Cleopatra and Antony (25 page)

Antony also made overtures to the other Artavasdes, king of Armenia, by suggesting that the five-year-old Alexander Helios be betrothed to Artavasdes’ daughter and inviting the Armenian monarch to visit him in Alexandria. Suspecting a plot to take both himself and his daughter hostage, Artavasdes failed to reply. Antony would later allege that Octavian had secretly persuaded him to refuse his offer.

In the spring of 34, the snubbed Antony set out to conquer Armenia as a prelude to his renewed attack on Parthia. He advanced up to the gates of its capital, Artaxata, sitting below snowy Mount Ararat and not far from the modern-day Armenian capital of Yerevan. Little is known of the campaign except that Antony induced Artavasdes to come to his camp, where he demanded the king surrender his treasuries and his fortresses. Whatever Artavasdes may have wished, his army refused to agree and promptly put his son Artaxes on the throne in his place. The Roman legions quickly crushed the Armenian forces, causing Artaxes to seek sanctuary with the Parthians while Antony sent Ar-tavasdes, bound with chains of silver, with his wife, two younger sons and a large amount of Armenian treasure to Alexandria and annexed Armenia. Leaving the able Canidius Crassus behind to garrison and organize the administration of Armenia into a Roman province and handing some territory to the Median king, whose daughter, Iotape, his only child, it was now agreed would be betrothed to Alexander Helios, Antony set out for Egypt preparatory to renewing his Parthian campaign the following year. He was about to demonstrate dramatically and publicly the strength of his ties to Cleopatra and their children.

Cleopatra, “seated in the midst of the populace upon a platform plated with silver and upon a gilded chair,” according to Dio Cassius, waited ready to receive Antony’s gifts, together with the miserable Artavasdes and his family. Despite “much coercion” and “much ill-treatment,” the Armenian refused to prostrate himself before her and, instead of acknowledging her titles and supremacy, addressed her simply by her name. In spite of this defiance, his life and the lives of his family were spared, and they were sent into confinement as prisoners of state.

A few days later, Antony gave the Alexandrians a yet more remarkable and significant spectacle. The setting was one of the city’s most splendid buildings, the great Gymnasium, which stood in the center of the city adjoining the agora, the city’s meeting place and market. Antony had ordered golden thrones for himself and Cleopatra to be placed upon a silver stage, with smaller thrones at a slightly lower level for their children. Before a packed, expectant crowd, Antony rose to his feet. First, he confirmed Cleopatra as queen of Egypt, Cyprus and her possessions in Syria and decreed that henceforward she would be known as the “Queen of Kings.” Next, Antony confirmed the thirteen-year-old Caesarion as joint ruler of Egypt with his mother and awarded him the title “King of Kings.” Yet more significantly, Dio Cassius related that Antony proclaimed Cleopatra to have been “in very truth the wife” and Caesarion “the son of the former Caesar”—in other words, Caesarion was Caesar’s legitimate son. All the measures he was taking, Antony asserted, were “for Caesar’s sake.”

Turning to his own children by Cleopatra, Antony announced that the six-year-old Alexander Helios was to be king of Armenia in place of Artavasdes and overlord of Media and all the lands east of the Euphrates “as far as India”—vast territories that, of course, included Parthia. His twin, Cleopatra Selene, received Cyrenaica, while the two-year-old toddler Ptolemy Philadelphus acquired Egyptian possessions in Syria and Cilicia and was appointed overlord of all lands westward from the Euphrates to the Hellespont.

Plutarch related that while making this announcement, Antony “brought his sons forward for all to see,” impressively attired in the garb of their new lands. Alexander was kitted out in Median clothes with, on his young head, the regal tiara—a turban-like cap topped with a waving peacock’s feather. Ptolemy was dressed like a tiny Macedonian king, in military boots, purple cavalryman’s cloak, a woolen or goat-hair Macedonian bonnet and a royal diadem. This was, as Plutarch noted, the style of dress “adopted by all the kings since Alexander the Great.” After the no doubt somewhat shy and puzzled small children had formally saluted their parents, as they left the stage Alexander was given a guard of honor in Armenian dress and Ptolemy one of soldiers in Macedonian costume.

Cleopatra clearly gave careful thought to her own appearance at this great moment in her life. Plutarch described how she appeared before her people as Isis incarnate. Of the many faces of the goddess, Cleopatra was probably on this occasion evoking the image of Isis the great mother, in recognition of the honors lavished on her children. She may also have been wearing the grand headdress, the triple uraeus, in which three hooded cobras reared from the headband above her forehead and which, as statues of the period reveal, she had adopted as her personal insignia. A double uraeus—two rearing cobras—had long signified the Egyptian monarch’s rule over Upper and Lower Egypt. Cleopatra’s bold adoption of a third serpent could have been used by her to signify various things at various stages of her reign—for example, to mark her acquisition of lands once ruled by the rival Seleucid dynasty. Now it could have taken on an additional significance, recognizing her rule over her three sons as “Queen of Kings.”

The glamour and glitz of the Donations of Alexandria—as the ceremony came to be known—were signs that the balance in the partnership between the couple had swung yet further Cleopatra’s way. Antony’s failure in Parthia had badly damaged his hopes of becoming the Roman Alexander. Despite his modest triumph in Armenia, events had left him increasingly dependent on Cleopatra and thus increasingly sympathetic to her Hellenic concept of monarchy. The ceremony of the Donations was to her benefit rather than Antony’s and can only have been at her prompting as a demonstration of their personal and political commitment.

In practice, the Donations were more form than substance, making little difference to how the various territories would be administered. Many of the lands so portentously conferred on her and her children by Antony already belonged to Cleopatra. Of the remainder, Alexander Helios’ hopes of actually governing Media depended on his future father-in-law, the current king of Media, while Armenia was, in fact, under the firm governance of Roman legions and Parthia had yet to be conquered. Of Alexander’s other acquisitions as overlord many, like those of his younger brother, Ptolemy Philadelphus, already had rulers, some of whom were Antony’s clients and could not be expected to be delighted at this turn of events.

The political importance of the Donations to Cleopatra was the potent underlying message conveyed to her people and those of the neighboring lands. Antony was establishing a new hierarchy of power in the east. Until then, client kings such as Amyntas, Polemo, Herod and others had given him their allegiance direct, not in his own right but as the representative of Rome. By making Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus their overlords he was implying that the client kings would owe their loyalty first to Cleopatra, the “Queen of Kings,” and only thence to distant Rome. Furthermore, by declaring Alexander Helios overlord of Parthia, Antony was indicating that, when the war of conquest in due course resumed, Parthia too would be subject first to Hellenized Egypt and then to Rome. Cleopatra could present herself and her kingdom as being exalted to a status only a little beneath that of Rome itself.

Another important subtext of the Donations of Alexandria concerned Cae-sarion. Antony’s confirmation of him as co-ruler of the Egyptian empire with his mother was, of course, no surprise. Cleopatra had marked him out from birth as heir to the Ptolemaic empire, ensuring that his image was prominently displayed to her Egyptian subjects.
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The truly satisfying part of Antony’s pronouncements about Caesarion for Cleopatra was therefore his public reaffirmation of the boy as Caesar’s legitimate son. This was a direct challenge to Octavian. Caesarion was, as everyone knew, not legitimate in any conventional sense—Caesar had been married to Calpurnia at the time of his birth and Roman law did not countenance bigamy. Even had Caesar not been married, Roman law did not recognize the marriage of any Roman citizen, even those as powerful as Caesar or Antony himself, to a foreigner. The children of all such unions were illegitimate and could not inherit. This was rather different from the situation in the Egyptian royal family, where there were several precedents for illegitimate offspring to inherit the throne, particularly in the absence of any legitimate heir. But, encouraged by Cleopatra, Antony was brushing this aside, perhaps on the basis that the union between Caesar and Cleopatra had been a union of gods and therefore above such banalities as marriage ceremonies. In the words of Dio Cassius, Antony wished to remind the world that Octavian “was only an adopted and not a real son” of Julius Caesar and that Caesarion had a better claim on the loyalties of Caesar’s Roman followers. Antony also may have wished to suggest a similar type of legitimacy for his own children by Cleopatra.

The silver coins issued by Antony to mark his Armenian victory and the Donations of Alexandria and depicting both himself and Cleopatra, one on each side, mark her ascendancy. Though she is somewhat unflatteringly portrayed, with thin lips, a long and beaky nose, a sharp chin and a slight frown, this was perhaps not the point. The stark image conveyed an uncompromising power and authority. The encircling description, “To Cleopatra, queen of kings and her sons who are kings,” proclaims her newly acquired status. It was an unprecedented honor. Until this time, only two other women had been represented on Roman coins—both Roman and both Antony’s wives, Fulvia and Octavia. While this shows Antony’s unusual and disarming propensity to admit and, indeed, celebrate his consorts’ important place in his political life, neither woman had been named. Conversely, the coin records no new honors or titles for Antony—the only member of the “family” whose status remained unchanged, formally at least, at the Donations of Alexandria. Though atop the new power structure he had created, he remained a triumvir of Rome. The simple inscription running around his forceful profile reads simply, “Antony, after the conquest of Armenia.”

To Octavian in Rome, however, the situation must have appeared menacing. He suspected Antony of intending to lay claim to the empire in the west through Caesarion and to a vast empire in the east through Cleopatra and their children, with himself as supreme overlord. But Octavian’s own position had meanwhile been strengthening. His campaigns in Illyricum had been successful—he had subdued the tribes that had been energetically raiding northern Italy and plundering along the eastern shores of the Adriatic, seized their strongholds and thus secured the northeast approaches to Italy. These victories allowed him to demonstrate that he as well as Antony was capable of defeating foreigners. He had also shown his personal willingness to fight. A stone missile that struck him on the knee and crippled him for several days made useful propaganda for him. In addition, the Illyricum campaigns had allowed him to train and battle-harden an army, ready for whatever new demands he might make of it.

And now his rival had played right into his hands. The news of Antony’s Armenian celebrations had caused considerable resentment in Rome. According to Plutarch, what Romans found “particularly offensive” was that, to please his mistress, “he gratified the Egyptians with the noble and solemn ceremonies proper to his homeland,” rather than dedicating the spoils of war to Jupiter in his temple on the Capitol in Rome. On a less lofty level, Antony had denied his fellow citizens the revels and feasting that were a traditional part of a Roman Triumph, giving the sweets of victory instead to the Alexandrians. Then, within days, Antony had compounded his sins by mounting what Plutarch called the “theatrical, overdone and anti-Roman” Donations of Alexandria, scattering Roman possessions among his mistress and children as if such decisions were matters of little consequence about which he need only follow the whims of Cleopatra and not consult the Senate and people of Rome. What better proof did Octavian need to maintain that Antony had “gone native”—a situation no decent Roman should tolerate?