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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARC ANTHONY
CHAPTER IXAntony as Vice-Dictator in Rome,and his Temporary Estrangement from Caesar.40 - 45 BC.
When the
news of the death of Pompey had run its breathless course through the crowded
streets of Rome one day in November, 48 BC,
it was generally understood by the Caesarians that the war was over, and that a
Utopian age of democratic liberty had dawned; for, though Cato might hold out
for some time in Africa, and other conservative leaders might try their luck
again elsewhere, their ultimate suppression did not seem to be in doubt. The
Roman world had passed into the hands of the People; the aristocratic or
republican party was practically wiped out; and as a token of the changed
outlook, the statues not only of Pompey but of Sulla, the last great
aristocrat, were removed from the Forum. The absent Caesar was given the
Dictatorship until the end of the coming year, 47 BC; he was authorized to hold the Consulship for five consecutive
years; and his person was made sacrosanct by his being elected a perpetual
Tribune of the People, in spite of his patrician rank.
Meanwhile,
however, the astonishing man had disappeared into the unknown. The tidings were
that he and his troops had gone ashore at Alexandria, the Egyptian capital, and
that he had apparently involved himself in the war then being waged there between
King Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra. Nobody knew when he would come back; but
Antony was his deputy, his Master of the Horse as it was called, and to him the
western world now looked. The first thing Antony did was to issue a
proclamation forbidding any partisan of the late Pompey to return to, or to
reside in, Italy pending further orders from the Dictator, with the exception
of two or three persons, amongst whom was Cicero, his case receiving particular
consideration through the good offices of Dolabella, his son-in-law, a young
man much liked by Caesar.
Cicero
had already crossed over from Greece to Italy, and had taken up his residence
at Brindisi, where, it may be said m anticipation, he spent the next nine or
ten months until Caesar's return. He was a miserable man, broken-hearted at the
loss of all the money—the bulk of his fortune—which he had lent to Pompey, and
bitterly vexed at the collapse of his worldly hopes. His brother Quintus, in
attempting to make his peace with Caesar, had put all the blame for his
deflection to the Pompeians upon Cicero, with whom he was now on terms of open
hostility; his son, Marcus, now nearly eighteen years of age, was turning out
to be a dissolute young rascal; his daughter, Tullia, was leading a very
unhappy life with her youthful husband Dolabella; and his wife, Terentia, was
showing him neither love nor respect.
He hated
living at Brindisi, and yet his vanity refused to permit him to proceed further
into Italy until the new government should authorize him to travel in state
with lictors marching before him and with the correct equipage of an ex-Consul.
“How is it possible for me to come nearer to Rome”, he petulantly asked, “without
the official retinue, given me by the nation, which cannot be taken away from
me without a robbery of my rights?” At the same time he was very glad to have
severed his connection with the remnant of the Pompeian party. “There was such
ferocity in those men”, he complained, “such intimate alliance with barbarous
foreigners; and a proscription had already been sketched out by them, not of
isolated individuals but of whole classes”. Wars, proscriptions, bloodshed,
always frightened him; and his only connection with armed force had been on
those occasions when he had believed that any other course of action might have
endangered his own skin. He was a man of peace, and his fears often made of him
a turncoat and a toady; but his frank admission of the fact adds just that
touch of the ludicrous to his behavior which wins him our sympathy.
Antony’s
character was precisely the reverse. He was so indifferent to personal danger
that he stuck to his friends in all the vicissitudes of their fortune with a heart
so light that he did not always receive the praise for his fidelity which
should have been his. He, too, is often ludicrous, but it is not because of any
floundering attempts, such as Cicero’s, to keep out of danger, but because of a
blind indifference to public opinion. He goes his own rollicking way, following
his heart’s fidelities, loyal to his friendships, and sometimes butting his
head against the stone wall of tradition with such force that one laughs to see
him stagger back.
In these
days when the maintenance of Caesar’s interests depended entirely upon him, he
faced the difficult situation in the spirit, and, indeed, in the guise, of a
soldier. Having once commanded the Gallic cavalry, he now dressed himself—a
little theatrically, perhaps in the very becoming uniform of that force,
wearing the Gallic cloak fastened at the shoulder by a jeweled brooch, and
having Gallic shoes upon his feet. His sword hung by his side wherever he went,
nor did he unbuckle it even at parties or public entertainments. A body of
soldiers accompanied him everywhere; and although the lictors and other civil officials
who were in his train gave some hint of the vitality of the institutions he was
supposed to be supporting, he deemed it better for Rome to understand that he
was holding the empire for his master by means of the mailed fist. He was quite
aware that he cut a very fine figure thus armed and arrayed; and if some of the
fashionable young cavaliers of his own social circle smiled at his heroic pose,
and impotently marveled at his ability to drink and carouse with his burly
veterans when the day's work was done, there was none who doubted his courage
or regarded his sword as a mere ornament.
He needed
all his courage just now; for Rome was in a very abnormal condition, and the
dread of what might occur filled the air with rumors and portents. The doors of
the Temple of Fortune were said to have burst open of their own accord; blood
had issued from a baker's shop and had streamed towards another temple; babies
were born holding their left or unlucky hands, to their heads; bees swarmed on
the statue of Hercules on the Capitol; and owls were seen in the city. There
was an earthquake, too; and in a series of severe thunderstorms the Capitol was
struck, by lightning, and a valuable horse was killed in Caesar’s own stables.
It was all very trying to the nerves, and the tonic of Caesar’s presence was sorely
needed.
The
situation required the most careful handling, and yet Antony did not allow his
strenuous work to interfere with his pleasures. At this time he was living in a
house which had once belonged to Marcus Piso, who had been Consul in 61 BC; and here he entertained lavishly,
although he was always pressed for money and must have been deeply in debt. His
domestic life, however, was not a very happy one just now, for, as has been
said, he was sufficiently fond of his wife, Antonia, who, as already mentioned,
had presented him with a daughter,—to be jealous of her; and he was very
suspicious in particular of her friendship with Dolabella, Cicero’s son-in-law,
who was constantly at the house.
Dolabella
was a heavily-built, handsome young man of about twenty-two years of age, an
aristocrat of the bluest blood by birth, who, having strong democratic views,
had followed the precedent set by Clodius and had allowed himself to be adopted
into a plebeian family in order to become a Tribune of the People for the new
year, 47 BC. His private life was
thoroughly disreputable. As a boy of sixteen or seventeen he had been married
to a girl named Fabia, but a year later she had left him because of his infidelity,
and he had divorced her.
In 51 BC, when he was eighteen, he had married
Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, a union which had at first pleased the orator because
it had linked him with the aristocracy he so dearly loved; but Dolabella had
proved an entirely unfaithful husband and had made Tullia thoroughly miserable.
Caesar had taken him up because he displayed that audacious courage which he
always liked. He had fought under Antony at Pharsalia; and now, at the
beginning of 47 BC, he was behaving
himself, in his political work, as a budding Clodius, exciting the rabble with
fiery, socialistic speeches which Antony thought were extremely indiscreet,
and, at the same time, in his private capacity, he was paying these tactless
attentions to Antonia and thereby incurring Antony’s furious ill-will.
Now,
Dolabella, like so many others, was on the verge of bankruptcy; and as Tribune
he proposed in the Comitia a revolutionary law by the terms of which all
financial contracts might be annulled, an debts repudiated, and an payment of
rent abolished. I think it is to be supposed that he had in view no more that a
moratorium which would be followed in most cases by a settlement not wholly
ruinous to the creditor; for Caesar, during his last brief visit to Rome, had
dealt with the matter of debt by promulgating a very moderate measure for the
partial relief of debtors, and had thus shown himself opposed to drastic steps.
But the mob whom Dolabella addressed, it seems to me, interpreted the proposal
in no such manner: to them it was to be a grand assault upon the hated
capitalists, a sweeping emancipation of the down-trodden from all the
obligations which in these troubled times had become more and more difficult to
meet.
It was to
be the first step along the blissful highway of proletarian rule, the first
step towards the seizing of the property and the money of the rich. The old order
had been destroyed at Pharsalia; the People were the victors; and now they were
going to receive the fruits of their victory. “Down with capital!” was the cry;
and the moderate democrats who heard it shook in their shoes, for they knew
that the price of mob-support was being demanded of them. They feared that the
always dreaded contingency inherent in a democratic triumph—the releasing, that
is to say, of the left wing of the party from the restraint of the right, was
about to eventuate, and that that catastrophe was going to take place which is
so often a consequence of a proletarian victory, namely revengeful poverty’s
blind destruction of the misused sources of plenty.
In all
ages the constitutional democrats’ most exacting task is the prevention of a
retaliatory anarchy after the overthrow of conservative rule, so difficult is
it to leash the forces which have been given their head during the process of
the revolution. Caesar, it appears to me, had not fully realized that his
personal struggle with Pompey had become in effect a struggle between the
People and their traditional rulers; and he had casually disappeared into Egypt
at a time when every dictate of common sense should have required him to hold
the reins tightly in his own hands in Rome itself.
He had
left to Antony the hardest task of all, namely the maintaining of law and order
in these days when the mob was mad with excitement at the rout of the class
which had held it down. Caesar, in fact, had viewed his victory as a personal
triumph; but the People, on the contrary, regarded him as a Tiberius or a Caius
Gracchus, a Catiline, the hope of the poor, the scourge of the rich, and,
thinking that they understood his projects, they were not prepared to wait for
him to come home to tell them how to profit by their success; they knew what to
do. As far as they were concerned he had served his purpose; he had overthrown
their rulers; and now they would take matters into their own hands under the
leadership of this fiery young protégé of his, Dolabella.
Antony
had given orders that no civilian was to carry a weapon in the city; but this
rule was constantly being disobeyed, and Dolabella’s followers were
continuously fighting with the partisans of the more sober citizens. A
socialistic revolution seemed imminent. The property-owners besieged Antony’s
house; urging him to save them; senators and politicians of the right wing of
the Democratic Party demanded that he should take immediate measures for the
protection of the constitution, telling him as, indeed, he well knew—that
Caesar was a moderate, not a revolutionary. Antony sent for Dolabella to reason
with him, but the hot-headed young man would not listen to common sense. Antony
lost his temper, and a personal element of hostility was introduced by “the
terrible suspicion”, as Plutarch terms it, “that Dolabella had committed adultery
with his wife”. As a consequence of the quarrel Antony summarily divorced
Antonia, furiously telling her to go to her lover; and at the same time he
warned Dolabella that he would oppose the passage of the proposed law by force,
if need be.
The
Senate then formally charged Antony with the duty of protecting the State, and
authorized him to use the military for that purpose. Thus when the time
approached for the first reading of the bill by Dolabella, as Tribune, in the
Comitia, Antony concentrated a force of troops in the Capitol, ready to march
them into the Forum to keep order while the other Tribunes, who were on his side,
should oppose the measure. But during the night before the eventful day, Dolabella
collected the mob in the Forum, and barricaded the streets leading into it, so
that the passing of the bill should be effected without opposition; and sunrise
found him upon the rostra, the voters in readiness in front of him, and every
entrance to the meeting held by an armed rabble.
Thereupon
Antony led his men to the barricades, demanded admission, and, on this being
refused, gave the order to his troops to take the place by storm. A furious
fight ensued, and before Dolabella and the remnant of his mob took to their
heels, eight hundred of them lay dead upon the ground together with not a few
of the soldiers. It was an appalling catastrophe; but there can be no doubt
that it saved Rome from anarchy, though whether or not this object could have
been attained by other and less sanguinary means is a matter for speculation.
Too little attention has been paid to the incident by historians; but a careful
study of the situation will show, I think, that on that day the empire’s fate
hung in the balance.
Antony,
however, soon had other troubles to deal with. The troops stationed in Campania
mutinied because of their long-deferred discharge, and he had the greatest difficulty
in persuading them to await Caesar’s return. Dispatches were presently received
that a son of Mithridates had revolted in Asia Minor; and from Africa came news
that Cato and the two sons of Pompey were in alliance with King Juba, and were
gathering a formidable army. Yet month after month went by without any news of
Caesar, and, indeed, the belief began to spread that he would never return: he
was a prisoner, they whispered, or was dead. It was not until the late spring
of 47 BC that at long last the silence was broken, and the tale of his
adventures began to filter into Rome.
It will
be recalled that Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy, the children of Auletes,
had succeeded jointly to the Egyptian throne, and had sent a fleet of sixty
ships to the aid of Pompey; but they had then quarreled, Cleopatra had been
driven out of Egypt, and her brother, while at Pelusium on the north-eastern
frontier of his kingdom, had been a party to Pompey’s murder. Caesar,
therefore, had landed at Alexandria early in October, 48 BC, to extract at least an apology from the Egyptian king for
having at first aided Pompey, and an explanation of his conduct in afterwards
having authorized his murder. With about four thousand men he had marched
through a hostile crowd into the palace, which was situated on a promontory
forming one side of the Alexandrian harbor; and thereupon, so the story went, King
Ptolemy had hurried back to his capital to find out what on earth Caesar meant
by thus pushing himself into the royal residence. No sooner had the young
monarch arrived, however, than he had found himself a prisoner in his own
house, Caesar, his unwanted guest, being his gaoler and the Roman troops being
posted at all the gates.
A few
days later the exiled Queen Cleopatra, whom rumor described as a clever and
audacious little daredevil of some twenty years of age, had come to Alexandria
by boat from across the eastern frontier, and had caused herself to be smuggled
into the palace, so that she might lay her case against her brother before this
great Roman, who was now evidently the autocrat of the western world. Seven years
ago, when Antony had met her in Egypt, she had been a girl of no great
attraction so far as he could remember; but now, it was said, she had grown
into a charming and vivacious young woman, not outstandingly beautiful, but
piquant and sparkling in a superlative degree, and having an extremely
seductive manner and what Dion Cassius calls “a most delicious voice”.
Caesar at
this time was fifty-four; but his years, as Antony knew, had not greatly
diminished his capacity to play the lover, and, after months of campaigning and
travelling, it was evident that he had seized upon this royal young lady as his
natural prey, and had seduced her within a few hours of her arrival, for the
news stated that it would not be long now before she presented him with a child.
Thereafter he had lived with her in the palace; her brother had escaped, and
had besieged them both, which accounted for the absence of news of him in Rome;
but after giving Caesar a pretty bad time, and, on one occasion, having been
within an ace of capturing him, the unfortunate young man had been killed in
battle; and in March, 47 BC, all
Egypt had submitted, Cleopatra being declared Queen with her second brother,
also named Ptolemy, who was only eleven years of age, as joint sovereign.
Such was
the news. Communications between Alexandria and Rome were now re-established and
Anthony fervently hoped that Caesar would soon return to relieve him of his
difficult task of keeping order; but the anxious weeks went by, and he showed
no signs of hurrying himself. The delay was incomprehensible to Antony, for not
only was Asia Minor in revolt, but Cato’s forces in Numidia were ever
increasing in numbers, and it was very apparent that the civil war was not yet
over. Moreover, Caesar must now have received the reports of the state of
affairs at Rome, and must have heard of Antony’s trouble with Dolabella.
At last,
however, it began to dawn on him that Caesar had made up his mind to wait in
Alexandria until Cleopatra’s baby should be born; but history does not enlighten
us as to whether it fell to Antony to report this explanation of the delay to Calpurnia,
Caesar’s wife in Rome, or to hide it from her. It seemed that Caesar, this time,
was really in love; and Antony must have scratched his head in perplexity as he
considered what the consequences might be. Would he divorce Calpurnia, and
marry this charming queen? It was just the mad sort of thing he might do.
Cleopatra was a pure Macedonian Greek, having not a drop of Egyptian blood in
her veins to disqualify her from being received as a westerner by Roman society;
she was the richest woman in the world; and there was a persistent rumor that
in her own kingdom she had caused Caesar to be recognized as her legal consort.
But would such a union inspire him with the ambition to become a monarch himself?
Would he overthrow the Republic on his return, found a sort of Egypto-Roman
throne, and set up a dynasty with himself and this royal Cleopatra at its head?
Or would he remain a democrat, a leader of the People, and forget this dazzling
little enchantress who now had him in thrall? Antony was puzzled and extremely
troubled.
In
August, however, exciting news arrived in Rome. Early in July, just nine months
after her meeting with Caesar, she had presented him with a son whom she had
named Ptolemy Caesar, or, more familiarly Caesarion; and immediately after the
event the happy father had sailed for Asia Minor to deal with the rebellion
there of the son of Mithridates. Shortly after that, dispatches arrived stating
that he had utterly routed the rebels at Zela (Zilleh) in the north-east of
Asia Minor early in August; and so rapid had been his journey thither and his
offensive that he wrote to a friend delightedly describing his victory in the
three famous words, “Veni, vidi, vinci”, “I came, I saw, I
conquered!”. Thence he passed through Greece, crossed the Adriatic, and in the
last week of September landed at Tarentum (Taranto), in the heel of
Italy, where he learnt that the faithful Antony had caused
him to be reappointed Dictator for the coming year 46 BC.
Hearing
of his arrival the unhappy Cicero hastened from Brindisi, some thirty-five
miles away, to meet him; and to his great joy Caesar received him with the
utmost kindness, embraced him, and went for a walk with him, telling him, no
doubt, how glad he was that Antony had allowed him his life and freedom. Moreover,
he authorized him to use the consular lictors; but, judging by subsequent
events, the Dictator advised him to meddle no more in politics, and for some
time after this the great orator devoted himself to those literary pursuits
which, in spite of his weak character and the absurdities of his behavior, have
handed down his name to posterity in deathless renown. After all, artists in
words should be neither required nor permitted to vie with men of action, lest
the balance of their thought be tipped.
When Caesar
arrived back in Rome Antony received one of the greatest blows of his life: his
hero reprimanded him for having employed unnecessary force in suppressing Dolabella.
It was useless for him to explain to that cold critic how unavoidable the use
of the troops had been, or to blame him for leaving a lieutenant so many months
unsupported. It was useless to remind Caesar of his devotion under the most
trying circumstances. The Dictator looked icily at him, accusing him of having
estranged the lower classes—the masses upon whom Caesar relied in the last
extreme. Antony had killed eight hundred democratic voters, eight hundred
friends or relations of the rank and file of the Roman army: it mattered not how
great had been the provocation—a terrible blunder had been committed.
Nor was a
curtain-lecture all that he had to endure. Caesar at once set about the
rectification of the mistake, and in doing so humiliated Antony without mercy.
He called Dolabella to him, and knowing him to be the idol of the mob, publicly
patted him on the back. The young man’s proposed law in regard to debts and
arrears of rent, he admitted, was somewhat too drastic, but it had been upon
the right lines; and now he himself drafted a measure by which the payment of
rent by the men of small means should be cancelled for one year. He distributed
presents of corn, oil, and actual money to every man who was in any need; he
gave free meals to the poor; and he instituted a levy upon capital. He courted,
in fact, the left wing of his party, the extremists; and the moderates were
left in bewilderment.
Antony
bore his shame as best he could, but he was not going to allow himself thus to
be trampled upon by the man he had loved and served with such devotion; and an
incident which, now occurred showed that he was ready for a fight. Caesar
regarded the property of Pompey as having been confiscated to himself, and he
at once put up the fallen leader’s town house and furniture for auction. No
wealthy man in Rome, however, would bid for them, partly out of respect for Pompey’s
memory, partly for superstitious reasons, and partly, it would seem, because
the reserve-price was too high. Antony, thereupon boldly declared that he would
take charge of the whole property, and very soon he had placed his servants in
possession of the house and grounds. Caesar, finding him thus established,
demanded a cash payment, but Antony replied with the argument that the property
was as much his by right as Caesar’s, since he had helped to defeat Pompey. “Why
does Caesar demand this money of me?” he asked. “Was he victorious without my
help? No!—and he never could have been. Why should not those whose common work
the achievement is have the booty in common?”
Caesar
was astounded, but he did not press the matter for the moment; and soon Antony
had converted Pompey’s magnificent mansion into a sort of pleasure-resort for
all and sundry and was giving away the furniture, plate, and linen to his
guests with a handmade lavish by his anger. In the cellars he found immense
quantities of wine, and the drinking-parties which he gave attracted hundreds
of bibulous friends to his doors. Every living-room became a saloon, says
Cicero, and every bedroom a brothel. No man or woman left his house without
being loaded with gifts, and even the slaves covered their beds with Pompey’s richly
embroidered counterpanes. “Nothing was locked up”, Cicero adds, nothing sealed,
no list of anything was made; whole storehouses were handed over to the most
worthless of men; actors seized on this, actresses on that; and soon there was
hardly anything left.
Caesar
guessed, presently, that Antony was thus dissipating the unlisted contents of
the house from motives of retaliation, so that there should be little left for
him to demand back in lieu of payment; and when Antony at last offered to renew
the auction, and placed on view a few of Pompey’s old clothes and some battered
metal plates and cups as a sample of what there now was to sell, Caesar let the
matter drop, apparently admitting that Antony had the laugh of him.
But, for
Antony the quarrel was no laughing-matter. He loved Caesar, and his always
sensitive feelings were deeply hurt at the Dictator’s treatment of him. In his
bitterness he decided to retire altogether from public life; and when Caesar
set out in December to destroy Cato and the Pompeians in North Africa, Antony
neither asked for nor received any command in the army or official position at
home. He was a wounded and disillusioned man. Caesar’s attitude had permitted
the rabble to abuse him with impunity, and with the upper classes he was not
uniformly popular; for some there were who dared not befriend one at variance
with Caesar, and some who honestly disliked his hectic kind of life, and in
particular his having brought the actress Cytheris to live with him in Pompey’s
house now that he was once more a bachelor. Yet the right wing of the
democratic party knew that he had been badly treated and made a scapegoat by
his chief; and there were plenty of others who liked the honesty and simplicity
of his character, admired him for being perfectly open about Cytheris, laughed
indulgently at their theatrical parties, appreciated his otherwise excellent
taste and elegant mode of life, and, in general, deemed him a good fellow and a
man of mark.
Caesar’s
African campaign resembled most of his others in the sense that it opened with
his placing himself in a position of the utmost danger, from which he was saved
by sheer good fortune, and that it ended in complete victory. He landed on the
African coast, to meet an army reckoned at not less than fifty thousand men,
with a force of only about three thousand, the others having been delayed in
transit; and for some time his chances of escaping annihilation were slight
indeed. At length, however, his missing battalions turned up, and he was able
to march on Thapsus (Demass), a little African sea-port, where he encountered
the enemy under the command of Metellus Scipio, the late Pompey’s
father-in-law. The Pompeians, in spite of a huge advantage in numbers, were
routed after a stubborn fight, and the slaughter which followed was terrible.
This time Caesar showed little mercy: besides the many important officers
killed in the battle, he put to death Faustus Sulla, Pompey’s son-in-law, the
son of the great Sulla; Lucius Julius Caesar, Antony’s first cousin, son of his
uncle of the same name; and Afranius, the Pompeian general whom he had
previously defeated in Spain; while Metellus Scipio, King Juba, and others
committed suicide.
That
strange and inflexible traditionalist, Cato, whose narrow and militant career
had been one long agitation against democracy, was at Utica, near the site of
Carthage, when the news of the defeat was brought to him. He at once offered
all the ships in the harbor to those who desired to make their escape, but
stated that he himself would remain where he was. That night at supper he drank
heavily, as, indeed, he had been doing for some months, and then began to talk
vehemently in praise of the Stoic philosophy which advocated suicide in the
last resort as a means of preserving a man’s mastery over adverse
circumstances. He was very excited, and Plutarch tells us that in a fit of
anger he hit one of the servants so resounding a blow with his fist that his
hand was severely damaged. It was obvious that he intended to make away with
himself during the night, and his friends therefore took his sword from his
bedside; but when he discovered the loss he turned upon them irritably, saying
“Why don't you bind my hands behind my back?—I want no sword to put an end to
myself: I need only hold my breath, or knock my brains out against the wall”.
He insisted upon the sword being returned to him, saying, when he had it again,
“Now I am master of myself!”—and presently, finding himself anxiously watched,
he asked whether they really thought they could keep a man alive against his
will. “Can you give me any reason”, he demanded, “to prove that it will not be
unworthy of Cato, when he can find his safety in no other way, to ask it from
his enemy?”
He then
seated himself in his bedroom, and began to read the Phaedo, Plato’s treatise on the soul, until, at dawn, he lay down
on his bed and slept. Then, being awakened by the singing of the birds outside
and the light of the sun, and finding himself alone, he seized the sword and
drove it into his stomach, ripping himself open so violently that his
intestines fell out. At the sound of his first convulsive struggles his friends
rushed into the room, and stared at him in horror as he lay now silently before
them in a pool of blood, his eyes fixed inscrutably upon their faces. A doctor
was sent for, who attempted to close the wound; but while the man was turning
to reach for the bandages, Cato suddenly tore the gash wider open with his two
hands, pulled out the intestines again, and a few moments later expired.
Caesar
marched into Utica during the morning, and when he heard of his enemy’s death
he is said to have expressed sincere regret. “Cato, I grudge you your death”,
he exclaimed, “as much as you grudged me the privilege of giving you your life!”
It may be added that during the next few weeks Caesar spent some time in regulating
the affairs of the neighboring kingdoms of Numidia and Mauretania, and that
this work having brought him into contact with Queen Eunoe, wife of the
Mauretanian monarch, he took the opportunity to seduce her before he left for
Italy. She was a dusky-complexioned Moorish lady, and he found her attractions
so novel that he loaded her with presents, and for the time being her forgot
all about Cleopatra.
By July,
46 BC, he was back in Rome again,
where he celebrated a fourfold Triumph. The first day’s proceedings were devoted
to the commemoration of the already half-forgotten wars in Gaul; and at the
head of the wretched captives walked the noble Vercingetorix who had
surrendered to him, it will be remembered, at Alesia in 52 BC. For six years he had been kept an obscure prisoner in Rome; and
now, after being paraded through the streets, loaded with chains, he was taken
at the end of the day to the Tullian dungeon beneath the Capitol and there put
to death. The act was one of gross cruelty and barbarism, but while blaming
Caesar, one must not forget that at a Triumph the killing of a foreign prince
taken in the wars was an ancient custom having its origin in propitiatory human
sacrifice, and that deviation from this traditional course would have been far
more remarkable than adherence to it. Rome was then quite uncivilized according
to modern standards of humanity; and though Caesar could be merciful to his
fellow-countrymen, and even to foreigners on occasion, his leniency was
dictated by policy rather than by any inborn regard for human life.
On the
second day he celebrated his Triumph over Egypt, and in this procession
Princess Arsinoe was led in chains through the streets. She was the younger
sister of Cleopatra, but since she had taken sides against the latter in the
late troubles at Alexandria, mere was no objection to her being humiliated; and
Caesar did all that was necessary out of regard for Cleopatra by releasing her
after this public ordeal. On the third day the victory in Asia Minor was commemorated;
and on the fourth the Triumph for the recent African campaign was celebrated,
the little son of the dead King Juba of Numidia being exhibited. This boy,
because of his youth, was also spared, and lived to become a great scholar,
being ultimately restored to his throne. (He subsequently married Cleopatra
Selene, daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, and by her had a daughter Drusilla,
who married Felix, the brother of Pallas, the great minister in the time of
Claudius and Nero). In this procession Caesar had the bad taste to show a
picture of Cato tearing open the wound in his stomach; and later, when Cicero
published a little book in praise of Cato, Caesar wrote a counterblast which he
called Anti-Cato: it is now lost, but Plutarch says that it was a compilation
of whatever could be said against that odd and violent personage.
Antony,
so far as we know, took no part in these Triumphs, although his participation
in that over the Gauls might have been expected since he was one of Caesar’s
chief officers in those campaigns. He seems to have been bitterly nursing his
grievance at this time, and to have been so angry with Caesar that the latter
was ready to believe a rumor that he wanted to kill him. What his future would
have been it is hard to say—except that he would have assuredly drunk himself
into an early grave—had he not, in about the autumn of 46 BC, become intimate
with Fulvia, the extremely strong-minded widow of Curio, who set herself the
congenial task of reconstructing his life.
Fulvia,
it will be recalled, had been married first to Clodius, Caesar’s turbulent protégé
who was killed by Milo early in 52 BC;
and then to Curio, another of Caesar’s men, who was killed in Africa in 49 BC, as has already been related.
Plutarch describes her as “a woman not born for spinning and household duties,
nor one who could even be content privately to rule her husband, but was quite
prepared to govern a governor or give commands to a commander-in-chief”. She
was now a woman of perhaps about thirty years of age, and was, by her first
husband, the mother of two children, a boy, Clodius, and a girl, Clodia; and
she seems to have felt that Antony, who had divorced his wife Antonia over
eighteen months ago and was, apparently, no longer in love with Cytheris, nor
had any legitimate children of his own, except one little girl Antonia, the daughter
of the divorced Antonia, would be just the right husband for her and stepfather
for her son and daughter. He was only thirty-seven years of age, and yet he had
practically ruled the empire during Caesar’s absence. He had a great career
before him, she thought; and this quarrel with his chief could easily be
patched up. She knew how to handle Caesar: she had done so with success—at
least, I think we may suppose so—in the days when Clodius was trying his patience
and when Curio was getting into scrapes. Caesar was always ready to grant a
favor asked by a good-looking woman; and it must have seemed to her that all
Antony needed for his re-establishment in his chiefs good graces was just such
an intervention on his behalf by herself. He was really devoted to Caesar at
heart, and Caesar had often shown how greatly he trusted him: surely she could
bring them together again.
Antony,
of course, was fated to fall into the hands of a restless, scheming,
domineering woman of this kind. I have tried to show that he was a man of
brains, yet in many ways was what history deems him—a simple, good-hearted
giant; and in spite of his by no means negligible attainments in the world of
culture and dilettantism, in spite of his fine leadership in war and capable rule
in peace, he had just those weaknesses, those gentle qualities, that attraction
towards the line of least resistance, which placed him inevitably at the mercy of
feminine determination. When Fulvia decided to marry him, lift him out of the
doldrums, stop him drinking, take Cytheris away from him, reconcile him with Caesar,
and make him once more the second man in Rome, and perhaps ultimately the first,
it was beyond his power to prevent her doing so. Before the year was out she
had made him bring his affair with Cytheris to an end, and had married him;
while before the following spring she had effected his reconciliation with Caesar—but
the story of the reunion must be held back for a moment while other matters of
more immediate importance are recorded.
In the autumn
of this year 46 BC Queen Cleopatra,
and with her, of course, her baby, Caesar’s son, arrived in Rome as the Dictator’s
guest, and was given a suite of rooms in his house on the far side of the
Tiber. Roman society was both intrigued and scandalized, and nobody could
pretend to fathom Caesar’s intentions, for his movement towards the founding of
a royal dynasty was not apparent to more than a few of his contemporaries until
at least a year later. All that could be said was that the Queen of Egypt was
his mistress, and the mother of his child; that he was evidently thinking of
her as a possible wife; and that the situation created by such a union would be
anomalous in the extreme.
It was to
be supposed, of course, that such a marriage would mean that Cleopatra would
abdicate her throne and would become the first lady of the Roman Republic, with
Egypt, perhaps, as her private estate, administered by Roman officials—which
is, in fact, what it did become under Augustus; but there was always the possibility,
on the contrary, that Cleopatra would retain her crown, and that she and Caesar
would be regarded as sovereigns in Egypt at the same time that they were
private persons in Rome. It was even conceivable that Caesar would attempt to
establish a monarchy in Rome; but this possibility, as has been said, had
hardly yet entered the minds of more than a few persons: it was too outrageous.
True, Tiberius Gracchus had once been thought to be aiming at a throne; so had
Catiline; so had Pompey: kingship, indeed, was a familiar bogey to the
Romans; but surely Caesar, with his reiterated democratic ideals and his recent
inclination towards the left wing of his party, the socialistic wing, had no
such intentions.
A subject
which Cleopatra’s arrival also opened up was that of the heirship of Caesar’s
now vast estate. Would he recognize the little Caesarion, Cleopatra’s baby, as
his son and heir? He had no legitimate son, and at present it was understood
that he intended to adopt his grand-nephew, Octavian, the son of Atia, the
daughter of his sister, Julia, who was now a youth of seventeen years of age. There
was also a widespread rumor that he was going to acknowledge Brutus as his own
son, for he had shown the greatest consideration for him after Pharsalia, and
had now made him governor of Cisalpine Gaul. People had lately been saying that
he thought the world of Brutus and that he had declared that nobody was so hit
as he to be his heir; but at this juncture the young man spout his chances by
divorcing his first wife and marrying Portia, daughter of Cato and widow of
Bibulus, Caesar’s old enemy, thereby linking his fortunes with the
republicans—a step which his mother, Servilia, did her best to prevent, and
which must have been a great blow to the Dictator. Thus, the question as to
whether he intended to marry Cleopatra had this further interest, that it
involved the matter of the heirship; and Antony for one, though it seems that
he did not call to pay his respects upon the Queen, must have listened with attention
to the gossip which told how Caesar was showing a fatherly affection for the
baby.
At about
this time another matrimonial complication, which must here be mentioned,
engaged the notice of Roman society. Cicero, it will be recalled, had for long
been on bad terms with his wife Terentia, who was a cold, critical woman,
incapacitated, it would seem, by sheer honesty from responding as he would wish
to his heroics and his emotional outbursts. One feels that the years had opened
her eyes to his shortcomings, and that she had no bouquets now to lay upon the
altar of his vanity. But to Cicero flattery was as the breath of life, and
there had lately come into his house a pretty little girl of fourteen, Publilia
by name, who was his ward, and who thought him the most wonderful of men. Now
Publilia was not only adoring: she was also extremely rich; and it occurred to
the orator, who was at this time sixty years of age, that if he were to divorce
Terentia and marry this child, he would be able to replenish his much depleted
fortunes, pay his many debts, recover something of his forgotten youth, and reestablish
his position as a hero in his own home.
He
therefore dismissed the elderly Terentia, and married his ward; but he soon
found that the girl was violently jealous of his daughter, Tullia, and made a
scene every time he paid the latter any attention. Tullia, who was going to
have a baby, had recently been divorced by the scapegrace Dolabella, and was
living at home; but shortly after her confinement she died, plunging Cicero into
the deepest grief, whereupon the naughty little Publilia could not restrain her
delight, and went about the house singing and smiling so happily that Cicero,
observing her unseemly behavior, promptly divorced her. It was a disastrous end
to his domestic life; and thereafter he devoted himself to his literary work,
pointing out to his friends how courageously he was behaving under his affliction.
“After being stripped of all those public honors which I had won for myself by
my unparalleled achievements” he wrote, “the one solace which remained—my
daughter—has been taken from me. But I am resolved to be strong amidst absolute
despair”.
In the
winter of 46-45 BC, Caesar, having
sent Cleopatra back to Egypt, loaded with gifts, went off to Spain to attack
the last of the Pompeians, who were concentrated there under Sextus and Cnaeus
Pompeius, Pompey’s sons. Once more the campaign began badly, and Caesar’s army
was very nearly starved into an ignominious defeat; but in March, 45 BC, a desperate battle at Munda, in
southern Spain, in which Caesar escaped death or capture by the merest chance,
at last ended in a victory, Cnaeus being killed, with his chief general,
Labienus, and Sextus sent flying. As soon as the news was made known in Rome a
number of Caesar’s admirers decided to undertake the journey to Marseilles—where
the victor was expected soon to arrive and to stay while attending to post-war
business—to congratulate him and to escort him back to the capital; and,
hearing of this, Fulvia persuaded Antony to hurry ahead as far as Narbo
(Narbonne) on the Spanish frontier, where Caesar was then staying, and to
present himself at headquarters as a practical mark of his willingness to go more than half
way to meet him in the matter of their personal quarrel. Brutus and Octavian
were of the party which went to Marseilles; but it was Antony at Narbo “who was
the best received of any”, and later, when they all set out on the road back to
Rome, “Antony was made to ride almost the whole journey with Caesar in his
carriage, while in the carriage behind came Brutus and Octavian”. The
reconciliation, in fact, was public and complete.
This
settlement of the quarrel is as understandable as was its cause. When Caesar
had returned to Rome from Egypt, he must have found that people were somewhat
doubtful of his democratic ideals, since he had been living so many months in a
luxurious palace with a queen as his mistress; and when he had been told of
Antony’s severity towards the socialistic extremists of the party, he had
thought it advisable to give a practical demonstration of his benevolent
interest in the left wing by sitting heavily upon his unfortunate lieutenant
who represented the right. But since then he had come to realize that Antony’s
attitude had probably been wise, and that, at any rate, it was supported by the
bulk of moderate opinion. He had found, in fact, that the right wing of his
party was much stronger than he had realized; and since that wing was
politically closest to the conservatives, or Pompeians, with the shattered
remainder of whom he wished to live at peace, he was anxious now to face about,
reverting to his old dream of a coalition. Antony, he saw, was regarded as a
level-headed man who, while being a sound democrat, would stand no nonsense
from the rabble; and a renewal of his friendship with him would thus help the
political situation.
Moreover,
Antony seemed now to have turned over a new leaf in his private life. He had
dismissed Cytheris and her theatrical crowd, and was married to the capable
Fulvia, who, as the wife of Clodius and then of Curio, had won Caesar’s esteem;
and hence there were high hopes that he would no longer be deemed a black sheep
by the respectable element in Roman society, but would serve Caesar’s purpose
as a factor in the union of the two political camps—that union which alone
could mend the wreckage of the now ended civil war. Caesar’s desired
rapprochement with the conservatives was so evident that Brutus wrote a letter
to Cicero saying that the Dictator seemed actually to intend to set up a government
on the old aristocratic lines; and, this being so; I think it is clear that the
quarrel with Antony required to be ended. And, after all, Caesar must have felt
that a man who could defy him as boldly as Antony had done in regard to the
payment for Pompey’s house would be safer as a friend than as an enemy.
Antony,
of course, was very happy at the reconciliation, and as he jogged homewards in
Caesar’s carriage his thoughts may well have turned gratefully to Fulvia who
had persuaded him to take this fortunate step. He told himself that she was
evidently a woman in a thousand, and he made up his mind to pay back his debt
to her by trying his best to be faithful to her. While the party was still two
or three days’ journey from Rome, Caesar was obliged to stop off for a few
nights at a certain city to attend to some business; and Antony therefore
obtained permission to go on ahead, for he knew that Fulvia would be deeply
anxious about him, and would be worrying herself as to whether the quarrel had
been patched up or had been intensified by the step she had advocated. But when
he arrived on the outskirts of Rome he dismissed his escort, and went into a
little tavern where he wrote his wife a letter telling her that he loved her
and that she need never fear that he would return to the arms of Cytheris.
He waited
in hiding in this inn until it was dark, and then, muffling himself up in his
cloak, he drove in a hired carriage to his house, and when the porter at the
gates asked him who he was and what he wanted, he replied in a dramatic whisper
that he was an express courier from Marc Antony. He was then led into the
presence of Fulvia, to whom he silently and ominously handed the letter; but
when she had read it and knew from it that he was not only safe but was full of
love for her, she burst into tears, whereupon Antony threw off his disguise and
flung his arms around her.
This
little joke of his, however, caused a good deal of trouble, for soon the story
got about that he had come back secretly and in flight to Rome, and that Caesar
had been defeated. At length he was obliged to show himself at the Comitia, and
to explain that he had merely come on ahead in connection with some private
business, and that Caesar would presently arrive; but at a later date Cicero
threw the incident up at him in a public speech, exclaiming, “O worthless
man!—was it in order that a woman might see you before she hoped to do so, that
you disturbed the city by nocturnal alarms and with terrors of several days’
duration? My friends, mark the trilling character of the fellow!”
Cicero,
of course, could never appreciate Antony’s jokes, which generally had a touch
of horseplay about them; but in this particular instance he failed to see what we
can plainly see now, that Antony was wildly elated at the termination of his
quarrel with the man he had idolized and at his coming return to public life.
The estrangement had been a nightmare to him, and now that all was well again
he wanted to dance a jig on the rostra in the Forum or turn cartwheels all down
the Sacred Way.
Antony's Consulship, and the Death of Caesar.
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