The battle of Philippi (43 BCE) in the far north of Greece, lost by the optimates, put an end to dreams of restoring the republic. Brutus and Cassius were dead, and soon after Cicero’s beheaded head was hung on a Roman rostra. The road to the empire led through Actium (31 BCE) and the victory of Augustus, or perhaps Gaius Octavian, over Antony and Cleopatra.
These events are more than 10 years apart. What was happening then in the Roman Empire ruled by the triumvirs, Octavian, Antony and Lepidus?
The bloodiest civil war in the history of Rome was raging, bringing death and chaos. The Perusine War was one of the stops in this trial of strength between the Roman “alpha males” Octavian and Antony. He draws an interesting and captivating fresco from this war in his novel “Liwia. “Mother of the Gods” Michał Kubicz.
The historical novel has its rights and the author himself admits that he does not know whether the republican Tiberius Claudius Nero, the father of the future emperor who participated in it, was accompanied by the heroine of the novel, Livia Drusilla, later empress Augusta. She was or wasn’t, it doesn’t matter. The story faithfully reflects the siege of Perusia (today’s Perugia) by Octavian’s legions. A siege that brought death and fire to the city. Octavian slaughtered the entire city council of Perusia, except for one judge. Mary Beard writes about it in her history of Rome. The lucky man turned out to be the man who voted in the Senate to punish Caesar’s killers.
The Republican commanders, Lucius Antony, Mark’s brother, and Fulvia, his wife, also escaped with their lives. Octavian pardoned them, but Fortune was not kind to the patricians who were with him in Perusia. 300 senators and equites were sacrificed to the divine Caesar. This is confirmed by the accounts of Suetonius and Cassius Dio. But Appian, who left the most detailed accounts of the Perusine War, does not mention anything about it.
Of course, Livia’s then-husband, Tiberius Claudius Nero, had no idea about the later doubts of historians and simply fled the city before it was surrendered. As the author of the novel wants, Livia and the future emperor Tiberius escape with him.
But before they escaped, they had to see with their own eyes the lead bullets with which the besiegers were pouring down the defenders. As Mary Beard writes in her book, in modern Perugia, dozens of small, deadly slingshot shells were unearthed, with various slogans on them intended to lower the morale of the defenders. They contain eloquent slogans, such as “You’re starving and you’re pretending you’re not,” because hunger was the main reason for the city’s surrender. Others carried obscene messages about the leaders, Lucius Antony and Fulvia: “Lucius Antony, you bald cock, and you too, Fulvia, stick your asses out,” “I’m aiming for Fulvia’s clitoris”.
I wonder if the legion blacksmiths themselves came up with these slogans because they were bored, or did they write them at the dictation of their commanders?
