Episode 53. The Road to Philippi: Antony, Octavian, and the End of the Liberators

Sources and Historiography

The source situation for this period is both rich and layered, and the layers matter.

Appian wrote his Civil Wars, which is the primary systematic narrative for this episode, in the mid-second century CE, roughly a hundred and fifty years after the events. His account is built from earlier sources, most of which are now lost, and it carries the usual cautions about temporal distance: the specific details of crowd scenes at the funeral, the precise reconstruction of the Philippi fighting, the individual anecdotes of proscription are not contemporary reports. They are reconstructions. Appian's account of the proscriptions is the fullest we have and contains detail with the texture of earlier documentation. His battle accounts for Philippi are detailed and broadly credible, though casualty figures should be treated with appropriate scepticism.

Plutarch is our most important biographical source, and his three relevant Lives here are the Life of Antony, the Life of Brutus, and chapters forty-four through forty-eight of the Life of Cicero. Episode 51 of this series engaged extensively with the Life of Brutus. The Life of Antony is the source for the funeral oration and for Antony's character, and it is one of Plutarch's most vivid works precisely because Antony is one of his most vivid subjects. Plutarch's purpose throughout is moral biography rather than institutional history, and he will sacrifice chronological precision for a scene that illuminates character. When Plutarch tells us that Antony covered Brutus's body with his finest cloak, we are reading either exact reportage from a source now lost, or a story that was told because it captured something true about both men. The distinction matters to the historian. For the listener it may matter less: the story is true in the sense that it describes correctly the difference between Antony and Octavian, and Plutarch is very precise about that difference throughout.

Cicero's own writing is a category apart. The Philippics are primary sources for the political crisis of 44 to 43 BCE in the way that no secondary account can be: speeches written by a participant, intended to change the outcome of events, composed under genuine personal risk. The Letters to Atticus and the Letters to Brutus from this period are real-time documentation of a brilliant man trying to navigate a situation he understood better than almost anyone and could not control. They are also, inevitably, documents shaped by the pressures of the moment. Cicero was not always right. He was not always honest even with his closest friend. He consistently overestimated the Senate's capacity to act decisively and consistently underestimated Octavian's willingness to act ruthlessly. Reading the letters alongside the events is one of the most illuminating exercises in ancient political psychology available to us.

The major modern scholarly debate runs between Ronald Syme and the scholars who have complicated his reading. Syme's The Roman Revolution, published in 1939, treats Octavian as a cold revolutionary who understood from the beginning what he was building and pursued it with complete strategic discipline, using the language of Republican restoration as deliberate camouflage. Karl Galinsky, in Augustus: Introduction to the Life of an Emperor and in earlier work, argues for a more contingent picture: an extraordinarily gifted politician making things up as he went, responding to crises as they arose, arriving at the principate by sustained improvisation rather than predetermined design. The debate has not been resolved and probably cannot be. The young man who arrived in Rome in April 44 BCE and the emperor who reorganised the Roman world in 27 BCE may have been the same person with the same intentions from the beginning, or the second may have been made by the first's experience of the intervening years. The evidence supports both readings. What it does not support is the view that he was ever, at any point, simply riding events rather than shaping them.

Works CitedPrimary Sources

• Appian. Civil Wars, Books 3 and 4. The most systematic narrative of this period. Appian wrote in the mid-second century CE, drawing on earlier sources now mostly lost. His account of the proscriptions is the fullest surviving description and carries the texture of earlier documentary sources. His Philippi narrative is detailed and broadly reliable, though specific figures should be treated cautiously.
• Cicero. Letters to Atticus, Books 14 to 16, and Letters to Brutus. The most urgent primary source for the political crisis. The tollendum letter, in which Cicero uses the ambiguous word about Octavian, is in Book 11 of the Letters to Atticus and is worth reading against Octavian's later account of it.
• Cicero. Philippics. The final political act. All fourteen are significant, but the second Philippic is the most sustained attack on Antony, and the fourteenth, his last public speech delivered in April 43 BCE, has a quality of exhausted determination that is unlike anything else in the corpus.
• Plutarch. Life of Antony. Essential for Antony's character and role from Caesar's murder through the Triumvirate. The funeral oration account is the most vivid surviving description of that scene. The Life should be read alongside the Life of Brutus, which was covered in detail in Episode 51, for the full picture of the Philippi campaign from both sides.
• Plutarch. Life of Brutus, chapters 36 to 53. Covers Philippi and the death of Brutus. The earlier sections of this Life were the primary source for Episode 51 of this series. Readers should consult that episode for the full character portrait before reading this one.
• Plutarch. Life of Cicero, chapters 44 to 48. The death of Cicero. Among the most powerful passages in all of Plutarch. Should be read alongside Cicero's own final letters to see the same events from inside and outside simultaneously.

Secondary Sources

• Galinsky, Karl. Augustus: Introduction to the Life of an Emperor. 2012. The essential counterweight to Syme: a contingent, improvisational Octavian, no less brilliant but built by experience rather than designed in advance.
• Goldsworthy, Adrian. Augustus: First Emperor of Rome. 2014. The most comprehensive modern biography for this period from Octavian's perspective. Strong on the Mutina campaign and the mechanics of the Triumviral period.
• Holland, Tom. Rubicon. 2003. The most readable popular account of the whole late Republic; essential context for everything in this episode.
• Syme, Ronald. The Roman Revolution. 1939. Still essential, still contested. Syme's Octavian is a cold revolutionary with a plan.

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