Augustus. Buchan John

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      CHAPTER I

      THE TRIUMVIRATE: PHILIPPI

      (B.C. 43-42)

      My fate cries out,

      And makes each petty artery in this body

      As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve.

      Still am I called!

      Hamlet.

      I

      OCTAVIAN moved north in September, nominally to oppose Antony as well as to do justice on the luckless Decimus. He waited in Cisalpine Gaul, while Antony and Lepidus, now joined by the troops of Plancus and Pollio, came south to meet him. The meeting, prepared for by much correspondence, took place on an island in a tributary of the Po, between Bononia and Mutina, at the close of October or the beginning of November. For two days the three conferred, and terms of settlement were agreed upon. Octavian surrendered his consulship, which went to Antony’s creature, the ex-muleteer Ventidius Bassus; Lepidus and Plancus were to be consuls for the year 42; for the rest of the year, and for five years following, Lepidus, Antony and Octavian were to be appointed triumvirs for reconstituting the Republic, with overriding executive and legislative powers, a dictatorship without the name. Brutus and Cassius held the East, but the western empire was apportioned between the three. Antony took Cisalpine and Celtic Gaul, Lepidus the Narbonese and Spain, while to Octavian fell Africa and the islands, the least easy command, since Sextus Pompeius held the seas. The soldiers approved the pact, for it meant the narrowing of the possibilities, or at any rate the area, of civil war. They were further conciliated by the promise of large grants of good Italian land, and by the announcement of the betrothal of Octavian to Claudia, Antony’s step-daughter and Fulvia’s child. The Caesarians were at last united.

      The allies marched upon Rome and the triumvirate was proclaimed. Appian has preserved the terms of the proclamation.¹ Vengeance upon the murderers of Julius was alleged as the chief motive, but before the arch-assassins, Brutus and Cassius, could be followed overseas, it was necessary to make Italy safe for the triumvirs. Also, to furnish a war-chest and to pay bounties to the troops, money must be raised, since the state treasury was empty. That meant a proscription on Sulla’s lines. A small preliminary list of the proscribed was drawn up in the north, on which appeared Cicero’s name. Then came a long list of three hundred senators and two thousand knights—rich men whose money was wanted, dangerous and uncertain men, private enemies of this or that triumvir. Shakespeare has pictured the ghoulish chaffering:

      ANT. These many, then, shall die: their names are pricked.

      OCT. Your brother too must die: consent you, Lepidus?

      LEP. I do consent—

      OCT.Prick him down, Antony.

      LEP. Upon condition Publius shall not live,

      Who is your sister’s son, Mark Antony.

      ANT. He shall not live; look, with a spot I damn him.²

      Then till the close of the year the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rode abroad in the land. Some of the proscribed escaped overseas to Brutus and Cassius and Sextus Pompeius. Some were saved by the fidelity of their slaves and kinsfolk. Some were begged off by gentle women like Octavia. But blood ran like water, and Pedius, the other consul, died of the horror of it. The triumvirs achieved their purpose. They could now cross the sea with a maimed and silent land behind them, and they had amassed from confiscations enough to furnish the sinews of war.

      Among the first to die was Cicero. He had little estate, only debts, but Antony could not forgive the lash of the Philippics. Plutarch has told the tale of that winter afternoon in the wood by the sea-shore when the old man stretched out his frail neck to the centurion’s sword, and of that later day in Rome when the head was fixed by Antony’s order above the Rostra, and “the Romans shuddered, for they seemed to see there, not the face of Cicero but the image of Antony’s soul.”¹ He met his death in the high Roman fashion—the only misfortune of his life, says Livy, which he faced like a man. The verdict is scarcely fair; juster is the comment of the same historian that he was so great a figure that it would require a Cicero to praise him adequately. In the wild years when the Roman Republic fell, the thinker and the scholar does not fill the eye in the same way as the forthright man of action, and Cicero is dim in the vast shadow of Julius. His weaknesses are clear for a child to read, his innocent vanity, his lack of realism, his sentimentality about dead things, his morbid sensitiveness, his imperfect judgment of character, his frequent fits of timidity. The big head, the thin neck, the mobile mouth of the orator could not dominate men like the eagle face of Julius. He failed and perished because he was Cicero. The man of letters in a crisis, who looks round a question, cannot have the single-hearted force of him who sees the instant need. Yet it is to be remembered that he could conquer his natural timorousness and act on occasion with supreme audacity, a far greater achievement than the swashbuckling valour of an Antony. And let it be remembered, too, that it was Cicero’s creed which ultimately triumphed. His dream came true. His humanism and his humanity made him the prophet of a gentler world. The man to whom St. Augustine owed the first step in his conversion,² who was to St. Ambrose a model and to St. Jerome “rex oratorum,” the scholar whose work was the mainspring of the Renaissance, has had an abiding influence on the world. While others enlarged the limits of the Roman empire, he “advanced the boundaries of the Latin genius.”³

      The proscription of the triumvirs is the darkest stain upon Octavian’s record. So dark, that ancient writers, looking on the beneficent rule of Augustus, were driven to assume what psychologists call “dissociated personalities”—youth debauched, pitiless and self-centred, which by some miracle was changed by success into a pattern of virtue. Others have attributed the СКАЧАТЬ