Cleopatra: A Life

by Stacy Schiff

  Cleopatra’s Red Sea venture was not impossible in a country that had for centuries hauled immense stone blocks across vast distances. A monstrosity of a two-prowed Ptolemaic vessel—it was said to have been nearly four hundred feet long and to sit sixty feet above the water—had centuries earlier been launched along wooden rollers, set at even intervals along a harborside ditch. Greased hides occasionally served the same purpose. Ships could be broken as well into sections. The enterprise was less feasible for a sovereign who had antagonized the tribe on the far side of the isthmus. Those happened to be the Nabateans, the shrewd, well-organized traders who had spent a year fighting Herod, thanks in part to Cleopatra’s sabotage. They did not need Herod—who had finally just defeated them—to remind them that Cleopatra was their common enemy. The Nabateans set fire to each of the Egyptian ships as it was drawn ashore. For Cleopatra the failure was particularly bitter. This was the corner of the world from which she had successfully relaunched herself in 48.

  Herod was of course the obvious ally; in the desert, Octavian would be no match for their combined forces. To no one, however, was Cleopatra’s misfortune so profoundly satisfying. Cleopatra had dealt Herod a get-out-of-jail-free card in dismissing him from Actium; he lost no time in making his peace with Octavian. Probably in Rhodes that fall the Judaean king made a great show of contrition. Dressed as a commoner, he removed his diadem as he set foot on shore. Before the new master of the Roman world he was frank and forthright. Indeed he had been loyal to Antony. Such, alas, was his nature. Integrity was his stock-in-trade. In his book, explained Herod, a friend ought to risk “every bit of his soul and body and substance.” Had he not been off assailing the Nabateans he would, he assured Octavian, be at Antony’s side even at that very moment. He abandoned his good friend of over two decades now only on account of that Egyptian woman, he admitted, proceeding to cough up the official version of Octavian’s war on Cleopatra. He had told Antony to do away with her. There is no indication of how Herod got through this speech with a straight face. At its end Octavian professed himself grateful to Cleopatra. She had, he reassured his caller, bequeathed him a fine ally. (Herod had reason to be doubly grateful to Cleopatra. He owed his crown to Roman fears of her in the first place.) Graciously, Octavian replaced the diadem on Herod’s head. He sent him off with Roman reinforcements. Meanwhile Cleopatra continued tirelessly to court neighboring tribes and friendly kings. She was able to mobilize only a troop of gladiators, highly skilled fighters who had been training for what were presumed to be Antony and Cleopatra’s victory celebrations. Answering her call, they headed south from what is today modern Turkey. Herod saw to it that they got no farther than Syria.

  Failing the East, Cleopatra could look in the opposite direction. Rome had not fully conquered Spain, a restive region, hugely fertile and rich in silver mines. Even if the Mediterranean were closed to her, even if she were unable to continue the war against Octavian, she might sail west via the Indian Ocean, circumnavigating Africa. With her vast resources she and Antony might stir up Spain’s native tribes and found a new kingdom. It was not such a far-fetched idea; Cleopatra had before her the example of another linguistically gifted, charismatic leader. In 83 a rogue Roman proconsul had seized control of Spain, to the horror of his countrymen. Hailed by his native recruits as “the new Hannibal,” Sertorius had incited a revolt. He had very nearly gone on to establish an independent Roman state.* Cleopatra considered the prospect seriously; Octavian worried that she would manage to repeat Sertorius’s coup. A military operation at home was after all unlikely; with the defections of Herod and of Antony’s Cyrenean troops, Egypt was all that remained. It was firmly behind Cleopatra—in Upper Egypt her partisans offered to rise up on her behalf, an effort she discouraged—but unlikely to hold out long against Octavian. She had at best four hundred fiercely loyal Gaulish bodyguards, a modest number of troops, and a remnant of a fleet.

  Nothing about the battle of Actium had been as brilliant as the blaze of invective that preceded it; most of the drama, and many of the casualties, came after the unspectacular fact. It was anticlimactic in the extreme, which could not be said of the months that followed in Alexandria. Yet again Cleopatra’s plans had miscarried. Yet again she cast about vigorously to ensure that all was not lost. All was a whirl of feverish activity at the palace; Plutarch has her not only looking to Spain and India but experimenting daily with deadly poisons. To one end or another she made a collection of these, testing them on prisoners and on venomous animals to determine which toxin yielded the most expeditious, least painful results. She was neither humbled nor panic-stricken but every bit as inventive as she had been when the first reverse of her life had landed her in the desert. The word “formidable” sooner or later attaches itself to Cleopatra and here it comes: she was formidable—spirited, disciplined, resourceful—in her retreat. There were no hints of despair. Two thousand years after the fact, you can still hear the fertile mind pulsing with ideas.

  The same could not be said for Antony. He roamed restlessly about North Africa, mostly with two friends, a rhetorician and an especially clever, steadfast officer. Antony dismissed the rest of his entourage. The relative solitude comforted him. He counted on marshaling reinforcements but in Cyrene discovered that his four legions had defected. Crushed, he attempted suicide. The two friends intervened, to deliver him to Alexandria. He arrived at the palace without the expected reinforcements, and, concedes Dio, “without having accomplished anything.” It was probably late in the fall, toward the end of the sowing season. Cleopatra was in the midst of her ill-fated Red Sea venture. She settled for fortifying the approaches to Egypt. She may also have contemplated Octavian’s assassination. For his part, Antony withdrew from the city and from society. He ordered a long causeway built into the Alexandrian harbor, at the end of which he fixed a modest hut, near the foot of the lighthouse. He declared himself an exile, a latter-day Timon of Athens, “for he himself also had been wronged and treated with ingratitude by his friends, and therefore hated and distrusted all mankind.” Dio slips in a bitter note of sympathy; he cannot help but marvel at the great number of people who—having received lavish honors and favors from Antony and Cleopatra—left them now in the lurch. Cleopatra appeared not to stumble over the injustice. Her understanding of gratitude may have been more realistic than Antony’s. She accepted the rude truths more easily than did he.

  Antony did not last long as a hermit and turned up at the palace soon enough. Cleopatra purportedly coaxed him out, to the lush groves and the colorful royal lodges on which he had turned his back. If indeed she did so, it was one of the less difficult assignments of her life. The news continued to be bleak: Canidius appeared in Alexandria to report that Antony’s land forces had in the end surrendered to Octavian. Many of them joined that army; Octavian had now more men than he could use. He burned what remained of the captured warships. Antony and Cleopatra learned next of Herod’s defection, especially painful as they had sent their most persuasive messenger to plead for his continued loyalty. (It was the friend whom Cleopatra had enlisted to clear Antony’s head of Octavia.) Not only did he fail with Herod, but he took advantage of his trip to defect. The Roman governor of Syria also went over to Octavian, as would Nicolaus of Damascus.

  The recriminations were kept to a minimum. Cleopatra appears to have looked to the future rather than to the past, to have calculated that Antony was well beyond the tickle and tease of admonition, the love bites. She subscribed to Plutarch’s counsel on rebuke: better in time of calamity to opt for sympathy over blame, for “at such a time there is no use for a friend’s frankness or for words charged with grave and stinging reproof.” Antony was, however, a different man, the storied audacity and “irresistible courage” wrung from him by Actium. Cleopatra was left with two projects, to minister to her distressed lover and to plot their escape. Somehow she comforted Antony, or numbed him, so that the dire reports seemed to agitate him less. She addressed his frustrations and calmed his suspi
cions. She did the thinking for them both.

  By relinquishing hope Antony discovered that he could relinquish anxiety as well; he returned to the palace and—never in need of an occasion—“set the whole city into a course of feasting, drinking, and presents.” Together Antony and Cleopatra staged too an elaborate coming-of-age party for their sons by their previous marriages, fifteen-year-old Antyllus and sixteen-year-old Caesarion. By the Greek reckoning, Caesarion was now of military age.* For his part Antyllus was ready to shed the purple-edged toga of a Roman child. In a mingling of traditions, Antony and Cleopatra ushered the boys into adulthood. Both enlisted in the military to boost Egyptian morale. For days banquets and revels and feasts distracted the city. Dio asserts that Antony and Cleopatra staged the celebrations to stoke a new spirit of resistance; to her subjects Cleopatra conveyed the message that they were “to continue the struggle with these boys as their leaders, in case anything should happen to the parents.” Come what may, the Ptolemaic dynasty would survive, and with a male sovereign to boot. Indeed Caesarion was hailed as pharaoh in inscriptions that autumn. Antony and Cleopatra might just as well have desperately been throwing sand in Octavian’s face. They had sons, by which the future was calibrated. He had none.

  Over the fall a flurry of envoys traveled back and forth, with bribes and proposals from one side, threats and promises from the other. Initially Cleopatra pleaded for the only thing that mattered to her: Could she pass down her kingdom to her children? To lose her life was one thing; to sacrifice her children—and with them her country—was unthinkable. They were now between the ages of seven and seventeen; she pinned her hopes on Caesarion, whom she had already promoted to rule in her absence. Later she sent Octavian a golden scepter, crown, and throne. She would abdicate in exchange for clemency, suggests Dio, “for she hoped that even if he did hate Antony, he would yet take pity on her at least.” Antony hoped to be allowed to live as a private citizen in Egypt or—if that was asking too much—in Athens. Octavian had no time for Antony’s proposal but he answered Cleopatra. Publicly he threatened her. Privately he replied that he would be perfectly reasonable with her on one condition: she was to arrange for Antony’s execution, or at the very least his exile. (Octavian kept the gifts.) Antony tried again, defending his relationship with Cleopatra, reminding Octavian of their family ties, their “amorous adventures,” their shared pranks. To prove his sincerity he delivered up a remaining assassin of Caesar’s, then living with Antony. He proposed something else as well. He would kill himself “if in that way Cleopatra might be saved.” Again he elicited only an icy silence. The assassin was put to death.

  The sad truth was that Antony had nothing to offer. Cleopatra had a stronger hand, with the greatest treasure still outside Roman control. Octavian could not succeed without her famed gold and pearls and ivory. They had long motivated his men; more than anything else, Cleopatra’s hoard held his rank and file in check. So much were Antony and Cleopatra alone, so regular were the desertions, that they had no emissary to entrust with these messages. They were left to press one of the children’s tutors into service. With his third overture Antony dispatched fifteen-year-old Antyllus and a vast quantity of gold. Octavian kept the gold and dismissed the boy. It is unclear how sincere the proposals were; Dio suggests that Antony and Cleopatra were simply biding their time while plotting revenge. The overtures were in any event no less genuine than the replies. Octavian could not truly expect Cleopatra to murder Antony. Her brother had won no points for eliminating the distressed and defeated Pompey seventeen years earlier. Nor had she any guarantee that Octavian would honor his end of the bargain. Was he likely to pardon a woman on whom he had so theatrically declared war? Cleopatra might well agree to disassociate herself from Antony, but she hardly had reason to go further. She knew an ambush when she saw one. Octavian would have to figure out how to dispense with his former brother-in-law himself.

  With Cleopatra’s last messenger Octavian sent to Alexandria an especially clever emissary of his own. (It is notable, though usually forgotten, that Octavian by this arrangement tried his wiles on Cleopatra.) Thyrsus was handsome, persuasive, and more than adequately qualified to negotiate with “a woman who was haughty and astonishingly proud in the matter of beauty,” as Plutarch has it, or who “thought it her due to be loved by all mankind,” as Dio concludes. Dio finds Cleopatra vain to the point of delusion, so taken with her own charms as to allow an emissary to convince her that Octavian, a young general who had never set eyes upon her, was infatuated with her, simply because she wished him to be, and because in the past she had had that effect on Roman commanders. Cleopatra spent a great deal of time closeted with the superbly intelligent Thyrsus, on whom she lavished special honors. She had every reason to win his favor; the two conferred privately and at length. We have no account of his response but we do of another. Antony exploded with jealousy. He had Thyrsus seized, whipped, and returned to Octavian with a letter. Octavian’s man had provoked him, and at a time when he was already irritable. He had enough on his mind. If Octavian objected to what he had done he could easily settle the score. Mark Antony’s man was with Octavian in Asia. (He had defected early on.) Octavian had only “to hang him up and give him a flogging,” suggested Antony, “and we shall be quits.”

  Cleopatra too had plenty on her mind but before all else humored Antony. It was difficult to say what value he added to the equation at this juncture, which makes her solicitude all the more remarkable. She calmed him with every imaginable attention. At the end of the year she celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday modestly, in a style “suited to her fallen fortunes.” She spared no expense when it came time for Antony’s in January. He continued to count on a future in which he might live, retired from public affairs, either in Athens or Alexandria, rather unrealistic prospects under the circumstances. Cleopatra saw to it that he rang in his fifty-third year with the greatest of splendor and every kind of magnificence, among friends who had little reason to question their loyalty, as “many of those who were bidden to the supper came poor and went away rich.”

  Otherwise Alexandrian affairs took on a melancholy complexion. Octavian continued to threaten Cleopatra publicly while privately he maintained that if she killed Antony she would have her pardon. Silver-tongued messengers aside, she had no intention of accepting the offer. She continued with her poison experiments, though probably not with a cobra, as Plutarch asserts. She was in search of a toxin that subtly, painlessly overwhelmed the senses. Its victim should submit to what appeared to be a profound natural sleep. Much of this was common knowledge to a Hellenistic sovereign, reliably familiar with her toxins and antidotes, and well aware that a cobra bite did not answer to that description. In all such matters Cleopatra’s personal physician, Olympus, at her side over these weeks, would also have been eminently well versed; if you wanted an excellent poison, you procured it in Egypt, from an Alexandrian doctor. The suppers and drinking bouts continued, with as much profligacy as ever but under a different name. Cleopatra and Antony dissolved the Society of the Inimitable Livers to found another, every bit that association’s equal in “splendor, luxury, and sumptuosity.” Out of black humor or bleak despair, they called this new society the Companions to the Death. Those who reclined on the plush palace couches vowed to die with their hosts. And Cleopatra oversaw the hurried construction of an elaborate, two-story building, adjacent to an Isis temple, with a commanding view of the Mediterranean, probably on a sandy strip of palace ground, her “surpassingly lofty and beautiful” mausoleum.

  THERE WAS A reprieve of sorts over the winter, when it became clear that Octavian would make no expedition until the weather warmed. Urgent matters intervened. From Samos he returned to Rome, where there were demonstrations and disturbances of all kinds. Discharging an army was always complicated, and—short on funds—Octavian had thousands of mutinous veterans on his hands. Only early in the spring did he make a lightning trip east. The sailing season had not yet opened; he moved so quickly �
��that Antony and Cleopatra learned at one and the same time both of his departure and of his return.” His cordial new friend greeted him in Syria; no sooner had Octavian and his men disembarked on the Phoenician coast than Herod was on hand with gifts and provisions. He installed the weary travelers in magnificently appointed apartments. And he saw to it that they lacked nothing for the desert march before them, sending Octavian off precisely as he had sent off Cleopatra six years earlier, though this time tossing goodwill and funds into the bargain. To Octavian’s cause Herod contributed monies equal to four years of Cleopatra’s Jericho revenue. (The logic was transparent. Herod meant to make it blindingly obvious to the Romans that his “realm was far too restricted in comparison with the services which he had rendered them.”) Without any touristic detours Octavian headed to Pelusium, where Herod left him, early in the summer. The idea was to assault Egypt simultaneously from two sides, through Syria and Libya, mobilizing Antony’s former legions in the West.

  In Alexandria Cleopatra continued the “strange, wild life” with Antony, without which she could not have reconstituted the Ptolemaic Empire, and on account of which she now found herself in dire straits. There may have been another covert set of negotiations that winter; although their accounts differ wildly elsewhere, both Plutarch and Dio assert that Octavian crossed easily into Egypt, without any resistance at the Eastern frontier, because Cleopatra secretly arranged for him to do so. The accounts may derive from the same inimical report; Cleopatra’s treachery was a fertile subject, on which a Roman could, for a few hundred years, dilate inexhaustibly. She may well have been double-dealing, bowing to the inevitable, bargaining for leniency. She had been ruthlessly pragmatic before. At this point her interests substantially diverged from Antony’s. He could hope for little more than a brilliant last stand. She fought to preserve a dynasty, if not a country. (By one account she both bribed the general at Pelusium to surrender and allowed Antony to murder the general’s family for his cowardice. And, naturally, the accusations of her collusion did not prevent Octavian from asserting later that he took Pelusium by storm.) Cleopatra knew that she could not hold out militarily against Octavian; certainly there was acquiescence, if not treachery. As she had discouraged the partisans of Upper Egypt from rising up in her defense (she claimed she did not care to see them needlessly massacred; she may have been banking still on a negotiation), she discouraged the Alexandrians in their resistance. Dio assigns her a second, infinitely less plausible motive as well. He asserts that she believed Thyrsus when he said that Octavian was smitten with her. Why should Octavian be any different from Caesar and Antony? So obsessed is Dio with Cleopatra’s vanity that he forgets she was also a skilled politician. She yields Pelusium, he asserts, as “she expected to gain not only forgiveness and the sovereignty over the Egyptians, but the empire of the Romans as well.” Cleopatra could generally be counted on to do the intelligent thing. Dio has her engaged with the nonsensical. She was fighting for her life, her throne, and her children. She had ruled for two decades, and was without illusions. She knew Octavian was deeply enamored not with her but with her wealth. Into the mausoleum she heaped gems, jewelry, works of art, coffers of gold, royal robes, stores of cinnamon and frankincense, necessities to her, luxuries to the rest of the world. With those riches went as well a vast quantity of kindling. Were she to disappear, the treasure of Egypt would disappear with her. The thought was a torture to Octavian.