by Michael Foss
This last statement sounded like Roman propaganda; but it would not have been out of character for Cleopatra. She was always very careful with the resources of the state, and would not have been keen to squander the contents of her treasury on an unlucky Roman venture in the wilds of Parthia. It was not in her plans to pay to avenge Roman defeat or to salve Roman pride.
For Antony, the Parthian campaign could only be unfinished business that left him with a tarnished reputation. He was anxious to pursue the war, but many of his best veterans were dead, and a large part of his army was destroyed. He needed money, but more immediately he needed fresh troops, which Octavian in Italy was not disposed to send him. After eight years of prudence, steadfast effort, canny political scheming and manipulation, Octavian’s position was secure, even triumphant, in the West. With the advice of Maecanas and the military support of Agrippa, the most brilliant naval commander of the day, Octavian had defeated Sextus Pompeius whom Antony, very honourably, had refused to support. Octavian had eased Lepidus out of North Africa, released the flow of grain into Italy, finally settled his legionaries in a newly-pacified country, and so created the conditions for peaceful economic prosperity.
I cleared the seas of pirates [Octavian wrote in his fragment of autobiography] and in that war I captured 30,000 fugitive slaves, who had taken up arms against the state, and I returned them to their masters.
And his good opinion, of himself was shared by the senate and the people. ‘After prolonged unrest’, said the inscription put up for him in the Forum by the senate, ‘he restored peace by land and sea.’ Not without good reason was Octavian now hailed as Caesar Divi Filius. Only Antony in the East stood between him and the unpartitioned Roman world. On his own silver coins Octavian placed the figure of Apollo, god of light and order; on Antony’s coins was Dionysus, the dark god of mystery and violence.
For most observers, the reasons for a final conflict were now in view. Mists of uncertainty had been burnt away by success in the West and failure in the East, and the contestants stood starkly differentiated. All this was easily seen. Only Antony befuddled by misplaced dreams and frustration was not yet sure. Cleopatra knew it and at last was ready to throw down her gambler’s hand on the side of Antony. Things had gone so far she could not avoid his fate, for good or bad. Octavian, most clear-sighted of all, knew it, but for the sake of the sister he loved so well he would not yet move against Antony. For Octavia, with the serene confidence of a good woman, refused to abandon her husband, though she knew to the last scandal the follies he committed with Cleopatra. Antony was her husband and there was no more to be said. She would defend and support him to the grave.
There never was a chance that Octavia, for all her tender virtue, would prevail on her husband. To a man under the influence of the Egyptian queen, goodness and constancy were poor companions. In March 35 BC, as soon as she could organize shipping and supplies, Octavia set out for the East with aid for Antony, as Cleopatra had done some months before. She had with her such troops and stores as her brother Octavian was willing to provide, but these were less than were owed to Antony under the terms of the treaty of Tarentum. She never got to deliver them. At Athens she received a peremptory message from Antony ordering her to send on the ships but to return to Rome herself, and as an obedient wife she went. She returned to the house in Rome to look after not only her own daughters by Antony, but also his sons by Fulvia; she became a figure in the city whose every dignified step admonished Antony and sent a dart of anger into Octavian’s heart.
In 35 BC Antony was spared any further challenges from Parthia by the internal rivalries of that kingdom. But he remembered that the Armenians had abandoned him and needed to be taught a lesson. In January 34 BC he invaded Armenia with his rested and reinforced legions. He subdued the country and captured King Artavasdes and two of his sons, though the rumour put about by Octavian’s adept writers suggested that these captives had been taken by treachery, not in battle. By the autumn of 34 BC, flush with this success, Antony was back in Alexandria with Cleopatra.
In the scale of conquests, the success in Armenia was nothing very much. But it needed recognition, if only for the sake of Antony’s self-esteem, and Cleopatra was ready to indulge him. Alexandria, a city well-used to grand spectacle, was granted the extraordinary sight of a Roman triumph a world away from the Capitol in Rome. Romans, who were always jealous of their ancient practices and privileges, found in this show a subtle insult to the traditions of their people. But Cleopatra, looking back as ever to the former greatness of the Ptolemies and drawing her inspiration from their royal deeds, perhaps had in mind the celebratory processions of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, for the event in Antony’s honour was given an Alexandrian gloss. Cleopatra sat on a golden throne, awaiting the arrival of Antony’s triumphal chariot, leading through the city the Armenian captives and the spoils of war. This was not so much an exultation of a Roman general. It was a representation of Egyptian Isis welcoming to her court the god Dionysus after his dangerous wanderings in the East. It was a homecoming as much as a celebration of victory, and the un-Roman nature of the occasion was made clear by Antony’s clemency when he spared the life of the treacherous King Artavasdes. Julius Caesar had spared the life of Arsinoe, but she was only a young girl. Cold-blooded Octavian, truly Roman in his calculated cruelty as in all else, would never have allowed such cloudy generosity to come between him and sound policy.
This Alexandrian diversion – this almost-Roman triumph – was followed by another that was even more strange, which startled as much as it gave offence, as Plutarch reported:
Antony assembled a great number of people in the gymnasium, and there on a high dais of silver he set two golden thrones, one for himself and the other for Cleopatra, with smaller thrones for his children. Then he openly proclaimed Cleopatra as Queen of Egypt, Cyprus, Libya and Coele Syria, and named Caesarion as her consort. This youth was reputed to be the son of Julius Caesar, who had left Cleopatra pregnant. Next, he proclaimed his own sons by Cleopatra to be Kings of Kings. To Alexander he gave Armenia, Media and Parthia (as soon as it might be conquered), and to Ptolemy he gave Phoenicia, Syria and Cilicia. And then he presented his sons to the people, Alexander in the dress of the Medes, with long gown and high, narrow hat, and Ptolemy clothed in the old Macedonian way with boots and short cloak and broad hat circled by a royal diadem, for such was the old attire of the successors to Alexander the Great. When the children had saluted and kissed their parents they went their way, one with an Armenian guard of honour, the other with a Macedonian. As for Cleopatra, at this time and on all other public occasions she wore the robes of the goddess Isis, and came before her subjects as the New Isis.
So that the message should not be lost or misconstrued Antony had a coin struck. On one side was his own head with the inscription Armenia conquered; on the other side was Cleopatra’s head and the legend Queen of Kings and of her Sons who are Kings.
These Donations of Alexandria were in name the gift of Antony, but Cleopatra had the greater glory, and who can doubt that she was the mastermind behind the whole portentous demonstration? Antony’s own position was left carefully undefined. In the East he was the New Dionysus. But to his legions he was plain Marcus Antonius, Roman citizen and general, and they followed him in this capacity. He could do nothing that would alienate their loyalty, which fundamentally belonged to Rome. Whatever brilliant plumage he might wear in the Alexandrian court, Antony must appear before his soldiers in unaffected Roman guise or else his authority in the empire would be nothing.
Cleopatra was not constrained by such scruples. Without striking a single war-like blow she had secured for her Ptolemaic dynasty an inheritance that included by far the greater part of the eastern Roman empire. And she was beginning to permit herself a new dream. Already, her consort Ptolemy Caesar – Caesarion – gave some colour to a claim, weak though it was, for recognition from Rome. Now the documents of her realm were beginning to appear with a double dating that had
nothing to do with her official co-ruler Ptolemy Caesar. This dating stemmed from 37 BC, the year of her conjunction – her formal marriage? – with Antony in Antioch, and recognized not only the years of her own reign but also the regnal years of Antony With the greatest daring she had incorporated the Roman ruler of the East – the de facto Imperator of the Eastern Empire – into her royal family Cleopatra was the Egyptian goddess-queen. Now it seemed that she was also on her way to becoming the empress of Rome. She began to use as her customary oath a formula that said ‘as surely as I shall one day give judgement in the Capitol’.
In amazement and some apprehension Romans began to wonder how all this had happened. With a good knowledge of Antony’s faults they preferred to credit her triumphs, not to intelligence or clear policy, but to sexual manipulation. Plutarch, whose later history voiced much of this Roman prejudice, had many stories of the tricks she played for Antony’s love:
She pretended to be consumed with the most passionate love for Antony taking little food so that she seemed to be pining away When Antony was near she would fix on him a look of rapture, and when he left she would languish and seem on the verge of collapse. She was often seen in tears, which she would hurriedly wipe away as if to hide them.
Her creatures and flatterers also worked hard on Antony. They told him that he must be a callous brute with a heart of stone, since here was a mistress utterly devoted to him alone, and his coldness was killing her. His marriage to Octavia, so they said, was only a political convenience for her brother’s sake. Octavia enjoyed the title of wife, but Cleopatra, who was queen of many nations, had been content to be called his mistress, nor did she shun this name or think it unworthy of her so long as she could see him and be with him all her life. If he drove her away it would be the death of her. In the end they so melted and unmanned him that he truly began to believe that she would die if he left her.
Whatever the truth of these stories, certainly Cleopatra knew the uses of sexuality. She also had the theatricality of the Ptolemies, those practised deceivers, and could act with the best of them. Her dress and looks and conduct were well-calculated, A little book on the use of cosmetics appeared under her name, and though she may not have written it, at least it showed that in the common mind she knew those arts. She dressed carefully for effect, usually in the Greek costume of Alexandria, but when the occasion demanded it in the full majesty of the Egyptian Isis. To her, her whole persona was an artifice of state, to impress her subjects, to lend dignity to her monarchy, and to let her play, if need be, on the susceptible male heart.
Later Roman writers, in the grip of the virulent Roman propaganda that Octavian had encouraged against her, went from criticism to coarse abuse. Lucan, untrustworthy and foul-minded as ever, claimed that Pothinus the eunuch had said that men’s lives were at risk, if they would not sleep with her: ‘We are guilty in her eyes, like every other man who has not slept with her.’ Propertius called her ‘lecherous Canopus’s harlot queen’, who wore her servants out with sex and conducted a ‘filthy’ union with Antony.
She became so debauched [Sextus Aurelius added] that she frequently offered herself as a common whore; but she was so beautiful that many men bought a night with her at the price of their own death.
The contemporary records of her reign, particularly from Alexandria where many hated her and found good reason to vilify and libel her, mention nothing of this sexual depravity. In a life of 39 years she had four children by two men. She conceived easily enough, but in an age without adequate contraception there is no record of further pregnancies, apart from Cicero’s malicious rumour of a miscarriage, and even that baby would have been Julius Caesar’s. At home, no sexual scandal touched her, even in the long periods between 41 and 32 BC when Antony was busy with his wars. In her imperious mind it is likely that she regarded herself as bound in a form of marriage first to Caesar and then, after his death, to Antony. These were not, and could never have been, marriages in the strict Roman form, but according to the fashion of the Ptolemies who in these matters made their own rules. And all the evidence shows that, far from being a wanton woman, she was constant to the two Romans in her life.
Nor, indeed, was sexual morality ever at the heart of the contention between Cleopatra and Rome. Great Romans were themselves notoriously loose in their affairs. Julius Caesar had been a rampant stallion, as his admiring troops loved to remind him. In his loves Antony was no worse than Octavian. The difference was that Antony appeared openly amorous, while Octavian clothed his bed-work with hypocrisy, as Antony sharply told him. Suetonius, the historian of the Caesars, quoted a letter of this time from Antony to Octavian:
What’s come over you? Is it because I go to bed with the queen? And what about you, is Livia the only woman you bed? I congratulate you if, at the time you read this letter, you haven’t also had Tertullia or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia or the whole lot of them. Does it really matter where you get your erection, or who the woman was?
Antony was genuinely indignant. He said firmly that Cleopatra was his wife, and if she was Egyptian, so what? Had not Octavian been willing to offer his daughter Julia to a Dacian prince?
The truth was that Rome had now begun to fear Cleopatra, and the accusation of depravity was only a convenient stick with which to beat her. She was portrayed as a witch of the orient, a voracious fertility goddess of an alien culture who unmanned Roman probity, and the hunting-dogs of the writer’s yellow trade were set on her, in support, as always, of the ascendant power. But a greater mystery than her supposed sexual appetite was the extent and brilliance of her aura which engulfed the Roman intentions of Antony, and eventually lost him in the Alexandrian quagmire where he forgot both his military duty and Octavia. This was a triumph of personality that Rome could not understand.
Octavian, for one, did not want to try to understand, nor was it necessary from the point of view of his policy for him to do so. From his distance he saw an unstable Rome general, derelict in sense and duty and now becoming a danger to all Rome’s interests, not only in the East, but through Cleopatra’s vanity for imperial power even in the Italian heartland. He saw also a studied insult to his sister Octavia, which was also an offence to himself. Antony had hatched a dream in Cleopatra’s bed, a vision of a Hellenistic-Roman monarchy taking its forms from Ptolemaic tradition and relying on the ancient productive mass of Egypt for its prosperity. Sober Octavian was not led astray by impossible dreams. He worked steadily according to the usual Roman method of expansion by cautious conquests and by the patronage of client-kingdoms, but all firmly and solely under the authority of Rome. Nothing could reconcile the opposing visions of Antony and Octavian.
The coldness between them began with mutual accusations of bad faith and neglected promises, and progressed, particularly on the part of Octavian, to sneers about lack of probity, sobriety and competence. He brought up Antony’s sexual misdemeanours and also his military failures in the East. Antony retaliated with contemptuous memories of Octavian’s less than glorious conduct at the battle of Philippi (where Antony’s generalship had been decisive), and of his feeble lack of spirit against Sextus Pompeius. ‘He could not bear to look straight at the battle,’ said Antony, ‘but lay on his back stupidly staring at the sky and did not stir until the hostile fleet had been routed by Agrippa.’ And as for sexual games, Antony hinted that Octavian had won Caesar’s favour by homosexual pandering.
By pre-arrangement, the two consuls in Rome for the year 32 BC were both supporters of Antony But they did not dare to reveal to the senate the Donations of Alexandria which Antony had made in favour of his own children. Instead, the consul Sosius delivered a strong indictment of Octavian which he answered in person but surrounded by an armed posse of friends and soldiers. The senate broke up and the two factions divided irrevocably. The consuls and some 400 senators fled to Antony in Asia Minor, leaving Rome completely in the hands of Octavian.
The arrival of his senatorial supporters in Ephesus steadied An
tony’s nerve. Accompanied by Cleopatra, he was once again all energy, an experienced general preparing for his last campaign. He had by his side his co-ruler and co-deity, and the queen of Egypt was now fully committed to him in war as in peace. At last, she opened her Egyptian treasury for his benefit and provided him with a sum that might have amounted to the huge figure of 20,000 talents, roughly the whole Egyptian income for one year. She also gave him a part of the Egyptian fleet and about 150 supply ships. Antony now had the resources to gather his army and he sent out the usual summonses to the client-kings. They came with their oaths of allegiance and their soldiers and were accepted, all but Herod whose presence Cleopatra could never stomach. He was sent away to gather the tribute owed to Cleopatra from her balsam groves in Judaea, but before he departed the Jewish fox (so Josephus tells us) confided to Antony that his best chance of success was to murder Cleopatra and seize Egypt as quickly as possible.
Octavian was dismayed by the speed and purpose of the preparations being made in Asia Minor.
For he himself [Plutarch wrote] was not only very short of supplies but also immediately made himself unpopular by the taxes he had to impose. Citizens were made to pay a quarter of their income and freedmen one eighth of their property, which fell heavy on both, and caused a violent outcry and many disturbances all over Italy. For this reason, it was a great error that Antony did not make war at once, since the delay allowed Octavian time to prepare. Also, in this period of inaction the indignation subsided; for people were angry when the money was taken from them, but once they had paid their temper cooled.
Antony had followed the custom of great men and lodged his will with the Vestal Virgins in Rome, where it was supposed to be sacrosanct until he died. But Octavian wrung the will from their grasp and read to the senate those passages likely to offend Romans. Particularly obnoxious to the senators was the clause that Antony’s body, even if he died in Rome, should be taken back to Cleopatra in Egypt. Other charges were raised against the frivolity, luxury and weak irresponsibility of the lovers: