Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  Here Cicero stayed, hoping the madness would pass him by, but a search party flushed him out. He tried to escape by litter but pursuing soldiers caught up with him in a wood. Cicero had once written, “What gladiator of ordinary merit has ever uttered a groan or changed countenance? Who of them has disgraced himself, I will not say on his feet, but who has disgraced himself in his fall? Who after falling has drawn in his neck when ordered to suffer the fatal stroke?” Now, accepting his own fall, the haggard, unshaven old man unflinchingly stretched his own wrinkled neck to the soldiers’ blades and paid the price of his outspoken Philippics against Antony. His head and hands were nailed to the rostra, the speaker’s platform before the Senate house where he had delivered so many speeches. Fulvia, wife to Clodius as well as to Antony and with a double dose of vengeance to extract, apparently spat in his blood-smeared face and, yanking out his once voluble tongue, impaled it with a hairpin.

  Fulvia was less than sympathetic to the plight of some fourteen hundred wealthy Roman women whose relatives had been proscribed and who were themselves being taxed to fill the triumvirs’ coffers. Led by Hortensia, daughter of the famous orator Hortensius, they forced their way into the Forum: “You have already deprived us of our fathers, our sons, our husbands, and our brothers . . . but if in addition you take away our property you will reduce us to a condition unsuitable to our birth, our way of life, and our female nature,” Hortensia argued. “Why do we share in the punishments when we did not participate in the crimes?” With the crowd shouting their support, the triumvirs gave ground, reducing the number of women subject to the tax to four hundred. Using the money they had sequestered, they now concentrated their efforts on planning to take the fight to Brutus and Cassius in their eastern exile.

  Despite the rapprochement between Antony and Octavian, to the queen of Egypt, anxiously monitoring events from a distance, it must have seemed far from clear who would triumph in the forthcoming showdown. The architects of Caesar’s assassination had prospered. Brutus had been consolidating his position in Asia, while in Syria Cassius had defeated Dolabella, sent as governor to wrest back control of the province. Both Cassius and Dolabella had appealed to Cleopatra, who had had to decide the safest course for herself and Caesarion.

  Cleopatra’s natural affinity was of course with those seeking to avenge Caesar’s death and, after careful thought, she had encouraged the legions left by Caesar in Alexandria to go to Dolabella’s aid. However, at some point they had defected to Cassius. Hopelessly outnumbered, in July 43, the month when Octavian’s soldiers had demanded the consulship for him, Dolabella took refuge in the seaport of Laodicea and, when Cassius bribed the town’s commanders to throw open the gates, ordered his slave to decapitate him.

  The aid she had sent Dolabella had left Cleopatra exposed to reprisals by Cassius, and her position was weakening. Her governor in Cyprus had also gone over to Cassius, sending him ships to bolster his fleet, while in Ephesus Cleopatra’s younger half sister and rival, Arsinoe, was planning a comeback. In the Temple of Artemis, the high priest was already hailing her as Egypt’s new queen.

  There seemed every danger that, eager for Egypt’s wealth, Cassius would move into Egypt, plunder its treasuries himself and depose Cleopatra in favor of the more compliant Arsinoe. If that happened, who knew what the fate of Caesarion would be? Cassius had killed the father. Why should he spare the son? At one of the most perilous moments of Cleopatra’s short reign, she was fortunate that Brutus asked Cassius to hurry to Smyrna for a council of war. By the end of 43 Cassius had arrived in Asia Minor.

  The reason for this urgent consultation was the news that Antony and Octavian, having buried their differences, were moving against them. To build up their own forces, Cassius increased his already heavy demands on the eastern kingdoms for money and men but, mindful of who was by far the richest ruler in the east, renewed his demands on Cleopatra in particular. Once again she must have agonized. Cassius and Brutus were closer geographically than Antony and Octavian. Defying them was risky. But yet again Cleopatra decided to link her fate to Antony and Octavian. An important factor was the triumvirs’ decision to sanction Caesarion’s right to sit beside her on the throne of Egypt as a reward for her previous help to Dolabella. The passing of such a decree, as they astutely deduced, was exactly the way to appeal to Cleopatra, both as mother and as dynast.

  Cleopatra informed Cassius, with perfect truth, that the Nile had failed to rise to its usual bountiful level and that the harvest that year had been poor. Desperate for food, some Egyptians were binding themselves to others as servants for many years—a device to bypass the law forbidding free people to sell themselves into slavery. One woman engaged herself as a servant for ninety-nine years. There had also been an outbreak of plague. In the Museon in Alexandria, one of Cleopatra’s personal physicians, Dioscurides Phacas, tracked the spread of the disease. In the world’s first medical treatise, he documented the plague’s terrible course, from the swollen lymphatic glands to the black, evil-smelling, suppurating boils of the victims. With her own people suffering so badly, Cleopatra argued that she could spare no men or food for Cassius. He, however, was skeptical of such excuses. When he learned that Antony and Octavian were massing their troops at Brundisium ready for ferrying across the Adriatic to Macedonia, he dispatched one of his admirals to the southern point of the Peloponnese with a fleet of sixty ships, a legion of men and orders to intercept any ships that Cleopatra might try to send to the aid of Antony and Octavian.

  Indeed, not only had Cleopatra, despite her apparent economic distress, managed to build and equip a fleet in the shadow of the Pharos in Alexandria but, in one of the bold, theatrical gestures at which she was so gifted, she was planning to do what no queen of the East had done since the fifth century, when Queen Artemesia of Halicarnassus led a squadron of ships to assist her Persian ally Xerxes against the Greeks at Salamis: to be the admiral of her own navy. She would lead it to support the triumvirs.* Only the weather defeated Cleopatra. Storms beat back her ships long before they met any challenge from Cassius. Many were wrecked, some of their broken hulls drifting northward to be washed up on the beaches of Greece. Cleopatra herself, laid low with seasickness aboard her flagship, managed to regain Alexandria. She at once began preparing a second fleet but events were moving so swiftly that by the time it was ready the battle between Caesar’s avengers and Caesar’s murderers was over.

  Even without Egyptian aid, the Caesarean forces had dodged the enemy squadrons sent against them by Cassius and Brutus and landed safely in Macedonia. Here Octavian fell ill, apparently with dropsy—a disease in which watery fluid collects in body tissue. While he remained behind to recover, Antony marched their twenty-eight legions over the mountains to take up position near the town of Philippi and await the arrival of the enemy forces. Antony had with him some of the most tried and trusted legions, many of whom had previously served Julius Caesar and who had long been eager to avenge his death.

  Caesar’s uncle Marius had reformed the legions more than fifty years earlier, making the army into a professional one subject to rigorous discipline and drill, rather than a citizen militia. He had stopped the practice of disbanding legions at the end of each campaign and given them numbers and emblems, in particular the legions’ eagle. Made of silver and gold and mounted on a long pole, it was carried by a standard-bearer who had a special lion-skin headdress, and it served as a rallying point to be defended to the death. Its capture was a lasting disgrace. At full strength, which was rare, each legion consisted of some six thousand men split into ten cohorts of six hundred men each. Each cohort had its own symbol—for example, a golden hand—and contained six centuries of one hundred men, each led by that backbone of the Roman army, the centurion—a career soldier distinguished from the ordinary legionary by the transverse crest on his helmet.

  Another of Marius’ changes had been to make the legions more mobile and less vulnerable by reducing the baggage train. He made the legionary carry more of
his own food and equipment, including sixteen days’ rations, a cooking pot and two stakes as a contribution to the palisade thrown round the camp for protection. All this gear, the legionaries joked, turned them into “Marius’ mules.” Burdened with such a heavy pack, weighing some sixty pounds, the legionary was subject to frequent training runs with full kit, like modern soldiers.

  A legionary’s weapons were the sword and the spear. The sword had a double cutting edge and a stabbing point. The spears—six-foot-long javelins—were designed so that the soft iron of their neck would bend on impact, thus preventing the spear from being thrown back if it missed its target and hit the ground, and also making it more difficult to pull from a wound if it did not. Unlike most armies of the time and for a long time afterward (until the seventeenth century, in fact), the Roman legionary had a standard uniform—a leather jerkin over which he wore chain-mail armor. (The latter was soon to be displaced by a leather or metal breastplate.) His bronze helmet had protective cheek pieces and was pear-shaped, rising to a lead-weighted topknot surmounted by the crest. His shield was oval and slightly cylindrical, to curve around and protect his body. It was made of leather-covered wood with a metal boss. The legionary went bare-legged but on his feet wore sturdy leather sandals, lacing up above and around his ankles and with their soles studded with iron nails.

  Brutus and Cassius did not rush to battle, preferring to leave the Caesarean forces to run short of supplies and patience. Instead, after attempting to ensure the loyalty of their legions, of which they were much less certain than Antony was of his, by payments to each man of fifteen hundred denarii, they carefully drew up their troops in a strong position on high ground west of Philippi—Brutus’ troops on the right flank were protected by mountains and Cassius’, on the left, abutted marshland. Antony decided to confront his enemies head-on and boldly encamped his own troops in the plain beneath the high ground where his opponents sat. To remedy his inferior position, he had his men rapidly throw up a series of towers and fortifications. During this period, determined to share in what he hoped would be a glorious victory, Octavian joined Antony as soon as he felt strong enough, but he would remain physically below par throughout the campaign.

  Still confident in their ability to wear down their opponents by cutting off their supplies, Brutus and Cassius made no move. Frustrated by his failure to draw them into battle, in October 43 Antony formulated a plan secretly to build a causeway through the marshes to outflank them. Drawing his main army into battle formation to deflect his enemies’ attention by suggesting that a frontal attack was imminent, Antony ordered others of his men to work under the cover of the high reeds to construct the causeway. To do so they piled up embankments of earth and stone and used timber to bridge the deepest parts of the squelching marsh. After ten days of this work, Antony succeeded in getting a body of his men across the causeway and led them in an attack on the perimeter of Cassius’ fortification. The weight of their charge swiftly put Cassius’ men to flight and they fell back on their camp proper. However, Antony’s legionaries smashed through the gates, despite showers of missiles from the defenders above. Soon the camp was Antony’s, and Cassius fled up the hill toward Brutus’ position. Because of the confusion of battle and the all-pervasive clouds of dust obscuring the plain, Cassius, who in any case had poor sight, thought that he saw signs that Brutus too had been defeated. Without waiting for confirmation, a despairing Cassius killed himself, according to Plutarch with the very dagger he had used against Caesar. However, far from dead, Brutus had, in fact, taken advantage of the engagement to capture Octavian’s camp. Caesar’s heir was not there. According to some, he had taken refuge deep in the marshes.

  The result of the battle had been inconclusive and Brutus’ army still had the better position and better supplies. Indeed, the same day as the battle at Philippi, the Liberators’ navy had destroyed a convoy bringing two more legions as well as provisions to Antony and Octavian. However, Cassius’ death had unsettled the republican forces. There were desertions among some of the contingents of their eastern allies. Growing impatient, just like Pompey’s men before Pharsalus, the majority clamored for action and revenge. Antony did his best to provoke his opponents further by regularly leading out his troops in battle array and having them yell alternately at Brutus’ men accusations of cowardice and offers of bribes if they would desert.

  A cultured and relatively gentle man with limited military experience, Brutus could no longer restrain his forces, and just three weeks after the first encounter, the second and decisive battle of Philippi was joined at three o’clock in the afternoon. After a bloody hand-to-hand struggle of Roman against Roman, the Caesarean troops finally overcame their ideological foes. Brutus retreated to the mountains. There, after realizing that he had no more than four legions left to call upon, Shakespeare’s “noblest Roman of them all” chose suicide. Plutarch described how, after shaking hands with his remaining officers, “he placed the tip of his drawn sword on his chest, and with the help of a friend’s strong arm, they say, plunged the sword in.”

  Antony ordered the body to be covered with a purple cloak and cremated but, according to Suetonius, Octavian later ordered Brutus’ head to be hacked off and sent to Rome to be hurled at the feet of Caesar’s statue. Suetonius also related how when a father and son begged for their lives, Octavian coldly invited them to draw lots. Instead, the father chose to give his life for his son, who was so distressed that he at once committed suicide. Octavian watched both men die and his callous conduct so disgusted other prisoners that as they were led off in chains “they courteously saluted Antony as their conqueror, but abused Octaivian with the most obscene epithets.” Among the defeated dead was Cato’s son, who, with the stubborn courage of his father, had refused to retreat and was killed where he stood. According to Plutarch, his wife, Porcia, who was also Brutus’ sister, determined on suicide when news of their deaths reached Rome. Evading the friends who were keeping watch on her, she seized a glowing coal from a brazier and swallowed it.

  Philippi was Antony’s victory. Again he had proved his military skill and leadership while Octavian, still in frail health, had played only a minor role, as Antony very well knew. In later years the tall, muscular Antony would deride Octavian as “a puny creature in body” who “has never by his own efforts won a victory in any important battle by land or sea. Indeed at Philippi, in the very same battle in which he and I fought as allies, it was I who conquered and he who was defeated.” Nevertheless, recognizing that they still needed each other, the two men redistributed Rome’s provinces between them. Lepidus, far away in Rome and much less powerful than either, was the loser. Antony and Octavian suspected him of plotting with Sextus Pompey, the surviving son of Pompey the Great, who was waging a successful maritime war from his base on Sicily and disrupting Rome’s grain supply, while being demonized as a pirate for his actions.

  Accordingly, consulting no one, least of all the Senate, they imperiously divided Lepidus’ provinces between them and allotted him Africa. Octavian took Spain, while Antony, as the dominant partner, was to have the whole of Gaul beyond the Alps, though he agreed that, as Caesar had intended, Cisalpine Gaul should be absorbed into Roman Italy, which would be held in common. Antony also took command of the provinces east of the Adriatic—Macedonia, Greece, Asia, Cyrenaica, Syria and Bithynia. This also made him guardian of Rome’s client kingdoms to the east, of which by far the most important in practice was Cleopatra’s Egypt, even if it nominally still enjoyed full independence. Above all, Antony hoped to use his new position to carry out Caesar’s plan of conquering the Parthians.

  In late 42 Antony departed on the road that would lead him to Cleopatra. He spent the winter months in Athens, touring the sights and enjoying the honors lavished respectfully upon him. He tactfully ignored the fact that two winters earlier, statues of Brutus and Cassius had been everywhere on display. With the arrival of spring, Antony sailed east. In Ephesus, women dressed as bacchantes, and men and bo
ys clad as satyrs and Pans hailed him as the new Dionysus, the bringer of joy, and conducted him riotously through the streets.* Plutarch wrote, “The city was filled with ivy, thyrsi, harps, reed-pipes and wind-pipes.” Antony doubtless loved it. Octavian could call himself the son of a god, but better by far to be an actual god, especially one associated with glorious triumphs in the east, lauded and adored. Antony made several magnanimous gestures to the city that had given him such a wild reception, including extending the rights of the Temple of Artemis to grant asylum. Whether he encountered Arsinoe, still in sanctuary there and no doubt regretting her collusion with the governor of Cyprus against Antony and Octavian, is not recorded.*

  Antony was happy to reward Ephesus and other cities that had suffered at Cassius’ hands, but he badly needed money to pay off the veterans and for his forthcoming campaign against Parthia. He therefore summoned the local rulers of the region to a meeting in Ephesus. It was an order few dared disobey. According to Plutarch, “Kings beat a path to his door, while their wives, rivals in generosity and beauty, let themselves be seduced by him.”

  Antony enjoyed the flattery, but not sufficiently to be entirely forgiving. While graciously accepting the rulers’ explanations that they had supported his enemies only under duress, he smilingly told them that he and Octavian had 170,000 soldiers to pay off. To help meet the debt, he demanded the same sum they had paid Cassius: ten years’ taxes in a year. When the shocked rulers, already bled dry by the republicans, stuttered that they could never find the money, Antony relented only a little, remitting one year’s taxation and extending the payment period to two years.

  Leaving Ephesus, Antony visited several important client kingdoms of Rome in Asia Minor. He was aware that if his Parthian campaign was to succeed, he needed stability at his rear in Rome’s satellite states along the eastern borders. He therefore paid particular attention to a dynastic dispute in Cap-padocia, a kingdom important because its ruler also controlled parts of Armenia and hence the frontier with the Euphrates. According to some, however, of even greater interest to Antony were the charms of Glaphyra, a beautiful Cappadocian princess with whom he probably had an affair.