The Implosion of Two-Man Rule
First the insults, then civil war.
The reasons why great men fall out are always different, but the way in which they fall out are invariably the same.
In 33 BC the relationship between the two men who ran the western world blew up in spectacular fashion. The comrades turned combatants were Mark Antony and Octavian — the man who would later come to be known to history as Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. Their weapons, in the first instance, were personal insults, dark insinuations, school yard nicknames, and scurrilous sexual accusations. By the end of the year, these were swapped for weaponry of another sort, as the Roman empire degenerated into all-out civil war.
Few observers in Rome’s political circles can have been surprised that it had come to this. The entente between Mark Antony and Octavian had veered wildly between open enmity, pragmatic coalition, and euphoric camaraderie. For the past two years, things had been getting decidedly worse. There was no question about whether a break was coming. The question was when.
The two men had been in open conflict before, but things were more serious this time. During the decade of on-off alliance that had just come to an end, they had split almost the entire known world between them. There were no alternate power sources left. No ballast for their interests or check on their self-aggrandisement — nothing, in other words, to prevent this petty personal mud-slinging spiralling into something all-consuming and existential.
This is how it happened.
Dangerous Manoeuvres
By 34 BC, conditions in the ancient Mediterranean world were primed for a crisis.
The checks and balances of the Roman constitution, and her ancient conventions of sportsman-like political behaviour, long on the wane, had been thoroughly destroyed by the civil wars that had followed Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC. Amid the chaos of 43 BC, a triumvirate — composed of Octavian, Mark Antony, and the lesser-known Lepidus — had been handed extraordinary powers for a term of five years. These three men carved up the Roman world: Octavian was to control Italy and the western provinces, Mark Antony the East, and Lepidus Africa.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the triumvirs did not give up their powers when their term expired. And what could anyone do? Faced with the three most powerful men in the world under arms and in control of all Rome’s legions, the Senate and people of Rome soon ratified their renewal for a further five years. The reestablished triumvirate was now set to expire on the 31st of December 33 BC.
It would not remain intact that long. Within a year of the pact’s renewal, Lepidus had been forced out by Octavian after being baited into an ill-fated parlay in Sicily. He was stripped of his land, armies, and offices, and allowed only narrowly, and with a great show of mercy, to escape with his life.
Just two men — both of whom had shown themselves to be pathologically ambitious, ruthless, and more or less amoral — now had total and unrestrained control over the Roman state.
Conditions were made more volatile still by the personal connection the two men had formed when Octavian had married his beloved sister Octavia to Antony in 40 BC. Family honour and feeling — real and irrational or feigned and manipulative — was now yet another dangerous force at play. Particularly dangerous, given that Mark Antony — already caught up in an all-consuming affair with the notorious Egyptian queen, Cleopatra — proved to be an especially terrible husband.
Trading Insults
The end of 33 BC came, and with it the end of formal ties between Antony and Octavian. There was no question of the pact being renewed. Both men knew that they were on the road to outright war, and they no longer saw any use in hiding that fact from the public.
Both men flooded the city with invective. Octavian, who was present in Rome, made continuous public speeches. Antony, who had built his base in the East, sent a barrage of public proclamations. Any ‘private’ correspondence between the two men that looked like it might be useful was immediately leaked into circulation.
The stances of the two camps shaped up like this:
Octavian claimed that Antony was a womaniser, a drunk, and an un-Roman degenerate, who had been corrupted by eastern luxury and made the slave of a wicked whore-queen. Stories circulated about the excesses of Antony and Cleopatra’s eastern court. Dionysiac processions. Nightly carouses. Roman senators, with their bare chests painted blue, play-acting as sea-gods. Rare pearls dissolved in vinegar to settle bets.
It was as though Antony had been bewitched. Cleopatra had made him so soft that this once great general now slept under mosquito nets on campaign. He couldn’t refuse her. He fell into her emotional traps and bowed to her political judgement. His every decision was now driven not by the interests of the Roman state, but by the interests of an eastern Queen.
Antony, meanwhile, countered that Octavian was a coward, an upstart, a weakling, and a hypocrite. Man enough – under all that moralising – to sleep around just as much as Antony did, but not to stand, as he did, in the front line of battle.
He attacked Octavian’s lineage, claiming that his great-grandfather had been a slave and a rope-maker, and his grandfather an insalubrious money-lender. He spread stories about his farcical aversion to war, about the naval battle in which he’d felt so seasick from looking at the boats that he’d had to lie flat on his back looking up at the sky until his general Agrippa had won the day. And about the land-battle in which he’d fled the fray on sighting the enemy, only reappearing the next morning having lost both his cloak and his horse.
Antony also countered Octavian’s accusations of adultery with tales of his own. Octavian, he claimed, had sold his sexual favours to a senator for three-hundred-thousand sesterces. He singed the hair off his leg like a woman and had once taken the wife of an ex-consul to bed before her husband’s very eyes. Dark suggestions were made too about the nature of Octavian’s relations with his uncle Julius Caesar – and hadn’t people heard about that scandalous private dinner party he’d held? The debauched and extravagant one, held in the midst of a famine, at which all the attendees had been dressed as gods?
A private letter from Antony to Octavian was put into circulation. One which conveniently minimised Antony’s affair with Cleopatra – making it seem, through its light and crass language, like the natural dalliance of a jocular soldier – even as it revealed Octavian’s sexual hypocrisy:
“What has so changed you? The fact I fuck the Queen? I consider her my wife. Have I now embarked on anything new? This been going on for years. So, do you only fuck Livia [Octavian’s wife] then? All strength to you if, when you read this letter, you have not just been inside Tertulla, or Terentilla, or Rufilla, or Salvia Titisenia, or all of them. What does it signify where and in whom you get your erections?”
Suetonius, Life of Augustus, 69.
This was the level to which the war of words had sunk.
The Unforgivable
Now that things had broken out into the open, there remained only a final Rubicon of offence to be crossed on each side.
Antony went first. He initiated divorce proceedings against Octavia and sent men to turn her out of his house in Rome. She went, in tears and taking his children with her, vowing that she would continue to raise them as best she could in his absence.
Few things could have played more perfectly into Octavian’s hands. The people went wild over the sight of Octavia – the sobbing, virtuous, Roman wife – supplanted by a shameless foreign whore. Octavian put it about that Octavia had been crying not because she’d lost her husband but because she was terrified that he, her protective brother, would go to war over her honour and that the Roman people would blame her for it.
Then Octavian went further.
Some defectors from Antony’s camp were said to have told Octavian that the will Antony had left in the care of the Vestal Virgin priestesses before leaving Rome contained inflammatory secrets. Octavian demanded that the Vestals hand the document over. They refused but said they would do nothing – indeed, what could they do? – to prevent him if he chose to take it.
He did. First, Octavian unsealed and read the will in private. He underlined its most shocking passages – or indeed, as has been plausibly suggested, added them in himself – and then, calling a meeting of the Senate, read them out.
The triumviral period had been full of outrages, but this – the unsealing and of exposure another Roman’s will – was received as a shameful desecration. Yet the contents of the will were arguably worse still. It specified that even if Antony were to die in Rome, his body should be conveyed in state to Alexandria and buried there by Cleopatra.
It is hard to overstate the import of this detail to a Roman audience. For a Roman man to choose to be buried abroad according to foreign custom was tantamount to the repudiation of his motherland.
The accusations kept coming. Calvisius, an ex-consul and an old partisan of Caesar’s, stood and made a slew of claims. Antony, he said, had handed over to Cleopatra the entire contents of the two great Pergamene royal libraries – some two-hundred-thousand priceless books. He had told Ephesian envoys to salute her as his mistress. He had got up in the middle of a grand banquet and rubbed her feet before the serried guests. Even when he was at his official tribunal – dealing with affairs of state, receiving the envoys and petitions of Rome’s client-kings – he would break off whenever a love letter, usually written on a tablet made of some semi-precious stone, arrived from Cleopatra.
And if he saw her in person? Why, then there could be no more thought of work or public duty. Once, when he had seen her litter passing in the middle of an important trial, he had sprung immediately from his seat, chasing it down and escorting his mistress home.
Not all of these tales were believed, but rumours none the less ripped through Rome. Cleopatra liked to swear, some said, that she would one day pass her judgements on Rome’s Capitol. Others claimed that Antony was planning to take Rome’s government to her – to move the empire’s capital to the Egyptian city of Alexandria.
The Declaration of War
From these personal slanders it was a short and easy step to violence and soon the Senate and people had voted for war. The declaration was made only against Cleopatra, not against Antony, although his allegiances were by now quite clear. It was better, Octavian knew, to pitch this as a struggle against a foreign power rather than as a civil war.
Antony, Octavian claimed, had been drugged. He was not in control of himself, let alone the eastern forces. The real leaders of the armies Rome would be facing were Cleopatra’s eunuchs and handmaidens.
It didn’t matter, of course, who Octavian claimed to be fighting. The truth was that this was a battle for the all-out mastery of the Roman world. Within a year, Octavian had won, and a new era dawned over Rome — the epoch of the emperors, of family dynasties, of arbitrary tyrants, and of one-man autocracy.
Writing at the turn of the third century AD, with over three-hundred years of hindsight, the historian Cassius Dio saw things clearly. During the duumvirate, brutal and unconstitutional though it was, domination had not been entirely complete: ‘The Roman people had been robbed of their democratic form of government, but had not become a monarchy in the strict sense of the term.’
But the situation could not last and it was when, Dio said, ‘these two turned openly against each other, that the people were finally reduced to total slavery.’
Surprisingly relevant in the present moment!
I'm sure the timing of this is purely coincidental.