Cicero (46 page)

Antony also met with Balbus and the following year's designated Consul, the gourmet and writer Hirtius. The former argued, unsurprisingly, for the severest measures against the assassins, the latter for caution. This
disagreement boded ill for the dead Dictator's party: it revealed a split which constitutionalists hurried to exploit.

On March 16 Brutus addressed a large gathering at the Capitol, but he made little impression. He was a plain, unemotional speaker and his performance more than justified Cicero's low opinion of the Attic style of oratory. He let it be known that, had
he
been asked to give an address, he would have spoken much more passionately.

The conspirators stayed away from the Senate on the following day, although they were invited to attend. Die-hard Caesarians were a minority, but a lively debate started as to whether to declare Caesar a tyrant and give immunity to the assassins. Antony interrupted and went straight to the point. He ruled that if Caesar was condemned, it followed that his appointments would be illegal. Was this what the Senate wanted? Self-interest immediately concentrated minds. Senators jumped up and protested against having to go through another round of elections. Dolabella, so strong in his denunciation of the Dictator and all his works the previous day, was first among them, for he knew that his own position as Consul would be at risk.

Privately Cicero would have much preferred to have drawn a line under the past and agreed on a new start. But with veterans surrounding the meeting and Senators fearful of losing their offices and provincial commands, that was out of the question. So he spoke strongly in favor of Antony's proposal. A compromise was found: all Caesar's official acts were to be approved and, in return, the conspirators would not be punished. The formal decision was taken at a Senate meeting on March 18. A few weeks later Cicero justified himself to Atticus: “What else could we have done? By that time we were long sunk.”

One of the important results of the Senate's ruling was the protection it gave to the leading conspirators. In addition to deciding the Consulships for the coming three years, Caesar had allocated provincial governorships. Brutus and Cassius were to have Macedonia and Asia in 43. Decimus Brutus was confirmed in the current year for Italian Gaul, where he would be the first conspirator to take charge of an army, for two legions were stationed there. If trouble arose, these provinces would provide power bases where the conspirators could legitimately establish themselves.

A
S
the Senate was about to break up, a noisy discussion broke out over
Caesar's will. His father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, was asked not to announce its contents or conduct a public funeral for fear of disturbances. He angrily refused and, after renewed debate, permission was granted.

When published, the will inflamed opinion on the street, for it bequeathed Caesar's gardens on the far side of the Tiber as a public park and left 300 sesterces to every Roman citizen. Popular with the masses, it was not calculated to please Antony, for it also disclosed that the chief heir to the Dictator's fortune was Caius Octavius, his eighteen-year-old grandnephew. He was also designated as his adoptive son; from now on his formal name would be Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus (in English, Octavian). The news came as a complete surprise to everyone, including its young beneficiary. The will concerned his personal estate and did not mean that Caesar was giving him the Republic. Antony saw himself as the inheritor of Caesar's political legacy and that was how he meant it to remain. He did not anticipate a teenage boy to be a serious threat.

The funeral on March 20 promised to be a very grand affair on the Field of Mars and was to be preceded by speeches in the Forum before the bier. Brutus and the other conspirators foresaw trouble and locked themselves in their houses. A funeral pyre was built on the Field of Mars and, because the traditional procession of mourners bringing funeral gifts would have taken all day to file past, everyone was invited to come there by whatever route he pleased and without order of precedence.

In the Forum, an ivory couch stood on the Speakers' Platform, draped in an embroidered gold-and-purple pall. In front a temporary chapel had been erected, modeled on the Temple of Venus in Caesar's new Forum. Piso brought the body, clothed in the purple gown the Dictator had been wearing when killed, into the square, laid it on the couch and posted a large group of armed men to guard it. There were loud cries of mourning and the men clashed their weapons.

Antony, in his capacity as mourner, friend and kinsman (his mother was a member of the Julius clan) of the dead Dictator, delivered the funeral oration. There are two accounts of what happened. According to the historian Suetonius, writing about a century and half later but with access to the imperial archives, Antony dispensed with the usual speech and
asked a herald to read out the recent decree voting Caesar “all divine and human honors” and the oath by which the Senate had vowed to watch over his safety. He then added a few comments.

Appian, writing in the second century
AD
, has it that Antony spoke with passion about the dead man's achievements and criticized the recent amnesty for the assassins. Standing close to the bier as though he were on stage, he hitched up his toga to free his hands. He bent over the body and, swept by emotion, pulled off Caesar's gown, bloodstained and torn, and waved it about on a pole. Choirs then sang formal dirges, again stating the dead man's achievements and bewailing his fate. At some point in these lamentations Caesar was imagined as listing by name those enemies of his whom he had helped and saying in amazement: “To think I saved the lives of the people who were to be my murderers.”

It is possible that in their memory of this extraordinary day people mixed up the contents of Antony's opening presentation and the dirges. It was not obviously to the Consul's advantage to foment general disorder and Suetonius's account may be the right one. Whatever the truth of the matter, the ceremony made a tremendous impact on the crowd. The climax came when a wax effigy of Caesar (the corpse itself was lying out of sight on the bier) was lifted up. It was turned around in all directions by a mechanical device and twenty-three wounds could be seen, on every part of the body and on the face.

This was too much for many to bear. In a repetition of the outpouring of grief and rage at the death of Clodius, the mob went berserk. They burned down the Senate House, not long rebuilt after its previous incineration. Furniture and wood were pulled out of shops to create an impromptu pyre in the Forum not far from the Temple of the Castors. Musicians and performers who had been hired for the funeral threw their costumes onto it. It was reported that two young men with swords and javelins lit the pyre and subsequent mythmaking or ingenious stage management on the day suggested they were the divine brothers Castor and Pollux, who had a legendary record of guarding over Rome and making an appearance at moments of crisis. Caesar was cremated then and there.

It is hard to believe that whoever designed the funeral ceremony was unaware of the effect it was likely to have. If Antony was not responsible, it must have been Caesar's family, perhaps advised by his clever aides, Balbus
and Oppius. After all, it was in their interest to subvert the attempts by Republicans and moderate Caesarians to create a peaceful transition to a new political order.

The conspirators realized it was impossible for them to remain in Rome and withdrew to their country estates. This left Antony master of the situation. He acted with restraint, discouraged an unofficial cult of Caesar and was deferential to leading Senators. A well-received law was passed abolishing the office of Dictator. Antony was scrupulously polite to Cicero, who in early April decided that he was “more concerned about the composition of his menus than about planning any mischief.”

This was a misjudgment of the situation, for the Consul was still intent on securing his power base. To this end he used Caesar's papers for his own purposes, forging documents to reward his supporters and enrich himself. His main aim was to ensure that the compromise settlement of March 17 stuck. The main threat to him lay in the future behavior of the conspirators when they went abroad to take over their allotted provinces and armies. Decimus Brutus, soon to set off for Italian Gaul, already looked threatening and in the summer two other conspirators left for commands in Asia Minor.

In some ways Cicero found himself in the same uncomfortable position that he had been in at the beginning of the civil war. This time, though, he had absolutely no doubt whose side he was on and had no intention of putting himself forward as mediator again. However, there was a problem of competence. He admired the conspirators for their heroism on the Ides of March but felt that everything they had done afterwards had been ill-conceived and poorly planned. He believed that Antony's venality and willingness to act arbitrarily was the prelude to a new autocracy. Realizing that he was not being taken seriously, he became cross with everybody and left the city. He confessed wryly to Atticus that he ought to reread his own essay
On Growing Old
. “Advancing years are making me cantankerous,” he remarked in May. “Everything annoys me. But I have had my time. Let the young ones worry.”

Cicero kept restlessly on the move from one villa to another, often sleeping in one place for only one night. He wrote to Atticus almost every day. He also seems to have revised the savage
Secret History
he had started working on in 59, in the bitter aftermath of his Consulship.

Marcus was getting on reasonably well in Athens. Atticus, presumably in Greece, was helping out with his cash flow. The boy was poor at keeping in touch, but when in June he did eventually write home his father was pleased to see that his literary style showed signs of improvement. Meanwhile, Quintus fell out with his son and was having difficulty repaying Pomponia's dowry. Young Quintus was as politically unsatisfactory as ever, having now attached himself to Antony.

Balbus and Hirtius took care to keep in touch with Cicero. He received a very civil letter from Antony asking him to agree to the recall of one of Clodius's followers from exile; this unpleasant reminder of the past annoyed him, but he made no objection. He was delighted when “my wonderful Dolabella” put down some pro-Caesar riots and demolished a commemorative pillar and altar where the Dictator had been cremated in the Forum. An agitator, falsely claiming to be Marius's grandson, was arrested and executed.

Cicero noted the hurried departure of Cleopatra from Rome. “The Queen's flight does not distress me,”
he wrote coolly. Well endowed with regal ways, Cleopatra appears not to have been a popular figure in Rome, and the death of her protector meant that there was nothing left to keep her in Italy. She may have hoped that Caesar would have recognized their son, but there had been no mention of Caesarion in his will. This may have been a disappointment, but at least she was able to leave with a renewed treaty of friendship between Rome and Egypt.

A month later, on May 11 Cicero noted cryptically: “I hope it's true about the Queen and that Caesar of hers.” A week or so later, he made further references to some rumor about her. It is hard to know what to make of this, but it has been conjectured that Cleopatra had become pregnant a second time and that she had been reported to have miscarried on the journey home. “That Caesar” would have been a dismissive reference to the dead fetus.

Towards the end of April Caesar's youthful heir arrived in Italy. Octavian had been born during Cicero's Consulship in 63 and came from a respectable provincial family in the country town of Velitrae in the Alban Hills south of Rome. His ambitious father had married Atia, Caesar's niece, but he had died when Octavian was four. The widowed Atia had married again, choosing Lucius Marcius Philippus, who was Consul in 56.

Octavian grew up to be a short, slight, attractive young man with curly yellowish hair and clear, bright eyes. A weakness in his left leg sometimes gave him the appearance of having a limp. His health was delicate, but he was an industrious student. Although he had a gift for speaking extempore, he worked hard at improving his rhetorical technique.

In 45, despite being in a state of semiconvalescence after a serious illness, Octavian had followed Caesar to Spain, where he was fighting the last campaign of the civil war. After surviving a shipwreck, he had traveled with a small escort along roads held by the enemy. His great-uncle had been delighted and impressed by his energy and formed a high estimation of his character. Doubtless this was why he had decided to make the boy his heir.

After the battle of Munda, Octavian had been sent to the coastal town of Apollonia, across the Adriatic Sea in Macedonia. Caesar wanted him on the Parthian campaign and told him to wait there with the assembled legions until he joined them. In the meantime he was to pursue his education and receive military training.

When the terrible news arrived in Apollonia, Octavian's first nervous instinct was to stay with the army, whose senior officers offered to look after him. But his mother and stepfather suggested that it would be safer if he came quietly and without fuss to Rome. Shortly afterwards Octavian was informed of his dangerous inheritance. His family thought he should renounce it, but he disagreed. Crossing the sea to Brundisium, he made contact with the troops there, who received him enthusiastically as Caesar's son. He decided, as instructed, to assume his great-uncle's name. He liked to be addressed as Caesar, although this was not to his stepfather Philippus's liking, and for a time Cicero insisted on calling him Octavius and later by his
cognomen
after adoption, Octavianus.

In taking these actions, Octavian was publicly asserting himself as the Dictator's
political
, not merely personal, heir. He felt able to do so because he realized that Antony's compromise settlement with the Senate did not take the feelings of the army into full account. It was a remarkably bold step and calls for explanation. I
S
it reasonable to believe that an inexperienced teenager would have seized the initiative in this way without prompting? It is of course a possibility, for his later career revealed very considerable political ability. It is much more plausible, however, that Balbus and other members of the Dictator's staff, disenchanted with Antony's
policy of reconciliation, judged that the young man, carefully handled and advised, was well placed to assume the leadership of the Caesarian cause. The boy would be a focus for the simmering resentments among the Roman masses, the disbanded veterans and the standing legions, and that Antonius would be outmaneuvered and put on the defensive.