Towards the end of April Caesar’s youthful heir arrived in Italy. Octavian had been born during Cicero’s Consulship in 63 and came from a respectable provincial family in the country town of Velitrae in the Alban Hills south of Rome. His ambitious father had married Atia, Caesar’s niece, but he had died when Octavian was four. The widowed Atia had married again, choosing Lucius Marcius Philippus, who was Consul in 56.
Octavian grew up to be a short, slight, attractive young man with curly yellowish hair and clear, bright eyes. A weakness in his left leg sometimes gave him the appearance of having a limp. His health was delicate, but he was an industrious student. Although he had a gift for speaking extempore, he worked hard at improving his rhetorical technique.
In 45, despite being in a state of semiconvalescence after a serious illness, Octavian had followed Caesar to Spain, where he was fighting the last campaign of the civil war. After surviving a shipwreck, he had traveled with a small escort along roads held by the enemy. His great-uncle had been delighted and impressed by his energy and formed a high estimation of his character. Doubtless this was why he had decided to make the boy his heir.
After the battle of Munda, Octavian had been sent to the coastal town of Apollonia, across the Adriatic Sea in Macedonia. Caesar wanted him on the Parthian campaign and told him to wait there with the assembled legions until he joined them. In the meantime he was to pursue his education and receive military training.
When the terrible news arrived in Apollonia, Octavian’s first nervous instinct was to stay with the army, whose senior officers offered to look after him. But his mother and stepfather suggested that it would be safer if he came quietly and without fuss to Rome. Shortly afterwards Octavian was informed of his dangerous inheritance. His family thought he should renounce it, but he disagreed. Crossing the sea to Brundisium, he made contact with the troops there, who received him enthusiastically as Caesar’s son. He decided, as instructed, to assume his great-uncle’s name. He liked to be addressed as Caesar, although this was not to his stepfather Philippus’s liking, and for a time Cicero insisted on calling him Octavius and later by his cognomen after adoption, Octavianus.
In taking these actions, Octavian was publicly asserting himself as the Dictator’s political, not merely personal, heir. He felt able to do so because he realized that Antony’s compromise settlement with the Senate did not take the feelings of the army into full account. It was a remarkably bold step and calls for explanation. IS it reasonable to believe that an inexperienced teenager would have seized the initiative in this way without prompting? It is of course a possibility, for his later career revealed very considerable political ability. It is much more plausible, however, that Balbus and other members of the Dictator’s staff, disenchanted with Antony’s policy of reconciliation, judged that the young man, carefully handled and advised, was well placed to assume the leadership of the Caesarian cause. The boy would be a focus for the simmering resentments among the Roman masses, the disbanded veterans and the standing legions, and that Antonius would be outmaneuvered and put on the defensive.
The long-term plan, shadowy in outline at this stage and not publicly emphasized, would be to turn the tables on the conspirators and take revenge for the assassination. What the Caesarians had in mind was, in essence, a plot to overthrow a restored Republic. When Caesar foresaw that a new civil war would break out if he was removed from the scene, he can hardly have guessed that it would be his heir who fulfilled his prediction.
On his journey north from Brundisium, Octavian was welcomed by large numbers of people, many of them soldiers or the Dictator’s former slaves and freedmen. Perhaps some of these demonstrations on the road were engineered, but they revealed a deep well of support for the young pretender. In Naples he was met by Balbus and went on to his stepfather’s villa at Puteoli. Cicero happened to be on hand when he arrived, for Philippus was his neighbor. (It was at their two villas that they had entertained Caesar the previous December.) Always prone to like young men and take them under his wing, Cicero may have been tempted by the prospect of another protégé to groom. On the following day he received a visit from Octavian and, writing to Atticus in his presence, insisted that gratified vanity did not mean he had been taken in. “Octavian is with me here—most respectful and friendly,” he noted. “My judgment is that he cannot be a good citizen. There are too many around him. They threaten death to our friends and call the present state of affairs intolerable.… I long to be away.”
During recent weeks Cicero had been thinking of leaving the country for a few months and he arranged for a special leave of absence from the Consuls. He intended to be in Rome for a Senate meeting on June 1 but afterwards there would be no reason to linger. His idea was to go to his beloved Athens and check in person how Marcus was getting along.
Young Octavian’s appearance on the scene turned the political situation on its head. His growing popularity with the army and the Roman masses had the effect, as intended, of detaching Antony from the Senate, for it compelled him to outbid his new rival as a loyal supporter of Caesar’s memory. This in turn meant that Brutus’s and Cassius’s strategy of sitting around quietly in their country houses, on the assumption that politics were gradually returning to normal, was pointless. All sums had to be recalculated.
For the time being the newcomer was little more than a nuisance and the Consul called him dismissively a “boy who owes everything to his name.” However, the popularity of that name in the army and among the urban masses soon made him a force to be reckoned with. If he meant to remain at the head of affairs, Antony would sooner or later be driven to align himself against the constitutionalists (and so fulfill Cicero’s originally misplaced suspicions). To begin with, though, he bided his time.
When Octavian asked Antony to make over the moneys promised in the Dictator’s will so that he could pay out the various bequests, the Consul coolly responded that the funds belonged to the state and had, in any event, been spent. With a sharp eye on public relations, Octavian simply raised the necessary funds from his family and by loans.
The atmosphere in Rome grew tense and uneasy. Antony’s popularity slid and he enlisted the services of veterans to keep public order. The Consuls, who had been squabbling, were now friends, for Dolabella, bribed (or so Cicero thought) by Antony, had changed sides and abandoned the constitutionalists. They had already dispossessed Brutus and Cassius of their original provincial allocations, with Antony taking over Macedonia and Dolabella Syria. But this was no longer enough for Antony, who decided that it was time to tackle Decimus Brutus head-on in Italian Gaul. With the help of the General Assembly, Antony engineered a further switch of his Consular province from Macedonia (taking the army there with him) to the two Gauls. This was an unusual maneuver, for according to convention it was the Senate that decided provincial appointments, and the move was seen as a blatant attempt to undermine Decimus Brutus. A land-distribution bill was also passed, which would please the demobilized soldiery. In place of their original provincial commands, Brutus and Cassius were given insultingly unimportant commissions to purchase corn, respectively, in Asia and Sicily.
Many moderates in the Caesarian camp, including the following year’s Consuls-elect Hirtius and Caius Vibius Pansa Caetronianus, now agreed with Cicero that open hostilities were approaching. They did their best to stop the main players from provocations. When Hirtius heard that Brutus and Cassius were thinking of leaving Italy, to raise troops he suspected, he sent Cicero a desperate appeal to try to prevent them. “Hold them back, Cicero, I beg you, and don’t let our society go down to ruin; for I swear it will be turned upside down in an orgy of looting, arson and massacre.”