Half a world away from the Hellespont bridges and the Athenian long walls, the ancient Chinese, knowing nothing of Xerxes or Pericles, were preparing a manual on aligning aspirations with capabilities. Sun Tzu may have been one person or many and The Art of War could have been compiled over several centuries: in that sense, it’s more like Homer than Herodotus or Thucydides. But the Greek epics and histories depict distinctive events and individuals. They leave it to us to draw lessons.
Sun Tzu, in contrast, sets forth principles, selected for validity across time and space, and then connects them to practices, bound by time and space. The Art of War, therefore, is neither history nor biography. It’s a compilation of precepts, procedures—and categorical claims: “If a general who heeds my strategy is employed, he is certain to win. Retain him! When one who refuses to listen to my strategy is employed, he is certain to be defeated. Dismiss him!”
That’s straightforward enough, but what’s the strategy? “The nature of water is that it avoids heights and hastens to the lowlands,” Master Sun tells us. “[T]he nature of logs and stones is that on stable ground they are static; on unstable ground, they move. If square, they stop; if round, they roll.” And, more succinctly: “Do not gobble proffered baits.” Sun Tzu might as well have advised us, with Shakespeare’s Polonius, to “neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Or, from Marketing 101, to “buy low and sell high.”
Except that history is full of borrowers and lenders who bought high but had to sell low. They disengaged their practices from their principles. They couldn’t resist proffered baits. What look like platitudes, in The Art of War, are in fact tethers, meant to prevent such separations. “[T]he shape of an army resembles water,” Sun Tzu goes on to explain. If you attack where your enemy least expects it—if you “avoid his strength and strike his emptiness”—then, “like water, none can oppose you.” Logs and stones illustrate leverage: “[O]ne need use but little strength to achieve much.” And on proffering: “The fish which covets bait is caught; troops who covet bait are defeated.”1
Polonius’s pontifications float freely above landscapes, which is why Hamlet mocks him:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.2
Sun Tzu would never put up with this. He lures lightning from thunderstorms with kite, string, and key. He grounds each precept in some crackling sharp reality. He tethers what’s obvious to what’s much less so: how states, without defeating themselves, can win wars.
“Having paid heed to the advantages of my plans,” Master Sun advises, generals “should act expediently in accordance with what is advantageous.” The tautology itself tethers, for the “advantages” of which he writes lie in the “advantageous” situations that make leverage possible. Wise leaders will seek these out. They’ll sail with winds, not against them. They’ll skirt swamps, not slog through them. They’ll avoid battles until they’re sure they can win them. They’ll try to benefit from the absence in life—if not in games—of level playing fields. They’ll understand the futility, as my Naval War College students used to like to put it, of “shoveling shit uphill.”
“War is a matter of vital importance to the State,” Sun Tzu warns, not to be embarked upon “without due reflection.” Xerxes and Alcibiades didn’t reflect. Artabanus and Nicias did so unduly. Master Sun reflects but then acts, deploying maximum leverage against minimal resistance. Success comes as quickly as the least expenditure of resources and lives allows. “Know the enemy, know yourself,” The Art of War exhorts. “Know the ground, know the weather. Your victory will then be total.”3
But wouldn’t that require knowing everything before you could do anything? Artabanus had no answer when Xerxes asked, but Sun Tzu does: simplicity, he shows, coexists with complexity and can guide us through it.
The musical notes are only five in number, but their melodies are so numerous that one cannot hear them all. The primary colors are only five in number but their combinations are so infinite that one cannot visualize them all. The flavors are only five in number but their blends are so various that one cannot taste them all. In battle there are only the normal and extraordinary forces, but their combinations are limitless; none can comprehend them all.4
No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities, though, is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. Sun Tzu seeks sense—even common sense—by tethering principles, which are few, to practices, which are many. He fits the mix to the moment, as if setting sound levels on a synthesizer, or color combinations on a computer screen. He leaves enough options to satisfy any fox, while retaining the purposefulness of a hedgehog. He keeps opposing ideas in his mind by projecting them across time, space, and scale.
Leadership in The Art of War, then, is seeing simplicities in complexity. Some realities are as easily grasped as Sun Tzu’s five fundamental sounds, colors, and flavors: that’s how we know their nature. But when simplicities mix, complexities become endless. No matter how thoroughly we prepare, they’ll always surprise us. If tethered to principles, however, they need not paralyze us. And how might you learn to tether? By having great teachers, I think, for tethering is what they have us do.
I.
For someone with so many names—Caius Octavius Thurinus, Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Imperator Caesar Divi Filius, Imperator Caesar Augustus Divi Filius, Imperator Caesar Augustus Divi Filius Pater Patriae—he started out with relatively little. He was born into the family of a respectable but forgettable Roman senator in 63 B.C.E. By the time he was twenty, he was a third of a ruling triumvirate. He became at thirty-two the most powerful man in the “western” world. He died peacefully at seventy-six in a bed he’d selected, an extraordinary accomplishment for an emperor of that era—all the more so for his never having used that title. His life fed rumors, long before his death, that strange signs had preceded his birth: even an unusual if not immaculate conception (something about a snake). In fact, though—apart from a teacher’s timely launch—the kid made it mostly on his own.5
The Greeks had Chiron the centaur instructing Achilles and other epic heroes: the Romans got by, well enough, with Julius Caesar. His conquests had doubled, within two decades, the size of their “republic’s” empire.6 His histories, two thousand years later, elicit readership and respect. After crossing the Rubicon—the real one—in 49, he became Rome’s paramount leader, determined to restore order after a half century of civil wars. But Caesar, then in his fifties, had little time left, as Plutarch puts it, to “outdo his past actions by his future.” His haste made him, on March 15, 44, the most famous assassination victim ever. Caesar’s life and death, therefore, were exemplary. He taught what to do and what not to do.7
Caesar had no living legitimate children, but he did have Octavian, a promising great-nephew, to whom he’d awarded the Roman equivalent of an internship. Octavian’s assignment was to “shadow” Caesar around Rome, then join him in Spain on what turned out to be his last military campaign. The young man handled the proximity well, always observing, never presuming, building his résumé and stamina—his health was always delicate—for what Caesar might next have in mind. Octavian was training for an offensive against the Parthians when word reached him, in Macedonia, of the murder in Rome two weeks earlier. He was only eighteen. “We will talk later,” the novelist John Williams imagines him telling disconsolate friends. “Now I must think of what this will mean.”8
His first decision was to return to Rome without knowing who was in charge or how he’d be received. The stakes skyrocketed when he learned, after landing near Brundisium, that Caesar’s will had made him an heir and—by adoption—a son. He reached the capital as Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus,9 and out of respect for their martyred leader the legions he encountered took his new status seriously. Octavian could have blown the opportunity by coming across as a twerp. But he saw the difference, even then, between inheriting a title and mastering the art of command. The first can happen overnight. The second can take a lifetime.
Octavian never explained how he learned this, but with the privilege of closely observing the greatest of all commanders, he’d had to have been a blockhead not to pick up something. Sun Tzu, untranslated in Europe for another eighteen centuries, suggests what it might have been:
If wise, a commander is able to recognize changing circumstances and to act expediently. If sincere, his men will have no doubt of the certainty of rewards and punishments. If humane, he loves mankind, sympathizes with others, and appreciates their industry and toil. If courageous, he gains victory by seizing opportunity without hesitation. If strict, his troops are disciplined because they are in awe of him and are afraid of punishment.10
Caesar, in turn, appears never to have explained to Octavian why he was being taught.11 That spared him the hang-ups of knowing he’d be son, heir, and commander. Rome’s Chiron tethered a student who had little sense of being tethered. The constraint conveyed instruction and liberation.12
II.
Octavian would need both if he were to go beyond just taking the cheers of his great-uncle’s legions. His own stepfather thought it too dangerous to accept Caesar’s inheritance or title. Cicero, the famous orator and a family friend, considered both undeserved. Even Mark Antony, who made Rome uncomfortable for Caesar’s assassins, tried to do the same for the “boy” who had taken Caesar’s name. In his capacity as consul, Antony withheld the bequest Caesar had left to the citizens of the city, and kept Octavian waiting when—without success—he came to protest.
His response was to leverage limited assets. Octavian pledged his own wealth to the Romans and, when this proved insufficient, borrowed to provide more. The risk paid off, making Antony look cheap. It was easier to turn Cicero, a well-known weather vane. He loved flattery and Octavian gave it freely, even though Cicero had welcomed Caesar’s assassination. For Cicero also hated Antony, and it was useful to have him denouncing the consul on a more epic scale—the Philippics, fourteen furious speeches in the Roman senate—than Octavian could ever have managed. His chief preoccupation during the summer of 44 was staging Caesar’s funeral games, unexpectedly under a comet. It was not a bad omen, Octavian acrobatically assured the Romans: it was his great-uncle’s soul ascending to immortality.13
Agility too, however, could go only so far: Octavian’s longer-term prospects required retaining the loyalty of Caesar’s armies and he’d as yet little military experience. Antony was no Caesar, but he had a lot. What he lacked was Octavian’s skill in taking initiatives, setting up sequences, and benefiting accordingly.14 Drawing on his Macedonian ties, Octavian seized the funds Caesar had reserved for the offensive—now canceled—against the Parthians. He then sent agents with bonuses to greet troops disembarking at Brundisium. Caught off guard, Antony rushed there, failed to match the largesse, lost his temper, and ordered decimations: arbitrary executions of every tenth man in several units. The bloodshed restored discipline, but with such resentment that the Macedonian legions defected, as soon as they got the chance, to the man they were now coming to regard, in name and in fact, as the new Caesar.15
Octavian was less than half Antony’s age, but he was the far shrewder judge of character. He made himself a foil for the older man’s flaws: massive debts, sexual promiscuity, public drunkenness, explosive volatility.16 Caesar’s heir was no prude and he certainly had a temper, but he sensed the need for self-control—Antony rarely did. Nor was Antony ever quite sure what he wanted. He’d known of, but not participated in, the assassination plot. He hoped to rule Rome, but hadn’t decided what he’d do with it if he had it. He allowed drift and depravities to deprive him of purpose. Octavian in contrast focused, from the moment Caesar’s will let him know who he was, on avenging his “father’s” death, on completing Rome’s rehabilitation, and on not winding up in a bloody heap on the senate floor.17
III.
That required self-assessment, a skill not even Caesar mastered—hence the bloody heap—which Octavian with difficulty acquired. Shortly after his return from Macedonia he mistook the acclaim of Caesar’s veterans for a mandate to march on Rome, as the great general himself had earlier done. But Octavian’s Rubicon was not yet in sight: his troops refused to fight Antony’s, and the Romans weren’t ready to welcome a teenage dictator. The fiasco humiliated Octavian. He’d try harder, henceforth, to keep his enthusiasms within his competencies.
He’d known, since childhood, that he got sick easily. What he hadn’t known, until it was almost too late, was that something like this also happened before battles.18 Perhaps it was physical, perhaps psychological, but it looked like cowardice. Octavian first experienced the problem at the first battle in which he participated, near Mutina, in northern Italy, in April 43. He’d merged his forces with those supporting Cicero and the senate to take on Antony, still a formidable figure. Rome’s new consuls Hirtius and Pansa led their legions courageously and would die from their wounds, as would many of Octavian’s men. He on the first day, however, was conspicuously invisible. No one, even now, is sure why.
Octavian recognized quickly, though, that this wouldn’t do. And so on the second day he rallied himself and his troops, led them through enemy lines, retrieved Hirtius’ body as well as a lost standard, and forced Antony to withdraw. With one consul dead, the other dying, and his adversary fleeing, Octavian achieved, through sheer will, a victory worthy of Caesar himself. He didn’t rush back to Rome, however, to claim his triumph. He waited until he was sure of support from the deceased consuls’ legions—and until Antony, now in Gaul, had had time to regroup. Then Octavian crossed his Rubicon with an army that respected him, reinforced by another, more distant, that Cicero and his fellow senators had reason to fear. Octavian only at that point claimed the consulship, the most powerful position in Rome. He was not yet twenty.19
From this position of strength, Octavian worried about his weaknesses. To run Rome was not to control its empire. Antony, despite Mutina, remained unchallenged in Gaul. Caesar’s assassins Cassius and Marcus Brutus were recruiting armies in Syria and Macedonia. Sextus Pompeius, the son of Caesar’s old adversary Pompey, had seized Sicily. The Roman senate itself, where the conspiracy against Caesar had been hatched, could do anything if not carefully watched. Self-assessment for the triumphant Octavian, then, suggested the need for help, even if from distasteful sources. For as one of his biographers has pointed out: “To remove a rival was to remove a potential ally.”20
IV.
He started with Antony, on an island in a river near Mutina, in the fall of 43. Octavian, with his legions, marched north from Rome while Antony, with his, proceeded south from Gaul, bringing along Lepidus, a complaisant former consul.21 Together they had more troops than Octavian, but he demanded equal treatment. And so, as their guards watched warily from both banks, the three warlords—one barely beyond adolescence—divided most of the world they knew.22
To Octavian’s disadvantage, it might at first seem. Antony got the best parts of Gaul, Lepidus took Spain and the routes from Italy to it, and Octavian had to content himself with Sardinia, Sicily, and the African coast, where he’d have to fight Sextus Pompeius. Octavian also gave up his consulship, allowing the triumvirate to rule Rome. At this stage, however, status meant more than substance. He preferred, from an inferior position, to be one of three: ruling alone could await superiority. Meanwhile, there were scores to settle.
While on the island, Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian exchanged names of prominent Romans to be killed, their properties seized, and their families exiled. The most prominent of those “proscribed” was Cicero, who’d always talked too much. Despite his sensitivity to the way winds blew, he’d infuriated Antony with the Philippics. That triumvir didn’t just have the orator executed: he had Cicero’s head, along with the hand that had drafted the speeches, nailed to the rostrum in the Roman Forum.23
It’s unlikely that Octavian would have ordered such a display, but it’s equally unlikely that he tried to prevent it. Cicero had swung around to praising him publicly as a promising youth, but couldn’t help hinting privately that so inexperienced a leader could always be discarded if necessary. The suggestion got back to Octavian, who filed it for future reference.24 With Antony now an ally, he had no further need for Cicero’s Philippics, or his applause, or his indiscretions. Which is to say that Octavian had no further need of Cicero.
The triumvirate’s next priority was to proscribe Brutus and Cassius, but that would require their military defeat. In a strange echo of Cicero, the battle took place at Philippi, in Thrace, in the fall of 42.25 Antony commanded for the triumvirate while Lepidus stayed behind to run Rome. Octavian disembarked his legions in Macedonia but immediately fell ill, reaching the battlefield only on a litter. From an unfavorable position and against fortified lines, Antony surprised Cassius and then Brutus, leading each to commit suicide. The only triumvir capable of commanding had achieved a complete victory.
Furious with himself, Octavian lashed out at others. He humiliated and even executed captives. After Antony honored Brutus’ corpse, Octavian is said to have desecrated it, sending the head back to Rome to be placed before his great-uncle’s statue—fortunately it sank in a shipwreck on the way. Octavian himself, upon his return, found the city’s citizens cowering, for fear of what he might do next. Too old now to be an immature tyrant, he was nonetheless behaving like one.26
V.
But Octavian regained self-control, partly through an improvised show of resolve, partly by getting help, and partly with a more disciplined resort to brutality. Antony stayed in the east after Philippi, ostensibly to resume Caesar’s campaign against the Parthians, but probably also to dodge the responsibility of distributing land, in Italy, to soldiers whose service was no longer needed. That task fell to Octavian, and there was no way he could perform it without infuriating the landowners displaced or the veterans disappointed. Meanwhile, Sextus Pompeius, from his Sicilian base, was slowly shutting down Rome’s grain supply from across the Mediterranean.
The crunch came one day in 41 when Octavian was late for a meeting with recently discharged soldiers. Angered by the delay, they slaughtered a centurion who’d tried to keep order. Octavian arrived, viewed the body, asked the men to behave better in the future, and proceeded to hand out allocations. His calm so shamed the former troops that they demanded the murderers’ punishment. Octavian agreed, but only on the condition that the perpetrators acknowledge their guilt, and that the veterans approve their sentences. He’d called forth courage and composure in a dangerous situation—qualities not evident after Philippi—and so began his own reputational rehabilitation.27
That led Antony’s wife Fulvia and his brother Lucius to try to depose Octavian before he won too much support. Lucius seized the fortified town of Perusia in central Italy, while Fulvia recruited troops in and around Rome. Still in the east, Antony knew what was happening but was distracted, having proclaimed himself the new Dionysius, dressed the part, and fallen in love with Cleopatra of Egypt, with whom Caesar had had a protracted affair. Antony claimed to be raising funds for the offensive against the Parthians and to be securing Rome’s food: Egypt had no shortage of gold or grain.28 But he handed Octavian an opportunity.
Knowing now that he was no battlefield commander, Octavian turned over the siege at Perusia to Quintus Salvidienus Rufus and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, two friends who’d been with him in Macedonia at the time of Caesar’s assassination. They quickly forced Lucius’ surrender, while Fulvia’s armies simply melted away. Octavian had the sense this time to delegate his authority, not to try to exercise it where he doubted his own competence.29
He had no such doubts when it came to deterrence. Determined to prevent any further rebellions, Octavian brought three hundred senatorial-rank prisoners back to Rome, condemned them to death, and had them sacrificed on the site of Caesar’s cremation. Such practices had long been suppressed, but Octavian broke the rules to make two points. He’d tolerate no further opposition from within the city. And he himself, by shedding blood in the center of Rome, could claim at last to have avenged Julius Caesar’s murder.30
VI.
The empire was now a duopoly—Octavian and Antony had sidetracked Lepidus in Africa—but its halves weren’t run in the same way. Octavian, in Rome, was learning what to do with power once he had it. Antony, still in the east and after Philippi the stronger of the two, was forgetting what he’d known about the same thing. Each still disliked the other; each trusted the other even less. One, however, retained a purpose and acted accordingly. The other, when he acted at all, reacted. It was no longer much of a contest.
Perusia revealed the pattern. Octavian first reconstituted respect in Rome by navigating the treacherous currents of land redistribution. He then won a battle by entrusting its conduct to others with superior military skills. Finally, he fortified his authority against further insurrections by publicly executing prominent rebels, an act of violence sufficiently precise in its victims and clear in its intentions that it prevented more violence. Octavian was thinking ahead: how one decision can be made to affect what happens next.
Antony wasn’t. The latest division of the empire had given him all of Gaul, but he was in Greece, preparing to move—in the opposite direction—against the Parthians. Suddenly his governor in Gaul died. Octavian, who from Rome was much closer, rushed there and took command of eleven legions. It was a direct challenge to Antony, who put off the Parthians, ordered his armies back to Italy, and began arranging with Sextus Pompeius a land and sea offensive that would wipe out Octavian altogether.
But Antony brought more ships than he needed and not enough men, for Octavian had also occupied Brundisium. He again fell ill before any battles took place, but this allowed time for troops on both sides to fraternize, and then to demand that their commanders make peace. At that point, Antony lost the resolve that had propelled him across the Adriatic: he abandoned Sextus, acknowledged Octavian’s authority in Gaul, and returned his attention to the Parthians. Not, however, before securing—or so he thought—the new settlement. His wife Fulvia having died shortly after her failed coup, Antony now married Octavia, the beloved sister of the “boy” with “only a name.”31
There’s no way Octavian could have planned all of this.32 He couldn’t have anticipated that angry veterans would kill a centurion, or that Fulvia and Lucius would rebel without Antony’s support, or that the governor of Gaul would die, or that Antony would miscalculate his logistics, or that his troops and Octavian’s would refuse to fight, or that Antony would reverse course and wed his sister. Unlike Pericles, Octavian never tried to forge, from contingent events, causal chains.33
Instead he seized opportunities while retaining objectives. He saw next steps where Antony stumbled. Octavian stuck to his compass heading while avoiding swamps: it’s almost as if Antony sought out swamps, sank into them, and then got bored with them. He was, Plutarch concludes, “full of empty flourishes and unsteady efforts for glory.”34
VII.
Which could hardly be said of Sextus Pompeius, the most formidable enemy Octavian ever faced. His father Pompey’s greatest achievement had been to suppress piracy throughout the Mediterranean, but Sextus saw its political uses and could revive it, from Sicily, whenever he wanted. That endangered Rome, because the city and its surroundings relied so heavily on food imports, mostly from Egypt. Sextus had the Romans, if not by their necks, then by their stomachs.
Antony’s reconciliation with Octavian gave Sextus a grievance, and by the end of 40, he’d blockaded Italy. That provoked a riot in Rome, which Octavian, recalling his success with the angry veterans, tried again to stare down. This time, though, he was pelted with stones and might have been killed had not Antony rushed in soldiers to rescue him. No one could doubt, any longer, Octavian’s bravery. But in proving it he’d risked his life—to be saved only by Antony’s lack of foresight. For this was his last chance to rid himself of, without assassinating, an exasperating rival.35
Negotiations with Sextus having failed, Octavian decided to invade Sicily and secure the supply routes permanently. He knew nothing about navies, though, and Sextus easily defeated the Roman fleets, one of which Octavian commanded. And so the ruler of half the empire found himself shipwrecked on the Italian side of the Strait of Messina with only a few other survivors, no food or supplies, and no means of summoning help except by lighting fires in the hills, hoping for the best. Fortunately a passing legion saw these and rescued Octavian, in time for him to watch a storm, on the next day, complete the destruction of his armada.36
But he appears not to have fallen ill, or to have despaired, or to have rethought taking Sicily. Instead he regrouped, secured the Italian coast against raids by Sextus, and placed Agrippa—just back from pacifying the Gauls—in charge of the next offensive. Twenty-four at the time, he had no greater nautical experience than Octavian. But where Octavian had come to rely, in crises, on simply showing resolve, Agrippa prepared on a scale worthy of Xerxes. He rearranged topography by linking two lakes, hidden by forested mountains, to the sea. The forests provided wood to build warships, the lakes became training facilities for crews, and the mountains hid it all from Sextus, who could only guess what was happening from offshore.37
It took two years, but by 36 Agrippa was ready. Three fleets would converge on Sicily: his own, another formed from ships Antony had supplied, and a third commanded by Lepidus sailing from Africa. The first two ran into storms, however, and only Lepidus successfully landed troops—whereupon he began collaborating with Sextus. Who had, again, surprised and humiliated Octavian: he wound up stranded this time on the Sicilian coast until his armies could find him. It was Octavian’s third rescue in as many years.
Agrippa, however, retained enough of his fleet to overwhelm that of Sextus, driving him into exile while leaving Lepidus, who had again switched sides, in charge of Sicily. Having suffered a long- overdue physical collapse, Octavian played no part in this battle, but he recovered in time to claim a symbolic victory. Suspecting that Lepidus had flipped once too often, Octavian appeared at his camp one day, alone and unarmed. He took some blows, shed blood, and began to retreat, but found the men following because they admired his audacity: this time he required no rescue. Lepidus could only surrender.38
So Octavian triumphed in Sicily after all, but more by show than through strategy: he repeatedly risked his life, while relying on Agrippa’s steady hand. Once he’d prevailed, though, Octavian steadied himself. He forced Lepidus from the triumvirate but allowed a dignified retirement—there were no executions or exhibitions of body parts. That left only Antony to contest Octavian’s rule over the Roman world. And Octavian had the good sense, this time, to let his adversary defeat himself.
VIII.
Having promised so often to fight the Parthians, Antony could no longer delay doing so.39 He began his campaign in 36, as Octavian and Agrippa were completing their conquest of Sicily. Antony relied, for supplies and funds, on his former and future lover Cleopatra, a greater delicacy than it might have been had he not married Octavian’s sister. Reasons of state could justify both relationships but only awkwardly, another problem Antony appears not to have anticipated. That he and Cleopatra had had twins made the situation no simpler. Nor did Cleopatra’s claim, probably true, that she was the mother of Julius Caesar’s only biological son: the young man’s name, dangerously, was Caesarion.40
If Antony juggled mistresses, matrimony, and politics badly, the same was true of his military operations against the Parthians. He started too late to finish before winter, then accidentally revealed his plans to a spy, then failed to ensure the loyalty of allies along the way, and finally left his supply train so inadequately guarded that the Parthians destroyed it. He had no choice, at that point, but to order a costly retreat through snowstorms to the Syrian coast, where Cleopatra took her time re-equipping him. Antony reported to Rome, though, that all was well.
Octavian didn’t believe this, but took Antony at his word. He ordered victory celebrations, knowing that these would discredit his rival all the more than if he seemed to be welcoming Antony’s defeats. He then withheld reinforcements, citing Antony’s dispatches as evidence that he didn’t need them. Octavian did send Octavia with supplies from Greece, though, counting on her arrival alongside those from Cleopatra to complicate the situation still further. Antony took the replenishments but ordered Octavia back to Rome, fueling rumors of a revived affair with the Egyptian queen. Octavian chose not to deflate these, trusting that Antony, through self-inflation, would confirm them soon enough.41
That happened when the word got out that Antony had deposited a will—supposedly inviolately—with Rome’s vestal virgins. Octavian demanded that they hand it over, and when they refused he seized it. The breach of tradition was shocking: Octavian gambled, however, that the will’s contents would be even more so, and he was right. It recognized Caesarion as Julius Caesar’s son and it conveyed Antony’s request, even if he died in Italy, to be buried beside Cleopatra in Egypt.
Antony was no longer Roman in the eyes of Romans: if he should ever rule the empire, they feared, it would cease to be Roman too.42 That was the final break. Octavian arranged it, Antony blundered into it, and it remained only for war to settle. This required a single significant battle, at sea off the Greek coast near Actium, in September of 31. Antony and Cleopatra placed their ships and armies in and around the harbor, but Octavian and Agrippa bottled them up, preventing resupply. Plagued by desertions, Antony lost most of his fleet trying to break out: he and Cleopatra then fled to Egypt with no further means of defense. Antony had given up everything, Plutarch records, “to follow her that so well had begun his ruin and would hereafter accomplish it.”43
Octavian took his time in pursuit, but in the summer of 30, he occupied Alexandria, meeting little resistance. Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide—he, clumsily, by dagger; she elegantly (if the legend is accurate) by asp.44 It remained only for Octavian to execute the unfortunate Caesarion, still a teenager, and to tour the great city, then much more impressive than Rome.45 To bring history full circle, Octavian paid his respects at the tomb of Alexander the Great. The coffin was opened, but while placing a crown on the embalmed corpse, the new ruler of the known world inadvertently knocked off the former ruler’s nose.46 The miscalculation didn’t much matter.
IX.
For Octavian never modeled himself on Alexander.47 The Macedonian learned limits only through failures. His troops had to tell him, just short of the Himalayas, that they could go no further. Octavian saw constraints while seeking successes, and on those few occasions when he did lose sight of them, quickly self-corrected. Strategy, therefore, came naturally: he rarely confused aspirations with capabilities. Alexander spent his life doing so, and didn’t long survive the realization that they weren’t the same. He died in Babylon—from exhaustion, illness, and disappointment—at thirty-three.48 Octavian was that age but only a third of the way through his career on the day in Alexandria, almost three centuries later, when he saw and subtracted from what was left of Alexander.
Octavian was fortunate, of course, to have survived his own illnesses and the many risks he ran, but he was also more careful than Alexander in deploying strengths and in compensating for weaknesses. “He who knows the art of the direct and the indirect approach will be victorious,” Sun Tzu writes, appearing as usual to cover all possibilities. But then he tethers: “Such is the art of maneuvering.”49
Direct approaches work, Master Sun suggests, only when capabilities approximate aspirations. Abundance allows all you want: there’s little need for maneuver. Most of the time, though, capabilities fall short—that was Octavian’s problem. Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver:
[W]hen capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far; when far away, that you are near. Offer an enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. . . . When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. . . . Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. . . . Keep him under a strain and wear him down.
Opposites held in mind simultaneously, thus, are “the strategist’s keys to victory.” It’s as if Sun Tzu pre-channels, however improbably, F. Scott Fitzgerald. But then the sage adds, as if to oppose—and tether—himself: “It is not possible to discuss them beforehand.”50
Victories must connect: otherwise they won’t lead anywhere. They can’t be foreseen, though, because they arise from unforeseen opportunities. Maneuvering, thus, requires planning, but also improvisation. Small triumphs in a single arena set up larger ones elsewhere, allowing weaker contenders to become stronger.51 And that brings us back to the young Octavian running circles around the befuddled Antony, leveraging limited assets until he could switch, at Actium, to a more direct approach.
X.
“[W]e have come a great long way,” a poet told Octavian, shortly after his return from Alexandria in the year 29. “The time has come to unyoke our steaming horses.”52 The poet was Virgil, the poem was the Georgics, and Octavian is said to have listened as the author and a few friends read it aloud, over several days, all 2,118 hexameters.53 This was no epic—The Aeneid would come later—and the occasion has so puzzled Octavian’s recent biographers that they’ve passed over it. Why would the most powerful man in the world sit still for instruction, at such length, on the rotation of crops, the nurturing of vines, the breeding of cattle, and the keeping of bees? John Buchan, an earlier biographer, suggested that Octavian was ready to slow down, to look around, and to think about how to use power now that he had no rivals. He was shifting from navigation to cultivation.54
The rising Octavian had spent a decade and a half fending off, buying out, circumventing, eliminating, or capitalizing on threats posed by Antony, Cicero, Cassius, Brutus, Fulvia, Lucius, Sextus, Lepidus, Cleopatra, and Caesarion, as well as Rome’s senate, its mobs, his sicknesses, storms and shipwrecks, even a comet. He did so resourcefully, but he wasn’t setting the pace. He kept seizing the initiative, losing it, and having to regain it. He couldn’t keep this up. No steaming horse runs forever.
After Actium, Octavian began controlling events, rather than letting them control him. He put off any new campaign against the Parthians. He placed local rulers—Herod in Judea was an example—in charge of difficult provinces. He settled veterans by giving them land and long-term support. He pleased Rome by accepting triumphs, staging games, and starting a building program meant to match Alexandria’s. But knowing the dangers of arrogance, he also affected modesty. He rushed through his triumphs instead of stretching them out, maintained less than luxurious living arrangements, and when returning from travel crept into the city to avoid elaborate welcomes. He secured authority by appearing to renounce it, most dramatically on the first day of 27 when he unexpectedly gave up all his responsibilities. The surprised senate had no choice but to forbid this and to award Octavian the title of princeps (“first citizen”)—as well as a new name: Augustus.55
What he was really doing was giving up the republic, but so gradually and with such tact—while displaying at every stage such self-evident benefits—that the Romans would adapt to and even embrace their new environment, hardly noticing how much it had changed. They themselves would become crops, vines, cattle, and bees. For unlike Xerxes, Pericles, Alexander, and Julius Caesar—not the least of whose gifts to Octavian had been to start him early—Caesar Augustus saw time as an ally. As the historian Mary Beard has pointed out, he didn’t need to abolish anything. He used time to grow things.56
One was a constitutional settlement renewing respect for the senate and the rule of law while retaining, as if in a soft glove, an iron fist. Another was imperial stabilization: the empire, Augustus announced, was large enough. Beyond a few boundary adjustments, it needn’t expand further. Still another was a national epic. Rome had no Homer, so the princeps provided one. The Aeneid, unlike The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a commissioned work. Augustus encouraged its composition, subsidized its author, and saved the manuscript from the flames when the dissatisfied Virgil, on his deathbed, asked to have it burned.
Aeneas is a prince of Troy who, after fleeing those flames and surviving countless tests, founds Rome, a city that becomes an empire favored by gods. He could be Octavian on his path to power, “his thoughts racing, here, there, probing his options, / shifting to this plan, that—as quick as flickering light.”57 But apart from a famous prophecy—“Son of a god, he will bring back the Age of Gold”58—Virgil says little about how Augustus might use power. The Aeneid looks to Rome’s past, not its future. It celebrates navigation, not cultivation.
Why, then, did the princeps see such value in planting—and preserving—this very long poem? “[T]he greatness of poetic perception,” the novelist Hermann Broch has him say to the dying poet, “and therefore your greatness, Virgil, lies in being able to grasp all of life . . . in a single survey, in a single work, in a single glance.” So are strategy and statecraft the ability to grasp interconnections? To know where you’ve been in order to see where you’re going? It’s hard to understand, otherwise, how an indirect approach—whether Odysseus’ twists and turns or Octavian’s probes and shifts—can ever reach Ithaca, or anywhere else. “[I]t will yet be part of my future fame,” Broch’s Augustus correctly concludes, “that I was the friend of Virgil.”59
XI.
There were some things, though, that even Augustus couldn’t control: one, sadly, was his own family. He understood, as had his great-uncle, that abandoning the republic would subject the empire to the uncertainties of inheritance. It seemed a reasonable bargain at the time, for Rome was more tolerant of divorce and adoption than most monarchies would later become. That would allow the cultivation of heirs—and opportunities to tether the most promising—without having to depend on who’d given birth to whom.60
Misfortune caught up with Augustus, though, in the breeding (the word isn’t too strong) of his own family. He married four times, but only his third wife produced a child, Julia, who for all her brilliance and self-assurance could not, as a woman, succeed him.61 That left adoption as an alternative, and a major priority for Augustus as princeps was to grow a new Octavian. His first choice was Marcellus, the much-admired son of his sister Octavia by her first marriage.62 Augustus had him marry Julia when she was only fourteen, but Marcellus died of a sudden illness at twenty-one, in time for Virgil to portray him poignantly as a lost spirit in The Aeneid.63 The next possibilities were Tiberius and Drusus, the sons by a previous marriage of Augustus’ last and longtime wife, Livia. Drusus died at twenty-nine, though, from injuries sustained in a riding accident. Tiberius stayed healthy, but he and the princeps distrusted each other—owing to still more maneuvers on the latter’s part to secure a successor.
Hoping to expand his options, Augustus forced Julia, after the death of Marcellus, to marry the much older Agrippa, his own contemporary and the genius behind so many of his military victories. They had five children with three males among them, but Gaius and Lucius died young and the third, Agrippa Posthumus—born after his father’s death—became, as a teenager, a vicious thug. So Augustus, now desperate, demanded that Tiberius divorce his wife, whom he loved, and marry Agrippa’s widow, whom he hated. Julia reciprocated, and the unhappy union produced only a child who died in infancy, after which Tiberius—defying Augustus—exiled himself to the island of Rhodes. From there, he divorced Julia, whose sexual escapades had begun shocking even the Romans, leading Augustus to exile her to the smaller and more desolate island of Pandateria, off the Italian coast. Hoping for the best, Augustus then adopted Tiberius and Agrippa Posthumus, in 4 C.E. and at the age of sixty-seven, but with little confidence in either.64
Five years later—far too old, by the standards of his era, to be running anything—the princeps suffered his worst military defeat. He’d long opposed expanding the empire, but this didn’t preclude straightening its perimeters. He therefore approved an extension of Roman rule from the Rhine to the Elbe, which would, with the Danube, shorten the mostly riverine boundary running from the North to the Black Sea.65 It looked good on maps, but it required pacifying Germania, a heavily forested region of which the Romans knew little. The task fell to Publius Quinctilius Varus, who promptly led three legions, at Teutoburg, into a catastrophic ambush. Some fifteen thousand men were enslaved or killed—surviving relics suggest by particularly gruesome means—and Augustus lost a tenth of his entire army almost overnight.66
He’s said to have raged for months, banging his head against walls, talking to himself, refusing to shave, seeing no one: Lear-like, but without a heath, a storm, or the consolations of a fool. He eventually pulled himself together, knowing though that, despite his long life, he’d secured neither his empire nor his succession. The best he could manage, when he knew he was dying, was to surprise Agrippa Posthumus on the island to which he’d been exiled and—after determining that the young man hadn’t changed—to have him slain, with no greater regret than Octavian had felt for Caesarion almost half a century earlier. The embittered Tiberius, it was now understood, would become—untethered—the new Caesar.
Augustus died, just short of his seventy-seventh birthday, in the same house in which his real father had done so, near Naples: the date was August 19, 14. Characteristically, he’d prepared last words: “I found Rome built of clay: I leave it to you in marble.” But then he asked, with the lightness that, for all his troubles, never quite left him: “Have I played my part in the farce of life creditably enough?” And then he added, as if Shakespeare had staged his curtain call:
If I have pleased you, kindly signify
Appreciation with a warm goodbye.67
In his great novel on the life of Augustus, John Williams has Julia recall asking her father, when they were still speaking: “[H]as it been worth it? . . . [T]his Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?” The princeps looks at her for a long time and then looks away. “I must believe that it has,” he finally replies. “We both must believe that it has.”68
XII.
Perhaps it was. Rome’s subsequent history set standards unsurpassed since for dysfunctional ruling families and exposed imperial perimeters: still, by the strictest reckoning, the empire survived for four and a half centuries after Augustus’ death. Rome didn’t “fall” until 476. The Byzantine empire, founded by Constantine, would last for another thousand years; and his role in Christianizing the Roman empire would be at least as consequential as that of Augustus in establishing it. The Holy Roman empire, a European remnant of Roman rule, originated in 800 with Charlemagne—one of whose titles was “most serene Augustus”—and held itself together for its own thousand years, until Napoleon swept it aside. Even he knew better than to try that with the Roman Catholic Church, founded in the age of Augustus, which seems likely to endure for as far into our future as anyone can foresee, under the rule of a pontifex maximus, a position dating back to the ancient kings of Rome some six centuries before Octavian was born.
Longevity, for empires, is by no means automatic. Most have risen, fallen, and been forgotten. Others may be remembered for the legends they inspired, the arts they produced, or the ruins they left behind, but not for much else: who today would model a state on Xerxes’ Persia, or Pericles’ Athens, or Alexander’s Macedonia? Rome, though, is different—as is China. Their legacies—in language, religious belief, political institutions, legal principles, technological innovation, and imperial administration—have survived repeated “collapses” of regimes that gave rise to them. If the post–Cold War era is indeed to witness a contest between the “West” and the “East,” then that will reflect the durability of Roman and Chinese cultures—empires of mind69 cultivated, through many crises, over a very long time.
Augustus was Rome’s most skillful cultivator. Having navigated himself into unchallenged authority, he used it to turn a failing republic—as if it were a Virgilian vine—into an empire that flourishes, in more ways than most of us realize, even now. Plants aren’t aware that they’re being made to mature in a certain way, but if firmly rooted and carefully tended they’ll cooperate. The princeps was fortunate to have been given the time such horticulture requires. He employed it productively while cultivating, within himself, a purpose for planting as well as, in harvesting, self-restraint.
He feared, at the end, that he’d failed, and in one sense he had: he never got to train a successor in the way Julius Caesar had trained him. Had the dying Augustus foreseen his heirs’ abuses, he’d have been horrified: Nero was only forty years into the future.70 But Rome was robust enough, as China has also been, to survive terrifyingly bad rulers.71 Both have done so through diversification: dependent on no single variety of power, they grew into ecosystems, as robust gardens and forests tend to do.
It’s all the more interesting, then, that Augustus understood so much of Sun Tzu while knowing nothing of him. The explanation may lie in a logic of strategy that undergirds cultures—much as grammar does languages—over vast stretches of time, space, and scale. If so, common sense, when confronting uncommon circumstances, may itself be another of the contradictions held simultaneously in the minds of first-rate intelligences. For the practice of principles must precede their derivation, articulation, and institutionalization. You may be looking at clouds, like Polonius, but you’ll need to have both feet firmly planted on the ground.