XV. The Acts of Caesar Augustus (A.D. 14)
At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the Republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.
CHAPTER THREE
I. Letter: Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius (13 B. c.)
My dear old friend, these letters that you require of me-I could not have suspected how they would take me back to the days that are gone, and through what a strange tangle of emotions I must go on that journey! Now in these uneventful years of my retirement, as my time on earth draws to an end, the days seem to hasten with unseemly speed; and only the past is real, so that I go there as if I were reborn, as Pythagoras says we are, into another time and another body.
So many things whirl around in my head-the disorder of those days! Can I make sense of them, even to you, who know more of the history of our world than any mortal? I comfort myself with the certainty that you will make sense of what I tell you, even if I cannot.
Marcus Antonius went to Brindisi to meet the Macedonian legions that he had called up, and we knew that we must act. We had no money: Octavius had stripped his fortune and sold much of his property to discharge Julius's bequests to the people. We had no authority: according to the law, not for ten years would Octavius be eligible to become even a member of the Senate, and of course Antonius had blocked every special privilege that the Senate would have given him. We had no power: only a few hundred of the veterans of Caesar's army in Rome had unequivocally declared for us. We had a name, and the force of our determination.
So Octavius and Agrippa went immediately to the south, to the Campanian coastal farms where Caesar had settled many of his veterans. We knew what Antonius was offering recruits as an enlistment bounty; we offered five times that amount. We offered money that we did not have; it was a desperate gamble, but it was a necessary one. I remained in Rome and composed letters for distribution among the Macedonian legions that were nominally under Antonius's command. We had had promises from them earlier, and had reason to believe that some would defect to us, if the circumstances were right. As you know, the letters had their effect-though it was not precisely what we had anticipated.
For Antonius then made the first of his many serious blunders. Because of some wavering on the part of two of the legions -the Macedonian IV and the Martian, I believe-he had some three hundred officers and men put to death. More than the letters, I am sure, this action worked to our advantage. During the march to Rome, these two legions simply diverged to Alba Longa, and sent word to Octavius that they would cast their fortunes with his. It was not the cruelty of Antonius's act that outraged them, I think; soldiers are used to cruelty and death. But they could not trust themselves to a man who would act so rashly and unnecessarily.
In the meantime, Octavius and Agrippa had had a small success in raising the beginnings of an army to meet the Antonian threat. Some three thousand men with arms (though we let it be thought that it was double that number) assigned themselves to his command; and the same number without arms pledged themselves to our future. With a sizable portion of this three thousand, Octavius marched toward Rome, leaving Agrippa in command of the rest and charging him to march with them toward Arezzo (the place of my birth, as you will remember), and to raise whatever other troops he could on the way. It was a pitiful force to range against the power of our enemies; but it was more than we had had in the beginning.
Octavius encamped the army a few miles outside of Rome and entered the city with only a small body of men to guard his person, and offered his services to the Senate and the people against Antonius; it was known that Antonius was marching toward Rome, and no one could be sure of his purpose. But in their division and impotence, the Senate refused; and in their confusion and fear, the people did not speak as one. As a result, most of the army that we had raised at so much cost to ourselves dispersed, and we were left with fewer than a thousand men at Rome, and a few hundred more who marched (futilely, we thought) with Agrippa toward Arezzo.
Octavius had sworn to himself, to his friends, and to the people that he would have vengeance upon the murderers of his father. And now Antonius was marching through Rome on his way to Gaul-to punish (he said) Decimus Albinus, one of the conspirators. But we knew (and Rome feared) his real purpose, which was to gain for himself the Gallic legions under Decimus's command. With those legions, he would be invincible; and the world would lie like an unguarded treasure house before his plundering ambition. We simply faced the death of the Rome for which Caesar had given his life.
Do you see the position we were in? We had to prevent the punishment of one of those very criminals we had ourselves sworn to punish. And it became clear to us that, unexpectedly, another end had discovered us-an end larger than revenge and larger than our own ambitions. The world and our task enlarged themselves before us, and we felt that we peered into a bottomless chasm.
Without money, without the support of the people, without the authority of the Senate-we could only wait for what would ensue. Octavius withdrew the remnants of his army from the outskirts of Rome, and began slowly to follow Agrippa's little band to Arezzo-though it seemed now that there was no hope of diverting or even delaying Antonius's progress to Gaul.
And then Antonius made his second serious blunder.
In his vanity and recklessness, he marched into the city of Rome with his legions; and they were fully armed.
Not for forty years-since the butcheries of Marius and Sulla-had Roman citizens seen armed soldiers inside the city walls; and there were people still alive then who could remember the cobbles dark with blood, and there were senators then in the House who as young men had seen the rostrum piled with the heads of the senators ofthat day, and could remember the bodies left in the Forum to be devoured by dogs.
So Antonius swaggered and drank and whored through the city, and his soldiers plundered the houses of his enemies; and the Senate cowered, and did not dare oppose him.
Then the news came to Antonius from Alba that the Martian legion had deserted him and had declared for us. It is said that he was drunk at the time he got the news; in any event, he acted as if he were. For he precipitately called the Senate to meet (he was still consul, remember), and in a long irrational harangue demanded that Octavius be branded a public enemy. But before the speech was over, another piece of news came into the city, and was whispered among the senators even as Antonius was speaking. The Macedonian IV legion, following the Martian, had declared its allegiance to Octavius and the party of the Caesars.
In his rage, Antonius lost control of what little good sense he had. He had defied the constitution once by entering the city with his armed forces; now he defied law and custom by convening the Senate at night and by threatening his opponents with harm if they attended the meeting. In this illegal assemblage, he accomplished the following: he had Macedonia given to his brother, Gaius; and the provinces of Africa, Crete, Libya, and Asia to his own supporters. And then he hastened to the rest of his army at Tivoli, whence he began his march to Rimini, where he was to prepare his siege of Decimus in Gaul.
Thus, what Octavius could not accomplish by his caution, Antonius accomplished for us by his recklessness. Where there had been despair, I could see hope.
Now, my old friend, I will tell you something that no one knows; and you may use it in your history, if you wish. It is known that during the midst of these events, Octavius was on his slow march with the raggle of his troops to Arezzo; what is not known is that, at the moment of Antonius's open display of contempt toward the Senate and the law, and at the moment I judged the temper of the Senate and the people to be what they were, I sent an urgent message to Octavius to return, in dead secret, to Rome, so that we could make our plans. As Antonius swaggered boisterously out of the city, Octavius came secretly in.
And we laid the plan that would give us the world.
II. Letter: Marcus Tullius Cicero to Marcus Junius Brutus, at Dyrrachium (January, 43 B. c.)
My dear Brutus, the news we have in Rome from Athens fills all of us who honor the Republic with joy and hope. Had the others who are our heroes acted so boldly and with such decision as you have, our nation would not now be in such a state of turmoil. To think that, so shortly after the illegal assignment that Marcus Antonius made of Macedonia to his half-witted brother Gaius, now that same Gaius cowers in fear in Apollonia, while your armies grow and gather the strength that will one day be our salvation! Would that your cousin Decimus had had that
