AI: Gaius Octavian 🦅👑, Marcus Agrippa ⚓🛡️, Mark Antony 🍷🔥, Marcus Tullius Cicero 📜🗣️, Marcus Junius Brutus 🦉🗡️, and Cleopatra VII 👑🐍 Compared: Civil War Summer 44 BC to Fall 42 BC (Part III)
“In my own heart I rejoiced at this omen, interpreting it as meaning that the star was born for me and that I was born in it.” — Gaius Octavian (Recorded in his lost memoirs (preserved by Pliny the Elder). Octavian is describing the bright comet that appeared in July during the games he hosted, brilliantly weaponizing it as a sign of Julius Caesar’s deification and his own divine destiny.)
“He alone acted for what he believed was the good of the Republic; the rest acted out of jealousy and hatred of Caesar.” — Mark Antony (The sentiment Antony famously expressed upon finding Brutus’s body on the battlefield (recorded by Plutarch). Taking off his own expensive purple commander’s cloak, Antony respectfully covered the fallen assassin, cementing his own reputation as a magnanimous and honorable victor.)
“I promise, I undertake, I pledge myself, Conscript Fathers, that Gaius Caesar[Octavian] will always be such a citizen as he is today…” — Marcus Tullius Cicero (Delivered on January 1, 43 BC, in his Fifth Philippic. In a tragic and fatal miscalculation, Cicero publicly stakes his own life and reputation on the belief that the nineteen-year-old Octavian will remain a loyal servant of the Senate after Antony is defeated.)
“O wretched virtue, you were but a name, and yet I worshipped you as real indeed; but now, it seems, you were only a fortune’s slave.” — Marcus Junius Brutus (Attributed by Cassius Dio and Plutarch (quoting a Greek tragedy) as Brutus’s despairing final words before falling on his sword.)