‘At the hands of Ahenobarbus? Never!’ said Antony, nostrils flaring. ‘Plancus, I do believe you shit yourself!’
Plancus fled, leaving Antony to wait for the arrival of a rowboat heading for his ship. His own standard still fluttered from the mast, but Ahenobarbus had lowered his.
Squat, dark and bald, Ahenobarbus clambered neatly up a rope ladder and advanced on Antony, grinning from ear to ear. ‘At last!’ the irascible one cried, hugging Antony. ‘You’re moving on that odious little insect, Octavianus, aren’t you? Please say you are!’
‘I am’ was Antony’s answer. ‘May he choke on his own shit! Plancus just shit himself at sight of you, and I would have put his courage higher than Octavianus’s. Do you know what Octavianus did, Ahenobarbus? He murdered Lucius in Further Spain, then had the gall to write and inform me that he’s the proud owner of Lucius’s ashes! He dares me to collect them! Is he mad?’
‘I’m your man through thick and thin,’ Ahenobarbus said huskily. ‘My fleet is yours.’
‘Good,’ said Antony, extricating himself from a very strong embrace. ‘I may need a big warship with a solid bronze beak to break Brundisium’s harbor chain.’
But not a sixteener with a twenty-talent bronze beak could have broken the chain strung across the harbor mouth; anyway, Ahenobarbus didn’t have a ship half as large as a sixteener. The chain was anchored between two concrete piers reinforced with iron pieces, and each of its bronze links was fashioned from metal six inches thick. Neither Antony nor Ahenobarbus had ever seen a more monstrous barrier, nor a population so jubilant at the sight of their frustrated attempts to snap that barrier. While the women and children cheered and jeered, the men of Brundisium subjected Ahenobarbus’s battle quinquereme to a murderous hail of spears and arrows that finally drove it offshore.
‘I can’t do it!’ Ahenobarbus yelled, weeping in rage. ‘Oh, but when I do, they’re going to suffer! And where did it come from? The old chain was a tenth this one’s size!’
‘That Apulian peasant Agrippa installed this one,’ Plancus was able to say, sure he no longer smelled of shit. ‘When I left to seek refuge with you, Antonius, the Brundisians were quick to explain its genesis. Agrippa has fortified this place better than Ilium was, including on its land sides.’
‘They won’t die quickly,’ Antony snarled. ‘I’ll impale the town magistrates on stakes up their arses and drive them in at the rate of an inch a day.’
‘Ow, ow!’ said Plancus, flinching at the thought. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘Wait for my troops and land them wherever we can to north and south,’ said Antony. ‘Once Pollio arrives – he’s taking his sweet time! – we’ll squash this benighted place from its land side, Agrippa’s fortifications or no. After a siege, I suppose. They know I won’t be kind to them – they’ll resist to the end.’
So Antony withdrew to the island off Brundisium’s harbor mouth, there to wait for Pollio and try to discover what had become of Ventidius, curiously silent.
Sextilis had ended and the Nones of September were gone, though the weather was still hot enough to make island living an ordeal. Antony paced; Plancus watched him pace. Antony growled; Plancus pondered. Antony’s thoughts never left the subject of Lucius Antonius; Plancus’s ranged far and wide on one subject too, but a more fascinating one – Marcus Antonius. For Plancus was seeing new facets in Antony, and didn’t like what he saw. Wonderful, glorious Fulvia wove in and out of his mind – so brave and fierce, so … so interesting. How could Antony have beaten a woman, let alone his wife? The granddaughter of Gaius Gracchus!
He’s like a small child with its mother, Plancus thought, brushing at tears. He should be in the East fighting the Parthians – that’s his duty. Instead, he’s here on Italian soil, as if he hasn’t the courage to abandon it. Is it Octavianus who eats at him, or is it insecurity? At his core, does Antonius believe he can win future laurels? Oh, he’s brave, but generaling armies doesn’t demand bravery. It’s more an intellectual exercise, an art, a talent. Divus Julius was a genius at it, Antonius is Divus Julius’s cousin. But, to Antonius, I suspect that fact is more a burden than a delight. He’s so terrified of failing that, like Pompeius Magnus, he won’t move unless he has superior numbers. Which he has here in Italia, between Pollio, Ventidius and his own legions just across a small sea. Sufficient to crush Octavianus, even now Octavianus has Calenus’s eleven from Further Gaul. I gather that they’re still in Further Gaul under the command of Salvidienus, writing to Antonius regularly in an attempt to switch sides. One little item I didn’t tell Octavianus.
What Antonius fears in Octavianus is that genius Divus Julius had in such abundance. Oh, not as a general of armies! As a man of infinite courage, the kind of courage Antonius is beginning to lose. Yes, his fear of failure grows, whereas Octavianus starts to dare all, to gamble on unpredictable outcomes. Antonius is at a disadvantage when dealing with Octavianus, but even more so when dealing with foes as foreign as the Parthians. Will he ever wage that particular war? He rants about lack of money, but is that lack really the sum total of his reluctance to fight the war he should be fighting? If he doesn’t fight it, he’ll lose the confidence of Rome and Romans; he knows that too. So Octavianus is his excuse for lingering in the West. If he drives Octavianus out of the arena, he’ll have so many legions that he could defeat a quarter of a million men. Yet, with sixty thousand men, Divus Julius defeated over three hundred thousand. Because he went about it with genius. Antonius wants to be master of the world and the First Man in Rome, but can’t work out how to go about it.
Pace, pace, pace, up and down, up and down. He’s insecure. Decisions loom, and he’s insecure. Nor can he embark upon one of his famous fits of ‘inimitable living’ – what a joke, to call his cronies in Alexandria the ‘Society of Inimitable Livers’! Now here he is, in a situation where he can’t binge his way to forgetfulness. Haven’t his colleagues realized, as I have, that Antonius debauched is simply demonstrating his innate weakness?
Yes, concluded Plancus, it is time to change sides. But can I do that at the moment? I doubt it, in the same way as I doubt Antonius. Like him, I’m short on steel.
* * *
Octavian knew all this with more conviction than Plancus, yet he couldn’t be sure which way the dice would fall now Antony had arrived outside Brundisium; he had staked everything on the legionaries. Then their representatives came to tell him they would not fight Antony’s troops, be they his own, or Pollio’s, or Ventidius’s. An announcement that saw Octavian limp with relief. It only remained to see if Antony’s troops would fight for him.
Two nundinae later, he had his answer. The soldiers under the command of Pollio and Ventidius had refused to fight their brothers at arms.
He sat down to write Antony a letter.
My dear Antonius, we are at an impasse. My legionaries refuse to fight yours, and yours refuse to fight mine. They belong to Rome, they say, not to any one man, even a Triumvir. The days of massive bonuses, they say, are past. I agree with them. Since Philippi I have known that we can no longer sort out our differences by going to war against each other. Imperium maius we may have but, in order to enforce that, we must have command of willing soldiers. We do not.
I therefore propose, Marcus Antonius, that each of us chooses a single man as his representative to try to find a solution to this impasse. As a neutral participant whom both of us deem fair and impartial, may I nominate Lucius Cocceius Nerva? You are at liberty to dispute my choice and nominate a different man. My delegate will be Gaius Maecenas. Neither you nor I should be present at this meeting. To attend it would mean ruffled tempers.
‘The cunning rat!’ cried Antony, screwing up the letter.
Plancus picked it up, smoothed it out and read it. ‘Marcus, it’s the logical solution to your predicament,’ he faltered. ‘Consider for a moment, please, where you are and what you face. What Octavianus suggests may prove a salve to heal injured feelings on both sides. Truly,