Fic: Simulacra (Rome), 7/10
Title: Simulacra (7/10)
Fandom: Rome (HBO)
Rating: R
Notes/disclaimer: HERE.
Chapter 6
Imperium et Libertas
It was dark when Brutus returned to the camp. Fires had been lit and torches burned at either side of the entrance to his tent. He saw from the flickering shadows that Cassius stood inside waiting for him.
He ducked inside and silently removed his coat, detesting its weight, its foreignness, its smell of hot sand and mutton fat.
“Where have you been?” Cassius asked quietly, evenly, in a tone of voice which implied that he did not desire a fight. “What have you been up to, that you need to creep back to camp under cover of darkness?”
Brutus sighed. “Did you ask the sentry to report to you as soon as I returned?”
“Yes,” Cassius replied, stepping out of the shadows and tugging the heavy linen flaps of the tent closed behind him. “I asked him for an hourly update, to post extra men along the approach to the gate, and to tell me as soon as you were found. Don’t worry,” he added, “I trust him not to let word of my anxiety spread to the men.”
“Even so, that was desperately unsubtle.”
“Yes, perhaps it was. Brutus,” he asked a second time, gently, “where have you been?”
Brutus turned to look at him. “I have been at the river,” he said in a voice heavy with irony, “asking Janus for release from my torment. You don’t mean to tell me you were worried?”
Cassius sighed, “Of course I was worried. You left without even a personal guard.”
“But surely we’re amongst allies?” He regretted the bitterness in his words as soon as he had uttered them and lifted a hand in apology. “Forgive me, Cassius. It has been a trying day.”
Cassius nodded and came nearer. The mountain lion look of months ago had gone and had been replaced by one of deep, anxious regret. He took Brutus’ hands and held them tightly for some moments, before pressing them to his lips in a kiss which might, between other men, have seemed merely fraternal. “Forgive me.”
Brutus inclined his head wearily and felt absently defeated, as though all the resistance - that which had troubled him so greatly and driven him to drink - was quite suddenly ebbing from him. “Was it part of your strategy from the beginning to seduce me into compliance?” he wondered aloud.
Cassius smiled wanly, and Brutus realised that, with a glib comment, he had stumbled uncomfortably near to the truth. “After you rejected my clumsy attempts to flatter you months ago, I soon abandoned all hope of your ever being compliant; I don’t believe it would suit you.”
Brutus looked at him, trying to summon the will to detest him for his honesty. Instead, he felt tired to the bone, exhausted by the effort of holding Cassius at a distance, and so dispirited by the toll of the day’s exertions that he wanted to restore Cassius’ faith in him, simply to prove his worthiness to receive it.
“You’re right, of course,” he agreed, holding Cassius’ hands tightly. “As you always are.”
Cassius’ smile brightened and his tone took on something of a teasing, sardonic lilt, “On some subjects I consider myself to be something of an expert.”
Brutus wondered, yet again, though this time without any trace of irritation, what Cassius saw in him that was so fascinating and deserving of this type of devotion. The guilt he felt in remembering Cicero’s declaration to him before the departure from Velia prevented him from saying more, so he let go of Cassius’ hands and stepped away to take a seat at the table.
He motioned to the slave nearest the door and informed him that he wished to be shaved, and as the slave departed to find a razor he sank into stoic contemplation of his reflection in the silver mirror which stood propped between coffers against the far wall of the tent, a neglected gift of tribute from the Oligarch of Damascus.
“News has come again from Smyrna,” Cassius said, watching him as though he could hardly bear to tear away his gaze; it was the first time he had tried to seriously discuss politics with Brutus since his dalliance with the eunuch in Patara. “Dolabella’s new seizure of Trebonius’ goods and chattels smacks of Antony more soundly than the murder he committed to begin with - it’s a wonder those two snakes didn’t throw in their lots together sooner. One wonders why Cicero thought to marry his daughter to him in the first place. For all his much-vaunted wisdom - ”
“Please, Cassius,” Brutus interrupted firmly. “Not tonight.”
Cassius said nothing for a moment, but was not in the mood to needle him further on the subject. “I simply thought you might like to be kept informed. Our route back to Greece will have to take us once again through Smyrna; we can add another legion or two to our numbers once we relieve Dolabella of his new position.”
Brutus glanced at him, brows knitting into an expression of utmost unhappiness. “We’ve had no word from Cicero - the Senate haven’t yet asked us to return to Rome.”
“They’re busy squabbling with Antony over his claim on Gaul; he’ll soon lose his patience and force them to declare war, and then our legions will make us extremely attractive prospects indeed.”
“I have no desire to be another Caesar.”
“No one would wish you to be, least of all me. But you are the great Marcus Junius Brutus - you are the republic, now.”
“No man is supposed to be the republic, Cassius,” Brutus said wryly, “that is precisely the point of it.”
The slave returned, bearing a bowl of warmed water and a cloth and razor which he set down on the table, and proceeded to lay a second cloth around Brutus’ shoulders. Brutus relinquished himself to the slaves’ ministrations and sat back in his chair, watching his reflection in the mirror with the greater part of his attention, and Cassius out of the corner of his eye.
Cassius had taken on the intent, feline look of old, watching impassively as the slave wetted Brutus’ face and began to trim away the three month’s growth of beard. He had aged badly in the months since they sailed for the East, but if anything it made him appear hungrier, gave him a determined look which Brutus found appealing.
“Give that to me,” Cassius said suddenly when the slave had sharpened the razor. He held out his hand and the slave obeyed, leaving the tent with his head bowed and barely a backwards glance.
Brutus supposed word of his and Cassius’ altercation and their subsequent activities had spread amongst the slaves by now, and had noticed their unusual solicitousness in slipping away and blending tactfully into the shadows should he and Cassius find themselves at any time alone together. It had not happened often since their original confrontation, and yet there had been a sense of tense anticipation between them, clearly palpable even by the slaves who served them. That atmosphere now seemed to be in the process of dissipating gently, like fog in the heat of the rising sun.
Stepping behind Brutus’ chair, Cassius met his eye in the mirror and smiled. “Permit me?”
The poet in Cassius no doubt thought this was terribly symbolic, and to refuse would only be to make him think he was no longer trusted, so Brutus tipped back his head.
“All this hair,” he said ruefully. “I’ll be glad to have it off.”
“I rather think it suits you,” Cassius replied, laying his hand lightly over Brutus’ long hair. “You look like some sort of wandering philosopher.”
“I think it makes me look like a shepherd.”
Cassius laughed and slipped his hand beneath Brutus’s jaw, gently turning his head and wetting the skin and then drawing the blade in a gentle stroke from his ear to the corner of his jaw. The razor felt cool and pleasant against his skin - the process of shedding the beard was one of stepping back into his old self. As Cassius drew the blade over his skin in careful strokes, he slowly became himself once more.
“Look,” Cassius said, when he had finished.
Brutus looked at their reflections, at Cassius’ hands on his shoulders, and the small, proud smile on Cassius’ face.
“We are both looking a great deal older than I remember.”
“You look every inch the statesman,” Cassius murmured, and leaned forward to press a gentle kiss against his temple. “You are yourself again.”
*
a.d. ii Id. Feb. 43
When word arrived that Anthony had taken troops and departed for Gaul, Cassius sent to Decimus to expect their arrival in Ionia within the fortnight. The long march westwards, which would take them through Asia to Smyrna, before crossing the Hellespont and sweeping across the plains of Macedonia, could only end with Rome, or death. That prospect seemed to have brightened even Brutus’ gloomy outlook, and Cassius was relieved to find himself no longer alone in shouldering the burden of the command of their legions.
Since the evening in Bithynia they had not lain together, but it was a measure of the restoration of their friendship that Brutus smiled now when Cassius addressed him, and spent his evenings immersed in conversation, rather than the wine jar.
“Word from Patara,” Cassius read out from a letter as Brutus was fitted for a new suit of armour. “They’ve capitulated to our demands and send sixteen thousand talents.”
“How many troops?”
“Seven thousand.”
“And the rest of Lycia?”
“No word as yet, but I imagine they’ll follow suit.”
“I’ll see that they do. We must be up to eight legions now.”
“Nine: twenty five thousand infantry, ten thousand cavalry, almost a match for Antony.”
“It’s good,” Brutus said, breathing deeply with the feel of the breastplate about him. “It’s very good.”
“Well,” Cassius agreed, with open, easy sincerity, looking him up and down, “you look magnificent. You should have your portrait done.”
“No, no time for such vanity.”
“It’d please your mother.”
Brutus laughed. “It would, wouldn’t it?”
“You know, speaking of Antony,” Cassius said, coming behind Brutus to adjust the straps on his shoulder plates, dismissing the slave with a nod of his head, “I hardly think it’s likely we’ll have to match him at all.”
Brutus turned to him and Cassius was struck by how much like his old self he looked, hopeful and familiar. “You have high hopes for Octavian, then?”
“Don’t you? Cicero must.”
Brutus smiled, as mentions of Cicero these days often made him, despite the long lull in communication from that quarter since the delivery of a transcript the last vitriolic speech, copied in Tiro’s tidy hand. “I knew him when he was a boy, when Caesar picked him out as an heir - he wasn’t much of a fighter, not in the same way Antony is, but he’s cunning. If he can outwit Antony and force him to an impasse, drive him further into Gaul before the spring, things will be looking well for us.”
Cassius nodded. “Either way, one will destroy the other, and we shall be more than a match for whichever’s left.”
*
Cicero once told Antony that he did not like to submit to mere implication, that he much preferred threats to be overt, purely so that his cowardice might seem the more reasonable when he later tried to justify it to himself in the grey hours of sleeplessness which came to him just before dawn. Octavian’s personal style of coercion defied all his attempts to rationalise it beyond the fact that the boy had an army at the gates of Rome - but he and his advisers were little more than children, therefore what harm they could possibly do was immediately diminished. Cicero might admit to himself, in the deepest recesses of the night time, that promising to be dependent upon his consent had been a masterstroke for the boy, because he had always been susceptible to flattery. This was, after all, another Caesar at the gates of Rome, and Cicero was pleased with the thought that he would be granted the opportunity to accomplish what Cato could not and tame the wolf at the door, circumventing further civil strife, and earning himself a name yet again as the saviour of the republic. Yes, he rather liked that.
Cicero was not afflicted by utter self-delusion as so many powerful men often are. He knew perfectly well that he was vain and he was cowardly, but he was secure in the knowledge that he was also very clever.
*
“What an auspicious day! Many gave their lives that we might stand here once again, united in the government of a lawful republic. And how fitting that we welcome this new beginning by swearing in the youngest Consul in the history of Rome: Gaius Octavian Caesar!”
It really was the perfect little speech - grounding the appointment in the imagery of high religion, conservatism being Octavian’s watchword for the republic; a reminder of previous civil calamities to menace the more redoubtable senators into abeyance; and tacking Octavian’s consulship neatly onto the legend of the republic while making its illegality seems entirely unremarkable and even fitting for the occasion. Cicero felt justifiably pleased with himself, right up until Octavian’s own turn to take the floor.
He was a strange, pale boy, sitting beneath a laurel wreath far too vibrant for his wan complexion. Cicero disliked the pretence of wearing the laurel wreath, the incomplete circlet somehow supposed to be a talisman against the return of the republic to monarchy. On Octavian it gave him an inhuman appearance, his otherworldly pallor conspiring with the laurel crown to give him the countenance of a man playing at being a god. Cicero found it unnerving, particularly when the boy began to speak in that reedy, inelegant voice and proceeded to prove the adage about a bedfellow underestimated being an enemy in the making.
“Esteemed senators,” young Caesar said, “I take this first moment before you not to glorify myself, but to honour my father. In his honour I declare that my term as Consul shall usher in a new era, an era of moral virtue, of dignity. The debauchery and chaos we have had to endure will end. Rome will be again as she once was; a proud republic of virtuous women and honest men!”
These were words of which Cicero approved, being ones he wrote himself. The boy had proved a willing puppet for these sentiments - there was nothing particularly revolutionary about them; on the contrary, they were a purposeful reminder of the days when the Senate was the moral arbiter of the glorious republic, a calculated piece of nostalgia.
“I speak to you now, not as a soldier or as a citizen, but as a grieving son.”
The boy’s voice deepened and Cicero thought it menacing rather than powerful. It was a deviation from the script and it did not, Cicero saw all at once, bode well.
“As my first act in this reborn republic, and in honour of my father I propose a motion; to declare Brutus and Cassius murderers and enemies of the state.”
The senators grew uneasy and began to murmur nervously, and Cicero looked about at the anxious, surprised faces surrounding him and knew that they were too desirous of stability to withstand Octavian’s wishes if he were allowed to table the motion and receive a quorum for the vote.
He hurried across the floor where the very act had taken place whose ghost Octavian was evoking in order to shame the senators into obedience. “My dear boy, this is not what we agreed.”
“It is not,” Octavian replied, still and serene, regarding him coolly with those unnerving, pale eyes. “Yet here we are.”
“Brutus and Cassius still have many friends, you will split the chamber. The unity of the republic - ”
“Step away from my chair,” said the boy, in a voice so cold it shocked Cicero to hear it directed at him with full force.
He looked at the boy, with his toga virilis and his laurel wreath - what is a circlet on a tyrant’s head, in any case, but a crown? - and realised, suddenly, the terrible mistake he had made. It was shocking, momentarily bewildering, even, to find himself so thoroughly outplayed.
He returned to his seat with his mind whirling furiously with thoughts of the republic, of the immediate need to retire to the country, and last and most shamefully of Brutus.
“My father died on this floor,” the boy was whispering, gesturing to the spot where Caesar’s body had lain, the attendant audience holding its breath in anticipation of the denouement of this sickening little piece of drama, “right there. Stabbed twenty seven times, butchered by men he called his friends. Who will tell me that is not murder? Who will tell my legions, who love Caesar as I do, that is not murder?”
Centurions trooped onto the Senate floor with choreographed precision. Cicero saw in the boy exactly what he had created and felt a sudden rush of sympathy for poor old Cato.
The legionaries unsheathed their swords enough that the rasp of cold steel cut through the rising hubbub and silence fell.
“Who will speak against the motion?”
Cicero sank into his seat as predictably as none of the other senators stood to oppose the new Caesar, and remained there long after the house had emptied.
“Some willow tea, perhaps?” suggested Tiro, who had slipped in to sit beside him.
“Henbane, more like,” he said dryly, thinking what a sad tableau they must make. He sighed, “I’ve been outmanoeuvred by a child.”
“To the country then?” Tiro asked gently and placed a hand briefly on his shoulder in a gesture some would no doubt think too familiar in a former slave, but which Cicero found comforting. “Some fresh air and sleep’ll do you good.”
Cicero ignored him and made a swift decision which he was not entirely sure he would not come to regret. “Take a letter: To Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus - ”
“Dominus,” Tiro interrupted, casting a glance about them as though legionaries would spring from behind the columns to arrest them, “if Octavian hears that you are in communication with Brutus - ”
“Don’t talk,” Cicero said firmly, “write: ‘Heroes of the republic, greetings.’”
***
Continue: Chapter 6a
Fandom: Rome (HBO)
Rating: R
Notes/disclaimer: HERE.
Chapter 6
Imperium et Libertas
It was dark when Brutus returned to the camp. Fires had been lit and torches burned at either side of the entrance to his tent. He saw from the flickering shadows that Cassius stood inside waiting for him.
He ducked inside and silently removed his coat, detesting its weight, its foreignness, its smell of hot sand and mutton fat.
“Where have you been?” Cassius asked quietly, evenly, in a tone of voice which implied that he did not desire a fight. “What have you been up to, that you need to creep back to camp under cover of darkness?”
Brutus sighed. “Did you ask the sentry to report to you as soon as I returned?”
“Yes,” Cassius replied, stepping out of the shadows and tugging the heavy linen flaps of the tent closed behind him. “I asked him for an hourly update, to post extra men along the approach to the gate, and to tell me as soon as you were found. Don’t worry,” he added, “I trust him not to let word of my anxiety spread to the men.”
“Even so, that was desperately unsubtle.”
“Yes, perhaps it was. Brutus,” he asked a second time, gently, “where have you been?”
Brutus turned to look at him. “I have been at the river,” he said in a voice heavy with irony, “asking Janus for release from my torment. You don’t mean to tell me you were worried?”
Cassius sighed, “Of course I was worried. You left without even a personal guard.”
“But surely we’re amongst allies?” He regretted the bitterness in his words as soon as he had uttered them and lifted a hand in apology. “Forgive me, Cassius. It has been a trying day.”
Cassius nodded and came nearer. The mountain lion look of months ago had gone and had been replaced by one of deep, anxious regret. He took Brutus’ hands and held them tightly for some moments, before pressing them to his lips in a kiss which might, between other men, have seemed merely fraternal. “Forgive me.”
Brutus inclined his head wearily and felt absently defeated, as though all the resistance - that which had troubled him so greatly and driven him to drink - was quite suddenly ebbing from him. “Was it part of your strategy from the beginning to seduce me into compliance?” he wondered aloud.
Cassius smiled wanly, and Brutus realised that, with a glib comment, he had stumbled uncomfortably near to the truth. “After you rejected my clumsy attempts to flatter you months ago, I soon abandoned all hope of your ever being compliant; I don’t believe it would suit you.”
Brutus looked at him, trying to summon the will to detest him for his honesty. Instead, he felt tired to the bone, exhausted by the effort of holding Cassius at a distance, and so dispirited by the toll of the day’s exertions that he wanted to restore Cassius’ faith in him, simply to prove his worthiness to receive it.
“You’re right, of course,” he agreed, holding Cassius’ hands tightly. “As you always are.”
Cassius’ smile brightened and his tone took on something of a teasing, sardonic lilt, “On some subjects I consider myself to be something of an expert.”
Brutus wondered, yet again, though this time without any trace of irritation, what Cassius saw in him that was so fascinating and deserving of this type of devotion. The guilt he felt in remembering Cicero’s declaration to him before the departure from Velia prevented him from saying more, so he let go of Cassius’ hands and stepped away to take a seat at the table.
He motioned to the slave nearest the door and informed him that he wished to be shaved, and as the slave departed to find a razor he sank into stoic contemplation of his reflection in the silver mirror which stood propped between coffers against the far wall of the tent, a neglected gift of tribute from the Oligarch of Damascus.
“News has come again from Smyrna,” Cassius said, watching him as though he could hardly bear to tear away his gaze; it was the first time he had tried to seriously discuss politics with Brutus since his dalliance with the eunuch in Patara. “Dolabella’s new seizure of Trebonius’ goods and chattels smacks of Antony more soundly than the murder he committed to begin with - it’s a wonder those two snakes didn’t throw in their lots together sooner. One wonders why Cicero thought to marry his daughter to him in the first place. For all his much-vaunted wisdom - ”
“Please, Cassius,” Brutus interrupted firmly. “Not tonight.”
Cassius said nothing for a moment, but was not in the mood to needle him further on the subject. “I simply thought you might like to be kept informed. Our route back to Greece will have to take us once again through Smyrna; we can add another legion or two to our numbers once we relieve Dolabella of his new position.”
Brutus glanced at him, brows knitting into an expression of utmost unhappiness. “We’ve had no word from Cicero - the Senate haven’t yet asked us to return to Rome.”
“They’re busy squabbling with Antony over his claim on Gaul; he’ll soon lose his patience and force them to declare war, and then our legions will make us extremely attractive prospects indeed.”
“I have no desire to be another Caesar.”
“No one would wish you to be, least of all me. But you are the great Marcus Junius Brutus - you are the republic, now.”
“No man is supposed to be the republic, Cassius,” Brutus said wryly, “that is precisely the point of it.”
The slave returned, bearing a bowl of warmed water and a cloth and razor which he set down on the table, and proceeded to lay a second cloth around Brutus’ shoulders. Brutus relinquished himself to the slaves’ ministrations and sat back in his chair, watching his reflection in the mirror with the greater part of his attention, and Cassius out of the corner of his eye.
Cassius had taken on the intent, feline look of old, watching impassively as the slave wetted Brutus’ face and began to trim away the three month’s growth of beard. He had aged badly in the months since they sailed for the East, but if anything it made him appear hungrier, gave him a determined look which Brutus found appealing.
“Give that to me,” Cassius said suddenly when the slave had sharpened the razor. He held out his hand and the slave obeyed, leaving the tent with his head bowed and barely a backwards glance.
Brutus supposed word of his and Cassius’ altercation and their subsequent activities had spread amongst the slaves by now, and had noticed their unusual solicitousness in slipping away and blending tactfully into the shadows should he and Cassius find themselves at any time alone together. It had not happened often since their original confrontation, and yet there had been a sense of tense anticipation between them, clearly palpable even by the slaves who served them. That atmosphere now seemed to be in the process of dissipating gently, like fog in the heat of the rising sun.
Stepping behind Brutus’ chair, Cassius met his eye in the mirror and smiled. “Permit me?”
The poet in Cassius no doubt thought this was terribly symbolic, and to refuse would only be to make him think he was no longer trusted, so Brutus tipped back his head.
“All this hair,” he said ruefully. “I’ll be glad to have it off.”
“I rather think it suits you,” Cassius replied, laying his hand lightly over Brutus’ long hair. “You look like some sort of wandering philosopher.”
“I think it makes me look like a shepherd.”
Cassius laughed and slipped his hand beneath Brutus’s jaw, gently turning his head and wetting the skin and then drawing the blade in a gentle stroke from his ear to the corner of his jaw. The razor felt cool and pleasant against his skin - the process of shedding the beard was one of stepping back into his old self. As Cassius drew the blade over his skin in careful strokes, he slowly became himself once more.
“Look,” Cassius said, when he had finished.
Brutus looked at their reflections, at Cassius’ hands on his shoulders, and the small, proud smile on Cassius’ face.
“We are both looking a great deal older than I remember.”
“You look every inch the statesman,” Cassius murmured, and leaned forward to press a gentle kiss against his temple. “You are yourself again.”
*
a.d. ii Id. Feb. 43
When word arrived that Anthony had taken troops and departed for Gaul, Cassius sent to Decimus to expect their arrival in Ionia within the fortnight. The long march westwards, which would take them through Asia to Smyrna, before crossing the Hellespont and sweeping across the plains of Macedonia, could only end with Rome, or death. That prospect seemed to have brightened even Brutus’ gloomy outlook, and Cassius was relieved to find himself no longer alone in shouldering the burden of the command of their legions.
Since the evening in Bithynia they had not lain together, but it was a measure of the restoration of their friendship that Brutus smiled now when Cassius addressed him, and spent his evenings immersed in conversation, rather than the wine jar.
“Word from Patara,” Cassius read out from a letter as Brutus was fitted for a new suit of armour. “They’ve capitulated to our demands and send sixteen thousand talents.”
“How many troops?”
“Seven thousand.”
“And the rest of Lycia?”
“No word as yet, but I imagine they’ll follow suit.”
“I’ll see that they do. We must be up to eight legions now.”
“Nine: twenty five thousand infantry, ten thousand cavalry, almost a match for Antony.”
“It’s good,” Brutus said, breathing deeply with the feel of the breastplate about him. “It’s very good.”
“Well,” Cassius agreed, with open, easy sincerity, looking him up and down, “you look magnificent. You should have your portrait done.”
“No, no time for such vanity.”
“It’d please your mother.”
Brutus laughed. “It would, wouldn’t it?”
“You know, speaking of Antony,” Cassius said, coming behind Brutus to adjust the straps on his shoulder plates, dismissing the slave with a nod of his head, “I hardly think it’s likely we’ll have to match him at all.”
Brutus turned to him and Cassius was struck by how much like his old self he looked, hopeful and familiar. “You have high hopes for Octavian, then?”
“Don’t you? Cicero must.”
Brutus smiled, as mentions of Cicero these days often made him, despite the long lull in communication from that quarter since the delivery of a transcript the last vitriolic speech, copied in Tiro’s tidy hand. “I knew him when he was a boy, when Caesar picked him out as an heir - he wasn’t much of a fighter, not in the same way Antony is, but he’s cunning. If he can outwit Antony and force him to an impasse, drive him further into Gaul before the spring, things will be looking well for us.”
Cassius nodded. “Either way, one will destroy the other, and we shall be more than a match for whichever’s left.”
*
Cicero once told Antony that he did not like to submit to mere implication, that he much preferred threats to be overt, purely so that his cowardice might seem the more reasonable when he later tried to justify it to himself in the grey hours of sleeplessness which came to him just before dawn. Octavian’s personal style of coercion defied all his attempts to rationalise it beyond the fact that the boy had an army at the gates of Rome - but he and his advisers were little more than children, therefore what harm they could possibly do was immediately diminished. Cicero might admit to himself, in the deepest recesses of the night time, that promising to be dependent upon his consent had been a masterstroke for the boy, because he had always been susceptible to flattery. This was, after all, another Caesar at the gates of Rome, and Cicero was pleased with the thought that he would be granted the opportunity to accomplish what Cato could not and tame the wolf at the door, circumventing further civil strife, and earning himself a name yet again as the saviour of the republic. Yes, he rather liked that.
Cicero was not afflicted by utter self-delusion as so many powerful men often are. He knew perfectly well that he was vain and he was cowardly, but he was secure in the knowledge that he was also very clever.
*
“What an auspicious day! Many gave their lives that we might stand here once again, united in the government of a lawful republic. And how fitting that we welcome this new beginning by swearing in the youngest Consul in the history of Rome: Gaius Octavian Caesar!”
It really was the perfect little speech - grounding the appointment in the imagery of high religion, conservatism being Octavian’s watchword for the republic; a reminder of previous civil calamities to menace the more redoubtable senators into abeyance; and tacking Octavian’s consulship neatly onto the legend of the republic while making its illegality seems entirely unremarkable and even fitting for the occasion. Cicero felt justifiably pleased with himself, right up until Octavian’s own turn to take the floor.
He was a strange, pale boy, sitting beneath a laurel wreath far too vibrant for his wan complexion. Cicero disliked the pretence of wearing the laurel wreath, the incomplete circlet somehow supposed to be a talisman against the return of the republic to monarchy. On Octavian it gave him an inhuman appearance, his otherworldly pallor conspiring with the laurel crown to give him the countenance of a man playing at being a god. Cicero found it unnerving, particularly when the boy began to speak in that reedy, inelegant voice and proceeded to prove the adage about a bedfellow underestimated being an enemy in the making.
“Esteemed senators,” young Caesar said, “I take this first moment before you not to glorify myself, but to honour my father. In his honour I declare that my term as Consul shall usher in a new era, an era of moral virtue, of dignity. The debauchery and chaos we have had to endure will end. Rome will be again as she once was; a proud republic of virtuous women and honest men!”
These were words of which Cicero approved, being ones he wrote himself. The boy had proved a willing puppet for these sentiments - there was nothing particularly revolutionary about them; on the contrary, they were a purposeful reminder of the days when the Senate was the moral arbiter of the glorious republic, a calculated piece of nostalgia.
“I speak to you now, not as a soldier or as a citizen, but as a grieving son.”
The boy’s voice deepened and Cicero thought it menacing rather than powerful. It was a deviation from the script and it did not, Cicero saw all at once, bode well.
“As my first act in this reborn republic, and in honour of my father I propose a motion; to declare Brutus and Cassius murderers and enemies of the state.”
The senators grew uneasy and began to murmur nervously, and Cicero looked about at the anxious, surprised faces surrounding him and knew that they were too desirous of stability to withstand Octavian’s wishes if he were allowed to table the motion and receive a quorum for the vote.
He hurried across the floor where the very act had taken place whose ghost Octavian was evoking in order to shame the senators into obedience. “My dear boy, this is not what we agreed.”
“It is not,” Octavian replied, still and serene, regarding him coolly with those unnerving, pale eyes. “Yet here we are.”
“Brutus and Cassius still have many friends, you will split the chamber. The unity of the republic - ”
“Step away from my chair,” said the boy, in a voice so cold it shocked Cicero to hear it directed at him with full force.
He looked at the boy, with his toga virilis and his laurel wreath - what is a circlet on a tyrant’s head, in any case, but a crown? - and realised, suddenly, the terrible mistake he had made. It was shocking, momentarily bewildering, even, to find himself so thoroughly outplayed.
He returned to his seat with his mind whirling furiously with thoughts of the republic, of the immediate need to retire to the country, and last and most shamefully of Brutus.
“My father died on this floor,” the boy was whispering, gesturing to the spot where Caesar’s body had lain, the attendant audience holding its breath in anticipation of the denouement of this sickening little piece of drama, “right there. Stabbed twenty seven times, butchered by men he called his friends. Who will tell me that is not murder? Who will tell my legions, who love Caesar as I do, that is not murder?”
Centurions trooped onto the Senate floor with choreographed precision. Cicero saw in the boy exactly what he had created and felt a sudden rush of sympathy for poor old Cato.
The legionaries unsheathed their swords enough that the rasp of cold steel cut through the rising hubbub and silence fell.
“Who will speak against the motion?”
Cicero sank into his seat as predictably as none of the other senators stood to oppose the new Caesar, and remained there long after the house had emptied.
“Some willow tea, perhaps?” suggested Tiro, who had slipped in to sit beside him.
“Henbane, more like,” he said dryly, thinking what a sad tableau they must make. He sighed, “I’ve been outmanoeuvred by a child.”
“To the country then?” Tiro asked gently and placed a hand briefly on his shoulder in a gesture some would no doubt think too familiar in a former slave, but which Cicero found comforting. “Some fresh air and sleep’ll do you good.”
Cicero ignored him and made a swift decision which he was not entirely sure he would not come to regret. “Take a letter: To Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus - ”
“Dominus,” Tiro interrupted, casting a glance about them as though legionaries would spring from behind the columns to arrest them, “if Octavian hears that you are in communication with Brutus - ”
“Don’t talk,” Cicero said firmly, “write: ‘Heroes of the republic, greetings.’”
***
Continue: Chapter 6a