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 gathered 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.
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.