Chapter V
V
We lost no time in making public the contents of Atia’s letter. We posted the news in the forum of the town and sent messages to the commanders of all the legions, alerting them to the sensational development that Octavius was Caesar’s adopted son and heir and intended to act accordingly.
Two days later, we boarded the fastest boat we could find and set course for Italy.
We were a party of ten: Salvidienus and another officer whose name I have forgotten, and the six trusted legionaries I had recruited as a bodyguard. Octavius wore a black toga to show he was in mourning. The rest of us were in military kit.
I had, at Octavius’s request, begun to call him Caesar, although I found it hard to get used to at first. The others, especially Salvidienus, could not bring themselves even to attempt it.
Octavius affected not to care. When I asked if he wanted me to remind them of his elevated status, he shook his head.
– For now, I am a figurehead, nothing more. They will only use my name when I have earned it.
We sailed directly for Brundisium. But as soon as the entrance of the great harbour came into view, late on the second afternoon, Octavius, who was suffering badly from seasickness, became nervous of stepping into the unknown.
What if Mark Antony’s men were in control of the city?
They might take him prisoner, or worse. He directed the captain to sail along the coast until we came upon a small fishing port about six miles to the south.
We anchored in the bay at dusk. Octavius hoisted his toga to his thighs and waded ashore. The rest of us followed. When we reached the beach, he kneeled to kiss the wet sand of Mother Italy and asked for the blessing of the gods upon his enterprise.
What a strange figure he must have cut, slight and adolescent, his face still white from vomiting and pitted with acne, emerging from nowhere out of the twilight, wearing his mourning clothes, half drenched, surrounded by his guards.
His arrival attracted the curiosity of some nearby fishermen repairing their nets.
They abandoned their work and gathered around us.
Octavius stepped onto the keel of an upturned rowing boat and made a short formal speech, as if he were addressing the Senate.
He stated who he was, proclaimed himself Caesar’s heir and declared that he had come to claim his inheritance.
The response was silence. It was more than three weeks since the assassination, but in this remote spot, it was the first they had heard of it.
Then one of the fishermen spoke. He said he was a veteran of Caesar’s Gallic legions, demobbed and settled in retirement on the centuriated land around Lupia.
He spat onto the sand and declared that if what Octavius said was true, he would follow him all the way to Rome to seek justice.
He led us up from the beach to the hamlet and showed us a place where we could stay the night.
It was a squalid inn with goats and chickens living in the downstairs rooms. Salvidienus borrowed a horse and went off to scout our likely reception in Brundisium.
As night fell, we ate a simple meal of fried sardines cooked over an open fire and dried our clothes.
Octavius stared into the flames with a pensive expression.
It can hardly have been the triumphant return he had envisaged.
After the livestock had been driven out, we lay down on the filthy floor and tried to sleep.
At dawn we were woken by voices outside.
Our fisherman had returned with half a dozen comrades, wearing their old chain mail and helmets, carrying their army-issue swords and shields, with their kitbags on their backs, all ready to follow Octavius.
At this spontaneous demonstration of loyalty, I saw his eyes fill with tears.
He shook the hand of each man in turn and swore that if his venture was successful, they would never have to work again.
Later that morning, Salvidienus returned from Brundisium.
He reported that the garrison commander, an old comrade of his, had expressed himself appalled by Caesar’s murder: it was safe for Octavius to go there.
And so our little party set out along the coastal road, almost twice the strength in numbers that it had been when we landed.
The commander at Brundisium knew scarcely more than we did – only that Mark Antony, as consul, was in control in Rome, that the assassins had been granted amnesty and had retreated to their country estates, but that no one expected the truce with them to last. Reports of Caesar’s will had also reached him.
He offered us beds for the night, horses for the morning, and supplies and extra men for protection on our journey.
Our ultimate objective was Rome. However, we decided to travel via Philippus’s villa at Puteoli, two hundred miles to the north-west, on the opposite side of Italy.
This route would take us through more of the regions where Caesar had settled his veterans.
We made sure that word of our progress travelled ahead of us.
At Rubi, Canusium and Herdoniae, crowds of retired soldiers turned out to greet Octavius.
Repeatedly we had to stop so that he could address them.
Scores fell in behind us, and at the request of Octavius – and to the irritation of Salvidienus – I took command of the column.
Once we had crossed the mountainous spine of the peninsula and come down into the fertile lands of Campania, the scores of would-be recruits became hundreds.
These were men who had spent twenty-five years in Caesar’s armies.
They wanted vengeance for his death. But that was not the whole story.
Talking to them, I realised they preferred soldiering to the back-breaking tedium of a farmer’s life – a yearning for excitement and glory I understood, and shared.
By the end, there were more volunteers than we could cope with, and I had to tell the newcomers to return to their homes until they received further orders.
It took us until the twentieth day of April to reach Puteoli.
As usual, news of our progress had preceded us.
Atia and Philippus were already waiting at the gates of their villa.
They stared in shock at the column of nearly a thousand legionaries marching five abreast along the road from Neapolis.
Standing beside them, to my surprise, was our old tutor, Maecenas, and another man I did not recognise – stocky, grizzled, black-bearded – who in contrast to the unconcealed dismay of Atia and Philippus was grinning broadly.
I gave the order to halt. Octavius dismounted, embraced his mother and stepfather, shook hands with the others, then gestured with a sweeping arm to his followers.
– My dear mother and father, you urged me to renounce my inheritance. Here you see my answer.
The stranger at the gate was L. Cornelius Balbus, a Spaniard in his middle fifties, a man of great cunning and intrigue, who had handled Caesar’s financial affairs.
Like many of the most eminent men in Rome, he had come south in April for the warmer weather.
He was staying at his villa along the coast and wished to make the acquaintance of his old master’s heir.
As for Maecenas, he had only just arrived.
He said he had travelled down on his own initiative purely to support his former pupil.
No doubt he also scented opportunities. It did not matter. We were glad to see him.
That evening, after I had arranged for our legionaries to set up their camp in the neighbouring fields, and Octavius and I had bathed and changed, we all dined together on a terrace overlooking the sea.
Maecenas had brought the latest intelligence from Rome.
Mark Antony’s wife, Fulvia, was said to be busy behind the scenes.
Together they had tricked Caesar’s widow, Calpurnia, into handing over the dictator’s private papers, and now they were using what they claimed to be his draft decrees to pass laws that consolidated Antony’s power.
They had seized Caesar’s property. They had also taken control of the state treasury, alleged to contain seven hundred million sesterces in coinage, gold and silver.
Antony’s ambition was plain – to make himself the new dictator.
They might have the treasury, said Balbus, but they did not have the whole of Caesar’s wealth. He knew where some of it was hidden, and he promised to hand three quarters of it to Octavius, in accordance with Caesar’s will.
We also discovered over dinner that by chance, the most famous of Rome’s elder statesmen, M. Tullius Cicero, the orator and former consul, was himself vacationing on the bay, staying in his villa next door, which he had recently acquired.
Octavius was immediately intrigued and started asking questions about him.
According to Balbus, Cicero had not been part of the conspiracy to murder Caesar.
However, as a staunch defender of the old Republic, he had hailed the assassins as liberators.
When I heard that, I urged Octavius to have nothing to do with him.
Now that we had men and the possibility of money, we should maintain our momentum and press on to Rome the following morning – that, I said, was what Caesar would have done.
Octavius shook his head.
– No, you are wrong. Caesar set great store by Cicero’s shrewdness and patriotism. He allowed him a freedom he granted no other man. He would have gone to see him.
He asked Philippus to arrange a meeting.
Philippus, who had been mostly silent throughout the evening, began to object to this, then changed his mind.
It was an instruction rather than a request, issued with the authority of an eighteen-year-old who was no longer a child but had two cohorts of well-trained soldiers encamped in the neighbouring fields, all sworn to do his bidding.