The conspirators claimed that they had killed Caesar in the cause of republican liberty. It now became clear that what they meant was the liberty of the optimates, a concept that had long since forfeited popular support. The crowds did not rise in support of the conspirators and they were forced to take refuge on the Capitoline Hill and then hammer out a compromise with the surviving consul Mark Antony and supporters of Caesar. The dictatorship was abolished and the murderers given an amnesty, but in return all Caesar’s acts were confirmed and there would be no prosecutions for activities in the civil war. Cicero emerged to preside over the reconciliation. However, when it was discovered that Caesar had left his gardens to the city and a sum of money to each of its citizens, popular fury against the murderers grew and Brutus and Cassius were forced to leave Rome. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar remains an unforgettable re-creation of the drama.
It was Antony, with the support of Lepidus, Caesar’s Master of the Horse, who now held the initiative. To his dismay Antony found that Caesar had adopted his 18-year-old nephew Octavian as his son and heir, and Octavian, despite family pressure to keep out of politics, arrived in Rome to claim his inheritance. He soon began appealing for troops to join him, with some success. It was Cicero, once again leaving his writing desk, who now came forward to play his final role in Roman politics. He flattered himself that he could woo Octavian and use him against the growing power of Antony, who had secured a command in Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul to follow his consulship. In the senate Cicero launched into a series of speeches against Antony that he called his Philippics after the great speeches of his hero Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon (see p. 312). His plot was to send the new consuls and Octavian, with a special command, against Antony.
The plan backfired. Antony was indeed defeated in Cisalpine Gaul but both consuls were killed and Octavian found himself commander of an army of eight legions. These he refused to give up and marched to Rome to demand and receive a consulship from the humiliated senate. He was aged 19. He now threw off the patronage of his elders and marched north on his own initiative to meet Antony and Lepidus. Between them they could muster forty-five legions and so there could be no argument when in November 43 they set up a triumvirate, a government of three. The west of the empire was divided between them and they took on the responsibility of making laws and appointing magistrates. This liquidation of the republic was ratified by a meeting of the concilium held in a Forum ringed by troops. The senate, by allowing Octavian to raise his own troops and then recognizing him as a consul, had once again helped bring about its own demise.
There was a nasty aftermath. All three of the new rulers owed their position to Caesar and they now took the opportunity to rid themselves of Caesar’s and their own enemies. It was important to them to seize land in Italy to settle their large armies. A death list of 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians was drawn up. There was only one name of consular rank, Cicero. He hesitated over his escape and was caught in his litter and beheaded. The final scene is recorded by Plutarch in one of the most evocative passages of his Lives. (The approaching end is signalled by a flock of crows cawing around Cicero.) In a grisly aftermath Antony ordered the hands that had written the Philippics to be hacked off and nailed alongside Cicero’s head on the speaker’s rostrum in the Forum. It was a grotesque end to Rome’s greatest orator and one of the founding figures of European liberal Humanism.
Lepidus was now left to keep order in Italy while Octavian and Antony headed east. Their quarry was Brutus and Cassius to whom the senate had given commands in Macedonia and Syria in 43. They had acquired a total of nineteen legions between them but these proved no match for the larger forces of the triumvirate. At successive battles at Philippi in Greece in the autumn of 42 they were defeated by Antony and both committed suicide. (Octavian played very little part in the battle and was haunted for years to come by taunts of cowardice.) The only focus of opposition to the triumvirs was now Pompey’s son Sextus Pompeius, who was based with a fleet on Sicily where he styled himself ‘the son of Neptune’.
He was not the only one to claim divine inheritance. In January 42 the senate had recognized Caesar as a god. After his death a cult had sprung up focused on the spot where his body was burned and the appearance of a comet confirmed to those who wished to believe that a new god had arrived in the heavens. Octavian eagerly appropriated his father’s status and from now on called himself divi filius, ‘the son of a god’.
There was no love lost between the triumvirs. Lepidus was soon pushed aside. Antony tried to outmanoeuvre Octavian by allocating him the west of the empire where he would have the unpopular task of settling veterans in Italy and dealing with Sextus. When Octavian simply confiscated the land he needed and wiped out his opponents, Antony reacted and attempted to land in Italy. The two would have fought each other in 40 if their armies had not been so sick of war. At Brundisium in September 40 they agreed on a new division of the empire. Octavian was to take the west of the empire, from Illyricum westwards, while from Macedonia to the east was to stay with Antony. Lepidus was to remain in the triumvirate with a command in Africa. The agreement brought universal relief. In his fourth Eclogue the poet Virgil talked of a new era of peace that would be consolidated by the birth of a young child. Later Christian writers argued that this was Christ but Virgil probably meant the expected child of Mark Antony and his wife Octavia, the sister of Octavian.
The third member of the triumvirate, Lepidus, did not last long. In 36 he was involved in the final defeat of Sextus Pompeius in Sicily but unwisely then made an attempt to challenge Octavian, whose own part in the fighting had been less successful. His troops simply melted away at Octavian’s approach and he was forced to capitulate. Octavian, in merciful mood, confirmed him in his office of pontifex maximus that he had been awarded on Caesar’s death and Lepidus lived out the remaining twenty-four years of his life quietly in Africa.
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