Cleopatra and Antony (20 page)

Antony probably shared the latter sentiment. Landing in Athens to be reunited with the crestfallen, distraught Fulvia, he learned at firsthand how she and his brother had deliberately destroyed his relationship with Octavian. He became furiously angry. Some would allege that he must have known what they were doing and was angered only by their failure, but there seems little logic to this. While he might have planned for the coup to take place during his time in the east, this would have been an obviously flawed strategy. Without the charismatic commander beloved by officers and soldiers alike present in person to lead it, any coup would have been unlikely to succeed.

Antony also found another of the strong-minded women in his life—his intelligent and politically astute mother, Julia—waiting for him in Athens. Now in her sixties, Julia had fled to Sextus Pompey in Sicily. After hurried negotiations, she had set off once more, this time to meet her son. With her she had brought two envoys from Sextus instructed to offer Antony an alliance with their leader. Antony, however, still shocked by the speed of events and his wife and brother’s inept interfering, was reluctant to take a step that would lead to an inevitable breach with Octavian. Instead he told the envoys that if Octavian was still adhering to the agreement reached after Philippi, he would do his utmost to reconcile Octavian and Sextus. Only if Octavian had renounced their pact would he ally himself with Sextus. Then, angrily denouncing Fulvia and his brother for the stupidity of their actions and refusing even to bid his wife good-bye, Antony left for Italy.

Fulvia, broken by events and ailing, was thus brutally abandoned to mourn her folly. The pregnant Cleopatra, watching from the sidelines, was forced once again to await the result of a Roman power struggle that would have profound implications for her future.

†A century later, the cook Epicurus celebrated the Egyptian bottle gourd in the following recipe for gourd Alexandrian fashion. Drain a boiled gourd, season with salt and arrange in a dish. Crush pepper, cumin, coriander seed, fresh mint and asafoetida root. Moisten with vinegar. Add caryota date and pine kernel; crush. Blend with honey, vinegar, fish sauce, concentrated grape juice and oil. Pour the whole over the gourd. Bring to a boil, season with pepper and serve.

*The ancient Egyptians also found a practical use for the cobra, fashioning condoms from its skin.

CHAPTER 15

Antony, though, had just acquired an important new ally in the fiercely republican Domitius Enobarbus, the seasoned warrior portrayed by Shakespeare as Antony’s loyal officer and devoted friend. Enobarbus had earlier supported Cassius and Brutus and taken charge of their fleet but after the fall of Perusia had been persuaded to give Antony his allegiance.
*
In dramatic scenes off the Adriatic coast, Enobarbus’ great fleet had swooped down on Antony’s as if he meant to attack but at the last moment he had swung his flagship broadside to the ram on the prow of Antony’s ship in token of submission. Enobarbus was neither the first nor the last die-hard republican to join Antony in preference to Octavian. That so many did so indicates a belief that Antony’s intentions were less autocratic than those of his fellow triumvir.

The appearance of Enobarbus’ and Antony’s combined fleets off Brundis-ium caused the troops stationed there by Octavian to panic. They blocked the crescent-shaped harbor to deny entry to Antony’s ships and barred the town against him. This was probably without Octavian’s knowledge but, whatever the case, they had no right to do so. Antony was still a triumvir with all the authority that conferred. Interpreting the soldiers’ actions as a sign that the war he had not wanted with Octavian had begun, Antony sailed further along the coast, disembarked his advance guard and, moving on Brundisium, laid siege to it.

By now, the maverick Sextus Pompey had also thrown in his lot, at least for the present, with Antony. This was a blow to Octavian, who, fearing just such a development, had tried to neutralize the troublesome Sextus through the time-honored Roman tactic of a matrimonial alliance. In the aftermath of the siege of Perusia, Octavian had, to general ribald mirth, proposed to and been accepted by Scribonia, a twice-married woman at least ten years his senior whose brother was Sextus’ father-in-law. No doubt laughing along with everyone else at Octa-vian’s nakedly cynical maneuverings, Sextus had immediately pursued an alliance with Antony.

Octavian hurriedly dispatched his erstwhile school friend Marcus Agrippa, who would be his lifelong supporter, from Rome to Brundisium with orders to raise the siege. As he marched, Agrippa recruited more troops from among the recently disbanded veterans he encountered along the way. The men joined readily enough because they mistakenly thought their target was to be Sextus Pompey. When they learned that they were instead marching against Antony, under whom they had so recently defeated Caesar’s murderers at Philippi, many turned around and went home. Once again, the weary, wary veterans were demonstrating their disinclination for civil war. As Octavian followed in Agrippa’s wake to Brundisium, his veterans too made their views plain—nothing less than a permanent settlement between the triumvirs, they insisted, would satisfy them.

Reaching Brundisium, Octavian found that Antony had thrown ditches and palisades across the prong of land leading to the peninsula on which the city lay. It would be impossible to relieve Brundisium from the landward side. Yet for all the strength of his position, Antony was caught between Octavian’s ever-growing forces and Brundisium’s high walls. Unless he could take the fortress and harbor quickly, the legions he had summoned from Macedonia would be unable to land unopposed. Instead they would have to disembark further along the coast, fighting their way onto the beaches.

All this was food for reflection, as was his knowledge that his new ally Sextus was volatile and unreliable. So too was the news that reached him of the death near Corinth in Greece of Fulvia, who, Appian wrote, “had become a willing victim of disease on account of Antony’s anger.” Antony could now place all blame for the rebellion against Octavian on the shoulders of a forceful, ambitious and conveniently defunct wife. How much grief Antony felt at Fulvia’s loss is debatable. They had known each other since their youth, but the close bonds between them had loosened even before the recent fiasco. Though Antony had once depended on Fulvia, his reliance on her emotionally and politically had declined, otherwise he would have taken her east with him. Instead, he had reveled alone in his unprecedented new powers and godlike position. The “new Dionysus,” as he imagined himself, felt no need of a bossy middle-aged Roman matron by his side, however astute she was.

To survive politically and stabilize the Roman world, Antony was prepared to compromise. A mutual friend with well-honed diplomatic skills, Nerva, agreed to act as go-between between Antony and Octavian. With both men anxious to achieve a peaceful solution, Nerva’s primary problem was to find a way in which neither would lose face. At his artful suggestion, Octavian wrote not to Antony but to his mother, Julia, who had sailed with him from Greece. Octavian assured her that he had not ordered the Brundisium garrison to bar her son’s ships from the harbor. The men had acted on their own initiative. He also reproached her for having fled from him to Sextus, assuring her she had never been in danger from him and that he would always treat her honorably.

These honeyed words proved sweet enough. A conciliating Antony sent Enobarbus off to be governor of Bithynia, ordered Sextus to withdraw to Sicily and, in early October 40, concluded the Pact of Brundisium with Octavian. The watching soldiers roared their approval as the two men embraced, but Antony was probably less transported. Though the triumvirate was to continue and Italy was to remain common ground, leaving Antony full rights to recruit there, the pact obliged him to yield his territorial rights in the west to Octavian. In other words, Antony had lost Gaul for good. The line dividing their respective lands would run through Scodra (Scutari) in modern Albania. It formed a true border in terms of geography, culture and language. Everything to the Greek-speaking Hellenized east would be Antony’s, everything to the Latin-speaking Romanized west Octavian’s. The province of Africa was to remain under the ineffectual third triumvir, Lepidus.

It was a disappointing, even somewhat humiliating outcome for the victor of Philippi, who had lost Gaul while gaining nothing that he had not had before. Yet Antony had learned through the twists of the civil war to be a pragmatist. The outcome, as he well knew, could have been worse, and he was at least free to resume his plans for the invasion and subjugation of mighty Parthia, which, if he succeeded, would make him unassailable.

News of the Pact of Brundisium probably filtered through to Cleopatra as she recovered from the birth. She was relying for much of her information on an Egyptian astrologer she had infiltrated into Antony’s household. With two new children to scheme and plan for, she would have pondered the pact’s implications carefully. Politically, the most important point was that Antony remained in control of the east. Though she would have preferred Antony to obliterate his young rival, the situation was better than she might have feared when Antony had rushed back to Italy to confront Octavian.

On a personal level, though, the possible consequences of the pact were more complex. Any hopes that her lover would soon return to her and resume their “inimitable” days and nights were quickly dashed. Cleopatra learned that he had also agreed at Brundisium that, to cement their relationship, he and Octavian should be allied through marriage. With Fulvia dead, as Plutarch wrote, Antony was “generally held to be a widower . . . since although he made no attempt to deny his relationship with Cleopatra, he refused to call her his wife.” He was thus free to marry Octavian’s beautiful, recently widowed older sister—already the mother of three young children and around the same age as Cleopatra herself.

Images of Octavia suggest a classic Roman beauty with slender neck, straight nose and regular features. Writers, both in her lifetime and later, lauded her as the model of a virtuous Roman wife, with none of the unwomanly stridency and personal ambition of Fulvia or oriental wiles of Cleopatra. Plutarch wrote of her “dignity and intelligence, as well as her great beauty” and, in a recognition of the potent influence women could exert behind the scenes in Roman politics, of how men hoped “she would prove to be the savior and moderator of all Rome’s affairs.” The glowing depictions of Octavia were at least partly fashioned by propaganda, which depicted her as a veritable Griselda, too cloyingly patient and good to be true. Yet facts suggest Octavia was indeed astute and conciliating as well as patient, gentle and kind—in fact, the antithesis of the martial, managing Fulvia. She would need all these qualities during her marriage to Antony. She must have known her new husband was—in Plutarch’s words—“a lover, drinker, warrior, giver, spender” and above all “outrageous.” But Antony was now, at forty-three, on the threshold of middle age and perhaps ready for a life of greater gravitas and domestic calm.

How much Octavia knew of Cleopatra can only be guessed. She had agreed to fulfill one of the primary roles of aristocratic Roman women—to be fodder in the marriage market to benefit the ambitions of her male relations and to further the greater glory of her family.

In Rome, news of the impending marriage was received with delight, as it signaled that war had been averted. The Senate marked its approval by waiving the law stipulating that widows could not remarry within ten months of the death of their husband. Since Romans believed babies were born between seven to ten months after conception, this was intended to remove all doubt about the paternity of any child that was born.

Antony and Octavia married in early November 40—a month that, unlike May or early June, was considered auspicious for weddings. The ceremony was always the same, regardless of whether it was a first marriage or not. Octavia’s female relations gathered in her house to dress her in a simple white tunic secured at the waist by a girdle fastened in a double knot, which Antony would later have to unfasten. Using the head of a spear, they divided Octavia’s hair into six bunches, which they secured with ribbons. Finally, they draped her with a saffron cloak and placed a flame-colored veil over her head, topped with a wreath of verbena and sweet marjoram. When she was ready, Antony arrived and a sacrifice was made to the gods. As soon as the entrails had been examined and the auspices judged favorable, Antony took Octavia’s right hand in his and the pair exchanged vows before the assembled witnesses, who affixed their seal to the marriage contract while the guests with one voice exclaimed “
feliciter
” (congratulations).

After the wedding feast, Antony enacted the age-old charade of abducting his bride, dragging a seemingly reluctant Octavia from the arms of her family. Then, to a chorus of obscene remarks and jokes, Antony led her in rowdy procession, preceded by flute players and torch bearers, to his house. Arriving before the door, Octavia performed the ritual of decorating it with lengths of wool and smearing it with oil and lard. To avoid any possibility that his new bride might inauspiciously trip on entering her new home, Antony then carried her over the threshold, which was spread with white cloth and branches of greenery. After Antony had offered her fire and water, one of Octavia’s three bridesmaids led her to the scented nuptial couch, where, as the bridal party withdrew, she lay down and Antony began to undress his new wife.

Octavia’s new home was Pompey’s former mansion on the Palatine Hill—a house of suitably aristocratic splendor. A Roman architect enthused that for people of great rank, “we must provide princely vestibules, lofty halls and spacious gardens, plantations and broad avenues finished in a majestic manner. Further there must be libraries and basilicas of similar grace, and as magnificent as the equivalent public structures, because in such palaces public deliberations as well as private trials and judgments are often performed.”

Guests were shown into a large, rectangular and open reception hall or atrium. It had a pool to collect rainwater at its center, and along the sides were ancestral statues and wall cupboards containing wax death masks of male ancestors—the Roman equivalent of family portraits. The masks were taken out for family funeral processions to be worn by actors who dressed in the full insignia of the defunct dignitaries they were impersonating and rode in chariots before the litter bearing the deceased. Ornate public rooms lined with marble and decorated with mosaics and frescoes opened off the atrium, while the family’s private apartments were toward the back of the house, arranged around the garden.