Read Cleopatra and Antony Online
Authors: Diana Preston
This story of the dissolving pearl seems pure fiction—pearls do not instantly disintegrate in vinegar or anything else quaffable.
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But the fact that the tale was so widely related and readily believed shows a reputation for wanton extravagance that must have had some substance. In fact, Cleopatra would remain associated with the power and opulence of pearls. In the sixteenth century Rabelais punningly invented a role for her in the afterlife as an onion seller in Hell—the word
onion
coming from the Latin
unio
, meaning “an enormous pearl.”
Cleopatra’s extravagant playacting clearly touched an answering chord in Antony. The historian Socrates of Rhodes related how not long after these encounters while in Athens Antony “prepared a very superb scaffold to spread over the theatre, covered with green wood such as is seen in the caves sacred to Bacchus; and from this scaffold he suspended drums and fawn-skins and then sat there with his friends getting drunk . . . and after that he ordered himself to be proclaimed as Bacchus throughout all the cities in that region.”
Yet amidst the revelry and pageantry and passion there was hard business to attend to. As she had doubtless anticipated, Cleopatra had little difficulty convincing Antony that she had resisted the threats of his enemies and done nothing to help them. She pointed out that she had sailed in person with her fleet from Alexandria, intending to aid Antony and Octavian against Brutus and Cassius, and had been prevented only by a sudden storm. She had also attempted to send legions from Egypt to help Dolabella in Syria. It was hardly her fault that they had defected to the enemy.
Antony was anyway far more interested in Cleopatra’s future help than her past behavior. His desired model for governing the east, at least for the present while he dealt with Parthia, was no different from that of his Roman predecessors. Like Pompey and Caesar, he wished Rome’s eastern empire to consist of a core of pacific, prosperous provinces administered directly by Rome. Their safety and security would be guaranteed by a buffer zone of surrounding client kingdoms whose rulers understood the rewards of loyalty to Rome—and the risks of disloyalty. Within this tidy, Romanized world Antony intended Cleopatra’s Egypt to continue to occupy her traditional place. Under the Ptolemies the country had, of course, long been an ally of Rome. Her wealth, strategic importance and judicious wooing of Rome at the right moments had retained for Egypt a unique position with continuing independence beyond that of any ordinary client state.
Antony hardly can have believed Cleopatra would do anything to prejudice this. However, over and above Cleopatra’s acquiescence in his plans for the east, Antony wanted her specific assistance. His forthcoming campaign against the Parthians would, as he well knew, be costly and difficult. He would need a secure source of supplies for his legionaries, which the wealthy Egyptian queen could supply. From Cleopatra’s perspective, to find herself so integral and important to Antony’s plans was ideal and enabled her to achieve some immediate ambitions of her own. She demanded the death of her half sister Arsinoe, spared from execution five years earlier by Caesar, self-righteously pointing out that while she herself had been blameless, her sibling very likely had aided Brutus and Cassius. Her accusations were enough to have Arsinoe dragged out from her refuge in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus by centurions sent by Antony and killed. Arsi-noe’s execution meant that four of Cleopatra’s five siblings had met a violent end—two at her direct instigation. Cleopatra also sought the death of the high priest of Artemis on the grounds that he had recognized Arsinoe as queen of Egypt but, though Antony was quite happy to acquiesce, when a delegation arrived from Ephesus to plead for the priest’s life Cleopatra decided to let him live, probably for reasons of political expediency.
She was not, however, so merciful to the former governor of Cyprus, who had supported Arsinoe and sent ships to Cassius. His death was essential to underline that she had not been complicit in his acts. Neither did she show compassion to a young man who appeared in the city of Aradus claiming to be Cleopatra’s erstwhile husband-brother Ptolemy XIII, supposedly drowned in the Nile in his gleaming golden armor while fleeing Caesar. Antony obliged, ordering both men to be executed. He also confirmed Caesar’s gift to her of Cyprus.
All this was highly satisfactory to Cleopatra. Even more so was Antony’s agreement, before they parted, to visit her in Egypt.
A
NTONY WAS NOT LONG in following Cleopatra. He paused briefly in Syria, where he appointed one of Caesar’s former generals as the province’s new governor. He also settled matters in neighboring Judaea, confirming Hyrcanus, who with his minister Antipater had aided Caesar in Egypt in 47, as ruler. Antony also confirmed Antipater’s sons, Phasael and Herod, as Hyrcanus’ viceroys in Jerusalem and Galilee with the princely rank of tetrarch, despite the fact that after Caesar’s death they had aided Cassius during the civil war, albeit, as they said, under duress. Their appointments were made in the teeth of violent opposition from the Maccabees, also known as Hasmonaeans—a powerful faction in Judaea. The name Maccabee, probably meaning “the hammer,” was the appellation of Judas, who in 168 with his brothers had launched a guerrilla war against the occupying Seleucids. In 142 the Seleucid garrison had finally been expelled from Jerusalem, leaving the Jews to be ruled by the hereditary Hasmonaean high priests, the dynasty to which Hyrcanus belonged.
Although Hyrcanus supported Phasael and Herod, many Hasmonaeans distrusted them because they were from Idumaea, a district south of Jerusalem and Bethlehem whose inhabitants had been forcibly converted to Judaism toward the end of the second century during a period of Jewish expansion and who were not considered proper Jews by the orthodox. Even worse in their eyes, Phasael and Herod’s mother was not Jewish but an aristocratic Arab and thus, since Judaism was a matrilineal religion, the two men were not Jewish at all.
Antony ignored the protests and in the autumn of 41 sailed eagerly on to Alexandria and into the arms of his new mistress. Cleopatra, according to Ap-pian, gave him “a magnificent reception.” Unlike Caesar, who had immediately aroused the animosity of the Alexandrians by entering their city with all the pomp of a Roman consul, with lictors bearing the fasces before him and marching columns of helmeted and armed legionaries, Antony came softly, “without the insignia of his office.” He adopted “the habit and mode of life of a private person, either because he was in a foreign jurisdiction, in a city under royal sway, or because he regarded his wintering as a festal occasion.” Consequently, the Alexandrians for their part welcomed Antony as an honored guest who had come at the explicit invitation of their queen. He had already shown during his tour of the east that he admired the Hellenic world and, as he walked their streets, the citizens noted with approval that he had abandoned Roman garb for “the square-cut garment of the Greeks” and white Attic sandals.
During the winter of 41 to 40, Cleopatra created a fantasy world for Antony, where his every whim was granted and every day brought new surprises. Plutarch deplored Antony’s “many follies,” bemoaning how Cleopatra “abducted Antony so successfully . . . that he was carried off by her to Alexandria where he indulged in the pastimes and pleasures of a young man of leisure, and spent and squandered on luxuries that commodity called the most costly in the world, namely time.” Cleopatra, he alleged, always found “some fresh pleasure and delight to apply whether he was feeling serious or frivolous and so she kept up his training relentlessly without leaving him alone either by night or by day.” She was constantly with him, whether he was “playing dice, drinking, and hunting; she watched him while he trained with his weapons.”
According to Plutarch, Cleopatra and Antony “formed a kind of club called the Society of Inimitable Livers, and every day one of them had to entertain the rest.” This magic circle of exquisite bon viveurs “spent incredible, disproportionate amounts of money.” A doctor living in Alexandria at the time, who was invited to visit the royal kitchens by one of the cooks, later regaled Plutarch’s grandfather with tales of prodigality almost beyond belief.
He was surreptitiously brought into the kitchen and when he saw all the food, including eight wild boars roasting on spits, he expressed his surprise at the number of guests whom he imagined were going to be entertained. The cook just laughed and said that there were not going to be many for dinner, only about twelve, but that every dish which was served had to be perfect and it only took an instant’s delay for something to spoil. He explained that Antony might call for food immediately a party began and then a short while later postpone it and ask for a cup of wine instead, or become distracted by a discussion. Therefore, he said, they prepared many meals, not just one, since they could never guess when the exact moment was going to be.
Roasted boars apart, the food at the feasts of the Inimitables can best be imagined from our limited knowledge of Egyptian delicacies and from descriptions of lavish Roman banquets. Pâté de foie gras was probably on the menu. The Egyptians had been the first to appreciate it, sending fattened geese to the Spartans in around 400. The Romans too had swiftly acquired the taste, with detailed recipes surviving from the first century BC for how best to “cram” a goose. Other delicacies might have been the flesh and in particular tongues of flamingos from the Nile; snails, which the Romans were the first to breed for the table; and dormice. The latter, our field mice, were bred in captivity from Greek times to the Middle Ages. The Romans kept them in the dark in large jars and fattened them on walnuts, figs and chestnuts. When the dormice were plump they were roasted, often glazed with honey and sometimes scattered with poppy seeds. Cleopatra and Antony may have tried roasted ostrich, whose range then extended to North Africa, but cooks struggled to render it tender enough, although the brains were relished, as, it seems, were those of other exotic birds, such as peacocks and parrots. Such use of only a small part of an animal or fowl was another way of demonstrating prodigality.
Along with sows’ udders, elephants’ trunks and camels’ heels were consumed—the last said, on somewhat unreliable evidence, to have been a favorite of Cleopatra’s. Other tricks were to build delicacies into fantastic centerpieces themed on concepts such as the signs of the zodiac or the shield of Minerva, or indeed to sculpt one animal by bringing together bits of others. One satirist suggested that a skillful cook could even make a dish of pork look like a fattened goose garnished with fish and different kinds of birds. There would also have been plenty of flaky pastry, copied from the Arab filo pastry, to top the pies.
The Romans were accomplished marinaders and sauciers. Octavian’s favorite poet, Horace, thought a chicken drowned to death in wine had a particularly good flavor. (The hen, originally from India, was first recorded in Europe in the sixth century BC.) Antony would have relished such dishes, as well as other more conventional sauces. Among the most popular was a clear fish sauce made by fermenting salt and fish for up to three months. Sanguine garum was an expensive and stronger version made from a particular kind of tuna’s blood. Other sauces included a bright yellow concoction made from mustard (grown, like fenugreek and cumin, in Egypt) and a very popular one based on a herb called siliphum from Egypt’s neighbor Cyrenaica.
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The Romans and Egyptians also enjoyed using fruit sauces to produce a sweet-and-sour taste, serving slices of veal, for example, in a sauce of raisins, honey, pepper, onions, wine vinegar and herbs.
Less exotically, fish from the Nile and, of course, vegetables grown along its banks would have been served. The Egyptians enjoyed fibrous papyrus stalks, crisp lotus roots, lentils and garlic.
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Their preferred use of the homely cabbage was as a hangover cure.
Although the Romans knew the technique of distilling, neither they nor the Egyptians drank spirits. Egyptian beer had been brewed since pharaonic times and had an excellent reputation but was probably not grand enough to serve to the Inimitables. Their bejeweled goblets would, however, have brimmed with wine. The Egyptians had been producing named wines and labeling vintages from at least the time of Tutankhamen (1327) onward. Hostile Roman poets were certain that Cleopatra so much enjoyed wine from the area around Lake Mareotis that she was usually fuddled with it. Reports reached Rome that on Cleopatra’s ring was an amethyst engraved with the figure of Methe, the goddess of drunkenness who follows in the wake of Dionysus, and this was gleefully interpreted as proof of decadent dipsomania. In fact, the symbolism was more complex and perhaps to the Roman mind more disgraceful. The amethyst was the stone of sobriety, so what the carving of Methe actually symbolized was “sober drunkenness”—the overwhelming ecstasy or “drunkenness without wine” that possessed the female followers of Dionysus.
Cleopatra needed to be as fantastic and fascinating as the heady, intoxicating atmosphere in which she cocooned Antony. Plutarch described her predilection for dressing “in the robe which is sacred to Isis.” If the depiction of the goddess by the writer Apuleius in the second century AD is accurate, Cleopatra, as Isis, must have dazzled Antony. Isis wore her hair falling “in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck” and “crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon.” The uraeus, the Egyptian cobra sacred to the god Amun-Ra and a feature also of the royal Egyptian crown, reared on each side to support the disc, “with ears of corn bristling beside them.”
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Heavy pendant earrings of gold set with gems—lapis lazuli and turquoise, perhaps, or deep red garnet—and rings and armlets of golden wire artfully twisted into the coiled bodies of serpents would have added to the effect.
Isis’ “many-colored robe was of finest linen; part was glistening white, part crocus-yellow, part glowing red and along the entire hem a woven border of flowers and fruit.” The dramatic effect was heightened by “the deep black luster” of a mantle slung across the body from “the right hip to the left shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else and in the middle beamed a full and fiery moon.” Isis’ dramatically particolored robe symbolized her all-embracing power, “concerned with matter which becomes everything and receives everything, light and darkness, day and night, fire and water, life and death.”
Cleopatra intended to be everything to Antony—to fill his days and satisfy his nights to the exclusion of all else. She was no longer bent on mere seduction. That had been achieved at Tarsus, and the speed with which Antony had followed her to Alexandria was proof of its success. What mattered now was to bind Antony to her as the best means of protecting herself and her country.
Compared with Antony, Cleopatra was sexually inexperienced. She had had only one previous lover compared with Antony’s probable hundreds. Yet the Ptolemies must have imbibed something of the sexual attitudes of the people they ruled. The ancient Egyptians had, like the Romans, regarded sex as infinitely pleasurable and nothing to be ashamed of. Many Egyptian words were associated with the sex organs, while more than twenty expressions described making love. A famous erotic papyrus in the Egyptian Museum in Turin shows a cartoon-like sequence of sexual activities between a woman and an extraordinarily well-endowed middle-aged man.
Unused to privacy, the Egyptians took nakedness for granted. All bodily functions were performed publicly, except in the very highest circles. Since people were so used to nudity, they did not find bare flesh especially erotic. Far more arousing to a man was the sight of a woman in a clinging, semitransparent robe, nipples or navel protruding through the thin fabric, as depicted in many carvings, not least of Cleopatra herself at Dendera.
She and Antony were clearly well suited physically but, ever a shrewd judge of character, she would have studied Antony carefully, working out how to make herself indispensable to him at every level. She spiced the sensuality of their relationship with slapstick, encouraging Antony’s love of schoolboy practical jokes—“childish nonsense,” Plutarch grumbled. Cleopatra would “dress as a serving-girl, because Antony used to do his best to make himself look like a slave,” and together they roamed the nighttime streets of Alexandria. Antony liked to stand “at the doors and windows of ordinary folk and mock the people inside.” Unsurprisingly, this “would constantly earn him a volley of scorn and not infrequently blows too before he returned home, despite the fact that most people suspected who he was.”
While on a fishing trip amongst the tall reeds of Lake Mareotis, Antony complained to Cleopatra that he was having little luck. Subsequently he secretly persuaded one of the fishermen accompanying them to swim down and attach one of the fish that had already been caught to his hook. According to Plutarch, “He hauled in two or three fish on this basis but he did not fool the Egyptian queen. She pretended to be impressed and to admire her lover’s skill but told her friends all about it and invited them to come along the next day . . . When Antony had cast his line she told one of her own slaves to swim over to his hook first and to stick on to it a salted herring . . . Antony thought he had caught something and pulled it in, to everyone’s great amusement, of course. ‘Imperator,’ she said, ‘hand your rod over . . . Your prey is cities, kingdoms and continents.’ ”
According to Plutarch, “the Alexandrians loved the way Antony played the fool and joined in his games . . . They liked him and said that he adopted the mask of tragedy for the Romans, but the mask of comedy for them.” He alleged that “Cleopatra did not restrict her flattery to Plato’s four categories, but employed many more forms of it.” Plato defined the four categories in his
Gorgias
, where he invited the reader to compare the false, flattering arts of sophistry, rhetoric, pastry cooking and cosmetics with the “genuine” arts of lawgiving, justice, medicine and gymnastics. Plato believed morality to be the essential basis of human existence and in
Gorgias
was challenging those whose first priority—as Plutarch was accusing Cleopatra—was the pursuit of pleasure.