Augustus (15 page)

Addressing the Senate on January 1, 43
B.C.,
he returned to the theme of Octavian, “this heaven-sent youth.” Cicero put forward and carried a motion that Octavian be made a propraetor (a post usually held by a man who had already served as a praetor) and a member of the Senate.

The orator went on to claim that he had a unique insight into Octavian’s motives. “I promise, I undertake, I solemnly engage, that Gaius Caesar will always be such a citizen as he is today, and as we should especially wish and pray he should be.” In a word, he guaranteed the young man’s good behavior as a sincere supporter of the restored Republic.

What was going on? The dictator’s heir, who had sworn vengeance on his adoptive father’s murderers, is revealed as entering into an alliance with a man who rejoiced at the Ides of March.

It must have cost Octavian and his advisers, the financiers and political agents who had once worked for Julius Caesar and were now devoted to his adopted son’s cause, a great deal emotionally to discard their deepest ideals and join forces with republicans. But the discarding was only apparent; they were acting from necessity, not conviction.

Octavian’s position, after his failed coup in November, was perilously weak. How long, he must have asked himself, would his demoralized veterans stay with him? Mark Antony had already briskly outmaneuvered Decimus Brutus and bottled him up in the old Roman colony of Mutina (today’s Modena) in northern Italy. The new consuls, backed by the Senate, were raising legions with a view to relieving Decimus and putting an end to Antony’s ambitions.

From Cicero’s point of view, Octavian would reinforce the Senate’s new military strength by placing himself and his army at the Senate’s disposal, and thus would hasten the day when Antony could be challenged and eliminated. This was important, for dispatches from Decimus Brutus suggested that he was hanging on at Mutina only with difficulty. In the longer run, Cicero and his followers feared that at some stage Octavian would reconcile with Antony. The new entente made that a less likely prospect.

As for Octavian, he was no longer outside the law, for at one leap he had acquired a senior constitutional position. Above all, he had bought time. His soldiers will have been mystified, even perturbed, by the volte-face, but could see the advantage of their army being legitimized.

Neither side had any illusions about its sincerity; there was a good deal of playacting. Octavian used to call Cicero father, and was much too discreet to betray his real motives. The gossipy Cicero, on the other hand, could not keep his mouth shut. He joked about Octavian:
“Laudandum adolescentem, ornandum, tollendum.”
That is, the boy must be “praised, honoured—and raised up.” But
tollendum
was a pun, with the second meaning of “must be removed.” Someone was kind enough to pass the witticism to Octavian, who was unamused and almost certainly unsurprised.

In February, Octavian marched off to join forces with the new consul Hirtius, while the other consul, Pansa, stayed behind to recruit four new legions. The young propraetor probably commanded about two legions. In the last few months, he had had to learn fast the duties of a military commander. He had never witnessed a battle and had had little time for the military training that upper-class Romans were expected to undertake in their teens.

The legion, the standard army unit, was usually led by the commanding general’s deputy, a
legatus,
or legate. The legate also had at his disposal a number of military tribunes, staff officers recruited from upper-class families (unlike the civilian tribunes of the people).

Officially, a legion had a strength of between four thousand and six thousand men, although in practice it could be smaller (this was almost certainly the case with Octavian at Arretium). It was divided into ten cohorts, which were in turn subdivided into six centuries commanded by centurions; these junior officers were a legion’s backbone. The first cohort always stood in the front row at the right end of the line (the most honorable position) and was sometimes larger than the others.

Men signed up for at least six years’ service. Each legionary carried on his back a large quantity of equipment, weighing at least sixty-five pounds. This included sixteen days’ worth of rations, a cooking pot, tools for digging, two stakes for the camp palisade, two javelins to throw in battle, clothes, and any personal possessions. On the march, Roman soldiers resembled not the smart upright legionaries of Hollywood movies, but beasts of burden.

A soldier’s armor consisted of a bronze helmet, a cuirass of leather or metal, an oblong or oval shield made of sheets of wood covered by oxhide, a
pilum
or javelin (the head was designed to break off, so that it could not be thrown back), and a short, two-edged thrusting sword, the
gladius
. In Julius Caesar’s day, a legionary was paid nine hundred sesterces a year—not a princely wage, but frequently supplemented by a share of the booty won in victorious campaigns.

Discipline was severe, ranging from food rationing and pay deductions to public floggings and execution for desertion. The worst penalty, for mutiny or collective cowardice before the enemy by a group of troops (usually a cohort), was decimation. One in ten men was chosen at random and the remainder clubbed them to death. This brutal punishment could be effective, but, as when Antony had applied it at Brundisium, was more likely to impose sullen and temporary obedience than to restore morale.

More constructively, much attention was paid to fostering an esprit de corps. Every century carried its standard (a pole with insignia or emblems at its top), and a legion was represented by a silver eagle, carried by the
aquilifer,
a special standard-bearer in a lionskin headdress. These standards embodied a collective pride and honor, and the loss of a legionary eagle was an irretrievable disgrace. In the confusion of battle the standard helped to orient soldiers by showing them where their military unit was.

Today hand-to-hand fighting is relatively rare, but, after a preliminary phase of javelin throwing and sometimes archery, it was how battles were won and lost in the ancient world. It is hard to imagine the noise, crush, smells, blood, and terror of an ancient battle. Even then, it was recognized as being a particularly demanding experience. A line of soldiers at close quarters to the enemy would fight for only about fifteen minutes; the line would then retire and have its place taken by soldiers in the rear. The dead and wounded were dragged back and replaced by fresh men.

Octavian reached Hirtius north of Arretium, and their legions moved on in the direction of Mutina. Their aim was to break the siege and relieve the proconsul, Decimus Brutus, now dangerously short of provisions.

Despite this progress on the military front, Octavian was in a gloomy frame of mind. First and foremost, a propraetor was junior to a consul, and when he and Hirtius met he was clearly the subordinate officer: Hirtius divided command of the army between them, but insisted on having control of the two Macedonian legions. Octavian bit his lip and complied.

He was also irritated by the continuing efforts on the part of certain senators and the consuls to negotiate a settlement with Antony. He needed a war with a victorious outcome, for if Antony and the republican faction were reconciled, he would once again be isolated. That said, he did not want Antony destroyed: he could envision a time when the two men might need to combine against the Senate and Brutus and Cassius. The Senate had recently awarded the province of Syria to the tyrannicide Cassius. It was looking very much as though there was a conscious plan to build up the republican party and ruin the Caesarians. Appian summed up Octavian’s feelings: “He reflected on the way they [the Senate] had treated him like a boy, offering a statue [equestrian, in the Forum] and a front row at the theatre and calling him Propraetor, but in fact taking his army away from him.”

Octavian’s blood baptism was approaching. Mark Antony was encamped just outside Mutina, around which he had constructed a rampart. In the first week or so of April, news filtered north that the consul Pansa would soon (and at last) be arriving with four newly recruited legions, marching up from Bononia (today’s Bologna) to Mutina. It occurred to Antony that it would be a good idea to attack these raw, barely trained soldiers on the road, before they joined Hirtius and Octavian.

It simultaneously occurred to Hirtius that that was exactly what Antony might do. So, under cover of night, the consul sent the Martian legion (one of those that had defected from Antony) and Octavian’s Praetorian Guard, an elite body of about five hundred men, to reinforce Pansa.

The next day, Antony laid an ambush for Pansa’s army, sending in some cavalry and hiding two legions in a roadside village, Forum Gallorum, and nearby marshland. The Martian legion and the Praetorians could not be held in check and rushed at the horsemen. They noticed some movement in the rushes and here and there the glinting of a helmet; suddenly they were confronted by Antony’s main force.

A grim, speechless, waterlogged combat ensued, lasting for some hours. Pansa was wounded by a javelin in his side and taken back to Bononia, and Antony pushed the consul’s forces back to their camp. Meanwhile, Hirtius again engaged in some quick thinking, and came up with two more legions on the double to intercept the victors.

It was already late in the evening. Antony’s men, expecting no trouble, were singing songs of triumph and marching in no sort of order. To their horror, a fresh and disciplined army emerged from the twilight. They were cut to pieces, although Hirtius steered clear of the marshes and had to call off the fighting at nightfall. Those who had escaped death or serious injury made their way back to Antony’s camp. Out of victory had come catastrophe.

Wide areas of bog were clogged with dead or dying men who had tried to find safety there from the enemy. It is evidence of the care Antony took for his soldiers that he sent his cavalry during the night to hunt around and rescue as many of them as possible. According to Appian, “they put the survivors on their horses, changing places with some and lifting others up beside them, or they made them hold the tail and encouraged them to run along with them.”

Meanwhile, what of Octavian? He did not accompany his Praetorians, who were wiped out, nor the Martian legion, bloody but unbowed. According to Dio, he stayed behind to defend the camp, a useful if inglorious duty. Years later, Antony accused Octavian of running away from the battle of Forum Gallorum: “He did not reappear until the next day, having lost both his horse and his purple general’s cloak.”

The truth cannot be recovered, but it is clear that, at the very least, the inexperienced commander failed to distinguish himself. The fault would have to be quickly rectified: a noble Roman was expected to be as busy on the battlefield as in the Forum. The legions had loved his adoptive father at least in part for his intrepid generalship.

Decimus Brutus, beleaguered in Mutina, was in urgent need of rescue, and on April 21 Hirtius led his troops to the back of the town to make an entry. Antony felt obliged to respond, by sending out first his cavalry and then legions from other, more distant camps, which took some time to arrive.

On this occasion Octavian steeled himself to fight in the thick of the fray. Hirtius rode into Antony’s camp and was struck down and killed fighting around the commander’s tent. Octavian burst in and took up the body, like a Homeric hero dragging his friend out of the mêlée. He held the camp for a short while, but was then forced out. No matter, for the day was his. According to Suetonius: “Though bleeding and wounded, he took an eagle from the hands of a dying
aquilifer
and bore it back upon his shoulder to the camp.”

Antony had been comprehensively defeated, and the seize raised. After a pause for thought, he withdrew with the remnants of his army across the Alps to Gallia Comata (“Long-haired Gaul”). His men endured terrible hardship on the journey. In a fine display of leadership, Antony shared their sufferings, drinking foul water and eating wild fruit and roots.

Octavian visited Pansa, who was seriously ill and died some days later. Pansa’s Greek doctor, Glyco, was suspected of poisoning his wound, presumably in Octavian’s interest. Another story had it that Octavian had personally struck Hirtius down in the fighting in Antony’s camp. The accusation concerning Hirtius is almost certainly malicious gossip: a battlefield is not a private place and one would have expected eyewitness accounts of a consul being murdered.

Doubtless, Pansa’s injury was a flesh wound from which he would have been expected to recover; that he did not suggests an insuperable infection, a common enough occurrence in the days before antibiotics. In May, having heard the rumor, Marcus Brutus spoke up for Glyco, who was being kept in custody: “It is quite incredible. Pansa’s death hit nobody harder. Besides, he is a well-conducted, decent fellow, who would not be likely to be driven to crime even by self-interest.”

What was certain, though, is that sheer good luck—the untimely elimination of both Hirtius and Pansa—had placed Octavian in an extraordinarily powerful position. For the time being, though, he decided to take no precipitate action. When the Senate ordered that the dead consuls’ armies should be handed over to Decimus Brutus, he refused and took command of them himself, with the result that he now controlled eight legions, loyal to him rather than the Republic. He explained, with some plausibility, that the established legions would refuse to fight under the command of one of Julius Caesar’s assassins.

He would not cooperate with Decimus Brutus, either, and told a delegation from the proconsul, “Nature forbids me either to set eyes on or talk to Decimus. Let him seek his own safety.” Decimus strongly, and rightly, suspected that Caesar’s heir was looking for an opportunity to take revenge on him.

Octavian also refused to chase Antony. When an officer of the former consul was captured at Mutina, Octavian treated him respectfully before setting him free and sending him on to join his general in Gaul. The officer asked what his policy was toward Antony. Octavian replied dryly: “I have given plenty of hints to people who have their wits about them. Any more would still not be enough for the stupid.”