Ides of March spark a civil war | World History | Khan Academy

We finished the last video with the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, March 15, 44 BCE. You might remember it was done by factions opposed to Julius Caesar who thought that, one, he had gotten too much power, but even more, he was using that power to, in a lot of ways, at least from their point of view, undermine their authority. That he was a populist, and as a populist, he was undermining the power of the aristocracy. So, they get together and they assassinate him.

Now you can imagine that all sorts of turmoil emerges from that. At the time of the assassination, Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony are co-consuls. You might remember Mark Anthony from the previous video, one of Julius Caesar's generals in Gaul. He was also put in charge of the Italian Peninsula when Julius Caesar went to go and take on his opponents, take on Pompey in Greece. So, Mark Anthony is the remaining consul and he says, “Well, what do I do? Do I immediately try to punish these conspirators?” In particular, you have Brutus and Cassius, who are considered two of the leaders of the conspiracy. He decides, instead of putting the Senate into further turmoil, to try to have a little bit of a compromise and doesn't immediately punish them. They are able to go from Rome and then go to the east, where they are the de facto leaders of the eastern provinces.

But then, in 43 BCE, things get a little bit more interesting. Julius Caesar, in his will, declares that his nephew, Octavian—or will be shortly known as Octavian—who's 18 years old at the time of the death on the Ides of March, that he, in his will, should be his adopted son and so makes him the natural heir of Julius Caesar. Now, Anthony, who's also one of Julius Caesar's right-hand men throughout and one of his strong supporters as he came to power, he also, in a lot of ways, could have claimed, “Well, I have some rights here to some of the power that Julius Caesar has gotten.”

Then there was a third figure, Lepidus, and this is a picture of him right over here. This is actually a picture of the three: this is Mark Antony, this is Octavian, and this is Lepidus. Lepidus was also a significant supporter of Julius Caesar. So, the three of them get together, and this is Lepidus' timeline right over here. Each of these timelines shows the lifespans of these characters, so you can see when they were born, when they die, to get a sense of their ages and when they happen to pass away.

These three characters get together and they form a triumvirate. This triumvirate is called the Second Triumvirate because you might have remembered the First Triumvirate between Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, and that was an informal agreement. This one actually gets legal backing, and not only do they form this triumvirate, but they're given incredibly powerful power over the Roman Republic. They decide to go after the conspirators.

So, in 43 the triumvirate is formed, and in 42 they eventually are able to meet the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar, and they meet them at the Battle of Philippi, which is right over—let me do this in color—you can see the Battle of Philippi where they're able to defeat the conspirators. After the defeat of the conspirators, they essentially divide the republic, although it really is an empire; they divide the republic between them. Anthony, Mark Anthony, becomes the ruler, the de facto ruler of the east, and he becomes a de facto ruler of the east, and then he actually is the nominal ruler over Gaul as well, but then he puts someone else in charge there.

As we'll see over the course of this tumultuous 17-year period, Mark Anthony really has a lot of his control and influence in the east. They've essentially split the empire between the three of them, and right at that split, Octavian doesn't get so much of the empire, but we'll see that will change shortly, where he's able to be in control of the western half of the empire in a matter of a few years.

So after that, then in 41—this is where Cleopatra enters into the picture and she always makes this a little bit more colorful—Mark Anthony decides that he wants to meet with Cleopatra. So, he's now leading the east, he starts leading it from Athens, then he moves where he governs from to Ephesus, and he calls Cleopatra to—and he already knows her; he's met her several times—to come meet him here in Tarsus. Here in Tarsus, they go back to Alexandria, and a romance starts between Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, one of the most famous romances in all of history.

Remember, this is the same Cleopatra who had a romance and a child, likely through Julius Caesar, and Anthony, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, will actually have three children together, two of which were conceived in this time period, right over here, this period of around 41 BCE. This is where we are on the timeline, right over there.

But then, in 40 BCE, the Parthians invade. You might remember the Parthians; this is another very significant—you really can consider them a pure empire to the Romans. On this map, you're only seeing the very left, or the most westward tip of the Parthian Empire. They had control of, when you remember, the Achaemenid Empire, the Seleucid Empire of most of Persia. They are a significant empire that was really a check on ancient Rome, and so they decide to invade.

The Romans already have trouble with the Parthians; you might remember Crassus, one of the first three triumvirs, a member of the triumvirate, he went and while fighting the Parthians, that's where he was killed. The Romans have had some interest in going after them, and now you have the Parthians who are taking it to the Romans—they've taken it on the offense.

So, Anthony, he goes from his—when he finds out about this, and apparently, he's in charge of the east, so it's a bit of an embarrassment for him. He goes to Tyre, which is the remaining significant holding that the Romans have. While he's in Tyre, he finds out that his wife—he does have a wife, so this thing that he has with Cleopatra is really an affair—his wife is embroiled in a civil war with Octavian.

In the civil war, and you'll see there's a general issue throughout the later stages of the Roman Republic and even the Roman Empire, that as Rome expands, it needs these armies, and one of the things that they promised these soldiers is, “Hey, after you serve, when you're a veteran, we're going to give you some land so you could be a nice farmer, or at least landlord; other people might do the farming and we'll probably, you know, and you can have slaves and all the rest.”

Now, in order to keep doing that, you keep needing new land. So, Octavian, in order to make some of these veterans happy, was giving away land, some of which was already, I guess you say, owned by existing Romans. So, Mark Anthony's wife was using that really as an excuse to try to vie for power.

Just to be clear, even though there was this triumvirate between Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, things were tense from the beginning between Antony and Octavian. Both of them saw themselves as natural heirs to Julius Caesar. Anthony says, “Hey, this young little 18-year-old upstart, what has he done to deserve this empire? I've been beside Julius Caesar the entire time.” Octavian is here saying, “Hey, I am now officially Julius Caesar's adopted son.” He takes on the name Caesar, “I am the rightful heir to Julius Caesar's power.”

So, sitting here in Tyre, Antony decides, “Okay, let me go take on Octavian.” He takes, he decides to go and lay siege to Brundisium in order to defend his wife, even though he obviously didn't care too much about his wife's honor. As over there, they’re essentially at loggerheads, he tries to go into the civil war. His wife, Anthony's wife, dies. Octavian and Antony decide, “Okay, maybe we should not be fighting each other so much.”

So, they decide, once again, to be friends. At that point, they decide to split the empire more formally between east and west, where in the triumvirate you have Mark Antony still getting the east, you have Octavian being in control of the west, including the Italian Peninsula, and then Lepidus gets Africa. You have Lepidus getting Africa right over here.

So, I’ll leave you with that. There's a little moment that looks like a little bit of peace between Mark Antony and Octavian, but as we'll see in the next video, it's about to get a lot worse. The big picture from here is that they were able to take care of the conspirators, but now they're starting to squabble. The triumvirate is starting to squabble, especially Mark Antony and Octavian. Lepidus was always kind of the, I guess you could say, the third wheel here, was always between Antony and Octavian.

Cleopatra now has a romantic relationship with Antony; she's aligned with Antony. At the same time, remember Cleopatra, she's considered the richest woman in the world at this time. She is the Pharaoh of Egypt, and remember, Egypt, even though the people were Egyptian, Cleopatra is part of the Ptolemaic dynasty—she is Greek.

What makes her interesting is that she takes on a lot of the trappings, and she learns to speak Egyptian. So, she's actually quite popular, relatively speaking, terms with the Egyptian people. The other thing to keep in mind is if these Parthians—these Parthians have just laid another insult on the Romans right over here when they invaded Syria and took over this territory. This is especially annoying to Mark Antony, who's supposed to be in charge of the east.