CHAPTER 12
STORMING INTO NORTHERN ITALY—Cisalpine Gaul—which Dec-imus Brutus, insisting that he was upholding the rights of the Senate and the people of Rome, was refusing to relinquish, Antony besieged him in Mutina (Modena) and began pounding the town with boulders flung from his ballista (siege catapults), which used torsion energy to throw missiles long distances.* One particular kind was known as the “wild ass” because of its kickback. He was anxious for a quick victory since, on January 1, his own consulship would end and he suspected that his enemies were likely to persuade the pusillanimous Senate to send to Decimus’ aid the new consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, both former generals of Caesar’s but now inclining to the republican cause. Indeed, by early December, Cicero was back in Rome and urging war against Antony. He was also openly and lavishly praising Octavian, calling him by his adoptive name of Caesar in public for the first time.
By now Octavian had the support of five legions and also archers, cavalry and even some elephant units. Unleashing some of his finest oratory, Cicero cajoled the Senate into raising Octavian to the rank of senator and conferring on him the right to command an army, thus legalizing his leadership of the troops he had originally raised from the veteran colonies to march on Rome. Together with the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, the Senate commanded Octavian to go to the aid of Decimus Brutus. It was a strange mission—Caesar’s adoptive son succoring one of Caesar’s murderers against Caesar’s most seasoned and trusted lieutenant—but for the moment this does not appear to have troubled Cicero, who had his mind set on the elimination of Antony. As for Octavian, for the moment he was prepared to temporize.
To Antony, Octavian’s actions must have signaled just how far he was prepared to go to achieve his ambitions. Antony’s friends, still struggling to avert a war, convinced the vacillating Senate to dispatch ambassadors to Antony, but this proved futile. The ambassadors’ arrival did not distract him for one moment from his bombardment. In a determined mood, he rejected their demands that he withdraw south across the Rubicon—the border of Cisalpine Gaul—but keep at least two hundred miles from Rome and submit to the Senate. Instead he issued his own unrealistic counterdemands. These included the recall of Brutus and Cassius from their eastern commands, confirmation of the legality of his and Caesar’s actions (including his own seizure of funds after Caesar’s murder), the grant to him of the province of Transalpine Gaul for five years and rewards for his legionaries.
Reeling at the hubris of Antony’s ultimatum, or at least pretending to, Cicero urged the Senate to declare a state of war and denounce Antony as a public enemy. However, Antony’s determined mother, Julia, and wife, Fulvia, donning mourning garments, lobbied the senators on his behalf. As a result, more moderate voices arguing for the declaration of a “state of emergency,” not a war, once again prevailed. Though Antony’s demands were refused, he was not yet outlawed, and his siege of Mutina continued. Furthermore, his allies in the Senate tried to engineer another embassy to Antony. Cicero was to be one of the ambassadors, but his sudden withdrawal sabotaged the mission, as he no doubt intended. With Octavian and Hirtius already in position near Mutina, the war that Cicero was trying so passionately to promote moved closer.
In late March the Senate dispatched a further four legions, this time of new recruits, north under Pansa to join Octavian and Hirtius. Learning of this, Antony decided to intercept them en route and on April 14 ambushed them as they passed through a village. Unknown to him, the inexperienced recruits had been joined by more seasoned soldiers—the Martian Legion which had defected from him. The struggle, on boggy ground, was bloody and protracted. According to Appian, the legionaries fought with determination in a grim silence punctuated only by the clash of weapons and human groans. Each side suffered heavy losses. A javelin struck Pansa in the side and mortally wounded him. Antony eventually emerged the victor. However, as his forces returned to camp weary and sweat-soaked but singing songs of victory, they were ambushed in turn by fresh waves of troops sent by Hirtius. Only with difficulty did Antony manage to extract his men and withdraw to safety as night fell. He left behind on the battlefield two legionary eagles and sixty standards, as well as many of his veteran men. During the night Antony sent search parties to rescue as many as he could. Appian described how the rescuers “set the survivors on their own horses, swapping places with some, and lifting others up beside them or encouraging them to cling to the horses’ tails and run along with them.”
On the brink of capturing Mutina, whose inhabitants were starving, Antony was not inclined to give in and raise the siege, but six days later, on April 21, Hirtius and Octavian infiltrated his camp while Decimus Brutus led a sally out of the besieged town. In the ensuing confused struggle, Octavian, who had reputedly hidden away during the previous battle, is said to have carried one of the legionary eagles after its bearer fell, and Hirtius was killed in the fighting around Antony’s tent. Antony’s men eventually recaptured their camp and forced Decimus Brutus’ men back into Mutina. But recognizing he could not take the town while being constantly harassed from the rear, Antony decided to withdraw over the chill passes of the Apennines. His hope was to join forces with Lepidus, who the previous year had taken up his post as governor of the provinces of Narbonese Gaul (Provence) and Nearer Spain and was currently in southern Gaul with seven legions—provided, of course, that Lepidus was still loyal to him.
According to Plutarch, “Antony’s nature was to excel in difficult circumstances” and in the retreat he showed his finest qualities. “Antony was an incredible example to his men: for all his extravagant and indulgent lifestyle, he did not hesitate to drink stagnant water and eat wild fruits and roots . . . tree-bark was eaten.” As the cold and hungry men crossed the mountains, they and their leader “ate animals which had never before been tasted by man.”*
When news of the second battle at Mutina reached Rome on April 26, the Senate finally felt sufficiently secure in its ascendancy to declare Antony and his supporters public enemies and to order Decimus Brutus, to whom they awarded a Triumph, to hunt them down. Cicero was now at his most politically influential since the time of the Catiline conspiracy. At his behest, the Senate also confirmed Cassius and Brutus in the provinces of Syria and Macedonia that they had seized and gave them authority over all the other governors in the east. However, amid the general rejoicing and self-congratulation, the Senate failed to award any significant honors to Octavian. Though Cicero had argued for the relatively minor distinction of an ovatio for him, he probably thought it timely to bring Caesar’s young heir, whom just a few weeks earlier he had been extolling as “this heaven-sent boy,” to heel. A pun, a witticism of a perhaps overconfident Cicero, caused much mirth among his friends: “lau-dandum, ornandum, tollendum”—“Octavian must be praised, honored and extolled”—but the last word also means “removed.”
This joke, which was swiftly reported to Octavian, would prove unwise. The situation was polarizing, and Octavian was about to reassess his options and, after a careful calculation of the risks, make his choices. On one side were Cassius and Brutus, the murderers of Octavian’s adoptive father, who as every day passed were being given luster and legitimacy by an increasingly conservative, anti-Caesarean Senate urged on by Cicero. Between them they had seventeen legions. On the other side were the basically pro-Caesarean forces of Antony, with whom, personal rivalry apart, Octavian had far more political affinity and whose military skill he would need to defeat the considerable forces of Cassius and Brutus. Octavian, with the glory of Caesar’s name behind him, and Antony, with his military strength and experience, should, he reasoned, be a powerful combination.
Octavian therefore judged that his own status had been sufficiently raised and that of Antony sufficiently diminished by the previous round of fighting to make any future alliance between them one of equals, and refused either to pursue Antony himself or give aid to others sent to annihilate him. He also profited from the deaths of the two consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, to enhance his position. Discarding Cicero as Cicero had assumed he could discard him, Octavian arranged in July 43 for four hundred of his centurions to march to the Senate to demand the consulship for him. When the Senate prevaricated, a company commander named Cornelius threw back his cloak, put his hand on his sword hilt and brazenly cried, “If you do not make him consul, this will.” Opposition ceased. On August 19, still only nineteen, Octavian entered Rome as the youngest consul ever, his disregard for the Senate now as clear as that of his adoptive father. According to some, at his first taking of the auspices, twelve vultures circled in the hot skies above—the same number that had appeared to Rome’s founder, Romulus.
Octavian used his new powers to have himself formally recognized as Caesar’s heir and to demand vengeance on his murderers. Soon after, he set off north again with his legions to find Antony. In his absence, his docile cousin Pedius, selected to be his co-consul, persuaded the cowed Senate to rescind its condemnation of Antony as an enemy of the state. The stage was artfully set for the grand reconciliation of the two Caesarean leaders.
Meanwhile, in Gaul, Antony had located Lepidus, whom Cicero and the Senate had been attempting to win over with ever more spectacular inducements. Instead, or so accounts relate, having found Lepidus’ camp, Antony just wandered in, a wild-haired, bearded and smiling figure, to be saluted by Lepidus’ men, who recognized him immediately. Moments later, amid the cheers of the legionaries, he and Lepidus embraced. Lepidus wrote nonchalantly to the Senate that his soldiers had forced his hand. Decimus Brutus’ position was now hopeless. His armies swiftly deserted him and Antony’s men hunted him down and killed him.
Lepidus now brokered a meeting between Antony and Octavian, which took place around the end of October on an island in the Lavino River near Bononia (Bologna). It was staged with the care of a gathering of Mafia chiefs. Antony and Octavian approached from opposite sides of the river, each with five legions. Having scoured the island to ensure there were no lurking assassins, Lepidus, the go-between, waved his cloak to signify that all was well. Each man then crossed to the island with a bodyguard of three hundred. Before sitting down in full view of their men to begin negotiations, each gave the others body searches to check for concealed weapons. Two days later, the three told their jubilant troops that they had reached agreement. They would be viri rei publicaeconstituendae (three men responsible for restoring the government of the republic), with consular powers for five years. Historians would call this the Second Triumvirate. It was, to all intents and purposes, another dictatorship.
With the eastern half of the empire largely in the hands of their adversaries, the three triumvirs carved up Rome’s western empire between them “as if,” Plutarch wrote, “it were an ancestral estate.” Antony was to have Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, Octavian received Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and Lepidus—who was to remain as consul in Rome while Antony and Octavian made war on Cassius and Brutus—was to retain Narbonese Gaul and to acquire, in addition to his existing province of Nearer Spain, the remainder of Spain. To reward their veteran soldiers, on whom their future success depended, the triumvirs agreed to appropriate private land from some of Italy’s richest towns and redistribute it once final victory was theirs.
The troops greeted the news with roars of support. They also cheered the news that, to confirm their new bonds, Octavian had given up the woman he had been engaged to wed and would instead marry Clodia, Antony’s stepdaughter, the scarcely pubescent child of Clodius and Fulvia. What they were not yet told was that, like Sulla thirty-nine years earlier, the triumvirs had drawn up lists of opponents to be punished—“proscribed”—for their role in Caesar’s murder. Anyone so proscribed would have no option but to flee Italy or face death, and all his property would be forfeit to the state. Prominent on the list, at Antony’s insistence, was Cicero. Although revenge on their enemies would be sweet, a major purpose was to raise money for the forthcoming war in the east to smash Brutus and Cassius and establish their own preeminence beyond dispute. In consequence, as Appian noted, many unfortunates were outlawed solely “on account of their wealth.”
The triumvirs dispatched a band of executioners in advance to deal with seventeen key men on the list, including Cicero, and followed with their legions to Rome, which they entered separately on three successive days. A nervous Senate had no choice but to endorse the dictatorial powers the three men had already grabbed for themselves and in so doing sanctioned its own demise as a meaningful political entity. Panic spread through the city as the lists of the proscribed—perhaps as many as three hundred senators and three thousand of Rome’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens—were made public. Large rewards awaited those prepared to “become hunting dogs for the murderers for the sake of the rewards,” as Appian put it. The head of any of the proscribed brought a reward of twenty-five thousand denarii if brought in by a free man and ten thousand denarii if brought by a slave.
Appian described the desperate plight of the fugitives: “Some descended into wells, others into filthy sewers. Some took refuge in chimneys. Others crouched in the deepest silence under the thick-set tiles of their roofs. Some were not less fearful of their wives and ill-disposed children than of the murderers.” Some unfaithful but influential wives took advantage of the witch hunt to have their husbands’ names added to the list to be rid of them. Other women, however, offered Antony sex in return for their husbands’ lives.
Fulvia used the situation to settle some scores. Appian wrote of a man named Rufus who “possessed a handsome house near that of Fulvia, the wife of Antony, which she had wanted to buy, but he would not sell it, and although he now offered it to her as a free gift, he was proscribed. His head was brought to Antony, who said it did not concern him and sent it to his wife.” According to Appian, the murders even extended to orphan children “on account of their wealth. One of these, who was going to school, was killed, together with the attendant, who threw his arms around the boy and would not give him up.”
There were many such scenes of great courage. Appian praised the fidelity “of wives, of children, of brothers, of slaves who rescued the proscribed or . . . died with them when they did not succeed in their designs. Some even killed themselves on the bodies of the slain.” He described how one man “was concealed by his wife, who communicated the secret to only one female slave. Having been betrayed by the latter, she followed her husband’s head as it was carried away, crying out, ‘I sheltered him; those who give shelter are to share the punishment.’ As nobody killed her or informed on her, she came to the triumvirs and accused herself before them. Being moved by her love for her husband, they pretended not to see her. So she starved herself to death.” Antony’s elderly republican uncle Lucius Caesar, whom Antony had agreed to place on the list to please Octavian since he had supported Caesar’s murderers and as a quid pro quo for Cicero, was saved by Antony’s own mother, Julia, who interposed herself between the old man and the soldiers who came to murder him.
Cicero did not escape. As with Louis XVI trying to flee the mobs of revolutionary France, his indecision proved fatal. He had fled to sea from Astura in a small boat in the hope of escaping down the coast but, retching with seasickness, had ordered the boatman to make once more for land. Disembarking, Cicero had tottered on foot northward again toward Rome but, reaching the Appian Way, halted. Fearing he would be recognized and arrested on this thronging highway, he turned back toward Astura, where he spent a dreadful night tormented by “terrible thoughts and desperate plans.” His attendants persuaded the hesitant, nervous orator to take to sea again and sail south to his villa at Caieta near Formiae.
Here Cicero stayed, hoping the madness would pass him by, but a search party flushed him out. He tried to escape by litter but pursuing soldiers caught up with him in a wood. Cicero had once written, “What gladiator of ordinary merit has ever uttered a groan or changed countenance? Who of them has disgraced himself, I will not say on his feet, but who has disgraced himself in his fall? Who after falling has drawn in his neck when ordered to suffer the fatal stroke?” Now, accepting his own fall, the haggard, unshaven old man unflinchingly stretched his own wrinkled neck to the soldiers’ blades and paid the price of his outspoken Philippics against Antony. His head and hands were nailed to the rostra, the speaker’s platform before the Senate house where he had delivered so many speeches. Fulvia, wife to Clodius as well as to Antony and with a double dose of vengeance to extract, apparently spat in his blood-smeared face and, yanking out his once voluble tongue, impaled it with a hairpin.
Fulvia was less than sympathetic to the plight of some fourteen hundred wealthy Roman women whose relatives had been proscribed and who were themselves being taxed to fill the triumvirs’ coffers. Led by Hortensia, daughter of the famous orator Hortensius, they forced their way into the Forum: “You have already deprived us of our fathers, our sons, our husbands, and our brothers . . . but if in addition you take away our property you will reduce us to a condition unsuitable to our birth, our way of life, and our female nature,” Hortensia argued. “Why do we share in the punishments when we did not participate in the crimes?” With the crowd shouting their support, the triumvirs gave ground, reducing the number of women subject to the tax to four hundred. Using the money they had sequestered, they now concentrated their efforts on planning to take the fight to Brutus and Cassius in their eastern exile.
Despite the rapprochement between Antony and Octavian, to the queen of Egypt, anxiously monitoring events from a distance, it must have seemed far from clear who would triumph in the forthcoming showdown. The architects of Caesar’s assassination had prospered. Brutus had been consolidating his position in Asia, while in Syria Cassius had defeated Dolabella, sent as governor to wrest back control of the province. Both Cassius and Dolabella had appealed to Cleopatra, who had had to decide the safest course for herself and Caesarion.
Cleopatra’s natural affinity was of course with those seeking to avenge Caesar’s death and, after careful thought, she had encouraged the legions left by Caesar in Alexandria to go to Dolabella’s aid. However, at some point they had defected to Cassius. Hopelessly outnumbered, in July 43, the month when Octavian’s soldiers had demanded the consulship for him, Dolabella took refuge in the seaport of Laodicea and, when Cassius bribed the town’s commanders to throw open the gates, ordered his slave to decapitate him.
The aid she had sent Dolabella had left Cleopatra exposed to reprisals by Cassius, and her position was weakening. Her governor in Cyprus had also gone over to Cassius, sending him ships to bolster his fleet, while in Ephesus Cleopatra’s younger half sister and rival, Arsinoe, was planning a comeback. In the Temple of Artemis, the high priest was already hailing her as Egypt’s new queen.
There seemed every danger that, eager for Egypt’s wealth, Cassius would move into Egypt, plunder its treasuries himself and depose Cleopatra in favor of the more compliant Arsinoe. If that happened, who knew what the fate of Caesarion would be? Cassius had killed the father. Why should he spare the son? At one of the most perilous moments of Cleopatra’s short reign, she was fortunate that Brutus asked Cassius to hurry to Smyrna for a council of war. By the end of 43 Cassius had arrived in Asia Minor.
The reason for this urgent consultation was the news that Antony and Octavian, having buried their differences, were moving against them. To build up their own forces, Cassius increased his already heavy demands on the eastern kingdoms for money and men but, mindful of who was by far the richest ruler in the east, renewed his demands on Cleopatra in particular. Once again she must have agonized. Cassius and Brutus were closer geographically than Antony and Octavian. Defying them was risky. But yet again Cleopatra decided to link her fate to Antony and Octavian. An important factor was the triumvirs’ decision to sanction Caesarion’s right to sit beside her on the throne of Egypt as a reward for her previous help to Dolabella. The passing of such a decree, as they astutely deduced, was exactly the way to appeal to Cleopatra, both as mother and as dynast.
Cleopatra informed Cassius, with perfect truth, that the Nile had failed to rise to its usual bountiful level and that the harvest that year had been poor. Desperate for food, some Egyptians were binding themselves to others as servants for many years—a device to bypass the law forbidding free people to sell themselves into slavery. One woman engaged herself as a servant for ninety-nine years. There had also been an outbreak of plague. In the Museon in Alexandria, one of Cleopatra’s personal physicians, Dioscurides Phacas, tracked the spread of the disease. In the world’s first medical treatise, he documented the plague’s terrible course, from the swollen lymphatic glands to the black, evil-smelling, suppurating boils of the victims. With her own people suffering so badly, Cleopatra argued that she could spare no men or food for Cassius. He, however, was skeptical of such excuses. When he learned that Antony and Octavian were massing their troops at Brundisium ready for ferrying across the Adriatic to Macedonia, he dispatched one of his admirals to the southern point of the Peloponnese with a fleet of sixty ships, a legion of men and orders to intercept any ships that Cleopatra might try to send to the aid of Antony and Octavian.
Indeed, not only had Cleopatra, despite her apparent economic distress, managed to build and equip a fleet in the shadow of the Pharos in Alexandria but, in one of the bold, theatrical gestures at which she was so gifted, she was planning to do what no queen of the East had done since the fifth century, when Queen Artemesia of Halicarnassus led a squadron of ships to assist her Persian ally Xerxes against the Greeks at Salamis: to be the admiral of her own navy. She would lead it to support the triumvirs.* Only the weather defeated Cleopatra. Storms beat back her ships long before they met any challenge from Cassius. Many were wrecked, some of their broken hulls drifting northward to be washed up on the beaches of Greece. Cleopatra herself, laid low with seasickness aboard her flagship, managed to regain Alexandria. She at once began preparing a second fleet but events were moving so swiftly that by the time it was ready the battle between Caesar’s avengers and Caesar’s murderers was over.
Even without Egyptian aid, the Caesarean forces had dodged the enemy squadrons sent against them by Cassius and Brutus and landed safely in Macedonia. Here Octavian fell ill, apparently with dropsy—a disease in which watery fluid collects in body tissue. While he remained behind to recover, Antony marched their twenty-eight legions over the mountains to take up position near the town of Philippi and await the arrival of the enemy forces. Antony had with him some of the most tried and trusted legions, many of whom had previously served Julius Caesar and who had long been eager to avenge his death.
Caesar’s uncle Marius had reformed the legions more than fifty years earlier, making the army into a professional one subject to rigorous discipline and drill, rather than a citizen militia. He had stopped the practice of disbanding legions at the end of each campaign and given them numbers and emblems, in particular the legions’ eagle. Made of silver and gold and mounted on a long pole, it was carried by a standard-bearer who had a special lion-skin headdress, and it served as a rallying point to be defended to the death. Its capture was a lasting disgrace. At full strength, which was rare, each legion consisted of some six thousand men split into ten cohorts of six hundred men each. Each cohort had its own symbol—for example, a golden hand—and contained six centuries of one hundred men, each led by that backbone of the Roman army, the centurion—a career soldier distinguished from the ordinary legionary by the transverse crest on his helmet.
Another of Marius’ changes had been to make the legions more mobile and less vulnerable by reducing the baggage train. He made the legionary carry more of his own food and equipment, including sixteen days’ rations, a cooking pot and two stakes as a contribution to the palisade thrown round the camp for protection. All this gear, the legionaries joked, turned them into “Marius’ mules.” Burdened with such a heavy pack, weighing some sixty pounds, the legionary was subject to frequent training runs with full kit, like modern soldiers.
A legionary’s weapons were the sword and the spear. The sword had a double cutting edge and a stabbing point. The spears—six-foot-long javelins—were designed so that the soft iron of their neck would bend on impact, thus preventing the spear from being thrown back if it missed its target and hit the ground, and also making it more difficult to pull from a wound if it did not. Unlike most armies of the time and for a long time afterward (until the seventeenth century, in fact), the Roman legionary had a standard uniform—a leather jerkin over which he wore chain-mail armor. (The latter was soon to be displaced by a leather or metal breastplate.) His bronze helmet had protective cheek pieces and was pear-shaped, rising to a lead-weighted topknot surmounted by the crest. His shield was oval and slightly cylindrical, to curve around and protect his body. It was made of leather-covered wood with a metal boss. The legionary went bare-legged but on his feet wore sturdy leather sandals, lacing up above and around his ankles and with their soles studded with iron nails.
Brutus and Cassius did not rush to battle, preferring to leave the Caesarean forces to run short of supplies and patience. Instead, after attempting to ensure the loyalty of their legions, of which they were much less certain than Antony was of his, by payments to each man of fifteen hundred denarii, they carefully drew up their troops in a strong position on high ground west of Philippi—Brutus’ troops on the right flank were protected by mountains and Cassius’, on the left, abutted marshland. Antony decided to confront his enemies head-on and boldly encamped his own troops in the plain beneath the high ground where his opponents sat. To remedy his inferior position, he had his men rapidly throw up a series of towers and fortifications. During this period, determined to share in what he hoped would be a glorious victory, Octavian joined Antony as soon as he felt strong enough, but he would remain physically below par throughout the campaign.
Still confident in their ability to wear down their opponents by cutting off their supplies, Brutus and Cassius made no move. Frustrated by his failure to draw them into battle, in October 43 Antony formulated a plan secretly to build a causeway through the marshes to outflank them. Drawing his main army into battle formation to deflect his enemies’ attention by suggesting that a frontal attack was imminent, Antony ordered others of his men to work under the cover of the high reeds to construct the causeway. To do so they piled up embankments of earth and stone and used timber to bridge the deepest parts of the squelching marsh. After ten days of this work, Antony succeeded in getting a body of his men across the causeway and led them in an attack on the perimeter of Cassius’ fortification. The weight of their charge swiftly put Cassius’ men to flight and they fell back on their camp proper. However, Antony’s legionaries smashed through the gates, despite showers of missiles from the defenders above. Soon the camp was Antony’s, and Cassius fled up the hill toward Brutus’ position. Because of the confusion of battle and the all-pervasive clouds of dust obscuring the plain, Cassius, who in any case had poor sight, thought that he saw signs that Brutus too had been defeated. Without waiting for confirmation, a despairing Cassius killed himself, according to Plutarch with the very dagger he had used against Caesar. However, far from dead, Brutus had, in fact, taken advantage of the engagement to capture Octavian’s camp. Caesar’s heir was not there. According to some, he had taken refuge deep in the marshes.
The result of the battle had been inconclusive and Brutus’ army still had the better position and better supplies. Indeed, the same day as the battle at Philippi, the Liberators’ navy had destroyed a convoy bringing two more legions as well as provisions to Antony and Octavian. However, Cassius’ death had unsettled the republican forces. There were desertions among some of the contingents of their eastern allies. Growing impatient, just like Pompey’s men before Pharsalus, the majority clamored for action and revenge. Antony did his best to provoke his opponents further by regularly leading out his troops in battle array and having them yell alternately at Brutus’ men accusations of cowardice and offers of bribes if they would desert.
A cultured and relatively gentle man with limited military experience, Brutus could no longer restrain his forces, and just three weeks after the first encounter, the second and decisive battle of Philippi was joined at three o’clock in the afternoon. After a bloody hand-to-hand struggle of Roman against Roman, the Caesarean troops finally overcame their ideological foes. Brutus retreated to the mountains. There, after realizing that he had no more than four legions left to call upon, Shakespeare’s “noblest Roman of them all” chose suicide. Plutarch described how, after shaking hands with his remaining officers, “he placed the tip of his drawn sword on his chest, and with the help of a friend’s strong arm, they say, plunged the sword in.”
Antony ordered the body to be covered with a purple cloak and cremated but, according to Suetonius, Octavian later ordered Brutus’ head to be hacked off and sent to Rome to be hurled at the feet of Caesar’s statue. Suetonius also related how when a father and son begged for their lives, Octavian coldly invited them to draw lots. Instead, the father chose to give his life for his son, who was so distressed that he at once committed suicide. Octavian watched both men die and his callous conduct so disgusted other prisoners that as they were led off in chains “they courteously saluted Antony as their conqueror, but abused Octaivian with the most obscene epithets.” Among the defeated dead was Cato’s son, who, with the stubborn courage of his father, had refused to retreat and was killed where he stood. According to Plutarch, his wife, Porcia, who was also Brutus’ sister, determined on suicide when news of their deaths reached Rome. Evading the friends who were keeping watch on her, she seized a glowing coal from a brazier and swallowed it.
Philippi was Antony’s victory. Again he had proved his military skill and leadership while Octavian, still in frail health, had played only a minor role, as Antony very well knew. In later years the tall, muscular Antony would deride Octavian as “a puny creature in body” who “has never by his own efforts won a victory in any important battle by land or sea. Indeed at Philippi, in the very same battle in which he and I fought as allies, it was I who conquered and he who was defeated.” Nevertheless, recognizing that they still needed each other, the two men redistributed Rome’s provinces between them. Lepidus, far away in Rome and much less powerful than either, was the loser. Antony and Octavian suspected him of plotting with Sextus Pompey, the surviving son of Pompey the Great, who was waging a successful maritime war from his base on Sicily and disrupting Rome’s grain supply, while being demonized as a pirate for his actions.
Accordingly, consulting no one, least of all the Senate, they imperiously divided Lepidus’ provinces between them and allotted him Africa. Octavian took Spain, while Antony, as the dominant partner, was to have the whole of Gaul beyond the Alps, though he agreed that, as Caesar had intended, Cisalpine Gaul should be absorbed into Roman Italy, which would be held in common. Antony also took command of the provinces east of the Adriatic—Macedonia, Greece, Asia, Cyrenaica, Syria and Bithynia. This also made him guardian of Rome’s client kingdoms to the east, of which by far the most important in practice was Cleopatra’s Egypt, even if it nominally still enjoyed full independence. Above all, Antony hoped to use his new position to carry out Caesar’s plan of conquering the Parthians.
In late 42 Antony departed on the road that would lead him to Cleopatra. He spent the winter months in Athens, touring the sights and enjoying the honors lavished respectfully upon him. He tactfully ignored the fact that two winters earlier, statues of Brutus and Cassius had been everywhere on display. With the arrival of spring, Antony sailed east. In Ephesus, women dressed as bacchantes, and men and boys clad as satyrs and Pans hailed him as the new Dionysus, the bringer of joy, and conducted him riotously through the streets.* Plutarch wrote, “The city was filled with ivy, thyrsi, harps, reed-pipes and wind-pipes.” Antony doubtless loved it. Octavian could call himself the son of a god, but better by far to be an actual god, especially one associated with glorious triumphs in the east, lauded and adored. Antony made several magnanimous gestures to the city that had given him such a wild reception, including extending the rights of the Temple of Artemis to grant asylum. Whether he encountered Arsinoe, still in sanctuary there and no doubt regretting her collusion with the governor of Cyprus against Antony and Octavian, is not recorded.*
Antony was happy to reward Ephesus and other cities that had suffered at Cassius’ hands, but he badly needed money to pay off the veterans and for his forthcoming campaign against Parthia. He therefore summoned the local rulers of the region to a meeting in Ephesus. It was an order few dared disobey. According to Plutarch, “Kings beat a path to his door, while their wives, rivals in generosity and beauty, let themselves be seduced by him.”
Antony enjoyed the flattery, but not sufficiently to be entirely forgiving. While graciously accepting the rulers’ explanations that they had supported his enemies only under duress, he smilingly told them that he and Octavian had 170,000 soldiers to pay off. To help meet the debt, he demanded the same sum they had paid Cassius: ten years’ taxes in a year. When the shocked rulers, already bled dry by the republicans, stuttered that they could never find the money, Antony relented only a little, remitting one year’s taxation and extending the payment period to two years.
Leaving Ephesus, Antony visited several important client kingdoms of Rome in Asia Minor. He was aware that if his Parthian campaign was to succeed, he needed stability at his rear in Rome’s satellite states along the eastern borders. He therefore paid particular attention to a dynastic dispute in Cap-padocia, a kingdom important because its ruler also controlled parts of Armenia and hence the frontier with the Euphrates. According to some, however, of even greater interest to Antony were the charms of Glaphyra, a beautiful Cappadocian princess with whom he probably had an affair.
Antony was every bit as susceptible to women as Caesar had been, perhaps more so. Plutarch thought:
His weakness for the opposite sex showed an attractive side of his character, and even won him the sympathy of many people, for he often helped others in their love affairs and always accepted with good humor the jokes they made about his own . . . Well versed in the art of putting the best possible face on disreputable actions, he never feared the audit of his copulations, but let nature have her way, and left behind him the foundations of many families.
He was about to encounter another royal ruler ready to let nature have her way in pursuit of her goals and who would dominate the rest of his life.
*Ballista gives us our word ballistic.
*Shakespeare changed “stagnant water” to “stale of horses” when he cribbed this account from Plutarch, showing his masterly touch at heightening dramatic imagery.
*According to Herodotus, Artemesia unsuccessfully urged Xerxes not to fight at Salamis. She herself fought bravely in the battle until his defeat and then escaped by sinking a ship in her way, causing Xerxes to remark, “My men have become women and my women men.”
*The Greek god Dionysus was known to the Romans as Bacchus.
*To further enhance his divine status, Octavian apparently claimed that his mother, Atia, had been ravished by Apollo in the form of a snake nine months before giving birth to him and had been left with a permanent mark on her stomach from the snake’s fangs.