Antony and Cleopatra (68 page)

“The Senate will never permit it,” Maecenas said.

Octavian grinned. “The Senate won’t be present to object, my dear Maecenas. I’m taking it with me on campaign.”

“Ye gods!” said Maecenas feebly. “Hundreds of senators is a recipe for madness.”

“Not at all. I’ll have work for every one of them, and while they’re under my supervision, they can’t sit in Rome brewing vats of mischief.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

Cleopatra labored under terrible handicaps, handicaps that only increased when she and Antony left Ephesus bound for Athens. At the root of her worry was a conviction that Antony wasn’t telling her all his thoughts or plans; whenever she fantasized about delivering her judgments from the Capitol in Rome, a tinge of amusement crept into his eyes that knowledge of him told her was evidence of disbelief. Yes, he had concluded that Octavian had to be stopped, and that war was the only way left to stop him, but about his plans for Rome she couldn’t be so sure. And though he always sided with her in those command tent disputes, he did so as if they didn’t really matter—as if to humor her was more important than keeping his legates happy. He had also developed considerable agility at sidestepping her accusations of disloyalty when she did voice her suspicions. Ageing he might be, subject to lapses of memory he was, but did he truly believe in his heart of hearts that Caesarion would be King of Rome? She wasn’t sure.

Only nineteen of Antony’s thirty Roman legions sailed for western Greece; the other eleven were assigned to garrison Syria and Macedonia. However, Antony’s land forces were augmented by forty thousand foot and horse donated by client-kings, most of whom had come in person to Ephesus—there learning that they were not to accompany Antony and Cleopatra to Athens. Instead, they were to make their own way to the designated theater of war in western Greece. Which didn’t sit well with any of them.

It was Mark Antony himself who had separated his progress from that of his client-kings, fearing that, were they to witness Cleopatra’s autocracy in the command tent, they would make matters worse for him by siding with her against his Roman generals. Only he knew how desperate his plight was, for only he knew the full extent of his Egyptian wife’s determination to have her say. And it was all so silly! What Cleopatra wanted and what his Roman generals wanted was usually much the same thing; the trouble was that neither she nor they would admit it.

Gaius Julius Caesar would have pinpointed Antony’s weaknesses as a commander, whereas only Canidius had that kind of perception, and Canidius, low-born, was largely ignored. Simply, Antony could general a battle, but not a campaign. His cheerful trust that things would go well betrayed him when it came to the logistics and problems of supply, perpetually neglected. Besides, Antony was too concerned with keeping Cleopatra happy to think of equipment and supplies; he devoted his energies to dancing attendance on her. To his staff it looked like weakness, but Antony’s real weakness was his inability to kill her and confiscate her war chest. Both his love for her and his sense of fair play negated that.

So she, not understanding, gloried in her ascendancy over Antony, deliberately provoking his marshals by demanding this or that from him as proof of his devotion to her, without seeing that her conduct was making Antony’s task much harder—and making her own presence more abominable to them with every passing day.

In Samos he had a brain wave and insisted on remaining there to revel; his legates went on to Athens and he had Cleopatra to himself. If she deemed him drunk, so much the better; most of the wine in his goblet was emptied surreptitiously into his solid gold chamber pot, a gift from her. Her own, she pointed out gleefully, had an eagle and the letters SPQR on its bottom so that she could piss and shit on Rome. That earned her a tirade and a broken chamber pot, but not before it traveled to Italia as a canard Octavian exploited to the limit.

One more handicap lay in her growing conviction that Antony was not a military genius after all, though she failed to see that her own conduct made it impossible for Antony to enter on this war with his old zest, his rightful position of authority. He had his way in the end, yes, but the constant brawling sapped his spirits.

“Go home,” he said to her wearily over and over again. “Go home and leave this war to me.”

But how could she do that when she saw through him? Were she to leave for Egypt, Antony would reach an accommodation with Octavian, and all her plans would fail.

In Athens he refused to travel farther west, dreading the day when Cleopatra rejoined his army. Canidius was an excellent second-in-command; he could manage things in western Greece. His own main duty, Antony thought, was to protect his legates from the Queen, an activity so demanding that he neglected his correspondence with Canidius, not as difficult as it would have been for a man less addicted to pleasure than Antony. On the subject of supplies he ignored every letter.

The news of Octavian’s seizing and reading of his will took Antony’s breath away.

“I, treasonous?”
he asked Cleopatra incredulously. “Since when do a man’s posthumous dispositions brand him a traitor? Oh,
cacat
, this is more than enough! I have been stripped of my legal triumvirate and all my imperium! How dare the Senate side with that disgusting little
irrumator
? He’s the one who committed sacrilege! No one can open the will of a man still living, but he did! And they have forgiven him!”

Then came publication of the Oath of Allegiance. Pollio sent a copy of it to Athens, together with a letter that told of his own refusal to take the oath.

“Antonius, he is so crafty!” the letter said. “No reprisals have been visited upon those who refuse to swear—he intends future generations to be impressed by his
clementia,
shades of his divine father! He even sent notices to the magistrates of Bononia and Mutina—your cities, stuffed with your clients!—saying that no one was to be compelled to swear. I gather that the oath is to be extended to Octavianus’s provinces, which are not so lucky. Every provincial is to swear whether he wants to or not—no choice like Bononia, Mutina, and me.

“I can tell you, Antonius, that people are swearing in huge numbers, absolutely voluntarily. The men of Bononia and Mutina are swearing mightily—and not because they felt themselves intimidated. Because they are so fed up with the uncertainties of the last few years that they would swear on a clown’s
centunculus
if they thought that might bring stability. Octavianus has divorced you from the coming campaign—you are merely the drugged, drunken dupe of the Queen of Beasts. What fascinates me most is that Octavianus hasn’t stopped at citing Egypt’s queen. He names King Ptolemy XV Caesar alongside her as equal aggressor.”

Cleopatra’s face was ashen when she put Pollio’s missive down with shaking fingers. “Antonius, how can Octavianus do that to Caesar’s
son
? His blood son, his true heir—and a mere child!”

“Surely you can see for yourself,” Ahenobarbus said, reading in his turn. “Caesarion turned sixteen last June—he’s a man.”

“But he is
Caesar
’s son! His
only
son!”

“And the living image of his father,” said Ahenobarbus flatly. “Octavianus knows full well that if Rome and Italia set eyes on the lad, he’ll be overwhelmed with followers. The Senate will scramble to make him a Roman citizen and strip Octavianus of his so-called daddy’s wealth—
and
all his clients, which is far more important.” Ahenobarbus glared. “You would have done better, Cleopatra, to have stayed in Egypt and sent Caesarion on this campaign. There would have been less rancor in the councils.”

She shrank, in no condition to contend with Ahenobarbus. “No, if what you say is true, I was right to keep Caesarion in Egypt. I must conquer for him, and only then display him.”

“You’re a fool, woman! As long as Caesarion remains at the arse end of Our Sea, he’s invisible. Octavianus can issue leaflets describing him as totally unlike Caesar, and get no arguments. And if Octavianus should get as far as Egypt, your son by Caesar will die unseen.”

“Octavianus will never reach Egypt!” she cried.

“Of course he won’t,” said Canidius, stepping in. “We’ll beat him now in western Greece. I have it on good authority that Octavianus has settled on sixteen full-strength legions and seventeen thousand German and Gallic horse. They represent his only land forces. His navy consists of two hundred big fives that did well at Naulochus, plus two hundred miserable little Liburnians. We outnumber him in all aspects.”

“Well said, Canidius. We cannot possibly lose.” Then she shivered. “Some issues can be settled only by a war, but the outcome is always uncertain, isn’t it? Look at Caesar. He was always outnumbered. They say this Agrippa is almost as good.”

Immediately after Pollio’s letter they moved to Patrae, on the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth in western Greece; by now the entire army and navy had arrived, sailing around the westernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, into the Adriatic.

Though several hundred galleys were left to garrison Methone as well as Corcyra and other strategic islands, the main fleet still numbered some four hundred and eighty of the most massive quinqueremes ever built. These leviathans had eight men to the three oars of one bank, were completely decked, and had ramming beaks of solid bronze surrounded by oak beams; their hulls were reinforced with belts of squared timber plated and belted with iron to serve as buffers should they be rammed. They were two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide in the beam, stood ten feet above the water amidships and twenty-five feet above it at stern and prow. Each had four hundred and eighty oarsmen and a hundred and fifty marines, and bristled with tall towers carrying artillery pieces. All this rendered them impregnable, an asset in defense; but they crept along at the pace of a snail, no asset in attack. Antony’s flagship, the
Antonia,
was even bigger. Sixty of Cleopatra’s ships were of this size and design, but the second sixty were roomy triremes with four men to an oar bank, and could move at a fast clip, especially when under sail as well as oar power. Her flagship, the
Caesarion
, though daintily daubed and gilded, was swift and designed more for flight than fight.

When everything was in train, Antony sat back complacently, finding nothing wrong in issuing orders so broad that much of the detail was left up to the ability of invidual legates, some good, some mediocre, and some hopeless.

He had put himself on a line running between the island of Corcyra and Methone, a Peloponnesian port just to the north of Cape Acritas. Bogud of Mauretania, a refugee from his brother, Bocchus, was given command of Methone, while the other big naval base, on the island of Leucas, was given to Gaius Sosius. Even Cyrenaica in Africa had been garrisoned. Lucius Pinarius Scarpus, a great-nephew of Divus Julius, held it with a fleet and four legions. This was necessary to safeguard grain and food shipments from Egypt. Huge caches of foodstuffs were put on Samos, at Ephesus, and at many ports on the eastern coast of Greece.

Antony had decided to ignore western Macedonia and northern Epirus; to try to hold them would stretch his front and thin out the density of his troops and ships, therefore let Octavian have them and the Via Egnatia, the great eastern road. Dread of a too-long, too-thin front obsessed him so much that he even vacated Corcyra. His main base was the Bay of Ambracia; this vast, rambling, almost landlocked body of water had a mouth into the Adriatic less than one mile wide. The southern promontory at the mouth was called Cape Actium, and here Antony put his command camp, with his legions and auxiliaries fanned around it for many miles of swampy, unhealthy, mosquito-ridden ground. Though it hadn’t been in camp very long, the land army was approaching dire straits. Pneumonia and the ague were pandemic, even the hardiest men had bad colds, and food was beginning to run short.

His supply chain had not been well organized, and anything that Cleopatra suggested to rectify its deficiencies was either ignored or deliberately sabotaged. Not that either she or Antony spared supply much thought, sure that their policy of keeping the foodstuffs on the eastern side of the landmass was good strategy; Octavian would have to round the Peloponnese to get at the caches. But what they failed to take into account was the high, rugged, rather impassable range of mountains that ran like a fat spine from Macedonia down to the Gulf of Corinth and separated eastern Greece from the west. The roads were mere tracks where they existed at all.

Alone among the legates, Publius Canidius saw the imperative necessity of bringing most of these food and grain caches around the Peloponnese by ship, but Antony, in a stubborn mood, took many days to approve the order, which then had to make the voyage east before it could be executed. And that took time.

Time, it turned out, that Antony and Cleopatra didn’t have. It was so well known that late winter and early spring saw the advantages lie with those on the east side of the Adriatic that no one in Antony’s command tent believed Octavian and his forces would—or could—cross the Adriatic until summer. But this year all the watery gods from Father Neptune to the Lares Permarini were on Octavian’s side. Very brisk westerlies blew, as unusual as unseasonal. They meant a following wind and a following sea for Octavian, but a head wind and a head sea for Antony. Who was powerless to prevent Octavian’s sailing—or landing wherever he pleased.