Cicero - Anthony Everitt [162]
In taking these actions, Octavian was publicly asserting himself as the Dictator’s political, not merely personal, heir. He felt able to do so because he realized that Antony’s compromise settlement with the Senate did not take the feelings of the army into full account. It was a remarkably bold step and calls for explanation. IS it reasonable to believe that an inexperienced teenager would have seized the initiative in this way without prompting? It is of course a possibility, for his later career revealed very considerable political ability. It is much more plausible, however, that Balbus and other members of the Dictator’s staff, disenchanted with Antony’s policy of reconciliation, judged that the young man, carefully handled and advised, was well placed to assume the leadership of the Caesarian cause. The boy would be a focus for the simmering resentments among the Roman masses, the disbanded veterans and the standing legions, and that Antonius would be outmaneuvered and put on the defensive.
The long-term plan, shadowy in outline at this stage and not publicly emphasized, would be to turn the tables on the conspirators and take revenge for the assassination. What the Caesarians had in mind was, in essence, a plot to overthrow a restored Republic. When Caesar foresaw that a new civil war would break out if he was removed from the scene, he can hardly have guessed that it would be his heir who fulfilled his prediction.
On his journey north from Brundisium, Octavian was welcomed by large numbers of people, many of them soldiers or the Dictator’s former slaves and freedmen. Perhaps some of these demonstrations on the road were engineered, but they revealed a deep well of support for the young pretender. In Naples he was met by Balbus and went on to his stepfather’s villa at Puteoli. Cicero happened to be on hand when he arrived, for Philippus was his neighbor. (It was at their two villas that they had entertained Caesar the previous December.) Always prone to like young men and take them under his wing, Cicero may have been tempted by the prospect of another protégé to groom. On the following day he received a visit from Octavian and, writing to Atticus in his presence, insisted that gratified vanity did not mean he had been taken in. “Octavian is with me here—most respectful and friendly,” he noted. “My judgment is that he cannot be a good citizen. There are too many around him. They threaten death to our friends and call the present state of affairs intolerable.… I long to be away.”
During recent weeks Cicero had been thinking of leaving the country for a few months and he arranged for a special leave of absence from the Consuls. He intended to be in Rome for a Senate meeting on June 1 but afterwards there would be no reason to linger. His idea was to go to his beloved Athens and check in person how Marcus was getting along.
Young Octavian’s appearance on the scene turned the political situation on its head. His growing popularity with the army and the Roman masses had the effect, as intended, of detaching Antony from the Senate, for it compelled him to outbid his new rival as a loyal supporter of Caesar’s memory. This in turn meant that Brutus’s and Cassius’s strategy of sitting around quietly in their country houses, on the assumption that politics were gradually returning to normal, was pointless. All sums had to be recalculated.
For the time being the newcomer was little more than a nuisance and the Consul called him dismissively a “boy who owes everything to his name.” However, the popularity of that name in the army and among the urban masses soon made him a force to be reckoned with. If he meant to remain