Cleopatra: A Life (37 page)

She could not have been unaware of the discomfort her presence caused in the sweltering, mosquito-infested camp, where her retinue and tents made for a discordant sight, and where her immense flagship, the
Antonia,
with its ten banks of oars and carved and decorated bow,
presumably evoked little pride. Rations were curtailed. The men were hungry, the mood sour. Cleopatra sat on a pile of closely guarded treasure. A Roman soldier liked to see his general
eating stale bread
and sleeping on a simple pallet. Cleopatra disturbed that equation. From all sides Antony—his tent positioned squarely at the center of the vast camp—heard that Cleopatra should be sent away, to which pleas he remained deaf. Even the trusted Canidius, who had earlier argued on her behalf, wanted her gone. She knew of the ridicule Fulvia had inspired. Even in Egypt, female commanders were not popular, as Cleopatra understood from her sister’s short career during the Alexandrian War. She had no experience of armed conflict on this scale. Herod’s theory was that Antony would not send her away as
“his ears, it seems
, were stopped by his infatuation.” Why, then, did she not step aside, as she had with Caesar?

Octavian had declared war on her alone. She had every reason to demand vengeance. She had been shunted aside by military advisers before, to wind up in the Sinai desert, homeless and disenfranchised. She had been ill served by intermediaries; she may have been unwilling to entrust Egypt’s fate to Antony alone. All was at stake: The future of the Ptolemaic dynasty hung in the balance. Were Octavian and Antony to come to terms now, she would be the price of that accord. The real mystery of 31 is less why Cleopatra remained than why—having expertly neutralized cultural collisions in Egypt, having artfully assuaged Roman egos—she neglected to work her charm on Antony’s officers. In camp she seems to have been an infuriating and exhausting presence. Many were treated to the scorn she had heaped on the straight-talking Geminius. Friends of Antony and Roman consuls alike suffered at her hands, universally reported to have been
“abused by Cleopatra.”
She was vindictive, peremptory, brittle. Experience had not made her any more tractable than she had been as a teenager, with her brothers’ advisers. She was after all accustomed to exercising supreme authority, poor at taking orders. Meanwhile morale plunged as Octavian’s blockade tightened around the gulf, as swarms of mosquitoes descended upon the camp, and as an epidemic—it was likely malaria—set in. Conditions were
deplorable. Relief came only toward midday, when with a rustle the wind picked up from the west. For a few hours a fresh, brisk breeze swept in, growing stronger as it pivoted from west to north, to subside as the sun set.

Months passed in readiness and inactivity, and with them a gradual reordering of the odds. While the idea had presumably been to trap Octavian in the Ambracian Gulf, Antony and Cleopatra found themselves bottled up in the bright blue bay, a shifting of realities to which they were slow to adjust. Notes Plutarch:
“The chief task of a good general
is to force his enemies to give battle when he is superior to them, but not to be forced himself to do this when his forces are inferior.” Antony had long relinquished that advantage. By August he had no choice but to enlist whole towns to carry supplies overland to camp. Plutarch’s great-grandfather was among those miserably pressed into service, to make the trek over mountain paths to the gulf, sacks of wheat on their shoulders, whips at their backs.

What the blockade, the disease, the debilitating inactivity, the heat, did not affect, the desertions did. Slaves and client kings alike abandoned the cause. Antony made an example of two near-deserters, a senator and a Syrian king, tortured and executed to discourage imitators. Antony was himself rattled, enough so to attempt a solitary stroll along the fortifications, toward the sea, in the course of which Octavian’s men nearly succeeded in kidnapping him. Ahenobarbus’s defection affected him deeply; he was afterward fiercely paranoid. By one account, he
distrusted even Cleopatra
, whom he suspected of attempting to poison him. To prove her innocence she was said to have prepared a lethal drink, only to intercept the goblet as Antony raised it to his lips. Had she intended to kill him she would not have done so, would she? She then sent for a prisoner, to whom she handed the potion. It had the advertised effect. (The story is suspect, as Cleopatra could hardly proceed without Antony. He was unlikely to have forgotten as much, even in an agitated state.) Cleopatra quarreled as well with Dellius, who had spent his summer recruiting mercenaries. The two came to blows at dinner one night,
when Dellius complained of the wine. It was sour, he scoffed, while in Rome Octavian’s staff downed the finest vintages.
Dellius
emerged from the tussle convinced that Cleopatra meant to murder him. One of her physicians, he claimed, confirmed as much. It was a perfectly legitimate excuse for his third and final defection. He fled to Octavian, depriving Antony of what Caesar had termed the mightiest of weapons: surprise. With Dellius went Antony’s battle plans.

Toward the end of August Antony called a war council. Sixteen weeks of blockade had taken a toll. The situation was bleak. Supplies were short; the night air was crisp. Winter would soon be upon them. Antony needed finally to resolve the question that had plagued him through the scorching summer. Tactics came more easily to him than did strategy; he could be indecisive. If she had not already done so, Cleopatra now fell out even with Canidius. He preferred to march north and to decide the contest on land. They were Romans after all; to wage battle atop scudding waves was in his opinion folly. Antony had never before commanded a fleet. He could yield the sea to Octavian without shame. There were moreover recruits to be had in Macedonia and Thrace. Of course Canidius knew well that to fight on land was to sacrifice Cleopatra’s fleet and with it her usefulness. Cleopatra knew that to sacrifice the fleet was to imperil Egypt. Her chests of silver denarii could not be carted across mountains. She argued vigorously for a naval engagement. Her reasons were perfectly sound: Antony was seriously outnumbered on land. He could not ultimately cross to Italy without a fleet. Nor was it easy to move an army over mountains; five years had not erased the memory of Parthia. There was another consideration as well, an analogue that no one involved in the Actium deliberations could have ignored. For his showdown with Caesar, Pompey too had marshaled a massive, noisy, polyglot force of Asiatic kings and princes in Greece. Cleopatra had contributed sixty ships to that fleet. Ahenobarbus had been present, as had his father, who had perished in the battle. Antony had commanded with distinction on the opposite side. In August 48 Pompey had elected to ignore his navy, far superior to Caesar’s. Hardly was the day out when he
realized that he had
blundered grievously
in opting for a land battle. The result was utter carnage, a speechless, senseless commander, robbed of his army, his wits, and his pride, and—days later—decapitated off the coast of Egypt.

ANTONY OPTED FOR
a naval campaign. Plutarch has him swayed by emotion. More likely the most experienced general of his day meant neither to accommodate Cleopatra nor to showcase her navy but bowed in the end to necessity. Octavian had not only a more coherent narrative but a more cohesive force, an army of Latin-speaking, well-drilled Romans. The land advantage was his. At sea the two sides were more evenly matched. Antony explained as much to his restless men, few of whom could swim. He did not care to open a campaign with a defeat.
“I have chosen to begin
with the ships, where we are strongest and have a vast superiority over our antagonists, in order that after a victory with these we may scorn their infantry also.” (Elaborating on the same theme, Octavian proved himself more psychologically astute:
“For in general
it is a natural characteristic of human nature everywhere, that whenever a man fails in his first contests he becomes disheartened with respect to what is to come.”) Despite the explanations, a battle-worn veteran threw himself upon Antony with an emotional appeal. He displayed an astonishing collection of scars. How could Antony insult those wounds, to invest his hopes
“in miserable logs
of wood”? The soldier pleaded with his commander: “Let Egyptians and Phoenicians do their fighting at sea, but give us land, on which we are accustomed to stand and either conquer our enemies or die.” Antony—
“better endowed
by nature than any man of his time for leading an army by force of eloquence”—looked upon him kindly but could not manage a reply.

Over the last days of August a familiar smell greeted Cleopatra. The afternoon breeze lifted the acrid odor of flaming cedar and resin throughout camp. It was a smell she knew from the Alexandrian harbor seventeen years earlier; in what must have seemed to be a regular Roman tradition, Antony dragged some eighty of her ships to the beach and set
fire to them. He no longer had the crew to man the fleet and could not risk its falling into Octavian’s hands. That was no secret; the blaze was bright and pungent. A storm soon extinguished the lingering wisps of smoke; for four days, gale winds and drenching rains lashed the coast. By the time the weather cleared only warped fittings and scorched rams remained. Under cover of darkness on the evening of September 1 Cleopatra’s officers secretly loaded her chests of treasure onto the massive
Antonia.
Several transport ships took on additional monies, as well as a hoard of royal tableware. Masts and bulky sails went aboard both Cleopatra’s ships and Antony’s. By sunrise Antony had embarked 20,000 soldiers and with them thousands of archers and slingers, wedging a colossal number of men into slivers of space. The sky was crystal clear and the sea a glassy sheet as they rowed out, with a crash and clatter of oars, to the mouth of the gulf. There Antony’s three squadrons stationed themselves in close, crescent formation. Cleopatra and her remaining sixty ships took up the rear, as much to head off deserters as for protection. She was not meant to take part in the fighting.

Outside the strait Antony’s men discovered Octavian’s fleet assembled in a similar formation, about a mile off. The gulf resounded with the high-pitched blasts of trumpets; criers and officers urged the men on. And Antony’s 240 ships, oars poised, prows pointed, facing Octavian’s 400, sat through the morning, prepared to fight, hulls crammed together, creaking and motionless, as the land armies watched from shore. Finally at midday Octavian ordered his northernmost squadron to row backward, in an attempt to draw Antony out. His ships advanced into open water. Instantly the air was thick with shouts, onshore and on the water. From the lofty towers of Antony’s fleet a dense hail of stones and arrows and metal shards rained down. On Octavian’s side oars shattered and rudders snapped. Despite the sea churning beneath her, it was from Cleopatra’s perspective an odd floating land battle, with Octavian’s men playing the cavalry and Antony’s men repelling the assault from their floating fortresses, the largest of which loomed ten feet above the waterline. The fierce ramming and grappling continued inconclusively until
late in the afternoon. At about three o’clock Octavian’s left wing shifted, to outflank Antony’s; Antony’s in turn edged north. The center of the line dissolved. Suddenly Cleopatra’s squadron hoisted sail and—expertly plying the wind—broke coolly through the middle of the battle, past the flying slings and missiles, beyond the spears and axes of the enemy line, sowing confusion on all sides. Octavian’s men looked on in amazement as Cleopatra sped south in her majestic flagship, its purple sails billowing. For the most part the enemy was powerless to overtake her. Their shock only increased when, moments later, Antony transferred from his flagship to a swift galley and followed behind, with forty ships of his personal squadron.

Octavian’s men were arguably less bewildered, as Plutarch has it, than impressed. Antony and Cleopatra had slipped away with a third of the remaining fleet and all of her treasure. Clearly the flight had been prearranged; there would have been neither valuables nor sails stowed on Cleopatra’s ships otherwise. She timed her move perfectly to take advantage of the brisk and favorable rise in the wind. And from Dellius, Octavian had known of the blockade-breaking plan. Antony and Cleopatra had had no intention of prolonging a battle. Earlier in the month they had already once attempted to force their way through the blockade. If they could nudge Octavian out to sea they could escape to Egypt; they made this sally only in order to do so. In the prebattle speech Dio supplies him, Octavian alerts his men to precisely this course of events:
“Since, then, they admit
that they are weaker than we are, and since they carry the prizes of victory in their ships, let us not allow them to sail anywhere else, but let us conquer them here on the spot and take all these treasures away from them.” On September 2 a few of Octavian’s swift ships—light, highly maneuverable galleys, with streamlined prows—indeed headed off in pursuit.

On the high seas Cleopatra signaled to Antony. With two companions he climbed over the whitecaps to board the
Antonia
. The reunion was not a happy one; Antony neither saw nor spoke to Cleopatra, on account of what sounds more like shame than anger. Something had
gone very wrong. Probably Antony’s men were not meant to have remained behind. Cleopatra had earlier argued that the bulk of the army return with her to Egypt. The fleet had either been unable to escape or had elected not to do so. They may have preferred to fight a Roman rather than follow a foreigner; certainly there were mutinous murmurs in camp. Antony and Cleopatra may have planned the maneuver only in case of necessity, and alone or together acted peremptorily. Or Cleopatra may have made her exit prematurely. She must have been longing to sail off to Alexandria, a city that—were she vanquished off the coast of Greece—she knew she would never see again.
Dio suggests that Antony fled
because he (erroneously) read a concession of defeat in Cleopatra’s departure. Or all went precisely according to plan, and its repercussions emerged only after the fact; we are left to square unintelligible decisions with obscure accounts. In any event Antony could not have bowed his head in defeat, as the engagement—less a skirmish than a melee—continued inconclusively for some time. Even Octavian would not know by day’s end who had prevailed. Whether the plan had been misconceived or had miscarried, the I-told-you-so’s hang palpably in the salty breeze. If Plutarch can be believed, Antony choked on his helplessness. Ignoring Cleopatra,
“he went forward alone
to the prow and sat down by himself in silence, holding his head in both hands.” He stirred only at dusk, when two of Octavian’s galleys materialized in the distance. Antony commanded the flagship to be swung around so that he might stand and face the enemy head on. A skirmish ensued, from which the
Antonia
escaped, but to which Cleopatra sacrificed a command ship and a second vessel, packed with a quantity of rich plate and furniture.