Cleopatra and Antony (14 page)

Whatever Cicero may have hoped, papyrus documents show that by late July 44 Cleopatra, Caesarion and her brother-husband Ptolemy XIV were safely back in Egypt. About a month later, Cleopatra’s fifteen-year-old co-ruler was dead. The historian Josephus, writing in the first century AD, believed Cleopatra had poisoned Ptolemy and he was probably correct. Cleopatra was as accomplished as any Roman at seizing the moment and perhaps even more cold-bloodedly ruthless. Paramount in her mind, now that she had lost her Roman supporter, was the need to safeguard her own position and that of her son, Caesarion. Her half brother would have seen the child, as he grew older, as a rival. The traumatic events of her girlhood at the Alexandrian court, especially her sister’s murder at the hands of Auletes, could hardly have demonstrated more clearly that, individually, the Ptolemies had most to fear from those nearest to them. Only a few years thereafter, her elder half brother had attempted to eject her from the throne. Sharing power with him had only given rise to factionalism and was in any case probably not best suited to her nature. As Josephus wrote of her character, “If she lacked one single thing that she desired, she imagined that she lacked everything.” And if Cleopatra did kill her brother, she was following a long tradition. Plutarch, writing with lofty disapproval, thought such activities an inherent characteristic of the Hellenic dynasties: “With regard to the assassination of siblings, it was a well-established habit . . . as widely used as were the propositions of Euclid by mathematicians, it was legitimized by the kings, in order to guarantee their security.”

Even if she was not the direct agent of her brother’s death, Cleopatra would not have agonized long over it. She could now elevate her son to the throne beside her. He was far too young to question her or to take any part in decision making. Like all parents, she would have believed that her relationship with her child would avoid previous familial mistakes. Like all mothers, she wanted both to protect Caesarion and to see him succeed. Her ambition for him and for his security and that of her dynasty would henceforth become a major driving force. For obvious reasons, as their joint reign began, she abandoned her previous title of Philadelphus, “brother-loving.” Caesarion, ruling as Ptolemy XV Caesar, was called Theos Philopater Philometer, “God Who Loves His Father and Mother.” The adored father, as Cleopatra wished to state clearly to the world—and doubtless to Octavian in particular—was Julius Caesar. Her son allied Egypt with Rome, East with West, a geopolitical claim no other familial union would be able to make until she and Antony became lovers.

To drive that message home to her people, Cleopatra milked the symbolism of her identification with Isis. The goddess was a potent image in people’s minds—the embodiment of the power of the moon, of the sea and the Nile, of the underworld and of the life beyond. The earliest surviving Greek or Roman account of the myth of Isis is Plutarch’s. He wrote of how Isis and her twin brother, Osiris, the offspring of sky and earth, fell in love while still in the womb. Their uterine bond was absolute. When Osiris was later murdered and dismembered into fourteen parts by his envious brother, Seth, a distraught but devoted Isis managed to find all the pieces except one—the phallus. Using magic in place of the missing sexual organ, Isis managed to become pregnant and give birth to a son, Horus, who was not only Osiris’ child but a reincarnation of the god himself. After the ides of March, Cleopatra could use the imagery of Isis to present the murdered Caesar as Osiris and Caesarion as Horus, his divine and undisputed son.

To honor her dead lover further, the grieving Cleopatra commissioned a carved bust of Caesar to be placed in the still-incomplete Caesareum. A surviving head of green diabase stone, quarried only in Egypt, may well be that image. It shows a man with thinning hair and crow’s feet but an intent and masterful gaze.
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It was Octavian’s great good fortune that his mother, Atia, was Caesar’s niece, making him one of Caesar’s closest male relatives. Young as he was, he had already striven to cultivate this relationship. His determination, despite shipwreck and illness, to join his great-uncle on campaign in Spain in 45 had greatly pleased and impressed Caesar. That year Caesar had asked the Senate to raise Octavian’s family to patrician rank. (The patricians were the descendants of Rome’s ancient nobility. The number of acknowledged patrician families had remained unaltered since 450, but Caesar had gained the right to nominate new members to their ranks.)

Busts of the young Octavian depict a fine-boned face, slighty protuberant ears, a long neck and light, slender shoulders very different from those of the muscular, bull-necked Antony. Octavian was probably no more than five feet six or seven inches tall, according to Suetonius—short by Roman standards. Suetonius added that, “one did not realize how small a man he was, until someone tall stood close to him.” Though generally negligent about his appearance, Octavian was sensitive about his height and had his footgear made with “rather thick soles to make him look taller.” His body was dotted with birthmarks, which his flatterers in later years proclaimed were configured like the constellation of the Great Bear. He also apparently suffered from gallstones all his life and had “a weakness in his left hip, thigh and leg, which occasionally gave him the suspicion of a limp.” This perhaps explains why “he loathed people who were dwarfish or in any way deformed, regarding them as freaks of nature and bringers of bad luck.” His red-blond hair was curly and unkempt and, in later years, to save time, he “would have two or three barbers working hurriedly on it together.”

Immediately on learning of Caesar’s death—Atia wrote to him on the very evening of the murder—Octavian left Apollonia in Macedonia, where he had been training with Caesar’s troops for the Parthian campaign and, in his spare time, studying Greek literature. Though his mother urged him to come at once, she also warned him to be cautious. He slipped across the Adriatic, landing on a deserted beach south of Brundisium. After sending members of his retinue ahead to check that all was well, he made his way to the town where, to an earsplitting welcome from the garrison, he learned for the first time that he had become Caesar’s adopted son and heir to both his name and his fortune.

Yet Octavian allowed neither the crowd’s adulation nor the news of his inheritance to go to his head. Only the omnipresent blotches on his skin, which modern doctors suggest were produced by nervous eczema, betrayed his anxieties. He mastered any youthful impulse to dash straight to Rome. Instead, showing the same cool ability for political analysis and calculation that would one day make him emperor, he decided first to call on Cicero and other influential republicans, who had removed themselves from the capital until things quieted down, to assess their feelings toward him. Cicero did not give him a particularly warm welcome. He had loathed Caesar and was glad he was dead. He had no wish to entertain the ambitious great-nephew with the piercing gray-eyed gaze whom Caesar had been grooming since he was sixteen. “I cannot see how he can have his heart in the right place,” Cicero wrote, and made his feelings clear, refusing to address his visitor as “Gaius Julius Caesar,” as Octavian now wished to be called. Nevertheless, such was his vanity that, despite himself, Cicero found Octavian’s deference gratifying, writing, “The young man is quite devoted to me.”

Cicero was entirely wrong. To Octavian, he was an arrogant, cantankerous but potentially useful old man who probably had been complicit in Caesar’s murder. Visiting him had simply been prudent. Cicero had also misread Octavian as an inexperienced youth who would probably get his comeuppance in Rome, where there would be plenty of ambitious men to challenge the dictator’s heir. He had not discerned Octavian’s diamond-hard determination, belied as it was by the slender, almost puny body. As the historian Velleius Paterculus later put it, the self-contained Octavian was a man who “spurned mortal advice and preferred to aim at dangerous eminence rather than at safe obscurity.” To that extent, he was not so different from Cleopatra. She could have chosen “safe obscurity” rather than unrolling from a carpet at Caesar’s feet.

Octavian did not receive the comeuppance Cicero had anticipated. Knowing the excitement and interest it would cause, he planned his arrival in Rome in late April 44 with care. To avoid any seeming arrogance or presumption, he separated from most of his followers and entered the city with only a few attendants. Yet, according to Suetonius, his arrival in Rome did not go unmarked—a shimmering, rainbow-like halo ringed the sun, though the skies were clear. Many took it as an omen from the gods of great things to come.
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Octavian had intentionally chosen to arrive while Antony was away attending to the resettlement of large groups of Caesar’s veterans in Campania. As soon as Antony marched back into Rome, Octavian requested an interview. The young man’s arrival put Antony in a quandary. Until now Antony had been the acknowledged leader of the Caesarians but also had managed to hold the Senate. He had achieved a delicate balance, but if Octavian began to press for vengeance against Caesar’s murderers, maintaining that equilibrium would become impossible. If he openly supported Octavian, he risked alienating much of the Senate and, of course, the Liberators and their factions, while if he refused, he would anger Caesar’s friends and veterans. Antony therefore must have reasoned that he needed metaphorically to play for time, both to think and to assess his potential rival. He did so clumsily, at their first meeting literally keeping Octavian waiting in an anteroom. When he was finally ushered in, Antony was blunt and dismissive and, when Octavian asked him to hand over Caesar’s papers and money, downright unhelpful. Falling back on technicalities, he argued that Octavian’s adoption as Caesar’s son had not yet been formalized and that separating out Caesar’s money from public funds would take time.

Off to a bad start, the relationship between the two men, who should have had much in common, would soon get much worse. On a personal level, Antony was probably suspicious of the motives of the young Octavian and jealous of him. Caesar had named Antony, his most trusted commander, as one of several secondary heirs, while Octavian had inherited nearly everything. Antony’s resentment of Octavian may explain why he soon began a propaganda campaign against Octavian to denigrate his lineage and diminish his dignity. He alleged that one of his great-grandfathers “had been only a freedman, a ropemaker . . . and his grandfather a money-changer.” Another great-grandfather, Antony sneered, had kept a bakehouse and a perfumery. Antony would also deploy the usual Roman smear tactics of accusing Octavian of playing the passive role in a homosexual relationship, alleging that “Julius Caesar made him submit to unnatural practices as the price of adoption.” Antony’s brother, not to be outdone in accusations of unmanliness, claimed that Octavian “used to soften the hairs on his legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells.” A desire to diminish Octavian’s unique relationship to Caesar and thus his status may also explain why, if Suetonius is correct, Antony told the Senate “that Caesar had, in fact, acknowledged Caesarion’s paternity.”

Yet for the moment, the quiet-spoken albeit insistent Octavian seemed a less immediate threat than did Caesar’s murderers and certain to support any move against them. Antony was particularly worried what would happen when the Liberators took command of the provinces and the armies assigned to them before Caesar’s death, fearing that they might use them as power bases to gather forces and money for a move on Rome. One of them, Decimus Brutus, was already in Cisalpine Gaul and thus in control of the key northern gateway into Italy. In early June, Antony managed, through a vote in the popular assembly, to strip him of the province and have himself appointed governor in his place for the next five years. This angered the Senate, who thought it their right to control provincial appointments and jealously guarded this prerogative. Antony also pressured the Senate into giving Brutus and Cassius special commissions to oversee Rome’s corn supplies from Asia and Sicily rather than their assigned provinces. This was exile under another name. The two men were left angered and humiliated but could not decide how to assert themselves. Cicero at around this time went to an inconclusive council of war attended by Cassius, Brutus and their wives at which Brutus’ mother, Servilia, played a key role. Her promise to use her still considerable influence at least to get the corn commissions revoked was one of the few actions agreed upon. Cicero wondered why he had bothered to go, commenting, “I found the ship breaking up, or rather already wrecked. No plan, no thought, no method.”

Octavian, however, did have method and probably a greater certainty about his long-term goals than any other of the Roman leaders. He began to build alliances and to pressure and undermine Antony, who, he claimed with justice, was obstructing the legislation that would ratify his adoption by Caesar. He also claimed that Antony had helped himself to money belonging either to himself, as Caesar’s heir, or to the Roman treasury and now would not, or could not, free the money to honor Caesar’s bequests. In July, Octavian staged lavish games in his adoptive father’s honor and used the occasion to fulfill Caesar’s legacy to the people of Rome, stipulated in his will, of three hundred sesterces a man. Octavian made abundantly clear to the public that he was paying this from his own purse, although he may in fact have used some of the contents of Caesar’s war chest for the Parthian campaign, which he was said to have seized on his way to Rome. He also attempted to display the golden throne and wreath that the Senate had granted Caesar. Seemingly anxious to avoid a confrontation between the Caesarian and anti-Caesarian factions by Octavian’s glorifying of Caesar, Antony refused to allow even this, causing the crowds to bellow their disapproval.