Chapter XIII #2
The citizens of Rome were happy and at peace.
Sometimes in the winter afternoons I strolled through the city with Caecilia and watched the people drinking and talking at the fountains, and laughing as they came out of the bathhouses.
I felt more satisfaction at those moments than I had after any battle.
The only thing that took the edge off my pleasure was the knowledge that this peace was about to end, and that within a few months we would be at war again.
Antony was a proud and wilful man. He could not abide to be challenged. Livia knew this, and he duly walked straight into the trap she had set for him.
Enraged with Octavia for publicly exposing his adultery, he divorced her.
And he did so in the cruellest fashion. He sent her a one-line message – Take your possessions and go – and ordered his agents to evict her and the children from his house.
She left the next day, watched by a gawping crowd, and moved in with Caesar.
Nor did Antony’s retaliation stop with her.
He sent Caesar a defiant open letter, posted in the Forum, written in the crudest language, admitting he was screwing the queen – so what?
Is it only Livia you fuck? Congratulations when you read this letter if you haven’t been inside – and he then named four married women with whom Caesar was supposedly having affairs.
Does it really matter where or in whom you stick your cock?
The letter was the talk of Rome. Livia, who was as ruthless about her marriage as she was about politics, knew what her husband was like and refused to read it. Caesar pretended to dismiss it with amused contempt.
– The work of a drunkard. You can practically smell the wine coming off the page.
But privately he was furious at being accused of hypocrisy, not least because it was true.
It had become a question of personal honour, and from that moment on, war was certain.
Men now began scrambling to join their chosen side.
The two new consuls, Sosius and Ahenobarbus, were both Antony’s supporters.
They left Italy to join him in the east, taking with them more than a hundred senators sympathetic to his cause.
The exodus was not all one way. At the same time, some of Antony’s lieutenants deserted him and returned to Rome.
Chief among these was L. Munatius Plancus – even in those treacherous days one of the slipperiest characters I ever met.
He had supported the dictator when he was alive, and then his assassins after he was dead, and then Lepidus, and then Antony, and now he had finally come home to Caesar.
He brought with him lurid tales of Antony’s decadence and extravagance, and as clinching proof of his sincerity, a vital piece of intelligence.
He reported that Antony had deposited his will with the Vestal Virgins. He knew the contents because he had witnessed the document. He assured Caesar they would be deeply damaging to Antony if ever they became public.
The will was supposed to be kept secret until his death.
To this day, I have no idea how Caesar managed to get hold of it.
My suspicion is that Livia, who knew several of the Vestals, either persuaded or coerced one of them into handing it over.
Whatever the truth, in March Caesar summoned a public assembly in the Forum and read the most incriminating extracts to a vast crowd.
These were: first, the huge legacies Antony left to his children by Cleopatra; second, his instruction that he was to be buried in Alexandria next to the queen, even if his death had occurred in Italy; and third, and most astonishing, his official recognition of Cleopatra’s fourteen-year-old son Caesarion, the so-called ‘King of Kings’, as the child of Julius Caesar.
Of all his many follies, this was Antony’s greatest. The crowd roared their anger.
It showed he placed Egypt higher in his heart than Italy, a foreign queen above an honest Roman matron, and in his acknowledgement of Caesarion, he openly endorsed a rival claimant to the title of the true heir of the dictator.
I spoke to Caesar as soon as he came down from the rostrum.
He was as coldly determined as I had ever seen him.
The reaction of the people was exactly what he had hoped for.
There would be no more peace treaties, he said, jabbing his finger to emphasise his determination, no more equal division of the spoils.
This time it would be a fight to the finish, winner take all, and Antony and Caesarion were both marked for death.
Throughout this period, I was having to contend with a family tragedy.
Over the years, Atticus had been more than a father-in-law to me.
In the absence of my own father, he had become a close friend and a source of wise advice.
Now, at last, in his seventy-eighth year, after decades of good health, Nature had finally caught up with him.
He had been seized with frightful stomach pains.
The doctors diagnosed an inoperable ulcer.
After three months of increasing agony, he announced his intention to starve himself to death.
In vain did Caecilia and I plead with him to change his mind and stay with us a little longer. He said the pain was too excruciating, that life had nothing more to offer him, that he could not bear to endure the prospect of another civil war, and that he preferred to die on his own terms.