Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [22]
Then Caesar was off again—down to Brundisium and overseas to seek out his great rival Pompey.
Rome reverted to its default setting of worried waiting. Once again, the news seesawed. Letters traveled unpredictably back to Italy through messengers dispatched by participants, whether by the northern land route or, once spring had set in, over the dangerous seas.
In mid-August of 48 B.C., astonishing reports reached the city. Pompey’s army had been utterly defeated in a great battle near the town of Pharsalus in central Greece. Fifteen thousand of his legionaries were dead, against only two hundred of Caesar’s. The Republic’s commander in chief had survived, but promptly disappeared, presumably making his way eastward. Caesar followed. For the moment, no one knew where either man was.
In Rome, the immediate reaction was to accept that Caesar had become the first man in the state. He was awarded unprecedented honors and powers. In the middle of September, within a few weeks of the battle, Caesar was nominated dictator for a year (the usual limit was six months), and Mark Antony was proclaimed his deputy as magister equitum, master of the horse.
It emerged that Pompey had fled to Egypt, where he hoped that the boy pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, would give him refuge and a base from which he might be able to recruit a new army in Asia Minor and raise the resources to pay for it. The king’s advisers, feeling that it was far too dangerous to become implicated in someone else’s civil war on what looked like the losing side, and wishing to ingratiate themselves with the winner, had the defeated general killed even before he landed on Egyptian soil.
Caesar arrived in Alexandria on October 2 in hot pursuit. To his public disgust, but also his private relief, he was presented with Pompey’s head. He refused to look at it and shed a well-judged tear; but he accepted the dead man’s signet ring as evidence to send to Italy. Roman public opinion was saddened, but not surprised, when it learned a month later of the death. As Caesar remarked of Pompey during the campaign in Greece, “He does not know how to win wars.”
It was at this high point of his great-uncle’s career that Gaius stepped out from the shadows of childhood and joined the adult community.
III
A POLITICAL MASTER CLASS
48–46 B.C.
* * *
The ceremony was a crucial rite of passage. Before leaving his house, Gaius dedicated a key symbol of his childhood to the lares, the divine spirits that protected a home. This symbol was the bulla, an amulet, usually made of gold, that hung around his neck. After the dedication, he offered the lares a sacrifice at the small altar and shrine in their honor in the main hall, or atrium.
Surrounded by his family, friends, and supporters, the young man stepped out of doors and walked to the Forum, Rome’s main square in the city center, where he exchanged his boy’s toga with the red stripe for the pure white gown of manhood, the toga virilis. (Only if he was elected to the Senate or to a priesthood would a man again be entitled to sport the red stripe.)
While Gaius was putting on the toga, he tore his undertunic on both sides, so that it fell to his feet, leaving him naked except for a loincloth. On the face of it this was a bad omen, but with some presence of mind, he quipped: “I shall have the whole Senatorial Order at my feet.” This boyish comeback is almost certainly an invention, although it has a certain astuteness characteristic of the man into whom he grew.
Gaius had been taught to understand the importance of religious ritual; he would grow up to become a devout and superstitious traditionalist. For the Romans, religion had little to