Augustus (30 page)

As the campaigning season of 35 drew to a close, Octavian was able to congratulate himself on a successful year. He left a garrison of more than two legions to hold Siscia, and returned to Rome to spend the winter on civilian business.

To have defeated some barbarian tribes was good, but hardly glamorous. He decided to stage an invasion of the island of Britannia (following up his adoptive father’s brief forays ten years earlier). It lay on the edge of the known world and its remoteness exerted a great fascination on the Roman mind; the conquest would be a coup.

Then, before the winter of 35–34 was over, a rumor filtered back to Rome that the garrison at Siscia had come under attack, so Octavian abandoned his plans and dutifully returned to Illyricum. Discovering that the tribal forces had been fought off, he traveled down to the south of the province, where he joined Agrippa and devoted the campaigning season to a major onslaught on one of Illyricum’s largest tribes, the Dalmatae. It was hard slogging in an inhospitable rocky landscape. Octavian was struck in the knee by a sling stone and laid up for several days.

Once recovered, he returned to Rome late in the autumn to ready himself for his second consulship, to begin on January 1, 33.

Shortly after his return to Egypt in 34
B.C.
, Antony staged an event that looked at first glance very like a triumphal procession. He rode into the city on a chariot, preceded by his Armenian prisoners of war, and made his way to a central square where the queen sat in splendor awaiting him. Banquets followed, accompanied by distributions of money and food.

When Octavian learned of this, he unscrupulously used it as a means of criticizing Antony. It was unheard-of and offensive for a Roman general to hold a triumph anywhere except in Rome. Evidence was building up that, in some way, Antony was going native—cutting loose from his
romanitas,
his Romanness, and behaving more and more like a grand Hellenistic monarch.

In fact, Antony seems to have been staging an exotic eastern spectacle, not mimicking a triumph. Rather than dressing as a Roman general, he presented himself as a human version of Dionysus. His head was bound with an ivy wreath, his body was enveloped in a robe of saffron and gold; he held the thyrsus (a fennel stalk topped with a pinecone or vine or ivy leaves, which Dionysus’ followers carried) and wore buskins (the raised boots used by actors in plays staged at the festival of Dionysus in Athens). He was reported as riding in the “Bacchic chariot”; this was traditionally drawn by big cats, such as leopards or panthers. By identifying himself with an appropriate divinity, Antony was merely continuing his policy of establishing a public persona that would appeal to the inhabitants of the eastern provinces.

A few days later, he presided over an even more unusual ceremony, which came to be known as the Donations of Alexandria. It took place in the city’s great Gymnasium, a splendid colonnaded building for athletic training and lectures on philosophy. A silver-gleaming dais with two golden thrones was erected, either in the open air in the
palaistra
(
, “exercise ground”) or in the Gymnasium’s largest covered space, reserved for ball games and called the
sphairisterion
(
). Antony and Cleopatra, who was dressed as the goddess Isis, seated themselves on the thrones. Caesarion, now aged thirteen, was officially Ptolemy XV Caesar and Cleopatra’s co-ruler (for a woman was not allowed to reign alone). He and the queen’s children by Antony sat on lower thrones.

When everyone had arrived and settled into their places, Antony stood up and delivered an address. Cleopatra, he said, had been married to Julius Caesar, and so Ptolemy Caesar was his legitimate son. This preposterous claim was aimed at undermining Octavian’s position. It ignored the existence of Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, and of the Roman avoidance of marriage to foreigners. Perhaps what Antony had in mind was another symbolic or heavenly union between two gods.

He then proceeded to shower Cleopatra and the children with honors and territories. Alexander was to receive Armenia, Media, and all the land to the east as far as India—in other words, the as yet unconquered Parthian empire. Little Ptolemy Philadelphus was to become king of all the Syrian territories already awarded to Cleopatra, and overlord of the client kingdoms of Asia Minor. Cleopatra Selene, Alexander’s twin sister, received Cyrenaica (the eastern half of today’s Libya, abutting Egypt) and the island of Crete. Caesarion was declared king of kings, and Cleopatra (the mother) queen of kings.

At about this time, Antony issued a coin, a silver denarius, which graphically illustrated his partnership with Egypt’s female pharaoh. One side showed Antony’s bare head, and behind it the royal tiara of Armenia, with the message “Antony, after the conquest of Armenia.” Scandalously for Roman currency, which never depicted foreigners, the head of Cleopatra, diademed and with jewels in her hair, was on the other side, accompanied by the prow of a ship. The inscription read: “To Cleopatra, queen of kings and of her sons who are kings.”

What strategy underlay the Donations of Alexandria? Antony has not shared his ideas with posterity, and the literary sources mainly regurgitate the Octavian version. So we can only speculate.

It is important to be clear what Antony was
not
doing. He was not giving the eastern half of the Roman empire away for good to Cleopatra and her brood of little Ptolemies. This was no abdication. As triumvir and commander of the armies of Rome, Antony remained the ultimate authority, and behind him stood the Senate and people of Rome. What he gave, he could take back.

The Donations were in line with the thinking that underlay Antony’s previous reorganization of the east. That is, it was far easier to allow locals to manage most of the eastern provinces on behalf of Rome, administering justice and raising taxes, than for the imperial authorities to do it. The Romans being unsupported by a permanent civil service, this would save them a world of trouble, as well as helping to solve the problem of rapacious public officials. The empire would be far more stable if its inhabitants did not feel that they were under foreign occupation.

However, unkind commentators, both at the time and later, saw something more alarming. A large part of the east, Antony’s allocated territory as triumvir, was being gathered together into a single monarchy, with Antony as emperor and Cleopatra as empress. Their long-term aim, it was suggested, was to overthrow Rome. Rumor assiduously put it about that the queen’s favorite oath was “so surely as I shall one day give judgement on the Capitol.”

This is implausible. Antony had a conventional mind that could not imagine an end to Roman dominion, and Cleopatra was too much of a realist to wish for more than the reassertion of Egypt as the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean, under Roman protection. Most probably, the Donations were a symbolic gesture, a way of settling public opinion in the east and marshaling it behind Antony as Dionysus/Osiris and Cleopatra as Isis/Aphrodite. In fact, few if any practical changes were noticeable on the ground in Syria, or Cappadocia, Pontus, or Galatia. Hordes of Egyptian administrators did not spread through the Middle East, replacing local authorities and Roman officials and tax farmers.

It is hard to disagree with the sentiments that the great twentieth-century Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy attributed to the audience at that glittering ceremony in the Gymnasium.

And the Alexandrians thronged to the festival

Full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations,

In Greek, and Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,

Charmed by the lovely spectacle—

Though they knew of course what all this was worth,

What empty words they really were, these kingships.

XIII

THE PHONY WAR

33–31
B.C.

Trials were conducted here in the open air, senators met and debated in the Senate House, citizens’ assemblies were convened in an open space called the Comitia. Money could be borrowed in the Forum, and prostitutes bought. Statues of famous statesmen stood on columns, and large paintings illustrated Roman victories. Down the Forum’s long sides stood two
basilicas,
which combined the functions of shopping mall and conference center.

With the Second Triumvirate and Octavian’s growing domination of the political scene, a gradual change could be detected. Politics moved from the noisy open square up to a complex of houses on the fashionable Palatine Hill, where Octavian and Livia lived and worked. From “Palatine” derives the word “palace,” meaning that enclosed space where autocrats make decisions in private.

Today the Palatine is a quiet, almost pastoral spot, overshadowed by tall maritime pines. A short but brisk climb from the Forum leads to the summit of the hill, a flat area pockmarked with ruins, some of them protected from the weather by modern roofs. The top of the Palatine is a maze of shaded lanes and hidden corners.

To the northwest stand the buildings where Octavian and Livia spent most of their lives. In 36
B.C.,
a grateful popular assembly voted that a house should be presented to him at public expense. Octavian had already bought an expensive property at the southwest end of the Palatine Hill, but it had been struck by lightning—an omen that persuaded him to demolish the unlucky building and replace it with a temple to Apollo. With his grant from the Senate, he arranged the purchase of a house, or more accurately a group of houses, next door.

The location was chosen with great care, for Octavian wanted his residence to signal and embody his role in the commonwealth. Near it stood a hut, built on the hill’s natural tufa and with a sloping thatched roof, its reed walls daubed in clay. This was said to be the home of Romulus, Rome’s founder, and was carefully preserved in his honor. By closely associating himself with Rome’s beginnings, Octavian was telling the Roman world that he stood for traditional values, for
mos maiorum,
the customs of ancestors.

There was no question about it in anyone’s mind: Rome did not look like the capital of a great empire. Over the centuries, the city had grown untidily and organically. There were no broad avenues and few open spaces, apart from the Forum and the
forum boarium
. Few streets were wide enough to allow vehicles to pass one another and most of them were unpaved. (In the daytime there was no wheeled transport, for, in an attempt to eliminate daytime traffic jams, Julius Caesar had restricted it to the hours after dark; the night clattered with the cacophony of wooden carts.) Projecting balconies and upper rooms sometimes nearly touched one another.

The rich lived in houses with no outside windows, so that it was possible (as in traditional Arab town houses) to escape the urban hubbub; rooms were grouped around one or more open-air courtyards. The poor rented single rooms or crowded into multistory apartment blocks, or
insulae
. These were often jerry-built and liable to fire or collapse.

Shops lined many of the main streets, but they were usually no more than a ground-floor room with a masonry or wooden counter for selling goods and a space at the back for stock. All kinds of goods were on display—jewelry, clothing and fabrics, pots and pans, and books. There were numerous bars and restaurants, catering mainly to people from the lower classes, whose houses did not have properly equipped kitchens.

Rome was a city of horrible smells. Rubbish and sewage, even, occasionally, human corpses, were tipped into the street. Passersby were so often hit by the contents of chamber pots emptied from the second floor or the roof that laws were passed regulating the damages that could be claimed.

City life was made bearable only by the ready availability of water. Four aqueducts (the first of them built in the fourth century
B.C.
), high arcades, strode across the land, bringing fresh, clean water from springs and lakes miles away. The water was piped to fountains, some of them no more than stone troughs, in the small public squares that dotted Rome. The rich and famous could obtain the Senate’s permission to tap the pipes. Ordinary citizens collected water from the nearest fountain or had it delivered by a water seller.