The funeral on March 20 promised to be a very grand affair on the Field of Mars and was to be preceded by speeches in the Forum before the bier. Brutus and the other conspirators foresaw trouble and locked themselves in their houses. A funeral pyre was built on the Field of Mars and, because the traditional procession of mourners bringing funeral gifts would have taken all day to file past, everyone was invited to come there by whatever route he pleased and without order of precedence.
In the Forum, an ivory couch stood on the Speakers’ Platform, draped in an embroidered gold-and-purple pall. In front a temporary chapel had been erected, modeled on the Temple of Venus in Caesar’s new Forum. Piso brought the body, clothed in the purple gown the Dictator had been wearing when killed, into the square, laid it on the couch and posted a large group of armed men to guard it. There were loud cries of mourning and the men clashed their weapons.
Antony, in his capacity as mourner, friend and kinsman (his mother was a member of the Julius clan) of the dead Dictator, delivered the funeral oration. There are two accounts of what happened. According to the historian Suetonius, writing about a century and half later but with access to the imperial archives, Antony dispensed with the usual speech and asked a herald to read out the recent decree voting Caesar “all divine and human honors” and the oath by which the Senate had vowed to watch over his safety. He then added a few comments.
Appian, writing in the second century AD, has it that Antony spoke with passion about the dead man’s achievements and criticized the recent amnesty for the assassins. Standing close to the bier as though he were on stage, he hitched up his toga to free his hands. He bent over the body and, swept by emotion, pulled off Caesar’s gown, bloodstained and torn, and waved it about on a pole. Choirs then sang formal dirges, again stating the dead man’s achievements and bewailing his fate. At some point in these lamentations Caesar was imagined as listing by name those enemies of his whom he had helped and saying in amazement: “To think I saved the lives of the people who were to be my murderers.”
It is possible that in their memory of this extraordinary day people mixed up the contents of Antony’s opening presentation and the dirges. It was not obviously to the Consul’s advantage to foment general disorder and Suetonius’s account may be the right one. Whatever the truth of the matter, the ceremony made a tremendous impact on the crowd. The climax came when a wax effigy of Caesar (the corpse itself was lying out of sight on the bier) was lifted up. It was turned around in all directions by a mechanical device and twenty-three wounds could be seen, on every part of the body and on the face.
This was too much for many to bear. In a repetition of the outpouring of grief and rage at the death of Clodius, the mob went berserk. They burned down the Senate House, not long rebuilt after its previous incineration. Furniture and wood were pulled out of shops to create an impromptu pyre in the Forum not far from the Temple of the Castors. Musicians and performers who had been hired for the funeral threw their costumes onto it. It was reported that two young men with swords and javelins lit the pyre and subsequent mythmaking or ingenious stage management on the day suggested they were the divine brothers Castor and Pollux, who had a legendary record of guarding over Rome and making an appearance at moments of crisis. Caesar was cremated then and there.
It is hard to believe that whoever designed the funeral ceremony was unaware of the effect it was likely to have. If Antony was not responsible, it must have been Caesar’s family, perhaps advised by his clever aides, Balbus and Oppius. After all, it was in their interest to subvert the attempts by Republicans and moderate Caesarians to create a peaceful transition to a new political order.
The conspirators realized it was impossible for them to remain in Rome and withdrew to their country estates. This left Antony master of the situation. He acted with restraint, discouraged an unofficial cult of Caesar and was deferential to leading Senators. A well-received law was passed abolishing the office of Dictator. Antony was scrupulously polite to Cicero, who in early April decided that he was “more concerned about the composition of his menus than about planning any mischief.”
This was a misjudgment of the situation, for the Consul was still intent on securing his power base. To this end he used Caesar’s papers for his own purposes, forging documents to reward his supporters and enrich himself. His main aim was to ensure that the compromise settlement of March 17 stuck. The main threat to him lay in the future behavior of the conspirators when they went abroad to take over their allotted provinces and armies. Decimus Brutus, soon to set off for Italian Gaul, already looked threatening and in the summer two other conspirators left for commands in Asia Minor.
In some ways Cicero found himself in the same uncomfortable position that he had been in at the beginning of the civil war. This time, though, he had absolutely no doubt whose side he was on and had no intention of putting himself forward as mediator again. However, there was a problem of competence. He admired the conspirators for their heroism on the Ides of March but felt that everything they had done afterwards had been ill-conceived and poorly planned. He believed that Antony’s venality and willingness to act arbitrarily was the prelude to a new autocracy. Realizing that he was not being taken seriously, he became cross with everybody and left the city. He confessed wryly to Atticus that he ought to reread his own essay On Growing Old. “Advancing years are making me cantankerous,” he remarked in May. “Everything annoys me. But I have had my time. Let the young ones worry.”
Cicero kept restlessly on the move from one villa to another, often sleeping in one place for only one night. He wrote to Atticus almost every day. He also seems to have revised the savage Secret History he had started working on in 59, in the bitter aftermath of his Consulship.
Marcus was getting on reasonably well in Athens. Atticus, presumably in Greece, was helping out with his cash flow. The boy was poor at keeping in touch, but when in June he did eventually write home his father was pleased to see that his literary style showed signs of improvement. Meanwhile, Quintus fell out with his son and was having difficulty repaying Pomponia’s dowry. Young Quintus was as politically unsatisfactory as ever, having now attached himself to Antony.
Balbus and Hirtius took care to keep in touch with Cicero. He received a very civil letter from Antony asking him to agree to the recall of one of Clodius’s followers from exile; this unpleasant reminder of the past annoyed him, but he made no objection. He was delighted when “my wonderful Dolabella” put down some pro-Caesar riots and demolished a commemorative pillar and altar where the Dictator had been cremated in the Forum. An agitator, falsely claiming to be Marius’s grandson, was arrested and executed.
Cicero noted the hurried departure of Cleopatra from Rome. “The Queen’s flight does not distress me,” he wrote coolly. Well endowed with regal ways, Cleopatra appears not to have been a popular figure in Rome, and the death of her protector meant that there was nothing left to keep her in Italy. She may have hoped that Caesar would have recognized their son, but there had been no mention of Caesarion in his will. This may have been a disappointment, but at least she was able to leave with a renewed treaty of friendship between Rome and Egypt.
A month later, on May 11 Cicero noted cryptically: “I hope it’s true about the Queen and that Caesar of hers.” A week or so later, he made further references to some rumor about her. It is hard to know what to make of this, but it has been conjectured that Cleopatra had become pregnant a second time and that she had been reported to have miscarried on the journey home. “That Caesar” would have been a dismissive reference to the dead fetus.