by Michael Foss
In the spring of 40 BC the urgency of all the state business that Antony had wilfully neglected dragged him back to Italy He had intended to go to Syria to prepare for the Parthian invasion but suddenly events in Italy were more pressing. On his journey he briefly met Fulvia in Greece, and having heard the story of her trouble-making he abandoned her to die in Sicyon. Sextus Pompeius, youngest son of the great Pompey, from this Sicilian base had made himself the master of the seas – he called himself ‘Son of Neptune’ and put the sea-god on his Sicilian coins. He had become a piratical but influential third force between Antony and Octavian, and he was sounding out Antony for plots and sympathy.
The two powerful triumvirs (poor Lepidus by now hardly counted) were offended with each other, bickering amid mutual accusations of ill-faith. After Philippi, Octavian had struggled with the thankless task of attempting to settle the veteran legionaries with gifts of land. To assimilate them into the Italian countryside caused a chaos in land-holding and farming, leading to a loss of agricultural production and some hardship from hunger. Also, Sextus’ fleet was restricting the import of grain from the traditional markets in Egypt and North Africa. Italy needed a period of rest, consolidation and stability, as Octavian knew very well. Civil war was a gangrene in the body politic.
In October 40 BC Antony and Octavian met in Brundisium and warily made a new agreement. Lepidus was confined to North Africa from where he was later removed to complete his undistinguished life as pontifex maximus in Rome, a ritual office of no practical significance. Then the Roman world was divided in two along the line of the Adriatic Dalmation coast. Octavian took the West and Antony the East, though both had the right to recruit in Italy. And in the Roman way, to try to seal bargains that would not stick, a political marriage of convenience was arranged. Octavian’s well-loved elder sister, Octavia, a lady of noble virtue and the sweetest nature, was given to the libertine Antony Both were recently widowed. Octavia was already pregnant by her deceased husband. And in Alexandria there was another pregnancy; Cleopatra expected the birth of Antony’s twins.
Basalt head of Octavia, Octavian’s sister and Mark Antony’s second wife.
After this pact, it seemed as if Antony would be permanently lost to Alexandria and to Cleopatra, the only mementoes of his gaudy stay being some riotous memories and his twin children. Newly-married and newly-respectable, Antony began keeping state in Athens with Octavia, but more like a Greek Dionysus than a Roman Mars. As 39 slipped into 38 BC he still had not begun the great vengeance against Parthia, even though the Parthians had twice invaded the client-kingdoms of the East, the first time most shamefully under the Roman renegade Labienus. Antony’s subordinates Ventidius and Pollio had contained Parthia with some hard-fought victories, won largely because the Parthians had temporarily abandoned their light-cavalry tactic of hit and run.
Nor were things going well in Italy The treaty of Brundis-ium had settled nothing. Octavian and Antony were again in dispute about money and troops and spheres of influence. Sextus Pompeius still had a grip around Rome, strangling the gain-supply with his fleet. The term of office of the triumvirate was coming to an end and Antony needed to extend it. Encouraged by Octavia, who was torn between brother and husband, Antony went to Tarentum early in 37 BC in an angry mood, determined to out-face Octavian. For a moment the empire hung on the edge of war, which was averted in large part by Octavia’s anguished diplomacy, and another treaty was arranged. But it was only a truce. Antony was convinced that Octavian was playing him false, and this was to some extent true (if truth could be found in the welter of recriminations), though Octavian’s political determination and ceaseless hard work contrasted sharply with Antony’s sloth in Athens. Antony was hardly satisfied. He did not trust Octavian, with good reason, and perhaps he no longer trusted Octavia. In Athens, she had borne him two children and was pregnant with a third. But half her heart was still with her brother. She was a good woman, no doubt, but was she sufficiently devoted to her husband? And virtue is often dull. Antony had had enough of Roman obduracy and Roman sobriety. He left Octavia and his children in Italy and went east again.
Antony turned his back on the West and on all the connections that had tied him to it. In those parts, Octavian might do as he pleased. The East was now wholly Antony’s domain and he would play whatever tunes he wished on this vast tympanum. A thunder of war awaited him in Parthia but first, to soothe his bruised spirit, his mind turned to a little night-music. He threw away ‘all those nobler considerations of restraint that might have saved him’, Plutarch wrote. He sent one of his followers to bring Cleopatra to him in Syria.
The summons appeared to be no surprise to Cleopatra. She had kept her usual close intelligence on Roman affairs and saw how it now stood between Octavian and Antony It was said that she had placed an Egyptian astrologer in Antony’s court, and knew day by day the inclination of his mind. She arrived at Antioch with the twins whom their father had never seen – a powerful argument with a warmhearted man – and a prepared course of action. She was looking for gifts, but not the jewels or ornaments that would settle a lover’s estrangement.
When she arrived [Plutarch continued] the presents he showered on her were no trifles. To the lands she already possessed he added Phoenicia, Coele Syria, the isle of Cyprus and a great part of Cilicia. He also gave her that portion of Judaea which produces balsam, and the Nabataean coast of Arabia down to the Red Sea.
Cleopatra’s preoccupation was, as always, the strength of her kingdom and the security of her borders, especially the dangerous frontier in the east of Egypt that let on to a huge tract of dust and mountain where dynasts with puzzling histories fought to save themselves from the Roman onrush. That frontier at Pelusium was the weak point of Egypt, trampled time and again by invasion, and the policy to guard the vulnerable point by taking firm footholds in Palestine and Syria and along the Arabian coast had been set out and successfully implemented long ago by her great predecessor Ptolemy II Philadelphus. In wanting the lands given to her by Antony, Cleopatra was only drawing on the wisdom of her royal house. Behind the soft moments of her dalliance with Antony lay the resolution of an iron will and a cool understanding of statecraft. What did it matter to her that Lysanias must be executed so that his kingdom of Chalcis might add to the greater safety of Egypt? Antony gave way, and Cleopatra gave her tigress’ purr. Then between caresses she pushed a little further for the kingdom of Herod. But Judaea and Herod were too important to Antony and he would not budge. Cleopatra gained only the balsam groves and Herod’s undying enmity.
Naturally, Antony’s generosity did not please Rome.
In the past [wrote Plutarch] Antony had given territories and principalities to private men, and he had deprived many rulers of their kingdoms. But none of this caused as much offence to Romans as the extraordinary gifts he granted Cleopatra. And he made matters worse when he acknowledged his twin children by her, whom he named Alexander and Cleopatra, and surnamed Sun and Moon. Antony, however, was well-versed in the art of cloaking shameful deeds with fine words, and he declared that the greatness of the Roman empire was in the bestowing of kingdoms, not in taking them, and that nobility was increased by a succession born of many sovereigns.
Egyptian chalkstone relief showing Cleopatra as Isis. She is depicted wearing the head-dress of the Mother-goddess Mut, surmounted by the horns of the Cow-goddess Hathor and the disk of the Moon.
ABOVE: The main temple at Denderah is dedicated to Hathor, goddess of love and beauty. It dates mainly from the Ptolemaic period but probably occupies the site of a much older temple.
BELOW: The Sacred Lake or Cleopatra’s Pool at Denderah.
The sandstone relief on the outside south wall of the temple of Hathor at Denderah shows Cleopatra with Caesarian, her son by Julius Caesar, as Isis and Horus offering to the gods. Caesarian is depicted as a pharaoh offering incense.
ABOVE: Marble bust of Mark Antony.
BELOW: This Pompeiian wall painting shows Roman galleys
engaged in a sea battle.
Detail of a marble statue of Octavian who assumed the title of Emperor Augustus Caesar a few years after he had won the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. 1ST century AD copy of an original dating from c. 20 BC.
The deaths of Antony and Cleopatra have been wildly romanticized over the years by various artists.
RIGHT: Illumination from a medieval manuscript depicting the tomb of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
BELOW: The Death of Antony and Cleopatra by Alessandro Turchi (1579–1649).
The Death of Cleopatra by Jean-Baptiste Regnault (1754–1829)
After the annexation of Egypt by Octavian in 30 BC Egyptian themes became even more popular in Roman decorative arts. This second-century AD mosaic from Tivoli shows a boat trip on the river Nile.
Antony added that his paragon Heracles had scattered his seed widely not relying on the posterity of a single womb.
He never feared the audit of his copulations, but let Nature have her way and become the foundation of many families.
Did Antony and Cleopatra now enter into a form of marriage? It is likely though the historical evidence is not certain. But in any case their destinies were beginning to run together. Roman law permitted Antony only one wife, and she was Octavia. But by his many actions Antony had repudiated that law and morality. The looser habits of the orient suited him better. And the marriage customs of the Ptolemies were lax indeed. At a later date Antony certainly considered himself married to Cleopatra, and at this time the two lovers began to put the image of their heads on each other’s coins. Cleopatra was sure at last that she had found the Roman most likely to save Egypt from Rome, and she intended to bring him to her, not just with the wiles of sex and pleasure, but with children and marriage and the symbolism of kingship. If he was Dionysus, as he claimed to be in all lands to the east of Athens, then once again she was Isis, the goddess-queen. Their lives were intertwined, in ambition, in bed, and in joint deification according to the ancient custom of the East.
All this was a matter of hard policy for Cleopatra, whatever the pleasures of their meeting, but to Antony it was an imaginative stroke in a dream-like plan. Already Dionysus, he was now thinking of himself as a second Alexander. The conquests that Antony hoped to make in Parthia, following steps already imprinted by Alexander, would give him a fame to rival that of the Macedonian conqueror. And a conjunction with Cleopatra would lend legitimacy to his claim, for the Ptolemies were the successors of Alexander, the last and most successful of his followers. It was no idle whim that made Antony name his twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. The rise of a young Sun and a young Moon gave promise of a new Golden Age and rang out a challenge to the Parthians, whose king styled himself ‘brother of the Sun and Moon’. The symbolism illuminated this un-Roman dream in which a new Alexander joined to a long-ruling Ptolemy would march to eastern glory. Cleopatra, in her shrewd way, pitched her dream at a lower level. It was enough for her that she should make her dynasty safe, guided by ancestral light. In 36 BC, when she gave birth to Antony’s third child, she named the baby Ptolemy Philadel-phus in honour of the king who had achieved so much for Egypt.
But it was a fault with Antony that he dreamed too much and acted too little. It was time to go to work. Though the Parthian campaign had been put off for many years, in the winter of 37–6 BC Antony started to make strenuous preparations. A new king, Phraates IV, reigned in Parthia, a prince who had killed his father Orodes because the old man was too long in dying. As Antony had been idle before, now he was all energy. He gathered his Roman legions, many of them composed of veterans from Spain and Gaul, and summoned the client-kings to send their armed contingents. A large army collected in Armenia, perhaps as many as 100,000, a force that made ‘the Indians beyond Bactria and all Asia tremble’. Cleopatra went with Antony and the army as far as the Euphrates and then turned back for Egypt, intending to visit on the way the new territories granted her so recently. In particular, she wanted to go through Judaea, to make sure that her old enemy Herod would not stand in the way of the income due to her from the balsam groves.
The hostile account that the historian Josephus wrote of this journey showed just how much Cleopatra disturbed the delicate equilibrium of the East, and how much men feared her influence with an Antony they judged to be besotted beyond reason:
King Herod turned all his personal treasures into cash and sent it to Antony. Even so, he could not buy freedom from all trouble; for Antony ruined by his passion for Cleopatra, had become the complete slave of his desire, while Cleopatra struck right through her own family till not a single relative was left alive. And thirsting now for the blood of strangers, she was slandering the princes of Syria and urging Antony to have them executed, hoping in this way to become mistress of all their possessions. She even extended her greed to Jews and Arabs, working in secret to get their kings Herod and Malchus put to death.
Antony was sober enough to realize that one part of her demands – the killing of honest men and famous kings – was utterly immoral. But he cut them to the heart by withdrawing his friendship. He lopped a large part off their territories, including the palm-grove at Jericho in which the balsam is produced, and gave it to Cleopatra together with all the cities south of the river Eleutherus except Tyre and Sidon. Mistress now of this domain she escorted Antony as far as the Euphrates on his way to fight the Parthians, and then came byway of Apamea and Damascus into Judaea. Herod placated her with costly gifts, and leased back from her the lands broken from his kingdom, at 200 talents a year!
This was Cleopatra, the queen of sharp practice, the astute woman of business who husbanded the resources of Egypt so carefully and even found time to run her own woollen-mill in Alexandria staffed by her waiting-women.
When Cleopatra left him in May 36 BC, Antony went north from Zeugma with the arrogant confidence of a Roman general at the head of the invincible legions. He was an intrepid commander of men and a fine cavalry tactician, but he was not a good strategist and the conduct of a difficult campaign eluded him. The usual road into Parthia lay along a more southerly route, but Antony intended to make a bold swing to the north and the east to approach the Parthian capital, Ecbatana, from an unexpected direction. At first, the march went well. But by the time the army reached Phraaspa, in the land of the Medes, the campaign began to stall though oversight, folly and some bad luck. Antony failed to secure his rear in Armenia, where the king was only loosely bound to him by fear not love. The Roman wagon-train was too slow and too vulnerable, which forced Antony to divide his army to guard it. And the enemy, who had good intelligence of his plans, had started to use again their devastating light-cavalry tactics, never challenging the full force of the Roman onslaught but firing and then vanishing under the perpetual cloud of their arrows. Antony was forced to turn back. The retreat of 27 days through mountains unknown to the army to the base-camp in Armenia was a chapter of horrors, menaced all the way by the deadly buzz of the Parthian arrows, toiling amid extremes of privation from hunger, fatigue and exposure. Though at one point Antony thought of suicide, in the worse circumstances he showed his best qualities, his strength and endurance, his comradely spirit, his open-hearted generosity under adversity and his care for his poor suffering troops.
Many reasons inspired the devotion of his men [wrote Plutarch who was never an uncritical admirer of Antony] namely his nobility, his eloquence, his simplicity, his extravagant generosity, the familiar and genial manner of his daily conduct. His heart was with his men, and he shared their distress, and tended to them in their woe, so that even the wounded and the sick were ready to serve him – as ready or even more so as the strong and the healthy.
But having given this affecting tribute to Antony’s great qualities, Plutarch must then return to the familiar criticism and place the real blame for the failure of the campaign on the witch of Egypt.
Such was his passion to spend the winter with her that he took the field too early in the season and conducted a campaign withou
t good order. It was as if he were no longer the master of his own judgement, but rather under some magic spell; for his eyes seemed to be constantly going back to her image. His thoughts were fixed upon his return rather than on defeating the enemy.
Antony’s military errors were his own, not Cleopatra’s. But the accusations against her of magic, or of a drug-induced influence, began to become the common-place of history.
If not wounded, then sinking from dropsy and dysentery, the soldiers of the legions limped back to Armenia. Here, however, Antony could no longer rely on the goodwill of the king and the inhabitants, so he pulled further back, with another increase in hardship, to the Syrian coast near Sidon. In this miserable campaign he lost some 30,000 men. Hurt in body and reputation, Antony like a chastized schoolboy wanted comfort. He also needed money and supplies, which Cleopatra could give him. He sent for her but she was slow in coming and the black mood descended on him, for he lacked the resolution patiently to endure this uncertainty.
He became distraught and took to heavy drinking. He could not endure the waiting but would jump up from the table to look for her arrival. At last, she came by sea with large quantities of clothing and money though some accounts say that she came with clothing only and that Antony took money from his own private funds to distribute to the soldiers as if it were a gift from her.