Octavian vs Antony: The Civil War That Destroyed The Roman Republic

The man known to history as Mark Antony was born as Marcus Antonius Creticus on the 14th of January 83 BC in the city of Rome. He was named after his father, Marcus Antonius Creticus Senior, hailed from the Gens Antonia, a plebeian family. The plebeians were the lower rank of free Roman society, below the aristocratic patrician class and the equestrian class. However, the enormous expansion of the Roman state in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC had created a highly fluid social system, and many plebeian families had acquired wealth and political prestige as a result. The Antonia were amongst these upwardly mobile families, and Antony's grandfather had risen to important political offices within the Roman Republic, becoming a member of the Roman Senate, a governing official of the province of Cilicia in what is now southern Turkey in 102 BC, and then Consul of Rome three years later. Antonius' mother was a woman by the name of Julia, who hailed from an old aristocratic patrician family, the Gens Julia. She was also a cousin of one Gaius Julius Caesar, a young man of 16 at the time that Mark Antony was born. Caesar would be an integral figure in Antony's life story, as will become abundantly clear. She and Antony's father had several other children, notably two sons called Gaius and Lucius. Antony was born into a nation in turmoil. The Roman Republic had expanded from being a city-state that controlled a small stretch of territory in central Italy at the beginning of the 4th century BC, to first conquer most of the Italian peninsula, then expanding to become the dominant power of the Western Mediterranean in the 3rd century BC, and finally to expand into the Eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd century BC. Its conquests had made Rome a great power, however, it had also made its generals so powerful, that they, rather than the members of the Senate, the aristocratic parliament which controlled the Republic, had become the real power within the state. This was even more the case after Rome's most popular general, Gaius Marius, implemented a slew of reforms in 107 BC, which expanded and professionalized the Roman military, further concentrating power in the hands of the generals. Marius soon had a rival in the shape of Cornelius Sulla, and a quasi-civil war was being fought between the Marians and the Sullans into the 90s and 80s BC. During a period when the Marians were ascendant in the city in 87 BC, Antony's grandfather had been killed in a purge of Marius' enemies. The old general had died himself soon after, but the fight had continued as his son and Sulla entered into open war with one another in the spring of 83 BC, just weeks after Antony was born. When he was just an infant, Sulla's forces met the Marians at the Battle of the Colline Gate outside Rome in November 82 BC. Sulla emerged victorious and established himself as dictator of Rome thereafter. He would retire in 79 BC and died the following year, but the republic had been left in tatters by decades of instability, and it was clear to all that supreme power could be claimed by an individual if they had the ability and the ruthlessness to mimic Sulla's actions. While Mark Antony would never rule the Roman state, and so was not the subject, for instance, of Suetonius' biographical histories, a figure who wrote about every ruler of Rome from Julius Caesar down to the Emperor Domitian a century and a half later, he is still very well served by the primary sources we have available. Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars has much to say on Antony in his biographies of Julius Caesar and of Caesar Augustus. Antony features in Caesar's two surviving works on the BC, and he appears frequently in Cassius Dio's enormous History of Rome, written in the 3rd century AD. However, the foremost source material for Antony's life is found in the extensive Philippics, of the great orator and rhetorician Cicero, who composed a series of treatises condemning Antony in the aftermath of Caesar's assassination, and argued that Antony posed a enough threat to the Roman state that he should have been killed too, in addition to the Life of Antony, written by the great 2nd century AD Greco-Roman historical biographer Plutarch. It is an indication of Antony's historical importance that he was written about so extensively in ancient times, despite never actually ruling the Roman state. Antony had a difficult early life. As noted, his grandfather had been killed in one of the Marian purges a few years before he was born. Counter-intuitively, this benefited Antony's father, who with the defeat of the Marians years later, suddenly seemed like a faithful ally of Sulla's faction. He began a steady ascent as an official thereafter, and in the 70s BC was given charge of a military command in the eastern Mediterranean, tackling the piracy which was rife throughout the region there. This disrupted Antony's early years, and then he was left fatherless when his father died on the island of Crete in 71 BC. Antony's mother remarried, though his stepfather, Publius Cornelius Lentulus, was a dubious influence on him. This chaotic family life, combined with the influence of a number of feckless Roman aristocrats, such as Gaius Scribonius Curio and Publius Claudius Pulcher, who were a few years older than Antony, led to him beginning to lead a dissolute lifestyle in Rome in the 60s BC as a young man, spending much of his time drinking, gambling and generally carousing, at a time when political figures like the Roman senator, Cato the Younger, were voicing concerns in the Senate about the breakdown of traditional Roman values and the growing self-indulgence of wealthier Roman families, of which Antony was seemingly a symptom. By the time he was entering his 20s, in the late 60s BC, Antony had already accumulated a large amount of debts around Rome, as a result of his immoderate behaviour. It didn't help matters when his stepfather was implicated in an attempted coup d'état, led by a Roman politician by the name of Lucius Sergius Catalina in 63 BC, and was executed as a result. With the family name battered and his creditor's insistence on repayment becoming louder, Antony decided it would be best to make himself scarce from Rome for a time. Hence he spent much of the first half of the 50s BC in the east, travelling to Athens, where he allegedly studied philosophy and rhetoric. He clearly wasn't attracted too much to the philosophical life, and soon joined a Roman military expedition that was travelling east to the Levant, to consolidate Rome's position in different regions at a time when Roman provincial government here was still embryonic, after the series of Roman conquests which had occurred here several years earlier. Antony's opportunism was on display when he inveigled his way into the inner circle of several senior Roman military commanders in the east, and pushed for a more aggressive policy towards Ptolemaic Egypt, one of the successor kingdoms to the empire of Alexander the Great, and the last major power in the eastern Mediterranean by that time to remain outside of Rome's control. It was during a foray into Egypt to support one of the royal factions here, during a quasi-civil war within the Ptolemaic dynasty, that Antony appears to have met a princess of that same royal household by the name of Cleopatra for the first time. She was around 14 or 15 years of age at that time, and four or five years later would become queen of Egypt, in association with her brother Ptolemy XIII. As Antony was growing up and as he fled to the eastern provinces and spent time there as a young man, the political situation across the republic was in a new period of flux. Sulla's retirement back at the start of the 70s BC and the defeat of the Marian faction several years earlier had created a vacuum within the state for new popular generals to emerge as powerful figures. The first to do so successfully was Pompeius Magnus, Pompey the Great, a general who in the late 70s BC and into the early 60s BC won a series of great wars in the eastern Mediterranean against the Kingdom of Pontus and the Seleucid Empire, conquering much of Anatolia and Syria in the process. Back home he became a hugely powerful and popular figure. He had rivals for power though, notably Marcus Crassus, reputedly the wealthiest man in the Roman world, and Antony's distant cousin Julius Caesar, a dangerous populist who had stirred up the Roman people to support him through a series of provocative acts and election campaigns in the late 60s BC. Together these three formed a political alliance to share power at Rome, one known as the First Triumvirate. In the course of the 50s BC though, Caesar would begin to eclipse his rivals as he undertook a series of rapid conquests north of the Alps against the Celtic tribes of Gaul, the ancient name for what is now France and the Low Countries. Crassus was killed in 53 BC on campaign in the east, and with Pompey's glory days seemingly long behind him, Caesar was the ascendant figure within the Roman Republic. Antony would now gravitate towards his cousin. By 54 BC, Antony had made his way back from the east to Rome, and from there travelled north over the Alps to find Caesar, who at that time was in the north of the region in between two reconnaissance missions in which he crossed the English Channel to Britain to evaluate whether the island could also be conquered, the Romans knowing little about it. When he joined Caesar's army in Gaul, Antony rose quickly within it. Caesar warmed instantly to him, and he would become one of his closest allies. He appointed Antony as one of his senior commanders, and there too Antony quickly won the affection of his troops by appearing to live much as the common legionary did. Over the next two years he would serve in Gaul. From Caesar's book on the Gallic Wars, we learn that Antony was present at the siege of Alesia in September 52 BC, the defining conflict of the Gallic Wars, in which a grand coalition of the Celtic tribes of Gaul, led by a warlord named Vercingetorix, were defeated by Caesar and his legions. Victory at Alesia crushed the resistance of the Gallic tribes, and thereafter Caesar spent the next year or two largely reorganizing the vast territory he had conquered into new Roman provinces. It was most likely sometime after his return to the western provinces that Antony married Antonia Hybrida Minor, a woman who came from a mix of patrician and plebeian background. Historians of Rome have long debated if this was Antony's first marriage or not. Years later, Cicero claimed that Antony had briefly been married to a woman named Fadia in his youth. However, it is unclear if this was true or not, as Cicero may have been trying to smear Antony by suggesting he had married the daughter of a freed slave. Whatever the truth of his possible brief first marriage, we know that his marriage to Antonia Hybrida would result in a daughter named Antonia. Plutarch, who was always fond of capturing the personalities of his subjects, gives us a good insight into Antony at this time, describing him as quote, having a noble dignity of form, and a shapely beard, a broad forehead, and an aquiline nose, were thought to show the virile qualities peculiar to the portraits and statues of Hercules. Whenever he was going to be seen by many people, he always wore his tunic girt up to his thigh, a large sword hung at his side, and a heavy cloak enveloped him. There were other elements to his character, though, beyond this noble bearing. Plutarch stated that many people found his jesting and boastfulness offensive, yet there was no doubt that he was able to win the affection of the soldiers he commanded, something which came from having both a common touch and also through his liberal distribution of money to the legionaries. Nevertheless, Plutarch concluded he was possessed of, quote, countless faults. With victory at Alesia, Caesar determined that Antony should head to Rome and begin his own political career. Caesar's long absence in Gaul had allowed Pompey and the aristocratic faction which supported him within the Senate to begin trying to undermine him in the capital. Caesar had responded by building up his own faction at Rome. He now sent Antony to join them, in large part in response to the murder of Antony's old friend Publius Claudius, in Italy that year, Claudius having acted as one of Caesar's principal supporters in the capital for years, while he was in Gaul. At Rome, Antony quickly began his ascent through the series of political offices which marked the career progression of any Roman politician. He was quickly elected as a quaestor. This was a low-ranking political office with responsibilities for the municipal government of the city of Rome. Crucially, quaestors were automatically given a seat in the Senate, and so Antony now entered the main deliberative body of the Roman Republic. Here he was able to position himself as a leading figure in the popularis faction amongst the hundreds of senators. The popularis were those who looked towards popular support amongst the people of Rome for their power, and largely supported Caesar against the optimates, the faction of the more traditional, aristocratic senators who favoured Pompey and were broadly led by figures like Cato and Cicero. These were not political parties in the modern sense, but they were important for the struggle which would very soon rip apart the Roman Republic. Antony remained in Rome throughout the late 50s BC. This was a period of growing tension across the city, as Caesar used figures like Antony to stir up the Roman people into mobs, which called for his political power to be increased. This was in response to efforts by Pompey and his supporters in the Senate to undermine Caesar, principally by plotting to recall him from Gaul and remove the eight legions which he controlled there, an army of 40,000 men which the optimates were now worried Caesar could refuse to relinquish control of when his governorship of Gaul ended. In this environment, Antony was elected to be one of the tribunes of the people for 49 BC, an important office junior only to the consulship, the senior most magistracy in the Roman Republic. Matters boiled over in the first days of January 49 BC, during debates in the Senate, where Cato and other optimates moved to have Caesar recalled from Gaul with the clear intention of prosecuting him for exceeding his authority as governor there. Antony responded in the Senate by stating that Caesar would agree to return to Rome if he was promised the command of two legions and the governorship of Illyrium, around what is now Croatia, along with immunity from prosecution. Although Pompey was inclined to agree to these requests, Cato and other leaders of the optimates refused and Antony fled northwards. He met Caesar just north of the Rubicon, a river east of modern day Florence, which was the boundary beyond which legions were prohibited from moving any closer to the city of Rome. Here, after conferring with Antony on the political situation in Rome, Caesar decided compromise was impossible, and on the 10th of January 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon, signalling the beginning of civil war. The civil war which began in 49 BC is often depicted as a clash between Caesar and Pompey, and this is accurate to a certain extent, but it might more accurately be said to have been a conflict in which an alliance of traditionalists and aristocratic conservatives in the Senate, led by Pompey and Cato, attempted to prevent Caesar, a populist demagogue, from seizing control of the Roman state, abetted by enforcers and henchmen like Antony. The war would last several years, with regional clashes between legions and governors who had declared their support for Caesar and pockets of Pompeian resistance. The main clash though took place in Greece in 48 BC, after Pompey retreated there with his senatorial supporters and began preparing an army for a potential invasion of Italy. Caesar followed him to Greece, and at the Battle of Pharsalus on the 9th of August, he inflicted a severe defeat on the events, including Caesar's own account, were clearly written to exaggerate the extent of his military genius at Pharsalus. Pompey fled in the aftermath of it to Egypt, where the Ptolemaic government had him murdered in order to acquire the favour of Caesar. Cato seized control of part of North Africa and attempted to hold it for the optimates' cause, but in 46 BC he killed himself there, rather than be captured. The civil war would drag on for years to come, with pockets of resistance around the Mediterranean, but after Pharsalus, Caesar would effectively become the ruler of the Roman state, ruling through the office of Dictatores, a constitutional power which granted a commander enormous powers to deal with military emergencies within the Roman Republic, from which the concept of a dictator in the modern sense derives. Antony played a major role in these affairs, commanding two of Caesar's legions at the Battle of Pharsalus, afterwards he returned to Italy with Caesar, who appointed Antony as magistere equitum, a term translating as master of the horse. This was an adjunct position to that of dictator, one which made Antony Caesar's second-in-command as master of the horse. It was an enormously important position, as the constitution did require anyone with powers of Dictatores to still have the agreement of the magistere equitum to make major decisions. It was an indication of the trust which Caesar reposed in Antony. So too was Caesar's decision to appoint him as governor of Italy in 47 BC, effectively leaving him in control of the government at Rome, while Caesar left for North Africa to militarily campaign against some of the remaining groups of optimates and Pompeians there. This period was one of shifts and turns in Antony's personal life, in ways which overlapped with his position within the new political dispensation. Around the time he was appointed as governor of Italy, Antony became suspicious that his wife Antonia was engaged in a relationship with Publius Cornelius Dollabella, an important senator who had first sided with the Pompeians at the start of the civil war, but later changed sides to support Caesar. When he learned of the affair, Antony divorced Antonia and quickly married Fulvia, a woman of the Roman aristocracy who had probably been his mistress for several years by then, and who was the widow of Clodius, Antony's old friend and Caesar's ally, who had been murdered back in 52 BC. The incident also caused Antony to oppose legislation which Dollabella brought before the Senate concerning the alleviation of debts incurred during the civil war and in Antony blocked this. Whether he did so out of spite or to benefit himself in some way is unclear. What is clear is that this was just one example of Antony's mishandling of the government in 47 BC and 46 BC, while Caesar was absent from Rome. When the dictator returned to the Eternal City, he found the political atmosphere tense, and there was a cooling of relations between Caesar and Antony for a time on account of Caesar's perception that Antony had acted poorly as his understudy while he was in North Africa. In time, the relationship between Antony and Caesar healed, though at the same time it was clear that Caesar was also grooming his great-nephew, a boy named Octavian, who was entering his late teens and showing considerable promise as a This did not mean that Antony stopped accumulating power of his own. He was, for instance, appointed by Caesar to serve as one of the two consuls for the year 44 BC. We will never know exactly what political dynamic might have prevailed with Octavian growing up with his great-uncle as dictator of Rome, however, for in the spring of 44 BC, Caesar was assassinated at a meeting of the Senate by a cohort of senators opposed to Caesar's decision just weeks earlier to extend his power of dictatores for the duration of his life. That day, the 15th of March, the Ides of March in the Roman calendar, Caesar was stabbed upwards of three dozen times and died on the spot of his attack. Caesar's death created more problems than it solved. On the surface of things, the man who had usurped the Republic and who, unlike Sulla over three decades earlier, had refused to relinquish his power once the civil war was over, was gone. However, Rome had also been robbed of its effective politicians, men like Cato, who might have been able to restore the Republic once Caesar was dead. Instead, there were many individuals seeking to simply take Caesar's place, Antony an Octavian chief amongst them. Antony initially fled from Rome, wary of a potential purge of Caesar's former allies. He eventually returned to the city, where he and another of Caesar's former allies, Marcus Lepidus, managed to negotiate an amnesty for anyone associated with the former regime. Antony went further in the weeks that followed, stirring up of people across Rome as he tried to present himself as Caesar's populist successor. He then employed his newfound power to attempt to coerce the government into granting him the governorship of much of Gaul. The Senate was understandably wary of placing Antony in the same position of military power which Caesar had held in the 50s BC, and so a military standoff ensued between Antony, who established a power base in the Alpine region in the autumn of 44 BC, and the Senate. Some historians have termed the clashes which followed a species of limited civil war between Antony and the government, one called the War of Mutina after a battle fought as part of it in 43 BC. As Antony was maneuvering to become Caesar's political successor, one of Rome's great literary figures and statesmen, the rhetorician, writer and orator Cicero was warning the Roman political classes of the danger which Caesar's closest ally posed to the Republic, modelling his approach on the Athenian orator Demosthenes, who in the middle of the 4th century BC had rallied against the rule of Philip II and Alexander the Great over Athens. Cicero composed 14 documents attacking Antony, known as the Philippics, a literary name for an invective or attack on a political enemy. He delivered these as public speeches in the Senate and at gatherings around Rome between September 44 BC and April 43 BC. In them he repeatedly condemned Antony, warned of the threat he posed and the manner in which he was trespassing over the codes of conduct expected of a Roman official or commander, before finally calling on the Senate and the people of Rome to wage war on Antony before he claimed absolute power. Cicero was successful in his appeals for several months, though ultimately Antony was able to have him prescribed in a purge of his enemies at the end of 43 BC and Cicero was executed while trying to flee from Italy, his head and hands, the latter of which had written against Antony, were symbolically severed and set up on public display in central Rome. Cicero might have been convinced that Antony posed the gravest threat to the possibility of restoring the Republic after Caesar's fall, yet he was not alone in trying to acquire Caesar's mantle. By 43 BC there were multiple individuals with their own factions who were emerging as Antony's rivals. In the autumn of that year Antony came together with two others, Octavian and Marcus Lepidus, to form a new triumvirate, one which imitated the one formed nearly twenty years earlier by Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. By employing a number of biddable officials in Rome to propose the legislation, they managed to have a law named which established this second triumvirate, ostensibly with Antony, Octavian and Lepidus charged with restoring the Republic, whereas in reality this political alliance was designed exclusively for the three to consolidate their power and bring some stability to the state, as a mere prelude to fighting it out between themselves to see which would succeed Caesar as master of Rome. The first major concern for the triumvirs was to end a war which had been initiated by some of those who were central to the assassination of Caesar back in 44 BC. These liberators, as they have been termed in the historiography of the late Roman Republic, had fled from Rome after killing Caesar and gathered their forces overseas to prepare for conflict with figures like Antony that would now step into the void left by the death of the dictator. The liberators' civil war culminated in October 42 BC in the first and second battles of Philippi. These were fought near the city of Philippi in Macedonia, with Antony and Octavian leading by some estimates over 100,000 soldiers against a similarly sized force led by Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. The two battles, fought three weeks apart, were chaotic. Morale was low amongst the legions on all sides after years of civil war. Rank-and-file legionaries on all sides must have wondered what it was they were actually fighting for, other than money, at a time when the Republic was simply lurching from crisis to crisis. In the end, the clashes themselves weren't decisive. Instead, it was Marcus Brutus ending his own life after an indecisive engagement and the general collapse of leadership amongst the liberators that led to the end of this civil war. Other conflicts in different provinces and involving different rebel leaders smouldered across the Mediterranean in its aftermath. Following the liberators' civil war, Antony, Octavian and Lepidus began considering how they would work with each other going forward. The resolution which they arrived at involved dividing up a large number of the provinces of Rome's empire between them. Initially, Antony took control of Gaul and the Alpine region, which was significant in that it included the plain of Lombardy and meant that he had legions under his control just north of the Rubicon. Lepidus was largely in control of Hispania, although Rome remained at war with some stubborn native groups in Cantabria in the north there. Octavian's power base was in North Africa, where, as well as having direct control over the provinces of Africa and Numidia, the kingdom of Mauretania in what is now Morocco and western Algeria was a client state. This arrangement gradually changed from 42 BC onwards, as the eastern territories which the when the second triumvirate was first established were retaken and Antony began shifting his power base from Gaul to the eastern Mediterranean. As these arrangements between the trio were evolving, Antony's personal life was again overlapping with his political one. His marriage to Fulvia, which was either his second or third marriage and which had resulted in Antony having two more children, had become problematic in 41 BC, when tensions escalated between her and Octavian in Italy while Antony was absent in the east. The immediate cause of the conflict was Octavian's decision to renounce his wife, Claudia, who was Fulvia's daughter from her earlier marriage to Clodius. The resulting clash between Fulvia and Octavian's supporters has become known as the after the town of Perusia in the Umbrian countryside where Fulvia had strong support for her case. The irony of this is that even as she was trying to buoy up her husband's chance of becoming pre-eminent at Rome, Antony was in the east negotiating a new diplomatic arrangement with the Ptolemaic royal family of Egypt, in the course of which he began an affair with Cleopatra, whom he had met many years earlier. Cleopatra was a born survivor. Faced with the prospect of Egypt being brought under Roman rule, she had started an affair with Julius Caesar during the civil war and had a son by him named Caesarion. Now she wooed Antony when they met again in 41 BC. It was a relationship which would dominate the rest of his life. Back in the west, Octavian suppressed Fulvia's partisans in the first months of 40 BC and then banished her to the city of Sicyon in Greece. Her presence there could have posed an ongoing problem for relations between Antony and Octavian in the years ahead had it not been for Fulvia's unexpected death shortly after arriving in Greece. Antony might have married Cleopatra at this juncture, but instead a political marriage was quickly worked out whereby he married Octavia, Octavian's sister, in October 40 BC. This union was intended to bring Octavian and Antony closer together and to allow Caesar's great-nephew and the man he had made master of the horse to divide power between them. It would have the opposite effect, as Antony acted as though the instead settling in Alexandria in Egypt and continuing his relationship with Cleopatra, as though it were her he had married. Indeed, Cleopatra gave birth to twins by Antony, a son named Alexander Helios and a daughter named Cleopatra Selene, around the time of their father's marriage to Octavia. A third child of Antony and Cleopatra's, another boy named Ptolemy, was born in 36 BC. Perhaps one of the reasons why Antony was so sexually promiscuous and had spent 20 years getting into trouble because of his relationships, his gambling and his indebtedness, was owing to his drinking habits. People drank a lot in ancient times, encouraged by the fact that alcohol was often safer to drink in settings where the water supply could often be a petri dish of disease and bacteria. As such, weak wine, mead, and in some parts of Rome's empire, beer, were imbibed throughout the day. It is meaningful then that people made note of how much Antony drank. In his biography of him, Plutarch points out that Antony was known for being frequently intoxicated. From the 1st century AD encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, we learn that Antony even allegedly wrote a book boasting about his penchant for drinking. He entitled it De sua ebriatate, meaning of his drunkenness. His tendencies would only get worse over time, and there are many examples of Antony's excessive drinking in the eastern provinces throughout the 30s BC. It is worth remembering when considering Antony's career and actions that he might well have been what we call now a high-functioning alcoholic. The period following Fulvia's death and Antony's marriage to Octavia, in tandem with his growing relationship with Cleopatra, was also a critical phase for the second triumvirate. Much of this focused on the war with Sextus Pompeius, the son and heir of Pompey the Great. In the aftermath of the civil war and the chaos that followed Caesar's assassination, Sextus, who as the leader of the Pompeians still commanded a good deal of support across the Republic, had managed to take control of the island of Sicily. With a powerful fleet here, he controlled the island and sometimes expanded outwards to Sardinia and southern Italy, becoming a powerful figure in his own right by controlling the waterways between the western and eastern Mediterranean. In the early 30s BC, he managed to continue to win victories over all three of the triumvirs, as they variously sent forces against him. However, in 36 BC, Octavian finally launched a successful invasion of Sicily. Sextus fled eastwards, hoping to obtain an alliance with Antony, but he was hunted down and killed the following year. The wider significance of this was that in the west, Octavian took control of Sextus' territory and marginalized Lepidus too. By 35 BC, the latter had become a broadly insignificant figure, and the power struggle was now developing almost entirely into a clash between Octavian and Antony. Even by the time the second triumvirate broadly became a non-entity, from around 35 BC onwards, the battle lines were being drawn in the broader struggle between Antony and Octavian. An agreement made at the city of Brundisium back in 40 BC had already ensured that Octavian's main base was in Italy, Hispania and Gaul. Now with control of the Italian islands and growing influence over North Africa, where Lepidus had previously held sway, he was all but in charge of the western half of the Republic's provinces. On the other hand, Antony's sphere of influence had been determined as lying in Greece, Anatolia and the Levant at Brundisium, while Egypt, which was theoretically still a quasi-independent client state of Rome's, was assured to him owing to his relationship with Cleopatra. He based himself here out of the city of Alexandria, the second largest city of the empire and its intellectual capital. So it was that in the course of the 30s BC, Octavian came to largely control the western provinces and Antony the eastern provinces. Antony benefited from the fact that the eastern provinces were considerably wealthier and more economically productive, but in Rome, Octavian could manipulate the senate and gain the support of the people of Rome. Everything pointed towards a new civil war, but perhaps if Antony reformed his behaviour and made the marriage alliance, which had been entered into through his union with Octavia work, conflict could be averted. Antony, though, was not the sort of figure to prioritise conflict resolution. With the Second Triumvirate now evaporating into a rivalry between Octavian and Antony, Antony concluded that he would try and gain mastery over the Republic the old-fashioned way. Just as Marius in the 100s BC, Sulla in the 80s BC, Pompey in the 60s BC, and then Caesar in Gaul in the 50s BC had each in their turn attained a pre-eminent position within the Republic by conquering new territories for the senate and the people of Rome, Antony would now seek to eclipse Octavian by expanding the empire himself, and there was an obvious target. There was just one state other than Rome, anywhere in the known world, that had a strong centralised government, controlled extensive territory and had a large army. This was the Parthian Empire, based out of Persia and Mesopotamia around modern day Iran and Iraq. What was more, the Romans had suffered an egregious stain on their honour when Marcus Crassus, the third member of the First Triumvirate, had been heavily defeated and killed in the desert along the Syrian and Turkish border at the Battle of Karai, back in 53 BC. At the time of his assassination in 44 BC, Caesar was planning to campaign eastwards against the Parthians and avenge the loss of several Roman legions at Karai a decade earlier. His death had put pay to any such effort, and instead the Parthians had taken advantage of the chaos following Caesar's assassination to invade the Roman east and occupy some of the border regions. Now, with the war with Sextus coming to an end in the west, Antony gathered together upwards of sixteen legions in the east and began preparing to invade Parthia. A great victory here might have represented the triumph that would have allowed him to outflank Octavian back in Rome. The war which followed against the Parthians is sometimes known as the Atropotene Campaign, after the region of northern Persia near the Caspian Sea, where most of it played out. Antony marched eastwards in 36 BC. As with many other campaigns against Parthia, the Kingdom of Armenia, an independent buffer state in the southern Caucasus, played a role, with Antony winning over King Artevastes II there as an ally against King Phrates IV of Parthia. He then marched into Armenia before swinging southwards towards northern Persia, a strategy many Roman generals followed to avoid campaigning through the Syrian desert. Our sources vary in their figures, but Antony clearly had one of the largest Roman armies to ever campaign eastwards, with 100,000 men under his command. Despite these extensive military resources, the campaign became an unmitigated disaster. After arriving in the Atropotene region, he began a siege of the city of Freyta, near modern-day Ganzakh in northwestern Iran. Disease broke out in the camp, then his Armenian allies abandoned him, and he subsequently faced attacks by the Parthians. Dismayed, Antony ordered a retreat back west through Armenia and finally to Syria, having lost as many as 30,000 men without achieving anything. He planned another campaign to both exact revenge on the betrayal of the Armenians and to strike again at the Parthians, though it never fully materialised, as his attentions were drawn to the west and the increasingly inevitable showdown with Octavian. One success which Antony did have during these years was in Judea. Back in the middle of the 2nd century BC, the Jewish people here had managed to establish themselves as an independent nation once again, after years of foreign domination by the Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians and the This was through the Maccabean Revolt, following which a new Jewish monarchy was set up. However, a century later, when Pompey was undertaking his conquest of Syria, the Hasmonean dynasty had agreed to become client kings of Rome, a form of vassalage, whereby Judea only remained semi-independent. The Hasmoneans had attempted to exploit the chaotic period following Caesar's assassination to reassert their independence. Antony was now committed to reversing this situation, and ordered the governor of Cilicia and Syria, Gaius Sosius, to campaign into Judea. Military clashes followed in the Levant between 40 BC and 37 BC, at the end of which Herod, a commander from western Judea of Idumean origin, was placed on the throne of Judea as Rome's new favoured client king. Herod would rule for the next four decades, though he is more widely known as Herod the Great in the historiography owing to the success of his reign. He is a reviled figure in both Christian and Jewish traditions for allying with the Romans, who desecrated Judea for decades to come and paved the way for the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It is often forgotten that Antony was responsible for putting the Herodian dynasty in place in Judea as the clients and allies of Rome. As the years went by and as Antony spent more and more time in the eastern provinces, he appears to have adopted many of the trappings of eastern monarchy. Nation-states and peoples often define themselves as much by what they aren't as what they are. The Greeks in centuries gone by had, for instance, defined themselves as being a free people and the antithesis of the tyrannical, absolutist rule of the kings of Persia. Rome, with its republican government, adopted this mentality when it expanded into the eastern Mediterranean and viewed itself as the opposite of Parthia. But now Antony seemed to be drifting more towards this form of autocratic government, one in which he aspired more towards monarchy and lived as such with Cleopatra in Egypt, a country which had the oldest tradition in the world of revering its rulers as the representatives of the gods on earth. If Octavian's propaganda back in the west is to be believed, Antony's court in Alexandria became a place of people bowing and scraping before the rulers and forms of iconography and wealth which was deemed to be un-Roman. His enemies made the most of this impression of Antony as an emerging despot in the eastern provinces, though the extent to which this reflected reality or was the product of a propaganda campaign is hard to say for sure. Antony did little to allay worries about his eastern tendencies. Alexandria seemed to have become the capital of what was becoming an independent fiefdom of his own in the east, a fact accentuated by his decision to hold a Roman triumph, the military celebration usually held in Rome itself in Alexandria in 34 BC. This was after he had conducted a raid into Armenia and captured King Artevastes who had betrayed him two years earlier during the Parthian campaign. Artevastes was led as a prisoner through the streets of Alexandria during the triumph. Then, that evening, Antony and Cleopatra, purportedly dressed up in imitation of the Egyptian deities Osiris and Isis, issued a series of decrees known as the Donations of Alexandria. Through this, Antony and Cleopatra's children, along with Cleopatra's child with Caesar, Caesarion, were bestowed with royal titles. Caesarion was proclaimed as King of Egypt and as heir to Julius Caesar, the latter action being a direct attack on Octavian's position as Caesar's political heir. Alexander Helios, Antony and Cleopatra's oldest son, was named as King of Armenia and Parthia, while his twin sister, Cleopatra Selene, was proclaimed as Queen of Cyrenaica, in what is now Libya. Ptolemy Philadelphus was made King of Syria. If anyone in the West was looking for evidence of Antony's alleged shift towards becoming a despot, they couldn't have found clearer evidence of it than that supplied by the Donations of Alexandria. These actions in the East provided Octavian with the ammunition he needed to begin pressing the case for total war between the Roman government in the West and Antony's forces in Egypt and elsewhere. Indeed, we have to be cautious about how willingly we accept subsequent depictions of Antony's despotic behaviour during this period, as many of our records may be coloured by the concerted propaganda campaign which Octavian and his supporters were now engaged in from Rome against his rival. It was ultimately a successful campaign. In 32 BC, Octavian exaggerated reports that Antony was planning on establishing a rival senate in Alexandria, essentially splitting Rome's empire in two in the process. This, combined with Antony's ill-judged decision to marry Cleopatra in Alexandria that year, without first organising an official divorce from Octavia, tipped the senate at Rome into backing Octavian's calls for war. This latest civil war, known as the War of Actium, would involve the largest military build-up of all the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, with upwards of 200,000 legionaries and allies fighting on each side. Despite the huge numbers involved, the civil war would be fought and lost in just one major battle. This occurred at Actium, in the waters off the north-eastern shores of Greece at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, hence the reference to this civil war as the War of Actium. Antony had chosen to build up his forces in Greece, where many supporters and members of the Roman senate had fled from Italy to join his cause. Here, Antony found himself blockaded in the Gulf of Corinth, and on the 2nd of September 31 BC, decided to break the impasse by sailing out against Octavian's fleet. Hundreds of galleys, the standard Roman warship, clashed across the Gulf, in what was one of the largest and most consequential naval battles in human history. Antony and Cleopatra had the larger, more powerful ships, but the more agile smaller boats of Octavian and the naval tactics deployed by his foremost general, Marcus Agrippa, won the day, with many of Antony's ships sinking, while communication also broke down across his fleet after Cleopatra's Egyptian contingent became separated from the main body of Antony's galleys. Eventually, Antony broke free of the fighting with one of his ships and abandoned the naval battle when it became clear that all was lost. Most of his fleet, and with it his chances of winning the war, was destroyed. In the weeks that followed, Antony did his best to gather together the remnants of his forces from around the eastern Mediterranean in Egypt. Many of his former allies abandoned him, and both Cleopatra and he sent word to Octavian that they would step down from their positions and retire to become private citizens, if Octavian pardoned them. Caesar's heir was in no mood for clemency, though he did take his time before initiating the final campaign, dealing with matters in Greece and Italy in the There, a battle was fought around Alexandria throughout July. When it was lost at the end of the month, Antony knew that nothing but death and a possible humiliation of being dragged to Rome to be used in a spectacle at Octavian's triumph awaited him. He killed himself on the 1st of August 30 BC, stabbing himself in the stomach. Plutarch's Life of Antony suggests he mistakenly believed at that time that Cleopatra had just died and only learned that he was mistaken after stabbing himself. He was then carried to her and allegedly died in her arms, calling for a glass of wine before doing so. The Egyptian queen killed herself a week and a half later, after being captured by the Romans. Legend has it that it was from the poisonous bite of an asp, though most ancient accounts state that she drank poison. She and Antony were buried together, somewhere around Alexandria, though the tomb has never been located. With Antony's defeat and death, Octavian was left without any major rival within the Roman Republic and had firmly succeeded his great-uncle as the pre-eminent figure within the state. He would not make the same mistakes as Despite his relative youth, Octavian proved himself to be an immensely shrewd politician, in reaching a new political settlement three years after Antony's death. In 27 BC, he established what is known as the Principate. He would not take the power of Dictatores, which had given Caesar such immense authority, but which had also proved his undoing. Nor would he to rule as a sort of eastern despot, in the manner which Antony had over the eastern provinces. Instead, he granted himself a number of well-established powers through long-standing Roman political offices such as the office of Tribune of the People. He would also hold the consulship frequently for years to come and became the Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of Rome. Finally, he adopted the names Caesar and Augustus. As Caesar-Augustus, Octavian was declaring to all that he was now the first citizen of Rome, though not its ruler. The façade of maintaining the Republic worked extremely well, and the new dispensation was accepted by all. We should not be fooled in retrospect, though. What Octavian did in 27 BC was begin to establish a new position at Rome, that of Emperor of Rome, of which he was the first. While he stood in the shadow of two men in his time, first Caesar and then Octavian, Antony was still a huge figure in the history of the demise of the Roman Republic, and his relationship with Cleopatra and the manner in which he hived off the eastern provinces as his own territory for the better part of a decade has ensured that Antony has been a figure who has interested people ever since his own time. Plutarch deemed him to be one of the individuals who had shaped the history of Rome and included him in the biographies of the most eminent Romans, alongside Caesar and Augustus. At the height of the English Renaissance, over a millennium and a half after his own time, Antony and his relationship with Cleopatra became the subject of one of William Shakespeare's plays. John Dryden took up the same theme in his play All for Love a century later. Closer to our own time, in the 20th century, versions of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra were adapted for the screen, and Antony was played by both Charlton Heston and Marlon Brando in the 1950s. Yet it is surely the 1963 film Cleopatra in which Antony was played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor starred as Cleopatra that is the most infamous modern take on Antony, a production which became the most expensive movie ever made up to that time, and which contributed to the decline of the golden age of the Hollywood studio system. Mark Antony was one of the most striking figures of Roman political history. Rising as a military and political figure in the 50s BC, he gravitated into the orbit of Julius Caesar and eventually became his closest ally and most trusted military accomplice. When the civil war broke out with Pompey, Antony played an absolutely vital role in defeating the Pompeians and was rewarded commensurately by being made master of the horse. Unsurprisingly, when Caesar was assassinated, he was able to step into the breach as one of his potential successors. But Antony wasn't just an important political figure. He was also one of the more colorful characters of ancient Roman history, a man who ended up in the Greek East as a young man because of his debts, a serial philanderer who married four or five times, and a noted heavy drinker in an age when you really needed to drink a lot for people to make an especial note of it. Ultimately, his disregard for convention was his undoing. By setting himself up in the East, sundering his relationship with Octavian through his affair with Cleopatra, while married to Octavia, and then ruling the eastern provinces as a despot, he ensured that a new civil war would have to be fought. His gamble didn't pay off. Antony's defeat and Octavian's triumph changed the course of history, as the Roman Empire emerged under his nemesis and the man who defeated him. What do you think of Mark Antony? Could he have become Rome's first emperor if he hadn't made the mistake of spending so many years away from Rome itself with Cleopatra in Egypt? Or was he no match for the political guile of Octavian? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.