Augustus

The fleet was brought around from southern Italy and given the task of eliminating the pirates who operated out of Illyrian harbors. At the same time, two armies congregated at the Italian frontier with Illyricum. One force, commanded by Octavian’s legates (or deputies), was to strike in a northeasterly direction, toward the tribes of Pannonia. The remaining legions, led by their young commander in chief, would strike southeast down the valley of the river Colapis (today’s Kupa).

The first aim was to reduce the Iapudes, a fierce tribe not far from the coast. The campaign started well and a few strongholds surrendered. Then the going grew harder. The terrain the legions marched through often consisted of precipitous hills and deep ravines along which torrents rushed. At the tribal capital, Metulum (perhaps the modern hill of ViniÄica near Munjava), the resistance of the Iapudes stiffened.

Octavian had a large mound built against the town wall, which would allow his soldiers to storm the place. The Iapudes used tunneling devices captured from the Romans in an earlier campaign to undermine it. They set fire to Roman siege engines, including the large catapults that bombarded Metulum with missiles and battered the wall.

Two more mounds were raised and four wooden gangways installed to enable the Romans to gain access from them to the wall and storm the town, but the Iapudes cut away the supports. Gangway after gangway collapsed, until only one was left. The legionaries hesitated and stood still.

At this crisis in the assault, Octavian ran down from a temporary wooden tower from which he had been directing operations and snatched the shield from a soldier who was hesitating to make the crossing. Accompanied by the inevitable Agrippa and his bodyguard, he strode over the gangway. The men followed. Unfortunately, too many soldiers clambered onto the gangway at the same time and it collapsed.

Octavian was wounded and one leg and both arms were badly crushed. However, he survived and was protected by troops on the wall who had already made the crossing. More gangways were quickly run out and soldiers poured across. The defenders’ morale failed and the town fell.

This was a display of conspicuous bravery. In classical times generals were expected to risk their lives alongside their men, although they were closely surrounded by friends and followers and, being needed to control the battle, were seldom in the front line. Leading an assault on a besieged city was an exceptionally dangerous enterprise and only the most audacious commanders, such as Alexander the Great, took such risks.

Octavian was not a man for acting in hot blood or on the spur of the moment, and his action was out of character. One wonders whether he and his advisers were looking in advance for an appropriate opportunity to offer a bravura exhibition of valor. It is noteworthy that he was well guarded at all times during the incident. Also, the seriousness of his injuries may have been exaggerated, for there is no record of a pause in the army’s onward march to allow time for them to heal.

In any event, the propaganda value of this event was substantial, and public opinion was impressed. The contemporary historian Livy remarked that Octavian’s “beauty of person [was] enhanced by blood and his dignitas by the danger in which he found himself.”

Throughout 35 B.C., Octavian kept as close an eye as practicable on Mark Antony’s activities, or lack of them, in the east. His worst fear was that Antony, who had not been in the capital since 39 B.C. and had time on his hands, might take it into his head to visit Rome. There he would be able to overshadow Octavian, who was becoming used to regarding the city as his exclusive patch. Worse yet, once Antony came back to Italy it is hard to see how Octavian could in practice prevent him from raising troops.

But Antony did not come. It may be that his presence was needed to prepare for a renewal of the Parthian war, even if a new expedition was to be postponed to 34 B.C. The more likely cause, though, was his increasingly strong relationship with Cleopatra. The triumvir and the queen were now a settled couple. It has been suggested that they married in 36, at the time of Antony’s territorial allocations; however, although a ceremony of some sort is reported, this seems unlikely, for both Romans and Greeks strongly disapproved of bigamy and (as we have seen) Romans did not recognize foreign marriages. Perhaps what was intended as a mystical partnership between the New Isis and the New Dionysus was maliciously misinterpreted in Rome as an earthly union. In 35, the queen gave birth to her fourth child, and her third by Antony, a boy called Ptolemy Philadelphus.