by M. J. Trow
Over all of them, because of their ages, Cleopatra ruled as regent as Cleopatra Thea Neotera Philopator Philopatris – the new Thea, father and fatherland loving. The Latin legend on her coins struck in this year read ‘Cleopatrae reginae regum filium regum’ – Cleopatra, queen of kings and her sons who are kings.
Yet none of this was actually to happen, at least not for long, because of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s decision concerning her eldest son, Caesarion. He was already her co-ruler, Ptolemy Caesar, king of kings. Now, he was officially declared the heir of Julius Caesar. He was not a Roman citizen and had no following in the city itself, but for the first time, Antony’s co-triumvir was made painfully aware of a rival who might, in time, challenge him.
Over 1,200 miles away in Rome, Octavian, Julius Caesar’s other heir, vowed vengeance.
16
THE SHARERS IN DEATH
Antony and Cleopatra continued to organize the East, live in splendour and enjoy each other’s company. His eldest son, Antyllus, joined them and was taught alongside Cleopatra’s children in the rigorous Alexandrian schooling that she herself had undergone. Conspicuous consumption was the couple’s trademark. On one occasion Cleopatra, at a banquet, was said to have taken off a large pearl earring and dissolved it in a goblet of wine, for a bet. Scientists of our time have gone to the lengths of trying to reproduce this vanishing act; it doesn’t work, except by cheating and crushing the pearl first, which would rather have taken the edge off the magnificent gesture. The man who stopped her from throwing in the other earring, Lucius Munatius Plancus, joined in the nonsense by dressing as Glaucus, the sea-god, complete with blue body paint and a fish’s tail. The drunkenness went on, the parties went on. And it rubbed off on the children. Antyllus once gave away an entire set of gold tableware to a young tutor who had pleased him at a dinner party.
The family were hugely generous, as they could afford to be. The only document to have survived that may contain Cleopatra’s handwriting refers to a massive tax exemption to Antony’s general Publius Canidius Crassus in 33, allowing him the free importation of wheat and wine to Alexandria. The single phrase ‘ginestho’ in Greek reads ‘let it be done’.
But behind the general lifestyle, the daily administration and the sacrificial duties, a storm was gathering. Although no one had the stomach for it, the civil war was not actually over, however Octavian might pretend to the contrary. It could have been possible to re-order the Republic with a dictator for the West (Octavian) and a dictator for the East (Antony) but Roman minds did not see it that way in the first century BC. Above it all floated the growing shadow of Cleopatra. She was supposed to be a client king, subservient to Antony; and she was a woman. The stories drifting west with every merchant ship and official envoy said the opposite. He was in thrall to her, whether by magic or his own weakness hardly mattered. And because of this, Antony was playing precisely into Octavian’s hands.
The two men had never been friends but from 33 onwards, the mutual sniping got worse. Octavian accused Antony of drunkenness (he may actually have been an alcoholic by now) to the extent that Antony wrote a defence of his behaviour – De Sua Ebrietate, On his drunkenness. He could hardly retaliate; like Julius Caesar, Octavian drank little. When Octavian began to hurl sexual jibes, however, Antony could throw the mud back. One of the few letters of his to have survived (albeit as a paraphrase from Cicero) reads:
Why have you changed? Is it because I’m screwing the queen? Is she my wife? Have I just started this or has it been going on for nine years? How about you – is it only [Livia] Drusilla you’re screwing? Congratulations, if when you read this letter you have not been up Tertulla or Terentilla, Rufilla or Salvia Titiseniam or all of them. Does it really matter where or in whom you dip your wick?69
It is not clear whether these women were actually Octavian’s mistresses or merely generic female names, implying that anything in a peplos would do for Caesar’s heir. Rumours about Octavian’s rapaciousness needed no additions from Antony. On one occasion, he is said to have whisked away the wife of his host at a banquet and returned looking mightily pleased with himself while she was dishevelled and blushing.
Far more important in this letter is the phrase uxor mea est – she is my wife. In the context in which Antony uses it, it is probably a rhetorical question rather than a statement. But that was part of what had changed Octavian. Antony was free to take any mistress he liked, but to marry a foreigner and place her on so high a pedestal was indefensible. And Antony knew it.
Whatever else he was – manipulator, lecher, coward – Octavian was a past master at propaganda. Antony made it easy for him, but in Rome, Caesar’s heir was busy building his image for the future. He began to build – and Romans were always hugely impressed by the physical symbols of power – even starting the library Caesar had wanted to build having seen Cleopatra’s at Alexandria. He did not talk now of rebuilding the Republic, which most far-seeing men knew was broken for ever. Now, he styled himself the successor of the divine Julius – and halfway to a god himself. There was a deep irony here – all her life, Cleopatra had enjoyed this status, precisely one which Romans found so noxious.
In February 32 so pushy was Octavian becoming that the two consuls, Ahenobarbus and Gaius Sosius, ran to Antony while Octavian figuratively buried his former colleague (Antony had officially renounced his triumvir title) by reading his will to the senate and anybody who cared to listen. According to tradition, Antony was believed to have placed a copy of the will with the Vestal Virgins in Rome, but since it was only Octavian who had seen it and who was able to quote chunks from it, it is highly likely that he had written it himself. Caesarion, the will said, was Julius Caesar’s son and heir and Antony left various bequests to his children with Cleopatra. This was illegal under Roman law but the most damning indictment against Antony was that, irrespective of where he died, he wanted to be buried with Cleopatra in Alexandria.
It was only a short step from that libel to the myth that Octavian spread that Cleopatra intended to ‘dispense justice on the Capitol’. In other words, she and Antony would oust Octavian, shelve for ever the lie of the Republic and preside as lord and lady, king and queen, over a Roman empire. A second rumour, which rather made nonsense of the first, was that Alexandria and not Rome would become their headquarters. If Antony and Cleopatra were happy enough in the east, why go to such dangerous and unprecedented lengths of taking the west as well?
Octavian showed his greatest skill in turning a renewed outbreak of the civil war, a rather sordid power struggle between him and Antony, into a foreign war, little short of a crusade against the weak, debauched east where women urinated standing up and people worshipped gods with animals’ heads. At this stage, the senate was split. Of the 1,000 members, perhaps 600 sided with Octavian, the rest unwilling to believe all the invective about Antony. Historians today argue that if Antony had struck quickly when Octavian’s tax hikes to pay for the forthcoming campaign made him unpopular in Rome; or if he had landed without Cleopatra in Italy, he could have overthrown his rival and perhaps Marcus Antonius would have become Rome’s first emperor.
But that was precisely the point. Cleopatra was the sticking place. Antony now officially divorced Octavia and told her to take herself and her children out of his sumptuous villa in Rome’s suburbs. She went dutifully, willingly, an excellent propaganda tool for her brother; she was the perfect, wronged, Roman wife. From now on, Antony went through the motions of preparing for a war he clearly did not want to fight. Like a sleepwalker, he went through the last months of his life in a curious slow motion – and all of this, both at the time and since, was blamed on Cleopatra. While she was contributing vast sums to the war and 200 galleys to bolster Antony’s war-fleet, while troops were being raised as far north as Thrace (today’s Bulgaria) and the client kings and their armies were summoned, the lovers dallied on Samnos, watching plays and throwing parties! They held court at Athens where Antony had once lived and Cleopatra was hailed as a
goddess as Octavia had been not long before.
By the end of the summer, Octavian felt he had enough support to declare war formally on Cleopatra. He snatched up a pilum dripping with sacrificial blood – he claimed this was an ancient custom, but had probably invented it as a powerful symbolic act – and hurled it from the steps of the senate towards the south-east in the direction of Egypt.70 If ever there was a contrived war, this was it. The traditional method of declaring war was for the senate to demand restitution for a wrong. It would wait for a few weeks for a response, then send an emissary to the enemy’s capital to begin proceedings. None of this happened in the case of Cleopatra and, unlike a number of client kings who had shifted sides with the blowing of the wind, she had remained loyal to Rome. Even when given the hopeless choice of which Rome to support during the post-Ides ferment, she had clearly dragged her feet so as not to offend either side more than she had to. For his part, Antony was charged with fighting alongside ‘the Egyptian [sic] woman against his native country’.71 The senate officially took away his consulship.
Still Antony did not hurry but steadily built up his war effort. Canidius Crassus joined him with sixteen legions, but none of them was likely to have been up to full strength. According to Plutarch, he had 100,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry and to his standards flocked the client kings of the east, from Thrace, Cappadocia, Mauretania, Armenia and Greece itself. Herod of Judaea was sent to deal with the Nabatean Arabs who were not paying their allotted tribute of bitumen, although this decision may have had something to do with Cleopatra in that she clearly hated the man and he her.
For weeks Antony dithered over what sort of campaign he wanted to wage. He had fought in Greece before under Caesar against Brutus and Cassius and had been successful, but there is always a sense with Antony that he was a better tactician than strategist and the broad brushstrokes of war are the ones he was less good at applying. Despite the Parthian debacle, he was popular, experienced and knew the country. Octavian, with a similarly sized army, was fighting on foreign soil (his presence at Philippi had been very nebulous) and he was strapped for cash to keep his campaign going.
Antony had vast resources from Cleopatra. Not only did she provide a large proportion of the fleet, but most of the galley rowers were Greek or Egyptian and she literally spoke most of the languages of the client kings, keeping them on-side with her well-known charm offensive. She seems to have been less charming to Antony’s Roman generals. The gruff Ahenobarbus, once an anti-Caesarian republican, was now one of Antony’s most loyal supporters, but he clearly found the queen’s presence in Antony’s tent offensive. He called her ‘Cleopatra’ to her face and followed none of the fawning flattery a queen of her wealth and power was due. Late in the day, he abandoned them both and went over to Octavian, dying shortly afterwards, probably of malaria. Dellius deserted too, although given his track record, this could have been predicted. More serious was the defection of Lucius Plancus, who had once been a cringing courtier, dressed as a fish for Cleopatra’s delight. Not only did he leave the pair in the lurch, he took Antony’s war plans with him. It is one of the great unanswered questions why Antony did not see this as a pressing need to change them.
Octavian’s ace-in-the-hole was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a long-time friend and supporter of the triumvir, whose fleet (actually Cleopatra’s fleet) had smashed that of Sextus Pompey off Sicily. He was a gifted military commander and probably the best admiral Rome produced. He had recently been aedile responsible for Octavian’s building programme in the city, but his first love was action at sea and he made the opening moves of the war, striking at the port of Methone, the most southerly of Antony’s outposts. Antony was wrong-footed. He had prepared too slowly and expected an initial attack further north. His fleet at Methone was captured, reversing the ship numbers in Octavian’s favour and King Bogud of Mauretania was killed trying to defend the town. Octavian landed and occupied the town of Torone, which means ladle. It also means penis in Greek slang and Cleopatra quipped that it made no difference that Octavian was sitting on his ladle – he’d been doing that for years. Such ribaldry only added to Rome’s low opinion of her and disguised the seriousness of the situation. Once Octavian had landed on the Greek mainland, the focus of the campaign became the Gulf of Ambracia and particularly Actium on its seaward side. When Antony arrived from Patmos he was outnumbered so refused to be drawn into a land battle straight away. He had already offered to face Octavian in a personal duel but the result of that would have been so obvious that the triumvir declined. Within days, Antony’s cohorts had arrived and he offered battle. Again, Octavian refused. Conjectural history is always difficult – the ‘what ifs’ are rarely decisive – but it seems likely that if a pitched land engagement had been fought at that stage, Antony would have been victorious and Octavian’s gamble would have failed. As it was, Antony languished in a malaria-infested swamp for sixteen weeks before attempting a break-out by sea.
Cleopatra was criticized at the time just for being there and even modern commentators regard her as being at best in the way and at worst countermanding Antony’s strategy with ill-informed female illogicality. Little of this makes sense. She was not a general, say her detractors, yet she had camped with Achillas in the desert outside Pelusium before visiting Caesar in Alexandria; she had led her fleet in action against his murderers. As queen, she must have felt it was her place to command her troops in person; it was what the Ptolemies did. Against that we have only the Roman bigotry, which said that women had no place in an army camp. It was the kind of thinking that allowed Boudicca of the Iceni to destroy three Roman towns in Britain before the legions finally stopped her.
At first, Antony had a camp within bow shot of Octavian’s on a narrow peninsula between the Ionian Sea and the Gulf of Ambracia. As malaria, low morale and desertions took their toll, he abandoned that and established himself at a base in Acarnania, across the narrow gulf entrance from the enemy. There were skirmishes and clashes in which neither side gained an advantage. Against the advice of Canidius, who advocated marching inland and drawing Octavian after them before tackling him on ground of their choosing, Antony opted for a naval break-out, which would still allow a rearguard to escape by land. They could all reform in Alexandria, with fresh troops, high morale and no malaria. That alone makes sense of what happened on 2 September as the trumpets announced the emergence of Antony’s fleet.
Naval battles were not the fast, long-range artillery duels of steel, engine-driven ships. The largest ships in either fleet were the huge war-galleys with ten banks of oars. Antony’s flagship was one of these – so, probably was Cleopatra’s Antonia. Most of them were quinqueremes or triremes, driven by five and three banks of oars respectively. We have no clear idea of the ethnic make-up of the rowers, but the vast majority would have been slaves and they were shackled to their oars with chains. Each ship had a single mast and one sail, but in battle, the oars did the talking, building up to ramming speed at which the bronze-tipped beaks at the prow would smash into the timber mid-ships of the enemy. Artillery would fire rocks and burning balls of pitch onto enemy decks as the galleys closed and then grappling irons were thrown to lash the ships together. Boarding parties of legionaries would jump from wooden towers and fight as if on land. Most of Antony’s troops were not used to warfare of this kind and in keeping with most men at the time were unable to swim. Both sides had their ships in a three-block formation, but by September Antony had had to destroy at least eighty of his ships because he had insufficient crew to man them. Against him, the centre was commanded by Lucius Arruntius; Agrippa had the left wing and Caius Lucius the right. Octavian was with this wing (on land, commanders-in-chief usually occupied this position) but he was curiously indisposed on 2 September and Agrippa coordinated the battle. For two hours or more, neither side gained advantage, but Antony’s manoeuvring meant that large gaps had appeared in Octavian’s line and through one of them sailed the queen of Egypt and her lover, heading south under full
sail.
The fullest account we have comes from Cassius Dio and he is in no doubt about what happened: