Augustus

XI

PARTHIAN SHOTS

36–35 B.C.

Octavian accepted three honors from those that had been voted to him. The first was an annual festival to mark the victory at Naulochus, the second a gold-plated statue of himself in the Forum, dressed as he was when he entered Rome and standing on top of a column decorated with ships’ rams.

The third honor was by far the most important: tribunicia sacrosanctitas. This meant that his person was sacer, consecrated and inviolable on pain of outlawry. This protection was given to tribunes of the plebs, but Octavian did not have to hold the office of tribune, although he was additionally awarded the right to sit on the tribunes’ benches at meetings.

Of greater practical benefit to citizens, Octavian forgave unpaid installments of special taxes as well as debts owed by tax collectors. It was announced that documents relating to the civil wars would be burned. The administration of the state was returned to the regular magistrates, and Octavian agreed to hand back all his extraordinary triumviral powers when Antony returned from Parthia.

Octavian owed a great deal to his friends and supporters, and he made sure they were well rewarded. Agrippa, who had masterminded the Sicilian victory, was given a probably unprecedented honor—a corona rostrata, or golden crown decorated with ships’ beaks, which he was entitled to wear whenever a triumph was celebrated. Priesthoods were liberally distributed. Booty and land flowed into the hands of the triumvir’s friends; thus, Agrippa was granted large estates in Sicily and married one of Rome’s greatest heiresses, Caecilia, daughter of Cicero’s friend the multi-millionaire Titus Pomponius Atticus.

Some men did not know how to handle success with the expected decorum. Cornificius, awarded the consulship in 33, so prided himself on his Sicilian exploits that he had himself conveyed on the back of an elephant whenever he dined out.

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of the Sicilian victory. In his early years of struggle, Octavian had boasted of his connection to Julius Caesar; but from now on he no longer insisted on his rank as divi filius. He was who he was in his own right.

And what of Mark Antony? Octavian’s victory over Pompeius and his acquisition of Sicily and Africa (taken from the dismissed Lepidus) marked an important shift in the triumvirs’ respective positions. His two rivals for control of the west were now gone.

This simplification of the political scene had an important consequence. Despite the years of bloodshed, there was still a republican faction, an assorted group of diehards who were unwilling to accept what looked increasingly like the settled verdict of history.

With the end of Sextus Pompeius, the only remaining refuge was Mark Antony. In part, this was because, compared with Octavian, Antony was the lesser of two evils. But they could also detect in him a more relaxed approach to autocracy. In the last resort, he liked an easy life. He was no revolutionary and, provided that he could retain his dignitas and auctoritas, a preeminence of respect and influence, he had no difficulty in envisaging a return to the familiar rough-and-tumble of the Republic.

In the spring of 36, Antony launched his long-planned invasion of Parthia, leading an army of sixty thousand legionaries and other troops. His task was to settle an overdue piece of military business: to avenge the catastrophe of the battle of Carrhae in 53 B.C., the death of the Roman commander, Marcus Licinius Crassus, at the hands of the Parthians, and the loss of many Roman legionary standards. Few people doubted that Antony would score a great victory, which would set the seal on his predominance.

Information took time to filter back from the eastern deserts, and when the battle of Naulochus was fought nobody in Italy had any idea how the Parthian campaign was going. Then, sometime during the autumn, dispatches from Antony arrived announcing victory. Although it would have suited him very well if Antony had at least met with a setback, facts were facts and Octavian must needs rejoice.

It had taken Mark Antony years to prepare for his Parthian war. After the Treaty of Brundisium in October 40, he faced two challenges. The first was posed by the Parthini, an Illyrian tribe that occupied rough and mountainous country overlooking the port of Dyrrachium and the beginnings of the Via Egnatia, which, we remember, gave access to Greece and Rome’s eastern provinces. The Parthini, who had sided with Brutus and served in his army, were in a state of revolt. They invaded Macedonia and by moving south were able to cut one of the empire’s crucial communications links. They also captured the Illyrian port of Salonae in the north (Salon, near Split, in Croatia). Antony dispatched eleven legions, which efficiently suppressed the rebellion.

The second challenge concerned the Parthians, who posed a far more serious threat than an Illyrian hill tribe. They were well aware that once a senior Roman took time off from fighting other Romans, he would assemble all the forces of the empire to punish them for the Carrhae disaster. Would it not be sensible to launch a preemptive strike?

In the spring or summer of 40 B.C., Parthian horsemen, led by Pakûr, the brilliant son of King Urûd, swept across the province of Syria, killing the governor. The invasion was the greatest threat to Roman rule since the days of a rebel monarch, Mithridates of Pontus, half a century before.

Unfortunately, dealing with Octavian and the aftermath of the Perusian war distracted Antony for much of this year. He decided not to take the lead, perhaps wanting to hold himself in reserve for the full-scale Parthian invasion. Instead, he dispatched one of his best generals, Publius Ventidius, who had served under Julius Caesar and understood the need for celerity in war.

In a two-year campaign Ventidius won three great battles, the last of which was fought northeast of Antioch, the capital of Syria, on June 9, 38 B.C. Pakûr was killed. The Parthian prince had been well liked in the Syrian region; Ventidius sent his head around various cities to deter his sympathizers. Having smashed and dispersed the invaders, the general marched east and besieged the city of Samosata (now Samsat, in Turkey) on the Euphrates.

Time passed and rumors spread that Ventidius was accepting bribes to hold back from taking Samosata. Antony decided to come and conclude the campaign in person. He dismissed Ventidius and never employed him again. However, Samosata proved a tougher nut to crack than he had thought. Antony negotiated a settlement, and returned to Athens for the winter of 38–37 B.C. According to Plutarch, he received three hundred Greek talents, the equivalent of more than seven million sesterces, to pay for his departure. How did this price compare, one wonders, with what Ventidius received?

The thought of Antony assuming the moral high ground on account of a subordinate’s financial impropriety seems out of character. It is rather more likely that the triumvir was “jealous of [Ventidius] because he had gained the reputation of having carried out a brave exploit independently.” Whatever the truth of the matter, the jettisoning of a commander of Ventidius’ caliber combined arrogance with carelessness.

Octavian had little difficulty in keeping up-to-date with Mark Antony’s activities. Although communications were slow and could be difficult or even dangerous, individuals, whether businessmen or state officials, wrote home with news and gossip. The triumvir had plenipotentiary powers, but he was expected to send dispatches to the Senate and keep his colleague in the picture. Octavia, back in Rome while her husband was on campaign and looking after her large brood of six children and stepchildren, worked to promote his interests and to smooth relations between the two men in her life.

The first reports from Antioch, which Antony fixed as his headquarters, showed him at his best. The invasion by Pakûr was evidence that the client kingdoms, which acted as buffers between the Parthians and the Roman empire, needed strengthening. Antony redrew the map, carving out large territories for men he trusted, all of them Greek-speaking west Asians—Amyntas in Galatia, Polemo in Pontus, Archelaus-Sisinnes in Cappadocia, and Herod in the much smaller but strategically important kingdom of Judea. As the ruler of the Roman east, he needed monarchs stable enough to resist military shocks and strong enough to react effectively to them.

But the monarch on whom the triumvir placed the greatest reliance was the queen of Egypt. Nearly four years had passed since the pair had met. One would suppose that they kept in touch by letter, if only to discuss their twins, Alexander and Cleopatra, who had grown into sturdy toddlers. It would be wrong to think, though, that either party was in love; their relationship was essentially that of two professional politicians who needed to do business with each other.

Antony and Cleopatra renewed their friendship at the respective ages of forty-five and thirty-three. They quickly came to an understanding (and, equally quickly, the queen became pregnant again); Egypt’s resources were placed at the triumvir’s disposal, and in return Cleopatra received substantial territories. These included a string of coastal cities running from Mount Carmel in the south to today’s Lebanon, part of Cilicia, and other regions north and south of Judea. The queen viewed this enlargement of her power as being of the first importance. She had largely reconstituted the Ptolemaic empire as it had been in its heyday, two centuries before.

Back at Rome nobody saw anything especially scandalous about these developments; Antony’s reorganization of the east made very good sense, and it appeared that, a good judge of character, he had chosen able and intelligent people for his client kings. As a onetime appendage of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra was familiar to the Roman political class, even if they did not particularly like her. She was obviously a competent ruler; it mattered little that Antony had stepped into his predecessor’s bedroom slippers.

Octavian, though, found the renewal of the liaison disagreeable and threatening. It was an insult to his sister, Octavia; also, he noted with interest that Antony’s children were provided with additional names about this time, being now called Alexander Helios (Greek “Sun”) and Cleopatra Selene (“Moon”). Being illegitimate, the children had no hereditary status either Roman or Egyptian, but the new cognomens gave them a quasidivine prestige.

More serious, though, and more embarrassing for Octavian, was the fact that Cleopatra was almost part of the family. Her co-monarch, Ptolemy XV Caesar, was the son whom she claimed, almost certainly truthfully, to have had by Julius Caesar. In his eleventh year, Caesarion was the murdered god’s real, not adoptive, offspring; it would not be so very long before he could create some trouble, if backed by Antony and his mother.

How did Mark Antony’s contemporaries regard a man who was unfaithful to his wife? This question cannot be answered without an understanding of Roman sexual mores.

The Romans took an unsentimental view of sexual relations. Romantic love, as we know it, was rare. Public displays of affection were frowned on, as was excessive sexual activity. Marcus Porcius Cato the Censor, who lived in the second century B.C., set the standard for conventional good behavior when he expelled a man from the Senate for kissing his wife in the street.

A Roman man, almost invariably locked into a marriage of convenience (although second or later unions often permitted a freer choice), did not suffer feelings of moral guilt about sex, nor did he feel necessarily bound to any particular sexual object. He would not have understood modern terms such as “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality,” which categorize people as sexual types. What he did was the issue, not what he was.

To judge by the literary sources, it did not greatly matter whether the randy husband fancied a young man or woman. The poet Horace was not untypical of his age:

When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl

Or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know

You can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension?

Not me. I like sex to be there and easy to get.

According to Suetonius, Horace had his bedroom lined with mirrors; he brought hookers or rent boys there and enhanced his pleasure by turning his own sexual experience into pornographic imagery.

Two chief concerns governed sexual conduct. First, a free male citizen should be the one who performed the penetrative or insertive act, who was the “active” rather than the “passive” partner. For him to be sodomized was shameful, a betrayal of his masculinity. Anyone who was known to enjoy being buggered was scorned. This was why Julius Caesar deeply resented the story that in his youth he had been the catamite of the king of Bithynia, and the gibe of a political opponent that he was “every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.”

Second, an adulterer or fornicator was meant to restrict his attentions to noncitizens and slaves, as in Horace’s case; freeborn boys and women were out of bounds. Although there is plenty of evidence that this was a custom honored mostly in the breach, it was essential that there should be no doubt as to the identity of a Roman citizen’s father. This was why Octavian ordered a favorite freedman of his to commit suicide after he had been convicted of adultery with Roman matrons. In addition, foreign genes should not be permitted to enter the Roman gene pool; only citizens could marry citizens, and to wed a foreigner was frowned on; if not illegal, such a union was unrecognized by the law, especially when it came acknowledging heirs in a will.

What all of this signified so far as Antony was concerned was straightforward: he could not marry Cleopatra, who was as non-Roman as they came, but if he wanted to conduct an affair with her it would be odd if anyone complained. Roman women, such as Octavia, well understood the conventions; her husband’s extramarital dallying did not strain her loyalty to him. It was her loving brother who could not stand the idea of her betrayal by Antony’s entanglement with an eastern temptress.

Surprising information started trickling out of the east during the autumn and winter of 36–35 B.C. Personal letters from officers and others to their families and friends indicated that Antony’s laurel-wreathed communiqués did not tell the whole truth about the Parthian war. Indeed, Octavian and the political elite in Rome were intrigued to learn that Antony’s campaign had come perilously close to defeat. A careful but confidential investigation was commissioned to establish the facts.

This was what had actually happened. Antony followed Julius Caesar’s original plan of campaign, and to begin with things went well. Rather than struggle across the desert plains of Mesopotamia, harried by the Parthian cavalry, and slowly lose a war of attrition, he marched through the independent and (he expected) friendly kingdom of Armenia. He then turned south and invaded Media Atropatene (roughly speaking, today’s Azerbaijan), with a view to besieging and capturing its capital, Phraata.

Unfortunately, Antony made four bad mistakes. Because he had launched his attack in June, he could not afford setbacks or he would find himself campaigning in winter. He placed confidence in a senior Parthian defector, who was in fact spying for his king. To compound this error, Antony failed to impose garrisons and to take hostages from the Armenian king, Artavâzd. It may be that he had neither the time nor enough troops to do this, but the consequence was unfortunate.

Antony’s final mistake was to let his slow baggage train (with all the siege equipment for Phraata) travel at its own speed with a relatively light guard. The well-informed Parthians turned up out of the blue with a force of fifty thousand mounted archers, who set on fire all the siege equipment and destroyed it. The Armenian king and his forces defected.

This was a catastrophe, for it would no longer be possible to take Phraata, where Antony had intended to winter. He was forced to march back the way he had come, now through incessant snowstorms. More than twenty thousand men, one third of the army, were lost in the month it took to march to the comparative safety of Armenia, where the king saw no advantage in trying to impede the Roman retreat.

Antony was very upset and, rightly, blamed himself. He had all his silver plate cut up and distributed to the soldiers as an improvised bonus to keep them happy. Several times he prepared for suicide, asking his sword bearer to be his executioner. Like any good general, he went around the hospital tents to comfort the wounded; if Plutarch is right, his men realized that his need for comfort was as great as theirs. They “greeted him with cheerful faces and gripped his hand as he passed: they begged him not to let their sufferings weigh upon him, but to go and take care of himself.”

At last the battered army reached Syria. Messengers had been sent ahead to ask Cleopatra to bring money and clothing for the soldiers. The legions waited by the sea for the queen to arrive. Antony’s self-confidence was still at a low ebb and he started drinking heavily. Unable to bear the waiting, he kept jumping up and running to the shore to look for Egyptian sails.

Cleopatra took her time, but when she appeared she brought everything that was needed. Once the soldiers were fully supplied, their general returned to Alexandria, there to do some hard thinking about how to proceed.

At Rome, Octavian absorbed the news of his colleague’s discomfiture. He could see that from a strictly military perspective Antony had suffered only a setback—serious, certainly, but by no means a total disaster.

No records exist of Octavian’s secret intentions; it may be that like many politicians he was merely an intelligent opportunist, and did not cherish a long-term ambition to oust Antony and become sole master of the Roman world. However, the evidence of his behavior—his patience and pertinacity, his persistent reluctance to do more than a bare minimum to help his fellow triumvir, his ruthlessness with other competitors—suggests a covert plan.

Always the realist, though, Octavian knew better than to strike too soon. The correct approach, he decided, would be to accept his colleague’s account of his campaign at face value, and in no way to question it. So victory celebrations were staged, sacrifices conducted, and festivals held. On the face of it this was convenient for Antony, who, it was said, soon came to believe his own propaganda and convinced himself that in escaping from Media and Armenia he had won the day.

Octavian was aware that Antony would need to replace the men he had lost, but never allowed him to raise troops in Italy as he was entitled to do. He was also determined not to fulfill his promise in the Treaty of Tarentum to send Antony four legions in return for the ships he had received. He wrote to his colleague saying, with hidden but barbed sarcasm, that in the light of his resounding victory Antony ought to have no trouble raising any additional soldiers he might need in his own half of the empire.

To add injury to insult, Octavian sent his sister, who had been living in Rome since last seeing Antony in Greece, to join her husband. She brought with her large stores of clothing for his troops, money, presents for Antony’s staff, and two thousand picked men, splendidly equipped with full armor, to serve as his Praetorian Guard (that is, the ex officio bodyguard of a general). She was also accompanied by seventy warships, the survivors of those Antony had lent to her brother. This apparently kind and thoughtful gesture was, in fact, multiply wounding.

First of all, the provision of help for Antony’s troops betrayed Octavian’s knowledge of the real outcome of the Parthian campaign. Second, the dispatch of two thousand soldiers rather than the twenty thousand promised was an almost laughable insult. Third, it was widely known that Antony was living with Cleopatra, and sending his wife to him was mischievously tactless.

Charitable historians have conjectured that Octavian wanted to apply pressure on his colleague with a view to detaching him from Cleopatra. But Octavian knew his Antony by now. He probably guessed that Antony would react intemperately, and show himself in a bad light.

When Octavia reached Athens, she received a curt message from her husband, instructing her to send on the legionaries and supplies and then return to Rome. Her brother advised her to move out of Antony’s palatial residence and set up her own independent household. Octavia obeyed her husband’s order but declined her brother’s advice: she came back to the capital, but refused to move house.

Plutarch presents the rejection from a romantic perspective, giving a highly colored account of Cleopatra staging a nervous breakdown to persuade Antony to send Octavia away. No such explanation is necessary; the decision was political and intended as a firm response to Octavian’s hostile, or at least unfriendly, actions.

The literary sources regard Octavia as a saintly figure, characterized by a “truly noble devotion and generosity of spirit.” One may detect here the hand of her brother’s propagandists. However, factual claims about matters familiar to contemporaries—and so not worth lying about—suggest that she did everything she could to save her marriage. She went on looking after the large brood of Antonian children, entertaining Antony’s friends in Rome on business, and doing everything she could to obtain what those friends wanted from Octavian.

It was beginning to be clear to all but the most determined optimists that the triumvirs were approaching a parting of the ways. Their personalities had always been diametrically opposed. Octavian suffered from frequent bouts of ill health; Antony was strong and gloriously fit. Octavian was dutiful and self-disciplined; Antony was prone to binge drinking and worked hard only when he had to. Octavian planned and schemed; Antony reacted more spontaneously to events. Octavian was fiercely loyal to those who put their confidence in him; Antony easily betrayed them. Octavian often broke his agreements; Antony fulfilled his promises.

At issue was not only a dysfunctional personal relationship but also opposing political philosophies, or at least casts of mind. Antony was an old-fashioned kind of politician, who was happy with things as they were provided that he could maintain a leading role in public life. Octavian was a revolutionary, who meant to transform the Roman world.

For the time being, though, the triumvirs silently agreed to forget about each other and concentrate on their own projects. There was room enough in the empire not to trip over each other.