Human nature has a love for violent drama and undue simplification, which sober history cannot accept. It must not be forgotten that Octavian lived under a fierce light, and that in a civil war the wildest gossip is believed. When, after the fall of the Julio-Claudian house, historians need no longer be circumspect, ancient tattle was resurrected. It may fairly be said that most of the scandals about Octavian’s youth should be taken as the malice of Antony’s faction,2 reproduced in later generations for political ends. But one fact remains which no apologist has adequately excused,3 his responsibility for a campaign of brutal murder. A fissure in his nature, a miraculous change of heart, are too facile explanations. The proscription was in keeping with a character which had in it strange depths of good and evil, and which, though it broadened and mellowed with the years, remained in essence the same.
In Octavian the emotional side was slow to develop, but from the start the rational was all-powerful. He had always a capacity for affection, even deep affection, but its area was strictly circumscribed. He had this love for his mother Atia, who died at the beginning of the triumvirate; for Julius, in whose case it was joined with a profound intellectual reverence; for Agrippa and Maecenas, where it had something of the camaraderie of youth engaged in the same adventure. In later years it was extended to certain members of his family. For these few it was a strong emotion; the rest of the world he regarded at first with suspicion, and never, even when success came, with more than a tepid benevolence. But on the intellectual side he had certain purposes held with a serious passion. The first was to finish the task of reshaping the empire which his great-uncle had begun. A second was to be himself the chief agent in that work. We need not credit him at the age of nineteen with even the rudiments of the policy which made the principate. What he possessed from the start were certain guiding ideas derived from Julius, a passion for order, a realism about facts, and a belief that he possessed a capacity for reconstruction. So in his intricate course he moved by the light of three principles. One was emotional—the avenging of Julius, a motive into which there entered something of the Roman “pietas.” A second was intellectual, a determination to bring order out of chaos, a polity out of banditry. This purpose he held with the rigidity of a devotee. The state should be re-made at whatever cost, and only violence could curb violence. To this task he brought both the stony-heartedness of self-absorbed youth, and the moral opportunism of the fanatic. His view was that of Horace Walpole: “No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go the lengths that may be necessary.”
There was a third purpose, in which the emotional and the rational were blended. He had a strong vein of superstition, unlike the cool scepticism of Julius, and he was avid of omens. He believed himself destined for a high mission, to which personal happiness, friendship, ease, common morality must all be sacrificed. Like Napoleon he followed his star. The conviction gave his youth that confidence which a Calvinist gets from the sense that his every step is divinely ordained. “Italiam non sponte sequor”—the cry of Aeneas was always his assurance and consolation.
To a mind thus constituted the proscription was warranted both by public and personal necessities. Brutus and Cassius, with the armies of the East, had still to be accounted for. The Senate and the republicans had revealed their bitter enmity. Their fangs must be drawn, and their estates mulcted. “Since we intend,” ran the triumvirs’ proclamation to the Roman people, “to conduct this war at a distance on your behalf, it does not seem to us to be safe either for us or for you to leave the rest of our enemies here behind us, since they would take advantage of our absence and lie in wait for the accidents of war. Nor do we think that, in the present emergency, we ought to be slow to act from any consideration for them, but rather we must put them one and all out of the way.” Brutal, but not without warrant from common sense. It was undoubtedly what the republicans would have done to the Caesarians, had they been uppermost. As for Octavian himself, he was still on a razor edge. He was facing implacable foes. Assassins waited for him at every street corner. He had painfully built up his purchase with Antony; if by a halfhearted policy he should weaken the alliance, and the alliance failed, he himself would be the first victim. To insist upon clemency in the circumstances would not only have required quixotic courage, but would have demanded the surrender of every hope he had cherished since boyhood, and the sacrifice of the toil of eighteen desperate months. On the facts Octavian’s conduct can be understood, if it cannot be defended.
We must judge it, too, in the light of the moral standards of his day. The past century had been a reign of terror, for Rome had seen nine separate civil wars, four deliberate massacres, and a long series of political murders from the Gracchi to Julius. The life-and-death struggle with Hannibal, with incidents in it which were no better than human sacrifices,1 had permanently debased the Roman temper and left in it a core of hard inhumanity. Cicero might found law upon the natural love of man for man,2 but the Roman jurist would have had a long search for that commodity. Even Virgil, the prophet of a better world, permits Aeneas, the ideal figure which to some extent personified the later Augustus, to suffer prisoners in bonds to be immolated on Pallas’s funeral pyre. To the Roman of the day the triumvirs’ doings cannot have seemed more barbarous than other events in comparatively recent history, than the Gracchan slaughterings, or Sulla’s proscription, or the public butchery of seven thousand Samnites, or the six thousand gladiators of Spartacus crucified along the road to Capua.
Of the three men responsible Octavian alone showed some glimmerings of mercy. He had at the start opposed the proscription, but when it was agreed upon he bargained as closely as his colleagues, and he was inflexible in carrying out its main purpose, on the ground that that kind of thing must be done effectively or not at all.1 But it is clear that, outside that purpose, he alone of the triumvirs tried to mitigate the hideous business. His cruelty was politic, not temperamental. In the beautiful story of Vispullo and Turia it was Octavian who removed the husband’s name from the list of the doomed.2
It is his consent to Cicero’s death that has most smirched his repute with posterity. But between him and Cicero there was no kindness. The young man had learned from the elder much that he was one day to put into practice, but the link was of the head, not of the heart. Forty years later, when he found a grandson reading a book of the old philosopher, he spoke of the author as a good man who loved his country,3 but it is fantastic to see in that tribute penitence for his share in his death. To Octavian, Cicero must have been always the head and front of offence. He had been notoriously ungrateful to Julius who had befriended him; he had exulted hysterically at the Ides of March, and had made gods and heroes of the assassins; he was the brain of the faction which sought to revive the derelict Republic. He had been willing to use Octavian as a tool, but had made no secret of his intention to discard him when he had served his purpose. Was it unnatural that Octavian should do the same by Cicero?
II
The year 42 B.C. opened anxiously for the triumvirs. They had made a peace of death in Italy, but outside Italy formidable forces were massing against them. Pompey’s son Sextus had maintained himself after Munda in the western seas, and had drawn to himself a great following of old Pompeians. Antony had negotiated with him, but could not pay the five millions sterling which he demanded as the value of his father’s property; the Senate had promised him everything and made him admiral-in-chief; the triumvirs had put him on the list of the proscribed. Sextus retaliated by seizing Sicily and Sardinia, and making these islands a cave of Adullam for exiled republicans, and threatening the sea-borne supplies of Rome. The pirate had become an independent potentate. In the East the situation was still more menacing. Cassius was in control of Asia, and busy levying troops and amassing treasure. He had scared Dolabella into suicide, and had got together a formidable fleet, part of which was used to immobilize Cleopatra in Egypt, and part, under Statius Murcus and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, to watch the Adriatic. Brutus relinquished his province of Macedonia, and in the early spring met Cassius at Smyrna and settled a strategical plan. They believed that Sextus Pompeius would keep the triumvirs busy in Italy, and that their first task was to strengthen their grip on the East. They plundered the cities of Asia, patched up a peace with Orodes of Parthia, and in September crossed the Hellespont and took up a position west of Philippi, astride the Via Egnatia and
