Augustus (20 page)

Octavian and Antony liked each other no more than they had in the past, but they were now bound together as permanent partners. They agreed that each should automatically approve the political decisions of the other. However, the two men were not on an equal footing. The victor of Philippi was a world-bestriding colossus. Little wonder then that, as before, when it came to a division of tasks, the junior colleague came off worse.

Antony was to reorganize the east, raise money there, and restore the state’s solvency; in due course, he would pick up the baton let drop by the murdered dictator and launch the much delayed expedition against the Parthian empire. By contrast, Octavian’s thankless duty was to demobilize a large number of troops and settle them on smallholdings in Italy.

About fourteen thousand survivors from the legions of Brutus and Cassius were incorporated into the victorious army. Old Caesarian veterans and soldiers who had been recruited in 49 and 48
B.C.
, some forty thousand in all, were sent to Italy and civilian life. That left enough men to make up eleven legions, eight of which Antony took to the east; the remaining three came home with Octavian.

Unfortunately, there was insufficient state-owned land to accommodate the veterans. The exchequer was empty, so compulsory purchase was out of the question. Eighteen cities in Italy were marked down for land confiscation and freeholders were summarily dispossessed. Public opinion was outraged. Those threatened flooded into Rome. Appian writes: “People came in groups…young men, old men, women with their children, and gathered in the Forum and the temples, lamenting and declaring that they had done no wrong.”

Octavian explained to the towns that he had no choice. “From what other source, then, are we to pay the veterans their prize money?” he asked complainants. This was nothing less than the truth. There was no countervailing force with which to gainsay the soldiers. Worse, the allocated land was still not enough and some men used violence to expropriate farms they had not been granted, often with more fertile fields. In many parts of Italy, law and order were breaking down. Relations between the soldiers and their commander also deteriorated, as an unnerving incident demonstrated only too clearly.

Veterans were summoned to the Campus Martius to hear announcements on the allocations. They were so eager for news that they arrived early, before first light. Octavian was late; they became angry, and when a centurion gave them a severe dressing-down they first jeered at him and then killed him.

Octavian made a calculated and very brave decision. What had suddenly become a crisis would, he judged, end in catastrophe if he stayed away from the assembly. So he walked there as planned, turning aside when he saw the centurion’s body and politely asking the legionaries to behave with greater restraint in future.

He then announced the expected land grants, handed out some bounties, and invited further applications for reward. This disarmed the angry soldiers, who became ashamed of what had been done and asked Octavian to punish the centurion’s murderers. He agreed to do so, but carefully (and wisely) imposed two conditions: that the culprits admit their guilt and that the army as a whole condemn them. The men’s mood cleared.

For much of 41
B.C.
Octavian was caught between two fires. At the same time that he sought to pacify the veterans, he made conciliatory gestures toward the civilian population. As Dio put it, “He learned from actual experience that weapons had no power to make the injured feel friendly towards him.” So he no longer confiscated senatorial estates and kept his hands off other kinds of private property.

However, the veterans were annoyed by this; Dio reports that they killed a number of centurions and others whom they saw as taking his side: “They came very near to killing [Octavian] himself, making any excuse justify their anger.” Relations between them and the dispossessed citizens went from bad to worse. Riots took place, in which the two sides fought against each other in the streets. The capital and even Italy were slipping out of official control. At one point there seems to have been something approaching a general strike at Rome. Appian writes: “The civilian population shut the workshops and made the elected office-holders leave, saying that they had no need of either office-holders or crafts in a starving and plundered city.”

For years the landless poor had gravitated to Rome, and many thousands depended on the supply of subsidized grain to keep body and soul together.

Every year the city consumed between 140,000 and 190,000 tons of wheat. More than 300,000 citizens were on the dole and received free supplies of grain. Some of this was homegrown, but much came from overseas, from Sicily, Africa, and Sardinia. The fact that Italy was not agriculturally self-sufficient made Rome heavily dependent on the vagaries of international politics, just as today’s industrial societies rely on imports of gas and oil.

Pompey the Great had understood this well; in 67
B.C.
(as already noted) he had cleared the seas of pirates, who had become so widespread and powerful as to blight the free passage of goods, including wheat. He began by “entirely clearing pirates from the seas adjoining Etruria, Libya, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily.” A quarter of a century later, his son Sextus controlled these waters himself; one wonders if, as a boy, he had heard his father reminisce about his past exploits and learned of the pirates’ strategic stranglehold.

Sextus set out systematically to starve the city. The republican admirals Ahenobarbus and Murcus strengthened the blockade by standing off Brundisium in the Ionian Gulf. Exploiting the confusion pirates raided southern Italy.

The ancient sources usually dismiss Sextus as a pirate himself. He was much more than that. By applying pressure on the triumviral regime, he meant to pave the way for his return to Rome and the restitution of his family’s confiscated property. Not without reason, Sextus may have supposed that he could then easily come to terms with Antony, who would be grateful to see the last of his infuriating young colleague and competitor.

It is argued that he should have invaded Italy, but that was hardly necessary. If he had done so, Caesarian veterans would have put up a die-hard resistance. Far better to let starving dogs lie.

Octavian’s tribulations were all the more painful and humiliating in the light of news from the east, where his colleague was at the height of his powers and prestige. Trumping the
divi filius,
Antony decided to claim divine status on his own account.

He presented himself to the people of Asia as the New Dionysus. Dionysus, also widely known as Bacchus, was a god with two interrelated dimensions: on the one hand, he was the patron of wine, agriculture, and the abundance of nature; on the other, he presided over mystical cults whose secret rituals induced ecstatic or out-of-body experiences and delivery from the daily world through physical or spiritual intoxication. Dionysus stood for a euphoric eastern irrationalism that could be set against the western clarity of Apollo, god of reason and light.

The triumvir–cum–Greek god had more on his mind than establishing an iconic image for himself and having a good time. His most urgent task was to raise funds to refill the bankrupt Roman exchequer, and he set about his work with ruthless enthusiasm.

The trouble was that the eastern provinces had already been called on to finance much of Rome’s civil wars. Now Antony used any method that came to hand to squeeze out all remaining wealth. Recalling that the god had his dark side, Plutarch notes acidly:

To most people, [Antony] came as Dionysus the Cruel and Eater of Flesh, for he stripped many noble families of their property and gave it away to rogues and flatterers. In other cases, men were allowed to steal fortunes from owners who were still living by making out that they were dead.

Antony saw he was going too far, and reduced his demand for nine years’ worth of taxes to two. He had to look elsewhere for additional cash; and at this point the New Dionysus, equivalent to the Egyptian god Osiris, thought of his divine sister, the New Isis, alias Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, who saw herself as an incarnation of the kingdom’s celebrated goddess of fertility. Antony had last met her in Rome when she was Caesar’s mistress. Aware of Egypt’s untold riches, he decided to invite her politely but firmly to make a substantial contribution to his running costs. From Tarsus in Cilicia (in today’s southern Turkey), where he was then based, he sent one of his aides to fetch the queen.

He chose for the task Quintus Dellius, a versatile character who was said to have been his sexual pet when a boy, and who built a reputation in these dangerous times for switching sides at precisely the right moment. A memorable putdown described Dellius as a “circus-rider of the civil wars,” adept at jumping effortlessly from horse to horse.

When Dellius arrived at Alexandria he was struck by Cleopatra’s charm, and suspected that Antony would be too. Knowing that the triumvir routinely fell for pretty women, he advised the queen to wear her most alluring attire when presenting herself to him. Antony was a gentleman, he added, and she had nothing to fear from him.

Impressed by Dellius, Cleopatra took his advice. She came to meet the triumvir at Tarsus, sailing up the river Cydnus to the city in a splendid barge. Plutarch evoked the scene brilliantly (perhaps adding some color):

[She] was in a barge with a poop of gold, its purple sails billowing in the wind, while her rowers caressed the water with oars of silver which dipped in time to the music of the flute, accompanied by pipes and lutes. Cleopatra herself reclined beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed in the character of Aphrodite.

Antony was waiting in state on a dais in the central square of Tarsus to give the queen a formal welcome. Rumors spread through the crowds of bystanders of the floating spectacle that was sailing up the river into port and mooring at the quayside. Gradually they drifted away to have a look, leaving Antony and his entourage alone in the marketplace.

Word spread that Aphrodite (whom many worshippers identified with Isis) had come to revel with Dionysus “for the happiness of Asia.” This notion doubtless originated with Cleopatra, but it shows that Antony’s religious propaganda featuring himself as the New Dionysus was evidently working its way into the public mind. She herself well understood the role of religion in royal self-promotion. If she was consciously presenting herself as Aphrodite, she was at one level making a direct sexual offer; but, more profoundly, she was also putting in a claim to be Antony’s divine partner.

The triumvir sent the queen a message inviting her to dinner, but she had already determined what the next step in their relationship should be. Well-informed about Rome’s leading personalities, she will have known that Antony’s character was essentially simple and easy to read. He greatly enjoyed the display of wealth. He was easygoing and had a broad sense of humor that belonged to “the soldier rather than the courtier,” as Plutarch put it. He loved practical jokes. These were not exactly the tastes to which Cleopatra, educated in the sophisticated court of the Ptolemies, was accustomed, but in his company she made every appearance of sharing them.

The queen countered the triumvir’s invitation to dinner with one of her own; always complaisant with the ladies, he gracefully gave way and attended a banquet on board ship. On the following day, the queen dined with Antony. The gustatory exchanges were repeated for four days.

At a certain point, business supplanted pleasure. Antony required practical support from Cleopatra for the invasion of Parthia. She agreed to provide it, but on certain conditions. She required the execution of a few inconvenient personages, and in particular of her hated half sister, Arsinoe, who had briefly seized her throne and had been given sanctuary at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Antony obliged.

The queen now invited him to spend the winter with her at Alexandria. The couple sailed off to Egypt, where Antony laid aside the garb of a Roman official and wore an informal tunic in the Greek manner. The couple formed a dining club called the Inimitable Livers and spent much of their time enjoying themselves.

In February or March of 40
B.C.
, bad news reached Egypt. Having decided not to await Antony’s planned attack on them, the Parthians had launched an invasion of Syria. The triumvir quickly set off for Asia Minor.

Mark Antony’s critics have made much of his oriental debauchery, as though he were acting in an original and shocking way. In fact, he did nothing out of the ordinary but rather behaved very much as he had always done. There are no reports that, at this stage of life, he was sexually promiscuous. He had sex with the queen, but with no one else. (She gave birth to twins, Alexander and Cleopatra, later in the year.) However, he was not in love with her and left Egypt without qualms. The couple were not to meet again for three and a half years. He had spent a most enjoyable holiday, and that was all.

Something more serious, though, was taking place in his personality: a gradual and growing loss of focus. The Greek word for this process was
eklusis,
the term for the unstringing of a bow. Dio remarks that Antony “had earnestly devoted himself to his duties so long as he had been in a subordinate situation and had been aiming at the highest prizes; but now that he had got into power, he no longer paid strict attention to these things.”

When things are as bad as they can be, fate finds a way to deliver another blow. One of the consuls in 41
B.C.
was Lucius Antonius, Mark Antony’s brother, who decided to launch a military challenge against Octavian. He was in collusion with Mark Antony’s wife, the virago Fulvia. At this time she played an active and influential political role, to the point where she seemed to be as much of a consul as those elected to that office.