Read Cleopatra and Antony Online
Authors: Diana Preston
O
N JANUARY 1, 33, Octavian rebuked Antony openly in public for the first time. To do so he used the customary New Year debate in the Senate about the state of the republic. Speaking, as he invariably did, from a prepared text, “to avoid either his memory betraying him or wasting his time in learning the speech,” on this occasion he restricted himself to savaging Antony’s management of affairs in the east. However, building on the groundwork he had previously subtly laid, he soon broadened his propaganda offensive to encompass Antony’s character, his treatment of Octavia and, in particular, his alleged subservience to Cleopatra and its disastrous consequences for Rome.
Parts of Antony’s reply have been preserved. In response to Octavian’s claims about his relationship with Cleopatra he wrote, “What has changed for you? Is it because I have sex with the queen? Is she my wife? Do you think it a new affair? Didn’t I start it nine years ago?” Detecting a whiff of hypocrisy, he went on, “Do you only sleep with Livia? I congratulate you if when you read this letter you haven’t fucked Tertulla or Terentilla or Ruffila or Salvia Titisenia. What does it matter where I stuff my erection?” As for a charge by Octavian that he had falsely recognized Caesarion as Caesar’s son, he dismissed it with the simple comment that Caesar himself had done so.
Turning to more weighty political matters, Antony reproached Octavian for his failure, after his success against Sextus Pompey, to keep his promise to return the ships he had borrowed from Antony and for his broken commitment to send Antony twenty thousand troops for his Parthian and Armenian campaigns. Very belatedly he complained that Octavian had deposed Lepidus without consultation and had expropriated all his territories for himself. He had also failed to make proper provision for Antony’s veterans in Italy. Antony therefore claimed half of all the territories and revenue Octavian had seized and demanded that half the troops Octavian had recently recruited be sent to him in the east. His remonstrations dispatched, Antony returned to Armenia, where he still had hopes of resurrecting his campaign against the Parthians.
Octavian’s reply was brisk and to the point. Antony could have half of Octavian’s conquests when Antony gave him half of Armenia. Lepidus had been justly deposed. As for Antony’s complaints about his veterans, they were entirely unjustified. Surely, Octavian suggested disingenuously, Antony could settle them in Parthia and Media, which he had so recently conquered?
Each man continued to sling accusations at the other. Many centuries before the phrase “
qui s’excuse s’accuse
” was coined, Antony wrote a whole pamphlet to refute allegations of his drunkenness, while Octavian likewise commissioned one to explain why Caesar could not be the father of Caesarion and hence, in the eyes of some, the proper heir to Caesar. (Disappointingly, both documents are now lost.) Perhaps concerned about the impression that reports about the self-indulgence of the Club of the Inimitables had made, Antony alleged that Octa-vian, dressed as a god like all the other participants, had presided “at a feast of the divine twelve” remarkable not only for debauchery but also for gluttony. All this had taken place at a time of food shortage—presumably during Sextus’ maritime blockade of Italy—which led the Roman population to shout the next day, “The gods have gobbled all the grain.”
Antony went on to pillory Octavian’s sexual appetites. He and his supporters revived earlier allegations that as a youth Octavian had allowed Caesar to sodomize him. They claimed that nowadays, despite Octavian’s buttoned-up public persona, his friends pimped for him, behaving “like the slave dealer Toransius in arranging his amusements. They would strip married women and mature girls naked and inspect them as if they were for sale.” Antony also reminded everyone of the scandal of Octavian’s overhasty betrothal to Livia while she was heavily pregnant with her former husband’s child and recounted another story of how Octavian had hauled an ex-consul’s wife from her dining room into the bedroom before her husband’s eyes, subsequently returning her blushing and disheveled. Switching his attack, Antony accused Octavian of cowardice at Philippi and elsewhere, alleging that it was Agrippa who had beaten Sextus and the pirates while Octavian lay petrified on the deck, not even capable of giving the order to engage.
By the late summer of 33, with conflict seeming increasingly probable, Antony ordered his senior general, Canidius Crassus, to curtail his preparations for further campaigns against Parthia and to bring his sixteen legions to Antony’s new winter base near Ephesus. Here Cleopatra joined him, bringing with her money, two hundred ships and other resources to bolster his forces. Antony yet again showered his ally and lover with presents, including the contents of the library at Pergamon and many other looted works of art, all designed to beautify Alexandria.
Despite his prolonged absence from Rome, Antony still had a numerous and loyal band of supporters there, some of whom were former staunch republicans, others allies of many years’ standing. Two of them, Enobarbus and Sosius, were due to become consuls for 32. With an eye to their winning further support for him in the Senate, Antony wrote to them a full justification of his actions in the east, including the Donations of Alexandria. Just like Pompey so many years earlier, he asked that the Senate formally ratify them. He also clearly stated that he would lay down his triumviral powers if Octavian did so too. It is a measure of just how badly Rome had received the news of the Donations that even the two consuls, supporters of Antony as they were, decided not to publish the justification Antony had given for them or to seek their ratification.
However, in February 32, Sosius addressed the Senate in favor of Antony while attacking Octavian virulently. Octavian, who had wisely absented himself from Rome at the time of Sosius’ speech, soon returned with his troops and entered the Senate, showing his now customary disregard for senatorial traditions and contempt for its current membership. He came not alone but with a large and threatening group of bodyguards and a coterie of allies all concealing weapons beneath their clothing. Interrupting the day’s business, Octavian marched up to where the two consuls were seated and placed himself between them. From this position he harangued the Senate, informing its members that he would bring to its next meeting documentary proof of Antony’s misdeeds quite sufficient for the senators to condemn him out of hand as a traitor. Octavian then stalked out, followed by his phalanx of bodyguards. The threat to any senator so unwise as not to collaborate in Octavian’s condemnation of Antony was all too clear. Sosius, Enobarbus and about three hundred of the one-thousand-strong Senate did not stay around long enough for Octavian to appear a second time but packed their bags and fled to Antony at Ephesus.
Octavian let them go and offered any others who wished the opportunity to follow. He was conscious, perhaps, that clemency had been key to Caesar’s civil war campaign and also that he had gone quite some way toward purging Rome of his opponents. He knew too that since many of the departed were remnants of the republican faction, they would be likely to exacerbate tensions in Antony’s camp, where die-hard republicans already coexisted uneasily with allied kings, the supporters of Cleopatra and Antony’s pan-Hellenism and, most of all, with Cleopatra herself.
If the latter was indeed in his mind, Octavian was soon proved right. Antony welcomed his new supporters and, mindful that the adherence of the year’s two consuls gave his faction an appearance of legality, convened a Senate in exile to debate the course of the forthcoming political and military campaigns. In these debates Enobarbus, who continued to hope for some reconciliation between the two sides, played a prominent role. Alone among Antony’s supporters and as befitted a nephew of the stiff-necked Cato, he refused to address Cleopatra by her new title of “Queen of Kings” or even as “Queen,” calling her simply Cleopatra. Her attempts to ingratiate herself with him by naming a town in Cilicia after him probably only confirmed his suspicion of her egotism and despotism. At around this time Enobarbus seems to have convinced Antony that his cause would best be served if he ordered Cleopatra to return to Egypt to see out the forthcoming hostilities there. However, Canidius Crassus spoke in her defense, arguing:
that it was wrong to exclude a woman who had contributed so much towards his war effort and secondly that he would regret lowering the morale of the Egyptians who made up much of his navy, besides Canidius certainly could not see that Cleopatra was the intellectual inferior of any of the allied kings. She had governed a vast kingdom all on her own for many years and she had also been with Antony for a long time and had learned to manage important matters.
Plutarch claims that Cleopatra had bribed Canidius Crassus to speak on her behalf, concerned, not unreasonably, that in her absence a further peace settlement might be pieced together that would disadvantage her personally and politically, by Antony being reconciled with Octavia as well as Octavian. Whether bribed or not—at about this time he did acquire lands and privileges in Egypt, as attested by a surviving royal decree—Canidius’ arguments were logical. Antony listened to them as well as, no doubt, Cleopatra’s private entreaties and relented. Nevertheless, Cleopatra’s presence would continue to symbolize the deep division among Antony’s supporters and serve as a focus for the discontent of the republicans.
While at Ephesus, Antony continued to assemble his armies. He had at his disposal not only seventy-five thousand legionaries, more than half of whom Canidius Crassus had marched the fourteen hundred miles from Armenia to join him, but also the troops of his client rulers, who numbered around twenty-five thousand infantry and, importantly, twelve thousand cavalry. One of Antony’s most loyal client kings was not, however, present. Herod had gathered a body of troops and “carefully furnished them with all necessities and designed them as auxiliaries for Antony,” only to be ordered by Antony not to lead them to him. Instead he was asked to use them to bring to heel the king of the Nabataean Arabs, who had failed to maintain the rent payments for the bitumen deposits that Herod had been supposed to collect on Cleopatra’s behalf. Josephus wrote that Antony’s order was issued at the pleading of Cleopatra, who saw it “to her advantage that these two kings should do one another as great mischief as possible.” Cleopatra also dispatched a contingent of her own troops from Egypt to monitor what was going on around the Red Sea. According to Herod, they only got in his way, as no doubt intended, thus preventing him winning a too clear-cut victory.
In the spring of 32, Antony and his military advisers determined that the ground for any conflict between themselves and Octavian’s forces should be Greece, just as it had been for the battle between Caesar and Pompey and Antony and Octavian themselves against the Liberators. Greece was the frontier state between the Hellenic east and Rome and offered reasonable scope for supply and military maneuver, as well as a launch pad for any invasion of Italy once Octa-vian had been defeated. Plutarch and others suggested that by moving to Greece in 32, Antony lost his opportunity for an immediate invasion of Italy with the numerically superior forces he then had. This, however, overlooks some key points. Antony’s army was not yet fully assembled and trained. There were few landing points in Italy and all were well defended. And most importantly, if Antony brought with him his eastern levies and Cleopatra, an undefeated Octavian could easily have presented himself as the savior of Italy, rallying the population to repulse an alien horde. Yet if Antony had left Cleopatra and the others behind, his numerical superiority would have been lost.
While their armies were boarding their mostly Egyptian transport vessels for the voyage to southern Greece, Antony first made the very much shorter voyage from Ephesus with Cleopatra to the island of Samos. Here they stayed for less than a month, mainly to stage a lavish festival of theater and music.
Every practitioner of the arts sacred to Dionysus had been compelled to congregate on Samos and while all around almost the whole inhabited world was filled with sighs and groans a single island resounded day after day with the music of pipes and lyres while theaters were crowded and choruses competed with each other. Every city sent an ox for a communal sacrifice and kings vied with one another in the parties they threw and the gifts they gave. As a result people began to ask “if their preparations for war are treated as an occasion for such extravagant festivities how will Antony and Cleopatra celebrate their victories?”
This was precisely the impression they had wished to create. They designed the festivities to reaffirm their associations with Dionysus and Isis and also to echo similar events organized by Cleopatra’s predecessor Alexander before he went to war. At the end of the celebrations both Cleopatra and Antony embarked for Athens, but not before presenting the artists with property in the city of Prirene as a reward for their participation.
The couple passed the summer in Athens, where Antony and Octavia had previously spent some of the happier days of their married life and Octavia had become a great favorite of the Athenians and honored patron of their city. Antony, as well as Cleopatra, must have been uneasily conscious of this. He therefore set about raising Cleopatra’s status, leading an Athenian delegation to Cleopatra to present her with a decree awarding her a whole variety of privileges. Cleopatra reciprocated with a series of extravagant festivals to celebrate her newfound relationship with the city. In return, the Athenians erected a statue of Cleopatra bedecked in the robes of Isis on the Acropolis itself.
Then, around the end of May, Antony gave Cleopatra the gift she must have wanted the most. He took the profoundly symbolic step of formally divorcing Octavia, even going so far as to have his agents evict her from his house on the Palatine in Rome. Octavia, as she seems to have done throughout, behaved well. Plutarch adds, “She left with all Antony’s children except for the eldest of Fulvia’s sons who was with his father and they say that she was in tears, upset by the idea that people might regard her as one of the causes of war.”