Cleopatra and Antony (5 page)

The first was the blond Pompey, then twenty-three years old and far removed from the middle-aged man who more than thirty years later would seek sanctuary in Egypt after his defeat by Caesar at Pharsalus. Plutarch writes that Pompey bore a resemblance to Alexander through “the slight quiff of his hair and the mobility of his features about the eyes”—a resemblance “which contributed quite a bit towards his popularity.” He had already won several victories over Sulla’s opponents, some by arms and some by words, while marching to join Sulla. So pretty, so precocious and so successful was he that he began to be called, with a hint of irony, “Pompey the Great.”

The other commander was the twenty-eight-year-old Marcus Licinius Crassus, the son of a rich patrician whose wealth Marius had seized. He had raised his own private army to support Sulla, achieve vengeance and rebuild his patrimony.

By the end of 82, with the help of these two young leaders, Sulla took possession of Rome and the capital’s public places once more ran red with blood. Sulla decreed lists—proscriptions—of public enemies, opponents summarily to be killed and to have their property confiscated. Many names were added at least as much for their wealth as for their deeds. All the republican leaders and their clients profited hugely—Crassus so flagrantly that Sulla felt forced to disclaim his actions.

Romans believed that all important events in life were divinely instigated and that different gods were responsible for particular activities. Perhaps symptomatic of Rome’s materialistic society, Roman religion was concerned with success, not with sin or moral judgments. “Jupiter is called best and greatest,” Cicero commented, “because he does not make us just or sober or wise but healthy and rich and prosperous.” In worship the Romans sought, with the aid of their priests, to appease the gods and to persuade them to look kindly on their activities by offering gifts, pouring libations or, on special occasions, performing animal sacrifices. The Romans had no holy scriptures and like the Greeks, but unlike the Egyptians, their concept of an afterlife was indistinct and shadowy.

In addition to their reliance on the Sibylline Books, the Romans did, however, believe strongly in portents and prodigies of all sorts. Before important events, specially appointed augurs or, in their absence, magistrates and generals looked for signs of the gods’ wishes manifested by the pattern of birds’ flight (
auspices
originally meant “signs from birds”), the weather or cloud formations. If the signs were unfavorable, meetings or even battles would be postponed. The appearance of comets or of alleged showers of blood, deformed animals or animals acting against their own nature (for example, by devoring their own young) were given automatic credence as omens.

As a priest of Jupiter, Caesar would have been required to perform ceremonies and to inspect the entrails of sacrificed animals to interpret any messages they conveyed for the future. His position allowed him a measure of political power through his ability to manipulate omens. It attracted many privileges but also much regulation. Some rules were bizarre, such as that the priest’s home should contain no knots and that his hair could be cut only by a freeman using a bronze knife and the clippings, together with those from his nails, buried in a special place. Others were theoretically more serious, such as a prohibition against holding a magistracy.

Sulla’s arrival changed everything for Caesar, even though, fortunately for him, the eighteen-year-old had taken no active part in the opposition. While others were killing themselves to avoid a worse death, Sulla summoned Caesar and offered him amnesty if he divorced Cornelia. Alone among his contemporaries, Caesar refused Sulla’s terms and so lost his priestly office, Cornelia’s dowry and his family fortune, as well as being compelled to flee Rome. Such a stiff-necked refusal to bow to the authority of others, especially when his honor was at stake, would typify his future career.

Eventually some hard lobbying and even an intervention from the Vestal Virgins secured his rehabilitation.
*
On bestowing it, Sulla is said to have commented, “Keep him since you so wish, but I would have you know that this young man who is so precious to you will one day overthrow the aristocratic party which you and I have fought so hard to defend. There are many Mariuses in him.” He told others to beware of “this youth who wears his toga so loosely girdled.” The latter was a reference to a modish, some said effeminate, way of dressing affected by Caesar and some other young bloods of which the conservative Sulla clearly strongly disapproved. Certainly, as the historian Suetonius wrote, “Caesar was something of a dandy, always keeping his head carefully trimmed and shaved; and he has been accused of having certain other hairy parts of his body depilitated with tweezers.” He was also tall with a somewhat large mouth and dark, lively eyes.

After his pardon, Caesar wisely took himself abroad, finding a place on the staff of one of Rome’s high officials in Asia. Caesar’s first mission was to the kingdom of Bithynia on the Black Sea, west of Pontus. Its king, Nicomedes, maintained a luxurious court and was well known for his harem of young men. Nicomedes seems to have taken an immediate fancy to Caesar, who, to the later outrage of Rome, performed the role of cupbearer to Nicomedes at an extravagant banquet. Also according to persistent rumor, reclining on a gold bed with purple sheets, he became the king’s lover—in the words of his later opponents, “the female rival of Bithynia’s queen” and “the bottom half of the royal bed.” While the Romans and Greeks had no such word as
homosexuality
and relations with youths were accepted and celebrated in verse, the Romans approved only the active role in such relationships for freeborn men. The receptive or pathetic role, which Caesar was said to have assumed with the king, was considered far too submissive for a freedom-loving Roman and to be taken only by foreigners or slaves.
*

In 78 came the news that Sulla was dead. He had in 81 revived for himself the office of dictator, abolished at the end of the third century for fear of autocracy. The role, designed for emergencies only, had previously been restricted to a six-month tenure but Sulla had set himself no time frame and used the office to inaugurate a vast number of conservative reforms, among them drastic reductions in the power of the people’s representatives—the tribunes—including removing their veto over legislation. He also restricted the freedoms of provincial governors, who were not allowed, without the permission of the Senate, to make war or to lead their legions over their provincial boundaries. However, in 79 and to the amazement of many, Sulla retired into private life, where, once again, he took to riotous drinking and partying in a bid to recapture his youth. Like his old rival Marius, his excesses probably hastened his death, which occurred a few months later. By bringing troops onto Rome’s streets, by his murderous proscriptions and by his assumption of dictatorial powers, Sulla had set sinister precedents for the years ahead, both for the fate of the Republic and for the actions of Caesar, Antony and Octavian.

*Aeneas was also the hero whose desertion of Dido, queen and founder of Carthage, to pursue his own imperial ambitions was said to have caused her suicide—a story much elaborated later by the poet Vergil to the detriment of both Cleopatra and Antony and the benefit of Octavian.

*Vesta, keeper of the eternal fire, was one of the most venerated Roman goddesses. Unlike most other deities, she had her own priestesses. The six Vestal Virgins were selected at the age of eight from good families to be raised in chastity to serve the goddess for thirty years. After that time they were free to leave and marry. Before then, if they were convicted of having sexual relations with a man, they were buried alive and their lover whipped to death.

*According to one academic source, more Roman love poetry is directed toward youths than to girls and women together. There is, however, no love poetry between men.

CHAPTER 4

Crassus and Pompey too were still on the rise. Pompey, unlike Caesar, had understandably accepted Sulla’s suggestion to divorce, since Sulla had offered his stepdaughter as a replacement bride and Pompey was always uncomfortably conscious that his family pedigree was inferior to Rome’s best. After Sulla’s death, Pompey had led an army to subdue a rebellion in Spain.

While he was away, in the summer of 73 a revolt broke out among gladiators in southern Italy. Such outbreaks were not unusual, but this time, led by a Thracian named Spartacus, the gladiators uniquely formed themselves into disciplined units, drawing further recruits from among runaway slaves. They had rules stipulating that plunder should be shared equally. Sometimes to underline the role reversal they made their Roman prisoners fight as gladiators. At their height, their numbers reached 70,000, some even suggest 120,000, and they defeated several Roman armies, forcing open the road to the Alps and to freedom beyond the Roman frontiers. Why they did not take it but instead turned back into Italy is uncertain, but loot may have been the spur. Crassus sought and was given command against Spartacus and his men. Eventually he trapped them and Spartacus was killed. Crassus crucified each of his prisoners on crosses placed every forty yards or so along a hundred-mile stretch of the Appian Way, Roman Italy’s main southern highway.

Pompey returned from Spain at the end of the revolt and with his troops defeated and killed all five thousand men of a breakaway gladiator army, thus stealing some of Crassus’ glory and engendering a lasting rivalry. Although Pompey was below the required age of forty, both men were elected consul for the first time—Pompey at thirty-five and Crassus at forty-one. Together they abolished many of Sulla’s changes, returning to the tribunes the powers they had previously enjoyed and expelling from the Senate more than a fifth of its members on the grounds that their contributions were worthless.

The twenty-six-year-old Caesar was delighted to be made a member of the College of Pontiffs on his return from Rhodes, succeeding one of his relatives. Unlike his previous priesthood, the lifetime position offered influence and privileges—such as the right to wear a red-striped toga—without serious restrictions. Influence was often exerted and deals done informally and over meals. Around 70, Caesar attended and may have presided as “king of the celebrations” over a dinner to mark the inauguration of a recruit to the priesthood. Unusually, details have been preserved. In addition to the candidate, eleven priests including Caesar and his brother were present. Roman women participated in such dinners and the newcomer’s wife and mother-in-law were there too, together with some of the Vestal Virgins. Everyone reclined on ebony couches, the men in two circles and the women in a third.
*
The diners leaned on their left hand with a cup of wine near their right alongside perfumed oil, perhaps of roses, to anoint their brows. Just as in Egypt, achieving the right ambient aroma was thought essential to conviviality. Dining room floors were often spread with aromatic foliage such as ferns and verbena and scented oils burned.

The dinner menu survives. Among the hors d’oeuvres were sea urchins, raw oysters, mussels, thrushes baked under a thatch of asparagus, clams, loins of wild boar and roe deer and force-fed fowl. The main course included sows’ udders, boars’ heads, boiled teals, ducks, hares, fish quiches and more.
*

The account of the feast does not tell what wines were served but, though relatively abstemious himself, Caesar was a connoisseur who knew the value of wine to draw others into injudicious promises or confessions. At another feast, he astonished his guests because, as Pliny records, “he gave Falerian, Chian, Lesbian and Marmartine—the first time apparently that four types of wine were served [at such an event].”

In his previous campaigns Mithridates had ordered the massacre of some eighty thousand Roman men, women and children and had murdered a captured Roman governor by having his mouth wrenched open and molten gold from a crucible poured down his throat to show that the Roman desire for gold could only be slaked by killing Romans. Despite his setback at the hands of Sulla, Mithridates’ forces were strong once more. Nevertheless, Pompey defeated Mithridates in 66 and forced him into exile, where he died three years later. Ever the showman, Pompey appropriated from among Mithridates’ possessions a red cloak once said to have been worn by Alexander and in Pompey’s view an ideal garment to wear in his own Triumph.

Pompey certainly did much to earn his sobriquet “the Great” during his time in the east, adding Syria and its great capital of Antioch, as well as Pontus, to the Roman provinces. He occupied Jerusalem, where he horrified the temple priests by entering the inner sanctum. Although he eventually withdrew from Jerusalem and Judaea, Roman rule, already establshed on Egypt’s western border, was surging ever closer to her eastern one. Of the three great successor states to Alexander’s empire—Macedonian, Seleucid and Egyptian—Egypt was now the only one remaining independent. Cleopatra’s father, Auletes, though no doubt congratulating himself for the aid he had sent Pompey and sycophantically and publicly toasting his success in Alexandria, must have wondered how much longer that would last.

Also in 63, Crassus backed Caesar for the post of high priest, or pontifex maximus—the top religious office in the state. The appointment, which brought with it a town house in the Forum next to the Vestal Virgins, usually went to an elder statesman. Caesar spent massively on his campaign, both on public shows and on direct bribery of the electorate. According to Suetonius, Caesar told his mother as she kissed him good-bye on the morning of the poll that he owed so much that if he did not return to her as high priest, he would not return at all but have to flee his creditors. To general surprise he won, having demonstrated both his supreme self-confidence and the willingness to stake his future on a single event. Later that year, Caesar was also elected praetor, and at thirty-seven was well on the way to the top himself.
*

Catiline stood for consul at the following year’s elections but was again defeated. As ambitious as Caesar but less skilled at planning and calculating, he 48 began to plot a rising. Both Caesar and Crassus disclosed to Cicero what they knew of his conspiracy. Further aided by the disclosure of pillow talk by one of the conspirator’s mistresses, Cicero denounced Catiline to the Senate, claiming that he intended to set fire to parts of Rome as a distraction and then to murder hostile senators. Catiline fled Rome and was killed after a brief battle in January 62.

Cicero was the hero of the hour and never afterward let the Senate or anybody else he could buttonhole forget that he had saved the Republic. Despite what he himself called his “foolish vanity,” Cicero was an astute man. By nature a defender of the republican orthodoxies, he remained suspicious of the radical intentions and personal ambitions of both Caesar and Crassus. In later years he would become Antony’s most influential and outspoken critic.

During a debate in the Senate about the fate of the alleged conspirators, who included Antony’s stepfather, Caesar first made an enemy of Cato, another key conservative figure in the dramatic period that lay ahead.
*
Perhaps conscious of his own contacts with Catiline at the time of the plot’s infancy, Caesar suggested light sentences for some of the conspirators. The thirty-two-year-old Cato, who despite his relative youth rightly enjoyed a reputation for moral probity and incorruptibility, was a supporter of what he imagined as the stern old republican values and demanded the death sentence. The argument in the Senate grew heated. While Cato was orating, insinuating that Caesar might have been in league with the conspirators, he saw a note being passed to Caesar. Cato suggested to the assembled senators that it was from more undisclosed conspirators and demanded it be handed to him. Reading it, Cato found that it was, in fact, a love letter to Caesar from his mistress, Cato’s married half sister Servilia. Cato threw the letter back with the unsophisticated insult “Have it, you drunken idiot”—seemingly the best riposte that Cato, a heavy drinker himself, could muster on the spur of the moment. When the debate closed with victory for Cato, several of his henchmen attacked Caesar. His murder was averted only by Cicero’s intervention, perhaps to his later regret. Cato’s enmity, as unbending as his moral certainties, endured.

In 62, Caesar became indirectly involved in one of the great scandals of the Roman republic. Every year the Festival of the Good Goddess was held in the house of one of the magistrates and on this occasion the house chosen was Caesar’s. He was forbidden to be present—the celebrations were strictly for women only. Cicero described the Good Goddess as “a mystery beyond the powers of men to know.” She was a kind of earth goddess responsible for the female side of life such as the fertility cycle and childbirth. Caesar’s second wife, Pompeia, a granddaughter of Sulla whom he had married in 67 following the death a couple of years previously of his first wife, Cornelia, was the hostess, together with his mother, Aurelia. The chief celebrants of the rite were the Vestal Virgins, but most of female high society was present. In defiance of tradition, the young patrician reprobate Clodius infiltrated the gathering.

His scandalous reputation at this time derived not from his being a womanizer who had affairs with married women—such liaisons were, even if disapproved of, common among the elite, where marriages were usually arranged for political ends—but from the report that he had had sexual relations with each of his three married sisters. (The most famous of these sisters was Clodia, about whom another of her lovers, the poet Catullus, wrote the poem “Odi et Amo,” “I both hate and love her.”) Unlike in Cleopatra’s Egypt, in Rome incest was forbidden and considered perverted.

Why Clodius wanted to invade the feast is not clear. Perhaps it was simply bravado and curiosity; perhaps he was having an affair with Pompeia. Whatever the case, he sneaked into the house dressed as a singing woman but was caught loitering in the shadows. The women, as Plutarch puts it, “after covering up the sacred objects . . . drove him out of doors and at once that same night went home and told their husbands.”

Conservatives denounced Clodius’ behavior as symptomatic of a contemporary decline in moral values and disrespect for tradition. The ambitious Caesar coolly protected his political position by divorcing his wife with the celebrated and enigmatic words “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion” and departed without further comment at the end of his praetorship to take up a governorship in Spain. Cicero was the prosecutor at Clodius’ trial. He described in disgust how Clodius, with Crassus’ money, bribed the jury. He “settled the whole business, called the jurors to his house, made promises, backed bills or paid cash down . . . some jurors actually received a bonus in the form of assignations with certain ladies or introductions to youths of noble families . . . nevertheless twenty-five jurors had the courage of their convictions . . . As for the other thirty-one, they were more worried about their empty purses than their empty reputations.” Though acquitted, Clodius would neither forget nor forgive the witty barbs Cicero aimed at him during the trial and afterward.

Pompey was nonplussed. His lust was for glory, not for absolute power. At heart he trusted in the Senate and the tradition of the elders and all he wanted was for the senators to show their trust and appreciation of him, his troops and his deeds by meeting his requests without quibbling. Always a poor speaker in the Senate and so politically inept that a contemporary wrote, “He is apt to say one thing and think another but he is usually not clever enough to stop his real aims from showing,” he did not know what to do next. Yet within a few months the Senate, at Cato’s instigation, had unwisely alienated Crassus and Caesar as well and made Pompey’s next step clearer.