Marking as it does the passing of the last great Republican mover and shaker, Gaius Julius Caesar, The October Horse brings my series of novels about Republican Rome to an end.
Octavius/Octavian/Augustus more properly belongs to the Imperium than to the Republic, so, having dealt with his childhood and his emergence on to the stage of world affairs, I think it is appropriate to call a halt to what has been an enormously enjoyable creative exercise: breathing life into history without distorting it more than the limitations of my scholarship make inevitable.
Provided that history is adhered to and the writer can resist the temptation to visit his or her own modern attitudes, ethics, morals and ideals upon the period and its characters, the novel is an excellent way to explore a different time. It permits the writer to climb inside the characters’ heads and wander the maze of their thoughts and emotions: a luxury not permitted to professional historians, but one that can render understandable events that are otherwise inexplicable, mysterious or incongruous. During the course of these six books, I have taken the external events of some very famous lives and attempted to create rounded, believable human beings endowed with all the complexities common sense dictates they must have possessed.
What attracted me to the period was threefold: first of all, that it hadn’t been done to death by other writers; secondly, its relevance to modern western civilization in that so much of our own systems of justice, government and commerce stem out of the Roman Republic; and, last but by no means least, that rarely have so many extraordinarily gifted men walked history’s stage in close enough temporal proximity to one another to have known one another as living men. Marius, Sulla and Pompey the Great were all known to Caesar, and all, in one way or another, shaped the course of his life, as did other famous historical figures like Cato Uticensis and Cicero. But by the end of The October Horse they are all gone, including Caesar. What remains is their legacy to the ongoing Roman experience: Caesar’s great-nephew, Gaius Octavius, who was to become Caesar Imperator, and then Augustus. If I don’t stop now, I never will!
Now to some specifics.
The specter of William Shakespeare must always overshadow our preconceptions of Brutus, Cassius, Mark Antony, and Caesar’s assassination. With apologies to the Bard, I have decided to follow the ancient sources that state that Caesar said nothing before he died, and that Mark Antony didn’t have a chance to make a great funeral oration before the crowd surged.
The etymology of the word “assassin” is younger than this period, but I have chosen to use it in my text because of its specificity to modern readers. Occasionally a more modern word is more satisfactory than any word a Latin speaker may have had at his or her command, but I have endeavored to keep this sort of thing to a minimum. Some words are untranslatable, and appear in the text in Latin, such as pomerium, mos maiorum and contio.
The reader may be intrigued by some of the less well-known events of these generally best known years: Cato’s overland march to Africa Province, and the fate of Brutus’s head, for example. Others, like the battle of Philippi, are so confused that making head or tail of them is difficult. The two most widely read ancient sources, Plutarch and Suetonius, must be supplemented by dozens and dozens of others, including Appian, Cassius Dio and Cicero’s letters, speeches and essays. A bibliography is available if any interested party cares to write to me at P.O. Box 333, Norfolk Island, via Australia.
One liberty I have taken with history concerns the reputed cowardice of Octavian during the campaign that culminated in the battle of Philippi. The more I delved into his early life, the less credible cowardice seemed. So many other aspects of his career at this stage indicate that he did not lack courage; he had quite astonishing sticking power, and tackled undertakings like two marches on Rome as a teenager with all the aplomb of a Sulla or a Caesar. I am in good company, incidentally, when I have the lad steal Caesar’s war chest; Sir Ronald Syme thought he did too.
Getting back to the so-called cowardice, it struck me that there might be a physical reason for his behavior. What intrigued me was the statement that Octavian “hid in the marshes” during First Philippi, a battle we know produced so much dust that Cassius couldn’t even see Brutus’s camp from his own. In that conduct, I believe, lies the answer to the riddle. What if Octavian suffered from asthma? Asthma is a disorder that can imperil life, may diminish (or increase) with age, and is affected by foreign matter in the air, from dust to pollen to water vapor, and by emotional stress. It fits very well with what we know of the young Caesar Augustus. Maybe, after he had cemented his power, enjoyed a more stable private life, and had the gold of Egypt to put the Empire back on its feet, he suffered fewer or even no asthmatic attacks. Though he traveled, he was not an inveterate traveler like Caesar, nor does he seem to have experienced Caesar’s rude health. Did Octavian have asthma, it makes everything that happened to him during that campaign in Macedonia logical, including his fleeing to the sea breezes and cleaner air of the salt marshes while dry ground was fogged by a suffocating pall of chaffy dust. My recourse to asthma is not an excuse aimed at making Octavian look good, it is simply an attempt to explain his conduct in a reasonable, possible way.
On the subject of Caesar’s “epilepsy,” I have professional experience to assist me. In a day and age when anticonvulsant medication was not available, Caesar’s mental acuity, including at the end of his life, militates against a long-term epileptic condition of generalized nature, though the only seizure described in the ancient sources seems to have been a generalized one. Many altered physiological states can cause a rare seizure in persons who do not have regular seizures, for epilepsy is a symptom rather than a disease. Trauma, space-occupying lesions of the brain, cerebral inflammation, severe electrolyte imbalances and acute hypoglycemia, among other things, can cause seizures. Since the ancient sources harp a little on Caesar’s indifference to food, I elected to attribute his seizure to an attack of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) following a systemic illness that may have involved the pancreas.
So much has been written about the significance of Caesar’s wearing the high red boots of the Alban Kings in the last two months of his life that a spirit of mischief led me to gift him with varicose veins. The Roman boot was a low affair that would not afford support for varicosities, whereas a high, tightly laced boot would. I am as likely to be right as wrong!
Health and disease are, not unnaturally, often misinterpreted by historians, whose academic inclinations lie far from medicine. It just seems to me that, particularly in times when knowledge of and treatment of ailments was less adept than it is now, many famous historical characters must surely have suffered common maladies like diabetes, asthma, varicose veins, heart failure, and Napoleon’s notorious hemorrhoids. Cancer was common, pneumonia often fatal, and poliomyelitis stalked Rome’s seven hills every summer. The description of the plague in Egypt sounds suspiciously like a close cousin to the Black Death, or else was it.
There are aspects of Cleopatra’s relationship with Caesar and her subsequent relationship with Mark Antony that are overlooked, though they should not be.
One must always be skeptical about Cleopatra, whom the mature Octavian/Augustus found it politic to malign; he didn’t dare have a civil war with Antony, so in her he found his foreign foe. The first master of propaganda, Octavian is responsible for her reputation as sexually promiscuous, up to and including denying that Caesarion was her son by Caesar. The truth is that her royal situation would have insisted that she be a virgin, but more than that: a Ptolemy, she would never have lowered herself to mate with a mere mortal. Circumstances like inundations in the Cubits of Death and an unavailable Ptolemaic husband made Caesar an eligible husband; he was generally regarded as a god throughout the eastern end of the Mediterranean when he landed in Alexandria.
But having introduced a new strain of godly blood into her line, Cleopatra was then faced with the problem of reinforcing that new, Julian blood. Her first choice to achieve this would have been a full sister for Caesarion to marry, but when that did not happen, she had to find another source of Julian blood. Mark Antony’s mother was a Julia, so he qualified. There can be no doubt that, had he lived, Caesarion would have married his half sister by Antony, Cleopatra Selene. The only other answer to Cleopatra’s dilemma than a Julian bride for Caesarion was marriage to her own half sister, Arsinoë: an alternative she could not condone, as it would have led to her own murder.
There were thus excellent dynastic reasons why Cleopatra espoused Mark Antony and had children by him. To do so ensured the House of Ptolemy Caesar. But, of course, Octavian destroyed all Cleopatra’s hopes by killing Caesarion before his little half sister was old enough for marriage. This child, Cleopatra Selene, was reared by Octavia and was eventually married to King Juba II of Numidia. Her twin brother, Ptolemy Helios, and their small brother, Ptolemy Philadelphus, were also raised by Octavia.
Now to the drawings.
Rarely has a people pre-dating the candid camera left such an immensely rich legacy of “warts and all” portraiture as the Romans. Identification of the busts depends largely upon coin profiles, as the busts were almost never labeled with a name. These unflattering likenesses were painted in the manner of a waxworks figure, which means that we do not see them today as they were in antiquity. It is for this reason that I have tried to bring the busts to life by drawing them. As I am no artist, I beg to be excused their faults. Most have lost their necks, so I fall down badly on necks. The hair I have kept stylized because to do so emphasizes the genius of the Roman barber, who seems to have catered for the individual mutiny of his master’s hair amazingly well.
First, the authenticated busts.
Good busts of Caesar all possess certain similarities: the frown lines, the creases at the outer corners of the eyes, the ears, the extraordinary cheekbones, and the slightly uptilted lips.
The Cassius is drawn from the Montreal bust, and confirms the impression one must get from Cicero’s famous “shipwreck” letter, that Cassius did not look lean and hungry!
There are many busts of Caesar Augustus, and of all ages save old age. Though they do have vague echoes of Alexander the Great, inspection always reveals the prominent ears and unclassical nose.
Cato we know is Cato thanks to a labeled bust found in North Africa, where he was adored.
The young Cleopatra is from the marble head in Berlin, but none of her extant likenesses do the enormous beaked nose of her coin portraits justice. It was truly immense.
Lepidus, Cicero and Agrippa are authentic.
The Brutus is the bust in the Prado at Madrid; note the fascinating muscle wasting in the right cheek.
Marcus Antonius is an elusive character; perhaps no other famous Roman has as many so-called likenesses as he, all very different from one another—and from the coin profile, which depicts a huge nose and chin striving to meet across a thick-lipped mouth. I have chosen to draw from the bust that most resembles the coin profile.
Now come a group of three drawings that are not authentic, but bear similarities to some well-authenticated people. The Lucius Caesar is said to be a bust of the great Caesar, but is not: the frown lines are absent, so are the creases in the outer corners of the eyes; the shape of the skull and face are wrong, and there is a general asymmetry that Caesar’s face does not have. Whether this is Lucius Caesar, I don’t know, but the subject certainly looks like a Julian.
The Calpurnia reminded me of an authenticated bust of her father, Lucius Calpurnius Piso. I can say the same for Porcia.
The rest of the drawings are from busts of the proper date, but anonymous. They are there because it’s fun to put a name to a face, and I maintain that my casting is better than Hollywood’s.