Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (49 page)

Then the Ides of March. Brutus, raising his dagger wet with Caesar’s blood, had called out Cicero’s name and congratulated him on the recovery of liberty. Cicero himself, startled and delighted, had reciprocated by hailing the conspirators as heroes, and Caesar’s murder as a glorious event. But it was only a start – and maybe, Cicero was soon fretting, not even that. Brutus and Cassius might have succeeded in striking down Caesar, but they had made
no attempt to destroy his regime. Instead an awkward truce had been patched up between the dictator’s assassins and his henchmen, and as a result the advantage was daily slipping through the conspirators’ grasp. Already Brutus and Cassius had been forced by the menaces of pro-Caesarian demagogues to flee Rome. Cicero, who had been urging more ruthlessness and resolution on them, lambasted their strategy as ‘absurd’. It was said that the conspirators had decided to exclude him from their plans because they feared that he had grown timid with age. Now the old man paid them back in fitting coin. To the sacred task of redeeming the Republic from tyranny, he complained, the conspirators had brought ‘the spirits of men, but the foresight of children’.
⁴

Naturally, even in the depths of his despond, the role of knowing elder statesman was one that Cicero could not help but relish. Few would have denied his right to it. The parvenu from Arpinum had become, to younger generations, an almost iconic figure, the very embodiment of tradition, a living relic of a vanished age of giants. Despite his gloating over the murder of their leader, he remained an object of curiosity even to Caesarians. One of these, a particularly startling visitor, was a fair-haired, bright-eyed young man, no more than eighteen, who dropped by to pay his respects while Cicero was still holidaying outside Puteoli. Only a month previously Gaius Octavius, the dictator’s great-nephew, had been in the Balkans, stationed with the expeditionary force for Parthia. When the news of Caesar’s murder had reached him he had sailed at once for Brundisium. There he had learned of his formal adoption in Caesar’s will, becoming, by its terms, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and being mobbed by crowds of his adoptive father’s veterans. With their cheers still ringing in his ears, he had set off for Rome, but, rather than rushing headlong to the capital, had first turned aside to pay a visit to the Bay of Naples. Touring the holiday villas, he had consulted with assorted Caesarian heavyweights and
made his pilgrimage to Cicero. The venerable republican, for once proving impervious to flattery, had refused to be charmed. After all, it was Octavian’s sacred duty, as Caesar’s heir, to hunt down the murderers of his adoptive father. How was such an avenger ever to become a good citizen? ‘Impossible,’ Cicero sniffed.
⁵
Pointedly, he referred to the young man by his original name, Octavius, and not – as Octavian himself now preferred to be called – Julius Caesar alone.
*
For Cicero, one Julius Caesar had been more than enough.

Even so, he can hardly have been seriously alarmed by Octavian’s prospects. The young man was heading on from Puteoli armed with little more than the magic of his name and a determination to claim his inheritance in full. In the snake-pit of Rome these were not decisive qualifications. Indeed, for established Caesarians, let alone Caesar’s enemies, they verged on the provocative. The dictator might have named Octavian as his legal heir, but there were others, trusted lieutenants in positions of great power, who also had their eyes fixed on their dead master’s legacy. Now that Caesar was gone, the ambitions of Rome’s leading men once again had free play, but hardly in the manner that Brutus and Cassius had anticipated. ‘Freedom has been restored,’ Cicero noted in perplexity, ‘and yet the Republic has not.’
⁶

Which was, as he further noted, ‘unprecedented’ – and raised a terrifying prospect. Was it possible that the old rules, the old traditions, poisoned by civil war, had been placed forever beyond recovery? If so, then a disorienting and blood-sodden new order threatened, one in which a magistracy would always prove to be of less moment than an army, and legitimacy less than the threat of naked violence. Already, by the summer of 44
BC
, the outlines
of such a future could be glimpsed. Would-be warlords toured the colonies where Caesar had settled his veterans, currying favour, offering bribes. Even Brutus and Cassius tried to get in on the act. The welcome they received from Caesar’s veterans was, unsurprisingly, chilly. By late summer they had come to the reluctant conclusion that Italy was no longer safe for them. Quietly, they slipped away – for the East, it was said, although no one could be sure. For men who had claimed to be liberators, exile anywhere was a bitter defeat.

And for those who had looked to them for leadership it was a disaster. Now, with Brutus and Cassius gone, it would take even more courage to stay behind, to defend the Republic where it still mattered most: in the city that had given birth to its freedoms, before the Senate and the people of Rome. Who was left to make such a stand? Eyes turned to Cicero – but, panicky and a born civilian, he had also vanished from Rome. His intention, painfully arrived at after much vacillation, had been to sail to Athens, where his son, who was supposed to be studying, was instead making a name for himself as the university’s foremost drunk. But the anxious father, eager to set his heir back on the straight and narrow, had no sooner set sail than he was swept by bad weather back into port, and it was there, while waiting for the storms to subside, that he learned how his journey was being represented back in Rome. ‘Fine! Abandon your country!’
⁷
even the imperturbable Atticus had written to him. Cicero was mortified. Both shame and vanity served to steel his fluttering nerves. But so too did the knowledge that it was his duty to stand his ground, to beard the warlords in their den. Out came his luggage from the cargo hold. Bracing himself for the fray, Cicero set off back to Rome.

It was the most courageous decision of his life. But it was not entirely reckless. True, Cicero brought no legions to the armed and carnivorous death-struggle – but he did bring his unsurpassed
powers of oratory, his well-honed skills in political dog-fighting and his prestige. The news of his arrival in Rome brought out cheering crowds to welcome him, and even among the highest echelons of the Caesarian grandees he did not lack for contacts. If he could only attach some of these to the cause of the constitution, Cicero hoped, then all might yet be well. He had two particular targets: Aulus Hirtius and Vibius Pansa. Both were prominent Caesarian officers, and had been appointed by the dictator as consuls-designate for the succeeding year, 43
BC
. Of course, to Cicero, the fact that magistracies had been allocated in advance, without any reference to the electorate, was an outrage, but one which, for the moment, he was prepared to swallow. Hirtius and Pansa were both, by the standards of the troubled times, moderates, even to the extent of having asked Cicero himself for lessons in public speaking. Certainly, there were other Caesarians whom Cicero would far rather have seen excluded from the consulship. And of them all, in his opinion, the most dangerous was Mark Antony, who already held the office, not to mention an army and Caesar’s treasure to boot.

As far as Cicero was concerned, even the most attractive aspects of Antony’s character – his boldness, charm and generosity – served only to brand the consul all the more a menace. As did his taste in women: after years of pursuing Fulvia, Antony had finally succeeded in hitching himself to Clodius’ domineering widow. Pleasure-loving and exhibitionist as he was, Antony appeared to Cicero a worthy heir of Clodius’ bed, and as such a self-evident public danger. But there was another spectre, even grimmer, standing at Antony’s shoulder. ‘Why should it have been my fate’, Cicero pondered, ‘that for the past two decades the Republic has never had an enemy who did not turn out to be my enemy as well?’
⁸
No doubt Catiline’s spectre would have laughed hollowly at that question. Indeed, Cicero’s conceit in 44
BC
was, if anything, even greater than
it had been during the year of his consulship. By denouncing Antony, he was effectively declaring war not on an open rebel, as Catiline had been, but on a man who was himself the head of state. But Cicero was unabashed. As with Catiline, so now with Antony, he believed himself confronted by a monster. Only by cutting off its head, he trusted, would the Republic be restored at least half-way to health. So it was that Cicero, the spokesman of legitimacy, prepared to work for the destruction of a consul.

As so many of his campaigns had done, the great orator’s assault on Antony was to prove inspirational and specious in equal measure. With a series of electrifying speeches to the Senate, Cicero sought to rouse his fellow citizens from the torpor of despair, to school them in their deepest ideals, to remind them of what they had been and might be still. ‘Life is not merely a matter of breathing. The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude – but our city is not.’ Here, in Cicero’s oratory, was a worthy threnody for Roman freedom: both a soaring assertion of the Republic’s heroic past and a rage against the dying of the light. ‘So glorious is it to recover liberty, that it is better to die than shrink from regaining it.’
⁹

To this claim, ancient generations had borne witness, and Cicero, by staking his life, was at last proving himself worthy of the ideals he had for so long aimed to defend. But there were other traditions, just as ancient, to which his speeches were also bearing witness. In the public life of the Republic, partisanship had always been savage, and the tricks of political rhetoric unforgiving. Now, in Cicero’s mauling of Antony, these same tricks received their apotheosis. Elevated calls to arms alternated with the crudest abuse, as, throughout Cicero’s speeches caricatures of a drunken Antony – vomiting up gobbets of meat, chasing after boys, pawing at actresses – were conjured. Malicious, rancorous, unfair – but it was the mark of a free Republic that its citizens’ speech be free too. For
too long Cicero had felt himself gagged. Now, for his swansong, he spoke without inhibition. As only he could, he touched the heights and in his next breath plumbed the depths.

Yet his words, like sparks borne on a gale, needed kindling – and this Cicero could only hope to procure by the dark and time-hallowed arts of political fixing. The Caesarian warlords had to be turned against each other and poisoned against Antony, just as rival noblemen had been persuaded to turn against the over-mighty throughout the Republic’s history. Hirtius and Pansa, already suspicious of Antony, needed little encouragement, but Cicero, not content with wooing the consuls-designate, was also luring a far more dramatic recruit to the cause. Only a few months previously he had cold-shouldered Octavian; now, in the dying days of 44
BC
, there were few – and certainly not Cicero – who would presume to do that.

Even the gods had blessed the young Caesar with formidable proof of their favour. As Octavian, beneath a cloudless sky, had entered Rome for the first time, a halo in the form of a rainbow had appeared around the sun. Then, three months later, an even more spectacular phenomenon occurred. While Octavian was staging games in honour of his murdered father, a comet had blazed over Rome. It was hailed by the excited spectators as the soul of Caesar ascending to the heavens. Octavian, who privately regarded the comet as a portent of his own greatness, had publicly agreed – as well he might have done, for to become the son of a god was no small promotion, even for Caesar’s heir. ‘You, boy, owe everything to your name,’
¹⁰
Antony had sneered. But if Octavian’s good fortune had been prodigious, then so too was the skill that he had brought to exploiting his inheritance. Already, even Antony, the seasoned populist, was finding himself outplayed. Requested to hand over Caesar’s treasure so that certain legacies promised to the people could be paid, he had proved obstructive; meanwhile,
Octavian, speculating to accumulate, had coolly auctioned off some of his own estates and paid for the legacies out of the proceeds.

His reward was spectacular popularity – not only with the urban mob, but with Caesar’s veterans too. Recruiting head to head with Antony, Octavian soon had a private – and wholly illegal – bodyguard of three thousand men. With this, he briefly occupied the Forum, and although he was soon forced to retreat in the face of Antony’s much larger army, he remained a palpable threat to his rival’s ambitions.

By now it was late in the year, and Antony’s term of office was drawing to its close. Desperate to secure a continued power base, the consul marched north, crossed the Rubicon into Gaul, and proclaimed himself the governor of the province. Blocking his path was Decimus Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, who also claimed the post. Rather than surrender his province to Antony, Decimus chose instead to barricade himself in Modena and sit out the winter. Antony, advancing, settled down to starve him out. The new civil war, long threatening, had finally begun. And all the while, as Caesar’s two former lieutenants locked horns, Caesar’s heir lurked in their rear, a menacing but imponderable factor, his loyalties uncertain, his ambitions even more so.

Only to Cicero had he claimed to open his soul. Octavian had not ceased to woo the old statesman since their first meeting. Cicero, still suspicious of such flattering attentions, had wrestled painfully with the temptation that Octavian represented to him. On the one hand, as he had wailed plaintively to Atticus, ‘Only look at his name, his age!’
¹¹
How could Cicero possibly take Caesar’s heir at face value when the young adventurer, sending endless requests for advice, addressed him as ‘Father’ and insisted that he and his followers were at the service of the Republic? But, on the other hand, bearing in mind the desperate nature of the crisis, what was there to lose? By December, with reports of war arriving
from the north, Cicero had finally made up his mind. On the twentieth he addressed a packed Senate House. Even as he continued to press for the destruction of Antony, the legitimate consul, he demanded that Octavian – ‘yes, a young man still, almost a boy’
¹²
– be rewarded for his recruitment of a private army with fulsome public honours. To waverers, who were understandably startled by this proposition, Cicero protested that Octavian was already a glittering credit to the Republic. ‘I guarantee it, Fathers of the Senate, I promise it and solemnly swear it!’ Of course, as Cicero himself knew full well, he was protesting too much. All the same, even in private, he was not entirely cynical about Octavian’s prospects. Who was to say how the young man sitting at his knee, absorbing his wisdom and the ancient ideals of the Republic, might prosper? And should Octavian, despite Cicero’s tutorship, prove an unworthy pupil, then there would be ways to deal with him, when the occasion and opportunity arrived. ‘The young man should be lauded, glorified – then raised to the skies.’
¹³
Just as Caesar had been, in other words.