Cleopatra and Antony (13 page)

Despite this public act of self-denial, many still suspected Caesar of aiming at the ultimate prize and of having contrived the whole thing with Antony to test public reaction. Cicero later asked, “Where did this diadem come from?” and claimed that “it was a premeditated crime prepared in advance.” Caesar’s behavior seemed to bear this out. In one notable outburst he shouted that the republic “was nothing—a mere name without form or substance.” He added that Sulla had been a dunce to resign his dictatorship.

Despite the fact that Caesar had pardoned both Brutus, Cato’s nephew and Caesar’s rumored son, and Cassius, a former officer of Pompey the Great after Pharsalus and had even made them praetors for 44, they had lost faith that he would ever restore the republic inaugurated by the coup of Brutus’ ancestor, Lucius Brutus, against Tarquin. They believed that Caesar made policy in private with his advisers and cronies and then, rather than discuss it with his peers in the Senate as tradition demanded, cut out the Senate and went directly to the people and to his soldiers to secure backing for his decisions. Both thought Caesar’s death would lead to the restoration of the Senate’s supremacy. Wanting to make a clean sweep, Cassius had argued for the deaths not only of the dictator but of his deputy in the dictatorship, his master of the horse, Lepidus, of Antony and a host of others. Brutus, however, insisted that their target was one man only—Caesar. The day they chose was March 15, three days before Caesar was due to depart on his Parthian campaign. The place, perhaps symbolically, was to be a meeting of the Senate, the institution whose powers Caesar had so diminished. The assassins pondered inviting Cicero to join the plot but decided he was too old, timorous and, above all, indiscreet to be of any use.

Caesar perhaps had some intimation that Brutus and Cassius were his foes. According to Plutarch, when someone warned him that Antony and Dolabella were subversives, he replied, “I’m not afraid of these fleshy, long-haired men, so much as those pale, lean ones,” that is, Cassius and Brutus. But, contemptuous of danger and confident no one would wish to risk reigniting civil war by killing him, Caesar ignored a rash of graffiti scrawled on public monuments. Among them were the words “If only you were alive now” daubed on a statue of Brutus’ king-ousting ancestor, and the following verse scribbled on Caesar’s own statue:

On the night of March 14 Lepidus invited him to dinner. The two men are said to have discussed what manner of death was preferable, and Caesar’s choice was a death that came swiftly and without warning. The next day, Caesar woke feeling groggy and ill and reluctant to attend the meeting of the Senate he had called, which was to take place in Pompey’s great stone theater. Calpurnia, unnerved by a night of terrifying dreams in which she cradled Caesar’s murdered body in her arms, begged him to stay at home. Caesar offered sacrifice, and the diviners’ unfavorable reading of the omens provided by the sacrificed animal’s entrails added to his unease. He decided to send Antony to the meeting of the Senate in his place. However, Decimus Brutus, one of the plotters, opportunely happened to call at Caesar’s house and laughingly derided the diviners and managed to persuade Caesar to change his mind.

Just before noon, Caesar was borne by litter to Pompey’s theater, where the Senate was awaiting him in an assembly hall. As he climbed down, a Greek scholar who had learned something of the plot pushed forward to thrust a scroll into his hand, crying out, “Read this one yourself, Caesar, and read it soon. The matters it mentions are urgent and concern you personally.” The insistence in the man’s voice convinced Caesar to keep hold of the scroll instead of passing it as usual to his servant, but he did not unroll it. Seeing Spurinna standing by the entrance to Pompey’s theater where the Senate would meet, Caesar remarked sarcastically that the ides of March had come. The augur replied, “Yes, they have come, but they have not yet gone.”

While Gaius Trebonius, the man who almost a year earlier had attempted to draw him into the conspiracy, detained Antony on a pretext, Caesar entered the building. The senators rose to greet him as he made his way to his chair beneath the statue of his rival Pompey, which he himself had ordered to be reerected. Some of the sixty conspirators were ranged behind it. Others now pushed through the ranks of senators, as if eager to present a petition to him. When Caesar waved them away, one of the supposed petitioners grabbed at Caesar’s toga with both hands. This was the agreed signal for the attack. Caesar turned the first blade, that of Casca, aside before it could penetrate deep into his throat, but the other conspirators closed around, each determined to deliver the dagger blow they had promised. Their knives thrust into his body until finally Caesar, bleeding copiously from twenty-three stab wounds, crumpled at Pompey’s feet. He pulled his bloodstained purple toga over himself to hide his dying moments from the round-eyed senators watching in horrified disbelief. Suetonius wrote that “Caesar uttered no word after the first blow . . . although some say that when he saw Brutus about to strike he reproached him in Greek with, ‘You too, my son!’ ”

The bloodstained assassins tumbled half crazed from Pompey’s theater and, running across the Campus Martius, entered the city and ran onward to the Forum shouting, “Liberty!” Waving his dripping dagger in the air, Brutus declared the tyrant dead and wished long life to the republic. But there were no answering cheers. Instead, as the news spread, panicking people tripped over one another in their hurry to get home and barricade their doors against the chaos they feared was about to burst over them. For Cleopatra, it was a terrible moment. She and her son had lost their protector. All she could do now was try to save their lives.

*Caesar also offered citizenship to individuals or groups of individuals with skills needed to keep Rome running—for example, any foreign doctor willing to work in Rome.

Isis Alone

CHAPTER 11

Antony would have sensed, as he discussed his plans with his wife, Fulvia, that this was his moment. If he acted quickly, he could take control, becoming the leader of Rome rather than playing the loyal supporting role. Given his present position, restraint, not chaos, would best serve his ends. Needing to get his hands on the levers of power with as little fuss as possible, he made his way to Caesar’s house, where the stiffening corpse now lay, and asked Calpurnia to hand over Caesar’s papers and the huge sums of money in their house, which the grief-stricken widow did without demur. Next, Antony sent a message to Lepidus urging him to hold back from military action and promising him the post of pontifex maximus if he did so. Then, by dint of his authority as the surviving consul and thus the highest officer of state, he summoned the Senate to meet the following morning, March 17, in the Temple of Tellus, close to his house.

When the senators arrived they found the temple ringed by Lepidus’ troops. Antony needed all his skill to control the debate in a nervy Senate, many of whose members sympathized with the Liberators, who did not themselves dare attend. Their attempted appeals to the populace had met with a sullen response and, isolated and apprehensive, they remained on the Capitol, protected by the battle-scarred gladiators they had hired to defend them. Their fate, as they knew, depended on what their supporters in the Senate could achieve. Some senators argued that Caesar’s murderers should be feted and rewarded as public benefactors. Others, taking courage, insisted that Caesar had been a tyrant, all of whose acts should be annulled. Antony cannily pointed out that the majority of those present owed their positions to ordinances of Caesar and asked whether they were really proposing to renounce their appointments.

Self-interest won the day. New elections would be expensive and the results uncertain. Even Cicero, whose sympathies lay with the conspirators, recognized that, for the present, there was no alternative and reluctantly supported Antony. The senators hastily confirmed Caesar’s acts, accomplished or in gestation, as being “for the good of the state.” This gave Antony carte blanche to bring forward all manner of schemes that Caesar had been planning—or so he claimed. He could also, in the months ahead, nominate anyone he wished to official positions, blandly maintaining that he was only fulfilling the dead Caesar’s wishes. Wits called the new appointees
charonides
—men who owed their power to Charon, ferryman of the underworld, who it appeared was now, on his return journey, conveying the dead Caesar’s wishes to Antony, his living representative.

Somewhat paradoxically, given the legitimacy they had just conferred on Caesar, at Cicero’s urging the senators also immediately agreed on an amnesty for Caesar’s assassins. They would not be prosecuted and no inquiry would be held into the murder. For the moment this suited Antony. In the vacuum following Caesar’s death he needed to achieve some kind of political equilibrium in order to maintain his authority as consul and, with the help of the politically attuned Fulvia, begin to sound out new allies and confirm existing ones. The Liberators were invited to come down from the Capitol while Antony and Lepidus sent their own children to the hill as hostages. A formal public reconciliation followed, after which Antony and Lepidus played host to Caesar’s murderers at dinner. Clearly any vengeance for Caesar was to be a dish consumed cold. Dio Cassius described a tense evening during which “Antony asked Cassius, ‘Have you perchance a dagger under your arm even now?’ To which he answered: ‘Yes, and a big one, if you too should desire to make yourself tyrant.’ ”

That same day, March 17, Caesar’s will was read out in Antony’s house, and Cleopatra and the world learned that it contained no reference to her or to their son, Caesarion. Most disturbing to Cleopatra were the intentions of the heir Caesar had named, Octavian. He would never look favorably on a child who, though Caesar had not acknowledged him publicly, was almost universally believed to be his son and blatantly and brazenly bore his name.

Cleopatra’s mind must have been in turmoil. At the flash of the assassins’ knives, she had lost both her main emotional bulwark and her political support. She and her son were alone in a hostile and uncertain environment whose political systems were alien to her own and where she had been seen as a pernicious influence on the murdered leader. She would have known that with Caesar dead, Antony was, in theory at least, the most powerful man in Rome. Perhaps in those first difficult days she contemplated turning to him, recalling his courage and compassion after his triumph at Pelusium, when he had counseled moderation, not murder, to her vengeful father, Auletes. Yet she would not have known whether she could trust him entirely.

Emotionally, Cleopatra needed time to mourn and to reflect on her feelings for Caesar. A clever, gifted man endowed with the glamour and charisma of great power, he was not only the father of her child but perhaps also a father figure, supplanting the memory of the weak and pleading pipe player Auletes. Though she had engineered her liaison with him, she no doubt felt affection, passion, even love for him. Letters written to Cicero by his friend Atticus suggest the close bonds between them—they had attended fashionable parties together and were regarded as a couple.

Like so many mistresses through history, Cleopatra did not attend her lover’s funeral. On March 20, five days after his murder and with the Senate’s agreement, Antony, who had a ready appreciation of theater and its power over the popular imagination, staged a public funeral for Caesar. This was a far cry from the fate Brutus had originally planned—the late dictator’s still-warm body being impaled on the executioner’s hook, dragged swiftly to the Tiber and tossed into the water like that of a common criminal. Antony’s stated plan was to bear Caesar’s corpse on an ivory funeral couch draped with purple and gold cloth through the Forum to the Campus Martius, where he would be cremated on a vast pyre by the tomb of his daughter, Julia. Antony carefully orchestrated the procession, hiring musicians and masked, wailing professional mourners to walk in it, clad in the robes Caesar had worn at his Triumphs. When it reached the Forum the cortege paused before the speaker’s platform and the ivory couch was set down. Here, in front of the couch, Antony, in the absence of any close male relative, delivered the
laudatio
or eulogy.

Shakespeare’s Antony begins by declaring that praising Caesar is not his business. The real Antony did praise Caesar and very cleverly. A herald solemnly read a list of all the decrees passed by the Senate and people of Rome in Caesar’s honor and intoned the oath of loyalty sworn to him by every senator. Next he related every war and battle won by Caesar, all the prisoners, kings among them, and all the rich booty he had brought to Rome. When the herald finished this rehearsal of greatness Antony mounted the rostrum to address the hushed crowd. He played his audience expertly. Voice cracking, he reminded them what manner of man Rome had lost, exhibiting the bloodstained toga Caesar had been wearing when he was assassinated.

A wax effigy of Caesar, which had probably been concealed behind or within the draped couch, was then produced and hoisted high above the crowd. Operated by a mechanical device, it slowly rotated to reveal the all too realistic simulations of every one of the twenty-three livid wounds hacked into Caesar’s body. The crowd erupted in grief and anger, tearing down anything wooden it could find to build an impromptu pyre for the dead leader. Wailing women tossed in their bracelets and necklaces. As the flames crackled and burned, angry mobs sought out the houses of the plotters and were restrained only with difficulty from burning them to the ground. A tribune unfortunate enough to share the name of Cinna with one of the assassins was mistaken for him and ripped apart. The mob paraded his head through the streets on the point of a spear before it realized its error. Eight years previously Fulvia had, by displaying the wounds of her dead husband, Clodius, to the mob, provoked a surge of emotion that led to the Senate house being consumed as Clodius’ funeral pyre. Now her new husband’s oratory and display of Caesar’s body led to the reconstructed building going up in flames once more.

Antony had succeeded magnificently in mobilizing the loyalty of the people to the dead Caesar. In the process he demonstrated the power of the late dictator’s name and established himself, at least for the present, as the leader of the pro-Caesarean party. The moral victory that Brutus and Cassius had believed was theirs had been plucked from them. Antony had also shown himself strong, decisive and capable of maintaining order, if anyone could. He had mastered the crisis, but what to do next was more difficult. He was perhaps uncertain, like Pompey before him, of what he wanted to achieve politically—whether autocracy or some form of republican government. Significantly, Antony’s next move, within just a few weeks of Caesar’s death, was to take the highly symbolic measure of bringing before the Senate a motion abolishing the dictatorship for good. This may have indicated no more than a consciousness of the need to conciliate the more moderate republicans, but perhaps more likely it indicated a disinclination to aim for sole power, at least for the present. Yet his relationship with the republicans and others would undergo many twists over the next few months as he pragmatically sought to preserve and enhance his position.

While Antony was lauded for his good sense and moderation, the streets of Rome were no longer safe for Brutus and Cassius, and by mid-April they and many of their fellow conspirators thought it only prudent to withdraw to their country estates. A dyspeptic and depressed Cicero lambasted them for having “the spirit of men but the common sense of boys.” The bookish, high-principled Brutus and his associates had courageously removed the dictator but devised no strategy for dismantling his apparatus of power and obliterating his regime. If the conspirators had thought about it at all, they had naïvely assumed that with Caesar dead, the old republican system would simply resurrect itself of its own accord. This was, in Cicero’s view, “absurd.” “Freedom has been restored and yet the republic has not,” he raged. In particular, he blamed the conspirators for not having seized the initiative and convened the Senate themselves immediately after murdering Caesar instead of allowing Antony time to react and use his position as consul to take control. Cicero fumed that had he had his way, Antony would have been killed as well, leaving both Senate and Caesarians more obviously leaderless.

Cicero too decided to leave Rome, heading to the purer air of the Bay of Naples to wait on events. His despair at the political situation added to recent turmoil within his family and deep personal grief. In early 45 Tullia, the daughter to whom he had been so devoted that enemies accused him of incest with her, had died in childbirth. Perhaps Cicero saw her death as punishment for having divorced his wife of more than thirty years—a woman who, in a society in which only 50 percent of people reached adulthood, only 30 percent forty years of age and a mere 13 percent sixty, would achieve the remarkable feat of living to 103—in favor of one of his nubile and rich young wards, Publilia. The marriage had taken place mere weeks before Tullia’s death. When teased for wedding such a young girl, the sixty-one-year-old Cicero had leerily responded, “She’ll be a woman tomorrow.” In his anguish at his daughter’s death and Publilia’s apparent lack of sympathy, Cicero had sent his new wife back to her family and asked his friends to prevent either the girl or her family from seeking him out while he arranged a divorce. Now, a year later, moving between his assorted villas overlooking seas just beginning to grow warmer in the early spring sunshine, he contemplated the shipwreck of his political fortunes and the loss of the republic he held so dear and whose arcane procedures he was so adept at manipulating. His response was not to acquiesce in its fall but rather a newfound steely resolve to use any means possible to prevent this.