IMMEDIATELY AFTER CAESAR’S MURDER, Antony fled, according to some, disguised in the nondescript garments of a slave. He took refuge first in a friend’s house and then in his own—the grand mansion on the Palatine that had once been Pompey’s and for which Caesar had made Antony pay in full—which he barricaded. In the uneasy hours that followed he must have wondered, like Cleopatra, whether the assassins would also come for him. But as the hours passed, he began to take heart, especially when a messenger sent by “the Liberators,” as the assassins were styling themselves, brought word that they wished to treat with Antony. Rome, they insisted, must not be plunged into further bloodshed. Lepidus, Caesar’s master of horse, who commanded the only troops in Rome, also contacted Antony. He had marched his legion to the Campus Martius and, in the gray dawn light of March 16, had seized the Temple of Ops, Rome’s treasury, and occupied the Forum. Lepidus was demanding immediate vengeance on Caesar’s killers.
Antony would have sensed, as he discussed his plans with his wife, Fulvia, that this was his moment. If he acted quickly, he could take control, becoming the leader of Rome rather than playing the loyal supporting role. Given his present position, restraint, not chaos, would best serve his ends. Needing to get his hands on the levers of power with as little fuss as possible, he made his way to Caesar’s house, where the stiffening corpse now lay, and asked Calpurnia to hand over Caesar’s papers and the huge sums of money in their house, which the grief-stricken widow did without demur. Next, Antony sent a message to Lepidus urging him to hold back from military action and promising him the post of pontifex maximus if he did so. Then, by dint of his authority as the surviving consul and thus the highest officer of state, he summoned the Senate to meet the following morning, March 17, in the Temple of Tellus, close to his house.
When the senators arrived they found the temple ringed by Lepidus’ troops. Antony needed all his skill to control the debate in a nervy Senate, many of whose members sympathized with the Liberators, who did not themselves dare attend. Their attempted appeals to the populace had met with a sullen response and, isolated and apprehensive, they remained on the Capitol, protected by the battle-scarred gladiators they had hired to defend them. Their fate, as they knew, depended on what their supporters in the Senate could achieve. Some senators argued that Caesar’s murderers should be feted and rewarded as public benefactors. Others, taking courage, insisted that Caesar had been a tyrant, all of whose acts should be annulled. Antony cannily pointed out that the majority of those present owed their positions to ordinances of Caesar and asked whether they were really proposing to renounce their appointments.
Self-interest won the day. New elections would be expensive and the results uncertain. Even Cicero, whose sympathies lay with the conspirators, recognized that, for the present, there was no alternative and reluctantly supported Antony. The senators hastily confirmed Caesar’s acts, accomplished or in gestation, as being “for the good of the state.” This gave Antony carte blanche to bring forward all manner of schemes that Caesar had been planning—or so he claimed. He could also, in the months ahead, nominate anyone he wished to official positions, blandly maintaining that he was only fulfilling the dead Caesar’s wishes. Wits called the new appointees charonides—men who owed their power to Charon, ferryman of the underworld, who it appeared was now, on his return journey, conveying the dead Caesar’s wishes to Antony, his living representative.
Somewhat paradoxically, given the legitimacy they had just conferred on Caesar, at Cicero’s urging the senators also immediately agreed on an amnesty for Caesar’s assassins. They would not be prosecuted and no inquiry would be held into the murder. For the moment this suited Antony. In the vacuum following Caesar’s death he needed to achieve some kind of political equilibrium in order to maintain his authority as consul and, with the help of the politically attuned Fulvia, begin to sound out new allies and confirm existing ones. The Liberators were invited to come down from the Capitol while Antony and Lepidus sent their own children to the hill as hostages. A formal public reconciliation followed, after which Antony and Lepidus played host to Caesar’s murderers at dinner. Clearly any vengeance for Caesar was to be a dish consumed cold. Dio Cassius described a tense evening during which “Antony asked Cassius, ‘Have you perchance a dagger under your arm even now?’ To which he answered: ‘Yes, and a big one, if you too should desire to make yourself tyrant.’ ”
That same day, March 17, Caesar’s will was read out in Antony’s house, and Cleopatra and the world learned that it contained no reference to her or to their son, Caesarion. Most disturbing to Cleopatra were the intentions of the heir Caesar had named, Octavian. He would never look favorably on a child who, though Caesar had not acknowledged him publicly, was almost universally believed to be his son and blatantly and brazenly bore his name.
Cleopatra’s mind must have been in turmoil. At the flash of the assassins’ knives, she had lost both her main emotional bulwark and her political support. She and her son were alone in a hostile and uncertain environment whose political systems were alien to her own and where she had been seen as a pernicious influence on the murdered leader. She would have known that with Caesar dead, Antony was, in theory at least, the most powerful man in Rome. Perhaps in those first difficult days she contemplated turning to him, recalling his courage and compassion after his triumph at Pelusium, when he had counseled moderation, not murder, to her vengeful father, Auletes. Yet she would not have known whether she could trust him entirely.
Emotionally, Cleopatra needed time to mourn and to reflect on her feelings for Caesar. A clever, gifted man endowed with the glamour and charisma of great power, he was not only the father of her child but perhaps also a father figure, supplanting the memory of the weak and pleading pipe player Auletes. Though she had engineered her liaison with him, she no doubt felt affection, passion, even love for him. Letters written to Cicero by his friend Atticus suggest the close bonds between them—they had attended fashionable parties together and were regarded as a couple.
Like so many mistresses through history, Cleopatra did not attend her lover’s funeral. On March 20, five days after his murder and with the Senate’s agreement, Antony, who had a ready appreciation of theater and its power over the popular imagination, staged a public funeral for Caesar. This was a far cry from the fate Brutus had originally planned—the late dictator’s still-warm body being impaled on the executioner’s hook, dragged swiftly to the Tiber and tossed into the water like that of a common criminal. Antony’s stated plan was to bear Caesar’s corpse on an ivory funeral couch draped with purple and gold cloth through the Forum to the Campus Martius, where he would be cremated on a vast pyre by the tomb of his daughter, Julia. Antony carefully orchestrated the procession, hiring musicians and masked, wailing professional mourners to walk in it, clad in the robes Caesar had worn at his Triumphs. When it reached the Forum the cortege paused before the speaker’s platform and the ivory couch was set down. Here, in front of the couch, Antony, in the absence of any close male relative, delivered the laudatio or eulogy.
Shakespeare’s Antony begins by declaring that praising Caesar is not his business. The real Antony did praise Caesar and very cleverly. A herald solemnly read a list of all the decrees passed by the Senate and people of Rome in Caesar’s honor and intoned the oath of loyalty sworn to him by every senator. Next he related every war and battle won by Caesar, all the prisoners, kings among them, and all the rich booty he had brought to Rome. When the herald finished this rehearsal of greatness Antony mounted the rostrum to address the hushed crowd. He played his audience expertly. Voice cracking, he reminded them what manner of man Rome had lost, exhibiting the bloodstained toga Caesar had been wearing when he was assassinated.
A wax effigy of Caesar, which had probably been concealed behind or within the draped couch, was then produced and hoisted high above the crowd. Operated by a mechanical device, it slowly rotated to reveal the all too realistic simulations of every one of the twenty-three livid wounds hacked into Caesar’s body. The crowd erupted in grief and anger, tearing down anything wooden it could find to build an impromptu pyre for the dead leader. Wailing women tossed in their bracelets and necklaces. As the flames crackled and burned, angry mobs sought out the houses of the plotters and were restrained only with difficulty from burning them to the ground. A tribune unfortunate enough to share the name of Cinna with one of the assassins was mistaken for him and ripped apart. The mob paraded his head through the streets on the point of a spear before it realized its error. Eight years previously Fulvia had, by displaying the wounds of her dead husband, Clodius, to the mob, provoked a surge of emotion that led to the Senate house being consumed as Clodius’ funeral pyre. Now her new husband’s oratory and display of Caesar’s body led to the reconstructed building going up in flames once more.
Antony had succeeded magnificently in mobilizing the loyalty of the people to the dead Caesar. In the process he demonstrated the power of the late dictator’s name and established himself, at least for the present, as the leader of the pro-Caesarean party. The moral victory that Brutus and Cassius had believed was theirs had been plucked from them. Antony had also shown himself strong, decisive and capable of maintaining order, if anyone could. He had mastered the crisis, but what to do next was more difficult. He was perhaps uncertain, like Pompey before him, of what he wanted to achieve politically—whether autocracy or some form of republican government. Significantly, Antony’s next move, within just a few weeks of Caesar’s death, was to take the highly symbolic measure of bringing before the Senate a motion abolishing the dictatorship for good. This may have indicated no more than a consciousness of the need to conciliate the more moderate republicans, but perhaps more likely it indicated a disinclination to aim for sole power, at least for the present. Yet his relationship with the republicans and others would undergo many twists over the next few months as he pragmatically sought to preserve and enhance his position.
While Antony was lauded for his good sense and moderation, the streets of Rome were no longer safe for Brutus and Cassius, and by mid-April they and many of their fellow conspirators thought it only prudent to withdraw to their country estates. A dyspeptic and depressed Cicero lambasted them for having “the spirit of men but the common sense of boys.” The bookish, high-principled Brutus and his associates had courageously removed the dictator but devised no strategy for dismantling his apparatus of power and obliterating his regime. If the conspirators had thought about it at all, they had naïvely assumed that with Caesar dead, the old republican system would simply resurrect itself of its own accord. This was, in Cicero’s view, “absurd.” “Freedom has been restored and yet the republic has not,” he raged. In particular, he blamed the conspirators for not having seized the initiative and convened the Senate themselves immediately after murdering Caesar instead of allowing Antony time to react and use his position as consul to take control. Cicero fumed that had he had his way, Antony would have been killed as well, leaving both Senate and Caesarians more obviously leaderless.
Cicero too decided to leave Rome, heading to the purer air of the Bay of Naples to wait on events. His despair at the political situation added to recent turmoil within his family and deep personal grief. In early 45 Tullia, the daughter to whom he had been so devoted that enemies accused him of incest with her, had died in childbirth. Perhaps Cicero saw her death as punishment for having divorced his wife of more than thirty years—a woman who, in a society in which only 50 percent of people reached adulthood, only 30 percent forty years of age and a mere 13 percent sixty, would achieve the remarkable feat of living to 103—in favor of one of his nubile and rich young wards, Publilia. The marriage had taken place mere weeks before Tullia’s death. When teased for wedding such a young girl, the sixty-one-year-old Cicero had leerily responded, “She’ll be a woman tomorrow.” In his anguish at his daughter’s death and Publilia’s apparent lack of sympathy, Cicero had sent his new wife back to her family and asked his friends to prevent either the girl or her family from seeking him out while he arranged a divorce. Now, a year later, moving between his assorted villas overlooking seas just beginning to grow warmer in the early spring sunshine, he contemplated the shipwreck of his political fortunes and the loss of the republic he held so dear and whose arcane procedures he was so adept at manipulating. His response was not to acquiesce in its fall but rather a newfound steely resolve to use any means possible to prevent this.
By this time, Cleopatra had also decided that her most prudent course would be to quit Rome and take Caesarion back to safety in Egypt. In mid-April, a month after Caesar’s murder, Cicero was writing dismissively to his friend Atticus, “I see nothing to object to in the flight of the queen.” The term the hostile Cicero used to describe her exit from Rome was flight, a word implying panic, which probably belies the calculation behind her decision. Three weeks later, after lamenting the miscarriage suffered by Tertia, Cassius’ wife and Brutus’ half sister—all too probably induced by the stress of Caesar’s murder at the hands of the two men closest to her—Cicero added somewhat mysteriously, “I am hoping it is true about the queen and that Caesar.” This seems to be a reference to some misfortune that had befallen Cleopatra and Caesarion on their journey back to Egypt. Perhaps reports had reached Rome suggesting that they might be dead. Though not short of things to talk about, Rome was clearly abuzz with a story or scandal about Cleopatra that refused to go away. On May 17 Cicero noted that the rumor about the queen was finally dying down, but a week later he was still embroiled in speculation, writing again, “I am hoping it is true about the queen.”*
Whatever Cicero may have hoped, papyrus documents show that by late July 44 Cleopatra, Caesarion and her brother-husband Ptolemy XIV were safely back in Egypt. About a month later, Cleopatra’s fifteen-year-old co-ruler was dead. The historian Josephus, writing in the first century AD, believed Cleopatra had poisoned Ptolemy and he was probably correct. Cleopatra was as accomplished as any Roman at seizing the moment and perhaps even more cold-bloodedly ruthless. Paramount in her mind, now that she had lost her Roman supporter, was the need to safeguard her own position and that of her son, Caesarion. Her half brother would have seen the child, as he grew older, as a rival. The traumatic events of her girlhood at the Alexandrian court, especially her sister’s murder at the hands of Auletes, could hardly have demonstrated more clearly that, individually, the Ptolemies had most to fear from those nearest to them. Only a few years thereafter, her elder half brother had attempted to eject her from the throne. Sharing power with him had only given rise to factionalism and was in any case probably not best suited to her nature. As Josephus wrote of her character, “If she lacked one single thing that she desired, she imagined that she lacked everything.” And if Cleopatra did kill her brother, she was following a long tradition. Plutarch, writing with lofty disapproval, thought such activities an inherent characteristic of the Hellenic dynasties: “With regard to the assassination of siblings, it was a well-established habit . . . as widely used as were the propositions of Euclid by mathematicians, it was legitimized by the kings, in order to guarantee their security.”
Even if she was not the direct agent of her brother’s death, Cleopatra would not have agonized long over it. She could now elevate her son to the throne beside her. He was far too young to question her or to take any part in decision making. Like all parents, she would have believed that her relationship with her child would avoid previous familial mistakes. Like all mothers, she wanted both to protect Caesarion and to see him succeed. Her ambition for him and for his security and that of her dynasty would henceforth become a major driving force. For obvious reasons, as their joint reign began, she abandoned her previous title of Philadelphus, “brother-loving.” Caesarion, ruling as Ptolemy XV Caesar, was called Theos Philopater Philometer, “God Who Loves His Father and Mother.” The adored father, as Cleopatra wished to state clearly to the world—and doubtless to Octavian in particular—was Julius Caesar. Her son allied Egypt with Rome, East with West, a geopolitical claim no other familial union would be able to make until she and Antony became lovers.
To drive that message home to her people, Cleopatra milked the symbolism of her identification with Isis. The goddess was a potent image in people’s minds—the embodiment of the power of the moon, of the sea and the Nile, of the underworld and of the life beyond. The earliest surviving Greek or Roman account of the myth of Isis is Plutarch’s. He wrote of how Isis and her twin brother, Osiris, the offspring of sky and earth, fell in love while still in the womb. Their uterine bond was absolute. When Osiris was later murdered and dismembered into fourteen parts by his envious brother, Seth, a distraught but devoted Isis managed to find all the pieces except one—the phallus. Using magic in place of the missing sexual organ, Isis managed to become pregnant and give birth to a son, Horus, who was not only Osiris’ child but a reincarnation of the god himself. After the ides of March, Cleopatra could use the imagery of Isis to present the murdered Caesar as Osiris and Caesarion as Horus, his divine and undisputed son.
To honor her dead lover further, the grieving Cleopatra commissioned a carved bust of Caesar to be placed in the still-incomplete Caesareum. A surviving head of green diabase stone, quarried only in Egypt, may well be that image. It shows a man with thinning hair and crow’s feet but an intent and masterful gaze.*
If anything had induced Cleopatra to leave Rome quickly—if not in a panic, as Cicero sneeringly alleged—it was probably the news that the eighteen-year-old Octavian was on his way to Rome to claim his inheritance. Octavian had been born in 63, at the time of the Catiline conspiracy. The son of a wealthy novus homo, the first of his family to reach the Senate, who had died when Octavian was only four, he had grown up with the knowledge that his route to power would depend as heavily on patronage as on his own abilities. He had already acquired the skill of self-publicity. According to Suetonius, at his coming-of-age ceremony, “the seams of the senatorial gown which Caesar had allowed him to wear split and it fell at his feet.” Bystanders might have interpreted this as an evil portent but Octavian seized the moment to declare, “I shall have the whole senatorial dignity beneath my feet.” Whether made on the spot or invented with his advisers sometime afterward, this priggish statement from one so young would have been deeply impressive to Roman ears.
It was Octavian’s great good fortune that his mother, Atia, was Caesar’s niece, making him one of Caesar’s closest male relatives. Young as he was, he had already striven to cultivate this relationship. His determination, despite shipwreck and illness, to join his great-uncle on campaign in Spain in 45 had greatly pleased and impressed Caesar. That year Caesar had asked the Senate to raise Octavian’s family to patrician rank. (The patricians were the descendants of Rome’s ancient nobility. The number of acknowledged patrician families had remained unaltered since 450, but Caesar had gained the right to nominate new members to their ranks.)
Busts of the young Octavian depict a fine-boned face, slighty protuberant ears, a long neck and light, slender shoulders very different from those of the muscular, bull-necked Antony. Octavian was probably no more than five feet six or seven inches tall, according to Suetonius—short by Roman standards. Suetonius added that, “one did not realize how small a man he was, until someone tall stood close to him.” Though generally negligent about his appearance, Octavian was sensitive about his height and had his footgear made with “rather thick soles to make him look taller.” His body was dotted with birthmarks, which his flatterers in later years proclaimed were configured like the constellation of the Great Bear. He also apparently suffered from gallstones all his life and had “a weakness in his left hip, thigh and leg, which occasionally gave him the suspicion of a limp.” This perhaps explains why “he loathed people who were dwarfish or in any way deformed, regarding them as freaks of nature and bringers of bad luck.” His red-blond hair was curly and unkempt and, in later years, to save time, he “would have two or three barbers working hurriedly on it together.”
Immediately on learning of Caesar’s death—Atia wrote to him on the very evening of the murder—Octavian left Apollonia in Macedonia, where he had been training with Caesar’s troops for the Parthian campaign and, in his spare time, studying Greek literature. Though his mother urged him to come at once, she also warned him to be cautious. He slipped across the Adriatic, landing on a deserted beach south of Brundisium. After sending members of his retinue ahead to check that all was well, he made his way to the town where, to an earsplitting welcome from the garrison, he learned for the first time that he had become Caesar’s adopted son and heir to both his name and his fortune.
Yet Octavian allowed neither the crowd’s adulation nor the news of his inheritance to go to his head. Only the omnipresent blotches on his skin, which modern doctors suggest were produced by nervous eczema, betrayed his anxieties. He mastered any youthful impulse to dash straight to Rome. Instead, showing the same cool ability for political analysis and calculation that would one day make him emperor, he decided first to call on Cicero and other influential republicans, who had removed themselves from the capital until things quieted down, to assess their feelings toward him. Cicero did not give him a particularly warm welcome. He had loathed Caesar and was glad he was dead. He had no wish to entertain the ambitious great-nephew with the piercing gray-eyed gaze whom Caesar had been grooming since he was sixteen. “I cannot see how he can have his heart in the right place,” Cicero wrote, and made his feelings clear, refusing to address his visitor as “Gaius Julius Caesar,” as Octavian now wished to be called. Nevertheless, such was his vanity that, despite himself, Cicero found Octavian’s deference gratifying, writing, “The young man is quite devoted to me.”
Cicero was entirely wrong. To Octavian, he was an arrogant, cantankerous but potentially useful old man who probably had been complicit in Caesar’s murder. Visiting him had simply been prudent. Cicero had also misread Octavian as an inexperienced youth who would probably get his comeuppance in Rome, where there would be plenty of ambitious men to challenge the dictator’s heir. He had not discerned Octavian’s diamond-hard determination, belied as it was by the slender, almost puny body. As the historian Velleius Paterculus later put it, the self-contained Octavian was a man who “spurned mortal advice and preferred to aim at dangerous eminence rather than at safe obscurity.” To that extent, he was not so different from Cleopatra. She could have chosen “safe obscurity” rather than unrolling from a carpet at Caesar’s feet.
Octavian did not receive the comeuppance Cicero had anticipated. Knowing the excitement and interest it would cause, he planned his arrival in Rome in late April 44 with care. To avoid any seeming arrogance or presumption, he separated from most of his followers and entered the city with only a few attendants. Yet, according to Suetonius, his arrival in Rome did not go unmarked—a shimmering, rainbow-like halo ringed the sun, though the skies were clear. Many took it as an omen from the gods of great things to come.*
Octavian had intentionally chosen to arrive while Antony was away attending to the resettlement of large groups of Caesar’s veterans in Campania. As soon as Antony marched back into Rome, Octavian requested an interview. The young man’s arrival put Antony in a quandary. Until now Antony had been the acknowledged leader of the Caesarians but also had managed to hold the Senate. He had achieved a delicate balance, but if Octavian began to press for vengeance against Caesar’s murderers, maintaining that equilibrium would become impossible. If he openly supported Octavian, he risked alienating much of the Senate and, of course, the Liberators and their factions, while if he refused, he would anger Caesar’s friends and veterans. Antony therefore must have reasoned that he needed metaphorically to play for time, both to think and to assess his potential rival. He did so clumsily, at their first meeting literally keeping Octavian waiting in an anteroom. When he was finally ushered in, Antony was blunt and dismissive and, when Octavian asked him to hand over Caesar’s papers and money, downright unhelpful. Falling back on technicalities, he argued that Octavian’s adoption as Caesar’s son had not yet been formalized and that separating out Caesar’s money from public funds would take time.
Off to a bad start, the relationship between the two men, who should have had much in common, would soon get much worse. On a personal level, Antony was probably suspicious of the motives of the young Octavian and jealous of him. Caesar had named Antony, his most trusted commander, as one of several secondary heirs, while Octavian had inherited nearly everything. Antony’s resentment of Octavian may explain why he soon began a propaganda campaign against Octavian to denigrate his lineage and diminish his dignity. He alleged that one of his great-grandfathers “had been only a freedman, a ropemaker . . . and his grandfather a money-changer.” Another great-grandfather, Antony sneered, had kept a bakehouse and a perfumery. Antony would also deploy the usual Roman smear tactics of accusing Octavian of playing the passive role in a homosexual relationship, alleging that “Julius Caesar made him submit to unnatural practices as the price of adoption.” Antony’s brother, not to be outdone in accusations of unmanliness, claimed that Octavian “used to soften the hairs on his legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells.” A desire to diminish Octavian’s unique relationship to Caesar and thus his status may also explain why, if Suetonius is correct, Antony told the Senate “that Caesar had, in fact, acknowledged Caesarion’s paternity.”
Yet for the moment, the quiet-spoken albeit insistent Octavian seemed a less immediate threat than did Caesar’s murderers and certain to support any move against them. Antony was particularly worried what would happen when the Liberators took command of the provinces and the armies assigned to them before Caesar’s death, fearing that they might use them as power bases to gather forces and money for a move on Rome. One of them, Decimus Brutus, was already in Cisalpine Gaul and thus in control of the key northern gateway into Italy. In early June, Antony managed, through a vote in the popular assembly, to strip him of the province and have himself appointed governor in his place for the next five years. This angered the Senate, who thought it their right to control provincial appointments and jealously guarded this prerogative. Antony also pressured the Senate into giving Brutus and Cassius special commissions to oversee Rome’s corn supplies from Asia and Sicily rather than their assigned provinces. This was exile under another name. The two men were left angered and humiliated but could not decide how to assert themselves. Cicero at around this time went to an inconclusive council of war attended by Cassius, Brutus and their wives at which Brutus’ mother, Servilia, played a key role. Her promise to use her still considerable influence at least to get the corn commissions revoked was one of the few actions agreed upon. Cicero wondered why he had bothered to go, commenting, “I found the ship breaking up, or rather already wrecked. No plan, no thought, no method.”
Octavian, however, did have method and probably a greater certainty about his long-term goals than any other of the Roman leaders. He began to build alliances and to pressure and undermine Antony, who, he claimed with justice, was obstructing the legislation that would ratify his adoption by Caesar. He also claimed that Antony had helped himself to money belonging either to himself, as Caesar’s heir, or to the Roman treasury and now would not, or could not, free the money to honor Caesar’s bequests. In July, Octavian staged lavish games in his adoptive father’s honor and used the occasion to fulfill Caesar’s legacy to the people of Rome, stipulated in his will, of three hundred sesterces a man. Octavian made abundantly clear to the public that he was paying this from his own purse, although he may in fact have used some of the contents of Caesar’s war chest for the Parthian campaign, which he was said to have seized on his way to Rome. He also attempted to display the golden throne and wreath that the Senate had granted Caesar. Seemingly anxious to avoid a confrontation between the Caesarian and anti-Caesarian factions by Octavian’s glorifying of Caesar, Antony refused to allow even this, causing the crowds to bellow their disapproval.
Popular anger against Antony mounted when, for seven evenings in a row, a bright comet flared in the sky to the north, as if symbolizing the spirit of the divine Caesar elevated to heaven.* To ensure people did not forget the portent, Octavian ordered a flaming star to be placed on the forehead of Caesar’s statue. “You, boy, you owe everything to your name,” Antony taunted Octavian. But the boy was quietly outflanking the man in the propaganda war to which Roman politics had descended, making every use of his name to stake his claim to be Caesar’s political as well as personal heir.
Whatever the two protagonists said in public, it must have been obvious to them both that they coveted the same thing—to succeed Julius Caesar as the most powerful man in Rome. Each may have had his own ideas about how such power should be deployed and it also must have been obvious that a confrontation was not far away.
Perhaps influenced by Servilia’s behind-the-scenes lobbying and with Octavian becoming ever more aggressive, Antony decided to conciliate the Liberators. He may well have recognized that, in any contest for the leadership of the hard-line Caesarians alone, he would be likely to lose out to Octavian and that therefore his best chance of success lay in capturing the middle ground. Accordingly, to find somewhere they could go with honor but where they would pose little threat to stability, in late July Antony convinced the Senate to award Brutus the governorship of Crete and Cassius the governorship of Cyrenaica. He addressed the Senate with such silkily conciliatory words that, learning of them, Cicero abandoned a proposed journey to Athens to visit his son, who was studying there. Instead he turned his steps back toward Rome, hoping but perhaps not expecting to find a less aggressively autocratic Antony acknowledging the authority of the Senate.
However, Antony’s conciliatory tactics, by giving his critics courage to speak out, backfired. When the Senate met on August 1, Caesar’s father-in-law, Piso, who had once offered to mediate between Caesar and Pompey, lambasted Antony for dictatorial behavior and fraudulent use of Caesar’s papers. Suspecting the hand of Brutus and Cassius behind the attack, Antony tossed aside the velvet glove and, in an instant reversal of tactics, immediately issued a consular edict threatening Brutus and Cassius with force for reneging on various official responsibilities. He also wrote them an aggressive letter. Their reply of August 4 was equally mettlesome. “We are amazed that you are so little able to control your animosity that you reproach us with the death of Caesar,” they said self-righteously before themselves issuing an implicit threat by noting that Caesar had not lived long once he began to play the king. By late August 44 both Brutus and Cassius had abandoned Italy, not for the provinces they had been allocated but for Macedonia and Syria.
Cicero reached Rome in time to attend a Senate meeting called by Antony on September 1 and was cheered by the crowds as he entered the city. One of Antony’s purposes in summoning the Senate was to propose a special day to honor Julius Caesar each year, an overt bid to woo the pro-Caesarean party and anathema to Cicero. Weary from his journey and wanting time to assess the situation, the sixty-two-year-old stayed away from the Senate. Interpreting his absence as a slight to his dignity, Antony threatened to pull Cicero’s house down and did not attend the Senate himself the following day. Cicero, however, did and launched the first of a series of increasingly vitriolic attacks on Antony, which he nicknamed the “Philippics.”*
To the old statesman, any means of attack was valid. Antony had become to him as great a menace to the republic and its traditions of senatorial authority as any Catiline or Caesar. Cicero used the Philippics to detail Antony’s supposed sexual depravities, calling him “a public whore” and raking up his affair with Curio, in which he alleged Antony had been the shameful, passive partner. His assault embraced Fulvia, whom he portrayed as a malignant influence, just as she had been on his old enemy, her previous husband, Clodius. “Life is not merely a matter of breathing,” he lectured an uncertain Senate. “The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude—but our city is not.” Liberty, he insisted, was worth dying for. Lathering himself into self-righteous indignation, he pilloried Antony as a drunken, vomiting, womanizing wastrel who, hell-bent on his own glory, continued to abuse the constitution and the Senate.
Antony withdrew to his villa in the country to consider his response. On September 19 he marched into the Senate, “not to speak but as usual spew up his words,” as Cicero sneered to Cassius. Cicero himself was not there to hear Antony’s accusations of how, when Cicero was consul, he had put citizens to death without trial after the Catiline conspiracy, including Antony’s own stepfather, and had set Caesar and Pompey at one another’s throats.
Cicero bided his time. He knew that what people feared most was a bloodbath and that Antony’s strength was that he offered stability to a Rome still dazed by events and demoralized by memories of civil war. Cicero needed to find an alternative figurehead, and his gaze fell on the slender, sharp-eyed young man whom several months earlier he had snubbed—Octavian. Over the next few months the two would become allies of expedience. Octavian would conveniently forget, for the time being at least, that Cicero had celebrated Caesar’s murder, while the elder statesman would flatter himself that, whatever Octavian’s unfortunate forebears, he was an intelligent, impressionable young man who could be molded in a more republican image, a man infinitely better than that “gladiator looking for a massacre,” as he had derided Antony.
Caesar’s heir was by now locked in a tribal dance with Antony as complex as any internal power struggles of the Ptolemies. Alarmed by Antony’s breach with the Senate and his growing hostility toward Octavian, Antony’s officers pleaded with him to avoid an open break. He responded by staging a public reconciliation with Octavian on the Capitol. But just two days later came sensational news of a plot orchestrated by Octavian to murder Antony. Octa-vian probably correctly vigorously protested his innocence and claimed it was all a conspiracy to discredit him. Nevertheless, on October 9, claiming his life was at risk, Antony departed for Brundisium with Fulvia to greet the four legions he had summoned home from Macedonia to enable him to oust Decimus Brutus from Cisalpine Gaul. As his officers feared, he was becoming isolated and hence vulnerable to his enemies.
Cicero, who was among the first, most vindictive and influential of these, accused Antony of planning first to bribe the legions and then to bring them to Rome “to subjugate us.” Octavian, though, was the one doing the bribing, sending agents to Brundisium equipped with propaganda leaflets intended to vilify Antony and buy the legionaries over to him. He also traveled around Campania with carts brimming with money, recruiting his own troops. This was entirely illegal, since he did so without the Senate’s authority, but Octavian’s lavish offers of more than two years’ pay up front soon attracted three thousand eager volunteers from the colonies of Caesar’s veterans.
Antony, meanwhile, was having a hard time in Brundisium with the legionaries newly arrived from Macedonia. Soldiers throughout this period rightly sensed they had more to gain in terms of payments, pensions and plunder from a single strong man than from the diffuse rule of the Senate, but they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Antony in the role of a strong, independent leader. Why had he weakly allowed their beloved Caesar’s assassins to go free? they demanded. And, less nobly, why was the bounty he was offering them so much less than what Octavian was promising his recruits? So dangerous was the situation that Antony had lists of the dissenters drawn up and ordered those whose names were randomly selected from amongst them by lot to be battered to death in front of himself and Fulvia. So close was she standing that blood spattered her face. Having, as he thought, quelled the mutiny, Antony sent three legions north and hurried back to Rome with the remaining legion, the elite “Larks,” to take firm control of the city and then to deal with Octavian and his illegal army by whatever means necessary.
Learning of Antony’s advance, Octavian was sufficiently alarmed to send repeated and urgent messages to Cicero asking what to do, even offering to lead the republicans in a war against Antony. After some agonizing, Cicero stilled any doubts he had about his ability to control Octavian and advised him to take his men to Rome as fast as possible, believing, as he wrote to a friend, he would “have the city rabble behind him and respectable opinion too if he convinces them of his sincerity.” Octavian reached the city before Antony, on November 10, and camped on the Campus Martius outside its walls. Here he addressed his forces, damning Antony while lauding his adoptive father, Caesar. However, his veteran recruits had marched to Rome under the impression they were to fight against the Liberators. Antony, they protested, had been loyal to Caesar, just as he had been to the soldiers he commanded. Appian related how some, disillusioned and upset, “asked if they could return to their homes.” Helpless to stop his new army from breaking up, Octavian watched as at least two thirds of his force melted away. In despair, he withdrew the remnants north.
Antony arrived with his Larks several days later. Delighted that Octavian had put himself so clearly in the wrong by flouting the law and bringing the forces he had raised illegally to Rome, he ordered the Senate to meet on November 24, declaring that any senator who was absent would be considered a traitor. He heaped more verbal ordure on Octavian’s head. Caesar’s heir was, he said, provincial, effete and the descendant of manual laborers—all deep insults to a Roman of his time and class. Antony even contemplated trying to declare Octavian an enemy of the state, but while he pondered whether he would win sufficient support for this drastic step, alarming reports reached him that two of his Macedonian legions, including the veteran Martian legion still smarting from Antony’s treatment of them at Brundisium, had deserted to Octavian, seeing him as the more likely to avenge Caesar and reward them well. Thus they readjusted the balance of power once again.
Accordingly, Antony decided to set off for Cisalpine Gaul to dislodge Decimus Brutus. Once in control of this strategically important province, he reasoned, he could retrench and deal with his other enemies. Before leaving, on November 28 Antony again summoned the Senate, this time to what was a highly irregular evening meeting, at which he reallocated the provinces between his supporters. A number of senators and wealthy citizens, unnerved by Octavian’s recent illegal and bellicose acts, so reminiscent of Caesar at his most dictatorial, swore their allegiance to Antony and bade him a reluctant farewell as he marched north. According to Appian, “He got a splendid send-off.”
The news filtering through to Cleopatra during those months must have been as confused and fragmented as the situation itself. For the moment, with the three-year-old Caesarion by her side on the throne as Ptolemy XV Caesar, she could concentrate only on strengthening her hold on the country. The fact that no serious unrest seems to have occurred during her absence in Rome suggests that her authority had not been challenged and that her officials had governed well.
Cleopatra was fortunate to have inherited a centralized, sophisticated and efficient system of land management, which had survived down the centuries since the time of Ptolemy I and provided stability. Officials graded all agricultural land according to its productivity. The choicest land was allocated to the crown, then leased back to the peasants under strict rules about which crops to cultivate, when to sow, when to reap, how much to hand over to the government as rent and how much seed corn to retain. The headman of each village supervised the farmers, reporting to a hierarchy of Greek and Macedonian officials, at whose apex was Cleopatra—the country’s greatest farmer, industrialist and merchant.
These arrangements ensured an annual stream of grain into the royal granaries. After supplying the needs of the population, Cleopatra, who held the monopoly in grain production and sale, could dispose of surpluses on the world market. Her other monopolies included olive oil (a vital commodity used in everything from food production to skin care and lighting), salt, perfume, the brewing of beer, and the tall, triangular-stemmed and feathery papyrus that grew in dense, bright green thickets in the swamplands of the Nile delta.
“No one has the right to do what he wishes,” an early Ptolemaic decree had informed Egypt’s citizens, “but everything is organized for the best.” However, Rome’s new conflicts would not leave Egypt and its well-regulated administration untroubled for much longer and Cleopatra would once again be forced to take sides.