previous next

[63] After saying much more to the same purpose Antony wrote his reply to the decree, saying that he would obey the Senate in all respects as the voice of his country, but to Cicero, who wrote the orders, he would make the following answer: "The people gave me the province of Gaul by a law, and I shall prosecute Decimus for not obeying the law, and I shall visit punishment for the murder upon him alone, as representative of them all, in order that the Senate, which now participates in the wickedness by reason of Cicero's support of Decimus, may at last be purged of the shocking crime." These words Antony spoke and wrote in reply.1 The Senate immediately voted him an enemy and also the army under him if it should not abandon him. The government of Macedonia and Illyria, with the troops still remaining in both, was assigned to Marcus Brutus until the republic should be reëstablished. The latter already had an army of his own and had received some troops from Apuleius.2 He also had war-ships and ships of burden and about 16,000 talents in money and quantities of arms which he found in Demetrias, where they had been placed by Gaius Cæsar long before, all of which the Senate now voted that he should use for the advantage of the republic. They voted that Cassius should be governor of Syria and that he should make war against Dolabella, and that all other commanders of Roman provinces and soldiers between the Adriatic sea and the Orient should obey the orders of Cassius and Brutus in all things.

1 Antony's reply is quoted with a running comment in the eighth Philippic (8-9). It was a counter-proposition demanding money and lands for his troops; requiring that the edicts of himself and Dolabella relative to Cæsar's writings and note-books should not be questioned; that there should be no inquiry into the disposition made of the money left by Cæsar in the temple of Ops; that he (Antony) should have the province of Transalpine Gaul with six legions (to be filled up from the forces under command of Decimus) for at least five years, and as long as Marcus Brutus and Cassius should retain their provinces.

2 Apuleius was the quæstor of Asia. Plutarch, who gives him the name of Antistius, says that he was bringing some ships laden with money to Rome and that Brutus met him near Carystus (at the southern end of Eubœa) and persuaded him to deliver the ships and contents to himself, and that the amount of money was 500,000 drachmas. Plutarch mentions also the store of arms at Demetrias, accumulated by Cæsar for the Parthian expedition. (Life of Brutus, 24-25.)

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (L. Mendelssohn, 1879)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (2 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
  • Cross-references in notes to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: