When a crisis of flooding, famine and plague besieged Rome in 22 B.C., citizens did not agitate for a restoration of the republic, but instead locked up a group of senators and threatened to burn them alive if Augustus was not named dictator. He said that he restored the republic and never used the terms dictator or king, instead calling himself Rome’s ‘first citizen.’” “He had a lot of tricks, and one of them was to pretend that what was happening wasn’t really happening. “He was a very shrewd politician," Strauss says. bestowed the title “Augustus” upon Octavian, which according to Roman historian Cassius Dio signified “that he was more than human.” Augustus ruled as Rome’s first emperor-although he never took that title for himself.
By providing for soldiers’ retirements, he ensured their personal loyalty to him. Citizens in towns across Italy and the western Mediterranean were compelled to swear their personal loyalty to Octavian. Throughout Roman territories, coins, statues and even silverware bore his image. He approved of all candidates standing for election, while the powerless Senate rubber-stamped his decisions. Having eliminated his rivals and seen the support given to Caesar by the masses, Octavian established absolute rule over the former republic and surpassed the power of his great-uncle. after which Antony and Cleopatra each took their own lives. Octavian forced Lepidus into exile and took up arms against Antony, whose affair with Egyptian ruler Cleopatra VII damaged his reputation in Rome and humiliated his wife, who was Octavian’s sister. Octavian positioned himself as the sole defender of Rome from the eastern influence of Egypt, and his navy defeated the combined fleet of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in northern Greece in 31 B.C. The triumvirate eventually turned on each other. Tens of thousands died in the bloody battle, and the defeated Brutus and Cassius each committed suicide. After speaking ill of Antony, Cicero was killed by soldiers loyal to Caesar’s deputy, and his head and right hand were placed on display in the Roman Forum. Avenging Caesar’s murder, Octavian and Antony collaborated to defeat the forces of assassination plot leaders Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus in 42 B.C. Mary Beard, author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, writes that the triumvirate’s main achievement was a “new round of mass murder.” Octavian and Antony brutally purged the republic’s leadership by killing their enemies and potential rivals.
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“He was a cunning, ruthless politician who knew how to play both sides,” Barry Strauss, author of Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine, says of Octavian. The forces of the two competing leaders clashed until Octavian and Antony called a truce and agreed to share power with another of Caesar’s former deputies, Lepidus, in the Second Triumvirate. Octavian quickly amassed a private army and outbid Antony for the support of several legions. In his will, Caesar had named his sickly, 18-year-old great-nephew Octavian as his primary heir and provided for his adoption. Although former deputy Mark Antony positioned himself as Caesar’s rightful successor by delivering a powerful funeral oration, the slain ruler had pre-empted that outcome. Instead of stabilizing the Roman Republic, the assassination plunged it into another civil war as Caesar’s supporters battled the assassins and then each other. If Caesar had been an autocrat, the lower and middle classes didn’t seem to mind as they benefitted from his radical reforms such as the cancellation of debts and adjustment of the tax code. He was shocked to find that outrage, rather than praise, greeted news of the dictator’s killing. One of the assassination’s leading planners, Marcus Junius Brutus, had prepared to deliver a speech celebrating the Roman Republic’s restoration right after Caesar’s murder. The death of Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate.
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