Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [69]
Octavian, with a leaden heart, took the road to Brundisium. Although he had many more troops at his disposal than did his fellow triumvir, he did nothing but watch and wait outside Antony’s fortifications. As often happened at times of crisis, he fell ill for several days, we are not told with what ailment.
The Roman world was about to be convulsed once more, were it not for one familiar obstacle. Not for the first time, the soldiers took a hand in events. Octavian’s veterans came to a secret decision that they would reconcile the triumvirs if they could; they would fight for Octavian only if Antony refused to come to terms (in fact, some turned back from the march to Brundisium). Fraternization between the armies grew and compelled a reconsideration. There was to be no war, because there was no one willing to fight it. This was a blow to the generals’ authority, but there was nothing they could do about it, no punishment they could order, that would not make matters worse. Their only realistic option was to come to terms.
Peace negotiators were appointed to resolve the dispute, among them Maecenas, Octavian’s trusted school friend, for Octavian. The two sides agreed that there should be an amnesty for the past acts of both triumvirs. Each side had bitter claims to put forward about the other’s behavior, but it was time, as political realists have said throughout history, to move on.
The arrangement they came to distinctly favored Octavian, for it left him with Gaul and Calenus’ legions. However, this seems not to have troubled Antony; he came to a strategic decision that he could not go on treating Octavian as a temporary annoyance who would either disappear through illness (quite likely) or mistakes (unlikely), or whom he would swat like a fly at some convenient moment. He wanted a full, final, and permanent settlement. To achieve it, he was willing to make substantial compromises.
The Triumvirate was renewed for another five years. The empire was cut neatly in half, with Octavian taking all of the west, including Gaul, and Antony the east from Macedonia onward. Italy was to be common ground, where both men would be allowed to recruit soldiers. The increasingly insignificant Lepidus retained Africa, a courtesy granted by Octavian. Antony had received help from the anomalous and threatening Sextus Pompeius, who still held Sicily and the western Mediterranean; he now had to abandon him. It would be Octavian’s duty to dispose of Sextus, just as Antony would punish Parthia.
Divisions on a map were insufficient to guarantee a permanent peace, however. Octavian and Antony had never got on with each other and were unlikely to do so in the future. Unless something decisive was done to bind them personally as well as politically, the Treaty of Brundisium, as the accord is called, would not be worth the marble on which it was inscribed. A solution to the conundrum was made possible by two recent deaths. That of Fulvia not only enabled Antony to blame her for his past misdeeds, but also made of him a merry widower (Roman opinion regarded the queen of Egypt as an innocuous diversion). In the same year, 40 B.C., Octavia, Octavian’s sister, lost her elderly husband, Gaius Claudius Marcellus, and, perhaps five years older than her brother, became a highly eligible widow (albeit with two daughters and an infant son).
The proposition that the treaty should be sealed by their marriage was irresistible. Although Octavian’s brief betrothal to Fulvia’s daughter Claudia had failed to reconcile the two triumvirs, there was a benign precedent for such a union in the long-ago and extremely happy marriage between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar’s daughter, Julia. As long as she lived the two warlords had stayed friends;