Into this dangerous arena steps the nineteen-year-old Octavian. His guardian advised him to have nothing to do with his perilous inheritance. Historians have often dubbed him a coward. But alone and unfriended this youth left his tutors at Apollonia and came to Rome to take up his trust. It meant, first, revenge upon the conspirators; and secondly, a quarrel with Antony. It meant, in fact, two more civil wars, and Octavian had seen nothing of warfare. He set to work coolly and warily. There was still a magic in the name of Cæsar, and the veterans rallied to him and besought him to march against Brutus and Cassius. Part of his duties as executor was to pay a million sterling in donations to the Roman people. He sold his property and began to distribute the largess, man by man, tribe by tribe, until the sum was paid. He gave magnificent games in his “father’s” honour, with the lucky star of Julius publicly exhibited. He bought an army of 10,000 men with borrowed money. Two of Antony’s legions deserted to him bodily, and the very veterans of Antony’s bodyguard offered to murder their general if young Cæsar would give the signal. But there was no haste in his method. Antony was to be used first and then destroyed. Octavian tried for a time to work with the senate, and even marched against Antony under their orders, but the incredible folly of the senate, who were persuaded by Cicero that “the boy” was negligible, drove him into the famous triple alliance of Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus. These three were appointed under threat of their armies to a kind of dictatorship in commission, “a triumvirate to reorganise the state.” Revenge was the explicit motive of this league. They began with the usual horrid proscription of all the senatorial aristocrats to be found in Rome. This was mainly Antony’s work. His creditors, his enemies and his wife’s enemies were slain wholesale, and, among them, Cicero. Eighteen towns of Italy were destroyed to provide lands for the veterans.