commanded by the sorceress of the Nile. The Republic would be destroyed. I have been called a master of propaganda; I had no need of such skills now. The facts spoke for themselves.
Yet Antony retained partisans in the city. I had still to move cautiously. I sent Antony a friendly, yet strongly worded, protest, pointing out that he had no authority to dispose of the provinces of the Roman state as he had reportedly done. He replied insolently, demanding that the Senate approve what he had done in Egypt. His henchmen in the Senate, the consuls Gaius Sosius and Domitius Ahenobarbus, did not dare to present this message, but they conveyed the news that Antony now regarded the triumvirate as having expired, its powers as obsolete. The implication was that henceforth I had no authority, no imperium.
I attended the Senate, and in a speech of the utmost moderation, I outlined the course of Antony's actions over the last year. 'Do you wish, conscript fathers,' I asked, 'to deliver Rome into the hands of Cleopatra?' It was a question Antony's friends could not answer; instead Sosius, a man of neither merit nor achievement, tried to shift the argument by attacking me. He even went so far as to propose that I be named a public enemy. A tribune interposed his veto; a kind but unnecessary act, for the motion could not have passed. Nevertheless his veto saved me a momentary embarrassment and I was grateful to him.
That debate however convinced me that the moment had come for a bold stroke. First, I asked Maecenas to call on the consuls.
'Let them know,' I said, 'in your most silky and sinister manner that I am displeased. Let them know that I will not brook such behaviour. Ask them – politely – how many legions they have. Suggest that their friends in the East must be bewailing their absence. Remind them how brief is a consul's authority. Ask them if they imagine the mob will respect Cleopatra's friends. In short, my dear Maecenas, I look to you to put the fear of death into the pair of them.'
'Don't worry, ducky,' Maecenas said, 'when I've finished with them they'll be scared even to shit.' 'I don't want them so scared they can't run.'
They ran; I then announced that all those who regarded themselves as friends or clients of Antony might leave Italy. Perhaps one-third of the Senate departed.
Traffic however ran both ways. Many Romans who had been attached to Antony could not stomach his exotic and deluded and disgusting debasement. Among these was L. Munatius Plancus.
A word on him whose arrival I greeted with great pleasure. Plancus came from a good bourgeois family of Tibur. He had served on my father's staff in the Gallic wars and at Pharsalus, but he had never before, in all the comings and goings of the last decade, adhered to me. Indeed, he had fought against me in the war of Perusia, for he had been a close friend of Antony's brother Lucius. He had later joined Antony himself, and had recently been proconsul of Asia and of Syria. There was no one more experienced, no one more knowledgeable of how things stood in Antony's party. Curiously, I had only met him once before: at the time of the Proscription when he had proved his zeal for the Republic by assenting to the inclusion of his own brother in the list, and also his eye for personal advantage by seeing to it that the Coponii of Tibur, old rivals of his family, were pricked down.
I would not have recognized the thin grey-haired man who was ushered in. He had a restless, glance-over- the-shoulder, finger-twitching manner which I have often observed as being induced by long immersion in politics. His speech too was nervous and jerky.
I apologized for the search to which he had been subjected before he was allowed in.
'I am ashamed of it,' I said. 'Nevertheless the fact is, that only a couple of months ago, I had a dagger drawn on me… so my friends insist that now I should see nobody alone who hasn't first undergone a search, and, my dear Plancus, I very much wanted to see you alone.'
We talked a little about the changes he found in the city, for he had not been there since the year after Caesar's murder. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'this makes it easier for me to applaud what you have done in the way of restoration; perhaps also it has made it possible for me to retain an ideal Rome in my mind; and it was, Caesar, my vision of that ideal Rome which persuaded me to break the old bonds of my friendship with Mark Antony. I could not stomach the perversions he now displays.' I was sure this was high-flown nonsense. Plancus I had written down as a cunning old time-server, quick to sniff the direction of the prevailing wind and ready to tack – if I have got the right nautical expression – before it. I had welcomed his arrival for just this reason, also of course for the news he could bring…
I remained wary though, in case Antony had sent him to deceive me. He soon disembarrassed me of this notion.
'I can't stomach,' he said, 'what's happened and what's happening over there. I tell you, no Roman could. The last straw was seeing Antony in Egyptian robes walking among that woman's eunuchs. He is about to divorce your sister, you know, and stage a public wedding with that woman. Not that that means much, in my view they've been man and wife for years. He's half-besotted, and half-blind to any other way to restore his fortunes… But, Caesar, I've come, on conditions, to hand you the game…' 'Conditions?' I said.
'Conditions which your natural gratitude and dignity will be happy to satisfy.' He gave a quick forky lick of his lips. 'Caesar, I have served the Republic all my life. I have lived as honourably as a man can these last terrible two decades. I recognize what you have done to shore up the State, but I have done my bit myself even though we have sometimes found our judgements differ. No more of that though. I've attained some honour, I say – do you know, in Mylyssa in Caria where I was proconsul there's a priest consecrated in my honour – awful, these Orientals, aren't they? But honour is one thing and a man can't live on it in his old age.'
'What,' I said, 'do you have to…'I hesitated before the word 'sell'; it hardly chimed with all this talk of honour… 'tell me? I am sure we shall be able to satisfy you.'
'Antony's made a will,' he said. 'I witnessed it and know its provisions… As for me, there's various honours and comforts – a priesthood of Jupiter, an estate on the Bay of Naples – that I have my eye on… I would like a contract, Caesar… the provisions of the will are scandalous…' 'Would they be believed?' I said. 'My word…' he said. 'Words,' I said, 'are discounted these days. The currency of language has been debased. Look at the insults Antony has showered on me. They mean nothing, have no effect.'
Plancus smiled. This would be different. Let me tell you what is in the will. He asserts again that Ptolemy Caesar is Caesar's son and leaves huge legacies to him and Cleopatra's other brats. Nothing is left Octavia or her daughter Antonia. He orders that his body be buried in the royal mausoleum at Alexandria. I don't need to spell out the implications of this will, do I, Caesar?'
He did not; I felt my head swim with excitement. Plancus had handed me what I needed to convert a personal struggle (as some persisted in seeing it) into the cause of Rome and all Italy. 'But words,' I said. 'I can prove them… but first my contract…' I called for a slave, signed whatever he dictated. (It mattered little.) 'The will,' he said, 'is deposited in the Temple of Vesta.' Livia was adamant: it could not, must not, be done. It was wrong in itself, sacrilege. Whatever lay in the Temple of Vesta was a sacred trust of the Goddess. No man might enter the shrine; no man might compel the Virgins to surrender what had been entrusted to their keeping. Her eyes flashed as she said this, and love, fear and anger were mingled in my heart. If no man… could she not herself? 'You have been blinded, Caesar,' she said. 'You are in danger of losing your sense of what is right and what is wrong. I beg you to have nothing to do with this, to forget and lay aside the evil temptation that that man Plancus has sown in your mind. I warn you too, that if you commit this sacrilege, our marriage will be doomed to perpetual unfruitfulness…'
How can a man respond to such a plea from his wife? There are no words. No argument can still a trembling heart such as Livia revealed. I took her in my arms, but she drew her head away, resisting my kiss. There was no answering embrace.
'You will kill,' she said, 'whatever is good and true in you and in us…' A shadow crossed the face of the sun and the room was cold. Maecenas, too, hesitated. The news shook him out of his affectations. His hand flew to the carved frog he wore on a chain round his neck. For some time he could not speak. Then he went and looked out of the window to the hills…
Tm afraid,' he said, 'I would be afraid to do it myself, and I'm afraid for you, my dear. You can put me down
