Cleopatra the Great (37 page)

Among a whole range of love spells, one claimed to attract ‘men to women and women to men and makes virgins rush out of their homes'. A particularly sinister curse from Cleopatra's reign asked a love rival, ‘are you a burning woman, an abominable fire, a scorching woman? You should bathe yourself in blood, you should wash yourself with urine, one should set a suit of nettles on your body. Go! No one will find enough water in the sea, you sow, for washing off your face. Your day of death is at hand.' Such words were spoken over wax or pottery figurines with the victim's hair attached or even impaled with nails.

Yet regardless of her personal feelings for Antonius and indeed for Octavia, it was clear that Cleopatra was deeply concerned by political matters closer to home after the Parthians forced Antonius' client king Herod from Judaea. He travelled south to Alexandria to seek help from Cleopatra, who formally received him as Antonius' ally and in the same way that previous Ptolemaic royals had employed Jewish generals offered him command of her army. Turning her down, he instead requested a ship to take him to Rome, where he was declared ruler of Judaea and King of the Jews by the Senate, who saw him as a vital counter to Cleopatra's growing powers in the East. With official sanction from Rome Herod went into military overdrive, returning to Judaea to oust the Parthians, kill off all remaining rivals to his throne and deal with fundamentalist Jews who regarded him as a Roman collaborator. Yet his expansion into Samaria, Galilee and much of Syria also earned him Cleopatra's bitter enmity, since these were all territories she wanted for herself in order to restore the Ptolemies' former empire.

She must also have been seriously unimpressed with news that Octavia was pregnant with Antonius' child. When the couple's first daughter, Antonia, was born in the autumn of 39
BC
they moved to Athens for the winter to prepare for Antonius' forthcoming invasion of Parthia. There they issued coins featuring their joint profiles, and with the Athenians honouring the couple as ‘Beneficent Gods' Antonius underwent sacred marriage to the city's patron goddess Athena Polias, who on this occasion was identified with Octavia. And as the wily Octavia tried to eclipse her rival on a divine as well as an earthly level, this incursion into territory previously occupied by Cleopatra must have outraged her — presumably as intended.

Nevertheless Antonius' political fortunes were in the ascendant. Herod's success against the Parthians was matched by that of Antonius' forces, led by his capable deputy Publius Ventidius Bassus, one of Caesar's men and part of the old guard. The Parthian advance into Asia Minor and Syria was beaten back and their crown prince killed in battle near Antioch in June 38
BC
. His severed head was sent on a tour of the provinces to ram home the point.

Having finally beaten the Parthians to restore Rome's honour fifteen years after they had defeated Crassus, Antonius celebrated the victories in Greece while Ventidius was given a Triumph of his own in Rome. Yet such success clearly upstaged Octavian: despite the fact that had married into the family of Sextus Pompeius, Sextus himself remained a rallying point for rebels. His powerful fleet controlled Rome's all-important grain supply and this power was a threat to the Triumvirs' plans.

Left with little choice, Octavian had to take him on, and began by divorcing Scribonia, mother of his only child. Claiming as the reason ‘I could not bear the way she nagged me', Octavian had already spotted a much younger model. Almost immediately after his divorce in January 38
BC
he made nineteen-year-old Livia Drusilla divorce her husband to marry him in ‘indecent haste', according to Antonius, particularly since she was then pregnant with her second child. Nevertheless, their enduring union was probably the most important alliance Octavian ever made, based on Livia's impressive family's connections, her outstanding advice and her political, some claimed murderous, man-oeuvrings behind the scenes.

Although Octavian then launched his attack against Sextus, he was twice defeated and was forced to ask Antonius for help. So in the spring of 37
BC
Antonius brought him the ships he needed. He was met at Tarentum by Octavian and a large retinue including Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) and Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), two poets appointed as Octavian's spin doctors to promote his public image and rewrite history when necessary.

As Antonius and Octavian continued to dominate Rome's fortunes, Octavia's presence was vital in negotiating the uneasy peace between husband and brother, two men of wildly differing character who never actually liked each other. Nevertheless, she managed to persuade Antonius to loan Octavian 130 ships, promising that her brother would return the favour by providing Antonius with twenty thousand more troops for his forthcoming campaign of retribution against Parthia. And since the original Triumvirate had lapsed, it was renewed for another five years with the treaty of Tarentum, sealed by the betrothal of Antonius' eldest son, nine-year-old Antyllus, to Octavian's two-year-old daughter Julia.

After business was concluded in autumn 37
BC
, Octavian returned to Rome to maintain a high public profile as the model Roman leader while Antonius left Italy for the East. He was accompanied by Octavia, pregnant with their second child, but she became ill on reaching Corcyra (Corfu) and, rather than risk her health, Antonius sent her back to her brother's care in Rome where she lived with their daughter Antonia, his two sons by Fulvia and Octavia's two sons by a previous marriage.

Meanwhile Antonius travelled on to Syria to reorganise the Eastern provinces following the Parthian invasions. Over the winter of 37-36
BC
which he spent in Antioch, he drew up new plans for controlling the East. Reducing the previous five provinces down to three, namely Syria, Asia (referring to Asia Minor) and Bithynia, he also amalgamated the scattered client kingdoms into fewer, larger regions in order to create a chain of allies stretching from Thrace in the north right down the eastern Mediterranean to Egypt in the south. He placed each in the hands of his most trusted supporters. Herod would remain in Judaea, backed by a Roman garrison to suppress Jewish unrest, while hand-picked new men included Amyntas, secretary to a previous client king and now promoted to ruler of Galatia, and Polemon, son of a Phrygian politician, who gained Pontus. Cappadocia went to Archelaos Sisinnes, son of Antonius' one-time lover Glaphyra and Archelaos, short-lived consort of Cleopatra's eldest sister, Berenike IV.

Yet, with no sign of the legions promised by Octavia and her brother, Antonius would need the support and wealth of Cleopatra more than ever. But he had not seen his lover for almost four years, nor the twins she had borne him. And since in the meantime he had married and fathered two children by Octavian's sister, he knew he would need to make some serious concessions to win back the support of the woman who held his future in her hands.

In autumn 37
BC
, Antonius once more sent his envoy to Alexandria to request the presence of Cleopatra in Antioch. He must have presented her with a most attractive offer in return for her support, an offer suggested by the choice of venue. The great Seleucid city had long played a crucial role in Ptolemaic politics, from Ptolemy Ill's expansion in the 240s
BC
to the great ceremony of 145
BC
when the people of Antioch had offered Ptolemy VI the Seleucid throne and diadem. His adoption of the combined Ptolemaic and Seleucid diadems demonstrated his control of both empires in a form of dual regalia which must surely have appealed enormously to Cleopatra. It had also been at Antioch where Antonius had taken up his post as Gabinius' cavalry commander back in 55
BC
, setting out to meet the teenage Cleopatra and escort her back to Egypt with her father Auletes. Eighteen years later, he prepared to meet her again as she finally arrived in a city filled with meaning for them both.

Royal protocol aside, it must have been a deeply emotional moment for the couple as Cleopatra presented Antonius with his three-year-old twins for the very first time. Although he already had at least five other children, his twins by Cleopatra gave him a dynastic link to Alexander the Great. So, whereas his other children all bore their father's name, from his eldest child Antonia, his two sons Marcus Antonius Antyllus and Iullus Antonius and, most recently, two daughters again both named Antonia, he acknowledged Cleopatra's children as his own while confirming their names as Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene.

Names and their associations would be an important part of his propaganda campaign. Since the Greeks regarded the sun and moon as twin companions of Victory there was a great portent for the forth-coming campaign against Parthia, whose king was traditionally regarded as ‘Brother of the Sun and Moon': Antonius' paternity made him ‘Father of the Sun and Moon'. The children's names equally reflected Cleopatra's ambitions, since Alexander Helios, named after Alexander the Great as the sun god Helios in his distinctive sunray crown, had been the role model of Ptolemy III who had extended Ptolemaic power to its greatest extent. The same king had also sent Isis' statue to Antioch and the goddess' powers were now invoked in the name Cleopatra Selene, whose namesake had ruled over much of the region during four marriages within the Ptolemaic and Seleucid houses. As likely mother of Auletes, Selene was also the child's great-grandmother, so this was a most appropriate name to conjure with in Cleopatra's attempted reunification of Egypt and Syria under her own control.

Taking up residence with her precious children in Antioch's royal palace, set among groves of laurel and cypress trees, Cleopatra was at last reunited with Antonius when the thirty-one-year-old pharaoh officially married her forty-six-year-old Roman lover in the winter of 37
BC
.

Their marriage was recognised in Egyptian law and Antonius' status as royal consort referred to in demotic texts; ancient sources refer to Cleopatra ‘who married the Roman general, Antony'. He himself announced ‘uxor mea est', ‘she is my wife', and although he was already married in Roman law, which forbade marriage to a non-Roman citizen, Antonius certainly regarded marriage between Roman and non-Roman citizens as legally binding, since he married his eldest child, Antonia, to a wealthy Asiatic. Although polygamy was likewise banned under Roman law, Alexander, Ptolemy I and Ptolemy Physkon had all been married to several women at once. So too had Caesar, marrying Cleopatra while he was still married to Calpurnia and even planning new laws to legalise the move. So, given his intention to follow in Caesar's footsteps, Antonius himself wed Cleopatra, his sacred marriage to the goddess Athena in Athens repeated in Syria when Dionysos-Osiris finally married Aphrodite-Isis to usher in the prophesied Golden Age.

No doubt he was attired for the ceremony in the manner of a Greek groom, richly clothed and perfumed; Roman men did little more than put on a clean toga and comb their hair. Yet the bride in both Greek and Roman tradition had to undergo a whole variety of rites prior to marriage. After being bathed, perfumed and made up, the Greek ‘nymphokomos' would be on hand to oversee every detail of the bride's appearance as a means of expressing her family's status; the Roman wedding garment, on the other hand, based on an ancient Etruscan noble's tunic, would be woven by the bride to prove her domestic abilities.

Although Cleopatra's attire would have been manufactured by dressmakers and arranged by her attendants to transform her into black-robed Isis, she may have adopted the traditional Roman bridal belt of ewe wool to symbolise fertility. It was tied firmly in place with the complex knot of Herakles, Antonius' ancestor; the knot was a popular motif in gold jewellery and is likely to have appealed to Cleopatra alongside her trademark pearls and diadem.

Of paramount importance in Roman wedding preparations, the bride's hair was styled with a spear as a reminder that the first Roman marriages were associated with warfare when women of the neighbouring Sabines were carried off to Rome for marriage. A spear which had taken life was felt best able to tackle the dangerous sexual powers believed to lurk in women's hair. Its tip was used to part the hair into six sections which were then wrapped around the head to create the ‘six-tressed coiffure' of the Vestal Virgins which ‘commits the bride's chastity to their husbands'.

Then, with heads bound by fragrant laurel, myrtle or marjoram flowers, Greek and Roman brides traditionally wore a veil, dyed with costly saffron to create the orange-red ‘flame colour' believed to promote fertility. Both the Greeks and Romans associated red with births, marriages and deaths: it was the colour of sacrifice from the woman sacrificing her virginity to her husband to the blood of childbirth, and the mother of Zeus' twins, Leto, was known as ‘Leto of the red veil'. So, as mother of divine twins herself, Cleopatra may well have worn a red veil as part of her bridal outfit, fitting as it did with the fiery Egyptian goddess Hathor-Sekhmet, dubbed ‘Lady of the Red Linen' after her propensity for violence and blood-letting. A red veil would certainly have complemented the black robes of Isis, whose temples were a venue for marriage where couples could ‘exchange vows with the goddess as our witness'. So it seems quite possible that Cleopatra and Antonius made use of Antioch's own temple of Isis, whose cult statue, dating back to 241
BC
, had been sent from Egypt by Ptolemy III to mark the extent of Egyptian control.

Although scenes from Antioch's ‘House of the Isis Mysteries' show the goddess standing beside a male initiate wearing nothing but a red cloth over his shoulder, the actual marriage ceremony differed widely throughout the ancient world. Traditional Egyptian marriage required little more than cohabitation followed by equal legal rights to property and divorce, whereas Greek and Roman women were handed from father to husband as property. The original Roman marriage which symbolised the seizure of the bride by force with the words ‘Thus, beloved, I seize you' was eventually superseded by a ceremony based more on Eastern customs in which the bride announced, ‘Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.' And as the couple clasped right hands, a ring might be placed on the third finger of the bride's left hand — usually gold in the case of the wealthy, perhaps set with a precious stone carved with an image of deities or hands clasping in union. Certainly, Antonius was sufficiently impressed with the work of the Athens-based engraver Gaius Avianius Evander to bring him to Alexandria: a gold ring adorned with a red jasper intaglio of Antonius' portrait was perhaps a type deemed appropriate for his new wife Cleopatra.

The ceremonials were generally followed by a wedding feast, which in the case of royal marriages was held in a great pavilion of the sort used at the nuptials of Alexander, Ptolemy and their successors. Roses and narcissi formed the backdrop for specially composed wedding songs and speeches, followed by the groom revealing his wife's face to the guests by lifting her veil before the happy couple were taken in nocturnal procession to the groom's home. He carried his new wife over the threshold to prevent her stumbling and bringing bad luck, and they were showered with dried fruit and nuts to bring fertility before being led to the bridal chamber with its saffron-coloured hangings. Then, behind closed doors, the husband undertook the final unveiling of his bride, untying the complex Herakles knot of her bridal belt in a symbolic unlocking of her chastity.

Although the extent to which such customs were employed during Antonius' marriage to Cleopatra is impossible to gauge, she regarded the event as so important that she renumbered her regnal years to make ‘Year 16 which is also Year 1'. Yet this was no mere declaration of love, since her marriage had been accompanied by one of the most generous wedding presents of all time — nothing less than the restoration of virtually all the Ptolemies' former empire — and it was this major achievement which Cleopatra wished to announce to the world.

As the couple prepared to rule the East together, coins issued at Antioch, Damascus and Askelon provide the only known images of Cleopatra at the time of her marriage. With her usual melon coiffure topped with the royal diadem and embellished with small curls carefully arranged over her brow, her chlamys robe adorned by a necklace of round pearls wrapped twice about her neck, the thirty-one-year-old appears younger than her gaunt face on coins from her late teens and early twenties. So perhaps her rejuvenation was part of this ‘new beginning', in the same way that images of certain pharaonic predecessors had grown younger during their reigns. She was literally backed by her new husband Antonius, who appeared on the coins' reverse. His increasingly Eastern ways were balanced by the apparent Westernisation of Cleopatra who was ‘made to look Roman, almost like Antony in drag', an amusing notion not so far from the truth, since their images emphasised their combined powers noted on the coins' inscriptions.

With Antonius named ‘Imperator for the third time and triumvir', Cleopatra was ‘Basilissa', female version of the Greek ‘king', followed by the title ‘Kleopatra Thea Neotera', ‘the new Cleopatra Thea', after her great-great-aunt the first Cleopatra Thea. Daughter of one monarch, sister of two, wife of three (two of whom took on Parthia) and mother of four (virtually the same tally as Cleopatra VII herself), Egyptian-born Thea had ruled in her own right as the only Seleucid royal woman ever to issue her own coins. And it was her example Cleopatra VII chose to follow as she restored the Ptolemies' former empire across the East.

Believing that ‘the greatness of the Roman empire consisted more in giving than in taking', Antonius made land grants to his new wife stretching right down the eastern Mediterranean coast, from Cilicia, through Syria and Phoenicia, large parts of Judaea, Lebanon and the Arab state of Ituraea. Confirmed as ruler of Cyprus, she also received estates on Crete and regained Cyrene. All these regions were rich in a range of natural resources which Egypt had intermittently controlled for the previous three millennia. Lebanon's timber supplies, in particular, would be vital for building the ships needed to patrol the eastern Mediterranean during Antonius' forthcoming Parthian campaign, particularly since he had given 130 of his ships to Octavian in return for troops which had still not materialised.

Although Cleopatra did not receive all of Judaea, which she wanted but which Antonius had previously given to the militarily useful Herod, she did receive Herod's lands around Jericho containing groves of the shrubs which produced the precious Balm of Gilead
(Commiphora gileadensis
and
Pistacia lentiscus)
, of which it was said that ‘every scent ranks below balsam'. Only growing in these limited areas, the balm was so rare that it was incredibly expensive, and since it was regarded as ‘the most precious drug that there is', a key ingredient in medicine, incense and perfumes, this land was a most valuable gift. Nor was Herod the only one of Antonius' dependants left seriously out of pocket by Cleopatra's gains, for the Nabatean Arabs of Jordan were ordered to hand over control of their trade in Dead Sea bitumen ‘which serves as no small source of income. . . . the barbarians export the tar to Egypt and sell it for embalming the dead, for if this material is not mixed into the other substances the cadaver will not last long'. And whereas the mighty Seleucid army had failed to take the bitumen trade by force, the Nabateans were forced to hand it over to Cleopatra without a fight.

So not only had her restoration of almost all the Ptolemies' empire been achieved without bloodshed, it had made Cleopatra an incredibly wealthy woman; and to crown her amazing success, she now discovered she was pregnant with her fourth child. It must therefore have been with the most tremendous sense of satisfaction that she left Antioch in the spring of 36
BC
, taking her leave of Antonius at Zeugma on the Euphrates to return to Alexandria in a grand royal progress overland. Taking the opportunity to view her new territories and show herself to her new subjects, she travelled from the Seleucid city of Apamea and the religious centre of Emesa down toward the mountains of Lebanon to arrive at Ituraea with its famous shrine of Zeus at Baalbek. After a rapturous reception at the great city of Damascus where her image was placed on the coinage, she moved on to Judaea and was received by Herod at his capital, Jerusalem.

Housed in suitably regal splendour in his newly built fortified palace, she toured the balsam groves which had once been his, ordering cuttings to be taken back to Egypt for planting in Heliopolis, the ancient centre of Egypt's incense-fuelled sun worship. Then the consummate businesswoman agreed to lease the groves back to him for the huge annual rent of 200 talents. Apart from these financial reverses Herod was also unsettled by Cleopatra's friendship with his new mother-in-law Alexandra, whose daughter he had recently married when he became king and adopted the Jewish faith. Because he was an Idumaean Arab by birth, however, he was unable to fulfill the accompanying role of Jewish high priest; but equally he claimed that Alexandra's popular sixteen-year-old son Aristobulus was too young for the office. This so outraged Alexandra that she appealed directly to Cleopatra and Antonius, whereupon Aristobulus was made high priest regardless of Herod's opinion.