by Mary Beard
Any fragile truce was now forgotten. In October 42 BCE, the united forces of the triumvirate defeated Brutus and Cassius near the town of Philippi in the far north of Greece (the focus of much of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar), and the victorious allies then began even more systematically to turn on one another. In fact, when Octavian returned from Philippi to Italy to oversee a massive programme of land confiscation, aimed at providing settlement packages for thousands of dangerously dissatisfied retiring soldiers, he soon found himself facing the armed opposition of Fulvia and Mark Antony’s brother Lucius Antonius. They had taken up the cause of the landowners who had been dispossessed, and even managed to gain control of the city of Rome, albeit briefly. Octavian soon had them under siege in the town of Perusia (modern Perugia). Starvation forced their surrender early in 40 BCE, but the stage had been set for more than a decade of further war, interspersed with brief truces, between the different parties who claimed to represent Caesar’s legacy.
It is often hard to make much coherent sense of the shifting coalitions and changing aims of the various players in the different rounds of this conflict. It remains anyone’s guess what combination of indecision, political realignment and self-interest caused Cicero’s onetime son-in-law Dolabella to change sides twice within a few months – before taking a command against the Liberators in the East, tricking, torturing and executing the unfortunate governor of Asia en route, and meeting his own death in 43 BCE as he tried unsuccessfully to confront Cassius in Syria. ‘Will anyone ever have the talent to put this all in writing so that it seems like fact, not fiction?’ one later Roman author asked, clearly expecting the answer no. Yet confusing as the roles of many of the leading characters are, this conflict offers more evidence than any before in Roman history of what this kind of war meant for the rest of the population of Italy, soldier and civilian – including the real or scripted voices of some of the innocent victims.
The poor peasants who lost their land in the confiscations of the triumvirate are a focus of the poet Virgil’s first major work, the Eclogues (‘Selections’). Though he was later one of the ‘poet laureates’ of the Augustan regime, in the late 40s and early 30s BCE he shone the spotlight on the fallout of civil war in the once idyllic and innocent lives of the shepherds and herdsmen of rural Italy, with Octavian a powerful and sometimes menacing figure in the background. As they sing of life and loves in their pastoral world, some of his rustic characters turn out to be the disgruntled victims of expropriation. ‘Some godless and ungrateful soldier will take over my carefully tended fields,’ one complains. ‘See where civil strife has brought us poor citizens.’
Other writers concentrated on the human side of the proscriptions in a series of stories about clever hiding places, pitiful suicides, and the brave loyalty or cruel treachery of friends, family and slaves. One ingenious wife saved her husband by bundling him into a laundry bag; another pushed hers into a sewer, where the foul smell successfully deterred would-be murderers. One pair of brothers apparently took refuge in a large oven until their slaves discovered them and killed one of them instantly (a revenge for his cruelty, we are meant to assume), while the other escaped – only to have his death leap into the Tiber foiled by some kindly fishermen, who mistook his jump for an accidental fall and hauled him out. There is almost certainly some embellishment, and added heroism, in these literary accounts. But they are not so different from the description of the conduct of one loyal wife, as it is plainly inscribed on her epitaph. This explains how she went in person to Lepidus to beg for her husband’s life and came away, having been roughly handled, ‘black and blue, as if she were a slave’, as the text puts it – an indication not only of the woman’s bravery but also of the almost automatic connection between slavery and corporal punishment.
There is some hint of what the rank-and-file soldiers might have been thinking too. In and around the modern town of Perugia, dozens of small sling bullets have been unearthed, deadly lead projectiles that ‘You’re famished and pretending not to be’, reads one message lobbed into the city, where starvation eventually led to surrender. Several others carry brutally obscene messages aimed at predictable parts of the anatomy of their different targets, male and female: ‘Lucius Antonius, you baldy, and you too, Fulvia, open your arsehole’; ‘I’m going for Madam Octavius’ arsehole’; or ‘I’m going for Fulvia’s clitoris’ (landica, the earliest attested use of the term in Latin). The unsettling overlap of military and sexual violence, plus the standard Roman potshot at a receding hairline, is probably typical of the ribaldry found on the legionary front line: part bravado, part aggression, part misogyny, part ill-concealed fear.
57. One fragment of the epitaph of the loyal wife. Sadly the names of the couple concerned are missing, but it is clear that he was a prominent senator. ‘XORIS’ on the first line is what remains of ‘UXORIS’ – ‘wife’. In this section the wife’s assistance during the husband’s flight is recounted; the second line, for example, refers to the AURUM MARGARITAQUE (‘the gold and the pearls’) that she sent to provide funds for him.
58. The small lead bullets, a few centimetres long, that both killed, and took a message to, the enemy. ‘Esureis et me celas’ (‘You’re famished and pretending not to be’) has prompted other translations, including some explicitly erotic ones (‘You’re hungering for me …’). On the right, the first known example of landica, here upside down.
Lucius Antonius and Fulvia admitted defeat in early 40 BCE. How far she had been in joint military command is doubtful; for one of the easiest ways for the other side to attack Lucius, as they later attacked his brother, was to pretend that he was sharing command with a mere woman. In any case, Fulvia returned to Mark Antony in Greece and almost immediately died. For a while, the triumvirate was patched up, and as a pledge for the future, the widowed Antony married Octavian’s sister, Octavia. It was, however, an empty pledge, as by this date Antony was already in the partnership that would come to define him; he was more or less living with Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, and she had just given birth to his twins. In any case, the coalition of three was soon reduced to two, when Lepidus, who had always been a junior player, was squeezed out in 36 BCE. When the final showdown came in 31 BCE, there was no doubt about the question at stake. Who was going to rule the Roman world? Was it to be Octavian or Antony – with Cleopatra at his side?
Cleopatra had been in Rome when Caesar was assassinated, lodging at one of the dictator’s villas on the outskirts of the city. It was the best that Roman money could buy, though probably not a patch on the luxurious surroundings of her home in Alexandria. After the Ides of March 44 BCE, she quickly packed up and returned home (‘The queen’s exit does not worry me,’ Cicero wrote to Atticus in a transparent understatement). But she kept her finger in Roman politics for obvious and pressing reasons: she still needed outside support to shore up her position as the ruler of Egypt, and she had plenty of cash and other resources to give to anyone prepared to offer it. She first fell in with Dolabella, Cicero’s one-time son-in-law, but after his death turned to Mark Antony. Their relationship has forever been written up in erotic terms, whether hopeless infatuation on Antony’s part or one of the greatest love stories in the history of the West. Passion may have been one element of it. But their partnership was underpinned by something more prosaic: military, political and financial needs.
In 40 BCE Octavian and Antony had effectively carved up the Mediterranean world between themselves, leaving just a small patch for Lepidus. So for much of the 30s BCE, Octavian operated in the West, dealing with any of his Roman enemies who remained at large – including the son of Pompey the Great, the main surviving link to the civil wars of the early 40s BCE – and conquering new territories across the Adriatic. Meanwhile, in the East, Antony mounted rather more high-profile campaigns, against Parthia and Armenia, but with very mixed success, despite the resources of Cleopatra.
Reports reaching Rome hyped the luxury of the couple’s life in Alexandria. Fantastic storie
s circulated about their decadent banquets, and their notorious bet on who could stage the most expensive dinner party of all. One deeply disapproving Roman account records that Cleopatra won by providing a spread worth 10 million sesterces (almost as much as Cicero’s grandest house), including the cost of a fabulous pearl which – in an act of conspicuous and entirely pointless consumption – she dissolved in vinegar and drank. Equally worrying for Roman traditionalists was the sense that Antony was beginning to treat Alexandria as if it were Rome, even to the point of celebrating the distinctively Roman ceremony of triumph there, after some minor victory in Armenia. ‘For the sake of Cleopatra he bestowed on the Egyptians the honourable and solemn ceremonies of his own country’, as one ancient writer reported the objections.
Octavian exploited these fears in a dramatic intervention in 32 BCE. Antony had divorced Octavia earlier in the year, and Octavian responded by getting his hands on Antony’s will and reading out particularly incriminating selections from it to the senate. These revealed that Antony recognised young Caesarion as Julius Caesar’s son, that he was planning to leave large amounts of money to the children he had had with Cleopatra and that he wanted to be buried in Alexandria by Cleopatra’s side, even if he died in Rome. The rumour on the Roman streets was that his long-term plans were to abandon the city of Romulus and transfer the capital wholesale to Egypt.
It was against this background that open war broke out. At the start of the conflict in 31 BCE, the good money would probably have been on a victory for Antony: he had considerably more troops and more cash at his disposal. But Antony and Cleopatra lost the first battle at sea, near Actium (the name just means ‘promontory’) in northern Greece, and they never regained the initiative. For one of the world’s decisive military engagements, which drew a final line under the Roman Republic, the Battle of Actium, in September 31 BCE, was a rather low-key, slightly tawdry affair – though perhaps more decisive military engagements are low-key and tawdry than we tend to imagine. Octavian’s easy victory was owed to his second in command, Marcus Agrippa, who managed to cut off their opponents’ supplies; to a handful of well-informed deserters who disclosed the enemy plans; and to Antony and Cleopatra themselves, who simply disappeared. As soon as Octavian’s forces seemed to be getting the upper hand, they beat a hasty retreat from Greece to Egypt with a small detachment of ships, abandoning the rest of their soldiers and sailors, who understandably did not bother to go on fighting much longer.
The next year, Octavian sailed to Alexandria to finish the job. In what has often been written up as a kind of tragic farce, Antony stabbed himself when he thought that Cleopatra was already dead, though he lived just long enough to discover that she was not. A week or so later she too is said to have killed herself, with the bite from a snake smuggled into her quarters in a basket of fruit. According to the official version, her motive was to deprive Octavian of her presence in his triumphal procession: ‘I will not be triumphed over,’ she is supposed to have muttered over and over again. But it may not be so simple, or as Shakespearean, as that. Suicide by snake bite is a hard feat to pull off, and anyway the most reliably deadly snakes would be far too hefty to conceal in even a regal fruit basket. Although Octavian publicly regretted that he had lost the prize specimen for his triumph, he may privately have thought that the queen was less trouble dead than alive. At the very least – as several modern historians have suspected – he may have facilitated her death. He certainly took no chances with Caesarion, given his supposed paternity. Now aged sixteen, he was killed.
What was displayed in Octavian’s triumph in the summer of 29 BCE was a full-scale replica of the queen at the moment of her death, and even in this form she caught the attention of the crowd. ‘It was as if,’ one later historian wrote, ‘she was there with the other prisoners’. The procession was a carefully choreographed affair which took place over three days, ostensibly to celebrate Octavian’s victories across the Adriatic in Illyricum and against Cleopatra at Actium and in Egypt. There was no explicit mention of Antony or any other enemy of the civil wars and none of the gruesome images of Roman death that Julius Caesar had ill-advisedly paraded in his celebrations fifteen years earlier. Yet there could have been no real doubt about who had really been defeated, or about what the consequences of Octavian’s success would be. This was as much a coronation ritual as a victory parade.
Losers and winners
There is more to this story of the war between Octavian and Antony than meets the eye. What survives is the self-confident, self-justifying version written by the winners, Octavian and his friends. But the feasibility of suicide by snake bite is only one aspect of the history of this period that should raise suspicions. There is also a question mark over quite how extravagantly immoral, or anti-Roman, the lifestyle of Cleopatra and Antony really was. The accounts that have come down to us are not complete invention. One of the sources of Plutarch’s biography of Mark Antony, written 150 years after Antony’s death and full of some of the most lurid anecdotes of his life of luxury, was a descendant of a man who worked in Cleopatra’s kitchens – and may well have preserved a view of the culinary style of her court from below stairs. But it is absolutely clear that, both at the time and even more so in retrospect, Augustus (as he was soon known) exploited the idea of a clash between his own deep-rooted, Roman, Western traditions and the ‘oriental’ excess that Antony and Cleopatra represented. In the war of words, and in later justifications of Augustus’ rise to power, it became a struggle between the virtues of Rome and the dangers and decadence of the East.
The luxury of Cleopatra’s court was wildly exaggerated, and relatively innocent occasions in Alexandria were twisted out of all recognition. However Antony chose to celebrate his Armenian victory in Alexandria, for example, there is no evidence except Roman criticisms to suggest that it was anything resembling a Roman triumph (the scant descriptions that survive suggest that it was more likely based on some ritual of the god Dionysus). And those incriminating quotations from Antony’s will would certainly have been a prejudicial selection, even if not outright invention.
The Battle of Actium too played a key role in later representations. It was made out to be a much more impressive encounter than it really was, and built up to be the founding moment of the Augustan regime, which is still usually said to have begun in 31 BCE; one later historian went so far as to suggest that ‘the second of September’, the exact date of the encounter, is one of the few Roman dates worth remembering. A new town called Nicopolis (‘Victoryville’) was built near the battle site, as well as a vast monument overlooking the sea, decorated with rams from the captured ships and a frieze depicting the triumphal procession of 29 BCE. Rome was also filled with reminders of it, on everything from monumental sculpture to precious cameos (see plate 19), and many ordinary soldiers who had fought on the winning side proudly gave themselves the extra name Actiacus, or ‘Actium-man’. What is more, in the Roman imagination the battle was almost instantly turned into a clash between solid, disciplined Roman troops and wild hordes of orientals. Despite the fact that Antony had the staunch support of several hundred senators, all the emphasis was on the exotic rabble, with – as Virgil put it – ‘their barbarian wealth and weird weapons’, and Cleopatra issuing commands by shaking an Egyptian rattle.
Cleopatra was a crucial element in this whole picture. Whether or not she, like Fulvia, really played the leading part in the military command, as ancient writers claimed, is debatable. But she was a useful target. By focusing on her rather than on Antony, Octavian could present the war as one fought against a foreign rather than a Roman enemy – and led by a commander not only dangerous, regal and seductive but also unnatural, in Roman terms, in undertaking the male responsibilities of warfare and command. Antony might even seem to be her victim, enticed from the proper path of Roman duty by a foreign queen. When Virgil in his Aeneid, written just a few years after Octavian’s victory, imagines Queen Dido ‘burning with love’ in her African kingdom of Cart
hage and attempting to seduce Aeneas from his destiny of founding Rome, there is more than a faint echo of Cleopatra.
59. One fragment of the newly discovered victory monument at the site of the Battle of Actium shows Octavian’s triumphal chariot at his procession of 29 BCE. Two children, seen beneath Octavian’s arm, share the ride. They are most likely his own daughter Julia and Drusus, the son of his wife, Livia, by an earlier marriage, or possibly the children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.
60. The tombstone of Marcus Billienus who served in the eleventh legion (‘legione XI’) in the Battle of Actium and took the name Actiacus (‘Actiumman’) to celebrate his own part in the victory. Although the bottom of the stone is missing, what does survive, combined with the find-spot, suggests that he ended up a local councillor (decurio) in a settlement of veterans in North Italy.
So is it possible to reconstruct an alternative version of the story? In detail, it is not. The problem is that in this case the victor’s perspective is so dominating that it is easier to be suspicious of the standard line than to replace it. There are, however, a few hints of different perspectives. It is not difficult to see what the image of Octavian would have been if Antony had won at Actium: a sadistic young thug with a dangerous tendency to self-aggrandisement. In fact, some of the worst anecdotes about his youth may go back to Antony’s negative propaganda, including the story of the fancy-dress banquet where Octavian impersonated the god Apollo; his biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (just ‘Suetonius’ from now on) explicitly states that this combination of sacrilege and extravagance was one of the accusations that Antony levelled at him.