When no ship’s captain in Amphipolis could be prevailed upon to take a fat fee and put out into winter seas bound for Rome, Cornelius Gallus brought the big, swilling jar back to the camp at Philippi to find the army still mopping up.
“Then,” said Octavian, sighing, “take it all the way across to Dyrrachium and find a ship there. Go now, Gallus. I don’t want it traveling with the army. Soldiers are superstitious.”
Cornelius Gallus and his squadron of German cavalry arrived in Dyrrachium at the end of that momentous year; there he found his ship, its master willing to make the voyage across the Adriatic to Ancona. Brundisium was no longer under blockade, but there were many fleets roaming, their Liberator admirals rudderless as they debated what to do. Mostly, join Sextus Pompey.
It was no part of Gallus’s orders to accompany the jar; he handed it over to the captain and rode back to Octavian. But someone in his party whispered what the cargo was before he left, for it had generated much interest. A whole ship, hired at great expense, just to ferry a big ceramic jar to Italy? It hadn’t made any sense until the whisper surfaced. The head of Marcus Junius Brutus, murderer of Divus Julius! Oh, the Lares Permarini protect us from this evil cargo!
In the middle of the sea the merchantman encountered a storm worse than any the crew had ever experienced. The head! It was the head! When the stout hull sprang a bad leak, the crew was sure that the head was determined to kill them too. So the oarsmen and sailors wrested the jar from the captain’s custody and threw it overboard. The moment it vanished, the storm blew into nothing.
And the jar containing the head of Marcus Junius Brutus sank like the heavy stone it was, down, down, down, to lie forever on the muddy bottom of the Adriatic Sea somewhere between Dyrrachium and Ancona.
FINIS