Cleopatra and Antony (30 page)

Some of Antony’s ships had already been captured. Some raised their oars aloft as a token of surrender. Others took refuge back in the gulf. Yet others fought on well into the night, which Octavian spent aboard one of the swift Liburnian vessels, supervising the closing stages of the battle. Dio Cassius probably exaggerated when he recounted how Octavian’s ships turned to fire as their main weapon. But the battle continued with Octavian’s sailors tossing jars of flaming pitch onto Antony’s larger galleys from their more maneuverable vessels, as well as throwing torches lashed to javelins into their flammable and pitch-coated sides. When the ships were well aflame, some, presumably the rowers belowdecks, were, according to Dio, “roasted in the midst of the holocaust as if they were in ovens,” while the legionaries were incinerated in their armor as it grew red-hot.

By morning, Octavian’s victory was long since complete and all was quiet save for the sound of the waves lapping on the beach strewn with pieces of wreckage and the occasional sodden corpse.

CHAPTER 21

As Antony’s fleet began to pull away from the frenzied mêlée around the two stricken vessels, which he had abandoned to their fate, he resumed his vigil in the prow. He would remain there without seeing or speaking to Cleopatra the whole three days it took the fleet to reach Taenarum, one of his surviving fleet bases, at the southern tip of the Peloponnese.

Both his thoughts and those of Cleopatra, keeping her distance elsewhere in the vessel, can only be imagined. The full implications of the previous day’s engagement would have weighed heavily on Antony. Up until the last moment, he may well have hoped that the initial stages of the sea fight would be so successful that he could convert a planned retreat into a great victory. Now he knew he could not. He had probably at least expected that more of his fleet would have escaped with him. As it was, he was fleeing Greece just as Pompey had done seventeen years earlier, saving himself and leaving his armies behind. In doing so he was inevitably losing credibility as a Roman leader, ceding the Roman world to Octavian. Admittedly, unlike Pompey, he had left an undefeated army of fifty thousand men in Greece, but the realistic and experienced field commander within him would have known that their morale would have been further lowered by the outcome of the sea battle and the sight of him fleeing after the Egyptian queen. Perhaps he wondered whether his decision to leave Canidius Crassus in charge of the land forces had been correct or whether he might have done better going ashore himself to rally his remaining troops, leading them to Asia in person and sharing their privations as he had done in his finest hours—the retreat over the Apennines from Mutina thirteen years ago and that from Parthia four years previously. He needed time, perhaps even a drink, to compose himself.

Cleopatra’s intuition would have told her not to approach her lover while he was sunk in melancholic introspection. Her own spirits would have been higher than Antony’s. She was returning to her kingdom, where she still controlled immense riches and a large population in a land with good natural defenses. She was free of the carping and hostile glances of Roman senators. Previously, Antony could have hoped to succeed without her, but now their fates were inextricably linked. Any future either had would be together and in the East.

The balance of power in her relationship with Antony had tipped further. Henceforward it would lie almost exclusively with Cleopatra. Antony was now in his early fifties and his usual self-confidence in the face of adversity was crumbling. He was suffering a failure of will and did not believe, deep down, that he was making a retreat to victory.

Once they were ashore at Taenarum, Plutarch described how “Cleopatra’s ladies in waiting managed to get them to talk to each other, then persuaded them to share a meal and go to bed together.” Mutual love and dependence are not hard to discern amid the sulks, histrionics, recriminations and final pleasure of reconciliation. However, Antony had more to solace him than the soft words and warm embrace of Cleopatra. Quite a few transport ships and other remnants of his army gathered in the little port. Encouraging reports came in that the land army was holding together in its retreat. In return, Antony sent messages to Canidius Crassus, ordering him to bring the troops across to Asia as soon as he was able.

Even according to the critical Plutarch, Antony was “in misfortune the most nearly a virtuous man.” Thus, remaining a realist about his chances, in a typical gesture of magnanimity, he publicly released many of his friends and clients from their obligations to him. Although with tears in their eyes they refused the gift of a ship filled with treasure “in coined money and valuable royal utensils of silver and gold,” many took the opportunity to depart for Corinth, where Antony commended them into the safe care of his procurator while they “made their peace with Octavian.” Resupplied and with political and emotional equilibrium at least somewhat restored, Cleopatra and Antony reembarked and headed for Egypt.

Back in northern Greece, Canidius Crassus had indeed started his fifty thousand troops on the northeastward crossing of the rugged hills and mountains toward Macedonia. But they had not marched far before Octavian’s forces, confident and exulting in their maritime victory, overtook them. Both sides were reluctant to fight. Although Octavian would be likely to win, he could not be sure of this. As his victories in the east had shown, Canidius was an experienced and resourceful general. Therefore, Octavian sent blandishments to Canidius’ troops through his heralds, appealing to them over the heads of their senior officers to come to terms. Antony’s legionaries, under the leadership of their veteran centurions, drove a hard bargain in the full knowledge of the alternative price they could extract in blood. After seven days of negotiations, Octavian’s wooing succeeded. Antony’s legions would go over to Octavian on the condition that they would receive equal treatment with those in Octavian’s ranks in terms of benefits and rewards on discharge. The most prestigious legions, such as the Larks, would be assimilated whole rather than their men being split up individually within Octavian’s army. This agreement reflected not only Octavian’s trust but also the esprit de corps of the legions.

While these negotiations, which he may well have tacitly condoned, were reaching their conclusion, Canidius and his senior officers, all loyal to Antony, slipped away. In promoting the negotiations and bringing them to a successful conclusion, Octavian showed his high diplomatic skills, marrying clemency and expediency to his propaganda advantage, just as he was already making the most of his victory at Actium.

The poet Horace had, it appears, been present at Actium and wrote in its immediate aftermath how “the wild queen plotting destruction to our capital and ruin to the empire with her pack of diseased half-men [eunuchs]” had had all her fleet burned. Horace went on to vilify Antony’s devotion to Cleopatra, “a Roman to a woman slave by sale,” and cited his passion as a central reason for Antony’s defeat. However, he did not accuse Cleopatra of cowardice or treachery by flying from the battle, thus confirming that, like Octavian and others who were eyewitnesses, he was aware all along that a breakout was Antony’s prime intention, whatever later historians, including Plutarch, portrayed.

Octavian did not set out in immediate pursuit of Cleopatra and Antony. He knew that his final victory was assured provided he retained control of Italy and conciliated some of those Greek and eastern states that had so recently supported them. In furtherance of this latter aim, he traveled to Eleusis, a community on a landlocked bay neighboring Athens. Here in the square stone hall of the sanctuary, once the largest public building in Greece, he sought initiation into the secret rituals of the goddesses Demeter and Kore, who were associated with both the settled rhythms of life and the seasons and the development of civilization, law and morality. He probably timed his visit to coincide with the great early autumn festival of the goddesses, to which initiates flocked from all over the Greek-speaking world. By his action, Octavian was demonstrating to a large and influential audience both his respect for Greek culture and religion and his embrace of more regular, civilized deities than the wild, anarchistic Dionysian and Bacchanalian cults of his opponents.

From Athens, Octavian traveled across to Samos, where Cleopatra and Antony had held their celebration of music and dance, and made it his winter headquarters preparatory to reordering the administration of Asia Minor, which was now swiftly falling into his hands without a fight. However, he had not been on the island long before disturbing news reached him from Rome.

Already during the Actium campaign, Marcus Lepidus, the son of the deposed triumvir and the nephew of Brutus, had been incriminated in a plot to murder Octavian on his return to Italy and been executed. Now disturbances had broken out among the veterans released from the legions and eager for their rewards, as well as among the public, resentful of the high taxation to fund the wars and fearing the expropriation of their land to assuage the veterans’ demands. Octavian hastily returned to Italy to pacify his veterans with initial payments and promises of more to come in the future. He also vowed only to expropriate land from communities that had taken Antony’s part and even then promised the victims land in overseas colonies. However, Octavian knew that unless he gained swift access to the great riches of Egypt, he would not be able to hold off the conflicting demands for too much longer. Returning to Samos, he began to plan his political campaign to woo away yet more of Antony and Cleopatra’s remaining supporters and to consider what his military strategy should be against the rump of their forces.

It is perhaps unlikely that Cleopatra would have risked arousing her subjects’ religious sensibilities by such crude actions, but she was clearly engaged in raising funds and placing her kingdom on a war footing. In a bid to conciliate the king of Media, Cleopatra had Artavasdes, the king of Armenia, who had been a prisoner in Egypt since the time of Antony’s Armenian triumph and the Donations of Alexandria, executed and she had his head sent to the Median king, his longtime adversary. Throughout she seems to have shown tenacity and determination in adversity and a single-minded desire to do everything she could to continue resistance to Octavian and to protect her kingdom and her family.

In sharp contrast, Antony’s confidence had imploded as his troubles mounted. Never among the most emotionally stable of men, he had once more slumped into depression and inactivity. After leaving the Peloponnese, he had first gone to Cyrenaica in the hope of rallying his four legions stationed there. However, their commander had already declared for Octavian and refused to see Antony, killing the members of the embassy he sent ahead and executing some of his own legionaries who protested at his treatment of Antony’s delegation. Plutarch describes how Antony wandered aimlessly up and down the hot, desolate and deserted beach where he had landed, with only two friends for company. One was a Greek orator and the other a Roman soldier whose devotion Antony had won by sparing his life in the aftermath of Philippi when he had impersonated Brutus to allow the republican leader to escape. Through the combined efforts of their philosophical and comradely cajoling, these two very different men dissuaded Antony from his plan to commit suicide. Eventually, he went back on board his ships for the journey of more than 160 miles east to Alexandria.

Once there, Antony relapsed into ever deeper despair. He ran a jetty out into the harbor and on it had a house built over the sea. Here, according to Plutarch, he spent his time “in exile from the world of men,” calling his residence the Timoneum after that of the bad-tempered, misanthropic recluse Ti-mon of Athens. Antony, whose paranoia was becoming more acute, claimed that, like Timon, he had reason to hate the world: “he too had been wronged and treated with ingratitude by his friends and so had come to mistrust and hate all mankind.”

What Cleopatra, never mind his troops, made of Antony’s overblown displays of despair is not recorded, but they can have given no one confidence in his future chances of success. Around this time, Cleopatra began to consider how she might save herself and her family if Egypt was overrun or, indeed, if Antony followed through on his threats and committed suicide in his despair. She contrived what Plutarch called “an extraordinary enterprise.” She determined to move some of her fleet down through the Nile and Egypt’s elaborate pattern of waterways to the Arabian Gulf, whence she could flee with her treasure “far from the dangers of slavery and war.” Cleopatra may have hoped that even if she could not prevent Octavian’s invasion of the Nile delta, by assembling a fleet in the Red Sea, where Octavian had no ships, she could put pressure on him to come to terms.