Chapter VII #2
– This is intolerable! I have won a great victory, and now he will take all the credit – and take my legions too! With Antony now gone from Italy, I have outlived my usefulness, and Cicero and the Senate will destroy me at their leisure.
It was probably true. We had already heard of a witticism of Cicero’s that was doing the rounds in Rome: ‘the Heaven-sent boy’ was to be ‘raised, praised and erased’.
Octavius looked across the empty camp. He tapped his fingers on the hilt of his sword.
I knew what was in his mind. I agreed with his reasoning.
I did not object. But I warned him it would be too obvious.
If anything happened to Pansa, there was bound to be an investigation, and only one suspect. He thought about it for a while.
– You are right. Wait here until the doctor comes out and then send him to me.
Why am I telling this story now, which has always been rumoured but never proved?
I suppose because it has troubled my conscience for thirty years.
And because I sense this memoir will never see the light of day, so what does it matter?
In any case, there is no point in writing an account of one’s life unless one tells the truth.
I have had my fill of lies and pretence.
I waited until the doctor emerged, and then I beckoned him to follow me.
His name was Glyco – he was Greek, of course, as most quacks are – and he was quite old and rather timid.
I left him at the entrance to Octavius’s tent, and that was the extent of my involvement.
What Octavius said to him, what threats he made or inducements he offered, I do not know. We never spoke of it again.
Pansa fell into a coma and died the following day.
Of course there was a great outcry when the news began to spread.
To lose both consuls in the same week was an unprecedented disaster.
Pansa’s deputy, T. Manlius Torquatus, was particularly suspicious, and had Glyco arrested and interrogated.
But the doctor maintained that Pansa had sustained internal injuries, invisible to the naked eye – after all, such things are not unknown.
And Torquatus, despite his outrage, had no wish to make an enemy of Octavius, who was now in effective command.
After a week or two, the investigation was dropped.
Glyco was released, and a few months later was himself found dead.
But by then the world had moved on, and men were concerned with more urgent problems than the death of a wounded consul.
Pansa’s corpse, like Hirtius’s, was dispatched to Rome with a guard of honour.
The siege of Mutina was lifted. Soon afterwards, Decimus sent a message summoning Octavius to a meeting.
Octavius replied that he would prefer to meet him in our camp at Bononia, to which Decimus came with a few of his officers.
Octavius received him in his tent, sitting in a curule chair, flanked by me and Salvidienus and the senior commanders of our legions. There were no other seats.
Decimus was not quite forty, an impressive figure, a real soldier.
He had been Caesar’s most trusted lieutenant in Gaul.
Indeed, Caesar had regarded him almost as a son, and had left him property in his will.
Of all the assassins, his treachery was the greatest. Yet here he was, angrily asserting that as the legitimate governor of Nearer Gaul – a position he had been granted by Caesar shortly before the assassination – he outranked Octavius, and that Octavius should have come to him!
He produced dispatches from the Senate empowering him to take command of the entire army following the death of the consuls.
Decimus had not seen Octavius for nearly two years, when they had travelled together to Rome with Antony and Caesar, the summer before we left for Apollonia.
He treated him as if nothing had changed and he was still little more than a gilded schoolboy.
He demanded to know why Octavius was not taking advantage of their victory.
He began issuing orders for our legions to set off in pursuit of Antony, who had escaped with his cavalry over the Alps into Gaul.
He could not hide his astonishment when Octavius coldly interrupted him.
– Stop, Decimus. There is no possibility of your taking command of my legions.
My men despise you. They will never follow you.
I have explained all this in a letter to the Senate.
It is dangerous for you to even be here.
I shall give you safe passage out of the camp, and I strongly advise you to get as far away from it as you can.
Decimus stood open-mouthed at such insolence. He protested. They argued. Finally, in his fury, he drew his sword. So did his officers. We all did the same. Octavius sat calmly in his chair.
– If I might offer you a word of advice, Decimus – time is not on your side. You should go now.
For a few moments I thought there might be a fight.
But then Decimus saw the hopelessness of his situation.
He lowered his sword and swore that Octavius had not heard the last of this.
He left, followed by his men. A few months later, he was captured by a Gallic chieftain loyal to Antony and executed.
After he had gone, Salvidienus said that he was right about one thing. We should make haste to catch Antony before he had a chance to regroup with a new army in Gaul.
Octavius disagreed.
– No, it suits me better to leave him on the other side of the Alps. Let us take advantage of his absence, gentlemen. We shall march on Rome!
We now had eight legions – our own four, plus Pansa’s – a combined force of more than thirty thousand infantry and cavalry. In July, on the banks of the Rubicon, Octavius offered a sacrifice and prayers to the deified Caesar, and then we followed in his footsteps and crossed into Italy.
By this point, ours was no longer the only army on the peninsula.
For their defence, the Senate had brought back three legions from Africa – the same ones my brother had fought against at Thapsus.
According to Maecenas, who was spying for us in Rome, they were stationed on the hill of Janiculum.
From these heights they commanded the approach to Rome, a mere five hundred feet away across the Tiber.
Octavius halted our advance ten miles short of the city and invited the leaders of the African legions to a conference.
They came in secret, curious to meet Caesar’s adopted son.
He pointed out that we greatly outnumbered them.
He assured them he had no desire to see the shedding of any more Roman blood.
He demanded to know why they were protecting men like Cicero who had welcomed the death of Caesar.
Finally he offered each of their legionaries his usual generous bounty if they came over to his cause.
The officers left, promising to relay the offer.
He then wrote a letter to the urban praetor, M. Caecilius Cornutus – who in the absence of the dead consuls was presiding over the Senate – and ordered me to deliver it, with a show of force.
The next day, I rode towards Rome at the head of a column of four hundred men. As we reached the Field of Mars, I kept an eye on the Janiculum for any sign of movement. The African legions did not stir.