Only three hundred senators! Ahenobarbus was disappointed that he couldn’t persuade a quarter of the loyal Antonians, let alone any of the neutrals, but the tally was respectable enough, he was sure, to make it impossible for Octavian to form a working government without huge ructions. A judgment largely made out of his own exclusivity; Ahenobarbus was a Palatine man with a Palatine man’s elitist view of Rome.
Antony was delighted to see them, and promptly set up an anti-Senate in the Ephesus city hall. Indignant merchants of wealth who had only a socius standing were evicted from their mansions; luckily, Ephesus was a big emporium and provided Antony with enough residences to accommodate this huge influx of important men and their families. The local plutocrats relocated in Smyrna, Miletus, and Priene, which led to the disappearance of commercial shipping from the harbor, another blessing; more war galleys could anchor there. What would happen to the city when the Roman assemblage departed didn’t worry Antony or his confreres, a pity; Ephesus was to take years to regain its prosperity.
Cleopatra wasn’t at all pleased at the advent of Ahenobarbus and the government-in-exile, who adamantly refused to permit her to attend the anti-Senate.
Which led her to snarl an imprudent statement to Ahenobarbus.
“You’ll be sorry for this when I sit in judgment on the Capitol!”
“You’ll not judge me, madam!” he snarled back. “If you sit in judgment on the Capitol, I’ll be dead—and all good Romans with me! I warn you, Cleopatra, that you’d better put such ideas out of your head, because it will never happen!”
“Don’t you dare address me by my given name!” she said in freezing tones. “You address me as ‘Your Majesty’—and bow!”
“In a pig’s eye I do, Cleopatra!”
She went straight to Antony, who had returned from Athens in a dull, lackluster mood she deduced was the result of his binge on Samos; Lucilius had reported.
“I want to attend the Senate, and I want that oaf Ahenobarbus disciplined!” she cried, standing with fists clenched by her sides and her mouth a thin red strip.
“My dear, you can’t possibly attend the Senate—it’s sacred to Quirinus, the god of Roman men. Nor am I in any position to—er—discipline men as august as Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. Rome isn’t ruled by a king, it’s a democracy. Ahenobarbus is my equal, as are all Roman men, no matter how poor or undistinguished. In the eyes of the law, Roman men are level. Primus inter pares, Cleopatra—all I can be is first among my equals.”
“Then that must change.”
“That can’t change. Ever. Did you really tell him that you would sit in judgment on the Capitol?” Antony asked, frowning.
“Yes. Once you’ve beaten Octavianus and Rome is ours, I will sit there as Caesarion’s deputy until he’s old enough.”
“Even Caesarion won’t be able to do that. He’s not a Roman, that’s one reason. And the other is that no living man or woman inhabits the Capitol. It’s sacred to our Roman gods.”
She stamped her foot. “Oh, I don’t understand you! One moment you appoint my son King of Kings, the next you have speech with a few Romans and you’re all a Roman again! Make up your mind! Am I to continue to finance my son’s bid for the world, or am I going to pack up and go back to Alexandria? You’re a fool, Antonius! A big, bumbling, indecisive idiot!”
In answer, Antony turned his shoulder; time would prove to her that when he defeated Octavian, Rome would go on as Rome always had—a republic owning no king. In the meantime, she was footing the bill, whole and entire. That didn’t make her the owner of a Roman army, but it did make her the owner of this campaign. Oh, he could compel her to return to Egypt. That was what every angry legate instructed him to do, more and more of them with each passing day. But if he sent her home, she would take her war chest with her, all twenty thousand gold talents of it. Some, like Atratinus, had told him openly that he should simply kill the sow, confiscate her war chest, and annex Egypt into the Empire. Knowing himself unable to do any of that, he bore Cleopatra’s diatribes in silence and reminded his legates who was paying. But some, like Atratinus, had ended in preferring Octavian’s rule to Cleopatra’s.
“How can I send her home?” he asked Canidius, one of her two Roman supporters.
“You can’t, Antonius, I know that.”
“Then why do so many others demand that I do it?”
“Because they’re not used to women in command, and they’ve failed to get it through their thick heads that she who pays the musicians calls the tune.”
“Will they ever get it through their thick heads?”
Canidius laughed at the genuinely funny question. “No, they won’t. An affirmative would mean sophistication, Hellenistic attitudes—all the qualities they don’t possess.”
Cleopatra’s other supporter was Lucius Munatius Plancus, whom she had bought with a lavish bribe. This investment also gained her Marcus Titius, his nephew, though Titius, more openly feral than Plancus, found it difficult to hide his dislike and contempt for his uncle’s new employer. What Cleopatra didn’t understand about Plancus was his unerring ability to choose the winning side in any clash between potential Roman First Men. Like the present Lucius Marcius Philippus’s grandfather, he was a born tergiversator, saw no disgrace in changing sides whenever instinct prompted it.
And, as he said to Titius at the end of a month in Ephesus, “I am beginning to see that Antonius remains hamstrung when it comes to dealing with That Woman. I think it’s nonsense that she drugs him, or even charms him the way a Marsian does a snake. No, it’s his deficiencies bind him to her—he’s a henpecked husband, and we all know plenty of them. He’d rather kidnap Cerberus from the doors of Hades than stand up to her, be it over a trifle or a huge ultimatum. While I fancied myself in love with Fulvia, I had a taste of it—she could bluff, bully, or bludgeon me into doing anything, and, like Cleopatra, she tried to occupy the command tent. Well, her only reward was to be divorced from Antonius for her temerity, but Cleopatra? She’s his mama, his lover, his best friend, and his co-commander.”
“Maybe that’s the core of it,” said Titius thoughtfully. “All Rome has known Antonius for twenty years as a pure force of nature. He got it up ten times a night every night, he left a trail of broken hearts, bastards, and cuckolded husbands in his wake, he knocked heads together as if they were melons, he drove chariots drawn by lions—he’s a legend rapidly on his way to becoming a myth. He made a difference in the Senate, he served valorously at Pharsalus and won Philippi brilliantly. He’s adulated! And now all of us who love him are discovering that our idol has feet of clay—Cleopatra dominates him utterly. A crushing blow.”
“The inescapable power of Nemesis…He’s paying for a legendary life. Well, Titius, we watch and wait. I still have friends in Rome, they’ll keep me informed as to how Octavianus deals with this coming crisis. The moment the scales tip in favor of Octavianus—we decamp.”
“Perhaps we should decamp now.”
“No, I think not,” said Plancus.
Much of Cleopatra’s perceived arrogance and rudeness stemmed from an insecurity both new and alarming; the culture she came from and the circumstances of her life to date had never imbued her with any consciousness that a woman, certainly one who was a queen, was inferior to a man. It never occurred to her that, entering the world of Roman men, neither her status nor her untold wealth could make them see her as their equal. Her basic mistake was to assume that it was her foreignness that provoked their antipathy; that it was her sex was so incredible she never considered it. Thus when she aped the behavior of her Roman enemies inside Antony’s circle, she aped to make herself seem more Roman, less foreign. Wearing a plumed helmet, a cuirass over a shirt of chain mail, and a short sword on a jeweled baldric, she marched around military headquarters cursing as foully as any legate, under the impression that when they cast her looks of loathing, they did so because she hadn’t succeeded in being Roman enough. When she toured the camps before Antony returned from Ath
ens, clad in her armor and mouthing her oaths, the legionaries laughed at her openly, the centurions tried to stifle their guffaws, the military tribunes looked her up and down as if she were a freak, the junior legates spat insults at her and proceeded to ignore her. On one occasion she demanded of a legion commander that he flog his primipilus centurion for insubordination; the man flatly refused, unintimidated.
“Run away and play with dolls, not toy soldiers!” he snapped.
He had given her the answer, but she didn’t see it. Not her foreignness: the fact that feminine lips spewed obscenities and a feminine body wore military gear. Women didn’t interfere with the doings of men, not in person and right under men’s noses.
When Antony did return from Athens she demanded retribution, but he declined to act, preferring to tell her to stay away from the camps if she didn’t want to look a fool; it never occurred to him that she didn’t understand the cause of Roman enmity. If she didn’t quite obey him, she made sure that in future the only camps she visited belonged to Antony’s non-Roman allies. Ah, they knew how to treat her! Polemon’s son Lycomedes (Polemon himself had gone back to Pontus to guard the far East against the Medes and Parthians), Amyntas of Galatia, Archelaus Sisenes of Cappadocia, Deiotarus Philadelphus of Paphlagonia, and the rest of the client-kings who had come to Ephesus fawned upon her.
She had noticed that Herod of Judaea hadn’t appeared, nor sent an army; once her complaints about her treatment had been summarily dismissed upon Antony’s return, she drew his attention to Herod’s absence, which perturbed him sufficiently to write the King of the Jews a letter. Herod’s answer was swift and full of flowery, obsequious phrases that, stripped bare and summed up, said matters in Jerusalem prevented his presence as much as they did the sending of an army. Open rebellion was a whisker away, so—a thousand pardons, but…True enough, though not the real reason for Herod’s delinquency. Herod’s instinct for survival was as exquisitely tuned as Plancus’s, and it was telling Herod that Antony might not win this war. To hedge his bets, he had sent a nice letter to Octavian in Rome, together with a gift for the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus—an ivory sphinx carved by Phidias himself. It had once belonged to Gaius Verres, who had looted it from his province of Sicily, and had been given as a fee to Hortensius for defending Verres (unsuccessfully) on many charges of exortion. From Hortensius it went to one of the Perquitieni for a thousand talents; bankrupted, that Perquitienus sold it for a hundred talents to a Phoenician merchant, whose widow, an artistic ignoramus, sold it to Herod for ten talents. Its real worth, Herod estimated, was anywhere between four and six thousand talents, and he had heard that Antony was showering artworks on Cleopatra. Queen Alexandra knew he had it, and if she tattled to Cleopatra, it would not long remain his. Hating his Egyptian neighbor with all his being, he decided the best place for it was Rome—in a public place of great sanctity. To get it from Jupiter Best and Greatest, Cleopatra would indeed have to sit in judgment upon the Capitol. It represented an investment for the future of his kingdom and himself. If Antony won—oh, perish the thought, tied as he was to Cleopatra! Not knowing that he echoed the sentiments of Atratinus, Herod decided that Antony’s only way out of his present predicament was to kill Cleopatra and annex Egypt into the Empire.
As the army and the fleets commenced to move from Ephesus to Greece at the end of summer, Antony hit upon the best present of all to give Cleopatra, to take her mind off the constant feuding and fighting in the command tent: he sent to Pergamum and ordered that the two hundred thousand scrolls in its library be packed up and sent to Alexandria.
“A little recompense for Caesar’s burning your books,” he said. “Many of them are duplicates, but there are some volumes unique to Pergamum.”
“Silly!” she said fondly, ruffling his hair. “It was a book warehouse on the waterfront that burned, not Alexandria’s library. That’s in the Museum.”
“Then I’ll give them back to Pergamum.”
She sat up straight. “Indeed you will not! If they remain in Pergamum, some Roman governor will confiscate them for Rome.”
24
“I’ve heard a peculiar rumor,” said Maecenas to Octavian when Octavian returned to Rome in April.
Knowing that Ahenobarbus and Sosius were ardently Antonian and also determined to stay in office for the entire year, Octavian had felt it prudent to leave Rome just after the New Year and stay away until he saw whether the doughty couple could swing the Senate around. They hadn’t thus far succeeded, and Octavian’s exquisitely sensitive instincts said they wouldn’t now. Rome was safe for him, would continue to be safe for him.
“Rumor?” he asked.
“That Ahenobarbus and Sosius have been rendered impotent by their master in Alexandria. Antonius ordered Ahenobarbus to read out a treasonous letter to the Senate, but he didn’t dare.”
“Do you have the letter?”
“No. Ahenobarbus burned it and gave a speech instead. Then when Sosius held the fasces in February, he spoke. Limp oratory.”
“Limp? The adjective I heard was ‘fiery’!”
“It couldn’t achieve its objective, to turn the Senate around. There were icicles on the Curia Hostilia eaves, yet Sosius sweated. In fact, both our consuls are as restive and restless as stabled mules smelling smoke.”
“Restive and restless?”
“Yes. Keeping up the muley metaphor, try to lead them, and they balk. Restive. But they can’t stay still. Restless. I’ve put our consuls’ behavior down to yet another rumor—that they intend to flee into exile, taking the Senate with them.”
“Leaving me to govern Rome and Italia without legal authority, a repetition of Pompeius Magnus’s conduct after Divus Julius crossed the Rubicon. Not very original.” Octavian shrugged. “Well, this time it won’t work. I’ll have a quorum in the Senate, and be able to appoint suffect consuls. How many senators do you think our pretty pair will cozen into going with them?”
“Not above three hundred, though most of the praetors will go—it’s an Antonian year for government.”
“So I’ll still have a hundred die-hard Antonians in Rome to stick daggers in my back.”
“They would all have gone, and a lot of the neutrals with them, save for Cleopatra. It’s that lady you have to thank for your being able to make a quorum. While she lingers in Antonius’s vicinity like a bad smell, Caesar, you’ll always have die-hard Antonians hovering around your back with daggers drawn, because they won’t hover around Cleopatra.”
“And is it true that Antonius is moving his legions and fleets to Ephesus?”
“Oh, yes. Cleopatra insists. She’s with him.”
“Which means she’s opened her money bags at last. How happy Antonius must be!” The long-lashed lids fell over Octavian’s eyes. “But how foolish! Can he really be contemplating civil war, or is this a ploy to push me into moving my legions east of the Drina?”
“I honestly don’t think it much matters what Antonius thinks. It’s Cleopatra set on war.”
“She’s a foreigner. If I could wipe Antonius off this tablet, it would be a foreign war against a foreigner bent on invading Italia and sacking Rome. Especially if Antonius’s forces move from Ephesus west to Greece or Macedonia.”
“A foreign war is far preferable. However, it’s a Roman army moving to Ephesus, and a Roman army possibly going on to Greece. Cleopatra has no troops of her own, just fleets, and those not in the majority. Sixty enormous fives and sixty mixed threes and twos out of five hundred war vessels.”
“I need whatever that letter from Antonius contained, Maecenas! Bother Ahenobarbus! Why did he have to be consul this year? He’s intelligent. A stupid man would have read the letter out despite its treasonous content.”
“Sosius isn’t stupid either, Caesar.”
“Then they’re best separated from Rome and Italia. They can do us less harm in Ephesus.”
“You mean you’ll not oppose their leaving the country?”
“Definitely. While
ever they’re here, they’ll make my life harder. Only where am I going to find the money to fight a war? And who will condone another civil one?”
“No one,” said Maecenas.
“Exactly. Everyone will see it as a struggle for supremacy between two Romans, whereas we know it’s a struggle against the Queen of Beasts. But we can’t prove that! Whatever we say about Antonius comes out sounding like an excuse to wage civil war. My reputation is in question! I’ve been quoted too many times as saying that I would never go to war against Antonius. Now I look like a hypocrite.”
Agrippa spoke; until now he had sat and listened. “I know a civil war won’t be condoned, Caesar, and I feel for you. But I hope you realize that you’ll have to start preparing for one now. At the rate things in the East are going, it will come on next year. That means you can’t demobilize the Illyrian legions. You will also have to gather fleets.”
“But how do I pay the legions? And how do I build extra war galleys? I’ve spent the entire contents of the Treasury settling over a hundred thousand veterans on good land!” Octavian cried.
“Borrow from the plutocrats. You’ve done that before,” said Agrippa.
“And plunge Rome back into staggering debt? Nearly half of Sextus Pompeius’s hoard never even reached the Treasury—it went on paying back loans with interest. I can’t do that again, I just can’t. It gives the knights too much power over the state.”
“Then tax,” said Maecenas.
“I daren’t! Not, at least, what I’d have to tax.”
“Have you worked the amount out already?” Maecenas asked.
“Of course I have. One of Antonius’s most telling slurs against me is that I’m more an accountant than a general. To keep thirty legions under the Eagles and provide a total of four hundred ships, I’d have to tax every Roman citizen from highest to lowest one-quarter of his annual income,” Octavian said.
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