Antony and Cleopatra (36 page)

“Then hasn’t it occurred to you that all the money you need to regulate the East and invade the Kingdom of the Parthians is sitting in Sextus’s vaults?”

“Well, yes…that has occurred to me.”

“Then if it has, why don’t you start redistributing wealth in the proper way, the Roman way? Does it really matter that Caesar Octavianus will see his troubles dissolve if Sextus is defeated? Your troubles are what concern you, Antonius, and like Caesar Octavianus’s, they will melt into nothing once Sextus’s vaults are thrown open. Isn’t that more important to you than the fate of Caesar Octavianus? If you come back from the East with a brilliant campaign under your belt, who can rival you?”

“I don’t trust your master, Maecenas. He’ll think of a way to keep the contents of Sextus’s vaults for himself.”

“That might be true if Sextus had less in them. I think you will admit that Caesar Octavianus has a head for figures, for the minutiae of accounting?”

Antony couldn’t help laughing. “Arithmetic was always his best subject!”

“Then think about this. Whether it’s grown in Sicilia on his land, or pilfered from the grain fleets of Africa and Sardinia, Sextus doesn’t pay for the wheat he sells Rome—and you. This has been an ongoing fact since well before Philippi. Conservatively, the amount of grain he’s stolen over the past six years comes to—in roundish figures—at least eighty million
modii
. Granting him a few greedy admirals and overheads—but not nearly as many overheads as Rome and you bear—Caesar Octavianus and his abacus have arrived at an average of twenty sesterces the
modius
in clear profit. Not fanciful! His price to Rome this year was forty, and it has never been less than twenty-five. Well, that means Sextus’s vaults must contain in the neighborhood of one thousand, eight hundred million sesterces. Divide by twenty-five thousand, and that’s a staggering
seventy-two thousand talents
! Why, with half that, Caesar Octavianus can feed Italia, buy land to settle veterans, and reduce taxes! While your half will let your legionaries wear silver mail shirts and put ostrich feather plumes in their helmets! The Treasury of Rome has never been as rich as Sextus Pompeius is right now, even after his father doubled its contents.”

Antony listened in rapt fascination, his spirits soaring. A dunce at arithmetic he might have been as a schoolboy (he and his brothers had played truant most of the time), but he had no trouble following Maecenas’s lesson, and he knew that this had to be an accurate estimation of Sextus’s present wealth. Jupiter, what a
cunnus
! Why hadn’t he sat down with his abacus and come up with it? Octavian was right, Sextus Pompeius had bled Rome of all her wealth. Money didn’t just disappear! Sextus had it!

“I see your point,” he said curtly.

“Then will you come in person to see Caesar Octavianus in the spring?”

“As long as the place isn’t Brundisium.”

“Ah—how about Tarentum? A longer voyage, but not as arduous as Puteoli or Ostia. And it’s on the Via Appia, very convenient for a visit to Rome afterward.”

That didn’t suit Antony. “No, the meeting has to be early in the spring, and brief. No squabbling or dickering. I have to be in Syria by summer to commence my invasion.”

That isn’t going to happen, Antonius, Maecenas thought to himself. I’ve whetted your appetite by producing sums that a glutton like you can’t resist. By the time you come to Tarentum, you will have realized how enormous the carcass is, and you’ll want the lion’s share. Born in the month of Sextilis, the Lion. Whereas Caesar is a cusp child, half the cool, meticulous Virgin, half the balance of the Scales. Your Mars is in the Lion too, but Caesar’s Mars is in a far stronger constellation, the Scorpion. And his Jupiter is in the Sea Goat together with his ascendant. Riches and success. Yes, I chose the right master. But then, I have the Scorpion’s shrewdness and the ambivalence of the Fishes.

“Is that agreeable?” Antony rapped, apparently a repetition.

Jerked out of his astrological analysis, Maecenas started, then nodded. “Yes. Tarentum on the Nones of April.”

“He took the bait,” Maecenas informed Octavian, Livia Drusilla, and Agrippa when he arrived back in Rome just in time for the New Year and Agrippa’s inauguration as senior consul.

“I knew he would,” Octavian said smugly.

“How long have you had that bait tucked in the sinus of your toga, Caesar?” Agrippa asked.

“From the very beginning, before I was Triumvir. It is just a matter of adding each year to the earlier ones.”

“Atticus, Oppius, and the Balbi have indicated that they’ll be willing to lend again to buy the next harvest,” Livia Drusilla said, smiling rather venomously. “While you were away, Maecenas, Agrippa took them to see Portus Julius. They are beginning at last to believe that we will defeat Sextus.”

“Well, they can tot up figures better than Caesar,” Maecenas said. “They know now their money is safe.”

Agrippa’s inauguration went smoothly. Octavian watched the night skies with him during his vigil, and his perfect white bull accepted the hammer and the knife of
popa
and
cultrarius
so calmly that the watching senators suppressed twinges of apprehension—a year of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was a year too many. Since Gaius Caninius Gallus’s white bull eluded the hammer and almost bolted before the stunning blow was finally administered, it didn’t seem likely that Caninius would have the mettle to deal with this low-born, vulgar fellow.

Rome still rioted, but it was a hard winter; the Tiber froze, snow fell and didn’t melt, a perishing north wind blew incessantly. None of which encouraged huge crowds in the Forum and squares, all of which permitted Octavian to venture from behind his walls, though Agrippa forbade him to tear them down. In the end state grain sold for forty sesterces the
modius
—thanks to the plutocrat loans and a shocking interest bill—and Agrippa’s increased activity on Portus Julius meant work was available for any man willing to quit Rome for Campania. The crisis wasn’t over, but it had lessened.

Octavian’s agents began to talk about the conference to be held at Tarentum on the Nones of April, and to predict that Sextus’s days were numbered. The good times would return, they hymned.

This time Octavian wouldn’t be late; he and his wife arrived in Tarentum well before the Nones, together with Maecenas and his brother-in-law, Varro Murena. Wanting the conference to have the air of a fete, Octavian decorated the port city with wreaths and garlands, hired every mummer, magician, acrobat, musician, freak, and specialty act Italy could produce, and erected a wooden theater for the staging of mimes and farces, the favorite fare of ordinary people. The great Marcus Antonius was coming to revel with Caesar Divi Filius! Even had Tarentum suffered at Antony’s hands in the past—it had not—all resentments would have been forgotten. A festival of spring and prosperity, that was how the people saw it.

When Antony sailed in the day before the Nones, all Tarentum was lined up along the waterfront, cheering wildly, especially when the people realized that he had brought the hundred and twenty warships of his Athenian fleet with him.

“Wonderful, aren’t they?” Octavian asked Agrippa as they stood at the harbor mouth looking for the flagship, which hadn’t come in first. “I count four admirals so far, but no Antonius. He must be wagging his tail in the rear. That’s Ahenobarbus’s standard—a black boar.”

“Apt,” said Agrippa, more interested in the ships. “Every one of them is a decked five, Caesar. Bronze beaks, many double, plenty of room for artillery and marines. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a fleet like this!”

“My agents assure me he has more at Thasos, Ambracia, and Lesbos. Still in good condition, but in five years they won’t be. Ah, here comes Antonius!”

Octavian pointed at a magnificent galley with a high poop to allow a roomy cabin beneath it, its deck bristling with catapults. His standard was a gold lion on a scarlet background, mouth open in a roar, black mane, a black-tipped tail. “Apt,” Octavian said.

They began to walk back in the direction of the jetty chosen to receive the flagship, which the pilot was directing in a rowboat. No hurry; they would beat it easily.

“You must have your own standard, Agrippa,” Octavian said as he inspected the town spread around the shores, its houses white, its public buildings painted in bright colors, the umbrella pines and poplars in its squares strung with lanterns and bunting.

“I suppose I should,” Agrippa said, taken aback. “What do you recommend, Caesar?”

“A pale blue background with the word FIDES written large in crimson,” Octavian said immediately.

“And your naval standard, Caesar?”

“I won’t have one. I’ll fly SPQR in a laurel wreath.”

“What about admirals like Taurus and Cornificius?”

“They’ll fly Rome’s SPQR, like me. Yours will be the only personal standard, Agrippa. A mark of distinction. It’s you will win for us against Sextus, I know it in my bones.”

“At least his ships can’t be mistaken, flying crossed bones.”

“Distinctive” was Octavian’s reply. “Oh, what wretch did that? Shameful!”

He referred to the red carpet that some official belonging to the
duumviri
had laid down the full length of the jetty, a sign of kingliness that horrified Octavian. But no one else seemed perturbed; it was the scarlet of a general, not the purple of a king. And there he was, jumping from the ship to the red matting, looking as fit and healthy as ever. Octavian and Agrippa waited together under the awning at the base of the jetty, with Caninius, the junior consul, one pace behind, and behind him, seven hundred senators, all Mark Antony’s men. The
duumviri
and other officials of the city had to be content with a position farther back still.

Of course Antony wore his gold dress armor; a toga didn’t sit well on his bulk, made him look overweight. An equally muscular man, though more slender, Agrippa didn’t care how he looked, so wore his purple-bordered toga. He and Octavian came forward to greet Antony, Octavian seeming a frail and delicate child between those two splendid warriors. Yet it was Octavian who dominated, perhaps because of that, perhaps because of his beauty, his thick thatch of bright golden hair. In this southern Italian town where Greeks had settled centuries before the first Romans penetrated the peninsula, bright gold hair was a rarity, and much admired.

It is done! Octavian thought. I’ve managed to get Antonius onto Italian soil, and he’s not leaving it until he gives me what I want, what Rome must have.

Amid showers of spring petals thrown by little girls they paraded to the complex of buildings set aside for them, smiling and waving at the ecstatic crowds.

“An afternoon and night to settle in,” said Octavian at the door of Antony’s residence. “Shall we get straight down to our business—I understand you’re in a hurry—or shall we gratify the people of Tarentum by going to the theater tomorrow? They’re playing an Atellan mime.”

“Not Sophocles, but more to everybody’s taste,” Antony said, looking relaxed. “Yes, why not? I’ve brought Octavia and the children with me—she was desperate to see her
little
brother.”

“No more desperate than I to see her. She hasn’t met my wife—yes, I brought mine too,” said Octavian. “Then shall we say the theater tomorrow morning, and a banquet tomorrow afternoon? After that—definitely down to business.”

When he walked into his own residence, Octavian found Maecenas in fits of laughter.

“You’ll never guess!” Maecenas managed to gasp, wiping his eyes, then broke into a fresh paroxysm. “Oh, it’s funny!”

“What?” Octavian asked, allowing a servant to divest him of the toga. “And where are the poets?”

“That’s just it, Caesar! The poets!” Maecenas managed to command himself, occasionally swallowing, eyes still streaming. “Horatius, Virgilius, Virgilius’s shield companion Plotius Tucca, Varius Rufus, and a few more minor luminaries set off from Rome a
nundinum
ago to elevate the intellectual tone of this Tarentum festivity, but”—he choked, giggled, composed himself—“they went to Brundisium instead! And Brundisium won’t let them go, determined to have its own festival!” He howled with laughter.

Octavian managed a smile, Agrippa rumbled a chuckle, but neither of them could appreciate the situation as Maecenas did, lacking his knowledge of the woolly-mindedness of poets.

When he found out, Antony roared quite as loudly as Maecenas, then sent a courier to Brundisium with a bag of gold for them.

Not expecting Octavia and the children, Octavian hadn’t put Antony in a house big enough to accommodate everyone without the noise of the nursery disturbing him, but Livia Drusilla came up with a novel solution.

“I have heard of a house nearby whose owner is willing to donate it for the duration of the conference,” she said. “Why don’t I move into it together with Octavia and the children? If I am there as well, then Antonius can’t complain of second-class treatment for
his
wife.”

Octavian kissed her hand, smiled into those wonderful stripey eyes. “Brilliant, my love! Do so, immediately.”

“And, if you don’t mind, we won’t attend the play tomorrow. Not even Triumvirs can have their wives sit with them, I can never hear from the women’s rows at the back, and besides, I don’t think Octavia is more enamored of farces than I am.”

“Ask Burgundinus for a purse, and shop your way around the town. I know you have a weakness for pretty clothes, and you may find something you like. As I remember, Octavia likes to shop.”

“Don’t worry about us,” said Livia Drusilla, very pleased. “We may not find anything to wear, but it will be a chance to get to know each other.”

Octavia was curious about Livia Drusilla; like all of Rome’s upper stratum, she had heard the story of her brother’s peculiar passion for another man’s wife, pregnant with his second child, that divorce on religious grounds, the sheer mystery surrounding him, her, the passion. Was it mutual? Did it exist at all?