Augustus

VIII

DIVIDED WORLD

42–40 B.C.

The great families that had controlled the Senate and the consulship had been bloodily culled and many now disappear from the historical record. Most of the senior politicians active before the civil wars had joined their ancestors. New men from the provinces with unfamiliar names entered the Senate and commanded armies. Aristocracy gave way to meritocracy, and Rome became a city of opportunity for men with energy and talent.

Before going their separate ways after Philippi, Antony and Octavian signed an agreement and reconfirmed the division they had made of Rome’s provinces, with a few changes. The loser was Lepidus, who had commanded the triumviral forces in Italy during the Philippi campaign. He was not only idle but was suspected of treasonable communication with the republican leader, Sextus Pompeius, master of Sicily. He was made to disgorge Spain to Octavian and Narbonese Gaul to Antony. If Lepidus could clear his name, Octavian might be persuaded to give him a province or two from his allocation. Antony retained Long-haired Gaul, but gave up Cisalpine Gaul, which the triumvirs decided should be incorporated into Italy instead of continuing as a province. Originally an idea of Julius Caesar, this had the great advantage that it removed the risk of an overmighty provincial governor in command of an army only a few days’ march from Rome—in short, the risk of another Julius Caesar.

Octavian and Antony liked each other no more than they had in the past, but they were now bound together as permanent partners. They agreed that each should automatically approve the political decisions of the other. However, the two men were not on an equal footing. The victor of Philippi was a world-bestriding colossus. Little wonder then that, as before, when it came to a division of tasks, the junior colleague came off worse.

Antony was to reorganize the east, raise money there, and restore the state’s solvency; in due course, he would pick up the baton let drop by the murdered dictator and launch the much delayed expedition against the Parthian empire. By contrast, Octavian’s thankless duty was to demobilize a large number of troops and settle them on smallholdings in Italy.

About fourteen thousand survivors from the legions of Brutus and Cassius were incorporated into the victorious army. Old Caesarian veterans and soldiers who had been recruited in 49 and 48 B.C., some forty thousand in all, were sent to Italy and civilian life. That left enough men to make up eleven legions, eight of which Antony took to the east; the remaining three came home with Octavian.

Unfortunately, there was insufficient state-owned land to accommodate the veterans. The exchequer was empty, so compulsory purchase was out of the question. Eighteen cities in Italy were marked down for land confiscation and freeholders were summarily dispossessed. Public opinion was outraged. Those threatened flooded into Rome. Appian writes: “People came in groups…young men, old men, women with their children, and gathered in the Forum and the temples, lamenting and declaring that they had done no wrong.”

Octavian explained to the towns that he had no choice. “From what other source, then, are we to pay the veterans their prize money?” he asked complainants. This was nothing less than the truth. There was no countervailing force with which to gainsay the soldiers. Worse, the allocated land was still not enough and some men used violence to expropriate farms they had not been granted, often with more fertile fields. In many parts of Italy, law and order were breaking down. Relations between the soldiers and their commander also deteriorated, as an unnerving incident demonstrated only too clearly.

Veterans were summoned to the Campus Martius to hear announcements on the allocations. They were so eager for news that they arrived early, before first light. Octavian was late; they became angry, and when a centurion gave them a severe dressing-down they first jeered at him and then killed him.

Octavian made a calculated and very brave decision. What had suddenly become a crisis would, he judged, end in catastrophe if he stayed away from the assembly. So he walked there as planned, turning aside when he saw the centurion’s body and politely asking the legionaries to behave with greater restraint in future.

He then announced the expected land grants, handed out some bounties, and invited further applications for reward. This disarmed the angry soldiers, who became ashamed of what had been done and asked Octavian to punish the centurion’s murderers. He agreed to do so, but carefully (and wisely) imposed two conditions: that the culprits admit their guilt and that the army as a whole condemn them. The men’s mood cleared.

For much of 41 B.C. Octavian was caught between two fires. At the same time that he sought to pacify the veterans, he made conciliatory gestures toward the civilian population. As Dio put it, “He learned from actual experience that weapons had no power to make the injured feel friendly towards him.” So he no longer confiscated senatorial estates and kept his hands off other kinds of private property.

However, the veterans were annoyed by this; Dio reports that they killed a number of centurions and others whom they saw as taking his side: “They came very near to killing [Octavian] himself, making any excuse justify their anger.” Relations between them and the dispossessed citizens went from bad to worse. Riots took place, in which the two sides fought against each other in the streets. The capital and even Italy were slipping out of official control. At one point there seems to have been something approaching a general strike at Rome. Appian writes: “The civilian population shut the workshops and made the elected office-holders leave, saying that they had no need of either office-holders or crafts in a starving and plundered city.”

For years the landless poor had gravitated to Rome, and many thousands depended on the supply of subsidized grain to keep body and soul together.

Every year the city consumed between 140,000 and 190,000 tons of wheat. More than 300,000 citizens were on the dole and received free supplies of grain. Some of this was homegrown, but much came from overseas, from Sicily, Africa, and Sardinia. The fact that Italy was not agriculturally self-sufficient made Rome heavily dependent on the vagaries of international politics, just as today’s industrial societies rely on imports of gas and oil.

Pompey the Great had understood this well; in 67 B.C. (as already noted) he had cleared the seas of pirates, who had become so widespread and powerful as to blight the free passage of goods, including wheat. He began by “entirely clearing pirates from the seas adjoining Etruria, Libya, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily.” A quarter of a century later, his son Sextus controlled these waters himself; one wonders if, as a boy, he had heard his father reminisce about his past exploits and learned of the pirates’ strategic stranglehold.

Sextus set out systematically to starve the city. The republican admirals Ahenobarbus and Murcus strengthened the blockade by standing off Brundisium in the Ionian Gulf. Exploiting the confusion pirates raided southern Italy.

The ancient sources usually dismiss Sextus as a pirate himself. He was much more than that. By applying pressure on the triumviral regime, he meant to pave the way for his return to Rome and the restitution of his family’s confiscated property. Not without reason, Sextus may have supposed that he could then easily come to terms with Antony, who would be grateful to see the last of his infuriating young colleague and competitor.

It is argued that he should have invaded Italy, but that was hardly necessary. If he had done so, Caesarian veterans would have put up a die-hard resistance. Far better to let starving dogs lie.

Octavian’s tribulations were all the more painful and humiliating in the light of news from the east, where his colleague was at the height of his powers and prestige. Trumping the divi filius, Antony decided to claim divine status on his own account.

He presented himself to the people of Asia as the New Dionysus. Dionysus, also widely known as Bacchus, was a god with two interrelated dimensions: on the one hand, he was the patron of wine, agriculture, and the abundance of nature; on the other, he presided over mystical cults whose secret rituals induced ecstatic or out-of-body experiences and delivery from the daily world through physical or spiritual intoxication. Dionysus stood for a euphoric eastern irrationalism that could be set against the western clarity of Apollo, god of reason and light.

The triumvir–cum–Greek god had more on his mind than establishing an iconic image for himself and having a good time. His most urgent task was to raise funds to refill the bankrupt Roman exchequer, and he set about his work with ruthless enthusiasm.

The trouble was that the eastern provinces had already been called on to finance much of Rome’s civil wars. Now Antony used any method that came to hand to squeeze out all remaining wealth. Recalling that the god had his dark side, Plutarch notes acidly:

To most people, [Antony] came as Dionysus the Cruel and Eater of Flesh, for he stripped many noble families of their property and gave it away to rogues and flatterers. In other cases, men were allowed to steal fortunes from owners who were still living by making out that they were dead.

Antony saw he was going too far, and reduced his demand for nine years’ worth of taxes to two. He had to look elsewhere for additional cash; and at this point the New Dionysus, equivalent to the Egyptian god Osiris, thought of his divine sister, the New Isis, alias Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, who saw herself as an incarnation of the kingdom’s celebrated goddess of fertility. Antony had last met her in Rome when she was Caesar’s mistress. Aware of Egypt’s untold riches, he decided to invite her politely but firmly to make a substantial contribution to his running costs. From Tarsus in Cilicia (in today’s southern Turkey), where he was then based, he sent one of his aides to fetch the queen.

He chose for the task Quintus Dellius, a versatile character who was said to have been his sexual pet when a boy, and who built a reputation in these dangerous times for switching sides at precisely the right moment. A memorable putdown described Dellius as a “circus-rider of the civil wars,” adept at jumping effortlessly from horse to horse.

When Dellius arrived at Alexandria he was struck by Cleopatra’s charm, and suspected that Antony would be too. Knowing that the triumvir routinely fell for pretty women, he advised the queen to wear her most alluring attire when presenting herself to him. Antony was a gentleman, he added, and she had nothing to fear from him.

Impressed by Dellius, Cleopatra took his advice. She came to meet the triumvir at Tarsus, sailing up the river Cydnus to the city in a splendid barge. Plutarch evoked the scene brilliantly (perhaps adding some color):

[She] was in a barge with a poop of gold, its purple sails billowing in the wind, while her rowers caressed the water with oars of silver which dipped in time to the music of the flute, accompanied by pipes and lutes. Cleopatra herself reclined beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed in the character of Aphrodite.

Antony was waiting in state on a dais in the central square of Tarsus to give the queen a formal welcome. Rumors spread through the crowds of bystanders of the floating spectacle that was sailing up the river into port and mooring at the quayside. Gradually they drifted away to have a look, leaving Antony and his entourage alone in the marketplace.

Word spread that Aphrodite (whom many worshippers identified with Isis) had come to revel with Dionysus “for the happiness of Asia.” This notion doubtless originated with Cleopatra, but it shows that Antony’s religious propaganda featuring himself as the New Dionysus was evidently working its way into the public mind. She herself well understood the role of religion in royal self-promotion. If she was consciously presenting herself as Aphrodite, she was at one level making a direct sexual offer; but, more profoundly, she was also putting in a claim to be Antony’s divine partner.

The triumvir sent the queen a message inviting her to dinner, but she had already determined what the next step in their relationship should be. Well-informed about Rome’s leading personalities, she will have known that Antony’s character was essentially simple and easy to read. He greatly enjoyed the display of wealth. He was easygoing and had a broad sense of humor that belonged to “the soldier rather than the courtier,” as Plutarch put it. He loved practical jokes. These were not exactly the tastes to which Cleopatra, educated in the sophisticated court of the Ptolemies, was accustomed, but in his company she made every appearance of sharing them.

The queen countered the triumvir’s invitation to dinner with one of her own; always complaisant with the ladies, he gracefully gave way and attended a banquet on board ship. On the following day, the queen dined with Antony. The gustatory exchanges were repeated for four days.

At a certain point, business supplanted pleasure. Antony required practical support from Cleopatra for the invasion of Parthia. She agreed to provide it, but on certain conditions. She required the execution of a few inconvenient personages, and in particular of her hated half sister, Arsinoe, who had briefly seized her throne and had been given sanctuary at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Antony obliged.

The queen now invited him to spend the winter with her at Alexandria. The couple sailed off to Egypt, where Antony laid aside the garb of a Roman official and wore an informal tunic in the Greek manner. The couple formed a dining club called the Inimitable Livers and spent much of their time enjoying themselves.

In February or March of 40 B.C., bad news reached Egypt. Having decided not to await Antony’s planned attack on them, the Parthians had launched an invasion of Syria. The triumvir quickly set off for Asia Minor.

Mark Antony’s critics have made much of his oriental debauchery, as though he were acting in an original and shocking way. In fact, he did nothing out of the ordinary but rather behaved very much as he had always done. There are no reports that, at this stage of life, he was sexually promiscuous. He had sex with the queen, but with no one else. (She gave birth to twins, Alexander and Cleopatra, later in the year.) However, he was not in love with her and left Egypt without qualms. The couple were not to meet again for three and a half years. He had spent a most enjoyable holiday, and that was all.

Something more serious, though, was taking place in his personality: a gradual and growing loss of focus. The Greek word for this process was eklusis, the term for the unstringing of a bow. Dio remarks that Antony “had earnestly devoted himself to his duties so long as he had been in a subordinate situation and had been aiming at the highest prizes; but now that he had got into power, he no longer paid strict attention to these things.”

When things are as bad as they can be, fate finds a way to deliver another blow. One of the consuls in 41 B.C. was Lucius Antonius, Mark Antony’s brother, who decided to launch a military challenge against Octavian. He was in collusion with Mark Antony’s wife, the virago Fulvia. At this time she played an active and influential political role, to the point where she seemed to be as much of a consul as those elected to that office.

The two played a double game, simultaneously sympathizing with dispossessed Italian farmers and telling the legionaries that Octavian was acting disloyally to the absent Mark Antony, for whom they claimed to speak. All would be well, they argued, once Mark Antony returned to Italy. Lucius backed a protest against Octavian in Rome, managed to raise eight legions, and occupied the capital. He then marched north, hoping to link with two Antonian generals and their armies. However, the generals were unsure of Antony’s wishes and held aloof.

Fulvia raised troops and, most unusually for a Roman woman, issued orders directly herself. Dio writes: “And why should anyone be surprised at this, when she would wear a sword at her side, give out the watchword to the soldiers, and on many occasions give speeches directly to them?”

Octavian kept his nerve. He was not at ease on the battlefield, and was helped, or more likely masterminded by, his boyhood friend Agrippa, who had a gift for generalship. He and Salvidienus outmaneuvered Lucius, who took refuge in the strongly fortified hill town of Perusia (today’s Perugia, in Umbria), where he waited for the Antonian generals to come to his relief. Fulvia, infuriated, pressed them to do so, but Agrippa confronted them before they had succeeded in joining forces. Still without instructions from Antony, the generals were unenthusiastic about pressing on to Perusia in the first place and pulled back. Lucius was on his own.

Meanwhile, Octavian sealed the town with a ditch and rampart seven miles long. At one point in the siege he was surprised by a sudden sortie by the enemy while holding a sacrifice outside the town walls, and was lucky to escape with his life.

Both sides hurled stone and lead slingshot at each other. About eighty of these lead balls have been discovered by archaeologists and many have brief, extremely rude messages scratched on them. Examples include “I seek Fulvia’s clitoris”; “I seek Octavian’s arse”; “Octavian has a limp cock”; “Hi, Octavius, you suck dick”; “Loose Octavius, sit on this”; and, rather more feebly, “Lucius is bald.”

Lucius’ men launched numerous attacks on the enemy, including one by night, but they all failed. The formal act of surrender was carefully stage-managed. The defeated legions laid down their weapons and were pardoned. Octavian placed their commander and some of his senior followers under discreet arrest. They were later freed, and Lucius was sent to be governor of Spain (there was no point needlessly annoying his brother).

Despite the appearance of clemency, the triumvir appears to have been coldly and bitterly angry for what he had been obliged to endure. Perusia was given over to the troops to plunder, and accidentally burned to the ground. Other prisoners of war were less fortunate than Lucius and his intimates. According to Suetonius,

[Octavian] took vengeance on crowds of prisoners and returned the same answer to all who sued for pardon or tried to explain their presence among the rebels. It was simply: “You must die!” According to some historians, he chose 300 prisoners of equestrian or senatorial rank, and offered them on the Ides of March at the altar of the god Julius, as human sacrifices.

This story is repeated by Dio, and is very possibly true. Although human sacrifice was forbidden by senatorial decree in 97 B.C., it runs through Roman history as a recurrent ritual idea. Roman religious ceremonies contain traces of the practice, with dolls replacing human victims. On three occasions, during times of great crisis during the third and second centuries, two pairs of Gauls and Greeks, each a man and a woman, were buried alive in the cattle market (forum boarium) as a human sacrifice. In the sixties B.C., Catilina was reported to have sacrificed a boy and eaten his entrails. The most recent recorded instance took place during Julius Caesar’s triumph at Rome in 46 B.C., when, in a fury, he had had two rioting soldiers sacrificed to Mars.

Lucius surrendered in January or February 40 B.C., only a few weeks before the anniversary of the assassination. A commemorative altar had been erected on the site of Caesar’s cremation in the Forum, and this was where Octavian conducted the mass sacrifice. It shocked Roman opinion to the core, both for its scale and for the status of the victims. So far as the divi filius was concerned, it was the end of a story; four years had passed and now he had finally slaked the blood thirst of his deified adoptive father. The drama of murder and revenge had run its course.

The butchery came at a price, for the public long and bitterly recalled

…our fatherland’s Perusian graves,

The Italian massacre in a callous time.

What did Lucius and Fulvia mean by this disastrous enterprise? Did Antony know and approve of what his wife and brother were doing? These are hard questions to answer. Although Lucius does not give the impression of being particularly able, Fulvia was evidently energetic and experienced.

She may have been irritated by, even jealous of, Antony’s infidelity with Cleopatra. However, such behavior was commonplace and wives were expected to take it in stride. A political motive is much more plausible. Octavian was a nuisance, and here was a chance to eliminate him—a chance that Lucius and Fulvia seized, to give Antony the supreme power he scarcely seemed to covet.

Antony claimed that he was completely ignorant of much that was done in his name, and that he learned of what was happening in Italy too late to influence the course of events. However, Octavian and others wrote him many letters about the situation. It would have been amateurishly odd for Fulvia to act without her husband’s knowledge. We must conclude that Antony knew perfectly well what Lucius and Fulvia were up to, although it may not have been his idea. He was anxious to be regarded as a man who kept his word, and wanted to exploit the outcome whatever it happened to be. So he turned a blind eye.

The Perusian war proved that Antony and his supporters were poorly organized and prone to miscalculation. By contrast, it greatly strengthened Octavian’s political position and provided evidence of his staying power. Now twenty-three years old, he was no longer a virginal boy over-protected by his mother, but a fully grown adult and one of Rome’s two most powerful citizens. The year and a half since Philippi had been miserable, unglamorous, and testing, but it had brought out the best in him. He had succeeded in every endeavor.

His reputation for physical cowardice in the field was probably not unjustified; he was never at ease as a soldier. But Octavian had demonstrated something better—a dogged moral courage that saw him impose an unpopular but necessary policy of land confiscation and nearly cost him his life when confronting angry soldiers in the Campus Martius.

He would not shirk what needed to be done and moved patiently from task to task. This methodical approach to politics had two important dimensions: Octavian was naturally cautious and avoided impulsive gestures; and he showed an unforgiving fury to anyone who crossed him.

So far as contemporaries were concerned, the inexperienced triumvir was no nine days’ wonder, as some had predicted or hoped he would be. He had earned himself a permanent place at the head of affairs. Barring accident or ill health, he was there to stay.

We have relatively little information about Octavian’s personal life; what we do have falls broadly into two categories—dynastic marriages and stories put about by his enemies.

Julius Caesar’s heir was the finest match in Rome. Since he was only of middling provincial stock (despite his connection with the patrician Julii), it was in his interest to ally himself to blue blood. This would not only increase his personal social status but also be a signal that he wanted a political reconciliation with the aristocracy, thinned by the civil wars but still powerful, if only as an obstacle.

Probably in the spring or early summer of 43 B.C., Octavian married the daughter of Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus, a member of Rome’s most ancient nobility. However, the union lasted only a few months, for Mark Antony and Octavian, uncomfortable colleagues, agreed that it would be wise to cement their political deal, enshrined in the Second Triumvirate, with a family bond. Antony’s wife, Fulvia, had a daughter, Claudia, by her first husband, a lordly rabble-rouser, Publius Clodius Pulcher. She was only just of marriageable age and too young to have sex, but a match was arranged.

A girl was considered ready for wedlock at about twelve, a boy at fourteen. Husband and wife must both have reached puberty. Children could be betrothed provided that they were old enough to understand what was being put to them—say, from seven upward.

We are told rather more about Octavian’s sex life away from the marriage bed, by his opponents. Politicians often publicized the sexual peccadilloes of those with whom they disagreed, and were expected to be capable of producing scabrous lampoons. Octavian was no laggard in this regard; and a scabrous verse attributed to him survives, which is very probably authentic. It broadcasts a cheerfully indecent explanation of the motives that underlay Fulvia’s political activity. One can imagine the guffaws in the Forum and among the soldiery.

Because Antony fucks Glaphyra [a current mistress], Fulvia is determined to punish me by making me fuck her in turn. I fuck Fulvia? What if Manius [a freedman of Fulvia] begged me to sodomize him, would I do it? I think not, if I were in my right mind. “Either fuck me or let us fight,” says she. Ah, but my cock is dearer to me than life itself. Let the trumpets sound.

Octavian was accused of loose living. His girlishly attractive appearance doubtless inspired Sextus Pompeius to accuse him of effeminate homosexuality, of being a “queen.”

Lucius Antonius asserted that Octavian had sold his favors to Aulus Hirtius, the consul who lost his life at Mutina in 43 B.C., for the princely sum of 300,000 sesterces. The incident supposedly took place in Spain in 45 B.C., during the last campaign of the civil war, which culminated in Caesar’s victory at Munda. This was not long before Caesar returned to Italy and wrote his will. Lucius added, perhaps to lend verisimilitude to his claims, that Octavian used to soften the hair on his legs by singeing it with red-hot walnut shells.

With their circumstantial detail, these allegations just might be true, though that is unlikely. It does appear that the young triumvir won a reputation with the Roman mob for sleeping with men, whether or not it was deserved. One day at the theater an actor came onstage representing a eunuch priest of Cybele, the Great Mother. As he played a tambourine, another performer exclaimed, “Look how the queen’s finger beats the drum!” Since the Latin phrase can also mean “Look how this queen’s finger sways the world!” the audience delightedly applied the line to Octavian, who was watching the show, and burst into enthusiastic applause.

Most evidence suggests that Octavian, in fact, preferred sleeping with women, and he was widely credited with multiple adultery. It was probably during his early years of power that a private banquet he gave caused a public scandal. The event became known as the Feast of the Divine Twelve. It was a costume party with a difference; guests were invited to dress up as one or other of the gods and goddesses of Olympus. Octavian came as Apollo (always his favorite deity), god of the sun and of healing, and patron of musicians and poets. Suetonius notes that Antony mentioned the affair in a “spiteful letter,” but adds that an anonymous popular ballad confirmed it.

Apollo’s part was lewdly played

By impious Caesar; he

Made merry at a table laid

For gross debauchery.

What made the scandal worse was that the feast allegedly took place at a time of food shortage (caused, presumably, by Sextus Pompeius’ blockade). On the next day people were shouting “The gods have gobbled all the grain!” and “Caesar is Apollo, true, but he’s Apollo of the Torments”—this being the god’s aspect in one city district at Rome.

In the spring of 40 B.C., Antony was on his way to arrange his Parthian expedition when he learned that Perusia had fallen and that Fulvia had been forced to flee Italy. Antony met her at Athens and spoke very sharply to her, blaming her for the debacle. What she replied is unknown, but she was deeply shaken; an able woman, she had done everything in her power to advance her husband’s interests, and this was her recompense. The couple traveled to Sicyon, a port on the Gulf of Corinth, where Fulvia fell ill. We do not know what her sickness was, but it was exacerbated by a bout of depression. According to Appian, she “aggravated her illness deliberately,” which suggests self-harm.

Another lady paid Antony a visit: his mother, Julia, who had left Italy for her safety and taken refuge with Sextus Pompeius in Sicily. She conveyed a message from Sextus, offering an alliance against Octavian. Antony replied cautiously; if he went to war with Octavian he would regard Sextus as an ally; if not, he would try to reconcile them.

Meanwhile, the political situation was darkening. Antony’s ally Quintus Fufius Calenus, the governor of all Gaul beyond the Alps, unexpectedly died. As soon as he heard the news, Octavian rushed off to take control of Calenus’ eleven legions, which the dead man’s terrified son handed over to him without offering any resistance.

This was a clear breach of the agreement among the triumvirs and, so far as Antony was concerned, tantamount to a declaration of war. He laid plans for the invasion of Italy. Civil strife was set to resume, and everyone knew who would win. After Philippi, Antony was regarded as the greatest general of the day; he would make short work of his junior partner in power.

Somehow or other Octavian had to prevent Sextus and Antony from entering into an alliance against him. The depth of his anxiety can be gauged by his next step. He put aside his untouched wife, Fulvia’s daughter Claudia, sent Sextus’ mother, Mucia, to Sicily to convey a friendly message from him to her son; and wed Scribonia, Sextus’ aunt-in-law. Married twice before, she was considerably older than her new husband, perhaps in her early to mid-thirties. Scribonia was not a life partner of personal choice, but this did not prevent him from quickly consummating the union and making Scribonia pregnant.

Antony set off for Italy from Sicyon hurriedly, giving Fulvia the further grievance that he was leaving her on her sickbed. He did not even say goodbye before his departure. Estrangement from her husband seems to have been the final blow for this Lady Macbeth of the ancient world, for she soon died. It would appear that her steely determination to advance her husband’s cause concealed a fragile psyche. Antony was greatly upset by her death, and blamed himself for it.

The triumvir set a course for Brundisium with only a small number of troops, but with two hundred ships. En route he joined forces with Ahenobarbus’ powerful republican fleet. The two men had come to a secret agreement that they would work together as partners.

This was an important moment, for it marked a change of opinion among republicans about the victor of Philippi. A number of leading personalities had escaped the proscription by fleeing to Sextus Pompeius in Sicily, but he was a young and untried leader. Now surviving optimates, recalling his readiness to come to terms with the Senate and freedom fighters in 44 B.C., increasingly placed their hopes in Antony and joined his following.

The understandings with Ahenobarbus and Sextus strongly suggest that Antony was ready to succeed where his brother Lucius had failed, and bring about the destruction of his tiresome young colleague. He had had his fill of him, not merely from personal irritation but because the triumvirs’ dysfunctional relationship was destabilizing Roman politics and needlessly delaying the invasion of Parthia. The ancient sources are studiously vague about Antony’s exact intentions; it may be that a renewed civil war was meant to be a last resort if Octavian proved uncooperative and undependable. More probably, Antony actively sought a showdown.

Supported by Ahenobarbus, he made his way to Brundisium. The port, garrisoned by five of Octavian’s cohorts, closed its gates to them, and Antony immediately laid siege to it. He sent to Macedonia for immediate reinforcements. It was a sign of the depth of his anger that he also asked Sextus, with whom he had no formal alliance, to launch naval attacks against Italy; the young commander enthusiastically complied. He sent a large fleet and four legions to Sardinia, then in Octavian’s possession, capturing it and its two legions.

Octavian, with a leaden heart, took the road to Brundisium. Although he had many more troops at his disposal than did his fellow triumvir, he did nothing but watch and wait outside Antony’s fortifications. As often happened at times of crisis, he fell ill for several days, we are not told with what ailment.

The Roman world was about to be convulsed once more, were it not for one familiar obstacle. Not for the first time, the soldiers took a hand in events. Octavian’s veterans came to a secret decision that they would reconcile the triumvirs if they could; they would fight for Octavian only if Antony refused to come to terms (in fact, some turned back from the march to Brundisium). Fraternization between the armies grew and compelled a reconsideration. There was to be no war, because there was no one willing to fight it. This was a blow to the generals’ authority, but there was nothing they could do about it, no punishment they could order, that would not make matters worse. Their only realistic option was to come to terms.

Peace negotiators were appointed to resolve the dispute, among them Maecenas, Octavian’s trusted school friend, for Octavian. The two sides agreed that there should be an amnesty for the past acts of both triumvirs. Each side had bitter claims to put forward about the other’s behavior, but it was time, as political realists have said throughout history, to move on.

The arrangement they came to distinctly favored Octavian, for it left him with Gaul and Calenus’ legions. However, this seems not to have troubled Antony; he came to a strategic decision that he could not go on treating Octavian as a temporary annoyance who would either disappear through illness (quite likely) or mistakes (unlikely), or whom he would swat like a fly at some convenient moment. He wanted a full, final, and permanent settlement. To achieve it, he was willing to make substantial compromises.

The Triumvirate was renewed for another five years. The empire was cut neatly in half, with Octavian taking all of the west, including Gaul, and Antony the east from Macedonia onward. Italy was to be common ground, where both men would be allowed to recruit soldiers. The increasingly insignificant Lepidus retained Africa, a courtesy granted by Octavian. Antony had received help from the anomalous and threatening Sextus Pompeius, who still held Sicily and the western Mediterranean; he now had to abandon him. It would be Octavian’s duty to dispose of Sextus, just as Antony would punish Parthia.

Divisions on a map were insufficient to guarantee a permanent peace, however. Octavian and Antony had never got on with each other and were unlikely to do so in the future. Unless something decisive was done to bind them personally as well as politically, the Treaty of Brundisium, as the accord is called, would not be worth the marble on which it was inscribed. A solution to the conundrum was made possible by two recent deaths. That of Fulvia not only enabled Antony to blame her for his past misdeeds, but also made of him a merry widower (Roman opinion regarded the queen of Egypt as an innocuous diversion). In the same year, 40 B.C., Octavia, Octavian’s sister, lost her elderly husband, Gaius Claudius Marcellus, and, perhaps five years older than her brother, became a highly eligible widow (albeit with two daughters and an infant son).

The proposition that the treaty should be sealed by their marriage was irresistible. Although Octavian’s brief betrothal to Fulvia’s daughter Claudia had failed to reconcile the two triumvirs, there was a benign precedent for such a union in the long-ago and extremely happy marriage between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar’s daughter, Julia. As long as she lived the two warlords had stayed friends; history would now be given an opportunity to repeat itself.

Octavian’s short but dazzling political career had exposed a ruthlessness that overrode ordinary affection, but on this occasion we may guess that he sincerely wanted reconcilation with Antony. Plutarch records that he was “deeply attached to his sister, who was, as the saying is, a wonder of a woman.” He is unlikely to have handed her over into the hands of his unpredictable and womanizing colleague if he did not have his adoptive father’s example in mind.

Great celebrations took place to honor the historic accord. At Brundisium, the triumvirs entertained each other at banquets in their respective camps, Octavian “in military and Roman fashion and Antony in Asiatic and Egyptian style.” They then moved on to Rome, where the wedding of Antony and Octavia was held; Antony struck a coin showing their heads (the first time a woman’s likeness is known to have appeared on a Roman coin). They marched into the city on horses as if celebrating a military triumph.

Only one shadow was cast across the new landscape of peace and harmony. Octavian’s friend and supporter, the talented Quintus Salvidienus Rufus, was in command of the legions in Gaul. Sometime before the triumvirs became reconciled, he had opened a secret correspondence with Antony, hinting that he might be ready to switch sides. His motives are obscure; perhaps there were hidden jealousies in Octavian’s circle of intimates, or Salvidienus may simply have judged that his leader’s prospects were poor.

Astonishingly, if we are to believe the ancient sources, Antony told Octavian that Salvidienus had been plotting to defect to him and had sent a message to that effect while he was besieging Brundisium. Octavian was loyal to a fault, but if a friend betrayed him he was merciless. He immediately sent the proconsul a summons to come to Rome for urgent consultations, after which he would return to his command in Gaul. Salvidienus unwisely obeyed. Octavian arraigned him before the Senate and had him condemned both an inimicus (a personal enemy) and a hostis (a public enemy), and put to death. It was the end of a spectacular career. Salvidienus came from a humble background and had started out as a shepherd boy. He had been designated a consul for the following year, 39 B.C., without ever having held civilian office or sat in the Senate.

Whatever the background to this mysterious affair, Appian remarks drily that “Antony did not win general approval for making this admission” about Salvidienus. In these murky and shifting times, few were without guilty secrets and Antony might have been expected to turn the same blind eye to Salvidienus as others were to his own maneuverings. It is hard to see what he expected to gain from his treachery. Perhaps he simply wanted to demonstrate, at someone else’s expense, that he was sincerely committed to his new friendship with Octavian.

Salvidienus’ death is a reminder of an alienation deep inside Antony’s personality. It was easy to be misled by his celebrated bonhomie, his fondness for fun and games, for binge drinking and easy women; but below the affability lay a casual brutality and an inability to imagine the feelings of others.