The Winner Takes It All
One year after the establishment of the triumvirate the last hopes for the survival of a free republic perished outside the Macedonian city of Philippi. Trapped and near starving on a Balkan plain, a Caesarian army once again succeeded in tempting its enemies into a fatal engagement. Brutus and Cassius had stripped the East of its legions, possessed command of the sea, and occupied an impregnable position: like Pompey at Pharsalus, they could well have afforded to bide their time. Instead, they chose to fight. In two battles on a scale more massive than any in Roman history first Cassius then Brutus fell on his sword. Other celebrated names also perished in the carnage: a Lucullus, a Hortensius, a Cato. The last of these, removing his helmet and charging into the depths of the Caesarian ranks, consciously followed his father in preferring death to slavery. So too did his sister. Back in Rome the austere and virtuous Porcia had been waiting for news of Philippi. When it arrived, and she learned that both her brother and her husband Brutus were dead, she slipped free from the grasp of her friends, who had feared what she might do, she ran to a brazier and swallowed burning coals. Women, after all, were Romans too.
But what would that mean in a state no longer free? Not, by definition, the old answer, that it was to value liberty above everything, even life itself. Heroic it may have been, but the grisly example of Porcia was not much emulated. Of those who had lived truest to the ideals of the Republic, most, now that stillness had settled again over Philippi, were dead. The loss of such citizens was impossible to make up, and all the more so because a disproportionate number of the casualties had come from the nobility. The heir to a famous name, in the universal opinion of the Roman people, bore the history of his city in his veins. This was why the extinction of a great house had always been regarded as a matter for public mourning – and why the scything of an entire generation of the nobility, whether at the hands of executioners or amid the dust and flies of Macedon, was a calamity fatal to the Republic. More, much more, than blood had been spilled.
Of the victorious triumvirs, it was Antony who sensed this most clearly. He had come of age at a time when liberty had been something more than just a slogan, and he was not incapable of mourning its death. Searching out the corpse of Brutus on the battlefield of Philippi, he had covered it respectfully with a cloak, then had it cremated, and sent the ashes to Servilia. Nor, now his supremacy was secured, did he abuse it with further bloodbaths. Rather than return to misery-stricken Italy, he elected, as the senior partner in the triumvirate, to stay in the East and play at being Pompey the Great. His pleasures, as he progressed through Greece and Asia, were those that had long been traditional among the Republic’s proconsuls: posing as a lover of Greek culture while leeching the Greeks; patronising local princelings; fighting the Parthians. To die-hard republicans, this was all reassuringly familiar, and gradually, in the months and years that followed Philippi, the shattered remnants of Brutus’ armed forces would gravitate, faute de mieux, towards Antony. With him, in the East, the cause of legitimacy licked its wounds as its life-blood ebbed away.
For only in Rome could there be any hope of restoring a free republic – and Rome was in the hands of a man who appeared its deadliest enemy. Chill and vengeful, Octavian was the man whom those defeated at Philippi chiefly reviled as the murderer of liberty. On the battlefield, brought past their conquerors in chains, the republican prisoners had saluted Antony courteously, but the youthful Caesar they had cursed and jeered. Nor, in the years following Philippi, had Octavian’s reputation grown any the less sinister. With Lepidus sidelined by his two colleagues to Africa, and Antony lording it over the East, it was to the youngest member of the triumvirate that the most invidious task had fallen: finding land for the returning war veterans. With some three hundred thousand battle-hardened soldiers waiting to be settled, Octavian could not afford to delay the programme; nor, for all the efficiency he brought to executing it, could he avoid inflicting on the countryside the miseries of social revolution. Respect for private property had always been one of the foundation-stones of the Republic, but now, with the Republic superseded, private property could be sequestered on a commissar’s whim. Farmers, evicted from their land without recompense, might find themselves abducted into slave-pens, or else, lacking any other means of subsistence, end up as brigands themselves. As in the time of Spartacus, Italy became bandit land. With armed gangs daring to raid even towns and cities, rioting flared, impotent explosions of suffering and despair. Amid all the upheaval crops failed and harvests were lost. As the countryside slipped into anarchy, so Rome began to starve.
The famine was worsened by a familiar plague. More than twenty years after Pompey had swept the pirates from the sea, they were back – and this time their chief was Pompey’s own son. Sextus, having escaped Caesar’s vengeance in Spain, had profited from the chaos of the times to establish himself as the master of Sicily, and the admiral of two hundred and fifty ships. Preying on the shipping lanes, he was soon throttling Rome. As the citizens grew gaunt with hunger, so the flesh peeled off the city’s bones too. Shops were boarded up, temples left to crumble, monuments stripped of their gold. Everywhere, what had once been scenes of luxury were converted to the needs of war. Even Baiae, bright and glittering Baiae, rang to the hammers of Octavian’s engineers. On the neighbouring Lucrine Lake, a naval dockyard was built over the fabled oyster beds – a desecration worthy of the times. History itself appeared diminished; and epic, repeating a familiar storyline, was reduced to shrunken parody. Once again a Pompey fought a Caesar, but they both seemed, in comparison to their giant fathers, dwarfish thieves. A pirate and a gangster: fitting generals to scrap over a city no longer free.
Yet, although Sextus was a constant menace and more than capable of bringing misery to his country, he was never a fatal threat to the Caesarians. A much greater danger, and one that cast its shadow over the entire world, was that just as the first triumvirate had finally torn itself to pieces, so too might the second. In 41 BC, only months after Octavian’s return from Philippi, this came perilously close to happening. With Antony absent in the East, his wife, the ever pugnacious Fulvia, stirred up a rebellion in Italy. Octavian, responding with swift and calculated atrocities, only just succeeded in repressing it. His revenge on Fulvia herself, however, was limited to the penning of abusive verses on the subject of her nymphomania. His power in Italy was still precarious, and he could not risk provoking Antony. Fulvia was permitted to leave for the East and her husband.
Conveniently, however, she died before she could join him. In September 40 BC Antony’s agents and those of Octavian met in uneasy truce at Brundisium. After much haggling the pact between the two men was reconfirmed. To cement it, Octavian gave to the widower the hand of his beloved sister, Octavia. Rome’s empire, far more neatly than it had been before, was now sliced in two. Only Sextus and Lepidus still obscured the division – and they were soon swept from the gaming board.
In September 36 BC Octavian finally succeeded in destroying the fleet of Sextus, who fled to the East and ultimate execution at the hands of Antony’s agents. At the same time, when Lepidus pushed his resentment at being sidelined too far, he was formally stripped of his triumviral powers, a humiliation staged by Octavian without any reference to the third member of the partnership. The young Caesar, now more firmly established in Rome than his adoptive father had ever been, could afford to shrug aside Antony’s inevitable protests. Still only twenty-seven, he had come far. Not only Rome, nor only Italy, but half the world now acknowledged his rule.