Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Chronology of the Emperors

Maps

Prologue: A Night on the Palatine

1. Augustus, the Founder

2. Tiberius, the Tyrant

3. Nero, the Entertainer

4. Vespasian, the Commoner

5. Trajan, the Best Prince

6. Hadrian, the Greek

7. Marcus Aurelius, the Philosopher

8. Septimius Severus, the African

9. Diocletian, the Great Divider

10. Constantine, the Christian

Epilogue: The Ghosts of Ravenna

Photographs

Acknowledgments

Cast of Characters

Imperial Family Trees

About the Author

Notes

A Note on Sources

Index

Illustration Credits

To my students

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Ancient names are generally spelled following the style of the standard reference work, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Translations from the Greek or Latin are my own, unless otherwise noted.

All dates are AD unless noted otherwise.

CHRONOLOGY OF THE EMPERORS

THE REIGNS

All dates AD unless stated otherwise.

PROLOGUE

A NIGHT ON THE PALATINE

It is night on the Palatine Hill, a historic height in the heart of Rome. Imagine yourself alone there after the tourists go home and the guards lock the gates. Even during the day, the Palatine is quiet compared with the crowded sites in the valleys below. At night, alone and given an eerie nocturnal run of the place, could you rouse imperial ghosts?

At first sight, the answer might seem to be no. The breezy, leafy hilltop lacks the majesty of the nearby Roman Forum’s columns and arches or the spectacle of the Colosseum and its bloodstained arcades. The ruins on the Palatine appear as a confusing jumble of brick and concrete and misnomers. The so-called Hippodrome, or oval-shaped stadium, for example, is really a sunken garden, while the House of Livia did not belong to that great lady.

But look more closely. Give rein to your imagination, and you will understand why the Palatine Hill gave us our word palace. It was here on the Palatine that Rome’s first emperor planted the flag of power and where, for centuries, most of his successors each ruled over fifty million to sixty million people. It began as a modest compound for the ruler and his family and a temple to his patron god. Then it turned into a series of ever-grander domus, or houses. They were palatial estates used not only as homes but also for imperial audiences, councils, embassies, morning salutations, evening banquets, love affairs, old and new religious rituals, conspiracies, and assassinations.

In their day, they bespoke magnificence. Their walls were lined with colored marbles from around the empire. Their columns gleamed with Numidian yellow, Phrygian purple, Egyptian granite, Greek gray, and Italian white. Gilded ceilings rose high over tall windows and heated floors. One banquet room seated thousands while another revolved. Water flowed in fountains and pools fed by the Palatine’s own aqueduct. Some rooms looked over the chariot races in the Circus Maximus in the valley to the south, offering a kind of skybox.

Perhaps a modern night visitor to the Palatine could imagine a famous dinner party with the emperor at which one guest said he felt like he was dining with Jupiter in midheaven. Or a less pleasant banquet when the emperor had the walls painted black and the dining couches laid out like tombstones, leaving the terrified guests in fear of their lives—which were spared. Or we might remember the rumor that another emperor turned the palace into a brothel—a salacious but not very credible tale. We might think of the palace steps, where one emperor was first hailed and another announced his abdication. We might think of the grand entrance, where one new emperor’s wife proclaimed her resolution not to be corrupted, or the back door, where another emperor slinked home, barely escaping with his life from a food riot in the Forum. Or we might imagine a Senate meeting in a palace hall, with the emperor’s mother watching through a curtain. Or the covered passage where a crowd of conspirators murdered a young tyrant. They all happened here.

From the Palatine, the emperors ruled what they called the world, a vast realm stretching at its height from Britain to Iraq. Or at least they tried to rule it. Few excelled at the grueling job. The imperial administration took care of ordinary business, but crises proved a challenge. Many emperors turned out not to be up to the task. A few did extremely well. They brought to bear, in equal measure, ambition, cunning, and cruelty.

They brought family, too. The Roman emperors ran one of history’s most successful family businesses and one of its most paradoxical. In order to concentrate power in trusted hands, the imperial family made full use of its members, including women. As a result, mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and mistresses enjoyed what some might consider a surprising amount of power. But it was sometimes an unhappy family, with forced marriages common and infighting and murder hardly rare. It was, moreover, a family whose definition was loose and flexible. More emperors came to the throne from adoption than by inheriting it from their fathers, and not a few seized power in civil war. It was both the empire’s glory and curse that succession was often contested. It opened the door to talent and to violence.

The first emperor, Augustus, set the tone. Adopted by the founder of the family’s fortune, his great-uncle and Rome’s last dictator, Julius Caesar, Augustus had to fight a civil war in order to prevail. Indeed, his wife, Livia, eventually perhaps the most powerful woman in Roman history, was once a refugee in that war and had run away from the man she eventually married.

The following pages tell the story of ten who ruled. They were Rome’s most capable and successful emperors—or, in the case of Nero, at least one of the most titillating, and even he was a great builder. Success was defined variously according to circumstance and talent, but all emperors wanted to exercise political control at home, project military power abroad, preside over prosperity, build up the city of Rome, and enjoy a good relationship with the divine. And every emperor wanted to die in bed and turn over power to his chosen heir.

We begin with the founder, the first emperor, Augustus, and end about 350 years later with the second founder, Constantine, who converted to Christianity and created a new capital in the East, Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, Turkey). Roughly halfway in time between the two men came Hadrian, who called himself a second Augustus and who did more than most to make the empire peaceable and to open the elite to outsiders. Alas, Hadrian was also tyrannical and murderous. In that, he was not unusual.

From beginning to end, the Roman emperors resorted to force. They rarely hesitated to have rivals and dissidents killed. They depended on the army, which conquered the empire, defended it, and put down revolt with brutality. Even Marcus Aurelius, a philosopher-emperor who preferred the arts of peace and came to power with no military experience, devoted most of his reign to fighting on the frontier.

No less important, the army made and broke emperors. No emperor could rule without the soldiers’ consent. They mattered even more than the Roman Senate, those members of the elite who supplied the leadership class, at least at first. The emperors increasingly relied for administration on nonsenators, even on ex-slaves. The people of Rome also mattered to the emperors, but they were bought off with subsidized food and entertainment—not that life was ever easy for the poor, who made up the vast majority of the empire. Finally, the gods also mattered. Every emperor established peace with the gods, and more than a few introduced new gods while not rejecting the old. Constantine was different not in worshipping a new god but in turning his back on Rome’s ancestral deities.

But religion is embedded in culture, and the character of Rome’s culture would change mightily with the coming of monarchy. Between them, Augustus and his successor, Tiberius, accomplished a herculean feat. They turned the Roman Empire from conquest to administration. They took power away from the proud, militaristic, quarrelsome nobility and began to transfer it to bureaucrats, who came from less prestigious social classes. They decentered the city of Rome to the benefit first of Italy and then of the provinces.

Augustus’s successors added two new provinces to the empire by armed force; but these were minor border adjustments compared with the two previous centuries, when Rome conquered the entire Mediterranean and northwestern Europe. Conquering elites always burn themselves out and become more interested in money and pleasure than in expansion. Every empire declines without exception. However, the Romans did an excellent job of holding onto what they had won.

Behind a façade of sumptuous and extravagant rhetoric lay the heart of a pragmatist. That was the real Rome. The real Rome is found less in the periodic sentences of Cicero or the polished prose of Publius Cornelius Tacitus than in Tiberius’s giving up Germany without a backward glance or in the emperor Vespasian justifying a tax on public toilets with the observation that money has no smell. New blood and new gods; tough choices and strategic retreats: in order to survive as an empire, the Romans were willing to do whatever it took.

Eventually Rome lost its role as capital. The Western emperor ruled from northern Italy or Germany—and eventually there was a Western emperor as well as an Eastern emperor. Constantine’s predecessor, Diocletian, recognized that the empire was too big and its problems too great for one man to manage. Constantine, who carried the full burden, was an exception.

Rome outgrew itself, but that was one of the reasons for its success. Change was built into the very fabric of the system, not that it came easily or without bloodshed. New men rose to the top. The two middle emperors of the book, Trajan and Hadrian, were both born in Hispania, today’s Spain. Two generations later, the emperor Septimius Severus came from North Africa. He was of Italian-immigrant descent, as well possibly of mixed African and Middle Eastern ancestry, but not Diocletian or Constantine, both of whom came from the Balkans and had no Italian blood. New women rose, too: Severus’s wife came from Syria and Constantine’s mother from Asia Minor, today’s Turkey.

The lords and ladies of the Palatine proved in time to be more diverse than the empire’s founder could have imagined. Their voices are long stilled, many of their names forgotten. In some cases, their statues are lost or the ancients tore them down after revolution or scratched their images off paintings or stone reliefs. Yet we can call up their ghosts from literary texts and inscriptions, from art and archaeology, and from the scientific study of everything from shipwrecks to sewage.

The Romans live, and they do so not only in the imagination of a night on the Palatine.

Augustus, detail of Prima Porta statue.

1

AUGUSTUS

THE FOUNDER

Augustus is an icon, and well he should be. Few historical figures show better what it takes to win at everything. He ended a century of revolution, brought down the Roman Republic, and replaced it with the empire of which he was the first emperor. But Augustus is also a mystery. Fatherless at the age of four, he became one of Rome’s top political players by the age of nineteen. How did he do that—and so much more?

How did he overcome an opposition led by the most glamorous team in history, Antony and Cleopatra? How did a frail boy become a successful warlord, and how did he then turn into one of history’s most famous promoters of peace? How did he find the perfect number two: a partner to serve as his general and administrator without threatening the boss’s power? How did he manage one of the most productive but challenging marriages in history, to the brilliant, talented, and crafty Livia? How did he found a dynasty that lasted a century and an empire that lasted many centuries more?

Toward the end of his long life, Augustus answered some of these questions. On bronze pillars before his mausoleum in Rome, he had a detailed inscription erected that included this statement: When I had extinguished the flames of civil war, after receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the senate and the Roman people. For this service on my part I was given the title of Augustus by decree of the senate.

That was the official account. What was the real story? Let us begin with a young boy and follow his career.

ATIA’S BOY

He was born on September 23, 63 BC. We know him as Augustus, but it is customary to call him Octavian when referring to the first thirty-five years of his life. Only then did he take the name Augustus.

His father, Gaius Octavius, came from a family of strivers from a small town south of Rome. Octavius was wealthy and politically aspiring, but he lacked the noble heritage that most Romans, rich or poor, expected in their leaders. By nobility, the Romans meant a very small group: descendants of the consuls, the Roman government’s two annually elected chief magistrates. Octavius married into the nobility by wedding Julius Caesar’s niece, the daughter of the future dictator’s sister. She opened the doors to power for her husband and their young son. Her name was Atia.

Her marriage began well, with a move to Rome and a rise in the political ranks for her husband. Gaius Octavius seemed headed for the consulship, but he died suddenly in 58 BC on the way home from a trip abroad after a successful stint as a provincial governor. Atia was now a widow and had two children: Octavian and his older sister, Octavia.

To add to the fatherless young Octavian’s troubles, at least one of his guardians mismanaged or even plundered his inheritance. Yet the boy not only survived; he thrived. He had three things going for him: his mother, her family, and his own resilience.

Atia is one of history’s unsung heroines. True, we don’t see her in the round. We don’t know what she looked like, for no coin image or sculpture of her appears to have survived. Augustus’s now-lost Memoirs probably drew the portrait that survives in later Roman writing: of a chaste, old-school mother who exercised strict discipline and kept a close watch on her son’s upbringing. The sources reveal a woman who was shrewd, pragmatic, politic, and a relentless booster of her son’s career.

Roman mothers had to be boosters. Their husbands often predeceased them, leaving it up to the mother to fend for the children. Roman history is full of forceful mothers who pushed their sons ahead. Latin literature offers the example of the goddess Venus, who drives her son, Aeneas, forward to his divine fate of founding Rome. No wonder Roman men often revered their mothers.

Shortly after being widowed, Atia remarried, this time to another prominent public figure, a slippery character who managed not to commit himself to either side in Rome’s Civil War (49–45 BC) and yet still came out on top. Young Octavian might have learned more than a little of the art of deception from his stepfather. But Atia entrusted him to his grandmother Julia, Atia’s mother, who raised the boy under her roof during his formative years. Her brother, Julius Caesar, was in the process of conquering Gaul, an ancient country in the area now occupied by France and Belgium, and becoming the first man in Rome. Surely Julia wrote to him about the bright and ambitious youngster in her charge and how he did the family proud.

When Julia died circa 51 BC, Octavian moved to his mother and stepfather’s house, but he kept thinking of his famous great-uncle. It is said that Octavian was eager to join Caesar at the front in 46 BC, but Atia, who worried about the boy’s health, refused.

While Octavian grew up, Caesar was revolutionizing Rome, which had evolved into a proud, self-governing republic. The people and the elites shared power through institutions such as assemblies, courts, elected officials, and the Senate. That was the theory. In practice, the republic could not hold its own against a conquering general like Caesar and his tens of thousands of loyal soldiers.

When Caesar crossed the Rubicon River and marched from Gaul into Italy in 49 BC, he inflicted civil war on a country that had already suffered five decades of intermittent civil conflict, with roots in a crisis going back another two generations. Rome, it seems, was trapped in a maze of political, military, social, economic, cultural, and administrative impossibilities.

Only someone who could tame both the city of Rome and its empire could bring peace, order, and stability. Caesar was not that man. He was a conqueror, not a builder. But if Caesar couldn’t do it, who could?

Caesar had no legitimate son of his own, although he probably had sired a foreign prince born out of wedlock, Caesarion, son of Cleopatra. Instead, Caesar would choose another relative as his heir. He had several legitimate Roman nephews and great-nephews, but Octavian rose to the top.

Burning with ambition, Octavian was a natural politician: intelligent, charming, communicative, and handsome. Although not a born soldier, he was tenacious, cunning, and brave. He had an iron will. And he had Atia, who surely sang his praises to Caesar at every opportunity. She might have even told him a tale making the rounds that her son’s father was not really Gaius Octavius but the god Apollo, who in the form of a snake visited her in a temple, impregnated her, and left a permanent mark on her body. Only the gullible would believe this, but Caesar knew that the masses were gullible, and so he might have been impressed.

Caesar kept promoting his great-nephew. Around 51 BC, at the age of eleven, Octavian gave the funeral oration for his grandmother Julia on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum. Soon after turning fourteen, Octavian was named to an important religious office at Caesar’s request. At seventeen, Octavian marched through Rome in Caesar’s triumphs—his victory parades—for his conquests in Gaul and the Civil War. It was 46 BC, and Caesar honored the young man the way a triumphing general would normally honor only his son.

A prominent boy like Octavian had many friends, one of whom became his lifelong right-hand man: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Like Octavian, he came from a prosperous Italian family, although without a connection to the Roman nobility. What Agrippa had in abundance was practical genius. He was courageous, assertive, and, above all, loyal. To be sure, Octavian had a gift for making men follow him. In Agrippa’s case, Octavian went to his great-uncle and got Agrippa’s brother freed even though he had fought against Caesar. Agrippa was grateful.

In 45 BC Octavian became sick, and Caesar supposedly even visited his bedside before departing Rome to stamp out a rebellion in Hispania. Octavian faced chronic health problems and endured several major bouts of illness in his life, but until the very end, he always soldiered on. Soon the young man was on his feet again, and he left for the front. His small entourage probably included Agrippa but not Atia. She wanted to join them but Octavian turned her down.

Octavian arrived in Hispania too late for the fighting but reached Caesar after a dangerous trip through hostile country. This earned his uncle’s admiration—a quality that only increased during the several months that Caesar spent with the gifted young go-getter. It was Octavian’s chance to shine, and he used it well. When Caesar returned to Italy shortly afterward, he made Octavian his main heir and offered him posthumous adoption as his son.

By choosing Octavian as his successor, Caesar surely saw the seed of greatness. Yet when the news of Caesar’s choice came out, some found it hard to believe that a seventeen-year-old could persuade the most powerful man in the world to pick him without some underhanded ploy: sex. Octavian’s rival Mark Antony later accused the boy of having an affair with Caesar while in Hispania. On the one hand, this was just the kind of slander that Roman politicians dished out. On the other hand, Octavian was as handsome as he was ambitious, and rumor said that when Caesar was a teenager, he himself had gone to bed with a powerful older man. Yet both Caesar and Augustus were ladies’ men, so the tale is probably untrue.

When he returned to Rome, Octavian finally moved out but continued to live near his mother and stepfather, supposedly spending most of his time with them. He also continued his education in oratory, philosophy, and literature, in both Latin and Greek—the preferred curriculum of the Roman elite. Although war and revolution interrupted Octavian’s studies, he continued to read and to practice delivering speeches daily. At the age of eighteen, he is supposed to have given up sex for a year, which he thought would keep his voice strong. Perhaps it worked because in later years, he had a sweet, distinctive speaking voice unlike Caesar’s piercing vocal sound.

Caesar’s plan now was a three-year war of conquest in the East. He gave Octavian a big role by naming him, at the age of eighteen, his Master of the Horse, or second in command. Although this was in some ways a ceremonial position, it offered visibility and networking opportunities. The expedition was scheduled to begin in March 44 BC. Around December 45 BC, Octavian left Rome at Caesar’s command and, along with Agrippa, crossed the Adriatic Sea to Caesar’s military headquarters in what is today Albania. There Octavian made invaluable contacts with legionary commanders.

But the Ides of March changed everything. On that day, March 15, 44 BC, a conspiracy of more than sixty prominent Romans, led by Marcus Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, and Decimus Brutus, assassinated Caesar at a meeting of the Senate.

Suddenly Octavian’s closeness to Caesar made him a target. Atia was in Rome when Caesar’s will named her to organize his funeral. But her first priority was Octavian, and she immediately sent a messenger to him across the Adriatic. Octavian was considering the possibility of launching an armed revolt at the Adriatic headquarters. Atia disagreed strongly. She knew that Rome was the key, and she urged Octavian to return there. She wrote that now he had to be a man and consider prudently what he had to do and do it according to fortune and opportunity. After consulting his friends and advisors, Octavian agreed and sailed back to Italy.

What a loss for Octavian Caesar’s death was. The man who had stepped in to become Octavian’s father, and who had gone out of his way to give him his sense of potential greatness, had been murdered. In a traditional Roman gesture of mourning, Octavian grew a beard. But sorrow was not his only emotion; he also felt fear, anger, and a lust for vengeance. Yet Caesar’s death was an opportunity as well as a blow. Octavian was now the head of the family, as well as heir to Rome’s dictator. But he had to fight for his inheritance.

MY NAME IS CAESAR

November 44 BC

The Forum, Rome, the plaza that was Rome’s civic center

Octavian gave a speech that he later proudly circulated. It was a defining moment. He stretched his right hand out to a statue of Julius Caesar and swore by his hopes of attaining his adoptive father’s honors. He had just turned nineteen but had already claimed all the power and glory of Rome’s former dictator for life. Men have been sent to mental hospitals for less.

Megalomania it might have been, but after six months of hustling, Octavian was making progress. As Atia advised, he had hurried back to Italy. He was cautious and obedient enough to consult his mother and her husband but too ambitious to accept their advice to proceed slowly—or even, as his stepfather supposedly said, to turn down Caesar’s inheritance and retire from public life when he had barely entered it.

Rome was full of enemies. The consul Mark Antony was in charge of the city, and Caesar’s assassins were regrouping after a temporary setback. They had little use for Octavian. Neither did Antony. At thirty-nine years old, Antony was in the prime of his life. Son of a noble Roman family, he was a superb general, a cagey politician, and an excellent orator. Strong and handsome, Antony took as his patron deity Hercules—a symbol of responsibility and justice as well as military prowess. Antony looked down on Octavian. As a distant relative and longtime associate of Caesar’s, Antony considered himself the slain dictator’s rightful successor.

But Octavian was determined. He wanted honor and glory, and he didn’t care what they cost. He was ready to fight. He wasn’t going to mourn Caesar; he was going to avenge him. No, he was going to be him. He began the process of finalizing the adoption that Caesar had offered him in his will. Although we’ll continue to call him Octavian, he now called himself Caesar. He adopted the name as easily as if he had been born to it. Not only that, but he treated it like a talisman of power, as if it already had the weight of centuries behind it. His mother was the first person to address him as Caesar, but she would not be the last.

Octavian was audacious but not impetuous, and violent without being wild. After her own initial doubt and indecision and having shown respect for her husband’s position, Atia changed her mind: she decided to give her full support to Octavian’s ambition. But she advised cunning and patience, and Octavian now agreed. He moved strategically and showed people only what he wanted them to see. He was mysterious, so it seems appropriate that for a part of his career he sealed documents with the image of a sphinx; later on, he replaced it with his own likeness. (A later emperor called Augustus a chameleon.) The sources say that Octavian got his sphinx seal from Atia, which brings us back to the god Apollo, his supposed heavenly father, as the Romans associated the sphinx with that deity.

The sphinx knew how to tempt people, starting with his stepfather’s neighbor in his country villa on the Bay of Naples. This was Rome’s greatest living statesman: Marcus Tullius Cicero. Of all the statesmen of the ancient world, none speaks to us more intensely than Cicero. His tongue was eloquently persuasive; his hands wrote ceaselessly; his heart beat for the republic, whose last decades his career spanned. His orations still sparkle, his letters lay bare the political maneuvering of the age, and his philosophical works practically invent Latin political thought.

As a politician, Cicero enjoyed mixed success. He put down a revolt during his term of office as consul, but, along the way, he executed five Roman citizens without benefit of a trial, which later forced him into temporary exile. After vacillating in the Civil War, Cicero received Caesar’s pardon and compliments on his literary works, but he found the door to power slammed shut. Following the Ides of March, Cicero came out of retirement and supported the assassins. Now Octavian convinced Cicero that he, Octavian, could restore the liberty that Caesar had curbed.

On the face of it, that seems naïve. Cicero wanted to save the republic from another military dictator like Caesar. Octavian wanted to be that dictator. Had the old man gone soft? No. He knew that Octavian was a risky bet, but he thought it worth taking. Cicero considered Antony older, more experienced, and more dangerous than young Octavian, while Octavian feared no man. So Cicero and Octavian made an alliance of convenience, and then the real question was who would dump whom first and come out on top.

Octavian’s youth turned out to be an advantage. Since he had little investment in the old system, he had little inhibition about upending it.

Octavian was determined to push the issue with Antony. Hiding his real plans from his mother, Octavian went to southern Italy and lobbied for support among Julius Caesar’s former soldiers. He convinced three thousand veterans to come out of retirement and support him. This private army violated the law, but years later, he boasted of his action, which he rebranded as a way of saving the republic: At the age of nineteen at my own initiative and private expense I raised an army, by which I set free the republic which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.

The most important part of that army consisted of two veteran legions that Octavian’s agents lured away from Antony by offering more money and less discipline. The two legions suddenly gave Octavian the power to compete in a bloody game of maneuver. And they got the Senate’s attention.

With an armed showdown against Antony imminent, the Senate turned to Octavian and his legions. His claim of loyalty to the republic rang hollow, but his youth made him seem less threatening to the senators than Antony. In April 43 BC, the two sides clashed in two battles in northern Italy. Antony, a hardened warrior, hurled a charge of cowardice at Octavian, who had never seen combat before. Although Octavian was not a natural warrior, he was capable of courage. At the second battle in 43 BC, for instance, he heroically shouldered the eagle when his legion’s eagle bearer suffered a severe wound. In war, as in all else, Octavian displayed self-control. By way of illustration, consider that although he was in the company of soldiers, he drank no more than three glasses of wine at dinner—probably only about nine ounces.

The Senate’s armies were victorious and forced Antony to retreat. He crossed the Alps and withdrew to Gaul, but Octavian did not pursue him, as the Senate had wished. Octavian knew better than to trust the senators. When he heard that Cicero had said of him, The young man should be honored and lifted up—and out, Octavian was angry but probably not surprised. Antony regrouped by winning over the armies of Gaul. Meanwhile, Octavian decided to change course and support Antony.

The Senate was only a temporary ally, useful to confer Octavian legitimacy but hostile to his goal of attaining Caesar’s status. Antony made a better partner because he lacked the Senate’s attachment to the republic’s institutions. Besides, his new armies made Antony too strong for Octavian to defeat. So Octavian turned to Antony.

In the summer of 43 BC, Octavian sent a centurion (captain) to the Senate to demand that it name him consul, the highest office in the state and one customarily unattainable before the age of forty. He didn’t care about custom. The senators agreed reluctantly and then reneged, hoping vainly for new troops from abroad. They tried to take hostage Atia and Octavia, who were in the city, but the women fled for safety among the Vestal Virgins. The six Vestals were priestesses of an important state cult and lived in an official residence beside the Roman Forum. In part to protect them, Octavian, ever devoted to his family, hurried to Rome with his legions. He became master of Rome on August 19, 43 BC. Now liberated, Atia and Octavia embraced him.

Sadly, the reunion was brief, as his mother died sometime between August and November. Her husband probably died around the same time. Octavian persuaded the Senate to give Atia a public funeral, if persuaded is the right word for someone who won the consulship via military might. A public funeral was a rare honor. In fact, as far as we know, Atia was the first woman in Roman history to receive one. A poet wrote Atia’s epitaph. It says:

Here, stranger, the ashes of Atia, here the mother of Caesar / Is found; so ordained the Roman fathers that is, the Senate.

Atia had been indispensable as Octavian’s mother, advocate, and political advisor in his early crises. Even after death, she was recalled in literature. Even as a memory, Atia was a reminder of her son’s claim to nobility.

And in Rome, vengeance was a noble virtue, with Romans fearing its outcome but admiring its pursuit. Right after the Ides of March, the Senate had hammered out an amnesty for Caesar’s killers. Now Octavian tore it up. He had a law passed that set up a special court that condemned them to death. As a good son, he took Caesar’s murder personally.

Octavian invited Antony back to Italy and made peace. In October they met, along with Julius Caesar’s old ally Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and formed a three-man commission with dictatorial powers for five years, later renewed. They had over forty legions. They divided up the western part of the empire among them, while Brutus and Cassius, who had fled Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar, controlled the East. It was a coup d’état.

Less than two years after returning to Italy, Octavian had maneuvered his way through politics and war, outfoxed his competitors, and become one of the three most powerful men in the Roman Empire—all by the age of twenty.

When Julius Caesar conquered Rome, he followed a policy of clemency, pardoning his enemies. But his assassination suggested that clemency did not pay. Instead, the triumvirs chose proscription: a purge. They marked out around two thousand elite and wealthy Romans for death and confiscated their lands. Most escaped; probably around three hundred were killed. Cicero was the most famous casualty. Antony wanted his archenemy dead. Octavian said later he tried to save Cicero but, if so, he didn’t try very hard.

As part of his new alliance with Antony, Octavian married Antony’s young stepdaughter, Claudia. Her mother, Antony’s wife, Fulvia, was a formidable woman who had outlived two previous husbands—both politicians who died violently.

On January 1, 42 BC, Octavian took his devotion to his father’s memory up a notch and had the Senate declare Caesar a god, which allowed Octavian to call himself the son of a god. A law was passed to build a temple and institute the worship of the deified Julius Caesar. Four years later, in 38 BC, Octavian was acclaimed by his troops as imperator, or victorious general. He now became known as the victorious general Caesar son of a god.

At age twenty-four, Octavian had achieved great things. His ambition was boundless, his intelligence was keen, his judgment was sure, his work ethic was limitless, and his persuasion was winning. Like any young man, he felt emotion—above all, rage at his adoptive father’s murder—but he mastered the art of turning pain into strategy. And strategy, it became clear, was Octavian’s specialty. He always thought far ahead. He would have to, to face the trials that awaited.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

The showdown with Brutus and Cassius came outside the Greek city of Philippi in 42 BC. Octavian partnered with Antony, and the latter shone in the two battles that brought victory. Octavian had once again to face the charge of cowardice when, in the first battle, the enemy captured his camp but he had already fled. He said later that he was ill and had a vision warning him of danger. This was probably true, since Octavian faced recurrent medical challenges. But he recovered and issued the bloodthirsty command to cut off the head of Brutus’s corpse and send it to Rome to place at the foot of a statue of Julius Caesar as revenge.

Philippi was a tremendous victory for Antony and Octavian, but they still had to bring the Roman world under their control. After pushing aside Lepidus, Octavian and Antony divided the empire, with Antony taking the East and making his base in Athens, while Octavian ruled the West from Rome.

That left Octavian the unpopular task of confiscating civilians’ land in Italy to give to veterans. Antony’s wife, Fulvia, and his brother, Lucius Antonius, led the charge against him. She made an appearance with Antony’s children and his mother before the soldiers in order to keep their loyalty. (Octavian had recently divorced Claudia, claiming under oath that the marriage had never been consummated. No doubt this angered his former mother-in-law.) Octavian now had to subdue Fulvia. He surrounded her and Lucius and their army in the central Italian town of Perusia (modern Perugia). Fulvia got the backhanded compliment of having her name inscribed on her enemy’s sling bullets along with rude references to her body parts. Fulvia wrote to Antony’s generals in Gaul to ask them to hurry across the Alps to her aid, but it was too late. Octavian’s forces won. If the report is true and not just propaganda, Octavian then massacred a large number of enemy leaders on the altar of the deified Julius—on the Ides of March. Octavian supposedly met every request for mercy with a cold It’s time to die. But he let Fulvia and Lucius go free.

Antony, meanwhile, restored Roman control to the East, which Brutus and Cassius had left in turmoil. But Antony is known for something different during his time in the East: his relationship with Cleopatra, an affair not only of the heart but also of the sword and the purse.

Cleopatra was the most powerful, richest, and most glamorous woman of the era. Queen of Egypt, she was a female ruler in a male world. Like all of her ancestors in the three-century-old Ptolemaic dynasty, she was Greek (or, more precisely, Macedonian), even though she ruled Egypt. She was clever, cunning, educated, and seductive. Cleopatra had great physical presence. She was short and vigorous. She could ride a horse and hunt. She paid enormous attention to her public image. Greco-Roman portrait sculptures made her elegant, while coin portraits showed her as kingly and even slightly masculine.

Cleopatra exuded charisma, and Egypt’s capital, Alexandria, was an architectural marvel and a cultural magnet. Whichever man had Cleopatra had access to Egypt’s fabled wealth and to the mystique she created in the bedroom. Octavian had Caesar’s name, but Antony had Caesar’s mistress. In 41 BC Antony and Cleopatra began an affair that produced a set of twins. Nevertheless, with Fulvia having died of a sudden illness, Antony took a new wife: Octavian’s sister, Octavia. She was newly widowed herself and understood the way the game was played; the purpose of such a marriage was politics, not love. Yet Octavia seems to have enjoyed Antony’s charm. They had two daughters together whom she raised