Cleopatra Read online

  When Cleopatra sailed home, it was business as usual for Antony. He put down a revolt in Syria before following her to Alexandria. Again, with hindsight we see a pattern – he would do the same thing, fatally, at Actium ten years later. She snapped her fingers and he jumped. In fact, we have no idea who initiated who, but it is likely that Antony was as captivated by Cleopatra as Caesar had been, even though he paused on the way to seduce the wife of the king of Mauretania. It is this sort of high-class power-bed hopping – he had an affair with the queen of Cappadocia just before the Tarsus meeting – that has led historians to doubt whether Cleopatra meant anything to Antony other than another notch on his bedpost. In Alexandria, however, they seem to have become a couple.

  Caesar had come to the city as a potential conqueror at the head of three legions. Antony came as a private citizen, wearing Greek dress, going to the theatre and working out in the gym like other virile Alexandrians. He was careful to speak their language, literally and metaphorically. People remembered the handsome commander of the Gabinian cavalry and how he had prevented wholesale slaughter in the restoration of Auletes to his throne.

  But if Antony knew how to play to the gallery, Cleopatra was better at it. She indulged him, watching as he wrestled and practised swordplay in the gymnasion. She hunted with him in the desert. She attended the theatre with him. She was there when he talked to the scholars in the great library – and was no doubt tactful enough not to upstage him in the conversation.

  The couple came to be known as the Inimitable Livers, the founder-members of an elite drinking club who wined and dined almost nightly, sometimes disguising themselves as slaves and rolling around the streets, pulling faces at passers-by and getting into fist fights. They diced together, they fished on Lake Mareotis and played practical jokes on each other and their friends. On one occasion, with most of the Court bobbing about on the lake, Cleopatra sent a slave underwater to hook a reeking old saltwater fish onto Antony’s line so that the ‘great angler’ was ridiculed in the eyes of everyone. Unlike Caesar and certainly unlike Octavian, Mark Antony had a great sense of humour and took it all in good part.

  It is difficult to believe that Cleopatra was laughing at Antony rather than with him. What would be the point? They already had from each other what they wanted politically. The stay in Alexandria can only be interpreted as a genuinely romantic interlude and by the time Antony left for Parthia, Cleopatra was carrying his twins.

  Antony’s clash with the Parthians was delayed, however. They had invaded Syria in 40 under their king Pacorus and, if unchecked, posed a threat to Cleopatra’s Egypt too. The delay came because of the arrival in Greece of Antony’s wife, Fulvia and her sons Antyllus and Iulius. Antony’s mother was with her too. Time and again in the next five years, Antony would be distracted by other things. Rome called him or Cleopatra did and he went at their behest away from the Parthian objective. In this at least he proved himself not to be another Caesar.

  The family had run from Rome because Fulvia had antagonized Octavian so much that the legions she controlled, on Antony’s behalf, were now squaring up to each other for a renewal of the civil war. As Adrian Goldsworthy sums up with classic understatement, ‘The result was a confusing period of unrest ... in which allegiances were often unclear.’67 In other words, it was basically the same business as usual since Caesar had crossed the Rubicon. Increasingly in these months, the third triumvir, Lepidus, was sidelined as governor of Africa and there was a smouldering build-up of tension between the other two, which would end in the collapse of an independent Egypt and the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra.

  In the fighting, Octavian sacked Perusia, sacrificing 300 of the town’s inhabitants to the gods. Sextus Pompey, in the meantime, still a potential threat on the outskirts of empire, called himself the ‘king of the seas’ and captured Sicily, blockading the trade routes that led to Rome.

  Most modern commentators agree that Fulvia’s provocation of Octavian came from her jealousy of Cleopatra; that declaring war was the one sure way to bring the wayward Antony home. If that was the case, it didn’t work. When husband and wife met in Athens, Antony was notoriously cold, left her weeks later without saying goodbye and did not see her again. She was dead, probably from exhaustion, by the end of the year.

  Joined by Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (Shakespeare’s Enobarbus), one of those on the periphery of the Caesar assassination, Antony landed in Brundisium with 200 war-galleys and faced Octavian and his legions. These men were rather happier now that he had given most of their veteran comrades farms, which would come their way too in the fullness of time. Neither side wanted to fight, and an uneasy truce resulted in the Treaty of Brundisium of September 40. The relief, to a nation exhausted and terrified by civil war, was palpable and ironically people were accidentally killed in exuberant street parties in Rome and Brundisium itself.

  The terms of the treaty effectively created a duumvirate to all intents and purposes. With Lepidus in Africa, Antony and Octavian divided the rest of the Roman world between them; Octavian had the west which included Rome and Italy while Antony had the east which of course included Egypt. Octavian promised him eleven legions to take on the Parthians and the new rapprochement was sealed with a wedding. Fulvia’s death freed Antony and his new bride was the beautiful and sophisticated widow Octavia, Octavian’s sister. She was about thirty and the fact that Octavian gave her to Antony might imply a genuine attempt on his part to bury the hatchet. On the other hand, it could simply have been Octavian’s way to keep a close watch on his rival.

  At more or less the same time, Octavian divorced his wife Clodia on the grounds that she was a nag and married the much younger Scribonia, despite the fact that she was already pregnant by her former husband. Both triumvirs celebrated orations in Rome late in 39 – an oration was less lavish than a triumph and it was given partly because there was no actual campaign victory to celebrate. It was just a feel-good exercise in public relations.

  Octavian’s reputation fluctuated during this period. Although ultimately he would emerge as Caesar’s sole heir, billing himself, not Antony, as the victor of Philippi and emerging, butterfly-like, as the Emperor Augustus, in 39 he was the man who had still not found enough farms for his veterans and who had annoyed civilians by planting ex-soldiers in their back gardens. When, on top of this, he raised taxation, he was attacked in the Forum and hit by flying missiles. Only the timely arrival of Antony and his bodyguard saved his life. The resulting bodies were dumped in the Tiber.

  The Peace of Misenum at the end of the summer reconciled the dangerous Sextus Pompey with the others. He was now officially governor of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica and became an augur, giving him a status in Rome he had never held before. The truce may have continued uneasily (the rumour ran that at every party and banquet, everybody carried hidden daggers, just in case) but it gave Antony the chance, at least, to march on Parthia. And he took Octavia with him. She would only go as far as Athens. Romans did not take their women to the battle-zone.68 They waited for the spring campaigning season to start by enjoying themselves in Athens. Once again, Antony dropped his conqueror pose, wore Greek clothes, went to the theatre and became Dionysus. With Octavia in tow he probably drank less than he had with Cleopatra, but she joined in the social life and the pair were hailed officially as ‘the beneficent gods’.

  What are we to make of Octavia? Because she was Octavian’s sister and he was a master of propaganda, an odour of sanctity clings to the woman. She was probably as capable and pushy as Fulvia and possibly as Cleopatra, but she hid it well as the dutiful Roman wife and seems to have supported Antony all the way, an increasingly difficult job as he and her brother went their separate ways. Was she, like Fulvia, trying to tie Mark Antony to Rome by supplanting his Alexandrian love? And were they lovers at all in the real sense? The ‘Inimitable Livers’ became the ‘Inimitable Lovers’ in some versions but intimacy is not recorded. If Antony and Cleopatra exchanged letters (which seems likely) they h
ave not survived and without them the exact nature of their love is difficult to measure. Antony seems to have been an opportunist in love as he was in politics and war. He was not known to have turned any woman down, especially one with brains and power to add to their charms. It is likely that when with Cleopatra he was blissfully happy. And when he was with Octavia he was happy too.

  We know that, this time, Cleopatra kept a watchful eye on Antony. She sent an Alexandrian staff back to Rome with him, including a soothsayer who prophesied that Octavian’s ‘karma’ would always outshine Antony’s as long as the men were together. Only in distance would Antony have a chance. Was this music to Antony’s ears – the soothsayer knowing he had plans to invade Parthia? Or was this prophecy on the orders of Cleopatra, to bring her lover back to the East as quickly as possible? Only one account says that the links between them were more direct – they exchanged letters. Either way, because we do not know their exact relationship, we cannot know how Cleopatra reacted to news of Antony’s marriage or the birth of Octavia’s two daughters by 37. It is unlikely that she sulked and stormed as Shakespeare would make her do sixteen centuries later. She, above all, understood the nature of political marriages – she may have been married to her father, was certainly married to both her brothers and was now ‘married’ to her son.

  And in October 40, Cleopatra Thea Philopator gave birth to twins, Anthony’s children. Octavia may have two girls, but they were single births. Cleopatra had achieved that rarity among the Ptolemies – a boy and a girl born on the same day. All sorts of omens and prophecies chimed with this, from Greek and Egyptian religious tradition. She called the boy Alexander Helios, Alexander the Sun, in honour of the great half-founder of her dynasty, whose embalmed body still lay in the Soma in Alexandria. The girl she named Cleopatra Selene, after an earlier Ptolemy and linked clearly with the moon.

  There were celebrations throughout her lands at the delta and along the Nile; adoration and sacrifice at Dendera where the twins were carved on the temple walls; worship of the Apis bull. The vital religious ingredients of Cleopatra’s political life went on as before. Not even the death of her high priest at Memphis, Pasherenptah III, broke her stride. His seven-year-old son Petubastis took over his duties. He was the same age as Caesarion and Cleopatra could hold sway over the two boys who represented her earthly and her divine existences.

  She made overtures in this year to Herod of Judaea who had fled to her court in the oncoming advance of the Parthians. She offered him, according to one account, command of her army, so highly renowned was he as a general. In the event he turned her down and offered his services to Rome where he led Roman legionaries to victory against the Parthians along with Antony’s grizzled veteran Publius Ventidius who smashed his opponents in a series of dazzling victories at the Cilician Gates, Mount Amanus and Gindarus.

  But Antony was not there and more importantly, neither were Octavian’s promised legions. In the autumn of 37 Antony sent for Cleopatra again. The city of Antioch lay on the River Orontes and was the Syrian capital. A centre of trade, it was famous for its olive oil and wine, both locally produced. It was 15 miles from the sea so Cleopatra and her entourage would have weighed anchor at the port of Seleucia, named after Alexander the Great’s general, whose family had ruled this part of the mighty empire 300 years earlier.

  Antony and Cleopatra had first met here eighteen years before when he was a junior cavalry officer and she was a fourteen-year-old princess-in-waiting. Here, in 37, Antony met his twins for the first time. The family lived in the palace and it was here that the couple were married. Technically, both were committing bigamy, but there was a great deal of precedence for that in the Ptolemy family and in Roman terms, the now-deified Julius Caesar had done exactly the same thing – and with the same woman! Since Roman law did not recognize marriage to a foreigner, it could be said that Antony had found a loop-hole in legality he could drive a chariot through. We do not know exactly what form the marriage ceremony took. Joann Fletcher gives the options, including the dress, hair preparation and jewellery involved. The simple Roman version was a choreographed seizure of goods – ‘So, darling, I seize you.’ The Greek version was more delicate – he was Antonius, she was Antonia, although she never used the name; it was the equivalent of today’s Mrs Mark Antony. There would have been an exchange of vows and rings and a wedding feast on a scale befitting the union of Aphrodite-Isis and Dionysus-Osiris. They issued coins as joint rulers, which were struck at Damascus and Askalon as well as Antioch.

  But the greatest wedding present of all was the one that Antony gave to Cleopatra. He gave her back all the ancient lands of the Ptolemies before Rome took them, something he did not have the right to do. Cilicia, Syria, Phoenicia, the Lebanon and Iturea were restored to her, and Cyprus, Crete and Cyrenia affirmed as Egypt’s. Antony drew the line at Judaea, probably because Herod, based in Jerusalem, was a militarily useful ally to Rome. She did, however, obtain a monopoly in the trade of the legendary Gilead balm, a perfume rarer than gold and all the bitumen from the Dead Sea region, which was vital for Egyptian embalming customs.

  When Cleopatra went home in the spring of 36, she was carrying her fourth child. She travelled back to Alexandria overland, on a royal progress that took in Herod’s Jerusalem. The man was an Arab and his Jewish people hated him. Although there is no evidence for the massacre of the innocents as described in the New Testament, he did kill one of his wives, three of his own sons, an uncle and a brother-in-law. Cleopatra and Antony overrode him in a religious controversy with the tribes of Israel and it turned Herod into a bitter opponent, to add his invective later to join Octavian’s. According to Josephus, who, as we know, had his own agenda in the context of Cleopatra, Herod heroically rebuffed her attempts to seduce him and even toyed with having her poisoned.

  In September the queen gave birth to Ptolemy Philadelphus, brother-loving, and his eldest brother, Caesarion, now eleven, was named official co-ruler with Cleopatra to celebrate the new arrival.

  Since Cleopatra had been given her throne back by Caesar in 48, she had had twelve years of relative happiness. The sun shone literally and metaphorically on her reign in Alexandria. If she had been the richest woman in the world before 37, she was doubly so now and she had four healthy, loyal and adoring children to carry on the Ptolemy line. She also had a dynamic, mercurial lover, but Antony was tied by an umbilical cord of duty to Rome. And somehow, whenever Rome was mentioned, storms arose in ‘their sea’ and war-clouds gathered.

  Antony may have had 100,000 men with him as he marched on Parthia, the largest single Roman army ever seen. Plutarch suggests sixteen legions as well as 10,000 cavalry from Gaul and Iberia. Client kings flocked to him as he marched. They had clashed with Rome before and for most of them, it was an experience they did not want to repeat. This gave Antony 6,000 Armenian cavalry and 7,000 infantry with a possible 30,000 of both arms from other nations. From later events we know that he had enough archers and slingers to keep the Parthians at a respectful distance. At first all went well, but as he reached Media (today’s Azerbaijan) he was betrayed by the Armenian king Artavasdes. Antony should have known better than to trust this man – Crassus’ head was kicked around on stage during his wedding celebration in 53. Somewhere in the desert, Antony’s huge supply train was destroyed by the deadly Parthian horse-archers and he was trapped in Media itself.

  The Parthian army relied heavily on its cavalry and despite Antony’s alae auxiliary units, the real strength in his army lay with the Roman legions, the trained veterans. The triumvir may have faced up to 50,000 horse-archers on this campaign, expert bowmen who fired their short bows from the saddle and under the animals’ necks and were particularly dangerous when retreating – the deadly Parthian shot. The Parthians’ heavy cavalry were extraordinary – lancers riding heavily armoured horses that would not be seen on European battlefields until the fifteenth century, by which time gunpowder could destroy them. These cataphracts were unstoppable in Antony’s da
y. In a forced retreat that foreshadowed the even grimmer one by Napoleon from Moscow in AD 1812, Antony fought his way back to Antioch in the middle of winter. His column marched in hollow square formation to fight off cavalry attacks so the legendary speed of the legions (perhaps 20 miles a day) was reduced to four or five at best. His men died from exposure, hunger and dysentery, the universal enemies of fighting men in every age, and he lost an estimated 20,000, between a quarter and a third of his force.

  Cleopatra hurried to him at Leuce Come, near the old Phoenician city of Sidon. He had almost certainly summoned her for a third time, but for the first time Antony was in trouble. She sailed in the teeth of winter with food, clothing and money for his army and brought her man home to Alexandria. Antony was exhausted. His own courage and the lengths he went to to rally his men and to care for them were extraordinary (Octavian could not hope to match that) but in the end he had failed, almost as badly as Crassus. But Crassus had died and Antony had come home – or at least to one of his eastern homes. It is likely that at some point on the retreat from Media he had contemplated suicide.

  In the spring of 35, Octavian’s promised troops arrived at last, but a mere 2,000 rather than the 11 legions and only 70 rather than 130 ships (the rest had been lost fighting against Sextus Pompey off Sicily). And Octavian sent his sister, too. Most historians see this as the final, disastrous turning point in the always fragile relationship between Antony and Octavian. Cleopatra’s critics claim that she went on a hunger strike, threw tantrums, sulked and screamed to get Antony back, but this does not sound like Cleopatra Thea, the most powerful woman in the world. If it was intended to be a straight choice engineered by Octavian, it can’t have been much of a contest for Antony. He sent Octavia home from Athens without seeing her in person, keeping her troops and her ships, and renewed the Parthian campaign from Antioch. By the summer of 34, Artavasdes was a prisoner, appearing chained in a later triumph and Armenia had been conquered. To celebrate all this, Antony and Cleopatra embarked on a series of celebrations known as the Donations of Alexandria. Antony’s critics – and by now there were many of them – claimed that he was trying to emulate a triumph, which could only be held in Rome, but Alexandria had been holding its own celebrations when Romans still lived in mud huts along the Tiber. It is probable that nothing on this scale had been seen before, even in the triumphs of Roman generals. Antony was dressed as Dionysus, with his ivy-leaf headgear. Cleopatra, in black and gold, was Isis, and the whole city dazzled. In the more formal part of the ceremonies, Antony transformed himself. He appeared now in the breastplate, helmet and cloak of a Roman imperator, with the eagles of the legions around him. He made brilliant speeches in Greek to the politicians and the crowds, and the children were crowned to honour the occasion. Two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus was Lord of Phoenicia, Cilicia and Syria. He wore Greek boots and a crown like a little Alexander and no doubt had been coached to walk steadily, as befitted the occasion. Alexander Helios, six, was given Media, Parthia and Armenia and was officially called ‘king of kings’. He was betrothed to the Queen of Media on the same day. His twin, Cleopatra Selene, became queen of Crete and Cyrenia.