Antony and Cleopatra (46 page)

Antony first confronted the force approaching from the west, hoping to persuade his men to return to their former allegiance. Gallus is supposed to have had his trumpeters sound a fanfare to blot out the words. Antony attacked and was repulsed, then Gallus managed to lure the enemy ships into attacking the harbour and trapped them there. Antony and the remnants of his forces withdrew. In the meantime, Pelusium had fallen, apparently without a fight. Dio claims that Cleopatra had betrayed the fortress to the enemy. The commander of her garrison there was named Seleucus and Plutarch says that she had this man's wife and children executed for his failure. This may have been genuine anger, an attempt to quash the rumour or even to conceal her involvement.
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Coming back from his defeat, Antony bumped into Octavian's vanguard and was able to rout some cavalry. He had archers shoot arrows into the enemy camp, each with a message tied to the shaft, offering the soldiers 1,500 denarii each if they came over to his side. None did. Even so, Antony returned to Alexandria – the action had been fought on the outskirts of the city – and without bothering to take off his armour, embraced Cleopatra and kissed her in suitably Homeric fashion. One of his cavalrymen had distinguished himself in the skirmish and Antony presented the man to the queen, who rewarded him with a helmet and cuirass decorated with gold. Perhaps the soldier was one of the bodyguard of Gauls he had given to her some years before. Whatever his background, he deserted to the enemy that night.
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‘The Sharers in Death' held a last feast that night. It was lavish in scale, but tearful, with Antony talking openly of his desire for an heroic death – scarcely an encouraging topic for the night before a battle. Overnight, it was said people heard music and chants, just like one of the Dionysiac processions so favoured by the two lovers. The sound seemed to leave the city, as if the god was abandoning it. The Greeks and Romans were inclined to believe that the deities associated with a place left before a disaster. The Roman army regularly performed a ceremony intended to welcome the gods of a besieged city into new homes freshly prepared for them by the besiegers.
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Antony had planned an ambitious combined attack for the following day, 1 August 30
BC
. It would begin with warships attacking the enemy fleet and this would be followed by an assault on land. There was no realistic chance of victory, or at least not of any success that might actually turn the tide of the war. This may explain what happened next. Antony watched as his warships closed with the enemy, but was amazed to see them stop and raise their oars out of the water, a gesture of surrender. Closer to him, his cavalry followed their example, choosing this moment to defect. His infantry – less able to move quickly, less sure of each other's mood or truly loyal –remained. They attacked and were quickly beaten. Antony returned to the palace and Plutarch claims that he was yelling out that the queen had betrayed him. Dio simply states that Cleopatra had ordered the ships' captains to defect.

Most of the ships to escape from Actium were hers. Some may have been lost in the attempt to reach the Arabian coast, but any built to replace them were constructed and crewed at her expense. In most respects the naval squadrons were hers rather than Antony's and so it is certainly possible that she had arranged their defection in secret negotiations. Most modern historians dismiss this as propaganda aimed at blackening her reputation. They may be right, and the truth in such cases was unlikely to have been widely known even at the time. However, there was absolutely nothing to be gained by fighting. Possessing the fleet gave a bargaining counter and giving it up could well have been a gesture of faith. Unconditional surrender either then or in the past months meant simply trusting to the mercy of the conqueror. Cleopatra hoped to persuade Octavian to make her a deal and that meant conceding slowly, demonstrating both her capacity and willingness to be of assistance. Giving up Pelusium, and later ordering the surrender of her fleet, would make sense as gestures, making Octavian's conquest easier and less costly in lives. These would be coldly pragmatic decisions, but they were certainly not impossible ones.
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Cleopatra was a survivor who had clung on to power for almost twenty years amidst all the intrigues of the Ptolemaic court and the chaos of Roman civil wars. It would have been out of character for her to despair and it is clear that she had not yet done so. She might be able to save something of her own power, or if not then secure the position of some or all of her children. Caesarion was vulnerable after the emphasis on his paternity in the struggle with Octavian, but he had already been sent away on the long journey that should eventually take him to India. Her children by Antony might well be more acceptable to the young Caesar, and the Romans liked to employ client rulers. Their father may already have been beyond salvation.

While Antony's army dissolved around him, Cleopatra went to her mausoleum. It was a two-storey structure, with a single door and one or more large windows on the upper storey. Construction work was not yet complete and there were ropes and other building equipment for raising and placing the stone blocks still around it. She went inside, accompanied only by her two maids and a eunuch. Mechanisms were sprung, dropping into the doorway a stone barrier to close the entrance permanently. Sealed in with her treasure, the queen obviously did not expect her lover to join her. Both Plutarch and Dio say that she told her courtiers to tell Antony that she was dead.
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He believed the report and his anger against her turned to sorrow and a desire to join his lover in death. Plutarch makes him regret that the queen had been the first to take this courageous step, so that he – the great commander – had to follow her example. Retiring to his chamber and taking off his armour, he asked a slave to help him do the job, just as Brutus and Cassius had done. Although this generation of Roman aristocrats had become so enamoured of suicide, most still realised that it was a difficult thing to do cleanly and quickly. Even the determined Cato had not succeeded at his first attempt. On the retreat from Media, Plutarch says that Antony had asked one of his bodyguards to perform the task. His choice now was different and fell on an attendant named Eros, who had already been told to prepare for this final service to his master. Taking Antony's sword as if to guide and give force to the thrust, instead the slave ran himself through.

Inspired by this gesture, Mark Antony then stabbed himself in the stomach, slumping back to lie on a couch. Either there were others in the room or they were attracted by the noise. Antony regained consciousness and begged them to help him die. None would, and some or all of them then fled. Plutarch says that at this point Cleopatra sent one of her scribes to have Antony brought to her, although does not explain how she knew what he had done. Dio claims that the cries of his attendants had made the queen look out from a window in the mausoleum. Someone saw her and told Antony, who realised that his lover was not dead. He tried to rise, collapsed from the exertion, then ordered them to carry him to her.

The door to the mausoleum was sealed and so they used some of the builders' ropes to raise him on a bed up to the window, Cleopatra and her servants pulling hard to lift his weight. After a struggle, they brought him into the tomb and laid him out. After this effort she is supposed to have wept loudly, tearing her clothes and striking and scratching her own chest in grief. Antony begged her to be calm, then asked for wine and drank. It may have hastened the end and he died soon afterwards, with the queen beside him. Plutarch has him say that his end was a good one for a ‘Roman, conquered valiantly by a Roman', but it is hard to know how anyone could have known what he said. These were good dying words, both for Octavian's propaganda and for those Romans who cherished Antony's reputation.

At best his suicide had been a series of misunderstandings, but since both our main sources report that some of the confusion was deliberately created by Cleopatra, then it is hard not to believe that she planned to separate her own fate from that of Antony. The report of her death was bound to make him react. He might flee from Alexandria, although with another invader to the west it would have been hard for him to go anywhere but to the south, and there was little chance of his rallying support there. Perhaps he would surrender or let himself be captured, suffering imprisonment or execution as Octavian saw fit. Most likely he would do what he did and take his own life. Cleopatra knew him as well as anyone and must have guessed how he would react. She did not kill her lover, and most certainly had not in the past months stooped to murder, although admittedly Antony's Roman friends would most likely have reacted violently had she done so. Yet the false message made it likely that he would take his own life, or leave, or be killed in some other manner.
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Whichever action he took, Antony would be out of the way and leave her to negotiate her own settlement with Octavian. For it is clear that Cleopatra had no intention of being a ‘Sharer in Death', at least for the moment, and she was to survive him by more than a week. Ensconced in her mausoleum, surrounded by her treasure and the means to destroy it, she had a few cards left to play. That does not mean that her grief for Antony was any less real, even if— perhaps especially if — it was tinged with an element of guilt through having to sacrifice him so that there was a chance for her and any of her children to survive with dignity and perhaps power. Cleopatra mourned her lover and she and her attendants did their best to treat the body properly. There was nothing she could have done to save him.

Octavian entered Alexandria with more show than actual use of force. He summoned the population to a public meeting in the gymnasium. There, he addressed them in Greek. Unlike Antony and most Romans of his class, he was not entirely comfortable in the language, in part because his education had been cut short by Caesar's murder. He assured the Alexandrians of good treatment and brought before them a philosopher named Areius, whom he planned to use as a local representative. The inhabitants of the city did not respond with the enthusiasm they had kept for Antony, but there was certainly general relief.
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Antony's suicide in turn relieved Octavian of having to deal with him and the stigma likely to follow his execution. He could afford to be magnanimous and put on a display of grief, reading Antony's letters to his senior staff and speaking of their past friendship. Cleopatra and her treasure presented a problem, even if they were not a threat to his victory. Whatever contact and secret negotiation had occurred, either no agreement had been struck or she was not yet prepared to rely on his good faith. Octavian sent an equestrian named Caius Proculeius along with a freedman to the mausoleum to speak to the queen. In Plutarch's account of his death, Antony is supposed to have told her that she could trust Proculeius, although once again it is hard to know how the author could have obtained this information. None of the witnesses wrote an account of what happened, although it is possible that they did tell others about what had happened in the days before they died. Proculeius and the queen spoke, but she refused to come out and he returned to report to Octavian.

Next, Proculeius returned with Cornelius Gallus and it was the latter who led the negotiations. As on the earlier occasion, she did not come to the window, but shouted through the sealed door. While Gallus kept her attention, Proculeius and two slaves put a ladder up against the side of the building and climbed in through the window. Going down to the ground floor, they grabbed hold of Cleopatra, thwarting her attempt to stab herself with a knife. The eunuch died in the struggle, perhaps of snakebite or poison, but the queen and her maids were taken as prisoners back to the palace.
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Cleopatra was given permission to attend to the funeral arrangements for her dead lover, a task that several prominent Romans and other client rulers are said to have requested. Romans, and especially the aristocracy, in the first century
BC
generally cremated the dead and then interred the ashes in a tomb. Antony's body does not seem to have been burned, but was embalmed and probably placed in a coffin. Alexander the Great had been mummified, and so were many of the Ptolemies, at least from the second century
BC
onwards. However, the full process took seventy days, and could not have been completed before Cleopatra herself was dead.
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From grief, and an infection in the cuts she had given herself with her own nails, Cleopatra fell ill, developing a fever and refusing to eat. She was treated by her doctor, Olympus, who later wrote an account of her last days, which was used by Plutarch. He said that the queen had lost the will to live, but then rallied a little when told that Octavian wished to see her, perhaps unwillingly because it was said that he threatened to harm her children.

Dio and Plutarch present the encounter in dramatically different ways. The former has Cleopatra dressed to look at once pitiful and beautiful — much as she had first met Caesar. She reclined on an elaborately decorated couch in a grand apartment, surrounded by pictures and busts of Caesar, with his letters clutched to her bosom. When Octavian entered, she rose to greet him, not the proud queen, but the respectful and open suppliant. Her talk was mainly of Caesar and she read extracts from his letters, pausing sometimes to weep and then kiss the papyrus. Dio has Octavian refuse to look at the beautiful petitioner when he replied, but simply assure her that her life was not in danger. The queen went down on her knees to beg, but could get no more than this, even when she begged him to let her join Antony in death. Propaganda emphasised that the virtuous Octavian was not to be seduced like Caesar and Antony, but in reality the situations were so different that this was never likely.