Map 9. The Roman Empire (Central And Eastern Provinces)The future Emperor Augustus was born at Rome in September 63 B.C. His father, Gaius Octavius, held a praetorship two years later, but any hopes there may have been of a
consulship died with him in 58 B.C. The Octavii of Velitrae were well-to-do, but hitherto of only equestrian standing, and Octavius' wife Atia came of no higher than modest
senatorial stock on her father's side; it is not surprising that a story later spread that the destined ruler of the world had been fathered on her by the god Apollo. Yet the boy's
'bourgeois' pedigree was singularly appropriate for one who was to engineer and secure the victory of the non-political classes of Italy. And Atia's mother was sister to Gaius Julius
Caesar, who' himself had no son and whose only daughter Julia died without surviving issue in 54. Julius early discerned his great-nephew's precocious promise, and after his death
in 44 B.C. his will disclosed that the young Octavius was to be his adopted son and so keep alive the name of the noble and patrician Julii Caesares. Marcus Antonius sneered that his
challenger was 'a mere boy, owing everything to a name', but he was only half right: the magic of the name of Caesar was a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause of the success of
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, who at the tender age of eighteen at once plunged head first into the maelstrom of intrigue and war that swirled all over the Mediterranean world.
By 30 B.C., still little over thirty years old, Octavian had eliminated the last and most formidable of his rivals and, like his adoptive father before him, bestrode that world 'like a
Colossus'. But this new Colossus did not have feet of clay. Julius had survived barely six months after his return to Rome from his final victory in Spain before he lay murdered
beneath the statue of his great opponent Pompey. His assassins (they preferred the name of 'liberators') were an ill-assorted collection of ex-Pompeians, 'Republicans', and prominent
adherents of the dictator himself, united by a shared fear or abhorrence of Julius' openly despotic authority. The new Caesar, in stark contrast, survived his own final victory at
Actium by nearly half a century, and when he died in his bed in his seventy-sixth year he bequeathed to Rome and Italy and the Empire not civil war and insecurity, but that stable
and durable system of government that we call the 'Principate'.
The Second Triumvirate
'If Caesar, for all his genius, could not find a way out, who is going to find one now?' The bleak pessimism of Julius Caesar's old friend Gaius Matius proved amply justified, for it
was to be over thirteen years before the Roman world was delivered from disruption and uncertainty, pillage and slaughter, near-anarchy and the ever-present threat of disintegration,
years in which the rule of law was set aside and justice was merely 'the interest of the stronger'.
Caesar's assassins, as Cicero saw at once, had been ingenuous in their hope that with his death 'normality' would return. Marcus Antonius soon gained control of the situation in Italy.
Cicero's own cynically clever attempt to use Octavian against Antony and so divide the Caesarians against themselves back-fired, and by the autumn of 43 Antony and Octavian and
Marcus Aemilius Lepidus with his Gallic legions had reached the sensible conclusion that they must all hang together or all hang separately. The 'Second Triumvirate' which resulted
was a three-man legal dictatorship for five years; and Cicero's head was one of the earliest to roll when the first proscription since Sulla's day issued the death-warrants of some 300
senators and 2,000 knights, as the new masters of Rome sought security and a war-chest. Leaving Lepidus to hold Italy, Antony and Octavian moved to crush the only challenge to
their dominance, and in October 42 the last 'republican' leaders, Brutus and Cassius, perished in defeat at Philippi in Macedonia.
While Antony left to set the East to rights, Octavian was saddled with the unenviable task of finding land in Italy on which to settle about 100,000 discharged triumviral soldiers.
Virgil's First Eclogue (below, pp. 617 f.) affords a glimpse of the misery of the dispossessed, driven from their holdings to penury and bitter exile. Antony's wife Fulvia and his
brother Lucius (consul 41 B.C.) tried to exploit Octavian's unpopularity, but were briskly driven from Rome and starved into surrender at Perugia. When Antony himself returned, a
fresh civil war threatened, but the legions had had enough of fighting each other, and the diplomacy of Maecenas and Asinius Pollio patched together the so-called 'Treaty of
Brundisium' in October 40 B.C. Lepidus was fobbed off with Africa, and Antony, before returning to the East, was married to Octavian's sister Octavia. The feeling of relief
produced by this reconciliation of the dynasts and the widespread longing for a settled peace are perhaps mirrored in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue (below, pp. 619 f.) with its vision of the
new Age of Gold that seemed about to dawn.
Such hopes quickly died. Pompey's son Sextus won naval dominance in the western and central Mediterranean, and his threat to the corn-routes compelled concessions-a five-year
proconsular command in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and Greece. But once Marcus Agrippa had secured Gaul for Octavian, Sextus' days were numbered. After yet another open clash
between Antony and Octavian had been narrowly averted, Octavian and Agrippa (who had built and trained a fleet out of nothing) and Lepidus from Africa regained Sicily and
destroyed Sextus and his huge navy off Naulochus in north-west Sicily (September 36 B.C.). A year earlier the tenure of the triumvirs had been retrospectively renewed for a further
five years, but the three were now quickly reduced to two: Lepidus, with twenty-two legions at his back in Sicily, threw down the gauntlet in a bid for a larger share of the spoils, but