By the summer of 43 B.C., Octavian had made good progress toward fulfilling the three-point program he set out in the letter he wrote Philippus on reaching Italy after the catastrophe of the Ides of March. One, he had accepted the legacy, and the lex curiata confirming his adoption, which Antony had obstructed, was now finally passed. Two, with the consulship, he had “succeeded to [Caesar’s] power,” at least in part, although there was more to do as and when opportunity offered. Three, now at last, he was in a position to “avenge his ‘father’’s death.”
The consul calmed the public by completing the payments that Julius Caesar had bequeathed to citizens, and by settling the bounties promised to the legions. He behaved with pretended gratitude to the Senate, but dared not attend its meetings without a bodyguard.
Then his colleague Pedius won approval for a bill that made Caesar’s killing a crime and outlawed the conspirators. A special court was set up, which sat for one day and found all the accused guilty. Different prosecutors were appointed, at least of the leading conspirators; Agrippa took on the case against Cassius. None of those charged were present and able to defend themselves; indeed, many were governors of provinces. Those who happened to be in Rome quietly disappeared abroad.
This business done, Octavian left the city with his eleven legions, ostensibly to do battle with Antony but in fact to come to terms with him. He proceeded at a leisurely pace up the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile Pedius urged a reluctant Senate to reconcile itself with Antony and Lepidus. The reason for this policy switch was obvious; both they and Octavian were, in their different ways, Caesarian leaders and would soon need to defend themselves against the mighty host that the liberatores were reportedly assembling in the eastern empire. Victory over a legionless Senate had been an easy piece of work. Brutus and Cassius backed by the manpower and wealth of the east were a very different matter.
VII
KILLING FIELDS
43–42 B.C.
* * *
Octavian was in the weaker position, for Antony’s forces, which brought together those of three provincial governors, including the former consul Lepidus, could easily have wiped him out. However, he calculated that his onetime enemy recognized that a united front among Caesarians was essential to maximize the chances of defeating Brutus and Cassius. They needed to come to an understanding. Also, the last twelve months had taught all military commanders that Julius Caesar’s veterans would fight against anybody except his heir.
Antony and Octavian brought five thousand men each to positions on opposite sides of the river. Then three hundred soldiers approached the bridges at either bank. Lepidus crossed over to the island; he inspected it for weapons or hidden assassins, then waved an all-clear with his cloak. Octavian and Antony now left their bodyguards and advisers at the bridgeheads and walked to the island, where they sat down with Lepidus in full view of everybody. They met for two days, from dawn to dusk.
There were three items on the agenda: how to legalize their power; how to raise the funds needed to finance the war against Brutus and Cassius; and how to keep the opposition from regaining its strength.
During the weeks following the Ides of March, when Antony was on good terms with the Senate, he had enacted a law abolishing the post of dictator. Now it was reinvented in tripartite form. A Commission of Three for the Ordering of the State was to be established for five years (modern historians call it the Second Triumvirate), with Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus as the commissioners, or triumvirs. They were empowered to make and repeal laws and to nominate officeholders. There was no appeal from their decisions. Octavian would resign the consulship in favor of one of Antony’s generals.
It is a little hard to see what the undistinguished Lepidus, who had given Antony his army a few months previously in Gaul, contributed to the Triumvirate. Of the three men, Antony was by far the most powerful and experienced figure; he was probably responsible for promoting Lepidus, who in the event of any disagreements could be counted on to take his side.
The commissioners immediately nominated the consuls and other officeholders for the coming five years, and they also decided the provincial governorships. Antony was to take Gaul (except for Transalpine Gaul); Lepidus, his old province of Transalpine Gaul and the two Spains; and Octavian, Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily. (Sensibly, the empire east of the Adriatic, now in the hands of Brutus and Cassius, was left undecided.) This distribution showed with embarrassing clarity that Octavian was the junior partner of the three. In due course, all these constitutional arrangements were approved by a people’s assembly in Rome.
A single solution was found for the second and third agenda items: a proscription. Proscription was an official mechanism for liquidating political opponents and amassing large sums of money from their confiscated estates; as already mentioned, it had first been used by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in 81 B.C.
The negotiators found it easier to agree on the principle of having a proscription than on the actual names of those to die. The choice of victims took a good deal of private haggling. To begin with, Octavian was of two minds about the project; but, Suetonius writes, once the proscription had been decided on, “he carried it out more ruthlessly than either of the others.”
The triumvirs marked down not only their political opponents whom they saw as public enemies (hostes), but also personal foes (inimici). They exchanged relatives and friends with one another. Lepidus abandoned his brother Paullus. Octavian allowed onto the list his onetime guardian, Gaius Toranius, who had been aedile in the year of his blood father’s praetorship. He also deserted Cicero—but only, if we can believe the sources, after resisting Antony, who so much wanted revenge for the Philippics that he let his own uncle be proscribed as payment for the superannuated orator.
Having concluded their island discussions, Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian arrived in Rome and posted the proscription decree on white boards in the Forum. Everyone named in the decree automatically forfeited his citizenship and protection from the law. The list was not final and new victims were added later, as the triumvirs decided. Informers who betrayed a proscribed man to the authorities were rewarded, and any person who killed one was also entitled to keep a share of his wealth. (The remainder went to the state.)
From a modern viewpoint, a proscription is a strange device. With the examples of the French and Russian revolutions before us, we expect the state to undertake mass liquidations if it deems them necessary; but, as has already been pointed out, the Roman state was remarkably nonbureaucratic; with no police force, no tradition of incarcerating offenders, and no professional judiciary, it was simply not equipped to execute large numbers of its citizens. The task had to be privatized.
The triumvirs betrayed signs of unease, of the need not to alienate public opinion. According to Appian, the proscription decree stated: “No one should consider this action unjust, or savage, or excessive, in the light of what happened to Gaius [Caesar] and ourselves.” The triumvirs promised not to punish “any member of the masses,” a guarantee they wisely honored. The decree closed with an assurance that “the names of none of those who receive rewards will be noted in our records.” What was to be done was shameful and it called for concealment.
The proscription brought out the best and worst in human nature. Appian records many terrible stories of those times:
Many people were murdered in all kinds of ways, and decapitated to furnish evidence for the reward. They fled in undignified fashion, and abandoned their former conspicuous dress for strange disguises. Some went down wells, some descended into the filth of the sewers, and others climbed up into smoky rafters or sat in total silence under close-packed roofs. To some, just as terrifying as the executioners were wives or children with whom they were not on good terms, or ex-slaves and slaves, or creditors, or neighbouring landowners who coveted their estates.
One tragic tale may evoke the selfishness and despair of the time. It concerns a teenager, whom we only know as Atilius; he probably belonged to an old
noble plebeian family that originated in Campania. His father was dead, and he had inherited a rich estate. He had just celebrated his coming of age at Rome and was proceeding with his friends, as the custom was, to sacrifice in various temples in or around the Forum. Adulthood rendered him liable to legal penalty. Suddenly his name was added to the proscription list displayed on the speakers’ platform, presumably because of his wealth, and when this was noticed all his friends and slaves ran off. The boy went, deserted and alone, to his mother, but she was too frightened to shelter him. After this betrayal, Atilius saw no point in asking anyone else for help; he ran away to the mountains.
Forced by hunger to come down into the plains, he was kidnapped by a bandit who made a living by preying on passing travelers, putting them in chains and forcing them to work for him. Atilius, brought up in luxury, could not endure the hard labor. Still wearing his fetters, he made off to a main road, where he incautiously identified himself to some passing centurions. They killed him there and then, doubtless taking his head back to Rome for their reward.
A funerary inscription dating from the late first century B.C. tells a very different story. It records the speech a grieving husband made at the funeral of his wife after forty years of marriage. We know neither his name nor hers, but she is usually called Turia, the name of a woman who led a similar life and who was once thought, wrongly, to be the same person.
Turia’s husband, an unrepentant republican, was proscribed and went into hiding. He recalled: “You provided abundantly for my needs during my flight and gave me the means for a dignified life-style, when you took all the gold and jewellery you wore and sent it to me.”
A year later, when the need for the proscription had ended, Octavian pardoned Turia’s husband, but Lepidus, then in charge of the city of Rome, refused to acknowledge his colleague’s decision. He seems to have enjoyed the proscription and did not wish it to be over.
Turia presented herself before Lepidus to ask him to recognize the pardon, and prostrated herself before his feet. He did not raise her up (as, according to convention, he should have done), but had her dragged away and beaten. This characteristically unpleasant behavior apparently angered Octavian and, according to Turia’s husband, contributed to his downfall. “That matter was soon to prove harmful to him,” the widower remarked with dry satisfaction.
The cruelty and confusion that the proscription brought about was widespread. As many as three hundred senators were butchered—among them Cicero—and perhaps two thousand equites. The republican opposition in Italy was largely liquidated.
Antony had a streak of savagery in his character and entered fully into the spirit of things (unless the record has been distorted by subsequent propaganda against him). He always inspected the heads of victims, even at table when eating a meal. His wife was equally ferocious.
As for Octavian, while the proscription was in progress some observers found him a good deal too fond of victims’ expensive furniture and their Corinthian bronze figures, objets d’art that were highly prized. According to Suetonius, someone scrawled on the base of a statue of him an insulting poem recalling the old story that his family’s fortune derived from the shameful business of moneylending.
I did not take my father’s line;
His trade was silver coin, but mine
Corinthian bronzes…
The proscription was not as effective as its designers had intended. Much less money was made than had been expected, for too much land and built property came on the market at the same time and prices collapsed. Also, the more respectable felt some qualms about buying the estates of innocent victims.
The triumvirs were at their wits’ end, for they had to find the resources to finance forty-three legions. They produced a new proscription list that merely confiscated property. They even stole the personal savings that people had placed in the sacred care of the Vestal Virgins. Ingenious new taxes were devised to swell their war chest.
All this came as a great shock to the citizens of Rome in Italy, who, thanks to the wealth of empire, had been exempt from personal tax for the last century. With the western provinces exhausted and the east off limits, they found themselves, for the first time, paying for their civil war.
Meanwhile, the republican cause was prospering. A new maritime leader in the west had emerged to complement the land power of Brutus and Cassius in the east. He was Sextus Pompeius, Pompey the Great’s youngest son. Although still a very young man, he had already lived an extraordinary life.
In 48 B.C., with the civil war in full swing, Pompey the Great sent Sextus, then a child of thirteen or so, with his third wife, the young and beautiful Cornelia, to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos in the north of the Aegean Sea, where they would be safe from the fighting. He joined them there after Pharsalus, and they sailed with him on his final journey.
Sextus witnessed his father’s murder off the coast of Egypt. A small fishing boat set out from the beach, with a Roman soldier in it and a few court officials. The passengers looked too unimpressively workaday for the reception of a great Roman commander, even one fallen on hard times. Pompey’s entourage grew increasingly suspicious and advised him to have their ship rowed back out of range of the shore.
It was too late, for soon the boat had come alongside and the Roman soldier, a certain Lucius Septimius, whom Pompey recognized, saluted him with the title of imperator, commander in chief. Turning to Cornelia and Sextus before leaving the ship, Pompey kissed them and quoted a couple of lines from Sophocles:
Whoever makes his journey to a tyrant’s court
Becomes his slave, although he went there a free man.
Cornelia and Sextus were in a frenzy of anxiety, but they relaxed when the little boat neared the beach where what they took to be a welcome party was waiting. However, as Pompey got to his feet before stepping down onto the sand, Septimius struck him with his sword, followed by others in the boat. Pompey pulled his toga over his head and sank down with a groan.
The people on the trireme gave out a great wailing sound when they saw what was happening, a cry so loud that it was heard on the shore. But Cornelia and Sextus knew there was nothing that could be done. Their ship weighed anchor and, with a strong following wind in its sail, ran out to sea.
The shock of what he had seen marked Sextus forever. The greatest personality not simply in the boy’s own life, but in the Roman world (as he will have been told), was dead, not falling honorably on the battlefield but butchered in a squalid ambush. Although the records of Sextus’ doings are scant, enough evidence survives to suggest that he modeled himself on his father. He gave himself an unusual agnomen, Pius, to convey the meaning that he was “loyal to his father’s memory.”
Cornelia went back to Rome, but Sextus made his way to Africa, where he joined his elder brother, Gnaeus. After the defeat at Thapsus and Cato’s suicide, he and his brother fled to Spain, where the Pompeius clan were popular. Gnaeus had little difficulty in raising an army of thirteen legions, in the main recruited from Spanish tribesmen and slaves. As we have seen, that force was largely destroyed at Munda, and Gnaeus was hunted down and killed. Sextus, however, made a getaway and disappeared into Spain’s tribal hinterland. Caesar published a pardon for Sextus and did not pursue him, believing he was too young to be a serious threat.
This was a mistake, for the young man soon gathered new forces. Although only a teenager, he ran a highly effective guerrilla war against the provincial governors whom Caesar appointed. Appian makes it clear that he understood the principles of irregular fighting, a long tradition among Spanish tribesmen: “With his greater mobility [Sextus] made unexpected appearances, disappeared again, harassed his enemies, and ended up taking a number of towns, small and large.”
The Ides of March changed everything. From being an enemy of the state, Sextus, now about eighteen years old, was suddenly in a position to support the republican cause. The Senate appointed him prefect of the fleet and the seacoasts in 43 B.C., whereupon he gathe
red together all the ships he could find and set sail for Massilia (today’s Marseille).
Sextus’ fortunes soon went into reverse. After the establishment of the Triumvirate, the consul Pedius canceled his appointment as admiral. However, Sextus hung on to his ships and, in a bold stroke, decided not to return to Spain, instead settling in Sicily, where he persuaded the governor to hand over the island. The triumvirs, seeing their danger, added his name to the proscription list (despite the fact that he had nothing whatever to do with Caesar’s assassination).
Sextus was now in an extraordinarily strong position; from his maritime vantage point in Sicily he controlled the grain supply to Rome from Egypt, Africa, and Sicily itself. Many proscribed men flocked to him, as did refugees and escaped slaves from all over Italy. Sextus encouraged this development, as Appian reports: “His small boats and merchant vessels met any who came by sea; his warships patrolled the shores, made signals to help the lost, and picked up anyone they encountered. He came in person to meet the new arrivals.”
A new strategy began to take shape in republican minds: Brutus and Cassius were in charge of the east, and Sextus of the west. Italy and Gaul were isolated. It would only be a matter of time before the dead dictator’s poisonous faction was isolated and crushed.
Octavian had the same idea, but from the opposite standpoint. He sent a squadron to put paid to Sextus, but it was defeated, and Cassius then sent ships and reinforcements to Sextus. For the time being, Octavian did not press the issue.
The mood in Rome was bleak and panicky. On January 1, 42, a religious ceremony of great political importance was conducted. The triumvirs took an oath that Julius Caesar had become a god, all of whose acts were sacred and binding, and made the Senate swear to the same effect. They laid the foundations of a small temple dedicated to Caesar in the Forum, on the spot where his corpse had been cremated by the grieving mob. His birthday was made a public holiday; celebrations were compulsory and senators or senators’ sons who did not take part were liable to a severe fine of one million sesterces.
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