Augustus

Fulvia raised troops and, most unusually for a Roman woman, issued orders directly herself. Dio writes: “And why should anyone be surprised at this, when she would wear a sword at her side, give out the watchword to the soldiers, and on many occasions give speeches directly to them?”

Octavian kept his nerve. He was not at ease on the battlefield, and was helped, or more likely masterminded by, his boyhood friend Agrippa, who had a gift for generalship. He and Salvidienus outmaneuvered Lucius, who took refuge in the strongly fortified hill town of Perusia (today’s Perugia, in Umbria), where he waited for the Antonian generals to come to his relief. Fulvia, infuriated, pressed them to do so, but Agrippa confronted them before they had succeeded in joining forces. Still without instructions from Antony, the generals were unenthusiastic about pressing on to Perusia in the first place and pulled back. Lucius was on his own.

Meanwhile, Octavian sealed the town with a ditch and rampart seven miles long. At one point in the siege he was surprised by a sudden sortie by the enemy while holding a sacrifice outside the town walls, and was lucky to escape with his life.

Both sides hurled stone and lead slingshot at each other. About eighty of these lead balls have been discovered by archaeologists and many have brief, extremely rude messages scratched on them. Examples include “I seek Fulvia’s clitoris”; “I seek Octavian’s arse”; “Octavian has a limp cock”; “Hi, Octavius, you suck dick”; “Loose Octavius, sit on this”; and, rather more feebly, “Lucius is bald.”

Lucius’ men launched numerous attacks on the enemy, including one by night, but they all failed. The formal act of surrender was carefully stage-managed. The defeated legions laid down their weapons and were pardoned. Octavian placed their commander and some of his senior followers under discreet arrest. They were later freed, and Lucius was sent to be governor of Spain (there was no point needlessly annoying his brother).

Despite the appearance of clemency, the triumvir appears to have been coldly and bitterly angry for what he had been obliged to endure. Perusia was given over to the troops to plunder, and accidentally burned to the ground. Other prisoners of war were less fortunate than Lucius and his intimates. According to Suetonius,

[Octavian] took vengeance on crowds of prisoners and returned the same answer to all who sued for pardon or tried to explain their presence among the rebels. It was simply: “You must die!” According to some historians, he chose 300 prisoners of equestrian or senatorial rank, and offered them on the Ides of March at the altar of the god Julius, as human sacrifices.

This story is repeated by Dio, and is very possibly true. Although human sacrifice was forbidden by senatorial decree in 97 B.C., it runs through Roman history as a recurrent ritual idea. Roman religious ceremonies contain traces of the practice, with dolls replacing human victims. On three occasions, during times of great crisis during the third and second centuries, two pairs of Gauls and Greeks, each a man and a woman, were buried alive in the cattle market (forum boarium) as a human sacrifice. In the sixties B.C., Catilina was reported to have sacrificed a boy and eaten his entrails. The most recent recorded instance took place during Julius Caesar’s triumph at Rome in 46 B.C., when, in a fury, he had had two rioting soldiers sacrificed to Mars.

Lucius surrendered in January or February 40 B.C., only a few weeks before the anniversary of the assassination. A commemorative altar had been erected on the site of Caesar’s cremation in the Forum, and this was where Octavian conducted the mass sacrifice. It shocked Roman opinion to the core, both for its scale and for the status of the victims. So far as the divi filius was concerned, it was the end of a story; four years had passed and now he had finally slaked the blood thirst of his deified adoptive father. The drama of murder and revenge had run its course.

The butchery came at a price, for the public long and bitterly recalled

…our fatherland’s Perusian graves,

The Italian massacre in a callous time.

What did Lucius and Fulvia mean by this disastrous enterprise? Did Antony know and approve of what his wife and brother were doing? These are hard questions to answer. Although Lucius does not give the impression of being particularly able, Fulvia was evidently energetic and experienced.