Augustus

What is more, many of Caesar’s men came not from Roman Italy but from the provinces of Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul. Mostly they were not Roman citizens (as in principle they should have been). They had no compunctions about invading Italy and fighting Romans. They might complain about their length of service, but never about where or against whom their commander was leading them.

It was during this visit to Rome that Octavius definitely met Caesar, if he had not already done so. Caesar made up his mind quickly about people. He was impressed by Octavius, who was growing into a thoughtful and prudent young man, and detected great promise in him. He arranged for the boy to be enrolled as a patrician. The patricians were Rome’s original aristocracy and were distinguished from the plebeians, who made up the rest of the population. They may originally have been the city’s founding citizens; or possibly an “aristocracy of invaders” who lorded it over the native population; or a grouping of royal appointees when Rome was a kingdom. Whatever the truth of the matter, patrician status became a nobility of birth.

The symbolism of Octavius’ promotion was significant. Caesar, as a Julius, was a patrician, but an Octavius, albeit connected through his mother to the Julii, was not. Without going so far as to adopt him, Octavius’ great-uncle was hinting that he regarded Octavius as an honorary member of the Julian clan.

Another signal honor was conferred on the teenager: appointment as praefectus urbi (city prefect) during the Feriae Latinae, the Latin Festival. This important ceremony was conducted at a shrine on the Alban Mount (today’s Monte Cavi) some twenty miles south of Rome. The Feriae was originally a celebration of the unity of the Latin League, an alliance of the Latin communities in Latium (Lazio); the Romans took it over for themselves when the league was incorporated into the Republic.

The festival was accompanied by a sacred truce: no battle could be fought while it was taking place. Both the consuls headed a procession from the city to the Alban Mount, on the top of which stood a very ancient shrine to Jupiter. An ox was sacrificed to the god and the victim’s flesh distributed among the towns and cities that made up the community of Latins. Individual towns also offered lambs, cheeses, milk, or cakes. A symbolic game, called oscillatio, or swinging, was played and, back in Rome, a four-horse chariot race took place on the Capitoline Hill, the winner of which received as his prize a drink called absynthium, or essence of wormwood (perhaps like the absinthe of modern times mixed with wine).

In theory, the praefectus was in charge of the city during the consuls’ absence, but the role was temporary and purely symbolic. Octavius presided over a ceremony in the Forum, where he sat on a speaker’s tribunal. According to Nicolaus, many people turned up “for a sight of the boy, for he was well worth looking at.”

Early in December, Caesar was to sail across to the province of Africa, where Cato and ten Pompeian legions were at large. The dictator hoped it would be his final campaign. Now in his seventeenth year, Octavius asked permission to accompany his great-uncle so that he could gain military experience. Atia opposed the idea. He said nothing by way of argument and dutifully agreed to remain at home. Caesar, too, was unwilling for him to take the field. He was worried about his great-nephew’s physical fitness and feared that “he might bring on illness to a weak body through such a sharp change of life-style and so permanently injure his health.”

The African campaign was by no means a walkover. Caesar quickly got into trouble, but fought his way out of it, decisively defeating the enemy near the port of Thapsus. Cato, standard-bearer of the Republic but no military man, had played little direct part in the campaign. Realizing the hopelessness of the situation, he now decided to take his own life. In this way he would avoid the humiliation of falling into Caesar’s hands and, worse, having to endure a pardon. After spending the night reading the Phaedo, Plato’s great dialogue about the last days of Socrates, he stabbed himself.

For all his intransigence and incompetence when alive, Cato’s death had an enormous impact on public opinion. People remembered his principled incorruptibility, not his blunders. His shining example unforgivingly illuminated Caesar’s selfishness and ambition, which threatened to destroy the centuries-old Republic.

The modern reader may be intrigued by the elite Roman’s propensity to kill himself in adverse circumstances, and indeed, despite undercurrents of popular and religious disapproval, the classical world’s attitude toward suicide was very different from today’s.