The Classical World (61 page)

As for Antony, after an open challenge by Octavian in Rome he fixed next year’s provinces at an illegal night-time meeting of the Senate (28 November) and then went early to the province which he had set for himself. He intended, surely, to wait and watch. But forces were gathering against him: Octavian, and the Decimus Brutus whom he was trying to remove from his province in north Italy. Seeing these allies, Cicero abandoned a low profile and prepared his case against Antony’s ‘tyranny’. On 20 December, in Antony’s absence, he denounced him before the Senate in a speech which he regarded as the reinvigoration of a weary Senate and the Roman people’s first hope of recovering their freedom.
¹³
There was a willing audience, but there was still a reluctance to pass the ‘ultimate decree’. In speech
after speech, Cicero’s invective rolled on, painting Antony as a man of utter debaucherywhose household was filled with male and female prostitutes and whose wife Fulvia ‘sold off’ public property in her private rooms. After more days of debate a state of public ‘tumult’ was eventuallydeclared and byFebruary 43 it was possible for troops to be turned against Antony in northern Italy.

However, Cicero’s call for the ‘Republic’ had encompassed an ironic choice of ally: Octavian, the ‘new Caesar’. In November this young man had alreadyled an illegal private army and marched with troops into Rome. At a public meeting, he had gestured ominously with his right hand towards the newly erected statue of his adopted father and prayed that his own deeds would be worthy of Julius Caesar. However, his troops were not prepared to fight fellow veterans of Caesar just yet. He was ‘taking the steam out of Antony neatly enough for the moment’, Cicero wrote at the time, but ‘may I never be saved by such a man as this’.
¹⁴
He was not, then, entirely deceived, but by January he was speaking as if safety and the Republic relied on Octavian’s support. His hope, at times too rosy, was to split the Caesarian supporters by playing Julius Caesar’s young heir against Antony, his consul. There were genuine differences of opinion to exploit here, even among Julius Caesar’s loyal admirers, but the strategy relied on Octavian being dispensable in the longer term. On 3 January 43 not just Cicero but also the Senate in Rome voted Octavian, the young outsider, a place among their own number. They added the powers and distinctions of a praetor and the right to a consulship in only ten years’ time. They were nurturing a young viper, but Cicero promised them that this young ‘Caesar’ ‘will always be such a citizen as he is today and as we should especially wish and pray him to be’.
¹⁵

By February 43 events seemed to be turning the Liberators’ way. Brutus and Cassius had gone on to Greece and the East and were becoming established with legionary support. Antony was still trying to claim his command in northern Italy, but was caught up at Mutina (modern Modena) besieging the man (Decimus Brutus) whose provincial allotment he had overturned. In November 44 Cicero had been despondent, thinking of running away and reduced to writing a book,
On Friendship
. It was indeed an issue of the moment. But now he
saw only what he wished to see, claiming ‘universal consent’ and wholehearted support for his plans both in Italy and among the common people. Octavian was that ‘egregious young man’; he ‘has entered on the affairs of the Republic in order to strengthen it, not to overturn it’.
¹⁶
Octavian was even calling him ‘father’. But the ‘consent’ which Cicero saw around him was probablymore for Caesar’s young heir than for his own beloved Republic. His hope of ‘liberty’ rested on a man whose promotion had been highlyirregular, and it required war with an ex-consul who had the backing of a ‘law’ of the people, voted in June. Admittedly, it had been voted under threat and with irregularities, but so had many other laws in the past twenty years.

In late April Antony’s troops were defeated near Modena in a fearful battle which involved Caesar’s hardened veterans on each side. There was dreadful bloodshed and, unlike Alexander the Great’s veteran soldiers, Caesar’s veterans would never be keen to fight each other again. Antony’s remaining troops then headed northwards to the western provinces where he might hope for support. At this point, Cicero was chillingly opposed to ‘clemency’ or mercy. In invaluable letters, we can watch the governors of the provinces in Antony’s path and the generals who were chasing him professing support to Cicero for the Republic and ‘liberty’. But when the choice came those same governors wavered, lied and ended by doing deals with Antony, the ‘enemy’. The cause of ‘liberation’ was already wavering, and Octavian was still an uncertain quantity. In early June Cicero was complaining that the Senate was no longer his ‘tool’ and that freedom and the Republic were being betrayed.
¹⁷
How true it was. At Modena both the consuls of the year had been killed, and in August Octavian turned round with troops and marched on Rome for the second time. He forced the Senate to elect him to a consulship in their place. He was not yet twenty years old.

As a complex summer unravelled Octavian’s troops would not fight Antony’s again, even if asked: their one taste of blood near Modena was still more than enough. In the East, meanwhile, Brutus and Cassius were raising huge armies of ‘liberation’ with looting and taxes in the provinces: the Senate proposed their command should be ‘greater’ than that of other governors in the East. The obvious answer for the Caesarians was to combine and take on their mutual enemies.

On 27 November, near Bononia (modern Bologna), another three-some, Rome’s ‘triumvirate’, was set up, once again for ‘settling the Republic’. Antony and the new ‘Caesar’ included the elderly Lepidus as a noble sleeping partner, and agreed that their powers were to run for five years. Thereafter, they would in principle be renewable.

These powers have been understood by some modern theorists as the legal powers of a consul, active in Rome and Italy, combined with the legal powers of an ex-consul in the provinces. Despite their approval by a ‘law’, they cannot be analysed so formally. The Senate and the people’s assemblies would still meet during the new arrangement; elections went on being held at Rome for various magistracies, but henceforward the three triumvirs could make or cancel laws, give personal judgements without appeal and appoint the governors of all the provinces and the consuls for the coming years. They promptly proved their paralegal, emergencystatus by listing, or ‘proscribing’, a large number of senators and Roman knights (probably 300 and 2,000 respectively) to be put to death. Sulla had set the precedent in this, but the triumvirs revived it to protect their hold on Italy while they marched eastwards against the Liberators. This dreadful terror became the subject, understandably, of many books long after the event. Some of them, perhaps, ‘went a long waytowards compensating for the absence of prose fiction among the Romans’,
¹⁸
but there was also a real loss of life and property in Italian towns. It was not a class war, of poor against rich, but it did give old hatreds and new ambitions a free rein in the upper classes. In that sense, it was a revolution; in another, it contributed to a revolution because the winners, importantly, would not exactly be people devoted to the cause of Rome’s old constitution. They had not taken power for any new system or ideology, but when one came about they would support it, so as to hang on to their gains.

Many of those named as ‘proscribed’ on the triumvirs’ lists fled to a fourth, remarkable figurehead, outside the ‘gang of three’: Sextus Pompeius, the son, no less, of the great Pompey. The history of the next seven years is too often written around the dominant triumvirs only, Antony and Octavian. But this fourth man was extremely important, and we should not dismiss him as a ‘pirate’ adventurer. Like Octavian, he was the young son of a great man too. Like Octavian,
he would soon present himself as the son of a god. In Spain in 45
BC
he had survived his brother’s death and Julius Caesar’s victories, and by mid-44 he was negotiating for recognition. He raised a fleet on the coast of Spain and by late April 43 he had even been recognized ‘as Prefect of the Fleet and the Coastline by decree of the Senate’.
¹⁹
He moved over to Sicily, increased his naval strength and became a refuge for Italian landowners and run aways laves, the victims of the paralegal proscriptions. Sicily and Sardinia were parts of Octavian’s ‘territory’, but Sextus soon held them both. He was now a major alternative to the new young ‘Caesar’, while controlling a bigger navy than any of the triumvirs. Remarkably, the contest of Pompey against Caesar was set up for a replay in this war between their sons. In Rome, Antony was occupying the great Pompey’s house, but the ‘pious’ Sextus rightly wanted it back.

First, the proscriptions ran their course. Among the names proscribed, inevitably, was Cicero’s. Even if Octavian was well disposed to him, he had said and provoked too many insults against Antony. In March 43 he had pilloried a blunt letter from Antony line by line in a scornful
Philippic
, the thirteenth, which is thus our best verbal memorial of Antony himself. Ever witty, Cicero was also said to have remarked that the ‘young little fellow’, Octavian his ‘ally’, ‘must be given praises, honours – and then, the push’.
²⁰
The story became known to Octavian.

Human to the end, Cicero was torn between flight and one last visit to Rome. Fifteen miles away from the city, at a seaside house of his own, troops caught up with him. They were directed into the grounds byone of his brother’s freedmen, a man whom Cicero had once taught and educated in fine literature. Dishevelled, but calm, Cicero looked out from his litter and was killed by a centurion. His head and his right hand (perhaps both hands) were hacked off and taken up to Antony in Rome. There, they were put in the lap of Fulvia, the wife of Cicero’s two great enemies, first Clodius, and then Antony. She pulled the tongue out of the skull, we are told, and stabbed it with a pin taken from her hair.
²¹
After a woman’s revenge, the head and hands were nailed as trophies onto the Rostrum in the Forum, the very platform from which Cicero had spoken so memorably. They are terrible symbols of the loss of ‘liberty’.

The fashion persists of condemning and deploring the last epoch of the Roman Republic. It was turbulent, corrupt, immoral. And some speak of decadence. On the contrary, it was an era of liberty, vitality – and innovation… Roman life was coming to feel to the full the liberating effects of empire and prosperity. In the aftermath of the Punic Wars, cult and ritual lapsed, and law was separated from religion… In various other ways good sense or chicanery were able to abate or circumvent the ‘ancient rigour’, the ‘hardness of the ancients’
.

Political fraud and Augustan romanticism conspired to embellish the venerable past – with unhappy consequences for historical study ever after
.

Ronald Syme,
Sallust
(1964), 16–17

The act of creative policy that was Augustus’ abiding legacy to Rome was the bringing into being of an ideology of rule, parallel to the careful traditionalism of most of what has been spoken of so far – surprising in that it manifests itself quite early in Augustus’ reign, and multifaceted, so that to describe it even summarily involves consideration of many phenomena of which the ‘imperial cult’ is only one. Glorification of the personality of the ruler, advertisement of his role, proclamation of his virtues, pageantry over his achievements, visual reminders of his existence, and the creation of a court and a dynasty: these are
, par excellence, the things that made
AD
14 different from 30
BC
… The work known as the ‘Dialogus’,
attributed to Tacitus, contains, through the mouth of an ‘opposition’ writer, a well-known expression of the view that the ending of the creative phase of, at least, Roman eloquence, was directly due to the loss of freedom. That was not the only view then, nor need it be now
…

J. A. Crook,
The Cambridge Ancient History
,
volume X (1996, 2nd edn.), 133 and 144 41938

Antony and Cleopatra

Never, as those who were present tell us, was there a more pitiable sight. Smeared with blood and struggling with death, Antony was drawn up (to the window of Cleopatra’s tomb), stretching his hands out to her as he dangled in the air… Cleopatra clung on with her hands and kept pulling up the rope, her face twisted by the strain, while those below encouraged her and shared her agony. When she had received him in this way and laid him down, she tore her robes over him, beat and tore her breasts with her hands, wiped some of his blood onto her face and kept on calling him master, husband, Commander
…

Plutarch,
Life of Antony
77.3–5

After Cicero’s murder, injustice continued to be set against freedom and ‘luxury’ to be cited against political rivals. Twelve memorable years brought the great men into conflict, Mark Antony against the young Octavian, and women into lasting fame, Antony’s second wife, Octavia, and once more, the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. Lesser persons, too, had a sudden memorable chance on the stage of power, people like the childless Turia whom we know from her husband’s inscription in her honour. She had grovelled and wept before the triumvirs to save his life, and in their household even offered that he should have a child by another woman which she would then bring up as hers (he declined).
¹
In Octavian’s circle we meet loyal ‘new men’ with a bright future, the urbane Maecenas, Octavian’s link with the great poets of the age, and the able Agrippa, the key to so many of Octavian’s militarysuccesses. Out east, we first meet Herod the Great,
the future ‘tyrant’ in the story of Christmas. He was imposed for the first time as king of the Jews through Mark Antony’s favour.

Yet these years of war and slaughter were also a fertile period for Roman literature. Great art can indeed be born in comparative anarchy. One reason was that new patrons emerged in the social shake-up and helped younger authors to break with older critics and the established canons of scholarly taste.
²
The greatest Latin poets, Virgil and Horace, began their careers now, as did the elegist Propertius: none of them came from Rome itself, as all three were Italians. There were also articulate losers, just as there had been in the age of aristocratic Greek lyric poets. One of them, the historian Sallust, developed the themes of luxury and liberty to explain political change. A former acolyte of Caesar, he had been forced out of public life and wrote an acid account of the Republic’s crisis, tracing it back to Sulla and then forwards through the greed and ambition of the ‘nobles’. Seen as a follower of Thucydides, Sallust had none of his intellectual depth. But his histories became a school-text for the greater mind of Tacitus and, centuries later, for St Augustine and his view of the lust for power in Roman history, as analysed in his
City of God
.