Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  By now, the maverick Sextus Pompey had also thrown in his lot, at least for the present, with Antony. This was a blow to Octavian, who, fearing just such a development, had tried to neutralize the troublesome Sextus through the time-honored Roman tactic of a matrimonial alliance. In the aftermath of the siege of Perusia, Octavian had, to general ribald mirth, proposed to and been accepted by Scribonia, a twice-married woman at least ten years his senior whose brother was Sextus’ father-in-law. No doubt laughing along with everyone else at Octa-vian’s nakedly cynical maneuverings, Sextus had immediately pursued an alliance with Antony.

  Octavian hurriedly dispatched his erstwhile school friend Marcus Agrippa, who would be his lifelong supporter, from Rome to Brundisium with orders to raise the siege. As he marched, Agrippa recruited more troops from among the recently disbanded veterans he encountered along the way. The men joined readily enough because they mistakenly thought their target was to be Sextus Pompey. When they learned that they were instead marching against Antony, under whom they had so recently defeated Caesar’s murderers at Philippi, many turned around and went home. Once again, the weary, wary veterans were demonstrating their disinclination for civil war. As Octavian followed in Agrippa’s wake to Brundisium, his veterans too made their views plain—nothing less than a permanent settlement between the triumvirs, they insisted, would satisfy them.

  Reaching Brundisium, Octavian found that Antony had thrown ditches and palisades across the prong of land leading to the peninsula on which the city lay. It would be impossible to relieve Brundisium from the landward side. Yet for all the strength of his position, Antony was caught between Octavian’s ever-growing forces and Brundisium’s high walls. Unless he could take the fortress and harbor quickly, the legions he had summoned from Macedonia would be unable to land unopposed. Instead they would have to disembark further along the coast, fighting their way onto the beaches.

  All this was food for reflection, as was his knowledge that his new ally Sextus was volatile and unreliable. So too was the news that reached him of the death near Corinth in Greece of Fulvia, who, Appian wrote, “had become a willing victim of disease on account of Antony’s anger.” Antony could now place all blame for the rebellion against Octavian on the shoulders of a forceful, ambitious and conveniently defunct wife. How much grief Antony felt at Fulvia’s loss is debatable. They had known each other since their youth, but the close bonds between them had loosened even before the recent fiasco. Though Antony had once depended on Fulvia, his reliance on her emotionally and politically had declined, otherwise he would have taken her east with him. Instead, he had reveled alone in his unprecedented new powers and godlike position. The “new Dionysus,” as he imagined himself, felt no need of a bossy middle-aged Roman matron by his side, however astute she was.

  To survive politically and stabilize the Roman world, Antony was prepared to compromise. A mutual friend with well-honed diplomatic skills, Nerva, agreed to act as go-between between Antony and Octavian. With both men anxious to achieve a peaceful solution, Nerva’s primary problem was to find a way in which neither would lose face. At his artful suggestion, Octavian wrote not to Antony but to his mother, Julia, who had sailed with him from Greece. Octavian assured her that he had not ordered the Brundisium garrison to bar her son’s ships from the harbor. The men had acted on their own initiative. He also reproached her for having fled from him to Sextus, assuring her she had never been in danger from him and that he would always treat her honorably.

  These honeyed words proved sweet enough. A conciliating Antony sent Enobarbus off to be governor of Bithynia, ordered Sextus to withdraw to Sicily and, in early October 40, concluded the Pact of Brundisium with Octavian. The watching soldiers roared their approval as the two men embraced, but Antony was probably less transported. Though the triumvirate was to continue and Italy was to remain common ground, leaving Antony full rights to recruit there, the pact obliged him to yield his territorial rights in the west to Octavian. In other words, Antony had lost Gaul for good. The line dividing their respective lands would run through Scodra (Scutari) in modern Albania. It formed a true border in terms of geography, culture and language. Everything to the Greek-speaking Hellenized east would be Antony’s, everything to the Latin-speaking Romanized west Octavian’s. The province of Africa was to remain under the ineffectual third triumvir, Lepidus.

  It was a disappointing, even somewhat humiliating outcome for the victor of Philippi, who had lost Gaul while gaining nothing that he had not had before. Yet Antony had learned through the twists of the civil war to be a pragmatist. The outcome, as he well knew, could have been worse, and he was at least free to resume his plans for the invasion and subjugation of mighty Parthia, which, if he succeeded, would make him unassailable.

  That same autumn in Alexandria Cleopatra gave birth to Antony’s twins—a girl and a boy. Following Ptolemaic tradition, she named her daughter Cleopatra, but given that its literal meaning is “glory of her father,” there was perhaps an implied message here for Antony. She called the boy Alexander in honor both of her own relation Alexander the Great and of her lover’s ambitions to become the new Alexander. Just as with the birth of her first child, the Roman father was not there to admire and exult in his offspring.

  News of the Pact of Brundisium probably filtered through to Cleopatra as she recovered from the birth. She was relying for much of her information on an Egyptian astrologer she had infiltrated into Antony’s household. With two new children to scheme and plan for, she would have pondered the pact’s implications carefully. Politically, the most important point was that Antony remained in control of the east. Though she would have preferred Antony to obliterate his young rival, the situation was better than she might have feared when Antony had rushed back to Italy to confront Octavian.

  On a personal level, though, the possible consequences of the pact were more complex. Any hopes that her lover would soon return to her and resume their “inimitable” days and nights were quickly dashed. Cleopatra learned that he had also agreed at Brundisium that, to cement their relationship, he and Octavian should be allied through marriage. With Fulvia dead, as Plutarch wrote, Antony was “generally held to be a widower . . . since although he made no attempt to deny his relationship with Cleopatra, he refused to call her his wife.” He was thus free to marry Octavian’s beautiful, recently widowed older sister—already the mother of three young children and around the same age as Cleopatra herself.

  Images of Octavia suggest a classic Roman beauty with slender neck, straight nose and regular features. Writers, both in her lifetime and later, lauded her as the model of a virtuous Roman wife, with none of the unwomanly stridency and personal ambition of Fulvia or oriental wiles of Cleopatra. Plutarch wrote of her “dignity and intelligence, as well as her great beauty” and, in a recognition of the potent influence women could exert behind the scenes in Roman politics, of how men hoped “she would prove to be the savior and moderator of all Rome’s affairs.” The glowing depictions of Octavia were at least partly fashioned by propaganda, which depicted her as a veritable Griselda, too cloyingly patient and good to be true. Yet facts suggest Octavia was indeed astute and conciliating as well as patient, gentle and kind—in fact, the antithesis of the martial, managing Fulvia. She would need all these qualities during her marriage to Antony. She must have known her new husband was—in Plutarch’s words—“a lover, drinker, warrior, giver, spender” and above all “outrageous.” But Antony was now, at forty-three, on the threshold of middle age and perhaps ready for a life of greater gravitas and domestic calm.

  How much Octavia knew of Cleopatra can only be guessed. She had agreed to fulfill one of the primary roles of aristocratic Roman women—to be fodder in the marriage market to benefit the ambitions of her male relations and to further the greater glory of her family.

  In Rome, news of the impending marriage was received with delight, as it signaled that war had been averted. The Senate marked its approval by waiving the law stipulati
ng that widows could not remarry within ten months of the death of their husband. Since Romans believed babies were born between seven to ten months after conception, this was intended to remove all doubt about the paternity of any child that was born.

  Antony and Octavia married in early November 40—a month that, unlike May or early June, was considered auspicious for weddings. The ceremony was always the same, regardless of whether it was a first marriage or not. Octavia’s female relations gathered in her house to dress her in a simple white tunic secured at the waist by a girdle fastened in a double knot, which Antony would later have to unfasten. Using the head of a spear, they divided Octavia’s hair into six bunches, which they secured with ribbons. Finally, they draped her with a saffron cloak and placed a flame-colored veil over her head, topped with a wreath of verbena and sweet marjoram. When she was ready, Antony arrived and a sacrifice was made to the gods. As soon as the entrails had been examined and the auspices judged favorable, Antony took Octavia’s right hand in his and the pair exchanged vows before the assembled witnesses, who affixed their seal to the marriage contract while the guests with one voice exclaimed “feliciter” (congratulations).

  After the wedding feast, Antony enacted the age-old charade of abducting his bride, dragging a seemingly reluctant Octavia from the arms of her family. Then, to a chorus of obscene remarks and jokes, Antony led her in rowdy procession, preceded by flute players and torch bearers, to his house. Arriving before the door, Octavia performed the ritual of decorating it with lengths of wool and smearing it with oil and lard. To avoid any possibility that his new bride might inauspiciously trip on entering her new home, Antony then carried her over the threshold, which was spread with white cloth and branches of greenery. After Antony had offered her fire and water, one of Octavia’s three bridesmaids led her to the scented nuptial couch, where, as the bridal party withdrew, she lay down and Antony began to undress his new wife.

  The early days of such a high-profile arranged marriage were a very different existence from the wild hedonism of the Inimitable Livers. Not only the Roman people but each spouse had much to gain by making their relationship succeed. Plutarch thought Antony wished to obliterate his idyll with Cleopatra from his memory, writing, “His rational mind was resisting his love for the Egyptian.” To celebrate his Roman marriage, Antony struck golden coins depicting his new bride. With her frank, open gaze and hair curling softly on her neck, Octavia looked everything a well-born Roman lady should and the antithesis of the Egyptian voluptuary who had ensnared him.

  Octavia’s new home was Pompey’s former mansion on the Palatine Hill—a house of suitably aristocratic splendor. A Roman architect enthused that for people of great rank, “we must provide princely vestibules, lofty halls and spacious gardens, plantations and broad avenues finished in a majestic manner. Further there must be libraries and basilicas of similar grace, and as magnificent as the equivalent public structures, because in such palaces public deliberations as well as private trials and judgments are often performed.”

  Guests were shown into a large, rectangular and open reception hall or atrium. It had a pool to collect rainwater at its center, and along the sides were ancestral statues and wall cupboards containing wax death masks of male ancestors—the Roman equivalent of family portraits. The masks were taken out for family funeral processions to be worn by actors who dressed in the full insignia of the defunct dignitaries they were impersonating and rode in chariots before the litter bearing the deceased. Ornate public rooms lined with marble and decorated with mosaics and frescoes opened off the atrium, while the family’s private apartments were toward the back of the house, arranged around the garden.

  Respectable Roman life was an orderly one of prudence, restraint and duty. Romans were early risers. Perhaps consequently there was little luxury in the bedchamber. Furniture there was minimal—usually just the couch that gave the room its name (the cubiculum), a chest to store clothes and a chair. Mosaics depict sumptuous-looking bronze couches with ivory feet but, compared with the soft beds of the East, they were not all that comfortable, with their sprung base of rope interwoven with webbing on which was placed a mattress and a bolster that served as a pillow. Like the rest of the house, bedrooms were kept warm in winter by portable charcoal braziers and by hot air centrally produced by a furnace in the basement and circulated through a network of ducts.

  Roman men did not undress to go to bed, removing only their cloak and toga and keeping the rest of their clothes on. These comprised a loincloth knotted around the waist and a simple tunic of two widths of linen or wool sewn together to make a shirt that was pulled over the head and fastened around the waist with a belt. Different social classes wore different types of tunic—a soldier’s military tunic, as favored by Antony, was shorter than a civilian’s, while those of Roman senators had vertical purple stripes. If, like Octavian, a man felt the winter cold, he might wear several tunics.

  After a simple breakfast of water, fruit, fresh bread and honey, the Roman male prepared for the day. Though he cleaned his teeth in the morning with a bicarbonate of soda mixture, he preferred to bathe in early afternoon, either at the public baths or, if an important man like Antony, in his own small baths at home. Antony would have had a slave especially trained as a barber to shave him. The Romans did not have soap and so the barber used only razor and water, making the whole process a painful one and cuts so frequent that, according to Pliny the Elder, a special plaster made of spiderwebs soaked in oil and vinegar was devised to stanch them.

  The poet Martial lists having to wear the heavy, expensive and voluminous toga only rarely as one of the keys to a good life, along with good health and inherited wealth. Nevertheless, the toga had a symbolic significance—only freeborn Romans could wear it. The garment had evolved from the cloak and took its name from tegere (to cover). Spun from soft wool, the toga worn by the ordinary Roman was an unbleached brown but senior officials edged their togas with a broad purple band and triumphant generals wore purple togas bordered with gold. (The purple dye came from seashells.)

  The toga comprised a semicircle of cloth with a diameter of up to eighteen feet. About six and a half feet of the straight edge was draped over the left shoulder, across the back, under the right arm, over the chest and then over the left shoulder again, and the folds arranged so that the curved edge formed the garment’s hem. The toga had no fastening, requiring the wearer to keep his left arm crooked to keep the draperies in place.

  As aristocrats, Octavia and Antony probably slept apart so their own slaves could tend them. Roman women also kept their underclothes on at night—loincloths, a form of brassiere and a long tunic. They too bathed in the afternoon. Their daytime outer garment was the long, flowing stola, nipped in at the waist by a belt and colored using a variety of dyes—the saffron crocus for yellow, woad for blue, madder for red, oak gallnuts for black and salt of tartar for white. The dresses of women such as Octavia were richly embroidered, often with gold thread, which, like their elaborate jewelry, caught the light.

  Octavia would have employed a special slave—her ornatrix—to dress her hair and help with her makeup. Hairstyles in this period were relatively simple compared with later imperial tastes. Octavia wore her hair in a soft topknot—the nodus—from which a thin braid, drawn back along a central parting, joined two side braids in a smooth knot on the nape of her neck, a style she invented and which set a fashion in Rome. Makeup, though, was elaborate. The ornatrix first used lanolin—the grease from unwashed sheep’s wool—as a foundation and then applied white chalk powder to Octavia’s forehead and arms, red ochre to her cheeks and black charcoal to her eyebrows and eyelids. A heady perfume completed her toilette. When she was ready to go out, Octavia draped a shawl, the palla, over her shoulders, securing it with a fibula—a brooch that was both shaped and functioned like a safety pin, though infinitely more decorative. A cloth called a mappa, which she could use to dab off dust and perspiration, dangled from her wrist. Slaves held parasols o
ver her to protect her from the sun and fanned flies away.

  Yet Octavia’s life was more than the comfortable routine of the wealthy, well-connected and fashionable Roman matron. As she settled into her new life as wife to one of the two most powerful men in Rome and sister to the other, she had done as much as anyone to restore peace and stability. However, her role as peace broker between a power-hungry brother and an ambitious husband was far from over.

  *Enobarbus is the form of the name used by Shakespeare and here. The precise classical transliteration is Ahenobarbus, meaning “bronze beard.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “The Awful Calamity”

  IN ROME THE HEARTFELT relief that civil war had been averted inspired the thirty-one-year-old Vergil to compose his famous Fourth Eclogue. Underscored by a plaintive yearning for peace and plenty, it predicted the arrival of a savior-child who would preside over a time of universal goodwill among men:

  Now comes the crowning age foretold in the Sibyl’s songs,

  A great new cycle, bred of time, begins again.

  Now virginal Justice and the golden age return,

  Now its first-born is sent down from lofty heaven.

  With the birth of this boy, the generation of iron will pass,

  And a generation of gold will inherit all the world.

  Vergil was vague about the identity of the child’s parents. Possibly he was referring to Octavian and his aging bride, since Scribonia was pregnant, though the ludicrous aspects of the marriage make this unlikely. Far more plausible is that Vergil meant Antony and Octavia, who were soon expecting a child.

  News of Octavia’s pregnancy would have been deeply worrying to Cleopatra and threatening to her twins by Antony, whom he had not yet seen. With Antony apparently content with his new wife and position in Rome and showing no sign of wishing to return to her, the outlook must have seemed bleak. Yet throughout her life Cleopatra, as a successful ruler, had learned the art of patience. Unlike her elder sisters, she had not overtly plotted for her father’s throne. When Antony had summoned her to Tarsus, she had not rushed to obey. Even such apparently impetuous acts as throwing herself at Caesar’s feet had been the result of careful calculation. She must have known that, however difficult, her best chance lay in waiting, knowing that before long her ambitious lover would return east to pursue his campaign against Parthia and, to do so, he would need Egypt’s wealth. She never seems to have considered abandoning her relationship with Antony or, indeed, her country’s close ties with Rome.