The Augustan Empire 43 BC

There was another medium, too, that of visual art: and here Antony found it even more difficult to hold his own. Particularly striking was the treatment of the gods. Antony might have his Dionysus, and a few years earlier he had been emphasizing Hercules. Both could seem all too appropriate to an Italian audience. That Dionysiac blend of excess, drunkenness and eastern menace was hardly reassuring. And Hercules, it was recalled, had fallen unmanned before Omphale: a suggestive model for Antony, indeed, and one that duly recurs in contemporary art. Octavian countered with more comfortable gods, especially Apollo with his civilized order, discipline, calm and restraint. Here too Octavian found a willing audience: Apolline themes, portrayed with delicate restraint, swiftly become favourites in private dwellings, sometimes in rooms which would not be open to any public gaze: that must reflect genuine Italian taste, a spontaneous welcoming of the new moral climate. But it was not just Apollo. On beautifully minted coins, Venus, Jupiter, Hermes and Victoria were all shown in association with Octavian. If the gods were taking sides, no one could doubt which divine entourage was the weightier.[129] And here Antony could do little to reply: religion worked differently in the East, and he could hardly be more than Dionysus incarnate. A plurality of gods would simply blur the picture, and no wonder that even Hercules was dropping from view.

So propaganda flourished. At whom was it all aimed? Really, at everyone, or at least everyone in Italy. We might expect the veteran colonies to be most important: after all, the veterans had refused to fight one another in 40,[130] and the recent mutiny had shown that Octavian's control of them was insecure. Doubtless they did matter, and Antony's coarse language would strike a particular chord with them; but perhaps they mattered less than we naturally assume. For one surprising omission from the catalogue of propaganda themes is the memory of Iulius Caesar himself. Was Antony or Octavian his true heir? In 44-43 that theme had been vital.[131] Now there was certainly a little of this: Antony for instance made something of Caesarion — Caesar's true son, as he claimed in a letter to the Senate (not merely adopted, like Octavian);[132]while Octavian toyed publicly with the idea of invading Britain again, and — very slowly — was building a temple to Divus Iulius in the Forum Romanum.[133] Still, this is surprisingly little. To judge from the propa­ganda now, Caesar was out of date; just as there had been no particular concern to portray the war with Sextus as a rehash of the old civil war, with a young Caesar and a young Pompey reliving their fathers' destinies. Yet surely, in the colonies themselves, Caesar's name was no irrelevance, and his veterans would not have been impervious to the battle-cry. Soldiers would surely be less moved by all this talk of oriental excess: Caesar too had had his women; soldiers, and their captains, were simply like that. Those themes had more appeal for the propertied classes of the Italian towns, where traditional morality was strong. These, probably, were the people whom Augustus was to eye a few years later with his moral legislation,²³¹ and a constituency to which he was always alert. Even the Senate, the rich, the cultured would not be unmoved by the themes; we might expect them to be more sophisticated — after all, they turned out too sophisticated to stomach the moral reforms — and it is true that many of the most republican and traditional stayed loyal to Antony;²³² but even the most urbane find propaganda hard to escape, if it is repeated often and insistently enough, and if it appeals sufficiently sharply to their pre-existent assumptions and prejudices. More senators eventually took Octavian's part than Antony's.²³³