Second Triumvirate

Based on Wikipedia: Second Triumvirate

Three men sat down and made a list of people to kill. Not in secret, not in shame—they published it. They posted the names on public boards throughout Rome. Anyone who murdered someone on the list would receive a cash reward. Anyone who sheltered the condemned would join them in death.

This was November of 43 BCE, and the three men were Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian—the future Augustus, the man who would become Rome's first emperor. He was nineteen years old.

We call their arrangement the Second Triumvirate, though the Romans themselves never used that term. They called it something far more Orwellian: the "Board of Three for the Reconstitution of the Republic." The irony would have been obvious to everyone. These three men weren't restoring the republic. They were burying it.

The Legal Murder Machine

What made the Second Triumvirate remarkable wasn't just its brutality—plenty of Roman strongmen had killed their enemies before. What made it remarkable was its legality. On November 27, 43 BCE, a law called the lex Titia formally created the triumvirate, giving these three men powers that exceeded even those of the consuls, Rome's highest elected officials.

They could make laws. They could unmake laws. They could execute Roman citizens without trial, without appeal, without any of the ancient protections that Romans had fought for centuries to establish. They appointed all other magistrates. They divided the Roman world into three sets of provinces like children dividing up toys.

The legal framework was modeled on the dictatorship of Sulla, who had done something similar forty years earlier. But Sulla had at least pretended he was responding to an emergency. The triumvirs weren't pretending anything. They announced their death lists with a declaration that Julius Caesar's famous clemency—his policy of forgiving enemies—had been a failure. Mercy, they proclaimed, had gotten Caesar killed. They would not make the same mistake.

The Death Lists

How many people did they kill? The ancient sources can't agree, which tells you something about the chaos of those months. Plutarch gives us figures ranging from 200 to 300 senators alone. Other sources mention 130 senators plus many equestrians—the wealthy business class just below the senatorial aristocracy. The historian Appian provides the most comprehensive picture: 300 senators and about 2,000 equestrians either killed or stripped of their property between the proscriptions and a peace treaty four years later.

The modern historian François Hinard, after exhaustively reviewing the evidence, settled on about 300 total victims, split roughly evenly between senators and equestrians.

But the raw numbers miss the human dimension. The triumvirs traded names with each other like baseball cards. Antony wanted Cicero dead—the great orator had spent months attacking him in a series of speeches called the Philippics, named after Demosthenes' famous denunciations of Philip of Macedon. So Cicero went on the list, along with his brother, his nephew, and his son.

Octavian had once respected Cicero enormously. It didn't matter. Antony wanted Cicero's head, and politics required accommodation.

Lepidus' own brother made the list. Antony's uncle was proscribed. The triumvirs sacrificed their own family members to prove their commitment to their partners. It was a blood oath sealed with actual blood.

Not everyone died. Some fled to Macedonia, where the assassins of Julius Caesar—Brutus and Cassius—were assembling their forces. Others escaped to Sicily, controlled by Sextus Pompey, son of Julius Caesar's old rival Pompey the Great. Some managed to beg successfully for clemency. But the message was clear: opposition meant death.

How We Got Here

To understand how three men could legally murder hundreds of their fellow citizens, you need to go back twenty months, to the Ides of March, 44 BCE.

When a group of senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death in the Theater of Pompey, they expected gratitude. They called themselves the liberatores—the liberators—and they assumed the Roman people would celebrate their tyrannicide. They were wrong.

The aftermath was messy compromise. The senate granted amnesty to the assassins while simultaneously confirming all of Caesar's official acts. The dictatorship was abolished. For a brief moment, it seemed like Rome might muddle through.

But Caesar had left behind a political heir: his grand-nephew Octavian, whom he had adopted in his will. And Caesar had left behind a political rival within his own faction: Mark Antony, who had been consul alongside him and expected to inherit Caesar's political machine.

Antony moved fast. In June 44 BCE, he pushed through legislation giving himself the provinces of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul—essentially, northern Italy and southern France. This was brilliant positioning. From Gaul, Antony could threaten Italy itself, just as Caesar had done when he crossed the Rubicon.

Meanwhile, Octavian was playing his own game. He was only eighteen, but he understood something fundamental about Roman politics: soldiers followed money. He began bribing Caesar's veterans away from Antony, building himself a private army with his inheritance from Caesar's will.

By December 44 BCE, Cicero had convinced the senate to support the existing governors of Gaul against Antony's power grab. A brief civil war followed. At the Battle of Mutina in April 43 BCE, Antony was defeated and fled north. Cicero, triumphant, had the senate declare Antony a public enemy.

But Cicero had made a fatal miscalculation. He thought he was using Octavian as a tool against Antony. "The boy," he reportedly said, "should be praised, honored, and removed." He meant that Octavian should be discarded once Antony was dealt with.

Octavian had other plans.

The Deal

Both consuls had died at Mutina, leaving two vacant positions. In August 43 BCE, Octavian marched his army south to Rome—not to fight the city, but to claim one of those consulships for himself. He was nineteen. The legal minimum age was forty-three.

The senate had no choice but to comply. Octavian took the consulship, immediately passed laws confirming his adoption as Caesar's heir, established courts to condemn Caesar's assassins in absentia, and repealed the declaration of Antony as a public enemy.

Then Octavian marched north again. Not to fight Antony—to join him.

The meeting took place near Bologna, with Lepidus serving as intermediary. Lepidus was a former consul and Caesar's former deputy, a man of respectable but not exceptional abilities who had positioned himself as a broker between the two rivals. The soldiers of all three armies reportedly demanded reconciliation. They were all Caesarians; they didn't want to kill each other over their generals' personal disputes.

So the three men made a deal. They would share power. They would destroy their common enemies. They would divide the western Roman world among themselves: Antony got Gaul, Lepidus got southern France and Spain, and Octavian—the junior partner—got Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily.

And to seal the agreement, to prove their commitment, to fund their coming wars—they would draw up death lists.

The War Against the Liberators

The proscriptions served multiple purposes. They eliminated political enemies. They terrorized potential opponents. And they raised money—the property of the proscribed was confiscated and sold at auction. Even so, the triumvirs didn't raise enough. They ended up seizing eighteen wealthy Italian towns and redistributing the land to their soldiers.

In January 42 BCE, Julius Caesar was officially declared a god. This had immediate political implications: Octavian could now style himself "Son of the Divine." Meanwhile, the triumvirs assembled forty legions for war against Brutus and Cassius.

The liberatores had spent the past year in the eastern Mediterranean, extracting money and troops from the wealthy provinces of Asia Minor and Syria. They had perhaps nineteen legions—fewer than the triumvirs, but they controlled the eastern Mediterranean sea lanes and had a strong position.

Lepidus stayed in Italy, watched over by pro-Antony governors. Antony and Octavian crossed the Adriatic and marched toward Macedonia. The naval forces of the liberatores harassed their supply lines but couldn't prevent the crossing.

The two armies met at Philippi in northern Greece. The first battle, in early October 42 BCE, was essentially a draw but felt like a defeat. Brutus' forces overran Octavian's camp—Octavian himself, according to later sources, spent the battle hiding in a marsh. But Antony's forces overran Cassius' camp, and Cassius, believing the battle lost, died by suicide.

Three weeks later came the second battle. Brutus, facing desertions and supply problems, felt he had to attack. This time there was no ambiguity in the result. The combined forces of Antony and Octavian crushed Brutus' army. Brutus followed Cassius into suicide.

The liberatores were finished. The Roman Republic, in any meaningful sense, was finished too. What remained was to determine which of the triumvirs would rule the wreckage.

The Redistribution of Power

After Philippi, the triumvirs reshuffled their territories, and the new arrangement revealed the balance of power.

Antony was the clear winner. He kept Transalpine Gaul and took southern France from Lepidus. He gave up Cisalpine Gaul—but only because it was being merged into Italy proper. Most importantly, he took control of the east, the wealthy half of the Roman world, where he could raise armies and accumulate resources just as his enemies Brutus and Cassius had done.

Octavian got the poisoned chalice: responsibility for settling the veterans of Philippi on Italian land and continuing the war against Sextus Pompey in Sicily. Both tasks were guaranteed to make him unpopular. Italian landowners would hate him for confiscating their farms. If he failed against Sextus Pompey, he'd look weak; if he succeeded, he'd merely have done his job.

Lepidus, who hadn't even fought at Philippi, got Africa alone. He was already being marginalized.

Antony's strategic position was formidable. From Gaul, he could threaten Italy, just as Caesar had before his civil war. From the east, he controlled enormous wealth. His trusted lieutenants held the Gallic provinces while he was away. He was, by any reasonable calculation, the most powerful man in the Roman world.

Antony's Eastern Adventure

Antony spent the years after Philippi reorganizing the eastern provinces and preparing for war against Parthia. The Parthian Empire—centered on modern Iran and Iraq—was Rome's great rival in the east, and it had made the mistake of supporting the liberatores. Antony planned to complete the conquest that Julius Caesar had been planning when he was assassinated.

His progress through the eastern Mediterranean was a kind of royal procession. He confirmed local rulers in their positions, even ones who had supported Brutus and Cassius. He displayed favor to great cultural centers like Athens. He was generous where Brutus and Cassius had been extractive.

Then there was Cleopatra.

Antony summoned the Egyptian queen to meet him in Cilicia, in southern Turkey. Cleopatra had been Julius Caesar's lover; she had borne him a son. Now she quickly entered into an affair with Antony. Ancient writers loved to portray Antony as manipulated by the exotic foreign temptress, but the reality was probably more calculated on both sides. Antony helped Cleopatra secure her throne against Ptolemaic rivals; Cleopatra provided Antony with Egyptian resources for his wars. It was an alliance of convenience wrapped in romance.

In the winter of 41 BCE, the Parthians struck first. Knowing Antony was preparing to invade, they launched a preemptive attack under the command of Prince Pacorus and a Roman renegade named Quintus Labienus. Labienus was the son of one of Caesar's most capable generals, who had switched sides during Caesar's civil war. Now the son was fighting for Parthia against Rome.

The Parthian forces swept through Syria and Asia Minor, largely unopposed. Antony should have responded immediately. He didn't. He was distracted by events in Italy.

The Perusine War

Back in Italy, Octavian was making enemies. The settlement of veterans required confiscating land from Italian farmers—in the middle of a famine made worse by Sextus Pompey's naval blockade. Protests and unrest spread through the countryside.

Antony's brother Lucius and Antony's wife Fulvia saw an opportunity. They positioned themselves as champions of the dispossessed, spreading propaganda that Octavian was trampling citizen rights and favoring his own veterans over Antony's. The charges weren't really true, but they were effective. By summer 41 BCE, Lucius had occupied Rome with an army.

Antony himself remained studiously aloof. He probably wanted to exploit whatever outcome emerged without committing himself. But his supporters in Italy didn't know his intentions, and his brother and wife were acting in what they assumed was his interest.

Octavian's forces drove Lucius out of Rome and besieged him in the town of Perusia—modern Perugia. Pro-Antony governors in Gaul and southern Italy had armies that could have relieved the siege, but without clear orders from Antony, they did nothing. Eventually Perusia fell. Octavian let most of the defenders go, but he executed the town council and—according to some sources—three hundred senators and equestrians who had joined Lucius' cause, sacrificing them on the altar of the divine Julius Caesar on the anniversary of Caesar's assassination.

Whether that mass human sacrifice actually happened is debated. But the story captures something true about the Second Triumvirate: it was an era when the unthinkable became routine.

Renewal and Decay

The triumvirate's original five-year term was set to expire at the end of 38 BCE. In 37 BCE, the arrangement was renewed for another five years, pushed partly by the soldiers themselves, who wanted their generals to cooperate. Octavian and Antony were reconciled yet again. Octavian even married Antony's sister Octavia, binding the two men together through family ties.

But the fundamental dynamic had shifted. Antony's Parthian campaign, launched in 36 BCE, ended in disaster. He lost perhaps a quarter of his army to Parthian harassment and the brutal Armenian winter. Meanwhile, Octavian finally defeated Sextus Pompey at the naval battle of Naulochus. And in the aftermath of that victory, Octavian found a pretext to strip Lepidus of his triumviral powers.

Lepidus had made the mistake of trying to claim Sicily for himself after the victory over Pompey. Octavian walked into Lepidus' camp and appealed directly to Lepidus' soldiers, offering them better terms. They switched sides. Lepidus was forced into retirement. He lived another twenty-four years, but he never held power again.

The triumvirate was now a duumvirate—two men instead of three. And those two men were increasingly hostile.

The Final War

Through the late 30s BCE, Antony and Octavian's relationship deteriorated. Antony stayed in the east with Cleopatra. He staged a ceremony in Alexandria where he distributed eastern territories to Cleopatra and her children—including the son she claimed was Julius Caesar's. Octavian used this as propaganda, portraying Antony as a man who had abandoned Roman values for oriental decadence.

When the triumvirate's second term expired in 32 BCE, both men simply ignored the technicality. Legal niceties had long since ceased to matter. What mattered was which army was stronger.

The final war came in 31 BCE. Octavian declared war—not on Antony, technically, but on Cleopatra. This legal fiction let him frame the conflict as Rome against a foreign enemy rather than another round of civil war.

At the Battle of Actium, off the coast of western Greece, Octavian's navy defeated the combined fleet of Antony and Cleopatra. It wasn't much of a battle—Antony and Cleopatra broke through the blockade and fled to Egypt, abandoning most of their forces. The following year, Octavian pursued them to Alexandria. Both Antony and Cleopatra died by suicide.

Octavian was thirty-three years old. He had been fighting civil wars since he was nineteen. Now, for the first time in his adult life, he had no rivals.

The Misleading Name

Historians call this arrangement the "Second Triumvirate" to distinguish it from the "First Triumvirate"—the informal alliance between Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar in the 60s and 50s BCE. But both terms are modern inventions, unknown before the late seventeenth century.

The Oxford Classical Dictionary warns that the names are misleading. The so-called First Triumvirate wasn't a triumvirate at all—it was a private political deal with no legal standing. Three powerful men agreed to cooperate. It was a political alliance, not an office.

The Second Triumvirate was something entirely different: a legally constituted magistracy with formally defined powers. The triumvirs weren't just cooperating—they were the government. They held power above the consuls, above the senate, above any legal check or balance.

Recent scholarship has started avoiding these traditional names precisely because they obscure this crucial distinction. One was an alliance; the other was a constitutional dictatorship.

The End of the Republic

In 27 BCE, Octavian formally gave up his triumviral powers and "restored the republic." The senate gave him a new name: Augustus. He would rule for another forty years, and after him, Rome would be governed by emperors for centuries.

Historians debate exactly when the Roman Republic died. Some point to Caesar crossing the Rubicon in 49 BCE. Others prefer the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, or Augustus' "restoration" in 27 BCE.

But there's a strong case for November 27, 43 BCE—the day the lex Titia created the triumvirate. That was the day Rome officially, legally, deliberately gave absolute power to three men. That was the day the republic voted for its own extinction.

The irony of the triumvirs' official title—the "Board of Three for the Reconstitution of the Republic"—was surely not lost on anyone who lived through those years. They reconstituted nothing. They destroyed everything. And they did it all perfectly legally.