The Augustan Empire 43 BC

Not that, at the time, the permanence of the change could be clear. As Tacitus brings out in the first sentence of the Annals, the roots of absolute power were firmly grounded in the Republic itself: there had been phases of despotism before - Sulla and Caesar, and in some ways Pompey too — and they had passed; the cause of Brutus and Cassius in the East was not at all hopeless. But what was clear was that history and politics had changed, and were changing still. The triumviral period was to be one of the great men feeling their way, unclear how far (for instance) a legion's loyalty could simply be bought, whether the propertied classes or the discontented poor of Rome and Italy could be harnessed as a genuine source of strength, how influential the old families and their patronage remained. At the beginning, there was a case for a quinquevirate, for Plancus and Pollio had played no less crucial a role than Lepidus in the manoeuvrings of mid-43. But Lepidus was included, Plancus and Pollio were not; and Lepidus owed that less to his army than to his clan and connexions. In 43 those seemed to matter; a few years later they were irrelevant, and so was he. Money too was a new, incalculable factor. In 44-43 the promises made to the troops reached new heights; and there was certainly money around — money of Caesar himself; money from the dead dictator's friends, men like Balbus and Matius; money that would be minted in plenty throughout the Roman world — no wonder that so many hoards from the period have been found, some of them vast.¹ But would that money ever find its way to the

¹ Crawford 1969(8 318) 117-31, 198) (в 320) 252.

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Map г. Italy and the eastern Mediterranean,

legionaries? They did not know; no one knew. The role of propaganda was also changing. Cicero had been one master of the craft — we should not, for instance, assume that the Philippics were simply aimed at a senatorial audience; they would have force when read in the camps and market-places of Italy. But what constituency was worth making the propagandist's target? The armies, certainly: they were a priority in 44­43. But what of the Italians in the municipalities? Could they be won, and would they be decisive? Increasingly, the propaganda in the thirties turned in their direction, and they were duly won for Octavian. But was he wise to make them his priority — did they matter much in the final war? One may doubt it, though they certainly mattered in the ensuing peace. But it was that sort of time. No one knew what sources of strength could be found, or how they would count. The one thing that stood out was that the rules were new.

The difference is even harder for us to gauge than for contemporaries, simply because of our source-material. No longer do we have Cicero's speeches, dialogues and correspondence to illuminate events; instead we have only the sparsest of contemporary literary and epigraphic material, and have to rely on much later narratives - Appian, who took the story down to the death of Sextus Pompeius in his extant Civil Wars (he told of Actium and Alexandria in his lost Egyptian History)-, Cassius Dio, who gave a relatively full account of the triumviral period in Books xlvii-l; and Plutarch's fine Lives of Brutus and Antony. Suetonius too had some useful material in his Augustur, so does Josephus. The source-material used by these authors is seldom clear, though Asinius Pollio evidently influenced the tradition considerably, and so did Livy and the colourful Q. Dellius; but all the later authors may well have used other, more recherche material. Still, all are often demonstrably inaccurate, and there is indeed a heavy element of fiction throughout the tradition. Octavian's contemporary propaganda, doubtless repeated and reinforced in his Autobiography when it appeared during the twenties, spread stories of the excesses and outrages of Antony and Cleopatra; then the later authors, especially Plutarch, elaborated with romance, evincing sometimes more sympathy for the lovers, but scarcely more accuracy. And all these authors naturally concentrated on the principals themselves - Brutus, Cassius, Octavian, Sextus, Antony and Cleopatra. We are given very little idea of what everyday political life in Rome was like, how far the presence of these great men smothered routine activity and debate in the Senate, the courts, the assemblies and the streets. The triumvirs controlled appointments to the consulship and to many of the lower offices, but some elections took place as well; we just do not know how many, or how fiercely and genuinely they were contested.² The plebs and

² Cf. Frei-Stolba 1967 (c 92) 80-6; Millar 1973 (c 175) 51-3.