Augustus (36 page)

Not long after her arrest, Octavian called on the queen. He knew her (one assumes) from her stay at Rome as Julius Caesar’s guest and lover nearly fifteen years previously, but her bedraggled appearance now must have made her nearly unrecognizable. According to Plutarch, “she had abandoned her luxurious style of living, and was lying on a pallet bed dressed only in a tunic, but, as he entered, she sprang up and threw herself at his feet. Her hair was unkempt and her expression wild, while her eyes were shrunken and her voice trembled uncontrollably.”

Octavian asked her to lie down again and sat beside her. Cleopatra then tried to justify her part in the war, saying she had been forced to act as she did and had been in fear of Antony. Octavian demolished her excuses point by point, and she changed her manner, begging for pity as if desperate to save her life. Octavian was pleased by this, for it suggested that the queen did not intend to kill herself. He wanted her to live, the ancient sources claim, for she would make an admirable display in the triumph he intended to hold in Rome.

However, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, a young aristocrat on Octavian’s staff who was “by no means insensible to Cleopatra’s charms,” warned her that Octavian was about to leave Egypt and that she and her children were to be sent away within three days. So far as she was concerned, this was the end. She arranged for an asp—the Egyptian cobra—to be smuggled in to her in a basket of figs. She dismissed all her attendants except for two faithful ladies-in-waiting, and closed the doors of the mausoleum.

“So here it is,” she said, lifting away the figs to reveal the snake, and held out her arm to be bitten (another version has her provoking the snake with a golden spindle till it jumped out of a jar and bit her). She was thirty-nine. Plutarch reports that she was found “lying dead upon a golden couch dressed in her royal robes. Of her two women, Iras lay dying at her feet, while Charmion, already tottering and scarcely able to hold up her head, was adjusting the crown which encircled her mistress’s brow.”

How much of this romantically tragic ending is true? Mists of propaganda have clouded the historical record, and a degree of skepticism is in order. Octavian would surely have found the queen’s survival more inconvenient than otherwise. Executing a woman was not the Roman way, and her appearance at his triumph in Rome might well have been counterproductive; he will have recalled how her half sister, Arsinoe, had won the crowd’s sympathy when led in chains in one of Julius Caesar’s triumphs. No, far better for the queen to be persuaded to do away with herself. It may be that, when she showed no signs of taking this step, Dolabella, probably half her age and far from being sincerely her
cavaliere servente,
was instructed to leak his employer’s travel plans in the hope that the information would edge her over the precipice, as indeed it did.

As for the method of Cleopatra’s death, it is safest to agree with Dio’s judgment that “no one knows clearly in what way she perished.” The story of the asp is problematic, for an individual one is typically about eight feet long, rather large for a basket of figs and inconvenient to handle. Also, a single bite by an asp is not necessarily fatal, and even when it is, as much as two hours may pass before life is extinguished.

It is possible that Octavian arranged for Cleopatra’s murder and put about the fiction that she killed herself. However, there is no evidence for this. All that can be said is that the queen’s removal was to his advantage, and that he showed no qualms in having the boys Caesarion and Antyllus caught and killed. Their coming-of-age ceremony was their death warrant, for it had qualified them as culpable adults. (The younger children, the twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, and Ptolemy Philadelphus, were spared. After adorning Octavian’s triumph, they joined the stable of youngsters being looked after by the kindly Octavia. When Cleopatra Selene grew up, she married the scholarly King Juba of Numidia, by whom she had a son and a daughter. She probably took her brothers with her to North Africa; nothing more is heard of them and we may guess that they led quiet lives, doing their best to avoid the world’s dangerous attention.)

Octavian enjoyed being a tourist, but unlike many Romans abroad he was no looter of beautiful and costly objects; the only item he personally took away from the palace of the Ptolemies was a single agate cup. He visited some of the sights of Alexandria, dazzling in white limestone and marble.

The first and foremost of these was the tomb of Alexander the Great, which stood at the crossroads of the city’s two main avenues. Alexander had died in 323
B.C.
His embalmed body in its gold and crystal coffin was the new city’s most sacred relic. Not a trace of the corpse or the building that housed it, the Soma, remains, although it probably stood on the site of today’s Mosque of the Prophet Daniel.

At thirty-three, Octavian was the same age as Alexander when he died. A great admirer of the Macedonian, he wanted to see the mummy and honor it; so it was temporarily removed from its coffin and burial chamber and displayed in public.

The young Roman gazed at the body for a time, then paid his respects by crowning the head with a golden diadem and strewing flowers on the trunk. He was asked, “Would you now like to visit the Mausoleum of the Ptolemies?” To which he retorted, “I came to see a king, not a row of corpses.”

The Alexandrians were doubtless impressed by Octavian’s admiring curiosity, but the effect may have been lessened when he accidentally knocked off part of Alexander’s nose.

Octavian’s friend Areius may have introduced him to the Mouseion, or Place of the Muses. This was a group of buildings in the palace grounds, linked by colonnaded walks and facing the Soma. They included richly decorated lecture halls, laboratories, observatories, a park, and a zoo. Generously funded by the Ptolemies, the Mouseion was a center for scientific research and literary studies.

Its library was world renowned. Staffed by many famous Greek writers and literary critics, it contained a vast collection of books, perhaps about 500,000 in all, and was open to anyone who could read. (Julius Caesar was accused of having accidentally burned it down during his brief Alexandrian war of 48–47
B.C.
; in fact, only a part of it was destroyed.)

All in all, Octavian’s stay in Alexandria will have given him a clearer concept of what a capital city might be, both architecturally and culturally. Here the art of state persuasion, whether recorded in carved stone or on inked papyrus, was at its most refined. In particular, the Ptolemies had shown how intellectuals and artists could flourish in a form of tamed liberty, or free and de luxe bondage. Rome could not be rebuilt in a day, but Octavian returned from Egypt determined to create a city whose public symbols manifested an appropriate splendor.

Egypt now lost the independence it had enjoyed (with a few intervals) for thousands of years and would not regain until the twentieth century
A.D
. Octavian handed it over, as was proper, to the Senate and people of Rome, but in many ways it became his private fiefdom. As well as being “lord of the two lands” (that is, Lower and Upper Egypt), Octavian was recognized as king of kings, an ironic echo of the grandiose title that Antony had accorded Cleopatra. The Egyptians soon accepted their Italian pharaoh. Modern archaeologists have recently discovered a telling example of assimilation: an image of the Egyptian jackal-headed god, Anubis, guarding the entrance of a tomb, but dressed and armed as a Roman soldier.

Any ruler of the Roman empire had good reason to set Egypt apart from the run-of-the-mill province. As the Mediterranean’s major producer of wheat, it was Rome’s bread basket. This made it much too dangerous to allow a senator, a full-dress member of the ruling class, to govern the kingdom; Octavian appointed an
eques,
his friend the poet Gallus, to become its first prefect.

The new governor was energetic and effective, but his splendid status as deputy pharaoh seems to have gone to his head. He indulged in “indiscreet talk when drunk” about his imperial employer, set up statues of himself, and had a list of his achievements inscribed on the pyramids. A colleague informed on him, and in 27
B.C.
Gallus was dismissed. Octavian merely denied him access to his house and the privilege of entering the provinces of which he was the proconsul. But the Senate exiled him and confiscated his estates. Octavian in tears thanked the Senate for supporting him in his painful severity.

“I am the only man in Rome,” he said, “who cannot limit his displeasure with his friends. The matter must always be taken further.”

Reportedly, Gallus felt so humiliated by his disgrace that he took his life (although another story was told that he died while having sexual intercourse). Like that of Salvidienus Rufus, his fate was an awful warning to others in leading circles.

The Mediterranean world had had plenty of time between Actium and the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra to consider the final conclusion of the civil wars and reckon with the unchallenged supremacy of Octavian. Honors cascaded on him from every quarter, including the right to use
Imperator,
the title with which soldiers acclaimed victorious generals, as his permanent first name. Other awards he declined with a well-judged display of modesty.

The senatorial decree that gave Octavian the greatest pleasure was the formal closing of the gates of the tiny Temple of Janus. This building stood in the Forum and had perhaps originally been a bridge over the stream that used to cross the square (long since covered over and turned into a drain). Janus was the god of gateways; he had two faces, one looking forward to the future, the other to the past. The temple had doors at either end, which were closed in times of peace and open in times of war. The Romans were a warlike people and the doors were almost always open.

That they were shut now was a great compliment to Octavian, and a symbol of the much heralded, much delayed arrival of peace throughout the empire.

XVI

ABDICATION

30–27
B.C.

The claim of clemency should not be taken at face value. Many were forgiven, but some were not. Sosius was given employment, while Antony’s loyal army commander, Canidius, who was unfairly criticized for abandoning his legions after Actium, was executed: despite having boasted that he did not fear dying, he is reported to have lost his nerve at the end.

Vengeance was also taken on the dead. Antony’s memory was formally expunged. His name was obliterated from the Fasti, the state registers of official events. His statues were removed. It was to be as if he had never existed. The Senate, not unprompted surely, voted that no member of the Antonius clan should be named Marcus (a measure that was later repealed). His birthday was made a
dies nefastus,
an unlucky day, on which public business could not be conducted.

What had taken place, the meaning of the campaign that had been won and lost, needed to be attractively dramatized as an irreversible turning point in history. Actium, which had really been no more than a scrappy breakout from a blockade, was transformed into a great battle—a duel between Rome and anti-Rome, between good and evil.

The poets associated with Maecenas worked on an imaginative rewriting of history. Horace produced an ode that celebrated Octavian’s achievement at Actium (in fact, as we have seen, the credit for the campaign goes to Agrippa) and blackened Cleopatra’s name. He described her as

Plotting destruction to our Capitol

And ruin to the Empire with her squalid

Pack of diseased half-men—mad, wishful grandeur,

Tipsy with sweet good luck!

But all her fleet burnt, scarcely one ship saved—

That tamed her rage; and Caesar, when his galleys

Chased her from Italy, soon brought her, dreaming

And drugged with native wine,

Back to the hard realities of fear.

In this vivid caricature, there is not a single accurate assertion. As we have seen, Cleopatra was not plotting the end of the Roman empire, all her fleet was not burned, Octavian did not chase her anywhere, certainly not from Italy, and there is no evidence that the queen was a drunk. However, it is fine poetry.

It was the leading poet of the age, Virgil, who drew the fullest picture of the battle in his great national epic about Rome’s beginnings, the
Aeneid
. Prophetically engraved on the shield of Julius Caesar’s ancestor Aeneas, Octavian is envisioned at the head of
tota Italia,
all Italy. The star or comet that blazed in the night sky for a week after Caesar’s assassination shines above Octavian as he sets sail against the corrupt and cowardly east.