An Island in the River — Octavian, Antony and Cleopatra: The War for the World
Three days, a small island in the middle of a river, three men. They divide the world like a family inheritance, as Plutarch puts it. They agree on almost everything. They quarrel over only one thing: whom to kill.
How did it come to this? First comes the war at Mutina: Antony is besieging Decimus Brutus there, and Octavian takes the field against him. Antony loses, but both consuls die: Hirtius in the battle, Pansa a few days later of a wound. In Rome a rumor spreads at once that Octavian got rid of them. Suetonius says that in Pansa’s case even his physician Glyco was jailed, accused of poisoning the wound.
Octavian is left without consuls, but with an army. He is not yet twenty when he demands the consulship for himself. When the Senate hesitates, his centurion, according to Suetonius, bares the hilt of his sword and says in the Curia that this sword will make him consul if the Senate does not. Octavian becomes consul.
And then he turns. Plutarch notes that he stopped trusting Cicero, because he saw that Cicero was devoted to liberty. He sends friends to Antony offering a reconciliation. The old enemies meet on a river island. The third man is Lepidus.
The rule of the three, as Plutarch writes, is hated by the Romans. Antony draws the most hatred: he is older than Octavian, stronger than Lepidus, and returns to his old life of pleasures. His house makes it worse: he has moved into the house of Pompey the Great, a man known for his moderation, and people cannot forgive him for holding revels within those walls (Plutarch, Antony 21).
Now you stand over the list of the condemned. Antony wants Cicero on it, the man who has made so many speeches against him. Cicero backed you when no one yet knew you. What do you do?
Plutarch describes a bargain. Octavian hands Cicero to Antony, Antony hands over his uncle Lucius Caesar, and Lepidus allows his own brother Paulus to be killed. In Plutarch’s view nothing was crueler than this exchange: murder for murder, with the greatest wrong done to friends, who were killed without a shadow of hatred. Lucius, incidentally, was saved by his sister, Antony’s mother.
And Octavian? Suetonius writes that at first he opposed the proscriptions, but once they began, he carried them out more harshly than his colleagues. He wanted to spare no one. He even added his own guardian, Gaius Toranius, to the list.
According to Appian, the lists of the condemned came to include about three hundred senators and about two thousand equestrians. Some were put on them not for politics but for a handsome villa or an estate someone wanted to get. You know this from Sulla’s time: boards in the Forum, rewards for heads, estates confiscated for the victors. Back then the young Caesar barely escaped the list. Now his own heir is drawing it up.
Cicero makes the list. Antony orders his head cut off, and his right hand, the hand that had written the speeches against him. Plutarch records that when they were brought to him, he ran his eyes over them and laughed with joy. Then he had them displayed on the Rostra in the Forum, where Cicero used to speak.
Rome now has three masters and no liberty. But Caesar’s killers are alive and have an army across the sea. Antony and Octavian cross the Adriatic.