The Ides of March (32 page)

But the proposal was approved and the session ended.

Romae, a.d. XVII Kal. Apr.–a.d. XIV Kal. Apr.

Rome, 16–19 March

A
NTONY HAD
Caesar’s body transported to the Campus Martius, where it lay on an ivory bier draped in purple and gold, near the tomb of his daughter Julia, born of his second wife, Cornelia. Behind the bier he had raised a shrine in gilded wood that perfectly reproduced the Temple of Venus Genetrix. Inside the shrine he hung the robes that Caesar had been wearing on the Ides of March, arranged so that the dagger slashes and the bloodstains were in plain view for all to see.

He had the shrine surrounded by a maniple of surly legionaries of the Ninth in full combat order, so that no one dared to approach.

The procession of people bringing gifts to be burned on his funeral pyre began. A long, long line of men and women of the Roman populace, of veterans, of friends. There were even some senators and knights. Some threw in precious objects, others a simple, early-spring flower. Many wept, others regarded in silence the lifeless body of the greatest Roman ever to have lived.

The body lay in state for three days and then the funeral began. The coffin was hoisted on to the shoulders of the magistrates in office and escorted by hundreds of legionaries in parade dress, led by officers wearing their red cloaks and crested helmets, to the sound of bugles and trumpets, and to the sombre, rhythmic beating of drums. Two soldiers at the fore held up the hanger with Caesar’s bloody tunic as a kind of trophy. His wife, Calpurnia, trailed behind, weeping, helped along by her maidservants.

Tension mounted with every step, reaching a peak when a theatrical machine was drawn up alongside the coffin. Gears were set in motion and a likeness of Caesar’s naked body was raised up high: a wax statue with twenty-three wounds reproduced in gory detail, dripping with a vermilion stain that looked just like blood. In this way, even those who had not seen his corpse could witness the devastation wreaked on Caesar’s body.

In the Forum, in a clearing quite close to the Domus Publica, wood had been piled for the pyre. The bier was placed upon it. A leaden silence fell on the crowded square.

An actor recited the verses of a great poet:

I spared their lives
So they could kill me!

This gave rise to an explosion of indignant shouting that grew even louder when a crier read out the words of the
senatus consultum
in which the senators had sworn to defend Caesar with their own lives. Curses and insults rang from every corner of the square.

Then two centurions appeared, armed to the teeth: Publius Sextius, known as ‘the Cane’, and Silius Salvidienus. Each held a torch and took up position beside the pyre.

Antony mounted the Rostra and raised a hand to request silence from the already agitated crowd, which was seething with violent emotions that threatened to spill over at any moment.

Brutus, hidden at the far end of the square, behind the trees of the Iuturna fountain, could see even at this distance the grotesque wax image of Caesar stabbed. He could hear in his mind the words that Caesar had said to him with his last breath, as Brutus had thrust his dagger into Caesar’s groin. ‘Even you . . .’

He instantly understood what Cicero had meant to say at the session at the Temple of Tellus. All was lost. Nothing could stop a new, bloody civil war from breaking out.

All at once, in the sudden, mortal silence, Antony’s voice rang out.

‘Friends, Romans, countrymen! I have come to bury Caesar!’

Epilogue

D
ECIUS
S
CAURUS
and his companions, thwarted by the fury of Publius Sextius and deprived of the leadership of Mustela, had continued on their mission, but they never succeeded in closing in on the centurion, who had escaped down the parallel paths of the Apennines. Too late, however, for meeting his appointment with destiny.

Three days later they found the body of their commander, Sergius Quintilianus, at the side of the Via Cassia. His life had ended in combat.

They paid their last respects to him, simply, then burned his body on a pyre of woody vines. They threw their weapons into the fire as a final homage to his memory.

They brought his ashes back to the villa and buried them together with those of his son, at the foot of an old cypress, so they could rest, finally united, in the kingdom of shadows.

Author’s Note

This novel tells a true story, a story which is at once familiar and shocking, by focusing on the date of its tragic conclusion: the Ides of March, that is, 15 March, 44 BC.

On that day, Julius Caesar, the greatest Roman, was assassinated.

Much has been said about his death and the enigmatic, difficult to-explain events that accompanied it. The true motives of the conspirators have long been debated as well. The central question is the same one we ask ourselves today: is civil liberty preferable to security and the promise of peace?

Caesar’s assassination was preceded by a long, bloody period of civil war, rife with political and institutional chaos. Caesar stepped forward as the person who could re-establish concord, peace, a stable government. But in exchange, the people of Rome would have to accept restrictions of their civil rights. The conspirators thus believed that they had good reason to kill Caesar. They considered the act virtuous in that it would serve to bring down a tyrant, or even nip a return to monarchy in the bud.

The fact is that Caesar’s assassination was futile. The ruling classes of the time effectively deprived themselves of the best of their leaders without succeeding in offsetting a new era of ferocious civil wars and without stopping the ascent of a monocratic imperial system of power.

To take on such a complex historical moment in a novel may seem facile, and in part it certainly is.

But an emotional reading of such dramatic events allows us to step inside a crucial time in western history, to relive the passions that animated the era and the conflicts that tore it apart, to meet the characters who were the leading players and the forces behind them. It allows us to imagine the nuances of their personalities, the contradicting urges that moved them.

History is, in fact, always moulded by passions such as hate, love, greed, frustration, disappointment, fanaticism, the desire for power and the thirst for revenge, rather than by rational reflection, philosophical meditation and ethical motivations.

This event, which inspired Shakespeare in one of his most masterful plays, reeks with violence and pathos at every turn. A maelstrom of contrasting forces come together to turn a murder into an epoch-making event. The Ides of March was one of those times when the river of history overflows its narrow banks, rushing, seething, carrying off any obstacle that lies in its way, like that chaotic force which the Greeks called anagkh meaning ‘necessity’ or ‘ineluctability’ that nothing and no one can govern until it finds enough room to spread out freely again and flow forward in peace.

Caesar’s story mirrors the greatness and the meanness of power and its illusions. In the end a man’s body lies lifeless, pierced by twenty-three dagger wounds, while the ‘victors’ have already lost and even been condemned. And this because history follows a path that neglects to consider the plans, dreams and desires of men, a path that is, finally, in great part a mystery.

T
HE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
of this novel concentrates on the eight days preceding the Ides of March, associating figures who actually existed with fictional characters.

The race from Cisalpine Gaul to Rome of Publius Sextius and his pursuers visits places, including some stations and inns, which are actually mentioned in ancient itineraries (notably the
Tabula Peutingeriana
), a thirteenth-century copy of an ancient Roman map that showed all the military routes of the Empire, currently conserved at the Hofbibliothek of Vienna) along with others that are fictitious. The
cursus publicus
, that is, the Roman Empire’s postal system, was established by Augustus. Thus in Caesar’s time it did not yet exist, but we can assume that basic structures like the inns (
cauponae
), way stations (
mansiones
) and horse-changing stations (
mutationes
) were already in use.

As far as the correspondence between Cicero and Atticus is concerned, although a number of their letters have been preserved and published, the ones appearing here are wholly imaginary.

V.M.M.

Characters

A
NTISTIUS
– Caesar’s doctor. The character is inspired by the doctor of the same name who, according to Suetonius (
Caesar
82) autopsied the murdered dictator’s body. He concluded that only one of all twenty-three stab wounds was fatal – the second.

A
RTEMIDORUS
of Cnidus – The character is inspired by a Greek teacher who actually existed. He frequented the home of Brutus and was familiar with some of the other conspirators. On the Ides of March he handed Caesar a scroll with a list of the conspirators, but Caesar, pressed by the throng, never opened it. He was holding it in his hand when he was murdered.

B
AEBIUS
C
ARBO
– Fictional character. Legionary stationed at an inn and postal-exchange station. Naive and a bit presumptuous, he takes his responsibilities to legendary front-line centurion Publius Sextius, known as ‘the Cane’, so seriously that he is over-zealous in his reaction to Rufus and impedes him from carrying out his mission.

C
AIUS
C
ASSIUS
L
ONGINUS
– Conspirator. Representative of the most extremist elements of the conspiracy and organizer of the same, along with Brutus. Quaestor under Crassus in the East during the Parthian War (53 BC), he survived the rout of the Battle of Carrhae. He later became a supporter of Pompey but, like many others, reconciled with Caesar and was nominated
praetor peregrinus
(magistrate for foreign residents) in 44 BC. After the Ides, the Senate made him governor of Syria. In 42 BC, certain that his side had lost at Philippi, he committed suicide. He was a devotee of Epicurean philosophy.

C
AIUS
S
ERVILIUS
C
ASCA
– Conspirator. Brother of Publius, he killed himself after the battle of Philippi in 42 BC.

C
AIUS
T
REBONIUS
– Conspirator. A general and veteran of the Gallic War, he commanded the siege of Marseilles (Massilia) and was responsible for the repression of Pompey’s supporters in Spain. The year before the conspiracy, at Narbonne (Narbo), he had informed Antony of the plot to murder Caesar, putting both men in an embarrassing position, since Antony apparently kept the plot secret. On the Ides of March it was he – according to Cicero and Plutarch – who chatted with Antony to prevent him from entering the Senate. The governor of Asia, he was killed at Smyrna on the orders of P. Cornelius Dolabella, proconsul of Syria and sympathizer of Mark Antony.

C
ALPURNIA
– Caesar’s wife, daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. According to Plutarch (
Caesar
63) she was an honourable, intelligent woman. The day before the Ides of March, she had a premonition of her husband’s murder and tried in vain to stop Caesar from going to the Senate. She is said to have always remained faithful to his memory.

C
ANIDIUS
– Fictional character. Brutus’s head servant, distinguished by his blind obedience and his perfidious ransacking of Artemidorus’s library.

C
ASSIUS
P
ARMENSIS
– Played a secondary role in the conspiracy. After fighting at Philippi in 42 BC at Brutus’s side, he joined up first with Sextus Pompey and later with Antony. In 31 BC, after Actium, he fled to Athens where he was murdered by a hired killer probably working for Octavian. He was probably the last of the conspirators to die. A respected man of letters, he was mentioned by Horace in his Epistles (I, 4).

C
LEOPATRA
VII – The last queen of Egypt. Universally acknowledged to be a woman of great charm and beauty, she probably had considerable political skills as well. Daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes, she was meant to govern Egypt with her younger brother and husband Ptolemy XIII, who was a minor at the time. Achillas, the royal prefect and army commander (responsible for Pompey’s murder), was keen to safeguard his own claim to power and forced Cleopatra to flee to Alexandria, where she became Caesar’s lover. She gave birth to Ptolemy Caesar, known as Caesarion (‘little Caesar’), and had grand designs for the child’s future. The queen’s immense ambitions were frustrated by Caesar’s assassination. She returned to Egypt and found a new, powerful protector in Antony, whom she married in 37 BC. The ill-fated naval battle against Octavian in 31 BC at Actium forced first Antony, and then Cleopatra, to commit suicide. She dramatically poisoned herself by inducing an asp to bite her.

D
ECIMUS
J
UNIUS
B
RUTUS
A
LBINUS
– Conspirator. Caesar’s trusted friend, listed among the heirs in his will. A general, he was one of Caesar’s most valiant officers and distinguished himself in several campaigns, playing a key role in the siege of Marseilles (Massilia) as commander of the fleet. Praetor in 45 and 44 BC; Caesar had designated him consul in 42 BC. He was instrumental in the success of the conspiracy, personally persuading a reluctant Caesar to go to the Senate on the Ides of March. After the War of Modena (Mutina) the following year against Antony, his position became untenable and he tried to reach Brutus and Cassius in Macedonia, but was assassinated on his way there.