Cleopatra: A Life (34 page)

As the clock ticked toward the end of the triumvirate, unlikely to be renewed, Antony and Cleopatra decamped for Ephesus. Ephesus had been the first city to recognize Antony as Dionysus incarnate and to have welcomed him at the city gates with loud cheers and a musical medley. After Philippi he had offered up splendid sacrifices and generous pardons there, to a people brutalized by Caesar’s assassins. The city of 250,000 remained kindly disposed toward him. He arranged now for the Ephesians to greet Cleopatra as his royal mistress. A rich banking center of narrow streets and shady, marble colonnades, Ephesus enjoyed a magnificent location. Built in a steep-sided valley, it gave onto rugged mountains on one side, the sea on the other. Ephesus boasted several remarkable temples, of which the most celebrated was that of Artemis, where both Cleopatra’s father and sister had sought asylum, and before the slender Ionic capitals of which her sister had met her end.

Strategically located across the Aegean from Athens, at the edge of a fine harbor, Ephesus was also the ideal address at which to establish a military base. From the coast of Asia Minor Antony set about assembling a navy, dispatching word to every client king in the region. They answered with fleets and submitted to oaths of loyalty. Cleopatra was the greatest single supplier of materiel, furnishing 200 of Antony’s 500 warships, fully manned, along with 20,000 talents and all the supplies required to sustain a vast army—in this case, 75,000 legionnaires, 25,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry—for the duration of a war. She was unlikely to have hesitated before doing so. Improbably, Octavian’s star had ascended in Rome. He had piled up victories as Antony bogged down in the East.
For the two triumvirs to coexist peacefully was difficult. For an implacable, ambitious Octavian and Caesarion to coexist was impossible. Unlike Parthia, this campaign was as vital to Cleopatra as to Antony. She had every reason to throw herself, and Egypt, into it. On the last day of 33, the triumvirate officially expired.

EARLY IN JANUARY 32
a new consul spoke out forcefully in the Roman Senate in praise of Antony. He went on to savage Octavian. On hearing of the denunciation, Octavian paid the Senate a visit, with a bodyguard of soldiers and supporters. They made no effort to conceal the daggers beneath their togas. In 44 Cicero had wondered if Caesar’s adopted son intended to stage a coup; he did so now. Offering his own scalding stream of accusations, he terrified the opposition into silence.
“By certain documents
,” Octavian promised to demonstrate that Antony constituted a threat to Rome. He fixed a date on which he would present his evidence. The opposing consuls had seen the daggers; they knew better than to await that session, and secretly fled the city. Nearly four hundred senators followed, sailing to Ephesus, where they reported on the political climate in Rome. Surely Antony underestimated Octavian’s strength and position. And he allied himself with Cleopatra at great risk. She seriously compromised the cause.

Many of Antony’s colleagues—at least a third of the Senate was with him—argued for her removal. Yet again Antony bowed to reason and agreed to dismiss Cleopatra. He ordered her
“to sail to Egypt
, and there await the result of the war.” She refused, possibly, as Plutarch asserts, because she feared that Octavia would again intervene, to prevent a war that Cleopatra knew for her own sake to be essential; possibly because she mistrusted Antony’s judgment; possibly because it would have been irresponsible to do otherwise. She was no warrior queen; recent Ptolemies had not evidenced a great taste for warfare. They did not die on the battlefield, as did other Eastern monarchs. They subscribed to the belief that an
empire could be acquired with money
, rather than money with an empire. She was, however, her men’s commander in chief,
responsible for their preparations and operations. She was as well Antony’s paymaster. A sober struggle of wills ensued. This time Cleopatra refrained from swooning hunger strikes. She took the opposite approach, assisted by Canidius, Antony’s gifted general, whom she allegedly bribed to argue her case. He may just as easily have been impressed with her. Surely, Canidius protested, it was not fair to banish an ally so instrumental to their campaign? She fed the troops. She provided the fleet. She was as capable as any man. Did Antony not understand that the Egyptian crews would be demoralized by her departure? Those men formed the backbone of his navy. They would fight for their queen, not necessarily for a Roman general. Were Antony to refute his Egyptian affections he would moreover offend his Eastern allies. Cleopatra challenged Antony to explain how she
“was inferior in intelligence
to any one of the princes who took part in the expedition, she who for a long time had governed so large a kingdom by herself, and”—she appended a compliment—“by long association with Antony had learned to manage large affairs.” Either her arguments made sense or her war chest did. She got her way.

In April 32 Antony and Cleopatra sailed with Antony’s staff to the island of Samos, off the coast of modern-day Turkey. Samos was a stepping-stone to Greece, where the struggle for control of the Roman world would most likely take place. While the couple settled in on the mountainous island their troops were ferried west, across the Aegean, an operation that would have required a good month. Antony’s veterans had returned from Armenia; along with the Eastern recruits, he had assembled some nineteen legions. Whatever the military or political preoccupations of the summer, they are lost to us, obliterated by Plutarch’s descriptions of the merrymaking on Samos. The lush resort island was the ideal place to throw a party, and Antony was well positioned to do so. He had time on his hands. Octavian made much of the extravagance, which has come down to us as another Dionysian revel. Just as every king and prince east of Athens contributed forces, so every dramatic artist reported to Samos. They arrived in throngs. For days on end the lute
players and flutists, actors and dancers, acrobats and mimes, harpists and female impersonators—
“a rabble of Asiatic performers”
—delivered a resplendent, multilingual festival of music and theater.
“And while almost all the world
around was filled with groans and lamentations,” Plutarch relates through pursed lips, “a single island for many days resounded with flutes and stringed instruments; theatres there were filled, and choral bands were competing with one another.” Every city also sent animals for sacrifice; the client kings “vied with one another in their mutual entertainments and gifts.” The question on all minds was how Antony and Cleopatra would stage a triumph that could conceivably surpass the prodigal prewar festivities.

In May Antony and Cleopatra made the short trip west, to hilly Athens. The revels continued in the theaters and the vast, marble-seated stadium of that city, which had welcomed
Antony as Dionysus
nine years earlier, and where he may now have embraced the role most closely. It seemed that no one who could afford to had passed through Athens without contributing a sculpture, a theater, a gymnasium of creamy marble; when they did not, the
Athenians erected the statue
for them. (Cleopatra’s forebears had bestowed a gymnasium, east of the marketplace.) While sports and drama distracted Antony, two matters clarified themselves, in quick succession. Cleopatra spent her summer in the storied city where Antony had spent the bulk of his years with Octavia. Antony’s wife had attended lectures in his company. They had conceived a second child there. She remained a vivid presence; her statues adorned the venerable city, as did inscriptions in her honor. The Athenians embraced her as a goddess. The annual religious festival paid her tribute. This was unacceptable to Cleopatra, for whom much had changed in the fourteen years since she had lived quietly across town from Caesar’s wife. She had heard enough of what Lucan would term
“illicit affairs
and bastard children.” Cleopatra was moreover the first Ptolemaic queen to set foot in Athens, a city that had reason to warm to her: At various junctures it had relied on her family—for grain, for military assistance, for
political refuge—since the beginning of the third century. Athens had erected
statues to earlier Ptolemies
, including Cleopatra’s great-aunt. Cleopatra focused, however, an another woman; she had kept careful account of the tributes accorded Octavia. She was jealous. She went on the offensive, attempting
“by many splendid gifts
to win the favor of the people,” in other words to blot out her predecessor’s traces. Realistic and reasonable, the Athenians obliged, to Antony’s delight. They voted his lover multiple honors. They planted statues of Cleopatra and Antony in the Acropolis, at the center of the city. On one occasion Antony appeared amid a delegation to pay Cleopatra tribute, delivering up a speech on the city’s behalf.

From the summer of 32 dates too a remarkable gift: Antony bestowed on Cleopatra the library of Pergamum, the only collection that rivaled Alexandria’s. The four rooms of that scenic hilltop library housed some 200,000 scrolls; for centuries, busts of Homer and Herodotus had kept them company. History has made of Antony’s gift a wedding present, or recompense for the volumes Caesar inadvertently destroyed in the Alexandrian War. In context, the largesse required no explanation. Pergamum was not far from Ephesus. It is likely that Antony and Cleopatra paid a visit to that city, a few days’ ride away. For years too the way to assemble a collection had been to plunder someone else’s. Already there was some tradition of this in Rome, where libraries were still in their infancy.

For the most part the reports of Antony’s disorienting, degrading passion for Cleopatra date from the Athenian summer. If in Alexandria he had distracted her from state business, the tables now turned. He attended principally to her.
“Many times, while he was seated
on his tribunal and dispensing justice to tetrarchs and kings, he would receive love-billets from her in tablets of onyx or crystal, and read them,” Plutarch tells us. (Antony was not the first to receive love letters on state occasions. Caesar too had received
“wanton bits”
during Senate sessions. That mistress did not write on onyx tablets, however.) At one juncture Cleopatra happened
to ride conspicuously past the courts on the shoulders of her servants as Antony presided over a legal case. A distinguished Roman orator held the floor, or did until Antony caught sight of Cleopatra. He then
“sprang up from his tribunal
and forsook the trial, and hanging on to Cleopatra’s litter escorted her on her way.” It was ignoble behavior; a Roman could indulge in as diversified, as lurid, a sexual life as he pleased, but he was meant to be discreet and unsentimental in his affections. Pompey had made himself a laughingstock for his indecent habit of falling in love with his own wife. In the second century a senator was expelled from that assembly for
kissing his wife in public
, in full view of their daughter. Antony had been reprimanded years earlier for having openly nuzzled his wife. He was said these days to rise during banquets, before his assembled guests, to massage Cleopatra’s feet
“in compliance with some agreement
and compact they had made.” (The relationship proceeded by pacts, wagers, and competitions, something Cleopatra evidently brought to the table. Antony was little inclined to formalities.) The gesture was in itself offensive; one had servants for such indulgences. And the stories—of what another age might term gallantry or devotion, of what the East deemed proper obeisance, of what were in Rome indecencies and indignities—piled up. Antony fawned over Cleopatra, which was
what eunuchs did
. He trailed her litter through the streets, among her attendants. And this, sniffed the Romans, heaping upon the Egyptian queen the usual abuse of the other woman, when she was not even beautiful!

From Octavian’s point of view, the Athenian reports were too good to be true, as they may well have been. For all of the martial preparations, for all of the governmental irregularities in Rome, despite the gathering sense of inevitability, there was no real cause for a rupture; Antony and Octavian remained two men in search of a conflict. They found one in 32. Antony evidently felt some degree of attachment to Cleopatra or felt with her invincible: In May, he divorced Octavia. From Athens, he instructed her to leave their comfortable home. We cannot know how much that gesture was directed at Octavia and how much at
her brother. Coming as it did after years of disingenuous reconciliations and flimsy agreements, after a season of slanders, it may only have preempted a salvo from the other direction. Octavia could have elected to end the marriage herself.
The divorce
itself was simple, an informal procedure for which there was no paperwork. Its ramifications were more complex. As Plutarch remarks on the death of Pompey’s wife and Caesar’s daughter, the family alliance
“which had hitherto veiled
rather than restrained the ambition of the two men was now at an end.” Cleopatra could only have been thrilled; already she had enlisted a friend of Antony to distract him from all thoughts of his wife. Octavian was overjoyed. Octavia was bereft. Tearfully she packed her bags. With her she took her children by Antony, as well as his second son by Fulvia. There were no recriminations. Octavia worried only that she would be said to have precipitated a war.

Insofar as a propaganda-free chronology can be established, relations were strained in Antony’s camp well before the divorce. For all of the later assertions that highborn Romans lay powerless and enchanted at her feet, in 32 we hear no chime, no caress of Cleopatra’s silvery voice. There were as many opinions on the looming conflict as there were advisers to Antony. For a variety of reasons, many of them legitimate, some continued to see Cleopatra as a liability. A military camp was no place for a woman. Cleopatra distracted Antony. She should not take part in a council of war; she was no general. Antony could not enter Italy in the presence of a foreigner and was unwise to wait to do so. He frittered away his advantage, on the Egyptian queen’s account. The criticism did not bring out the best in her. At one point Antony’s associates in Rome dispatched his friend Geminius to Athens, to plead their case. Antony must defend himself at home, where he was badly battered by Octavian. Why allow himself to be portrayed as a public enemy, in thrall to a foreigner? Geminius was an inspired choice for the delicate mission, having had some experience himself with what it is to fall unwisely and unreasonably in love. Cleopatra assumed that Octavia had dispatched him and
treated Geminius accordingly. She kept him as far as possible from Antony. At dinner she seated him among the least significant guests. She pelted him with sarcasm. Geminius endured the insults in silence, patiently holding out for an audience with Mark Antony. Before it was accorded, Cleopatra challenged Geminius, in the midst of a raucous dinner, to explain his errand. He replied that its details
“required a sober head
, but one thing he knew, whether he was drunk or sober, and that was that all would be well if Cleopatra was sent off to Egypt.” Antony erupted in fury. Cleopatra was more brutal. She commended Geminius for his honesty. He had spared her from having to torture him. Several days later he fled to Rome, to join Octavian.