Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [52]
Forced by hunger to come down into the plains, he was kidnapped by a bandit who made a living by preying on passing travelers, putting them in chains and forcing them to work for him. Atilius, brought up in luxury, could not endure the hard labor. Still wearing his fetters, he made off to a main road, where he incautiously identified himself to some passing centurions. They killed him there and then, doubtless taking his head back to Rome for their reward.
A funerary inscription dating from the late first century B.C. tells a very different story. It records the speech a grieving husband made at the funeral of his wife after forty years of marriage. We know neither his name nor hers, but she is usually called Turia, the name of a woman who led a similar life and who was once thought, wrongly, to be the same person.
Turia’s husband, an unrepentant republican, was proscribed and went into hiding. He recalled: “You provided abundantly for my needs during my flight and gave me the means for a dignified life-style, when you took all the gold and jewellery you wore and sent it to me.”
A year later, when the need for the proscription had ended, Octavian pardoned Turia’s husband, but Lepidus, then in charge of the city of Rome, refused to acknowledge his colleague’s decision. He seems to have enjoyed the proscription and did not wish it to be over.
Turia presented herself before Lepidus to ask him to recognize the pardon, and prostrated herself before his feet. He did not raise her up (as, according to convention, he should have done), but had her dragged away and beaten. This characteristically unpleasant behavior apparently angered Octavian and, according to Turia’s husband, contributed to his downfall. “That matter was soon to prove harmful to him,” the widower remarked with dry satisfaction.
The cruelty and confusion that the proscription brought about was widespread. As many as three hundred senators were butchered—among them Cicero—and perhaps two thousand equites. The republican opposition in Italy was largely liquidated.
Antony had a streak of savagery in his character and entered fully into the spirit of things (unless the record has been distorted by subsequent propaganda against him). He always inspected the heads of victims, even at table when eating a meal. His wife was equally ferocious.
As for Octavian, while the proscription was in progress some observers found him a good deal too fond of victims’ expensive furniture and their Corinthian bronze figures, objets d’art that were highly prized. According to Suetonius, someone scrawled on the base of a statue of him an insulting poem recalling the old story that his family’s fortune derived from the shameful business of moneylending.
I did not take my father’s line;
His trade was silver coin, but mine
Corinthian bronzes…
The proscription was not as effective as its designers had intended. Much less money was made than had been expected, for too much land and built property came on the market at the same time and prices collapsed. Also, the more respectable felt some qualms about buying the estates of innocent victims.
The triumvirs were at their wits’ end, for they had to find the resources to finance forty-three legions. They produced a new proscription list that merely confiscated property. They even stole the personal savings that people had placed in the sacred care of the Vestal Virgins. Ingenious new taxes were devised to swell their war chest.
All this came as a great shock to the citizens of Rome in Italy, who, thanks to the wealth of empire, had been exempt from personal tax for the last century. With the western provinces exhausted and the east off limits, they found themselves, for the first time, paying for their civil war.
Meanwhile, the republican cause was prospering. A new maritime leader in the west had emerged to complement the land power of Brutus and Cassius in the east. He was Sextus Pompeius, Pompey the Great’s youngest son. Although still a very young man, he had already lived an extraordinary