All right, Caesar's dead.
So, uh... where do we go from here?
Let's do some history.
If you were one of the handful of senators who have just forcibly perforated your Dictator
your first move would be to get the Pluto out of town.
See, the assassins thought that they were about to restore Rome to the full glory of the Republic
but they didn't count on Caesar's massive popularity among the Roman people.
Needless to say, they didn't quite get the warm welcome and round of applause
that they might have been hoping for.
So, Brutus, Cassius, and some others pulled a Pompey and hightailed it to Greece to build up an army.
Back in Rome,
Caesar's corpse is still sitting there all squidgy-like on the floor of the curia,
part of the Senate's gone, and most of what's still there didn't really like Caesar.
So, we've got a power vacuum on our hands.
The current consul, Marcus Antonius, Caesar's trusted friend and ally, attempted to brand himself
as Caesar's avenger against the assassins in order to rally the people to his side and fill that power vacuum.
As Consul, he was able to work out a compromise
so that the assassins would be granted a general amnesty so long as Caesar's reforms stayed in place.
The problem for him, like Caesar, was that even though the people liked him,
the Senate -- and Cicero in particular -- very much did not.
So after his consulship ended, Antony bailed to go be governor of Cisalpine Gaul.
So with Rome divided between dumpster fire and more overtly treasonous dumpster fire
let's leave all manners of fire behind us and jump over to Augustus, who at
this point, was named the rather less august "Gaius Octavianus" after his father.
For clarity, historians typically call the pre-imperial Augustus by "Octavian" instead, and so will I.
Octavian was the great nephew of Julius Caesar
and they were decently close for not being biologically-related.
At the time of the assassination,
He was studying astronomy off in Epirus in Greece,
and after learning that Caesar had died, Octavian rushed back to Rome.
Upon reaching Italy, he read Caesar's will and promptly acquired the single most valuable thing
that Caesar could possibly have given him: his name.
From that day on, Gaius Octavianus was now known to everyone as Gaius Julius Caesar,
the officially adopted heir to the big man himself.
And that was huge.
So now, Gaius "Little Caesar's" Octavian
and Mark "I'll Bang Anything That Moves and Drink Whatever Doesn't" Antony
were both in the race to become Caesar's avenger against the assassins.
This was important for both of them because that role
would entail not only glory, but a buttload of power.
The short of it is that Octavian was successful in this because he
was a brilliantly crafty manipulator of iconography and cultural symbolism
and he even convinced all of Rome that Caesar had become a god.
The next handful of political movements are honestly needlessly complicated,
but the gist is that most people wanted to be on the winning side regardless of which side that was
so the alliances were almost constantly shifting.
Anyway,
Octavian was probably the one encouraging Cicero to give all those angry speeches against Antony
and then after Antony skipped town and went north, he had to fight with the current governor of the province
-- who was another of Caesar's assassins.
The Senate, being markedly anti-Caesar
sided with the governor and against Antony, and declared him an enemy of the state.
The senate wanted to send a legion or two to deal with Antony but they didn't have an army.
Octavian, however, had promised Caesar's veterans that he could pay them if they remained loyal to him.
So Octavian, interestingly, buddied up with the Senate to go fight Antony
which on paper makes no sense because, you know, the whole "Caesar's avenger" business.
In practice, however, Octavian was very pragmatic
and if helping the anti-Caesar Senate fight the pro-Caesar Antony seemed politically-expedient to him
you'd bet he'd do it in a heartbeat.
As such Octavian and the two consuls that year went to fight Antony up at Mutina.
The result was that Octavian's senatorial army won,
but both consuls were killed in the battle.
When the Senate asked Octavian to give up his army, he said
[mocking chuckle]
"That was a good one! No."
and then allied with Mark Antony to march on Rome with eight legions
and politely request that the Senate declare him consul, or else.
And they did.
The Senate begrudgingly complied and Mark Antony hopped over to Spain to meet up
with his Caesarian political ally, Marcus Lepidus.
Meanwhile, anybody remember Pompey?
You know, first triumvirate, fought a civil war with Caesar, decapitated on an Egyptian beach?
Yeah, that guy.
So, the Senate granted his son, Sextus, command of the Republic's entire navy and Sicily as a base.
Also, Brutus and Cassius are still happily serving as governors of Macedonia and Syria, respectively
just doing their thing
having fun, building up armies, all that jazz.
The Senate sure got a really good deal out of that amnesty agreement.
Fun times.
Following the misunderstanding up at Mutina,
Octavian buddies up with Mark Antony and his friend Lepidus
and forms the Triumviri Rei Publicae Constituendae
in English, the Triumvirate for the Reconstitution of the Republic
and in smaller words the Three Guys for Making Rome Not Having a Civil War Again
team.
Unlike the First Triumvirate
-- which was an informal political alliance between Pompey, Crassus and Caesar --
the Second Triumvirate created by plebiscite was a legally recognized entity
that gave each Triumviri full dictatorial power.
So everything they said or did was law.
Now, what exactly reconstituting the Republic means is up for debate
but as far as the triumvirate was concerned, the most important matter
was taking care of Brutus and Cassius in the east
and financing the armies necessary for that would have been quite expensive.
The Senate would likely have disagreed with this
because, in their eyes, the formation of the triumvirate was nothing more than the plebeian assembly
handing over Rome to a few would-be Caesars playing dictators.
So, the triumvirate had to contend not only with the remote threat of the assassins
but also with the local hostility in the Senate.
So, they killed two birds with one stone, quite literally.
The triumvirate pulled a page right out of Sulla's book and drafted up a list of Rome's enemies
which conveniently contained about 300 wealthy anti-Caesarian senators
and some 2,000 anti-Caesarian landowners in Rome
and set a bounty on them.
The kicker is that everyone's funds were confiscated when they were killed, so the triumvirate conveniently
accumulated insane amounts of money in the process of killing off all of their political enemies.
Their proscriptions started with that initial 2,000 some odd people
but rapidly balloons to double that.
They gutted over a third of the Senate.
This was...
[exasperated sigh]
...honestly pretty messed up.
I mean... it worked, but geez!
They killed Cicero and hanged his head in the forum!
There's no way to swing this where the triumvirate doesn't come out of this looking like horrible people.
Civil war is one thing, but this was domestic slaughter.
If my exasperated tone doesn't exactly convey what I'm feeling here
I have problems with the way that Octavian and the triumvirate ran things.
[we'll get to Pax Romana soon]
Anyway,
the next big event on the docket for the triumviri was
using their ill-gotten funds to finance a campaign against the assassins.
Antony and Octavian led their armies into Greece and met Brutus and Cassius at Philippi.
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar goes into a little more depth here,
but what matters to our boy Octavian is that Antony defeats Cassius
(who kills himself)
and Brutus overruns Octavian's camp
But, conveniently, Octavian didn't die because for some reason, he wasn't even there.
Spooky.
After that Antony comes back to Octavian's camp and defeats Brutus,
who also kills himself.
So, the triumviri win, but Antony did all of the hard work
and Octavian maybe, possibly, bailed from the battle altogether.
While I personally take much more issue with the proscriptions,
Philippi was by far the biggest disgrace in Octavian's career.
And you can see him trying to make up for it by representing himself through
specific military imagery for decades after the fact.
After Philippi, the Republic was somewhat (slightly) reconstituted, and
in the aftermath of a reconquered east and gutted Senate
the triumvirate were the biggest players in the Roman world.
They carved up Rome between east, west, and south,
with Octavian taking Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Illyria,
Antony taking Greece, Anatolia, Cyrenaica, and the Levant,
and poor old Lepidus getting Carthage and a little bit of the African coast.
(If you got the sense that Lepidus didn't matter
it's okay, because you're right:
he didn't.)
On paper, things were peaceful and stable,
but late Republican Rome being late Republican Rome,
it really wasn't.
I mean three people
I mean (two people)
each controlling a third of the Roman world,
each controlling (half) of the Roman world,
each controlling a third of the Roman world,
each of whom is looking to follow Caesar's example of unilaterally ruling Rome...
That's fine...!
Right?
Yeah...
I am
sure they'll be just
totally, perfectly, fine.
Anyway, join me next time to see how
the system stalls, collapses, and unsurprisingly careens into yet another civil war.
[The YouTube auto-captions left a "you" here when I was editing the subtitles. Weird.]