus had no army. They had deserted him and gone into the hinterlands to become bandits. I brought them back to service with gold Queen Cleopatra gave me.’

‘I have been trying to get gold from Cleopatra for almost a year. I tell you this: that woman is freer with her virtue than her money.’

‘Give me my legions back, Imperator, and I will bring you all the gold in Egypt!’

A wistful smile. ‘Would you swear an oath to that effect?’

‘Happily.’

‘I cannot trust your oaths, Dellius. If you lie to the gods, you will lie to me.’

‘That is not true. I do not believe in the gods, Imperator. You, on the other hand, are quite real.’

‘An Atheist? I despise such men. At least your fellow officers felt some remorse at swearing an oath they had no intention of keeping.’

‘What have the gods to do with us?’

‘They care about the Law.’

‘Then why did you kill Caesar? If the gods cared that he had broken faith with Rome they ought to have struck him down; instead they let him prosper.’

‘The gods expect us to care, Dellius. When their laws are broken we must act or suffer the consequences.’

‘The gods are a fantasy, else there would be justice in the world.’

‘You do not know why the gods do what they do.’

‘Turn me loose on my father’s murderers or kill me for my crimes. Do not tell me about imaginary creatures who love justice and punish the wicked.’

‘The gods will teach you the truth in time, Dellius. Until then, we shall leave Cleopatra’s gold for another day. I need to get ready for the army of the Triumvirs. I have released your fellow officers and I intend to do the same with you. I will make you a senior tribune of the cavalry. I mean to assign you to a cohort of the Thracian auxiliaries who will form part of my Guard. They are a difficult race to manage but by all accounts excellent fighters. Cassius Scaeva will serve as your first centurion of the cavalry. He assures me, by the way, he would rather ride with you than with any officer in the legions, save only Brutus and me. High praise from a man of his reputation.’

‘I will try to be worthy of it, Imperator.’

‘Give me young Caesar’s pretty head, lad. If not his, then Mark Antony’s will serve as well. For such a trophy I will not only restore your father’s estate to you, I will give you all of Tuscany as your own.’

Scaeva and the others had already departed for Thrace by the time I interviewed Cassius. That left me to travel with several centurions, tribunes and prefects on their way to Hellespont. Our cavalry escort included a mix of Parthians, Medes, and Arabs, a thousand horsemen in all. We averaged forty miles a day and reached the Hellespont within a month of our departure. From there, I was only a few miles from my new camp, but it took a week before I caught one of the ferries across.

I reported to the prefect of the Thracian cavalry, the son of one of the assassins, as it happened. He informed me that, for the time being, the entire Thracian cavalry would answer to Junius Brutus. Once Cassius arrived, our cohort would join Cassius’s Guard. I did not expect a temporary assignment in the army of Brutus to make any difference to me, but as it turned out Brutus enjoyed frequent and large gatherings of his officers, including all his senior tribunes. To his thinking it was important for everyone to understand what we were doing.