Cleopatra: A Life

by Stacy Schiff

  With his new fleet Antony headed to the Adriatic. In his absence Fulvia became seriously depressed and died. The cause is unclear. Appian supposes she may have taken her own life out of spite “because she was angry with Antony for leaving her when she was sick.” She may simply have been exhausted from the incessant meddling. She could not have been much mourned in Alexandria. Antony on the other hand was deeply affected by the death, for which he berated himself. He had not even returned to see his wife in her illness. Others held him responsible too, writing the neglect down—as Dio chides—to “his passion for Cleopatra and her wantonness.” Fulvia had been handsome and serious-minded and devoted. She had come to the marriage with money, influential friends, and shrewd political instincts. She had borne Antony two sons. If in truth she was a virago, she was, as has been pointed out, “at least an infinitely loyal virago.” Antony had thrived at her side.

  Fulvia’s death was arguably her most pacific act. It opened the way for a reconciliation between Octavian and Antony, “now rid of an interfering woman whose jealousy of Cleopatra had made her fan the flames of such a serious war.” As it was easy to write an absurd and costly war down to a woman’s machinations, so it was easy to write off an accord to her demise, the more so as no one was inclined to fight in the first place. Sextus Pompey remained active at sea. He had vigorously blocked the grain routes to Rome. Incessant war had destroyed Italian agriculture. Rome was a starving, unruly city, at the limits of its endurance. The countryside was in revolt. Soldiers lobbied for the funds Antony was to have obtained abroad and had yet to distribute. Friends stepped in as go-betweens, again reconciling the two men, who again divided the world between them, with Octavian making out more handsomely than he had two years earlier.

  This was the Treaty of Brundisium, of early October 40. By its terms, Antony was to battle the Parthians, while Octavian was to fend off or reach an agreement with Sextus Pompey. Some eight months later, the three men would accordingly sign a new agreement in Misenum, across the bay from Naples, the summit of Pompeii in the background. No sooner had those pacts been drafted, no sooner had the men embraced, than “a great and mighty shout arose from the mainland and from the ships at the same moment.” Even the mountains resounded with joy. In the ensuing harborfront chaos many were trampled, suffocated, or drowned, as “they embraced one another while swimming and threw their arms around one another’s necks as they dived.” Armed conflict had again been averted, although the all-night Brundisium celebrations spoke as loudly as did the agreements themselves. In tents along the coast both camps feted each other through a day and a night. (Octavian did so in the Roman fashion, Antony in the Asiatic and Egyptian style, which passed without comment.) All the same, when they did so at Misenum “their ships were moored close by, guards were stationed around, and those actually attending the dinner carried daggers concealed beneath their clothing.” Conspiracies brewed and plots were extinguished throughout the cordial banqueting.

  To join the two men personally after Brundisium, Octavian offered up his adored half sister to Antony. Here was the one realm in which a Roman woman commanded a premium: She made for an invaluable personal guarantee, especially when it came to closing a political deal. Circumspect and sober, Octavia had at twenty-nine all the makings of the long-suffering political wife. She was intelligent but not independent, a mediator rather than a manipulator. While she had studied philosophy, she harbored no political ambitions. “A wonder of a woman,” she was an acknowledged beauty, graceful, fine-featured, with a glossy mane of magnificent hair. Conveniently, she had been widowed months earlier. She was precisely what the situation required, an eminently qualified counterweight to Cleopatra, from whom she was intended to divert Antony. By his own admission he remained under that faraway spell. “His reason was still battling with his love,” as Plutarch has it, and as Antony’s men well knew. They ribbed him mercilessly about the affair. By law a widow was to wait ten months before remarrying, to allow for the birth of any progeny. All parties counted so fervently on Octavia to “restore harmony and be their complete salvation” that the Senate hurriedly passed an exemption. At the end of December 40 the Brundisium festivities continued in Rome, where Antony and Octavia celebrated their marriage.

  Rome was hardly in a festive mood—it was famished, plundered, exhausted—but the news must especially have rankled in Alexandria. The pacts of 40 and 39 could not have surprised but may have alarmed Cleopatra. Antony’s marriage was one thing, his commitment to his brother-in-law another. It was not in Cleopatra’s best interest for Antony and Octavian to join forces. Octavian was her mortal enemy, a walking, plotting insult to her son. On the other hand, she knew her man. Antony would be back. She did not need to make any advances, as the Parthians could be counted on to do so. She may well have come to feel perversely grateful to the Parthians, who distracted the Romans from Egypt. They accentuated her importance; Antony could hardly effect his part of the Brundisium bargain without her. Cleopatra had fair reason to believe that reconciliation fragile if not hollow. Antony and Octavian could reconcile as many times as they liked. The enmity—as Fulvia had forcefully argued months earlier—would not vanish. Cleopatra could have guessed at the daggers and did not need to. She had informers in Antony’s camp, who conveyed news of every detail—of the plots and counterplots, the skirmishing and banqueting—to Alexandria.

  She was in contact at least indirectly with Mark Antony, to whom she sent a caller that winter. The Parthians swept through Phoenicia, Palestine, and Syria, to plunder Jerusalem at the end of the year. Herod, the thirty-two-year-old Judaean tetrarch, or prince—Rome would crown him king only the following year—managed a harrowing escape. Having settled his family at the fortress of Masada, he cast about for asylum. It was not immediately forthcoming; his neighbors were unwilling to displease the invaders. Herod made his way finally to Alexandria, where Cleopatra received him in style. She knew him primarily as an excitable friend of Antony’s and as a fellow Roman client but had additional reason to be favorably disposed toward him: Herod’s father had twice assisted in Ptolemaic restorations, both hers and that of her father. In 47 he had personally launched a vigorous, artful assault on the eastern frontier and rallied Egypt’s Jews to Caesar’s cause. Like their fathers, Cleopatra and Herod were former Pompeians, late converts to Caesar. They had a common enemy in the Parthians.

  Herod was moreover an entertaining companion, glib and keen, fanatical in his loyalties, expert in his displays of deference. Evidently Cleopatra attempted to enlist the dashing prince in an expedition, either of her own, into Ethiopia, or with Antony, in Parthia. It was unsurprising that she should offer him a command. Jewish officers had long served in the Ptolemaic forces, and Herod was particularly distinguished. An expert horseman, he could throw a javelin with unerring precision. He declined the offer. In the end Cleopatra supplied him with a galley—she seemed forever to be handing out ships—in which to make a risky winter crossing to Rome, an unusual kind of hospitality, and one that involved Herod in a shipwreck off the coast of Cyprus. (He washed up in Rome only weeks later, to be welcomed warmly by Octavian and Antony.) In the worst light, Cleopatra’s was a diversionary tactic. Grateful though she may have felt toward Herod’s family, she had no great interest in encouraging her neighbor’s friendship with Antony.

  We have no idea how or if Cleopatra delivered another piece of news, which likely preceded Herod across the Mediterranean. At the end of the year she gave birth to twins. Their father was absent—he was at about this time either marrying Octavia or on the verge of doing so—but the children did not want for glorious antecedents. In naming them Cleopatra made no concessions to their paternal heritage. She went Rome one better: she named Antony’s children Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, at once summoning the sun; the moon; her great-aunt, the remarkable second-century Ptolemaic queen; and the greatest commander of the age, the one who had tamed even the Parthians, and to whom she alone among reigning sovereigns maintained a li
nk. Given the way she was stockpiling successors, Cleopatra was arguably doing more to unite East and West than had anyone since Alexander the Great. The sun and the moon figured in the Parthian king’s title; Cleopatra may have been sending him a message. Surely there was no better way to inaugurate a golden age than with a sun god. We know nothing of Antony’s reaction to the news but Octavian’s would have been yet more interesting. In some roundabout way, Cleopatra had seen to it that the two men were, by way of her children, again related.

  She did not have to broadcast word of the sensational births. News that the enterprising queen of Egypt had borne a son named Alexander—whose father was Mark Antony and whose half brother was a child of Caesar—constituted a banner headline in 39 BC. It was enough to make Cleopatra, to borrow a much later phrase, an object of gossip for the whole world.

  FROM 40 TO 37, Cleopatra lived as in a Greek drama; all the violence occurred offstage. Reports were conveyed to her from a distance. She parsed them carefully. With the Treaty of Brundisium, the Mediterranean world breathed a sigh of relief, if one that felt cold on the back of the Egyptian neck. Antony’s marriage was a thrilling solution for a worn and depleted Roman people. Throughout Italy Antony and Octavian were “immediately praised to the skies for bringing peace: men were rid of war in their own country and of the conscription of their sons, rid of the violence of military outposts and of the desertion of their slaves, rid of the plundering of farmland and of the interruption to agriculture, and rid above all of the famine which had brought them to the limits of their endurance.” In the countryside people sacrificed, “as if to savior gods,” a role both Antony and Octavian embraced. Statues were erected to the peace and coins minted. With the celebrations came misty-eyed dreams and colorful prophecies. Suddenly a rosy age of brotherhood and prosperity dawned. Virgil wrote his much palpated Fourth Eclogue at this time, possibly to celebrate the marriage of Antony and Octavia, certainly to summon a golden age. The poet pinned messianic hopes on a child who was yet to be born, a savior who would usher in a new dawn and reign over a world of piety, peace, and plenty.

  For those breathless prophecies to be realized the world had to wait a little longer. In the spring of 38 Octavia dutifully produced a child. It was a daughter, however, rather than the much-heralded son. And the Parthians continued their westward advance, delighted to exploit Rome’s internal distractions. Cleopatra too kept a careful eye on the invaders as they neared her border. They were intent on expansion; the empire of their Persian predecessors had included Egypt. Antony dispatched a trusted general to engage the Parthians. Much to Antony’s annoyance, he did so beautifully, soaking up the glory for which his commander thirsted. And hungry Rome exploded again in riots. The unrest had been so great earlier that Octavian had found himself surrounded in the Forum by a seething mob, which castigated him for having exhausted the public funds. Paving stones met his attempts to explain himself. The bombardment continued even as the blood began to flow. Antony had swooped in to effect a spectacular rescue, snatching Octavian, with some difficulty and amid shouts and screams, from his assailants. He escorted his fellow triumvir to his house, for what was a very different visit from their initial interview there.

  Otherwise Antony’s brother-in-law was not proving a cooperative partner, as Fulvia earlier had warned him, and—from thousands of miles away—as Cleopatra managed still to do. A friendly spirit prevailed between the two men, on congenial terms and best behavior. All the same Mark Antony—the war hero, the senior statesman, the popular favorite—seemed continually to be bested by his stubborn and sickly brother-in-law. Certainly he had reason to be astounded by Octavian’s very ability to continue on the scene. Octavian had already been several times on his deathbed. Continually coughing and sneezing, susceptible to sunstroke, a reluctant warrior, he hardly seemed a worthy match for the barrel-chested, mighty-thighed Mark Antony. Octavian was morose, paranoid, fastidious. He wore lifts in his shoes. And yet at every juncture he continued to surprise Antony. A victim of his own easygoing confidence, acting from what he perceived to be his superior position, Antony regularly found himself manipulated. He engaged in a rivalry he had not even considered one, with a “rash boy” who had come from nowhere. Antony was without guile, of which he was often oblivious. Octavian was without charm, equally lost on him. He was the kind of man who would later brag about the number of triumphs he had been offered but had not celebrated, which amounted to boasting about his humility. Antony would never for a minute have turned down such honors and cheerfully admitted as much.

  Somehow Octavian managed to best his elder even in casual games of skill and chance. Whether the two bet on a cockfight or played cards, when they cast lots to decide political matters, if they tossed a ball between them, Mark Antony inevitably, improbably, wound up diminished. (It is easy to see why: Octavian could spin any outcome to his advantage. If he lost excessive amounts at the gaming table, it was, he explained, only because he “behaved with excessive sportsmanship.”) At Antony’s side Cleopatra had installed a soothsayer; many in Rome believed that an astrologer could predict a human career with as much accuracy as a solar eclipse. Antony spoke of his frustation to the seer, who cast his horoscope. Speaking either the truth or for his employer, he offered up a frank analysis. Antony’s prospects were splendid, but fated to be eclipsed by Octavian’s. The problem, explained the seer, was that Antony’s “guardian genius” lived in fear of his colleague’s, “and though it has a spirited and lofty mien when it is by itself, when his comes near, yours is cowed and humbled by it.” He was to steer clear of his colleague. The explanation made sense to Antony, who held the astrologer in new esteem and approached his brother-in-law with new wariness. In what was perhaps a veiled invitation to Alexandria, the seer “advised Antony to put as much distance as possible between himself and that young man.”

  He got only as far as Athens, where he settled for the winter, and which he made his headquarters for the next two years. He passed the winter of 39 much as he had passed the previous one, in a comfortable, cultivated city of superb architecture and fine statuary. He left lieutenants in the field but did no more than look over their reports. He dismissed his entourage. He made the rounds of lectures and festivals, with a few friends and attendants or with Octavia, with whom he appeared deeply happy. Again he exchanged the purple cloak of a commander for Eastern dress. Again he exultantly passed himself off as Dionysus, his preferred form of address. He allowed Octavia—who quickly bore him a second daughter—to be hailed as Athena. We know how those tributes registered in Alexandria as Cleopatra collected every detail of them. They were particularly galling as they verged on the sacred and the imperial. What a difference an address—or a change of consort—makes: there would be no Roman hand-wringing in 39 over Antony’s winter of dissipation. In Athens he dressed like a Greek and reveled like a Greek, but he did so under the watchful eye of the virtuous Octavia. It was moreover difficult to attack his divine pretensions when Octavian affected the same. He threw a costume party for which he dressed as Apollo. Only Antony, however, conspicuously built a hut of branches, decorated it with drums, tambourines, greenery, animal skins, and other Dionysian props, and “lay inside with his friends, beginning at dawn, and got drunk.” He summoned musicians from Italy to entertain at his hillside den. At times he moved his installation up to the Acropolis, “and the entire city of Athens was illuminated by the lamps that hung from the ceilings.”

  He continued to be perplexed by his brother-in-law’s ability to control the conversation. While commanding a reputation for stolid probity, Octavian managed in 38 to slip out of his marriage on the day his wife gave birth, to wed Livia, six months’ pregnant with her previous husband’s child. It was a marriage that delivered Octavian to the upper ranks of Roman society, making him Antony’s equal. (Despite the connection to Caesar, Octavian’s lineage was not noble.) Repeatedly he managed to cripple and confound his brother-in-law: If he promised one thing he delivered another. If Antony head
ed east Octavian summoned him west—then neglected to appear. He allowed Antony to recruit soldiers on Italian soil, next to impossible, as Octavian governed that territory. It made for a tenuous balancing act, but one that Antony was determined to maintain. He swallowed his pride and masked his irritation, even as his patience was rubbed raw.

  Matters came finally to a head late in the spring of 37, when the two met alongside a river, in the south of the Italian peninsula, to air several seasons of grievances. Octavia helped to broker a peace, delivering an impassioned Helen of Troy speech. She had no desire to watch her husband and brother destroy each other. The result was the Pact of Tarentum, a renewal of the expired triumvirate. Antony would be recognized as dictator in the East through December 33. He emerged satisfied: “Nearly everything,” notes Dio, “was going as he wished.” He prepared at last for his campaign and headed east, to Syria. Octavia and their two daughters accompanied him as far as western Greece, where he sent them back. Octavia was pregnant again. Further travel, Antony protested, would be detrimental to her health. Already she had six children—including those from prior marriages—in her care. He was eager that, as he put it, “she might not share his danger while he was warring against the Parthians.” This was all perfectly true.

  If Octavian was a flinty master of indirection, capable of appearing to cooperate while doing no such thing, Antony was a quick-change artist, given to dramatic about-faces. In Athens he was one day the layabout, languidly attending festivals in Octavia’s company and neglecting public business, the next, having rethought his wardrobe and snapped to attention, the sharp-minded military man, a tornado of activity, all diplomatic business, at the magnetic center of an entourage. Something gave way in the last months of 37. Possibly the long list of insults, disillusionments, and dodges suddenly added up. Possibly he burst with pent-up frustration. He was a soldier, whose glorious campaign had been postponed and postponed. His lieutenant reaped a series of victories in the East, victories that were rightfully his. Perhaps Antony realized that between them his wife and brother-in-law were holding him in check, that he was being played for the fool, that collaboration seemed less and less possible. Certainly the obvious way to secure the upper hand at home was with a blazing military victory abroad. To crush the Parthians was to eliminate Octavian, a strange sort of assymetrical accounting, not entirely unlike Auletes’ Roman calculation of two decades earlier.