Ten Caesars

by Barry Strauss

  Burning with ambition, Octavian was a natural politician: intelligent, charming, communicative, and handsome. Although not a born soldier, he was tenacious, cunning, and brave. He had an iron will. And he had Atia, who surely sang his praises to Caesar at every opportunity. She might have even told him a tale making the rounds that her son’s father was not really Gaius Octavius but the god Apollo, who in the form of a snake visited her in a temple, impregnated her, and left a permanent mark on her body. Only the gullible would believe this, but Caesar knew that the masses were gullible, and so he might have been impressed.

  Caesar kept promoting his great-nephew. Around 51 BC, at the age of eleven, Octavian gave the funeral oration for his grandmother Julia on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum. Soon after turning fourteen, Octavian was named to an important religious office at Caesar’s request. At seventeen, Octavian marched through Rome in Caesar’s triumphs—his victory parades—for his conquests in Gaul and the Civil War. It was 46 BC, and Caesar honored the young man the way a triumphing general would normally honor only his son.

  A prominent boy like Octavian had many friends, one of whom became his lifelong right-hand man: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Like Octavian, he came from a prosperous Italian family, although without a connection to the Roman nobility. What Agrippa had in abundance was practical genius. He was courageous, assertive, and, above all, loyal. To be sure, Octavian had a gift for making men follow him. In Agrippa’s case, Octavian went to his great-uncle and got Agrippa’s brother freed even though he had fought against Caesar. Agrippa was grateful.

  In 45 BC Octavian became sick, and Caesar supposedly even visited his bedside before departing Rome to stamp out a rebellion in Hispania. Octavian faced chronic health problems and endured several major bouts of illness in his life, but until the very end, he always soldiered on. Soon the young man was on his feet again, and he left for the front. His small entourage probably included Agrippa but not Atia. She wanted to join them but Octavian turned her down.

  Octavian arrived in Hispania too late for the fighting but reached Caesar after a dangerous trip through hostile country. This earned his uncle’s admiration—a quality that only increased during the several months that Caesar spent with the gifted young go-getter. It was Octavian’s chance to shine, and he used it well. When Caesar returned to Italy shortly afterward, he made Octavian his main heir and offered him posthumous adoption as his son.

  By choosing Octavian as his successor, Caesar surely saw the seed of greatness. Yet when the news of Caesar’s choice came out, some found it hard to believe that a seventeen-year-old could persuade the most powerful man in the world to pick him without some underhanded ploy: sex. Octavian’s rival Mark Antony later accused the boy of having an affair with Caesar while in Hispania. On the one hand, this was just the kind of slander that Roman politicians dished out. On the other hand, Octavian was as handsome as he was ambitious, and rumor said that when Caesar was a teenager, he himself had gone to bed with a powerful older man. Yet both Caesar and Augustus were ladies’ men, so the tale is probably untrue.

  When he returned to Rome, Octavian finally moved out but continued to live near his mother and stepfather, supposedly spending most of his time with them. He also continued his education in oratory, philosophy, and literature, in both Latin and Greek—the preferred curriculum of the Roman elite. Although war and revolution interrupted Octavian’s studies, he continued to read and to practice delivering speeches daily. At the age of eighteen, he is supposed to have given up sex for a year, which he thought would keep his voice strong. Perhaps it worked because in later years, he had a sweet, distinctive speaking voice unlike Caesar’s piercing vocal sound.

  Caesar’s plan now was a three-year war of conquest in the East. He gave Octavian a big role by naming him, at the age of eighteen, his Master of the Horse, or second in command. Although this was in some ways a ceremonial position, it offered visibility and networking opportunities. The expedition was scheduled to begin in March 44 BC. Around December 45 BC, Octavian left Rome at Caesar’s command and, along with Agrippa, crossed the Adriatic Sea to Caesar’s military headquarters in what is today Albania. There Octavian made invaluable contacts with legionary commanders.

  But the Ides of March changed everything. On that day, March 15, 44 BC, a conspiracy of more than sixty prominent Romans, led by Marcus Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, and Decimus Brutus, assassinated Caesar at a meeting of the Senate.

  Suddenly Octavian’s closeness to Caesar made him a target. Atia was in Rome when Caesar’s will named her to organize his funeral. But her first priority was Octavian, and she immediately sent a messenger to him across the Adriatic. Octavian was considering the possibility of launching an armed revolt at the Adriatic headquarters. Atia disagreed strongly. She knew that Rome was the key, and she urged Octavian to return there. She wrote that “now he had to be a man and consider prudently what he had to do and do it according to fortune and opportunity.” After consulting his friends and advisors, Octavian agreed and sailed back to Italy.

  What a loss for Octavian Caesar’s death was. The man who had stepped in to become Octavian’s father, and who had gone out of his way to give him his sense of potential greatness, had been murdered. In a traditional Roman gesture of mourning, Octavian grew a beard. But sorrow was not his only emotion; he also felt fear, anger, and a lust for vengeance. Yet Caesar’s death was an opportunity as well as a blow. Octavian was now the head of the family, as well as heir to Rome’s dictator. But he had to fight for his inheritance.

  MY NAME IS CAESAR

  November 44 BC

  The Forum, Rome, the plaza that was Rome’s civic center

  Octavian gave a speech that he later proudly circulated. It was a defining moment. He stretched his right hand out to a statue of Julius Caesar and swore by his hopes of attaining his adoptive father’s honors. He had just turned nineteen but had already claimed all the power and glory of Rome’s former dictator for life. Men have been sent to mental hospitals for less.

  Megalomania it might have been, but after six months of hustling, Octavian was making progress. As Atia advised, he had hurried back to Italy. He was cautious and obedient enough to consult his mother and her husband but too ambitious to accept their advice to proceed slowly—or even, as his stepfather supposedly said, to turn down Caesar’s inheritance and retire from public life when he had barely entered it.

  Rome was full of enemies. The consul Mark Antony was in charge of the city, and Caesar’s assassins were regrouping after a temporary setback. They had little use for Octavian. Neither did Antony. At thirty-nine years old, Antony was in the prime of his life. Son of a noble Roman family, he was a superb general, a cagey politician, and an excellent orator. Strong and handsome, Antony took as his patron deity Hercules—a symbol of responsibility and justice as well as military prowess. Antony looked down on Octavian. As a distant relative and longtime associate of Caesar’s, Antony considered himself the slain dictator’s rightful successor.

  But Octavian was determined. He wanted honor and glory, and he didn’t care what they cost. He was ready to fight. He wasn’t going to mourn Caesar; he was going to avenge him. No, he was going to be him. He began the process of finalizing the adoption that Caesar had offered him in his will. Although we’ll continue to call him Octavian, he now called himself Caesar. He adopted the name as easily as if he had been born to it. Not only that, but he treated it like a talisman of power, as if it already had the weight of centuries behind it. His mother was the first person to address him as Caesar, but she would not be the last.

  Octavian was audacious but not impetuous, and violent without being wild. After her own initial doubt and indecision and having shown respect for her husband’s position, Atia changed her mind: she decided to give her full support to Octavian’s ambition. But she advised cunning and patience, and Octavian now agreed. He moved strategically and showed people only what he wanted them to see. He was mysterious, so it seems appropria
te that for a part of his career he sealed documents with the image of a sphinx; later on, he replaced it with his own likeness. (A later emperor called Augustus a “chameleon.”) The sources say that Octavian got his sphinx seal from Atia, which brings us back to the god Apollo, his supposed heavenly father, as the Romans associated the sphinx with that deity.

  The “sphinx” knew how to tempt people, starting with his stepfather’s neighbor in his country villa on the Bay of Naples. This was Rome’s greatest living statesman: Marcus Tullius Cicero. Of all the statesmen of the ancient world, none speaks to us more intensely than Cicero. His tongue was eloquently persuasive; his hands wrote ceaselessly; his heart beat for the republic, whose last decades his career spanned. His orations still sparkle, his letters lay bare the political maneuvering of the age, and his philosophical works practically invent Latin political thought.

  As a politician, Cicero enjoyed mixed success. He put down a revolt during his term of office as consul, but, along the way, he executed five Roman citizens without benefit of a trial, which later forced him into temporary exile. After vacillating in the Civil War, Cicero received Caesar’s pardon and compliments on his literary works, but he found the door to power slammed shut. Following the Ides of March, Cicero came out of retirement and supported the assassins. Now Octavian convinced Cicero that he, Octavian, could restore the liberty that Caesar had curbed.

  On the face of it, that seems naïve. Cicero wanted to save the republic from another military dictator like Caesar. Octavian wanted to be that dictator. Had the old man gone soft? No. He knew that Octavian was a risky bet, but he thought it worth taking. Cicero considered Antony older, more experienced, and more dangerous than young Octavian, while Octavian feared no man. So Cicero and Octavian made an alliance of convenience, and then the real question was who would dump whom first and come out on top.

  Octavian’s youth turned out to be an advantage. Since he had little investment in the old system, he had little inhibition about upending it.

  Octavian was determined to push the issue with Antony. Hiding his real plans from his mother, Octavian went to southern Italy and lobbied for support among Julius Caesar’s former soldiers. He convinced three thousand veterans to come out of retirement and support him. This private army violated the law, but years later, he boasted of his action, which he rebranded as a way of saving the republic: “At the age of nineteen at my own initiative and private expense I raised an army, by which I set free the republic which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.”

  The most important part of that army consisted of two veteran legions that Octavian’s agents lured away from Antony by offering more money and less discipline. The two legions suddenly gave Octavian the power to compete in a bloody game of maneuver. And they got the Senate’s attention.

  With an armed showdown against Antony imminent, the Senate turned to Octavian and his legions. His claim of loyalty to the republic rang hollow, but his youth made him seem less threatening to the senators than Antony. In April 43 BC, the two sides clashed in two battles in northern Italy. Antony, a hardened warrior, hurled a charge of cowardice at Octavian, who had never seen combat before. Although Octavian was not a natural warrior, he was capable of courage. At the second battle in 43 BC, for instance, he heroically shouldered the eagle when his legion’s eagle bearer suffered a severe wound. In war, as in all else, Octavian displayed self-control. By way of illustration, consider that although he was in the company of soldiers, he drank no more than three glasses of wine at dinner—probably only about nine ounces.

  The Senate’s armies were victorious and forced Antony to retreat. He crossed the Alps and withdrew to Gaul, but Octavian did not pursue him, as the Senate had wished. Octavian knew better than to trust the senators. When he heard that Cicero had said of him, “The young man should be honored and lifted up—and out,” Octavian was angry but probably not surprised. Antony regrouped by winning over the armies of Gaul. Meanwhile, Octavian decided to change course and support Antony.

  The Senate was only a temporary ally, useful to confer Octavian legitimacy but hostile to his goal of attaining Caesar’s status. Antony made a better partner because he lacked the Senate’s attachment to the republic’s institutions. Besides, his new armies made Antony too strong for Octavian to defeat. So Octavian turned to Antony.

  In the summer of 43 BC, Octavian sent a centurion (captain) to the Senate to demand that it name him consul, the highest office in the state and one customarily unattainable before the age of forty. He didn’t care about custom. The senators agreed reluctantly and then reneged, hoping vainly for new troops from abroad. They tried to take hostage Atia and Octavia, who were in the city, but the women fled for safety among the Vestal Virgins. The six Vestals were priestesses of an important state cult and lived in an official residence beside the Roman Forum. In part to protect them, Octavian, ever devoted to his family, hurried to Rome with his legions. He became master of Rome on August 19, 43 BC. Now liberated, Atia and Octavia embraced him.

  Sadly, the reunion was brief, as his mother died sometime between August and November. Her husband probably died around the same time. Octavian persuaded the Senate to give Atia a public funeral, if persuaded is the right word for someone who won the consulship via military might. A public funeral was a rare honor. In fact, as far as we know, Atia was the first woman in Roman history to receive one. A poet wrote Atia’s epitaph. It says:

  “Here, stranger, the ashes of Atia, here the mother of Caesar / Is found; so ordained the Roman fathers that is, the Senate.”

  Atia had been indispensable as Octavian’s mother, advocate, and political advisor in his early crises. Even after death, she was recalled in literature. Even as a memory, Atia was a reminder of her son’s claim to nobility.

  And in Rome, vengeance was a noble virtue, with Romans fearing its outcome but admiring its pursuit. Right after the Ides of March, the Senate had hammered out an amnesty for Caesar’s killers. Now Octavian tore it up. He had a law passed that set up a special court that condemned them to death. As a good son, he took Caesar’s murder personally.

  Octavian invited Antony back to Italy and made peace. In October they met, along with Julius Caesar’s old ally Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and formed a three-man commission with dictatorial powers for five years, later renewed. They had over forty legions. They divided up the western part of the empire among them, while Brutus and Cassius, who had fled Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar, controlled the East. It was a coup d’état.

  Less than two years after returning to Italy, Octavian had maneuvered his way through politics and war, outfoxed his competitors, and become one of the three most powerful men in the Roman Empire—all by the age of twenty.

  When Julius Caesar conquered Rome, he followed a policy of clemency, pardoning his enemies. But his assassination suggested that clemency did not pay. Instead, the triumvirs chose proscription: a purge. They marked out around two thousand elite and wealthy Romans for death and confiscated their lands. Most escaped; probably around three hundred were killed. Cicero was the most famous casualty. Antony wanted his archenemy dead. Octavian said later he tried to save Cicero but, if so, he didn’t try very hard.

  As part of his new alliance with Antony, Octavian married Antony’s young stepdaughter, Claudia. Her mother, Antony’s wife, Fulvia, was a formidable woman who had outlived two previous husbands—both politicians who died violently.

  On January 1, 42 BC, Octavian took his devotion to his father’s memory up a notch and had the Senate declare Caesar a god, which allowed Octavian to call himself the son of a god. A law was passed to build a temple and institute the worship of the deified Julius Caesar. Four years later, in 38 BC, Octavian was acclaimed by his troops as imperator, or victorious general. He now became known as “the victorious general Caesar son of a god.”

  At age twenty-four, Octavian had achieved great things. His ambition was boundless, his intelligence was keen, his judgment was sure, his work e
thic was limitless, and his persuasion was winning. Like any young man, he felt emotion—above all, rage at his adoptive father’s murder—but he mastered the art of turning pain into strategy. And strategy, it became clear, was Octavian’s specialty. He always thought far ahead. He would have to, to face the trials that awaited.

  ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

  The showdown with Brutus and Cassius came outside the Greek city of Philippi in 42 BC. Octavian partnered with Antony, and the latter shone in the two battles that brought victory. Octavian had once again to face the charge of cowardice when, in the first battle, the enemy captured his camp but he had already fled. He said later that he was ill and had a vision warning him of danger. This was probably true, since Octavian faced recurrent medical challenges. But he recovered and issued the bloodthirsty command to cut off the head of Brutus’s corpse and send it to Rome to place at the foot of a statue of Julius Caesar as revenge.

  Philippi was a tremendous victory for Antony and Octavian, but they still had to bring the Roman world under their control. After pushing aside Lepidus, Octavian and Antony divided the empire, with Antony taking the East and making his base in Athens, while Octavian ruled the West from Rome.

  That left Octavian the unpopular task of confiscating civilians’ land in Italy to give to veterans. Antony’s wife, Fulvia, and his brother, Lucius Antonius, led the charge against him. She made an appearance with Antony’s children and his mother before the soldiers in order to keep their loyalty. (Octavian had recently divorced Claudia, claiming under oath that the marriage had never been consummated. No doubt this angered his former mother-in-law.) Octavian now had to subdue Fulvia. He surrounded her and Lucius and their army in the central Italian town of Perusia (modern Perugia). Fulvia got the backhanded compliment of having her name inscribed on her enemy’s sling bullets along with rude references to her body parts. Fulvia wrote to Antony’s generals in Gaul to ask them to hurry across the Alps to her aid, but it was too late. Octavian’s forces won. If the report is true and not just propaganda, Octavian then massacred a large number of enemy leaders on the altar of the deified Julius—on the Ides of March. Octavian supposedly met every request for mercy with a cold “It’s time to die.” But he let Fulvia and Lucius go free.