Chapter II
II
The most significant event of my life, from which all the others were to flow, occurred shortly before my fourteenth birthday, when I was plucked from the rough and tumble of my grammar school and sent to an academy on the Palatine to further my studies in Greek, astronomy and mathematics.
How my father could afford the fees was a mystery.
He was a fanatical Stoic, a follower of Cato.
He disdained worldly matters and subsisted on a small income from a few shops and apartments he had inherited.
I was the only pupil of plebeian rank. The others were all the sons of equestrian or senatorial families, with grand houses in Rome and estates in the country.
They never asked me back to their homes after classes ended, and certainly I never thought of inviting them to our modest dwelling in the valley amid the tenements of Subura.
The only boy who was as unpopular as myself was a young lad half a year my junior, called Gaius Octavius Thurinus.
His name meant nothing to me. He was puny and round-shouldered, often absent through illness, and when he did attend, he kept himself aloof.
He never spoke to me. I paid him no attention.
But one day when I arrived for the first lesson of the morning, I found him being set upon in the street by two much bigger boys.
I had been longing for a chance to fight ever since I arrived. I dragged them off him, knocked them both into the gutter and kicked them down the road. When I returned, expecting a word of thanks from their victim, he had gone.
Later that day, I asked another boy if he knew the reason why Octavius had been picked on. He looked at me as if I was a simpleton.
– Haven’t you heard? His uncle has just invaded Italy!
– Who is his uncle?
– Julius Caesar!
I was dumbfounded. It was impossible to connect so feeble a figure as Octavius with the mighty conqueror of Gaul.
When I got home that evening, I asked my father if it was true that Caesar had launched an invasion.
He replied bitterly that it was, that Caesar was a treacherous, immoral gambler who had broken the most sacred laws and brought his army across the Rubicon to destroy the Republic and make himself dictator.
I did not mention that I had met his nephew – in fact, I discovered afterwards, Octavius was only his great-nephew – and I certainly did not mention the fight.
A tremendous panic now seized Rome. The fathers of most of my fellow students, like my own father, were loyal to the Senate.
The city began to empty as they fled to join Pompey, supreme commander of the Senate’s legions, who had stupidly decided to abandon the capital and raise an army in the countryside.
Soon our classes were only a quarter full.
To begin with, Octavius was also absent, and I wondered if he might have gone north to meet his uncle.
But then one morning he slipped into the classroom, clearly nervous of his reception, and after looking around came over and took the place next to mine.
For the remainder of the day he stayed as close to me as my shadow. Finally I decided to make a joke of it.
– You seem to have appointed me your bodyguard!
– I can pay you if you want.
I should have taken offence. Instead, I found myself laughing. I told him he could keep his money. And after that, we were friends.
Despite the difference in our social status, we discovered we had much in common.
By temperament, we were both loners. I had lost my mother.
He had no memory of his father, who had died when he was four years old after a long period of service overseas.
I did not care for my stepmother. He did not like his stepfather.
Our talents were complementary. He helped me with my classwork. I showed him how to fight.
Two months later, Caesar entered Rome, and lessons were suspended.
Terror spread across the city. I was forbidden by my father to leave the house.
But I slipped out anyway and headed to the Forum in the hope of getting a glimpse of the man who had turned the world upside down.
He was rumoured to be inside the Temple of Saturn, the Republic’s treasury, which was ringed with his troops, who were being watched by a large and silent crowd.
Soldiers up till then had been forbidden to enter the city while on active service.
This was the first time I had seen so many gathered in one place.
They were part of Caesar’s legendary Thirteenth Legion – ‘Gemina’ – the veterans who had conquered Gaul and would follow him to the death.
I can remember to this day the excitement I felt at the sight of their hard, thin faces staring straight ahead, pinched red in the cold; the dull glint of their chain mail and helmets, their shields and swords and lances; their smell of leather and steel and sweat.
The only thing I wanted in life was to be one of them.
Presently there was a stir at the front of the crowd, and the doors of the temple opened.
I managed to squeeze my way to the front in time to see a gaunt, grim, broad-shouldered figure emerge, bare-headed and almost bald, closely surrounded by bodyguards with drawn swords.
There was no cheering or jeering, just a sullen silence on that chilly afternoon.
The crowd shuffled back to let him through.
He turned towards the Via Sacra, and I lost sight of him in the throng.
Years afterwards, I realised this must have been the famous occasion when he seized the state’s reserves of gold and silver – fifteen thousand bars of the one, thirty thousand of the other – and told the youthful tribune who had been left in charge of the treasury that if he did not stand aside, he would kill him on the spot.
– And, young man, you know well enough that it wearies me more to say this than it would to do it.
My father was waiting for me when I returned home, and I was soundly beaten for disobeying his orders. But I did not flinch. As the blows fell, I gritted my teeth and thought of the men of the Thirteenth.
Such was my first glimpse of Caesar. It was to be my last for a long time. He did not linger long in Rome. Within a week he was gone, intent on crushing Pompey’s forces, now mustering overseas. Out of the next two and a half years, he was in Rome for just eleven days.
The next morning, our lessons at the academy resumed, and with them, my friendship with Octavius.
He came into school bursting with stories of the hours he had spent with his uncle.
Caesar had been away fighting in Gaul for the past nine years.
It was the first time they had ever talked.
They had dined together twice. They had walked in Caesar’s gardens beside the Tiber.
He had been shown the general’s helmet, almost cleaved in two by a Gallic sword.
Caesar had no legitimate son of his own, although he was said to have fathered several by his many lovers.
(His only child, Julia, who had been married to Pompey, had, like my mother, died giving birth.) Octavius’s connection to him was entirely on the female side – he was the son of the daughter of Caesar’s sister – and in truth therefore somewhat tenuous.
But they were tied by blood, and clearly it had occurred to Octavius that if Caesar was to prove victorious in the civil war, a glorious future might open before him.
This awareness changed him. Outwardly our friendship continued as before.
But occasionally – if I went too far with a joke or grabbed him in a playful headlock – he would stiffen and give me a cold look, as if to remind me of his new dignity.
Already I sensed my destiny might be entwined with his. I learned to curb my tongue.
And so we grew to maturity together, the years passing to the distant drumbeat of Caesar’s victories.
That summer, he subdued his enemies in Spain.
The following March, as I turned fifteen and put on the toga signifying manhood, news came that he had landed in Epirus in north-west Greece in pursuit of Pompey.
In September, we learned that he had annihilated Pompey’s army at Pharsalus.
What was left of the Senate bowed to the new reality and appointed him dictator in his absence.
It was around this time that G. Cilnius Maecenas entered our lives.
(Such is his phenomenal memory that no doubt if he were here with me in Campania rather than back in Rome, he would be able to provide me with the exact date.) He was only five years older than us, but far more worldly.
We had never encountered such an exotic creature before.
His voice was high, his appearance feminine.
He had long, curly golden hair and fingers bejewelled by rings.
Although he claimed to be descended from the Etruscan royal family, he had little money and earned a living as a tutor in literature and philosophy.
He was obsessed by genealogy and gossip and knew more about the ancestry of some of the great families in Rome than they did themselves.
A ridiculous figure. Yet he controlled his unruly pupils by his wit and cleverness quite effortlessly.
He instilled in Octavius especially a lifelong love of poetry, although my literary tastes, to his despair, have always tended towards works on engineering and military history …
I digress.
Pompey by now was dead, murdered in Egypt by one of his own former officers.
Yet still the fighting dragged on. For the first time I experienced the true agony of a civil war.
Cato, the most implacable of the old Republicans, remained at liberty in Africa, and my elder brother, Lucius, to the pride of my father, was serving in the Republic’s army.
As Caesar’s legions closed in to give battle, I still secretly wanted the dictator to win.
But I also wanted Lucius to survive and come home.