When they ran through the Forum to make the second pass before the Rostra, the crowd had grown even larger. Again, Antonius broke away and ran onto the platform. Again, he displayed the diadem to the crowd. A number of people began to chant, “Crown him! Crown him!” Others chanted, “Never a king, never a crown! Never a king, never a crown!”
Like a mime on a stage, Antonius made a great show of trying to place the diadem on Caesar’s brow. Again, Caesar gently refused it, waving his hand as if to ward off a buzzing insect. The crowd’s reaction was even more enthusiastic than before. They cheered and stamped their feet.
Antonius withdrew and rejoined the pack.
“Marcus, what is going on?” said Lucius.
Antonius grunted. “Caesar is my commander. I was thinking that vulnerable bald spot could use a bit of strategic cover.”
“Marcus, this isn’t funny!”
Antonius shook his head and laughed. “There is nothing as funny as your great-uncle’s bald spot!” He would say no more.
They completed the third and final circuit. An immense crowd had gathered before the Rostra, made up not only of the pious and those who wished to take advantage of the feast, but of many others, for word of Caesar’s refusal of a crown had spread through the city. When Antonius mounted the Rostra, the competing chants were deafening.
“Crown him! Crown him!”
“Never a king, never a crown! Never a king, never a crown!”
A third time Antonius moved to place the diadem on Caesar’s head. A third time Caesar refused it.
The applause was thunderous.
Caesar rose to his feet. He raised his hands for silence. He took the diadem from Antonius and held it high above his head. The crowd watched in suspense. For a moment it appeared that Caesar might crown himself.
“Citizens!” he cried. “We Romans know only one king-Jupiter, king of the gods. Marcus Antonius, take back this diadem and carry it to the Temple of Jupiter. Offer it to the god on behalf of Gaius Julius Caesar and the people of Roma.”
The applause of the crowd was deafening. Caesar again raised his hands for silence. “I declare that the Lupercalia has been well and truly run. Let the feasting begin!”
Amid the surging throng, Lucius stood before the Rostra and looked up at his great-uncle. He did not know what to think of the performance he had just witnessed, nor what to make of the crowd’s reaction to it. It seemed to him that those who chanted “Crown him!” had cheered the loudest when Caesar refused the crown, as if the very act of rejecting the symbol entitled him to the power it represented. Those who had chanted “Never a king, never a crown!” had cheered as well; were they so foolish as to believe that because Caesar refused a diadem, he was not in fact their king? “In politics, appearance is everything,” Antonius had once told him. Still, it was all very confusing.
Lucius was also not sure what to make of Caesar. Every man, woman, and child in Roma seemed either to revere or despise the man with great intensity, but to Lucius, Caesar had always been Uncle Gaius, a bit larger than life, to be sure, yet all too human, with his preoccupied air, his combed-over hair, and his slightly absurd habit of speaking of himself in the third person. Caesar had loomed over Lucius all his life, yet he always seemed a bit distant and aloof. Indeed, whenever the two of them had been alone together, Lucius had sensed an uneasiness in his great-uncle’s manner. Sometimes Caesar averted his eyes rather than look Lucius in the face. Why was that?
A few times, Lucius’s father had made veiled references to a debt owed to the family by Caesar, but he had never explained. Lucius sensed that something tragic or shameful had occurred in the past, the sort of thing that grownups never discuss in front of children. He had an idea, though he could not say why, that it involved his grandparents, Julia and Lucius the Unlucky. What had Caesar done to them, or failed to do? Probably money was involved, or an insult to someone’s dignity, or both. Whatever the lapse or transgression, it was surely a very small matter when compared to the enslavement of Gaul or the carnage of the civil war. Still, Lucius was curious. Now that he was a man, would he be told what had happened in those mysterious, long-ago days before he was born?
A month later-on the day before the Ides of Martius-Lucius Pinarius attended a dinner party at the house of Marcus Lepidus on the Palatine. Lepidus had fought under Caesar and was now serving as the dictator’s Master of the Horse. Caesar himself was in attendance, as were Marcus Antonius and several other of Caesar’s most trusted officers.
Antonius drank more than anyone else. He showed no obvious signs of inebriation-his speech was not slurred, his gestures were controlled-but his eyes shone with a mischievous glimmer. “So, commander, what is this grand announcement you’ve assembled us to hear tonight?”
Caesar smiled. He had kept them in suspense through the fish course and the game course, but it seemed that Antonius would not submit to eating the custard course without hearing what Caesar had to say. “You become bored and impatient so quickly, Antonius. Well, I suppose I’ve become a bit bored myself lately. That’s why I asked Lepidus to invite this particular group for dinner. Some of you served me in Gaul, and saw the surrender of Vercingetorix. Some of you served me at Pharsalus, where we took down Pompeius. Some of you were in Alexandria, where we made peace among the bickering Egyptians, despite their treachery and their wiles. And some of you were at Thapsus, where Cato met his end. You’ve all been tested by battle-or you soon will be.” He smiled and glanced at Lucius. “You are a select band, the cream of Roma’s warriors. You are my most trusted men at arms. That’s why I wanted to meet with you all tonight, ahead of the official announcement I shall make tomorrow.”
“Yes!” whispered Antonius. “This is about-”
“Parthia,” said Caesar, who refused to let even Antonius utter the word before him. “I’ve reached my decision regarding the feasibility of an invasion of Parthia.”
There was a stir of movement around the room. Everyone knew what Caesar must be about to say, but the magnitude of it was so great that it could not seem entirely real until the words were actually said aloud.
“And?” said Antonius, fidgeting like a boy.
Caesar laughed. “Patience, Antonius! Patience! The custard course is on its way. We shall be enjoying tender bits of fowl and pork in an egg custard spiced with garum-isn’t that right, Lepidus? Lepidus has one of the finest cooks on the Palatine-”
“Commander, please!”
“Very well, the custard will have to wait.” Caesar cleared his throat. “I suppose I should stand up for this, and all of you should reach for your cups. My good friends: Tomorrow, Caesar shall put forward a request to the Senate-and the Senate, I feel certain,
“Parthia!” they shouted, raising their cups.
So the rumor was true, thought Lucius, draining his cup with the rest. His great-uncle, not satisfied to have mastered the whole of the Mediterranean world, had set his sights on yet another conquest: the land of the ancient Persians, which, since its conquest by Alexander, had become the kingdom of Parthia.
In all the known world, Parthia was the only power that could possibly rival Roma. When Lucius was nine years old, a man named Marcus Licinius Crassus, who was famous for putting down the great slave revolt led by Spartacus, led a Roman army to engage the Parthians, using Syria as his base of operations. Crassus had been the richest man in Roma and the political equal of Pompeius and Caesar; for a while the three of them formed the so- called Triumvirate, which temporarily stabilized the rivalry between them even as each plotted for a greater share of power. Crassus’s bid for fortune had been his invasion of Parthia. He had hoped to accomplish there what Caesar was already accomplishing in Gaul, reaping wealth and glory-except that the fabulous spoils of Parthia would far exceed anything to be taken in Gaul.
Instead, Crassus met Nemesis. At the battle of Carrhae his army was surrounded and subjected to a relentless barrage of armor-piercing Parthian arrows. Leading a cavalry unit to try to break through the Parthian
