by Michael Foss
But like a man prepared, like a brave man,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria who is departing.
Above all, do not delude yourself, do not say it is a dream,
that your ear was mistaken.
Do not condescend to such empty hopes.
Like a man for long prepared, like a brave man,
like to a man who was worthy of such a city,
go to the window firmly,
and listen with emotion,
but not with the prayers and complaints of the coward (Ah, supreme rapture!)
listen to the notes, to the exquisite instruments of the mystic choir,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria whom you are losing.
Next morning, Antony began calmly, making soldierly preparations for action, disposing his troops about the city, and watching the remains of his fleet put to sea. But when the sailors were beyond the harbour wall they went straight over to the enemy, and seeing this his cavalry also deserted.
Finally, when his infantry was routed, Antony withdrew into the city crying in a rage that Cleopatra had betrayed him to the very man he was fighting for her sake. In terror of his fury, the queen fled into her monument, closed the doors with locks and bars, and sent word to Antony that she was dead. Not doubting this message for a moment, Antony said to himself, ‘Why do you delay? Fate has taken away your only joy and your reason for living.’ Then he unarmed and laid his equipment aside, and said again, ‘O Cleopatra, your loss does not hurt me, for soon I shall be with you, but it shames me that such an Imperator as I might be judged to be of less courage and nobility than a woman.’
Now Antony had a faithful servant called Eros, who had sworn to kill his master if the need arose. That time had come, and Eros drew his sword as if to strike as his master ordered. But turning aside he thrust into himself and fell at his master’s feet. ‘O noble Eros,’ cried Antony, ‘that was bravely done, to teach me to do the thing you could not accomplish for me.’ Then he stabbed into his own belly and fell bleeding upon a bed. But the wound did not kill him, and presently, as the blood flowed less, he begged his friends to make an end of him. But they ran from the room and left him in agony till Diomedes, Cleopatra’s secretary, came with orders from the queen to carry him to her monument.’
Cleopatra saw that, in her message to Antony, her cunning had out-run her prudence. And now her general, the prop of her title and state, was dying. Servants carried Antony to her monument, but even then she was afraid to open the doors, and so she lowered ropes to pull up the dying man. With many groans she and her women drew him up and laid him on a bed, covered with a dress that she tore from her body. Cleopatra beat her head and lacerated her breast and smeared herself with his blood, calling him lord and husband and emperor. Antony drank a little wine and urged her to seek her safety, but without dishonour, and told her to trust none of Octavian’s men except Proculeius.
At last [wrote Plutarch] he begged her not to lament his wretched fortune, but to count him happy for the glories he had won, since he had lived as the greatest and most noble prince of the world, and now he died without dishonour, a Roman by a Roman conquered.
That same day Octavian entered Alexandria, on the first of the month later named August in his honour. In the Fasti, the calendar of public records in Rome, it was written that he had saved the republic from the most horrid of dangers. Since officially Cleopatra alone was the enemy, this could only mean that Rome was saved from the queen of Egypt. But before the ultimate rejoicing that queen had to be captured, and Octavian was most anxious to take her alive, to secure her treasure and her person, since he intended to show her in his triumph in Rome.
As soon as he entered the city Octavian heard of Antony’s death and was shown the bloodied sword. First, he wept, for Antony was related to him by marriage and had been his colleague in the greatest affairs of the world; then he took care to read aloud from Antony’s letters, to justify his own behaviour, to show how reasonable he had been at all times and how the fault lay with Antony. Then he sent Proculeius to try to tempt Cleopatra from her stronghold. But she would not open the doors and they spoke through a grating. She named her terms, that her children should be permitted to succeed her, and while Proculeius gave her soft words he also noticed the window high up, through which Antony had been drawn into the monument. He went away and made arrangements, and when another came to talk to the queen Proculeius mounted a scaling-ladder against the wall and led a posse of soldiers through the window. When Cleopatra saw that she was tricked she took a little dagger from her dress and tried to stab herself. But Romans rushed forward and pinned her arms and took her alive. Now Octavian had the treasure and the queen.
Within a few days Octavian granted an audience to Cleopatra. It was in both their interests to make a final reckoning. With her, it was a matter of life and death; but also, beyond the fate of her body, lay the fate of her Ptolemaic house and the fate of Egypt itself. These resolutions rested with Octavian, who must decide most carefully in the larger interests of Rome. The details of this meeting are not known, but many fanciful stories were embroidered around it. No doubt Cleopatra applied all her well-practised arts that had smitten and undone great men in other times. She was pathetic and forlorn, penitent and deeply wounded in mind and spirit; and when that did not work she tore at herself and raged. It was said she tried to seduce him, but in truth that was an abandoned ploy from an exhausted past dredged up here only by the poverty of literary imagination. They were not easily deceived by each other, for in depth of political understanding they were much alike. She knew that Rome intended to take it all: her person, her wealth, her right to confer the succession and her country. At this moment, death looked easy and comfortable.
For some time Cleopatra had studied death. She had made enquiries about poisons and their effects. The Order of the Inseparable in Death, her last company of friends in Alexandria, may only have been a piece of gloomy theatre, but it showed the drift of her thought. Suicide was a noble Roman way. Cato and Brutus had died thus, and now Antony had fallen by his own hand. It was not a Ptolemaic practice, but none before her had been given the Roman lesson and example that she had. Defeat braced her for death, Antony’s suicide resolved her, and Octavian’s cold determination to make a disgrace of her and all she stood for gave her the necessary courage. Plutarch wrote that after their meeting Octavian had left Cleopatra ‘believing that he had deceived her, but he himself was deceived’. It was a victory of a kind.
Octavian had allowed Antony an honourable funeral, and Cleopatra begged one last chance to pour a libation to her departed lover. Octavian, who had already made arrangements to transport the queen and her children out of Egypt, gave way. She went to the tomb and monument to Antony and poured her libation and made a simple prayer out of her grief:
O Antony, if there is any mercy or power in the gods of Rome, for my gods have betrayed us, do not abandon your wife, nor let me be led in triumph to your shame. Hide me and let me be buried here with you, for I know now that the thousand pains I have suffered in my life are as nothing besides the few days I have had to live without you.
On 10 August, in Antony’s mausoleum, she began to make her last preparation. The record of these events came down from her physician Olympus Into the family of Plutarch, and the historian put them into sombre words:
So Cleopatra mourned Antony, and crowned his urn with garlands and kissed it. Then she ordered a bath made ready, and coming from the bath she rested and was served with a most sumptuous meal. Now, while she was at dinner a countryman came to her bringing a basket. When the guards stopped him and demanded to see what was in the basket, he pulled away some leaves and showed ripe figs which looked so good the soldiers were tempted to try them. Then they allowed him to take the fruit to the queen. After she had dined, Cleopatra took a tablet and wrote on it for Octavian, and sealed it and sent it. Then she dismissed all but her two faithful waiting-women and closed the doors of the monument.
Cleopatra died by snake bite, from a cobra brought in the fig basket, though the snake was not found. The bite of the asp – the Egyptian cobra – was not painful and death from respiratory failure was quick, perhaps within thirty minutes. The famous Roman medical writer, Galen, noted that criminals in Alexandria were sometimes granted this death as a merciful execution. But for Cleopatra it was far from an execution; rather, it was an apotheosis that took the mortal parts of the goddess-queen Cleopatra and transmuted her into the Egyptian deity Isis. The asp was the uraeus, the snake sacred to Amon-Ra that the pharaohs carried on their insignia and wore on their headdress. Through the agency of the sacred asp the Sun God welcomed his royal and holy daughter into the pantheon of the Egyptian gods. The robes in which Cleopatra died were those of the New Isis, the robes in which she had appeared so regally on the great and public occasions of her reign. This Ptolemy, this Macedonian Greek queen, was never more Egyptian than in her death.
The death of Cleopatra, and the possession of her treasure intact, saved Octavian. When these Egyptian riches reached Rome the normal rate of interest dropped from 12 per cent to 4 per cent. Now he was able to make good the promises to his veterans, to pay for the land he had expropriated for them, and to have enough money left over for many public works besides. Some 120,000 veterans were each given 1000 sestercii, and even the people of Rome received 400 sestercii each. In this way Octavian avoided the turbulence of dissatisfaction in Italy that poverty would have forced upon him. He was at last free, and had the resources, to make final his plan for Roman greatness.
But first he had matters to clear up in Egypt. He pulled down the statues of Antony, but those of Cleopatra were left standing, for which act of grace one of her loyal friends paid a very large fee. Octavian feared no statues, but for a conqueror certain acts of revenge become a necessity. Antyllus, the eldest son and heir of Antony, was taken from asylum and killed. Nor could Caesarion be spared. In the Roman world there was room for only one Caesar. Ptolemy Caesar – Caesarion – had been sent by his mother to flee to India. But his tutor beguiled the 16-year-old with false promises of safety and led him back to Egypt where he was executed. A few others whom Octavian considered most guilty or most dangerous were killed, but these were very few in number, for Octavian was tired of bloodshed and wanted the murder to stop. The three children of Cleopatra by Antony, two boys and a girl, were taken to Rome where they walked in Octavian’s triumph. Then they joined the household of Octavia, the most forgiving of wives who took to her honourable heart all the lost children of Antony, those of the spitfire Fulvia and those called by Romans the children of the harlot-queen of Egypt.
After their education in Rome, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus disappeared from history. Their sister Cleopatra Selene was married to Juba II of Mauretania by whom she had a son, later executed by the Emperor Caligula, and a daughter who married Antonius Felix, the governor of Judaea known to the apostle PauL With greater irony, Antony’s other children by Octavia achieved what his little Egyptian Sun and Moon had never become. They shone in the imperial firmament of Rome. One daughter was mother of Emperor Claudius and grandmother of Emperor Caligula, and the other daughter was grandmother of Emperor Nero. Thus on the death of Nero in 68 AD, when madness and folly extinguished the Julian-Claudian-Antonian clans, the ashes belonged to the house of Mark Antony not to his deadly opponent Octavian Caesar, later called Emperor Augustus.
The triumph of Octavian brought the long brutal age of civil wars to a close. The Roman revolution had run its course, taking the wheel of the state in a great cycle from republic to principate. In the time of horrors, when blood leaked like rain in the streets of Rome, good citizens prayed constantly for peace, and yearned for some authority – man or god or godlike man – to lead them out of war. The longing for peace was never more feelingly expressed than in the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, a poem written to honour the poet’s patron Asinius Pollio, the friend of Antony who did so much to bring the two sullen titans of the state to the supposed harmony of the treaty of Brundisium in 40 BC. Virgil’s poem celebrated the birth of a boy who would institute a new age, the Golden Age of a new order that reconciled all difficulties and brought in the long-awaited time of universal peace and prosperity Who was that celebrated boy? It is a mark of the ache for holy order that so many posterities have rushed to claim that child. Christians, as is well known, have seen in the Fourth Eclogue a prophecy of the birth of Christ and the new order of Christendom.
The true history seems far more modest. The most likely candidate for Virgil’s bringer of peace was the expected child of Antony and Octavia. The hopes were immediately dashed, for the treaty of Brundisium did not hold, and the baby was born a girl not a boy But the burden of expectation laid on a mysterious babe was easily transferred to a pale young Roman with a prospering future. Even in 39 BC, when the concord of Brundisium was jangling out of tune, Antony complained that his luck went into decline under Octavian’s shadow.
Antony kept in his house [Plutarch wrote] an Egyptian soothsayer skilled in the casting of horoscopes. This man, either to please Cleopatra or because he wished Antony to know the truth, made no secret of his reading of Antony’s fortune. Although glorious and brilliant by any other standard, this fortune was constantly eclipsed by Octavian, so the soothsayer advised Antony to stay away from his young colleague. ‘Your guardian spirit’, said the Egyptian, ‘stands in awe of his. By itself it is proud and mettlesome, but in the presence of Octavian’s spirit yours becomes daunted and submissive.’ And the turn of events confirmed the soothsayer’s words, for whenever the two men cast lots or threw dice, either for amusement or to make decisions, Antony was the loser.
In an age of superstition, men judged that Antony’s failure was the decision of Fate. Roman hopes for a better world – a better Roman world – began to rest wholly on Octavian. Much hatred was directed against Cleopatra, not because Egypt was a threat to Rome, but because Cleopatra herself traduced the Roman ideal, leading a great and noble citizen into delusion and fraternal strife. ‘Neither wolves nor lions’, the poet Horace wrote angrily, ‘are so fiercely blind that they scratch and tear at their own kind. Is it a madness, or the result of sin?’ If Antony had sinned, he was drawn into it by Cleopatra. Virgil pictured Antony facing Octavian at the battle of Actium, deceived by the wealth of the orient gathered from ‘the nations of the Dawn’, and followed most shamefully by ‘an Egyptian wife’.
More and more, Octavian was seen as the necessary saviour. He was ‘giver of fruits, ruler of seasons, god of the boundless seas’. In the Aeneid, that encomium for Rome and her divine mission to civilize all the known world, Virgil placed the burden of this task squarely on Octavian’s slim shoulders:
This is the man you have been promised, Augustus Caesar, dear offspring of a god, who will take the Golden Age, founded in Latium, through all those lands where Saturn reigned of old and extend his empire to the Indian shores.
To stand in the way of this beneficence was an abominable evil, and for this reason if no other Cleopatra and all her works must be expunged from the face of the world. The time of universal harmony was near. Once, when Octavian’s mother was pregnant with her son, she had fallen asleep in the temple of A
pollo, and she had dreamed that the god himself was struggling from her womb. Not even Cleopatra, with all her Egyptian arts, could stand against the light of Apollo. Now she was gone, and the god’s time had come.
Coin depicting the triumphant Emperor Augustus in a chariot over an arch, issued in Asia Minor in 29–27 BC.
In January 27 BC, Octavian enacted his great fiction. Already the undisputed ruler of the Roman world, in a gesture of magnificent abasement he handed his authority back to the senate and people of Rome – In gratitude Romans returned to him all that his heart desired. Laurel decked his doorposts, and the hero’s wreath of oak leaves was paced above the portal to signify that he had preserved the lives of his fellow citizens. In the senate house a golden shield was inscribed for him with the words ‘Valour, Clemency, Justice, Piety’. And lastly he was honoured with the title Augustus, meaning (as the historian Dio Cassius said) ‘someone who was more than human’. He was pre-eminently princeps civitatis – the First Citizen. In return for peace and security Rome had tossed away forever its republican freedom and embarked on the new adventure of the Principate, the long years of empire, guided and directed by the voice of one man alone: he who had been Octavian but was now Augustus Caesar, the Emperor of Rome.
The success of the Principate, the Golden Age devised by Augustus, depended crucially on the economic strength of Egypt. In so far as Cleopatra had fostered and protected Egyptian production and trade she helped to secure the future of the Roman empire. For within a few years of Cleopatra’s death, when the inevitable neglect from the time of war had been put right, Egypt began to send Rome some five million bushels of grain a year, which was about a third of the total requirement. And to add to this agricultural wealth, there were large profits that resulted from the geographical position of Egypt, at the hub of the trade routes both by land and sea, between the Mediterranean and the further reaches of Africa and India. Historically, the riches of Egypt had seemed inexhaustible, and so they appeared to Augustus. He never let Egypt out of his own hands. Though in name a province like any other in the empire, Egypt remained in fact the personal estate of the emperor. No Roman senator could visit the land without the permission of Augustus, and he governed this imperial fief through his own nominee, a prefect drawn from the modest ranks of the equites completely devoted to the emperor.