Second Triumvirate

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Second Triumvirate was born on the 27th of November 43 BC, when three men divided the Roman world between them and gave themselves powers no Roman had legally held before. Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian could issue binding edicts, override provincial governors, appoint magistrates, and punish citizens without trial or appeal. Their formal title was triumviri rei publicae constituendae, men appointed for the reconstitution of the republic. The republic, of course, was exactly what they were dismantling.

  What drove three rivals to pool their ambitions rather than destroy each other? How did a lawful commission produce death lists, civil wars, and a final sea battle off the Greek coast? And why did only one of the three men walk away with everything? Those questions run through the eleven years of the triumvirate's existence, from the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC to the fall of Alexandria in 30 BC.

• 2. A Name That Never Was

  ›

  The Oxford Classical Dictionary warns directly that "'First' and 'Second Triumvirate' are modern and misleading terms." The label was not used during the period itself, was unknown through the Renaissance, and was first attested only in the late 17th century, spreading into common use only in the century after that. Recent scholarship has begun to quietly retire the terminology.

  The alliance the term refers back to, the political arrangement between Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, was created around 59 BC and was itself an informal pact with no legal charter. The later arrangement between Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian was something quite different: a formal extraordinary magistracy, constituted by the lex Titia and entered on the public record of the Capitoline Fasti, which listed the triumvirs above the ordinary consuls to mark the precedence of their authority. The gap between a private political deal and a legally enforceable, senate-recognised commission matters. The men of 43 BC were not simply calling themselves powerful; they were being formally granted power that exceeded the ordinary consuls by law.

• 3. The Proscriptions

  ›

  The triumvirs issued their joint declaration with a death list attached, citing, according to Appian, Caesar's clementia as a proven failure. Ancient sources disagree sharply on how many names were on the list. Plutarch, writing in three separate lives, gives figures of 200, a little more than 200, and 300 men. Livy counted 130 senators and many equites. Florus gave 140 senators. Appian described an initial list of 17 names, then two further rounds adding 130 and 150 others, with a total across the period to 39 BC of 300 senators and some 2,000 equites. The historian Francois Hinard, reviewing this evidence in his 1985 book Les proscriptions de la Rome republicaine, concluded that roughly 300 people were proscribed in total, split approximately evenly between the senatorial and equestrian orders.

  Properties of the proscribed were confiscated and auctioned off; bounty hunters and informers received cash rewards for their role in the killings. Some victims escaped to Macedonia or Sicily, where Brutus and Sextus Pompey respectively gave shelter. Others successfully pleaded for clemency. Still short of funds, the triumvirs seized eighteen wealthy Italian towns and redistributed them to their soldiers.

  Cicero, the most famous victim, was placed on the list despite Octavian's personal regard for him. His years of oratorical attacks on Antony in the speeches known as the Philippicae made him a target Antony was not prepared to spare. Cicero's brother Quintus, nephew, and son were listed alongside him. The proscriptions claimed friends and enemies of all three triumvirs; each man traded associates to secure the addition of his rivals' names to the list.

• 4. Philippi and Its Aftermath

  ›

  Julius Caesar was consecrated as a god in Rome at the start of 42 BC, and by summer Antony and Octavian were moving forty legions east across the Adriatic toward Macedonia and the liberatores. Brutus and Cassius, busy extracting tribute from Asian cities to pay their soldiers, delayed their march west, perhaps an error in retrospect. They intercepted Antony and Octavian only in mid-July.

  The first battle at Philippi split the fighting: Brutus faced Octavian, Cassius faced Antony. Brutus' forces broke Octavian's line and destroyed three of his legions. On the other flank, Antony stormed Cassius' camp. Believing the battle lost, Cassius died by suicide; his surviving forces were folded into Brutus' command. Three weeks later, on the 23rd of October 42 BC, Brutus offered a second engagement, fearing desertions and the cutting of his supply lines. The combined forces of Antony and Octavian defeated him. Brutus also died by suicide. Octavian, the sources note, apparently spent much of the first battle hiding in a marsh; Antony bore the military credit.

  The division of spoils after Philippi shaped everything that followed. Antony took the wealthy east, with access to enormous resources and loyal lieutenants holding Gaul. Octavian drew the harder assignment: settling veterans of Philippi in Italy, continuing war against Sextus Pompey in Sicily. Lepidus, who had stayed behind in Italy, received only Africa in exchange for surrendering Spain. Antony's strategic position at this moment was commanding. As the source observes, his control of Gaul gave him the same approach to Italy that Caesar had used before his civil war.

• 5. Cleopatra and the Eastern Gamble

  ›

  Moving down the Mediterranean coast to build support among allied rulers, Antony summoned Cleopatra to meet him in Cilicia. The relationship that followed was useful to both parties. Antony helped secure her throne by ordering the death of her sister Arsinoe and suppressing Ptolemaic rivals. Cleopatra, in turn, provided resources for his eastern ambitions. Ancient writers speculated that she was manipulating him; the source suggests he was more likely trying to anchor a strong Egyptian ally as part of a broader policy of favouring powerful client monarchs.

  The Parthian campaign that followed was a catastrophe. Antony struck north into Armenia and drove south into Persia with sixteen legions and auxiliaries from allied kings. Moving fast without his siege engines, he reached Phraata, the Parthian capital, only to learn that the slow-moving siege train had been intercepted and destroyed by the enemy. His Armenian ally Artavasdes then abandoned him. The retreat through winter terrain, harried over 27 days by Parthian cavalry archers, cost Antony roughly a third of his entire army. The source notes the failure fatally damaged his military prestige. A victorious Parthian campaign would have placed him clearly above Octavian; the failure reversed that equation.

  In 34 BC, Antony used treachery to capture Artavasdes, the Armenian king who had abandoned him, drawing him into a meeting and then seizing and parading him in a Dionysiac procession through Alexandria. He followed this with the "donations of Alexandria," crowning his children with Cleopatra as rulers of eastern territories. Octavian's propagandists exploited both spectacles as proof of eastern corruption and abandonment of Rome.

• 6. Sextus Pompey and the Italian Blockade

  ›

  Sextus Pompey, a son of Pompey the Great, controlled Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia and used his naval strength to strangle the grain supply to Italy. The famine his blockade worsened fed the unrest that his allies in Italy, Antony's brother Lucius Antonius serving as consul for 41 BC and Antony's wife Fulvia, turned into open conflict against Octavian. Lucius occupied Rome with an army before Octavian's forces drove him back and besieged him in the city of Perusia. When Perusia fell, Octavian's own soldiers interceded to spare Lucius and his men; Octavian nonetheless sacked the town, killed its councillors, and had it burned.

  The peace eventually brokered with Sextus at Misenum in the summer of 39 BC confirmed him in Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Peloponnese for five years, promised him the consulship in 33 BC, and granted freedom to his runaway slaves. The concessions to his soldiers and former slaves were the most important provisions: with those grievances resolved, the source observes, Sextus' military power was permanently neutered.

  Peace did not hold. By autumn 39 BC the arrangement was fraying, and after one of Sextus' own admirals defected to Octavian with three legions and sixty ships, Sextus declared war. Two large naval battles near Cumae and near Messana in the spring of 38 BC both went to Sextus. The decisive confrontation came at Naulochus on the 3rd of September 36 BC, where Agrippa defeated Sextus decisively; Sextus could muster only 17 ships and fled eastward to seek shelter with Antony. He was later caught and executed in Antony's provinces.

• 7. The Fall of Lepidus

  ›

  Lepidus had arrived in Sicily with forces from Africa to support the campaign against Sextus Pompey. After a successful landing in the south and the surrender of one of Sextus' lieutenants at Lilybaeum, he attempted to leverage his position. With Sextus defeated, Lepidus tried to suborn Octavian's troops and offered to exchange Sicily and Africa for his old provinces of Narbonensis and Spain.

  Octavian walked into Lepidus' camp nearly unaccompanied and secured the loyalty of the soldiers directly. Lepidus was stripped of his membership in the triumvirate and his provincial commands. Octavian left him his property, his life, and the title of pontifex maximus, but sent him into permanent exile and retirement. The three had become two.

• 8. The Final War and What Followed

  ›

  The triumvirate's legal term expired on the 31st of December 33 BC. Octavian used force early in 32 BC to drive two hostile consuls from Rome; they fled with several hundred senators to join Antony, who organised them into a counter-senate in the east. Lucius Munatius Plancus then defected from Antony and urged Octavian to open Antony's will, which had been sealed with the Vestal Virgins. Octavian did so and alleged the document showed Antony planned burial in Alexandria and would recognise Caesarion as Caesar's true heir. The source notes Octavian may have invented provisions: the Vestals in Rome would not have seen the sealed original, and some alleged provisions were ones Antony could not comfortably deny or admit.

  Antony had assembled some 100,000 men and 800 ships and moved toward Greece. He divorced Octavia in Athens, the public rejection of his Roman wife hardening Italian opinion against him. Declaring war on Cleopatra rather than Antony directly, Octavian organised an unprecedented civil oath of personal loyalty from the peninsula's population.

  Agrippa opened the 31 BC campaign with surprise attacks on western Greek harbours. After land and sea operations cut Antony off from supplies and exit routes, Antony and Cleopatra attempted a breakout by sea. On the 2nd of September 31 BC, at the Battle of Actium, they fought through a gap in the line and escaped, but most of Antony's fleet returned to port without following. The army in Greece surrendered. Through the winter of 31-30 BC, governors and client kings defected to Octavian. When Octavian reached Alexandria and took the city on the 1st of August 30 BC, Antony and Cleopatra both died by suicide.

  The historian Tacitus, writing in the imperial period, dated the end of the Roman republic to the triumvirs' victory at Philippi, which left the state, in his phrase, nulla iam publica arma, without armies of its own. Erich Gruen, in The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, traced the republic's collapse to the long brutal conflicts after Caesar's assassination, which eventually made it impossible to pick up the pieces. Among the works produced in these years were Horace's Epodes and Satires, Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and the histories of Sallust and Asinius Pollio, whose Eclogues record the anxieties of rural Italians whose lands were seized to settle veterans after Philippi.