Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/324

 2/2 Outlines of Europe a7t History )ctavi; gains taly and the West Octavian overthrows Antony and gains the East (31 B.C.) obvious lesson was the necessity of military power. He therefore rallied a force of Caesar's veterans, and two legions of Antony's troops also came over to him. Then playing the game of politics, with military power at his back and with none too scrupulous a conscience^ he showed himself a statesman no longer to be ignored. Thus the death of Caesar reopened the long and weary civil war. Year after year Octavian met the difficulties of his situa- tion with an ever surer hand as his experience increased. One after another his rivals and op- ponents w^ere overcome, and the murderers of his adoptive father were punished. Within ten years after Caesar's assas- sination this youth of twenty- eight had gained complete con- trol of Italy and the West. Meantime he had early been obliged to enter a political alli- ance with his most serious rival, Antony, who was now living in Alexandria, where he ruled the East as far as the Euphrates like an oriental sov- ereign. With Cleopatra as his queen, Antony maintained a court of sumptuous splendor like that of the Persian kings in the days of their Empire. The tales of all this made their way to Rome and did not help Antony's cause in the eyes of the Roman Senate. Octavian easily induced the Senate for this and other reasons to declare war on Cleopatra, and thus he was able to advance against Antony. As the legions of Caesar and Pompey, representing the East and the West, had once before faced each other on a battle field in Greece (p. 267), so now Octavian and Antony, the leaders of the East Fig. III. Portrait of Augus- tus, NOW IN THE Boston Mu- seum OF Fine Arts