Augustus (23 page)

Sextus employed two admirals, ex-slaves and former pirates called Menodorus (or Menas) and Menecrates. Perhaps they had been taken prisoner and enslaved by Pompey the Great during his highly successful campaign in 67
B.C.
against the pirate fleets that used to dominate the Mediterranean. Having secured control of Sardinia and Corsica, they maintained the blockade of Italy.

At Rome, the price of goods soared. For once Octavian lost touch with public opinion, which wanted him to restore peace by coming to an understanding with Sextus. He obstinately refused to do this, and to pay his soldiers he levied a new tax on property owners (fifty sesterces per slave, plus a death duty).

For many, this was the final straw. Forced settlements, war, proscription, and famine—these things had all been endured, but now the people lost patience. There were demonstrations and riots. As he had done with the mutinous soldiers, Octavian decided to brave the mob in person and explain why it was wrong to blame him for the situation. He came to the Forum, attended only by some associates and a handful of bodyguards.

As soon as the crowd caught sight of him, they started bombarding him with missiles. They did not stop even when they saw they had injured him. Octavian stood his ground, although this meant that he was, in effect, placing himself in their hands. When Antony was told what was happening, he rushed to the rescue. As he came down the Via Sacra into the Forum, the crowd did not at first throw anything at him, for he was known to favor peace with Sextus, but they warned him to go back. When he refused they began to stone him.

Antony summoned reinforcements. His soldiers quickly surrounded the Forum, broke into small groups, and marched down alleyways into the square. The crowd could not escape and a number of people were killed. Pushing his way through the press, Antony reached Octavian only with the greatest difficulty and escorted him home. There was no doubt that he had saved his colleague’s life, and in spectacular fashion.

This was a most instructive episode. It illustrates the continuing growth of a bloody-minded courage in Octavian. Through the exercise of will, Octavian, now twenty-four years old, was tempering himself in fire.

What kept Antony and Octavian in power was the active support of the people and the legions: this was a lesson they had already learned many bitter times. Octavian eventually realized that he would have to give way on the matter of Sextus. Discreet feelers were put out and soon an entente was in prospect. Menodorus in Sardinia wrote to Sextus, counseling against peace; either he should make war wholeheartedly, he recommended, or he should wait and see if the famine at Rome would enable him to drive a harder bargain.

Sextus rejected this advice and met the opposing leaders at a peace conference in the summer of 39
B.C.
Accompanied by many of his Roman supporters, he sailed from Sicily in a huge flagship, with six banks of oars, leading a fine fleet. He anchored off Misenum, a headland at the northern end of the Bay of Naples dotted with the holiday villas of the rich, where the meeting was to be held. Wooden planks had been laid on piles in the sea, to create two platforms. Antony and Octavian went to the one nearer the coast and Sextus to the seaward platform. Enough water lay between them to allow the members of each party to talk among themselves without being overheard; exchanges between them had to be shouted, in a primitive and literal form of megaphone diplomacy.

These cautious arrangements were presumably made at the initiative of Sextus. Perhaps recalling the nightmare scene when he had watched his father go to his death on the Egyptian coast, he was determined not to risk his life by abandoning his ship for the terra firma of his enemies.

Sextus opened the discussions by demanding on behalf of the proscribed the return of all their confiscated property. Antony and Octavian agreed to buy back a quarter of the properties from their new owners. The news was published and immediately welcomed by victims of the proscription.

The final agreement did little more than confirm what everyone knew to be the unstable status quo. Sextus was officially installed as governor of what he had already captured—Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily. To these was added the Peloponnese (southern Greece). He was honored by membership of the College of Augurs, the committee of senior statesmen who were charged with taking the auspices at Rome, and he was nominated for the consulship in the following year, 38
B.C.
Sextus’ followers in Sicily had their personal positions secured: all the exiles from Italy in his army (excepting, always, Julius Caesar’s assassins) were to have their civil rights restored; the buyback offer to proscribed senators and
equites
was confirmed; the runaway slaves in Sextus’ force were to be freed; and Sextus’ soldiers were to receive the same demobilization awards as those serving the triumvirs.

Sextus could claim that this was a reasonably good deal for him, in that he was no longer an outlaw. The Treaty of Misenum brought him inside the political fold. Privately, though, he already regretted rejecting Menodorus’ advice to avoid coming to terms with the triumvirs.

By contrast, Antony and Octavian had every right to be pleased with themselves. They had given Sextus nothing essential to their interests, but had won something beyond price. Although they may not have realized it at the time, they had initiated the process of detaching opposition politicians from Sextus. Once it became clear that the triumvirs were not planning a new bloodbath, many began trickling back either to Italy or to join Antony when he returned to the east. To Sextus’ alarm, the Pompeian constituency was set to decline.

The principals celebrated the peace with a series of banquets. They drew lots to decide the order. Sextus acted as host first, on his flagship (“My only ancestral home left to me”). The two sides did not trust each other; the triumvirs had their ships moored nearby, guards were posted and the dinner guests carried daggers underneath their clothes. On the surface all was smiles and friendship. Sextus gave a warm welcome to Antony and Octavian. The atmosphere softened and the conversation became coarse and convivial. Jokes were made about Antony’s passion for the queen of Egypt, a topic that Octavia’s brother and husband would ordinarily have found embarrassing.

As at Brundisium, the bond between the parties was incarnated in a marriage union. At the dinner table, Sextus’ infant daughter was formally engaged to the three-year-old Marcellus, Antony’s stepson and Octavian’s nephew.

According to Plutarch, Menodorus came to Sextus and spoke to him out of the hearing of his guests. “Shall I cut the cables and make you master not just of Sicily and Sardinia, but of the whole Roman empire?”

Sextus thought for a moment, and then burst out: “Menodorus, you should have acted, not spoken to me beforehand. Now we must be content with things as they are. I do not break my word.”

This famous anecdote has a suspiciously glib quality, yet it may be true, for it illustrates two facets of Sextus’ character. When he called himself Pius, “Dutiful” or “Honest,” the reference was primarily to his father’s memory, but it also indicated that he saw himself as a Roman of the old school, honorable and straightforward. In addition, the story points to a certain passivity that can be detected throughout his career, an absence of the killer instinct that marked out, in their different ways, Antony and Octavian.

On the following two days, Antony and then Octavian entertained Sextus, erecting dining tents on their sea platform. After this they left for their respective destinations—Octavian to Gaul, where there were disturbances; Antony to the east and the Parthians; Sextus back to Sicily. Most of the refugees in Sextus’ entourage said goodbye to him and left for Rome.

With the onset of autumn Octavian did something that, on the face of it, was out of character: for once letting his heart sway him, he fell passionately in love. The object of his affection was Livia Drusilla; about nineteen years old, she was intelligent and beautiful, although with a small mouth and chin. However, she suffered from one signal disadvantage: she was already married, to an aristocrat and cousin of hers, Tiberius Claudius Nero. Not only that, but she was heavily pregnant.

To add to the complications, Octavian’s wife, Scribonia, gave birth to her daughter, Julia, sometime in 39
B.C.
Despite the happy event, the marriage—a political union if ever there was one—was not going well. As was pointed out earlier, Scribonia was substantially older than her husband; too, she was reputed to be a
gravis femina,
a dignified or serious woman. This did not much suit a young man with a reputation for copious adultery. On the very day that Julia arrived in the world, her father divorced her mother. “I couldn’t bear the way she nagged at me,” he explained.

In September—perhaps on his birthday, the twenty-third—Octavian conducted a rite of passage. He did not have a hairy body, and at twenty-four had still not found it necessary to shave: now the moment had come. Being prone to devise a ritual for almost every aspect of daily life, the Romans made a ceremony of their first shave—the
depositio barbae,
which in most cases took place about the time a boy came of age, usually at sixteen or seventeen.

Octavian made a great to-do over the ceremony, throwing a magnificent party and paying for a public festival. The event could be seen as a statement that, with the arrival of peace, the “boy who owed everything to his name” had attained his political as well as physical maturity. But it was whispered that his true motive was to please Livia.

Livia had an impeccable family background. While Octavian was unquestionably smitten, it is also true that marriage with her would give him a valuable connection to the Claudii, one of Rome’s most aristocratic clans. The triumvir’s father had reached the praetorship and so qualified as a
nobilis.
He himself had been enrolled as a patrician; however, he was still regarded as something of a provincial upstart. The union afforded Livia’s family access to her lover’s political power, in return for which she contributed her ancestry.

Livia Drusilla’s life, although short, had been full of incident. She was born on January 30, 59 or 58
B.C.
, probably at Rome. Not long after the Ides of March in 44
B.C.
, a husband was found for her. At fourteen or fifteen years old, Livia was approaching the upper limit of a girl’s customary marriageable age. Most marriages were arranged by the parents and love (“friendship gone mad”) was not expected to enter anybody’s calculations. A daughter was often a pawn in the alliances—social, economic, or political—that a great family struck to maintain its position in Roman public life. Husbands could be much older than their wives, and for the physically immature the wedding night must have been a savage introduction to sex.

Despite the potentially inauspicious opening to her married life, the Roman wife was a powerful figure in the household, being its
domina,
or mistress. Old forms of marriage in the early Republic, according to which she lived in complete subjection to her husband, the all-powerful
paterfamilias,
had given way by the third century
B.C.
to a new and freer arrangement by which the woman remained under her father’s authority and from the age of twenty-five held possession of her own property.

The man Livia married was Tiberius Claudius Nero, from another branch of the Claudian clan, the Claudii Nerones; he was probably in his mid- to late thirties. Of impeccable birth, he had great promise, but (as it turned out) poor judgment.

Tiberius took a stand against the First Triumvirate during the fifties
B.C.
, but then, with the onset of the civil war in 49, turned his back on his optimate friends and sided with Julius Caesar. His services were recognized generously and Tiberius must have felt that fortune was smiling on him, but then on the Ides of March 44
B.C.
the Caesarian regime came crashing down. Tiberius immediately returned to his old optimate allegiance. When the Senate voted for an amnesty for the assassins, he went an obsequious step further and supported a proposal to reward them.

In 42
B.C.
, Livia became pregnant. She was very anxious to have a boy, and to find out in advance what the sex of her child would be she took an egg from under a broody hen and kept it warm against her breast; also, she and her attendants held it in turn in their hands. In due course, she hatched a fine cock chick already with a comb. The prophecy was exact. On November 16, Livia gave birth to a son at the family home on the Palatine Hill at Rome. As was the Roman custom with first-born males, he was given his father’s
praenomen,
Tiberius.

After the defeat of the republican cause at Philippi, Tiberius agilely changed course again. He now became a supporter of Mark Antony; in that capacity, he was elected praetor for 41
B.C.
, the same year in which Antony’s brother, Lucius, was consul.

Although we have no idea what opinion Livia held of her husband, she demonstrated a personal quality he certainly did not share: a steady loyalty, even, or perhaps especially, when under pressure. When Tiberius, with his usual poor judgment, decided to follow Lucius Antonius’ star, Livia and the infant Tiberius went along with him to Perusia. The family endured the terrible privations of the siege, and after Perusia fell Tiberius was the only Roman officeholder in the city to refuse to capitulate.

He somehow managed to escape with mother and child; the family went on to Neapolis, where Tiberius tried to foment a slave revolt by promising them freedom. Octavian’s forces soon broke into the city and the family had to flee again. Following bypaths to avoid the soldiery and accompanied by only one or two attendants, including a nurse to carry Tiberius, they secretly made their way to the coast. The baby twice started crying and nearly gave them away. The family found a ship—it must have been arranged for in advance—and sailed to Sicily, where the elder Tiberius expected a welcome from Sextus Pompeius.