Cleopatra and Antony (19 page)

But if much of what Cleopatra did to fascinate Antony was conscious and contrived, as in this early stage of their relationship it must have been, it could not have been so successful had it not touched something deep in them both. They shared a hunger for life. Excess was for both Cleopatra and Antony a natural, joyful expression of that hunger—whether making love night and day, feasting on impossible rareties, giving each other fabulous gifts or just playing the fool. Their appetites were well matched, their ambitions on a similarly grand scale, and instinctively they responded to one another. Nobody else would ever be as close to either of them as they would become to the other, although the mutual realization of that truth still lay some way in the future.

During those riotous winter months in her palace overlooking the harbor Cleopatra became pregnant, just as she must have hoped would happen. Yet if she thought this would detain her lover longer by her side, it was not to be. Antony had probably intended to leave Egypt and Cleopatra in the spring of 40, to allow him time to deal with the remaining eastern client kings—a task he had neglected in his rush to Alexandria—before embarking on his Parthian venture. However, the Parthians, with their armored cavalry and swift mounted archers, had seized the initiative, launching an ambitious two-pronged invasion of Rome’s territories. In late February, messengers brought news that Pacorus, son of the Parthian king Orodes, had invaded Syria, killing its Roman governor as he tried to flee. He had seized Jerusalem and deposed Hyrcanus from the throne of Judaea, installing Hyrcanus’ nephew Antigonus in his place as a puppet. Herod had fled for safety with the women of his family to the fortress of Masada in the dry, dusty mountains by the Dead Sea. At the same time, a former Roman republican now in the pay of the Parthians, Quintus Labienus, was pushing deep into the Roman province of Asia at the head of a strong force.

Shaken from the long, languorous dream of the past few months, or as Plutarch less sympathetically put it, “like a man struggling to wake up after a drunken night,” Antony tried to rally himself. After a hasty leave-taking from the pregnant Cleopatra he sailed to Tyre, one of the few Phoenician ports that had not yet succumbed to the Parthians. Here further ill tidings awaited him. A number of Rome’s client kings had thrown in their lot with the Parthians and some of his own troops in Syria had also defected.

Yet messengers from Italy delivered even worse news. Antony’s formidable wife, Fulvia, and his younger brother, Lucius Antonius, had instigated a revolt against Octavian and been utterly defeated. Fulvia was fleeing eastward to her husband. Antony received what Plutarch called “a miserable letter” from her. Any thought of continuing north to deal with the marauding Parthians was put aside. Instead, Antony headed back toward Italy to salvage what he could.

Fulvia, who had remained in Rome while Antony went east, had initially opposed her brother-in-law, arguing wisely that this was an inopportune moment to foment discord. However, Lucius convinced her otherwise, dangling before her an image of a Rome governed by Antony, with her as a powerful influence behind him. Now she became an active participant in a campaign to discredit and, if possible, oust Octavian. She allowed Lucius to present her and Antony’s children to Antony’s legionaries. In an emotional address, Lucius urged the soldiers to gaze on their wronged leader’s family. He implored them not to forget their commander, who, though absent in the east, had been the true victor of Philippi.

Irritated by these maneuvers but uncertain whether Antony himself might be behind them, Octavian reacted cautiously. He refrained from criticizing his fellow triumvir. Instead, he reserved his criticism for Antony’s wife and brother, claiming that they were trying for their own ends to prevent him from fulfilling the agreement he had reached with Antony. He also took the opportunity to repudiate Fulvia’s daughter Clodia, whom he had married after Philippi as part of his reconciliation with Antony. He sent the teenager back, assuring Fulvia cheerfully that she was still “
intacta
.” It was a terrible insult and one that a woman such as Fulvia, who had used Cicero’s tongue as a pincushion, was unlikely to forgive.

Yet at the same time, Octavian tried to contain the situation by permitting Antony’s own agents to oversee the land settlements. Thus wrongfooted, Lucius Antonius shifted his ground completely. He decided to exploit the anger of the thousands thrown off their land by Octavian, who was continuing his veterans’ resettlement program regardless of their protests. A recent calculation suggests that about a quarter of the land in Italy changed hands during the proscriptions and evictions. Among the families affected was that of the poet Vergil, whose estates were seized. In one of his poems he distills the pained cry of the victims:

At the same time, the legionaries began to doubt his intentions. An ugly incident occurred when Octavian arrived late at the Campus Martius, where a division of land to veterans was to take place. As the soldiers’ grumbling grew louder and angrier, a centurion rebuked them. Octavian, he claimed, had been delayed by illness and would soon be among them. But “they first jeered at him as a sycophant. Then as the excitement waxed hot on both sides, they reviled him, threw stones at him and pursued him when he fled.” Finally, they killed the centurion, tossing his body onto the road along which Octavian was due to pass. Hearing what had happened, Octavian’s advisers warned him not to go to the Campus Martius, but “he went forward, thinking that their madness would be augmented if he did not come.” The dead centurion’s blood-soaked body was still lying in the dust when he arrived. Realizing the volatility of the situation, Octavian wisely forbore from punishing the killers. Instead, he announced that he would leave them to “their own guilty consciences and the condemnation of their comrades” and withdrew.

Profiting from the deep despair and rising resentment, Lucius Antonius began raising an army and preparing to take on Octavian in the field. Octavian too began gathering forces, and both men helped themselves to temple treasures to fund the coming fight. Soldiers on each side, fearful of a renewed civil war, tried to broker a reconciliation, arranging a conference between Lucius and Octavian at Teanum. The two leaders met but, though a compromise of sorts was reached, nothing important was acted upon. Before long, Lucius and Fulvia fled to Praeneste, a stronghold east of Rome, making a great noise that they were in fear of their lives from Octavian. Again, anxious legionaries tried to head off a conflict, arranging a further meeting at Gabii, a town between Rome and Praeneste, but Lucius failed to turn up, while his agent produced a letter that he claimed had been written by Antony and which gave the green light to war.

Lucius’ next step was to march on Rome. Pushing aside Lepidus, the third triumvir, who put up only a feeble resistance, he briefly occupied the city. To the cheers of many senators, soldiers and members of the popular assembly, Lucius promised that his brother Antony would renounce his powers as triumvir and assume those of consul. He was, in effect, announcing the restoration of the Roman republic. However, losing his nerve, Lucius soon headed north, hoping to join forces with Antony’s generals, whom Fulvia had summoned from Gaul—but, divided by rivalries of their own, uncertain of Antony’s wishes and distrustful of Lucius and Fulvia, they did not come.

Outmaneuvered by Octavian’s forces, Lucius and his supporters, including a number of Antony’s Italian-based commanders and their legionaries, withdrew into the ancient Etruscan rock fortress of Perusia (Perugia) north of Rome, where Octavian laid siege to them. A relentless blockade followed during which Octavian’s forces girdled Perusia with a rampart seven miles in circumference containing fifteen hundred wooden siege towers.

Octavian focused his ire and his irony on Fulvia. After all, what better way to make Antony look ridiculous? The poet Martial preserved some lines of an obscene epigram by Octavian taunting Fulvia over Antony’s affair with Glaphyra of Cappadocia and accusing her of waging war with Octavian as a surrogate for sex. They include:

The besieged within Perusia responded with slingshots inscribed with slogans such as “Greetings, Octavian, you suck prick” and “Octavian has a limp dick.” Soon, however, they began to starve. Lucius ordered the bodies of those who died of hunger to be buried, not burned, so that no smoke from funeral pyres should reveal his plight to Octavian. By late February 40, with no sign of any forces marching to his relief and after a final, desperate, unavailing sortie, Lucius surrendered Perusia.

Octavian ordered Perusia to be sacked but, before his victorious troops could rampage through its narrow streets, the city burned down, possibly after a citizen deliberately set fire to his house before killing himself. Octavian spared Lucius, not from compassion but because he judged it would be ill-advised to slay Antony’s brother. Instead, he made Lucius governor of Spain, where he died not long after. Octavian also shrewdly allowed Antony’s own soldiers to go free but executed all the members of Perusia’s city council except for one man who, as a juror in Rome, had voted to condemn Caesar’s murderers. Suetonius reported the belief of some writers that Octavian chose three hundred prisoners of equestrian or senatorial rank and offered them as human sacrifices on the ides of March at the altar to the divine god Julius Caesar in Rome, and Dio Cassius reported similar rumors. Yet, although early in his career Octavian showed he could be brutal, there is no hard evidence, such as the names of the dead, to support the allegations.

Fulvia, meanwhile, fled eastward with her children to find Antony. Perhaps jealousy of Cleopatra had incited her to reckless acts. She must have seen Cleopatra in Rome and known her to be a formidable rival. Now in her midforties, Fulvia also knew her husband’s susceptibility to younger, beautiful women—especially those endowed with the glamour of royalty. Appian alleged that Fulvia believed that “as long as Italy remained at peace Antony would stay with Cleopatra, but that if war should break out there he would come back speedily.” Therefore, “moved by a woman’s jealousy,” Fulvia had incited Antony’s brother to rebellion. Plutarch also thought sexual politics were at work, asserting that Antony learned from friends “that Fulvia had been the cause of the war, being by nature restless, meddling and headstrong, and hoping to tear Antony away from Cleopatra by stirring up commotion in Italy.”

Yet Fulvia was an experienced, sophisticated woman interested, above all, in power. If she was jealous of Cleopatra, it was not so much on a sexual level as on a political one. The Egyptian queen, in her scented, silk-hung palace in Alexandria, was distracting Antony from the business of governing and conquering. That winter of 41 to 40, it must have seemed as if Cleopatra had bewitched Antony. As Appian wrote, in Alexandria Antony had “laid aside the cares and duties of a general” and on falling under the Egyptian queen’s spell “Antony’s interest in public affairs began to dwindle.” Drugged with pleasure and excess, Antony had become oblivious to the real world. Some of his veterans had actually sought him out in Alexandria and tried to warn him of the crisis brewing in Italy, but he had ignored them. All this would have been deeply aggravating to a woman of Fulvia’s temperament, who had known Antony since his wild youth and hence knew his vulnerability to distracting temptations of the sort dangled by Cleopatra.

Fulvia probably believed that by supporting Lucius’ attempted coup she was being a loyal wife, saving Antony from himself, jolting him out of an inertia that in Roman eyes was one of the great vices of the East. In intervening actively on her present husband’s behalf, she was doing no more than she had when she sought vengeance for the murder of Clodius, rousing the crowds by showing his wounds. She was in some ways following in a long tradition of powerful Roman matrons including Servilia—Brutus’ mother and Caesar’s onetime mistress—and Caesar’s mother, Aurelia. But she was also breaking with convention. Despite the considerable freedom of well-born Roman women, there was still a belief that they should exercise their influence behind the scenes. By taking the initiative so publicly and in such a violent fashion—and, most importantly, because she failed—Fulvia, like Cleopatra in later years, laid herself open to attack and misrepresentation not only by contemporaries but also by later writers. Dio Cassius called Fulvia, not Lucius, the true inspirer of the uprising, alleging that, unlike any other Roman woman, she took a direct hand in military matters: “She girded herself with a sword, gave the passwords to the soldiers and often made speeches haranguing them.” Paterculus sneered that she “had nothing of the woman in her except her sex” and “was creating general confusion by armed violence.”