Cleopatra (24 page)

It is important to see through this propaganda and to remember that Antony was not only a bluff, naïve, simple fellow; he was also an extremely ambitious and capable man.

Athenaeus tells the story of that first evening together.
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In a room decorated with purple and gold wall hangings Cleopatra served delicious food on golden plates inlaid with precious stones; she ended the banquet by presenting all her golden plates to Antony. The next night’s banquet was even more splendid and Antony went home with yet more golden tableware, while his invited guests were allowed to keep their couches and their goblets. Banquets were times when luxury could come dangerously close to debauchery. The connection between eating, drinking and sex was an obvious one, and the dynastic Egyptians had chosen to decorate their tombs, places of rebirth, with images of perpetual banquets where men and women sat before tables groaning with produce. Cleopatra, it is suggested, habitually used the banquet as a means of seduction. She feasted with Caesar, a man so remarkably abstemious that he legislated against personal luxury, lavish food, extravagant clothing and pearls. And now she feasted with Antony, a notoriously weak and lazy man. Indeed, if we take the accounts of the classical writers at face value, it seems that Cleopatra and Antony did nothing other than eat, drink and fornicate. The sheer amount of food consumed, and wasted, at Cleopatra’s court is enough to make a restrained man, in this case Plutarch, shudder:

Octavian, a moral, upright man who famously wore homespun clothes made (or so he fondly imagined) by his wife and daughter, could not be seduced either by Cleopatra or by her food. In his one interview with her he refused to meet the queen’s eye and, after her death, he melted down all the gold plates in the Alexandria palace.

Pliny the Elder tells the story of Cleopatra’s earrings, inherited from ‘oriental kings’ and made from the largest pearls ever discovered.
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One day, bored and irritated by the quality of the food served at Antony’s table, Cleopatra wagered that she could serve him a banquet worth ten million sesterces (this at a time when the annual pay for a legionary soldier was a mere 900 sesterces). The next evening she offered Antony the choicest of foods. Then, as dessert, she called for a cup of sour wine, removed a pearl earring, dropped the pearl in the wine and, as it dissolved, drank. With a few swallows she had consumed her banquet. This is of course, as many observers have pointed out, an unlikely if not totally impossible tale. Pearls, being almost 90 per cent calcium carbonate, will dissolve in an acid solution; they will dissolve much faster if ground to a powder by a pestle and mortar first. Egyptian vinegar was famed for its strength. If Cleopatra’s sour wine
(vinum acer
, or vinegar) was strong enough, and if she allowed enough time – experiment would suggest more than twenty hours for a large whole pearl in cold vinegar – the pearl would indeed dissolve, neutralising the acid. Cleopatra, who acquired a considerable posthumous reputation as an alchemist, may well have known this. Whether the resulting mixture would have been palatable, or indeed drinkable, is another matter. Some historians have suggested that Cleopatra’s pearl-wine mixture may have been considered an aphrodisiac. More
prosaically, Ullman’s experiments indicate that the pearl-wine mixture, correctly made, may have acted as an antacid. However, to assume that Cleopatra was actually manufacturing her own post-banquet pick-me-up is probably an assumption too far.
¹⁷

What happened to the other earring? Tradition holds that Antony’s friend Lucius Munatius Plancus prevented Cleopatra from dissolving it and, after the queen’s death, it was cut in two and placed in the ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome. As both Venus and the pearl came from the sea, and both symbolised love, this was an entirely appropriate donation.

Two other Roman pearl-drinking stories exist. Both Horace and Pliny tell the tale of the spendthrift son of the actor Aesopus who drank a pearl taken from the ear of the wealthy lady Metella. Metella’s pearl was, however, smaller than Cleopatra’s, and was valued at just a million sesterces. Suetonius tells us that Caligula, a notorious eccentric, drank pearls dissolved in vinegar; he also, apparently, bathed in perfume and fed his guests on bread and meat made of gold. These multiple tales do not, of course, mean that Cleopatra’s story must be immediately dismissed as an urban myth. Cleopatra may have inspired, or been inspired by, the son of Aesopus, while Caligula may have been inspired by Cleopatra. Nor does the need to boil, crush or steep the pearl in acid necessarily render the story invalid. Cleopatra, acknowledged mistress of the public spectacle, could have stage-managed her act and Antony, flushed with wine and love, is unlikely to have noticed. It is quite obvious that Cleopatra could simply have swallowed the pearl whole, although swallowing, and presumably retrieving the pearl later, would have turned the grandest of gestures into a cheap trick. We know that Cleopatra did wear pearls, as her later coins show her wearing either a lengthy rope of pearls wrapped twice around her neck or, less likely, a shorter pearl necklace and a pearl-embroidered dress. Pearls had no place in traditional Egyptian jewellery, which employed brightly coloured semiprecious stones set in gold, but a Roman fashion
for ostentatious pearl-wearing had started in 61, when, following his victory over Mithridates, Pompey commissioned his own portrait to be rendered in pearls. Suetonius tells us that Julius Caesar invaded Britain to collect freshwater pearls, and that back in Rome, as part of an enforced austerity drive, he attempted to restrict the wearing of pearls to those ‘of a designated position and age’.
¹⁸
Pliny, who clearly disapproved of pearls and all they stood for, records the tale of Lollia Paulina who wore pearl and emerald jewellery worth forty million sesterces and carried the receipts at all times to impress strangers!

On balance, it seems unlikely that the world’s most expensive banquet was consumed in quite the way that Pliny describes. This does not matter overmuch; it is what we have come to expect from Cleopatra tales. What does matter is that Pliny apparently believed the tale and used it to spread the propaganda of a Cleopatra who was cunning, recklessly extravagant, and selfish (she alone consumes the ‘banquet’): unnatural and worrying traits for a Roman man to encounter in any woman. At the same time, her easy outwitting of Antony does not bode well for his future. A subsequent story, also told by Pliny, sees Cleopatra poisoning the flowers in her crown before challenging Antony, who is refusing to eat or drink anything that has not been tasted by a slave, to drink a flower-wine mixture. This story has a more sinister ending: Cleopatra stops the trusting Antony from drinking her poisoned flowers and ‘she ordered a prisoner who had been led in to drink it and he promptly died’.
¹⁹
Again, Cleopatra has outwitted the innocent Antony with consummate ease.

Cleopatra feasted with Antony, but she bargained with him too. She would gladly agree to the execution of the traitor Serapion who, having fled Cyprus, had taken refuge in the Phoenician city of Tyre. She would also part-finance Antony’s Parthian campaign. But he, in return, must agree to protect her crown and her land. This protection included the removal of the sister who posed a constant threat to Cleopatra and Caesarion and who, as Cleopatra might well have
argued, had almost certainly sided with Serapion and Cassius. Dragged from her sanctuary, Arsinoë was murdered on Antony’s order, then buried in Ephesus, possibly in the imposing city-centre tomb, today known as the Octagon, which has yielded the remains of an anonymous woman in her twenties. At the same time Antony disposed of a troublesome young man who was claiming to be the long-lost, undrowned Ptolemy XIII.

Cleopatra returned to Egypt and Antony followed a month later. He was to spend the winter of 41/40 relaxing in Alexandria and, perhaps, like Caesar before him, considering the possibility of generating revenue from Egypt. In Alexandria he found that he enjoyed all the popularity that Caesar had lacked. The Alexandrians had not forgotten how Antony had allowed Archelaos an honourable burial, or how he had used his influence to dissuade Auletes from massacring innocent citizens, and they were impressed by his current demeanour. While Caesar had forced himself on Alexandria with all the subtlety of a miniature Roman invasion, Antony appeared as a private individual, happy to abandon his Roman toga for a Greek
chlamys
, a military-style cloak, pinned on one shoulder, which could be worn either alone or over other garments. If the classical authors are to be believed, Cleopatra and Antony enjoyed a carefree, almost childish winter. Together they formed a drinking society, ‘The Inimitable Livers’
(amimetobioi
, corrupted by a wag named ‘Parasite’, on an Alexandrian statue base, to ‘The Inimitable Lovers’), which met every night to drink, feast, dice, hunt and, a particular favourite, wander the streets of Alexandria in disguise, playing tricks on the hapless citizens. Plutarch believed that the new society was simply an excuse for Cleopatra to spend all her time with Antony: she could not bear, or could not risk, letting him out of her sight even for an evening. An alternative interpretation is that the Inimitable Livers was a group of Dionysiac initiates who met regularly, not for random debauchery but to perform sacred religious rites that required the consumption of alcohol. Certainly Cleopatra’s
amethyst ring, which reportedly bore the inscription
methe
(drunkenness), can be accepted as referring to mystical rather than actual inebriation, as the amethyst itself was associated with temperance. Velleius gives a flavour of the long Alexandrian evenings spent carousing when he tells how Plancus was persuaded to perform at one of Cleopatra’s banquets: with his naked body painted blue, a crown of reeds on his head and a fish’s tail swinging behind, Plancus played the part of the sea god Glaucus.
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Plutarch tells us that already, by their second evening together, Cleopatra had ‘recognised in the jests of Antony much of the soldier and the common man, and adopted this manner also towards him, without restraint now, and boldly’. Antony was a famous joker. He jested with his men, and roared with laughter when they in turn played tricks on him. He had even attempted to joke with the serious Fulvia, but she had proved less than receptive to his humour:

The Ptolemies, too, were fond of a good joke. Athenaeus tells of a trick played by Ptolemy II on Sosibios.
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Ptolemy had instructed his treasurers that when Sosibios asked for his salary, he was to be told that it
had already been paid. This they did and Sosibios brought his complaint of underpayment before the king. Ptolemy looked at the records and slowly read out the names of those who had definitely been paid: Soter, Sosigenes, Bion and Apollonos. As he explained to Sosibios, by taking elements from each name –
SO
ter, so
SI
genes,
Bl
on, Apollon
OS
– he could prove that Sosibios had indeed received his salary. Presumably the unpaid Sosibios was duty-bound to find this amusing. Cleopatra’s own sense of humour – aimed directly at the boyish Antony – had an equally unsophisticated twist: