ANTONY AND
CLEOPATRA
By the same author:
The Punic Wars
Cannae
Roman Warfare
In the Name of Rome
Caesar
How Rome Fell
ANTONY AND
CLEOPATRA
Adrian Goldsworthy
Yale
UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Haven & London
First published 2010 in the United States by Yale University Press and in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright © 2010 by Adrian Goldsworthy.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010929122
ISBN 978-0-300-16534-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Map List
Introduction
I The Two Lands
II The ‘She-Wolf’: Rome’s Republic
III The Ptolemies
IV The Orator, the Spendthrift and the Pirates
V The Oboe Player
VI Adolescent
VII The Return of the King
VIII Candidate
IX ‘The New Sibling-Loving Gods’
X Tribune
XI Queen
XII Civil War
XIII Caesar
XIV Master of Horse
XV Not King, But Caesar
XVI Consul
XVII ‘One of Three’
XVIII Goddess
XIX Vengeance
XX Dionysus and Aphrodite
XXI Crisis
XXII Invasion
XXIII ‘Lover of Her Fatherland’
XXIV ‘India and Asia Tremble’: The Grand Expedition 304
XXV Queen of Kings
XXVI ‘Is She My Wife?’
XXVII War
XXVIII Actium
XXIX ‘A Fine Deed’
Conclusion: History and the Great Romance
Family Trees
Chronology
Glossary
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like all my books, this one has been greatly improved by the generosity of friends and family who have taken the time to read drafts of the manuscript or listen to my ideas as they developed. All contributed to making this a much better book, and added to the great pleasure of writing it. There are too many to name them all, but particular mention should go to Ian Hughes and Philip Matyszak, both of whom took time off from their own writing to comment on the chapters of Antony and Cleopatra. Kevin Powell also read the entire manuscript and provided many insightful comments and criticisms. Of those who were patient enough to talk through the various ideas at length, I must single out Dorothy King for special thanks. Her knowledge and enthusiasm were always very helpful – and in addition she provided me with pearls for some modest experiments in an effort to replicate Cleopatra’s famous wager with Antony!
In addition, I must once again thank my editor, Keith Lowe, and the other staff at Orion, as well as Ileene Smith and the team at Yale University Press, for seeing the book through to production and making such a fine job of it. Finally, thanks must go to my agent, Georgina Capel, for once again arranging for me to have the time and opportunity to do the subject justice.
MAP LIST
The Hellenistic world in 185 BC
The Roman Empire in the first century BC
Ptolemaic Egypt
The centre of Rome
Judaea
Alexandria
The Italian campaign 49 BC
The Battle of Pharsalus
Italy
The Battle of Forum Gallorum
Greece and Macedonia, and the Battles of Philippi
Antony’s Parthian expedition
The Donations of Alexandria
The Battle of Actium
INTRODUCTION
Antony and Cleopatra are famous. With just a handful of others, including Caesar, Alexander the Great, Nero, Plato and Aristotle, they remain household names more than two thousand years after their spectacular suicides. Cleopatra is the only woman in the list, which in itself is interesting and a testament to her enduring fascination. Yet most often Antony and Cleopatra are remembered as a couple, and as lovers – perhaps the most famous lovers from history. Shakespeare’s play helped them to grow into fictional characters as well, and so their story can now be numbered alongside other tales of passionate, but doomed romance, as tragic as the finale of Romeo and Juliet. It is unsurprising that the tale has been reinvented time after time in print, on stage and, more recently, on screen. Since they both had strongly theatrical streaks, this enduring fame would no doubt have pleased them, although since neither was inclined to modesty it would probably not have surprised them or seemed less than their due.
The story is intensely dramatic, and I cannot remember a time when I had not heard of Antony and Cleopatra. As young boys, my brother and I discovered a small box containing coins collected by our grandfather, a man who had died long before either of us was born. A friend spotted one of them as Roman, and it proved to be a silver denarius, minted by Mark Antony to pay his soldiers in 31 BC for a campaign partly funded by Cleopatra – the same coin shown in the photograph section in this book. Already interested in the ancient world, the discovery added to my enthusiasm for all things Roman. It seemed a connection not only with a grandparent, but also with Marcus Antonius the Triumvir, whose name circles the face of the coin with its picture of a warship. We do not know where our grandfather acquired this and the other coins — an eclectic mixture, several of which are from the Middle East. He may have picked them up in Egypt, where he served with the Royal Field Artillery during the First World War. It is certainly nice to think that.
So in some ways, Antony and Cleopatra have always had a special place in my interest in the ancient past, and yet the desire to write about them is fairly recent. A lot has been written, most especially about the queen, and it seemed unlikely that there could be much more worth saying. Then, a few years ago, I fulfilled a long-held ambition by working on Caesar: The Life of a Colossus, which amongst other things involved looking in far more detail at his affair with Cleopatra, as well as Antony’s political association with him. Some of what I found surprised me, and — though this was less unexpected — there were vast differences to the popular impression of the story. If it was valuable to look at Caesar’s career with a straightforward chronology, and to emphasise the human element in his own behaviour and that of his associates and opponents, it soon became clear that most other aspects of the period would benefit from the same approach.
For all their fame, Antony and Cleopatra receive little attention in formal study of the first century BC. Engaged in a power struggle, they were beaten and so had little real impact on later events. Academic history has long since developed a deep aversion to
focusing on individuals, no matter how charismatic their personalities, instead searching for ‘more profound’ underlying trends and explanations of events. As a student I took courses on the Fall of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Principate, and later on as a lecturer I would devise and teach similar courses myself. Teaching and studying time is always limited, and as a result it was natural to focus on Caesar and his dictatorship, before skipping ahead to look at Octavian/Augustus and the creation of the imperial system. The years from 44–31 BC, when Antony’s power was at its greatest, rarely receive anything like such detailed treatment. Ptolemaic Egypt is usually a more specialised field, but, even when it is included in a course, the reign of its last queen — poorly documented and anyway in the last days of long decline — is seldom treated in any detail. The fame of Cleopatra may attract students to the subject, but courses are, quite reasonably and largely unconsciously, structured to stress more ‘serious’ topics, and shy away from personalities.
Antony and Cleopatra did not change the world in any profound way, unlike Caesar and to an even greater extent Augustus. One ancient writer claimed that Caesar’s campaigns caused the death of one million people and the enslavement of as many more. Whatever the provocation, he led his army to seize Rome by force, winning supreme power through civil war, and supplanted the Republic’s democratically elected leaders. Against this, Caesar was famous for his clemency. Throughout his career he championed social reform and aid to the poor in Rome, as well as trying to protect the rights of people in the provinces. Although he made himself dictator, his rule was generally benevolent, and his measures sensible, dealing with long-neglected problems. The path to power of his adopted son, Augustus, was considerably more vicious, replacing clemency with revenge. Augustus’ power was won in civil war and maintained by force, and yet he also ruled well. The Senate’s political freedom was virtually extinguished and popular elections rendered unimportant. At the same time he gave Rome a peace it had not known in almost a century of political violence and created a system of government that benefited a far wider section of society than the old Republic.1
Antony and Cleopatra proved themselves just as capable of savagery and ruthlessness, but the losers in a civil war do not get the chance to shape the future directly. Apart from that, there is no real trace of any long-held beliefs or causes on Antony’s part, no indication that he struggled for prominence for anything other than his own glory and profit. Some like to see Cleopatra as deeply committed to the prosperity and welfare of her subjects, but this is largely wishful thinking. There is no actual evidence to suggest that her concerns went any further than ensuring a steady flow of taxation into her own hands, to cement her hold on power. For only a small part of her reign was she secure on the throne, at the head of a kingdom utterly dependent on Roman goodwill, and it would probably be unreasonable to expect her to have done more than this.
Julius Caesar was highly successful. He was also highly talented across a remarkable range of activities. Even those who dislike the man and what he did can readily admire his gifts. Augustus is an even harder figure to like, especially as a youth, and yet no one would fail to acknowledge his truly remarkable political skill. Caesar and his adopted son were both very clever, even if their characters were different. Mark Antony had none of their subtlety, and little trace of profound intelligence. He tends to be liked in direct proportion to how much someone dislikes Octavian/Augustus, but there is little about him to admire. Instead, fictional portrayals have reinforced the propaganda of the 30s BC, contrasting Antony, the bluff, passionate and simple soldier, with Octavian, seen as a coldblooded, cowardly and scheming political operator. Neither portrait is true, but they continue to shape even scholarly accounts of these years.
Cleopatra was clever and well-educated, but unlike Caesar and Augustus the nature of her intelligence remains elusive, and it is very hard to see how her mind worked or fairly assess her intellect. It is the nature of biography that the author comes to develop a strong, and largely emotional, attitude towards his or her subject after spending several years studying them. Almost every modern author to come to the subject wants to admire, and often to like, Cleopatra. Some of this is a healthy reaction to the rabid hostility of Augustan sources. Much has to do with her sex, for as we noted at the start, it is a rare thing to be able to study in detail any woman from the Greco-Roman world. Novelty alone encourages sympathy – often reinforced by the same distaste for Augustus that fuels affection for Antony. In itself sympathy need not matter, as long as it does not encourage a distortion of the evidence to idealise the queen. There is much we simply do not know about both Antony and Cleopatra – and indeed most other figures from this period. The gaps should not be filled by confident assertions drawn from the author’s own mental picture of Cleopatra as she ought to have been.
By the time I had finished Caesar, I knew that I wanted to take a break from the first century BC and look at the decline of the Roman Empire and its collapse in the West. As much as anything this was because none of the books on that period seemed to explain events in a way I found satisfactory. The same sense that there was nothing that really did justice to the story of Antony and Cleopatra made me just as convinced that this book must come next.
To have real value, the study of history must be a quest for the truth. The whole truth is no doubt unobtainable even for comparatively recent events. For the ancient past, there will inevitably be many more gaps in our evidence as well as all the problems of understanding the actions of people from very different cultures to our own. That absolute success is impossible does not make the attempt to achieve it any less worthwhile. Similarly, although no historian can hope to be wholly objective, it still remains of fundamental importance to strive for this. If we always seek for the truth in history, whether or not it fits with our preconceptions or what we would like to believe, then we are far better placed to look for the truth in our own day and age.
This, then, is an attempt to tell the story of Antony and Cleopatra as objectively and dispassionately as possible, for there is passion enough in it without the author adding too much of his own personality. My aims are also to reveal as much of the true events as is possible, while making plain what we do not know, and bring the couple and their contemporaries alive as flesh-and-blood human beings. Getting to the facts is a lot less easy than it might seem, for even serious scholars so often want to see something else when they look at these two extraordinary lives.
THE PROBLEM
It begins with the question of just what Cleopatra was. Cleopatra was the queen of Egypt, and for the last few centuries Ancient Egypt has fascinated the modern world. At first interest came mainly from a desire to understand the Old Testament better, but rapidly moved far beyond that. Egypt is perceived as the most ancient of civilisations and its monuments are amongst the most spectacular. Some, such as the pyramids, sphinx and the great temples, are awe-inspiringly massive. Others are more intimate, such as the mummified animals and people, and the models of everyday things left in the tombs of the dead. Tutankhamen’s lavish death mask is immediately recognisable and conjures up images of ancient mystery and massive wealth. Hieroglyphics, with their mixture of symbols and pictures, or the flattened figures of people walking in the strange posture of wall paintings and reliefs are again both instantly recognisable as Egyptian. They are dramatic and at the same time alien.
Such imagery has time and again proven itself irresistible to filmmakers depicting Cleopatra. Her palace, court and indeed her own clothes are invariably inspired more by a caricatured version of New Kingdom Egypt than the reality of the first century BC. This is the chronological equivalent of presenting Elizabeth I as Queen Boudica of the Iceni, yet it has the dramatic virtue of making Cleopatra and Egypt utterly different and visually distinct from the Romans who form such a major part of her story. The Cleopatra of stories has to be exotic, and the images of an Egypt that was ancient even to her are a powerful part of this.
&nb
sp; The exotic is almost always reinforced by the intensely erotic. Cleopatra has become one of the ultimate femmes fatales, the woman who seduced the two most powerful men of her day. Beautiful, sensual, almost irresistible and utterly unscrupulous, she distracted Julius Caesar, and perhaps filled his head with dreams of eastern monarchy. She then dominated Antony and brought him low. This Cleopatra can be seen as a danger – the last great danger – to the Pax Romana Augustus would bring to the Roman world. Fashions change, so that empires are no longer seen as admirable, and the Augustan system viewed with a more sceptical eye. These days many want to tell the story differently, turning the sinister seductress into a strong and independent woman struggling as best she could to protect her country.
For all that the title of Shakespeare’s play makes it natural to speak of Antony and Cleopatra, the glamour associated with the queen readily overshadows her lover. She had anyway already had an affair with Caesar – the scene where she is delivered to him hidden in a rolled carpet is one of the best-known images of the queen, even if it does not quite fit the ancient source. Caesar was first, and history has on the whole relegated Mark Antony to the second place and the role of Caesar’s lieutenant. A ‘good second-in-command’ or a ‘follower rather than a leader’ have been common verdicts on Antony, both politically and militarily. He is also seen as the man who ought to have won, but failed, and this again feeds an impression of a flawed character – talent without genius. Some would blame Cleopatra for unmanning the tough Roman soldier, a tradition encouraged by his ancient biographer, Plutarch. Others would prefer to see Antony as simply not good enough to match her ambitions. For one historian, Cleopatra was ‘a charismatic personality of the first order, a born leader and vaultingly ambitious monarch, who deserved better than suicide with that louche lump of a self-indulgent Roman, with his bull neck, Herculean vulgarities, and fits of mind-less introspection’.2
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