Augustus and Mark Antony: Colleagues, Rivals, Enemies

History teaches that politicians seldom maintain deep and abiding friendships with one another. They are second selves as long as they pursue common goals and need the other’s bipartisanship to accomplish those goals. But when they begin jousting for power, especially in such places as ancient Rome, there is only room for one at the top. The callow youth Gaius Octavian and the battle-hardened general Mark Antony are classic examples.

The two men were superficially joined by chance because of their loyalty to one man, Roman dictator Julius Caesar. Octavian was Caesar’s grandnephew, son of Atia who was the daughter of Caesar’s sister Julia Minor. Antony had spent years serving Caesar in battles far and near. He was perhaps the closest and most loyal Roman to the man who many believed would end the nearly 500-year-long Republic and establish himself as king or emperor.

It was Caesar’s murder that tightened the relationship, albeit uncomfortably, of the two. Interestingly, the murder by a cabal of Roman senators was led by Brutus, who at one time had been a “friend”—his mother Servilia was the dictator’s long time mistress—but he feared that Caesar would end the Republic that he cherished. Brutus and his co-conspirator Cassius soon learned that they could not stay in Rome where they had failed to unite the Roman people, and the pair and others fled to the east to raise armies. They hoped to return, take control, and strengthen the Republic to its pre-Caesarian glory.

Caesar, in a will disclosed only after his death, decreed that grandnephew Octavian was his heir, giving the seventeen-year-old youth his name, his fortune, and the loyalty of his armies. We can only wonder how Caesar’s decision emotionally affected his long, loyal general Mark Antony who might have expected Caesar to name him as heir and successor. But for now, the pair had to contend with Brutus and Cassius. And they had to move as quickly as ancient mobility and communication allowed.

Caesar had been murdered in March of 44 B.C. Octavian and Antony, along with another general, Lepidus, created in November of 43 the Second Triumvirate, giving them nearly absolute power in the control of Rome and its provinces: Octavian in the West, Antony in the East, and Lepidus in North Africa. Then, within a year, in October of 42, Antony and Octavian took on Brutus’ and Cassius’ cobbled together eastern armies. Those who know Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar know how that turned out. Both of the murderers, losing separate battles on the Macedonian Plain of Philippi, fell upon their swords. Their ends solidified the nearly unchallenged power of the Triumvirate. Lepidus soon was forced out, leaving Octavian and Antony as colleagues, each with their own political agenda.

The relationship between Antony and Octavian over the next decade suffered mightily, but both men struggled to keep it together. They forged two treaties, one agreed to in Brundisium/Brindisi in 40 B.C., the other in Tarentum/Taranto in 37. In the second treaty, Octavian handed over his sister Octavia to be Antony’s wife. The two Roman generals still attempted to rely on one another: Antony needed Octavian’s military support in battles being fought in the East; Octavian needed Antony’s ships to help him in skirmishes in the West. Octavian got his ships; Antony never got any help from Octavian’s legions and lost those key battles.

The rifts festered. Eventually, Antony dumped Octavia, took up with Julius Caesar’s one-time lover Cleopatra, and declared his break from Octavian. The western ruler, still youthful at age thirty, could not bring himself to declare civil war against Antony, now age fifty-three. Instead, he declared war against Cleopatra and Egypt. In September of 31 B.C., just off the promontory of Actium in Greece, General Agrippa, commanding Octavian’s fleet, defeated Antony and the queen. Egypt became part of the soon-to-be Roman Empire.

The fallen Roman general and Cleopatra died at their own hands a few days apart nearly a year later, in August of 30 B.C. Fewer than three years later, in January of 27 B.C., the Roman Senate gave Octavian the honorific “Augustus.” The empire was established, and Augustus and successive emperors ruled for life, as short as those lives may have been, for the next five hundred years.