Cleopatra: A Life

by Stacy Schiff

  Antony remained sorely in need of a victory. He was also eager to settle a score. “In his endeavor to take vengeance on the Armenian king with the least trouble to himself,” he sent the ever-inventive Dellius east, to Armenia. As usual, Dellius had a proposition. It this time amounted to the traditional diplomatic bandage. Would Artavasdes, the Armenian monarch, not like to promise his daughter to Cleopatra and Antony’s six-year-old son, Alexander Helios? Cleopatra presumably signed off on this appeal, which would have established a Ptolemy on the Armenian throne. It would also have secured a peaceful alliance with a mountain kingdom crucial to a Parthian invasion and divided in its loyalties. Several times a Roman ally, Armenia was in both sympathy and civilization Parthian. The offer evidently made less sense to Artavasdes, a supple and unflinching statesman. He resisted Dellius’s blandishments and his bribes. Antony countered in the spring by invading Armenia. In little time he subdued the country, declaring it a Roman province. This was vengeance more than victory; Armenia was a strategically located buffer state but by no means a great power. And Antony knew the conquest satisfied his men, who had for months howled that Artavasdes had cost them Parthia. In anticipation of a larger campaign, Antony left the bulk of his army in the East for the winter. He returned to Alexandria in triumph, taking with him not only the collected treasure of Armenia, but its king, his wife, their children, and the provincial governors. Out of deference to their rank, he bound the royal family in chains of gold.

  This time Cleopatra received a jubilant message from her lover. She issued orders for an extravagant ceremony to mark his return. She likely took her cues from Antony: her immediate family were not conquerors. Processions were, however, a Ptolemaic specialty. The sphinx-lined avenues of Alexandria were designed for them, and the Roman triumph derived from them. That of autumn 34 was sensational. Antony sent his captives ahead of him into the city, which he entered in his purple cloak, aboard a chariot. Presumably they paraded past the marble colonnades and the awnings of shuttered shops, along the Canopic Way, lined with vibrant banners and cheering spectators. Here was the kind of show at which Ptolemies excelled. To this one Antony and Cleopatra added a new twist. As he marched his booty and captives into the heart of the city Antony presented them to the queen of Egypt, in ceremonial attire on a lofty, golden throne, atop a silver-plated platform, amid her adoring subjects.

  Antony had long been good at paying homage to his mistresses; Cleopatra received not only the spoils of his campaign, the royal treasury and its officials, but the proud Armenian king and his family, in their golden fetters. A discordant note was struck when the fresh-faced Artavasdes arrived before her. The Armenian king was neither a fool nor a philistine; he wrote histories and intricate speeches. For years he had shrewdly played Parthia and Rome off against each other. True to tenacious form, he approached but would neither sink to his knees before her nor acknowledge her rank. Instead he addressed her by name. All coercion was futile; though treated harshly, no member of the Armenian royal family would prostate himself before the queen of Egypt. (It is notable that despite the misbehavior, Artavasdes survived the display. In Rome a captive king was rarely so lucky, no matter how well he behaved.) It was Cleopatra’s first experience of a royal humiliation and a monarch’s proud resistance. There was every reason why they should have made an impression. A lavish banquet for the people of Alexandria followed, with celebrations at the palace and with public entertainments. She distributed coins and food freely.

  The military-themed procession was an oddity to the Alexandrians, though it had at least Ptolemaic roots. There was no precedent for the splendid ceremony that followed. Several days later a throng filled Alexandria’s colonnaded gymnasium, west of the city’s main crossroads, minutes from the palace. Six hundred feet long, the city’s largest structure, the gymnasium stood at the center of Alexandria as at the center of its intellectual and recreational life. It was the opera hall of its day; a gymnasium’s presence was what made a town a city. In the open court of the complex that fall day the Alexandrians discovered another silver platform, on which stood two massive golden thrones. Mark Antony occupied one. Addressing her as the “New Isis,” he invited Cleopatra to join him on the other. She appeared in the full regalia of that goddess, a pleated, lustrously striped chiton, its fringed edge reaching to her ankles. On her head she may have worn a traditional tripartite crown or one of cobras with a vulture cap. By one account Antony dressed as Dionysus, in a gold-embroidered gown and high Greek boots. In his hand he held the god’s fennel stalk. An ivy wreath circled his head. It seemed a second act of the exultant play begun in Tarsus, when—as Cleopatra made her way upriver—word preceded her that Venus had arrived to revel with Dionysus for the happiness of Asia.

  Cleopatra’s children occupied four smaller thrones at the couple’s feet. In his husky voice Antony addressed the assembled multitude. By his command Cleopatra was henceforth to be known as “Queen of Kings.” (On coins, she was “Queen of Kings, whose sons are Kings.” The titles would change with the territory, so that an Upper Egypt stela of four years later has her as “Mother of Kings, Queen of Kings, the Youngest Goddess.”) As for her consort, thirteen-year-old Caesarion, Antony promoted him to King of Kings, a pointed recycling of an Armenian and Parthian title. Antony conferred these honorifics in the name of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra’s husband and Caesarion’s father, an unusual case of flaunting a lover’s prior sexual history. Also on Caesar’s behalf, Antony proceeded to name his sons with Cleopatra as King of Kings. Producing the boys in turn, he assigned vast territories to each; the Eastern-inflected names came in handy now. At his cue, little Alexander Helios stepped forward, in the loose leggings and caped tunic of a Persian monarch. On his head he wore an upright, pointed turban topped with a peacock feather. His territories stretched to India; he was to rule over Armenia, Media, and—once his father had conquered it—Parthia. (He was again promised in marriage, this time to the daughter of the Median king, Artavasdes’ traditional enemy.) Two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, the fruit of Antony and Cleopatra’s Antioch reunion, was an Alexander the Great in miniature. He wore the high boots, the short purple cloak, and the brimmed woolen hat—in this case wrapped with a diadem—of a Macedonian. To him went Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia, the lands west of the Euphrates. Cleopatra Selene was to preside over Cyrene, the Greek settlement in what is today eastern Libya, hundreds of miles across the desert. The distributions made, each of the two younger boys rose to kiss his parents. They were then surrounded by a colorful phalanx of bodyguards, Armenians in Alexander’s case, Macedonians in Ptolemy’s.

  In such a way Antony parceled out the East, including lands not yet in his possession. For the young woman who fourteen years earlier had smuggled herself into Alexandria to plead for her diminished kingdom, it was a sensational reversal. Cleopatra stood divine and indomitable, less queen than empress, the supreme Roman commander at her side. Her rule extended over a vast swath of Asia, its frontiers established and now at peace. She was protected by Roman legions; with her children, she now reigned, at least nominally, over more land than had any Ptolemy in centuries. On coins minted for the occasion—with them she became the first foreigner to appear on a Roman coin—she appears majestic, authoritative. She has also aged. Her mouth is fuller, and she is noticeably fleshier, especially around the neck.

  It is impossible to say whose ambition had brought about the sparkling ceremony, to be known later as the Donations of Alexandria. It is especially difficult to locate Cleopatra’s fingerprints; the truth is smudged forever by Roman manhandling. At least in part the message of the day was clear. On their golden thrones sat what even a coolheaded modern historian has reasonably called “the two most magnificent people in the world.” Together they seemed to resurrect if not expand upon the dream of Alexander the Great, promoting a universal empire, one that transcended national boundaries and embraced a common culture, that reconciled Europe and Asia. They announced a new order. Cleopatra presided over th
e ceremony and the citywide banqueting that followed not only as a sovereign but as a deity after all, with the divine Caesar’s son on one side, Dionysian Antony on the other. Old prophecies evidently resurfaced now. The Jews linked Cleopatra’s rule with a golden age and with the coming of the Messiah. The queen of Egypt answered the call for an Eastern savior. She would rise above Rome for a better world. In conflating the political and the religious, the imagery was all on Cleopatra’s side.

  Mark Antony had a habit of jumping to conclusions, and in many ways the Donations were an exercise in wishful thinking. Certainly they made no difference to the administration of the lands in question, many of them governed by Roman proconsuls. The Armenian king was still very much alive. Parthia was not Antony’s to distribute. A two-year-old child was in no position to rule. As much as the ceremony was a stunning act of assimilation and appropriation, entirely Ptolemaic in its gigantism, it was probably not intended solely for the Alexandrians. Pageantry was never lost on them, but by 34 Cleopatra’s subjects needed no confirmation of her steady rule, of her divinity, her supremacy, or even of Antony’s role in her court. They knew him already more as Dionysus than as Roman magistrate. The two may have intended to formalize arrangements for a subdued but still messy East; Antony may have meant only to rebuke those monarchs who had defied him in Parthia. Or Antony and Cleopatra may have been delivering a powerful, unsubtle message to Octavian. His power derived solely from Julius Caesar. He might well be Caesar’s adopted son, but Caesar’s natural son was, Antony and Cleopatra emphasized, very much alive, nearly adult, and suddenly sovereign over a vast expanse of territory. That message was particularly crucial at a time when Octavian was said to be busy behind the scenes undermining Antony’s efforts in Armenia, where he attempted to suborn Artavasdes.

  Even if Antony and Cleopatra were not broadcasting to Rome, it is from Rome that our accounts derive. It is impossible to disentangle what the two may have meant to convey; what Rome actually heard; and what the propagandists turned out, magnified and distorted. The language of the display was Eastern. Especially in 34, it translated poorly. Antony should have known better than to emphasize Caesarion’s paternity. (He may well have known better. Plutarch does not mention the inflammatory remarks.) Octavian had reason to play up the insult, as he did the un-Roman magnificence. It was incumbent on him to blunt the potent symbolism, to turn a military triumph and royal pageant into a drunken revel and a specious, silly costume drama. One did not pay tribute to Julius Caesar in Alexandria, after all. Nor did one celebrate a triumph outside Rome, far from the Roman gods. And why this riotous celebration of an Armenian victory when Parthia remained to be punished?

  Whatever his message, Antony meant the Donations as an official act. He sent reports of the triumph and the ceremony back to Rome, for Senate ratification. Devoted friends intervened, aware that his dispatches would be read in an unflattering light. Antony appeared “theatrical and arrogant,” precisely the crimes that had cost Caesar his life. If he intended to dazzle his compatriots with the gorgeous display, the laws of optics worked differently from what he had remembered. Rome had to shield her eyes from the glare of golden thrones. Definitions were less fluid in that city, where Antony’s dual role as commander in the West and monarch in the East taxed the orderly Roman mind. He dangerously mixed his metaphors. If Cleopatra were the queen of those territories, what role was the Roman commander to play? Antony had after all claimed no territories for himself. Cleopatra’s title was preposterously, objectionably large, an insult not only to Rome, but to her fellow sovereigns. She had long occupied an exceptional position in the Roman constellation of client kings. She now outranked them in both wealth and influence. And Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship was problematic. What was a foreign woman doing on a Roman coin? It did not help that Antony shared denarii with a woman not his wife. He appeared to be distributing Roman lands to a foreigner.

  Only one man wanted Antony’s dispatches published. Octavian did not succeed, although he did manage to suppress reports of the Armenian victory. He had no intention of allowing Antony a Roman triumph, which would have counted for a very great deal. The Donations may have been at the time little more than an exercise in Alexandrian grandiosity, in Ptolemaic boasting, a provocative display of symbols, Antony’s version of erecting a golden statue of Cleopatra in the Forum. At best the celebrations were simply tone-deaf. At worst they were an insult to Octavian, a brazen power play. The intention hardly mattered given how the exercise looked in Rome, which was how Octavian wanted it to: as an empty gesture, a farcical overreaching by two slightly demented, power-drunk dissolutes, “a Dionysiac revel led by an eastern harlot.” With the Donations a munificent Antony handed out plenty of gifts, none more generous than that he settled on Octavian.

  VIII

  ILLICIT AFFAIRS AND BASTARD CHILDREN

  “For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god.”

  —HESIOD

  CLEOPATRA TURNED THIRTY-FIVE without a change in her considerable and accumulating good fortune; the year ahead promised to be among the happiest and most auspicious of her reign. With her hybrid family, she had ingeniously solved the Roman problem, the consort problem, the shrinking-empire problem. She no longer needed to be propped up by foreign troops. Nor could any Alexandrian critic conceivably object to her friendship with a Roman. She had tamed that power, and augmented Egypt through its largesse. With the Donations she experienced a surge of popularity; her shipyards were busy, as she doubled the size of Antony’s navy. The revenues flowed in. From Damascus and Beirut in the east to Tripoli in the west, cities minted coins in her honor. She had made good on a third-century poet’s promise, by which a Ptolemy—simultaneously safeguarding and supplementing his inheritance—outweighs all other monarchs in wealth, given “the abundance that flowed hourly to his sumptuous palace from every quarter.”

  Antony obliged her in her greatest desire: After the celebrations, he did not return to Rome, where he might have fleshed out his army with new recruits and neutralized Octavian’s influence. Nor did he even journey to Antioch, a logical base for an Eastern operation. Instead he settled down for a third festive winter in Alexandria, an imperial city that felt increasingly like the home of a new empire. In vivid illustration of the point, Cleopatra either put the finishing touches on or began to enjoy the newly constructed Caesareum, her vast harborside complex, which she may have modeled on the Forum of Rome. Fusing Egyptian and Greek styles, the Alexandrian version was slathered with gold and silver, stuffed with paintings and statuary, embellished with “galleries, libraries, porches, courts, halls, walks, and consecrated groves, as glorious as expense and art could make them.” Cleopatra stood at the helm of the mighty power that a nervous Roman had a century earlier predicted Egypt might one day be, “if ever that kingdom found capable leaders.”

  Around her assembled loyal, long-serving advisers, dedicated Romans, and an extended family, which by year’s end included the teenaged Marcus Antonius Antyllus, the elder of Antony’s two sons by Fulvia. Cleopatra took the children’s schooling seriously. In the wake of the Donations she entrusted their education in part to Nicolaus of Damascus, a lanky diplomat’s son several years her junior, with a ruddy face, an affable temperament, and a taste for Aristotle. Handy with an anecdote, Nicolaus was a gifted logician, the kind of man you could rely on to finish your speech, persuasively and eloquently, if you happened to dissolve into tears before you reached its end. He moved into the palace. Under his guidance Cleopatra’s children read philosophy and rhetoric but especially history, which their new tutor deemed “the proper study of kings.” Genial though Nicolaus may have been, he was sharp-tongued when necessary and a relentless taskmaster. His idea of leisure would be to add 25 volumes to his comprehensive history of the ancient world, already 140 volumes long, and a project its author compared to the lab
ors of Hercules. Around the children the festivities and frivolities continued. Many threw themselves into court life with enthusiasm. Lucius Munatius Plancus, one of Antony’s closest advisers and a former provincial governor, appeared at a dinner naked and painted blue. He entertained Cleopatra’s banqueters with his best sea nymph imitation, wriggling across the floor on his knees, attired only in a fish tail and a crown of reeds.

  The taste for indulgence was contagious, or possibly inherited. At dinner one night a physician from young Antyllus’s retinue began to pontificate, boorishly and interminably. When a second court physician stopped him in his windy tracks—it was the former medical student who had toured Cleopatra’s kitchen—Antyllus whooped with delight. With a wave of his arm, he gestured to the sideboard. “All of this I bestow upon thee, Philotas,” he exclaimed, forcing a collection of gold beakers on the quicker-witted of his guests. Philotas hardly took the teenager at his word but nonetheless found himself presented with a bulging sack of elaborately worked, antique vessels. (He headed off with its cash equivalent instead.) Throughout the city the music, mimes, and stage productions continued. As one clever stonemason saw it, the merry pact that joined Antony and Cleopatra merited an alternate interpretation. From December 28, 34, survives a basalt inscription, presumably from a statue of Antony. Whatever Cleopatra made of his ardent affections, the Alexandrians wholly reciprocated. The sporting Antony is hailed in stone not as an “Inimitable Liver” but—the pun requires more of a stretch in Greek than in English—the “Inimitable Lover.”

  Official business was by no means neglected among the revelries. Cleopatra continued to receive petitions and envoys, to participate in religious rites, to mete out justice. She supervised economic discussions, met with advisers, and presided over the innumerable Alexandrian festivals. Increasingly state business included Egypto-Roman business. Legionnaires had been posted in Egypt for half of Cleopatra’s lifetime; in one account, her Roman bodyguards now inscribed her name on their shields. And in a mutually beneficial arrangement, Roman futures were decided in Alexandria rather than the other way around. In 33 Cleopatra dictated an ordinance to a scribe, in which she awarded a substantial tax exemption to one of Antony’s top generals. Publius Canidius had served in Parthia and distinguished himself in Armenia. For his services, Cleopatra accorded him a waiver of export duties on 10,000 sacks of wheat and import duties on 5,000 amphorae of wine. He was exempted from land taxes in perpetuity, a privilege Cleopatra extended equally to his tenants. Even Canidius’s farm animals were to be above taxes, requisition, seizure.* It was an agile way to keep Antony’s men both loyal and local, in the unlikely event that the enchantments of Alexandria proved insufficient. It was also a more effective way of courting an ambitious Roman than paying bribes, which, it has been noted, “only made them come back for more.” Much of their business the Roman triumvir and the Egyptian queen transacted together. Cleopatra frequented the marketplace with Antony, “joined him in the management of festivals and in the hearing of lawsuits.” At her urging, Antony took charge of the city’s gymnasium, as he had done in Athens. As de facto leader of the Greek community, he directed its finances, teachers, lectures, athletic contests. With Cleopatra he posed for painters and sculptors; he was Osiris or Dionysus to her Isis or Aphrodite. In mid-33 Antony marched again to Armenia, where he arranged a peace with the Median king. They would henceforth serve each other as allies, against the Parthians and, if need be, against Octavian. Asia was now quiet. Antony returned to Alexandria with the Median princess Iotape, Alexander Helios’s intended.