Dictator

Cicero said, ‘Brutus, I implore you – I implore you all – go down to the Forum and tell the people what you’ve done and why you’ve done it. Fire them with the spirit of the old republic. Otherwise Lepidus will trap you up here and Antony will take control of the city.’

Even Brutus could now see the wisdom of this, and so a procession of the conspirators – or assassins, or freedom fighters, or liberators: no one ever could agree exactly what to call them – descended the twisting road that led from the summit of the Capitol around behind the Temple of Saturn and down into the Forum. At Cicero’s suggestion they left their bodyguard of gladiators behind: ‘It will make the best possible impression of our sincerity if we walk alone and unarmed; besides, if there is trouble, we can retreat quickly enough.’

It had stopped raining. Three or four hundred citizens had gathered in the Forum and were standing around listlessly among the puddles, apparently waiting for something to happen. They saw us coming when we were still quite a long way off, and moved towards us. I had no idea how they would react. Caesar had always been a great favourite of the mob, although latterly even they had come to weary of his kingly ways – to dread his looming wars and to pine for the old days of elections when they had to be courted by the dozens of candidates with flattery and bribes. Would they applaud us or try to tear us apart? In the event they did neither. The crowd watched in absolute silence as we entered the Forum and then parted to let us pass. The praetors – Brutus, Cassius and Cinna – went up on to the rostra to address them, while the rest of us, including Cicero, stood at the side to watch.

Brutus spoke first, and although I can remember his sombre opening line – ‘As my noble ancestor Junius Brutus drove the tyrant-king Tarquin from the city, so today have I rid us of the tyrant-dictator Caesar’ – the rest of it I have forgotten. That was the problem. He had obviously laboured hard over it for days, and no doubt as an essay on the wickedness of despotism it read well. But as Cicero had long tried to convince him, a speech is a performance, not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. A fiery oration at that moment might have transformed the situation – might have inspired the crowd to defend the Forum and their liberty from the soldiers who even now were massing on the Field of Mars. But Brutus gave them a lecture that was three parts history to one part political theory. I could hear Cicero beside me muttering under his breath. It did not help that while he was speaking, Brutus’s wound began to bleed beneath its bandage; one was distracted from what he was saying by that gory reminder of what he had done.

After what felt like a long time, Brutus ended to applause best described as thoughtful. Cassius spoke next, and not badly either, for he had taken lessons in oratory from Cicero in Tusculum. But he was a professional soldier who had spent little time in Rome: he was respected but he was not much known, let alone loved. He received less applause even than Brutus. The disaster, however, was Cinna. He was an orator of the old-fashioned, melodramatic school, and tried to inject some passion into proceedings by tearing off his praetorian robe and hurling it from the rostra, denouncing it as the gift of a despot that he was ashamed to be seen wearing. The hypocrisy was too much to bear. Someone yelled out, ‘You didn’t say that yesterday!’ The remark was cheered, which emboldened another heckler to shout: ‘You’d have been nothing without Caesar, you old has-been!’ In the chorus of jeering, Cinna’s voice was lost – and the meeting with it.

Cicero said, ‘Now this is a fiasco.’

‘You are the orator,’ said Decimus. ‘Will you say something to retrieve the situation?’ and to my horror I saw that Cicero was tempted. But at that moment Decimus was handed a new report that Lepidus’s legion appeared to be moving towards the city. He beckoned urgently to the praetors to come down off the rostra, and with as much confidence as we could muster, which was little, we all trooped back up to the Capitol.

It was typical of Brutus’s other-worldliness that he should have believed right up until the last moment that Lepidus would never dare to break the law by bringing an army across the sacred boundary and into Rome. After all, he assured Cicero, he knew the Master of Horse extremely well: Lepidus was married to his sister Junia Secunda (just as Cassius was married to his half-sister Junia Tertia).

‘Believe me, he’s a patrician through and through. He won’t do anything illegal. I have always found him an absolute stickler for dignity and protocol.’