Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  According to Plutarch, Octavian’s visit to Cleopatra convinced him that, despite her earlier displays of despair, she still valued her life. He told her that her valuables were for her to dispose of as she wished and that “he would give her more splendid treatment than she could possibly expect.” Cleopatra, though, was far too experienced to be lulled by platitudes and suspected Octavian’s true intentions toward her and her family. Plutarch described how she managed to worm the truth out of one of Octavian’s friends, the young, aristocratic Cornelius Dolabella, who told her that Octavian planned to leave Egypt in two days’ time, marching overland through Syria, and intended to pack Cleopatra and her children off to Rome, presumably by sea, in three days’ time. Just like her half sister, Arsinoe, they would be paraded before the mob in a Roman Triumph.

  The knowledge that her fate and that of her children would be as she feared seems to have decided Cleopatra that suicide would be preferable. Caught until then between her longing to follow her lover and her duty to her children, she may even have hoped that despite his earlier threats, with their mother dead, Octavian might spare her children. Concealing her emotions, she immediately begged Octavian’s permission to go to Antony’s tomb to pour libations on to his coffin. Octavian agreed and allowed Cleopatra, accompanied by her faithful ladies-in-waiting, Iras and Charmion, to make their way to the tomb. Once there, Cleopatra finally shed the carapace of regal self-reliance with which throughout her life she had sought to mask her vulnerability. Plutarch related how she fell on Antony’s coffin, lamenting that she was nothing but a prisoner of fate, a captive slave, to be “closely watched and preserved for the triumph to be celebrated over your defeat . . . In life nothing could divide us but now in death it seems that we must change places: you, the Roman will lie here and I will lie in Italian soil.” Though the earthly gods had abandoned them both, she begged Antony to invoke the help of the gods of the underworld and not allow “your wife,” as she simply styled herself, to be the centerpiece of a Triumph.

  She draped the coffin with garlands of flowers and, in a universal gesture of widow’s grief, kissed it a final farewell. Then Cleopatra returned to her apartments, where she ordered a bath to be prepared. On rising from its scented depths, she once more resumed her regal dignity and prepared for the final act of her twenty-year-long reign. She ordered her attendants to fetch her royal robes, probably the brilliantly colored garb of the goddess Isis, and to dress her, taking as much care as if she were preparing once more to meet her lover at Tarsus. Next, a lavish midday meal—which some have equated to a formal funeral banquet—was served to her. Plutarch stated that in the middle of this feast a man arrived carrying a woven basket. Challenged by the guards, he raised the lid to reveal a pile of temptingly large and luscious figs beneath a layer of green leaves and invited the guards to help themselves. Suspicious no longer, the guards allowed him to enter Cleopatra’s chamber.

  Once she had finished eating, Cleopatra dispatched a message she had already inscribed on a tablet to Octavian. Determined that her destiny should be forever united with that of Antony, her missive was a passionate appeal to be buried with her lover. Then she ordered all her attendants except Charmion and Iras to leave her so that she could make her last preparations for death and compose herself to it. Plutarch believed that, since returning to Alexandria after Actium and establishing the Society of Partners in Death, she had been seeking a painless form of suicide. He related how, with single-minded thoroughness, she had assembled a collection of various types of lethal poisons and tested each of them to see which was painless by giving them to condemned prisoners. When she saw to her dismay that the fast-acting ones brought a swift but painful death whereas the gentler ones were slow to take effect, she continued with her experiments on one prisoner after another. This became her daily routine, and she found that “in almost every case only the bite of an asp produced a sleepy lethargy without any convulsions or groans; their faces covered with a sheen of perspiration and their senses dulled, the men painlessly lost the use of their limbs and resisted all attempts to rouse them.”

  But, as Plutarch acknowledged, “no one knows the truth” of what really happened in Cleopatra’s apartments that day. Many in the ancient world believed that an asp was indeed responsible—smuggled in, just as Shakespeare portrays, in the basket of ripe figs. Others claimed Cleopatra had kept an asp concealed within a water jar. While she was goading it to come out by poking at it with a golden stick, “it lunged at her and fastened on her arm.” Yet another theory was that Cleopatra had concealed a hollow hairpin filled with poison in her hair.

  Whatever method she used, death must have come relatively quickly. Immediately on receiving her suicide note, Octavian ordered some of his men to Cleopatra’s apartments. Shouting to the guards to open the doors, the men rushed inside to find Cleopatra arrayed in her royal robes, dead upon a golden couch. Iras lay dying by her feet while Charmion, so weak she could barely stand or hold her head upright, was attempting with trembling fingers to adjust the diadem on Cleopatra’s forehead. According to Plutarch, one of the men spat out, “ ‘A fine deed, this, Charmion!’ to which she replied, ‘Yes, nothing could be finer. It is no more than befits this lady, the descendant of so many kings,’ ” whereupon she too slumped dead by Cleopatra’s couch.

  And so Cleopatra staged the last great spectacle of her reign, passing from life into legend upon her golden couch as the last of the Ptolemies of Egypt and the woman who, in the words of Dio Cassius, “through her own unaided genius captivated the two greatest Romans of her time.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “Too Many Caesars Is Not a Good Thing”

  OCTAVIAN APPEARED BOTH ASTOUNDED and angered by Cleopatra’s death. It was, Dio Cassius wrote, “as if all the glory of his victory had been taken away from him”—in their final tussle Cleopatra had outwitted him. This was doubtless what she had intended. Though grief at losing Antony and fears for the future had been her primary motives for choosing to die, her decision had been more than a desperate way out. Throughout her life she had struggled, sometimes fought, for control over her destiny and the right to her throne. Her death was a way of reasserting her power, of converting humbling defeat into victory, of regaining what a Roman would call her dignitas.

  According to Suetonius, in hopes of reviving the motionless queen, Octavian summoned snake charmers “to suck the poison from her self-inflicted wound.” This could, of course, have been playacting. Since his initial efforts to keep Cleopatra alive, the ever cautious Octavian might have changed his view and decided that, on balance, a dead Cleopatra was preferable to a live one. After all, the Roman crowds had not reacted well to the sight of Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe marching in chains in Caesar’s Triumph. The charismatic Cleopatra similarly might have aroused their sympathy. Also, the public disgracing of her might have seemed an affront to Caesar, who had erected her glittering image in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. It is just conceivable that Octavian helped engineer Cleopatra’s suicide by priming Dolabella to reveal the humiliating fate he had in store for her and her children and by relaxing the surveillance she was under. Yet more likely, Cleopatra had indeed convinced Octavian that life was still dear to her, so he failed to anticipate her suicide.

  The manner and mystery of Cleopatra’s death were eagerly debated in Alexandria and in Rome. The snake idea quickly gained currency. Although those searching her apartments found no serpents lurking there, some claimed to have seen a snake’s slithering track along the shore beneath the windows while others reported “two faint puncture marks” on Cleopatra’s lifeless arm. Death by snakebite appears to have been the version Octavian believed—at least publicly. Plutarch noted that he ordered a gigantic image of Cleopatra with a snake clinging to her arm to be carried in his Egyptian Triumph in 29.

  But if Cleopatra did indeed die by a serpent’s bite, it is unlikely that an asp was responsible. Plutarch’s claim that the prisoners bitten by asps on Cleopatra’s instructions perished
quietly and painlessly was wrong. Asp is a general term used to describe various small vipers of North Africa and Arabia.* A viper’s venom poisons the blood, causing an immediate burning sensation and bringing on giddiness, nausea and desperate thirst. The infected part of the body turns purple and begins to swell and the victim loses all control of bodily functions, sometimes helplessly vomiting, urinating and defecating, before finally passing out. This hardly would have been the death chosen by a divine monarch so conscious of appearances.

  Cleopatra more probably selected as her instrument of suicide the blackish brown or yellow Egyptian cobra or uraeus common in the marshlands of the Nile delta. Cobra venom is a nerve poison rather than a blood toxin and a cobra’s bite leaves only puncture marks on the skin—like those noted by eyewitnesses on Cleopatra’s body—with no discoloration or swelling. The victim begins to feel sleepy as paralysis takes hold, leading to coma and a slide into death. Such an end would have been both painless and dignified. Also, the cobra or uraeus would have appealed to Cleopatra. Not only was it sacred to Isis but it was also the symbol of the royal house of Egypt—the rearing cobras on the royal crown symbolized their protection of the wearer and a spitting defiance to any would-be enemy. Cleopatra would have considered the imagery of the cobra a suitable farewell message to Octavian.

  Yet even this solution begs further questions. The Egyptian cobra would have been hard for Cleopatra to conceal—the smallest cobra capable of killing a human being is around four feet long. An even bigger serpent—perhaps as long as six feet—would have been required to kill Iras and Charmion as well as their mistress. How could a reptile of such size have been smuggled into Cleopatra’s chambers? Perhaps, as several writers believed, including Horace and Vergil, there was more than one snake. Whatever the case, the legendary basket of figs carried into Cleopatra’s chamber of death seems an inadequate camouflage. But Cleopatra never lacked courage or ingenuity—somehow, in those burning days of high summer in Alexandria, she found a way of arranging her death to her satisfaction.

  Whatever his feelings toward her in life, Octavian seems to have been impressed by Cleopatra’s dignity and firmness of purpose at her end. He granted her last request to be buried beside Antony “with the kind of splendid ceremony suitable for a queen.” Octavian’s compassion did not, however, extend to Caesarion. Cleopatra’s suicide had done nothing to protect her eldest son, around whom so many of her hopes had been built. Suetonius related how Octavian dispatched cavalry in pursuit of Caesarion with orders to kill him. Other accounts tell of how the sixteen-year-old was lured back to Alexandria, perhaps through the treachery of his tutor Rhodon. However he was captured, the results were the same. Caesarion was just too dangerous to be allowed to live and was immediately executed. Octavian’s adviser Arius had counseled him that “too many Caesars is not a good thing,” and Octavian had agreed.

  Antony’s elder son by Fulvia, Antyllus, was also murdered. He had taken refuge by a statue of Julius Caesar, probably in the Caesareum. Despite his screams for mercy, he was dragged from the statue and his head hacked off. His tutor took advantage of the scuffling and confusion surrounding his pupil’s killing to steal a valuable jewel that Antyllus had always worn around his neck. Despite the tutor’s attempts to conceal the stone by sewing it into his belt, his theft was discovered and Octavian ordered him to be crucified. Though he was not such a threat as Caesarion, Antyllus suffered for having donned the toga virilis and formally come of age during the last months of Cleopatra and Antony’s rule. Octavian also would have been mindful that, several years earlier, Antony had declared Antyllus his heir and issued coins bearing both their heads.

  However, Octavian spared all Antony’s other children, whether by Cleopatra or by Fulvia, and of course Antony’s daughters by Octavia. Cleopatra Selene and her two full brothers, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, were made to march close to the image of their dead mother in Octavian’s Egyptian Triumph, which, according to Dio Cassius, “surpassed all others in luxury and magnificence.” They were then placed in the care of the virtuous and maternal Octavia, together with their half brother, Antony’s younger son by Fulvia, Iullus Antonius. Perhaps significantly, although she lived until 11 BC, Octavia never remarried. Perhaps she too had really loved Antony.

  In his own account of his life, Octavian claimed that after the conquest of Alexandria he pardoned all Antony’s Roman supporters who sought clemency, but he was, as so often, stretching the truth. He showed no mercy to the two surviving assassins of Julius Caesar who had been with Antony or to Antony’s loyal general Canidius Crassus and several others, including a Roman senator who had run Cleopatra’s woolen mill. All were executed.

  Octavian did, however, spare Alexandria, together with its citizens, as he had promised. Although he ordered all statues of Antony to be toppled and removed, he allowed those of Cleopatra to remain—a concession secured by a rich Alexandrian for a payment of two thousand talents. Octavian also continued work on the Caesareum—Cleopatra’s still incomplete memorial to his adoptive father. To make the building yet more imposing, he ordered two rose granite obelisks to be moved from Heliopolis and erected in front of it. The hieroglyphs on them reveal that they were originally erected by Tutmoses III in front of Heliopolis’ temple to the sun in the first half of the fifteenth century BC.*

  Octavian also put his men to work, improving Egypt’s canal system and dredging the mud from some of the Nile tributaries. The purpose was not so much to benefit the Egyptians but to improve the transport of Egyptian grain to Rome, where it soon met one third of the capital’s needs. Cargo fleets of up to five hundred ships at a time transported it across the Mediterranean to make Roman bread.

  Territories Antony had given Cleopatra became Roman provinces once more and Herod regained the lands he had lost to the Egyptian queen. He governed Judaea with increasing ruthlessness, suppressing any dissent and killing three of his sixteen sons for plotting against him—an act that caused Octavian to remark that it was better to be Herod’s pig than his child. In his final years, crazed with pain from a disease—perhaps cancer—that was putrefying his still-living body, Herod became yet more paranoid and cruel.

  The fate Cleopatra had once feared for her country and striven to avoid overtook it: Egypt was annexed to Rome. However, the country remained so rich, so important and so potentially dangerous as a focal point for dissent and rebellion that Octavian appointed not a senator to govern it but a member of the knightly or equites class. Furthermore, he made the governor report not to the Senate but directly to himself. Egypt thus became unique in the empire as Octavian’s personal fief. Senators were not even allowed to visit Egypt, never mind live there, without Octavian’s explicit personal consent. The first occupant of the governor’s post was Cornelius Gallus, who successfully put down rebellions and led military expeditions up the Nile and into Ethiopia. But despite his relatively humble background, Egypt appears to have seduced Gallus with delusions of grandeur, as it had so many others before him. He began openly disparaging Octavian when drunk, erecting great numbers of statues of himself throughout the country and having a list of his achievements chiseled into one of the pyramids. Octavian summoned him to Rome, where in 26 he was forced to commit suicide for his hubris.

  Octavian’s personal attitude toward Egypt was equivocal but pragmatic. Before leaving the country he had visited Alexander’s mausoleum, where he inspected the iconic leader’s embalmed body and, according to Suetonius, showed his veneration by crowning the head with a golden diadem and strewing the body with flowers. Dio Cassius claimed he went further, inadvertently breaking off a piece of Alexander’s nose, which he had touched, no doubt, out of curiosity. Octavian refused an invitation to view the bodies of the Ptolemies in their mausolea, insisting that he “came to see a King, not a row of corpses.” Nor would he visit the Apis bull, remarking that he was “accustomed to worship gods not cattle.”

  Yet Octavian was sufficiently concerned with administrative continuity
to allow—no doubt with an appropriate show of reluctance—for the last regnal year of Cleopatra’s rule to be followed in the official Egyptian calendar by the first year of his own, as well as allowing himself to be referred to formally as the “father of the country.” He added his name to those inscribed on the Temple of Dendera, the exterior walls of which depicted the graceful forms of Cleopatra and Caesarion, and placed his granite portrait next to that of Cleopatra’s father, Auletes, in a temple he had built to Isis. Later he permitted his wife, Livia, to appear on the Egyptian coinage—something that never occurred elsewhere and which may have been a concession to the Egyptian concept of joint rule. Such Egyptian coins even bore the double cornucopia—the badge of the Ptolemies—on the reverse.

  In Rome, the conquest of Egypt and, in particular, the acquisition of the contents of Cleopatra’s vast treasuries triggered a financial boom. Allegedly keeping only one of Cleopatra’s jeweled drinking cups for himself, Octavian ordered all the rest of her opulent gold and silverware to be melted down. Keen to retain the loyalty of his legions, he paid a special premium of about a year’s pay to the soldiers who had participated in the Alexandrian campaign as well as a general premium of the same amount to all his soldiers. He also spent a great deal of money buying land on which to settle his veterans, since he was eager to reduce the size of the armies swiftly to peacetime levels and thus lessen the potential for revolt. Rates of interest in Rome and Italy tumbled from 12 to 4 percent and the price of land doubled, producing a feel-good effect throughout the country. Octavian took the opportunity to underline his own part in this prosperity by minting coins as a beneficent victor and the founder of a new, yet stronger, prouder Rome. He also gave four hundred sesterces to each male citizen of Rome. The Roman population, which had yearned for so long for an end to civil wars and anarchic upheavals, was content even at the price of losing some liberties as Octavian strengthened his grip. As Dio Cassius wrote, “They forgot all the hardships they had suffered and accepted Octavian’s triumph with pleasure as though the enemies he had conquered had all been foreigners.”