Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  While their armies were boarding their mostly Egyptian transport vessels for the voyage to southern Greece, Antony first made the very much shorter voyage from Ephesus with Cleopatra to the island of Samos. Here they stayed for less than a month, mainly to stage a lavish festival of theater and music.

  Every practitioner of the arts sacred to Dionysus had been compelled to congregate on Samos and while all around almost the whole inhabited world was filled with sighs and groans a single island resounded day after day with the music of pipes and lyres while theaters were crowded and choruses competed with each other. Every city sent an ox for a communal sacrifice and kings vied with one another in the parties they threw and the gifts they gave. As a result people began to ask “if their preparations for war are treated as an occasion for such extravagant festivities how will Antony and Cleopatra celebrate their victories?”

  This was precisely the impression they had wished to create. They designed the festivities to reaffirm their associations with Dionysus and Isis and also to echo similar events organized by Cleopatra’s predecessor Alexander before he went to war. At the end of the celebrations both Cleopatra and Antony embarked for Athens, but not before presenting the artists with property in the city of Prirene as a reward for their participation.

  The couple passed the summer in Athens, where Antony and Octavia had previously spent some of the happier days of their married life and Octavia had become a great favorite of the Athenians and honored patron of their city. Antony, as well as Cleopatra, must have been uneasily conscious of this. He therefore set about raising Cleopatra’s status, leading an Athenian delegation to Cleopatra to present her with a decree awarding her a whole variety of privileges. Cleopatra reciprocated with a series of extravagant festivals to celebrate her newfound relationship with the city. In return, the Athenians erected a statue of Cleopatra bedecked in the robes of Isis on the Acropolis itself.

  Then, around the end of May, Antony gave Cleopatra the gift she must have wanted the most. He took the profoundly symbolic step of formally divorcing Octavia, even going so far as to have his agents evict her from his house on the Palatine in Rome. Octavia, as she seems to have done throughout, behaved well. Plutarch adds, “She left with all Antony’s children except for the eldest of Fulvia’s sons who was with his father and they say that she was in tears, upset by the idea that people might regard her as one of the causes of war.”

  Antony’s actions would have pleased Cleopatra politically as well as giving her the emotional reassurance that she was indeed the only woman in his life. Any reconciliation with Octavian that might threaten their eastern plans was becoming ever more unlikely. The divorce, unsurprisingly, increased Cleopatra’s confidence and perhaps also her hauteur. According to Plutarch, she treated two former consuls, Plancus and his nephew Titius, who had spoken out against her staying with the headquarters, so insolently that they deserted to Octavian. There was probably behind their action more calculation over who would be the most likely victor than this report of Plutarch suggests. Plancus had previously been quite willing to forget his consular dignity and be painted blue, dance, and fawn in other unbecoming ways before Cleopatra. Even historians favorable to Octavian saw him as “diseased with desertion.”

  The two ex-consuls certainly would have brought news to Rome of the dissension that surrounded Cleopatra’s position in Antony’s camp. They may also have told Octavian that Antony had entrusted his will to the care of the Vestal Virgins in Rome. Octavian knew that the Roman people and their legions were tired of civil wars and had welcomed his declaration in 36, after his victory over Sextus Pompey, that they were at an end. Furthermore, Antony was respected as Caesar’s trusted lieutenant and avenger. Therefore, if Octavian wished to gain the support of the country to move against Antony he needed to show that Cleopatra had so besotted him that he was a mere puppet in her scheming foreign hands. The news of his divorce from Octavia would certainly help, but Octavian believed that judicious use—or misuse—of Antony’s will might aid his efforts. Therefore he seized the document from the sacred care of the Vestals, illegally entering their temple to do so. He did not publish the will but carefully marked it up, then convened the Senate and read to them what he claimed were extracts, some of which at least he may have fabricated.

  The passages he quoted reiterated Antony’s claim that Caesarion was Caesar’s son and detailed legacies to his own children by Cleopatra. But, most important and most suspect, Octavian reported that Antony had given instructions that, even if he died in Rome, his body should be ceremonially escorted through the Forum and then sent to Cleopatra in Egypt for burial in Alexandria. Octavian used the latter provision to emphasize that Antony’s heart now metaphorically lay in Alexandria, as it would do physically in death, and to give credence to the rumors circulating that if Antony was victorious, he and Cleopatra would move the empire’s capital to that city.

  Octavian could contrast Antony’s love for Alexandria with his own efforts and those of his supporters to beautify Rome and to improve its public facilities. They had restored public buildings, built public parks, repaired the ancient sewers and constructed the first new aqueducts in generations, as well as new bathhouses. At least for a while, use of the latter was made free, as was the olive oil used to cleanse the skin.

  From the content of the surviving propaganda exchanges, from the work produced by Octavian’s court poets such as Horace, Propertius and Vergil shortly after Antony’s defeat and from the writings of the ancient historians, it is clear that Octavian now concentrated his propaganda fire on Cleopatra. He encouraged the Roman people to see the coming conflict as one in which, according to one of his historians, he and Cleopatra would fight respectively “one to save and one to ruin the world.”

  Octavian’s first step had to be to show that Antony was indeed entirely subservient to Cleopatra and had thus abandoned even the last shred of the dignity and sense of duty that were the birthright of every Roman. To this end, one of Octavian’s propagandists circulated stories that Antony had publicly massaged Cleopatra’s feet, placing himself in an obviously subordinate position. He also alleged that in the middle of hearing legal pleas from his seat on the podium, Antony had received billets-doux from Cleopatra scratched on tablets of onyx and crystal and had read them immediately.

  Additionally, on one occasion, while listening to a speech by a highly respected Roman, Antony had suddenly seen Cleopatra passing by in a litter and had leapt to his feet, quitting the court in midsession to accompany her while clinging to the litter. He was in any case said regularly to follow behind Cleopatra’s litter on foot among the company of her eunuchs.* Other writers described how Antony became “the Egyptian woman’s slave and devoted his time to his passion for her, causing him to do many outrageous things.” Sometimes Cleopatra was credited with bewitching Antony so that he became “a slave to passion and the sorcery of Cleopatra.”

  Octavian’s propaganda purported to show how, under Cleopatra’s influence, Antony had been led into the self-indulgence that was such a serious and disabling vice in Roman eyes and “degenerated into a monster.” Egyptian court life had so corrupted him that he had assumed the trappings of royalty, another ready trigger for Roman disdain, by appearing in a purple jeweled robe with a golden scepter; all he had needed was “a crown to make him a king dallying with a queen.” Others went so far as to say Antony had become so effete as to use a golden chamber pot, “an enormity of which even Cleopatra would have been ashamed,” and, equally decadently, a mosquito net, something that no hardy Roman should ever contemplate. Octavian even criticized Antony’s florid speechmaking, suggesting he was a madman for wanting “to be admired rather than understood” and for bringing into “our language the wordy and meaningless gush of Asiatic orators.”

  Octavian summed up his view of Antony:

  Who would not weep when he sees and hears what Antony has become, leaving behind his ancestral customs and embracing foreign and barbaric ones . . . giving away
islands and parts of continents as if he were lord of the whole earth . . . It is impossible for anyone who indulges in a life of royal luxury and pampers himself as a woman to conceive a manly thought or do a manly deed since it cannot but follow that a man’s whole being is modelled by the habits of his daily life. Let no one consider him a Roman but rather an Egyptian.

  Having established Antony as a mere feeble tool of the Egyptian queen, above her feminine station. He proclaimed:

  We Romans are the rulers of the greatest and best parts of the world and yet we find ourselves spurned and trampled upon by a woman of Egypt . . . Would we not utterly dishonor ourselves if, surpassing all other nations in valor, we then meekly endured the insults of this rabble, the natives of Alexandria and of Egypt . . . they worship reptiles and beasts as gods, they embalm their bodies to make them appear immortal, they are most forward in effrontery but most backward in courage. Worst of all they are not ruled by a man but are the slaves of a woman. Who would not groan at hearing that Roman knights and senators grovel before her like eunuchs?

  Octavian’s racism drew on well-established prejudices. Romans had long felt themselves superior to others, as Cato’s lavatorial reception of Cleopatra’s father, Auletes, had shown. Egyptians were routinely stigmatized as treacherous. In the history of Caesar’s Alexandrian war, written a few years previously, Cleopatra’s brother Ptolemy XIII was described as crying crocodile tears “so as to live up to the character of his countrymen because he was well trained in wiles . . . no one can doubt this breed is most apt to be treacherous.” Dio Cassius had Octavian maintain that Egyptians, and Alexandrians in particular, while putting on a bold front, were utterly useless as warriors. Another author bolstered this canard, long established even then, by suggesting the hot sun drained the courage from southern peoples such as the Egyptians.

  Misogynism was another easy totem to excite the crowd. Just as Fulvia’s behavior had been put down to sexual frustration, so Octavian and his propagandists condemned Cleopatra’s domination of Antony as unnatural. They alleged that, in her thrall, “he plays the woman and has worn himself out with lust.” Cleopatra was at fault for using her wiles on Antony, not Antony for, Adam-like, succumbing to them. Cleopatra’s “unchastity cost Rome dear.” Writings and illustrations of the period often compare Antony under Cleopatra’s rule to his hero Heracles under the thumb of Omphale, queen of Lydia. Plutarch captured this thread of Octavian’s propaganda when he wrote, “Antony like Heracles in paintings where Omphale is seen removing his club and stripping off his lionskin was frequently disarmed by Cleopatra, subdued by her spells and persuaded to let slip from his hands great tasks and necessary campaigns only to roam and disport with her on the seashores by the Nile.”

  Octavian was implicitly encouraging his soldiers to suppress Cleopatra to ensure that no woman made herself the equal of a man, nudging them to think what this might mean in more domestic contexts. Cleopatra was both a head of state and a commander in chief, positions to which no Roman woman could aspire, despite the political influence some wielded behind the scenes. In Octavian’s eyes, in proclaiming Cleopatra “Queen of Kings,” Antony was simultaneously disregarding not one but two Roman tenets—those of men’s superiority to women and the immorality of monarchy. In portraying Cleopatra and the east as a real threat to Rome, Octavian suggested that she and Antony wished to rule Italy, that her favorite oath was “as surely as I shall dispense justice on the Capitol” and that she regularly boasted that she and her eunuchs would dine on the Capitol, Rome’s most sacred place. He could use Antony’s insistence on Caesarion’s paternity to suggest that the two wished to found a ruling Roman–Egyptian dynasty. However, he had to be careful not to prompt questions as to why, if Cleopatra was such a witch, his adoptive father had not only been seduced by her but invited her to Rome and placed her statue in one of the city’s holy temples, where it still remained.

  In conjuring this eastern menace, Octavian was able to call on any number of anti-Roman prophecies of considerable age. One such, that of the so-called mad praetor, known to have circulated for at least a century, foretold how a mighty army would come from the east to enslave Rome. Others, related to the Sibylline prophecies, were frankly millennial and apocalyptic and spoke of a woman’s rule, after which would come damnation:

  And then the whole wide world would be ruled by a Woman’s hand

  and obey her in everything,

  and when the Widow shall queen the whole wide world

  and into the sea divine have the gold and silver hurled

  and into the water have hurled the bronzen swords of men,

  those creatures of a day, all the world’s elements then

  shall be widowed, and God, who dwells in the heavens

  shall roll up the sky like a scroll.

  And on earth divine and on the sea the multitudinous sky

  shall fall, while cataracts of wild fire from on high,

  ceaseless pour. The earth he’ll burn, the sea he’ll burn with his curse.

  The widow was equated by Octavian and his supporters with Cleopatra. Yet other prophecies spoke bloodily of eastern revenge on Rome. It is symbolic of Antony’s divided camp that, while Cleopatra could have used such prophecies to unite the east, disgruntled and oppressed as it was by Roman taxation and arrogance, any reference to them would have completely undermined Antony’s position in Rome and lost him all senatorial or republican support.

  While this torrent of propaganda may have engulfed some of the waver-ers in Italy and convinced them that in fighting against Cleopatra they would be fighting to protect the Roman way of life, others remained more concerned with practical, parochial matters. Octavian was desperate for funds. First he compelled freedmen to pay a tax of one eighth of their capital assets. When this failed to yield enough, he imposed a kind of income tax of some 25 percent on the free population, including those same unfortunate freedmen.* Unsurprisingly, the Italian public grew resentful—a resentment that sporadically boiled over into rioting and arson, quickly suppressed by Octavian’s troops.

  As part of his pretense of unity, Octavian induced the population to take an oath of loyalty to him, later boasting that “the whole of Italy of its own free will swore loyalty to me, and asked me to take charge of the war that I won at Ac-tium. The provinces of the Gauls, the Spains, Africa, Sicily and Sardinia swore in the same way.” Surviving records do not reveal how the idea of the oath was instigated or promulgated or indeed relate its formal wording, although, clearly and tellingly, it referred to personal loyalty to Octavian, not to the Senate or other apparatus of the Roman republic. However much Octavian’s propagandists railed against Antony’s pretensions to monarchy, Rome was pledging loyalty to another autocrat. The shrewd political skill underlying the oath was that to refuse to make such a relatively anodyne pledge would single out a man for special surveillance if not immediate attention.

  Even discounting the inevitable bias of the histories, it is hard not to see Octavian as setting the agenda throughout this period and Antony reacting to it. Antony, in turn, tried to bolster his diverse coalition by administering oaths of his own to his supporters and allies. Cut off from Rome, he had recruited many of his legions from the east by offering the men Roman citizenship, with its advantages such as immunity from torture and the right to trial in Rome—a right taken advantage of by Saint Paul a century later. Now, to reinforce the legions’ status, Antony had minted a series of silver and gold coins—enough to celebrate each of his thirty legions, his bodyguard and his scout unit individually. Each coin displayed the appropriate eagle, standards and name or number on one side, while the other showed a warship from Antony’s fleet.

  Despite the mutual oath swearing, there were still those who hoped for reconciliation. Some of Antony’s friends in Italy, sensing that the damage that Octavian’s propaganda against Cleopatra was doing was being aggravated by her presence at the heart of Antony’s headquarters, sent an envoy to Antony. Named Gaius Geminius, the en
voy’s remit was to urge Antony again to dismiss Cleopatra from his presence and to focus more effort on outmaneuvering Octavian’s attempt to isolate him politically. Plutarch recounted what happened:

  Geminius sailed to Greece but Cleopatra suspected him of acting in Oc-tavia’s interests so at dinner he became the constant butt of jokes and was insulted by being allocated the least prestigious couches. He put up with everything, waiting for an opportunity to have a meeting with Antony. Eventually he was told to deliver his message in the middle of supper. He said that most of the discussion he had come for required a clear head but that drunk or sober there was one thing he knew—that all would be well if Cleopatra were sent back to Egypt. Antony lost his temper and Cleopatra said, “Geminius, you have done well to confess the truth without it being tortured from you.”

  A few days later Geminius returned to Rome.

  With the collapse of such final mediation efforts, Octavian of the rump of the Senate to at last have Antony of the rump of the Senate to at last have Antony deprived of his triumviral status and of the consulship he was due to assume in 31. War became inevitable. Even so, Octavian chose not to declare war on Antony, just on Cleopatra alone. In doing so he made the war one ostensibly against a foreign opponent and not a civil war. At the same time, he shrewdly had the Senate pass a resolution “that Antony’s adherents would be pardoned and commended if they deserted him.”

  To underline the solemnity and nationalism of his declaration of “a just war” ( justum bellum), Octavian revived a long-obsolete ceremony for the purpose. Accompanied by his followers, who had symbolically fastened on their military cloaks, he himself marched from the temple of the goddess of war, Bellona, the sister of Mars, brandishing a spear dripping the blood of a sacrificial animal, to the Campus Martius, Rome’s old military assembly ground, where, facing east in the direction of his enemy, Egypt, he flung it quivering into the ground.*