Cleopatra and Antony (33 page)

As a consequence of his defeat of Cleopatra and Antony, Octavian was now well on his way to becoming the princeps, or chief citizen, of the Roman state, a title he assumed in 27, together with the appellation “Augustus,” with its implication of dignity, stateliness, even sanctity. As de facto first emperor of Rome, he remained, just as Cleopatra and Antony had been, conscious of his image—sufficiently so, in fact, to order an official portrait of himself depicting a calm, elevated leader to be widely copied and circulated throughout the Roman world. It served as the basis for a variety of surviving sculptures and other portrayals. Significantly, when the Senate offered to name one of the months after him, he asked that it should not be the month of his birth, as in the case of Julius Caesar and July, but Sextillis, the old sixth month but now, under the Julian calendar, the eighth—the month of his victory over Cleopatra and Antony. This became August.

After forty-four years of successful autocratic rule, during which he centralized the administration of the empire and banished conflict to its borders, where skirmishes with barbarians continued but did not threaten, Augustus died in AD 14. Ironically, many of his centralizing measures and, in particular, his concentration of all power in the hands of a single unelected leader resembled the way the Ptolemies had ruled Egypt. After Augustus’ cremation, his ashes were placed in his great round mausoleum set in a public park, which, it was said, he had designed taking the tomb of Alexander in Alexandria as his inspiration.

By now Rome also contained many artifacts transported from Egypt. Immediately following the return to Italy of Augustus and his veterans and over the subsequent decades a sort of “Egyptmania” had taken hold. Citizens eagerly imported pharaonic works of art. Sometimes obelisks were reerected in Roman squares to celebrate victories, sometimes in temples to Roman gods and at other times simply to beautify public spaces or to act as giant sundials.
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Rarely did those installing them in their picturesque new settings have any consciousness of the original purpose of the works, a sphinx being considered a must-have for any large Roman garden. Egyptian landscapes incorporating such elements as Nile scenes, lotuses, pyramids and crocodiles became commonplace in frescoes and decorative relief sculptures. There was also a fashion for Egyptian jewelry in the form of scarab rings and amulets.

Many Romans even chose to have their ashes buried in pyramid-shaped tombs. They did so irrespective of their religion, but the other major Egyptian exports to Rome were the cults of Isis, Osiris and other gods. These gods had initially been imported at the beginning of the first century BC but after Cleopatra’s defeat freed them from association with a foreign enemy they began to flourish. The cult of Isis offered life after death to its converts, together with exotic and elaborate rituals accompanied by music, chanting and the burning of incense. Each day before sunrise, the priests presented the statue of Isis to her seated followers who had gathered, shaking their metal rattles in her honor and to drown out any extraneous sounds intruding into the complex rites of the cult. They remained deep in prayer until the sun had risen to be blessed by the assembled worshippers who also celebrated the resurrection of Osiris, god of the underworld, at the daily rebirth of the sun. At two o’clock in the afternoon, a second ceremony was held for the adoration of the sacred water of the Nile. So popular were the cults that the worship of these Egyptian deities continued in some quarters of Rome until the city’s fall.

Antony’s two daughters by Octavia left a greater mark on history. Both remained in Rome and one became the mother and both became grandmothers of emperors, albeit notorious ones. The elder Antonia became the grandmother of Nero, while the younger Antonia became the mother of Claudius and grandmother of Caligula.
*
Octavian allowed Antony’s surviving son by Fulvia, Iullus Antonius, to claim his family inheritance. Under Octavian’s patronage he enjoyed a successful career in Rome, becoming a consul and governor in Asia Minor as well as a poet. However, in 2 BC, age forty-one, he became caught up in a sex scandal involving Octavian’s thirty-six-year-old daughter, Julia. She had first been married to Octavian’s faithful school friend and admiral Agrippa, who died in 12 BC, and at the time of the scandal was wife to Tiberius, the son of her stepmother, Livia, by her first husband.

Like several other well-born men, Antonius was accused of indulging in sexual debauches with Julia, “who refrained from no sex act possible to a woman.” Allegedly, she had been seen in the dead of night carousing and fornicating in the Forum with Antonius and the others, as well as drunkenly clambering and cavorting over the rostra where Cicero’s head had once been nailed and from which her father had addressed the populace urging the moral regeneration of Rome. The men were charged with treason and some, including Antonius, were forced to commit suicide or executed. Tiberius divorced Julia. As unforgiving of his only daughter’s weaknesses as he was of those of others, Octavian exiled her to an offshore island. Presumably because drink had played a part in her downfall, rather than just for spite, he ordered her guards to allow her no wine. She shared her abstemious life with her mother, Scribonia, abruptly divorced herself by Octavian so many years previously and who voluntarily followed her daughter into exile. Although eventually allowed to return to the mainland, Julia remained in close confinement until she died fourteen years later. She lived to see her former husband, Tiberius, succeed Octavian as emperor since her sons by Agrippa had died before their grandfather.

Sexual excess continued to play a part in Roman politics. Other women of the imperial family were banished for their appetites. As emperor, Octavian introduced legislation governing the behavior of women, promoting marriage, punishing adultery and generally emphasizing that a woman’s place was in the home bearing children. Nevertheless, Suetonius alleged that well into old age Octavian himself retained “a passion for deflowering girls—who were collected for him from every quarter, even by his wife.”

Predictably, it was Cleopatra who was the ultimate icon of sexual depravity in Roman eyes. Oil lamps depicted her squatting on a giant phallus. Stripped of humanity, intellect and feeling, she was beginning her long, distorted journey through history as the epitome of the scheming, predatory whore, her true story ignored and then forgotten.

*The obelisks remained in their new location long after the Caesareum itself had vanished until one was acquired by a Briton, placed in a cylinder of steel on a pontoon boat suitably named
Cleopatra
and towed toward Britain. During a wild storm in the Bay of Biscay, the tow ropes broke, six men were killed or drowned and the obelisk was adrift for six days, but it was rescued and eventually reached London, where, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, it still stands on the Thames embankment. The other obelisk was transported to New York at the expense of the millionaire William Vanderbilt and in 1881 erected in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

*One such sundial, which Octavian ordered to be brought to Rome and placed in the Campus Martius, is now in the city’s Piazza di Monte Citorio.

*In ad 40 Caligula murdered Ptolemy of Mauretania—Cleopatra and Antony’s grandson and so, of course, his cousin. The reason was that Ptolemy had dared to wear a more gorgeous purple mantle to the amphitheater than Caligula.

In analyzing the relationship between Cleopatra and Antony, certain elements always come through, whatever the source and however favorable or unfavorable the author. Their names are always linked—even in the earliest sources—as lovers. There was an undoubted chemistry between them that endured over a decade and produced three children. In many ways they were very similar: charismatic, with an ability to charm; risk takers, sometimes thrill seekers; ambitious and disposed to scheme on a grand scale; passionate lovers of life and relishers of excess. They were also loyal to one another.

Cleopatra was not the “bitch in heat” nymphomaniac so often portrayed. She had two men in her life, Caesar and then Antony. Neither—moving to the other end of the spectrum—was she the cold-blooded schemer and manipulator of men as she is equally frequently depicted to be. Certainly, she took her first lover, Caesar, because she feared for her throne, indeed her life, and there was an element of calculation. But she developed feelings for the man who fathered her beloved Caesarion and who was, in many ways, her own father figure. When she joined Caesar in Rome, so great was their empathy that he discussed with her his plans for remodeling Rome and for introducing a new calendar. Her influence with Caesar was one of the reasons she was so feared and disliked in Rome. Later, during the civil war that followed her lover’s murder, Cleopatra did not accede to the requests of his assassins for aid, despite the proximity of their armies to Egypt and the consequent risks to herself and her throne. Instead, she attempted to lead her navy to support Antony and Octavian.

Cleopatra’s relationship with Antony was very different. Though again it began with an element of calculation and self-interest, it developed and transmuted into deep and passionate love. With Caesar, Cleopatra had been the junior and very much younger partner. With Antony, she came to enjoy a relationship of equals unique for the time—a true partnership sexually, emotionally, intellectually, politically, in which each came to depend on the other. She was his daily companion. Unlike his Roman wives, Cleopatra usually accompanied Antony on his campaigns.

Something of Antony’s attachment to Cleopatra also penetrates the fog of Octavian’s misogynistic propaganda and the centuries of myth building. His feelings for her developed over time. Antony was clearly susceptible to attractive women and would not have been hard to seduce. He also admired and was accustomed to being guided by strong-minded, patrician women. Cleopatra fitted a mold he was used to, with the additional allure that she was a queen and the living incarnation of a goddess. It is not surprising that he fell heavily for her in Tarsus and followed her back to Alexandria for a period of sexual abandon. But his feelings at this early stage, though strong, did not, of course, prevent him from returning to Rome and settling down with Octavia.

Yet Antony could not forget Cleopatra, to whom, of all the many women in his life, he would make the greatest commitment. That was why he took the politically dangerous step of sending Octavia away and binding himself totally to the Egyptian queen, to whom thereafter he remained uniquely faithful. Sexual passion turned into a bond so strong that together they formulated a novel concept under which Egypt would become almost an equal partner with Rome in the East. Unlike Octavian, Antony had always been comfortable working in a team and sharing ideas—he had been a loyal second in command to Caesar—and had no difficulty regarding Cleopatra, though a woman, as his partner. She guided and reassured him, kept him focused and mitigated the mood swings of his mercurial, seemingly somewhat manic-depressive temperament. That was one reason—though of course there were others—why, when told Cleopatra was dead, he fell on his sword. The thought of life without the lover and friend with whom he had shared everything seemed unendurable.

There is, of course, much that we can never know and only guess at. That is part of our fascination with this couple whose lives still radiate such sensual, sexual glamour that we sometimes forget the bigger picture. Cleopatra and Antony were not romantic victims being swept to an inevitable doom in some epic tragedy. Almost uniquely in the ancient world, Cleopatra was a female ruler in her own right of a major economic power. Many centuries would pass—perhaps until the time of Elizabeth I—before another woman would show such political shrewdness and staying power. Antony was for a time the most powerful man in the Western world. The motivations and ambitions, decisions and actions of these lovers shaped one of the great power struggles of history—a struggle that, had Cleopatra and Antony succeeded, might have produced a world somewhat different from the one we know today.

Pascal’s question misunderstands the nature of romantic love and physical attraction if not of the symmetry that underlies so much of our appreciation of beauty. It also prompts delightful if idle speculation about the role of personal chemistry, itself as impossible to dissect as love between political leaders. For example, what made Churchill and Roosevelt kindred spirits and, even more, what gave Margaret Thatcher such influence with Reagan and Gorbachev? However, it is perhaps more profitable to speculate what would have happened had Antony been victorious with Cleopatra’s assistance over Octavian.

Octavian’s triumph marked the ascendance of occidental Rome over the Greeks and the eastern states that had absorbed Greek culture. It allowed Vergil, following Octavian’s imperialistic and chauvinistic party line, first to admit condescendingly that the East might supply better artists, sculptors, rhetoricians and even astronomers but that:

Scholars, as well as defining the battle of Actium as one of the major tipping points of history, have argued about what would have happened had Antony been victorious, either at Actium or earlier. Part of the answer depends on at what stage and how he would have won, with its consequences for the balance of power between the two lovers and leaders. If Antony had routed the Parthians and opened up Rome’s path to India and beyond, he could have returned to Rome. His triumph would have easily eclipsed Octavian’s victory over Sextus Pompey and the inhabitants of Illyricum. He would have had much less political need for Cleopatra than if together they had defeated Octavian in a close-fought series of naval and land engagements around Actium.

In the event of a complete victory over Parthia and the establishment of a Roman hegemony reaching as far as India, both contemporary and ancient history show that one of the most difficult feats would have been to retain order and control over such a vast dominion after the initial military victory. If Antony had done so, it is possible that he would have come to an agreement with Octavian establishing a duumvirate whereby Octavian ruled his existing western possessions from Rome and Antony an eastern empire consisting of a combination of Roman provinces and client kingdoms from Alexandria. While Antony still would have needed Cleopatra emotionally, he would have been unlikely to have needed politically to move so quickly to please her with such an ostentatious and elaborate ceremony as the Donations of Alexandria—such anathema to Roman society. Their ideas for a partnership between Rome and Egypt could have been developed more slowly and privately. In these circumstances, Antony and Octavian might have coexisted uneasily until Antony’s death—the latter would have been around fifty at the time of his Triumph and had lived a dissipated life. Depending on how long Antony in fact lived, the two halves of the empire might have become so distinct in culture and administration that Octavian would not have felt able to confront Antony’s successor, leading to a much earlier development of separate empires in the east and west.

A victory for Antony’s forces around Actium in 31, with the assumed death of Octavian by his own or another’s hand, poses a completely different set of questions. Crucially, Antony’s supporters were, in addition to Cleopatra, a mixed bag of eastern client kings and the remnants of the Roman republicans. If the Actium campaign had gone well, there would have been no republican defections from Antony, and it is hard to envisage that after his victory such elements would not have agitated for a resurrection of at least some of the senatorial powers.

Antony’s views on how Rome should have been governed are not clear. He offered Caesar the crown. However, nearly all the staunch republicans flocked to him as a better hope for the preservation of the republic than Octavian, perhaps indicating that his approach was more evolutionary than the revolution of his rival. Perhaps like Pompey, Antony would have been uncertain what to do with supreme power when he acquired it, relishing the respect and status his position afforded more than anything else. Unlike Octavian, Antony’s views were influenced by a succession of close associates: first his mother, Julia, then Curio, Julius Caesar, Fulvia and finally Cleopatra. Since she would have been his dominant influence after Actium, she would have pushed him toward autocracy and probably monarchy, a pressure that could have been reinforced by the practicalities of the new empire, which would have demanded a strong and stable administration and a clear, swift and decisive command structure. Rome would have found, just as it did with Octavian, that the republic’s lingering death had become inevitable—at least after the Senate’s supine approval of the Second Triumvirate. The republicans had been fractious, small-minded and far too inclined to focus on detail and petty jealousies to see the big picture and the consequences of their incessant squabblings on it. By refusing to pool some of their prerogatives and to sacrifice some of their privileges and even some minor liberties, they had rendered autocracy inevitable.

Given that Octavian’s propaganda against Cleopatra had built on deeply held xenophobic and misogynistic prejudices that would not easily have been dispelled, and given Antony’s preferences for the East, it is quite likely that after some time in Rome, he with Cleopatra’s strong backing would have chosen to make their capital in Alexandria, with that city becoming at least Rome’s equal, as Constantinople later became in reality. Bearing in mind the monarchical dynastic tradition of Cleopatra, it is highly likely that the two would have become hereditary rulers, indeed just as Octavian did, with Antyllus perhaps succeeding in Rome while Caesarion ruled in Alexandria.

Antony with Cleopatra at his side would have governed through a combination of direct rule and a hierarchy of client kingdoms as foreshadowed by Pompey and basically continued in practice by Octavian. However, their rule would have been founded more on a partnership between Greeks, Hellenes and Romans. It would have drawn on the Hellenic concept of
harmonia
—a community of outlook and interest—and would have shown a greater tolerance of difference and of local customs. Greeks and the other peoples of the region would have had more political power, avoiding much of the resentment that built up against the imperialist, cold and alien rule of Rome. Alexandria would have flourished as a center of learning and culture. Distinctions and prejudices between East and West, as apparent in those times as now, might have become blurred, to the benefit of all. As a consequence of Cleopatra’s longer rule, even women’s position in society might have changed.

One interesting sidelight is that Cleopatra might well have in the end succeeded in deposing Herod in Judaea. She had the wealth, power and determination. If she had, the area certainly would have developed in a less militaristic and antagonistic way. Jesus of Nazareth would then have been born into a more tolerant environment and, just perhaps, his reception might have been different.