He didn’t say anything. I tell you, Sentius, there’s something about that boy that rubs me the wrong way. I can’t keep my temper around him. I said: “I would also advise you not to use his name quite so freely, as if it were your own. It’s not your own, as you well know, and it won’t be until the adoption is confirmed by the Senate.”
He nodded. “I am grateful for the advice. I use the name as a sign of my reverence, not my ambition. But leaving the question of my name aside, and even my share of the inheritance, there is the matter of the bequest that Caesar made to the citizens. I judge that their temper is such that—”
I laughed at him. “Boy,” I said, “this is the last bit of advice I’ll give you this morning. Why don’t you go back to Apollonia and read your books? It’s much safer there. I’ll take care of your uncle’s affairs in my own way and in my own time.”
You can’t insult the fellow. He smiled that cold little smile at me and said, “I am pleased to know that my uncle’s affairs are in such hands.”
I got up from my table and patted him on the shoulder. “That’s the boy,” I said. “Now you fellows had better get running. I have a busy afternoon ahead of me.”
And that was the end of that. I think he knows where he stands, and I don’t think he’s going to make any very large plans. He’s a pompous, unimpressive little fellow, and he would be of no account at all—if only he didn’t have some right to the use of that name. That alone won’t get him very far, but it has proved annoying.
Enough of that. Come to Rome, Sentius, and I promise you that I’ll not give you a word of politics. We’ll see a mime at Aemelia’s house (where, by special permission of a consul who will not be named here, the actresses are allowed to perform without the encumbrance of clothing), and we’ll drink as much wine as we can, and contest among the girls which is the better man.
But I do wish the little bastard would leave Rome and take his friends with him.
VIII. Quintus Salvidienus Rufus: Notes for a Journal (44 B.C.)
We have seen Antonius. Apprehensive; enormity of our task. He’s against us, clearly; will use whatever means he has to stop us. Clever. Made us feel our youth.
But a most impressive man. Vain, yet boldly so. Cloud-white toga (heavy-muscled brown arms gleaming against it) with bright purple band delicately edged with gold; as big as Agrippa but moves like a cat rather than a bull; big-boned, dark handsome face, tiny white slashes of scars here and there; thin southern nose broken at one time; full lips turned up at corners; large, soft brown eyes that can flash in anger; booming voice that would overwhelm one with affection or force.
Maecenas and Agrippa, each in his way, furious. Maecenas deadly, cold (when he is serious, drops all mannerisms and even his body seems to harden); sees no possibility of conciliation, wants none. Agrippa, usually so stolid, trembles with rage, face flushed, huge fists clenched. But Octavius (we must now call him Caesar in public) seems oddly cheerful, not angry at all. He smiles, talks animatedly, even laughs. (It is the first time he has laughed since Caesar’s death.) In his most difficult moment, he seems to have no cares at all. Was his uncle like this in danger? We have heard stories.
Octavius will not talk about our morning. We usually take our baths at one of the public places, but today we go to Octavius’s home on the hill; he does not want to talk to strangers about our morning until we have discussed it, he says. We toss a ball among us for a while (note: Agrippa and Maecenas so angry they play badly, dropping the ball, throwing it carelessly, etc. Octavius plays coolly, laughing, with great skill and grace; I catch his mood; we dance around the other two, until they do not know whether they are angry at Antonius or us.) Maecenas flings the ball away and shouts at Octavius:
“Fool! Don’t you know what we have to face?”
Octavius stops dancing about, tries to look contrite, laughs again, goes to him and Agrippa, puts his arms around their shoulders. He says: “I’m sorry; but I can’t stop thinking of that game we played this morning with Antonius.”
Agrippa says: “It was no game. The man was deadly serious.”
Octavius, still smiling: “Of course he was serious; but don’t you see? He was afraid of us. He was more afraid of us than we are of him, and he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t even know it. That’s the joke.”
I start to shake my head, but Agrippa and Maecenas are looking strangely at Octavius. Long silence. Maecenas nods, face softens; shrugs with his old affectation, says negligently, pretending to be cross: “Oh, well, if you’re going to be priestly about it, divining the hearts of men—” He shrugs again.
We go to bathe. We shall have dinner and talk later.
We are in accord; no precipitate action. We speak of Antonius, knowing that he is our obstacle. Agrippa sees him as the source of power. But how to get at it? We have no force of our own to wrest it from him, even if we dared to do so. We must somehow make him recognize us; that will be the first tiny advantage we have. Too dangerous to raise an army now, even to avenge the murder; Antonius’s position in the matter too ambiguous. Does he want to avenge the murder as we do? Does he want only power? It is even possible that he was one of the conspirators. In the Senate, he supported an act that forgave the murderers, and gave Brutus a province.
Maecenas sees him as man of great force and action but unable to conceive the end to which action is directed. “He plots; he doesn’t plan,” Maecenas says. Unless he has discernible enemy, he will not move. But he must be made to move, otherwise we are at stalemate. Problem: How to make him move without his discovering his own fear of us.
I speak with some hesitation. Will they think me too timid? I say that I see Antonius as committed to same ends as ourselves. Powerful, support of legions, etc. Friend of Caesar. Brusqueness toward us not forgivable but understandable. Wait. Convince him of our loyalty. Offer our services. Work with him, persuade him to use his power to ends we have discussed.
Octavius says slowly: “I do not trust him, because there is a part of him that does not trust himself. Going to him would fix us too firmly in his course, and neither Antonius nor we know surely enough where that course leads him. If we are to be free to do what we must do, he must be made to come to us.”
There is more talk; a plan emerges. Octavius is to speak to the people—here and there, small groups, nothing official. Octavius says: “Antonius has persuaded himself that we are innocents, and it is to our advantage that he continue that self-deception.” So we will say nothing inflammatory—but we will wonder aloud why murderers have not been punished, why Caesar’s bequest to the people has not been made, why Rome has forgotten so quickly.
And then an official speech to the populace in which Octavius announces that Antonius is unable (unwilling?) to release the monies to pay them, and that Octavius himself, out of his own pocket, will give them that which Caesar promised.
More discussion. Agrippa says that Octavius will have depleted his own fortune if Antonius does not release the funds then, and that if an army is needed we shall be helpless. Octavius replies that without the good will of the people, an army will be useless in any event; that we will buy power without seeming to want power; and that Antonius will be forced to move, one way or another.
It is settled. Maecenas will draft the speech, Octavius will finish it, we begin tomorrow. Octavius says to Maecenas: “And remember, my friend, that this is to be a simple speech, not a poem. In any event, I’m sure I’ll have to untangle your inimitably labyrinthine prose.”
They are wrong. Marcus Antonius has no fear of us or anyone.
IX. Letter: Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius (13 B.C.)
Some years ago my friend Horace described to me the way he made a poem. We had had some wine and were talking seriously, and I believe that his description then was a more accurate one than that contained more recently in the so-called Letter to the Pisos—a poem upon the art of poetry of which, I must confess, I am not particularly fond. He said: “I decide to make a poem when I am compe
lled by some strong feeling to do so—but I wait until the feeling hardens into a resolve; then I conceive an end, as simple as I can make it, toward which that feeling might progress, though often I cannot see how it will do so. And then I compose my poem, using whatever means are at my command. I borrow from others if I have to—no matter. I invent if I have to—no matter. I use the language that I know, and I work within its limits. But the point is this: the end that I discover at last is not the end that I conceived at first. For every solution entails new choices, and every choice made poses new problems to which solutions must be found, and so on and on. Deep in his heart, the poet is always surprised at where his poem has gone.”
I thought of that conversation this morning when I sat down to write you once again of those early days; and it occurred to me that Horace’s description of the making of a poem had certain striking parallels to our own working out of our destinies in the world itself (though if Horace heard this, and recalled what he said, he would no doubt scowl dourly and say that it was all nonsense, that you made a poem by discovering a topic, disposing the topic properly, by playing this figure against that, by this disposition of the meter against that sense of the language, and so forth and so on).
For our feeling—or, rather, Octavius’s feeling, in which we were caught up as the reader is caught in a poem—was occasioned by the incredible murder of Julius Caesar, an event which seemed more and more to have simply destroyed the world; and the end that we conceived was to have revenge upon the murderers, for the sake of our honor and the state’s. It was as simple as that, or it appeared to be. But the gods of the world and the gods of poetry are wise, indeed; for how often they save us from the ends toward which we think we strive!
My dear Livy, I do not wish to play the father with you; but you did not even come to Rome until our Emperor had fulfilled his destiny and was master of the world. Let me tell you a little of those days, so that you might reconstruct, these many years later, the chaos that we confronted in Rome.
Caesar was dead—by the “will of the people,” the murderers said; yet the murderers had to barricade themselves in the Capitol against those very people who had “commanded” the act. Two days later, the Senate gave its thanks to the assassins; and in the next breath approved and made law those very acts of Caesar for the proposal of which he had been killed. However terrible the deed, the conspirators had acted with bravery and force; and then they scattered like frightened women after they had taken their first step. Antonius, as Caesar’s friend, roused the people against the assassins; yet the night before the Ides of March he had entertained the murderers at dinner, was seen speaking intimately with one of them (Trebonius) at the instant of the murder, and dined again with those same men two nights later! He aroused the populace again to burn and loot in protest against the murder; and then approved their arrest and execution for that lawlessness. He made Caesar’s will to be read publicly; and then opposed its enactment with all his power.
Above all, we knew that we could not trust Antonius, and we knew him to be a formidable foe—not because of his shrewdness and skill, but because of his thoughtlessness and reckless force. For despite the sentimental regard in which some of the young now hold him, he was not a very intelligent man; he had no real purpose beyond the moment of his will; and he was not exceptionally brave. He did not even perform his own suicide well, and he did it long after his situation was hopeless, so that it was too late for it to be done with dignity.
How do you oppose a foe who is wholly irrational and unpredictable—and yet who, out of animal energy and the accident of circumstance, has attained a most frightening power? (Looking back on it, it is odd to remember that at once we construed Antonius to be our foe rather than the Senate, though our most obvious enemies were there; I suppose instinctively we felt that if such a bungler as Antonius could manage them, we should not have that much trouble with him either, when the time came.) I do not know how you oppose him; I only know what we did. Let me tell you of that.
We had seen Antonius and had been brusquely dismissed by him. He was the most powerful personage in Rome; we had nothing except a name. We determined that our first necessity was to get recognition from him. We had not been able to get that by overtures of friendship; thus we had to try the overtures of enmity.
First, we talked—among Antonius’s enemies and among his friends. Or, rather, we questioned, innocently, as if we were trying to understand the events of the day. When did they suppose Antonius would give attention to Caesar’s will? Where were the tyrannicides—Brutus, Cassius, the others? Had Antonius gone over to the Republicans, or was he still faithful to Caesar’s Party of the People? That sort of thing. And we were careful to insure that reports of these conversations got back to Antonius.
At first there was no response from him. We persisted. And then at last we heard descriptions of his annoyance; retellings of insults he gave to Octavius began making the rounds; rumors and accusations against Octavius passed from lip to lip. And then we made the move that had to bring him into the open.
Octavius had, with some small assistance from me, composed a speech (I may have a copy of it somewhere among my papers; if my secretary can discover it, I will send it on to you), in which he sorrowfully announced to the people that despite the will, Antonius would not release Caesar’s fortune to him, but that he (Octavius), having taken Caesar’s name, would fulfill Caesar’s obligations—that the bequest would be paid them out of his own pocket. The speech was made. There was nothing really inflammatory in it; the tone was one of sorrow, regret, and innocent bewilderment.
But Antonius acted precipitately, as we had hoped he would. He at once introduced legislation into the Senate which would prevent the legal adoption of Octavius; he allied himself with Dolabella, who at that time was co-consul with him and who had been close to the conspirators; he enlisted the support of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who immediately after the assassination had fled Rome and gone to his legion in Gaul; and he made open threats against Octavius’s life.
Now you must understand that the position of many of the soldiers and citizens was extremely difficult—or at least so it seemed to them. The rich and powerful were almost without exception against Julius Caesar, and thus against Octavius; the soldiers and the middle citizenry almost without exception loved Julius Caesar, and hence favored Octavius; yet they knew that Marcus Antonius had been Caesar’s friend. And now they were witnessing what they took to be a destructive battle between the only two persons who might take their part against the rich and aristocratic.
Thus it happened that Agrippa, who better than any of us knew the soldiers’ life and language and habits of thought, went among those minor officers and centurions and common soldiers whom we knew to be veterans of the campaigns and friends to Caesar, and supplicated them to use their offices and common loyalty to quiet the dispute that had grown needlessly between Marcus Antonius and Octavius (whom he called Caesar to them). Assured of Octavius’s love and convinced that Antonius could not look upon their efforts as rebellion or disloyalty, they acted.
They were persuaded (there were several hundred of them, I believe) to march first to Octavius’s house on the hill. It was important that they go there first, you will understand. Octavius pretended surprise, listened to their pleas for friendship with Antonius, and made a brief speech to them in which he forgave Antonius the insults and agreed to repair the breach that had grown between them. You may be certain that we made sure Antonius was informed of this deputation; if they had marched upon his house without warning, he might easily have mistaken their intention and thought they were led against him in retaliation for his threats upon Octavius’s life.
But he knew of their coming; and I have often tried to imagine his anger as he awaited them alone in that huge mansion where Pompeius once lived and that Antonius had appropriated after Caesar’s murder. For Antonius knew that he had no choice but to wait, and he might have had an intimation then of the course his life was to
run.
At Agrippa’s prompting, the veterans insisted that Octavius come with them—which he did, though he would not walk in a position of honor, but was escorted at the rear of the line of march. I must say that Antonius behaved reasonably well when we marched into his courtyard. One of the veterans hailed him, he came out and saluted them, and listened to the speech that had already been given to Octavius—though he was a little curt and sullen when he agreed to the conciliation. Then Octavius was brought forward; he greeted Antonius, the salutation was returned, and the veterans cheered. We did not linger; but I was standing very near the two of them when they came together, and I shall always believe that there was a small, grudging, but appreciative smile on Antonius’s face when they clasped hands.
That, then, was the first small power we had. And it was that upon which we built.
I tire, my dear Livy. I shall write again soon, when my health permits it. For there is more that may be said.
Postscript: I trust that you will be discreet in the use of what I tell you.
X. Letter: Marcus Tullius Cicero to Marcus Junius Brutus (September, 44 B.C.)
The events of the past few months have put me in despair. Octavius quarrels with Antonius; I have hope. Their differences are reconciled, they are seen together; I am fearful. They quarrel again, rumors of plots are in the air; I am puzzled. Once again they mend their disputes; and I am without joy. What does it all mean? Does either of them know where he is going? Meanwhile, their disputes and reconciliations keep all of Rome in a turmoil, and keep the assassination of the tyrant alive in the minds of everyone; and through it all, Octavius’s strength and popularity steadily increase. I sometimes almost believe that we may have misjudged the boy—and then I am persuaded that it is the accident of event which makes him appear more capable than he is. I do not know. It is too dark.
I have found it necessary to speak against Antonius in the Senate, though it may have put me in some danger. Octavius gives me his support in private conversation, but he does not speak in public. In any event, Antonius now knows that I am his implacable enemy. He threatened such harm that I dared not give my second address to the Senate; but it will be published, and the world will know it.