Chapter III
III
Lucius always refused to say what had happened to him at Thapsus and afterwards. The memory was too awful. He was never the same man again. But I have studied enough accounts of the battle, and have fought in sufficient since, to have a good idea.
On that day, a combination of the arrows from Caesar’s archers and the braying of his trumpeters so wounded and terrified the enemy’s sixty elephants that they turned and stampeded back through their own ranks, tearing open a breach into which Caesar’s cavalry charged.
The line broke, and the ensuing massacre of the Republican army did not end on the battlefield but continued into their camp long after it had surrendered.
I know to my shame how hard it is to maintain discipline when bloodlust grips an army.
Lucius was fortunate to survive long enough to be sold into slavery. It was from this wretched state, on Caesar’s personal orders, following receipt of Octavius’s letter, that he was rescued two months later.
Although I passed on Caesar’s respects to my father as soon as I brought Lucius home, he offered no word of thanks.
Such ingratitude was incomprehensible to me, and we exchanged harsh words.
I was seventeen by now, too big for him to thrash.
In the end, he shouted that if I admired Caesar so much, I should go and live with him.
I left that same day.
For two nights I slept rough on the Field of Mars, close to where Caesar’s legions were encamped before entering the city to celebrate his triumphs. I hung around their tents. I talked to the soldiers. I even shared some of their meals.
When Octavius returned to Rome, I told him of the rupture with my father.
He insisted I should come and stay with his family on the Palatine.
At first I refused. I felt beholden enough to him as it was.
But he waved away my objections. He said it was a large household, I would easily be absorbed. This kindness I have never forgotten.
I was given a room of my own and a slave to look after me. That evening I dined for the first time with his family and began to understand my curious friend a little better.
His mother, Atia, to whom he was devoted, was the daughter of Caesar’s sister.
She was the most modest and gentle of women.
His stepfather, L. Marcius Philippus, was entirely different.
He was much older than Atia, descended from a grand patrician family, an ex-consul and governor of Syria.
He had managed to sit out the civil war without picking one side or the other, and as a result was distrusted by both.
He was embarrassed to find himself related to the dictator who had killed so many of his friends.
He barely addressed a word to me. I was riff-raff in his eyes. I could see why Octavius disliked him.
The person to whom Octavius was closest was his elder sister, Octavia.
They shared a couch at dinner and laughed and whispered together.
She had just turned twenty, with two young children by her husband, another patrician former consul, G.
Claudius Marcellus. He too had been opposed to Caesar but had also managed to avoid the fighting and had been pardoned.
Thus the family was split, like mine and so many others, by the consequences of the civil war.
After dinner, I was taken aside and quietly questioned about Octavius by both his mother and sister.
They were anxious about him, on account of his solitariness and persistent weak health, and relieved he had found a friend who was devoted to him.
Later, even Philippus swallowed his disdain for my plebeian origins sufficiently to thank me for my services to the family, as if I was a member of his staff.
During the next few weeks, I saw nothing of Caesar.
He stayed out in his villa on the Tiber, planning his four great triumphs, each of which was to last a day, accompanied by public feasts, gladiatorial games, and theatrical performances to be staged all over the city.
These latter productions he entrusted to Octavius to manage, and I helped him from dawn till dusk, selecting the plays with the help of Maecenas, hiring the actors, recruiting the gladiators and erecting the stages.
We covered the Forum in awnings to protect the spectators from the sun.
I had never witnessed a triumph before. I have seen many since, but none to compare with the spectacle Caesar contrived.
He rode in a chariot, as tradition demanded, in a purple toga, his face painted with red lead, an eagle sceptre in his hand, a golden laurel crown suspended over his bald head by a slave whispering in his ear to remember that he was human.
The four parades celebrated his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Asia and Africa, during which he claimed to have killed nearly two million enemies, not including Roman citizens.
Behind him each day wound a long column of prisoners captured in that particular campaign, including the son of King Juba, the sister of Cleopatra, and the leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, who was executed at the end of the parade.
Carts passed by laden with treasure and tableaux depicting his victories.
Most thrilling to me were the thousands of legionaries tramping in perfect order, the stamp of their feet shaking the streets, chanting that crude marching song that Caesar delighted in and I have never forgotten.
Home we bring our bald whoremonger;
Romans, lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him
Went his Gallic tarts to pay.
But there were worrying portents even then of the trouble that lay ahead, although I was too young and blinded by devotion to Caesar to pay them much heed.
A tableau depicting Cato’s suicide, tearing out his own entrails after the Battle of Thapsus, was greeted with groans and jeers.
As if in punishment for his impiety, the axle on Caesar’s chariot broke just opposite the Temple of Fortune, in front of a huge crowd, and in atonement he was obliged to climb the slope to the Capitol on his knees.
His open infatuation with Cleopatra caused a scandal, such was the Romans’ detestation of foreign rulers.
There were scuffles, fighting. In a fury, he seized one of the demonstrators with his own hands and had him executed.
Amid all this, Octavius celebrated his seventeenth birthday. Our theatrical shows at least had proved an unalloyed success, and on the final day, in a significant public mark of favour, he was commanded by Caesar to ride behind his chariot.
Afterwards, he dined often with his uncle, and one night returned home in a state of high excitement.
News had reached Caesar of another uprising in Spain, led by Pompey’s sons, Gnaeus and Sextus, and he had decided on one final military expedition to crush them once and for all. He wanted his nephew to join him.
– And not only me! I told him of the help you have given me. He wishes you to come as well!
It was the happiest day of my life when I accompanied Octavius to the Field of Mars.
We were enrolled in the Tenth Legion, one of three now mustering for the Spanish campaign.
In accordance with Caesar’s orders, Octavius received no special treatment.
We stood in line with the other new recruits to submit to a medical examination.
Then we swore the oath of loyalty, were issued with our chain-mail armour, identity tags and kit and taken to the tent where we were to sleep.
Not that we saw much rest. The daylight hours were swallowed up entirely by intensive training – drilling, weapons practice, physical exercise, rowing on the Tiber and, most hated of all, forced marches: twenty miles in five hours, carrying full kit, and even worse, twenty-four miles to be completed at a trot, also in five hours, also fully laden.
There were times, out on the dusty roads under the hot sun in my chain mail, when I thought my heart and lungs would burst.
Octavius suffered more than I. His nerves were already worn out from his exertions during Caesar’s triumphs.
One day he collapsed in the heat. The next morning he was unable to rise from the damp bare ground on which we slept, and our commanding officer, Q.
Salvidienus Rufus, came to the tent to inspect him.
He was one of the legion’s tribunes, a surly fellow at the best of times, a strict disciplinarian known behind his back for obvious reasons as Old Big Nose, even though he was only about six or seven years older than we were.
He had received orders not to show Caesar’s nephew any favours.
But neither was he about to let him die on his watch.
Octavius was carried away on a stretcher and Salvidienus ordered me to see him home.
All this was observed by our comrades, and so the secret of our relationship with Caesar was exposed.
I remember their sullen expressions as they watched us leave, the mutterings about the privileges of the rich. They felt they had been duped.
We returned to the house on the Palatine and Octavius was put to bed.
I should say something here of these recurrent illnesses which were to plague him for much of his life.
Their symptoms varied but generally included blinding headaches, fevers, vomiting, lassitude, and swelling of the stomach and joints.
They came upon him without warning, mostly at times of stress or exhaustion.
Sometimes they lasted for only a day or two, occasionally for weeks.
Every doctor was consulted, every cure tried, but there seemed to be no remedy except rest.
I waited a day to see if he would recover, and when there was no improvement, I went back to camp.