This was a setback for Cicero, but with cheery unconcern he wrote to Cassius advising him to act on his own initiative. This was, in fact, exactly what he did. It did not take him long to hunt Dolabella down. The clever young opportunist realized that he had run out of opportunities and, perhaps fearing he would be given the same treatment he had meted out to Trebonius, had the good sense to commit suicide before being captured. Seeing that his position was hopeless, he asked a bodyguard to cut off his head. The man who had charmed Tullia clearly knew how to win the affection of those around him, for, having obeyed the order, the soldier then turned the sword against himself.
In Italy, Antony’s supporters made a last desperate attempt to avert war. In Rome, Pansa put a motion before the Senate for yet another embassy, reporting that Antony was now pessimistic about his prospects and would be willing to make concessions. Cicero agreed to join a negotiating team of five ex-Consuls, but for some reason the project was abandoned after further discussion. In his twelfth Philippic Cicero regretted having agreed to be an envoy. He told the Senate that his duty lay elsewhere. “If I may, I will remain in the city. Here is my place. Here I keep watch. Here I stand sentinel. Here is my guardhouse.” The speech is interesting because it confirms that clemency was a discredited policy of the past. We learn that Antony had, in the event of victory, already decided to confiscate Cicero’s property and give it to a supporter. The orator’s life would almost certainly have been forfeit too. In this civil war there would be no pardons.
In late March, Lepidus and Plancus wrote letters from their provinces in Spain and Gaul urging peace. The former implied that he would join forces with Antony if his advice was not heeded. This was potentially a serious threat. On the same evening Cicero sent firm replies, and in Lepidus’s case struck a distinctly brusque note. “In my opinion, you will be wiser not to meddle in a kind of peacemaking which is unacceptable to the Senate and the People—and to every patriotic citizen.” However, it was important not to give needless offense. At a Senate meeting called on April 9 to discuss the letters, Cicero moved a vote of thanks for Plancus. On the following day he seconded another for Lepidus, to which a rider was attached warning the governor to leave questions of peace to the Senate. This was his thirteenth Philippic, in which he also dealt with a long dispatch which Antony had sent Hirtius and Octavian.
Antony’s dispatch was a very dangerous document, for it exposed Cicero’s policy of divide-and-rule with devastating clarity. It was written with passionate candor and had a ring of despair, as though Antony was at the end of his tether. He presented himself as the dead Dictator’s only sincere avenger and the letter must have made (as was surely intended) uncomfortable reading for Octavian. Antony made it threateningly clear that Lepidus was his ally and Plancus
the partner of my counsels.… Whichever of us is defeated, our enemies will be the beneficiaries. So far Fortune has avoided such a spectacle, not wanting to see two armies of one body fighting each other under the supervision of Cicero in his role as a trainer of gladiators. He has deceived you with the same verbal trickery he has boasted he used to deceive Julius Caesar.
Cicero took the Senate through Antony’s charges one by one, using them to demonstrate his treasonable intentions. But the length and detail of his rebuttal and a certain shrillness of tone betrayed his unease. The dispatch may well have disturbed waverers, especially among moderate Caesarians. Fortunately for Cicero, events had traveled too far to be undone.
A few days later battle commenced outside Mutina. On April 14 Antony led his army to intercept Pansa’s four newly recruited legions before they managed to join the other Republican forces already in the field. In order to keep these at bay he organized a simultaneous attack on their camp, not knowing that Hirtius had already sent Pansa the experienced Martian Legion the night before.
Antony laid a trap. He kept his legions hidden in a village named Forum Gallorum and showed only his cavalry. The Martian Legion and some other troops moved forward without orders, marching through marsh and woodland. Antony suddenly led his forces out of the village before Pansa could bring up his legions.
The mood among the soldiers of both sides was somber; instead of uttering their usual battle cries, they fought in grim silence. Surrounded by marshes and ditches it was difficult to charge or make flanking movements. Unable to push each other back, the two sides, as the historian Appian writes, were “locked together with their swords as if in a wrestling contest.” When a man fell he was carried away and another stepped forward to take his place.
Eight cohorts of the Martian Legion repulsed Antony’s left wing and advanced about half a mile, only to find their rear attacked by his cavalry. Pansa was wounded in the side by a javelin and his inexperienced army was routed. But Hirtius had anticipated Antony’s tactics and, leaving Octavian to guard the camp, arrived with some veteran troops in support. They came too late to prevent the defeat, but were in time to fall on Antony’s triumphant but disordered troops, on whom they inflicted heavy casualties.
A week later Hirtius, assisted by Decimus Brutus, who organized a sortie from Mutina, defeated Antony again and raised the siege of the town. Antony’s only hope now was to escape north with what was left of his army to the protection of Lepidus in Gaul, assuming that that weak but canny man would be willing to associate himself with an obviously lost cause.
A false report of an Antonian victory arrived in Rome and people fled from the city. It was rumored that, to meet the crisis, Cicero intended to become Dictator, a charge he furiously denied. When the truth about the first battle became known, the city erupted in celebrations. Cicero wrote to Brutus in Macedonia:
I reaped the richest of rewards for my many days of labor and sleepless nights—if there is any reward in true, genuine glory. The whole population of Rome thronged to my house and escorted me up to the Capitol, then set me on the Speakers’ Platform amid tumultuous applause. I am not a vain man, I do not need to be; but the unison of all classes in thanks and congratulations does move me, for to be popular in serving the People’s welfare is a fine thing.
Cicero had every reason to be proud of himself. The Caesarian faction was broken. Antony was out of the game and time-servers like Lepidus and Plancus would quickly come to heel. Brutus and Cassius controlled the eastern half of the empire. All that needed to be done now was some mopping up: Cicero wrote to Plancus on May 5, asking him to make sure that “not a spark of this abominable war is left alive.”
The only hostile, or potentially hostile, piece left on the board was Octavian, who was locked into the Republican cause. Cicero expected trouble from him but felt he could handle it. He told Brutus: “AS for the boy Caesar, his natural worth and manliness is extraordinary. I only pray that I may succeed in guiding and holding him in the fullness of honors and favor as easily as I have done hitherto. That will be more difficult, it is true, but still I do not despair.”
It had been a close-run thing, but Cicero’s strategy had worked: the Republic was saved.
16
DEATH AT THE SEASIDE
The End of the Republic: April–November 43 BC
As so often happens in human affairs, fate intervened at the moment of victory and destroyed the best-laid plans. It soon emerged that Hirtius had been killed in the second battle at Mutina, and Pansa died of the wound incurred in the first. This created a power vacuum at the worst possible moment. The absence of Consuls left Rome in disarray. There would have to be elections and in the meantime the Republic was without an effective executive authority. In the field Pansa’s troops went over to Octavian. He stayed where he was and refused to have anything to do with Decimus Brutus, the ally for whom he had fought at Mutina and, as he had not forgotten, one of his adoptive father’s assassins. He left Decimus Brutus and his forces to chase after the fleeing Antony on their own.