Augustus

Antony and Octavian brought five thousand men each to positions on opposite sides of the river. Then three hundred soldiers approached the bridges at either bank. Lepidus crossed over to the island; he inspected it for weapons or hidden assassins, then waved an all-clear with his cloak. Octavian and Antony now left their bodyguards and advisers at the bridgeheads and walked to the island, where they sat down with Lepidus in full view of everybody. They met for two days, from dawn to dusk.

There were three items on the agenda: how to legalize their power; how to raise the funds needed to finance the war against Brutus and Cassius; and how to keep the opposition from regaining its strength.

During the weeks following the Ides of March, when Antony was on good terms with the Senate, he had enacted a law abolishing the post of dictator. Now it was reinvented in tripartite form. A Commission of Three for the Ordering of the State was to be established for five years (modern historians call it the Second Triumvirate), with Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus as the commissioners, or triumvirs. They were empowered to make and repeal laws and to nominate officeholders. There was no appeal from their decisions. Octavian would resign the consulship in favor of one of Antony’s generals.

It is a little hard to see what the undistinguished Lepidus, who had given Antony his army a few months previously in Gaul, contributed to the Triumvirate. Of the three men, Antony was by far the most powerful and experienced figure; he was probably responsible for promoting Lepidus, who in the event of any disagreements could be counted on to take his side.

The commissioners immediately nominated the consuls and other officeholders for the coming five years, and they also decided the provincial governorships. Antony was to take Gaul (except for Transalpine Gaul); Lepidus, his old province of Transalpine Gaul and the two Spains; and Octavian, Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily. (Sensibly, the empire east of the Adriatic, now in the hands of Brutus and Cassius, was left undecided.) This distribution showed with embarrassing clarity that Octavian was the junior partner of the three. In due course, all these constitutional arrangements were approved by a people’s assembly in Rome.

A single solution was found for the second and third agenda items: a proscription. Proscription was an official mechanism for liquidating political opponents and amassing large sums of money from their confiscated estates; as already mentioned, it had first been used by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in 81 B.C.

The negotiators found it easier to agree on the principle of having a proscription than on the actual names of those to die. The choice of victims took a good deal of private haggling. To begin with, Octavian was of two minds about the project; but, Suetonius writes, once the proscription had been decided on, “he carried it out more ruthlessly than either of the others.”

The triumvirs marked down not only their political opponents whom they saw as public enemies (hostes), but also personal foes (inimici). They exchanged relatives and friends with one another. Lepidus abandoned his brother Paullus. Octavian allowed onto the list his onetime guardian, Gaius Toranius, who had been aedile in the year of his blood father’s praetorship. He also deserted Cicero—but only, if we can believe the sources, after resisting Antony, who so much wanted revenge for the Philippics that he let his own uncle be proscribed as payment for the superannuated orator.

Having concluded their island discussions, Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian arrived in Rome and posted the proscription decree on white boards in the Forum. Everyone named in the decree automatically forfeited his citizenship and protection from the law. The list was not final and new victims were added later, as the triumvirs decided. Informers who betrayed a proscribed man to the authorities were rewarded, and any person who killed one was also entitled to keep a share of his wealth. (The remainder went to the state.)

From a modern viewpoint, a proscription is a strange device. With the examples of the French and Russian revolutions before us, we expect the state to undertake mass liquidations if it deems them necessary; but, as has already been pointed out, the Roman state was remarkably nonbureaucratic; with no police force, no tradition of incarcerating offenders, and no professional judiciary, it was simply not equipped to execute large numbers of its citizens. The task had to be privatized.