Meanwhile Octavian had the good fortune to find a War Minister of rare genius and unexampled personal devotion; if the career of Octavian is marvellous, that of his friend Agrippa is no less so; the two men were of the same age; they were fellow students at Apollonia when the death of Cæsar summoned Octavian to Rome; they had already laid the foundations of a friendship which is among the most noteworthy in history.
Agrippa as a military genius has received scant consideration; but the man must have been a genius, who at the age of twenty-seven made a navy for Rome and re-organized an army, and who further contrived to place that army on a footing, which restored it to its proper position of subordination to the civil administration. All Agrippa’s projects bear witness to the mind of a daring planner and a consummate master of detail. It was necessary to build and train a fleet in the face of the opposition of Sextus Pompeius, who held the command of the sea; Agrippa at once bethought himself of an inland lake in which his ships could be built and then manœuvred; when the work of preparation was complete he cut a channel into the Mediterranean, and sailed out to attack and defeat his enemy. In preparation for the subsequent operations against Antonius at Actium, he was not misled by the example of the naval experts of the day; he saw that rapidity of manœuvring was more important in a man-of-war than size and weight, and instead of competing with the ship builders of Alexandria, constructed a large number of light galleys, and manned them with skilled crews.
The one great building for which Agrippa was responsible survives to our time, and still testifies to the originality of his genius; the dome of the Pantheon is remarkable even now; in its own day it was unexampled.
Agrippa was even greater in his moral qualities, in the self-restraint, or perhaps absence of a morbid ambition, which forbade him to become a rival to the man whose superiority he had elected to recognize. In the later days of the Republic a man could hardly become a great general without threatening the balance of the constitution; the death of Cæsar brought into prominence ambitious soldiers; it seemed that it was enough to be a successful leader of troops in order to enter upon the enjoyment of all things that ambitious men most covet; but to this kind of ambition Agrippa was superior; if he had a conscious ambition over and above the satisfaction of doing his work well, it was to make Octavian.
His example was most valuable to the fortunes of the Empire; his character impressed itself upon the young men at a later time, upon the youthful Tiberius his son-in-law among others. Henceforth the old loyalty to the Republic which restored victorious consuls to their proper place in civil life, when their wars were finished, was replaced by the loyalty of the army to a possibly civilian Imperator, whose military work was delegated to subordinate commanders; it was possible for a man to command an army without feeling that he lost dignity by submitting to the control of the head of the State.
If Octavian is to be admired for learning in a few years the trade of a statesman, Agrippa is no less to be admired for the celerity with which he acquired the detailed knowledge of a naval and military commander; both young men started with a rare power of submitting themselves to the guidance of men of experience; the eventual result was a combination of administrative ability, which was able to use other men without impairing its own supremacy.
After Sextus Pompeius had disappeared, and Lepidus had found himself in the unenviable position of a general without an army, and a provincial governor without a province, the delimitation of authority which followed may well have seemed to the sharers in power to be final.
Octavian took what was practically in later days the Western Empire, Antonius the Eastern. The marriage of Octavian’s sister with Antonius was held to render hostilities between them impossible; and there are few modern potentates who would not be content with the share which fell to Octavian; to be supreme ruler of France, Spain, Italy, the large islands of the Mediterranean, and the Western portion of the North Coast of Africa, would have satisfied Francis I. or Charles V. Nor were the Spain and Gaul of those days relatively in such a state of barbarism that the ruler of Italy could think of them as semi-savage frontier colonies. Parts of Spain were still imperfectly civilized, but the relation which they bore to the more settled regions was little different from that held by the Celtic fringes of our own islands till comparatively late in our history. Gaul was more united than the France of Louis XI., and no more subject to internal disturbances. Gaul, in fact, began almost from the time of Cæsar’s conquests to advance to a dominant position in the Empire; she supplied soldiers, statesmen, and rhetoricians to Italy; the balance of power gradually inclined to the country, which had not been exhausted by successive wars, and whose population was relatively homogeneous; the time was to come when the Emperors would be Gallic rather than Italian. The Gauls quickly assimilated Roman culture and Roman discipline; two of the greatest writers of the Augustan age, Virgil and Livy, one of an earlier date, Catullus, were natives of Cis-Alpine Gaul, if not Celtic in their nationality; Cornelius Gallus, a Transalpine Gaul, was not only estimated at a high value among the poets of his day, but was the first Viceroy appointed to Egypt by Octavian. In fact, though it may have appeared to the men of the day that Antonius had taken to himself the best share of the Empire, and left Octavian a valueless appanage, the sequel proved that the latter had the best of the bargain; the central part of his dominions was the longest organized and the best organized, while the outlying territories had no time-honoured reputation to set against the extension of Roman civilization; they had everything to gain by closer incorporation with the Empire; they even accepted its language, whereas the Eastern Empire never ceased to be Greek.
The personal qualities of Antonius brought about the union of the Empire; so long as he served under the direction of the great Cæsar he passed for a politician and administrator, no less than for a dashing general; deprived of his great model, he quickly showed himself to be nothing but a greedy soldier. The East learned by successive bitter experiences what it lost in Cæsar; first came little Dolabella to harry Syria, then Cassius and even Brutus extorted all that they could lay their hands on in the rich cities of the Levant and Asia Minor; then came Antonius with further fines and confiscations; there was a general sense of relief when Cleopatra carried him off to Alexandria, only however to prompt him to fresh extortions.
The alliance of Antony and Cleopatra was the salvation of the Roman Empire; it frightened the West into union, and its failure brought about the final submission of the East. This was no mere question of rivalry between two eminent Roman statesmen; it was a turning point in civilization; the issue was once again whether the Mediterranean was to be governed on Oriental or Western lines. The halo of not particularly edifying romance which shines round the figure of Cleopatra averts the attention from the statesman-like qualities which she really possessed; her residence in Rome in the capacity of Cæsar’s mistress was not a glorious episode in the career of the Egyptian Queen, but it taught her, as a similar experience had taught Juba, the weakness of Rome from an Oriental point of view. Cleopatra saw that Rome wanted a despot; on the death of her admirer she went back to Egypt to wait on events; when Antonius appeared in the East, she proposed to annex Italy through Antonius, as Cæsar had through herself annexed Egypt; but, like many others, she had misjudged the man; Antonius was no Cæsar; and though Cleopatra could form magnificent schemes of ambition, she lacked the self-control necessary to carry them out; unfortunately for herself, in the attempt to annex Antonius she fell violently in love with him, and statesmanship became a secondary consideration; she could not deny herself the companionship of her lover; he, too, more than once forgot all the duties of a soldier in his impatience to return to her arms. Their plans for extended conquests in the East were foiled by their maladministration; and even a temporary success proved in its results worse than a series of defeats; for Antonius celebrated his victory over the Parthians by parodying at Alexandria the solemn ritual of a triumph at Rome. This event, more even than a fleeting descent of Antonius at a previous date upon the coast of Iapygia in conjunction with Sextus Pompeius, consolidated the power of Octavian; he became no longer the leader of a party, but the representative of Latin civilization. Nor is it contrary to probability that the luxurious excesses of the Court at Alexandria, at Smyrna, at Samos, frightened the Greek cities, and that frequent emissaries gave Octavian good reason for supposing that the Greek cities were ready to throw themselves into his hands; Cæsar had never acted in the spirit of a Greek tyrant, but the type was abundantly manifested in Antonius. Octavian waited till he was ready; he then produced a document, the will of Antonius, which clearly informed the Roman people of the destiny prepared for them, and when the right moment came, allowed a dispute about his claims over certain cities to end in a declaration of war.