It was during this visit to Rome that Octavius definitely met Caesar, if he had not already done so. Caesar made up his mind quickly about people. He was impressed by Octavius, who was growing into a thoughtful and prudent young man, and detected great promise in him. He arranged for the boy to be enrolled as a patrician. The patricians were Rome’s original aristocracy and were distinguished from the plebeians, who made up the rest of the population. They may originally have been the city’s founding citizens; or possibly an “aristocracy of invaders” who lorded it over the native population; or a grouping of royal appointees when Rome was a kingdom. Whatever the truth of the matter, patrician status became a nobility of birth.
The symbolism of Octavius’ promotion was significant. Caesar, as a Julius, was a patrician, but an Octavius, albeit connected through his mother to the Julii, was not. Without going so far as to adopt him, Octavius’ great-uncle was hinting that he regarded Octavius as an honorary member of the Julian clan.
Another signal honor was conferred on the teenager: appointment as praefectus urbi (city prefect) during the Feriae Latinae, the Latin Festival. This important ceremony was conducted at a shrine on the Alban Mount (today’s Monte Cavi) some twenty miles south of Rome. The Feriae was originally a celebration of the unity of the Latin League, an alliance of the Latin communities in Latium (Lazio); the Romans took it over for themselves when the league was incorporated into the Republic.
The festival was accompanied by a sacred truce: no battle could be fought while it was taking place. Both the consuls headed a procession from the city to the Alban Mount, on the top of which stood a very ancient shrine to Jupiter. An ox was sacrificed to the god and the victim’s flesh distributed among the towns and cities that made up the community of Latins. Individual towns also offered lambs, cheeses, milk, or cakes. A symbolic game, called oscillatio, or swinging, was played and, back in Rome, a four-horse chariot race took place on the Capitoline Hill, the winner of which received as his prize a drink called absynthium, or essence of wormwood (perhaps like the absinthe of modern times mixed with wine).
In theory, the praefectus was in charge of the city during the consuls’ absence, but the role was temporary and purely symbolic. Octavius presided over a ceremony in the Forum, where he sat on a speaker’s tribunal. According to Nicolaus, many people turned up “for a sight of the boy, for he was well worth looking at.”
Early in December, Caesar was to sail across to the province of Africa, where Cato and ten Pompeian legions were at large. The dictator hoped it would be his final campaign. Now in his seventeenth year, Octavius asked permission to accompany his great-uncle so that he could gain military experience. Atia opposed the idea. He said nothing by way of argument and dutifully agreed to remain at home. Caesar, too, was unwilling for him to take the field. He was worried about his great-nephew’s physical fitness and feared that “he might bring on illness to a weak body through such a sharp change of life-style and so permanently injure his health.”
The African campaign was by no means a walkover. Caesar quickly got into trouble, but fought his way out of it, decisively defeating the enemy near the port of Thapsus. Cato, standard-bearer of the Republic but no military man, had played little direct part in the campaign. Realizing the hopelessness of the situation, he now decided to take his own life. In this way he would avoid the humiliation of falling into Caesar’s hands and, worse, having to endure a pardon. After spending the night reading the Phaedo, Plato’s great dialogue about the last days of Socrates, he stabbed himself.
For all his intransigence and incompetence when alive, Cato’s death had an enormous impact on public opinion. People remembered his principled incorruptibility, not his blunders. His shining example unforgivingly illuminated Caesar’s selfishness and ambition, which threatened to destroy the centuries-old Republic.
The modern reader may be intrigued by the elite Roman’s propensity to kill himself in adverse circumstances, and indeed, despite undercurrents of popular and religious disapproval, the classical world’s attitude toward suicide was very different from today’s.
People killed themselves in many different ways and for many different reasons, as they have done throughout history. But there was, at least among the upper classes and in military circles, what could be called a culture of suicide. In certain circumstances it was the honorable thing to do, and had about it a certain gloomy glamour.
The two main justifications for a “noble” suicide were desperata salus (no hope of rescue or deliverance) and pudor (shame). Julius Caesar in his account of his wars in Gaul gives a spectacular example of the former. Roman survivors of an ambush “had hard work to withstand the enemy’s onslaught till nightfall; in the night, seeing that all hope was gone, every single man committed suicide.”
In feeling pudor, a Roman meditating self-destruction did not so much suffer from guilt at some bad thing he had done (although this could be the case) as recognize a catastrophic collapse in his social or political standing. Such reversals of fortune happened from time to time, and for a senior politician suicide was a recognized professional hazard. It was pudor that did for Cato.
In July of 46 B.C., Caesar returned to Rome. Most people—including critics such as Cicero—were relieved that peace and, above all, certainty had returned. There was a widespread expectation that, if they had won, the republicans would have massacred their opponents, and even those who had been neutral in the civil war. Caesar’s famous clemency, although regarded with some suspicion, contributed to an atmosphere of calm.
The Senate offered the victor new, extravagant, and unprecedented honors, which he accepted. In return Caesar followed a policy of reconciliation. According to Dio, he promised not to “take any cruel action simply because I have conquered, and am able to say exactly what I like without being called to account, and have complete freedom to do whatever I choose.” He needed the cooperation of the surviving optimates to help him run the empire. He could not undertake this task singlehanded, but many of his leading followers were inexperienced and unreliable. That Antony was the best of them indicates the abilities of the rest.
In fact, Caesar felt impatient and thwarted. Behind adulation, he detected dumb insolence, a reluctance to award him true loyalty. When talking to his associates, he was less than discreet. “The Republic is nothing,” he said crossly, “a mere name without form or substance.”
IV
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
46–44 B.C.
He kept up with his old school friends, and, now that he had regular and free access to Caesar, he was able to do one of them a signal favor. Agrippa’s brother had been made a prisoner of war during the African campaign. Evidently he had fought on the republican side before and been pardoned, for Caesar tended to punish repeat offenders. Fearing for his brother’s life, Agrippa asked Octavius to put in a good word for the man. Octavius hesitated, for he had never yet used his special position in this way and knew Caesar’s anger with those who abused his clemency. Taking his courage in both hands, he made the request, which Caesar granted. This not only bound Agrippa to his friend, but won Octavius a reputation for loyalty.