Antony and Cleopatra (70 page)

“Speak, Publius Canidius,” she said.

Canidius too was looking old, despite his trim body and love of physical work. However, he hadn’t lost any of his frankness. “The first thing we have to do is abandon the fleet,” he said, “and by that I don’t mean we save as many as the flagships.
All
the ships, including Queen Cleopatra’s, must be abandoned.”

Stiffening, Cleopatra opened her mouth, then shut it. Let Canidius finish outlining his ridiculous plan, then strike!

“We withdraw the land army by forced marches into Macedonian Thrace, where we’ll have room to maneuver, room to give battle on ground of our choosing. We’ll be in a perfect position to gather additional troops from Asia Minor, Anatolia, and even Dacia. We can utilize the seven Macedonian legions, at present around Thessalonica—good men, Antonius, as you know. I suggest the area behind Amphipolis, where the air is clean and dry. This year has been wet enough to ensure no dust storms, as happened when we fought at Philippi. The harvest will be in by the time we get there, and it’s going to be a plentiful one. The move will give our sick soldiers time to regain strength, and morale will soar by the very fact that we’re quitting this terrible place. Into the bargain, I doubt Octavianus and Agrippa can march at Caesar’s speed—Octavianus, I’ve heard, is running out of money. He might even decide against fighting a campaign so far from Italia with the winter coming on and uncertain supply lines. We’ll be marching overland, whereas he’ll have to get his fleets from the Adriatic to the upper Aegean. We’re not going to need fleets, but with us blocking the Via Egnatia, he’ll have to rely on ships for supply.”

Canidius stopped, but when Cleopatra would have spoken, he held up his hand so commandingly that she didn’t. The others were hanging on his every word, the fools!

“Your Majesty,” Canidius went on, addressing her now, “you know I have been your strongest supporter. But not anymore. Time has proved that a campaign is no place for a woman, most especially when that woman occupies the command tent. Your presence has sown dissent, anger, opposition. Through your presence, we have lost valuable men and even more valuable time. Your presence has sapped the Roman troops of their vitality, their will to win. Your sex has created so many problems that, even were you a Julius Caesar—which you are definitely not—your presence is a frightful burden to Antonius and his generals. Therefore I say adamantly that you must return to Egypt at once.”

“I will do no such thing!” Cleopatra cried, jumping to her feet. “How dare you, Canidius! It’s my money that has kept this war going, and my money means
me
! I will not go home until this war is won!”

“You miss my point, Your Majesty. Which is that we cannot win this war while ever you are here. You are a woman trying to fill a man’s military boots, and you haven’t succeeded. You and your antics have cost us dearly, and it’s high time you realized that. If we are to win, you must go home immediately!”

“I will not!” she said through her teeth. “What’s more, how can you even suggest that we abandon the fleets? They’ve cost ten times what the land army has, and you want to hand them over to Octavianus and Agrippa? That’s tantamount to handing them the whole world!”

“I didn’t say they’d be handed over to the enemy, Majesty. What I implied—but will now say outright—is that we burn them.”

“Burn them?”
She gasped, hands going to her throat and that growing lump. “
Burn them?
All those trees, all that work, all that money, going up in smoke? Never! No, and no, and no! We have more than four hundred quinqueremes in fighting condition, and many more transports than that! We have no cavalry left, you idiot! That means the land army is in no position to fight—it’s utterly crippled! If anything is to be abandoned, let it be the infantry!”

“Land battles are decided by the infantry, not cavalry,” said Canidius, not about to give in to this crazy woman and her passion for getting her money’s worth. “We burn the fleets, and we march for Amphipolis.”

Antony sat silent while the verbal battle raged, Cleopatra fighting alone against Canidius backed by Poplicola, Sosius, and Lurius. What they said seemed to hum, float, wax and wane, strike colors off the walls that bled into each other. Unreal, thought Antony.

“I will not go home! You will not burn my fleets!” she was screaming, flecks of foam at the corners of her mouth.

“Go home, you woman! We must burn the fleets!” the men were shouting, fists clenched, some brandished at her.

Finally Antony bestirred himself; one hand came down on the table, sent it vibrating. “Shut your mouths, all of you! Shut up and sit down!”

They sat, all of them trembling with rage and frustration.

“We will not burn the fleets,” Antony said in a tired voice. “The Queen is right, they must be saved. If we burn all our ships, nothing will stand between Octavianus and the eastern end of Our Sea. Egypt will fall, because Octavianus will simply bypass us at Amphipolis. He’ll sail straight for Egypt, and Egypt will fall because we won’t be able to get there first if we have to march overland. Think of the distance! A thousand miles to the Hellespont, another thousand miles through Anatolia, and a third thousand to Alexandria. Maybe Caesar could have covered them in three or four months, but his troops would have died for him, whereas ours would grow tired of forced marches in a month, and desert.”

His argument was unassailable; Canidius, Poplicola, Sosius, and Lurius subsided, while Cleopatra sat with eyes downcast and no expression of triumph. At last she understood that it was her sex these fools couldn’t bear, that it was neither her foreignness nor her money-bags. All their hatred was for a
woman
. Romans didn’t like women, which was why they left them at home even if they were doing nothing more important than staying in a country villa! Finally she had the answer to the puzzle.

“I didn’t know it was my sex,” she said to Antony after his four generals had departed, muttering darkly, but convinced he was right. “How could I have been so blind?”

“Oh, because your own life has never lifted that veil.”

A silence fell, but not an uncomfortable one. Cleopatra sensed a change in Antony, as if the bitterness and protracted length of the argument between her and his four remaining friends had penetrated his detachment, pushed some energy back into him.

“I don’t think that I want to share
my
plan with Canidius and the others anymore,” she said, “but I would like to air it with you. Will you listen?”

“Gladly, my love. Gladly.”

“We can’t win here, I know that,” she said, but briskly, as if it didn’t concern her. “I also understand that the land army is useless. Your own Roman troops are as loyal as ever, and there have been no desertions among them. So, if possible, they should be saved. What I want to do is break out of Ambracia and make a run for Egypt. And there’s only one way to do that. Our fleets must offer battle. A battle you must lead in person aboard the
Antonia
. I’ll leave it to you and your friends to work out the details because I have no skill in naval matters. What I want to do is load as many of your Roman troops as will fit in my transports, while you load others aboard your fleetest galleys. Don’t bother with the quinqueremes, they’re so slow they’ll be caught.”

He was listening alertly, eyes fixed on her face. “Go on.”

“This is our secret, Marcus, my love. You can’t speak of it even to Canidius, whom you will keep on land to command whatever infantry are left. Put Poplicola, Sosius, and Lurius in command of your fleets, that will keep them busy. As long as they know you’re there in person, they won’t smell a dead rat. I’ll be aboard
Caesarion
just far enough behind the lines to see where a gap opens. And the moment that gap opens, we’re running for Egypt with your troops. You’ll have to keep a pinnace near the
Antonia
—when you see me sailing, you’ll follow. You’ll catch up with me quickly, and come aboard
Caesarion
.”

“I’ll look like a deserter,” Antony said, frowning.

“Not once it’s known that you acted to save your legions.”

“I can improve on your plan, my beloved. I have a fleet and four good legions in Cyrenaica with Pinarius Scarpus. Give me one ship and I’ll sail for Paraetonium to collect Pinarius and my men. We’ll meet again in Alexandria.”

“Paraetonium? That’s in Libya, not Cyrenaica.”

“Which is why I’m sending a ship to Cyrenaica this moment. I’ll order Pinarius to march for Paraetonium at once.”

“Given that we can’t save all eleven of your legions here, we can do with four more,” she said with satisfaction. “So be it, Marcus. I’ll have that ship on
Caesarion
’s beam, waiting. But before you board him, you must farewell me on
Caesarion,
please.”

“That’s no hardship,” he said with a laugh, and kissed her.

The secret leaked, as was inevitable when on the Kalends of September the legions were loaded, packed like sardines, aboard Cleopatra’s transports and any others deemed capable of sailing swiftly. Other evidence of something more than a sea battle had occurred before this: all but the massive fives had their sails stowed, and huge amounts of water and food. Canidius, Poplicola, Sosius, Lurius, and the rest of the legates assumed that, hard on the heels of the engagement, they were making a bid to get to Egypt. This was reinforced when every unseaworthy or unnecessary vessel was beached and burned far enough away from Ambracia’s mouth to dissipate the smoke before Octavian could see it. What no one suspected was that the engagement too was smoke, that it would not be fought to a conclusion. Proud Romans that they were, Poplicola, Sosius, and Lurius could not have borne a plan that meant no all-out fight. Canidius, who did see through the smoke, said nothing to his colleagues, simply concentrated on getting what troops could not be fitted aboard the transports on the march before Octavian woke up to what was going on.

At the end of the Adriatic summer the wind was more predictable than at any other season: it blew from the west in the morning, and about midday veered northwest, picking up in strength the more to the north it turned.

Octavian and Agrippa had not missed the signs of an impending battle, though no spy had reported to them about the sails, water, and food aboard every transport Antony and Cleopatra possessed; had they known those things, they might have planned countermoves for flight. As it was, they just assumed the enemy was tired of sitting still and had resolved to gamble all on defeating Agrippa at sea.

“Antonius’s strategy is simple,” Agrippa said to Octavian in their command tent. “He has to turn my line of ships at its northernmost end and drive it southward—that is, away from your land camp and my own base on the Bay of Comarus. His land army will invade your camp and my naval base with a good chance of winning. My strategy is equally simple. I have to prevent his turning my line downwind. Whoever wins the race to do the turning will also win the battle.”

“Then the wind favors you slightly more than it does him,” Octavian said, on tiptoe from excitement.

“Yes. What also favors me is size, Caesar. Those monstrous fives of Antonius’s are too slow. He’s Antaeus the giant, we’re Hercules the comparative midget,” Agrippa said with a grin, “and what he seems to have forgotten is that Hercules lifted Antaeus free of his mother, the earth. Well, there’s no earth for Antaeus to draw strength from in a battle fought on water.”

“Find me a flotilla to command at the south end of your line,” Octavian said. “I refuse to sit this battle out on dry land, and have everyone call me craven. But if I’m far enough away from the main thrust, I can’t interfere with your tactics even by the most innocent mistake. How many of our legionaries do you plan to use, Agrippa? Given that, if Antonius wins, he’ll invade our camp and port?”

“Thirty-five thousand. Every ship will have the
harpax
for hauling those elephants in from a distance, and as many hooked gangplanks as possible. We have the advantage in that our troops have been trained as marines—Antonius never bothered to do that. But, Caesar, there’s no use sitting at the south end of our line. Better to be aboard my own Liburnian as my second-in-command. I trust you not to countermand my orders.”

“Why, thank you for the compliment! When will it happen?”

“Tomorrow, by all the signs. We’ll be ready.”

On the second day of September, Mark Antony came out of the Bay of Ambracia in six squadrons, leading the northernmost one himself. His right, which was his north, comprised three of the six squadrons, each numbering fifty-five massive fives; Poplicola was his second-in-command. Agrippa lay on his oars farther from the shore than Antony had expected, which meant he had to row for longer than he wanted. By mid-morning he achieved the distance and lay on his oars, resting the oarsmen. Only at midday, when the wind began to veer to the north, could the battle begin.

Cleopatra and her transports took advantage of the longer distance, moving into the mouth as though keeping herself in reserve, and trusting to Agrippa’s unexpected distance from the shore to conceal the troop-carrying nature of her ships.

The wind began to change; both sides put their backs to the oars and rowed desperately for the north, the galleys at the north end of both sides strung out in a line that saw longer intervals between Antony’s fives than between Agrippa’s Liburnians.

The race was a tie. Neither side managed to turn the other downwind. Instead, the two end squadrons became locked in combat. The
Antonia
and Agrippa’s flagship, the
Divus Julius
, were the first to engage, and within moments six nippy little Liburnians had grappled the
Antonia
and were hauling it in. When he had the time to look, Antony discovered that ten of his galleys were also in trouble, grappled by Liburnians. Some were on fire; scant matter that they couldn’t be rammed and sunk when fire would do it. Soldiers from the six limpetlike Liburnians began pouring on to
Antonia
’s deck; Antony decided to abandon ship. He could see that Cleopatra and her transports had broken out of the bay and were heading south under sail, helped by the brisk nor’westerly. A leap into the pinnace and he too was away, dodging between the Liburnians in a craft famous for its speed.

No one aboard the
Divus Julius
took any notice of the pinnace, half a mile away by the time the
Antonia
surrendered. Lucius Gellius Poplicola and the other two squadrons of Antony’s right promptly surrendered without engaging, while Marcus Lurius, in command of Antony’s center, turned his ships around and rowed back into the bay. At the south end of his line and commanded by Gaius Sosius, Antony’s left followed Lurius’s example.

It was a debacle, a laughingstock of a battle. Of the more than seven hundred ships on the sea, less than twenty had clashed.

So incredible was it, in fact, that Agrippa and Octavian were convinced that this oddest of all outcomes was a trick, that on the morrow some other tactic would be employed. Thus all that night Agrippa’s fleet lay on its oars out to sea, losing any chance they might have had to catch Cleopatra and forty thousand Roman troops.

When the next day produced no clever stratagem, Agrippa rowed home to Comarus and he and Octavian went to see their captives.

From Poplicola they learned the shocking truth: that Antony had deserted his command to follow the fleeing Cleopatra.

“It’s all That Woman’s fault!” Poplicola shrilled. “Antonius never meant to fight! As soon as the
Antonia
was finished, he got over its side into a pinnace and hared off to catch Cleopatra.”

“Impossible!” Octavian exclaimed.

“I tell you, I saw it myself! And when I did, I thought, why should I imperil my soldiers and crews? Surrender suddenly seemed more honorable. I hope you take due note of my good sense.”

“I’ll put it on your memorial,” Octavian said genially, and to his Germans: “I want him executed immediately. See to it.”

Only Sosius was spared this fate; Arruntius interceded for him, and Octavian listened.

As it turned out, Canidius had tried to persuade the land army to attack Octavian’s camp, but no one save him wanted a fight. Nor would the troops strike camp and march for the east. Canidius himself vanished while the legion representatives negotiated a peace with Octavian, who sent the foreign levies home and found land in Greece and Macedonia for the Romans.

“For I’ll not have a one of you polluting Italia with your stories,” Octavian told the legion representatives. “Clemency’s my policy, but you’ll never go home. Be like your master Antonius, and learn to love the East.”

Gaius Sosius was made to swear the Oath of Allegiance, and warned that he was never to contradict whatever Octavian’s “official” version of Actium turned out to be. “I have spared you on one condition—silence all the way to the pyre. And remember that I can light it at any time.”

“I need a walk,” Octavian said to Agrippa two
nundinae
after Actium, “and I want company, so don’t make excuses. Cleaning up is properly in train, you’re not needed.”

“You come before anyone and anything, Caesar. Where do you want to walk?”

“Anywhere but here. Faugh! The stink of shit, piss, and so many men is unbearable. I could bear it better if there were a bit of blood, but there isn’t. The bloodless battle of Actium!”

“Then let’s ride first, up into the north until we’re far enough away from Ambracia to
breathe
.”

“An excellent idea!”

They rode for two hours, which carried them farther than the dimple of the Bay of Comarus; when the forest closed in, Agrippa stopped by a brook sparkling in the dappled sunlight. It tumbled over its rocky bottom in breaks of foam, the mossy ground around it giving off a sweetly earthy smell.

“Here,” Agrippa said.

“We can’t walk here.”

“I know, but there are two lovely rocks over there. We can sit on them facing each other, and talk. Talk, not walk. Isn’t that what you really want to do?”

“Brave Agrippa!” Octavian laughed, sat down. “You’re right, as always. Here is peace, solitude, reflection. The only source of turbulence is the stream, and it’s a melody.”

“I brought a skin of watered wine, that Falernian you like.”

“Trusty Agrippa!” Octavian drank, then passed the skin to his friend. “Perfect!”

“Cough it up, Caesar.”

“At least these days that carries no implication of asthma.” He sighed, stretched out his legs. “The bloodless battle of Actium—ten enemy ships engaged out of four hundred, and only two of them fired until they sank. Perhaps a hundred dead, if that many. And for this I’ve taxed the people of Rome and Italia twenty-five percent, the second year’s contribution even now being collected? I will be cursed, perhaps even torn in pieces when all I can show for their money is a battle that was no battle. I can’t even produce Marcus Antonius or Cleopatra! They stole a march on me, sailed away. And, like a fool, I believed better of Antonius, lingered to defeat him instead of flying in pursuit.”

“Come, Caesar, that’s all done with. I know you, which means I know you’ll manage to turn Actium into a triumph.”

“I’ve been racking my mind for days, and I want to try out my ideas on you because you’ll answer me truthfully.” He picked up a series of pebbles and began to lay them out on his rock. “I can see no alternative other than to deliberately inflate Actium into something that Homer would yearn to hymn. The two fleets came together like titans, clashed all down the line from north to south—that’s why Poplicola, Lurius, and the rest perished. Only Sosius survived. Let Arruntius think his pleas spared Sosius—now you know better. Antonius fought heroically aboard
Antonia
and was winning his part of the engagement when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Cleopatra treacherously leaving both the battle—and him. So much drug was still in his body that he suddenly panicked, commandeered a pinnace, and set off after her like a lovesick dog after a bitch. Many of his admirals saw him go after Cleopatra, crying out to her”—Octavian raised his voice to a falsetto—” ‘Cleopatra, don’t leave me! I beg you, don’t leave me!’ Dead men were floating everywhere, the sea was red with blood, spars and shrouds tangled on the water, but the pinnace that held Marcus Antonius forged onward through the carnage in Cleopatra’s wake. After that, Antonius’s admirals lost heart. And you, Agrippa, superlative in combat, crushed your adversaries.”

“It works so far,” said Agrippa, taking another swig from the wineskin. “What happens next?”

“Antonius reaches Cleopatra’s ship and climbs on board. Pray pardon the switch to the present tense—it always helps me when I’m embroidering something whose truth will never be known,” said the master of embroidery. “But suddenly he comes to his senses, sees in his mind’s eye the disaster he left so cravenly—I’ll teach that
irrumator
Antonius to accuse me of cowardice at Philippi! Now it’s his turn—sees the disaster he left so cravenly. He howls in anguish, pulls his
paludamentum
over his head, and sits on the deck for three days without moving. Cleopatra feeds him antidotes, pleading with him to go belowdeck to her cabin, but he won’t move, too devastated at his cowardice.
Thousands
of men dead, and he responsible!”

“It sounds like one of those trashy epic poems young girls buy,” said Agrippa.

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it? But would you care to bet that all of Rome and Italia won’t buy this one?”

“I’m not so silly. They’d buy it even on expensive paper. Once Maecenas adds some flowery phrases it will be faultless.”

“Certainly it ought to lighten the resentment against me for going to war. People like value for their money.”

“A touchy subject, Caesar. How on earth are you going to pay your debts? Now that Cleopatra’s defeated, you have no excuse for continuing to levy your tax. Yet while she’s alive, you’ll have no peace. She’ll be arming to have another try, whether Antonius is with her or not. It’s Divus Julius’s alleged son she wants to rule the world, not Antonius. So—money?”

“Proximately, I’m going to squeeze Antonius’s client-kings until they go Tyrian purple and their eyes bug out. Ultimately, I’ll invade Egypt.”

Agrippa glanced at the sun between the trees and rose to his feet. “Time to ride back, Caesar. We don’t want to be caught out here in the dark. According to Atticus—and he should know—the woods are full of bears and wolves.”

Some three hundred of Antony’s warships were undamaged, though all the troop transports had gone with Cleopatra. At first Octavian thought to burn all of them; he had fallen in love with the deadly little Liburnian, and become convinced that all future naval warfare would be Liburnian. Massive quinqueremes were obsolescent. Then he decided to retain sixty of Antony’s leviathans as a deterrent against piracy, growing at the western end of Our Sea. He sent them to Forum Julii, Caesar’s seaport colony of veterans on the coast where the Gallic Province met Liguria. The rest were beached and burned inside Ambracia, yielding such a vast number of ramming beaks that many of them had to be burned too. The most imposing were saved to adorn a column in front of the temple of Divus Julius in the Forum Romanum, but others were sent throughout Italia to remind the taxpayers that the threat had been very real.

Agrippa was to return to Italia and commence placating the veterans, who of late years always became truculent after service had involved a victory. The Senate was sent home too, and went thankfully; it had not been a comfortable sojourn overseas, even for those who had populated Antony’s anti-Senate. Clemency was the order of the day; once Antony’s admirals were executed, the inarguable ruler of Rome announced that only three men still at large would face decapitation: Canidius, Decimus Turullius, and Cassius Parmensis, the latter two because they were the last of Divus Julius’s assassins left alive.