Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  And Cleopatra had immediate problems of her own. With her lover and supposed protector absent and apparently distracted from the affairs of the east, she had to safeguard her own position on the Egyptian throne. This meant being on the lookout for internal dissent—there had been periodic outbreaks of nationalist feeling against the Ptolemies for most of their three-hundred-year reign. It also meant managing her country’s economy, the base of her power, prudently and carefully. As a result of the damage done to Egypt’s economy by her father’s debts, earlier in her reign Cleopatra had been forced to debase the country’s silver currency yet further. However, she had since revived the production of bronze in her mint in Alexandria and become the first Ptolemy to introduce separate denominations within Egypt’s bronze coinage and to establish a standard system of bronze weights to restore people’s confidence in the purchasing power of their coins. As a result of Cleopatra’s innovative reforms, her citizens calculated the worth of their coins by the denominations marked on them, rather than by the value of the metal of which they were composed.

  Cleopatra also wished to ensure that Egyptian agriculture—source of so much of her wealth—was prospering. She knew that nothing was so likely to cause civil discontent as shortages of grain or overexploitation of the workforce by greedy, grafting officials. A decree of April 41 reveals her close scrutiny of what was happening. Learning that local administrators were imposing unreasonable burdens on holders of estates outside Alexandria and hence on their peasants, she declared herself “exceedingly indignant.” Citing her “hatred of evil” and determination to halt abuses, she ordered the excessive demands to stop:

  Nor shall their goods be destrained for such contributions, nor shall any new tax be required of them, but when they have once paid the essential dues, in kind or in money, for corn-land and for vine-land, which have molested for anything further, on any pretext whatsoever.

  Evidence suggests that such decrees, written down by scribes, would have been authorized by Cleopatra’s addition of the single word ginesthoi (let it be so).

  At the same time, Cleopatra had to navigate through complex regional politics—in particular those of neighboring Judaea. In 40, displaced by the Parthians, the thirty-two-year-old Herod had hastened to Alexandria to seek Cleopatra’s help. He could not be entirely certain of his reception. His ambition was to regain the remainder of his territories intact from the Parthian invaders and the usurping Antigonus and his followers. However, Judaea had once been part of the Ptolemaic empire and Cleopatra, as he rightly suspected, nurtured hopes of someday regaining it.

  For the moment, though, Cleopatra and Herod, as staunch allies of Rome, shared a common interest—first to contain and then to repulse the fanatically anti-Roman Parthians, who, if not stopped, might threaten the very borders of Egypt. According to Josephus, Cleopatra received Herod with great splendor and even offered him a command in her own army, perhaps as a way of keeping some control over him. However, still grieving over news that his brother Phasael had committed suicide in a Parthian prison cell, Herod was determined to go to Rome to beg for aid in regaining his lost lands. After some hesitation Cleopatra agreed to provide him with a ship to take him as far as Rhodes, where he could obtain other transport to take him on to Rome.

  Cleopatra must have soon regretted her generosity. Arriving in Rome in the autumn of 40, not long after the Pact of Brundisium, Herod persuaded the triumvirs to convince the Senate not only to appoint him ruler of Judaea in place of Hyrcanus, now a captive of the Parthians, but also to award him the title of king of the Jews, an honor previously denied to Hyrcanus. In addition, Herod was awarded substantial territorial additions north of Jerusalem and a coastal strip to the southwest that probably included the port of Gaza, terminus of the Arabian spice route. Most unwelcome of all to Cleopatra was that, unsolicited, several of Antony’s supporters had spoken up for Herod in the Senate. In her eyes, their desire for a renewed and strong Judaea was more than a device to counter the Parthians—it was a signal that Rome did not wish Egypt to be the but wait for more propitious times to push her own claims.

  Josephus recorded that Herod had been warned he would find Italy “very tumultuous and in great disorder,” which he did. The Pact of Brundisium had not ushered in Vergil’s “golden age.” Rome’s citizens were hungry and angrily demanding bread—a situation for which Sextus Pompey was largely to blame. Affronted to have received nothing concrete out of the Pact of Brundisium and by Antony’s apparent disinclination to act on his promise to try to reconcile him with Octavian, he had resumed his disruption of Rome’s grain supplies, attacking ports and shipping and seizing Sardinia and Corsica to add to his Sicilian strongholds. When Octavian and Antony, raised taxes on slaves and inheritances to pay for troops to fight Sextus, rioting mobs took to the streets to protest. Reports of Octavian’s lavish parties and feasts so angered people that they surrounded and began to stone him in the Forum. His life was saved by Antony, who, hearing of his predicament, quickly assembled troops to attack the protestors and himself bravely pushed through the mêlée to snatch the injured Octavian to safety—a clear indication of his loyalty to Octavian at this time.

  With Sextus’ rampaging growing ever more blatant and ever more damaging to the authority of the triumvirs, Antony urged Octavian to seek a meeting with him. The encounter took place in somewhat bizarre circumstances in the spring of 39. The setting was Misenum at the northern end of the Bay of Naples, where so many of the Roman elite had built their luxurious holiday villas. Fearful of treachery, Antony and Octavian would not trust themselves to a shipboard meeting, and Sextus would not accept one on land. Sextus ordered the erection of two platforms supported on wooden piles a little way offshore and near the harbor mole and calculated their positioning to the inch. The platforms were near enough for men to be able to hear one another but too far apart for an assassin to leap between them. Antony and Octavian climbed onto the platform nearest the shore where their troops were waiting, while Sextus occupied the seaward perch close to his flagship.

  Sextus’ demands were ambitious—he wanted nothing less than to join the triumvirate. When the existing triumvirs refused, the strange conference adjourned while Sextus consulted his wife, Julia—Scribonia’s niece—and his mother, Mucia, who begged him to moderate his demands. Back on his platform with the warm waters of the Mediterranean lapping around him, Sextus shouted across to Octavian and Antony fresh ultimata, which the triumvirs finally accepted. In return for a huge payment, Sextus would cease raiding shipping and ensure that Rome received her grain. He was also to be consul for 38, to be left in control of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica and to acquire the Pelopon-nese, which Antony agreed to hand over. Sextus also won concessions for his followers, including the many republican exiles who had fled to him and who were now to be allowed to return home and receive partial compensation for their estates. Only those who had been complicit in Caesar’s death were excluded. The agreement was signed, sealed and dispatched for safekeeping to the Vestal Virgins in Rome.

  To celebrate, Sextus invited Antony and Octavian to dine aboard his magnificent flagship, an invitation the two men now felt sufficiently confident to accept. Before dinner, Sextus resentfully chided Antony that this vessel was “the only family home Pompey has left,” a rebuke for Antony’s having appropriated the mansion of Pompey the Great on Rome’s Palatine Hill. Plutarch went on that at the height of the party, when, in typical male fashion, “jokes about Antony and Cleopatra were flying thick and fast” as the wine flowed, one of Sextus’ commanders whispered to him in an undertone, “Shall I cut the ship’s cables and make you master of Rome, not just Sicily and Sardinia?” In other words, once out to sea, they could murder the triumvirs. Sextus thought for a moment in silence then replied, “You ought to have done it without telling me about it beforehand. For now, let’s be satisfied with things as they are. It’s not my way to break a promise.”

  It was perhaps Sextus’ last and best chance, as his treaty with th
e triumvirs did not endure long. Disgruntled that Antony, with Octavian’s connivance, was denying him tribute from the Peloponnese, which he believed was his, Sextus resumed his blockade of Rome’s grain. Captured pirates who confessed under torture that they were in Sextus’ pay gave Octavian every justification to resume hostilities.

  Octavian also took advantage of the situation to get rid of his wife, Sextus’ relation. On the very day that Scribonia gave birth to their daughter Julia, Octavian divorced her because, or so he said, “I could not bear the way she nagged at me.” Octavian’s brutal act in fact had less to do with either Scribonia’s failings or Sextus’ renewed hostility than with a consuming new passion. The object of the hot and urgent desires of the usually cool and restrained Octavian was a young married woman, the beautiful nineteen-year-old Livia Drusilla of the ancient house of the Claudii, his future empress and, as Suetonius believed, “the one woman whom he truly loved until his death.” Her patrician husband was the staunchly republican Tiberius Claudius Nero, with whom she had escaped after the fall of Perusia, where he had fought on Antony’s brother’s side. After surviving a terrifying series of adventures, he was one of the exiles permitted to return to Rome following the pact with Sextus. Livia herself was at the time heavily pregnant—some claimed, probably incorrectly, with Octavian’s child—and already had a two-year-old son, Tiberius. However, none of this—husband, child, pregnancy—mattered to Octavian, who was determined to have her.

  Some accounts, including that of the historian Tacitus, suggest that Octavian virtually abducted Livia from her husband’s house. Nevertheless, anxious to retain at least some semblance of propriety, Octavian sought advice from the priests on the delicate matter of how soon he could marry a woman pregnant at the time of her divorce. Faced with an unprecedented situation, the priests agreed the marriage could take place as soon as the child was born. In January 38, just three days after giving birth to her second son, Drusus, Livia duly married Octavian, given away by her complaisant former husband. To Octavian’s great disappointment, though their marriage would last fifty years, she would never bear him a child. Unlike those of Antony and Tiberius Claudius Nero, none of Octavian’s descendants would be emperors.

  Antony and Octavia were not at the wedding. In the autumn of 39, shortly after Octavia had given birth to a daughter, Antonia, they had sailed together for Athens so that Antony could prepare for his Parthian campaign. Plutarch claimed that Cleopatra’s astrologer, still attached to Antony’s household, had advised him to go: “Either as a favor to Cleopatra, or because he wanted to tell the truth, he spoke frankly to Antony and told him that despite his great brilliance . . . he was being eclipsed by Octavian and he advised him to put as much distance as possible between himself and the young man.” If Cleopatra had had a hand in urging Antony eastward, it did her little immediate good: Antony made no attempt to contact her.

  Whatever Cleopatra may have hoped, Antony, it seems, was still enjoying the novelty of a quiet domestic life with Octavia. Athens suited them both. Octavia liked conversing with Athens’ philosophers, while Antony, a longtime admirer of the Hellenic world, relished the more relaxed atmosphere. Just as he had done in Alexandria, he put aside his Roman garb for a Greek tunic and white shoes. Appian wrote, “He took his meals in the Greek fashion, passed his leisure time with the Greeks and enjoyed their festivals in company with Octavia with whom he was very much in love, being by nature excessively fond of women.” Their marriage was honored by a sacred marriage between Antony and the goddess of the city, Athena, with whom the Athenians associated Octavia. Both were hailed as “beneficent gods.”

  As well as a cultured, pleasant place, Athens was also Antony’s military headquarters. His plan was for his generals to drive the Parthians from the territories they had occupied in Asia Minor, Syria and Judaea while he reserved the glorious conquest of Parthia for himself. The campaign was, in fact, already well under way even before Antony reached Athens. Earlier in 39, his skillful commander Publius Ventidius, a veteran of Caesar’s campaigns and an ally of Antony since his darkest hour after Mutina, had defeated the Roman renegade Labienus and the Parthians under his command in the Taurus mountains. The next step was to conquer Armenia.

  However, in 38 Antony’s program was disrupted by a request for assistance from Octavian, who was again confronting Sextus Pompey. Though he would have preferred to crush Sextus himself and take the credit, Octavian had reluctantly concluded he needed Antony’s help. Antony duly sailed from Athens to Brundisium, only to find that Octavian was not there. Angered by the younger man’s apparent disrespect and by no means keen to become embroiled again in a distracting war with Sextus when all his thoughts were on Parthia, Antony sailed back to Athens, leaving only a brusque message that Octavian was on no account to break their pact with Sextus. Octavian, in turn, claimed that Antony should have waited for him and continued with his preparations for war.

  Good news soon made Antony forget his irritation with Octavian when, in June 38, messengers brought word that Ventidius had vanquished Pacorus, son of the Parthian king, near Antioch and sliced off his head. The Parthians had made the fatal error of deploying their heavy cavalry, the mail-clad cataphracts, rather than their swift-moving, devastating mounted archers. Although the bulk of Pacorus’ troops had escaped over the Euphrates, this and his defeat of Labienus’ Parthians were the first occasions on which Roman forces had defeated those of Parthia. Ventidius made slower progress in subduing a neighboring renegade king, some said because he had been bribed to do so. Antony supplanted him and took personal command. He did, however, allow Ventidius to return to Rome for the Triumph already voted to him by the Roman people for his previous success. The Triumph, the first ever celebrated over Parthia, had the very useful side effect of shedding reflected glory on Antony and reminding Rome of his campaigns in the east on its behalf.

  Antony quickly seized Samosata, the capital on the Euphrates of the renegade king. While he was there, Herod, who had been enjoying little military success, arrived to beg his help in dislodging the Parthian-backed Antigonus in Judaea. Antony agreed and appointed his supporter Sosius to command the expedition. Sosius in turn allowed Herod to go ahead with a vanguard of two legions—a rare example of Roman forces being placed under the command of a foreigner. With them, Herod defeated Antigonus’ troops at Jericho and then invested Jerusalem, where he was soon joined by Sosius and his larger Roman force.

  However, Antony’s plans for Parthia were about to be disrupted yet again by Octavian, who had ignored his strictures and launched an ill-considered attack on Sextus in Sicily. In a series of disastrous actions, which underlined his lack of ability as a commander, Octavian had lost many of his ships to Sextus’ superior seamanship and much of the remainder to bad weather. Confronted by what Appian described as a sea “full of sails, spars and men, living and dead,” he had been forced to call off the campaign, leaving a jubilantly swaggering Sextus to proclaim himself “son of Neptune.” In desperation, Octavian had recalled Agrippa, whom he had made governor of Gaul, to oversee the construction of a huge new fleet and, in Suetonius’ words, to get them “into fighting condition”—a task that included training thirty thousand freed slaves in oarsmanship.

  Octavian also asked again for Antony’s help, and in the early summer of 37, Antony and Octavia, pregnant once more, arrived off Brundisium with a fleet of three hundred ships. To Antony’s rage, in what must have seemed a repetition of events a year earlier, he found Octavian had once more failed to keep the rendezvous. Reluctant simply to depart again, he sailed southwest around the heel of Italy to the Gulf of Tarentum, from where he sent messages to Octavian that, despite his snubs, he remained ready to join loyally in the attack on Sextus and awaited an explanation of his brother-in-law’s bizarre and disrespectful behavior.

  The reality was that, with his new fleet in good shape, Octavian had recovered his nerve. He had decided he no longer needed Antony and, reluctant as ever to share power or glory, regretted
summoning him. He also wondered why Antony had arrived with such a large force and suspected some ulterior motive. He tried to fob Antony off with excuses that must have sounded ridiculous even to his own ears, but the nervous thoughts running through Octavian’s ever active, always questioning mind must have been obvious. Antony may also have reflected that, in a sense, Octavian was right to be wary—he did have another motive for returning to Italy, which had nothing to do with Sextus. It concerned his need for troops for the Parthian campaign and the fact that, in contravention of the Pact of Brundisium, Octavian had been obstructing his efforts to recruit in Italy. Antony knew that he could do little to compel Octavian to comply with the Pact, but he hoped that by helping defeat Sextus he would be able to take over some of his considerable forces and at the same time convince Octavian to loan him further troops.

  In an attempt to reassure Octavian, Antony dispatched Octavia from Taren-tum on a mission to her brother. She faced a difficult task. Her brother criticized Antony for not waiting for him at Brundisium the previous year, ignoring the fact that he was the one who had failed to keep the rendezvous. He also accused Antony of seeking an alliance with their fellow triumvir, Lepidus, against him. Octavia did her best to soothe Octavian, reassuring him that the only reason Antony and Lepidus had been in touch was to discuss a possible marriage between their children. Plutarch, who admired Octavia as a peacemaker and harmonizer in contrast to the divisive scheming of Cleopatra, claims she pleaded with her brother “not to connive at her downfall from a state of perfect happiness to one of complete misery,” for “if matters degenerate and war breaks out [between you], there is no telling which of you is destined to win and which to lose, but in either case my lot will be wretched.”