Someone Else’s Name — Octavian, Antony and Cleopatra: The War for the World
Rome, March 44 BC. Caesar lies dead, and Antony, his fellow consul, disguises himself as a slave and vanishes. He comes out of hiding only when it turns out that the conspirators are harming no one and have holed up on the Capitol. He persuades them to come down, leaving his own son with them as a pledge.
Meanwhile someone opens the will. Caesar left three quarters of his fortune to Gaius Octavius, his sister’s grandson. The rest is to go to two other relatives. And at the very end stands a sentence that changes everything: Caesar adopts Octavius and gives him his name. So Suetonius writes.
There is one more thing in that will. As guardians of a son Caesar might yet have, he named some of his own killers, and Decimus Brutus even appears among the heirs in the second degree. The man they stabbed to death had assumed to the very end that these men might be close to him.
The funeral is stormy. On the Campus Martius they build a pyre, and on the Rostra a gilded shrine holding the robe Caesar was killed in. According to Plutarch, Antony delivers the funeral oration and, seeing the crowd sway under his words, adds pity and outrage to the praise (Antony 14). Suetonius is more restrained: instead of a eulogy, Antony had the decrees of the Senate read out and added only a few words of his own. Right after the ceremony the people run with burning brands to the houses of Brutus and Cassius. They are driven back with difficulty. Along the way, the mob kills the wrong man: Helvius Cinna, whom it took for another Cinna, the author of a speech accusing Caesar (Suetonius, Julius 85).
The heir is eighteen and is not in Rome. Caesar sent him to Apollonia on the Adriatic to study and train with the army, because he was planning an expedition against the Parthians and wanted him at his side soon. The boy does not yet know he has a new name.
Suetonius writes that the young man hesitated for a long time over whether to call in the nearby legions. He judged it too rash and returned to Rome alone. His mother and stepfather, a former consul, begged him not to take the inheritance. He took it. He assumed the name Gaius Julius Caesar, and historians, so as not to confuse him with his uncle, call him Octavian. Antony mocks him in letters, reminding him of his old cognomen Thurinus, and Octavian replies only that he is surprised anyone would reproach him for his former name (Suetonius, Augustus 7).
The first thing awaiting him in Rome is a debt. Under Caesar’s will every Roman is to receive seventy-five drachmas, and Caesar’s money is with Antony. Calpurnia handed Antony four thousand talents and her husband’s papers. The boy comes for what is his. What will Antony say?
Antony takes Octavian for a brat and treats him as he pleases. According to Plutarch, he blocks his bid for the tribunate and threatens him with prison for trying to set up a golden chair in honor of his father. So Octavian looks for allies. He makes common cause with Cicero, who is writing speeches against Antony, and gathers Caesar’s veterans around him.
Cicero and Caesar’s heir against Caesar’s general. It sounds like a comedy, but that is what Roman politics is made of after the Ides of March: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, for as long as he is useful.
In less than two years, Antony and Octavian will sit down together on an island in the middle of a river and draw up a list of the people who must be killed. On that list will be the name of the man who has just befriended the boy.