Chapter XI
XI
I returned with Caesar to Rome at the beginning of March.
Later that month, on my twenty-third birthday, he summoned me to see him. As a reward for my services in the Perusian campaign, he said he had decided to appoint me urban praetor, the third most powerful magistrate in the Republic after the two consuls.
– And as the consuls are both nonentities, you are now my effective deputy.
Such was my surprise, I forgot to even thank him.
– May I ask why you are appointing me now?
– Calenus has died in Gaul – of natural causes, apparently: a rare event these days. I am taking the opportunity to go and finally take control of those eleven legions of Antony’s. While I am away, you will be in charge of Italy.
– Lepidus will not like that.
– Lepidus is going overseas to govern Africa.
– And Antony will like it even less, especially when he hears you have taken his legions.
– He can feel whatever he likes. I owe him nothing.
He sat back and watched his brother and his wife start a civil war, and never lifted a finger to help me.
Besides, he is occupied in Egypt with Cleopatra.
Wouldn’t you love to see the catfight between the queen and Fulvia when she arrives? He will have his hands full there!
Fulvia had recently escaped from Brundisium in a fleet of five ships to join her husband in the east. Caesar was angry not to have captured her, but imagining their reunion provided an amusing consolation.
I started to say that while I was honoured by his faith in me, I was a soldier not a politician. He cut me off with a wave of his hand.
– These days you cannot be one and not the other. Politics is warfare in civilian clothes. You will not refuse me, Agrippa. You have been at my side from the start. It was you who first encouraged me to seize my destiny. We either rise together or we shall fall together.
There was more in the same vein. I listened quietly, trying to absorb this dramatic change in my fortunes.
He was right, of course. He could not stop now.
Ten or twenty years earlier, when the laws of the Republic were still functioning, a man would hold power for a limited period, sharing it with others, and then be obliged to surrender it or face prosecution.
But those laws were no longer operative.
Force ruled all. Once Caesar accepted his inheritance from his great-uncle, he condemned himself to a perpetual struggle.
He had to keep pressing forward, otherwise he would be killed – and I most likely with him.
When he had finished, I accepted the appointment.
He left soon afterwards for Gaul.
I did not see him again until the autumn. Not since the Munda campaign had we been so long apart. I missed his cunning and his force of character. But away from his shadow, I discovered I had an aptitude for civilian rule. I was also at last able to live with Caecilia.
We spent the evenings quietly in our house on the Palatine.
Atticus came often to dine, and sometimes brought his friends.
After the rough comradeship of the army camp, it was a welcome change to have such civilised company, with their talk of philosophy and poetry, although much of it went over my head.
Most nights we went to bed early. Soon after sunrise, I dealt with clients and petitioners.
In the middle of the morning, I walked down to the Forum to preside over the court of the urban praetor, hearing cases and dispensing judgements.
In the afternoons, I attended the Senate, although I rarely spoke, except to read out dispatches from Caesar.
In between all this, I dealt with correspondence and oversaw preparations for the Games of Apollo, which it was my duty as urban praetor to arrange.
Indispensable to me throughout was Maecenas.
He had built up a network of informants, not just in Rome but across the empire.
His advice was shrewd, his intelligence reliable.
It was he who warned me that Sextus Pompey was said to be planning fresh raids on our southern coast while I would be stuck in Rome, presiding over the Apollo games.
I immediately issued orders for the garrisons in Brundisium and other harbours to be strengthened.
I wrote each week to Caesar to keep him abreast of developments.
Mostly my reports were terse accounts of political and military matters.
But in May, I had to inform him that his sister, Octavia, had been widowed, following the death of the ex-consul G.
Claudius Marcellus. She already had two young children by him and was several months pregnant with a third.
Caecilia befriended her, and she too became a regular visitor to our house, as gracious in her widowhood as she had been when I first met her six years earlier.
Caesar was indifferent to the news of his brother-in-law’s death. In his reply he said that he had never much cared for the fellow, but he asked me to take his beloved Octavia and her children under my protection.
Despite the threat from Sextus, the Games of Apollo went ahead as usual during the annual public holiday in the first week of July.
On the opening day I sacrificed a bull to Apollo in the Circus Maximus.
Then, in front of a seated crowd of two hundred and fifty thousand, I gave the signal to start the first of the chariot races.
In the following days there were excellent wild beast hunts and theatrical performances.
At first, I sensed a definite hostility towards me.
Who was I, after all – an absurdly young, unknown and unelected plebeian – to preside over some of the most sacred games in the Roman calendar?
But as the week went on and the people began to enjoy the various spectacles, the applause whenever I appeared became louder, and I briefly experienced the intoxicating sensation of popularity – almost as heady as winning a battle.
On the final afternoon, I noticed Maecenas approaching my seat in the president’s box.
Slipping in next to me, he cautioned me not to show any emotion at what he was about to tell me, as many eyes were upon us, then whispered that Sextus had launched his expected series of attacks and was rampaging through the south.
But that was not the worst of it. Sextus had made an alliance with Antony, who was even now at sea, heading towards Italy with an invasion force to settle scores with Caesar.
As soon as the last play was over, I hurried back to my house and sent a message to Caesar, telling him what had happened and urging him to return at once with as many legions as he could muster.
Then I set off for the south with an army, accompanied by Maecenas.
It seemed almost unbelievable that we should be fighting a third civil war in less than four years.
I pitied the long-suffering people of Italy as we passed through their derelict settlements – their property pillaged, livestock stolen, crops unharvested.
War, which I had once so relished, was gouged into the countryside like an open wound.
I vowed that if we emerged victorious, I would try to devote more of my life to building than destruction.
We marched to Campania, regrettably doing our share of damage, living off the land, taking men away from their farms, and then struck east across the mountains to the Adriatic.
While we were on the march, I learned that the garrison I had strengthened at Brundisium earlier in the year had held out manfully and prevented Antony from landing.
He had been obliged to come ashore much further up the coast, at Sipontum.
I stormed the town as soon as we reached it, and quickly subdued it, only to discover that Antony had departed a month earlier, leaving behind little more than a token force.
He had headed back along the coastal road over a hundred miles south to Brundisium, intending to conquer it from the landward side.
I pursued him, force-marching the army down the same road, with the sea to our left, and to our right the land granted to the veterans of Philippi, many of whom had left their farms to join Antony.
A complicated situation now arose. Antony had enclosed Brundisium in a defensive wall and was besieging the harbour.
We in turn began building a defensive wall around his positions and set about besieging him.
The trenches and ramparts were strangely quiet.
The soldiers did not have much stomach for a fight.
There was constant fraternisation in no-man’s-land between old comrades, which the officers were powerless to prevent. We settled down for a long haul.
Sextus meanwhile had taken Sardinia, but his other attacks had been repulsed.
At the beginning of September, Caesar arrived at the head of his six Gallic legions, after a long and weary journey down almost the entire length of Italy.
He looked even thinner than usual, and exhausted.
Yet again his old illness had flared up, and he had transferred day-to-day command of the army to Salvidienus.
His condition was not as serious as before, but he had been obliged to stop en route to recover and was in no condition to fight a battle.
We held a conference to decide what we should do – Caesar, me, Salvidienus, Maecenas and the legates of the legions.
After we had studied the map for a while, it was Maecenas who said frankly what was in all our hearts.
– You know this war is pointless? I have no doubt we will win it in the end. But if it goes on much longer, the country will be ruined. Everyone will lose.
And then he revealed his latest intelligence from the spies he had recruited in Antony’s camp – produced it like a conjuror whipping a rabbit from an empty sack, as it always pleased him to do.
– I can offer you one piece of good news at least, Caesar. Fulvia is dead.