Marching With Caesar-Antony and Cleopatra: Part I-Antony, page 5
“Are we really going to be fighting the young Caesar?” Vellusius’ voice was filled with anxiety as he stood next to me, watching the dust cloud that signaled the approach of Octavian’s army just a few miles away.
While the rest of the youngsters of the Legion were naturally apprehensive at the idea of facing battle for the first time, their focus was not on the prospect of facing the adopted son of the father of the Legion, just on fighting for its own sake.
Despite understanding why Vellusius was asking me this question, I could not allow my personal feelings to prevent me, or any of the Centurions for that matter, to do our jobs, so my tone was sharp as I replied, “We’ll be fighting whoever we’re told to fight Vellusius, whether it’s young Caesar, or Mars himself.”
“Yes, Primus Pilus, I know that,” Vellusius protested defensively. “But it’s just that . . . he’s Caesar, isn’t he?”
The look he gave me softened my heart because his anguish was very real, causing me to give him an awkward pat on the shoulder as I said softly, “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
The fact was that I was almost positive that it was not going to come to battle, because I had been using Diocles and his network of slaves to keep me informed of what was going on in Antonius’ headquarters tent, as he, Lepidus and Plancus were huddled together for watches at a time. It was through Diocles that I learned that the emissary from Octavian that rode into the camp had not been there to deliver an ultimatum or some sort of challenge, but an offer of a parley to discuss a possible alliance. However, I was not about to tell Vellusius, or anyone else other than Scribonius, Balbus and a couple other men about this development, in the event that talks fell through. We had been marching back in the general direction of Mutina, heading towards Octavian as he was heading for us. When our scouts spotted his army, we had stopped on the west side of the river Lavinius (Lavino), waiting for the situation to develop. Over the next few days, riders came galloping into camp, then went galloping out, carrying dispatches between Antonius and Octavian, before the two of them finally agreed to a meeting. For appearance’s sake, Lepidus was included in the meeting, which took place on an island in the middle of the river. Both armies stood on their respective sides of the river in formation, so naturally I had a front row seat at the head of the 10th. We could only hear snatches of conversation, when one of the three of them raised his voice, and it did not take long to see that invariably, Antonius did the yelling. Octavian’s body language was the model of restraint, as he struck a perfect orator’s pose, gesturing first to his army then to ours. Of course, it did not take long for the wits in the army to start providing their own dialogue, reminding me of that day in Hispania when Caesar met with Afranius in front of the armies when the Pompeian general surrendered.
“I’m Caesar’s heir and you’re not,” a voice that sounded startlingly like Octavian said somewhere in the ranks behind me.
“That may be, but I have a bigger cock than you’ll ever have,” a deeper voice growled, again sounding much like Antonius.
“Ooooohhhh, can I see it?” the Octavian voice asked, followed by a wave of muted snickering rippling through the ranks.
“No, you can’t see it. Not unless you pay me 10,000 denarii,” the mock Antonius said.
“I don’t want to see it that much. Now bow down before me, for I’m Caesar!”
“I’ll bend you over and ram my…”
“Enough,” I snapped, turning my head to glare at the men, wondering why every time we were in this situation things always degenerated into jokes about buggery.
Sighing, I turned back to see Antonius pounding a fist into his other hand, then point back at us, obviously making the point that he thought he could crush Octavian and his army. As for me, I was not so sure. Octavian was certainly not in the same league as Antonius, yet his army was more veteran than ours was, since Octavian was much more successful in luring Caesar’s veterans to his banner than Antonius was. I think it was at this moment that the first seed of doubt that I had picked the wrong side was planted in my mind as I watched the two of them bicker back and forth. To my eye, Antonius was full of bluster, while Octavian was calm and in total control of himself, reminding me of the short amount of time I had spent with him. At the time of this parley, the gamblers in the army were still betting that Antonius was the sure wager, that Octavian was too raw a youth. Nonetheless, what had always stuck in my mind was the fact that Caesar himself had chosen Octavian over Antonius, and having had more contact with Caesar than the rankers, I had to believe that he knew what he was doing.
The meeting took all day, but with nothing more concrete accomplished than the agreement to meet the next day. The camp was abuzz with speculation of how things would turn out, as very few men got any sleep that night, all the various possibilities being discussed around each and every fire.
“I think there’s going to be an accommodation,” Scribonius said as we sat in my tent. Balbus had the duty that night, so Servius Metellus, the Tertius Pilus Prior and Glaxus, my old Pilus Posterior, were there instead.
Metellus looked surprised, exclaiming, “After the way those two carried on today? I doubt it. Did you see the way Antonius was jumping all about and roaring like a gored bull?” He shook his head. “Sorry, Scribonius, I don’t see it.”
“Theatrics,” Scribonius replied. “For our benefit. He can’t be seen to just fold up his tent, but the reality is that he’s in the weaker position.”
Now it was my turn to look at him in surprise, though not in disbelief. I knew that Scribonius had a good reason to say this, so I wanted to hear it. The other two were having none of it, forcing me to wave them to silence before I asked Scribonius to continue.
“Octavian is young, that’s true. But he also has Caesar’s name, his money, and more importantly than anything, the bulk of his veterans,” Scribonius explained, and I saw the glimmering of doubt show in the faces of the other two. I understood how they felt; every successful soldier has a great deal of pride, meaning that it did not sit well to think they were on the weaker side, but when Scribonius explained things, it suddenly seemed to be more feasible that this was the case.
“Antonius, on the other hand, is more experienced, that also is true. But he’s made many more enemies, at all levels of society,” Scribonius continued. “In fact, you could say that Octavian’s youth is actually working in his favor because he hasn’t been around long enough to make the kind of enemies that Antonius has. Given time, he may, although I have to say that so far he hasn’t made any huge mistakes. Maybe his first march on Rome was a little premature, but he recovered nicely.”
“So what are you saying?” Glaxus asked, clearly confused, for deep thinking had never been Glaxus’ strong suit.
“I’m saying that all the jumping about on Antonius’ part is theatrics, that he’s in a corner and that there will be some sort of accommodation made, where the two of them share power equally.”
This made sense, at least to me, but then he threw out something that caught me completely by surprise.
“Of course, they'll probably have to include Lepidus in some way,” he sighed.
I sat up in my chair, shocked to my core.
“Lepidus? That...that worm?” I gasped. “How could that be? He’s about as useless as any man I’ve ever met. Surely they see that,” I protested.
Scribonius gave me a smile that I had seen him give before which I found infuriating, a smug little smile that seemed to say, “Poor Pullus, you just don’t understand these things.”
Which I suppose I did not, at least not to the level that Scribonius did, as he went on to explain. “I have no doubt that both of them know exactly how useless Lepidus is,” Scribonius agreed. “But unfortunately, because of Lepidus’ birth, he's important to the both of them, because he's nobler born than either of them. And that's still important in Rome. So,” he finished, “don’t be surprised if things work out with Lepidus being named as one of the big bosses, although I think it'll be more in name than deed.”
With that pleasant prospect, we all sat gloomily, waiting for what the next day would bring.
The next day, at least starting out, seemed destined to be a repeat of the first day, with much gesturing and pulling of hair by Antonius, placating gestures and soothing tones by Octavian, while Lepidus slumped in a chair seemingly oblivious to the histrionics going on around him. Just as the day before, both armies stood in formation, the sun beating down as we watched our future being decided. By midday, when the three were rowed to their respective sides to take a break, things seemed to have calmed down, so I sent Diocles to find out what he could from his network.
When he came back, he whispered to me, “I think they’re close to making a deal.”
Diocles was right; shortly before the end of the day, the three of them suddenly stood, then walked to the center of the island, where both sides could clearly see what was about to take place, whereupon the three men clasped hands in a three-way handshake. Immediately both sides erupted in cheers, the knowledge that we would not have to fight each other hitting all of us.
Of course, it was not that simple; the details still had to be worked out, so we spent another couple of tense days as Antonius and Octavian hammered out how this new Triumvirate was going to work. Finally, it was announced that Antonius would govern Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul, while Lepidus governed Narbonese Gaul and both Hispanias. Octavian would govern Italia, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and Africa. On the face of it, it sounded like Octavian got the better of the deal, but the reality was far from it. The governors of the African provinces were waging a private war with each other, while Sextus Pompey was in actual control of Sicily. Both of those provinces provided, or were supposed to provide the bulk of the grain to feed Rome. In short, Octavian had inherited most of the headaches of the three of them, but he was now a major player in the game, so I suppose that he thought that it was worth the ordeal. The final argument came over who would enter Rome first, a battle Octavian won, mainly because he had the law on his side. Because both Antonius and Lepidus were declared hostis, they could not legally enter Rome before their status was changed and only Octavian could do that, being the senior Consul. Once he made the change, he would lay down his Consulship and the Triumvirate would then begin.
There was one more component to this thing that was officially named the Committee of Three for the Ordering of the State, but was more commonly known as the Second Triumvirate, after the original of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. The state was bankrupt, for a variety of reasons, from the civil war to the bonuses that had to be paid to the men who re-enlisted, meaning that money had to be raised in some way, so the method chosen by the Triumvirate were the proscriptions of wealthy citizens. The idea of proscriptions started with the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who had initiated a reign of terror and bloodletting that people still talked about in hushed tones. Those proscriptions paled in the scope and depth of those ordered by the new Triumvirs, and they began almost immediately. It was also a way to eliminate political enemies, so it should be no surprise to know that Cicero’s name was at the top of the list, after his series of speeches against Antonius in the Senate and the Forum. Cicero’s demise was particularly brutal, with his head chopped off, his hands nailed to the Senate door at the order of Antonius, and a stylus run through his tongue. By this point in time, we had marched from Narbo, and were living on the Campus Martius, and while the rankers were strictly prohibited from entering the city, word of what was happening was quick to reach our ears. The streets were almost deserted, at least of the upper classes, who, as they had in the time of Sulla, lived in fear that their name would suddenly appear on a list nailed to the Rostra. Men were turned in by their slaves, or in some cases by other family members, while the roads were filled with men fleeing for their lives in the night. A growth industry sprang up again as men made tidy sums of money hunting down those who had not been turned in, bringing their heads back to claim their reward. Unlike during the time of Sulla, few of the heads were displayed publicly, Cicero being a special case, along with a few others who for one reason or another had earned the enmity of the Triumvirs. However, each of the Triumvirs was forced by their counterparts to give up someone close to them. In the case of Octavian and Antonius, it was their mutual kinsman Lucius Caesar, one of the great man’s most steadfast allies. Lepidus gave up his brother, although neither man lost his life, just his fortune. All in all, it was a bad business. The only people with a lot of money that were not touched were either closely allied with one of the Triumvirs and considered indispensable, or that class of men called plutocrats, who were in effect the bankers of the Republic. I did not understand why such an obvious source of wealth would escape with their fortunes, if not their lives intact, but as usual, I looked to Scribonius for an explanation.
“If that happened,” he explained, “all the hard cash would dry up.”
I looked at him helplessly, still not understanding. If I was trying his patience, Scribonius was graceful and smart enough to hide it from me. I was, and still am, particularly sensitive about my lack of education, and the perception that stupidity goes hand in hand with that lack.
“Every one of the plutocrats was in one camp or the other of one of the Triumvirs,” he went on. “And let’s say that Antonius demanded that Atticus, who was one of Caesar’s men and has transferred his loyalty to the young Caesar, be one of the men proscribed.”
He gave me a questioning look, and I nodded that I was following him.
“If that happened, then Octavian would be both honor-bound and politically required to demand that one of Antonius’ men go, like Oppius.”
I again nodded, this time thoughtfully as I was beginning to see where he was going.
“Now, Lepidus being Lepidus, would probably want to get in on the game, and suddenly none of the plutocrats are safe. So what do they do?”
“They take their money and run for their lives,” I answered, now seeing the wisdom of leaving these men alone, as Scribonius finished.
“And in hard times, the one thing that's needed is hard cash, to pay greedy bastards like us.”
He grinned, and I grinned back.
Aside from watching the game that was politics in Rome, a particularly bloody one in those days, there was not a lot for us to do. The Campus Martius is a huge area, yet it was positively crammed full of Legions at this point, so there was hardly any room to do much training on anything larger than a Cohort-sized scale. Because of what the 10th had done during my time away when I was in Alexandria with the 6th, when they had gone rioting through Campania, the army was prohibited on doing any marching out into the countryside, for fear that the men would see some villa belonging to one of the proscribed and help themselves to the contents. A valid fear, I suppose, but one that did not sit well with me, since it was because of the old 10th, and not the youngsters who were marching at that point in time. Still, it was a problem having so many men basically doing nothing, meaning that the Centurions and Optios in every Legion at this time, mine included, were busier than we had ever been before trying to keep the men out of all sorts of trouble. I was at my wits’ end trying to come up with clever ways of occupying the men or tiring them out sufficiently to keep them from killing someone or each other. At this point in time, there were a total of 43 Legions marching for Rome, though not all of them were on the Campus Martius. When Octavian and Antonius had combined the two armies, there were thirty-odd Legions, many of them full-strength, and while some of them were sent to Brundisium, there were still more than 50,000 men crammed into close proximity to each other. Given that, I suppose it was inevitable that there would be trouble sufficiently serious that the 10th suffered its first deaths in some sort of combat, although it was certainly not the way either the men who died or I would have wanted them to go out.
As it is with most disputes of this nature, this affair started over a woman, one of the camp followers. Apparently, my men, youngsters from the Tenth Cohort, had mistaken her for a common whore, one of them trying to buy her services. This may sound like a trivial matter to you, gentle reader, but the difference in status between a woman like Gisela, who took a man to be her husband for all intents and purposes, living with that man only, in theory anyway, and the woman who chose to ply her trade on her back, was huge and jealously guarded by the women of the former sort. To even insinuate that she was a whore was a huge insult, so under the best of circumstances; say, if the woman in question had belonged to a man from the same Legion as the one approaching her, there would still be some sort of altercation. The fact that this woman belonged to a veteran of the 4th Legion meant that it was the worst of circumstances, and to whom the youth and inexperience of my boy from the 10th mattered not at all, and in fact, contributed to his demise, because he had no idea he had done anything wrong. According to witnesses, he had approached the woman, who worked in the wineshop that the youngster and his friends liked to frequent. She had rebuffed him, then prevailed on the owner to throw him and his friends out. Things like this happened all the time, usually being of no moment, but on this evening, she ran to her man and I imagine that in her recounting, what was a relatively innocent exchange became a brutal attempt at raping her. At least, that is what the comrades of the Legionary from the 4th claimed under questioning during the investigation. Whatever the case, the man from the 4th gathered some friends, then went looking for the youngster, whose name I cannot remember for the life of me. They found him along with his close comrade sitting in another wineshop where, according to witnesses, the man from the 4th did not go storming up to my boy or in any other way alert him that there was something amiss. In fact, the man from the 4th and his comrades acted as if they had just happened into the wineshop, striking up a conversation with my two boys, even standing for a round of wine. All seemed well; newly found friends, much joking about their Centurions and how stupid they were, the usual things that Legionaries talk about. Then, according to the witness, a man who was tending bar, the Legionary from the 4th asked what seemed to be a casual question, about whether my boys had ever frequented the wineshop where his woman worked. Of course, neither of my two knew his real purpose behind the question, nor that they were in the last moments of their lives. My boy said yes, that they had indeed just come from the very place. The Legionary from the 4th then asked what they thought of the barmaid in the place, whereupon my boy said something that the witness could not make out, though I seriously doubt that it mattered at all what he said. His fate had been sealed when the camp follower went to her man, probably saying something along the lines of, “If you don’t avenge my honor, you’re not lying in my bed again,” or something to that effect. Whatever he said, it was barely out of his mouth when the Legionary from the 4th whipped out his dagger, plunging it into the eye socket of my youngster. According to the witness, his comrade was so overcome with shock that he made no attempt to defend himself when one of the men who had accompanied the murderer did the same thing to him, except that he was stabbed in the throat. Their bodies were found in a pigsty, which is fairly common practice when there is a hope that the pigs will destroy the evidence before the body is found. However, in this case, the men’s absence was noticed immediately, as they missed the morning formation, with neither of them having a history of such behavior. It was at this point that things could have and should have taken an official turn, the first of many opportunities, so I have to assume my share of responsibility for what happened next, which was anything but official.
