This book review was previously published by The Times.
The death of Caesar led to a relentless retribution “Men at some time are masters of their fates.” Gaius Cassius’s exhortation, according to Shakespeare, may have emboldened Marcus Brutus into joining his plot to assassinate Julius Caesar, but he forgot that other men might have something to say about it. The problem with removing one tyrant is it creates a vacancy for another. It did not take long for the killers on the Ides of March to become the prey.
Tell Gaius Trebonius about being master of his fate. A military ally of Caesar, who had killed hundreds of Britons and Gauls for him and been promised a governor’s post in Asia in return, Trebonius turned against his patron. His role in the plot was to keep Mark Antony, Caesar’s sidekick, outside the Theatre of Pompey on that morning of March 15, 44BC, while Cassius et al ended Caesar’s kingly ambitions with 23 bloody blows.
Trebonius would be dead within a year. It is 1,200 miles from Rome to Smyrna on the Anatolian coast, where he had taken up the role Caesar offered him, but vengeance travels quickly. A dissolute politician named Publius Cornelius Dolabella, described by Peter Stothard as “rapist of everywhere he governed and many whom he met”, was sent by Antony to punish him. He arrived with a man known only as the Samarian, a master torturer who could work wonders with a heated knife and a persuasive stretching machine that he called the Horse.
The Samarian’s usual trade was in torturing slaves before a trial to ensure they gave the right evidence. To give a former consul a going-over on the orders of another made a nice change for him. The torture lasted two days, after which Trebonius’s head was used by Dolabella’s soldiers in a game of football beside a statue of Caesar. The rest of him was chucked into the sea. So died the first assassin.
Stothard’s history of the hunting down of the murderers by Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, who are first accomplices then bitter rivals as they each seek the throne, is a riveting, fast-paced thriller that makes one think of the brutal settling of scores at the end of The Godfather.
It is framed through the story of Cassius Parmensis, not the lead assassin with the lean and hungry look, but a namesake who played a whip’s role in the plot, drawing up lists of supporters and using his relative anonymity to deliver messages round Rome. It opens with him hiding in Athens, a city that famously rejected tyranny, 14 years after Caesar’s murder. All the other members of the gang have been killed and Parmensis is haunted by a dream of the bearded avenger who will one day dispatch him too.
Some of the assassins had only themselves to blame for their fate. Lucius Minucius Basilus had been fond of mutilating his servants for small domestic offences. A lopped earlobe here, a tip off the nose there to encourage good behaviour: such an HR policy seldom wins the staff’s loyalty and they gleefully killed him.
Others were pursued by bounty hunters and would settle Antony and Octavian’s scores for a bag of denarii, often in extremely gory ways. Rome became “a city of disembodied heads. A corpse with all its extremities connected was the rare body of a man killed by mistake,” writes Stothard, a former editor of The Times and The Times Literary Supplement. Some of these bounty hunters were incompetent and picked off the innocent — whoops, I meant the other Cinna.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, the greatest orator in Rome, may not have been invited to join the plot — they feared he was too much of a gossip — but his name went on the kill list after he issued 14 abusive denunciations of Antony. Cicero fled, hoping to escape to Macedonia, but was found on the coast clutching a copy of Euripides’s Medea, a tale of gruesome revenge.
Realising the game was up, Cicero stretched out his neck and asked for a quick death. It took three men and a lot of sawing to separate his head from his shoulders. They removed his hands as well, to ensure that he could neither write nor speak another word. Just to be certain, Antony’s wife used Cicero’s tongue as a pin cushion, while her husband hung these severed trophies in the Forum, occasionally taking down the head to look at while he ate. Little wonder Brutus and Cassius chose to kill themselves rather than submit to Antony’s mercy.
Cassius had wanted Antony killed at the same time as Caesar. Was he not part of the problem? Had he not recently offered Caesar a crown as he lolled upon a golden throne, in an act of crowd-pleasing propaganda? The squeamish Brutus, whose ancestor had removed the last king of Rome 450 years earlier, talked him out of it.
A mistake, almost as bad as writing off the teenage and, so it turned out, extremely bloodthirsty Octavian. “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” to return to Shakespeare, this time writing for Brutus, “which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” The problem with tides is that they have a tendency to turn.Buy