Cleopatra Read online

  One man who emerged briefly was Publius Cornelius Dolabella. The ex-son-in-law of Cicero, he had been a supporter, nonetheless, of Caesar in the Pompey civil war and had fought with him at Pharsalus and Thapsus. He was prone to push the senate to pass laws that suited him personally, such as the cancellation of debts. On Caesar’s death, Dolabella suddenly switched sides, claiming to have been part of the conspiracy all along. He detested Mark Antony, as of course did Cicero, but even so, was slippery enough to accept cash from him and as consul, made sure that there was no martyr cult to Caesar in the months following the assassination. In October 43 he left to take up his post as governor of Syria and this brought him indirectly into Cleopatra’s orbit.

  The queen must have known that the news of the on-going civil war in Rome would affect her sooner or later. She still had three of Caesar’s legions in Alexandria and a fourth had been added recently so there were some 20,000 Romans in her capital. It remained to be seen who would approach her first for those troops and in the event it was Dolabella. Only in his twenties, the man had an awesome military reputation. He was a hot-head and hugely popular, an only slightly watered-down version of Mark Antony, and Cleopatra probably thought he was the official face of the new Rome and she had no choice but to comply. If it came to it, ‘her’ legions were not likely to fight for her against their own people, so she let them go, leaving her kingdom dangerously defenceless. Her own army was big enough to put down internal revolts and in Alexandria she still had the Gabinian bodyguard, but if a Roman army came against her, it was unlikely she would survive. But there had to be a deal in her parting with the legions; Rome must recognize Caesarion as king of Egypt.

  Cleopatra’s fleet was hijacked by Cassius to whom it defected without a murmur and this can only be explained by the fact that the vast majority of her naval force must have been Roman. Now it was Cassius’ turn to ask her for help. Cassius’ reputation was not high and during her time in Rome, it is likely that Cleopatra learned of it. He was cruel and vicious, his temper not lessened by the fact that he had been beaten by the slave army of Spartacus when Cleopatra was a little girl. Such slurs on a man’s reputation rarely went away. He knew Syria well, crushing a rebellion in Judaea in 52, and he was marching there now with twelve legions at his back. A prime mover in the assassination of Caesar, he had wanted to kill Mark Antony, too, but the genuinely honourable Brutus had stopped him. Brutus believed he was killing an idea, not a man.

  Cleopatra hedged. There was plague in her country and famine. This was no doubt true but it would not have precluded her sending more of her formidable fleet if she had wanted to. In the event, Serapion on Cyprus sent Cassius the ships he had and the Romans marched on Laodicia where Dolabella was entrenched. By now it was July 43 and Dolabella was isolated. Beaten and with his troops scurrying to Cassius’ standards, Dolabella did what was ‘fine, what’s Roman’, and ordered a soldier to thrust a sword into his heart.

  It would have taken Cassius days to reach the Egyptian border and his army was more or less intact. By now he had grown tired of Cleopatra’s vacillation and probably guessed that his opponents Antony and Octavian had also asked for her help. Luckily for Cleopatra Cassius, while on the march south received a messenger galloping from Brutus in Greece. Antony and Octavian were on the march. The unlikely comrades had buried their differences and were on the warpath. Reluctantly, Cassius broke his camp and marched north again.

  The exact sequence of events is unclear at this point but the fleet earmarked for Cassius was already at sea and Cleopatra was leading it. In fact, she had no intention of giving him any support but probably planned to throw in her lot with Antony and Octavian. Her own personal presence with the fleet cannot be explained any other way. Does it prove, after all, that Cleopatra really did love Julius Caesar, that she was sailing to play her part in the downfall of his murderers? Perhaps not, but it does add to our concept of the queen. The twenty-year-old who had once led her armies on campaign in the desert east of Pelusium was now the twenty-seven-year-old prepared to sail into battle against the mightiest military power on earth. Those historians who point out she was no general have overlooked these events.

  In his fascinating book The Hinge Factor,57 Erik Durschmied looks at the turning points in history, the often insignificant things that have shaped the past. It may be that Cleopatra’s fleet would have achieved nothing in 43–42, but we shall never know because storms at sea wrecked her ships and she had to run to port for safety. She herself was taken ill and for anti-Cleopatrans this is proof that she was no sailor and half explains her later actions at Actium in 31.58 Her illness was probably seasickness, by the way, and it was the pounding her ships took that led to her decision to call the whole thing off. In one way, it was the best of all worlds. She had promised to help both sides in the civil war and had not lost a man in battle. On the other hand, she had given away four legions and a fleet, had a second fleet damaged and had endeared herself to nobody.

  The heirs of Caesar were an ill-assorted pair. Mark Antony was the gruff soldier, reveller and Jack the lad. He had a cheery disposition and a notorious reputation with women. Handsome and powerful, he grew a beard in mourning for Caesar, which only seemed to make him so much more of a man than Octavian, who was twenty years younger. The man who would become Rome’s first emperor as Augustus was only twenty years old in 43 and Cicero at least saw him as a rising star. In various letters from Cicero, Octavian shape-shifts from ‘the boy’ to ‘that heaven-sent young man’.59 Antony clearly only ever regarded him as the boy.

  What Octavian did have, however, was Caesar’s name and that, in a Rome prepared to deify the dead dictator, was hugely important. Octavian may have been young, puny and probably a physical coward, but Antony needed him. He also needed Marcus Lepidus, who, in an age when the legions followed a general rather than the abstraction that was Rome, commanded several thousand men that Antony needed to track down Caesar’s killers. In November 43, the three men met at Boninia (near today’s Bologna) and thrashed out an agreement. Over two days of horse-trading, the second triumvirate was formed. Antony and Octavian wanted vengeance for Caesar, Lepidus wanted money and nobody believed that this three-cornered, self-centred alliance could last much longer than the time it took to defeat Brutus and Cassius.

  The excesses of Caesar had left Rome virtually bankrupt and the triumvirate needed money. It also needed to make sure that it would be politically accepted by Rome itself. None of the three had the stature and gravitas of Caesar and those qualities had got him killed. The only way to secure support was to remove opposition so that the senate and the assemblies would rubber-stamp everything the triumvirs wanted to do. So Sulla-style proscription returned to Rome. Each man compiled a list of men he wanted exiled or dead. Staunch republican virtues, large estates, slurs real and imagined, all went into the melting pot of causation. Cassius Dio wrote that the city was full of corpses, which was an exaggeration but the blood-letting had its effect. When Antony and Octavian led their armies to Greece, it was in the sure knowledge that Rome would behave itself under Lepidus until their return.

  The highest-profile casualty in the proscriptions was Cicero, who had been a thorn in Antony’s side for so long. He was on the point of leaving his villa to take ship to somewhere safe when a centurion caught him, dragged him off his litter and cut off the head of the greatest orator Rome had known. The head and the hand that had written so many anti-Antony diatribes were taken to Antony’s house. They arrived while he was at dinner with friends, and his wife Fulvia spat on it and, removing a hairpin from her elegant coiffure, rammed it into Cicero’s no longer deadly tongue.

  The triumvirs’ army landed near Apollonia and marched along the Via Egnatia in Macedon. Antony landed first; if Brutus and Cassius had had the foresight, they could have beaten him before Octavian arrived. The truth was that Brutus had no military experience at all and though it is difficult to measure such things, it seemed that the bulk of Caesar’s veterans were with
Antony. Despite the Romans’ penchant for exaggerating figures, the armies that clashed twice at Philippi in October were the largest ever sent out of Italy. The republicans had nineteen legions and 20,000 cavalry to the triumvirs’ nineteen and 13,000 horse. There is a sense that commanding so many men in the field was a step too far with relatively primitive communication systems. Clashes and skirmishes over several days resulted in the first pitched battle in which Antony smashed Cassius’ legions and captured his camp. The republican, believing the whole field lost, committed suicide. In fact, Brutus had done well, driving Octavian’s troops back and inflicting heavy losses while their commander, ill and probably terrified, was nowhere to be seen.

  Three weeks later, Antony forced Brutus to commit again. While Octavian’s troops held the centre, Antony’s crossed a marsh and hit the republicans in the flank. Like Cassius, Brutus took his own life and Caesar was avenged.

  Early in 41, Quintus Dellius, who had changed sides so often in recent years that a fellow politician called him ‘the bare-back vaulter of the civil wars’, came to Alexandria. He had been sent to ask the queen of Egypt for an account of her vacillation for the last four months and he came on the orders of the triumvir, Mark Antony.

  14

  THE GENTLEST AND KINDEST OF SOLDIERS

  ROME, 83

  The man who would die with Cleopatra was born fourteen years before her, the son of Marcus Antonius Creticus and Julia, sister of Lucius Julius Caesar who was consul in 64. If we only had Cicero’s opinion of him – ‘In truth, we ought not to think of him as a human being, but a most outrageous beast’60 – that would be no truth at all.

  The actual date of Antony’s birth is uncertain, but it was possibly 14 January 83. The Antonii were a distinguished plebeian family but Julia was patrician, the fifth cousin of Julius Caesar, and that gave Mark Antony a foot in both political camps as far as a career was concerned. Since his father, stepfather and grandfather all held senatorial rank and were quaestors at various times, it was inevitable that the family should be caught up in the civil war between Marius and Sulla that in some ways marked the beginning of the end of the Republic. When Marius returned to Rome at the head of an army four years before Antony was born, his grandfather became one of the would-be dictator’s victims. Stabbed to death, Marcus Antonius’ head was taken to Marius. Such appalling precedents are difficult to forget and may explain in part the fate of Cicero twenty-six years later.

  In 72 Marcus Antonius’ son (Antony’s father) was sent to Crete to control the extremely serious pirate situation there. His fleet was beaten by the Cilicians whose naval warfare was formidable and unimpressed Romans called him Creticus in mockery of a failed campaign. Antony was eight at the time and his disgraced father died on Crete, leaving huge debts and a miserable reputation. Julia married Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura who became consul in 71 and Antony spent the rest of his childhood years in his house.

  As a boy from a well-placed and connected family, Antony would have been groomed for a public career. Apart from the planning of actual conspiracies, such as that which toppled Caesar in 44, much of Roman life was extraordinarily public. Politicians made speeches in the Forum and outside temples; trials were held in the open air. Budding orators – and every politician had to be an orator – would have to prove themselves against large, indifferent or even hostile audiences. Antony would become part of all this, although, despite his famous oration burying, not praising Caesar, he never reached the heights of his grandfather in this respect.

  Young Antony would have learned a great deal under a private tutor – Latin and Greek literature, rhetoric, history – and would know the role of the pantheon of minor gods that guarded his home and his life. The lares watched over the hearth; educa and genialis guided the boy’s mind – there was a long list of them.

  He also learned to fight, wrestling on the open plain of the Campus Martius, handling the short stabbing sword all Roman soldiers used, throwing the pilum (a lance) and riding without stirrups61 on the four-pronged saddle. Politicians in Rome were expected to be field commanders, too; the Republic expected an awful lot of its leaders – they had to be generals, financiers, judges and events managers. Few men could manage it all.

  When Antony was thirteen, his uncle and stepfather were both stripped of their senatorial rank by the censors of 70. It is unclear precisely why and smacks of hypocrisy. Senators were supposed to be impeccable in their personal and private lives, but as we have seen, this was rarely the case. Caius Antonius and Publius Lentulus seem to have been unlucky – two of sixty-four senators who were the victims of what Lord Macaulay centuries later referred to as the ridiculous spectacle of one of society’s fits of morality. He was talking about nineteenth-century Britain, but it could equally well have been Rome in the century before Christ.

  Despite the existence of his stepfather, technically, on the death of Marcus Antonius Creticus, Antony was the head of the household. The coming of age of Roman boys was not fixed and there is no actual date for Antony’s. At some point in his early teens he now wore the toga virile of a man rather than the smaller, purple-edged praetexta of a boy. He also embarked on a career of debauchery with his friend Caius Scribonius Curio and acquired a taste for wine and women that never left him. Antony wore a thick, short beard at a time when most Romans were clean-shaven and wore his tunic short to show off his powerful legs. All the later images of the man, on busts and coins, show a muscular, thick-set man, completely at odds with the puny Octavian and even the sinewy Caesar. He and Curio worked their way through a succession of courtesans, the well-bred and surprisingly intellectual tarts who were passed around the Roman elite as a matter of course. In that sense, many Romans realized later, Antony’s dalliance with Cleopatra was just more of the same.

  Just as Antony’s family were caught up in the Marius/Sulla convulsions, so were they in the attempted revolt by Cataline. Lentulus backed the man wholeheartedly and in the fallout that followed, was executed for his pains by garotting. Antony was twenty by this time and old enough to be involved, but he seems to have escaped any of the taint and was probably genuinely innocent or someone would have publicly named him. His uncle Caius Antonius was put on corruption charges in 59 and exiled.

  That Antony should have survived so far was extraordinary and it may have been his mounting debts that led to his first marriage, to Fadia, the daughter of Quintus Fabius Gallius. Fabius was a freedman, so his family had no political clout at all. It may be that he was rich and that Fadia’s dowry had its own appeal to a young man who had so far done nothing with his life as his family crashed and burned around him. It is equally possible that Antony let his heart rule his head. All his life he was attracted to feisty women – perhaps Fadia was simply the first of these.

  In politics, Antony associated himself with the briefly rising star that was Publius Clodius Pulcher, who, with his opponent Milo, was taking Roman elections and realpolitik ever further into the gutter. The liaison did not last long; the pair quarrelled (exactly why is unknown) and Antony left for Greece, nominally to study rhetoric but perhaps because financially he could no longer afford to live in Rome.

  He was still there in 57 when Aulus Gabinius passed through Greece on his way to take up the proconsulship in Syria. He almost certainly knew Antony already and took him on. Antony was twenty-six by now without any real experience of politics or the army and the exact role that he took on is unclear. A general (which was what, in effect, Gabinius was as proconsul) needed a staff of officers – the comites – who were responsible for all the minutiae of logistics for an army in the field. Crucial as these men were, the post had little appeal for Antony who was a ‘dash and fire’ soldier in the mould of Pompey. So he became praefectus equitum, prefect of horse, the rough equivalent of a colonel. As such he would command an ala, a cavalry regiment or perhaps two or three together in a brigade. Most modern commentators on Cleopatra claim that Antony commanded Gabinius’ cavalry, but this is unlikely in a man with
little except keenness to recommend him.

  The fighting in which Antony took part is at once complicated and unclear. The Romans found themselves, inevitably, in a country in which they had no rights, in the middle of a civil war in Samaria and Judaea to the south. Near Alexandrion in the Jordan Valley, Mark Antony erupted onto the military scene, impressing everyone with his guts and ability in hand-to-hand combat. He handled mopping-up operations around Alexandrion and was still involved in this when Gabinius received his offer from Ptolemy Auletes to help him get his throne back.

  Plutarch, always superficial, says that Antony took Pelusium in the desert east of Alexandria, but the ease with which he did this probably implied that the city surrendered without a fight. This did not prevent Antony and other generals from adding it to a list of battle honours.62 Appian, always rather romantically inclined, claims that Antony met the fourteen-year-old Cleopatra at this point and that he fell in love with her. Antony was certainly impetuous and impulsive, and Cleopatra probably already perfectly able to flaunt her considerable charms, but both of them had other plans for the rest of their lives.

  Gabinius may have been successful in Syria and in putting Auletes back on his throne, but like far too many over-ambitious provincial governors, he had overstepped the mark and had to answer for it in Rome. Sensibly, although it is difficult to see that much blame could attach to him, Antony stayed in Syria. Marcus Licinius Crassus now took Gabinius’ place and began his ill-fated Parthian campaign. It made sense for Antony to join him; he was already in the east and had recent military experience whereas Crassus was over sixty and had not led an army in the field since the Spartacus war in 70. In the event, Antony joined Caesar instead.