Augustus (16 page)

When Rome learned of the relief of Mutina, there was unalloyed delight. It seemed that what Cicero called “this abominable war” was over. The Senate was so excited by Antony’s defeat that they completely misread the consequences of the consuls’ deaths. Decimus was awarded a triumph. A promised bounty for the soldiers was reduced from the (extremely generous) twenty thousand sesterces to ten thousand, and a commission was appointed to distribute the money directly to the soldiers (rather than routing it, as was the custom, through their general). Both Octavian, who was not even offered a place on the commission, and his men were infuriated, and their discontent was communicated to Rome.

Meanwhile reports began to filter south of an astonishing transformation in Antony’s fortunes. After his crossing of the Alps and arrival in Gaul, he made contact with three provincial governors. They were Marcus Aemilius Lepidus of Narbonese Gaul (today’s southern France) and Hither (northern) Spain, who commanded seven legions; Lucius Munatius Plancus of Long-haired Gaul (central and northern France); and Gaius Asinius Pollio of Farther (southern) Spain. Antony won them over to his cause and found himself the commander once more of a large army. The misery of Mutina could be forgotten.

Decimus Brutus had struggled after Antony with his bedraggled legions, but was now trapped. Antony renewed was too strong for him, and if he retraced his steps to Italy, he would find Octavian waiting to destroy him. His men saw the position was hopeless; they deserted. With a handful of supporters, Decimus tried to escape to Macedonia and Marcus Brutus, but fell into the hands of a Gallic chieftain, who killed him on Antony’s orders.

Caesar’s heir was now ready to pounce. Both consulships were vacant, and the disorganized and increasingly uneasy senators had no obvious and willing candidates. Octavian knew that the time for caution was past and he was more than ready to submit a claim. Obviously he was far too young, for according to the constitutional rules a consul had to be at least forty-two years old. However, it could be countered that in times of emergency men in their twenties had occasionally been elected—Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, for example, had been about twenty-nine when he won the command to defeat Hannibal in the third century
B.C.
Closer to the present day, Pompey the Great became a leading figure in Roman politics at the age of twenty-three and won proconsular authority when he was thirty.

In July a deputation of four hundred centurions arrived in Rome to lay proposals before the Senate. They wanted the soldiers’ promised bounty paid in full, and for their commander they required, rather than requested, the consulship. With extraordinary short-sightedness, the Senate refused.

As soon as this news reached him, Octavian, who was waiting in Cisalpine Gaul, called a soldiers’ assembly. They told him to lead them at once to Rome and they would elect him consul themselves. Octavian marched them off the parade ground—eight legions, cavalry, and auxiliaries—and took the road south.

As he neared the city, he became worried about the safety of his mother, Atia, and sister, Octavia. They clearly had great value as hostages, and with help from Caesarians in the city they went into hiding. There being no consuls, the praetors were in charge of Rome’s defense, but their men would not fight.

Determined to put on a show of constitutional propriety, the young candidate for the consulship waited twenty-four hours before entering Rome. On October 19, ostensibly without the slightest evidence of external threat, the people elected Octavian and the dim and unambitious Quintus Pedius, a nephew of Julius Caesar and one of his heirs, to the supreme governance of the Republic. Pedius had the advantage of being a safe pair of hands and could be guaranteed not to oppose his young colleague’s wishes. On the next day, Octavian made his way through the city to the Forum, surrounded by a precautionary bodyguard. His political opponents came out to meet him along the route, with what Appian called “spineless readiness to serve.”

Much to his relief, the new consul saw Atia and Octavia at the Temple of Vesta, waiting to greet him. They had survived the last few difficult days unscathed. Although she had advised against his accepting Caesar’s will only a short year previously, his mother must have been proud to see him at the pinnacle of power when he was not yet twenty years old. She was lucky to have witnessed this day, for within a few weeks or months she was dead. We do not know what killed her, nor has any account survived of her son’s reaction.

One of Octavian’s first official tasks was to preside over a sacrifice to the immortal gods in the Campus Martius. As he did so, he looked up and saw six vultures. This was a good omen, but an even better one followed: later, while he was haranguing his troops, twelve vultures appeared, as had happened to Romulus at Rome’s foundation in 753
B.C.
The livers of the animal victims Octavian slaughtered were found to be doubled up at the lower end—an omen the
haruspices
unanimously declared to foretell a prosperous and happy future. The supporters of the new regime made the most of this lucky propaganda opportunity.

The message the vultures gave to the world was that Rome was being founded for a second time.

By the summer of 43
B.C.
, Octavian had made good progress toward fulfilling the three-point program he set out in the letter he wrote Philippus on reaching Italy after the catastrophe of the Ides of March. One, he had accepted the legacy, and the
lex curiata
confirming his adoption, which Antony had obstructed, was now finally passed. Two, with the consulship, he had “succeeded to [Caesar’s] power,” at least in part, although there was more to do as and when opportunity offered. Three, now at last, he was in a position to “avenge his ‘father’’s death.”

The consul calmed the public by completing the payments that Julius Caesar had bequeathed to citizens, and by settling the bounties promised to the legions. He behaved with pretended gratitude to the Senate, but dared not attend its meetings without a bodyguard.

Then his colleague Pedius won approval for a bill that made Caesar’s killing a crime and outlawed the conspirators. A special court was set up, which sat for one day and found all the accused guilty. Different prosecutors were appointed, at least of the leading conspirators; Agrippa took on the case against Cassius. None of those charged were present and able to defend themselves; indeed, many were governors of provinces. Those who happened to be in Rome quietly disappeared abroad.

This business done, Octavian left the city with his eleven legions, ostensibly to do battle with Antony but in fact to come to terms with him. He proceeded at a leisurely pace up the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile Pedius urged a reluctant Senate to reconcile itself with Antony and Lepidus. The reason for this policy switch was obvious; both they and Octavian were, in their different ways, Caesarian leaders and would soon need to defend themselves against the mighty host that the
liberatores
were reportedly assembling in the eastern empire. Victory over a legionless Senate had been an easy piece of work. Brutus and Cassius backed by the manpower and wealth of the east were a very different matter.

VII

KILLING FIELDS

43–42
B.C.

Octavian was in the weaker position, for Antony’s forces, which brought together those of three provincial governors, including the former consul Lepidus, could easily have wiped him out. However, he calculated that his onetime enemy recognized that a united front among Caesarians was essential to maximize the chances of defeating Brutus and Cassius. They needed to come to an understanding. Also, the last twelve months had taught all military commanders that Julius Caesar’s veterans would fight against anybody except his heir.

Antony and Octavian brought five thousand men each to positions on opposite sides of the river. Then three hundred soldiers approached the bridges at either bank. Lepidus crossed over to the island; he inspected it for weapons or hidden assassins, then waved an all-clear with his cloak. Octavian and Antony now left their bodyguards and advisers at the bridgeheads and walked to the island, where they sat down with Lepidus in full view of everybody. They met for two days, from dawn to dusk.

There were three items on the agenda: how to legalize their power; how to raise the funds needed to finance the war against Brutus and Cassius; and how to keep the opposition from regaining its strength.

During the weeks following the Ides of March, when Antony was on good terms with the Senate, he had enacted a law abolishing the post of dictator. Now it was reinvented in tripartite form. A Commission of Three for the Ordering of the State was to be established for five years (modern historians call it the Second Triumvirate), with Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus as the commissioners, or triumvirs. They were empowered to make and repeal laws and to nominate officeholders. There was no appeal from their decisions. Octavian would resign the consulship in favor of one of Antony’s generals.

It is a little hard to see what the undistinguished Lepidus, who had given Antony his army a few months previously in Gaul, contributed to the Triumvirate. Of the three men, Antony was by far the most powerful and experienced figure; he was probably responsible for promoting Lepidus, who in the event of any disagreements could be counted on to take his side.

The commissioners immediately nominated the consuls and other officeholders for the coming five years, and they also decided the provincial governorships. Antony was to take Gaul (except for Transalpine Gaul); Lepidus, his old province of Transalpine Gaul and the two Spains; and Octavian, Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily. (Sensibly, the empire east of the Adriatic, now in the hands of Brutus and Cassius, was left undecided.) This distribution showed with embarrassing clarity that Octavian was the junior partner of the three. In due course, all these constitutional arrangements were approved by a people’s assembly in Rome.

A single solution was found for the second and third agenda items: a proscription. Proscription was an official mechanism for liquidating political opponents and amassing large sums of money from their confiscated estates; as already mentioned, it had first been used by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in 81
B.C.

The negotiators found it easier to agree on the principle of having a proscription than on the actual names of those to die. The choice of victims took a good deal of private haggling. To begin with, Octavian was of two minds about the project; but, Suetonius writes, once the proscription had been decided on, “he carried it out more ruthlessly than either of the others.”

The triumvirs marked down not only their political opponents whom they saw as public enemies (
hostes
), but also personal foes (
inimici
). They exchanged relatives and friends with one another. Lepidus abandoned his brother Paullus. Octavian allowed onto the list his onetime guardian, Gaius Toranius, who had been aedile in the year of his blood father’s praetorship. He also deserted Cicero—but only, if we can believe the sources, after resisting Antony, who so much wanted revenge for the Philippics that he let his own uncle be proscribed as payment for the superannuated orator.

Having concluded their island discussions, Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian arrived in Rome and posted the proscription decree on white boards in the Forum. Everyone named in the decree automatically forfeited his citizenship and protection from the law. The list was not final and new victims were added later, as the triumvirs decided. Informers who betrayed a proscribed man to the authorities were rewarded, and any person who killed one was also entitled to keep a share of his wealth. (The remainder went to the state.)

From a modern viewpoint, a proscription is a strange device. With the examples of the French and Russian revolutions before us, we expect the state to undertake mass liquidations if it deems them necessary; but, as has already been pointed out, the Roman state was remarkably nonbureaucratic; with no police force, no tradition of incarcerating offenders, and no professional judiciary, it was simply not equipped to execute large numbers of its citizens. The task had to be privatized.

The triumvirs betrayed signs of unease, of the need not to alienate public opinion. According to Appian, the proscription decree stated: “No one should consider this action unjust, or savage, or excessive, in the light of what happened to Gaius [Caesar] and ourselves.” The triumvirs promised not to punish “any member of the masses,” a guarantee they wisely honored. The decree closed with an assurance that “the names of none of those who receive rewards will be noted in our records.” What was to be done was shameful and it called for concealment.

The proscription brought out the best and worst in human nature. Appian records many terrible stories of those times:

Many people were murdered in all kinds of ways, and decapitated to furnish evidence for the reward. They fled in undignified fashion, and abandoned their former conspicuous dress for strange disguises. Some went down wells, some descended into the filth of the sewers, and others climbed up into smoky rafters or sat in total silence under close-packed roofs. To some, just as terrifying as the executioners were wives or children with whom they were not on good terms, or ex-slaves and slaves, or creditors, or neighbouring landowners who coveted their estates.

One tragic tale may evoke the selfishness and despair of the time. It concerns a teenager, whom we only know as Atilius; he probably belonged to an old noble plebeian family that originated in Campania. His father was dead, and he had inherited a rich estate. He had just celebrated his coming of age at Rome and was proceeding with his friends, as the custom was, to sacrifice in various temples in or around the Forum. Adulthood rendered him liable to legal penalty. Suddenly his name was added to the proscription list displayed on the speakers’ platform, presumably because of his wealth, and when this was noticed all his friends and slaves ran off. The boy went, deserted and alone, to his mother, but she was too frightened to shelter him. After this betrayal, Atilius saw no point in asking anyone else for help; he ran away to the mountains.