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Cleopatra, whose ship was riding at anchor behind the battle lines, could not endure the long hours of uncertainty while the issue hung in the balance: both as a woman and as an Egyptian [sic] she found herself stretched to breaking point by the agony of the suspense ... Suddenly, she made her choice – to flee – and made the signal for the others, her own subjects.72

  Nothing about the account makes sense yet until recently it was universally believed. It is simply a piece of propaganda. Dio was writing years later in praise of Octavian who, as Augustus, could do no wrong. Cleopatra’s own subjects were Greek as well as Egyptian and there must have been Romans on board, too. They were not directly in the firing line, being well behind Antony’s battle stations, and could have rowed back into the safety of the gulf or to land at any time. The fact that Cleopatra signalled to other ships and the fact that she had sails on board the Antonia at all, implies that this was a planned move. Antony wanted to fight elsewhere. He would have to clear Agrippa’s ships out of the way first – hence the battle of Actium – but then Cleopatra led the way through the gaps he had created and the whole fleet was to follow. Agrippa, without sails, would not be able to catch them.

  But something seems to have gone wrong and it is probably all about timing. This is one of those imponderables. A great general has an innate sense about these things – exactly when to hold steady, change formation, fall back, send in the cavalry. Communication from ship to ship was problematic and engagements difficult, at sea, to break off. The fact that Antony had to swing across to a quinquereme from his own flagship implies that Cleopatra had gone too early or that he was too committed against Agrippa’s wing. Either way, the result was chaos and Canidius’s land troops could only look on in horror as Agrippa’s ships closed in on Antony’s fleet and an appalling hand-to-hand slaughter took place. Javelins flew at close quarters, grappling hooks smashed into timbers and held fast. Fire hurtled through the blue of the Ionian sky to sear Antony’s ships and Antony’s men. ‘Their corpses were burned,’ wrote Dio, ‘on board the ships as though they were on a funeral pyre.’73

  For the next eleven months Antony and Cleopatra adopted a bunker mentality in an attempt to salvage what they could of their empire. There were highs and lows – moments of relief and optimism occasionally puncturing an over-arching sense of gloom and defeat. In this respect, Cleopatra emerged the stronger character. As we have seen already, Antony did not handle defeat well. After Parthia, his confidence shredded, it took him nearly a year to recover; after Actium, he never did. Cleopatra, however, planned, organized, executed. She was the arch-survivor and never more so, ironically, than in the last months of her life.

  On board the Antonia, sailing south, he sulked and sat on deck, brooding. She won him over, to join her for meals and in bed. In Alexandria, he had a summer-house, the Timonium, built on a jetty in the harbour and lived with a small staff there for weeks before moving, at her cajoling, back into the palace. Cleopatra returned from Actium as though from a victory, the band playing, flags flying and the decks strewn with flowers. What she needed was solidarity and cash and she carried out Roman-style proscriptions of her own. Those who would criticize her once the extent of the defeat was known were executed and their property became hers. No one doubted that Octavian was on his way, if only because the divine Julius had done exactly the same thing in 48 – chased his beaten rival Pompey to Egypt. Cleopatra set about rebuilding her shattered fleet while Antony, in one of his rare moods of optimism, organized his four legions from Cyrenaica.

  The pair gambled that Octavian, despite his huge numerical advantage (Canidius’ legions had defected en masse after Actium), would not risk the sea or a campaign, however one-sided, in midwinter and that bought them time. Caesarion was feted at a Greek coming-of-age ceremony in Alexandria to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. Antony’s son Antyllus officially put on the toga virile of a man at about the same time. The message was clear – Caesarion would rule on as the mother-loving pharaoh after Cleopatra’s death and Antyllus would one day make speeches in the senate as consul and rule the East as Antony now did.

  Both Antony and Cleopatra sent regular letters to Octavian and he replied to most of them. Antony usually employed bluff, reminding his former colleague of their wild youth in Rome. Cleopatra still played the ‘friend and ally of Rome’ and at one point sent Octavian her royal throne of gold, her sceptre and crown. Symbolically, she was surrendering, but it would be surrender on conditions. She wanted her children to rule Egypt after her. Antony was finished. He had no cards left to play. Cleopatra, with her kingdom intact and a vast personal treasure to which she had recently added, was another matter. It was clearly Octavian’s game plan to annex Egypt, take the treasure and bring Cleopatra in golden chains to Rome as part of his triumph, much as Arsinoe had appeared for Caesar years before. Antony would have no role in this. Beaten and discredited as he was, the people of Rome were fickle at all levels of society; the last thing Octavian wanted was a sudden upsurge of sympathy and perhaps even support for the ex-triumvir.

  In a surreal schizophrenia, Antony celebrated his fifty-third birthday at the end of January with huge expense, just like the parties of the good old days. On the other hand, and more or less at the same time, the Inimitable Livers became the Sharers in Death, bonded together in a suicide pact that would cheat Octavian of his ultimate victory at the last moment.

  With the summer of 30 came Octavian’s invasion. Caius Cornelius Gallus marched from Cyrenaica in the west where Antony’s legions promptly surrendered to him. Octavian approached from Syria in the east and Pelusium fell without a struggle (although Octavian later told tall tales of his personal heroism in a pitched battle). Antony was faced with that nightmare, a war on two fronts and he did not have enough troops to split his command. He tackled Gallus first and was beaten back by sheer numbers. Undeterred, he struck east, clashed with Octavian’s cavalry and forced them back. One particularly brave soldier was commended to Cleopatra in the palace that night and she gave him a breastplate and helmet inlaid with silver as a mark of her appreciation. In the small hours, he defected to Octavian.

  The last stand came on 1 August. Antony’s tiny fleet sailed out heroically against huge opposition. Within artillery shot of the enemy, they raised their oars clear of the water, a sign of surrender. On land, Antony’s cavalry broke formation and trotted across to the other camp. Only his infantry stayed steady and they were quickly defeated.

  This whole scene unfolded before Antony and Cleopatra as if in the ghastly slow motion of a nightmare. She had already begun the building of a two-storey mausoleum and had it stored with as much of the royal treasure as it would hold. She said goodbye to her staff and, with only her handmaidens Iras and Charmion, locked herself in the still-unfinished building. She sent word to Antony that she was dead.

  From this point on in the narrative, uncertainty mixes with fiction and we are left with messy scenes and loose ends that remain untied. With Octavian’s troops pouring into the city, Antony finally decided to end it. He had contemplated suicide before, perhaps even tried it. Now he believed his lover/wife was dead, he saw no reason to stay alive. Caesarion and Antyllus had been sent away for their own safety and Octavian might yet take pity on the younger children. Antony asked a bodyguard, Eros, to kill him but the man refused and rammed Antony’s sword into his own stomach instead. So Antony followed suit.

  Death by stomach wound is rarely instantaneous. In fact, victims have been known to linger for days. Either Cleopatra was told what had happened (through a locked door) or it is just possible that she had actually seen it from an upstairs window and commanded that the dying Antony be brought to her.

  She refused to unlock the mausoleum door so attendants used a builder’s apparatus to haul him up on wooden planks. With difficulty, the three women got Antony inside and he died, with all the delicious possibilities for later novelists and film-makers, in her arms. She screamed and wailed, tearing her chest with her nails so that the wounds became in
fected in the days ahead. She lost her appetite and was running a temperature, but she had not shared in death yet and was still trying to get what she could out of Octavian.

  The new conqueror of Egypt sent first Caius Proculeius, then Gallus, to talk to the queen. He wanted her country, he wanted her treasure (before his huge troop members became mutinous) and he wanted her alive. To that end, while Gallus kept Cleopatra talking through the locked door, Proculeius scrabbled up a rope and in through a window, just in time to prevent the queen from stabbing herself. There seems to have been a lull in the negotiations, during which Cleopatra had access to her doctor, Olympus, and it was now that she met Octavian for the first time.

  The problem is that we have two differing versions of Cleopatra’s last days. Plutarch says one thing; Dio another. Both were writing long after the event and both presumably embroidered for the sake of a good story. Dio’s Cleopatra is ill, dishevelled and desperate. She read Caesar’s faded letters to Octavian and stroked fondly a marble bust in her chamber. Plutarch has her still the proud queen, haughty to the end. When she listed the treasures she owned for Octavian’s benefit, a self-serving attendant butted in to add various items she had ‘forgotten’. She grabbed his hair and slapped him across the face several times; this sounds like the Cleopatra of old, the hard edge showing in the place of the wide-eyed seductress. Dio’s account is most interesting – Octavian could not look her in the face and appears most embarrassed in her company. Plutarch has the nonsense that Cleopatra tried her ‘magical’ seduction on him, but that Octavian was far too fine and noble to fall for that. And that doesn’t sound like Octavian at all.

  On 10 August, Cleopatra visited Antony’s body for the last time. Romans and Alexandrians usually cremated their dead; Egyptians embalmed them. It is clear from this that some kind of embalming process was used on Antony, as it had been on Alexander the Great, otherwise there would have been nothing to visit. That night Cleopatra, Iras and Charmion had their last meal together and she wrote a last letter to Octavian. Then all three killed themselves.

  In what has been described as a classic locked-room mystery, Octavian’s guards were sent clattering through the palace (he was probably only rooms away) and found Cleopatra dead, lying in state in the robes of Isis, all black and gold. Iras lay on the floor beside her and Charmion, adjusting the queen’s gown for the last time, was dying.

  Furious, Octavian sent for the psylli, Libyan snake charmers who, it was said, could detect snake venom in a wound by the smell and were expert at sucking it out. For 2,000 years, the asp has been blamed for Cleopatra’s death and it is patent nonsense. The only marks on Cleopatra’s body (apart, presumably, from the still-infected scratches on her breasts) were found on her arm, implying a pin prick. We know that Cleopatra knew her potions and she also had Olympus on hand to provide a range of poisons. There is no mention of the convulsions and vomiting that cobra bites cause. The poison was probably an opium derivative, which leads to lethargy, coma and respiratory collapse. No snake, not even a six-foot adult, can be relied upon to kill three people so quickly. Iras and Charmion had been handling Cleopatra’s combs and hair pins for years – how difficult would it have been to lace any one of these with a deadly toxin?

  ‘Was this well done of your lady, Charmion?’ Octavian’s guard asked.

  ‘Very well,’ she answered, ‘becoming a queen descended from so many kings.’

  Did she say it? Perhaps not, but she should have done.

  BOOK SIX: THE LEGACY OF CLEOPATRA

  17

  ‘YON RIBAUDRED NAG OF EGYPT’

  LONDON, AD 1607

  History, it is said, is written by the winners. And in 30, that meant Octavian. Such was the brilliance of his rewriting of history that to some, Actium is the last battle in the ancient world; Cleopatra was not only the last Ptolemy and the last pharaoh, she was an anachronism, a seductress with delusions of grandeur that had no place in Octavian’s brave new world.

  Antony was air-brushed out of history altogether, his eldest son, Antyllus, was decapitated, his younger children brought up by his fine Roman ex, Octavia, who cared for them as if they were her own, not Cleopatra’s. Antony’s statues were destroyed, the Donations of Alexandria ignored. In Octavian’s official account of Actium, there is no mention of Antony at all. But two things of the living Dionysus did survive, both of them beyond Octavian’s reach. His silver coinage, with the thick neck and bruiser’s nose prominent, were still currency in Rome’s eastern empire two centuries later. And, with less felicity, three of his descendants became emperors – Nero, Caligula and Claudius, a trio of the most flawed individuals in the history of Rome. Octavian could not possibly match that.

  Octavian’s first job in 30 was to secure Egypt. He had coins struck with a crocodile motif and the legend Aegypta Capta, Egypt Captured. From now on, it would not be a fabulously wealthy client kingdom to be wooed and flirted with, but a full part of the Roman Empire; in fact, Octavian’s personal fief. The huge amount of money it generated paid his troops and turned Rome from brick to marble; the inflation rate was said to have dropped from 12 per cent to 4 per cent almost overnight. Almost everything we see in the city’s ruins today owes more to Cleopatra’s Alexandria than to any other influence. Octavian left the country to be governed by Gallus as praefectus. There was little trouble. Sensibly, Octavian allowed the Alexandrians full mourning for their queen and permitted her the rites of burial alongside Antony. Such trouble as there was came briefly and the revolt was easily crushed by Gallus. When Egypt’s fatal lure affected him too and he began erecting life-size statues of himself, Octavian had the senate censure him and the prefect was obliged to follow Antony on the point of his sword.

  Cleopatra’s imagery remained, not because Octavian had any serious respect for her but because he was aware that in Egypt she was the living Isis and the statuary and bas-reliefs of queen and goddess were indistinguishable from each other. Much more surprising is that her influence spread to Rome where a certain amount of ‘Egyptomania’ caught on. Whereas Octavian left Egypt in 29 never to return, denouncing the sacred Apis and Buchis bulls as mere animals, the mummified Ptolemies as a load of old bodies and, according to legend, snapping off Alexander the Great’s nose by accident during his sightseeing, he brought Cleopatra back to his own city.

  His own triumphs – he milked the occasion, turning what was at best two campaigns into three – featured Cleopatra’s children and vast heaps of her treasure. Gold, silver and ivory dazzled in the sun along the Via Sacra. The ten-year-old twins, labelled as ‘Sun’ and ‘Moon’, were paraded, along with (probably) six-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, although he disappears from the record soon after and may even have died (of, probably, natural causes) before the triumph. Cleopatra was there as well – a life-size wax image of her complete with asps coiling up her arms; the legend of her death was already established.

  In the wake of this, statues of females appeared all over Rome. The first of these, in Cleopatra’s own lifetime, were of Livia and Octavia, but they were erected as an antidote to the queen and the idea took off. I am less happy with Stacy Schiff’s contention that Roman women received a certain amount of liberation because of Cleopatra, enjoying a far freer hand in business and even politics. Roman men still called the shots and would continue to do so for as long as the Roman Empire lasted. And these men began to rewrite history before her embalming process had been completed. Dellius had gone to her as an ambassador and probably had fallen under her spell. Lucius Plancus certainly had, dressing up as a sea-god to please her. The tutor Nicolas of Damascus had taught the queen’s children; yet all three turned on Cleopatra and added to the corrosive drips from Octavian’s own pen. The poets jumped on the bandwagon. Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) had fought against Antony at Philippi but he was restored under Octavian and eventually became a sort of poet laureate. In his Odes, written about seven years after Cleopatra’s death, he enshrined the snake legend. Cleopatra was:

  plo
tting wild destruction to our Capitol ... a woman mad enough to nurse the wildest hopes and dark with Fortune’s favours ... Yet she, seeking to die a nobler death, showed for the dagger’s point no woman’s fear, nor sought to win with her some swift, fleet secret shore ... courageous, too, to handle poisonous asps, that she might draw black venom to her heart ... no craven woman, she!74

  Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil) was of an age with Cleopatra and was, like Horace, very influenced by the Greek poets. By the mid 20s, he was working on the Aeneid, recounting the adventures of the Trojan prince Aeneas after his escape from burning Troy. En route Aeneas meets Dido, the queen of Carthage, and becomes enslaved by her. The parallels with Antony and Cleopatra were obvious and Octavian took a special interest in the poet and his works.

  Sextus Propertius came from Assisi in Umbria and his family lost land in the proscriptions that followed Philippi. Unlike Horace and Virgil, however, he had enough cash not to need a patron, so is less slavishly keen to praise Octavian and damn his enemies. Some experts have seen in his poetry dedicated to a mistress called Cynthia the same dilemma that Antony faced, if we accept that his, in the end, is a love story.

  Then the historians took over. We must remember that the writing of history as we know it is a new discipline. The ancient historians often had little to go on – suspect stories distorted by time; a complete lack of understanding of archaeology; often powerful patrons who paid them to write from a certain perspective; even the need to make a tale tell a moral story. Above all, they were Roman, born into a world dominated by Rome and dominated by men. Cleopatra simply did not fit the bill, so they called her fatale monstrum, which is almost untranslatable in its horror. She was unnatural.

  Lucius Cassius Dio held various minor magisterial offices in Rome early in the third century AD and his History of Rome ran to a vast eighty-volume work over twenty-two years. Although Greek, Dio toes the Roman party line, but his summing-up on Cleopatra has never been bettered – ‘She captivated the two greatest Romans of her day and because of the third she destroyed herself.’75