CHAPTER NINE

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THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF AUGUSTUS

Caesar’s heir

CICERO MAY WELL have been sitting in the senate on the Ides of March 44 BCE when Caesar was assassinated, an eyewitness to a messy and almost bungled murder. A gang of twenty or so senators crowded round Caesar on the pretext of handing him a petition. One backbencher gave the cue for the attack by kneeling at the dictator’s feet and pulling on his toga. The assassins were not very accurate in their aim, or perhaps they were terrified into clumsiness. One of the first strikes with the dagger missed entirely and gave Caesar the chance to fight back with the only weapon he had to hand – his sharp pen. According to the earliest account to survive, by Nicolaus of Damascus, a Greek historian from Syria writing fifty years later but likely drawing on eyewitness descriptions, several assassins were caught in ‘friendly fire’: Gaius Cassius Longinus lunged at Caesar but ended up gashing Brutus; another blow missed its target and landed in a comrade’s thigh.

As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide. The famous Latin phrase ‘Et tu, Brute?’ (‘You too, Brutus?’) is an invention of Shakespeare’s.

The watching senators took to their heels; if Cicero was there, he was presumably no braver than the rest. But any quick escape was blocked by a crowd of thousands who were at that moment pouring out of the Theatre of Pompey next door, after a gladiatorial show. When these people got wind of what had happened, they too wanted to make for the safety of home as quickly as they could, despite Brutus’ trying to assure them that there was no need to worry and that it was good news, not bad. The confusion only got worse when Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, one of Caesar’s close colleagues, left the Forum to muster some soldiers stationed just outside the city, almost bumping into a group of assassins coming from the other direction to announce their victorious deed, closely followed in turn by three slaves carrying Caesar’s body on a litter back to his house. It was an awkward job with only three of them, and reports were that the dictator’s wounded arms dangled gruesomely over the sides.

That evening Cicero met Brutus and some of his fellow ‘Liberators’ on the Capitoline Hill, where they had installed themselves. He had not been part of the plot, but some said that Brutus had called out Cicero’s name as he plunged his knife into Caesar – and in any case, as an elder statesman, he was likely to be a useful figurehead to have on board in the aftermath. Cicero’s advice was clear: they should summon the senate to meet on the Capitoline straight away. But they dithered and left the initiative to Caesar’s followers, who soon exploited the popular mood, which was certainly not behind the killers, despite Cicero’s later fantasies that most ordinary Romans in the end believed that the tyrant had to go. The majority still preferred the reforms of Caesar – the support for the poor, the overseas settlements and the occasional cash handouts – to fine-sounding ideas of liberty, which might amount to not much more than an alibi for elite self-interest and the continued exploitation of the underclass, as those at the sharp end of Brutus’ exactions in Cyprus could well have observed.

A few days later, Antony staged a startling funeral for Caesar, including a wax model suspended above the corpse, intended to make it easier for the audience to see all the wounds he had received, and where. A riot broke out, ending with the body being given an impromptu cremation in the Forum, the fuel partly provided by wooden benches from the nearby law courts, partly by the clothes that the musicians tore off themselves and threw into the flames, and partly by the jewels and their children’s junior togas that women heaped on top.

There were, at least to start with, no reprisals. Brutus and Cassius thought it safer to leave the city after the demonstrations at the funeral, but they were not deprived of their political offices (both were praetors). Brutus was even allowed, as praetor, to sponsor a festival in absentia, but the Caesarians quickly replaced the play he had intended to present – on the first Brutus and the expulsion of the Tarquins – by one on a less topical theme from Greek mythology. Following a proposal by Cicero, the senate had earlier agreed that all Caesar’s decisions should be ratified, in return for an amnesty for the assassins. It may well have been a fragile truce, but for the moment further violence had been avoided.

That changed when Caesar’s appointed heir arrived in Rome, in April 44 BCE, from the other side of the Adriatic, where he had been involved in the preparations for an invasion of Parthia. Whatever the rumours and allegations, and whatever the status of the little boy whom Cleopatra had pointedly named Caesarion, Caesar had recognised no legitimate children. So he had taken the unusual step of adopting his great-nephew in his will, making him his son and the main beneficiary of his fortune. Gaius Octavius was then only eighteen years old and soon started capitalising on the famous name that came with his adoption by calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar – though to his enemies, as to most modern writers wanting to avoid confusion, he was known as Octavianus, or Octavian (that is, the ‘ex-Octavius’). It was not a name he ever used himself. Why Caesar favoured this young man will always be a mystery, but Octavian certainly had an interest in ensuring that the murderers of the man who was now officially his father did not get off scot-free, and that no one among his many possible rivals, principally Mark Antony, should step into the dead dictator’s shoes. Caesar was Octavian’s passport to power, and after a compliant senate formally decided in January 42 BCE that Caesar had become a god, Octavian was soon trumpeting his new title and status: ‘son of a god’. More than a decade of civil war followed.

Octavian – or Augustus, as he was officially known after 27 BCE (a made-up title meaning something close to ‘Revered One’) – dominated Roman political life for more than fifty years, until his death in 14 CE. Going far beyond the precedents set by Pompey and by Caesar, he was the first Roman emperor to last the course and the longest-serving ruler in the whole of Roman history, outstripping even the mythical Numa and Servius Tullius. As Augustus, he transformed the structures of Roman politics and the army, the government of the empire, the appearance of the city of Rome and the underlying sense of what Roman power, culture and identity were all about.

In the process of taking and holding power, Augustus also transformed himself, in a staggering shift from brutal warlord and insurgent to responsible elder statesman, signalled by his astute change of name. His early record as Octavian was a mixture of sadism, scandal and illegality. He fought his way into Roman politics in 44 BCE, using a private army and tactics that were not far short of a coup. He went on to be jointly responsible for a ghastly pogrom on the model of Sulla’s proscriptions and, if Roman tradition is to be believed, to have plenty of blood, literally, on his hands. One lurid tale claims that he personally tore out the eyes of a senior official whom he suspected of plotting against him. Only a little less shocking to Roman sensibilities was the story of how he casually impersonated the god Apollo at a lavish banquet and fancy-dress party, held while the rest of the population was close to starving because of the deprivations of civil war. How he left all this behind to become the founding father of a new regime and, in the eyes of many, the model emperor and the benchmark against which his successors were often judged was a question that many observant Romans came to ask. And historians have puzzled and disagreed ever since, both about his radical transformation and about the nature of the regime he established and the basis of his power and authority. How did he do it?