What has changed your view towards me? Because I'm screwing the queen? Is she my wife? [Of course not!][128] And I've been doing it for nine years anyway. And what about you? Is Livia the only woman you screw? I bet, when you read this, you'll just have been inside some Tertulla or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia — or all of them. Does it matter where and in whom you have your erections? (Suet. Aug. 69)
The tone as well as the content has its point. This is the broad, coarse language of the soldier, the thoroughly masculine Roman. A man like this would not waste his time with effeminate mosquito nets.
There was another medium, too, that of visual art: and here Antony found it even more difficult to hold his own. Particularly striking was the treatment of the gods. Antony might have his Dionysus, and a few years earlier he had been emphasizing Hercules. Both could seem all too appropriate to an Italian audience. That Dionysiac blend of excess, drunkenness and eastern menace was hardly reassuring. And Hercules, it was recalled, had fallen unmanned before Omphale: a suggestive model for Antony, indeed, and one that duly recurs in contemporary art. Octavian countered with more comfortable gods, especially Apollo with his civilized order, discipline, calm and restraint. Here too Octavian found a willing audience: Apolline themes, portrayed with delicate restraint, swiftly become favourites in private dwellings, sometimes in rooms which would not be open to any public gaze: that must reflect genuine Italian taste, a spontaneous welcoming of the new moral climate. But it was not just Apollo. On beautifully minted coins, Venus, Jupiter, Hermes and Victoria were all shown in association with Octavian. If the gods were taking sides, no one could doubt which divine entourage was the weightier.[129] And here Antony could do little to reply: religion worked differently in the East, and he could hardly be more than Dionysus incarnate. A plurality of gods would simply blur the picture, and no wonder that even Hercules was dropping from view.
So propaganda flourished. At whom was it all aimed? Really, at everyone, or at least everyone in Italy. We might expect the veteran colonies to be most important: after all, the veterans had refused to fight one another in 40,[130] and the recent mutiny had shown that Octavian's control of them was insecure. Doubtless they did matter, and Antony's coarse language would strike a particular chord with them; but perhaps they mattered less than we naturally assume. For one surprising omission from the catalogue of propaganda themes is the memory of Iulius Caesar himself. Was Antony or Octavian his true heir? In 44-43 that theme had been vital.[131] Now there was certainly a little of this: Antony for instance made something of Caesarion — Caesar's true son, as he claimed in a letter to the Senate (not merely adopted, like Octavian);[132]while Octavian toyed publicly with the idea of invading Britain again, and — very slowly — was building a temple to Divus Iulius in the Forum Romanum.[133] Still, this is surprisingly little. To judge from the propaganda now, Caesar was out of date; just as there had been no particular concern to portray the war with Sextus as a rehash of the old civil war, with a young Caesar and a young Pompey reliving their fathers' destinies. Yet surely, in the colonies themselves, Caesar's name was no irrelevance, and his veterans would not have been impervious to the battle-cry. Soldiers would surely be less moved by all this talk of oriental excess: Caesar too had had his women; soldiers, and their captains, were simply like that. Those themes had more appeal for the propertied classes of the Italian towns, where traditional morality was strong. These, probably, were the people whom Augustus was to eye a few years later with his moral legislation,231 and a constituency to which he was always alert. Even the Senate, the rich, the cultured would not be unmoved by the themes; we might expect them to be more sophisticated — after all, they turned out too sophisticated to stomach the moral reforms — and it is true that many of the most republican and traditional stayed loyal to Antony;232 but even the most urbane find propaganda hard to escape, if it is repeated often and insistently enough, and if it appeals sufficiently sharply to their pre-existent assumptions and prejudices. More senators eventually took Octavian's part than Antony's.233
Octavian anyway knew better than to bludgeon the cultured too crudely. 'Propaganda' is too crass a word to apply to the literary production of his followers. Horace, for instance, was hardly disloyal. When he was writing an Epode, the tone would be appropriately Archilochean and abusive. But he was also writing his Satires, where Lucilius had set the generic pattern of personal attack and derision; yet, very self-consciously, Horace turned away from the tradition, dwelling instead on the delicate portrayal of his life and his values, especially the value of friendship. Remarkably, Antony and Cleopatra escape attack; Horace's personalia are different, warmer and more intimate. If Octavian is in the background, the suggestions are gentle ones: these are his friends, and this is how they live. A few years earlier Virgil too had complimented Octavian in the first Eclogue — 'deus nobis haec otia fecit' (1.6), and there can be little doubt that the god is Octavian. Coming so early in the first poem, that is almost an informal dedication of the whole collection. But the tone is anything but bluntly propagandist. The final emphasis of the first Eclogue rests more on the emptiness faced by the dispossessed Meliboeus; and the whole book explores the different registers of tragedy one found in the Italian countryside, an idyllic land now wracked by a devastation for which, if one thought about it, Octavian himself took much of the blame. In the late thirties Virgil was at work on the Georgics, and there too he wrote warmly of Octavian. But once again the tone is often sombre, dwelling on the vast work that was needed to restore the beauty that had been marred and lost.234 As in the first Eclogue, Octavian can certainly offer hope: 'hunc saltern everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo|ne prohibete' (G. 1. 500—1). But still not all of these are the emphases Octavian would have favoured himself. Guided doubtless by Maecenas, he was already seeing the value of a patronage which was notably loose and free, and the poets responded with writing
231 See below, ch. 18 pp. 883-93. 232 See below, pp. 49-50. 233 See below, p. 5 3.
234 That is a suggestion even of the proem to the third Gcorgic, where Virgil promises Octavian a poetic temple in the manner of Pindar. The 'temple' will be in Mantua. After G. 11.198-9, and indeed Eel. ix.27-9 (see above, p. 14), Mantua's suggestions are tragic; its idyllic description at G. 11.12-15 must now seem bland, with the tragedy artificially muted.
which meshed with his propagandist themes without always crudely echoing them. He already knew better than to confuse independence with subversion: knowledge which he was to retain for many years to come.
And, all this while, what was Octavian doing himself? He was in Illyricum, winning some glory for himself with cheap foreign blood. There had been campaigns there a few years earlier: in 39 Pollio had been involved with the Parthini in the south, and possibly with the Delmatae as well,235 at the same time an army of Octavian had apparently been active somewhere in the country.236 But little had been achieved, .and there was still plenty for Octavian to do. And, of course, Illyricum bordered Antony's dominion. It was not very likely that it would be strategically valuable if it came to war; at least, not unless Illyricum could be fully conquered, and that would hardly be practicable in the time. A civil war would probably be fought in Greece, and Greece would still be reached most readily by the sea-crossing from Italy. But, when war came, at least Octavian's troops would not have far to go. He could reasonably hope to make inroads into Antony's territory before Antony himself could return.