Cleopatra: A Life (59 page)

*
One wife hit on a particularly ingenious solution: she secreted her husband off to the coast in a hemp or leather sack, the kind into which Cleopatra had crawled.

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It was lost en route.

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It takes a hard heart to argue that Antony resisted the irresistible Egyptian queen but it has been done. The great Ronald Syme makes of Cleopatra just another notch on the bedpost, assigning her to a list of more or less interchangeable client queens. In his opinion there was no infatuation at all; Antony
“succumbed with good will
but did not surrender.” And in Syme’s view, after the Alexandrian winter of 41 Antony felt for her nothing but indifference.

*
Some have read into her grandiloquence an alignment instead with her Greek heritage. Genuine or not, a revival was unfailingly welcome in a world that measured itself against the past. Hers may have been an expansive, inclusionary gesture; Macedonia had produced not only the Ptolemies but the rival Seleucid dynasty as well. And the once-powerful Seleucids had controlled much of the territory now in Cleopatra’s hands.

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Herod too is a sovereign without a face. Possibly because of the biblical commandment against graven images, we have no likeness of him.

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The charge was a familiar one. In inciting a coup, Herod’s son later condemned his aunt for having
“one night even forced
her way into his chamber and, against his will, had immoral relations with him.”

*
Another intrigue followed, involving Costobar, the governor of a neighboring region, south of Judaea. He owed his position to Herod, whom he disdained. Nor had Costobar any affection for the Jews; he preferred to restore polytheism to his people. And he knew precisely where he might appeal for relief: He wrote to Cleopatra, a clearinghouse for Antonian questions. His land had long belonged to her ancestors. Why did she not ask Antony for it? He himself, he swore, stood ready to transfer his loyalty to her. Costobar did so not out of affection for Cleopatra but distaste for Herod. He got nowhere, as Antony refused Cleopatra’s request. Herod hesitated to take revenge on Costobar, again for fear of Cleopatra. To forestall any future plots, Herod instead arranged for Costobar to marry his newly widowed sister, a death sentence of a kind. She would ultimately betray her second husband as she had the first.

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His sister would not be happy until she had wrought vengeance as well on Herod and Mariamme’s sons, whom Herod later murdered. They were buried alongside Aristobulus.

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There was some irony in Canidius’s good fortune. As a young man, he had been charged with transporting to Rome the treasure of Cleopatra’s deposed uncle, the king of Cyprus. There had been some concern over whether Canidius could be trusted to acquit himself honestly of that lucrative task.

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Sextus Pompey complicated the picture from many angles. He enjoyed warm relations with several monarchs considered to be deadly enemies of Rome and Cleopatra was well disposed toward him, given their fathers’ relationship. (He in fact made overtures to Cleopatra, which Antony discouraged. He was wise enough to see he should not be in league both with a foreign queen and a swaggering compatriot who—despite popular support at home—behaved like a pirate. Antony’s instincts were correct; ever the adventurer, Sextus had simultaneously offered up his services to the Parthians, behind Antony’s back.) According to Appian, Antony refused to sign the order for Sextus’s execution. He was ashamed to do so personally, as he knew the death would displease Cleopatra and did not want her to hold him responsible. Appian likewise suggests that sentence was desirable; better to eliminate Sextus, lest that talented naval commander and Cleopatra league together to
“disturb the auspicious respect
which Antony and Octavian had for each other.”

*
Antony named names, five in all. Elsewhere he noted that Octavian had divorced his previous wife on the grounds of “moral perversity”; she had been a poor sport about his mistress.

*
No one saw the will other than Octavian, who may have fabricated it himself. Plancus may equally well have forged it; in urgent cases, he had authority to sign Antony’s name and affix his seal. The document evidently included a confirmation of the gifts Antony had bestowed on Cleopatra’s children, as well as of Caesarion’s paternity. So far as we know, Antony never refuted the terms. Nor, for that matter, did Octavian refute the claim regarding Caesarion, which at this point he was wiser to ignore. It is all the same difficult to imagine any circumstances under which Antony might actually have committed to paper the provisions Octavian read aloud.

*
That was an acknowledged weakness. As Plautus, Rome’s most popular playwright, had growled:
“I don’t much like
these highly connected women, their airs, their huge dowries, their loud demands, their arrogance, their ivory carriages, their dresses, their purple, who reduce their husbands to slavery with their expenses.”

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Stripped of his powers, Antony was now formally without the right to call upon assistance from client states or to distribute Roman territories. By some contorted logic it could be argued that Cleopatra therefore abetted a private citizen hostile to Rome, and that she stood in possession of lands that should not have been hers. To do so was, however, to include Antony in the indictment, in which he nowhere figured.

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Nicolaus of Damascus was quick to assert that even as a teenager, even at the age when youth
“are most wanton
,” Octavian had abstained from sexual gratification for an entire year. And in the face of all evidence to the contrary, it was inevitably asserted that he lived simply and austerely. In truth Octavian was as fond of costly furniture and Corinthian bronzes as the next man, more fond yet of the gaming table.

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As the poet Propertius asked later:
What does our history mean
if it leads to the rule of a woman?

*
In this realm alone ostentation met with Roman approval. As Plutarch explains:
“For extravagance in other objects
of display induces luxury and implants effeminacy in those who use them, since something like a pricking and tickling of the senses breaks down serious purpose; but when it is seen in the trappings of war it strengthens and exalts the spirit.”

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Nor was Cleopatra the first savvy Easterner to team up with a Roman general. Sertorius had joined forces with Mithradates, the Pontic king who in 69 so eloquently warned of Rome’s rise. Mithradates too had envisioned precisely the sort of amalgamated empire Cleopatra and Antony represented. He put decades toward its realization, to be vanquished by Pompey. Pompey ultimately defeated Sertorius as well, after a vicious four-year campaign.

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In the normal course of events he would have been preparing to depose his mother about now.

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Caligula descended from both Mark Antony (his paternal great-grandfather) and Octavian (his maternal great-grandfather). He posed alternately as a descendant of each, depending on his agenda. It was easy to trip up under his reign, when sacrifices to celebrate Antony’s overthrow might be objectionable one day, the reluctance to offer sacrifices to Augustus’s victory the next.

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As ever, a capable woman was suspect. It would be
whispered that Livia
killed him. Curiously, she was said to have done so with poisoned figs.

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The practice of renaming months ended with
Tiberius
, who—urged to appropriate November—scoffed that all would become highly problematic if there turned out to be thirteen Caesars.

*
She may well have known Aesop’s fable: As the lion said to the Man, “There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if only the lions were sculptors there might be quite a different set of statues.”

*
Dante at least places her seven circles above her brother in hell. Her sin (lust) was against herself. Her younger brother’s (betrayal) was against another.

CLEOPATRA

A Life

STACY SCHIFF

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

New York Boston London

Copyright © 2010 Stacy Schiff

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: November 2010

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ISBN: 978-0-316-12180-4