050 - The Donations of Alexandria

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 50, The Donations of Alexandria. Last week, we focused mainly on Octavian's trials in the West. So this week, I want to begin by tracing Antony's activities in the East before moving on to the final falling out between the two Triumvir colleagues. Because after failing miserably to conquer Parthia, Antony's status in Rome will plummet, leaving him vulnerable to political broadsides by Octavian, who will launch an all-out propaganda blitz against him. Neither being shrinking violence when it came to the game of power politics, the war of words escalated quickly into simply war.

As I said last week, 41 BC had opened with bad news for the Triumvirate. While Octavian dealt with the revolt cooked up by Fulvia and Lucius Antony, Mark Antony was faced with a preemptive strike by the Parthian Empire against Syria. For the next three years, Antony's legions would be forced to engage in a running war with the charismatic, popular, and brilliant Parthian prince Pacur. Before the Romans were able to react, the Parthians had overrun Syria and Judea and placed puppets on the thrones of both kingdoms. Constantly distracted by internal Roman politics and the preparations for his larger offensive, Antony left the prosecution of these initial Parthian campaigns to lieutenants, specifically a capable general named Ventidius.

In 38 BC, Ventidius was able to corner and kill Pacur in battle outside of Antioch, but he was curiously unwilling to follow up his victory and take an important Parthian stronghold on the Euphrates River. Word began to trickle back to Antony that Ventidius was accepting bribes to hold back his forces. So Antony relieved the general of command and headed out to take control of the situation himself. But with winter approaching and the city untaken, Antony prudently chose to withdraw the attack. Plutarch mentions that he took home with him some 300 Greek talents, a friendly gift from the Parthians that of course had nothing to do with him breaking off the siege.

In 37 BC, though, Antony was ready to go on the attack. Not only had he settled affairs with Octavian and renewed the triumvirate, but he also reaffirmed his alliance with Queen Cleopatra. As with the last time Antony and Cleopatra had established friendly terms with one another, the most recent summit produced another child. With all the money he would ever need and 100,000 troops finally organized and ready for action, Antony decided it was high time he put his stamp on the East. In the beginning, things went splendidly. Basing himself out of Antioch, Antony swept through Syria and brought the territory back under Roman control. With this reclamation, it was time to do something about the unsatisfactory political arrangements that had governed the East since the days of Pompey the Great. Specifically, Antony was tired of the weak-willed and half-hearted client monarchies which left Rome without buffer states it could really trust. So Antony deposed all the kings from Pontus to Judea, installing Hellenized monarchs he could trust. Men, it should be noted, who were not just loyal to Antony and Rome, but were capable administrators in their own right. Indeed, after Antony's suicide in 30 BC, Octavian would survey the political systems his dead colleague had left behind and see no reason to disrupt any of it.

In 36 BC, almost 20 years after Crassus had taken his shot at Parthia, and nearly a decade since Julius Caesar had begun planning his invasion, Mark Antony finally ordered 100,000 troops to march East. Rome was headed back into Parthia. The captured legionary standards of Crassus were still being held as trophies by the Parthian monarchy. Antony intended to get them back, by diplomacy if necessary, but hopefully by force. In the end, he never had the opportunity to use either. The invasion was a complete debacle.

Antony's legions set out in June and followed the route through Armenia laid out by Julius Caesar and the route that should have been taken by Crassus. But once in Parthian territory, Antony was, like Crassus before him, at the mercy of local guides. But this time, rather than leading him into a trap, his double-crossing native guides simply fed information to the Parthians about the location of the slow-moving and underguarded Roman baggage train, emphasizing particularly the slow-moving and underguarded nature of it. In a blow that crippled the whole enterprise, the Parthian cavalry arrived out of nowhere and set fire to the line of carts, wagons, and most importantly, siege works. Having spent months moving slowly towards the inner fortresses of Parthia, Antony was now in a bind. His plan had been to capture at least one of the major cities before the end of summer so he could establish winter quarters. But now, with his siege engines gone, he had no hope of capturing anything. With winter bearing down, Antony realized the whole invasion was irretrievably bolloxed. He ordered his stupefied men to turn around and head back to the Mediterranean.

The second great blow came when the Armenian king took the occasion of the smoldering baggage train to defect to the Parthians. Antony's only route home now lay through hostile territory. Winter set in across the hills and mountains of Armenia as Antony struggled to get his army home in one piece. While the Armenians prudently avoided outright attacking the Romans, they certainly didn't offer any aid or comfort to Antony's beleaguered army now dropping like flies in the harsh mountain snows. By the time they made it back to Antioch, 100,000 men who had left for Parthia were now 75,000. Antony had lost a quarter of his men and not even fought a single battle. He debated the pros and cons of suicide.

While his colleague was licking his wounds over the winter of 3635 BC, Octavian was riding high. Having defeated Sextus Pompey, his own stock had never been higher. But though he was no doubt already planning to eliminate Mark Antony from the picture, Octavian was content to let the older triumvir dig his own grave for a while. But until the time was ripe for a strike, Octavian had a problem. He couldn't afford to dismiss his legions, he would need them for the inevitable confrontation with Antony, but with Sextus gone, he had no real reason to keep them mobilized. So Octavian looked around for some trouble to get mixed up in and found the perfect excuse in Illyricum. I can't disband the legions, he told the Senate. I need them to fight those barbaric tribes in Illyricum who have long thumbed their noses at Roman rule. Yes, Illyricum, that's the ticket. So rather than being told where the retirement plots were located, Octavian's soldiers got word that they were needed for the war in Illyricum. What war in Illyricum, they asked. The war you're about to start, they were told, now get packed.

Illyricum was a wild country of fiercely independent tribes located in what is today the Balkans. So beyond giving him an excuse to keep his armies intact, pacifying the region would be a real propaganda coup for Octavian because Illyricum didn't just border the empire, it bordered Italy itself. Octavian spent the next two years off and on in the Balkans. He constructed a fleet to tackle the pirate havens off the east coast of the Adriatic and himself led the infantry all over the countryside, forcing tribe after tribe to acknowledge Roman rule. He penetrated as far as the Danube River, which Octavian dreamed one day would be the stable border of the empire. In the course of one siege, he even displayed some of the personal courage that had always been conspicuously absent from his career. While his men hesitated on a gangplank leading over a wall, Octavian and a few bodyguards rushed headlong across the short bridge. The episode mirrored a famous episode from the career of Alexander the Great, leading commentators even at the time to suspect that the entire scene was a publicity stunt engineered to dispose once and for all of the persistent rumors of cowardice. But whether intended or not, when reports of the incident made their way back to Rome, Octavian found his reputation greatly enhanced.

In 34 BC, while Octavian was entering his second year in Illyricum, Antony was ready to make amends for the shame of his disastrous invasion. He had spent the year and a half that had passed since returning from Parthia living with Cleopatra in Alexandria. The fact that he was still married to Octavia does not seem to have entered his head at all. Though she had always been a loyal wife, the bond between Antony and Cleopatra had grown far beyond a mere political alliance. Octavian privately, and pretty soon publicly, fumed at Antony's blatantly disrespectful treatment of his sister. What did it say about him that he would ignore a fine Roman woman in favor of some Eastern temptress? But regardless of what the chattering classes thought about it, Antony was perfectly content with his life in Egypt. Some said he had no intention of coming back to Rome at all, and really, why would he? He was passing his days in splendid luxury, ruling over half the known world. Alexandria was a rich, cosmopolitan, and rationally laid out city. In contrast to hot, crowded, noisy, and messy Rome, there was really no comparison.

Arriving in the Egyptian capital after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian himself would be smitten with the well-thought-out metropolis he found. But rather than dream of moving to Egypt, Octavian dreamed of reinventing Rome. For the duration of his rule over the empire, Octavian, later Augustus, would spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure trying to remake Rome in Alexandria's image, to turn the city of brick into a city of marble.

But while Antony slowly went native in Egypt, his sense of Roman honor had not deserted him. The betrayal of the Armenian king had not been forgotten, and as soon as the spring of 34 B.C. rolled around, Antony set out to remove the offending monarch. Flashing some of the old brilliance, he made short work of the Armenian army, and deposed the traitor king without too much difficulty. The victory in Armenia, however, would finally expose the growing distance between Mark Antony and the Roman people. Rather than finding some random capable noble to reign as the new king of Armenia, Antony placed his own son Alexander on the throne. An even greater affront than the simple dynastic implications of the appointment was that Alexander was Antony's son with Cleopatra, not Octavia. And it only got worse after that. When he returned home to Alexandria, he staged a triumph to celebrate the victory. Never in history had a triumph taken place outside of Rome itself, and Roman opinion was scandalized.

And as if the triumph itself wasn't bad enough, at the culmination of the event, Antony read a loud proclamation that has since become known as the Donations of Alexandria. Just as he had awarded control of Armenia to Alexander, he announced his intention to give Cyrenaica and Libya to Alexander's twin sister Selene, and granted his youngest son Syria and Cilicia. He declared Cleopatra to be the queen of kings, and in the most provocative move of all, named Caesarion Julius Caesar's son by Cleopatra, king of Egypt, king of kings, and crucially, the true heir of his father.

When Octavian and the Senate heard about this series of proclamations, they erupted in outrage. Antony had gone off the reservation, and was now putting his illegitimate children in control of Roman provinces. He was, in short, turning the Eastern Empire into his personal kingdom. Octavian, though, as much as he railed against Antony in public for his monarchical ambitions, was not nearly so concerned about what child technically ruled what province, and who was inheriting what. What troubled him was the massive navy Antony was constructing. All the military spending Antony had been undertaking of late was ostensibly for his planned reinvasion of Parthia, but you have to wonder, who needs 400 ships to invade the Iranian plateau? And of course, when you got all the way to the inner circle, the threat of Caesarion was acutely felt. Octavian's whole career was predicated on being the heir of Julius Caesar. True, in recent years, he had established himself as his own man, but still, people were following Gaius Julius Caesar for a reason. If the claim of Caesarion's legitimacy began to gain traction, it could threaten the whole project.

Now, in Octavian's inner circle was, of course, Agrippa, but there was also another man of equal importance, who I have thus far inexcusably neglected. Gaius Macinus was about seven years older than Octavian and Agrippa, but he had fallen in with the two ambitious youths early on. He had been with Octavian in Apollonia when news of Julius Caesar's assassination came, and he had been a powerful force behind the scenes throughout Octavian's rise to power. Just as Agrippa was Octavian's chief military advisor, Macinus was his chief political advisor. He had been the guiding force behind Octavian's first marriage to Scribonia, as well as arranging the treaties of Brundisium and Tarentum that had avoided potential civil war with Antony. While Agrippa and Octavian were off fighting battles, it was Macinus who was left behind to oversee things in Rome, much like Antony had been left in charge of the capital during the campaigns of Julius Caesar.

Much like Antony, too, Macinus had a penchant for extravagant, indulgent living, but where Antony embraced violent extremes, Macinus was actually a moderating influence on some of Octavian's more bloodthirsty tendencies. His love of soft living and the arts, though, were unmatched, which led to a tense relationship with the stolid, battle-hardened, and humorless Agrippa. In the end, the two were held together only by their mutual loyalty to Octavian, but both proved to be indispensable to their master's success. Agrippa's role was obvious. He won the great battles that put Octavian in power. But for example, it was Macinus' patronage of the arts that was the key to the cult of personality that would surround Caesar Augustus and keep him in power. Macinus cultivated the leading artists and poets of the day, specifically Horace and Virgil, and engaged them in a great project to perpetually glorify his boss. In the words of Antony Everett, Macinus somehow managed to keep them all on message without resorting to the heavy hand of censorship, which is, I can assure you, no mean feat when dealing with independent creative types.

In our discussions of the reign of Augustus, we will have much more to say about both Macinus and Agrippa, who will play as much a role in the imperial administration as they had played in establishing it.

At least from the time the donations of Alexandria were announced, the three old friends were actively plotting war with Antony. The trick was to bait him into making the first move so Octavian would not look like the aggressor. Octavian slated himself to hold the consulship for 33 BC, and from that position, he planned to do everything in his power to turn Rome against Antony. On the first day he presided over the Senate, Octavian let loose with the most inflammatory attacks he could think of. Antony was living in sin with Cleopatra in the East. Antony had betrayed the honor of blameless Octavia. Antony had illegally executed Sextus Pompey without trial. Antony started wars with foreign powers without the consent of the Senate. Antony was making himself a king. In short, Antony was the enemy of all that was good, pure, and decent about Rome.

For the rest of the year, Octavian and Antony were engaged in a war of words for the hearts and minds of Romans everywhere. Antony sent letters back to the Senate that were read aloud by his supporters, claiming that Octavian had forged the adoption papers of Julius Caesar, that he was consumed with a megalomaniacal lust for power, that he was a low-born provincial who had lied, cheated, and stolen his way up the political ladder. It was also whispered that Octavian had engaged in unnatural relations with his uncle on his way back from Spain in order to win Caesar's favor.

When 32 BC came around and Octavian's turn in the consulship ended, the propaganda war had played out to a near stalemate. But in provoking the confrontations, Octavian had succeeded in at least one important respect. With the triumph of an expiring December 31, 33 BC, there was no chance now that it would be renewed. The ten-year-old partnership was officially dissolved. Now the facade of collegial alliance could be dropped. They were rivals and enemies. It was time for everyone to come right out and say it.

Octavian even used the occasion of the triumvirate's expiration to hit Antony with a solid body blow. He made sure he was out in front, declaring that he would no longer be addressed as triumvir as he had been for the last decade. That was all in the past. The preeminence of the consuls in the Senate had returned to Rome for good. When Antony, though, refused to give up the title he had grown accustomed to, Octavian pounced, arguing that Antony had no legal standing, no right to the title, and technically no official role in the state whatsoever. If he continued to wield executive power in the East, he was doing so illegally and usurping the power of the Senate and the consuls. He saved his best for Cleopatra, who he built up as some sort of evil sorceress who had hypnotized Antony and controlled him like a puppet. It was important that Octavian lay as much at the feet of Cleopatra as he could. He was hoping to induce the Senate into declaring war, and he knew that they would find it far easier to direct their ire at an evil foreign queen than at Mark Antony himself, who had spent his entire adult life in the service of Rome.

Unfortunately for Octavian, many in the Senate weren't having these over-the-top accusations and were not ready to abandon Antony just yet. And in fact, by a stroke of luck, the two consuls for the year 32 B.C. also happened to be Antony loyalists. They denounced Octavian for his slander and introduced a resolution to censure young Caesar. Unwilling to accept the rebuke, Octavian was forced to reveal what everybody already knew, that despite having given up his triumvir title, he was not giving up on power. He unilaterally and illegally called a meeting of the Senate and addressed the charges brought against him, conspicuously flanked by armed bodyguards. This proved to be a fatal breach of protocol. In protest, fully one-third of the Senate packed their bags and left Rome, headed for Alexandria. Included in their ranks were the two consuls, who took with them all the official executive authority of the state. Octavian, who had for years been claiming his subservience to the Constitution, was now forced to reveal his true colors. He didn't give a whit about the Constitution. He had no official position within the state, but there was no doubt about it. Octavian ruled Rome.

Later in the year, he received a gift from the East. A high-ranking defector from Alexandria brought with him the pretext that Octavian could use to finally induce a declaration of war on Antony. It seems that Antony had recently lodged a will in the Temple of the Vestas, the contents of which, if known, would finally reveal the depths of his abandonment of Rome. Antony demanded that the Vestal Virgins produce the document, but citing sacred oaths, they refused. Undeterred, Octavian simply stormed the Temple and seized the will. Romans everywhere were shocked by this unthinkable violence against the Temple, but when Octavian began reading passages of the document aloud, they soon forgot all about Octavian's sacrilege. Antony had left large portions of his estate to his illegitimate children, reaffirmed the claim that Caesarion was the true heir of Julius Caesar, which was, it should be noted, an impossibility within Roman law, as Cleopatra was not a citizen. But most shocking of all, he requested to be buried in Alexandria, rather than Rome.

Octavian argued that Antony had betrayed his Roman heritage, and that it was high time for the Senate to recognize that he was an enemy of the state. Moved by the revelations contained in the will, the Senate, well, two-thirds of the Senate anyway, declared war on Egypt. The moment of truth had come. Octavian and Antony were finally going to face off in battle. The prize? Sole control of the Roman Empire.

Antony knew what was coming down the pike as soon as a third of the Senate showed up on his doorstep. The 400 ships he had built for the invasion of Parthia were soon sailing for Greece. In a crucial development, Antony decided not to lead the fleet all by himself, but appointed Cleopatra as co-general. There is no straight answer for why he chose to elevate Cleopatra to this high rank in the army, but the effect was almost wholly negative. The Romans who had fled Italy to join with Antony now found themselves subservient to a woman and a foreigner, a situation they found intolerable. This is in no way meant to knock the capabilities of Cleopatra, or get bogged down in comments on Roman misogyny, but is simply to point out that the Queen's position did prove to be a corrosive acid eating slowly at the heart of morale in the Antonian camp. But Antony ignored advice to leave her behind, or better yet, kill her and annex Egypt. And the two set sail for Greece, ready for the showdown with Octavian.

By the winter of 32-31 BC, the bulk of the Antonian fleet settled into the Ambrosian Gulf on the coast of the Ionian Sea. It was a curious choice of positions. When it came to strategically locating armies for east-west showdowns, the common assumptions was that the ports along the Adriatic were far more valuable. By stowing his fleet far to the south, Antony essentially ceded Octavian an opportunity to ferry ground forces from Brundisium over to Dyrrhachium. Historians have postulated that Antony was as concerned as Octavian about looking like an aggressor, and wanted to clearly signal that his intention was not to invade Italy, so he chose not to plant a huge navy off the coast of the peninsula. He may also have been concerned about keeping his supply lines from, and escape route back to, Egypt open. Whatever the final calculus that led to the decision was, the upshot was that with his fleet in the Ambrosian Gulf, when it came time to sail out in the spring, he would have to pass the small port town of Actium, which stood at the head of the narrow entrance to the Gulf.

Prior to their falling out, Octavian and Antony had been slated to share a year on the consul ship in 31 BC. With Antony persona non grata in Octavian's Rome, young Caesar took his position as senior executive without Antony in the way. Octavian began to claim, not totally inaccurately, that traitorous Mark Antony was leading a foreign army against the legitimate government of Rome. It was true that Antony served no official capacity, and that his legions were led and recruited largely from the east, while Octavian, as the rightful consul, was leading armies drawn from Italy itself. But at this point, everyone knew what the score was. No one bought the hype that one side was fighting for Rome and the other side against Rome, or for the constitution or against the constitution. This was just two powerful men using the resources of the empire to decide once and for all which one of them would run the whole show.

Octavian and Agrippa decided that their best shot against Antony, who, despite all their propaganda and slanders, they never once underestimated as a military commander, was to act boldly. Antony had set up a critical supply hub at Mithone in the southwest Peloponnese. If the city could be taken, Antony would find himself without access to fresh supplies and susceptible to a maritime siege of Actium. So in March of 31 BC, before the winter was out, Agrippa led a daring run through the storming waters of the Ionian and launched a surprise assault on the city, capturing it before Antony could react. When the spring arrived, Octavian hastily ferried 50,000 ground forces across the Adriatic and marched them south. Suddenly Antony was trapped. Octavian's forces prevented him from marching his army overland out of the Embracian Gulf, while Agrippa's navy positioned itself off the coast and dared him to try to sail out of danger.

Antony recognized immediately what a disastrous position he was in. Just as with the failed Parthian expedition, he knew that his only hope was retreat. He had to get back to Egypt and regroup, or all would be lost. And he had to do it fast, too. His men were badly undersupplied and, trapped in confined quarters during the summer heat, were falling prey to disease, the great scourge of armies. To top things off, reports came daily listing off which high-ranking officials had slipped across the lines during the night. His allies and his gods were deserting him.

Next week, Antony will make a break for it. Though at the time the Battle of Actium was an important but not necessarily decisive victory for Octavian, history would soon be written by the victors to portray it as the great and final triumph of Octavian over the enemies of Rome.