Julius Caesar’s deification calls for some explanation. In the classical world, the boundary between gods and men was not clear-cut. Heroes in Greek legends, such as Heracles, were thought to be half human and half divine. From the third century B.C., kings in the Middle East regularly arranged for themselves to be “deified” in their lifetimes. Nobody really believed that they were of a different nature from the rest of humanity, but divine status added majesty to their office and created a respectful distance between them and their grateful subjects.
Roman governors were also sometimes awarded divine honors, although these were held to be valid only in the east. The novelty of Caesar’s deification is that it took place in Rome and under the auspices of the state.
As for Octavian, his standing was considerably enhanced, for he could style himself divi filius, the son of a god. His supporters lost no opportunity to publicize his adoptive father’s elevation to the stars.
Since leaving Italy in the summer of 44 B.C., Brutus and Cassius had been doing extremely well. In theory, they should have made their way to their insultingly unimportant provinces: the island of Crete, and Cyrene, on the north coast of Africa next to Egypt. They chose other and more interesting destinations.
Cassius, a competent soldier, traveled at top speed to Syria, where he was well known and liked. Seven legions based there flocked to his standard. Another four in Egypt also joined him.
For a time Brutus played the student at Athens, the nearest thing the ancient world had to a modern university town. He attended lectures given by leading philosophers of the day. However, behind the calm appearance of academic withdrawal, Brutus and his agents were busy making friends and winning over opinion in Macedonia. By the end of 44 he was in control of most of the province; the legions of neighboring Illyricum came over to him as well, and he captured and eventually executed the official incoming governor, Mark Antony’s brother Gaius.
Brutus and the freedom fighters were extremely reluctant to commence hostilities; they issued manifestos in which they declared that, “for the sake of ensuring harmony in the Republic, they were even willing to live in permanent exile, they would furnish no grounds for civil war.” But Octavian’s second march on Rome, the Triumvirate, and, finally, the proscription persuaded them that peace was no longer an option.
At present, the joint power of Antony and Octavian was too great for Brutus. So he turned away and marched eastward to join forces with Cassius, to recruit more men, and to raise money for the legions’ wages. Cassius also wanted to secure their rear by eliminating potential enemies, such as the island of Rhodes with its powerful fleet.
After draining the east of its human and financial resources, the freedom fighters finally felt ready to march against the triumvirs.
Thrace, a largely ungoverned territory to the east of Greece and Macedonia, stretched up to the river Danube and along to the town of Byzantium and the Hellespont. In today’s topography it covered northeastern Greece, southern Bulgaria, and European Turkey. It was hot, mountainous, and heavily forested.
The territory’s inhabitants were fierce and warlike tribes who formed separate little kingdoms. Greek colonists founded city-states on the coastline, exploited the area’s deposits of gold and silver, and recruited Thracian soldiers, but, by and large, they left the Thracians to themselves in their uncultivated hinterland.
These were the lands over which the Romans established a shaky and uneven dominance from the second century onward and made into a province in 46 B.C. Through it they drove the Via Egnatia, the great highway that led from the Adriatic Sea to Byzantium and the provinces of Asia Minor. At the road’s eastern end stood the town of Philippi, named after Philip of Macedon, who had rebuilt it as a strongpoint against the Thracian tribes. Well supplied with springs, it occupied a precipitous ridge, which Philip ringed with walls. Not far west of Philippi was the Hill of Dionysus, with a gold mine called the Refuges. Just over a mile beyond this, and a couple of miles from the town, two hills flanked the road on either side.
Wooded high ground fell away down to the northern edge of the town, while to the south a marsh stretched eight miles or so to the coast. The Via Egnatia skirted the marsh and continued across a mountain pass called the Symbolon, or Junction, to the small port of Neapolis, a rocky headland with a spacious harbor. A few miles out to sea lay the island of Thasos.
Here was the place where the two largest Roman armies that had ever faced each other in battle were to meet. The triumvirs controlled forty-three legions (more than two hundred thousand men if they were up to strength). However, strong forces had to be stationed in the west, especially in northern Italy and Gaul, to prevent unrest. Octavian and Antony deployed twenty-one or twenty-two legions (perhaps a hundred thousand men) and thirteen thousand cavalry for their encounter with Brutus and Cassius. In principle, the two sides were fairly evenly matched, for the freedom fighters led an army of nineteen legions (say, about seventy thousand men) and twenty thousand foreign cavalry including some Parthian mounted archers; but the opposing generals were all aware of the potentially significant fact that many of these men had served under Julius Caesar and probably remembered him with affection.
Militarily, Antony, who had served with Caesar during the Gallic Wars, was by far the ablest soldier of the Triumvirate and, we may assume, was in charge of planning the campaign. His first task was to prevent Brutus and Cassius from taking over Greece and bringing their fleet into the Adriatic before he had had a chance to transport his forces there and establish himself. So he sent across the Adriatic Sea an advance guard, which marched down the Via Egnatia past Philippi and through the Symbolon, until it reached two further passes that provided the only known routes to Asia. But this force was quickly outflanked and compelled to retire.
Brutus and Cassius moved on to Philippi and were delighted by what they found there. The two hills in front of the town on either side of the road, flanked by woods on their right and the marsh on their left, made a very strong defensive position. Here they would stand and wait for the triumvirs.
The two generals built a fortified camp on each hill, connected by a palisade. Their strategy was to deny Antony a set-piece battle. He would have to maintain long supply lines across Greece, and transport from Italy would be halted, or at least harried, by the republican navy, which would blockade the seaways. It would not be long before he and Octavian were short of food. Eventually they would simply have to retreat—but where to, if the escape route by sea to Italy was barred?
A happy portent conveyed a general sense of optimism. Two eagles flew down onto two silver eagles, pecked at them, and then perched on the standards. As they stayed there the decision was taken to feed them regularly. Fortune was smiling on the republican cause.
The triumvirs and their legions slipped through the republican blockade and disembarked at Dyrrachium, where Octavian fell sick and had to be left behind, his army staying with him. According to Agrippa and Maecenas, his boyhood friends, he was suffering from dropsy (a morbid accumulation of fluid in the body) on this occasion. What may be significant is that he tended to be indisposed at times of great personal crisis. An inexperienced military leader, Octavian was approaching a fearsome challenge and it is possible that his illness was psychosomatic in origin.
Antony rushed on toward Philippi and encamped on the plain a mile or so from Brutus and Cassius. Ditches, earthworks, and palisades were built, and wells sunk for drinking water. Antony was in a most unfavorable position, on low-lying land prone to flooding. He judged that by setting up residence contemptuously close to the freedom fighters, he would communicate a powerful impression of self-confidence that might dampen his opponents’ morale; but when an ambush he set for some enemy foragers failed, he and his men began to lose hope of victory.
Octavian’s health did not improve, but when he learned that things were not going well, he immediately set off for Philippi. He was as suspicious of his colleague as of the freedom fighters. As Dio commented:<
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[Octavian] heard of the situation and feared the outcome in either case—whether Antony, acting alone, should be defeated or should conquer; for in the first case, he felt that Brutus and Cassius would be in a stronger position to oppose him, or in the latter case, Antony certainly would be.
When Octavian arrived, he shared the same camp as Antony and his forces.
For a while, nothing much happened, except for a few sallies and skirmishes. On or about September 30, the two eagles on the freedom fighters’ standards unexpectedly flew off, a discouraging sign for them. On the following day, Antony decided that something had to be done to break the deadlock and force a battle. With typical Caesarian dash, he ordered a detachment of men to cut a way secretly through the marsh, building a causeway by means of which a substantial number of men could out-flank the left of Cassius’ position, cutting the freedom fighters’ supply line down the Via Egnatia to Neapolis. Tall reeds prevented the enemy from seeing what was going on over the ten days needed to complete the work. Then, one night Antony sent a force along the causeway to the dry land on the far side, where the party quickly established fortified outposts.
Cassius was astonished when he realized what had happened. Not to be outdone, he had a fortification wall built through the marsh, which bisected Antony’s causeway and cut off the legionaries in the outposts. Antony responded by leading his army to attack and demolish a palisade that ran between Cassius’ camp and the marsh, for which purpose they carried with them crowbars and ladders. Their mission then was to attack and destroy the camp.
Cassius’ men could hardly believe their eyes, for the maneuver seemed extraordinarily foolhardy. Brutus’ men were ready and armed; they were unable to resist turning to their left and charging Antony’s men as they marched past. Brutus’ army would have endangered itself if it had pressed this attack for too long, because it would have exposed its own side and rear to a possible counterattack by Octavian’s forces. Before this could happen, they changed course and attacked the camp of Antony and Octavian. Sweeping all before them, they captured it.
Antony at last had his battle. Although he understood the difficulties the triumvirs’ soldiers were facing in the plain, it was too risky to lead his troops back down the hill. So he pressed on. The best account of the engagement is written by Appian, but at this point his description goes out of focus. Antony easily and quickly broke through the palisade and stormed Cassius’ camp, which was lightly defended. He led the attack in person, but presumably did so with only a part of his army, the rest of which must have been fighting Cassius’ main force, drawn up (we may suppose) along the line of the palisade to the marsh. The republican legionaries were gradually pushed back, and then lost further heart when they saw their camp being taken and scattered in disorder. The cavalry galloped off in the direction of the sea.
It had been a bizarre day. Both sides had won—and both had lost. Brutus’ men were plundering Octavian’s camp, and Antony’s that of Cassius. As a further complicating factor, there had been little rain and tramping feet had raised great clouds of dust over the battlefield—the “fog of war” avant la lettre. The various victors and vanquished had no idea what had happened to their friends and colleagues. Having looted the camps, soldiers began to go back to find their units. In the gloom they did not know to which army other legionaries belonged. Appian writes that they “returned looking more like porters than soldiers, and even then they did not notice or see each other distinctly.”
This confusion had an unexpected and disastrous consequence. When Cassius had been driven back from his palisade, he retreated quickly with a few followers to the hill on which Philippi stood and from there looked down on the battle. Being nearsighted, he could hardly see the looting of his camp, while the dust prevented any of his entourage from determining how Brutus was doing at the far end of the battlefield.
A large body of cavalry was seen riding toward his position, and Cassius feared that it was the enemy. However, to make sure, he sent one of his staff, a certain Titinius, to reconnoitre. In fact, the horsemen had been sent by Brutus and when they recognized Titinius approaching, they shouted for joy. Some of them leaped off their horses, hugged Titinius, shook him by the hand, sang, and clashed their weapons as a sign of victory.
Cassius jumped to the wrong conclusion, thinking that Titinius had been taken prisoner and that Brutus had been defeated. He withdrew into an empty tent and made his armor-bearer, a freedman called Pindarus, accompany him. While Pindarus, guessing what would be asked of him, hesitated, a messenger ran up to say that Brutus was victorious and was sacking the enemy camp.
“Tell him I wish him total victory,” Cassius replied, according to Appian.
Then turning to Pindarus, he said:
“Hurry up. Why won’t you release me from my disgrace?”
He pulled his cloak over his head and bared his neck for the sword. Later Cassius’ head was found severed from his body. Pindarus, knowing better than to wait around for consequences, had vanished.
Cassius’ death is usually presented as the tragic result of a mistake. But if Appian is correct, he committed suicide after learning that the day had not been entirely lost. It seems that he died of shame. An experienced commander should have parried Antony’s eccentric and foolhardy onslaught. Cassius had not been able to do so; that Brutus, a lesser general, had succeeded when he had failed simply added to the disgrace.
The one commander of whom nothing had been seen or heard was Octavian. How did he pass the day of battle? This is rather hard to say. Still convalescent, he appears to have remained at the camp when the troops were marshaled. After it had been captured, a rumor went around that he had been killed, for the enemy riddled his empty litter with their spears. But he was very much alive; he must have left the camp shortly before it was attacked.
The question arises as to where Octavian went. According to one ancient commentator, he “gave orders that he should be carried into the fray on a litter.” When we recall that his troops were rapidly routed with serious loss, it seems implausible that Octavian would have risked himself in this way. How could he have survived, and why did no one mention such a brave exploit? In fact, at the time, word soon spread that the divi filius had spent three days skulking in the marshes, and even his friends Agrippa and Maecenas did not deny it.
The likeliest scenario is that when it became clear that there was to be a battle, Octavian was advised by his doctor that he was too ill to play an active part, and would be wise to withdraw to a place of safety. Not very admirable behavior, but understandable in a sick young man with little experience of battle. The damaging consequence, though, was that Octavian acquired a reputation for cowardice.
Both sides’ armies were in a bad way. Octavian and Antony’s camp had been thoroughly looted. The weather broke. The autumn rains fell in torrents, flooding everyone’s tents with mud and water, and the temperature dropped below freezing. Antony gradually outflanked Brutus by pressing forward past his southern wing; to avoid encirclement, Brutus extended his own lines with fortifications along the Via Egnatia. However, the triumvirs, short not only of food but of money, could not afford to recompense their men for property lost or destroyed.
Then some terrible news arrived. On the same day as the battle, a great sea fight had taken place in the Adriatic. A republican fleet had encountered a convoy conveying two legions to join the triumviral forces. A few transport ships escaped, but then the wind fell and the remainder drifted about in the calm to be rammed or set on fire with ease. The soldiers were helpless in the face of their destruction. Appian writes:
Some committed suicide when the flames reached them, some jumped aboard the enemy warships, to do or die. Half-burnt ships sailed about for a long time with men on board who were incapacitated by burns or by hunger and thirst. Some men even clung to spars or planks and were washed up on deserted cliffs and beaches.
The disaster was a grim reminder that the republicans controlled the seas. If the tr
iumvirs failed to defeat them by land, they would find it difficult if not impossible to withdraw to Italy; they would be cornered in Greece and would soon run out of supplies. Unsurprisingly, morale among the troops was badly shaken, and Antony and Octavian determined to try to keep the news of the naval catastrophe from Brutus and his men, whom it would excite and reinvigorate.
Although living conditions were not so bad as down in the plain, the situation in Brutus’ camp left much to be desired. The mood among the republicans darkened. Some eastern princes and levies slipped away homeward and a local Thracian leader, who had been a firm ally, changed sides. The soldiers resented being cooped up “like women, inactive and afraid.” Against his better judgment, Brutus decided to take his officers’ advice and give battle.
Late in the afternoon of October 23, he led out his troops and combat commenced. There seems to have been little in the way of maneuver; the two sides simply slugged it out like tired boxers. Octavian’s troops fought bravely, and silence about his whereabouts suggests that their general was sufficiently recovered to lead them. Eventually they began to push the enemy back “as though they were tipping over a very heavy piece of machinery.” Retreat turned to rout. Antony led the pursuit until night fell. Octavian, still weak and doubtless now exhausted, was meant to guard the camp, but he delegated the duty to a deputy.
Brutus retreated into the wooded hills above Philippi with a sizable force, four understrength legions. His plan was to make his way back to his camp when night came, or perhaps escape to the sea, for through his navy he still ruled the waves. However, Antony had ringed his hideaway with guardposts and spent the night under arms on watch opposite him.
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