animosities trumped political issues. Trusted associates of Caesar both, Dolabella and Mark Antony had for several years been at odds following a certain indiscretion on the part of Antony’s then wife. (For the same reason, she abruptly became his ex-wife.) Sometimes it indeed seemed as if there were only ten women in Rome. And in Cicero’s view, Mark Antony had slept with every one of them.
Politics have long been defined as “the systematic organization of hatreds.” Certainly nothing better described Rome in the years following the Ides, when enmity rather than issues divided Caesar’s assassins, Caesar’s heirs, and the last of the Pompeians, each of whom, it seemed, had an army, an agenda, and ambitions of his own. Among the bumper crop of personal vendettas, none was more savage than that of Cicero and Mark Antony. The bad blood went back decades. Antony’s father had died when he was ten, leaving so many debts that Antony had declined his inheritance. His stepfather, a celebrated orator, had been sentenced to death on Cicero’s orders. From his father, Mark Antony inherited a joyful, capricious temperament. He was given to sulks and sprees. His mother—by all accounts a force of nature—appeared to have fostered in her reckless son a taste for competent, strong-minded women. Without them Antony arguably would have self-destructed well before March 44. Already his personal life was something of a catastrophe. He cemented the family reputation for insolvency while still in his teens. His sterling military reputation was eclipsed only by his fame as a reveler; he left tutors half-dead in his carousing wake. He was given to good living, great parties, bad women. He was generous to a fault, always easier when the house you are rashly giving away is not yours in the first place. What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: “He was a spendthrift of money and chastity—his own and other people’s.” The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar’s charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous.
After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour—at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra was not yet reinstalled in Alexandria when the first tensions were felt. They were entirely public: “All over the city,” Appian relates, “Octavian would climb up on to any elevated spot and accuse Antony at the top of his voice.” Antony might treat him with as much indignity as he liked, he might condemn him to a life of poverty, thundered Octavian, but would he please “stop plundering his property until the citizens have had their legacy?” He could then take all the rest. Antony hotly bellowed back. He was insulting and obstructionist wherever possible. The Senate did nothing to discourage either man, preferring instead, as Dio has it and as Antony had predicted, “to set them at odds with each other.” Antony’s men urged reconciliation, all the more crucial as the assassins consolidated their forces. Antony apologized. He promised to control his temper provided that Octavian did the same. One uneasy truce followed another. Antony broke the second with a sensational charge: in October he accused Octavian of bribing Antony’s bodyguards to murder him. (In truth Octavian had only tried to bribe them to defect, a practice of which he would make a regular habit. As for Mark Antony’s safety, Octavian offered personally to stand guard at his bedside.) Most believed the charge preposterous. Some did not, which left Octavian apoplectic. On one occasion he was reduced to pummeling the locked door of Mark Antony’s house in an attempt to clear his name, wildly shouting oath after oath at the servants and at a plank of wood.
Courted assiduously by Octavian, who wrote to him daily, Cicero played for time. It was a delicate business. Were Octavian to come to power, the assassins were lost. Moreover, Octavian was at once alarmingly impressionable and curiously resistant to advice from his elders. Cicero had particular difficulty with the young man’s florid encomiums of Caesar. “On the other hand,” Cicero reasoned, “if he is beaten, you can see that Antony will be intolerable, so one can’t tell which to prefer.” Antony was bent on plunder, Octavian blinded by vengeance. Cicero hemmed and hawed, fixing finally on one certainty, which he repeated like a mantra: “The man who crushes Mark Antony will have finished this ghastly and perilous war.” By the fall of 44, defending the commonwealth, or what remained of it, became to Cicero synonymous with mauling Antony, against whom he fulminated for the next six months. It was in the course of those harrowing weeks that Cleopatra found herself entangled with Antony and Octavian’s real enemies, collaborating as she was, ingenuously and disingenuously, with Dolabella and Cassius.
In the rabid attacks we know as the Philippics Cicero set out to destroy Caesar’s former lieutenant. Antony was at best “an audacious rascal,” at worst an erratic, drunken, filthy, shameless, depraved, licentious, pillaging madman. “In truth,” asserted Cicero, “we ought not to think of him as a human being, but as a most outrageous beast.” Certainly Antony gave Cicero plenty to work with. He had mismanaged funds. He had indulged in scandalous affairs. He had appropriated property. He had made a spectacle of himself, at one point allegedly attaching lions to a chariot for a joyride through Rome. Excess and conviviality were his middle names. His colorful stunts accounted in large part for his popularity; to his men he was irresistible. There had been ample carousing, even if “the fume of debauch” did not attach itself to Antony quite as tenaciously as Cicero insisted. He was all the same happy to retail and amplify tales of Antony’s indignities. The morning he had opened his mouth to speak in the Senate and instead vomited the putrid remains of a wedding feast into his lap was not one Cicero would ever let him forget. Antony was henceforth “the belching, vomiting brute,” prone to “spewing rather than speaking.” He had no ambition beyond providing for Rome’s actors, gamblers, pimps. On this subject Cicero was inexhaustible. As he had admitted long before: “It is easy to inveigh against profligacy; daylight would soon fail me if I were to endeavour to expose everything which could be said upon that topic: seduction, adultery, wantonness, extravagance, the topic is illimitable.”* So he proved on the subject of Mark Antony.
As the abuse continued, two new themes emerged. Octavian inevitably went from being “the boy” to “my young friend” to “this extraordinary youngster” to “that heaven-sent young man,” on whom Rome’s hopes rested. Also as Cicero ranted, Antony gained a partner in crime. Summoning every speck of evidence, rumor, and innuendo, Cicero included Fulvia, Antony’s wife of three years, in his rabid denunciations. Fulvia had participated equally in doling out appointments, auctioning off provinces, embezzling state funds, asserted Cicero. He indicted her for her greed, her ambition, her cruelty, her guile. He charged Antony with the worst crime that could be leveled against Caesar’s former lieutenant: Mark Antony, he bellowed, “would prefer to answer to a most audacious woman than the Senate and Roman people.” With his have-you-no-decency offensive Cicero settled an invaluable inheritance on Octavian, who would avail himself of each and every line, without once crediting the best ghostwriter in history.
BY NOVEMBER 43 Octavian and Antony had little choice but to join forces. It was that winter that Brutus and Cassius united in the eastern Aegean, Cassius having relinquished his expedition against Cleopatra. The assassins were well armed and well funded; bowing to necessity, Antony and Octavian swallowed their mutual disdain and submitted to a formal alliance. In it they included Lepidus, who commanded a particularly spirited army. Late in the month the three came together on a small island in the midst of present-day Bologna, “to exchange enmity for friendship.” They frisked one another for concealed daggers and sat down to talk, in full view of their armies. There they remained for two days of dawn-to-dusk discussions, unsurprising given the conflicting agendas. As the Roman historian Florus put it much later: “Lepidus was actuated by a desire for wealth, which he might expect to gain from confusion in the State; Antony desired vengeance upon those who had declared him an enemy; Caesar [Octavian] was spurred on by the thought that his father’s death was still unpunished and that the survival of Cassius and Brutus was an insult to his departed spirit.” At the end of two days the three nonetheless hammered out an agreement, essentially appointing themselves dictators for five years and carving up the empire among them. Each man swore to uphold the terms and joined hands. On the mainland, their exultant armies saluted one another. The agreement—to be known later as the Second Triumvirate—was to take effect as of January 42. Cleopatra could only have been relieved. Together Octavian and Antony had a chance. She was in no position to head off the combined forces of Brutus and Cassius, who would show no mercy to an ally of Caesar’s, less so to one who ruled with his child.
The new triumvirs addressed as well the pressing question of finances. The money was all in Asia, where it streamed freely into the assassins’ coffers. In Rome the treasury remained empty. That state of affairs led inevitably to the sticky subject of personal enemies. The three men withdrew to compile a list in private. There was some high-level horse trading as they offered up “their staunchest friends in return for their bitterest enemies.” In such a way Antony sacrificed a much-loved uncle for Cicero. Lepidus threw over a brother. Your chances of survival were especially poor if you had funds at your disposal. “Extra names were constantly added to the list, some from enmity, others only because they had been a nuisance, or were friends of enemies, or enemies of friends, or were notably wealthy,” Appian tells us. Separately the triumvirs hastened with their men to Rome, where they presided over a season of bloodletting. “The whole city,” notes Dio, “filled with corpses,” often left in the street to be devoured by dogs and birds, or cast into the river. Some of the proscribed descended for safety into wells or filthy
