"Rupa, what were you thinking? You could be dead right now! The lictors could have dragged you up to the Carcer along with those wretched Egyptians and dropped you into the Tullianum, and we would never have seen you alive again!"
The sun had set. The moon had risen. Occasionally, here in my lamplit garden, I could hear snatches of music and revelry from the Forum, where the feast that followed the triumph still continued, with endless Egyptian delicacies on offer. But I was in no mood to eat and drink. Every time I thought of the terrible risk Rupa had taken that day, my blood ran cold.
"But, Papa," objected Diana, "what did Rupa do that was against the law?"
"I'm pretty sure that a citizen is not allowed to interrupt the progress of a triumph."
"He didn't interrupt it. He took part in it! People do that sort of thing all the time. They run onto the path to taunt the prisoners, or to get a closer look at some trophy, or to plant a kiss on a soldier's cheek. We've all seen such things. Unless Caesar has passed some law against kissing a girl's toe-"
"Rupa embarrassed the dictator!"
"I'm pretty sure that's not against the law, either, Papa. Caesar's not a king. We don't live and breathe at his pleasure."
"Not yet," I muttered.
"And nothing untoward happened. The lictors came running, they threw Rupa off the pathway, he disappeared back into the crowd, and that was the end of it. Apparently, Caesar doesn't even know it was Rupa who saved the princess."
"Saved the princess!" I uttered the statement incredulously, amazed at the enormity of it. Arsinoe had been spared, and Rupa was the man most responsible for saving her. "A foreign-born freedman does not go about thwarting the will of a Roman dictator and nullifying a death sentence ordered by the Roman state. Such things do not happen!"
"But apparently they do, Papa."
"It was a mad act."
"I think it was terribly heroic," insisted Diana.
"So do I," said Bethesda.
The two of them converged on Rupa and planted kisses on his cheeks. He had been frowning and staring at the ground while I lectured him, but now he smiled and hugged himself. All my admonishments were for nothing.
"Besides," said Diana, "Rupa acted purely on impulse. There was nothing deliberate about what he did. He couldn't possibly foresee the outcome of his actions."
I was not so sure about this. In earlier days, Rupa and his sister, Cassandra, had been street performers in Alexandria. He was not an actor, just a mime, playing burly silent parts; nevertheless, he must have learned how to anticipate and manipulate the reactions of an audience. Bowing before Arsinoe and kissing her foot had played adroitly upon the crowd's sentiment, and the result had been just what Rupa desired. At the conclusion of his triumph, Caesar had bowed to the will of the people; criers announced that the princess would be spared and sent into exile, while Ganymedes and the other captives were duly executed.
I gazed hard into Rupa's unblinking eyes. His wits were on the simple side of average, that was certain, but because he was a mute, and brawny as well, had I underestimated his native intelligence? He might not possess the verbal capabilities of a Cicero, able to sway a jury with well-chosen words, yet he had proven himself able to rouse a multitude with a single, bold, perfectly timed gesture.
"Besides, Papa, you wanted to see Arsinoe spared, just like everyone else. Admit it!"
"The poor girl!" Bethesda shook her head. "An Egyptian princess, at the mercy of those Roman brutes-terrible!" More than ever since our return from Egypt, my wife loved to play the part of the cosmopolitan Alexandrian appalled by Roman barbarity.
"Poor girl?" I threw up my hands. "Arsinoe is a conniving royal brat, responsible for hundreds, maybe thousands, of deaths back in Egypt. She put one of her own generals to death! She's a viper, no less than her sister."
"Even so, Caesar had no business threatening to execute the child, just to show off," insisted Bethesda. "It did him no credit. It made him look bad, parading that poor girl in chains."
I had to agree. And, when all was said and done, I was not sorry that Rupa had acted on his impulse.
"Let us speak no more of the matter," I said. "And let there be no boasting about this to the other women in the market, do you understand? You may praise Rupa all you like here in the privacy of our home, but you're not to whisper a word of this to anyone else. If Caesar were to find out…"
"Yes, Papa?" said Diana. "What might the big, bad dictator do?"
"Let's pray that we don't find out."
Caesar had survived his first two triumphs. The only damage he had sustained was to his dignity, and that was minor. The teasing from his soldiers only served to endear him to them all the more, while his clemency to Arsinoe made him appear not weak and vacillating but decisive and wise, and won him even greater favor with the crowd.
If not from the Gauls or the Egyptians, or from disaffected Antony or ambitious Fulvia, or from love-addled Cicero or glib Brutus, then from what quarter came the threat to Caesar that Hieronymus had hinted at? Rather than feeling relieved that the dictator had survived his first two triumphs unscathed, I felt more anxious than before. What danger might Caesar face in the next two triumphs?
First would come the celebration of his recent victory in Asia, where King Pharnaces of Pontus had taken advantage of the civil strife between Pompey and Caesar to reclaim the kingdom of his father, the great Mithradates. Pharnaces's ruthlessness had been shocking, at least to Roman sensibilities; in conquering city after city, he not only plundered the property of a great many Roman citizens but also made a practice of castrating all the youngest and best-looking males, including Roman citizens, before selling them into slavery. News of these atrocities caused outrage throughout the Roman world, but Pharnaces's successes had gone unchecked until Caesar himself, after settling affairs in Egypt, moved to reassert Roman rule in the region. Pharnaces was routed at the battle of Zela, fled for his life, and was eventually captured and killed by one of his own treacherous underlings.
With Pharnaces dead and largely unmourned, it was hard to imagine who might choose the Asian Triumph as a venue to try to kill Caesar. But hadn't Hieronymus speculated that danger would come from an unexpected quarter?
Late that night, looking through Hieronymus's writings for links to the upcoming Asian Triumph, I came 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.