Cicero - Anthony Everitt [159]
One of the important results of the Senate’s ruling was the protection it gave to the leading conspirators. In addition to deciding the Consulships for the coming three years, Caesar had allocated provincial governorships. Brutus and Cassius were to have Macedonia and Asia in 43. Decimus Brutus was confirmed in the current year for Italian Gaul, where he would be the first conspirator to take charge of an army, for two legions were stationed there. If trouble arose, these provinces would provide power bases where the conspirators could legitimately establish themselves.
AS the Senate was about to break up, a noisy discussion broke out over Caesar’s will. His father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, was asked not to announce its contents or conduct a public funeral for fear of disturbances. He angrily refused and, after renewed debate, permission was granted.
When published, the will inflamed opinion on the street, for it bequeathed Caesar’s gardens on the far side of the Tiber as a public park and left 300 sesterces to every Roman citizen. Popular with the masses, it was not calculated to please Antony, for it also disclosed that the chief heir to the Dictator’s fortune was Caius Octavius, his eighteen-year-old grandnephew. He was also designated as his adoptive son; from now on his formal name would be Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus (in English, Octavian). The news came as a complete surprise to everyone, including its young beneficiary. The will concerned his personal estate and did not mean that Caesar was giving him the Republic. Antony saw himself as the inheritor of Caesar’s political legacy and that was how he meant it to remain. He did not anticipate a teenage boy to be a serious threat.
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