Augustus (35 page)

Cleopatra and Antony now dissolved their celebrated Society of Inimitable Livers and instituted another, which was at least its equal in elegance, luxury and extravagance, and which they called the Order of the Inseparable in Death. Their friends joined it on the understanding that they would end their lives together, and they set themselves to charm away the days with a succession of exquisite supper parties.

The couple knew that with the arrival of spring Octavian would march against them. They had no realistic prospect of escaping to some other part of the world, although they had briefly thought of Spain and Cleopatra had tried and failed to organize an expedition to Arabia. The star-crossed lovers were cornered. Their only recourse now was to negotiate and, assuming that failed, to prepare for a last, futile stand.

The queen had plenty of money and still commanded the loyalty of her people. An army and a fleet were assembled. To cheer up the Alexandrians, a great ceremony—almost as splendid as the Donations of Alexandria—was held, at which the sixteen-year-old king of kings, Ptolemy XV Caesar, alias Caesarion, and Antony’s son by Fulvia, the fourteen-year-old Antyllus, officially came of age.

Octavian received a succession of envoys from Alexandria who laid various proposals before him. He listened, but conceded nothing. Although he declined to make his own position clear, his policy was in fact straightforward: he wanted to win the great prize of Egypt, that rich, self-contained, and exotic realm which had attracted the greedy gaze of eminent Romans for more than a century—and he wanted to win it for himself, not simply for Rome.

Octavian’s plan of attack was yet another pincer movement. Four Antonian legions that had switched loyalties would invade from Cyrenaica, which lay west of Egypt; in a signal mark of favor, Octavian appointed to command them the thirty-year-old Gaius Cornelius Gallus, although he was only an
eques
and previously best known as a fine lyric poet.

Octavian marched through Syria at the head of a substantial army toward the Egyptian frontier. The campaign was unlikely to be problematic, so this time Agrippa’s services were not required. Octavian judged himself capable of managing on his own.

At last Antony bestirred himself. Believing that there was a good chance of winning over his legions, he marched back, at the head of a strong force of infantry and a powerful fleet, to Paraetonium where Gallus had installed himself. But his attempt to win back the legionaries and take the town failed, and his ships were trapped in the harbor and either burned or sunk.

The rest of Antony and Cleopatra’s forces were stationed at Pelusium, a port on the easternmost edge of the Nile delta. It straddled the coastal route that skirted the Sinai desert and, being the only means of entry by land into Egypt from the east, was strategically important. Pharaohs throughout the ages had always taken care to give it a strong garrison. However, Pelusium fell with little or no resistance, perhaps surrendered by Cleopatra or else quickly stormed. If the former, she was creating a distance between herself and Antony—as may well be, for her first loyalty was always to her kingdom and the preservation of her own power. This and other accounts of her behavior during this time may have been lifted from Octavian’s propaganda, which often stressed the queen’s eastern deviousness and Antony’s humiliating status as a dupe. However, it is perfectly possible that Cleopatra saw no advantage in going down with Antony and tried to save herself.

Octavian seems to have encountered little or no resistance in his advance on Alexandria. He passed the fashionable suburb of Canopus and set up camp near the racecourse or hippodrome, just outside the city walls. When he received the news that Pelusium was lost, Antony rushed back to Alexandria and, on its outskirts, surprised and routed an advance guard of enemy cavalry. Elated by the victory, he returned to the palace and embraced Cleopatra while still in full armor. He then introduced to her a soldier who had displayed unusual valor in the engagement. As a reward, the queen gave him a golden helmet and breastplate. He took them, and that night deserted to Octavian.

With hopeless bravado Antony challenged his onetime colleague to single combat, as if they were a pair of Homeric heroes. He can hardly have anticipated an acceptance. Octavian responded dismissively: “There are many different ways by which Antony can die.”

On July 31, Antony decided to launch an all-out attack by land and sea on the following day. At dinner he ate and drank particularly well, telling the people around him that he did not expect to survive the battle. That evening, or so the story goes,
about the hour of midnight, when all was hushed and a mood of dejection and fear of its impending fate brooded over the whole city, suddenly a marvellous sound of music was heard…as if a troop of revellers were leaving the city, shouting and singing as they went…. Those who tried to discover a meaning for this prodigy concluded that the god Dionysus, with whom Antony claimed kinship and whom he had sought above all to imitate, was now abandoning him.

Gods were imagined to leave besieged cities before they fell—Troy, Athens, Jerusalem. If the story has a basis in fact, perhaps Alexandrians were hearing Octavian, supported by a soldiers’ chorus, conducting an
evocatio;
in this ceremony, a Roman general used to call on the gods of an enemy city to change sides and migrate to Rome.

On August 1, as soon as it was light, Antony sent his fleet eastward to meet Octavian’s ships, and he drew up his remaining land forces on rising ground between the city walls and the hippodrome. The upshot was an almost comic fiasco. The ships raised their oars and surrendered without a fight; the fleets immediately combined and set a new course for the city. The cavalry deserted and the foot soldiers ran away.

Antony made his way back inside the walls of Alexandria and fell into a rage. He is reported to have shouted out that Cleopatra had betrayed him to the very men whom he was fighting for her sake. Terrified, she had word sent that she was dead.

There was only one thing now to be done. Antony went to his room and took off his armor. He asked his body servant to run him through, but the man suddenly turned away and fell on his sword instead. Antony then stabbed himself in the stomach and fell on the bed. The wound not only failed to kill him but soon stopped bleeding. Racked with pain, he begged bystanders to put him out of his misery, but they ran from the room.

The queen heard what had happened and sent word for Antony to be brought to her. She was hiding in a large mausoleum she had commissioned, which stood half complete in the palace grounds near a temple of Isis. Fearful of being surprised, she refused to unseal the doors, and she and two woman servants laboriously pulled the dying man with ropes up to a high window. Plutarch writes of the queen “clinging with both hands to the rope and with the muscles of her face distorted by the strain.” Cleopatra beat and scratched her breasts in the traditional manner of a grieving widow, and smeared her face with blood from Antony’s wound. He did his best to calm her, and, true to character to the last, called for and drank a cup of wine before expiring.

One of Antony’s bodyguards brought Octavian the dead man’s bloodstained sword, and it is said he withdrew into his tent and wept. Usually he kept his feelings under control, and we hear of him breaking down in tears on only one other occasion: when he received an account of Julius Caesar’s funeral. If he did weep now, it could have been the result of a snapping of tension after years of struggle rather than empathy. Octavian had never gotten on with Antony, and he is unlikely to have grieved for a man whom he had schemed to clear from his path for most of his public career. Alternatively, the incident was invented, and merely illustrated the victor’s highly developed skill at news management.

Octavian may have been the ruler of the Roman world, but he had never seen a great Hellenistic megalopolis before. He was familiar with cities that, like Rome and Athens, had grown untidily and organically over many centuries—crowded, noisy, ugly conurbations devoid of wide avenues and splendid vistas. So Alexandria made a great impression on him.

Founded in 331
B.C.
by Alexander the Great, the twenty-five-year-old Macedonian king who conquered the Persian empire, the city was built on a narrow bar of land with the Mediterranean on one side and a shallow lake, called Maraeotis (today’s Lake Mariout, smaller and shallower than in ancient times), on the other. A little way offshore lay an island, Pharos, with its celebrated lighthouse, which was three miles long and gave protection from storms.

As in a modern American city, the street plan was based on a grid. A mile-long mole or dike was built between the shore and the island of Pharos, so creating two harbors, the Great harbor on the east side and the Eunostus (or Happy Return) harbor to the west. A canal from Lake Maraeotis in the south connected the city to the Nile and so to Egypt both as a production center and a market.

The city was a runaway success. In the first century
B.C.,
the total population may have been about the same size as that of Rome, up to one million. With its grand overall look, Alexandria, rather like Haussmann’s Paris in the nineteenth century, became a center for culture and fashion throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Strabo called it the “greatest emporium of the inhabited world.”

Octavian was now free to enter the city, and on foot he led his men through the Gate of the Sun, not far from the hippodrome outside the walls, and along one of the city’s main streets, the Canopic Way. Nervous crowds had gathered. Octavian made a point of being accompanied by Areius, an Alexandrian citizen and a well-known philosopher and rhetorician. This friendly gesture was presumably calculated to allay the fears of the people, for it was an accepted custom of war that a captured city could be given over to pillage by the victors.

Octavian and his party made their way to the Gymnasium, where the triumvir and the queen had probably held the ceremony of the Donations of Alexandria. The place was packed: when Octavian came in and mounted a speaker’s dais, the audience was beside itself with fear and all present fell on their faces. He announced that he had no intention of holding the city at fault for the conduct of its rulers. At Areius’ request, he granted a number of pardons.

Octavian’s next destination was the Royal Palace, which lay north of the Canopic Way; here he would find the queen. He sent ahead as his envoy an
eques
called Gaius Proculeius, a close friend of his whom, it so happened, Antony in his last moments had recommended to the queen. Proculeius was under instruction to do whatever was needed to capture her alive.

The “palace” took up an entire fifth of the city, along the quayside of the Great harbor. We can imagine a large park or campus dotted with mansions, temples, and pavilions of one kind or another. The complex has almost entirely disappeared under later buildings and there are no ruins to visit; however, some of it sank into the sea as a result of an earthquake and tidal wave in the fourth century
A.D.
, and is now being explored.

The main palace building stood on Cape Lochias, a promontory at the harbor opening. A twentieth-century historian writes: “No Latin ruler, gasping for air in the hot Roman summer, had nearly so attractive a situation as these Greek rulers of the Egyptian people.”

Somewhere in the vicinity, Cleopatra sat desolate in her mausoleum, awaiting her conqueror. She had gathered there all the most precious items of royal treasure—gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony, ivory, and cinnamon (an extremely costly spice in those days and regarded as a fit present for royalty)—and also a great quantity of firewood and tinder. These preparations transmitted an implicit threat to Octavian: if he did not treat her well, she would set fire to the lot.

The ancient sources report that this consideration weighed heavily with him, although it cannot have been decisive: the queen can hardly have had personal possession of the kingdom’s entire reserves of precious metals—and, even if she had, they would survive a fire. The loss of the jewelry and other precious items would be a pity, but was not a matter of high importance.

Proculeius soon arrived outside the mausoleum, to which he managed to gain entry by a trick. He noted that the upper window through which the dying Antony had been dragged was still open; while someone distracted the queen by engaging her in conversation through the door of the mausoleum, Proculeius leaned a ladder against the wall and climbed in through the window accompanied by two servants. He captured Cleopatra and placed her under guard. She was allowed to preside at Antony’s funeral (not before Octavian had inspected the corpse), but her spirit was broken and she fell ill. She remained a prisoner inside the mausoleum.

(Possession of Egypt solved Octavian’s financial problems once and for all. When in due course the kingdom’s bullion reserves were transported to Rome, the standard rate of interest immediately dropped from 12 percent to 4 percent. There was plenty of money to settle his account with the veterans and to buy all the land they required [unsurprisingly, land values doubled]. Ample resources were also available for investing in public works, and the much-tried people of Rome received generous individual money grants.)