Augustus (8 page)

He much enjoyed having sex with women, a weakness that won him considerable sympathy, writes Plutarch, “for he often helped others in their love affairs and always accepted with good humour the jokes they made about his own.” When he was in funds, he showered money on his friends and was usually generous to soldiers under his command.

Few senators had any appetite for civil war; in December 50
B.C.
the Senate voted by a huge majority that Pompey and Caesar, both of whom had armies, should demobilize. It looked as if peace would break out, a prospect that the die-hard consul Marcellus, Octavia’s husband, was determined to avoid. He believed that Caesar would be easily defeated on the battlefield, and wanted to see him eliminated. He decided to act decisively. Without senatorial approval or the other consul’s consent, he put a sword in Pompey’s hand and gave him authority to defend the state.

On January 7, the Senate acknowledged that matters were now past recall and declared a state of emergency. Fearing for their lives, Antony and other supporters of Caesar fled to their commander, who was waiting at the little river Rubicon in northern Italy, which separated his province of Cisalpine Gaul from Roman territory proper.

While these high events unfolded, Philippus will have felt obliged to be at the heart of affairs in Rome, as would Atia as a close relative of Caesar’s. There was much at stake, and a threat to Caesar could be equally a threat to them. However, they quietly sent Gaius to one of his father’s country places, near Velitrae, where he would be out of harm’s way.

During the night of January 10, in the full knowledge that he was launching a civil war, Caesar ordered his soldiers, all passionately loyal to him, to invade Italy.

“Let the dice fly high!” he said, as if he were playing a game of chance.

There was panic in Rome. The consuls fled southward. Pompey, whom the Senate appointed commander in chief, gave up Italy as a lost cause and sailed to Greece. His idea was to recruit a large army from the eastern provinces. He would invade Italy when he was ready and, with the help of some legions in Spain, crush Caesar as if in a pincer.

Caesar had hoped to catch Pompey, but just missed him. So, after a whirlwind stay at Rome, he rushed off to Spain. A praetor, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, was instructed to look after his interests in the city, and Mark Antony was put in command of the troops remaining in Italy and given the responsibility for its administration.

Caesar was a master of the art of persuasion. When senior opponents fell into his hands, he did not take revenge, as expected, and execute them. Instead, he freed them all. Clemency was to be “the new style of conquest.” Some middle-of-the-road senators gratefully took the hint and returned without fanfare to the capital.

Philippus was on tenterhooks, knowing that he would soon have to choose sides. He had left Rome with everyone else, but not for Pompey’s camp. We hear of him a few weeks later in Naples, then a charming city founded by Greek colonists and called variously Parthenope or Neapolis. But, uncommitted as ever, he did not cross over to join Pompey, and eventually Caesar gave him leave to travel abroad if he wished (there is no evidence that, in the event, he took up this permission). Interestingly, the bellicose Marcellus, who as consul had precipitated the fighting, belatedly remembered into which family he had married, began to regret his bold stand, and unobtrusively slid into neutrality.

What Gaius made of these fine judgments and cautious calculations is unknown. His health was delicate and he did not have the full-blooded Roman delight in soldiering. So it may be that he was less impressed than others by Caesar’s extraordinary military adventures in Gaul. It should be borne in mind that, unless in infancy, he had never met his great-uncle, who had left Rome for his governorship when Gaius was only four years old. If their paths did cross in his earliest years, Gaius would have had at most a dim memory of his celebrated relative.

At the very least, though, the boy would have known all about the sensational doings of the head of the Julian clan: they must have been a frequent, sometimes anxious topic of conversation among his relatives.

Letters arrived in Rome from Spain. After some early setbacks when he had been cornered by flash floods, Caesar had won a brilliant campaign of maneuver with minimum bloodshed. With the western arm of Pompey’s pincers put out of action, he returned to Rome, where he was voted dictator. He made sure that at last he won the much-disputed consulship of 48
B.C.
, the prize for which he had set off the conflagration.

We may guess that Philippus visited Rome with Atia and Gaius and was present at Senate meetings as one of the few ex-consuls in Italy. So at some time during these eleven action-crammed days during the late autumn of 49
B.C.
, a momentous but inevitably brief encounter may have taken place between a busy fifty-one-year-old man at the height of his fame and his powers and an unknown teenager in his fifteenth year. Caesar would have had no time to make a considered judgment of Gaius, except perhaps for noting that he seemed a bright boy who had promise.

Then Caesar was off again—down to Brundisium and overseas to seek out his great rival Pompey.

Rome reverted to its default setting of worried waiting. Once again, the news seesawed. Letters traveled unpredictably back to Italy through messengers dispatched by participants, whether by the northern land route or, once spring had set in, over the dangerous seas.

In mid-August of 48
B.C.
, astonishing reports reached the city. Pompey’s army had been utterly defeated in a great battle near the town of Pharsalus in central Greece. Fifteen thousand of his legionaries were dead, against only two hundred of Caesar’s. The Republic’s commander in chief had survived, but promptly disappeared, presumably making his way eastward. Caesar followed. For the moment, no one knew where either man was.

In Rome, the immediate reaction was to accept that Caesar had become the first man in the state. He was awarded unprecedented honors and powers. In the middle of September, within a few weeks of the battle, Caesar was nominated dictator for a year (the usual limit was six months), and Mark Antony was proclaimed his deputy as
magister equitum,
master of the horse.

It emerged that Pompey had fled to Egypt, where he hoped that the boy pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, would give him refuge and a base from which he might be able to recruit a new army in Asia Minor and raise the resources to pay for it. The king’s advisers, feeling that it was far too dangerous to become implicated in someone else’s civil war on what looked like the losing side, and wishing to ingratiate themselves with the winner, had the defeated general killed even before he landed on Egyptian soil.

Caesar arrived in Alexandria on October 2 in hot pursuit. To his public disgust, but also his private relief, he was presented with Pompey’s head. He refused to look at it and shed a well-judged tear; but he accepted the dead man’s signet ring as evidence to send to Italy. Roman public opinion was saddened, but not surprised, when it learned a month later of the death. As Caesar remarked of Pompey during the campaign in Greece, “He does not know how to win wars.”

It was at this high point of his great-uncle’s career that Gaius stepped out from the shadows of childhood and joined the adult community.

III

A POLITICAL MASTER CLASS

48–46
B.C.

The ceremony was a crucial rite of passage. Before leaving his house, Gaius dedicated a key symbol of his childhood to the
lares,
the divine spirits that protected a home. This symbol was the
bulla,
an amulet, usually made of gold, that hung around his neck. After the dedication, he offered the
lares
a sacrifice at the small altar and shrine in their honor in the main hall, or atrium.

Surrounded by his family, friends, and supporters, the young man stepped out of doors and walked to the Forum, Rome’s main square in the city center, where he exchanged his boy’s toga with the red stripe for the pure white gown of manhood, the
toga virilis
. (Only if he was elected to the Senate or to a priesthood would a man again be entitled to sport the red stripe.)

While Gaius was putting on the toga, he tore his undertunic on both sides, so that it fell to his feet, leaving him naked except for a loincloth. On the face of it this was a bad omen, but with some presence of mind, he quipped: “I shall have the whole Senatorial Order at my feet.” This boyish comeback is almost certainly an invention, although it has a certain astuteness characteristic of the man into whom he grew.

Gaius had been taught to understand the importance of religious ritual; he would grow up to become a devout and superstitious traditionalist. For the Romans, religion had little to do with individual spirituality or with theological doctrine; rather, its task was to ensure that the gods were not offended and that their intentions were identified and publicized. The chief mechanism for these purposes was a complex web of rituals, including animal sacrifice.

It is hard to exaggerate the centrality of the ceremonial killing of animals to Roman religion. Animal sacrifice was a common feature of daily life, the means by which anyone could give thanks to the gods, ask them for a favor, or find out what their wishes were. Domestic animals—lambs, or young steers, or chickens—were killed in large numbers, their throats slit with a special knife and their blood gathered in a shallow dish for pouring on the altar. The meat was cooked, formally offered to the relevant god, and then eaten. Altars swam in the detritus of death.

Religious ceremonies had to be conducted with absolute accuracy; if a mistake was made or if there was some interruption—for example, if a rat squeaked or a priest’s hat fell off—the entire procedure had to be repeated.

In the earliest times, the Romans were animists; that is, they believed that
numina,
spirits, lived inside all natural objects—trees, rivers, dwellings. As time passed, they settled on a list of named deities, who looked and behaved like humans. Most of them were taken to have counterparts in the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. Rome’s Jupiter was the same as Zeus; Juno, Hera; Minerva, Athena; Mercury, Hermes; Venus, Aphrodite; Mars, Ares; and so on. Apollo was the same in both languages. As the Republic’s horizons expanded, equivalences were found with the deities of other, non–Greco-Roman cultures.

There were few corners of a Roman’s life—whether public or private—that were not governed by ritual. Every home had a shrine to its
lares
and to its
penates,
the deities of the household stores.

In public life, a priest-king, the
rex sacrorum
(literally, “king of holy things”), performed sacrifices that had once been the king’s duty. Beneath him there were two colleges of priests—the
pontifices,
or pontiffs, and, in second place, the augurs. There was no separate class of “religious” specialists, like vicars or bishops; all the priests (except for the
rex sacrorum
) were practicing politicians.

The
pontifices
decided the dates of annual festivals and kept a record of the major events of every year, the Annals. Some days were believed to be lucky (
fasti
) and some accursed (
nefasti
). Public business could be conducted only on a lucky day, and the
pontifices
decided which days fell into which category.

On major public occasions, the augurs took the “auspices,” a word that originally meant “signs from birds.” The augur searched for signs in the song or flight of birds, in thunder and lightning, or in the movement of animals, which he would then interpret. Portents could also be detected by consulting the Etruscan priests called
haruspices,
who examined the intestines of sacrificed animals for anything irregular or unusual. Finally, public records were kept of prodigies, extraordinary natural or supposedly supernatural events, which could range from a temple being struck by lightning to “blood” raining from the sky.

At one end of the Forum stood the circular temple of Vesta, goddess of the fire on the domestic hearth. In the temple, a sacred flame burned; in the large building behind it lived the Vestal Virgins, noble-born women sworn to chastity, who tended the flame. And adjacent the Domus Publica, Public House, was the official residence of the chief priest, or
pontifex maximus
(a title to be assumed centuries later by the Roman Catholic pope). He was the Vestals’ guardian and the chairman of the college of pontiffs.

The current
pontifex maximus
was Julius Caesar. There was a vacancy in the college, and it was surely at his instance that his great-nephew was appointed to fill it on the day of his coming of age, a high honor. Immediately putting aside his brand-new
toga virilis,
Gaius assumed the garments of priestly office—a conical hat made of undressed leather, and a red-striped toga—and then conducted a public sacrifice for the first time in his life. Although the procedure was familiar, the strain on him will have been intense. Animals do not always behave predictably and, of course, every detail of the ceremony had to be correctly observed.