Dictator

It paraded right in front of me, and I was amazed by the planning that had gone into it: Antony and I am sure Fulvia had left out nothing that might be relied upon to inflame the emotions. First came the musicians, playing their haunting plangent dirges; then dancers dressed as spirits from the Underworld, who ran up shrieking to the front of the crowd striking poses of grief and horror; then came household slaves and freedmen carrying busts of Caesar; then not one but five actors went marching past representing each of Caesar’s triumphs, wearing masks of the Dictator fashioned from beeswax that were so incredibly lifelike one felt he had risen from the dead five-fold in all his glory; then, carried on an open litter, came a life-size model of the corpse, naked except for a loincloth, with each of the stab wounds, including that to his face, depicted as deep red gashes in the white wax flesh – this caused the spectators to gasp and cry and some of the women to swoon; then came the body itself, lying on an ivory couch, carried on the shoulders of senators and soldiers and shrouded from view by covers of purple and gold, followed by Caesar’s widow Calpurnia and niece Atia, veiled in black and holding on to one another, accompanied by their relatives; and finally came Antony and Piso, Dolabella, Hirtius, Pansa, Balbus, Oppius, and all the leading supporters of Caesar.

After the cortège had passed, there was a strange hiatus while the body was taken to the steps behind the rostra. Neither before nor afterwards did I ever hear such a profound silence in the centre of Rome in the middle of the day. During this ominous lull the leading mourners were filing on to the platform, and when at last the corpse appeared, Caesar’s veterans began banging their swords against their shields as they must have done on the battlefield – a terrific, warlike, intimidating din. The body was placed carefully into the golden tabernacle; Antony stepped forward to deliver the eulogy, and held up his hand for silence.

‘We come to bid farewell to no tyrant!’ he declared, his powerful voice ringing round the temples and statues. ‘We come to bid farewell to a great man foully murdered in a consecrated place by those he had pardoned and promoted!’

He had assured the Senate he would speak with moderation. He broke that assurance with his opening words, and for the next hour he worked the vast assembly, already aroused by the spectacle of the procession, to a pitch of grief and fury. He flung out his arms. He sank almost to his knees. He beat his breast. He pointed to the heavens. He recited Caesar’s achievements. He told them of Caesar’s will – the gift to every citizen, the public park, the bitter irony of his honouring of Decimus. ‘And yet this Decimus, who was like a son to him – and Brutus and Cassius and Cinna and the rest – these men swore an oath – they made a sacred promise – to serve Caesar faithfully and to protect him! The Senate has given them amnesty, but by Jupiter what revenge I should like to take if prudence did not restrain me!’ In short he used every trick of oratory that the austere Brutus had rejected. And then came his – or was it Fulvia’s? – masterstroke. He summoned up on to the platform one of the actors wearing Caesar’s lifelike mask, who in a rasping voice declaimed to the crowd that famous speech from Pacuvius’s tragedy The Trial for Arms:

That ever I, unhappy man, should save

Wretches, who thus have brought me to the grave!

The impersonation was uncannily good. It was like a message from the Underworld. And then, to groans of horror, the manikin of Caesar’s corpse was raised by some mechanical contraption and rotated full circle so that all the wounds were shown.