Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  Antony himself had not been at Pelusium but nearly 180 miles to the west of Alexandria at Paraetorium, the modern Mersah Matruh, trying to stem the advance of Octavian’s forces from Cyrenaica. These were the four legions that had deserted from Antony only some nine months previously and were now led by Cornelius Gallus. From an unprivileged background, Gallus was nevertheless an accomplished lyric poet as well as a general. He had once composed volumes of verse to Antony’s former mistress, Cytheris. In the face of Antony’s advance, he showed his military skills by trapping and destroying some of Antony’s galleys in a small harbor, into which he had allowed them to sail unopposed. He did so by stretching chains across the harbor mouth and lowering them beneath the water before the arrival of Antony’s unsuspecting vessels, only to raise them again using a sophisticated system of winches once the galleys were inside. When, on land, Antony approached Gallus’ lines to try to address the troops who had so recently been loyal to him and had served with him on so many campaigns, Gallus ordered the trumpeters to sound their bugles and to continue as long as Antony persisted in his attempt to speak. Eventually Antony gave up.

  When the news of Pelusium reached him, Antony himself returned to Alexandria, leaving his subordinates to defend Egypt’s western frontiers as best they could. Antony was only just in time. Octavian advanced quickly across the branches of the Nile delta toward Alexandria. Before long, in the shattering July heat, he was making camp near the hippodrome to the east of the city walls. Energized by the chance of further action, this time against Octavian in person, Antony led a sally out of Alexandria and, encountering the advance guard of Octavian’s cavalry, sent them reeling back in panic to their camp.

  Plutarch wrote that “Antony felt good after his victory.” It was his final moment of glory. Still wearing his armor, dust-caked and sweat-soaked, and with the adrenaline of battle still pumping through his aging body, he strode into the royal palace, wrapped Cleopatra in his arms and kissed her. He then presented to her the soldier who in his view had fought the most bravely in the successful action. In a flamboyant gesture typical both of her generosity and of her ostentation, she rewarded him with a gleaming gold breastplate and helmet. However, that very night, the man quietly defected, crossing the lines to Octavian’s camp, taking Cleopatra’s gifts with him—a depressing sign of the faltering confidence of those close to Cleopatra and Antony and a reminder, if they needed one, to Octavian and his men of Alexandria’s riches.

  Nevertheless, Antony’s hopes had revived, at least for a while. In a grand gesture he invited Octavian yet again to take him on in single combat. The younger man, who had no intention of agreeing to anything so foolish, replied coldly that “there were all sorts of ways for Antony to meet death.” Antony next attempted a leafleting campaign, firing into the enemy camp missiles to which were attached notes offering large rewards to deserters. Octavian countered by reminding his men that the entire wealth of Antony, Cleopatra and of all Egypt would soon be theirs for the taking.

  Determined to confront Octavian rather than face a siege, Antony decided to unleash a combined land and sea assault on his enemy. The night before the attack, Plutarch related that he ordered an especially sumptuous and extravagant dinner. It was, perhaps, a final gathering of the Society of Partners in Death. Once more in a fatalistic mood, Antony demanded that his servants pile his plate and fill his glass, “since there was no means of knowing whether they would be able to do so on the morrow or whether they would be serving other masters while he lay dead, a lifeless husk, a nothing.” The eyes of his friends filled with tears as he told them he would be leading the attack not for the sake of victory or safety, since what he desired was “an honorable death.”

  At this emotional, perhaps even maudlin moment, strange sounds are said to have erupted in the otherwise subdued and apprehensive city. In the soft depths of the night, the diners heard “harmonious sounds from all manner of musical instruments, and the loud shouts of people making their way with Bacchic cries and prancing feet.” It was as if “a troop of Dionysian revellers were raucously leaving the city. Their course seemed to lie more or less through the middle of the city towards the outer gate which faced the enemy camp, where the noise reached its crescendo and then died away.” Plutarch continued: “Those who tried to interpret this sign concluded that the god [Dionysus], with whom Antony claimed kinship and whom he had sought above all to imitate, was now abandoning him.” It was a potent image—the god of glory and conquest in the East and the patron of the Ptolemies deserting Cleopatra and Antony just as the gods had abandoned Troy the night before its fall.

  As dawn broke over Alexandria on August 1, 30—ever afterward celebrated as a public holiday in Rome as the day when Octavian “rescued the state from the greatest danger”—Antony positioned his troops on high ground between the city and the hippodrome and waited as the rowers propelled his galleys out past the Pharos lighthouse into the blue waters of the Mediterranean before bearing down on Octavian’s fleet. Plutarch wrote that he expected to see his fleet victorious. Instead, as the vessels came within reach of Octavian’s, Antony’s rowers raised their oars in salute and Octavian’s men at once returned the greeting, whereupon Antony’s men changed sides and all the ships combined in a single fleet to make directly for the city. Seeing the two sides fraternizing and realizing that this made defeat inevitable, Antony’s cavalry also deserted, leaving only his infantry faithful to their old general. They were soon overrun by Octavian’s men. Antony rushed back to the city toward the royal palace, apparently heaping reproaches on Cleopatra’s head, crying out that she had betrayed him and that it was only for her sake that he had gone to war. But if they were ever spoken, they were words of abject despair uttered in the agony of the moment. Antony’s love for and trust in Cleopatra were undiminished.

  She was no longer in the palace but had barricaded herself with her waiting women, Iras and Charmion, in the “wonderfully imposing and beautiful” two-story stone tomb she was building, and which was now nearing completion, adjacent to the Temple of Isis, and which she had ordered to be crammed with all her royal treasure—gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony, ivory and cinnamon together with containers of pitch, a great stack of firewood and oakum for kindling. If all else failed, she could order that the whole lot should go up in an expensive bonfire, taking herself with it, just as Queen Dido had died at Carthage. With the portcullises lowered and secured with bolts and bars, she was waiting anxiously on events.

  Amidst all the confusion, as Antony searched for Cleopatra, a false report reached him that she had killed herself in her mausoleum. Plutarch and Dio Cassius believed she had sent it herself to deceive Antony and presumably to prompt his own suicide. Far more likely, a message sent by her to Antony that she was intending to kill herself had become confused, or perhaps reports of her death had begun circulating spontaneously. With Octavian’s forces expected in Alexandria any minute and panic-stricken citizens fleeing hither and thither, the city must have teemed with all kinds of contradictory and alarming stories.

  Whatever the source of the report, the distraught Antony believed it and no longer wished to live. In his despair he cried out, “It is not the loss of you that hurts. I shall be joining you very soon. What stings is that for all my great status as a commander, I have been shown inferior in courage to a woman.” Unstrap-ping his breastplate, he asked his slave Eros, “to whom he had long ago entrusted the task of killing him in an emergency,” to strike him down. Eros drew his sword, positioned it as if to kill Antony then, twisting, fell upon it himself and so died. With an agonized cry, “You have taught me what I must do,” Antony thrust his sword into his own abdomen. Though grave, the wound was not immediately fatal, leaving a swooning Antony to fall backward on a couch. Eventually recovering consciousness, he cried out for someone to finish him off but no one would deliver the coup de grâce. Instead, they ran off, leaving him alone, writhing in agony and growing ever weaker from loss of blood until finally Cleopatra’
s scribe, Diomedes, arrived. She had sent him to bring Antony to her in the tomb. Whether she had done so because she had learned that he was dying or whether she had been hoping for a final reunion with her lover is unclear.

  At the news that Cleopatra still lived, Antony struggled to his feet as if to go to her but, feeling his life ebbing away as the blood flow increased as he stood up, fell back on the couch and begged his returning slaves to take him to her. They carried him in their arms to the mausoleum, but Cleopatra refused to unlock the gates, presumably because she feared being captured. Instead she and her two waiting women let down ropes from an upper window. Antony’s slaves fastened these as securely as they could around their dying master, and Cleopatra and her women began struggling and straining to haul him up. Plutarch’s account has a raw vividness:

  Witnesses say that this was the most pitiful sight imaginable. Up he went, soaked in blood and in the throes of death, stretching his arms out towards her even as he dangled in the air beside the wall of the tomb. The task was no easy one for a woman: clinging to the rope as, with the strain showing on her face, Cleopatra struggled to bring the line up, while on the ground below people shared her agony and called out encouragement to her. At last she got him inside and laid him down. She tore her clothes in grief over him, beat her breasts with her hands, and scratched them with her nails. She smeared her face with his blood and called him her master, husband and commander.

  The thoughts of the dying Antony were only for Cleopatra. He tried to calm her and asked for a glass of wine. After gulping it down, he warned her to save herself, “if she could do so without dishonor,” and advised her that, of all Octavian’s men, his officer Gaius Proculeius was the most to be trusted. With his final breaths, he begged her not to mourn his recent troubles but to think of all the good fortune he had enjoyed in his life and count him happy. “After all, supreme fame and power had been his.” Moments later he was dead.

  Trapped in her mausoleum, cradling her dead lover and covered in his congealing gore, Cleopatra’s future had never been so bleak or so uncertain. As she sat and the first waves of numbing, paralyzing shock receded, fears over the fate of her children can only have added to her grief and agonized indecision—whether or not she should order the fire to be put to the wooden kindling in the mausoleum. Well before Octavian’s arrival on the borders of the kingdom, she had dispatched Caesarion, her “King of Kings,” to safety, “plentifully supplied with money” and under the protection of his tutor, Rhodon, whom she had ordered to take her son up the Nile, and over the desert to a port on the Red Sea and thence to India. Always a devoted mother and a woman with a strong sense of her lineage, she must have kept going over in her mind whether Caesarion was indeed beyond Octavian’s reach and also what would happen to Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene and Ptolemy Philadelphus, still somewhere in the royal palace. Their fates, like hers, lay entirely in the hands of Octavian, a man not noted for his clemency.

  It had not taken long for news of Antony’s death to reach Octavian. One of Antony’s bodyguards had grabbed the bloodstained sword with which he had stabbed himself, concealed it beneath his clothes and hastened with it to the enemy camp. Octavian apparently shed a few tears for the man who had been not only his brother-in-law but also once his partner in government. Such a magnanimous expression of sorrow over the fate of a fellow Roman was not only good manners but also good public relations—Caesar had wept when shown Pompey’s crudely severed head. Equally judicious was Octavian’s reading to his assembled supporters of the letters that had passed between himself and Antony to demonstrate that while he had been polite, reasonable and restrained, Antony had consistently been “rude and arrogant.”

  Octavian’s thoughts turned very quickly to the Egyptian queen immured with the body of her dead lover in her tomb. He sent Proculeius into the city with instructions to take her alive if possible. Foremost in his mind was the need to secure Cleopatra’s valuables before she had a chance to destroy them. Despite Antony’s dying display of foresight in commending Proculeius to her, she refused to open the gates of the mausoleum to him, just as she had refused to unlock them to the dying Antony. However, Cleopatra agreed to talk to Proculeius as he stood outside one of the doors at ground level. She petitioned for what now mattered most to her, her children, begging that they be allowed to inherit her kingdom. Proculeius smoothly assured her she could trust Octavian absolutely and had no need to worry, but he made no specific promises.

  While seeking to soothe the Egyptian queen, Proculeius took a careful look around the exterior of Cleopatra’s stronghold, assessing its weak points and how best to gain entry quickly before Cleopatra had time either to kill herself or to set fire to her treasure. After rushing back outside the city to report to Octavian, Proculeius set out once more through the hushed and nervous streets of Alexandria toward the tomb. This time he was accompanied by Cornelius Gallus, the commander who had led the invasion of Egypt from the west and who had already reached the Egyptian capital. On this occasion, he was to deploy his skill with words, not weapons. Gallus’ task, like a mediator in a hostage taking, was to keep Cleopatra talking and distracted from observing the activities of others. As Gallus was speaking, Proculeius quietly propped a ladder against one of the walls of the mausoleum, swiftly scaled it and climbed in through the same blood-smeared window through which Antony had been hoisted. Accompanied by the two slaves he had brought with him, Proculeius dashed past Antony’s stiffening body downstairs to where Cleopatra, still unsuspecting, was deep in earnest conversation with Gallus, her face to the door and her two waiting women beside her.

  As Proculeius ran toward them, one of the women turned and shrieked a warning to Cleopatra that she was about to be captured alive. Whipping around, Cleopatra pulled out the little dagger she had tucked into her belt, but before she could stab herself, the Roman had grabbed hold of her from behind, pinioned her arms and seized the knife. Then he frisked her, shaking out her clothes to check she had no poison concealed in them. Satisfied that she no longer had any means of harming herself, he left her under guard in the mausoleum.

  Soon afterward, Octavian made his formal entry into the city through the Gate of the Sun. By his side were not his military staff but his adviser on Egyptian affairs, a Greek Stoic philosopher named Arius, who had studied at the Museon. His presence was a considered gesture designed to show the apprehensive population that Octavian did not hold all things Greek or Egyptian in contempt. Passing along broad Canopus Street, the conqueror’s procession made its way to the Gymnasium, scene of the extravagant Donations of Alexandria. There Octavian mounted the dais that had been specially constructed for him. In somewhat shaky Greek—a language in which, according to Suetonius, he never became very fluent—he addressed the people gathered there. Fearing that their city would be given over to the soldiery for pillage and frightened out of their wits, they kept frantically prostrating themselves before Octavian until he told them to get up and announced that he was giving Alexandria “an absolute pardon.” His reasons were, he said graciously, threefold—his admiration for the city’s founder, Alexander, the greatness and beauty of the city and as a favor to his friend Arius.

  In a decision made with regard both to public sensibilities and also to appeasing and occupying Cleopatra, Octavian allowed her to give Antony “a sumptuous, royal burial.” Dio Cassius wrote that she embalmed her dead lover’s body with her own hands. She was by now ill—her breast was inflamed and ulcerated where she had beaten and scratched it in her grief and she was running a high fever. She had also given up eating in hopes of hastening her death. Her doctor and confidant Olympus, whose eyewitness account of Cleopatra’s last days was drawn on by Plutarch, was her accomplice. According to Plutarch, when Octavian threatened to harm her children, whom, with the exception of Caesarion, he now had under lock and key, she desisted. His well-directed threats “undermined her resolution as if they were siege-engines until she surrendered her body into the hands of those who wanted
to nourish and care for it.”

  A week after Antony’s death, to check on her mental and physical state, Octavian paid Cleopatra a visit in the palace to which she had been moved. Dio Cassius, to whom Cleopatra was “a woman of insatiable sexuality,” suggested that she had prepared carefully, dressing with studied negligence in robes of mourning that “wonderfully enhanced her beauty” and that she set out to flatter and seduce Octavian, whispering tremulously of her feelings for the man who reminded her of the long-dead Julius Caesar. Plutarch’s better-sourced account seems more credible. He described how Octavian found the once glamorous thirty-nine-year-old Egyptian queen sprawled on a straw mattress, clad only in a simple tunic. At the sight of him she leapt up and prostrated herself before him on the ground. “Her hair and face were unkempt and wild, her voice trembled, her eyes were sunken” and the self-inflicted bruises and lacerations on her breast were clearly visible. Octavian bade her recline once more and sat down beside her.

  Despite her wretchedness, Plutarch believed something of the old Cleopatra remained. Conscious still of her charisma and doubtless hopeful of achieving something for her children, she began to justify her actions, suggesting she had acted out of necessity, even hinting that she had been afraid of Antony. Octavian, however, would have none of it, knocking down her arguments one by one. Cleopatra switched from arguing to pleading. To ingratiate herself she handed Octavian a list of her most valuable personal possessions. Her steward somewhat spoiled the gesture by pointing out that the list was incomplete—Cleopatra had secreted some valuables away. Hearing this, Cleopatra jumped up and, rushing toward him, belabored the man’s face with her fists and pulled at his hair until a smiling Octavian stopped her. Thinking on her feet, she tried lamely to excuse herself by claiming that she had put aside a few of her jewels not for herself—she was far too miserable for such things—but, as she assured Octavian, “so she could give these trifles to Octavia and your Livia and through their intercession make you more compassionate and gentle towards me.”