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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARC ANTHONY
CHAPTER XIVThe War against Brutus and Cassius and the Destruction of the Republican Party.42 BC
“There was, writes Plutarch, much simplicity in Antony’s character”. He
was slow to see his faults, but when he did see them he was extremely repentant
and ready to ask pardon of those he had injured. He was severe in his
punishments, but prodigal in his acts of reparation; and his generosity was
much more extravagant than his severity. His banter or abuse, for example, was
sharp and insulting, but the edge of it was dulled by his readiness to accept
any kind of repartee, and he was as willing to be sworn at as he was to swear
at others.
Dion Cassius, writing more than two and a half centuries after these
events, describes Antony as being the most ruthless of the three Triumvirs at
the time of the proscriptions; but Suetonius who was separated from the period
by over a hundred year less than this, and is the better authority, is emphatic,
as has already been said, that Octavian was the only one of the three who
showed no wish to bring the massacre to an end. Antony, in fact, appears to
have been the first to feel shame for his atrocious behavior; and at any rate
there can be no doubt that he alone retained his popularity with Rome’s
democracy, whereas Octavian was detested. People made insulting jests at the
expense of the young man; they accused him of being so fond of fine furniture
and Greek antiques that he would condemn a man in order to get hold of his coveted
collections; and they declared that he used to get drunk and then cruelly add
names to the lists of the proscribed. Antony, on the contrary, when he was
intoxicated, seems to have beamed upon the world in ineffable goodwill; and
Plutarch, in his comparison between him and Demetrius, describes him under the
influence of wine as being like Hercules deprived of his club and his lion’s
skin, and as wanting only to have a game with somebody.
A personage who played an important part at this time was Sextus
Pompeius, the son of Pompey the Great. As has already been recorded, he had
been placed by Cicero in control of the Roman fleet; and now he managed to
retain possession of a good many of the ships of war, adding to the numbers
under his command by seizing merchant-vessels and enrolling vagabonds and
criminals to act as their crews. He is described as being quite illiterate, and
his language is said to have been shocking; but he was a brave man, and his
exploits as a pro-republican outlaw, an old-fashioned Pompeian turned pirate,
won him much renown.
He took complete possession of Sicily, putting the governor to death;
and he issued a proclamation far and wide, offering sanctuary to all proscribed
persons or republicans who could make their escape to him from the mainland. He
seized the corn-ships which were coming to Rome from Egypt and the east, and
caused something like a famine in the city; he attacked the forces of the Triumvirate
wherever he encountered them; and at length he sent his ships close in to the
Italian shore to pick up the fugitives, and, for any help given to them,
offered rewards double the size of those offered by the new government for
their heads. His activities caused great apprehension in Rome, but for the
moment the Triumvirs could take no serious steps against him.
Meanwhile, a wave of adoration of Caesar’s memory was sweeping the
country; and though Octavian was much disliked, and was regarded as an
unpleasant and intrusive representative of the great dictator, Antony was
hailed by the old soldiers, by the mob, and, indeed, by the bulk of the democrats
and Caesarians, as his true successor in the leadership of the People, and as
his avenger. Everybody was begging him to prosecute the war against Brutus and
Cassius with all speed, and to hunt down every one of the assassins. A temple
was erected to Caesar’s divinity upon the spot in the Forum where his body had
been cremated, and the hall in which he had been murdered was closed, to the
public as a mark of detestation of the crime.
Ventidius Bassus was now Consul, and enjoyed great popularity not only as
the man who had come to Antony’s aid after Modena, but as one of Caesar’s old
soldiers. He had once been a simple mule-owner, but had been raised to high
office by the Dictator; and the townspeople looked upon him as a fine instance
of Caesar’s democratic indifference to a man’s origin, and of Antony’s loyalty
to the same ideals in promoting him to the highest honors. The People, in fact,
felt that they were truly in power; and in their idolization of the memory of their
dead leader they rallied round Antony, the chief of the Triumvirs, and urged
him on to destroy the remaining republican forces in the east.
Antony, however, had been away from the metropolis for a year; and now
that the cessation of the executions was offering him the opportunity to forget
his months of hardship by enjoying in peace for a while the comforts of his
beautiful house in Rome, and all the amenities of city-life, he was in no hurry
to be off to the wars again. His affection for his wife Fulvia, it is true, had
not been revived by his long absence from her; and he can hardly have been
happy in sharing his home with so forceful and so violent a woman, in whom
there was “nothing feminine but her figure”, as Velleius says, and whose
ambitions for his ultimate autocracy gave him little rest. Yet he was able to
elude or exclude her fairly frequently and to make merry with his friends; and
his parties became once more the talk of the town. Often the doors of his
house, people complained, were shut in the face of magistrates and officials,
and yet were opened to actors and actresses, dancers, jugglers, and drunken
guests; and he was accused of spending in this manner some of the money
confiscated from the slaughtered republicans. Octavian, in fact, called at last
for an account and a proper division of these spoils, for “it was clear that
nothing would ever be enough for Antony”, whose wild generosity and “lavish
gifts to his friends and fellow-soldiers” quickly scattered the fortunes which
fell into his prodigal hands.
It is necessary now to turn to the affairs of Brutus, who, after deep
thought, had recently sealed his quarrel with the Caesarians by putting Antony’s
brother, Caius, to death in cold blood, as a matter of principle and in
retaliation for the execution of Cicero. Brutus was no sentimentalist, and one
may say of him, perhaps, that, like many puritans, he was capable of striking
at his worldly-minded opponents with all the venom of years of self-denial. He
had little respect for individual human life, his own not excepted: he stood
for a certain system of constitutional government, and his narrow intolerance
drove him sometimes to extremes of heartlessness wholly foreign to the
essential sanity of true rectitude.
On hearing that Antony contemplated an invasion of Macedonia in the
spring, he decided to retreat with his army eastwards into Asia Minor and there
join hands with Cassius; and having learnt that the latter intended to make an
attack upon Egypt, where Cleopatra had declared her adherence to Antony’s
cause, he sent him a letter begging him to give his sole attention to the
coming fight with the Triumvirs, as a result of which a meeting at Smyrna, in
Lydia, north of Ephesus, was arranged.
Brutus, now some forty-three years of age, was a man whose lofty
motives, though wrong-headed, were never in doubt; and even Antony admitted
that he was the only one of Caesar’s assassins who acted as he did out of an
earnest belief in the righteousness of the republican cause. Brutus was,
indeed, weighed down by his sense of responsibility, and by his strained
consciousness of the principles for which he stood. He suffered from melancholia,
and his nights were often sleepless, and his pillow wet with his tears, as his
slow and pedantic mind reviewed the duties which he believed a stern Providence
had imposed upon him. His nerves were in a very bad state: more than once he
experienced a definite hallucination; he was, at this time, always very close
to tears; and the news of the deaths of Cicero and so many of his friends was
almost unable to be borne.
His meeting with Cassius, however, heartened him somewhat, for between
them they now had a pretty big army, and there was a fair chance of victory.
Cassius was a clever general and one of forceful, aggressive character: he was
not an idealist; he was a practical man, impelled by a hatred of his enemies
which Brutus could never feel, and inspired by a desire for personal power and
wealth which he must have had difficulty in concealing from his self-denying
colleague. Cassius, in fact, supplied the driving force in their united
activities; but it was faith in the patriotic and disinterested motives of Brutus
that sustained the spirit of the legions. The men were fascinated by his
complete sincerity: he was like a holy-man leading a crusade for the rescue of
the fatherland from the rule of the democrats. Yet he did not preach hatred: of
Antony he said only that his punishment was already sufficient in having such a
treacherous colleague as Octavian, who would one day turn upon him—“in which”,
Plutarch remarks, “he proved to be no bad prophet”
The plans of the two generals were simple. There were two areas of
doubtful loyalty in these eastern dominions which they controlled, namely, the
island of Rhodes off the south-west corner of Asia Minor, and Lycia, the state
on the mainland east of it. These would have to be subdued before they could
comfortably march back to Macedonia to give battle to the Triumvirs; and it was
agreed that Cassius should undertake the former campaign, Brutus the latter.
Both enterprises were successful; but Brutus was much shaken by the effects of
his attack upon Xanthus, (Gunik), the Lycian capital, for nearly the entire population of the
city committed suicide before his eyes, being suddenly possessed by an almost
incredible frenzy which Plutarch aptly describes as a sort of “ravenous
appetite to die”. Not only men and women, but even children, plunged into the
names of the burning houses which they themselves had fired, or hanged
themselves, or leapt from high walls to the ground, or stabbed themselves and
each other to the heart. One woman was seen to set fire to her house, and then
with the torch still in her hand, and her strangled baby suspended around her
neck, to hang herself from one of the blazing beams.
Brutus was appalled. Mounting his horse, he galloped around the walls of
the burning city, crying out to the inhabitants that he would not harm them,
and holding out his hands to them, imploring them not to die, the tears running
down his cheeks as he did so. But none would listen, and in the end, out of the
entire population, less than two hundred were able to be restrained from
self-destruction by the Roman soldiers to whom Brutus had offered a reward for
every Xanthian saved.
The two generals rejoined one another at Sardis (Sart),
near Smyrna, and, crossing the Hellespont, marched into Thrace. At about this
time the overwrought Brutus experienced another hallucination. Late one night
he was seated alone in his tent, deep in thought, a dim light burning in a lamp
beside him, when suddenly he saw a figure standing silently in front of him. “Who
are you?” he called out. “What do you want?” The apparition replied, “I am your
evil genius, Brutus: you shall see me again at Philippi”. “Very well then”,
Brutus calmly replied, “I shall see you there”.
Next morning he told Cassius of his experience, but that unimaginative
man laughed the matter off, saying that he did not believe in ghosts, and that
he only wished he did, for then he might believe also that the spirits would
aid them in their coming fight. “Your mind”, he said, “is in an excited and
abnormal condition, because you are tired out. Not all we feel or see is real;
for the senses are most slippery and deceitful, and the brain is quick to put
them in motion and to stimulate them without any real occasion of fact. Just as
an impression is made upon wax, the consciousness can easily of itself produce and assume every kind of shape and figure, as
is evident from our dreams: it is ever in activity, and this activity produces
these fantasies and creations”.
But Brutus was not comforted. His brain was dark with the menace of
impending doom; and this strange experience indicates that, deep in his
subconscious mind, he was not always so sure of the righteousness of those
principles which had caused him to murder the Dictator. The clear, guiding
light of his conscience sometimes grew dim, leaving him in the darkness of
doubt; and it was then that he wondered whether, after all, he was not being
consigned to disaster by some flaw in his reasoning, some awful fallacy in the
whole argument of his life, some delusion, which in his tent he had visualized
as his evil genius.
Meanwhile, the light-hearted Antony had sent eight legions across the
Adriatic from Italy to Macedonia, and had suddenly extricated himself from the
pleasures of Rome to put himself at the head of twelve more legions which were
waiting at Brindisi for him to lead them over the sea. Octavian, acting in
concert with him, now attempted to recapture Sicily from Sextus Pompeius, so as
to prevent an attack upon the transports by that piratical commander’s
nondescript fleet; but in this he was wholly unsuccessful, and Sextus remained
a menace to the expedition. Then, while Antony was waiting for the opportunity
to slip across, an enemy fleet under Murcus, a
renegade caesarian, made its appearance before Brindisi, and thereafter
blockaded the transports in the harbor throughout the spring and early summer
of 42 BC.
Antony made several daring attempts to break the blockade, but failed to
do so. Octavian, however, at last brought his ships from Sicilian waters, and
drove Murcus off; and the two Triumvirs were thus
enabled to sail over to Dyrrachium (Durazzo), on the other side, with their
army.
But here Octavian fell sick and had to take to his bed, though the
nature of his complaint is unknown. He was an unhealthy young man, and though
the lower part of his face, as has been said, was at this time covered by a
youthful beard, his visible features revealed the weakness of his constitution.
Suetonius says that his left hip and leg used often to give him trouble, that
he suffered from gall-stones, that his liver was liable to be out of order, and
that he had the itch: in the autumn he was usually feverish, in the spring he
complained of pains in the neighborhood of the diaphragm, when the wind was
from the south he always caught a cold in his head, in the heat of summer he
was prostrated, and in winter he could endure neither the sun nor the chill of
the shade, and while not daring to go out into the glare except with a
broad-brimmed straw hat to protect his head, had to guard himself from the cold
by wearing a thick toga, four tunics, a shirt, a flannel chest-protector, and swathings around his thighs and legs. It is understandable,
therefore, that he was incapacitated by his exertions in the great heat of
summer.
Brutus and Cassius were now marching westwards along the coast of Thrace
towards that narrow doorway into Macedonia which is situated between the
mountains and the sea, where lay the plains of Philippi overlooked by the city
of that name. A few miles to the west was the fortress of Amphipolis (Ienikeui), and to this important point the first eight of
Antony’s legions had been dispatched to hold the enemy in check; but in
September at the approach of the republican forces, the commander sent urgently
for Antony to come to his support, whereupon the latter, leaving Octavian at Dyrrachium,
marched the other twelve legions as fast as he could to Amphipolis, which he
reached in time to bring Brutus and Cassius to an unexpected halt. The speed of
this march is said to have been almost unbelievable; but Antony had learnt from
Caesar the value of speed.
Brutus then camped his army at the foot of the mountains, a little
south-east of the city of Philippi, while Cassius placed his forces a short
walk to the south, at the edge of a marsh which passed down to the sea; and the
two camps were joined by a palisade and entrenchments. A little stream, the Gangas, running down from the hills, supplied them with
water; and the whole of Thrace behind them, and their ships which could unload
in the neighboring harbors, provided them with food.
Antony then divided his forces, taking up his own position with half his
army in front of the camp of Cassius, near the sea, and leaving to Octavian,
when he should arrive, the command of the other half which faced the camp of
Brutus. The sickly young man turned up some ten days later, but he was too ill
to be of any service. The republican army was slightly smaller than that of the
Triumvirs, but was better equipped; and in fact, the officers serving under
Brutus, being of far more elegant taste than those under the democratic Antony,
wore armor and used weapons richly ornamented with gold and silver, while even
the soldiers each carried quite a little fortune on their persons in this
manner.
Far into October these armies confronted one another. Brutus was anxious
to hasten a pitched battle, but Cassius believed that delay was to their
advantage. Antony was also ready to fight it out at once, before the cold
weather set in; and he did his best to tempt Cassius into the open, particularly
by beginning to construct a road across the marsh between him and the sea for
the purpose of turning his position, and, so it seems, by letting him know that
reinforcements for the Caesarians would soon be on their way from Italy.
At last, one day towards the end of October, Brutus persuaded his
colleague to give battle on the morrow; and that night, having made all his
arrangements, he showed himself more cheerful than he had been for many weeks,
though Cassius, on the contrary, was depressed and silent, declaring that he
did not like this hazarding the future of his country on one big battle.
Brutus, however, expressed his determination either to conquer or to kill
himself. “Indeed”, he said, “I already gave up my life to my country on the
Ides of March, and I have lived since then a second life solely for her sake.
If Providence does not give us the victory, I shall die quite content with my
lot”. In this he was not, like Cicero, uttering fine-sounding words: he was
entirely in earnest, and the belief that the crisis had come seemed to lift a
dead weight from his melancholy heart.
Next morning, Brutus was the first to begin the attack, which was
directed against Octavian’s entrenchments in front of him; and his troops were
so eager to take the offensive that they went forward in a disorderly but
overwhelming swarm, cut to pieces Octavian’s advance-guard of two-thousand
newly recruited Spartans, nearly annihilated his Fourth Legion—one of those
which had deserted to Octavian from Antony the year before, drove back the rest
of his forces onto the open ground, and, getting quite out of hand, gave
themselves up to the plunder of Octavian’s camp. What happened to Octavian
himself is a mystery. In his own memoirs, according to Plutarch, he said that a
friend of his had had such a bad dream about him that, to please him, he had
consented to leave the camp that day, before he knew that an attack upon it was
contemplated; but the fact that his litter was found a little distance away
pierced by arrows and spears, indicates that he had fled after the battle had
begun, and had escaped on foot when he was pursued. Brutus, at any rate,
thought that he was dead, and some of the victorious soldiers declared, in
fact, that they had seen him surrounded and killed—which suggests that he had
had the narrowest of escapes.
Meanwhile, Cassius had attacked the Caesarian forces in front of him, at
a time when Antony himself was supervising the road-making across the marshes,
and was more or less off his guard. Antony managed to get back to his camp,
however, beat off the assault, and soon counter-attacked, leading his men in a
wild onslaught upon the republican position. This was completely successful,
and soon the camp of Cassius was being as thoroughly plundered by Antony as
Octavian’s had been by Brutus.
Brutus, returning from his victory, saw with dismay what had happened to
his colleague, and sent his cavalry across to his aid. Cassius, who in his
night had halted on the high ground behind his lost camp, observed these men
bearing down upon him in the distance, and dispatched one of his officers, Titinius, a dear friend of his, to find out whether they
were comrades or foes. This officer quickly recognized them, and at once rode
forward to greet them, being soon surrounded by them and hearing from them the
news of their victory over Octavian. But when Cassius saw Titinius thus swallowed up by the oncoming cavalry he jumped to the fatally mistaken
conclusion that these troops were Caesarians and that they had killed or
captured his lieutenant.
He was too shattered by Antony’s capture of his camp to be able to form
a proper judgment, and thinking that the supposedly hostile force would soon
overwhelm him, he cried out “O, that I should have lived to see my friend taken
by the enemy before my very face!”—and immediately ordered his servant, Pindarus, to kill him. Pindarus,
who was also quite frantic, at once raised his sword and with one blow cut his
general’s head off; but when, a few minutes later, the relieving cavalry
arrived, and the mistake was discovered, the man took to his heels in horror,
and was never seen again. Titinius, however,
regarding himself as in part to blame, stabbed himself and fell dead across his
general’s headless body.
Then came Brutus, flushed with his own victory, and intent on reassuring
Cassius; but when he found his colleague’s corpse lying decapitated in the
midst of the astounded cavalry, he burst into tears, and presently gave orders
that it should be secretly carried away, so that the army should not be
unnerved by a public funeral. Antony, meanwhile, had just heard of Octavian’s
defeat and flight and had called his men back to defend their camp. Thus, the
fighting ceased, Cassius being dead with some eight thousand of his men, and
the loss of his camp, on the one side; and Octavian having disappeared, on the
other, his camp plundered, and nearly twice that number of his soldiers slam.
For some hours Antony assumed that the republicans were victorious, and,
with heavy heart, he must have made all arrangements to retreat; but after
nightfall, to his vast surprise, Octavian turned up safe and sound, and the
news of the death of Cassius was brought in, whereupon he boldly announced that
the battle would be continued on the following day, and he spent the hours of
darkness in steadying his own forces and reorganizing those of Octavian.
Brutus, meanwhile, behaved with a savagery which can only be accounted
for by the overwhelming excitement of the time, and by the shock of the death
of Cassius. He had captured a host of slaves in Octavian’s camp, and, having
apparently no higher sentiments than any other Romans in regard to the rights
of slaves, gave orders that these wretched prisoners should all be slaughtered.
The few soldiers and other free-men who had been taken, however, he released,
with the exception of Volumnius, a comic actor, and Sacculio,
a clown, whose business it had been to entertain Octavian’s camp. Brutus was
too puritanical to show any mercy to persons connected with the stage, and when
he was told that these two were facing their perilous situation with jests and
wry smiles, he indignantly gave orders that they should be flogged and sent
back, naked and bleeding, to the Caesarians; but later, changing his mind at
the instance of Casca, the man who had struck the
first blow in the murder of Caesar, he had them put to death. He then gave a
promise to his soldiers that in the event of victory he would lead them to the
wealthy cities of Thessalonica (Salonika) and Sparta, both of which had sided
with Antony, and would allow them to kill, rape, and plunder to their hearts
content. The apparent collapse of his moral character in this hour of
excitement is a matter of astonishment.
Next day, however, rain fell in torrents, and Brutus would not come out
to fight, although Antony sent some of his men close up to the republican camp
to shout rude remarks at him in an attempt to goad him into action. Several
days then elapsed, during which there was an exceptionally early spell of
wintry weather; and the, fact that Antony’s men were entrenched on low-lying
ground which first became a quagmire and then froze, caused much hardship and
many complaints. Every day, however, they were expecting the arrival of large
reinforcements from Italy, and a great convoy of much-needed winter supplies;
and Antony can hardly have been altogether sorry that the battle was delayed.
Now, however, came a terrible shock. Messengers
arrived in the Caesarian camp, bringing the news that disaster had overwhelmed
this convoy. The ships had been attacked at sea by Murcus and Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, and two entire legions and all the supplies
had been lost. One of these lost legions was the Martian,
that same which had deserted from Antony to Octavian after its
punishment at Brindisi; and the only satisfaction which Antony could derive
from the appalling tidings was that these men had, from his point of view, got their
deserts. This Ahenobarbus, it may be mentioned, was the son of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, Pompey’s general at Pharsalia whom Antony had
slain in that battle. Cnaeus had been present at Pharsalia, and had afterwards
been pardoned by Caesar; but he had now returned to the republican cause, for,
his mother having been the sister of Cato, he was the uncle of Porcia, the wife
of Brutus.
Antony now felt that he had only two alternatives—either to retreat or
to bring on an immediate battle before the news of this disaster should reach
Brutus. That same day, however, by a coincidence, Brutus made up his mind to
fight on the morrow; and, having made the necessary preparations, he retired to
his tent, where, it is said, that same apparition which had visited him once
before again made its appearance and stared at him, this time without speaking.
Brutus, indeed, was in so overwrought a condition that it is by no means
improbable that he believed himself to have received this second and promised
visit from the specter: his state of mind must have been conducive to such one
hallucination. He had recently received news that his wife Porcia, whom he had
left in Italy, was dead; and this, too, had unnerved him.
But what was more ominous was that a swarm of bees had that day settled
upon one of the legionary standards, and a report had also gone about that one
of his officers had found to his astonishment that his arm was sweating
attar-of-roses, nor did this sweet-smelling oil cease to ooze out of the pores
of his skin, so it was even after the arm had been wiped many times. One cannot
avoid the thought that Antony’s agents were in the camp, spreading such rumors,
though why a supposed phenomenon of this peculiar kind should have been thought
to indicate disaster is not now known. There certainly were, however, traitors
at work among the soldiers of Brutus, for next day, when he drew up his army
for battle, a trusted cavalry officer named Camulatus suddenly whipped up his horse and galloped away to Antony across the open
ground.
It was at about three o clock in the afternoon that Brutus gave the
signal for the onslaught, and soon his men had driven in the Caesarian left
wing commanded by Octavian; but the right wing, under Antony, responded by a
charge which broke through the opposing forces and took Brutus’s victorious
legionaries in their rear. A great but not very sanguinary route of the
republicans then followed, and by nightfall Brutus’s army was in full flight.
Several of the younger officers, following the aristocratic tradition,
fought to the last, and died gallantly. Cicero’s son, Marcus, brought his brief
and rather disreputable career to a close in a whirl of desperate bravery; Cato’s
only son, Marcus, who was the brother-in-law of Brutus, pulled off his helmet
and shouted his name, thus successfully attracting the enemy’s weapons against
him; Lucullus, the son of the general whom Pompey succeeded in the war against Mithridates,
and of Servilia, sister of Brutus’s mother of the same name, fell fighting
courageously; and Lucius, the nephew of Cassius, was also killed.
As Brutus rode from the field in a dazed condition one of his staff
officers, a certain Lucilius, who was riding a little
behind, noticed a body of Antony’s Gallic cavalry approaching through the
gathering darkness; and, in a brave attempt to save his general, he slowed his
horse and allowed himself to be taken prisoner, telling his captors that he was
Brutus. “They believed him” Plutarch writes, mainly because he begged so
earnestly to be taken to Antony and not to Octavian, as though he feared the
latter but could trust the former”—and I quote the remark for the reason that
it reveals Antony’s high reputation for what we should now call good
sportsmanship and compares it with Octavian’s unpopularity.
The Gallic troopers brought their prisoner to Antony, who, on hearing of
his approach, stood scratching his head and wondering what sort of attitude he
ought to adopt towards him, being evidently greatly embarrassed now by his
earlier declaration that he would hound all Caesar’s assassins to their deaths.
He was sorry for Brutus, and in this hour of triumph he wanted to deal generously
with all men; and thus when he saw that the prisoner was not Brutus he seems to
have been decidedly relieved.
“You may be quite sure”, said Lucilius,
saluting Antony, “that Brutus will never be taken alive. I cheated your men so
as to save him, and I am ready to take the consequences”.
At this there were angry exclamations on the part of the soldiers, but
Antony held up his hand for silence. “I see that you are annoyed at being
deceived”, he said to them, “but in my opinion you have made a capture better
than you expected; for you were looking for an enemy, and you have brought me a
friend. The truth is, I was not at all sure how to deal with Brutus if you had
brought him in alive; but I am quite sure what to do with this man”. And, so
saying, he went over to him and embraced him. It is better to have such men as Lucilius our friends than our enemies, he smiled.
Meanwhile Brutus had escaped with a few of his officers, servants, and
friends, including the philosopher Volumnius, who afterwards wrote the story of
these events which is now lost but is the basis of Plutarch’s account. In the darkness they crossed a stream, and came to a halt amongst the
trees and rocks on the other side, where Brutus, looking up at the stars,
solemnly quoted some lines of poetry, calling down a curse upon the author of
his misfortunes, and, having drunk some water brought to him in a helmet,
seated himself under the projection of rock, which screened him from the cold
night-wind to consider his position. There was little hope for him: the Caesarian
troops were round about, and could be heard on the far side of the stream. One of
his servants, in fact, was wounded while fetching water; and an officer who was
sent to try to find out in what direction the main army had fled fell into the
enemy’s hands and was killed.
At last, sometime after midnight, Brutus decided to put an end to himself, and whispered to his personal servant, asking him
to strike the blow; but the man burst into tears and refused to do as he was
bid. He then made the same request to Volumnius and others, begging them to
help him to drive his sword into his heart; but at this they all suggested that
they should, rather continue their flight. “Yes, indeed” said Brutus, “we must
make our escape, but not with our feet: with our hands—meaning that death by
suicide was a more honorable course”. Presently, in the darkness, he was heard
to quote the following lines, which did, in fact, provide a close parallel to
his tragic life:
“Unhappy Virtue!—you were but a name, while I
Who have been Fate’s plaything,
Thinking your godhead real, have vainly followed you”.
He then stood up, and shook each man by the hand, his expression being
described by Volumnius as one of great happiness. He told them what
satisfaction it gave him to think that none of them had deserted him, and he
declared that his situation was far more to be desired than that of his
enemies, because he would leave behind him a reputation for high principle
which his conquerors would never be able to acquire, and because posterity
would certainly regard his cause as just and good, and theirs as wicked. Only a
few days previously he had written to a friend saying how happy he was that the
end of his troubles was near, for he would either be victorious in the battle
or would kill himself, thus by the one means or the other obtaining the rest he
so much needed; and it seems that he was now indeed eager to close his
ill-balanced account with Fate, and have done with life's bad business. In
sudden haste, therefore, taking only two or three of his best friends with him,
he withdrew himself a short distance from the others, and, with the aid of one
of them, plunged his sword into his heart.
Next morning Antony was conducted to the spot where the dead general had
been found, and, taking on the rich, scarlet cloak which he was wearing, he
laid it gallantly over the corpse. Octavian, however, presently arriving upon
the scene, insisted that the head should be severed from the body in the
customary manner, and sent to Rome to be placed at the foot of Caesar’s statue,
and to this his colleague seems to have been obliged to agree, although
insisting on his part that the decapitated body should be cremated with all
honor, and handing out a sum of money for the purpose. A funeral pyre was
erected, and a few hours later, with great pomp, the body was consigned to the
names; after which Antony gave orders that the ashes should be sent to Brutus’s
mother, Servilia, for burial. It was generally supposed that Brutus was Caesar’s
own son, and it was remembered that the Dictator had been very fond of him; and
thus Antony’s reverent treatment of his remains was more in accord with Caesarian
sentiment than was Octavian’s severity.
A few of the important prisoners were put to death; Favonius,
a stern puritan who was generally nicknamed “Cato’s Ape” because he emulated
the austerity of that unbalanced personage, was executed by Octavian’s orders;
and by Antony’s the only son of the orator Hortensius was beheaded for his
complicity in the death of Caius Antonius, Antony’s brother. A number of other
commanders committed suicide, Livius Drusus, father of Livia who afterwards married Octavian and became the mother of the Emperor Tiberius,
killed himself in his tent; Quintilius Varus, who had been captured and pardoned by Caesar in his
war with Pompey, put on his full dress as a general and all his decorations,
and obliged his servant to run him through with his sword; and Antistius Labeo, a famous lawyer
who had been one of Caesar’s assassins, dug his own grave and, stabbing
himself, fell into it.
Brutus’s stepson, Lucius Bibulus, son of Pompey’s old admiral by Portia,
the daughter of Cato who had afterwards married Brutus, surrendered to Antony
and was pardoned by him, as were Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the afterwards famous poet, and several others who gave themselves up
or were captured. But many, of course, fled, and were not again heard of for
many a day; and it may be mentioned that Murcus and
Ahenobarbus, commanding the enemy fleet, put to sea as soon as the news of the
battle reached them, and took to a roving, piratical life, the former in
conjunction with Sextus Pompeius, and the latter independently. Most of the
defeated troops, meanwhile, went over to the Caesarians, and thus completed the
extinction of the republican cause.
It is an interesting commentary on the relative positions of Antony and
Octavian in popular esteem that when the prisoners who were brought in after
the battle were paraded before the two Triumvirs they saluted Antony with
respect, but cursed and spat at Octavian. The young man, indeed, seems to have
been generally detested, and, realizing the fact, he behaved with great cruelty
to some of those prisoners who had been unlucky enough to pass under his
jurisdiction and not Antony’s. One condemned man, for example, begged that his
body should not be left unburied, and to this Octavian replied, with a sneer, “That
matter may be left to the birds to decide”; while in another case where a
father and son both pleaded for their lives, Octavian coldly told them to draw
lots, and the father having drawn the fatal lot and having been instantly beheaded,
the son promptly killed himself also. Octavian was only twenty-one years of
age, and to us his youth may excuse him, since we know that he developed into a
praiseworthy man; but to his contemporaries, who knew not how he would shape,
the spectacle of his pale and spotty face, his cold, cruel eyes, and his sour
unhealthiness, must have rendered his severity absolutely odious.
In the ensuing weeks the incoming news of what was taking place in the
meantime in Rome caused Antony to thank the gods that he was in far-off
Macedonia, and not in the capital. Not only the third Triumvir, the easy-going
Lepidus, but also Lucius, Antony’s brother, who was Consul-elect for the coming
year had passed entirely under the domination of the strong-willed and terrible
Fulvia. Acting in the name of Antony, she had established
herself as the real ruler of Rome, and, in the words of Dion Cassius, neither the Senate nor the People dared transact any business contrary to her pleasure.
The indecisive Lepidus, indeed, was entirely discredited, and both Antony and
Octavian were at one in their wish to eliminate him as soon as possible. It was
agreed between them that they would divide the rule of the empire without
including him at all in their arrangements: they would, in fact, oblige him to
retire into private life.
Of the troops under their command, several legions would have to be demobilized,
and of the remainder Antony proposed that he should have the command of
seventeen, while Octavian should take fifteen—including the three to be filched
from Lepidus. Antony would take over the province of Gallia Narbonensis from Lepidus and add it to his portion of the empire; and Octavian would take
Spain from him. For the present the question of the government of the east—Greece,
Asia Minor, Syria, etc.—was left undecided; but Antony now made up his mind to
travel through this part of the empire not only to eradicate the influence of
the republicans from these regions, but also to raise money. He was glad of the
excuse to remain away from Rome and Fulvia; and he was very ready to agree that
Octavian should go alone to the capital.
He felt quite confident that the young man would there pass like
everybody else under the dominance of Fulvia; for not only had he played a very
secondary part in the war and had by no means derived any credit from it, not
only was he extremely unpopular, but his health was so bad that his early death
seemed quite probable, and was anticipated with unconcealed pleasure by most
people. Octavian, indeed, was hardly to be reckoned with as anything more than
a nominal factor in the situation; and when Antony parted from him at about the
end of the year, sending him back to the intrigues of Rome while he himself set
out to tour the more tractable Greece and the east, he did not really expect to
see him again: either he would die a natural death at no distant date, or
Fulvia would strangle him, metaphorically or actually.
Antony knew himself now to be really the only ruler of the Roman world;
and he turned to his new task with relish. The cities of Greece and the east
were delightful places to visit; and he was sorely in need of relaxation. He
was at this time forty-one years of age, and, after months of active life in
camp, he was physically in excellent shape; while the consciousness that he was
not only supreme but was immensely popular, particularly with the troops, was
in these days an unfailing stimulant to his mind. The Philippics of Cicero had
been uttered wholly in vain: his reputation had gloriously survived them, while
the two battles of Philippi had crowned his military career, and had greatly increased
his prestige as a brave and gallant soldier. The world, in fact, was at his
feet; and with a light heart he dismissed from his mind all thought of the
masterful Fulvia and the sinister Octavian.
The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra at Tarsus and His winter with her in
Alexandria
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