Caesar

  "Hmmm," said Caesar, "this is where we feast tonight! And for once, Antonius, you'll be able to eat and drink to your heart's content. Though," he ended with a chuckle, "it's back to the same old stuff tomorrow night. I will not live like Sampsiceramus when I'm on campaign. I daresay Crus got the snow from Mount Olympus."

  Accompanied only by Calvinus, he sat down in Pompey's command tent to investigate the chests of papers and documents found there.

  "One has to trot out that old saw and proclaim to the world that one has burned the enemy's papers—Pompeius did that once, in Osca after Sertorius died—but it's a foolish man who doesn't have a good look first."

  "Will you burn them?" Calvinus asked, smiling.

  "Oh, definitely! In great public state, as Pompeius did. But I read at a glance, Calvinus. We'll establish a system. I'll con everything first, and anything I think might be worth reading at leisure I'll hand to you."

  Among many dozens of fascinating pieces of paper was the last will and testament of King Ptolemy Auletes, late of Egypt.

  "Well, well!" said Caesar thoughtfully. "I think this is one document I won't sacrifice to the fire. It might come in quite handy in the future."

  Everyone rose rather late the following morning, Caesar included; he had stayed up until nearly dawn reading those chests and chests of papers. Very informative indeed.

  While the legions completed the burning of bodies and other inevitable duties consequent upon victory, Caesar and his legates rode out along the road to Larissa. Where they encountered the bulk of Pompey's Roman troops. Twenty-three thousand men cried for pardon, which Caesar was pleased to grant. He then offered places in his own legions for any men who wanted to volunteer.

  "Why, Caesar?" asked Publius Sulla, astonished. "We've won the war here at Pharsalus!"

  The pale, unsettling eyes rested on Sulla's nephew with cool irony. "Rubbish, Publius!" he said. "The war's not over. Pompeius is still at large. So too are Labienus, Cato, all Pompeius's fleet commanders—and fleets!—and at least a dozen other dangerous men. This war won't be over until they've all submitted to me."

  "Submitted to you?" Publius Sulla frowned, then relaxed. "Oh! You mean submitted to Rome."

  "I," said Caesar, "am Rome, Publius. Pharsalus has proved it."

  For Brutus, Pharsalus was a nightmare. Wondering whether Pompey had understood his torment, he had been enormously grateful for the fact that Pompey had deputed him to Lentulus Spinther on the right flank at the river. But Antony and the Eighth and Ninth had faced them, and though the Ninth in particular had been replenished with the more inexperienced men of the Fourteenth, no one could say afterward that they hadn't punished the enemy. Given a horse and told to look after the outermost cohorts, Brutus sat the animal in serviceable steel armor and eyed the ivory eagle hilt of his sword like a small animal fascinated by a snake.

  He never did draw it. Suddenly chaos broke loose, the world was filled with his own men screaming "Hercules Invictus!" and the men of the Ninth screaming some unintelligible warcry; he discovered, appalled, that hand-to-hand combat in a legion's front line was not a precious pairing-off of one man against another, but a massive push, push, push of mail-clad bodies while other mail-clad bodies pushed, pushed, pushed in the opposite direction. Swords stabbed and flickered, shields were used like rams and levers—how did they ever remember who was who, friend or enemy? Did they really have time to look at the color of a helmet crest? Transfixed, Brutus simply sat his horse and watched.

  The news of the collapse of Pompey's left and his cavalry traveled down the line in some way he didn't understand, except that men ceased to cry "Hercules Invictus!" and started crying quarter instead. Caesar's Ninth wore blue horsehair plumes. When the yellow plumes of his own cohorts seemed suddenly to vanish before a sea of blue ones, Brutus kicked his restive mount in the ribs and bolted for the river.

  All day and into the night he hid in the swampy overflow of the Enipeus, never for a moment letting go of his horse's reins. Finally, when the cheers, shouts and laughter of Caesar's feasting and victorious troops began to die away with the embers of their fires, he pulled himself upon the horse's back and rode off toward Larissa.

  There, given civilian Greek clothing by a sympathetic man of Larissa who also offered him shelter, Brutus sat down at once and wrote to Caesar.

  Caesar, this is Marcus Junius Brutus, once your friend. Please, I beg you, pardon me for my presumption in deciding to ally myself with Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and the Senate in exile. For many months I have regretted my action in leaving Tarsus and Publius Sestius and my legateship there. I deserted my post like a silly boy in quest of adventure. But this kind of adventure has not proven to my taste. I am, I discover, unmartial to the point of ridiculousness and quite without the will to wage war.

  I have heard it broadcast through the town that you are offering pardon to all Pompeians of all ranks provided they have not been pardoned before. I also heard that you are willing to pardon any man a second time if one of your own men intercedes for him. That is not necessary in my case. I cry for pardon as a first offender. Will you extend it to me, if not for my own unworthy sake, for the sake of my mother and your dear dead daughter, Julia?

  It was in answer to this letter that Caesar rode down the road to Larissa with his legates.

  "Find me Marcus Junius Brutus," he said to the town ethnarch, who presented himself at once to plead for his people. "Bring him to me and Larissa will suffer no consequences."

  The Brutus who came, still in Greek dress, was abject, thin, hangdog, unable to lift his face to the man on the horse.

  "Brutus, Brutus, what is this?" he heard the familiar deep voice say, then felt two hands on his shoulders. Someone took him into strong, steely arms; Brutus felt the touch of a pair of lips. He finally looked up. Caesar. Who else had eyes like that? Who else combined enough power and beauty to devastate his mother?

  "My dear Brutus, I am so delighted to see you!" said Caesar, one arm around his shoulders, walking away from his legates, still mounted and watching sardonically.

  "Am I pardoned?" whispered Brutus, who thought the weight and heat of that arm was about equal to his mother's, and terribly reminiscent of her. Lead to burden him down, kill him.

  "I wouldn't presume to think you needed to be pardoned, my boy!" said Caesar. "Where's your stuff? Have you a horse? You're coming with me this moment, I need you desperately. As usual, I have no one with the kind of mind capable of dealing with facts, figures, minutiae. And I can promise you," that warm and friendly voice went on, "that in years to come you will do better by far under my aegis than ever you could have under Pompeius's."

  "What do you intend to do about the fugitives, Caesar?" asked Antony that afternoon, back at Pharsalus.

  "Follow Pompeius's tracks, first and foremost. Is there any word? Has he been seen since he left Larissa?"

  "There are stories of a ship in Dium," said Calenus, "and of Amphipolis."

  Caesar blinked. "Amphipolis? Then he's heading east, not west or south. What of Labienus, Faustus Sulla, Metellus Scipio, Afranius, Petreius?"

  "The only one we can be sure of, Caesar—aside from dear little Marcus Brutus—is Ahenobarbus."

  "That is true, Antonius. The only one of the great men to die on the field of Pharsalus. And the second one of my enemies to go. Though I confess I won't miss him the way I will Bibulus. Are his ashes taken care of?"

  "On their way to his wife already," said Pollio, who found himself entrusted with all kinds of tasks.

  "Good."

  "We march tomorrow?" asked Calvinus.

  "That we do."

  "There might be a large number of refugees heading in the direction of Brundisium," said Publius Sulla.

  "For which reason I've already sent to Publius Vatinius in Salona. Quintus Cornificius can maintain Illyricum for the moment. Vatinius can go to command Brundisium and turn the refugees away." Caesar grinned at Antony. "And you may rest easy, Antonius. I've heard that Gnaeus Pom
peius the son has released your brother from detention on Corcyra. Safe and well."

  "I'll offer to Jupiter for that!"

  In the morning, Pharsalus returned to a sleepy, swampy river valley amid the Thessalian hills; Caesar's army dispersed. With him on the road to Asia Province, Caesar took two legions only, both made up of volunteers from Pompey's defeated legions. His own veterans were to return to a well-deserved furlough in Italian Campania under the command of Antony. With Caesar went Brutus and Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, whom Caesar found himself liking more and more. A good man in a hard situation, that was Calvinus.

  The march to Amphipolis was done in Caesar's usual swift manner; if Pompey's old legionaries found the pace a little more hectic than they were used to, they didn't complain. The truth was that Caesar ran a good army; a man always knew where he stood.

  Eighty miles east of Thessalonica on the Via Egnatia and located where the widened river Strymon flowed out of Lake Cercinitis on its short course to the sea, Amphipolis was a shipbuilding and timber town. The trees grew far inland and were sent down the Strymon as logs to be dismembered and reconstructed in Amphipolis.

  Here Marcus Favonius waited alone for the pursuit he knew would come.

  "I cry pardon, Caesar," he said when they met, another one whom defeat at Pharsalus had changed out of all recognition. His strident manner and his aping of Cato were gone.

  "I grant it with great good will, Favonius. Brutus is with me, and very anxious to see you."

  "Ah, you pardoned him too."

  "Of course. It's no part of my policy to punish decent men for mistaken ideals. What I hope is to see us all together in Rome one day, working together for Rome's well-being. What do you want to do? I'll give you a letter for Vatinius in Brundisium saying whatever you wish."

  "I wish," said Favonius, tears on his lashes, "that none of this had ever happened."

  "So do I," said Caesar sincerely.

  "Yes, I can understand that." He drew a breath. "For myself, I want only to retire to my estates in Lucania and live a quiet life. No war, no politics, no strife, no dissent. Peace, Caesar. That's all I want. Peace."

  "Do you know where the others have gone?"

  "Mitylene was their next port of call, but I doubt they have any intention of staying there. The Lentuli say they'll remain with Pompeius, at least for the time being. Just before he left, Pompeius had messages from some of the others. Labienus, Afranius, Petreius, Metellus Scipio, Faustus Sulla and some others have headed for Africa. I know nothing else."

  "And Cato? Cicero?"

  "Who knows? But I think Cato will head for Africa once he finds out so many others are going there. After all, there is a pro-Pompeian government in Africa Province. I doubt it will submit to you without a fight, Caesar."

  "I doubt that too. Thank you, Marcus Favonius."

  That evening there was a quiet dinner alone with Brutus, but at dawn Caesar was on his way toward the Hellespont, Calvinus by his side and Brutus, to whom Caesar was most tender, ensconced in a comfortable gig with a servant to minister to him.

  Favonius rode out to watch, he hoped for the last time, the silvery column of Roman legions stride off down a Roman-made road, straight where it could be straight, easily graded, unexhausting. But in the end all Favonius saw was Caesar, riding a mettlesome brown stallion with the ease and grace of a much younger man. He would, Favonius knew, be scarcely out of sight of the Amphipolan walls before he was down and marching on his feet. Horses were for battles, parades and spectacles. How could a man so sure of his own majesty be so down to earth? A most curious mixture, Gaius Julius Caesar. The sparse gold hair fluttered like ribbons in the keen wind off the Aegaean Sea, the spine was absolutely straight, the legs hanging down unsupported as powerful and sinewy as ever. One of the handsomest men in Rome, yet never pretty like Memmius or effete like Silius. Descended from Venus and Romulus. Well, who knew? Maybe the Gods did love their own best. Oh, Cato, don't go on resisting him! No one can. He will be King of Rome—but only if he wants to be.

  Mitylene was panic stricken too. Panic was spreading all over the East at the result of this clash between two Roman titans, so unexpected, so horrifying. For no one knew this Caesar save at second or third or fourth hand; all his governorships had been in the West, and those far-off days when he had been in the East were obscure. Mitylene knew that when Lucullus besieged it in Sulla's name, this Gaius Caesar had fought in the front lines and won a corona civica for valor. Hardly anyone knew of the battle he had generaled against the forces of Mithridates outside Tralles in Asia Province, though Tralles knew that it had erected a statue of him in a little temple to Victory near the site of the battle, and flocked now to tidy the temple up, make sure the statue was in good repair. To find, awestruck, that a palm seed had germinated between the flags at the base of Caesar's statue, the sign of a great victory. And the sign of a great man. Tralles talked.

  Rome had dominated the world of Our Sea for so long now that any convulsion within the ranks of the Roman powerful sent cracks racing through every land around it like the cracks which spread after an earthquake. What was going to happen? What would the new structure of the world be like? Was Caesar a reasonable man of Sulla's kind, would he institute measures to relieve the squeezing of governors and tax farmers? Or would he be another Pompeius Magnus, encourage the depredations of governors and tax farmers? In Asia Province, utterly exhausted by Metellus Scipio, Lentulus Crus and one of Pompey's minor legates, Titus Ampius Balbus, every island, city and district scrambled to tear down its statues of Pompey the Great and erect statues to Gaius Caesar; traffic was very heavy to the temple of Victory outside Tralles, where an authentic likeness of the new First Man in Rome existed. In Ephesus some of the coastal cities of Asia Province clubbed together to commission a copy of Caesar's Tralles statue from the famous studios at Aphrodisias. It stood in the center of the agora and said on its plinth: GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR, SON OF GAIUS, PONTIFEX MAXIMUS, IMPERATOR, CONSUL FOR THE SECOND TIME, DESCENDED FROM ARES AND APHRODITE, GOD MADE MANIFEST AND COMMON SAVIOR OF MANKIND. Heady stuff, particularly because it chose to put Caesar's descent from Mars and his son, Romulus, ahead of his descent from Venus and her son, Aeneas. Asia Province was very busy doing its homework.

  It was into this atmosphere of mingled panic and sycophantic adulation that Pompey stepped when he disembarked with the two Lentuli in Mitylene harbor on the big island of Lesbos. All of Lesbos had declared for him long since, but to receive him, a beaten man, was difficult and delicate. His arrival indicated that he was not yet forced from the arena, that perhaps in time to come there would be another Pharsalus. Only—could he win? The word was that Caesar had never lost a battle (the "great victory" in Dyrrachium was now being called hollow), that no one could defeat him.

  Pompey handled the situation well, maintaining his Greek dress and informing the ethnarchs in council that Caesar was most famous for his clemency.

  "Be nice to him" was his advice. "He rules the world."

  Cornelia Metella and young Sextus were waiting for him. A curious reunion, dominated by Sextus, who threw his arms about his adored father and wept bitterly.

  "Don't cry," said Pompey, stroking the brown, rather straight hair; Sextus was the only one of his three children to inherit Mucia Tertia's darker coloring.

  "I should have been there as your cadet!"

  "And you would have been, had events marched slower. But you did a better job, Sextus. You looked after Cornelia for me."

  "Women's work!"

  "No, men's work. The family is the nucleus of all Roman thought, Sextus, and the wife of Pompeius Magnus is a very important person. So too his sons."

  "I won't leave you again!"

  "I hope not. We must offer to the Lares and Penates and Vesta that one day we are all reunited." Pompey eased Sextus out of his arms, gave him his handkerchief to blow his nose and dry his eyes. "Now you can do me a good turn. Start a letter to your brother, Gnaeus. I'll be with you soon to finish it." r />
  Only after Sextus, sniffling and clutching the handkerchief, had gone off to do his father's bidding did Pompey have the opportunity to look at Cornelia Metella properly.

  She hadn't changed. Still supercilious looking, haughty, a trifle remote. But the grey eyes were red-rimmed, swollen, and gazed at him with genuine grief. He walked forward to kiss her hand.

  "A sad day," he said.

  "Tata?"

  "Gone in the direction of Africa, I think. In time we'll find out. He wasn't hurt at Pharsalus." How hard to say that word! "Cornelia," he said, playing with her fingers, "you have my full permission to divorce me. If you do, your property will remain yours. At least I was clever enough to put the villa in the Alban Hills in your name. I didn't lose that when I had to sell so much to fund this war. Nor the villa on the Campus Martius. Nor the house on the Carinae. Those are mine, you and my sons may lose them to Caesar."

  "I thought he wasn't going to proscribe."

  "He won't proscribe. But the property of the leaders in this war will be confiscate, Cornelia. That's custom and tradition. He won't stand in the way of it. Therefore I think it's safer and more sensible for you to divorce me."

  She shook her head, gave one of her rare and rather awkward smiles. "No, Magnus. I am your wife. I will remain your wife."

  "Then go home, at least." He released her hand, waved his own about aimlessly. "I don't know what will become of me! I don't know what's the best thing to do. I don't know where to go from here, but I can't stay here either. Life with me won't be very comfortable, Cornelia. I'm a marked man. Caesar knows he has to apprehend me. While I'm at liberty I represent a nucleus for the gathering of another war."