One year after the establishment of the triumvirate the last hopes for the survival of a free republic perished outside the Macedonian city of Philippi. Trapped and near starving on a Balkan plain, a Caesarian army once again succeeded in tempting its enemies into a fatal engagement. Brutus and Cassius had stripped the East of its legions, possessed command of the sea, and occupied an impregnable position: like Pompey at Pharsalus, they could well have afforded to bide their time. Instead, they chose to fight. In two battles on a scale more massive than any in Roman history first Cassius then Brutus fell on his sword. Other celebrated names also perished in the carnage: a Lucullus, a Hortensius, a Cato. The last of these, removing his helmet and charging into the depths of the Caesarian ranks, consciously followed his father in preferring death to slavery. So too did his sister. Back in Rome the austere and virtuous Porcia had been waiting for news of Philippi. When it arrived, and she learned that both her brother and her husband Brutus were dead, she slipped free from the grasp of her friends, who had feared what she might do, she ran to a brazier and swallowed burning coals. Women, after all, were Romans too.
But what would that mean in a state no longer free? Not, by definition, the old answer, that it was to value liberty above everything, even life itself. Heroic it may have been, but the grisly example of Porcia was not much emulated. Of those who had lived truest to the ideals of the Republic, most, now that stillness had settled again over Philippi, were dead. The loss of such citizens was impossible to make up, and all the more so because a disproportionate number of the casualties had come from the nobility. The heir to a famous name, in the universal opinion of the Roman people, bore the history of his city in his veins. This was why the extinction of a great house had always been regarded as a matter for public mourning – and why the scything of an entire generation of the nobility, whether at the hands of executioners or amid the dust and flies of Macedon, was a calamity fatal to the Republic. More, much more, than blood had been spilled.
Of the victorious triumvirs, it was Antony who sensed this most clearly. He had come of age at a time when liberty had been something more than just a slogan, and he was not incapable of mourning its death. Searching out the corpse of Brutus on the battlefield of Philippi, he had covered it respectfully with a cloak, then had it cremated, and sent the ashes to Servilia. Nor, now his supremacy was secured, did he abuse it with further bloodbaths. Rather than return to misery-stricken Italy, he elected, as the senior partner in the triumvirate, to stay in the East and play at being Pompey the Great. His pleasures, as he progressed through Greece and Asia, were those that had long been traditional among the Republic’s proconsuls: posing as a lover of Greek culture while leeching the Greeks; patronising local princelings; fighting the Parthians. To die-hard republicans, this was all reassuringly familiar, and gradually, in the months and years that followed Philippi, the shattered remnants of Brutus’ armed forces would gravitate, faute de mieux, towards Antony. With him, in the East, the cause of legitimacy licked its wounds as its life-blood ebbed away.
For only in Rome could there be any hope of restoring a free republic – and Rome was in the hands of a man who appeared its deadliest enemy. Chill and vengeful, Octavian was the man whom those defeated at Philippi chiefly reviled as the murderer of liberty. On the battlefield, brought past their conquerors in chains, the republican prisoners had saluted Antony courteously, but the youthful Caesar they had cursed and jeered. Nor, in the years following Philippi, had Octavian’s reputation grown any the less sinister. With Lepidus sidelined by his two colleagues to Africa, and Antony lording it over the East, it was to the youngest member of the triumvirate that the most invidious task had fallen: finding land for the returning war veterans. With some three hundred thousand battle-hardened soldiers waiting to be settled, Octavian could not afford to delay the programme; nor, for all the efficiency he brought to executing it, could he avoid inflicting on the countryside the miseries of social revolution. Respect for private property had always been one of the foundation-stones of the Republic, but now, with the Republic superseded, private property could be sequestered on a commissar’s whim. Farmers, evicted from their land without recompense, might find themselves abducted into slave-pens, or else, lacking any other means of subsistence, end up as brigands themselves. As in the time of Spartacus, Italy became bandit land. With armed gangs daring to raid even towns and cities, rioting flared, impotent explosions of suffering and despair. Amid all the upheaval crops failed and harvests were lost. As the countryside slipped into anarchy, so Rome began to starve.
The famine was worsened by a familiar plague. More than twenty years after Pompey had swept the pirates from the sea, they were back – and this time their chief was Pompey’s own son. Sextus, having escaped Caesar’s vengeance in Spain, had profited from the chaos of the times to establish himself as the master of Sicily, and the admiral of two hundred and fifty ships. Preying on the shipping lanes, he was soon throttling Rome. As the citizens grew gaunt with hunger, so the flesh peeled off the city’s bones too. Shops were boarded up, temples left to crumble, monuments stripped of their gold. Everywhere, what had once been scenes of luxury were converted to the needs of war. Even Baiae, bright and glittering Baiae, rang to the hammers of Octavian’s engineers. On the neighbouring Lucrine Lake, a naval dockyard was built over the fabled oyster beds – a desecration worthy of the times. History itself appeared diminished; and epic, repeating a familiar storyline, was reduced to shrunken parody. Once again a Pompey fought a Caesar, but they both seemed, in comparison to their giant fathers, dwarfish thieves. A pirate and a gangster: fitting generals to scrap over a city no longer free.
Yet, although Sextus was a constant menace and more than capable of bringing misery to his country, he was never a fatal threat to the Caesarians. A much greater danger, and one that cast its shadow over the entire world, was that just as the first triumvirate had finally torn itself to pieces, so too might the second. In 41 BC, only months after Octavian’s return from Philippi, this came perilously close to happening. With Antony absent in the East, his wife, the ever pugnacious Fulvia, stirred up a rebellion in Italy. Octavian, responding with swift and calculated atrocities, only just succeeded in repressing it. His revenge on Fulvia herself, however, was limited to the penning of abusive verses on the subject of her nymphomania. His power in Italy was still precarious, and he could not risk provoking Antony. Fulvia was permitted to leave for the East and her husband.
Conveniently, however, she died before she could join him. In September 40 BC Antony’s agents and those of Octavian met in uneasy truce at Brundisium. After much haggling the pact between the two men was reconfirmed. To cement it, Octavian gave to the widower the hand of his beloved sister, Octavia. Rome’s empire, far more neatly than it had been before, was now sliced in two. Only Sextus and Lepidus still obscured the division – and they were soon swept from the gaming board.
In September 36 BC Octavian finally succeeded in destroying the fleet of Sextus, who fled to the East and ultimate execution at the hands of Antony’s agents. At the same time, when Lepidus pushed his resentment at being sidelined too far, he was formally stripped of his triumviral powers, a humiliation staged by Octavian without any reference to the third member of the partnership. The young Caesar, now more firmly established in Rome than his adoptive father had ever been, could afford to shrug aside Antony’s inevitable protests. Still only twenty-seven, he had come far. Not only Rome, nor only Italy, but half the world now acknowledged his rule.
Yet his – and Antony’s – mastery remained that of a despot. The triumvirate, which had been hurriedly renewed in 37 after its expiry the year before, had no foundations in precedent, only in the exhaustion and misery of the Roman people. The sense of helplessness that the Republic had inspired in other peoples was now its own. As early as 44 BC, following Caesar’s assassination, one of his friends had warned that Rome’s problems were intractable – ‘for if a man of such genius was unable to find a way out, who will find one now?’17 Since then the Roman people had found themselves ever more storm-racked and adrift. The lodestars of custom were gone, and there seemed nothing to take their place.
No wonder, then, that despair and dislocation should have begun to breed in the Republic’s citizens strange fantasies:
Now comes the crowning age foretold in the Sibyl’s songs,
A great new cycle, bred of time, begins again.
Now virginal Justice and the golden age returns,
Now its first-born is sent down from high heaven.
With the birth of this boy, the generation of iron will pass,
And a generation of gold will inherit all the world.18
These lines were written in 40 BC, in the very teeth of Italy’s suffering. Their author, P. Vergilius Maro – Virgil – was from the fertile basin of the River Po, an area where the land commissars had been particularly active. In other poems Virgil had hauntingly depicted the miseries of the dispossessed, nor was his vision of Utopia any the less despairing in its inspiration. Such had been the scale of the catastrophe that had overtaken the Roman people that vague prophetic longings of the kind that Greeks or Jews had long indulged in appeared the only consolations left to them. ‘The Sibyl’s songs’: these were not the Sibyl’s songs as they appeared in the books on the Capitol. They contained no prescription for appeasing the gods’ anger, no programme for restoring peace to the Republic. They were dreams, nothing more.
And yet dreams, to autocrats, had their uses. Whatever Virgil’s talk of messianic babies sent from heaven, there were clearly only two candidates for the role of saviour – and of these two, it was Antony, not Octavian, who had the most suggestive traditions ready to hand. The East, bled white by successive sides in Roman civil wars, yearned for a new beginning even more passionately than did Italy. Visions of apocalypse still swirled through the imaginings of Greeks and Egyptians, Syrians and Jews. Mithridates had demonstrated how an ambitious warlord could turn such hopes to his advantage; but no one had ever done so who was not an enemy of Rome. To present oneself as the saviour god long promised by eastern oracles: no more monstrous crime, for a citizen of the Republic, could possibly have been imagined. For more than a century now proconsuls had been travelling to the East, hearing themselves hailed as divine, mimicking Alexander, handing out crowns – and always dreaded to follow where such indulgences might lead. The Senate would not permit it; the Roman people would not permit it. But now the Republic was dead, and Antony was a triumvir, owing nothing to either the Senate or the Roman people. And temptation came in the form of a great and enchanting queen.
Cleopatra, who had won Caesar’s affections by hiding in a carpet, had wooed Antony with overblown spectacle from the start. She knew him of old – his flamboyance, his love of pleasure, his dressing-up as Dionysus – and had calculated accordingly how best to win his heart. In 41 BC, during Antony’s progress through the East, she had sailed from Egypt to meet him, her ship’s oars made of silver, its poop sheathed with gold, her pages dressed as Cupids, her handmaids as sea nymphs, herself as Aphrodite, goddess of love. Antony had summoned her – an unconscionable humiliation – but Cleopatra, wafting into his headquarters amid the goggling of its stupefied inhabitants, had magnificently turned the tables. Not that she had been foolish enough to hog the limelight for too long. Instead, she had presented Antony with his own part to play in the extravaganza. ‘And the word went out everywhere, that Aphrodite had come to feast with Dionysus, for the common good of Asia.’19 No role could have been better designed to tickle Antony’s fancy – no bed-partner either. Just as he had been intended to do, he had speedily made Cleopatra his mistress, and passed a delightful winter with her in Alexandria. Matrons back in Rome would swear by Egyptian methods of birth control, but Cleopatra – at least while taking world leaders to bed – had no time for fiddling around with diaphragms of crocodile dung. As with Caesar, so with Antony, she soon got herself pregnant. Having delivered Caesar a son, Cleopatra now went one better. Aphrodite gave Dionysus twins.
Here, for the father, was the glimmering of a perilous temptation. To found a line of kings: this was the ultimate, the deadliest taboo. No wonder that Antony turned his back on it. For four years – belying the gossip that he was besotted with Cleopatra – he avoided his mistress. Octavia, beautiful, intelligent and loyal, provided him with ample compensations, and for a while – settled in Athens, attending lectures with his intellectual bride – Antony presented a model of uxoriousness. Yet even when with Octavia he could not forget the more glittering possibilities to which Cleopatra had opened his eyes. Outrageous stories began to be told: that Antony was holding orgies in the theatre of Dionysus, dressed like the god in a fetching panther skin; that he was leading torchlit processions up to the Parthenon; that he was pestering the goddess Athena with drunken marriage proposals. All most un-Roman – and the stories were no doubt much improved by the retelling. Not that there was any great scandal in Athens, or among the rest of Antony’s subjects. Just the opposite, in fact: in the East it was rather expected that a ruler be a god.
By 36 BC, when Antony and Octavian faced each other as twin masters of the Roman world, undistracted by rivals, the character of their rule was being influenced ever more by the different traditions of their power bases. For both men the challenge was the same: to secure a legitimacy that was not merely of the sword. Here Octavian, as the ruler of the West, had a crucial advantage. Both he and Antony were Roman, but only he had Rome. When Octavian returned to the capital from the defeat of Sextus he was greeted, for the first time, with genuine enthusiasm. The innate conservatism of his fellow citizens had survived the loss of their freedom, and now, grateful for the peace that Octavian had won them, they paid homage in the language of their ancient rights. They offered the conqueror a sacred privilege: the inviolability of a tribune. Only in a restored Republic would this have any meaning – and Octavian, by accepting it, was signalling his anticipation of just such a prospect. Not that this guaranteed anything, of course, for by now the Romans had learned better than to put their trust in rhetorical flourishes. Even so, with Sextus’ fleet sunk and Lepidus banished in ignominious retirement, Octavian could at last start to flesh out his claims to be labouring in the cause of peace. Taxes were rescinded, grain supplies re-established, commissioners appointed to bring order to the countryside. Documents relating to the civil wars were ostentatiously burned. The annual magistrates began to have their responsibilities restored. Back to the future indeed.
But not all the way, of course – not yet. Octavian had no intention of surrendering his triumviral powers while Antony held on to his, and for Antony, far distant from his native city, the restoration of the Republic hardly registered as a pressing issue. Instead, his ambitions were tending in a very different direction. For three hundred years, ever since Alexander, dreams of universal empire had haunted the imaginings of the Greeks, dreams that the Republic too, in the end, had come to share. Yet its suspicion of them had lingered, and even the greatest of its citizens – even Pompey, even Caesar himself – had feared to pursue them to the limits. So too had Antony – who had fled the temptings of a Macedonian queen to become the husband of a sober Roman matron. But four years had passed, four years of naked power such as no citizen had ever exercised in the East before – and the temptations, as they were fed, continued to gnaw. In the end Antony proved too self-indulgent, too besotted by his own pretensions, to resist them. Octavia – who was to remain loyal to her husband’s memory to the very end – was sent back to Rome. Meanwhile, once again, Aphrodite was summoned to the presence of the new Dionysus.
This time there was to be no backtracking from the affair. In Rome the scandal exploded. Ever since the Republic had begun involving itself in the affairs of the East there had been nothing more calculated to generate moral outrage than the spectacle of a citizen going native – and Antony, if reports were to be believed, was going native with a vengeance. The horrors of his behaviour seemed to have no limits. Why, he used a golden chamberpot, sheltered himself on the parade ground beneath mosquito nets, even massaged his mistress’s feet! Extravagance, effeminacy, servility: the charge-sheet was a familiar one to any Roman politician. Antony, playing the bluff man of the world, chose to treat it all with disdain. ‘So what if I’m fucking the Queen?’ he complained to Octavian. ‘What does it matter where you shove your erection?’20
But Antony was being disingenuous. His offences were not limited to the field of sex. Nor, even though the slanders that branded Cleopatra a whore were a staple of Roman misogyny, were they necessarily to be discounted for that reason. Her enemies were right to fear her, and to mistrust her seductions. These were not merely, as the cruder propagandists had it, the delights of her body, but charms more insidious and perilous by far. When Cleopatra whispered into Antony’s ear, her most honeyed words were not of sensual pleasure, but promises of godhead and universal empire.
And Antony, smitten by such dreams, began to trample where even Caesar had feared to tread. Having previously turned his back on dynastic ambitions, he now began to parade them. First, he acknowledged his children by Cleopatra. Then he gave them provocative, even inflammatory, titles: Alexander Helios, ‘the Sun’, and Cleopatra Selene, ‘the Moon’. Mingling the divine with the dynastic, these names may have been suited to Alexandria, but they could not have been more calculated to raise hackles back in Rome. Did Antony even care? His fellow citizens, watching him pander to the cheers of servile Greeks and Orientals, frowned in perplexity. And then, just when it seemed as though his offensiveness could go no further, came his – and Cleopatra’s – most spectacular stunt of all.
In 34 BC the crowds of Alexandria were invited to witness the inauguration of a dazzling new world order. The ceremony was presided over by Antony, Roman triumvir and new Dionysus. By his side sat Cleopatra, Macedonian queen and Egyptian pharaoh, splendidly robed as the new Isis, mistress of the heavens. Before them, arrayed in equally exotic national dress, stood Cleopatra’s children by both Caesar and Antony. To the Alexandrians, these princes and princesses were presented as saviour-gods, the inheritors of a dawning universal harmony, long promised, now drawing near. Young Alexander, garbed as a Persian king of kings, was promised Parthia and all the realms beyond it. Other children, more modestly, were presented with territories that it was actually within the power of Antony to give. The fact that some of these were provinces of the Republic, held in trust for the Roman people, failed to inhibit his generosity. This was partly because, in one sense, he was not being generous at all. Antony had no real intention of handing over the administration of Roman provinces to his children, and to that extent at least the ceremony was show and nothing more. But show mattered – and the message Antony had wished it to proclaim could also be found on his silver coins, jingling in purses throughout the East. His head stamped on one side, Cleopatra’s on the other: a Roman and a Greek; a triumvir and a queen. A new age was dawning in which Roman rule would be blended into what the Sibyl had prophesied: the divinely ordained synthesis of East and West, all differences shrunk, presided over by an emperor and an empress of the world.
But Alexandria’s meat, of course, was the Republic’s poison. Back in Rome, Antony’s friends – of whom there were still many – were appalled. Antony himself, alerted to the public-relations disaster, hurriedly wrote to the Senate. He offered, in a grand but vague manner, to lay down his triumviral powers – to restore the Republic. But too late. The gleaming white toga of constitutionalism had already been filched. Distracted as he had been by his grandiose Eastern dreams, Antony turned his gaze back to Rome to discover a most disconcerting sight: the heir of Caesar, adventurer and terrorist, posing resplendent as the defender of the Republic, the champion of tradition and his people’s ancient freedoms. And not only posing, but carrying the role off with great style.
True, not everyone was convinced by the young Caesar’s impersonation of a constitutionalist – and the mask itself might still occasionally slip. In 32 BC, wishing to browbeat the consuls, both of whom were supporters of Antony, Octavian entered the Senate House with armed guards and stationed them menacingly behind the magistrates’ chairs of state. The show of strength had the desired effect: opponents of Octavian’s regime were immediately smoked out. The two consuls fled to Antony in the East, and with them went almost a third of the Senate, some three hundred senators in all. Many of these were Antony’s placemen, but some, the heirs to a ruined cause, had more principled reasons for refusing to stomach a Caesar as the shield of the Republic. One of the two consuls who fled to Antony, for instance, was Domitius Ahenobarbus, the son of Julius Caesar’s old foe. Also in Antony’s camp – inevitably – was the grandson of Cato.
Octavian jeered at their choice of loyalties. That such men should end up as courtiers to a queen! Domitius actually made a point of snubbing Cleopatra whenever he could, and was constantly urging Antony to send her packing back to Egypt, but Octavian had always been a master at landing punches below the belt. In the summer of 32 BC, tipped off by a renegade, he even took the supremely sacrilegious step of raiding the temple of Vesta, where Antony had deposited his will, and seizing the document from the hands of the Vestal Virgins. The contents, eagerly pored over, duly proved as explosive as Octavian had anticipated. Stern-faced and censorious, he listed them for the benefit of the Senate. Caesarion to be legitimised; Cleopatra’s children awarded vast legacies; Antony himself, on his death, to be buried by Cleopatra’s side. It was all very shocking – perhaps suspiciously so.
Yet if there was much that was factitious about Octavian’s propaganda, it was not all spin. Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra, formalised in 32 when he divorced Octavia, was instinctively recognised by most Romans for what it was – a betrayal of the Republic’s deepest principles and values. That the Republic itself was dead did not make these any less mourned, nor its prejudices any less savage. To surrender to what was unworthy of a citizen: this was what the Romans had always most dreaded. It was flattering, therefore, to a people who had become unfree to pillory Antony as unmanly and a slave to a foreign queen. For the last time, the Roman people could gird themselves for war and imagine that both the Republic and their own virtue were not, after all, entirely dead.
Many years later Octavian would boast, ‘The whole of Italy, unprompted, swore allegiance to me, and demanded that I lead her into war. The provinces of Gaul, Spain, Africa, Sicily and Sardinia also swore the same oath.’21 Here, in the form of a plebiscite spanning half the world, was something utterly without precedent, a display of universalism consciously designed to put that of Antony and Cleopatra in the shadow, drawn from the traditions not of the East but of the Roman Republic itself. Undisputed autocrat and champion of his city’s most ancient ideals, Octavian sailed to war as both. It was a combination that was to prove irresistible. When, for the third time in less than twenty years, two Roman forces met head to head in the Balkans, it was a Caesar, yet again, who emerged triumphant. Throughout the summer of 31 BC, with his fleet rotting in the shallows and his army rotting with disease, Antony was blockaded on the eastern coast of Greece. His camp began to empty – dispiritingly, even Domitius was among the deserters. Finally, when the stench of defeat had grown too overpowering for Antony to ignore any longer, he decided to make a desperate throw. On 2 September he ordered his fleet to attempt a break-out, past the Cape of Actium, into the open sea. For much of the day the two great fleets faced each other, motionless in the silence of the crystalline bay. Then suddenly, in the afternoon, there was movement: Cleopatra’s squadron darting forwards, smashing its way through a gap in Octavian’s line, slipping free. Antony, abandoning his giant flagship for a swifter vessel, followed, but most of his fleet was left behind, his legions too. They quickly surrendered. With this brief, inglorious battle perished all of Antony’s dreams, and all the hopes of the new Isis. And for days afterwards the waves washed gold and purple on to the shore.
One year later Octavian closed in for the kill. In July 30 BC his legions appeared before Alexandria. The following evening, as twilight deepened towards midnight, the noise of invisible musicians was heard floating in a procession through the city, then upwards to the stars. ‘And when people reflected on this mystery, they realised that Dionysus, the god whom Antony had always sought to imitate and copy, had abandoned his favourite.’22 The next day Alexandria fell. Antony, botching his suicide in the manner of Cato, died in his lover’s arms. Cleopatra, having discovered that Octavian planned to parade her in chains for his triumph, followed him nine days later. As befitted a pharaoh, she died of a cobra bite, the poison of which, the Egyptians believed, bestowed immortality. It was, for the would-be emperor and empress of the world, a suitably multicultural end.
The scare that Cleopatra had given Rome doomed her dynasty. Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar, was quietly executed, the Ptolemies themselves officially deposed. On temples across Egypt artisans began sculpting the image of their new king: Octavian himself. Henceforward, the country would be ruled not as an independent kingdom, nor even as a Roman province – although the new pharaoh liked to pretend otherwise – but as a private fiefdom. Later, Octavian would boast of his mercy: ‘When it was safe to pardon foreign people I preferred to preserve them rather than wipe them out.’23 Alexandria was the greatest city to have fallen to a Roman general since Carthage, but its fate was far different. Ruthless in the pursuit of power, Octavian was to prove himself cool and cynical in the exercising of it. Alexandria was too rich, too much of a honeypot, to destroy. Even the statues of Cleopatra escaped being smashed.
Such clemency, of course, was the prerogative of a master, a demonstration of his greatness and power. All the world had fallen into Octavian’s hands, and now that he had no rivals, bloodshed and savagery had ceased to serve his purpose. ‘I am reluctant to call mercy’, wrote Seneca almost a century later, ‘what was really the exhaustion of cruelty.’24 But Octavian, if he were exhausted, could not afford to show it. Visiting the tomb of Alexander, he accidentally knocked off the corpse’s nose. In a similar manner he chipped at the conqueror’s reputation. The greatest challenge, Octavian argued sternly, was not the winning of empire but the ordering of it. He spoke with authority, for this was the challenge he had set himself. No longer to butcher but to spare; no longer to fight but to provide peace; no longer to destroy but to restore.
Such, at any rate as he sailed home, Octavian was pleased to claim.