by Stacy Schiff
From the summer of 32 dates too a remarkable gift: Antony bestowed on Cleopatra the library of Pergamum, the only collection that rivaled Alexandria’s. The four rooms of that scenic hilltop library housed some 200,000 scrolls; for centuries, busts of Homer and Herodotus had kept them company. History has made of Antony’s gift a wedding present, or recompense for the volumes Caesar inadvertently destroyed in the Alexandrian War. In context, the largesse required no explanation. Pergamum was not far from Ephesus. It is likely that Antony and Cleopatra paid a visit to that city, a few days’ ride away. For years too the way to assemble a collection had been to plunder someone else’s. Already there was some tradition of this in Rome, where libraries were still in their infancy.
For the most part the reports of Antony’s disorienting, degrading passion for Cleopatra date from the Athenian summer. If in Alexandria he had distracted her from state business, the tables now turned. He attended principally to her. “Many times, while he was seated on his tribunal and dispensing justice to tetrarchs and kings, he would receive love-billets from her in tablets of onyx or crystal, and read them,” Plutarch tells us. (Antony was not the first to receive love letters on state occasions. Caesar too had received “wanton bits” during Senate sessions. That mistress did not write on onyx tablets, however.) At one juncture Cleopatra happened to ride conspicuously past the courts on the shoulders of her servants as Antony presided over a legal case. A distinguished Roman orator held the floor, or did until Antony caught sight of Cleopatra. He then “sprang up from his tribunal and forsook the trial, and hanging on to Cleopatra’s litter escorted her on her way.” It was ignoble behavior; a Roman could indulge in as diversified, as lurid, a sexual life as he pleased, but he was meant to be discreet and unsentimental in his affections. Pompey had made himself a laughingstock for his indecent habit of falling in love with his own wife. In the second century a senator was expelled from that assembly for kissing his wife in public, in full view of their daughter. Antony had been reprimanded years earlier for having openly nuzzled his wife. He was said these days to rise during banquets, before his assembled guests, to massage Cleopatra’s feet “in compliance with some agreement and compact they had made.” (The relationship proceeded by pacts, wagers, and competitions, something Cleopatra evidently brought to the table. Antony was little inclined to formalities.) The gesture was in itself offensive; one had servants for such indulgences. And the stories—of what another age might term gallantry or devotion, of what the East deemed proper obeisance, of what were in Rome indecencies and indignities—piled up. Antony fawned over Cleopatra, which was what eunuchs did. He trailed her litter through the streets, among her attendants. And this, sniffed the Romans, heaping upon the Egyptian queen the usual abuse of the other woman, when she was not even beautiful!
From Octavian’s point of view, the Athenian reports were too good to be true, as they may well have been. For all of the martial preparations, for all of the governmental irregularities in Rome, despite the gathering sense of inevitability, there was no real cause for a rupture; Antony and Octavian remained two men in search of a conflict. They found one in 32. Antony evidently felt some degree of attachment to Cleopatra or felt with her invincible: In May, he divorced Octavia. From Athens, he instructed her to leave their comfortable home. We cannot know how much that gesture was directed at Octavia and how much at her brother. Coming as it did after years of disingenuous reconciliations and flimsy agreements, after a season of slanders, it may only have preempted a salvo from the other direction. Octavia could have elected to end the marriage herself. The divorce itself was simple, an informal procedure for which there was no paperwork. Its ramifications were more complex. As Plutarch remarks on the death of Pompey’s wife and Caesar’s daughter, the family alliance “which had hitherto veiled rather than restrained the ambition of the two men was now at an end.” Cleopatra could only have been thrilled; already she had enlisted a friend of Antony to distract him from all thoughts of his wife. Octavian was overjoyed. Octavia was bereft. Tearfully she packed her bags. With her she took her children by Antony, as well as his second son by Fulvia. There were no recriminations. Octavia worried only that she would be said to have precipitated a war.
Insofar as a propaganda-free chronology can be established, relations were strained in Antony’s camp well before the divorce. For all of the later assertions that highborn Romans lay powerless and enchanted at her feet, in 32 we hear no chime, no caress of Cleopatra’s silvery voice. There were as many opinions on the looming conflict as there were advisers to Antony. For a variety of reasons, many of them legitimate, some continued to see Cleopatra as a liability. A military camp was no place for a woman. Cleopatra distracted Antony. She should not take part in a council of war; she was no general. Antony could not enter Italy in the presence of a foreigner and was unwise to wait to do so. He frittered away his advantage, on the Egyptian queen’s account. The criticism did not bring out the best in her. At one point Antony’s associates in Rome dispatched his friend Geminius to Athens, to plead their case. Antony must defend himself at home, where he was badly battered by Octavian. Why allow himself to be portrayed as a public enemy, in thrall to a foreigner? Geminius was an inspired choice for the delicate mission, having had some experience himself with what it is to fall unwisely and unreasonably in love. Cleopatra assumed that Octavia had dispatched him and treated Geminius accordingly. She kept him as far as possible from Antony. At dinner she seated him among the least significant guests. She pelted him with sarcasm. Geminius endured the insults in silence, patiently holding out for an audience with Mark Antony. Before it was accorded, Cleopatra challenged Geminius, in the midst of a raucous dinner, to explain his errand. He replied that its details “required a sober head, but one thing he knew, whether he was drunk or sober, and that was that all would be well if Cleopatra was sent off to Egypt.” Antony erupted in fury. Cleopatra was more brutal. She commended Geminius for his honesty. He had spared her from having to torture him. Several days later he fled to Rome, to join Octavian.
Cleopatra’s courtiers failed equally to recommend themselves to the Romans, dismayed by the “drunken tricks and scurrilities” of the Egyptians. For reasons that are unclear, Plancus, the dancing fish of the Alexandrian revel, deserted as well, to return to Rome. He was disgusted. The defection may have had nothing to do either with Cleopatra or her advisers. A born courtier, Plancus inclined to the path of least resistance. He betrayed every bit as well as he bowed and scraped. “Treachery,” it would be said, “was a disease with him.” He was, however, a man of impeccable political instincts. Something had clearly transpired to make him doubt that Antony—despite his outsize power and prestige, his years of experience—could prevail over Octavian. Plancus counted among Antony’s closest advisers. For some time he had been in charge of Antony’s correspondence. He knew his secrets. He fled to Octavian with fulsome reports of foot massages, prodigal banquets, and high-handed queens, as well as with information concerning Antony’s will, to which Plancus had been a witness. Octavian at once pried that document from the Vestal Virgins, with whom it should have been safe. In it he found, or claimed to find, a number of scandalous passages. These he helpfully annotated so that he might read them aloud to the Senate. Most members of that body had no desire to participate in his transgression. A man’s will was to be opened after his death, which was why it happened to be illegal to unseal such a document before the event. Those qualms vanished as Octavian neared the end of his presentation, to reveal a heinous provision. Even if he should die in Rome, Antony had directed that his body “should be borne in state through the Forum and then sent away to Cleopatra in Egypt.”*
Genuine or not, the clause ignited a brilliant bonfire, for which Octavian had relentlessly stockpiled kindling. In his January coup he had promised the Senate documentary evidence against Antony. He now richly delivered. Suddenly reports of Athenian excess, of Antony’s subservience to Cleopatra, the sensational, salacious details of which
had been widely understood to be falsehoods, appeared credible. In a world entranced by rhetoric—addicted to “honeyballs of phrases, every word and act besprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame”—the plausible reliably trumped the actual. Octavian had at his disposal plenty of generous veins to mine. The depredations of the East alone—that intoxicating, intemperate, irrational realm—supplied a mother lode of material. Like its queen, Egypt was beguiling and voluptuous; the modern association between the Orient and sex was hoary already in the first century. Already Africa was the address of moral decay. From there it was no great leap to transform the Antony of the Donations into a power-crazed, dissolute, Eastern despot: “In his hand was a golden scepter, at his side a scimitar; he wore a purple robe studded with huge gems; a crown only was lacking to make him a king dallying with a queen.” It was the diadem and golden statues business all over again; the accessories of kingship unnerved Romans even more than did autocracy itself, which they had tolerated in a more subtle version for at least a decade. In Octavian’s account, Antony was irredeemably contaminated by the Oriental languor and the un-Roman luxuries of the East as, arguably, Caesar and Alexander the Great had been before him. In turn Octavian would soon enough discover that Egypt conferred on its conqueror a mixed blessing, a literal embarrassment of riches. Like a prodigious trust fund, it convinced men they were gods.
Octavian wrung the most mileage from Antony’s affair with Cleopatra. She allowed him to recycle the oldest trope: the allergy to the powerful woman was sturdier even than that to monarchy, or to the depraved East. Whether or not Cleopatra controlled Antony, she unequivocally permitted Octavian to control the narrative. He had at his disposal a whole grab bag of Cicero’s rantings against Fulvia, that avaricious, licentious virago. Diligent as ever, Octavian improved upon them. In his expert hands the Egyptian affair blossomed into a tale of blind, irresponsible passion. Antony was under the influence of some powerful narcotic, “bewitched by that accursed woman.” Writing closest to events, Velleius Paterculus provided the official version, distilled to pure cause and effect: “Then as his love for Cleopatra became more ardent,” explains Velleius, acknowledging Antony’s embrace of Eastern vices, “he resolved to make war upon his country.” Cleopatra does not so much corrupt Antony as she “melts and unmans him.” In Octavian’s version, she is masterful and Antony servile, a radically different account of the relationship than that which the sporting Mark Antony had supplied months earlier. Even while conceding that the charges were questionable, every chronicler subscribes to the party line. Antony became “a slave to his love for Cleopatra,” “he gave not a thought to honour but became the Egyptian woman’s slave,” he surrendered his authority to a woman to the extent that “he was not even a master of himself.” The construct was old enough to have a mythical equivalent, to which Octavian eagerly appealed. Antony claimed descent from Hercules. Octavian let no one forget that Hercules spent three years, disarmed and humiliated, as the slave of the rich Asian queen Omphale. She removes from him his lion skin and his club, and—donning his lion skin herself—stands over him as he weaves.
To the charges Octavian fixed an imaginative twist. He needed after all to rally an exhausted, hungry country, depleted after nearly two decades of civil war. To the hot baths and the mosquito nets, the golden accessories and jeweled scimitars, the illicit affair and bastard children, he added a rousing fillip. “The Egyptian woman demanded the Roman Empire from the drunken general as the price of her favors; and this Antony promised her, as though the Romans were more easily conquered than the Parthians,” relates Florus. Dio arrived at the same conclusion, by way of more tenuous logic: “For she so charmed and enthralled not only him but all the rest who had any influence with him that she conceived the hope of ruling even the Romans.” Cleopatra already had the Pergamum library. She had Herod’s balsam gardens. Reports circulated that Antony pillaged the best art from the temples of Asia—including famed colossi of Heracles, Athena, and Zeus that had stood in Samos for centuries—to gratify the Egyptian queen. If Antony was to send his body to her, what would he conceivably deny her? And for what would she hesitate to ask?
Octavian seems to have been the one who decided that Cleopatra plotted to make Rome a province of Egypt, an idea very unlikely to have crossed her quick mind. He had on his side the familiar type, the scheming, spendthrift wife, for whom no diamond is large enough, no house spacious enough. As Eutropius put it centuries later, Antony began a war at the urging of the queen of Egypt, who “longed with womanly desire to reign in the city as well.”* Already it was acknowledged “that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women.” Whole families had been ruined on their account. And already—the fault as ever of the sultry, sinuous, overtly subversive East—Egyptian women had caused their share of trouble. They were endowed with insatiable ardor and phenomenal sexual energy. One husband was not enough for them. They attracted and ruined men. Octavian only corralled the evidence.
He had found a cunning disguise for a civil war, which four years earlier he had declared officially over, and into which he had promised never again to lead his men. How much more palatable, how much more credible, that Antony should be destroyed by an illicit love than by his countrymen! It was by no means difficult to rally legions—or tax the populace, or set fathers against sons—with the claim that Cleopatra was poised to conquer them as she had conquered Antony. As Lucan formulated the battle cry a century later, “Would a woman—not even Roman—rule the world?” The logic was simple. The Egyptian queen had subdued Antony. Rome, Octavian warned, was next. At the end of October he declared war—on Cleopatra.
THE DECLARATION COULD not have been unexpected. It may even have come as a relief. Cleopatra must all the same have been surprised by its terms. She had engaged in no hostilities toward Rome. She had comported herself like the ideal vassal—if a vassal with privileges. She had maintained order in her kingdom, supplied Rome when called upon to do so, materialized when summoned, aggressed upon no neighbors. She had done everything in her power to uphold and nothing to diminish the surpassing greatness of Rome. Traditionally, a three-step process preceded a Roman declaration of war: The Senate submitted a demand for restitution, followed after a month by a solemn reminder that satisfaction was still wanting. Three days later, a messenger traveled to enemy territory, formally to open hostilities. Octavian summoned Cleopatra neither for an accounting nor an airing of charges. He made no overtures through diplomatic channels. Instead, deft as ever with the mise-en-scène, he dusted off the ceremonial portion of the process. In a military cloak he personally launched a spear drenched in pig blood toward the East, from a ritual patch of “hostile soil” in Rome. (There is speculation that he invented this ancient rite for the occasion, that Octavian was making up the history as he went along. He was very good at restoring traditions, including those that had never existed.) There were no official charges for the simple reason that none could be leveled. Insofar as Cleopatra stood accused of any hostile intent, she was condemned “for her acts,” conveniently left unspecified. Octavian gambled that Antony would remain true to Cleopatra, a loyalty that—under the circumstances—allowed Octavian to charge that his compatriot “had voluntarily taken up war on the side of the Egyptian woman against his native country.” At the end of 32 the Senate deprived Antony of his consulship and relieved him of all authority.*
Antony and Cleopatra did their best to spin the underhanded provocation. They were obligatory allies now. Under the circumstances, they cried, how could anyone trust a blackguard like Octavian? “What in the world does he mean, then, by threatening us all alike with arms, but in the decree declaring that he is at war with some and not with others?” Antony implored his men. His double-dealing colleague schemed only to sow dissension, the better to rule as king over them all. (In that he was no doubt correct. Octavian would have found a way to initiate a war with Antony even if Antony had thrown over Cleopatra.) Why would anyone associate with a man who unceremoniously disen
franchised a colleague, who illegally seized the will of a friend, companion, kinsman? Octavian was without the courage to declare himself openly, Antony thundered, although he “is at war with me and is already acting in every way like one who has not only conquered me but also murdered me.” The experience, the popularity, the numbers, were all on Antony’s side; he was the skilled commander behind whom stood the most powerful dynasts in Asia. Five hundred warships, a land army of nineteen legions, more than 10,000 cavalry, answered to his orders. It made no difference that he had no authority in Rome. A third of the Senate was at his side.
For twelve years Antony had contended that Octavian plotted to destroy him. Realistically and opportunistically, Cleopatra could only have agreed. The couple were finally right. Antony was equally correct that in a contest of disingenuousness he could not rival his former brother-in-law. (Cleopatra might have, but she was obliged to let Antony do the talking.) It was most unfortunate that Antony had made himself a traitor to Rome, clucked Octavian. He was heartsick about the state of affairs. He had felt so affectionately toward him that he had entrusted him with a share in the command and with a much-loved sister. Octavian had not declared war even after Antony had humiliated that sister, neglected their children, and bestowed upon another woman’s children the possessions of the Roman people. Surely Antony would see the light. (Octavian had no such hopes for Cleopatra. “For I adjudged her,” he scoffed, “if only on account of her foreign birth, to be an enemy by reason of her very conduct.”) He insisted that Antony would “if not voluntarily, at least reluctantly, change his course as a result of the decrees passed against her.” Octavian knew full well that Antony would do no such thing. He and Cleopatra were well beyond that point. Matters of the heart aside, he was the most faithful of men. The situation with Octavian was moreover untenable. It would be difficult to say to whom Cleopatra was more vital in 32: the man to whom she was the partner, or the man to whom she was the pretext. Antony could not win a war without her. Octavian could not wage one.