A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (14 page)

Caesar had not wanted to attend the meeting of the Senate on 15 March, not because he listened to the apprehensions of his young (fourth) wife Calpurnia, but because he felt unwell, and he sent
a message to that effect to the Curia, where the Senate was meeting on the Tiber. But they besought him to come and so he went, unescorted and unarmed. He was surrounded by a crowd of petitioners,
one trying to hand him a note warning him of the plot. Then
they struck. Twenty-seven blows later the boldest man in history fell dead at the foot of Pompey’s statue. The
horses he had liberated by the Rubicon were later seen to be weeping.

The plebs saw the assassination of their hero as the patricians striking back, possibly the first of a series of
coups
to regain the authority Caesar had taken from them. They cowered in
their tenements, shutters bolted; Rome cringed. Cicero had arranged a deal between the Caesareans and the Republicans whereby the assassins were to be amnestied and Caesar’s will and acts
were to be honoured. In the breathing space thus gained, Brutus and Cassius, the assassins, dined with Mark Antony on the Capitoline Hill. The will, which embittered Mark Antony in naming Octavian
as his heir, gave every citizen 300
sesterces
and his gardens on the other bank of the Tiber to the people of Rome. Mark Antony’s oration for Caesar has come down to us in a number of
different versions apart from Shakespeare’s. Suetonius says it was short, Dio long. Whatever happened, the mob’s reaction was such that Brutus and Cassius had to leave Rome.

The most famous assassination in history was also the vaguest. The conspirators may have wanted to restore the shaky institutions of the Republic; all they had done was set the scene for the
next civil war, whose victor would finally anaesthetize them, prior to a kindly death.

AUGUSTUS

Caesar’s great-nephew, his sister’s grandson, was in Illyria (modern Albania) when he heard the news of the great event in Rome. He was studying rhetoric and
undergoing military training for the proposed war in Parthia. He was eighteen. With his classmate, M. Vipsanius Agrippa, the son of an Italian farmer, who became his number two for life, he crossed
to Brindisi, and there learned he was Caesar’s principal heir and adopted son. Adoption was an honoured and frequent practice in Rome where the ladies were not philoprogenitive, disliking the
rigours of childbirth; their husbands did not complain because the greater the number of children, the greater the diminishment of the family estate (primogeniture was unknown). Adult sons of good
birth, therefore, were a rare enough commodity for it to be easy for a father with more than two of them to find a richer and more powerful parent. Henceforth C. Julius Caesar Octavianus, as he
called himself now, always referred to Julius Caesar, deified two years later in 42
BC
, as ‘my father’ and to himself as ‘son of the divine Caesar’.
He entered quickly and eagerly upon his inheritance.

At first his name appeared to be his only asset, but with Caesar’s legacies he was able to lure Mark Antony’s legions to his side (Crassus always used to say that no one could call
himself rich in Rome if he could not afford to keep an army).
Cicero was mad about the boy, suggesting to the Senate that he would be a counter to the ambitions of Antony. Two
battles followed immediately which Antony lost. He fled to Gaul. Octavian was now in charge of eight legions but the Senate refused to make him consul so he marched on Rome. He was nineteen. Then
on a small island near Bologna he met his rivals, Antony and Lepidus; they left their legions behind them, but had with them their kitchen cabinets. Octavian’s now consisted of one Q. Rufus,
Maecenas (an elegant Etrurian prince) and Agrippa; they were all the same age. The first was a disappointment, made trouble and was obliged to commit suicide. Agrippa became his commander-in-chief,
minister of works, son-in-law and stayed with him all his life, as did Maecenas, who was put in charge of propaganda and the arts. From this encounter emerged the second Triumvirate, official
unlike the first, and recognized by the assembly in November. The deal was that Antony kept Gaul, Lepidus Spain, Octavian Africa, Sicily and Sardinia. The Triumvirate needed money for its
forty-five legions and land. The speediest resource was through proscription of their enemies and the language of the edict was as savage as the action. Informers were promised rewards and no one
was safe. According to Plutarch, Octavian argued for two days to try and save Cicero, top of Antony’s hit-list in revenge for Cicero’s pillorying of him in the Philippics, but he failed
and the head and right arm of the great orator were displayed on the rostra in the forum. Cicero died because he had no army, no
gens
, no fortune to protect him. Faced with force his talents
failed him – the fate of intellectuals throughout the ages.

The civil war continued. Brutus rampaged in Greece and Cassius in Asia Minor. The Triumvirate defeated them. The chaos of the times – even contemporary historians did not
know exactly what was happening – suited the temperament of Octavian, who was perfectly willing to wade through slaughter to the throne, though he did not himself like the sight
of blood. Octavian had Brutus decapitated and sent the head to Rome to be thrown at the foot of Caesar’s statue. At the fall of Perusia in 41
BC
he had 300
high-ranking prisoners sacrificed on the Ides of March at the altar of the God Julius, his ‘father’. The bloodthirsty and cowardly Octavian was later unrecognizable in the benign
Emperor Augustus, a change of personality which Roman historians, accustomed to categorize their people into good and bad, found difficult to accommodate.

Sextus Pompeius, son of the great Pompey, entered the ring ironically as a sort of pirate king,
²³
and to the military were added some marital musical
chairs, for the day Octavian’s wife, Scribonia, a relative of Sextus, bore him a daughter, Julia, of whom much more anon, he divorced her. Octavian had fallen in love – with Livia, the
nineteen-year-old wife of one Tiberius Claudius Nero, who though he bore the names of three emperors was only the father of one, Tiberius. With Livia, quickly divorced though pregnant at the time,
Octavian – Augustus – lived happily ever after for fifty years. The connection was socially and politically important to him like the marriage of the Cornet William Pitt to the
Grenvilles, for, though Augustus’ father was now a God, his actual father was a provincial banker. Livia’s provenance was of the best and from 38
BC
the
Patriciate began to move towards Augustus. Over the years the love between them cooled but Augustus always found his wife useful, if only as the provider of virgins for his bed.

In the next five years, Agrippa subdued Pompey junior, whose legions the triumvir Lepidus tried to turn against Octavian. Smarter with his tongue than with his sword,
Octavian talked the legions round and preserved Lepidus in a seaside town for the rest of his life, occasionally dragging him up to Rome for public spectacles. Octavian loathed him but dared not
have him put down because at some point he had become Pontifex Maximus.

By 33
BC
, the contest for the Roman world was between the brothers-in-law Octavian and Antony. Antony had married his rival’s sister, always described as the
‘virtuous’ Octavia, but was now psychologically and financially dependent on the extraordinary Cleopatra, who had totally ensnared him. When the scene shifts to the court of the Queen
of Egypt, Roman history becomes grand opera. Cleopatra had enchanted Julius Caesar, scared Herod the Great, and had now become the mistress of Mark Antony, through whom she hoped to be mistress of
the world.

In late 34
BC
, Antony celebrated a Roman-style Triumph for his victory over the Armenians, which became known as the ‘Donations of Alexandria’. Plutarch
describes the occasion:

With Maecenas as his Goebbels, Octavian stepped up his hate campaign against Antony, who, in proclaiming Caesarion as Caesar’s son by Cleopatra, implied that Caesarion was a potential
usurper. There being no libel laws in Ancient Rome, nor any rules of evidence in courts of law, character assassination was invoked to harness public opinion, to which men in power were so
sensitive. They could not avoid the evidence of public opinion by roaring through the streets in bullet-proof cars, or disappear in helicopters. Every citizen could make himself heard in courts of
law or at the Games or in the streets. Julius Caesar had disdained protection but none of the five emperors descending from
him were successfully protected by their guards from
the anger of the Roman people, fomented by professionals.

Octavian defeated Antony with propaganda long before the battle of Actium. The message was simple. Antony, once an upright servant of the state, to whom Octavian had been so well disposed that
he gave him his own sister in marriage, who had been twice consul and many times
imperator
, had become the slave of a queen of a people who worshipped reptiles, a queen with the insolence to
look forward to issuing her decrees from the steps of the Capitol in Rome. He could prove it. Octavian took Antony’s will from the temple of the Vestal Virgins, where important people lodged
their wills for safekeeping, and read it to the Senate. Antony’s will acknowledged Caesarion, provided for his children by Cleopatra, and stipulated that he was to be buried next to her
– i.e., so propaganda ran, the capital was to be transferred to Alexandria. One hundred thousand copies – before the invention of printing – were distributed throughout the Roman
world denouncing Cleopatra as a
fatale monstrum
, Horace’s expression. Throughout Italy communities took oaths of allegiance to Octavian personally, later seen as another nail in the
coffin of the Republic. Octavian declared a just war on Cleopatra and advanced to Greece.

The war was not religious, political, ethnic or ideological, as so many were to be in Europe and in the Balkans, where the battles of the Roman civil war were often fought; it was a fight
between rival gangs for dominance but the gangsters’ ‘manor’, with Virgil to record the outcome, was the dawn of the Augustan Age. In terms of force, naval and military, they were
evenly matched, but Antony was handicapped by what we would call today the ‘Cleopatra factor’, and equally Octavian was boosted by the Caesar connection. Before, during and after the
battle, Romans deserted Antony. The
naval battle at Actium was lost by Antony more than won by Octavian, who may have passed the time lying on his back on a hill overlooking
the bay, gazing into the sky; but Agrippa was there. According to Dio, Cleopatra, impatient, anxious at anchor with her treasure (in ancient times one never left the family silver at home), very
much a woman, decided to return to Egypt; or did Antony signal her to retreat? Agrippa’s sailors, with no sails on board to unfurl, had anticipated a naval battle, a hand-to-hand business in
those days, grappling, ramming, catapulting and stoning. They won.