‘Let’s hear it,’ said Caesar.

‘Has anyone, in these last few days, attempted to put you on your guard against something?’

Caesar gave an involuntary shudder and Silius felt that he was about to share an important confidence that would allow him to ask more questions.

‘I don’t mean an explicit declaration,’ he added. ‘A veiled allusion, perhaps? Doesn’t anything come to mind, commander?’

Caesar could see the raving expression of Spurinna, the augur, hissing at him, ‘Beware the Ides of March!’ but he turned calmly to Silius and said, ‘We have to go downstairs. They’re waiting for us.’

He took a scroll from the table entitled The Anabasis of Cyrusand started down the stairs.

Silius followed him and, before entering the meeting hall, stopped to listen to the enthusiastic welcome Caesar was receiving: military salutes, shouts of greeting, barracks banter. Then Caesar’s voice, sharp as a sword: ‘Commanders of the legions of Rome, magistrates, masters of the cavalry and auxiliaries!’

‘Caesar!’ they all replied in unison.

It felt as though the lion had leapt into the circle of hunters.

The meeting went on until late, a good two hours. Caesar began with the Anabasis.He summarized Xenophon’s account of the expedition of the ten thousand Greek soldiers who, four centuries earlier, had made it nearly all the way to Babylon without striking a blow, but immediately pointed out that things had changed considerably since then, and that Crassus’s army had been wiped out just ten years earlier by the Parthians at Carrhae. This was the main objective of the mission: to avenge the massacre of Carrhae. Rome had been humiliated, the triumvir defeated, thousands of her most valiant soldiers killed, her Eagles lost. But this would be only the beginning. The Parthians constituted a perennial threat, so the problem must be solved once and for all.

He went on to describe the tactical and strategic aspects of the expedition. He took, from a case already sitting on the table, the map that Publius Sextius had provided him with. A copy of the ancient Road of the King, it included all the other roads and caravan routes that crossed the vast territory of the Parthian empire, stretching all the way to Armenia, to Sarmatia, Media and Bactriana. He laid the map on the table and the members of the war council were awed by a masterpiece of geographical expertise the likes of which they had never seen.

Each one of them, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, eagerly regarded this vision of the eastern part of the world. Each one made his comments, with those who already knew something of the Orient tracing their fingers over the rivers, lakes, seas and mountains they recognized.

Then it was Caesar’s turn. His officers followed the tip of his index finger as he drew out the lines of march and the attack routes on the parchment sheet painted in natural colours: brown for the mountains, bright green for the rivers, lakes and seas, light green for the plains, ochre for the deserts. The place names in Persian had been carefully transcribed in Latin in an even hand.

His plan was to attack on two different fronts, from Syria and from Armenia, converging his forces in a pincer on the capital, Ctesiphon.

The problems to consider, Caesar said, were the enemy cavalry and the double-curved bows the Parthians used, which could strike from a considerable distance. He pointed out that even if Crassus had won at Carrhae and had pushed on into enemy territory, his chances of succeeding would have been slight. Lost in the immensity of the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, deprived of his own cavalry, the army would have been easy prey for the continuous onslaughts of squads of enemy archers on horseback. Their tactics were to attack, strike and retreat, without ever engaging the infantry in hand-to-hand battle. This had been reported by a man who had miraculously survived the massacre, hidden under a pile of bodies.

As Caesar proceeded with his explanations, Silius noticed that some of those present were looking more at him than at the map. They were watching his expression rather than listening to his words. Why? What were they trying to read in their commander’s face?

His strength, decided Silius; they were trying to gauge how much strength remained in that wrinkled brow, those eyes, that jaw, in his fisted hands leaning on the table.

Antony seemed the most attentive to Caesar’s strategic plan, even interrupting him to ask for clarification. He seemed to be truly eager to leave on this Parthian expedition and play the role of subordinate commander in the vast theatre of operations. The others weren’t showing real interest, as if they didn’t believe it would happen. Decimus Brutus, for instance, was constantly talking under his breath to Caius Trebonius, making comments Silius would have liked to hear.

Perhaps Antony wanted to prove to Caesar — who had been treating him rather coldly since the Lupercalia incident, and who had seated him on his left at the table — that he was still his best officer, the only one among them capable of conducting wide-ranging, important operations. To let Caesar know he had been wrong to shut him out.

Silius himself was convinced of Antony’s military worth, but still wondered about his behaviour at the festival. Had he been acting on his own initiative? Had he merely made a mistake, a glaring error of judgement? Could one believe that Antony had truly meant it as a sincere gesture of admiration? Offering Caesar the king’s crown in order to say later that he had been the only one to openly acknowledge Caesar’s true worth? Could it have been a calculated ploy to become Caesar’s most trusted man, the most powerful in the empire after him?

Anything was possible, but nothing was convincing, because Antony was not a stupid man.

He could not have been unaware of the risks involved in making such a public gesture in front of such a large crowd. In the Senate it was a different matter, for here there was a relatively select group of aristocrats, most of whom owed everything to Caesar and bent over backwards to praise him. But not the people. Antony must have realized that suddenly forcing them to accept a choice that was universally felt to be scandalous, if not repugnant and even perfectly useless, was a huge risk. Not only because their reaction would be unpredictable, but even more so because the move had not been approved by Caesar himself. Silius believed Caesar when he said he had not been consulted. So what was the meaning behind the gesture, then? Had Antony acted on his own or was there someone behind him?

Although Silius had been over all this again and again, these thoughts kept crowding his mind and he was ashamed to realize he was not listening more closely to his commander as he illustrated his plans for universal conquest.

His generals were urging Caesar on now, enjoining him to conquer the whole world. They were raving about his plans, pressing him to undertake further exploits, to push past the boundaries of the inhabited world, to take on the desolate stretches of Sarmatia, the vast deserts of Persia and Bactriana, to follow the dreams of Alexander the Great. Now there was a model for you: larger than life, always victorious. .

Silius Salvidienus was watching Caesar’s face in the midst of this frenzy of excitement. His grey eyes were lit intermittently by a tired glow; otherwise they expressed mainly weariness and almost unbearable strain. These were the eyes of a man who could move only towards the impossible or towards death.

Both were undesirable outcomes.

The session ended in an atmosphere of general euphoria and Caesar announced he would convene the Senate for the morning of the Ides of March. There were various matters that would have to be finalized, some routine and others representing important new developments.