Throughout July, Cicero bombarded Brutus fruitlessly with letters begging him to intervene. He continued bravely, or obstinately, to defend his policy. “Our only protection was this lad,” he insisted. But in the end he was compelled to admit that he had failed. “Caesar’s army, which used to be excellent [i.e., loyal], is not only no help but forces us to ask urgently for your army.”
Octavian’s likely defection from the Republican cause was clear enough for any intelligent observer to predict, hence the appeals for help. However, Cicero must have felt he had no choice but to assume his trustworthiness until he had definite evidence otherwise. The two men stayed in touch.
Brutus was unimpressed by Cicero’s explanations and when he saw an excerpt from a letter he had written to Caesar, passed on to him by Atticus, he delivered a magisterial rebuke.
You thank him on public grounds in such a fashion, so imploringly and humbly—I hardly know what to write. I am ashamed of the situation, of what fortune has done to us, but write I must. You commend our welfare to him. Better any death than such welfare! It is a downright declaration that there has been no abolition of despotism, only a change of despot. Read over your words again and then dare to deny that these are the pleadings of a subject to his king.
On July 25 Servilia, Brutus’s mother, invited Cicero to an informal council of war and asked him for his advice as to whether they should try to persuade Brutus to return to Rome. Cicero said in the firmest terms that Brutus should “lend support to our tottering and almost collapsing commonwealth at the earliest possible moment.” In his last surviving (and perhaps his last actual) letter to Brutus on July 27, he reported this conversation in a further futile attempt to change his mind. Although he tried to be positive, he was obviously dispirited and gloomy. For the first time he admitted that the solemn oath he had sworn in the Senate at the beginning of January, guaranteeing Caesar’s good behavior, was no longer deliverable. “As I write I am in great distress because it hardly looks as though I can make good my promises in respect to the young man, boy almost, for whom I stood bail to the Republic.”
The rumors of Octavian seeking the Consulship turned out to be well grounded. According to Appian, he no longer troubled to communicate with the Senate but dealt privately with Cicero. He invited Cicero to join him in the Consulship—an echo of the far-off days when his adoptive father had tried to recruit the orator to join the First Triumvirate. It is possible that on this occasion Cicero was tempted to say yes, although a letter of the time to Brutus indicates otherwise. He claimed that “as soon as I had an inkling of [his wish to be Consul], I wrote him letter after letter of warning and taxed those friends of his who seemed to be backing his ambition to their faces, and I did not scruple to expose the origins of these criminal designs in the Senate.” The Senate was reluctant to give way to Octavian and postponed the elections. There was talk of a compromise that would allow him to stand as Praetor, but the sop was insufficient.
Not without reason, the families of the conspirators suspected that if he became Consul, the Dictator’s heir would launch a proscription. People were coming to believe that his alliance with the Republicans had been a pretense. He meant to avenge his father’s murder and restore his autocracy; no doubt it had been his secret policy all along.
In August, for the second time in a year, Octavian marched on Rome at the head of eight legions. He sent a flying force in advance, which entered the city and met the Senate. The soldiers made three demands: the Consulship, restoration of the bounty for the troops and, a sinister token of his future intentions, the repeal of the decree of outlawry against Antony. In the context of people’s fears, this was a comparatively modest request. It looked as if there would not, after all, be a proscription.
Some Senators lost their tempers and apparently struck the soldiers. One of the soldiers fetched his sword and touched it, saying: “If you don’t give Caesar the Consulship, this will.” Cicero replied dryly: “If that’s the way you ask for something, I am sure you’re right.”
Reluctant to face reality, the Senate would not be moved. Then, as Octavian approached, it panicked and issued a flurry of edicts, allowing him to stand for the Consulship in absentia, doubling the original army bonus, winding up the contentious Land Commission and transferring its powers to Octavian. But there was no stopping the young man now and he continued his advance.
With the arrival in Rome of the legions from Africa there was a flurry of resistance. The city planned for a siege, but the soldiers refused to fight and declared for the young Caesar. The next day he entered the city protected by a bodyguard. Even his opponents came out to greet him. The Urban Praetor, the Republic’s senior public official following the deaths of the Consuls, killed himself; this was the only bloodshed recorded.
Cicero arranged to meet Octavian and reportedly raised the now dead question of the joint Consulship. The “heaven-sent boy” did not bother to make a direct response. He simply remarked, with mocking regret, that Cicero had been the “last of his friends” to greet him.
A flame of hope briefly flared and died down again. A rumor spread through the city that two of Octavian’s legions were preparing to defect. Senators met at dawn at the Senate House with Cicero welcoming them at the door. AS soon as it transpired that there was nothing to the story he slipped away on a litter. On August 19 the Consular elections were held and the youngest Consul in Rome’s history took office with Quintus Pedius, a little-regarded relative of Julius Caesar, as his colleague in office. He had not reached his twentieth birthday. Now that he had power he was not slow to act. Dolabella was rehabilitated, Julius Caesar’s assassination was declared a crime and a special tribunal was appointed to try the conspirators.
Cicero was given permission to stay away from Senate meetings and his last surviving written words are an unheroic fragment of a letter to the new Consul. “I am doubly delighted that you have given Philippus [his neighbor at Puteoli and Octavian’s stepfather] and me leave of absence; for it implies forgiveness for the past and mercy for the future.” He probably stayed at Tusculum and for the time being disappears from view. It is curious that he did not try to leave the country and escape to Brutus. Perhaps he was under surveillance. More probably he simply lost heart.
Octavian left Rome and went back north at a leisurely pace, ostensibly to campaign against Antony. However, there was to be no more fighting. Octavian’s Consular colleague stayed in Rome and reversed the condemnations of Antony and Lepidus (who had also been declared a public enemy). Formal negotiations now opened to reunite the Caesarian factions which Cicero’s strategy had divided.
Antony and Octavian had every reason to distrust each other, but the logic of events drove them together. To deal with the challenge from Brutus and Cassius in the east, they were obliged to pool their resources. They gingerly marched their armies towards each other and met on a small island in a river at Bononia (today’s Bologna). Antony on one bank and Octavian on the other walked forward with 300 men each to bridges leading to the island. Lepidus went on ahead to conduct a search for hidden weapons and gave an all-clear by waving his cloak. The three men then met alone in talks that lasted for two or three days, working from dawn to dusk. Before sitting down they searched one another to make sure that no one had brought a dagger with him.