‘Time for a drink.’54 Horace’s relief, as he raised a toast to the defeat of Cleopatra and the victory of the young Caesar, was palpable. Maecenas, whose responsibility it had been during the months of his leader’s absence abroad to maintain order in Italy, was no doubt delighted to sense it. He knew just what he had in his reflective and independent-minded friend: a mirror held to all those who, storm-tossed by the evils of the age, had somehow attained dry land. ‘What are self-sufficiency and happiness? The ability to say: “I have lived.” ’ Maecenas could not return to Horace the lands stolen from him: they were gone for ever. He could, though, make some recompense now that the regime he served was secure at last. Shortly after Actium had ensured that he would not, after all, be appearing on any proscription list of Antony’s, he gave to his friend an estate just north of Rome, amid the Sabine hills. It was, in every sense, the answer to Horace’s prayers. No wonder it seemed to the poet a place hallowed by the joy he took in it. It was peaceful, it was beautiful, it was everything that the decade he had just experienced was not. In the farm’s fields, the crops grew with supernatural abundance; in its woods, the kids could roam without fear of the wolf, that beast of Mars. The gods, long absent from Italy, were back.
Or so Horace, and many, many others like him, now dared to hope.
The Spoils of Honour
‘Conquering your neighbours was your chief preoccupation.’55 So it was said of Romulus. Fighting foreigners, not themselves: this, everyone could agree, was the proper business of the Roman people. Naturally, in war as in peace, it was essential to respect legal niceties. Unprovoked aggression, while only to be expected from wild beasts and barbarians, was behaviour inappropriate to a civilised people. ‘When we go to war, it is for the sake of our allies – or to uphold our empire.’56 So it had always been. When Romulus attacked his neighbours, it had been with the resolve never to tolerate disrespect. Retribution for insult or injury had always been swift. One local king, ambushed and routed after presuming to raid Roman territory, had been cut down by Romulus himself. Here, in this slaying of a general by his opposite number, had been an exploit fit to illumine the succeeding ages. What more glorious feat of single combat could possibly be envisaged? Romulus, after stripping the blood-soaked armour from his foe, had borne it proudly back to Rome.
There was only one god worthy to receive the dedication of such a prize: Jupiter, the king of the gods himself. Hung at first from the branches of a sacred oak, the ‘spoils of honour’ had subsequently been moved into a temple custom-built for the purpose, the very first to be consecrated in the city. ‘Here,’ Romulus had decreed, ‘was where, in days to come, anyone who emulates me by killing a general or a king with his own hands, shall lay the stripped arms – the “spoils of honour”.’57
In the event, over the long and glorious course of Roman history, only a couple of other men had ever managed the feat. One was Cornelius Cossus, a cavalry officer who was supposed to have lived in the first century of the Republic, and the second a contemporary of Scipio Africanus by the name of Marcellus. The days when a commander would meet with his opposite number in single combat seemed to belong to a vanished age of heroes. Over time, the temple in which the ‘spoils of honour’ were stored had itself begun to crumble. Venerable though it was, it had long since been overshadowed. The steep hill on which it stood, across the Forum from the Palatine, had always been the seat of the gods. The Capitol was where, back in the golden age before history’s beginning, Jupiter’s father Saturn had established his throne. It was also where Rome’s largest temple had been raised in the final decades of the city’s own monarchy. Burned down in 83 BC, it had promptly been rebuilt on an even more grandiose scale. That it too was dedicated to Jupiter only served to emphasise the pokiness of Romulus’s original temple. As Rome, in the terrible decade that followed the Ides of March, grew ever shabbier, so the city’s oldest shrine seemed on the verge of collapse: ‘roofless and dilapidated with age and neglect’.58
Yet all along, beneath the cobwebs and the dust, the temple had been sheltering a weapon with the potential to set kingdoms tottering. Stored inside the crumbling walls, alongside the ‘spoils of honour’ and a lightning bolt made of stone, lay an antique spear. It was this that the young Caesar, when declaring war on Cleopatra in 32 BC, had hurled in accordance with venerable custom.59 Nothing could better have served to associate him with the martial virtues of Rome’s founder. Heading off to war, he did so as a second Romulus. Meanwhile, back on the Capitol, workmen were moving in. Comprehensive repairs were begun to Rome’s oldest temple. So comprehensive, indeed, as to rank as an almost total rebuild. The young Caesar knew better than to neglect the home front. The hammering and chiselling in the heart of the city provided a perfect accompaniment to the news coming in from Actium and Egypt. Even though the new Romulus was likelier, in truth, to pass a battle vomiting in his tent than engaging in hand-to-hand combat with enemy generals, that was beside the point. By 29, when he finally returned from the East with Antony and Cleopatra both dead, and the whole world seemingly his, it was to a city in which the wellspring of Rome’s martial traditions had been rebranded as his own.
It was not enough to be a victor. Auctoritas, that ineffable quality of prestige which served the Roman people as their surest measure of greatness, required a man to look and behave like a victor as well. The young Caesar, whose talents as an actor were no less formidable than his ambition, had long been sensitive to this. At Philippi, the prisoners-of-war had pointedly refused to salute him; at Perusia, the besieged defenders had mocked him as ‘Octavia’.60 By 38, he had had enough. Licking his wounds after a particularly humiliating reverse at the hands of Sextus, he had drawn a veil over his military inadequacies by means of one of his favourite and boldest expedients: beefing up his name.61 A new one had begun to feature on his coins. Henceforward, these proclaimed, he was to be known as Imperator Caesar – ‘Caesar The Victorious General’. Many commanders had been hailed as such on the field of battle, but none before had ever dreamed of making it so thoroughly and immodestly his own. Once Sextus was out of the way, the freshly minted Imperator Caesar had gone to great lengths to live up to his bold new nomenclature. In 35, he had headed across the Adriatic to the Balkans, there to test himself against bands of obstreperous barbarians named Illyrians. Two years of sporadic campaigning had enabled him to chalk up a succession of much-publicised victories. The tribes of Illyria had been variously ambushed, besieged and massacred. Some eagles captured a decade and more previously had been redeemed from captivity. Imperator Caesar himself had sustained a heroic wound to his right knee. Here, in the pacification of Illyria, had been a splendid appetiser for the even more glorious victories that were to follow. When, in the summer of 29, the conqueror of Egypt returned home from his settlement of the East, the refulgence of his auctoritas filled the whole world with its blaze. Imperator Caesar had become the sum of his name.
Italy, meanwhile, had been awaiting the conqueror with a degree of nervousness. Memories of his return from a previous civil war were still raw. As after Philippi, so after Actium the victor came trailing a monstrous number of land-hungry soldiers. His own recruitment drive and defections from his foes had combined to set him at the head of almost sixty legions. Such was the mood of anxiety that even Horace found himself pestered for inside information. ‘Where does Caesar mean to give his soldiers the land he has promised them?’62 The question weighed on everyone’s mind. Given how brutally the returning hero had consolidated his power in the early years of his career, it could hardly have done otherwise. Yet the trepidation was to prove misplaced. The murderousness of the young Caesar’s early career had been the measure of his weakness, not his strength. Now, with no foe left standing to oppose him, and the wealth of the East at his back, naked gangsterism no longer served his interests. The surest buttress of power he possessed was his auctoritas – and the surest buttress of that was his ability to serve the Roman people as the restorer and guarantor of peace.