The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Antony, who had positioned himself as a friend of Caesar’s, could not exactly oppose the man’s nephew. But he quite rightly saw Octavian’s arrival as a threat to his own power. He treated the young man with indulgence, asked him whether he really thought he was up to the task of dealing with Caesar’s estate, laughed at his serious manner, and tried to block him from standing for tribune.

  Opposed by Antony, Octavian began to make friends with all of Antony’s detractors and opponents. Eventually a rumor got back to Antony that Octavian was planning to have him assassinated. The younger man denied the charge, but the suspicion was enough to transform the two men from political rivals into actual enemies. “Each of them hurried about all through Italy to engage, by great offers, the old soldiers that lay scattered in their settlements,” says Plutarch, “and to be the first to secure the troops that still remained undischarged.”4 Cicero’s silver tongue helped to tip the balance; he convinced the Senate to declare Antony a public enemy of the Roman people, which meant that Roman troops could drive him out of Italy.

  Antony retreated to the north with the army he had managed to gather, and Octavian marched after him with another army and both consuls. The two met in battle at Modena, in 43 BC. But although Antony’s men finally broke their line and fled, both consuls were killed along with many of Octavian’s own men. It was not a joyful victory for the Romans.

  Antony went through the Alps to the soldiers stationed in Gaul, and recruited them to his side. They had served with him before, they respected his abilities as a commander, and apparently the crisis was bringing out the best in him: “It was his character in calamities to be better than at any other time,” Plutarch says. “Antony, in misfortune, was most nearly a virtuous man.”5

  Octavian at this point seems to have rethought his position. As long as Cicero and the Senate had hopes for the return of the Republic, they would never be fully behind him; their apparent support for him had merely been in order to get Antony out of Rome. But Octavian didn’t want the return of the Republic. He wanted his great-uncle’s power, and Cicero was not going to help him there: “Perceiving that Cicero’s wishes were for liberty,” Plutarch observes, “he had ceased to pay any further regard to him.”6

  So, following Caesar’s example, he decided to make an alliance with his rival in order to strengthen his own position. Rather than attacking Antony, he dispatched friends to take a message: he had a proposal to make, if Antony would agree to meet with him.

  In November, the two men met in a private location at Bologna, and for three days discussed a possible partnership. They decided to form a triumvirate, as their elders had done before them. As the third member of the triumvirate, they included Mark Antony’s ally Lepidus; he was, after all, Pontifex Maximus, and he commanded a good number of legions in his position as governor of provinces in Gaul and Nearer Spain.

  This triumvirate was no informal arrangement, though: the pact of allegiance was written out. “The empire was soon determined of,” Plutarch says, “it being divided amongst them as if it had been their paternal inheritance.”

  Each man then made up a list of the Romans he wanted to see killed in the takeover. This was far, far beyond even the pretense of legality. All together, there were three hundred persons on the death list, including Cicero (on Antony’s list), Antony’s own uncle (on Octavian’s list), and Lepidus’s brother (who had publicly opposed him) on Lepidus’s own list.

  The three returned to Rome at the head of an armed force and ruthlessly carried out the hits. After this, they divided the empire up. Octavian got the west, Antony the east. Lepidus, who was doomed to be the tail end of the triumvirate, lost his provinces in Gaul and Nearer Spain and instead was given Africa, which was hardly a plum job.

  But he was pacified with temporary control of the city of Rome. While Lepidus looked out for the capital city, Antony and Octavian set out for Greece with part of the army to kill Cassius and Brutus.

  Cassius and Brutus made a stand in Macedonia, dividing their army in two and stationing the troops in two different places. This forced Antony and Octavian to divided their forces as well. Octavian took the task of attacking Brutus; but on the day of the battle he was suffering from illness: “weak and unwell,” Suetonius says, and soon driven back in a rout.7 Antony, on the other hand, defeated Cassius, who killed himself without realizing that Brutus was still in good shape; he then turned and finished off Brutus for Octavian.

  Octavian headed home, having grown sicker, and more than half-expecting to die before he could get back to Rome. Antony stayed east, to help protect the border. The Roman province of Syria was facing a possible invasion; the Parthians, by command of their king Orodes II, were massing on their western border, ready to invade the Roman-governed lands. And Antipater, the Roman governor of Syria, had just been poisoned; his son Herod was now governing in his place, but he was new to the job.

  Antony arrived in Syria, but his attention was soon distracted from the coming attack. In 41, the year after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius, he met Cleopatra, who sailed up to Cilicia to see him and presented herself in a way bound to attract:

  in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay all alone, under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were dressed like Sea Nymphs and Graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. The perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes, part following the galley up the river on either bank, part running out of the city to see the sight.8

  79.1 Rome Under the Triumvirate

  Instead of remaining in Syria to protect the province, Antony, starstruck, followed Cleopatra back down to Alexandria.

  The Parthian attack came in 40 BC, just months later. The Parthians swept down through Syria into Palestine, intending to kill the Roman governor Herod. He fled to Rome, so the Parthians instead dragged out Hyrcanus (who was the High Priest and Ethnarch of Judea, reporting to Herod) and cut both of his ears off. This kept him from serving as high priest any longer, as Jewish law dictated that the high priest be unmutilated.

  Right after this success, Orodes was murdered by his son Phraates IV, who also killed off his brothers and his own oldest son, in an elimination of rivals that was excessive even by Parthian standards. Antony pulled himself away from Cleopatra and went back to Rome to consult with Octavian, who had, surprisingly, recovered from his illness. With a fresh army and the fugitive Herod in tow, Antony marched back east.

  The Parthians, under Phraates IV, tried to defend the Syrian holdings, but Antony managed to drive them back out of Palestine. In 37 BC, he installed Herod as a vassal king of Rome: a secular King of the Jews, doing away with a combined priesthood and kingship.

  Meanwhile, back a little farther to the west, Octavian had eliminated Lepidus. Lepidus had gotten terminally tired of being the weak sister in this setup. He sailed with troops to Sicily, which he claimed as his own. This was a clear message that he wanted more power in the triumvirate.

  Octavian, however, landed on the shores of Sicily and begged Lepidus’s soldiers not to resist him: they could save Rome from civil war, if they would simply desert Lepidus’s cause. They did, legion after legion; Lepidus seems to have lacked the personal charisma to overcome Octavian’s appeals. Finally Lepidus himself was forced to follow his troops to Octavian’s camp, surrender, and beg for mercy. Octavian spared his life, but took his provinces, his soldiers, and his title of Triumvir away from him.9 He also put him under house arrest, where Lepidus remained, for the rest of his life.

  Octavian and Antony now shared the power between them, but Antony was in an increasingly weak position. After its initial success, his campaign against Parthia had turned inexorably towards disaster. He had tried to make a push into Media and was forced back on a retreat during which twenty t
housand infantry and four thousand cavalry died.10

  By 34 BC, Antony had given up. He went back to Egypt and to Cleopatra. The desertion gave Octavian the excuse he needed to declare war on Antony as an enemy of Rome, which would make him ruler of Antony’s part of the empire as well as his own.

  But he needed to convert any pro-Antony senators to his side. In 32 BC, Octavian had Antony’s will read aloud to the Senate. This was illegal, but when the Senate heard that Antony had left most of his money to the half-Egyptian children that Cleopatra had borne him (these were twins, one boy and one girl) and also had asked to be buried in Egypt, they agreed to a formal pronouncement of war against Antony, as though he were a foreign enemy.11 Octavian remarked that, given Antony’s complete bewitchment by Cleopatra, he didn’t expect any trouble removing him from the scene; he suspected that Antony’s generals would be Cleopatra’s beauty stylist and an Egyptian eunuch or two.

  79.1. Octavian. Bronze head of Octavian, Caesar Augustus, 63 BC– AD 14. Museo Civico Archaeologico, Verona, Italy. Photo credit Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY

  Antony, hearing news of this declaration, began to assemble himself an army and navy at Ephesus. His force was considerable: five hundred warships, Plutarch says, with a hundred thousand infantrymen and a handful of royal allies, one of whom was Herod, king of Judea.

  Octavian journeyed towards him with a fleet and land forces of his own. After a series of pitched battles, the two navies met near the promontory of Actium, jutting from the northern coast of Greece. After Octavian’s ships had destroyed three hundred of Antony’s, Antony and Cleopatra left the scene of the fighting and sailed back towards Egypt. Most of his men deserted and joined Octavian, who was clearly on the winning side.

  Octavian decided that it would be wiser not to leave Antony down in Egypt to plan more trouble for Rome. He waited through the winter, and then set out for Egypt.

  When Antony heard of Octavian’s approach, he stabbed himself in the stomach with a sword and bled to death slowly. Cleopatra managed to kill herself, although her body was unmarked and no dagger was found nearby; later, her servants suggested that perhaps she had allowed a poisonous snake to bite her, rather than remain a lifelong prisoner of Octavian’s.

  Octavian ordered Cleopatra’s son by Caesar put to death as well. The year was 30 BC, and he alone was in control of the Roman territories.

  IN 29, HE ARRIVED BACK in Rome, to a people sick of war.

  Octavian threw himself a victory parade, and gave away money to the citizens. He also ordered the doors to the Temple of Janus closed to show that Rome had entered into a new time of peace. Octavian’s victory at Actium was, in his own version of events, a new beginning. Not: The Roman Republic has ended and the Roman Empire has begun (as later historians would see it), but rather: The Republic has been given a fresh new start.

  To keep this illusion alive, he could not dissolve the Senate: that would do away with half of Rome’s official name. The Senate too was in a delicate position. Octavian had just finished fighting a war against a Roman citizen, and he had just put to death Caesar’s only son. These were both autocratic actions, and if he acted too much like a king, protest was bound to swell up until it could no longer be ignored. If, on the other hand, the Senate compelled him to lay down all of his power, civil war might break out again. If one thing had become clear in the past years, it was that the original form of the Republic would not hold peace in the city for long.

  The compromise between the Senate and Octavian was, like Octavian’s own version of the victory at Actium, one of terminology. In 27 BC, Octavian walked into the January meeting of the Senate and formally announced the laying down of all the powers that had been granted to him in the years of crisis: this showed that they were extraordinary powers, not usual ones, and that the Republic was still in full force.

  Octavian himself set down an account of this in his Res Gestae, a statement engraved on brass that later stood in front of his mausoleum: “After I had put an end to the civil wars,” it said, “having attained supreme power by universal consent, I transferred the state from my own power to the control of the Roman Senate and people.”12

  In return, once Octavian had demonstrated that he respected the Republic, the Republic returned the favor. Octavian remained consul (a republican office), and the Senate gave him control over the outlying provinces—which, since most of the soldiers were stationed there and not in Rome, gave him control over the army. He was also allowed to establish something new, a large standing bodyguard in Italy itself: the “Praetorian Guard.” This gave him, in effect, a private army, and broke the tradition that Rome did not keep an army close to home.13

  He also retained the title Imperator, which he had held since 29; this title had always been a yearly honor, given to a successful general, but now it became part of his permanent name. So did another name, Augustus. Technically, the term meant consecrated, set apart and different; but it was a brand-new name, with no political baggage, so it could take on any shade of meaning that Octavian gave it.14 Octavian himself saw the title Augustus (which became his primary name) as a reward for virtue, given to him by the Senate in recognition of his refusal to grasp power. He lays this out in the Res Gestae, where he lists all his conquests (“I extended the frontiers of all the provinces of the Roman people, which had as neighbours races not obedient to our empire…. I restored peace to all the provinces of Gaul and Spain and to Germany…. Egypt I added to the empire of the Roman people” and soon),15 but these are not the basis for his authority. Rather, he deserves to be Augustus because “after I had extinguished the civil wars, having been put in supreme possession of the whole empire by the universal consent of all, I transferred the republic from my own power into the free control of the Senate and Roman people. For the which service I received the appellation of Augustus by decree of the Senate…. After that time I stood before all othersin dignity, but of actual power I possessed no more than my colleagues.”16

  This was, of course, almost an exact reverse of the truth; Augustus had the actual power of an emperor, but not the title. Even to some of his contemporaries (such as the geographer Strabo), this so-called First Settlement seemed silly.

  Over the next decades, Augustus combined acting like an emperor without a title and constant negotiations with the Senate over what formal privileges he should actually have. In the year 23, Augustus declined to be elected consul again, as he had successively for the past nine years. His exact motivation for doing this is not entirely clear. He may have realized that, if he were elected consul every year, a lot of senators were not getting the chance to run for an office which for many was the culmination of a lifelong dream. This was bound to produce discontented murmuring.17 And he was also struck by a serious illness in 23; Suetonius remarks that he had ringworm, bladder stones, and spots all over him.18 Possibly he did not like the idea of having to publicly display himself at an election while suffering from unsightly blemishes.

  In any case, relinquishing the consulship was no sacrifice, because he still remained above the consuls in the power structure. The Senate had agreed to make him proconsul for life, which meant he could not only dabble legally in senatorial and consular affairs whenever he pleased, but could also exercise military power—the imperium—inside the city. This was an important privilege, particularly since he now had a standing army within march of Rome.

  He had, in fact, every single power of royalty, including the legal means to strong-arm the city into doing what he wanted. But he still kept himself away from the word emperor. Augustus, Tacitus says, subjected the world to empire under the title of princeps: fessa nomine principis sub imperium accepit. Later translations would render this word “prince,” but Augustus would have simply called himself the First Citizen.19

  IN 20 BC, Augustus managed to work out a peace with the Parthian king Phraates IV. Antony’s defeat had been a very good thing for Augustus, but it had been an embarrassment for Rome. The Parthians had t
aken Roman prisoners of war and had captured the Roman standards; Augustus needed to get them back.

  Phraates IV agreed to return the prisoners of war and the standards. What he got from Rome is less clear. Augustus gave Phraates a slave girl, who soon became his lover, but there must have been some other inducement.

  Phraates IV did send all four of his sons to Rome as hostages, an act which usually indicated weakness.20 But given the state of intrigue in Parthian royal families, perhaps this was a Roman favor to Parthia; it gave Phraates IV a few more years in which he did not have to watch his back and sniff his cups. It also gave the Romans a chance to teach Roman ways to the Parthians (a technique that the Assyrians had used on Egyptian princes long before). Continued peace with the Parthians was important for Roman prosperity. It meant that the trade route to India and perhaps even farther to the east was now passable, rather than blocked by a solid wall of hostility.

  Rome may have been prospering, but Augustus, who so needed the forms of the Republic to hold his empire together, was having trouble keeping up appearances. Senators had started trailing into the Senate later and later; this was understandable, since they were basically wasting their time passing any laws at all, but Augustus wanted Rome to see business-as-usual carried on. In 17 BC, he announced that senators who came in late would have to pay a fine.

  Meanwhile he was accumulating even more powers. In 13, Lepidus died, still under guard. Octavian then “assumed the office of high priest,” Suetonius writes, “which he had never presumed to do while Lepidus was alive.”21 This meant that the ruler of Rome’s political affairs was now also the religious head of state, a combination which considerably boosted his power and would remain the norm thereafter.

  79.2 Rome Under Augustus

  This made the Senate even more irrelevant. By 11 BC, Augustus had to change the regulations of the Senate so that business could be carried on even if the required minimum of four hundred senators (out of six hundred) didn’t show up. He also announced that the members would no longer speak in order of seniority, since they had fallen into a habit of getting up one at a time and saying, “I agree with the last speaker.” Instead, in an effort to keep everyone awake, he started calling on them to speak at random, like a college teacher with an inattentive freshman class.22