Interesting points, Safiria! - but for one thing, IMHO. Antony had the Army - the Liberators didn't. After the murder, Lepidus was stationed on that lovely little island on the Tiber with a good chunk of a legion (as Caesar's Master of the Horse), with immediate access to several nearby legions. Remember, Caesar had sent on several legions but planned to travel north to Apollonia with several more, and they were all massed just outside of Rome. Whereas the Liberators had utterly NO contact with the legions at all. Antony was not only the legal consul, but his colleague had his fingers on thousands of armed men. This kills the idea, for me, that Antony would have been that scared of his life. In fact, once he got out of Pompey's Theatre, he would have been one of the safest men in Rome - it was far more likely that Cassius and Brutus, et al., were scared to death, as their skulking in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus for nearly two days clearly displays. THEY were scared of HIM.

Antony had shown before that he had not the slighest problem with pulling armed soldiers into Rome - into the Forum itself, as he had done a couple of years before as Caesar's Master of the Horse - and this makes it clear to me that, once he got in touch with Lepidus (which he did during the afternoon of the Ides), the army was his to command.

I have never read anyone who suggested that Antony was the actual author of Caesar's policy of clementia, and it's hard for me to believe. In the first place, Caesar always knew Antony's limits, and NEVER trusted him with making policy. In the second place, the fact that, almost as soon as Caesar was cold, Antony was moving politically against his enemies on all fronts, and that the sources are clear that he was the driving force behind setting up the proscriptions of the Triumvirate, makes it seem to me that he had very little mercy at all for the average opponent. His courtesy to Brutus is notable, a bit, for its sheer unusualness!