Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  The dinner menu survives. Among the hors d’oeuvres were sea urchins, raw oysters, mussels, thrushes baked under a thatch of asparagus, clams, loins of wild boar and roe deer and force-fed fowl. The main course included sows’ udders, boars’ heads, boiled teals, ducks, hares, fish quiches and more.*

  The account of the feast does not tell what wines were served but, though relatively abstemious himself, Caesar was a connoisseur who knew the value of wine to draw others into injudicious promises or confessions. At another feast, he astonished his guests because, as Pliny records, “he gave Falerian, Chian, Lesbian and Marmartine—the first time apparently that four types of wine were served [at such an event].”

  Pompey’s next military command was in 67 against pirates in the Mediterranean, who were becoming a major hazard to Roman trade. Within three months Pompey and his five hundred ships and 120,000 men had swept the pirates from the seas. Unsurprisingly, the next appointment he sought from and was granted by the Senate was in the east against Mithridates, who had followed up the limited incursions, made while Caesar was in Rhodes, with a full-scale invasion of Roman territory.

  In his previous campaigns Mithridates had ordered the massacre of some eighty thousand Roman men, women and children and had murdered a captured Roman governor by having his mouth wrenched open and molten gold from a crucible poured down his throat to show that the Roman desire for gold could only be slaked by killing Romans. Despite his setback at the hands of Sulla, Mithridates’ forces were strong once more. Nevertheless, Pompey defeated Mithridates in 66 and forced him into exile, where he died three years later. Ever the showman, Pompey appropriated from among Mithridates’ possessions a red cloak once said to have been worn by Alexander and in Pompey’s view an ideal garment to wear in his own Triumph.

  Pompey certainly did much to earn his sobriquet “the Great” during his time in the east, adding Syria and its great capital of Antioch, as well as Pontus, to the Roman provinces. He occupied Jerusalem, where he horrified the temple priests by entering the inner sanctum. Although he eventually withdrew from Jerusalem and Judaea, Roman rule, already establshed on Egypt’s western border, was surging ever closer to her eastern one. Of the three great successor states to Alexander’s empire—Macedonian, Seleucid and Egyptian—Egypt was now the only one remaining independent. Cleopatra’s father, Auletes, though no doubt congratulating himself for the aid he had sent Pompey and sycophantically and publicly toasting his success in Alexandria, must have wondered how much longer that would last.

  In Rome, Crassus had continued to finance any emerging leaders who might bolster his faction. Among these was Caesar. Both men gave some initial support to a near-destitute patrician called Catiline. However, in an attempt to win popular support over the heads of the Senate, Catiline began to proclaim wild programs for debt cancellation—an anathema to Crassus as Rome’s richest man, though perhaps less so to Caesar, himself heavily in debt. Senators became sufficiently worried that even the most patrician of them supported the new man Cicero against Catiline as one of the two consuls for 63. The gangling, stringy Cicero received the most votes, while the second consular post went to an ally of Crassus, not Catiline.

  Also in 63, Crassus backed Caesar for the post of high priest, or pontifex maximus—the top religious office in the state. The appointment, which brought with it a town house in the Forum next to the Vestal Virgins, usually went to an elder statesman. Caesar spent massively on his campaign, both on public shows and on direct bribery of the electorate. According to Suetonius, Caesar told his mother as she kissed him good-bye on the morning of the poll that he owed so much that if he did not return to her as high priest, he would not return at all but have to flee his creditors. To general surprise he won, having demonstrated both his supreme self-confidence and the willingness to stake his future on a single event. Later that year, Caesar was also elected praetor, and at thirty-seven was well on the way to the top himself.*

  Catiline stood for consul at the following year’s elections but was again defeated. As ambitious as Caesar but less skilled at planning and calculating, he 48 began to plot a rising. Both Caesar and Crassus disclosed to Cicero what they knew of his conspiracy. Further aided by the disclosure of pillow talk by one of the conspirator’s mistresses, Cicero denounced Catiline to the Senate, claiming that he intended to set fire to parts of Rome as a distraction and then to murder hostile senators. Catiline fled Rome and was killed after a brief battle in January 62.

  Cicero was the hero of the hour and never afterward let the Senate or anybody else he could buttonhole forget that he had saved the Republic. Despite what he himself called his “foolish vanity,” Cicero was an astute man. By nature a defender of the republican orthodoxies, he remained suspicious of the radical intentions and personal ambitions of both Caesar and Crassus. In later years he would become Antony’s most influential and outspoken critic.

  During a debate in the Senate about the fate of the alleged conspirators, who included Antony’s stepfather, Caesar first made an enemy of Cato, another key conservative figure in the dramatic period that lay ahead.* Perhaps conscious of his own contacts with Catiline at the time of the plot’s infancy, Caesar suggested light sentences for some of the conspirators. The thirty-two-year-old Cato, who despite his relative youth rightly enjoyed a reputation for moral probity and incorruptibility, was a supporter of what he imagined as the stern old republican values and demanded the death sentence. The argument in the Senate grew heated. While Cato was orating, insinuating that Caesar might have been in league with the conspirators, he saw a note being passed to Caesar. Cato suggested to the assembled senators that it was from more undisclosed conspirators and demanded it be handed to him. Reading it, Cato found that it was, in fact, a love letter to Caesar from his mistress, Cato’s married half sister Servilia. Cato threw the letter back with the unsophisticated insult “Have it, you drunken idiot”—seemingly the best riposte that Cato, a heavy drinker himself, could muster on the spur of the moment. When the debate closed with victory for Cato, several of his henchmen attacked Caesar. His murder was averted only by Cicero’s intervention, perhaps to his later regret. Cato’s enmity, as unbending as his moral certainties, endured.

  In 62, Caesar became indirectly involved in one of the great scandals of the Roman republic. Every year the Festival of the Good Goddess was held in the house of one of the magistrates and on this occasion the house chosen was Caesar’s. He was forbidden to be present—the celebrations were strictly for women only. Cicero described the Good Goddess as “a mystery beyond the powers of men to know.” She was a kind of earth goddess responsible for the female side of life such as the fertility cycle and childbirth. Caesar’s second wife, Pompeia, a granddaughter of Sulla whom he had married in 67 following the death a couple of years previously of his first wife, Cornelia, was the hostess, together with his mother, Aurelia. The chief celebrants of the rite were the Vestal Virgins, but most of female high society was present. In defiance of tradition, the young patrician reprobate Clodius infiltrated the gathering.

  His scandalous reputation at this time derived not from his being a womanizer who had affairs with married women—such liaisons were, even if disapproved of, common among the elite, where marriages were usually arranged for political ends—but from the report that he had had sexual relations with each of his three married sisters. (The most famous of these sisters was Clodia, about whom another of her lovers, the poet Catullus, wrote the poem “Odi et Amo,” “I both hate and love her.”) Unlike in Cleopatra’s Egypt, in Rome incest was forbidden and considered perverted.

  Why Clodius wanted to invade the feast is not clear. Perhaps it was simply bravado and curiosity; perhaps he was having an affair with Pompeia. Whatever the case, he sneaked into the house dressed as a singing woman but was caught loitering in the shadows. The women, as Plutarch puts it, “after covering up the sacred objects . . . drove him out of doors and at once that same night went home and told their husbands.”

 
Conservatives denounced Clodius’ behavior as symptomatic of a contemporary decline in moral values and disrespect for tradition. The ambitious Caesar coolly protected his political position by divorcing his wife with the celebrated and enigmatic words “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion” and departed without further comment at the end of his praetorship to take up a governorship in Spain. Cicero was the prosecutor at Clodius’ trial. He described in disgust how Clodius, with Crassus’ money, bribed the jury. He “settled the whole business, called the jurors to his house, made promises, backed bills or paid cash down . . . some jurors actually received a bonus in the form of assignations with certain ladies or introductions to youths of noble families . . . nevertheless twenty-five jurors had the courage of their convictions . . . As for the other thirty-one, they were more worried about their empty purses than their empty reputations.” Though acquitted, Clodius would neither forget nor forgive the witty barbs Cicero aimed at him during the trial and afterward.

  Many including both Cato and Crassus were highly apprehensive that on his return from the east Pompey would use the undoubted popularity his successes had brought him to demand for himself new powers and greater rewards. Yet when Pompey returned he acted in accordance with tradition and disbanded his legions. His requests to the Senate were relatively modest—for land to be allocated to his veterans and for ratification en bloc of the administrative arrangements he had made in the east. Pompey divorced his wife, Mucia, a notorious philanderer said to number Caesar among her lovers, and, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Cato, offered that he and one of his sons would marry Cato’s two nieces. Cato refused: “Pompey should know that I will not be outflanked through the bedroom of a young girl.” Cato also led the Senate in opposition to Pompey’s requests, partly on the procedural grounds that the administrative arrangements should be debated in full and partly simply to underline the Senate’s power over any individual citizen, however mighty.

  Pompey was nonplussed. His lust was for glory, not for absolute power. At heart he trusted in the Senate and the tradition of the elders and all he wanted was for the senators to show their trust and appreciation of him, his troops and his deeds by meeting his requests without quibbling. Always a poor speaker in the Senate and so politically inept that a contemporary wrote, “He is apt to say one thing and think another but he is usually not clever enough to stop his real aims from showing,” he did not know what to do next. Yet within a few months the Senate, at Cato’s instigation, had unwisely alienated Crassus and Caesar as well and made Pompey’s next step clearer.

  Cato opposed a bill put forward by Crassus to secure revisions to the terms under which cronies of the latter had purchased the right to gather (or “farm”) the taxes in Asia, since they had clearly overestimated the take and wanted the government to recompense them for their own error. While morally correct, as on so many other occasions Cato could have acted less bluntly to minimize offense, as Cicero realized: “As for our dear friend Cato, the fact remains that with all his patriotism he can be a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as if he were living in Plato’s ‘Republic’ instead of Romulus’s cesspit.”

  Caesar’s clash with the Senate occurred when he returned from Spain in 60 to seek the consulship. Because he had won some military victories in what is now Portugal, he had been awarded a Triumph. By tradition, until he celebrated his Triumph a general was still considered under arms, and a general under arms could not enter Rome. The consular elections would take place before his Triumph could be arranged. Caesar therefore sought permission to stand for consul by proxy—a request that his implacable foe Cato took pleasure in persuading the Senate to refuse. Caesar forwent his Triumph to stand for the consulship, which he won handsomely.

  Previously, it had been considered almost a law of nature that Crassus and Pompey were irreconcilable rivals but now, each thwarted and slighted by the conservative faction in the Senate led by Cato, they combined forces. It is a measure of Caesar’s rapidly rising stature that he promoted this unlikely alliance and joined these two giants of the age in their secret coalition. Soon to be made public, it has become known to historians as the First Triumvirate although it had no legal status. The participants simply agreed to undertake no action detrimental to the others. Nevertheless they, not the Senate, had effective control of Rome.

  To cement his place in these new arrangements, Caesar offered the hand of his twenty-four-year-old daughter Julia to Pompey, who accepted with alacrity. Cato condemned Caesar as no better than a pimp to his own daughter, trading her honor for political capital. When Caesar in turn married Calpurnia, the daughter of Piso, the Triumvirate’s favored consular candidate for the year after Caesar’s tenure of that office, Cato fulminated, “It was intolerable for marriage to be the coin by which leadership of the state was bought and sold and for women to be the means by which men slotted one another into provincial governorships, military commands and the control of resources.” Cicero wrote of Caesar’s new father-in-law that “talking with him is much the same as holding a discussion with a wooden post in the forum . . . a dull and brutish clod . . . profligate, filthy and intemperate.”

  With Caesar as consul, a bill was passed granting undeserved rebates to Crassus’ tax farmers. Caesar next introduced a law to grant the land his son-in-law Pompey had requested for his veterans. It was opposed, as usual, by Cato and by Caesar’s fellow consul for the year, a somewhat ineffectual man called Bibulus, whose election the conservatives had secured by bribery. Caesar, always impatient of dissent, became so enraged by Cato’s filibustering tactics in the Senate—a body that had to adjourn its sessions before the early spring sundown—that he foolishly ordered him to be seized and taken off to jail. Several senators made to accompany him, loudly asserting their preference to be in jail with Cato rather than in the Senate with Caesar. Realizing that for the present he had overreached himself, Caesar released Cato.

  Determined to have his way, however illegally, in the face of further stalling tactics from both Cato and Bibulus, Caesar with Pompey organized gangs of the latter’s veterans who roamed Rome’s streets intimidating their opponents whatever their rank. Bibulus had already angered Caesar, issuing edicts describing him as “the queen of Bithynia who once wanted to sleep with a monarch but now wants to be one.” When Bibulus tried to postpone another vote on the grounds that he saw inauspicious omens in the sky, Pompey’s veterans moved in. They emptied a basketful of dung over Bibulus’ head. As he struggled to wipe it off, the veterans smashed the fasces—the bundle of twelve 5-foot-long birch rods tied together with a red leather thong and with an axe in their middle that represented the consular power or imperium—and beat up the lictors, his official bodyguards. Recovering himself, Bibulus bared his neck for execution, ready to die and to call down vengeance on Caesar. But Caesar was bent on humiliation, not execution. Bibulus’ friends hurried him off, leaving the way clear for Caesar, after this display of brute force, to have the intimidated Senate vote through the land law.

  At the end of his consular year, after further political chicanery, Caesar was granted the governorship of Roman (Transalpine) Gaul for an unprecedented five-year period. He had obtained what he wanted—in the words of the contemporary historian Sallust, “a high command, an army and a war in some field where his gifts could shine in all their brightness.” Before departing, Caesar struck up an unexpected alliance with Clodius, the man who had disturbed the rites of the Good Goddess.

  Clodius had noted the success of Pompey’s veterans in forcing through laws in their favor. He gathered his own thugs around him and began to deploy them to further his own political ambitions by intimidating his opponents. The word fascist derives from the Roman fasces and many have seen parallels between the use of premeditated mob violence by Caesar, Clodius and their contemporaries to subvert weak but legal governments and the actions of Mussolini and Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s. Such gangs were certainly an increasingly destabilizing factor in the republic’s latter
days. Caesar secured Clodius’ election to a tribuneship further to increase the aspiring demagogue’s patronage and influence with the people—both of which he would be sure to use on his own new patron’s behalf.*

  Within three months and even before Caesar’s departure, Clodius forced Cicero into voluntary exile. The orator was not physically a particularly brave man and had been constantly harassed by Clodius’ gangs throwing dung and insults and threatening him with trial for irregularities in connection with the execution of the Catiline conspirators. Around this time too, Clodius, with triumviral backing, organized the annexation of the Ptolemaic possession of Cyprus—the act that sparked the Alexandrian mob to chase Auletes from his throne—to replenish Rome’s depleted coffers. He also orchestrated the appointment by the cowed Senate of Cato to oversee the annexation as a device to get him out of Rome. Caesar himself, having demonstrated his resolution to secure his own ends however far he needed to go in “persuading” the Senate, soon left for Gaul, where he was to spend, in total, nine years.