across a passage in his private journal I had not read before:
And what of this speculation one hears about young Gaius Octavius, Caesar's grandnephew? Antony repeats the tale with great zest, and for all I know the rumor originated with him (if, indeed, it is only a rumor). I realize that Antony is piqued at Caesar, but why should he spread salacious gossip about Octavius, unless he thinks Caesar intends to make the boy his heir, and Antony imagines that he himself deserves that honor (even though he has no blood tie to the dictator). Or… could the tale be true? I decided to see the boy with my own eyes, to judge whether he might tempt a man like Caesar. The meeting was easy to arrange. Octavius is a bright lad, easily bored, always looking for distraction; he was quite fascinated by me.
Is he a match for Caesar? Well, I suppose he's pretty enough, though not to my taste; his face is too broad and his eyes are too sharp-I should think a man would more likely cut himself on those eyes rather than become lost in them. But who knows what Caesar may have gotten up to with the boy? Octavius is ambitious, and ambitious boys are pliable. Caesar bestrides the world like the Colossus of Rhodes, but even giants long for lost youth, and I must admit the boy has a certain engaging freshness to him. As Antony says, Caesar gets to play Nicomedes, and Octavius gets to play Caesar.
Or is Antony making it all up? Antony loves to gossip more than any man I've ever met, and Cytheris constantly eggs him on…
This tale was new to me. Clearly, Hieronymus was of two minds whether to give it credence. On its face, the idea that Caesar might seek sexual favors from a younger man did not strike me as unlikely. I believed that Caesar had sought such a relationship with Meto, though I did not know and had never asked to know the exact details. I had reason to believe that Caesar had done the same with young King Ptolemy in Egypt, with whom he shared a most intimate relationship before they turned irrevocably against each other and Caesar finally chose to side (and share his bed) with Ptolemy's sister Cleopatra. And, for all I knew, Caesar might have shared such an intimacy with Brutus; that might explain the enduring but strangely volatile nature of their relationship.
I had never met Gaius Octavius. I tried to recall what I knew about him.
He was Caesar's grandnephew, being the grandson of one of Caesar's sisters. He had been born in the year that Cicero served as consul (and put down the so-called conspiracy of Catilina); that would make Octavius about sixteen now.
His father had been a New Man, like Cicero, the first of the family to become a senator; the elder Gaius Octavius was a banker and financier and began his political career by distributing bribes to gangs on election days. His chief claim to fame had been tracking down a band of runaway slaves made up of the last remnants of the long-destroyed armies of Spartacus and of Catilina. For as long as thirteen years some of these fugitives had remained at large, living by their wits and eluding capture. In the vicinity of Thurii, the elder Octavius managed to round up these ragged runaways and put them all to death. Thus he established his credentials as a serious proponent of law and order, and seemed destined for a particularly ruthless political career, but after a year as provincial governor of Macedonia he died of a sudden illness.
If I calculated correctly in my head, young Gaius Octavius was only four years old when his father died. Perhaps that explained his devotion to the women who raised him. When his grandmother died, Octavius, at the age of twelve, delivered a eulogy at her funeral that was said to have wrested tears from Caesar himself. Oratorical skills aside, the boy had never seen battle and was still too young to have made a mark on the world. But he must be very near the age of manhood, I thought, and when I began to read again, Hieronymus confirmed this:
On the other hand, Octavius is now sixteen, which is the very age that some older men find most appealing. Will Caesar turn fickle the day the calf becomes a bull? Octavius will turn seventeen and don his manly toga on the twenty-third day of September (or as the Romans calculate the date, nine days before the Kalends of October). Octavius boasted that his granduncle may allow him to appear in one of his triumphs, to celebrate his ascent to manhood. Never mind that the boy fought in none of the foreign campaigns (I doubt he has ever even picked up a sword), Caesar intends to parade him as a conqueror, presenting him formally to the Roman people-and that reinforces the idea that Caesar may be grooming young Octavius to become his heir. Because of the family tie? Because Caesar sees something extraordinary in the boy? Or because his catamite deserves a generous reward?
I whistled aloud at Hieronymus's boldness. At least he had confined such reckless speculations to his private journal, rather than putting them in his reports to Calpurnia, but I was surprised he had written them down at all. It suddenly occurred to me that Caesar himself might have had Hieronymus killed. But if that were the case, wouldn't Caesar have tracked down and destroyed this offending document? I shook my head. As far as I could tell, Caesar knew nothing about either his wife's Etruscan haruspex or about her Massilian spy.
If Hieronymus had the date correct, Octavius's birthday was tomorrow. Caesar's Asian Triumph would take place the next day, with the African Triumph to follow two days after that. Would Octavius be taking part in either one?
Hieronymus claimed that Octavius had been fascinated by him. What if Hieronymus had misread the boy's reactions? Hieronymus was not always tactful, and not always skilled in hiding his thoughts; had he given away to Octavius his suspicions about a relationship between the boy and Caesar? Had Octavius been embarrassed, offended, even outraged? Had he suspected that Hieronymus was maliciously spreading rumors about him? Antony was too powerful to be killed for such a thing, but Hieronymus was not. Here was yet another possible motive for someone to murder Hieronymus.
Or, if the story was true, did it provide Octavius with a motive to plot the death of his granduncle? The notion that Caesar's sixteen-year-old grandnephew and possible heir might conspire to kill him seemed far-fetched-and thus perfectly matched Hieronymus's warning of a menace from a quarter no one expected. But was the idea so unlikely? Catamites have been known to turn against their older lovers for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps Octavius was of the insanely jealous sort. Or perhaps he resented submitting to the domination of an older man, considering it a form of degradation, and craved revenge, no matter that his personal fortunes depended on Caesar.
Until I knew more about Gaius Octavius, these ideas were no more than idle speculation. Like Hieronymus before me, I decided that I needed to meet the boy face-to-face, so as to form my own judgment of him.
XV
The house of the widow Atia, Octavius's mother, was not far from my own on a slope of the Palatine. The next morning I put on my best toga, called for Rupa, and went to pay a visit-and encountered a crowd outside the house of Atia so large it blocked the street.
Most of the men wore togas. Others were dressed in military regalia. In the sea of faces I recognized senators, magistrates, high-ranking officers, and wealthy bankers. There were also a number of foreigners, including diplomats, traders, and merchants. I seemed to have stumbled into a open-air gathering of the most elite men in Rome.
I had expected a crowd, though not quite this big. It was traditional for well-wishers to pay their respects to a young citizen and his family on the day he reached adulthood and put on his manly toga. Usually, such guests trickle in over the course of the day. But in this case, the young man happened to be the grandnephew of Julius Caesar, and the well-wishers were legion. Because the rather modest house of Atia was too small to accommodate more than a handful of guests at once, an officious-looking slave was keeping strict order at the door, allowing only one or two callers to enter at a time, as other guests departed.
'Well, Rupa,' I said, 'we shall never get in. Mentioning Hieronymus won't count for much in these circumstances.'
The situation was even worse than I first thought. After watching awhile, I realized that callers were not being admitted by order of arrival; instead, the less important visitors were expected to give way to the more important. Even as I watched, Caesar's rabble-rousing favorite Dolabella showed up. With a swaggering gait, Marc Antony's young nemesis (and the erst-while son-in-law of Cicero) strode through the throng. No elbowing was necessarily; the crowd parted for him as if by instinct. He stepped past the officious doorkeeper and into the house without so much as a nod.
If admission was by order of influence, I would be the last man admitted, unless perhaps I could argue my way ahead of young Gaius Octavius's fuller or shoe mender.
