THE DISPUTED INHERITANCE
(B.C. 44-43)
Je suis jeune, il est vrai: mais aux âmes bien nées La valeur n’attend point le nombre des années.
CORNEILLE, Don Rodrigue.
I
WHEN Octavius, not yet nineteen, landed in Calabria on a day in mid-April,1 he had one fixed resolution; but it was an emotion and not a policy, for he had as yet no exact knowledge.2 He was resolved to avenge the one great man he had ever known, a man of his own blood who had treated him with a father’s tenderness and had kindled his imagination by his dreams. He was determined, also, himself to play a major part in Roman affairs, for Julius had awakened his ambition. But that, with Julius dead, would be no easy matter. He was conscious that, without the Caesarian mantle to dignify him, he was only a provincial bourgeois with a tincture of noble blood; well-to-do, but not with one of the great fortunes; without powerful connections, inexpert in the business of politics, and deplorably young. His was the case of a stripling advancing against giants. The thought of his impotence maddened him, but, if we may judge the youth by the man, he gave no sign of it to his intimates, but awaited fuller news with a frozen calm.
That news, which reached him when half-way to Brundisium, was startling enough. The murder had been shared in by Julius’s old companions in arms, like Decimus Brutus and Trebonius, but the leaders had been the ambitious arriviste Gaius Cassius, and Marcus Brutus, Cato’s nephew, whom Julius had respected for his portentous gravity. When the deed had been done, the assassins’ nerves had cracked and they had fled to the Capitol. Mark Antony, the senior consul, had taken charge of the city with the assistance of Lepidus, the master of the horse. Calpurnia had handed over to him her husband’s papers and ready money, and he had summoned a meeting of the Senate for March 17, which had proclaimed a general amnesty and ratified Julius’s decrees, both those enacted and those only proposed. That very day, too, he had entertained the murderers at dinner. But wild doings had followed. At the funeral three days later, the veterans of the Caesarian armies had taken charge of the proceedings. The ivory bier had been brought to the Forum, with singers chanting the verse of an old poet, “I saved those who have been my death.” Then Antony from the Rostra had spoken words which roused the mob to fury.1 A pyre had been raised in the Forum itself, and the body of Julius became ashes in the midst of such a scene of frenzy and lamentation as Rome had rarely witnessed. Thereafter there had been savage rioting, led by a bogus nephew of Marius, and a hasty exodus of all who had something to lose—Brutus and Cassius, Cicero, Cleopatra, and a medley of nobles and senators.
Antony was in control, and he was playing a subtle game. He had stirred up the mob, and then chastised it. He seemed determined to be no man’s enemy. He cultivated the Caesarians, allowing Dolabella to succeed Julius as consul, though he had once violently opposed the appointment, and winning the support of Lepidus by procuring his irregular election as Pontifex Maximus. But he was also conciliatory to the Senate; he himself proposed a decree abolishing the dictatorship for ever; he secured for Brutus permission to be absent from Rome beyond the statutory time permitted to the urban praetor; he even made friendly overtures to Cicero. But he was busiest in another way, for he had much of Julius’s wealth in his hands, and from his papers he was perpetually finding new enactments which the Senate had by anticipation given the force of law, which enriched him and consolidated his power, but which most men believed to be forgeries. The more Octavius thought of Antony’s doings the less he liked them.
But there was one item of news which outweighed all others. Julius by his will had adopted him as his son. After providing for lavish bequests to every Roman citizen, he had left him three-fourths of his huge fortune, the remaining fourth going to his other great-nephews, Lucius Pinarius and Quintus Pedius.1 Antony, Decimus Brutus and several others were named as alternate legatees, in case any or all of the nephews declined the bequest. The tidings moved Octavius deeply; the great man, whom he was already sworn to avenge, had singled him out as his successor, the legatee, as he saw it, not only of his name and his wealth, but of his dreams. The Caesarian mantle was now on his shoulders, and no man should pluck it from him.
His resolution was soon put to the test, for at Brundisium he found letters from his mother Atia and his stepfather Philippus, urging him to refuse the inheritance. His mother begged him to come at once to her. Philippus was an old Pompeian, and a timorous being; to him he replied that he could not disgrace the name of which Julius had thought him worthy. Atia, whose counsel meant much to him,2 he answered in the famous words in which Achilles replied to his mother Thetis: “Now go I forth that I may light on the destroyer of him I loved: then will I accept my death whensoever Zeus and the other immortals will to accomplish it.”1 But he hastened to fulfil her commands. She and Philippus were at Puteoli; so also was Cicero, and Caesarians like Balbus and Hirtius and Pansa, and a crowd of Roman notables. He would go there and spy out the land. Meantime he must walk warily. He was the heir of Julius, but none the less a person of small account, and Antony was in power and, said rumour, busy helping himself to that part of his inheritance which Julius had deposited in the temple of Ops to his private order. He was already encumbered by offers of help from Caesarian veterans who thronged around him and begged him to lead them to avenge the murder. He gently put aside such appeals. His first business was to go to Rome to give notice to the urban praetor that he accepted the inheritance, declare in a public assembly his plans for administering the will, and have his adoption officially ratified. One important step he did take with a view to future possibilities: as Julius’s heir, he sent to Asia for the treasure which Julius had stored there for the Parthian campaign. For the rest he was a private citizen, concerned only with his personal rights and duties. His “pietas,” his devotion to his kinsman’s memory, was the flag under which he must enter public life.2
To Puteoli he journeyed by the Appian Way, receiving on the road embarrassing attentions from colonists and veterans, some of whom continued in his train. He was obliged to allow himself to be addressed as Caesar. He reached his stepfather’s villa about the 18th, and found that, though Philippus was still opposed to his course, his mother’s heart was with him. Next day he met Balbus and told him his intentions; that loyal Caesarian was the first outside his family circle to know of them. That day, too, he called upon Cicero, and the statesman of sixty-two and the stripling of nineteen delicately manœuvred for position, and sought to read each other’s minds.
Cicero was the last of the philosophic republicans. For a time he had been Julius’s friend; had he not once written, “I burn with love for him”? In the final struggle he had half-heartedly gone over to Pompey, because his cause was more or less the cause of the Senate.: but after Pharsalus Julius had treated him kindly, and the old man had turned to letters in a new fever of composition. Julius’s death had opened vistas to a mind which had little contact with reality. He had passionately approved the murder, made gods of Brutus and Cassius, and laboured to stiffen the purpose of the bewildered conspirators. But Antony’s sinister figure had blocked the road to a restored republic, and now he sat in his country villa, hurling letters at a multitude of friends, sometimes buoyant with hope, oftener shrill with despair, striving to steady his thoughts by writing his treatise on “Old Age,” planning with his inexhaustible zest a new work on “Duty,” a philosopher who had lost all philosophic balance. He was consumed with most human hates, and tantalized by dreams of being once again, as in Catiline’s day, his country’s saviour. Octavius had known him slightly in Rome, had studied his de Republica and his de Legibus, and had learned from them certain doctrines which he was always to remember.1 As a student himself of Panaetius and Posidonius, he revered a master in their craft. There was much in Cicero’s creed with which he agreed, and he hoped to get from him some notion of the purpose and strength of the faction which had been the death of Julius.
So, as a respectful youth who had no thought beyond his family duties, he approached the old statesman. He addressed him as “father,” avoided all controversial matters, sadly declared
