Page 13 of Agrippa

Philippus said that Octavius would never even get to Rome.

– He will be dead before he has gone fifty miles!

The table went quiet. Octavius looked at me. With a confidence I did not entirely feel, I uttered my only remark of the night.

– We have a thousand men under arms. We can get him there.

We left soon after dawn – Octavius, Maecenas and I on horseback, attended by a small escort of cavalry, Salvidienus following with the legionaries on foot. We made thirty miles a day, staying at the villas of Caesar’s old followers along the route. Everywhere, Octavius was feted. At Aricia we halted and rested at the home of the banker C. Calvena Matius, so that Maecenas could go ahead and make sure it was safe for us to enter the city once our little army had caught up.

As soon as we received his message assuring us that Caesar’s supporters were eagerly awaiting us, we set off on the final leg with our legionaries behind us, standards flying.

Octavius was more nervous than I had ever seen him. He shifted in his saddle and glanced constantly from side to side as if at any moment he feared an assassin’s arrow. He stayed close to me, just as he had in the schoolyard only a few years earlier. I thought how far we had come since then and how much further we might go. Young as I was, I had no real sense of the dangers that lay ahead. I felt only excitement.

The sky was strange that final day of April. The brown smoke from the distant city’s fires mingled with the clouds over the seven hills. They shrouded the sun in a gauzy haze of red and orange and purple, so that it seemed to stare down at us like the eye of Cyclops. I had never seen anything like it, and pointed it out to Octavius in the hope of calming his anxiety.

– Look, Caesar, there is an omen for you!

He put his hand to his brow and squinted at it.

– Yes, Agrippa, it is an omen right enough, but is it good or bad?

As we neared the Capena Gate, I could see the dust raised by the crowds streaming out to greet us. Maecenas had done a wonderful job of alerting Caesar’s followers that his heir was approaching Rome. By the time we reached the city walls, they were lining the road in their thousands, cheering him and strewing his path with flowers.

The effect upon Octavius was of water upon a wilting bloom. He straightened in his saddle, nodded from side to side in acknowledgement, spurred his horse and rode ahead of me, through the gate and into Rome, where Maecenas was waiting.

He urged Octavius to go directly to the Forum to address the people. We dismounted, and the three of us walked through the streets at the head of our soldiers, past spectators standing four or five deep on the steps of the temples and hanging out of their upstairs windows.

The Forum was already packed and noisy with chants of Vivat Caesar! When we had fought our way through to the back of the Rostra, I shouted at Octavius to wait until I had deployed a cordon of our legionaries around the platform to protect him. Then Maecenas and I followed him as he slowly mounted the steps.

The roar as he appeared in his black toga went on for a long time, despite his signals for the crowd to quieten down. Finally, when they were still, he started to speak.

– People of Rome!

His voice carried well. I did not pay much attention to what he said. I was too preoccupied scanning his audience for potential assassins.

The greatest demonstration of approval came when he promised to claim the inheritance that had been stolen from him so that he could fulfil Caesar’s bequest to every citizen of a bounty of three hundred sesterces. But not all applauded. Supporters of Mark Antony, of whom there were many, including soldiers, cat-called and folded their arms. Maecenas nudged me and pointed to one well-dressed, diminutive woman standing beside a litter on the edge of the crowd. She flicked the backs of her hands at Octavius, brushing him away like so much dirt. Then she cupped them to her mouth, shouted a final inaudible insult and climbed into her litter, and her slaves carried her at a brisk trot out of the Forum.

Maecenas whispered in my ear that she was Fulvia, Mark Antony’s wife, and that she was doubtless hurrying even now to tell her husband what Octavius had just said.

Over the next few days, Octavius sent Antony repeated messages requesting a meeting. The consul ignored them all.

This was a setback he had not foreseen. Finally he decided we had no option except to call on Antony unannounced.

Ever since Octavius’s return to Rome, the house had been thronged with Caesar’s old supporters wanting to speak to him. Each time he left the building, they crowded behind him in procession. To escape them, we had to leave on foot by the back entrance, Octavius hidden beneath a cloak and hood.

Antony’s villa had once been the home of Pompey the Great. It stood on the Esquiline Hill. As a boy, I had often admired it from the outside. The ramming beaks of enemy pirate ships, trophies of Pompey’s victories when he commanded the Republic’s navy, were set into the walls.

In the vestibule, Octavius removed his cloak, grandly announced himself as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and asked to speak to the consul.

After a long interval, the steward returned to say that Antony was not at home.

Octavius replied that we would wait.

We were left standing in the entrance for several hours, offered neither seats nor refreshment, while Antony’s clients came and went, often casting surprised glances in Octavius’s direction. The steward kept returning to check we were still there. He grew increasingly agitated. Eventually a woman appeared.

I recognised Fulvia at once from the Forum. She was short and stocky, with a hooked nose and jutting chin. She gave an impression of powerful strength, more man than woman. Twice widowed – her first husband had been Clodius, the sworn enemy of Cicero; her second Curio, another cynical rogue – she had been at the centre of Roman politics for nearly twenty years. It was said she still retained control over Clodius’s gangs of street fighters.

She asked why we would not accept that her husband was not there. To which Octavius replied that for a man who was not there, he seemed to have a great many visitors.