The roman world war, p.5
The Roman World War, page 5
Antony was well acquainted with the East and well understood the central place of Galatia in Roman foreign policy. Deiotarus had made significant improvements with regard to the governance and security of the region. Seeking, not without difficulty, to replace the tribal system of the Celts of Asia by a Hellenistic monarchy, he drew inspiration from exemplars of Greek culture, particularly in connection with architecture, as well as the military model of Rome (thirty cohorts of his army were armed in the Roman fashion).37 In 54, when Crassus and his army passed through Galatia, the general found the king occupied with the construction of a new city (perhaps mistaken for the fortress of Peium, which housed the royal treasury). Deiotarus could not be accused of indulging a superficial taste for Hellenism: Diophanes of Nicaea dedicated to him his abridgment in six volumes of the Greek translation of the manual on agriculture composed in the Punic language by Mago of Carthage; and Cicero, during the trial, made a point of praising his abilities as an administrator, describing him as an “excellent family man, and industrious farmer and stock raiser”—in other words, a providential man for the kingdom.38
It was under these favorable circumstances that Antony sought to augment his military resources by seizing control of the army billeted in Macedonia, sent by Caesar, not far from Apollonia. Its six legions and various auxiliaries formed a quite respectable expeditionary force. Among the large number of auxiliaries, Appian mentions light infantry, archers (indispensable for parrying Parthian thrusts), and warriors from the Gymnesian Islands, today the Balearics, renowned for their ability to launch projectiles with a sling.39 It was said that the Dacians, before they learned of Caesar’s death, were laying waste to Macedonia.
Command of the Roman troops had been confided to Publius Cornelius Dolabella, Cicero’s former son-in-law and a rival of Mark Antony. The two consuls who assumed office at the beginning of the year 44 were Caesar and Antony; in anticipation of Caesar’s departure for the East, Dolabella was named suffect consul in his place. Antony, fearing the veterans who made up Octavian’s personal army, planned to reassign the Macedonian forces to Italy on the pretext that the Parthians, at least for the moment, posed no threat. He asked the Senate to use them for the purpose of bringing barbarians in the Balkans to heel; the Senate took its time, dispatching a commission to Macedonia to assess the situation. Antony finally obtained command of the army for the year 43, while exchanging the governorship of Macedonia for that of Cisalpine Gaul.40
Macedonia was entrusted to his younger brother Gaius Antonius, who set out for the province in late 44, probably a few weeks before the end of his term as urban praetor. In the meantime the commissioners sent to Macedonia reported that they had found no Dacians there, but that the possibility could not be excluded that they might reappear once the bulk of the army had departed.41 The Senate nonetheless gave command of these legions to Antony, while placing one of them under the authority of his brother and another under the authority of Dolabella in Syria. In the event, however, Antony was unable to exert control over the remaining Macedonian legions, the senatorial commission having emphasized the danger that might arise in the wake of their departure. Between Macedonia and Illyria, seven legions continued to be deployed in the Balkans.42
In Italy, the situation was becoming increasingly complicated. Cicero had begun to compose the Philippics. The second of these amounted to a manifesto against Antony, an unauthorized biography, in effect, if not also an incitement for his murder. Antony vigorously defended himself against Cicero’s invectives, accusing him of being the principal instigator of Caesar’s assassination. Before long, Antony’s position had become more precarious, however, despite his having managed to obtain the proconsulship of Gaul while retaining command over the four legions garrisoned in Macedonia that he had recovered in Brundisium—where, accompanied still by Fulvia, he had to violently suppress a revolt of local soldiers and aristocrats.
The years following were marked by the vagaries of the relationship between Mark Antony and Octavian, two very different men. First of all, there was the significant difference in age between them (in the autumn of 44, Antony was almost forty years old, Octavian only nineteen). Both of them, each in his own way, claimed to be Caesar’s heir, the one legitimate and the other spiritual. There was also the matter of personal temperament, amounting almost to a difference in religious allegiance: Caesar’s former right-hand man obeyed the counsels of Dionysus, god of drunkenness and excess, the young Caesar those of the more rational Apollo. The two men were also distinguished by their manner of public speaking, Octavian preferring the gravitas of the “neo-Atticist” rhetorical style, which had recently become fashionable, and disparaging the turgidness and redundancies of the so-called Asiatic tradition in which Antony had been trained as a student in Greece.43
From autumn 44 onward, Octavian and Antony “in all their acts were opposing each other, but had not yet fallen out openly, and while in reality they had become enemies, they tried to disguise the fact so far as appearances went.”44 In this passage, modeled on Thucydides, Cassius Dio likened the two men to Athens and Sparta. The young Caesar, exploiting the common interest of military veterans and the plebian class, created his own political network and recruited legions in Samnium and Etruria. In Rome, he delivered an address to the Plebeian Assembly in which, to Cicero’s great consternation, he restated his determination to assume his father’s responsibilities.45 Between October and December, the Philippics had begun to circulate among influential citizens.
Shortly afterward, Antony, who had suffered the defection of two legions, was obliged to leave Rome for the winter. In Cisalpine Gaul, the acropolis of Italy, as it was called, after replacing the proconsul Decimus Brutus, he went on to recruit troops and conduct military operations in the Alps, where his soldiers proclaimed him imperator. Brutus, for his part, sent a report to the Senate, hoping to obtain for himself the honor of a supplicatio, an official ceremony thanking the gods for victory. In a letter sent to Cicero in early autumn, he told of his exploits against an indigenous people, the Inalpini, who seem to have lived in what are now Piedmont and Savoy, and of his operations against “the most warlike people in the world,” with the conquest of several fortresses and the devastation of a certain amount of territory. The chief aim of these operations, he says, was not personal glory; their purpose was mainly to train his soldiers and raise their spirits to “strengthen them in support of our cause,” which is to say in anticipation of a civil war against Antony.46 Cicero promised to do his utmost to support Brutus’s “patriotic designs” and to assure him of the glory that was rightly his.47
At the same time he set about concluding an alliance, as surprising as it was necessary, with Caesar’s adoptive son in the hope of bringing him under his control. On 20 December 44, he formally called upon the Senate to declare Antony a public enemy. The assembly, though it did not approve the request, annulled the consul’s most important decisions and barred him from holding public office for the following year. This was the beginning of a new civil war, the first war between Dionysus and Apollo.
2
Western Warlords
THE CONSERVATIVES’ attempts to reestablish the republican order had collateral effects. The amnesty granted to Brutus and Cassius allowed them, once the first weeks of confusion had passed, to occupy positions of power in the East. In the West, another figure profited from the political and military disorder: Sextus, Pompey’s second son, who had survived Caesar’s war in Spain, unlike his older brother, Gnaeus, whose severed head was exhibited before the people of Hispalis (modern Seville).1 In theory, Caesar had pacified Spain, but Sextus managed to flee, apparently with the aid of local aristocrats and Roman colonists, ever faithful to the Pompeian cause.
In order to counter rearguard attacks, Caesar had been obliged to remain in Spain until September 45, Octavian having joined him there in the meantime. But once Caesar had returned to Italy, Sextus set about harassing his legates, carrying out raids throughout the Iberian Peninsula in the months leading up to the Ides of March. The governor of Hispania Ulterior in 44, based in Corduba (now Córdoba), was Gaius Asinius Pollio, a Caesarian loyalist and a veteran of Pharsalus and other battles of the civil wars, the last ones of which he recounted in his Histories in seventeen books. Pollio had directed the campaign against Sextus, but he seems not to have had any greater success than his predecessor, Gaius Carrinas. Appian relates a very unconvincing detail in this connection, saying that Sextus did not immediately reveal his identity to the men whom he had recruited for his acts of piracy; but that once it became known that he was Pompey’s son, all the veterans who had fought with his father and his brother, now widely dispersed, hastened to join his camp.2
Syme described Pompey’s younger son as an adventurer (a term he often applied to people he did not like). In fact, Sextus was a much more formidable adversary than Brutus or Cassius, for the renown of his father was not less than that of Caesar himself. The contest between Pompey the Great and Caesar continued long after they had died. The last phase of the civil wars, which determined the end of the Republic, should therefore be seen as a prolongation of their conflict, at least until Sextus’s defeat in 36. Sextus had chosen “Pius” as a cognomen, to emphasize his filial piety and his desire to avenge the deaths of his father and brother. Although he influenced events in the Mediterranean from this time onward, Sextus is often considered to have been a figure of the second rank.
The propaganda of his enemies granted him no more than a minor role as a brigand, indeed a pirate, insinuating that whereas his father had made the Mediterranean “one safe and enclosed harbor in the control of the Roman people,” his son undid this work.3 Velleius Paterculus characterized Sextus as “a young man without education, barbarous in his speech, vigorous in initiative, energetic and prompt in action as he was swift in expedients, in loyalty a marked contrast to his father, the freedman of his own freedmen and slave of his own slaves, envying those in high places only to obey those in the lowest.”4 In the second century CE, Florus exclaimed, “But how great the difference between him and his father! The latter had exterminated the Cilician pirates, his son protected himself by piracy.”5 This was no longer a civil war: Sextus’s operations amounted to banditry.6
The underestimation of Sextus Pompey’s influence is due to the legend created by his principal adversary, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. It is true that the prestige of his family name assured Sextus of the loyalty of his troops, but he was by no means an incapable commander; as the course of events was to show, his talent as a strategist was decidedly superior to that of Octavian. A young man who had rapidly become an adult, by 44, when he was twenty-two years old, he had assembled an army of legionaries and auxiliaries, the equivalent of seven legions, in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. Two days after the Ides of March, Decimus Brutus wrote to Brutus and Cassius, expressing the view that Sextus Pompey and Caecilius Bassus alone could guarantee their security—in other words, that the only possible refuges were territories controlled by Caesar’s enemies, Spain and Syria.7
Just after the Ides, however, after negotiations with the consuls, Sextus finally “show[ed] the white feather.”8 Shortly afterward, Decimus Brutus managed to rejoin his legions in Cisalpine Gaul, where Cicero had also considered taking refuge, though he did not rule out the possibility of seeking the protection of Sextus Pompey.9 On 10 July 44 Cicero learned that Sextus, having set out with a legion from Carthago Nova (New Carthage, present-day Cartagena), was laying siege to Baria (Vera, in Andalusia). It was while taking this stronghold that news reached him of Caesar’s assassination, the cause of much rejoicing.10
The situation changed as the result of intervention by the governor, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Formerly commander of the cavalry under Caesar, Lepidus succeeded him as pontifex maximus, the highest official of the civic religion, thanks to Antony’s influence. Lepidus had evidently learned from the experience of his father, who bore the same name and was the unhappy protagonist of yet another one of the many earlier episodes of civil war, just after the death of Sulla. Lepidus’s father, consul in 78, had adopted a demagogic policy, working to demolish all the measures taken by Sulla; the following year, he organized a rebellion. His mistake was deciding to march on Rome instead of going back to his own province, Transalpine Gaul.
During the same period, another rebellious military commander, Quintus Sertorius, was defeated in Spain, where he had ruled as a warlord for six years before his death in 73. Pompey, who was then in the process of consolidating his own power, managed to quiet the grumbling of Romans who could no longer tolerate Sertorius’s close relations with Hispanic aristocracies. Sertorius was finally murdered. His fate must have convinced Lepidus of the necessity of cooperating with other regional governors. He well understood that, in order to control the western part of the Mediterranean, it was necessary to control the whole of Romanized Western Europe.
Caesar had confided to Lepidus both Gallia Narbonensis and Hispania Citerior, that is, the coastal region extending from the Pyrenees to New Carthage. Lepidus remained in Spain, where he negotiated the cessation of hostilities with the Pompeians; in October 44 he removed himself to Gaul. Even if our sources are primarily interested in what was happening in Rome, it was in the West that Rome’s destiny was to be settled. It was there that Lepidus was decisive, by devising a strategy for consolidating Rome’s control over Gaul on either side of the Alps.
In his funeral oration for Caesar, Antony had made clear what Caesar had intended to do in entering upon the Gallic Wars. Caesar’s purpose was not limited to combating the enemies of allied peoples. Caesar had conquered all the peoples of these formerly unknown regions, accelerating the process of combining Cisalpine Gaul with the rest of Italy.11 As for Transalpine Gaul, the Caesarian conquest had created a new geopolitical landscape. Until the end of the civil wars, these territories had been untouched by significant events apart from a few sporadic revolts.
A part of the Gallic aristocracy had supported Caesar’s cause, and when the fighting was over he rewarded a number of tribal chiefs and members of the aristocracy with magistracies in their cities, distributions of land, even grants of Roman citizenship. The city of Arelate (Arles) was made a Roman colony. The same policy of integration was followed in Transalpine Gaul by the governor there, Lucius Munatius Plancus, another faithful lieutenant of Caesar who had fought alongside him against the Gauls, and later against the Pompeians in the wars of Spain and Africa.
One must nonetheless keep in mind what was at stake in the struggle for control of the region. The war did not end in 52 at Alesia. The Gauls continued to do battle with the Roman armies, and at the time of the Ides of March, Caesar’s generals were still conducting operations. Foreign clients with whom Caesar had negotiated alliances also included Germanic populations beyond the Rhine, who formed a protective glacis of federated tribes. The news of Caesar’s death spread very rapidly among the Gallic peoples; in Rome, there was fear of revolt, particularly among the Germanic peoples of Belgic Gaul. Late March brought the reassuring news that the Germans had declared their obedience to Rome.12
The Senate authorized Munatius Plancus to found two new Roman colonies: Lugdunum (Lyon) and, to the northeast of the Helvetii, Raurica (Augst). In the meantime, there had developed among the Gallic populations the practice of building oppida, fortified settlements that archeologists regard as a form of proto-urbanization. Alongside these agglomerations, mostly defensive in character, market towns grew up. In the countryside, Caesar noted various types of habitats, among them, in addition to oppida, villages (vici) and isolated farms (aedificia). The flourishing agriculture of these lands, combined with extensive rearing of livestock and hunting in the forests, allowed Caesar’s legions to feed themselves. While Romanization, understood as the formation of a Gallo-Roman civilization, began to take shape only around the middle of the first century BCE, archeological research has revealed evidence of Mediterranean acculturation from the second century, for example, the earliest appearance of animal breeds imported from Italy (initially in sites of aristocratic occupation). Lepidus, for his part, was in charge of the territory of the old province, created around 100, which encompassed more or less Provence, southwestern France, and the Rhône Valley. Its boundaries were the Caesarian colony of Vienne and Lake Geneva to the northeast, the Pyrenees to the southwest, the Alps to the east, and the Massif Central to the north.
