Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (8 page)

Meanwhile as Caesar’s mistress, Cleopatra journeyed to Rome, a visit either underplayed or excoriated by the Romans in later years. Cicero’s description of her sojourn in Rome belonged to the latter category: ‘I detest Cleopatra,’ he wrote, ‘and the insolence of the queen … when she was in her villa across the river [i.e. the Tiber] I cannot mention without great indignation.’
¹⁵
It was a taste of what was to come. At the time Cleopatra was saluted by Caesar with a golden statue of herself in the temple of Venus Genetrix, the publicly proclaimed ancestress of Caesar’s own Julian family. She was still living there in 44
BC
when Caesar’s assassination put an end to her political hopes – from that direction.

The rise of Mark Antony after the defeat of Caesar’s assassins at Philippi in 42
BC,
presented Cleopatra with another opportunity to exert her wiles in the interest of gratifying her territorial ambitions. She arrived to greet him in Tarsus in Asia Minor by barge up the River Cydnus, a scene originally described by Plutarch that lives forever at the pen of Shakespeare. Outwardly, Cleopatra appeared more as a goddess than as a potential mistress. Plutarch wrote: ‘the word spread on every side that Aphrodite had come to revel with Dionysus for the happiness of Asia’.

For Cleopatra herself, although Aphrodite was held in certain circles to be a mother goddess (which was useful), it was Isis who proved throughout her reign the most convenient point of identification. In the East, the cult of Isis stretched back for at least two thousand years: here was the national divinity of Egypt, the Great Mother of all the gods and of nature itself, the equivalent of Dionysus: except that the cult of Isis, which could be followed by both men and women, presupposed the equality of the female sex. Only one Ptolemaic creed connected with the cult has come down to us but it is a remarkable one from the point of view of a putative Warrior Queen: ‘I am Isis,
the Mistress of every land … I gave and ordained Laws for men, which no one is able to change … I am she that rises in the Dogstar, she who is called Goddess by women … I made man strong … I am the queen of war. I am the queen of the thunderbolt. I stir up the sea and calm it. I am the rays of the Sun.’
¹⁶
At one point, not only did Cleopatra project herself as the New Isis, but she projected her lover Antony as the New Osiris: not an agreeable concept to Antony’s political enemies at Rome.

Even more threatening from the point of view of those hostile to the renewal of the Ptolemaic empire were such words as these, taken from the so-called Sibylline books, a corpus of prophetic literature, probably written at the height of Cleopatra’s power:

But when the Tenth Generation goes down to Hades

There comes a Woman’s great power …

And then the whole wide world under a woman’s hand …

Soon Rome, the ‘delicate gilded voluptuous maiden’, would be at ‘a mistress’ stern command’.
¹⁷

Cleopatra’s territorial fortunes certainly prospered with Antony under her sway. Not only were lands handed over to her far into Asia Minor but her personal wealth was increased with the gift of the Nabatean Arab kingdom, enabling her to exploit its bitumen resources. It has been suggested that new coins issued jointly with Ptolemy xv Caesar (her son) commemorated this fortunate new development.
¹⁸
At the same time, the name of Cleopatra’s son by Antony, born in 40
BC,
Alexander Helios, pointed to the cult of the sun; his twin sister Cleopatra Selene being similarly linked to the moon goddess.

At the Donations of Alexandria of 34
BC,
by which little Alexander Helios was to rule Armenia, his two-year-old brother Ptolemy Philadelphus the lands to the west, and his sister Cleopatra Selene Cyrene, all the children were dressed in suitable national garb – Alexander in the traditional high royal cap of the ancient Persian monarchs. When Antony visited Athens, it was
the statue of Cleopatra, dressed in the robes of Isis, which the Greeks erected on the Acropolis.

The Roman attitude to the New Isis (and the new Osiris) was very different. As political opposition to Antony on the part of his brother-in-law Octavian hardened, Cleopatra was increasingly depicted as an unpleasant Eastern siren who had seduced the Roman Antony, in order to play out a life of debauchery with him far from his Roman duties (and his wife Octavia). Octavian proclaimed to the Roman people, on the basis of Antony’s will, which he seized from the temple of the Vestal Virgins, not only that Antony had given away Roman possessions to Cleopatra, but also that he intended to found a new dynasty with her, based on Alexandria, not Rome. It was thus the destiny of Octavian (the future Caesar Augustus) to contain her: ‘as swiftly as the hawk follows the feeble dove’, wrote Roman Horace with an air of satisfaction not lacking in vindictiveness for all the trouble Cleopatra had caused. ‘So he sailed forth to bind this fatal prodigy in chains.’
¹⁹

How different, how very different, at least in the popular imagination, was the sensuous and commanding Cleopatra from modest Octavia at home, Antony’s lawful Roman wife! Octavia’s admirable disposition encouraged her to plead for mercy where possible; ultimately she would bring up the children of Antony and Cleopatra (the surest test not only of an admirable but of a charitable nature). As for Fulvia, that vigorous Roman matron, Antony’s previous wife, this was how Plutarch described her: not content to rule a husband who had no ambition for public life, her desire was ‘to govern those who governed or to command a commander-in-chief’.
²⁰
But Fulvia’s ambitions were also alien to Cleopatra, who was herself ‘the Queen of War’.

The winter of 33/32
BC
was spent by Antony and Cleopatra together at Ephesus. In this period of gathering storm, the perpetual presence of Cleopatra not only at banquets but at military conferences was criticized by the Roman Ahenobarbus (another character gruffly familiar to us from Shakespeare). While Ahenobarbus wished in vain for Antony to send Cleopatra away,
it was left to another Roman, Canidius Crassus, to point out another aspect to the situation. Not only had Cleopatra contributed a great deal from her own treasury to the expenses of the war (of the five hundred warships under Antony’s command, Cleopatra had provided two hundred) but she had also ruled a great kingdom without effective aid for many years – and was by no means inferior in intelligence to the other kings Antony counted as his allies.

When Octavian formally declared war against Cleopatra (not Antony) at the end of 32, he also chose to direct his most vicious attacks against the ‘licentious’ Egyptian Queen, rather than against the man who might easily have been regarded as a treacherous Roman. Antony’s subjection to Cleopatra was declared to be incomprehensible (here was the Voracity Syndrome at work, with a vengeance). The poet Propertius made of Cleopatra ‘that courtesan obscene … that worst of stigmas branded on the Royal race of Macedon’ who ‘dared pit against our Jupiter, Her god Anubis, half a cur’. In another line, almost risible to modern ears in its disgust, Cleopatra was accused of longing on ‘Tarpeia’s rock to set, The effeminate mosquito net’.
²¹

This dichotomy between the Cleopatra of independent character and independent wealth described by Canidius Crassus, and the ‘courtesan obscene’ of Propertius persisted until the very end of the great adventure shared with Antony. It is even possible to argue that the sea battle at Actium in September 31
BC
which terminated it, was justifiable, if Cleopatra’s view that a land battle would have ensured the loss of her ships be accepted. As for Cleopatra’s presence at the scene of the battle (the Romans, like Napoleon later, thought a battle was no place for a woman), that too is explicable if one accepts that she was needed as the figurehead to her own troops; alternatively that her personal safety was guaranteed more easily there than if she had been left on shore.

More starkly, Horace put forward the Roman view that Cleopatra was the ‘wild Queen’ who had plotted ‘ruin to the Empire’. So Cleopatra’s reputation was trampled into the mire by
the Romans, much as Shakespeare has Cleopatra predict to her waiting-woman Iras at the end of the play that the two of them will be turned into puppets:

The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels. Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’ the posture of a whore.
²²

Like his fellow Romans, Horace ignored the possibility that Cleopatra might legitimately have ambitions of her own – for another kind of empire, under the domain of a Ptolemaic Warrior Queen. The Roman treatment of Cleopatra in this respect may be profitably contrasted with that meted out to Dynamis of Bosphorus whose name means ‘she who must be obeyed’ but who is sometimes known as the Bosphoran Cleopatra.
²³
Dynamis’ husband King Asander had been recognized as ruler of the kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosphorus by both Antony and Octavian, Dynamis herself being the daughter of the late king. In about 17
BC,
however, a certain Scribonius, alleged to be Dynamis’ lover, instigated a revolt against the now elderly sovereign. Whatever Dynamis’ part in the original uprising, she indubitably threw in her lot with Scribonius against her husband, leaving the aged Asander (he was said to be over ninety) to starve himself to death. Dynamis’ next step was to assume control of the country herself, her own descent from Mithridates being an important factor in bolstering up her position. The evidence of the coins, showing her head alone, indicated that Scribonius was not invited to share the throne, even if he shared the bed.

Such a revolution in the Bosphoran kingdom could not be regarded with equanimity by the Romans, notably by Marcus Agrippa, Governor of Jerusalem. The kingdom’s position both as a bulwark against the wild men surrounding it to the north, east
and west, and as a gateway for the empire’s supplies, demanded a stable Roman-controlled government.

Polemo, King of neighbouring Pontus, was accordingly sent into the field, having been promised the hand of Queen Dynamis if he managed to subdue the rebel Bosphorans. Reducing the Bosphorans to a state of submission was not difficult in that they had already thoughtfully put Scribonius to death of their own accord. Pontus duly received the kingdom of Bosphorus and he duly married Dynamis.

But Dynamis’ story was not to be so tamely concluded. Fleeing from what proved to be an unhappy marriage, she raised a fresh revolt, this time against Polemo, with the help of a Sarmatian tribe. Dynamis now felt herself free to wed a young Sarmatian named Aspurgus. With his help, a series of military campaigns ended with the victory of Dynamis over Polemo, and the death of the latter at the hands of Aspurgus in 8
BC.
Still, Dynamis could not rest easy until she had been accepted by Augustus Caesar and his representative Agrippa.

Once this was established, her chequered past, in both moral and political terms, proved no bar to her acceptance by the Romans. So Dynamis became a Roman vassal, receiving the title of ‘friend of the Roman people’. Although her head now disappeared from Bosphoran coins, being replaced by those of Augustus and Agrippa, Dynamis unlike Cleopatra lived to a ripe old age, dying in
AD
7 or 8.

It was Anchises, father of Aeneas, whom Virgil had prophesy the special destiny of the Romans, when Aeneas encountered him in the underworld: ‘You, Roman, must remember that you have to guide the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to graft tradition on to peace, to shew mercy to the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.’
²⁴
Of the two striking Warrior Queens whom the Romans encountered in the first century
BC,
Dynamis’ fate illustrated the mercy shown to the conquered regardless of sex or behaviour, when convenient from the point of view of security. But Cleopatra, by placing herself unlike Dynamis in the category of ‘the haughty’, received a very
different kind of treatment. Her fate was that of those whose ambitions or pretensions were inconvenient to the mighty Roman Empire.

It was a lesson to be learned again ninety years after Cleopatra’s death by another Warrior Queen, Boudica.

CHAPTER FOUR

Iceni: this Powerful Tribe

We had not defeated this powerful tribe in battle, since they had voluntarily become our allies.