[46] While Antony was at Tibur nearly all the Senate, and the greater part of the knights, and the most influential plebeians, came there to do him honor.1 These persons, arriving while he was swearing into his service the soldiers present and also the discharged veterans who had flocked in (of whom there was a goodly number), voluntarily joined in taking the oath that they would not fail in friendship and fidelity to Antony; so that one would have been at a loss to know who were the men who, a little before, had decried Antony at Octavius' public meeting. With this brilliant send-off Antony started for Ariminum, which lies on the border of Cisalpine Gaul. His army, exclusive of the new levies, consisted of three legions summoned from Macedonia (for the remainder had now arrived). There were also some discharged veterans, old men, who appeared nevertheless to be worth twice as much as the new levies. Thus Antony had four legions of well-disciplined troops, and the helpers who usually accompanied them, besides his body-guard and the new levies. Lepidus in Spain with four legions, Asinius Pollio with two, and Plancus in Transalpine Gaul with three, seemed likely to espouse the side of Antony.
1 In the thirteenth Philippic (9) Cicero refers to this meeting as "that pestilent assemblage at Tibur," but he makes it take place before the revolt of the two legions. In the fifth Philippic (9) he says that when Antony heard of the revolt of the legions "just after he had convoked the Senate, and procured a man of consular rank to propose that Octavius be declared a public enemy, he immediately fainted away." This is doubtful. Antony was not one of the fainting kind, but Cicero was prone to exaggeration.
The Civil Wars. Appian. Horace White. London. MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 1899.
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