Augustus

Octavian was in effect an only child (his sisters were much older than he). This, when combined with poor health and a very protective mother, will have given him a sense of being set apart. He was “different” or special in two other, contradictory respects. On the one hand, he was a boy from the provinces, not a member of the handful of great and ancient clans that governed Rome. It is telling that his best friends were not young nobiles; Agrippa’s background was Italian and obscure, and, while Maecenas boasted an exotic Etruscan origin, his family remained aloof from public life and was content with equestrian status.

On the other hand, Octavian trumped his aristocratic contemporaries by having privileged access to the patrician conqueror of the Republic. He was, in real life, the outsider-insider of fairy tale and childish fantasy—a shepherd’s son who turns out to be of royal blood; like Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus.

Nicolaus, who gives the fullest account of Octavian’s early years, portrays an adolescent still treated as a child, then pitchforked into adult life under the tutelage of his remarkable great-uncle. Suddenly he found himself at the gorgeous, exhilarating power center of the Roman world. The relationship with Caesar became the most important one in his life.

When confronted with such opportunity, many boys would have lost their heads. Not Octavian. As an intermediary between Caesar and multitudes of suppliants, he took care not to irritate his great-uncle with untimely requests, he was discreet and totally loyal, and he behaved in a modest and friendly manner with petitioners.

Octavian may have had an innately cautious cast of mind; but if environmental factors helped to shape him, this was the kind of behavior one would expect to find in an intelligent boy whose circumstances and upbringing fostered self-containment.

Octavian now proceeded to Capua and Rome along the Via Appia. He attracted large crowds, especially of demobilized veterans who were grief-stricken by the Ides of March and wanted the killers brought to justice.

Before entering Rome, Octavian called in at his parents’ seaside villa at Puteoli (now Pozzuoli), which happened to be next to a house belonging to Cicero. He needed to come to an understanding with his family, who were worried by the direction he was taking. The suspicious old orator noted that the young man’s “followers call him Caesar, but Philippus does not, and neither do I.”

This was the first chance for Octavian to meet Caesar’s disconsolate aides and advisers. Mostly equites or freedmen, who could not aspire to political careers of their own, they had no political constituency and with their employer’s death had lost their purchase on power. Octavian had a long conversation with Lucius Cornelius Balbus, a multimillionaire from Spain, who had run Caesar’s secretariat and been his leading fixer. There are no records of their discussions, but we can surmise that Balbus and his colleagues wanted to make a cool assessment of the teenage heir, and then to lay a plan of campaign. We can be sure that, from the outset, these Caesarians had every intention of demolishing the restored Republic and taking revenge on the conspirators. However, they would have to wait and see whether the young man was capable of heading a new autocracy.

For the present, they were in a weak position; it would be wise to conceal their intentions. Octavian held no official position and was simply a private citizen. Many senators, even though they had been appointed by the dictator, were inclined to accept his removal as a fait accompli. Once the emotion of the assassination and its aftermath had died down, even moderate Caesarians, like the next year’s consuls, Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Vibius Pansa Caetronianus, believed that almost anything was better than a renewed civil war.

Mark Antony took the same line. As consul he controlled the levers of power, was popular with the troops, and saw himself as the dead dictator’s political heir. He might have been expected to pursue the assassins and their republican supporters. In fact, his silent foreknowledge of the conspiracy suggests that he was not without sympathy with them, and he preferred to negotiate a compromise in which he agreed to an amnesty for Brutus and the other liberatores in return for the Senate’s agreement not to overturn any of the dead dictator’s legislation and executive decisions.

A long-term strategy for the Caesarians was not feasible; what was needed was a series of improvised tactics that made the most of any opportunity that presented itself. Consistency was irrelevant. The first tasks were to detach Antony from the Senate, discredit him in any way possible, and then replace him with Octavian as the leader of the Caesarian faction.