Cleopatra: A Life (30 page)

In bypassing his young brother-in-law Herod set off a maelstrom in his household. To Alexandra—daughter of a priest and widow of a prince—the appointment was an “unendurable insult.” With the help of a traveling musician she smuggled word of the indignity to Cleopatra, on whom she felt she could count for female solidarity, especially royal female solidarity. She knew Cleopatra had little patience with Herod and that she had Antony’s ear. Could she not intercede with him, implored Alexandra, to obtain the high priesthood for her son? If Cleopatra did so, Antony appears to have had greater matters on his mind than the domestic affairs in Herod’s household. He made no effort to intervene, although at some later date in 36 the double-jointed Dellius turned up in Jerusalem on unrelated business. Dellius had been the one to lure Cleopatra to Tarsus; the match of the conspiring mother-in-law and the contortionist adviser was almost too perfect. Alexandra’s children were uncommonly handsome, to Dellius’s eye more
“the offspring of some god
rather than of human beings.” As ever, pulchritude sent his lively mind whirring. He persuaded Alexandra to have portraits painted of Mariamme and Aristobulus and to submit them straightaway to Antony. Were the Roman triumvir
to set eyes upon them, promised Dellius, “She would not be denied anything she might ask.”

Alexandra did as Dellius asked, which suggests either naïveté on her part or something more toxic. She could be trusted to detect a plot from one hundred paces away and to supply one, should none be brewing. If Josephus can be taken at his word, Dellius intended to recruit sexual partners of both genders for Antony. In receipt of the portraits Antony hesitated, at least so far as Mariamme was concerned. He knew Cleopatra would be furious. Josephus leaves unclear whether Cleopatra was likely to object on moral grounds or out of jealousy. She would in any event be slow to forgive. Evidently Antony did not hesitate to send for Mariamme’s brother. Here Herod changed his mind. For his part, he deemed it unwise to send the most powerful Roman of his time a striking sixteen-year-old boy,
“to use him for erotic purposes.”
Instead Herod assembled his council and his family, to complain of Alexandra’s incessant complots. She colluded with Cleopatra to usurp his throne. She schemed to replace him with her son. He would do the right thing and appoint her son to the priesthood. Dellius’s proposition may obliquely have prompted the concession; Aristobulus’s appointment would keep him in Judaea, out of Antony’s clutches and far from Cleopatra’s schemes. Alexandra responded with a flood of tears. She begged her son-in-law for forgiveness. She regretted her “usual outspokenness,” her heavy-handedness, doubtless an unhappy consequence of her rank. She was overcome with gratitude. Henceforth she would be obedient in all ways.

Aristobulus had barely donned the brilliant robes of the priesthood when Alexandra found herself under house arrest, with round-the-clock surveillance. Herod continued to suspect his mother-in-law of treachery. Alexandra exploded with rage. She had no intention of living out her life
“in slavery and fear
” and turned to the obvious address. To Cleopatra went “a long sustained lament about the state in which she found herself, and urging her to give her as much help as she possibly could.” Again taking a page from Euripides—
“it is right for women
to stand by a
woman’s cause”—Cleopatra contrived an ingenious escape. She sent a ship to convey Alexandra and Aristobulus to safety. She would provide asylum for them both. It was now that—either on Cleopatra’s counsel or her own initiative—Alexandra arranged for two coffins to be built. With her servants’ assistance, she and Aristobulus climbed inside, to be carried from Jerusalem to the coast, where Cleopatra’s ship waited. Unfortunately, one of the servants betrayed Alexandra; as the fugitives were conveyed from the palace, Herod stepped from the darkness to surprise them. Though he yearned to do so he did not dare punish Alexandra, for fear of inciting Cleopatra. Instead he made a great show of forgiveness, while quietly vowing revenge.

By October 35 Herod was at his wits’ end with his wife and her family. His mother-in-law was in league with his greatest rival. With a far more legitimate claim to the throne, his brother-in-law commanded a dangerous degree of popular devotion. For Herod, the sight of the young man, with his noble bearing and his impeccable good looks, in his majestic robes and golden headdress, presiding at the altar over the Sukkoth festivities, was unbearable. In his subjects’ affection for the high priest he read a rebuke to his kingship. Meanwhile Herod was undone in the intimacy of his home by his wife, whose
“hatred of him was as great
as was his love of her.” She manifested little of the lewdness Herod condemned in Cleopatra and had taken to groaning aloud at his embrace. He could not retaliate, even indirectly, against his mother-in-law, too closely bound to Cleopatra. He could neutralize his overly promising brother-in-law, however. In the course of the unseasonably hot fall, Herod invited Aristobulus to join him at Jericho for a swim in the
palace pool
, nestled amid formal gardens. With friends and servants, the two roughhoused in the cool water at dusk. By nightfall, the seventeen-year-old Aristobulus had—amid the merrymaking—been held underwater a little too long. The high priest was dead.

Grand shows of counterfeit emotion followed on both sides. Herod arranged for an expensive, incense-heavy funeral, shed abundant tears,
and mourned loudly. Alexandra bore up bravely and quietly, the better to avenge her son’s murder later. (Only Mariamme was candid. She denounced both her husband and his uncouth mother and sister.) In no way deceived by Herod’s account of the accident, Alexandra wrote again to Cleopatra, who commiserated with her. The loss was tragic and unnecessary. Alexandra could entrust the unseemly matter to her; she would take it up with Antony. On his return from Parthia Cleopatra urged him to punish Aristobulus’s murderer. Surely it was not right, she contended hotly,
“that Herod, who had been appointed
by him as king of a country which he had no claim to rule, should have exhibited such lawlessness toward those who were the real kings.” Hers was a petition in favor of proper convention, of knowing one’s station, for the rights of sovereigns. Antony agreed she had a point.

Herod’s fears of Cleopatra’s influence were well founded. A summons arrived in due course from the Syrian coast; he was to explain himself to Antony. Having proceeded thus far by bribery and bravado, Herod was not generally cowed by authority. He tended rather to merry displays of presumption. And though he was said to have headed off timidly, he proved as adept at defusing the situation as had Cleopatra, six years earlier, in Tarsus, which was another way of saying either that Mark Antony had no great gift for calling client kings to account, or that he was powerless in the presence of a master sycophant. The visit does reveal Antony to have been in no way putty in Cleopatra’s hands. Herod arrived with lavish gifts and equally lavish explanations. He handily neutralized Cleopatra’s arguments. Surely, Antony assured him,
“it was improper
to demand an accounting of his reign from a king, since in that case he would not be a king at all, and those who had given a man this office and conferred authority upon him should permit him to exercise it.” He purportedly said the same to Cleopatra, who would do well to concern herself less with Herod’s affairs—or so Herod claimed, while boasting of the many honors Antony had shown him. The two dined together daily. Antony invited Herod to accompany him as he transacted business. And
all this “in spite of Cleopatra’s bitter charges.” There was nothing but goodwill between the two men; the Judaean king reported that he was safe from that
“wicked woman”
and her insatiable greed.

He was on that count slightly mistaken, although Herod did manage more or less to extricate himself from the feminine machinations at home. Within months of his return, his maniacally vindictive sister convinced him that her husband and Mariamme had had an affair in his absence. It was a surefire way of dispensing both with a malignant sister-in-law and an unwanted husband. The claim was perfectly calibrated to fluster an unloved, besotted man; it worked the desired effect. (As Euripides observed in a Hellenistic favorite among his plays,
“There seems to be some pleasure
for women in sick talk of one another.”) Without so much as a hearing, Herod ordered his brother-in-law to be put to death. And for good measure, he threw Alexandra into prison, on the grounds that she must at least in some part be responsible for his troubles. Herod was someone whose loyalties could be bought and who assumed the same of others. He was forever revising his will.

Even without Alexandra’s assistance, Cleopatra would continue to cause Herod headaches—or attempt to—for a few years longer. He was said to have
fortified Masada
out of fear of her, stockpiling grain, oil, dates, and wine in the fortress. He could not rest easy with the Egyptian queen in the neighborhood.
^*
And Herod’s female relations continued to seethe with hatred for his wife. They easily convinced him that Mariamme had in the end secretly sent her portrait to Antony. Herod had
“a ready ear only for slander”
and inclined always toward those who
indulged it; he liked to be proved right in his dire delusions. The accusation
“struck him like a thunderbolt
” and caused him to obsess anew about Cleopatra’s deadly schemes.
^*
Surely this was her doing: “He was menaced, he reckoned, with the loss not merely of his consort but of his life.” He sentenced his wife to death. As she was led to her execution her mother leapt out at her, to scream and pull at her hair. She was, Alexandra berated her daughter, an evil, insolent woman, insufficiently grateful to Herod, and entirely deserving of her fate. Mariamme walked serenely past, without acknowledging her mother. She was twenty-eight. In an additional proto-Shakespearean twist, Herod was undone by her death. His desire for Mariamme only increased; he convinced himself that she was still alive; he was physically incapacitated. He suffered precisely as his advisers had predicted Antony would if deprived of Cleopatra. Ultimately Herod left Jerusalem on an extended, recuperative hunting trip. Alexandra hatched a few new conspiracies in his absence. He ordered her execution on his return.

THROUGHOUT 36 MARK ANTONY
reported on his dazzling success in Parthia to Rome; the city held festivals, and performed sacrifices, in his honor.
Cleopatra’s intelligence
may have been better. She was well over a thousand miles from the snowy theater of action but closer than was the Italian peninsula. She was every bit as invested in Antony’s victory; she had the resources to arrange for regular emissaries. Nonetheless she may have been surprised by the messenger who arrived in Alexandria late in the year. He had an urgent summons, unlike any she had previously received. Probably a month in coming, it brought a season of exhilarations to an end. Antony and his army had returned from their Parthian adventure. It had taken them nearly to the Caspian Sea, in what is today northern Iran. Theirs had been a mere jaunt compared to Alexander the Great’s, but they had made an eighteen-hundred-mile trek all the same. They camped now in a small village south of modern-day Beirut, with an excellent harbor, in
which Cleopatra could land without difficulty. Antony implored her to join him posthaste, and to bring with her substantial gold, provisions, and clothing for his men. She had by no means expected to see him so soon. Parthia could hardly have been conquered in a matter of months. Caesar had anticipated a campaign of at least three years.

Plutarch reports that Cleopatra was slow in coming, but it is unclear whether she actually delayed or if it only seemed as if she did to Mark Antony, for whom she could not arrive quickly enough. It was winter; heavy rains and gale winds lashed the Mediterranean. She had supplies to assemble and a fleet to prepare. She needed either to collect or mint
silver denarii
. She had given birth months earlier. She knew she was heading toward disturbing news. For his part, Antony was restless and agitated, though Plutarch may have erred in imputing cause and effect, alleging that Antony was beside himself because Cleopatra was dilatory. The purported delay had little to do with the authentic distress. Antony attempted to distract himself by drinking heavily—already it was acknowledged that
“there is no other medicine
for misery”—but was without the patience to sit through a meal. He interrupted each one to run to shore, where he scanned the horizon again and again for Egyptian sails, irregular behavior in a precise and precisely disciplined Roman camp, where everyone dined together. Plutarch accuses Cleopatra of having dawdled but the point is that she came, in a season of short days and long nights, with the requested items, probably arriving soon after Antony’s forty-eighth birthday. She delivered
“an abundance of clothing
and money.” Both Plutarch and Dio retail a disgruntled rumor: Some claimed that she brought clothing and supplies but that Antony settled his own gold on his men, passing the monies off as a gift from Cleopatra, who had little patience for his Parthian obsession. Either way he was buying goodwill toward Egypt, clearly a priority for him, and at a time when he could ill afford to do so.

Slow-moving Egyptian queens aside, Antony had every reason for despair. There had been no dazzling success in Parthia, only a demoralizing campaign followed by a disastrous retreat. From the start he had
made strategic mistakes. Given the size of his army and the length of their march, he had left his siege equipment behind. He could not always find the Parthians but they could always find him: swarms of talented archers and pikemen repeatedly ambushed the regular Roman rows. Antony had relied on the Armenians—Parthia’s western neighbor—for military aid. They had not proved the faithful allies he anticipated. Not for the first time, they lured the Romans into
“a yawning and abysmal desert”
only to abandon them. No battle had been as costly as the retreat. Having marched for thirty miles in darkness, Antony’s exhausted men threw themselves upon brackish water. Starving, they feasted on poisonous plants that made them stagger and vomit. Convulsions, dysentery, and delusions followed. What stagnant water and poisonous plants failed to claim, the heat in Armenia and the unending snows of Cappadocia did. Ice congealed on beards. Toes and fingers froze.