Cicero - Anthony Everitt [153]
Antony, now in his late thirties and a little old for the part, was among the runners, but instead of carrying a thong he held a diadem in his hand, twined around a laurel wreath. Some of his fellow runners lifted him up so that he could place it at Caesar’s feet. Voices in the crowd shouted that Caesar should be crowned with it. Cassius with another of the conspirators, Publius Servilius Casca, picked up the diadem and put it on Caesar’s knee. The Dictator made a gesture of refusal and there were cheers from the crowd. Then Antony ran up again, presumably onto the Speakers’ Platform itself, and put the diadem on Caesar’s head. Antony said, “The people offer this to you through me,” and Caesar replied, “Jupiter alone is King of the Romans.” He immediately took it off and flung it into the crowd; those at the back clapped, but in the front rows people shouted that he should accept it and not resist the will of the People. An early source says that this “pantomime” went on for some time with applause ringing out with every refusal. Looking thoroughly put out, Caesar stood up and opened the front of his toga and said that anyone who wanted to cut his throat might do so.
Eventually Antony retrieved the diadem and had it sent to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. The official record in the archives for the Lupercalia of that year read: “To Caius Caesar, Life Dictator, Mark Antony the Consul, by command of the People, offered the kingship: Caesar was unwilling.”
The episode betrays every sign of having been premeditated. AS Cicero pointed out later to Antony: “Where did the diadem come from? It is not the sort of thing you pick up in the street. You had brought it from home.” It is highly unlikely that Antony would have dared to improvise or stage an ambush of this kind without Caesar’s knowledge and it seems equally implausible that the government was unaware of the real state of public feeling.
In all probability Caesar decided that the growing rush of rumors needed to be stemmed. Perhaps he had become wise to the unwisdom of accepting so many honors. Almost on the eve of the Parthian expedition, the feverish political climate needed to be calmed. The Lupercalia offered a high-profile opportunity to stage a “spontaneous” request and then have it decisively turned down. It is fascinating to observe (according to one of the earliest sources, Nicolaus of Damascus, who at one point in his life was a tutor in the household of Antony and Cleopatra) the active involvement of two known or presumed critics of the regime (and conspirators) in the charade. Their presence at the scene may imply an intention to involve a wide range of political opinion in a spectacle that was meant to quash the rumors once and for all.
The maneuver failed. What if the crowd’s applause had supported rather than refused the “crowning”? skeptics wondered. Could suspicious and cynical constitutionalists be sure what would have happened then? So far as the conspirators were concerned the Lupercalia did nothing to lull their fears. If anything, it focused their minds and hurried them up. What was probably an inchoate group, or groupings, of malcontents came together as a clearly defined plot. It was probably at this point that Cassius was able to recruit the conspiracy’s most celebrated member, Marcus Brutus.
Attacking Antony in a speech almost exactly a year later, Cicero said, “You, you, assassinated him at the Lupercalia.” This colorful overstatement contained a germ of truth: the public offer of kingship was in a sense Caesar’s death warrant.
About this time, an apparently unimportant misunderstanding also left a bad impression. Caesar was sitting in the vestibule of the Temple of Venus in his newly opened Julian Forum