Cleopatra Read online

  Thanks to Shakespeare and the actual events that followed Caesar’s assassination, we have the impression that Antony had always been the future dictator’s right-hand man, as close to him as a son. This is far from the case. The men were, as we have seen, distantly related by marriage and they must, in the small circle that was the Roman republica, have met. We do not know why or exactly how Antony approached Caesar, but it is likely to have been that way round. Caesar had temporarily abandoned the cut and thrust of Roman politics for the cut and thrust of brutal warfare against the tribes of Gaul where Antony turned up in 53.

  Again, his status and duties are unclear. Given Antony’s earlier experiences, he may well have commanded cavalry units, but Caesar does not mention him until the brilliant siege of Alesia in the summer of 52, during which time Antony had gone back to Rome to further his political career before rejoining Caesar on the front line. Adrian Goldsworthy paints a picture of Antony, now thirty and eligible for a quaestorship for the first time, striding through the Forum in the dazzling white toga candidus on his way to the sheep pens in which the open voting took place. With him would have been slaves – the nomenclatores – who knew anyone who was anyone by sight and would whisper the relevant name to Antony so that he could glad-hand with confidence. This summer, though, it was different. The cracks in the pavement had widened and the street fighting between the thugs of Clodius and Milo delayed the elections for some weeks.

  Antony was elected but in an atmosphere of martial law. The murder of Clodius had led a terrified senate to beg Pompey to restore order and this he did by force. It paved the way for Antony’s policy later. He watched as a triumvir used his legions to force through the legality of the senate. The time would come in Rome, and it would not be long now, when three power brokers would become one and the senate would not matter at all.

  What is telling about Antony’s various military appointments is how limited they were. Plutarch and subsequently Shakespeare paint a picture of the middle-aged Antony as a veteran. He is ‘the garland of the war’, a hugely successful general against Octavian’s boyish callowness. There is almost the temptation to put Antony on the same footing as Caesar and Pompey, but the facts speak otherwise. He became Caesar’s quaestor on his return to Gaul but by 50 he was back in Rome following up his political career.

  The first step on this road was to get himself elected, with the backing of Caesar’s supporters and Caesar’s newly obtained Gallic money, to the college of augurs. Priests in ancient Rome did not have the same gravitas as those of Cleopatra’s Egypt. They were political appointments at the highest level, as they remained in the Church of England, for example, until very recently. The augurs, like the Vestal Virgins, had supposed powers of prophecy, reading signs like the weather, bird flight patterns or interpreting rare, inexplicable events. There was no actual spiritual element in all this, but the Romans were superstitious, almost fatalistic people and such omens were important to them. Antony won against Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus and the post was life membership of what was in effect a very exclusive club of the Roman elite.

  Of more importance was the post of Tribune of the Plebs, which Antony obtained next and he became one of ten appointees for 49. This gave the man real political power. He could frame bills that would become law and veto anything he disapproved of in the senate. He would do that twice on Caesar’s behalf in the months ahead. With him was Gaius Cassius Longinus, at that stage a Caesar man rather than an embittered and murderous opponent.

  Throughout the year, Antony defended Caesar consistently against those who thought that the general had overreached himself in Gaul. Pompey, who had not actually gone to Spain to take up his appointment there, but had wisely stayed on the spot in Rome, was scornful of Antony. To Cicero he wrote, ‘What do you think Caesar will be like if he gets command of the Republic, if his weak and worthless quaestor acts like this!’63 Pompey couldn’t even be bothered to give Antony his official tribunal rank. He was often drunk or hungover in public and on one occasion spectacularly vomited while making a speech in the senate.

  Both Antony and Cassius were waiting as Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched south. They called the senate to a meeting on 1 April while Caesar waited beyond the city walls with his army. There were few attendees, as we have seen, but the general stayed just long enough to strip the Treasury before marching to Spain. At his back, he entrusted Rome itself to Marcus Lepidus and the rest of Italy to Antony.

  Caesar’s campaign against Pompey took its toll on Antony’s family and friends, even if he was not directly involved. His brother was captured, his cousin killed and his old friend Curio, beaten by Juba’s Numidians, was decapitated, his head sent to the king as part of his own triumph. In Italy Antony seems to have lived up to Caesar’s expectations. There were no pro-Pompey risings and much of his time was spent fitting out a fleet at Brundisium that would take Caesar to Greece to destroy Pompey once and for all.

  It was probably now that Antony remarried. The record is silent on the fate of Fadia. Epidemics were frequent in cities like Rome and she may have died. Equally, Antony could have divorced her (this was especially easy for a man), since the daughter of a freedman was hardly of the right social class for a Tribune of the Plebs and an augur who was now assuming praetorian powers by running the Italian province. His second wife was his cousin Antonia, the daughter of Caius Antonius, but within a year he had divorced her. It is likely that at this stage the real love in his life was the actress Cytheris whose real name was Volumnia. She was a freed slave with a huge talent for dance and music. Like many courtesans, she had been passed around the elite for some years, living for a while with the Marcus Brutus who would kill Caesar three years later.

  Unlike Cleopatra, whose personal written word is almost non-existent,64 we have letters from Mark Antony to Cicero, who was desperate to leave Rome to rejoin Pompey. Caesar had stipulated that no one should leave Italy and Antony’s letter is a thinly veiled threat – ‘However, because I am so very fond of you ... [?] my dear Cicero, I implore you not to make a mistake ...’65 Cicero took the hint and stayed put until Caesar himself came home and released him from his virtual house arrest.

  When Caesar embarked from Brundisium on 4 January 48, Antony was left behind again. His task was to raise more troops, since Caesar knew that Pompey outnumbered him. On 10 April, evading Pompey’s naval blockade, Antony crossed to Lissus on the Greek mainland with 10,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry. On joining Caesar Antony was given the post of Legate commanding the 9th Hispana Legion. This unit had already distinguished itself in Gaul and Britain but its reputation had been tarnished in recent months by a mutiny in which the Ninth refused to march until they got their back pay and the definite promise of land on their return. Caesar had put this insurrection down quickly with executions of the ringleaders. It is difficult to know why he gave them to Antony. His own preferred legion was the 10th Gemina, and it may be he needed a stalwart to make sure the Ninth behaved themselves, often on the furthest wing from his personal control on the battlefield. Antony was in the thick of the fighting now. On one occasion the Ninth held a fort against Pompey’s superior forces for a whole day before the attack failed and reinforcements arrived.

  At Pharsalus on 9 August, Antony commanded the left flank, near the River Enipeus, and although the fighting was hot here – he was facing the Cilician legion with Spanish auxiliaries led by Africanus – the battle was really won, as we have seen, by Caesar on the right wing detaching the fourth line to create a new formation behind the dust cloud of his cavalry.

  Back in Italy while Caesar chased Pompey to Egypt, Antony was chosen by Caesar to be magister equitum, Master of the Horse. The title continued to carry huge weight in Europe down the centuries and amounted to Caesar’s second-in-command at the time. If Cicero was appalled by Antony’s behaviour as Tribune, he was outraged now. Caesar’s right-hand man swaggered around Rome with a bodyguard or an entourage of pimps and actors and even wore his sword into the s
enate where such things were just not done. If Antony’s intention was to sweeten Caesar’s return he was going the wrong way about it.

  If Antony had avoided involvement in the street fighting between Clodius and Milo, he landed up to his neck in a similar debacle in 47. Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella stood as Tribune of the Plebs in that year and proposed once again the abolition of all existing debts. Apart from the obviously self-centred nature of this sort of legislation, it is difficult to see what it could achieve for the long-term finances of the Republic. Antony was away from Rome at the time but on his return he marched into the Forum with soldiers at his back and drove Dolabella out. While he was dealing with this potential rising, discontented, unpaid soldiers of Caesar’s pet legion, the Tenth Gemina, began to make loud noises in the Campania countryside south of Rome. Like the Ninth, they had not received their allotted land-plots and felt aggrieved about it. Only Caesar’s return and his personal intervention calmed them down.

  While Antony was busy buying up property abandoned by exiled or dead supporters of Pompey and giving away priceless furniture from Pompey’s own villa where Cleopatra had stayed as a girl, he married for a third time. This was Fulvia, already twice-widowed. Since her first husband was Clodius and her second Curio, Antony must have known her for years. Once again he had found a strong woman in the Cleopatra mould. Fulvia was high born and rich, inheriting fortunes from both her parents, and was counted as one of Rome’s great beauties.

  We have already traced Antony’s actions after the murder of Caesar. The weeks and months that followed the Ides of March are tortuously complicated, with leaders rising and falling, allegiances shifting and mob violence in the city spreading to open warfare in the provinces between the Caesarians and Pompeians and every shade of opinion in between; everybody claimed to be fighting for the Republic. In this atmosphere of mistrust and fear, Antony moved from Caesar’s Master of Horse to consul in his own right.

  It became clear by the autumn of 44 that Octavian, still only eighteen and almost unknown in Rome, was fast becoming a threat to Antony. Both men tried to grab the legions and were only partially successful. Octavian was untried, but he was a Caesar and he promised more cash and land in return for services than Antony did. Such was the state of chaos in this period that Antony went from consul to public enemy (declared so by Cicero’s repeated insistence to the senate) and back again. At one point he was defeated in battle – at Forum Gallorum – by the conspirator Decimus Brutus – but the creation of the triumvirate restored his power and status.

  Philippi sealed it. It was Antony’s greatest victory and it drew a line in the sand under the whirlwind events since the Ides. Among the triumvirs, Octavian had the most difficult job, of sorting out Rome and paying the army; Lepidus, always regarded as inferior and even slightly unreliable by the other two, had Africa. Antony had the east. And in 41 the most important area in the east was Egypt. He sent Quintus Dellius to Egypt’s queen, Cleopatra.

  15

  THE INIMITABLE LOVERS

  TARSUS, 41

  Antony and Cleopatra’s meeting at Tarsus – the future St Paul’s ‘no mean city’ – has gone down in legend. Plutarch pulls out all the stops to describe it; even Shakespeare could do no more than copy him (almost verbatim) and the filmmakers have had a field day. Cleopatra had done her homework on Antony. They had first met fourteen years before and although no one mentions it, it is inconceivable that he wasn’t one of her dinner guests on more than one occasion in Caesar’s villa on the Janiculum Hill. The rest she may well have got from Dellius, who seems to have been enslaved by her as far greater Romans were. She probably already knew that beautiful, powerful women captivated Antony; she knew he liked a drink. What she may have learned from Dellius was that he had recently declared himself to be another Dionysus, aptly underlined by his drunken revels in Rome. What could be more perfect for Cleopatra? Her father Auletes had called himself the new Dionysus and Dionysus was also Osiris in the Egyptian pantheon. She was the Aphrodite who was also Isis. They were already a couple in the eyes of the heavens. And it gave her a clue as to what to wear.

  Joann Fletcher waxes lyrical on the range of expensive make-up, especially for the eyes, that Cleopatra had at her disposal. The hair, the robes, the eyelids heavy with yellow saffron or lapis lazuli – all were chosen with great care.

  But even before the actual meeting, Cleopatra was playing hard to get. She ignored Antony’s letters and even took her time when Dellius turned up. Sailing in state with half her court and the equivalent of the kitchen sink, she may have approached Tarsus from Cyprus, the legendary birthplace of Aphrodite. And that was the message relayed along the coast and up the River Cydnos – Aphrodite was on her way to revel with Dionysus for the good of Asia. The barge she travelled in is the one that Shakespeare lifts entirely from Plutarch (see Chapter 17) and she reclined under a star-glittering canopy while little boys clothed as cupids scampered around her and her maidservants dressed as wood and sea nymphs. The smoking incense from the deck wafted along the river reeds and the sound of rattles and flute music reached Antony in the market-place.

  The exact time of arrivals was impossible to predict with all the variables of the ancient world, so Antony may have been genuinely busy hearing petitions in the al fresco Roman style when the queen’s barge was sighted. Alternatively, he may have been trying to affect a nonchalant air – after all, he was the most powerful representative of the greatest power on earth and he had sent for her. If that was the case, it failed badly because the crowd, the supplicants, even Antony’s own staff began to melt away to gawp at the sight – surely one of the most exotic in history and the imperator was left virtually alone on his dais.

  Not to be outdone, he did not join the adulatory throng himself but sent word to invite Cleopatra to dine with him that evening. She refused and invited him instead. This was a sticky moment of protocol; technically, it was Antony, as the resident, who should have played host. On the other hand, Cleopatra was a queen and, in her own country at least, semi-divine. Antony could call himself Dionysus as often as he liked; he was not a god, just a rather pushy and ambitious man who may have been about to over-reach himself.

  Every commentator on Cleopatra expresses themselves speechless at the scale of the banquet. Bearing in mind it happened on her barge rather than in a palace, it was extraordinary and was eclipsed only by those she threw in Alexandria weeks later. On the first night, the company ate off solid-gold plates set with precious stones. The ‘crockery’, cutlery, goblets, tables, even the couches they sprawled on were sent home as ‘doggie bags’ with the guests, Cleopatra’s slaves carrying it all through the streets of Tarsus. On the second night, it happened all over again. But behind all the conspicuous consumption, there was a hard kernel of realpolitik on both sides. Each one wanted something from the other and if sex was thrown into the mix, so be it.

  Cleopatra was twenty-eight by now and Plutarch positively slavers over her as far as a later-generation Graeco-Roman could over a foreigner.66 She was at the height of her powers, politically and seductively, and some historians have claimed that she ran rings around Antony, her inferior in every sense. In some ways it was an action replay of her bizarre meeting with Caesar, yet in others totally different. Then, the twenty-one-year-old wanted the general’s help to restore her to her kingdom and she briefly became his mistress, later his wife in the process. Now she was an accomplished queen and politician, some said sorceress, and she could buy Antony ten times over. The point was not lost on her, though, that she needed the man’s support. If he was Rome, at least as far as the East was concerned, she wanted him to affirm Caesarion as pharaoh of Egypt and perhaps extract a little more from him. Arsinoe was still at Ephesus, a stirring and potentially troublesome rival; and a man calling himself Ptolemy XIII had appeared, miraculously delivered from his watery grave in the Nile delta marshes.

  Antony was forty-two. He had reached the pinnacle of his own success but wanted more. He knew he had
enemies in Rome (everybody did) and he also knew it was only a matter of time before the boy Octavian began to muscle in on his domain. What he needed was a brilliant military victory along the lines of Caesar’s in Gaul and the obvious way to that was to destroy Parthia. The warlike people in what is today Iran and Iraq had taken advantage of the Roman civil war to claw back lost territory. When Crassus had tried to bring them to heel in 53 they had destroyed him and his legions; they still had the eagle standards to prove it. Caesar had once sent sixteen new legions to take them on – only his assassination had prevented him from leading them. And to make a Parthian campaign a success, Antony needed money. And who had more money than any other single individual in the known world? Cleopatra.

  A deal must have been struck during the heady wine mix of the banquet as the lights bobbed on the decks and the slaves danced and played music. Serapion, the strategos who had defied Cleopatra and declared for Cassius from Cyprus, was executed on Antony’s orders. So was the pretender Ptolemy XIII. It must have been Cleopatra who effectively put Arsinoe’s neck in the metaphorical noose. She was worshipping at a temple to Artemis when Antony’s hitmen dragged her out and killed her. The Roman was all for slaughtering the temple priests at Ephesus too, since they had willingly proclaimed Arsinoe queen of Egypt, but Cleopatra seems to have urged mercy and he complied. It had not been so many years since Antony had played a similar role to hers in reining in Auletes in Alexandria.

  Antony’s and Cleopatra’s critics have seen in all this her ruthlessness and his weakness. She might just as well have put a ring in his nose like the Buchis bull and dragged him, garlanded and perfumed, to slaughter and mummification. But all this is to miss the point. We have seen already that internecine murder was what the Ptolemies did – they’d done it for 300 years. We cannot see the family from Hell in conventional terms. ‘The past’, wrote L. P. Hartley, ‘is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ So did the Ptolemies. Both parties seem to have got exactly what they wanted out of the Tarsus summit meeting. Cleopatra had no rivals for her throne and her son’s continuing rule after her death was assured. Antony got his cash for Parthia.