Second Triumvirate
Octavian, Antony and Lepidus met on an island in a river near Bologna in November 43 BC and divided the Roman world between them for five years. Unlike the arrangement between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, this one was a legal office. The Lex Titia gave the three men the formal title of triumvirs for the ordering of the state, with the power to make law, appoint magistrates and judge without appeal — a dictatorship of three, created by statute. Caesar had been murdered nineteen months earlier. Octavian, his eighteen-year-old adopted heir, had raised troops privately, been used by the senate against Antony, and had then marched on Rome and demanded the consulship at nineteen. The first act of the triumvirate was proscription. Lists were posted in the Forum naming men who could be killed for a reward, with their property forfeit — some 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians, chosen for their politics and for their estates, since the armies had to be paid. Each triumvir gave up friends and relatives to the others' lists. Cicero was on Antony's, killed on the road, and his head and the hands that had written the Philippics were nailed to the rostra. Brutus and Cassius were destroyed at Philippi in 42 BC. The three then divided the provinces: Antony the east, Octavian the west, Lepidus Africa. Lepidus was stripped of everything in 36 BC and left as chief priest, and the two survivors fought at Actium in 31. The republic had been ended not by a general marching on the city but by a statute the senate itself passed.
- Category: Political
