Augustus (13 page)

Hearing what had happened at the funeral and remembering his great-uncle and his affection for him, Octavius burst into tears.

The young man now received an even more extraordinary piece of news. Unbeknownst to him, Caesar had written a new will during the brief Italian holiday on his return from Spain in 45
B.C.
, and had lodged it with the Vestal Virgins (who ran a safe deposit service for important confidential documents). Three days after Caesar’s death, his father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, read out the testament at the house of the consul Mark Antony, on the Palatine Hill.

Caesar named as his chief heirs his sisters’ two male grandchildren, one of whom was Octavius, and a nephew, Quintus Pedius. After certain legacies had been deducted, including an expensive commitment to give three hundred sesterces to every Roman citizen (there could be as many as 300,000 beneficiaries), two of the inheritors each received an eighth of the residue—and Octavius received the remaining three quarters. Added to the personal fortune we must presume he inherited from his father, this would make him a very rich man.

The Roman people received another gift: Caesar’s garden estate across the Tiber, presently occupied by Cleopatra, who was busy packing her bags for a rapid exit to Egypt.

At the end of the document came the greatest surprise. Caesar adopted Octavius as his son (although it was unusual to make such an arrangement from beyond the grave, it was possible, requiring only that a special law be passed, a
lex curiata
). The adoption was a personal, not a political, act. However, Caesar was handing Octavius a priceless weapon: his name and his
clientela,
all those hundreds of thousands of soldiers and citizens who were in his debt. As he must have known, he was giving the boy an opportunity to enter politics at the top if he wished to do so—and if he had sufficient talent.

The troops at Brundisium came out to meet Octavius on the news of his approach. They greeted him enthusiastically as Caesar’s son. Much relieved, he conducted a sacrifice and made the crucial decision to accept his inheritance. More letters from Atia and Philippus awaited him. His mother repeated her request that he come home as soon as possible; his designation as Caesar’s son had placed him in grave danger. Meanwhile, the fence-sitting Philippus strongly advised him to take no steps to secure Caesar’s bequest, and to keep his own name. If he wanted to live safely, he should steer clear of politics. Philippus could foresee the political strife in which his family would be implicated if the boy was to assume his dangerous inheritance.

All his life, Octavius had been risk-averse; now he acted without hesitation. He rejected his stepfather’s advice, and wrote to him saying so. According to Nicolaus, he insisted that he “already had his eyes on great things and was full of confidence.” He would accept the legacy, avenge his “father”’s death, and succeed to Caesar’s power. This was an uncompromising statement of his political aims.

Although it would be some months before the legal formalities of adoption could be put into effect, Gaius Octavius styled himself from now on as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. The change from Octavius to Octavianus signaled a transfer from one family to another, but contained a reminder of his original kin; he soon dropped it and insisted on being addressed as Caesar. This was a message to his enemies that if one Caesar was destroyed another would immediately arise to fill his place. (To avoid confusion, I follow the convention of calling him Octavian, an anglicized version of the name he himself rejected.)

Here was the first great challenge of Octavian’s life, a once-and-for-all turning point, and he met it with calm decisiveness. We do not have enough information about his childhood and adolescence to speak definitively, but certain early experiences may have contributed to the formation of his firm and careful character and equipped him for a dangerous future.

Octavian was in effect an only child (his sisters were much older than he). This, when combined with poor health and a very protective mother, will have given him a sense of being set apart. He was “different” or special in two other, contradictory respects. On the one hand, he was a boy from the provinces, not a member of the handful of great and ancient clans that governed Rome. It is telling that his best friends were not young
nobiles;
Agrippa’s background was Italian and obscure, and, while Maecenas boasted an exotic Etruscan origin, his family remained aloof from public life and was content with equestrian status.

On the other hand, Octavian trumped his aristocratic contemporaries by having privileged access to the patrician conqueror of the Republic. He was, in real life, the outsider-insider of fairy tale and childish fantasy—a shepherd’s son who turns out to be of royal blood; like Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus.

Nicolaus, who gives the fullest account of Octavian’s early years, portrays an adolescent still treated as a child, then pitchforked into adult life under the tutelage of his remarkable great-uncle. Suddenly he found himself at the gorgeous, exhilarating power center of the Roman world. The relationship with Caesar became the most important one in his life.

When confronted with such opportunity, many boys would have lost their heads. Not Octavian. As an intermediary between Caesar and multitudes of suppliants, he took care not to irritate his great-uncle with untimely requests, he was discreet and totally loyal, and he behaved in a modest and friendly manner with petitioners.

Octavian may have had an innately cautious cast of mind; but if environmental factors helped to shape him, this was the kind of behavior one would expect to find in an intelligent boy whose circumstances and upbringing fostered self-containment.

Octavian now proceeded to Capua and Rome along the Via Appia. He attracted large crowds, especially of demobilized veterans who were grief-stricken by the Ides of March and wanted the killers brought to justice.

Before entering Rome, Octavian called in at his parents’ seaside villa at Puteoli (now Pozzuoli), which happened to be next to a house belonging to Cicero. He needed to come to an understanding with his family, who were worried by the direction he was taking. The suspicious old orator noted that the young man’s “followers call him Caesar, but Philippus does not, and neither do I.”

This was the first chance for Octavian to meet Caesar’s disconsolate aides and advisers. Mostly
equites
or freedmen, who could not aspire to political careers of their own, they had no political constituency and with their employer’s death had lost their purchase on power. Octavian had a long conversation with Lucius Cornelius Balbus, a multimillionaire from Spain, who had run Caesar’s secretariat and been his leading fixer. There are no records of their discussions, but we can surmise that Balbus and his colleagues wanted to make a cool assessment of the teenage heir, and then to lay a plan of campaign. We can be sure that, from the outset, these Caesarians had every intention of demolishing the restored Republic and taking revenge on the conspirators. However, they would have to wait and see whether the young man was capable of heading a new autocracy.

For the present, they were in a weak position; it would be wise to conceal their intentions. Octavian held no official position and was simply a private citizen. Many senators, even though they had been appointed by the dictator, were inclined to accept his removal as a fait accompli. Once the emotion of the assassination and its aftermath had died down, even moderate Caesarians, like the next year’s consuls, Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Vibius Pansa Caetronianus, believed that almost anything was better than a renewed civil war.

Mark Antony took the same line. As consul he controlled the levers of power, was popular with the troops, and saw himself as the dead dictator’s
political
heir. He might have been expected to pursue the assassins and their republican supporters. In fact, his silent foreknowledge of the conspiracy suggests that he was not without sympathy with them, and he preferred to negotiate a compromise in which he agreed to an amnesty for Brutus and the other
liberatores
in return for the Senate’s agreement not to overturn any of the dead dictator’s legislation and executive decisions.

A long-term strategy for the Caesarians was not feasible; what was needed was a series of improvised tactics that made the most of any opportunity that presented itself. Consistency was irrelevant. The first tasks were to detach Antony from the Senate, discredit him in any way possible, and then replace him with Octavian as the leader of the Caesarian faction.

The weather had been terrible since the Ides of March. For much of 44, there was continuous gloom and a persistent rusty dry fog, and the sun was often invisible. This was probably the consequence of a major eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily; today’s scientists have identified acid snow from the period in the ice cores of Greenland. Years later, the poet Virgil recalled this time as one of “wars that grow in the dark like cancer.”

On the day in early May when Octavian entered Rome, stars could be seen in the daytime around a dim sun, looking like wreaths made from ears of wheat and rings of changing color. This was widely seen as a favorable omen, a prophecy of royalty.

Octavian’s most urgent task was to make his position official. The adoption had to be legally authorized by a
lex curiata
and he wanted to collect his legacy. He went straight to Antony to ask for the money. He found him in his garden house (
hortus
) on the edge of the Campus Martius.

After going to ground for some hours on the Ides of March, Antony in his capacity as Caesar’s fellow consul had persuaded Calpurnia to hand over to him all Caesar’s papers. He had also won control of Caesar’s financial resources. It was very likely that he had improperly salted away substantial sums of cash; the word was that, having been forty million sesterces in debt, he had suddenly become solvent.

From Antony’s point of view, the arrival of Caesar’s heir was an annoying distraction. He was an inexperienced teenager, “a boy,” Antony gibed, “who owes everything to his name.” Octavian was kept waiting in an anteroom and was admitted only after a long delay. Pleasantries were exchanged, and then he asked for Caesar’s money so that he could pay his legacies to the people.

Octavian’s request was awkward, and Antony angrily refused it. He said that he had found the state treasury empty and needed funds for the conduct of public business. He also made the technical point that the adoption was not yet official (later, he did his best to delay confirmation).

Octavian was furious, but there was little he could do to change the consul’s mind. However, even without access to Caesar’s estate, Octavian had large sums of money at his disposal. He is reported to have expropriated Caesar’s war chest for the Parthian expedition; while at Brundisium he may also have received, or seized, tax receipts from Asia on their way to the Roman treasury. Octavian decided to trump the consul. He announced that he would pay his adoptive father’s legacies out of his own pocket, even if Antony held back the moneys due. He also put up for sale all Caesar’s properties and estates.

A highly effective campaign of words was launched to discredit the consul further in the public mind. The aim was clever and twofold—first, to smear Antony before the people and the legions and, second, to break Antony’s concordat with the Senate by forcing him into a popularity contest for Caesarian support.

In accordance with a senatorial decree, Octavian planned to display at some games held in mid-May Caesar’s golden chair and a diadem (a white cloth strip worn around the head to denote royalty), which he had been offered and refused a few weeks before his death. The consul lost his temper and forbade it.

Octavian wandered around the city center, with a crowd of followers like a bodyguard, making speeches about the disgraceful treatment he was enduring. “Heap as many insults on me as you like, Antony, but stop plundering Caesar’s property until the citizens have received their legacy.
Then
you can take all the rest.” Antony was furious and responded with threats.

At this point the consul’s officers intervened and forced a reconciliation. They loved Caesar’s memory and, equally loyal to his trusted friend and his adopted son, refused to fight for either against the other.

Antony was compelled to reassess his situation; although he still saw the “boy” as little more than a nuisance, Octavian
had
destabilized the situation. In order to stay on terms with his soldiers, Antony abandoned his statesmanlike compromise with the Senate, with which his relations had deteriorated sadly. Cicero, who thought him an unreliable drunkard and a political gambler (
aleator,
“dice thrower”), suspected his good faith and was stirring up opinion against him among republicans. Antony needed to secure his personal safety and to continue to dominate the political scene in Rome.