Cesare Maccari, Cicerone denuncia Catilina, 1888. Palazzo Madama, Rome.
The Roman Republic did not end in a single event. It came apart over the course of a generation, through civil wars in which the most powerful men in the state turned the armies of the Republic against one another. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE and made himself dictator. His assassination in 44 BCE opened a new round of conflict among those who claimed his legacy. By the late 40s, three men held effective control of the Roman world: Octavian, Caesar’s adopted heir, Marcus Antonius, his most powerful general, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The arrangement they formalised, the Second Triumvirate, was held together by mutual suspicion and by the understanding that open war between them would be catastrophic.
The instrument the Triumvirate used to manage that suspicion was marriage. In 40 BCE, following the death of Antonius’ wife Fulvia, the two rivals met at Brundisium to negotiate a territorial settlement. At the centre of the treaty was a marriage: Octavian’s sister, Octavia Minor, was given to Antonius as his wife. The Roman senate issued a special dispensation allowing the marriage to proceed before the customary mourning period for her first husband had elapsed. In 37 BCE Octavia herself helped to negotiate the Pact of Tarentum, which renewed the Triumvirate and postponed the conflict that both sides knew was coming.
The postponement did not last. By the mid-30s Antonius had resumed his relationship with Cleopatra VII of Egypt. In 32 he divorced Octavia. Octavian used the divorce to frame the coming war as a conflict between Rome and a foreign queen. The Battle of Actium in 31 BCE ended the contest. Octavian returned to Rome as sole ruler and, in 27 BCE, accepted the title Augustus.
After Antonius’ death Octavia took into her household his surviving children by both Fulvia and Cleopatra, including Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of the Egyptian queen, and raised them alongside her own. The marriages arranged for these children connected the families of Caesar, Antonius, and Augustus into a single dynastic network from which three of the next four emperors of Rome would descend. Augustus honoured her with the Porticus Octaviae, among the most prominent public monuments in Rome to carry a woman’s name.
The title Augustus was conferred in 27 BCE, but the governing structure of the new regime continued to take shape for decades afterward, through the marriages and alliances that Octavia’s household made possible. The Republic had distributed authority among competing magistrates precisely to prevent its concentration in one family. The regime that replaced it depended on exactly that concentration, and the household in which it took shape was Octavia’s.
The Octavia Blouse
Selected Reading
- Holland, Tom. Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. London: Little, Brown, 2003.
- Goldsworthy, Adrian. Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014.
- Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. London: Profile Books, 2015.