Chapter V #3
Ever since Octavius’s return to Rome, the house had been thronged with Caesar’s old supporters wanting to speak to him. Each time he left the building, they crowded behind him in procession. To escape them, we had to leave on foot by the back entrance, Octavius hidden beneath a cloak and hood.
Antony’s villa had once been the home of Pompey the Great. It stood on the Esquiline Hill. As a boy, I had often admired it from the outside. The ramming beaks of enemy pirate ships, trophies of Pompey’s victories when he commanded the Republic’s navy, were set into the walls.
In the vestibule, Octavius removed his cloak, grandly announced himself as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and asked to speak to the consul.
After a long interval, the steward returned to say that Antony was not at home.
Octavius replied that we would wait.
We were left standing in the entrance for several hours, offered neither seats nor refreshment, while Antony’s clients came and went, often casting surprised glances in Octavius’s direction.
The steward kept returning to check we were still there.
He grew increasingly agitated. Eventually a woman appeared.
I recognised Fulvia at once from the Forum.
She was short and stocky, with a hooked nose and jutting chin.
She gave an impression of powerful strength, more man than woman.
Twice widowed – her first husband had been Clodius, the sworn enemy of Cicero; her second Curio, another cynical rogue – she had been at the centre of Roman politics for nearly twenty years.
It was said she still retained control over Clodius’s gangs of street fighters.
She asked why we would not accept that her husband was not there. To which Octavius replied that for a man who was not there, he seemed to have a great many visitors.
She said that if we did not leave, she would have us thrown out.
Octavius shrugged.
– Throw us out if you like, but we shall be back tomorrow, and again the day after that, and again and again for as many days as it takes, until the consul has the good manners to see Caesar.
She roared with laughter.
– Caesar? You?
Octavius stared her out. After glaring at him for a long while, she muttered under her breath, turned and stamped back into the interior of the house.
An hour later, the steward reappeared and said that Antony would grant Octavius an audience.
He received us in his pillared tablinum. It was the first time I had seen him at close quarters. As he was to loom so large in our lives over the next few years, it might be as well if I describe him.
He was in the prime of manhood – tall and broad, with thick dark hair and beard, and the red face and bloodshot eyes of a heavy drinker.
Imagine, if you will, a statue of Hercules with a club in one hand, a wineskin in the other.
He had been Caesar’s master of horse and his fellow consul at the time of the assassination.
It was he who had delivered the eulogy at Caesar’s funeral, rousing the crowd to a murderous fury against the conspirators.
Octavius knew him slightly from the previous year, when they had both accompanied Caesar back to Rome after his victory in Spain.
He tried at first in his polite greeting to be respectful to the famous soldier.
But it was clear from the start that Antony regarded him as a mere nothing – a feeble well-connected neophyte who by some freakish whim of Caesar’s had emerged as a rival, and who needed to be crushed underfoot like a cockroach.
– You are very persistent, young man. Some would say rude.
When Octavius said that he preferred to be addressed as Caesar, Antony, like his wife, burst out laughing.
– There will only ever be one Caesar, boy! You are no replacement!
After that, the atmosphere worsened.
In a quiet voice, Octavius said what he had come to say.
Antony was welcome to take a few trinkets from Caesar’s estate as keepsakes, but the rest must be handed over in accordance with the dictator’s will.
He wanted a loan from the public treasury to enable him to fulfil Caesar’s promise to give every citizen a cash legacy.
He wanted to see proof of the various edicts Antony claimed to have discovered in Caesar’s papers.
In fact, he wanted the papers themselves.
And he wanted his support to stand for the vacant tribunate.
Antony’s face as he listened to all this grew redder and darker.
When Octavius had finished, he shouted that Caesar had not been a king who could bequeath control of the state to his heir, therefore he as consul was not obliged to account for his actions to some pipsqueak who had never even fought in a battle.
Official papers were the property of the Republic and would remain in his safe keeping.
There was no money – Caesar had left an empty treasury, and he had no knowledge of what had become of his personal estate.
As for the tribunate, that was out of the question – it would be more than a decade before Octavius would be eligible to stand for even the most junior magistracy.
He picked up some documents.
– And now I have work to do. In any case, it must surely be past your bedtime.
Octavius replied politely that he too had much work to do and wished him a pleasant evening. Antony, his head bent, pretending to read, did not reply.
As we walked away from the house, Octavius was silent. I assumed he must be downcast and anxious. But when he spoke, his tone was thoughtful.
– You know, Agrippa, if I were him, I would have seen me promptly and shown me some respect. What would that have cost him? He thought he was demonstrating strength. Instead, he revealed his weakness. Beneath his bluster, he is uncertain.
I had discovered in the schoolyard that it was a mistake to offend Octavius’s sense of dignity. He never forgot a slight. By his behaviour that day, Antony had made a dangerous enemy, and from that moment, the road to war was open.