Cicero - Anthony Everitt [181]
Cicero was given permission to stay away from Senate meetings and his last surviving written words are an unheroic fragment of a letter to the new Consul. “I am doubly delighted that you have given Philippus [his neighbor at Puteoli and Octavian’s stepfather] and me leave of absence; for it implies forgiveness for the past and mercy for the future.” He probably stayed at Tusculum and for the time being disappears from view. It is curious that he did not try to leave the country and escape to Brutus. Perhaps he was under surveillance. More probably he simply lost heart.
Octavian left Rome and went back north at a leisurely pace, ostensibly to campaign against Antony. However, there was to be no more fighting. Octavian’s Consular colleague stayed in Rome and reversed the condemnations of Antony and Lepidus (who had also been declared a public enemy). Formal negotiations now opened to reunite the Caesarian factions which Cicero’s strategy had divided.
Antony and Octavian had every reason to distrust each other, but the logic of events drove them together. To deal with the challenge from Brutus and Cassius in the east, they were obliged to pool their resources. They gingerly marched their armies towards each other and met on a small island in a river at Bononia (today’s Bologna). Antony on one bank and Octavian on the other walked forward with 300 men each to bridges leading to the island. Lepidus went on ahead to conduct a search for hidden weapons and gave an all-clear by waving his cloak. The three men then met alone in talks that lasted for two or three days, working from dawn to dusk. Before sitting down they searched one another to make sure that no one had brought a dagger with him.
They agreed to appoint themselves as a three-man Constitutional Commission (which historians have called the Second Triumvirate) charged with the familiar duty of restoring the Republic. Their mandate was to last for five years. It was as if the old alliance of the First Triumvirate had returned in a new guise, but, unlike the private agreement among Pompey, Julius Caesar and Crassus in the 50s, the Commission was formally established in due course by the General Assembly and was, in effect, a triple Dictatorship. Of course, reform was the last thing on the Commissioners’ minds. Antony and Octavian (with Lepidus as a junior partner) had formed a coalition of convenience. Their priorities were to allocate provincial commands to themselves and assemble the forces necessary to defeat Brutus and Cassius.
The Commissioners were short of ready cash and needed to fundraise. They also had to consider what to do with the defeated Republican opposition in Rome. There was one solution that would solve both problems: a proscription. A good deal of time on the island was spent haggling over names. More than 130 Senators (perhaps as many as 300) and an estimated 2,000 equites were marked down for execution and property confiscation. Huge rewards were offered for anyone who killed a proscribed man—100,000 sesterces for a free man and 40,000 sesterces for a slave.
For members of the Roman ruling class, such as remained, history seemed to be repeating itself. They knew what to expect, for some of them could recall fearfully the last proscription conducted by Sulla nearly forty years previously. However, that dark moment in the history of the Republic had at least been followed by a rapid return to (more or less) constitutional government. Few people could be confident that this time around the three Commissioners would, like Sulla, step down voluntarily and retire into private life. What looked far more likely were further years of war as the reunited Caesarians fought