Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (52 page)

True, not everyone was convinced by the young Caesar’s impersonation of a constitutionalist – and the mask itself might still occasionally slip. In 32
BC
, wishing to browbeat the consuls, both of whom were supporters of Antony, Octavian entered the Senate House with armed guards and stationed them menacingly behind the magistrates’ chairs of state. The show of strength had the desired effect: opponents of Octavian’s regime were immediately smoked out. The two consuls fled to Antony in the East, and with them went almost a third of the Senate, some three hundred senators in all. Many of these were Antony’s placemen, but some, the heirs to a ruined cause, had more principled reasons for refusing to stomach a Caesar as the shield of the Republic. One of the two consuls who fled to Antony, for instance, was Domitius Ahenobarbus, the son of Julius Caesar’s old foe. Also in Antony’s camp – inevitably – was the grandson of Cato.

Octavian jeered at their choice of loyalties. That such men should end up as courtiers to a queen! Domitius actually made a point of snubbing Cleopatra whenever he could, and was constantly urging Antony to send her packing back to Egypt, but Octavian had always been a master at landing punches below the belt. In the
summer of 32
BC
, tipped off by a renegade, he even took the supremely sacrilegious step of raiding the temple of Vesta, where Antony had deposited his will, and seizing the document from the hands of the Vestal Virgins. The contents, eagerly pored over, duly proved as explosive as Octavian had anticipated. Stern-faced and censorious, he listed them for the benefit of the Senate. Caesarion to be legitimised; Cleopatra’s children awarded vast legacies; Antony himself, on his death, to be buried by Cleopatra’s side. It was all very shocking – perhaps suspiciously so.

Yet if there was much that was factitious about Octavian’s propaganda, it was not all spin. Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra, formalised in 32 when he divorced Octavia, was instinctively recognised by most Romans for what it was – a betrayal of the Republic’s deepest principles and values. That the Republic itself was dead did not make these any less mourned, nor its prejudices any less savage. To surrender to what was unworthy of a citizen: this was what the Romans had always most dreaded. It was flattering, therefore, to a people who had become unfree to pillory Antony as unmanly and a slave to a foreign queen. For the last time, the Roman people could gird themselves for war and imagine that both the Republic and their own virtue were not, after all, entirely dead.

Many years later Octavian would boast, ‘The whole of Italy, unprompted, swore allegiance to me, and demanded that I lead her into war. The provinces of Gaul, Spain, Africa, Sicily and Sardinia also swore the same oath.’
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Here, in the form of a plebiscite spanning half the world, was something utterly without precedent, a display of universalism consciously designed to put that of Antony and Cleopatra in the shadow, drawn from the traditions not of the East but of the Roman Republic itself. Undisputed autocrat and champion of his city’s most ancient ideals, Octavian sailed to war as both. It was a combination that was to prove irresistible. When, for the third time in less than twenty years, two Roman
forces met head to head in the Balkans, it was a Caesar, yet again, who emerged triumphant. Throughout the summer of 31
BC
, with his fleet rotting in the shallows and his army rotting with disease, Antony was blockaded on the eastern coast of Greece. His camp began to empty – dispiritingly, even Domitius was among the deserters. Finally, when the stench of defeat had grown too overpowering for Antony to ignore any longer, he decided to make a desperate throw. On 2 September he ordered his fleet to attempt a break-out, past the Cape of Actium, into the open sea. For much of the day the two great fleets faced each other, motionless in the silence of the crystalline bay. Then suddenly, in the afternoon, there was movement: Cleopatra’s squadron darting forwards, smashing its way through a gap in Octavian’s line, slipping free. Antony, abandoning his giant flagship for a swifter vessel, followed, but most of his fleet was left behind, his legions too. They quickly surrendered. With this brief, inglorious battle perished all of Antony’s dreams, and all the hopes of the new Isis. And for days afterwards the waves washed gold and purple on to the shore.

One year later Octavian closed in for the kill. In July 30
BC
his legions appeared before Alexandria. The following evening, as twilight deepened towards midnight, the noise of invisible musicians was heard floating in a procession through the city, then upwards to the stars. ‘And when people reflected on this mystery, they realised that Dionysus, the god whom Antony had always sought to imitate and copy, had abandoned his favourite.’
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The next day Alexandria fell. Antony, botching his suicide in the manner of Cato, died in his lover’s arms. Cleopatra, having discovered that Octavian planned to parade her in chains for his triumph, followed him nine days later. As befitted a pharaoh, she died of a cobra bite, the poison of which, the Egyptians believed, bestowed immortality. It was, for the would-be emperor and empress of the world, a suitably multicultural end.

The scare that Cleopatra had given Rome doomed her dynasty. Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar, was quietly executed, the Ptolemies themselves officially deposed. On temples across Egypt artisans began sculpting the image of their new king: Octavian himself. Henceforward, the country would be ruled not as an independent kingdom, nor even as a Roman province – although the new pharaoh liked to pretend otherwise – but as a private fiefdom. Later, Octavian would boast of his mercy: ‘When it was safe to pardon foreign people I preferred to preserve them rather than wipe them out.’
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Alexandria was the greatest city to have fallen to a Roman general since Carthage, but its fate was far different. Ruthless in the pursuit of power, Octavian was to prove himself cool and cynical in the exercising of it. Alexandria was too rich, too much of a honeypot, to destroy. Even the statues of Cleopatra escaped being smashed.

Such clemency, of course, was the prerogative of a master, a demonstration of his greatness and power. All the world had fallen into Octavian’s hands, and now that he had no rivals, bloodshed and savagery had ceased to serve his purpose. ‘I am reluctant to call mercy’, wrote Seneca almost a century later, ‘what was really the exhaustion of cruelty.’
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But Octavian, if he were exhausted, could not afford to show it. Visiting the tomb of Alexander, he accidentally knocked off the corpse’s nose. In a similar manner he chipped at the conqueror’s reputation. The greatest challenge, Octavian argued sternly, was not the winning of empire but the ordering of it. He spoke with authority, for this was the challenge he had set himself. No longer to butcher but to spare; no longer to fight but to provide peace; no longer to destroy but to restore.

Such, at any rate as he sailed home, Octavian was pleased to claim.

The Ides of January 27
BC
. The Senate House seething with anticipation. Senators, crowded on to benches, whispering urgently among themselves. A historic announcement, it appeared, was due. Not only had it been widely trailed, but there were some senators, the leading members of the house, who had been tipped off about the response that was expected. Waiting for the consul to begin his speech, they readied themselves to look surprised, while rehearsing stage-managed answers beneath their breath.

Suddenly, a falling away of voices. The consul, slight still, only thirty-five, rising to his feet. Hushed silence for him, the young Caesar, the saviour of the state. Composed as ever, he began to address the chamber. His words were measured, cool – and freighted with moment. Civil war, he announced, had been extinguished. The extraordinary powers awarded to him – true, by universal consent, but unconstitutional all the same – could no longer be justified. His mission had been accomplished, the Republic had been saved, and so now, at long last, after the worst and most convulsive crisis in its history, the time had come to hand it back to whom it belonged: the Senate and people of Rome.

As he sat down, murmurs of unease, swelling steadily. The leaders of the Senate began to protest. Why, having rescued the Roman people from otherwise certain ruin, was Caesar planning to abandon them now? Yes, he had announced the restoration of constitutional proprieties, and the Senate was duly grateful. But why, just because the traditions of the Republic were set to flourish again, did this mean that Caesar had to resign his guardianship of the state? Did he wish to condemn his people to eternal anarchy and civil war? For this, without him, would surely be their fate!

Perhaps, rather than abandon the Republic to disaster, he would therefore listen to a counter-proposal? Caesar had declared illegal any of his acts or honours that were contrary to the constitution; very well, then let him, just like any consul, be awarded a province. One that would bring with it twenty-odd legions, true, and include Spain, Gaul, Syria, Cyprus and Egypt – but a province, none the less. And let him hold it for ten years, not an unheard-of length of time, after all – for had not Caesar’s father, the great Julius, held office for a decade in Gaul? Nothing to offend precedent there. The Republic would flourish and Caesar would fulfil his responsibilities to Rome, and the gods would smile on both. Throughout the Senate there rose a roar of assent.

Who was Octavian to refuse such an appeal? The Republic needed him, so, graciously, as was his duty as a citizen, he announced that, yes, he was prepared to shoulder the burden. The gratitude of the Senate knew no bounds. Magnanimity as great as Caesar’s merited spectacular rewards. These were duly voted him. It was agreed that bay leaves should be wreathed over the doorposts of his house, and a civic crown fixed over its door. A golden shield was to be placed in the Senate House, listing his qualities of courage, mercy, justice and sense of duty – time-tested Roman virtues all. And then there was one final honour, novel and supreme, as was only fitting. It was decreed that Caesar should henceforward be known as ‘Augustus’.

This, for the man born Gaius Octavius, was the culmination of an entire career spent collecting impressive names. A Caesar at the age of nineteen, he had gone one better two years later when, following his adoptive father’s official deification, he had begun calling himself ‘Divi Filius’ – ‘Son of a God.’ Extraordinary though such a name was, it had evidently met with divine approval, for the career of Caesar Divi Filius had never ceased to be blessed with success. Now, as ‘Augustus’, he would be distinguished even further from
the common run of mortals. The title would veil him like a nimbus in a glow of unearthly power. ‘For it signified that he was something more than human. All the most sacred and honoured things are described as “august”’.
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Including Rome herself. A famous phrase, lodged in the mind of every citizen, asserted that the city had been ‘founded with august augury’
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– and now, by becoming Augustus, Octavian had made this phrase his own. To found Rome anew – here was his lifetime’s mission, and every time his fellow citizens spoke his name, they would be reminded of it. The artful, almost subliminal, nature of such an association was entirely calculated, for tempted as Octavian had been by the more obvious name of ‘Romulus’, he had rejected it: the first founder of Rome had been a king and had killed his brother, unfortunate details both. Now that Octavian held supreme power, anything that might jog memories of how he had won it was to be suppressed. Already, eighty silver statues, voted him the previous decade by an obsequious Senate, had been melted down. In official commemorations of his career, the years between Philippi and Actium were left a blank. And most crucially of all, of course, the name ‘Octavian’ itself was to be buried in oblivion. Augustus Caesar perfectly understood the importance of rebranding.

And he understood it because he understood the Roman people themselves. Augustus had shared in their deepest dreams and desires. That, after all, was what had won him the world. Last and greatest of the Republic’s strongmen, he had recognised, with the pitiless eye of a pathologist, the malignancy corrupting his city’s noblest ideals – nor had he ever ceased to exploit it. ‘Always fight bravely, and be superior to others,’ Posidonius had admonished Pompey, citing the impeccable authority of Homer. But the age of heroes was past, and the desire to fight bravely and to be superior to others might now encompass the ruin of Rome. The stakes had
grown so high, the resources available to the ambitious so immense, the methods open to them so devastating and lethal, that they had brought the Republic and all its empire to the point of annihilation. No longer a polity of citizens bound by shared assumptions and restraints, Rome had become an anarchy of head-hunters in which only the cruel and fratricidal could hope to advance. This was the hunting-ground into which Octavian, just nineteen, had thrown himself – and there could be no doubt that his aim, from the outset, had been to seize mastery of the state. Having achieved that, however, with his rivals dead or tamed and his people exhausted, he had next faced a momentous decision. Either to continue trampling on the traditions of his city’s past, to wield power nakedly with a sword, as a warlord, perhaps, like his father, like Antony, as a god – or to cast himself as the heir of tradition. By becoming ‘Augustus’ he signalled his choice. He would rule not against the grain of the Republic but with it. He would instruct his countrymen in an ancient lesson: that ambition, if not pursued for the general good, might be a crime. And he himself, the ‘best guardian of Romulus’ people’,
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would revitalise the ideals of citizenship so that never again would they over-reach themselves and degenerate into savagery and civil war.