Augustus

XIII

THE PHONY WAR

33–31 B.C.

Trials were conducted here in the open air, senators met and debated in the Senate House, citizens’ assemblies were convened in an open space called the Comitia. Money could be borrowed in the Forum, and prostitutes bought. Statues of famous statesmen stood on columns, and large paintings illustrated Roman victories. Down the Forum’s long sides stood two basilicas, which combined the functions of shopping mall and conference center.

With the Second Triumvirate and Octavian’s growing domination of the political scene, a gradual change could be detected. Politics moved from the noisy open square up to a complex of houses on the fashionable Palatine Hill, where Octavian and Livia lived and worked. From “Palatine” derives the word “palace,” meaning that enclosed space where autocrats make decisions in private.

Today the Palatine is a quiet, almost pastoral spot, overshadowed by tall maritime pines. A short but brisk climb from the Forum leads to the summit of the hill, a flat area pockmarked with ruins, some of them protected from the weather by modern roofs. The top of the Palatine is a maze of shaded lanes and hidden corners.

To the northwest stand the buildings where Octavian and Livia spent most of their lives. In 36 B.C., a grateful popular assembly voted that a house should be presented to him at public expense. Octavian had already bought an expensive property at the southwest end of the Palatine Hill, but it had been struck by lightning—an omen that persuaded him to demolish the unlucky building and replace it with a temple to Apollo. With his grant from the Senate, he arranged the purchase of a house, or more accurately a group of houses, next door.

The location was chosen with great care, for Octavian wanted his residence to signal and embody his role in the commonwealth. Near it stood a hut, built on the hill’s natural tufa and with a sloping thatched roof, its reed walls daubed in clay. This was said to be the home of Romulus, Rome’s founder, and was carefully preserved in his honor. By closely associating himself with Rome’s beginnings, Octavian was telling the Roman world that he stood for traditional values, for mos maiorum, the customs of ancestors.

There was no question about it in anyone’s mind: Rome did not look like the capital of a great empire. Over the centuries, the city had grown untidily and organically. There were no broad avenues and few open spaces, apart from the Forum and the forum boarium. Few streets were wide enough to allow vehicles to pass one another and most of them were unpaved. (In the daytime there was no wheeled transport, for, in an attempt to eliminate daytime traffic jams, Julius Caesar had restricted it to the hours after dark; the night clattered with the cacophony of wooden carts.) Projecting balconies and upper rooms sometimes nearly touched one another.

The rich lived in houses with no outside windows, so that it was possible (as in traditional Arab town houses) to escape the urban hubbub; rooms were grouped around one or more open-air courtyards. The poor rented single rooms or crowded into multistory apartment blocks, or insulae. These were often jerry-built and liable to fire or collapse.

Shops lined many of the main streets, but they were usually no more than a ground-floor room with a masonry or wooden counter for selling goods and a space at the back for stock. All kinds of goods were on display—jewelry, clothing and fabrics, pots and pans, and books. There were numerous bars and restaurants, catering mainly to people from the lower classes, whose houses did not have properly equipped kitchens.

Rome was a city of horrible smells. Rubbish and sewage, even, occasionally, human corpses, were tipped into the street. Passersby were so often hit by the contents of chamber pots emptied from the second floor or the roof that laws were passed regulating the damages that could be claimed.

City life was made bearable only by the ready availability of water. Four aqueducts (the first of them built in the fourth century B.C.), high arcades, strode across the land, bringing fresh, clean water from springs and lakes miles away. The water was piped to fountains, some of them no more than stone troughs, in the small public squares that dotted Rome. The rich and famous could obtain the Senate’s permission to tap the pipes. Ordinary citizens collected water from the nearest fountain or had it delivered by a water seller.

This abundance of water made possible one of Rome’s most popular pastimes, going to the public baths. These received their own supply and were much like modern Turkish baths or hammams. The price of entry was so small that everyone except the poorest could afford it. Many Romans would go to the baths every day, often in the early afternoon, after work and before the evening meal. Here they could meet friends and exchange gossip.

In 33, Octavian and Agrippa were back in Rome from Illyricum. How could they give the regime legitimacy, they asked themselves, how persuade public opinion that, after the long years of division, bloodshed, and power politics, Octavian meant to govern in the people’s interest, not just his own?

They found an answer in their run-down megalopolis. Investment in public buildings and services would achieve three useful purposes. First, it would improve the city’s grandeur, making its appearance worthy of its role as the capital of the known world. Second, the quality of life of Rome’s volatile citizenry would be enhanced. Third, the refurbishment of the city’s architectural heritage would be the first concrete illustration of Octavian’s commitment to restoring Rome’s antique values. An appeal to the old ways was a powerful means of sweetening the revolutionary nature of the Triumvirate.

Octavian called on his generals to signal their successes in the field by restoring one or another Roman landmark at their personal expense. They embellished temples and basilicas, and on the Campus Martius the extremely competent commander Titus Statilius Taurus built Rome’s first stone amphitheater.

But a diet of visually splendid grands projets was not enough. The average inhabitant of Rome must feel some personal benefit from these public works.

In 33 B.C., Agrippa took up the post of aedile—an unusual step, even a self-demotion, for he had already served as consul, the state’s highest post.

One of an aedile’s duties was to look after the city’s water supply, street cleaning, and drains; Agrippa reorganized and refurbished the aqueduct system. He also commissioned a new aqueduct, the Aqua Julia (some years later he added the Aqua Virgo, so called because a young girl pointed out springs to the soldiers who were hunting for water). He had five hundred fountains built as well as magnificent public baths, the Thermae Agrippae. The reservoirs and the fountains, or nymphaea, were elaborately decorated, with many bronze and marble statues and pillars. Agrippa also repaired and cleansed Rome’s underground drainage system.

The regime’s bid for popularity was unrelenting. During his aedileship, Agrippa distributed olive oil and salt and arranged for the city’s 170 baths to open free of charge throughout the year. He presented many festivals, and because those attending were expected to look smart he subsidized barbers to offer their services gratis. At public entertainments, tickets good for money and clothes were thrown to the crowds. Also, massive displays of many kinds of goods were set up and made available free on a first come, first served basis. All these measures were paid for from the fortune Agrippa had amassed (from war booty, legacies, and grants of land and money) during his ten years of working and fighting for Octavian.

Agrippa’s aedileship signaled in the most attractive and practical way that prosperous times were back. Agrippa’s investments in Rome’s infrastructure (to say nothing of the public buildings constructed or restored by other leading members of the regime) greatly enhanced its appearance. The construction work also provided welcome jobs in a city with a high rate of unemployment. While the other, long-absent triumvir was squandering time in the east, everyone could see the concrete advantages that Octavian’s regime was bringing to the ordinary citizen.

Octavian was ready for a showdown with Antony. His career since his acceptance of his legacy from Julius Caesar makes complete sense only if it is understood as a careful and undeviating pursuit of absolute power. A typically competitive and ambitious Roman, he wanted that power for himself; he was the heir of Rome’s greatest sole ruler since the expulsion of King Tarquin the Proud in the sixth century B.C., and it was only what he deserved. But Octavian also despised the incompetent and unruly selfishness of the ruling class, epitomized by the destructive and pointless policies of Fulvia and Lucius Antonius, that had led to the Perusian war; Sextus Pompeius’ absence of policy; and Mark Antony’s loss of discipline and focus. With respect to the latter, one senses a dismissive scorn for an older colleague who ought to have known better, and who had, in Octavian’s view, “failed to conduct himself as befitted a Roman citizen.”

Step by step, Octavian had built up his strength over the years, seizing every chance that came his way. The Illyrian campaign was the last piece of the puzzle: it gave him the military status he had so conspicuously lacked. Agrippa’s rebuilding of Rome was a sign that he and his supporters were planning a long-term strategy for the empire’s governance. However, if matters were not brought to a head now, the initiative might well pass back to Antony, especially if he finally scored a substantive victory over the Parthians and covered himself in glory.

The Triumvirate’s second term was due to end in December 33 B.C., and it would be in Octavian’s interest to avoid any risk of an amicable renewal, for that would freeze a status quo he wanted to terminate. He was in as strong a position as he would ever be.

In 33 B.C., Octavian was consul for the second time. Early in the year he delivered a blistering speech against his fellow triumvir. He criticized Antony’s activities in the east: Antony had had no right to kill Sextus Pompeius, whom he would willingly have spared, and Antony had been wrong to trick the Armenian king into captivity. This behavior had damaged Rome’s good name.

Octavian also attacked Antony’s cruel treatment of Octavia and his relationship with Cleopatra. The Donations of Alexandria were unacceptable. Even more offensive, seeing that it was clearly aimed at undermining Octavian’s position as Julius Caesar’s heir, was Antony’s promotion of young Ptolemy Caesar, or Caesarion, as the great dictator’s natural son.

Little of this was very convincing in itself. It strains credulity that Octavian had a soft spot for Sextus or cared a sesterce for the fate of a far-off country of which most people knew nothing. And as for Antony’s sexual life, it had always been colorful.

Pamphlets and letters were published, and envoys traveled assiduously between Rome and Alexandria making claim and counterclaim. Antony huffily stood his ground. He complained that he had been prevented from raising troops in Italy, as had been freely agreed; that his veterans had not received their fair share of lands on demobilization; that, after defeating Sextus Pompeius, Octavian had taken over Sicily without consulting him; and that Lepidus had been arbitrarily deposed.

Antony’s case was stronger than that of Octavian, who had consistently been an untrustworthy partner. Whenever compromise or concessions were needed, it was always the older and more reasonable triumvir who had given way. But some of the issues he raised were no more than debating points; for example, Sicily was in the western half of the empire, and once captured would naturally have fallen to Octavian.

The accusations grew more and more personal. Octavian castigated his colleague’s drunkenness. He also made fun of Antony’s high-flown and overelaborate use of Latin; he was “a madman, for writing to be admired rather than understood,” who introduced into “our tongue the verbose and unmeaning fluency of the Asiatic orators.”

Antony gave as good as he got. He ridiculed Octavian’s provincial ancestry and accused him of lustfulness, cruelty, and cowardice (for instance, the scandalous fancy-dress party that Octavian had attended as the god Apollo, and his curious behavior when he hid in the marshes at Philippi, were unkindly exhumed). Antony also made an angry charge, very probably with good reason, of sexual hypocrisy:

What’s come over you? Is it that I am screwing the Queen? But she isn’t my wife, is she? It isn’t as if it’s something new, is it? Or has it actually been going on for nine years now? What about you then? Is Livia the only woman you shag? Good luck to you if, when you read this letter, you haven’t also shagged Tertulla or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia, or all of them. Does it really matter where and in whom you insert your stiff prick?

What truths lie behind these quarrelsome exchanges? Personal insults were the stock-in-trade of debate. Distinguished Romans often expressed political disagreements in slanderously personal terms and seized on their opponents’ sexual misdemeanors with lip-smacking enthusiasm. But while disputants’ allegations may have been exaggerated, they needed to embody at least a poetic truth if anyone who knew the principals was to take them seriously.

Each triumvir claimed that he stood for a restoration of the Republic, and the other for tyranny by one man. Neither was telling the truth. Ten years after the murder of Cicero, the Republic was a thing of the past, irretrievable. The choice was simply between two kinds of autocracy—tidy and efficient, or laid-back and rowdy.

Octavian was approaching a very dangerous moment. He was trying to precipitate a war without receiving the blame for it. For the present, he set himself limited objectives. First of all, he had to make his public position crystal clear, announce the inevitability of a showdown, and force the political world to choose which triumvir to back in the coming struggle. At the same time, he had to mobilize maximum support throughout Italy, which Antony might very well invade.

Octavian’s final letter in the war of words reached Antony in October 33, when he was at the Armenian border with Media, preparing to renew his Parthian war. When he read what his brother-in-law had to say, Antony realized that once again Parthia would have to wait. Having rejected every charge leveled against him, Octavian concluded, with biting derision: “Your soldiers have no claim upon any lands in Italy. Their rewards lie in Media and Parthia which they have added to the Roman empire by their gallant campaigns under their imperator.”

Accepting that relations with Octavian had irretrievably broken down and that consequently war was inevitable, Antony set off with a small advance force on the long journey back to the Aegean, ordering one of his generals, Publius Canidius Crassus, a loyal and able supporter who had campaigned successfully in Armenia, to follow with an army of sixteen legions. He summoned Cleopatra, who joined him en route, bringing with her an ample war chest of twenty thousand talents (about 480 million sesterces), and the pair made the port of Ephesus (near the modern town of Selçuk in southern Turkey) their headquarters.

At the end of December, the Triumvirate came to an end. Octavian’s purpose now was to maintain his new public image as a strict observer of the constitution. He had no governmental status of any kind and in theory was taking a very dangerous risk by politically disarming himself this way. However, after more than ten years at the head of affairs he had built up a formidable auctoritas, the power that came from his record and his proven ability. Furthermore, by now he was the master of a multitudinous clientela; many thousands of people had obligations to him. Perhaps most important of all, the legions in the west remained his to command. Tactfully, he withdrew from Rome to await events.

In January 32, two new consuls took office. In the days when the triumviral machine was still more or less in working order, consuls had been named for years ahead, drawn on a roughly equal basis from supporters of the two triumvirs. It so happened that those for the new year were partisans of Antony.

The senior consul was Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (the cognomen means “Bronze Beard”), the aristocrat who had proved to be a good admiral for Brutus and Cassius. His colleague was the able and determined Gaius Sosius, a new man. As was typical of the time, he was a provincial, perhaps from Picenum in northern Italy.

The consuls had an important commission from Antony to execute. Late in the previous autumn, the triumvir had sent them a letter which they were to read out to the Senate once they had taken office. His aim was to set out his case fully, authoritatively, and persuasively; he probably restated his eastern settlement, his various acta, and in particular his welcome Armenian victory.

However, the consuls made a curious decision, as Dio writes: “Domitius and Sosius…being extremely devoted to [Antony], refused to publish [the dispatch] to all the people, even though Caesar urged it on them.” This can only mean that in the consuls’ view its impact on public, or at least senatorial, opinion would be the opposite of that intended by its author. The problem must have lain with a proud, or at least a complacent, description of the Donations of Alexandria. Antony would have been unaware that Octavian’s anti-Cleopatra propaganda had been all too effective and that his references to the Donations would merely add fuel to the flames.

On February 1, Sosius went on the attack. He strongly defended Antony and proposed a motion of censure of Octavian. His message will have been that, if there was a threat to peace, it did not come from Antony, who had shown no sign whatever of aggression toward his colleague.

Although a tribune friendly to Octavian entered a timely veto, Sosius’ intervention flushed Octavian out. In mid-February he gathered around him supporters and Caesarian veterans, and returned at their head to Rome. This was, in effect, his Rubicon, for he was staging something very like a coup d’état. On his own initiative, he convened a meeting of the Senate. He had absolutely no right to do this, but the consuls and the senators turned up at the session. He must have wondered whether he was riding events or they were riding him. Dio reports that he surrounded “himself with a bodyguard of soldiers and friends who carried concealed daggers. Sitting between the Consuls in his chair of state, he spoke at length and in moderate terms in his own defence, and brought many accusations against Sosius and Antony.”

For the consuls, this triumph of force could not be allowed to stand. “As they did not dare to reply to [Octavian] and could not bear to be silent,” in Dio’s sharp words, they secretly left Rome and set sail for the east. They were accompanied by between three and four hundred of Rome’s one thousand senators—republicans or supporters of Antony.

On the limited evidence available it is hard to be sure whether or not this move was a defeat for Octavian. Unlike the former triumvir, the consuls could claim legitimate political authority and, although the senators who joined them were a minority of the total membership, they were a substantial number of the ruling elite. What is more, it was uncertain how many of those who stayed behind were fully signed-up supporters of Octavian. Seasoned observers of the political scene will have seen a comparison with the flight from Rome in 49 of Pompey the Great and most of the Senate when Julius Caesar invaded Italy and launched the first of the civil wars. Ahenobarbus and Sosius could argue that they were taking “Rome” with them.

It looks as if Octavian was taken aback when he learned what had happened. He needed to neutralize the rebuff; pretending it was what he had always had in mind, he claimed that he had sent the senators away voluntarily. Anyone else who wanted to leave had his full permission to do so.

The upheavals at Rome were concentrating minds wonderfully. It was now certain that there was to be another round of civil war. Throughout the Roman world, men of importance in the state were considering their position: with whom were they to side?