The Horse Changer Read online

  Our Caesar, so beloved these days that we build temples to him throughout the empire, earned his divine status in the worst way imaginable: trading the lives of friends and even family for the fortune he stole. What astonishes me still is that he so cleverly managed to shift the full blame of it to Antony. But of course that is the enduring genius of our princeps. He has always been able to dress others in his own most egregious crimes and take wholesale the virtues of better men.

  Tyre, Lebanon: Summer, 42 BC

  Roman officers brought me out of my cell and ordered slaves to wash me, trim my nails, and cut my hair and beard. Finally, pale and shivering in my nakedness, the officers instructed these same slaves to slip a plain tunic over my head, the customary purple stripe of an eques quite forgotten for the likes of me.

  I spent some days at the coastal town of Tyre before being pushed into a carriage and taken to the marbled suburb of Daphne on the outskirts of Antioch. Daphne is where the Roman proconsul to Syria makes his home.

  While I was still in Tyre one of my guards befriended me. He informed me of a good many details about developments in the world since my imprisonment; this came like casual gossip from a bored attendant. I would learn later that the part this fellow played was for my rehabilitation. First I learned Allienus had surrendered my legions. Then I heard about the proscriptions. I did not even think about my father. How could he be affected? My guard was less certain about this matter but promised to find out if his name appeared on the list.

  Both Cassius and Brutus had gone to great lengths to learn the fates of men who had not escaped Italy’s new tyrants, and this fellow had only to approach one of his superiors for a glimpse of the latest proscription list. Eventually, my friendly guard returned to tell me my father’s name was on the list. He promised to ask his prefect if anything else was known.

  I had some days of worrying about my father’s fate before learning that his head did indeed decorate the speaker’s platform in Rome’s Forum.

  So I came first to worry and then fell at last to mourning. Of course my guard knew everything even from the beginning. I was only being manipulated so that I might rage all the more against the Triumvirate of Antony and Caesar and Lepidus. When I had finally got the full news I did not even weep. Instead, I recalled Octavian baiting Antony into a rage at their first meeting, the sly Maecenas standing beside him like a playwright watching his work being acted out. They were children with their schemes, incapable of empathy.

  And so I moved from disgust for our young Caesar’s impertinence to loathing him for the sake of his indifference to the lives of the innocent; almost fifty-years later I still want Caesar’s blood for the crime he committed against my father. I want it, but I do nothing. In all our decades together since that time, I have thought about killing Caesar every time I stood before him. For all that, I bow and call him by his title, just as everyone else does.

  Well, isn’t it the same with the gods? They sit by and watch nations burn and men of character murdered. They are quiet while the innocent are raped, and yet still we come before them whispering our adoring salutations and secretly loathing their indifference.

  Daphne-by-Antioch, Syria: Summer, 42 BC

  To my inexperienced eyes Cassius Longinus seemed a great man: silver-haired and handsome with a dignified voice and the cool assurance of one long familiar with power. He was then some forty-five years of age, a veteran of a great many campaigns. At first glance he appeared to be a far more impressive figure than Julius Caesar had been when I saw him in Spain.

  I would know Cassius better a few months later, when indecision and obstinacy characterised his every decision. In a palace, with no enemy to threaten him, he was the epitome of the old Roman imperator.

  At my appearance in his praetorium Cassius announced, almost conversationally, ‘I am told you nearly burned Alexandria to the ground, Dellius.’ This remark came without so much as a handshake.

  ‘Only its museum, Imperator.’

  Cassius liked this. At least he laughed. ‘Caesar set fire to it as well.’ He spoke as if he had been fond of the man he had murdered.

  ‘Let me make this easy for you, Imperator,’ I answered. ‘I was the one who murdered Gaius Trebonius. I made it a fair fight, my fists against his knife, but it was murder all the same.’

  ‘I know you did. I also know about the vows you swore to Artemis. She will not forget that you used her name for your crime, Dellius. But that is between you and the goddess. What I want to know is how you persuaded Allienus to give you command of his army?’

  ‘Allienus had no army. They had deserted him and gone into the hinterlands to become bandits. I brought them back to service with gold Queen Cleopatra gave me.’

  ‘I have been trying to get gold from Cleopatra for almost a year. I tell you this: that woman is freer with her virtue than her money.’

  ‘Give me my legions back, Imperator, and I will bring you all the gold in Egypt!’

  A wistful smile. ‘Would you swear an oath to that effect?’

  ‘Happily.’

  ‘I cannot trust your oaths, Dellius. If you lie to the gods, you will lie to me.’

  ‘That is not true. I do not believe in the gods, Imperator. You, on the other hand, are quite real.’

  ‘An Atheist? I despise such men. At least your fellow officers felt some remorse at swearing an oath they had no intention of keeping.’

  ‘What have the gods to do with us?’

  ‘They care about the Law.’

  ‘Then why did you kill Caesar? If the gods cared that he had broken faith with Rome they ought to have struck him down; instead they let him prosper.’

  ‘The gods expect us to care, Dellius. When their laws are broken we must act or suffer the consequences.’

  ‘The gods are a fantasy, else there would be justice in the world.’

  ‘You do not know why the gods do what they do.’

  ‘Turn me loose on my father’s murderers or kill me for my crimes. Do not tell me about imaginary creatures who love justice and punish the wicked.’

  ‘The gods will teach you the truth in time, Dellius. Until then, we shall leave Cleopatra’s gold for another day. I need to get ready for the army of the Triumvirs. I have released your fellow officers and I intend to do the same with you. I will make you a senior tribune of the cavalry. I mean to assign you to a cohort of the Thracian auxiliaries who will form part of my Guard. They are a difficult race to manage but by all accounts excellent fighters. Cassius Scaeva will serve as your first centurion of the cavalry. He assures me, by the way, he would rather ride with you than with any officer in the legions, save only Brutus and me. High praise from a man of his reputation.’

  ‘I will try to be worthy of it, Imperator.’

  ‘Give me young Caesar’s pretty head, lad. If not his, then Mark Antony’s will serve as well. For such a trophy I will not only restore your father’s estate to you, I will give you all of Tuscany as your own.’

  Beyond the Hellespont: Summer, 42 BC

  Scaeva and the others had already departed for Thrace by the time I interviewed Cassius. That left me to travel with several centurions, tribunes and prefects on their way to Hellespont. Our cavalry escort included a mix of Parthians, Medes, and Arabs, a thousand horsemen in all. We averaged forty miles a day and reached the Hellespont within a month of our departure. From there, I was only a few miles from my new camp, but it took a week before I caught one of the ferries across.

  I reported to the prefect of the Thracian cavalry, the son of one of the assassins, as it happened. He informed me that, for the time being, the entire Thracian cavalry would answer to Junius Brutus. Once Cassius arrived, our cohort would join Cassius’s Guard. I did not expect a temporary assignment in the army of Brutus to make any difference to me, but as it turned out Brutus enjoyed frequent and large gatherings of his officers, including all his senior tribunes. To his thinking it was important for everyone to understand what we were doing.

  B
rutus processed military decisions exactly as men shape law in the chambers of the senate. He was anxious to play the role of Rome’s liberator. To his thinking liberators do not give orders in the same manner as tyrants do. Rather, they build consensus. He was an idealist, of course. That created a certain degree of the unintended silliness in his command, but I must say whenever he spoke of liberty he affected all of us. I cannot recall any decision he made which did not include some philosophical touchstone. He was a hard man to despise, for all that I had loved the man he had murdered. But then, to be fair, I did not become well acquainted with the true character of Brutus at that point.

  Once Cassius crossed the Hellespont, I joined his army. Unlike Brutus, Cassius had no interest in the opinions of tribunes and prefects; I attended none of his staff meetings. Still, I could see differences in the commands of the two men. Our food and fodder came punctually into our camp without the usual sorts of reminders being sent up the line. Our equipment was always in perfect order and when there were problems we had replacements or repairs often on the very day we made the requisition. A real general, in other words – not a philosopher on a horse. Or so Cassius seemed in the beginning.

  If I had started to love my new patron, it all came to a halt on the morning Cassius finally rode out to inspect his legions. To my astonishment he sat atop Hannibal. It was easy enough to understand how Cassius had come to own my stallion: he had defeated Dolabella. In the aftermath of their battle he claimed Dolabella’s property as the spoils of war. Except that Hannibal was not Dolabella’s horse.

  I sent word through our chain of command that Hannibal was my horse, bought from the eques Seius through the services of a Tuscan horse-trader whose name I provided, if verification was required. I concluded my letter by explaining that Dolabella had taken Hannibal without my permission. As such, the animal was still my property, and I should very much like him returned to me.

  Cassius, who possessed the wealth of the orient, ignored my letter.

  XIV

  PHILIPPI

  Hellespont: Summer, 42 BC

  Our Thracian mercenaries were exceptionally skilled at the kind of fighting that patrols encounter, but this particular cohort was new to Roman discipline and needed extensive training. Scaeva performed this task admirably. That left me with the responsibility of bringing my staff of junior tribunes up to standard. These fellows were mostly from the great families of Rome, all of them splendidly educated in Greek literature. They could ride and most had some concept of which end of a sword to grab, but they were soft and spoiled. Schoolboys really. The worst of it was their fondness for jeering at the weakest fellow in our corps, a chubby tribune named Quintus Horatius Flaccus – Horace. Horace had originally been in the army of Brutus, severing as a legionary tribune. Brutus had loved Horace’s wit and poetry and assumed he would do well in a command position. When there were a number of complaints, Brutus sent his friend to serve as an officer in the auxiliaries. Whether by chance or design, Horace ended up in the army Cassius commanded.

  Horace’s father had bought his son a fine education, but neither he nor his son had any interest in a political career. That meant Horace had never intended to become an officer in the army and was ill prepared for the challenges of such a life. He knew enough to ride a horse, but he was not good at it. When it came to handling a weapon he was perfectly awful. Nearly everything he attempted brought gales of laughter from the others. Seeing nothing funny about incompetence I made sure the abuse stopped. Rather than speak to the issue of hazing directly, I called out the loudest of the bullies to pair with me when we practiced sword fighting. I always gave the fellow a practice shield and a proper helmet so we might make a fight of it, then I grabbed up two practice swords for myself. I never bothered with anything more than the cuirass, which I wore habitually. If two fellows had abused Horace or if one had laughed harder than the rest at someone’s joke, I called them both forward for a session. A swipe at their helmeted heads, a hard poke in the chest, a crack on the fist, or a slap across the back of his thighs: I delivered the blows with the easy indifference of a master swordsman. Bright fellows that they were, they caught on to what I was doing and the hazing soon stopped.

  Horace was actually a remarkably clever fellow; he had simply no talent for war. In fact, no one in our army possessed a finer command of the Greek language, with the possible exception of Junius Brutus and the Athenian nobility. For the chance to miss extra training sessions, Horace was happy to write my reports and was soon issuing orders in my name to our Thracians. These fellows knew no Latin and refused to comprehend what Greek I spoke to them.

  At our evening meals, with a sack of wine passed around to loosen our cares, Horace would often recite the most wonderful poems. All were original, though some were satires of quite familiar verses. His most popular recitations were wickedly scatological, but sometimes he was simply clever; others answered him with their own creations, for we were erudite in the extreme, but these were never to Horace’s standard, and Horace was soon recognised as our corps’ unofficial poet laureate.

  In the beginning, Scaeva was not really charmed by Horace. To his thinking Horace performed the same clerical work for me that a slave would do, if I had owned one. As for his wit and poetry, that counted very little in Scaeva’s worldview. A lifetime in the legions had taught him to appreciate martial valour and little else, but one evening Horace turned the old Cyclops into a hero with a poem in the heroic meter, the dactylic hexameter that Homer employed. It celebrated the day Cassius Scaeva lost his eye as he commanded a century of men in a battle that had famously stopped one of Pompey’s legions.

  When Horace had finished his recitation old Scaeva was so touched he had to leave our campfire. A few days afterwards Scaeva confided to me that he thought Horace might be useful holding our horses, should we ever need to go somewhere on foot. Scant as it was, it was more praise than he offered the other officers under my command.

  Philippi, Macedonia: September, 42 BC

  In late summer, we received our orders to move in advance of the army on its march to Philippi. Our patrols, finding no enemy resistance, soon discovered a splendid site for the army, two miles west of the city. Our position actually straddled the Via Egnatia, with a camp to either side of the highway. A rugged line of cliffs along our northern flank and a vast marsh to the south guarded our flanks. The marsh actually spanned a distance of eight miles from north to south and ran from the very edge of our southern camp all the way to the sea. From east to west the marsh extended nearly three miles. The ground was inhospitable to a man on foot, utterly impossible for horses, so it served as a barrier against any flanking manoeuvres by enemy cavalry.

  Our army occupied two large hills rising up to either side of the highway. Cassius claimed the southern hill, Brutus the northern one. The river, which fed the marsh, lay to the east of our camp. This provided us with the luxury of fresh water, while requiring the enemy to use well water. The highway that our two camps straddled kept supplies coming from Asia Minor, so long as our fleet guarded the Hellespont. In total, our generals commanded seventeen legions, divided evenly between the two commanders. There were another fifty thousand auxiliaries in the combined armies; almost half of them were cavalry. Most of our legions were close to full capacity, roughly five thousand men per legion. I would guess our total number of combatants amounted to one hundred thirty thousand men, with another ten thousand slaves and servants. Add to that number sixty thousand horses and mules. Antony and Caesar fielded roughly the same count of infantry, though easily ten thousand fewer cavalry. As with our own army, their legions were filled with veterans. That meant neither army was likely to panic; it also promised heavy casualties on both sides once the fighting began.

  To keep the loyalty of their soldiers, each of the four generals paid his men from his own purse. They also promised their men splendid bonuses in the wake of a decisive victory. Having lost everything to the proscriptions that winter, those of us in the se
rvice of Cassius and Brutus were especially hungry. To put it plainly, paydays and the prospect of bonuses meant everything.

  Once Antony’s legions began their march across Macedonia I spent nearly two weeks in western Macedonia on patrols with my Thracian cohort. Twice we encountered Antony’s scouts and made a fight of it, but these were quickly finished, as cavalry fights so often are. From the men we captured in these skirmishes I learned that Antony was coming at our position with eight legions. Caesar had crossed the Adriatic after Antony but, for reasons that were not entirely clear, he and his legions remained on the coast. All the men we interrogated said the rumour in Antony’s camp was that young Caesar was ill. Some said dying. This was critical news, which I sent back to Cassius at once, though Cassius did nothing with it.

  Antony arrived with his eight legions at Philippi in mid-September. Quite unbelievably, he established his camp only a mile from our fortifications. Our splendid position was suddenly compromised by Antony’s choice of a campsite. It meant that after the armies had formed for battle they would be quite close to one another. Nor would there be any room at either side of our battle lines for the cavalry to manoeuvre. I expected Cassius if not Brutus to understand the problem at a glance. All we had to do was attack before Antony could set up his defences. We needed to drive him back three or four furlongs. Instead, our generals allowed Antony to place his camp where he pleased.

  Antony established a ditch on the evening of his arrival. While this was being dug we had orders to remain behind a long palisade that fronted our two camps. Afterwards, we watched the enemy bring down timber from the forest. With these logs they erected a palisade behind their ditch, exactly like our own.