Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  Cleopatra was fortunate to have inherited a centralized, sophisticated and efficient system of land management, which had survived down the centuries since the time of Ptolemy I and provided stability. Officials graded all agricultural land according to its productivity. The choicest land was allocated to the crown, then leased back to the peasants under strict rules about which crops to cultivate, when to sow, when to reap, how much to hand over to the government as rent and how much seed corn to retain. The headman of each village supervised the farmers, reporting to a hierarchy of Greek and Macedonian officials, at whose apex was Cleopatra—the country’s greatest farmer, industrialist and merchant.

  These arrangements ensured an annual stream of grain into the royal granaries. After supplying the needs of the population, Cleopatra, who held the monopoly in grain production and sale, could dispose of surpluses on the world market. Her other monopolies included olive oil (a vital commodity used in everything from food production to skin care and lighting), salt, perfume, the brewing of beer, and the tall, triangular-stemmed and feathery papyrus that grew in dense, bright green thickets in the swamplands of the Nile delta.

  “No one has the right to do what he wishes,” an early Ptolemaic decree had informed Egypt’s citizens, “but everything is organized for the best.” However, Rome’s new conflicts would not leave Egypt and its well-regulated administration untroubled for much longer and Cleopatra would once again be forced to take sides.

  *Historian Michael Grant believed that Cicero’s reference to Tertia’s miscarriage immediately before mentioning Cleopatra in his letter is significant. This positioning, he suggested, might imply that Cicero had learned that Cleopatra had also miscarried a child and that Cicero’s reference to “that Caesar” means not Caesarion but a new child conceived by Cleopatra while in Rome. However, there is no evidence either to disprove or to substantiate this idea.

  *Today the head is in Berlin.

  *In fact, the phenomenon probably originated from the presence in the atmosphere of dust from a recent eruption of Mount Etna.

  *The records of contemporaneous Chinese astronomers confirm that there was indeed a comet at this time.

  *Cicero named the Philippics after the Athenian Demosthenes’ denunciations of Philip of Macedonia, Alexander’s father, as the enemy of the freedom of the Greek states.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ruler of the East

  STORMING INTO NORTHERN ITALY—Cisalpine Gaul—which Dec-imus Brutus, insisting that he was upholding the rights of the Senate and the people of Rome, was refusing to relinquish, Antony besieged him in Mutina (Modena) and began pounding the town with boulders flung from his ballista (siege catapults), which used torsion energy to throw missiles long distances.* One particular kind was known as the “wild ass” because of its kickback. He was anxious for a quick victory since, on January 1, his own consulship would end and he suspected that his enemies were likely to persuade the pusillanimous Senate to send to Decimus’ aid the new consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, both former generals of Caesar’s but now inclining to the republican cause. Indeed, by early December, Cicero was back in Rome and urging war against Antony. He was also openly and lavishly praising Octavian, calling him by his adoptive name of Caesar in public for the first time.

  By now Octavian had the support of five legions and also archers, cavalry and even some elephant units. Unleashing some of his finest oratory, Cicero cajoled the Senate into raising Octavian to the rank of senator and conferring on him the right to command an army, thus legalizing his leadership of the troops he had originally raised from the veteran colonies to march on Rome. Together with the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, the Senate commanded Octavian to go to the aid of Decimus Brutus. It was a strange mission—Caesar’s adoptive son succoring one of Caesar’s murderers against Caesar’s most seasoned and trusted lieutenant—but for the moment this does not appear to have troubled Cicero, who had his mind set on the elimination of Antony. As for Octavian, for the moment he was prepared to temporize.

  To Antony, Octavian’s actions must have signaled just how far he was prepared to go to achieve his ambitions. Antony’s friends, still struggling to avert a war, convinced the vacillating Senate to dispatch ambassadors to Antony, but this proved futile. The ambassadors’ arrival did not distract him for one moment from his bombardment. In a determined mood, he rejected their demands that he withdraw south across the Rubicon—the border of Cisalpine Gaul—but keep at least two hundred miles from Rome and submit to the Senate. Instead he issued his own unrealistic counterdemands. These included the recall of Brutus and Cassius from their eastern commands, confirmation of the legality of his and Caesar’s actions (including his own seizure of funds after Caesar’s murder), the grant to him of the province of Transalpine Gaul for five years and rewards for his legionaries.

  Reeling at the hubris of Antony’s ultimatum, or at least pretending to, Cicero urged the Senate to declare a state of war and denounce Antony as a public enemy. However, Antony’s determined mother, Julia, and wife, Fulvia, donning mourning garments, lobbied the senators on his behalf. As a result, more moderate voices arguing for the declaration of a “state of emergency,” not a war, once again prevailed. Though Antony’s demands were refused, he was not yet outlawed, and his siege of Mutina continued. Furthermore, his allies in the Senate tried to engineer another embassy to Antony. Cicero was to be one of the ambassadors, but his sudden withdrawal sabotaged the mission, as he no doubt intended. With Octavian and Hirtius already in position near Mutina, the war that Cicero was trying so passionately to promote moved closer.

  In late March the Senate dispatched a further four legions, this time of new recruits, north under Pansa to join Octavian and Hirtius. Learning of this, Antony decided to intercept them en route and on April 14 ambushed them as they passed through a village. Unknown to him, the inexperienced recruits had been joined by more seasoned soldiers—the Martian Legion which had defected from him. The struggle, on boggy ground, was bloody and protracted. According to Appian, the legionaries fought with determination in a grim silence punctuated only by the clash of weapons and human groans. Each side suffered heavy losses. A javelin struck Pansa in the side and mortally wounded him. Antony eventually emerged the victor. However, as his forces returned to camp weary and sweat-soaked but singing songs of victory, they were ambushed in turn by fresh waves of troops sent by Hirtius. Only with difficulty did Antony manage to extract his men and withdraw to safety as night fell. He left behind on the battlefield two legionary eagles and sixty standards, as well as many of his veteran men. During the night Antony sent search parties to rescue as many as he could. Appian described how the rescuers “set the survivors on their own horses, swapping places with some, and lifting others up beside them or encouraging them to cling to the horses’ tails and run along with them.”

  On the brink of capturing Mutina, whose inhabitants were starving, Antony was not inclined to give in and raise the siege, but six days later, on April 21, Hirtius and Octavian infiltrated his camp while Decimus Brutus led a sally out of the besieged town. In the ensuing confused struggle, Octavian, who had reputedly hidden away during the previous battle, is said to have carried one of the legionary eagles after its bearer fell, and Hirtius was killed in the fighting around Antony’s tent. Antony’s men eventually recaptured their camp and forced Decimus Brutus’ men back into Mutina. But recognizing he could not take the town while being constantly harassed from the rear, Antony decided to withdraw over the chill passes of the Apennines. His hope was to join forces with Lepidus, who the previous year had taken up his post as governor of the provinces of Narbonese Gaul (Provence) and Nearer Spain and was currently in southern Gaul with seven legions—provided, of course, that Lepidus was still loyal to him.

  According to Plutarch, “Antony’s nature was to excel in difficult circumstances” and in the retreat he showed his finest qualities. “Antony was an incredible example to his men: for all his extravagant and indulgent lifestyle, he did not h
esitate to drink stagnant water and eat wild fruits and roots . . . tree-bark was eaten.” As the cold and hungry men crossed the mountains, they and their leader “ate animals which had never before been tasted by man.”*

  When news of the second battle at Mutina reached Rome on April 26, the Senate finally felt sufficiently secure in its ascendancy to declare Antony and his supporters public enemies and to order Decimus Brutus, to whom they awarded a Triumph, to hunt them down. Cicero was now at his most politically influential since the time of the Catiline conspiracy. At his behest, the Senate also confirmed Cassius and Brutus in the provinces of Syria and Macedonia that they had seized and gave them authority over all the other governors in the east. However, amid the general rejoicing and self-congratulation, the Senate failed to award any significant honors to Octavian. Though Cicero had argued for the relatively minor distinction of an ovatio for him, he probably thought it timely to bring Caesar’s young heir, whom just a few weeks earlier he had been extolling as “this heaven-sent boy,” to heel. A pun, a witticism of a perhaps overconfident Cicero, caused much mirth among his friends: “lau-dandum, ornandum, tollendum”—“Octavian must be praised, honored and extolled”—but the last word also means “removed.”

  This joke, which was swiftly reported to Octavian, would prove unwise. The situation was polarizing, and Octavian was about to reassess his options and, after a careful calculation of the risks, make his choices. On one side were Cassius and Brutus, the murderers of Octavian’s adoptive father, who as every day passed were being given luster and legitimacy by an increasingly conservative, anti-Caesarean Senate urged on by Cicero. Between them they had seventeen legions. On the other side were the basically pro-Caesarean forces of Antony, with whom, personal rivalry apart, Octavian had far more political affinity and whose military skill he would need to defeat the considerable forces of Cassius and Brutus. Octavian, with the glory of Caesar’s name behind him, and Antony, with his military strength and experience, should, he reasoned, be a powerful combination.

  Octavian therefore judged that his own status had been sufficiently raised and that of Antony sufficiently diminished by the previous round of fighting to make any future alliance between them one of equals, and refused either to pursue Antony himself or give aid to others sent to annihilate him. He also profited from the deaths of the two consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, to enhance his position. Discarding Cicero as Cicero had assumed he could discard him, Octavian arranged in July 43 for four hundred of his centurions to march to the Senate to demand the consulship for him. When the Senate prevaricated, a company commander named Cornelius threw back his cloak, put his hand on his sword hilt and brazenly cried, “If you do not make him consul, this will.” Opposition ceased. On August 19, still only nineteen, Octavian entered Rome as the youngest consul ever, his disregard for the Senate now as clear as that of his adoptive father. According to some, at his first taking of the auspices, twelve vultures circled in the hot skies above—the same number that had appeared to Rome’s founder, Romulus.

  Octavian used his new powers to have himself formally recognized as Caesar’s heir and to demand vengeance on his murderers. Soon after, he set off north again with his legions to find Antony. In his absence, his docile cousin Pedius, selected to be his co-consul, persuaded the cowed Senate to rescind its condemnation of Antony as an enemy of the state. The stage was artfully set for the grand reconciliation of the two Caesarean leaders.

  Meanwhile, in Gaul, Antony had located Lepidus, whom Cicero and the Senate had been attempting to win over with ever more spectacular inducements. Instead, or so accounts relate, having found Lepidus’ camp, Antony just wandered in, a wild-haired, bearded and smiling figure, to be saluted by Lepidus’ men, who recognized him immediately. Moments later, amid the cheers of the legionaries, he and Lepidus embraced. Lepidus wrote nonchalantly to the Senate that his soldiers had forced his hand. Decimus Brutus’ position was now hopeless. His armies swiftly deserted him and Antony’s men hunted him down and killed him.

  Lepidus now brokered a meeting between Antony and Octavian, which took place around the end of October on an island in the Lavino River near Bononia (Bologna). It was staged with the care of a gathering of Mafia chiefs. Antony and Octavian approached from opposite sides of the river, each with five legions. Having scoured the island to ensure there were no lurking assassins, Lepidus, the go-between, waved his cloak to signify that all was well. Each man then crossed to the island with a bodyguard of three hundred. Before sitting down in full view of their men to begin negotiations, each gave the others body searches to check for concealed weapons. Two days later, the three told their jubilant troops that they had reached agreement. They would be viri rei publicae constituendae (three men responsible for restoring the government of the republic), with consular powers for five years. Historians would call this the Second Triumvirate. It was, to all intents and purposes, another dictatorship.

  With the eastern half of the empire largely in the hands of their adversaries, the three triumvirs carved up Rome’s western empire between them “as if,” Plutarch wrote, “it were an ancestral estate.” Antony was to have Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, Octavian received Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and Lepidus—who was to remain as consul in Rome while Antony and Octavian made war on Cassius and Brutus—was to retain Narbonese Gaul and to acquire, in addition to his existing province of Nearer Spain, the remainder of Spain. To reward their veteran soldiers, on whom their future success depended, the triumvirs agreed to appropriate private land from some of Italy’s richest towns and redistribute it once final victory was theirs.

  The troops greeted the news with roars of support. They also cheered the news that, to confirm their new bonds, Octavian had given up the woman he had been engaged to wed and would instead marry Clodia, Antony’s stepdaughter, the scarcely pubescent child of Clodius and Fulvia. What they were not yet told was that, like Sulla thirty-nine years earlier, the triumvirs had drawn up lists of opponents to be punished—“proscribed”—for their role in Caesar’s murder. Anyone so proscribed would have no option but to flee Italy or face death, and all his property would be forfeit to the state. Prominent on the list, at Antony’s insistence, was Cicero. Although revenge on their enemies would be sweet, a major purpose was to raise money for the forthcoming war in the east to smash Brutus and Cassius and establish their own preeminence beyond dispute. In consequence, as Appian noted, many unfortunates were outlawed solely “on account of their wealth.”

  The triumvirs dispatched a band of executioners in advance to deal with seventeen key men on the list, including Cicero, and followed with their legions to Rome, which they entered separately on three successive days. A nervous Senate had no choice but to endorse the dictatorial powers the three men had already grabbed for themselves and in so doing sanctioned its own demise as a meaningful political entity. Panic spread through the city as the lists of the proscribed—perhaps as many as three hundred senators and three thousand of Rome’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens—were made public. Large rewards awaited those prepared to “become hunting dogs for the murderers for the sake of the rewards,” as Appian put it. The head of any of the proscribed brought a reward of twenty-five thousand denarii if brought in by a free man and ten thousand denarii if brought by a slave.

  Appian described the desperate plight of the fugitives: “Some descended into wells, others into filthy sewers. Some took refuge in chimneys. Others crouched in the deepest silence under the thick-set tiles of their roofs. Some were not less fearful of their wives and ill-disposed children than of the murderers.” Some unfaithful but influential wives took advantage of the witch hunt to have their husbands’ names added to the list to be rid of them. Other women, however, offered Antony sex in return for their husbands’ lives.

  Fulvia used the situation to settle some scores. Appian wrote of a man named Rufus who “possessed a handsome house near that of Fulvia, the wife of Antony, which she had wanted to buy, but he would not
sell it, and although he now offered it to her as a free gift, he was proscribed. His head was brought to Antony, who said it did not concern him and sent it to his wife.” According to Appian, the murders even extended to orphan children “on account of their wealth. One of these, who was going to school, was killed, together with the attendant, who threw his arms around the boy and would not give him up.”

  There were many such scenes of great courage. Appian praised the fidelity “of wives, of children, of brothers, of slaves who rescued the proscribed or . . . died with them when they did not succeed in their designs. Some even killed themselves on the bodies of the slain.” He described how one man “was concealed by his wife, who communicated the secret to only one female slave. Having been betrayed by the latter, she followed her husband’s head as it was carried away, crying out, ‘I sheltered him; those who give shelter are to share the punishment.’ As nobody killed her or informed on her, she came to the triumvirs and accused herself before them. Being moved by her love for her husband, they pretended not to see her. So she starved herself to death.” Antony’s elderly republican uncle Lucius Caesar, whom Antony had agreed to place on the list to please Octavian since he had supported Caesar’s murderers and as a quid pro quo for Cicero, was saved by Antony’s own mother, Julia, who interposed herself between the old man and the soldiers who came to murder him.

  Cicero did not escape. As with Louis XVI trying to flee the mobs of revolutionary France, his indecision proved fatal. He had fled to sea from Astura in a small boat in the hope of escaping down the coast but, retching with seasickness, had ordered the boatman to make once more for land. Disembarking, Cicero had tottered on foot northward again toward Rome but, reaching the Appian Way, halted. Fearing he would be recognized and arrested on this thronging highway, he turned back toward Astura, where he spent a dreadful night tormented by “terrible thoughts and desperate plans.” His attendants persuaded the hesitant, nervous orator to take to sea again and sail south to his villa at Caieta near Formiae.