Augustus

by John Williams

  XI. Letter: Marcus Tullius Cicero to Marcus Junius Brutus (October, 44 B.C.)

  Recklessness, recklessness! Antonius has mobilized the Macedonian legions and goes to meet them at Brindisi; Octavius is enlisting the discharged veterans of Caesar’s legions in Campania. Antonius intends to march to Gaul against our friend Decimus, ostensibly to avenge the assassination but in fact to augment his power by gaining the Gallic legions. It is rumored that he will march through Rome, showing his strength against Octavius. Shall we have war again in Italy? Can we trust so young a boy and with such a name as Caesar (as he calls himself) with our cause? Oh, Brutus! Where are you now, when Rome has need of you?

  XII. Consular Order to Gaius Sentius Tavus, Military Commander of Macedonia at Apollonia, with Letter (August, 44 B.C.)

  By authority of Marcus Antonius, Consul to the Senate of Rome, Governor of Macedonia, Pontifex of the Lupercalian College, and Commander in Chief of the Macedonian Legions, Gaius Sentius Tavus is hereby ordered to command the chief officers of the Macedonian Legions to mobilize their forces in preparation for a crossing to Brindisi, to make this crossing at the earliest moment in his power, and to hold the legions in that place against the arrival of their supreme commander.

  Sentius: this is important. He spent part of last year at Apollonia. He may have made friends with some of the officers. Investigate this most carefully. If there are those who seem inclined toward him, transfer them out of the legion at once, or get rid of them in some other way. But get rid of them.

  XIII. A Libel: Distributed to the Macedonian Legions, at Brindisi (44 B.C.)

  To the followers of the murdered Caesar:

  Do you march against Decimus Brutus Albinus in Gaul, or against the son of Caesar in Rome?

  Ask Marcus Antonius.

  Are you mobilized to destroy the enemies of your dead leader, or to protect his assassins?

  Ask Marcus Antonius.

  Where is the will of the dead Caesar which bequeathed to every citizen of Rome three hundred pieces of silver coin?

  Ask Marcus Antonius.

  The murderers and conspirators against Caesar are free by an act of the Senate sanctioned by Marcus Antonius.

  The murderer Gaius Cassius Longinus has been given the governorship of Syria by Marcus Antonius.

  The murderer Marcus Junius Brutus has been given the governorship of Crete by Marcus Antonius.

  Where are the friends of the murdered Caesar among his enemies?

  The son of Caesar calls to you.

  XIV. Order of Execution, at Brindisi (44 B.C.)

  To: Gaius Sentius Tavus, Military Commander of Macedonia From: Marcus Antonius, Commander in Chief of the Legions Subject: Treasonable actions in the Legions IV and Martian

  The following officers will be presented at the headquarters of the Commander in Chief of the Legions, at the hour of dawn on the twelfth day of November.

  P. Lucius Cn. Servius

  Sex. Portius M. Flavius

  C. Titius A. Marius

  At that hour on that day, these men shall suffer execution by beheading. In addition, there will be selected by lot fifteen soldiers from each of the twenty cohorts of the IV and Martian, who shall be executed with their officers in the same manner.

  All the officers and men of all the Macedonian Legions are commanded to be present and witness this execution.

  XV. The Acts of Caesar Augustus (A.D. 14)

  At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the Republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.

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  I. Letter: Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius (13 B.C.)

  My dear old friend, these letters that you require of me—I could not have suspected how they would take me back to the days that are gone, and through what a strange tangle of emotions I must go on that journey! Now in these uneventful years of my retirement, as my time on earth draws to an end, the days seem to hasten with unseemly speed; and only the past is real, so that I go there as if I were reborn, as Pythagoras says we are, into another time and another body.

  So many things whirl around in my head—the disorder of those days! Can I make sense of them, even to you, who know more of the history of our world than any mortal? I comfort myself with the certainty that you will make sense of what I tell you, even if I cannot.

  Marcus Antonius went to Brindisi to meet the Macedonian legions that he had called up, and we knew that we must act. We had no money: Octavius had stripped his fortune and sold much of his property to discharge Julius’s bequests to the people. We had no authority: according to the law, not for ten years would Octavius be eligible to become even a member of the Senate, and of course Antonius had blocked every special privilege that the Senate would have given him. We had no power: only a few hundred of the veterans of Caesar’s army in Rome had unequivocally declared for us. We had a name, and the force of our determination.

  So Octavius and Agrippa went immediately to the south, to the Campanian coastal farms where Caesar had settled many of his veterans. We knew what Antonius was offering recruits as an enlistment bounty; we offered five times that amount. We offered money that we did not have; it was a desperate gamble, but it was a necessary one. I remained in Rome and composed letters for distribution among the Macedonian legions that were nominally under Antonius’s command. We had had promises from them earlier, and had reason to believe that some would defect to us, if the circumstances were right. As you know, the letters had their effect—though it was not precisely what we had anticipated.

  For Antonius then made the first of his many serious blunders. Because of some wavering on the part of two of the legions— the Macedonian IV and the Martian, I believe—he had some three hundred officers and men put to death. More than the letters, I am sure, this action worked to our advantage. During the march to Rome, these two legions simply diverged to Alba Longa, and sent word to Octavius that they would cast their fortunes with his. It was not the cruelty of Antonius’s act that outraged them, I think; soldiers are used to cruelty and death. But they could not trust themselves to a man who would act so rashly and unnecessarily.

  In the meantime, Octavius and Agrippa had had a small success in raising the beginnings of an army to meet the Antonian threat. Some three thousand men with arms (though we let it be thought that it was double that number) assigned themselves to his command; and the same number without arms pledged themselves to our future. With a sizable portion of this three thousand, Octavius marched toward Rome, leaving Agrippa in command of the rest and charging him to march with them toward Arezzo (the place of my birth, as you will remember), and to raise whatever other troops he could on the way. It was a pitiful force to range against the power of our enemies; but it was more than we had had in the beginning.

  Octavius encamped the army a few miles outside of Rome and entered the city with only a small body of men to guard his person, and offered his services to the Senate and the people against Antonius; it was known that Antonius was marching toward Rome, and no one could be sure of his purpose. But in their division and impotence, the Senate refused; and in their confusion and fear, the people did not speak as one. As a result, most of the army that we had raised at so much cost to ourselves dispersed, and we were left with fewer than a thousand men at Rome, and a few hundred more who marched (futilely, we thought) with Agrippa toward Arezzo.

  Octavius had sworn to himself, to his friends, and to the people that he would have vengeance upon the murderers of his father. And now Antonius was marching through Rome on his way to Gaul—to punish (he said) Decimus Albinus, one of the conspirators. But we knew (and Rome feared) his real purpose, which was to gain for himself the Gallic legions under Decimus’s command. With those legions, he would be invincible; and the world would lie like an unguarded treasure house before his plundering ambition. We simply faced the death of the Rome for which Caesar had given his life.

  Do you see the p
osition we were in? We had to prevent the punishment of one of those very criminals we had ourselves sworn to punish. And it became clear to us that, unexpectedly, another end had discovered us—an end larger than revenge and larger than our own ambitions. The world and our task enlarged themselves before us, and we felt that we peered into a bottomless chasm.

  Without money, without the support of the people, without the authority of the Senate—we could only wait for what would ensue. Octavius withdrew the remnants of his army from the outskirts of Rome, and began slowly to follow Agrippa’s little band to Arezzo—though it seemed now that there was no hope of diverting or even delaying Antonius’s progress to Gaul.

  And then Antonius made his second serious blunder.

  In his vanity and recklessness, he marched into the city of Rome with his legions; and they were fully armed.

  Not for forty years—since the butcheries of Marius and Sulla—had Roman citizens seen armed soldiers inside the city walls; and there were people still alive then who could remember the cobbles dark with blood, and there were senators then in the House who as young men had seen the rostrum piled with the heads of the senators of that day, and could remember the bodies left in the Forum to be devoured by dogs.

  So Antonius swaggered and drank and whored through the city, and his soldiers plundered the houses of his enemies; and the Senate cowered, and did not dare oppose him.

  Then the news came to Antonius from Alba that the Martian legion had deserted him and had declared for us. It is said that he was drunk at the time he got the news; in any event, he acted as if he were. For he precipitately called the Senate to meet (he was still consul, remember), and in a long irrational harangue demanded that Octavius be branded a public enemy. But before the speech was over, another piece of news came into the city, and was whispered among the senators even as Antonius was speaking. The Macedonian IV legion, following the Martian, had declared its allegiance to Octavius and the party of the Caesars.

  In his rage, Antonius lost control of what little good sense he had. He had defied the constitution once by entering the city with his armed forces; now he defied law and custom by convening the Senate at night and by threatening his opponents with harm if they attended the meeting. In this illegal assemblage, he accomplished the following: he had Macedonia given to his brother, Gaius; and the provinces of Africa, Crete, Libya, and Asia to his own supporters. And then he hastened to the rest of his army at Tivoli, whence he began his march to Rimini, where he was to prepare his siege of Decimus in Gaul.

  Thus, what Octavius could not accomplish by his caution, Antonius accomplished for us by his recklessness. Where there had been despair, I could see hope.

  Now, my old friend, I will tell you something that no one knows; and you may use it in your history, if you wish. It is known that during the midst of these events, Octavius was on his slow march with the raggle of his troops to Arezzo; what is not known is that, at the moment of Antonius’s open display of contempt toward the Senate and the law, and at the moment I judged the temper of the Senate and the people to be what they were, I sent an urgent message to Octavius to return, in dead secret, to Rome, so that we could make our plans. As Antonius swaggered boisterously out of the city, Octavius came secretly in.

  And we laid the plan that would give us the world.

  II. Letter: Marcus Tullius Cicero to Marcus Junius Brutus, at Dyrrachium (January, 43 B.C.)

  My dear Brutus, the news we have in Rome from Athens fills all of us who honor the Republic with joy and hope. Had the others who are our heroes acted so boldly and with such decision as you have, our nation would not now be in such a state of turmoil. To think that, so shortly after the illegal assignment that Marcus Antonius made of Macedonia to his half-witted brother Gaius, now that same Gaius cowers in fear in Apollonia, while your armies grow and gather the strength that will one day be our salvation! Would that your cousin Decimus had had that same resolution and skill nine months ago, after our banquet of the Ides of March!

  I am sure that the disturbing news of Antonius’s new madness has reached you even in Dyrrachium. Disregarding all law and custom, he has terrorized the city; and now he marches into Gaul against Decimus. And until a few weeks ago, it was clear to all of us that he would be successful in that endeavor.

  But young Caesar (I call him that now, despite my aversion to the name) and his young friend, Maecenas, came to me in secret with a plan. The boy has asked my advice before, and has courted me; but only recently have I become persuaded that he may be of serious consequence and help to us. Despite his incredible youth, and his much too diffident manner, he has accomplished remarkable things during these last few months.

  Quite correctly, he pointed out to me that he maintains the only force capable of deterring Antonius: one army, under Marcus Agrippa, now marches to Arezzo, which is in the path of Antonius’s intended entry into Gaul; and another, which has been discreetly encamped several miles from Rome, follows that; and the gods know how many other veterans and recruits they will pick up on the way. But (and this is what makes me begin to trust the young leader) he will not move illegally; he must have the sanction of the Senate and the people. And he proposes that I use my offices (which are still not inconsiderable, I imagine) to effect this sanction.

  This I have consented to do, under conditions that are mutually agreeable. For his part, young Octavius Caesar asked that the Senate sanction his actions in raising the army; that the veterans who had joined him, as well as the IV Macedonian and the Martian legions, be formally given honor and the thanks of the people; that he himself be legally given command of the forces that he had raised and that no man be put in military authority over him; that the state defray the expenses of his army and supply them with the bounty he had promised them for their enlistment; that lands be allotted to the troops after their service; and that the Senate waive the law of age (as it has done before) and upon his successful alleviation of the siege of Decimus at Mutina, that he return to Rome as a senator and be allowed to stand for consul.

  In another time and in other circumstances, these might have seemed excessive demands; but if Decimus falls, then we are ruined. I confess to you, my dear Brutus, I would have promised nearly anything; but I put a grave face on, and made some demands of my own.

  I stipulated that in no way would he or his men take that revenge upon Decimus which he had earlier threatened; that he not oppose as a senator the decrees that I might pass in behalf of the legality of Decimus’s position in Gaul; and that he not use the armies sanctioned by the Senate for an adventure against either you in Macedonia or our friend Cassius in Syria.

  To all these conditions he agreed, and said, that so long as the Senate adhered to its part of the bargain, he would take no action on his own authority nor allow those under his command to do so.

  Thus our cause advances. I have given the speech which put these proposals before the Senate; but as you know, the real work came before I dared to speak, and still I cannot rest in my labors.

  III. Quintus Salvidienus Rufus: Notes for a Journal, at Rome (December, 44 B.C.)

  Restless, I await my fate. Gaius Octavius is secretly in Rome; Agrippa marches to the north; Maecenas intrigues with everyone, our friends and enemies alike. Yesterday he returned from an afternoon spent with Fulvia herself, that red-faced harridan who is the wife of that same Antonius against whom we are to march. The Senate has given Octavius Caesar powers that a month ago we could not have dreamed: the legions of the next consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, are ours; Octavius has military powers second to none, he will be allowed into the senatorial ranks upon our return from the Gallic campaign—and I have been given the command of a legion, by Octavius himself with the sanction of the Senate. It is an honor that I could not reasonably have expected for many years.

  Yet I am restless, and filled with a foreboding. For the first time I become unsure of the rightness of our course. Every success uncovers difficulties that we have not foreseen, and every vic
tory enlarges the magnitude of our possible defeat.

  Octavius has changed; he is no longer the friend we had in Apollonia. He seldom laughs, he takes almost no wine, and he seems to disdain even the harmless, distracting pleasures that we took with the girls once. So far as I know, he has not even had a woman since our return to Rome.

  “So far as I know,” I realize I have said. Once we knew all about each other; now he has become contained, withdrawn, almost secretive. I, to whom he once talked with open friendship; from whom he had no secret of his heart; with whom he shared the closest dreams—I no longer know him. Is it grief for his uncle that will not leave him? Is it that grief which has hardened into ambition? Or is it something else that I cannot name? A cold sadness has come over him and draws him apart from us.

  In my leisure now in Rome, as I wait for the consular armies to be raised, I can think of these things, and wonder. Perhaps when I am older and wiser I shall understand them.

  Gaius Octavius on Cicero: “Cicero is a hopeless conspirator. What he does not write to his friends, he tells to his slaves.”

  When did the distrust begin?—if it is distrust.

  The morning that Octavius and Maecenas announced the plan to me?

  I said: “We would aid that Decimus who was one of the murderers of Julius Caesar?”

  Octavius said: “We would aid ourselves, so that we might survive.”

  I did not speak. Maecenas had not spoken.

  Octavius said: “Do you remember the oath we made—you and I and Agrippa and Maecenas—that night in Apollonia?”