Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (23 page)

In the wider Mediterranean world things were far from peaceful. The second triumvirate of Caesar’s friend Mark Antony, his great-nephew and heir Octavian and his supporter Marcus Aemilius Lepidus had united in their determination to capture Caesar’s principal assassins, Brutus and Cassius. They were intent on public revenge and Egypt – still, in spite of her suffering, the richest land in the eastern Mediterranean – was expected to provide practical help. Meanwhile, Brutus and Cassius, having realised that they had few friends in Rome, were looking to the eastern provinces for support and they, too, expected Egypt to help. When Cassius occupied Syria and formed an alliance with the powerful king of Parthia (whose extensive territories covered much of modern Iran and Iraq), Cleopatra was forced to take sides. She hesitated as long as she could, then committed herself by returning the four Roman legions, stationed in Egypt by Caesar in 48, to the triumvirs’ general, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, who was now in Syria. As an acknowledgement of her support, or as payment for services rendered, the triumvirs officially recognised Caesarion as coruler of Egypt. This decision would, it was hoped, persuade Cleopatra, mother of Caesar’s natural son, to continue to support Octavian, Caesar’s legal heir.

Cassius had been able to intercept and subvert Cleopatra’s Roman troops. They had changed sides without putting up a fight and were now stationed with his own legions along Egypt’s north-eastern border. When Cassius appealed directly to Cleopatra for aid – surely a prelude to invasion – she pleaded famine, plague and a manpower shortage that would prevent her from taking any direct part in the war. Meanwhile, Serapion,
strategos
or governor of Cyprus, had unilaterally declared his support for Cassius and had supplied him with ships. It seems that Serapion was planning to depose Cleopatra in
favour of Arsinoë IV, who, currently living in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, had maintained close contact with Cyprus. When, in 42, Brutus summoned Cassius and his troops to Smyrna, the threat of invasion lifted and Cleopatra breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Now openly on the side of the triumvirs, Cleopatra raised a fleet and set sail to join Octavian and Antony in Greece. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), a mighty Mediterranean storm blew up, her ships sustained serious damage and Cleopatra herself fell ill, possibly with seasickness. As Egyptian wreckage washed up on the Greek shore, the badly battered fleet limped home to Alexandria. It is impossible not to suspect that this may have been another delaying tactic. If so, it was successful. While Cleopatra waited for a second fleet to be made ready, news came that Brutus and Cassius had committed suicide following a heavy defeat at the two battles of Philippi in Macedon in October 42. Two men now effectively held power in Rome: Octavian, Caesar’s twenty-one-year-old great-nephew and legal heir, controlled the bulk of Rome’s western empire; while Antony, Caesar’s forty-year-old friend and general, controlled Gaul and the eastern provinces of Achaea (Greece), Asia, Bithynia-Pontus and Cilicia. Lepidus, who was eventually to be given control of Africa, remained a triumvir but was a political nonentity. There remained just one problematic region. Sextus Pompey, the younger son of Pompey the Great, had occupied part of Sicily and could not be dislodged. His ships – pirate ships – were threatening the vital Mediterranean trade networks.

Octavian left the battlefield of Philippi ill – it was widely believed that he was dying – and returned to Rome, leaving Antony to establish control over his eastern territories. Cleopatra and Caesarion were extremely vulnerable in Egypt. They needed a protector and Antony was their natural ally. Not only was he the controller of the east, he was the dominant triumvir: older, more popular and demonstrably healthier than the sickly Octavian. Antony, in turn, needed money. He had promised each of his veterans a reward of 500 drachmas, which
he had no means of paying, and he had vowed to resurrect the campaign against the Parthian empire that Julius Caesar had been planning at the time of his death. Success against Parthia would finally avenge Crassus, and would demonstrate to the whole world that Antony was Caesar’s natural, if not his legal, heir. Antony spent the winter of 42/1 raising funds in Greece, then moved on to Ephesus. Here the priestesses of the Artemis temple were persuaded to greet him as the living incarnation of Dionysos the Gracious, ‘Giver of Joy’. He was welcomed into a celebrating city filled with ivy,
thyrsos
wands, harps, pipes and flutes, dishevelled women dressed as maenads and men and boys dressed like satyrs and Pans. The political implications of this religious honour would not have been lost on Octavian. While he was confined to Rome, the eastern territories were starting to identify Antony as the successor of all the former earthly Dionysoi, including Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies of Egypt and Pompey the Great. As Caesar had been granted posthumous divine honours in 42, his adopted heir Octavian could legitimately claim to be the ‘Son of the Divine Julius’, but this must have seemed poor compensation. Octavian fought back the only way he could: by circulating rumours of his own familial relationship with the Olympian Apollo, who, as an Italian god of light, might reasonably be considered the theological opposite of the dark, eastern Dionysos. Soon everyone knew the story of his mother, Atia, who had fallen asleep in the temple of Apollo and been ravished by a snake. Nine months later, Octavian was born, and Atia was left with an indelible snake mark on her stomach.

Ephesus was not Antony’s first brush with divinity. He came from an impoverished junior branch of the Antonius family, and Plutarch tells us that his father, Antonius Creticus, was ‘a man of no great repute in public life, nor illustrious, but kindly and honest and generous’. Both his father and his stepfather were careless with money and when Creticus died he left such steep debts that his son refused to inherit his estate. Perhaps to compensate for this undistinguished
background, Antony claimed descent from Anton, one of the sons of Heracles. This gave him a distant kinship with the Ptolemies, who also claimed Heracles as an ancestor through Arsinoë, mother of Ptolemy I, and who were occasionally depicted wearing his trademark lion-skin headdress. Antony did not don a skin, but he did, or so Plutarch claims, emulate his hero in public by wearing a tunic hitched up to his thigh, a heavy cloak and a large sword: ‘a shapely beard, a broad forehead, and an aquiline nose were thought to show the virile qualities peculiar to the portraits and statues of Heracles’. In citing Heracles as an ancestor, Antony was clearly thinking of his hero’s bravery and exceptional strength, and maybe even of his multiple fruitful relationships with women. Later, under the influence of Octavian’s propaganda, others would draw a crueller comparison. At one stage in his colourful career Heracles had been sold into slavery. He became the property of Omphale, the forceful queen of Lydia, who dressed him in women’s clothing and forced him to spin and weave at her command. When Omphale donned his discarded lion-skin garment, Heracles’s humiliation was complete. Yet Heracles the slave and Omphale the mistress were known to be lovers, and Omphale bore Heracles’s children. The parallels between the weak Antony and the unnaturally forceful Cleopatra were obvious.

The
tryphe
of the Hellenistic courts was far more to Antony’s taste than the puritanism of Rome, and he found much to appreciate in the cult of Dionysos, with its ecstatic rituals, and its heavy consumption of wine. Antony had enjoyed a well-documented dissolute youth when, heavily influenced by his friends, he indulged in binge drinking, promiscuous sex and immoderate expenditure that left him heavily in debt. A distinguished military career and a growing reputation as a politician and orator followed, but the tendency to overindulge was never quite suppressed. Military life brought out the best in him: Antony was a brave and able soldier, a generous man well regarded by his troops. But the dull routine of civilian life brought out
the worst. Plutarch gives a report of his behaviour when, with Julius Caesar busy in Egypt, he was left unsupervised to maintain order and promote Caesar’s cause in Rome:

[Men of worth and uprightness] loathed his ill-timed drunkenness, his heavy expenditures, his debauches with women, his spending the days in sleep or in wandering about with crazed and aching head, the nights in revelry or at shows, or in attendance at the nuptial feasts of mimes and jesters. We are told, at any rate, that he once feasted at the nuptials of Hippias the mime, drank all night, and then, early in the morning, when the people summoned him to the forum, came before them still surfeited with food and vomited into his toga, which one of his friends held at his service. Sergius the mime also was one of those who had the greatest influence with him, and Cytheris, a woman from the same school of acting, a great favourite, whom he took about with him in a litter on his visits to the cities, and her litter was followed by as many attendants as that of his mother.
⁷

Plutarch is, of course, deliberately painting a portrait of a weak man made weaker by over-indulgence; he is preparing us for Antony’s first encounter with Cleopatra. The consistent emphasis on Antony’s drinking links him firmly in the Roman reader’s mind with disreputable Dionysiac rituals, while repeated references to his sex life invite the manly reader to imagine not a stud, but a man who is somehow softened by his constant association with women. Plutarch was by no means the only classical writer to consider
eros
, or sexual desire, a form of madness. Heterosexual sex was, in theory at least, an unclean act forced on men by women and nature: an activity to be endured in the dark rather than enjoyed in the daylight.
⁸

Antony was a much-married man. His first wife, Fadia, was the daughter of a freedman. We know little about this most unsuitable union, but it seems that Fadia’s father, Quintus Fadius Gallus, had
been able to provide a dowry large enough to tempt a chronically impoverished young aristocrat. Fadia soon disappeared, and it is assumed that she and her children, with their embarrassing origins, died young. Antony’s next and far more suitable wife was his first cousin Antonia. She bore him a daughter, also named Antonia, and then was divorced in 47 on the grounds of adultery with the notorious rake Dolabella. Antony undoubtedly allowed himself a great deal of sexual licence while expecting his long-suffering wife to remain chaste, but the speed with which he subsequently remarried suggests that Antonia, like Fadia before her, was simply discarded when the chance of a better wife came along. In 47/6 Antony married Fulvia, widow of the murdered popular hero Publius Clodius. This was an extremely advantageous match. Fulvia was beautiful, intelligent and capable, and her role as the mother of Clodius’s young children gave her great political standing.
⁹
Furthermore, she was immensely wealthy and Antony was in desperate need of funds, as Caesar was now forcing him to pay for Pompey’s estate, which he had ‘bought’ and squandered. Fulvia bore Antony two sons, Marcus Antonius (Antyllus) and Julius Antonius, and did much to protect his interests while he was campaigning away from Rome:

She was a woman who took no thought for spinning wool or housekeeping, nor would she deign to bear sway over a man of private station, but she wished to rule a ruler and command a commander. Therefore Cleopatra was indebted to Fulvia for teaching Antony to endure a woman’s sway, since she took him over quite tamed, and schooled at the outset to obey women.
¹⁰

Now, with Fulvia fully occupied in Rome, Antony was travelling with the well-known courtesan Volumnia Cytheris. This did not prevent him from casting his eye over other women. In the summer of 41 he was rumoured to have had an affair with the beautiful Glaphyra, the
daughter-in-law of Archelaos, the twice-married husband of Berenice IV, and to have fathered her son Archelaos.

Antony, now stationed in the Cilician city of Tarsus (in the south of modern Turkey), was busy raising funds, rewarding those who had been loyal to the triumvirate and punishing those who had not by demanding ten years’ back-tax to be paid within two years. Cleopatra can hardly have been surprised when first a series of letters, then an emissary, Quintus Dellius, arrived in Alexandria to summon her to Tarsus. She was to answer the charge that she and her
strategos
Serapion had aided the traitor Cassius. Whatever the truth of the matter, this would be a hard charge to disprove and Antony, his eyes firmly fixed on Egypt’s wealth, would need to be persuaded of her innocence. As always, Cleopatra hesitated, considering her options. It would be surprising if she had not already met Antony during her visit(s) to Rome. She may even have met him much earlier: Appian, for one, believed that Antony had fallen in love with the teenage Cleopatra while campaigning in Egypt with Gabinius.
¹¹
Her personal knowledge of Antony the man allowed Cleopatra to settle on a tactic that would give her genius for showmanship full rein. If Antony was Dionysos, she would greet him as Isis, consort of Dionysos-Osiris. Cleopatra sailed along the Cydnus River to enter Tarsus in a gilded ship fitted with silver oars and a splendid purple silk sail. Flutes, pipes and lutes played on deck, and powerful incense perfumed the air. Cleopatra herself reclined beneath a gold-spangled canopy dressed in the robes of Isis (a colourful dress covered by a black mantle, we must assume), attended by beautiful small boys dressed as Cupids. The people of Tarsus flocked to the harbour to watch this spectacular arrival, leaving Antony alone and disconcerted in the marketplace. When he sent the queen an invitation to dine that night she declined, declaring that she would rather he ate as her guest. She entertained him with a banquet so splendid that the usually verbose Plutarch simply refuses to attempt a description, and they sat together that
evening on the deck of her boat amidst a multitude of twinkling artificial lights.