Not a Love Story: The Marriage of Antony and Cleopatra
The love affair between Antony and Cleopatra has been the subject of books, films, and a play by Shakespeare. As Plutarch tells it, the great Roman general Mark Antony fell hopelessly in love with Cleopatra after she dressed as the love goddess Aphrodite and sailed to meet him on a golden barge. The oars were made of silver, and the rowers kept time to the music of flutes and violins. Little boys dressed as Cupid were positioned on each side of Cleopatra and fanned her face and hair. Her ladies were costumed as mermaids, and the boat was furnished with precious metals, ornaments, and gifts. But, says Plutarch, despite all these delights to the senses, she relied above all on “the charms and enchantment of her passing beauty and grace” to secure Mark Antony’s protection, keep him in Egypt, and divert him from his duties to Rome.21
According to most stories, Cleopatra soon returned Antony’s love and the two married before the war with Rome broke out. After their defeat, believing that Cleopatra was already dead, Antony tried to commit suicide. He lived just long enough to die in her arms. Cleopatra followed her beloved husband into death by allowing a poisonous asp to bite her breast.
The real story is more complicated, because both Cleopatra and Antony were playing for stakes that had little to do with undying love. Their saga can be understood only in the context of the role of princesses in conferring legitimacy in Hellenistic Egypt and their active participation in struggles for political power. Sexual passion may indeed have existed between Cleopatra and Antony and, prior to that, between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. But on everyone’s part this was a calculated, even ruthless, political intrigue.
Before the Egyptian emperor Auletes died, in 51 B.C., he designated his ten-year-old son, Ptolemy XIII, and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Cleopatra, joint heirs, with instructions that they marry. Instead, they went to war, each seeking sole control of the kingdom.
The war between Cleopatra and her brother may have been started by ambitious advisers, certainly on the side of the ten-year-old. But Cleopatra, an educated, intelligent woman who spoke several languages, was no slouch when it came to intrigue and power plays. She first met the Roman general and ruler Julius Caesar in 48 B.C., when he was trying to effect a reconciliation between the warring siblings. Cleopatra immediately grasped the strategic advantage of allying herself with a Roman general. Even as she participated in the political and military negotiations designed to reconcile her with her brother, Cleopatra began a love affair, or at least a sexual liaison, with Caesar. Chroniclers of the day believed that Caesar was enraptured with the young woman. But that did not prevent him from officiating over a marriage between Cleopatra and her brother, confirming their joint rule of Egypt. Nor did any attachment she felt to Caesar prevent Cleopatra from agreeing to the match.22
A year later Cleopatra’s brother/husband, Ptolemy XIII, died, and Cleopatra married Ptolemy XIV, who succeeded to the throne with her. That same year, Cleopatra also bore Caesar a son, whom he acknowledged as his own and whom she named Caesarion. Whether or not Caesar and Cleopatra were in love, Cleopatra was glad to have a child with a claim to Caesar’s inheritance, and Caesar welcomed the birth of a son with a claim to the Egyptian throne.
In 44 B.C. Cleopatra’s second husband died. Some sources suggest that she had him killed. Cleopatra then elevated her son, Caesarion, to the throne as her coruler. After Caesar was assassinated in Rome that same year, the question of what to do about Cleopatra and her son became central to Roman politics. The triumvirate set up to rule Rome after Caesar’s murder was unstable and riven by rivalry between two of its members, Mark Antony and Octavian. Octavian, Caesar’s designated successor, was Caesar’s adopted son. The existence of a biological son in Egypt, acknowledged by Caesar himself, was a major worry for Octavian and an intriguing opportunity for Octavian’s foes.
Initially, Cleopatra did not take sides in the escalating rivalry between Octavian and Mark Antony, although the military resources at her command made her a potentially valuable ally for any contender for Roman power. This was the situation when Mark Antony summoned the Egyptian queen, hoping to gain her support, and she arrived in her golden barge.
Within a year, Cleopatra bore Mark Antony twins. But if he was by then besotted with Cleopatra, as Plutarch claimed, Antony still managed to conduct his political and marital life in Rome in a very tough-minded, unromantic way. The same year his twins were born, 40 B.C., he and Octavian made up their differences. Antony took responsibility for the eastern part of the Roman Empire and sealed the deal by marrying Octavian’s sister Octavia in Rome.
But Mark Antony did not repudiate his relationship with Cleopatra. Just a few years later he was issuing coins in Egypt with his likeness on one side and Cleopatra’s on the other. Eight years after marrying Octavia, he formally notified her of his intention to divorce her and commit to his Egyptian marriage with Cleopatra, even though Roman law did not recognize marriages contracted with foreigners. By this time Mark Antony was championing Caesarion, son of Cleopatra and Caesar, as the rightful ruler of Rome. With Caesarion still too young to succeed Caesar, Antony generously offered to hold his place as the protector of Caesar’s bloodline.
When Antony renounced Octavian’s sister and claimed rulership of Rome on behalf of Caesarion, he closed the door to any compromise, staking everything on a decisive victory by his troops over Octavian’s army. Even if this was poor judgment, Antony was certainly not, as legend would have it, throwing away his career for the sake of a woman’s love. Both he and Cleopatra were using their relationship to gain a kingdom.
Octavian emerged the victor in 31 B.C., prompting Antony and Cleopatra to commit suicide rather than face being paraded through the streets of Rome as dishonored captives. Octavian promptly had Caesarion, then seventeen years old, put to death, and Egypt became a Roman province.
Back in Rome, Octavian’s sister Octavia devoted her efforts to raising her family. In addition to the two daughters she had borne Mark Antony during their marriage, she had three children by her first marriage, as well as Antony and Cleopatra’s two youngest sons and Antony’s younger son by his first wife (her brother Octavian having had the older son put to death to eliminate a potential rival). Imagine the undercurrents in that blended family!
Cleopatra’s ambitious campaign to escape Roman domination and revive the power of Egypt shows that princesses were not always helpless pawns in the marital intrigues of the ancient world. Sometimes they exerted great power in their own right, frustrating the plans of those who had arranged their marriages or hoped to profit from them. Women’s power plays generally revolved around their husbands: who they might marry or scheme to discard. But the development of Christianity offered one ambitious Roman woman an alternative strategy in the politics of marriage, sexuality, and kinship.
Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century A.D. In the fifth century the emperor’s sister Pulcheria came up with a political strategy somewhat similar to that of Queen Elizabeth I in England more than a thousand years later. Pulcheria declared herself celibate, dodging an arranged marriage, and established an elaborate Christian cult to honor her virginity. Gradually she installed handpicked bishops in the churches. Upon her brother’s death, she seized power and married a common soldier who, according to her official proclamations, had pledged to honor and guard her virginity, so that her spiritual authority would remain intact. While her husband directed the empire’s military affairs, Pulcheria conducted most of the other government and social business through her control of the state church.23
In Japan in the eighth century A.D., another strong-willed princess was able to use her political skills to turn her marital and kin connections to her own ends and serve two terms as emperor of Japan. The Fujiwara clan was well known for its marriage politics. For several centuries they made sure that their sisters and daughters married the crown princes and emperors of Japan. This meant that the head of th
e Fujiwara family was the father-in-law or the grandfather—and often both—of the reigning emperor. As the power behind the throne, the Fujiwaras not only maneuvered the young emperors into marrying their own aunts but ensured that emperors abdicated at an early age, so that each emperor was a young man easily manipulated by the family’s elders. Thus the emperor himself had little real authority. To “capture the king”—to have the emperor father a son with one’s daughter—was the route to political power in the Japanese court .24
In the eighth century, however, before they had quite perfected their system, the Fujiwaras elevated one of their sisters, a commoner, from the position of a secondary wife to that of the Empress-Consort of Japan. Her daughter then became the crown princess, and when her father abdicated in her favor in 749, she became the Empress Koken. Nine years later her powerful kin maneuvered Koken into resigning in favor of a male with even closer links to the Fujiwara clan leaders. But Koken remained so politically effective that a few years later she was able to banish, then kill, her main opponent in the clan and depose the ruling emperor. She came back to the throne a second time, this time as the Emperor Shotoku, and ruled from 764 to 770.25
Marriage Among the Common Folk of Ancient Society
Marriage was a less turbulent affair among people who were not in the running for political power. But in most cases, marriage was still a matter of practical calculation rather than an arrangement entered into for individual fulfillment and the pursuit of happiness.
For people with property, marriage was an economic transaction that involved the transfer or consolidation of land and wealth as well as the development of social networks. Even small landowners manipulated kin and marriage ties to consolidate property. For families with larger amounts of wealth, marriages in the ancient world were the equivalent of today’s business mergers or investment partnerships.
Parents with property to administer were no more willing than their royal and aristocratic counterparts to allow their children to choose a spouse freely, or to leave a useful marriage merely because they were personally unhappy. On the other hand, parents might force a child to abandon a partner that he or she truly cared for. In ancient Athens, if a woman became an heiress (this could happen only if her father died without leaving a son), she could be claimed as a bride by her closest male relative, even if she was already married, in order to keep the property within the family. If the kinsman who claimed the heiress was also married, he could summarily divorce his wife, though he might considerately arrange a new marriage for her.26
Even when individuals could make their own choices about marriage and divorce, as wealthy Romans often did, their decisions frequently had more to do with politics and finances than with feelings of love or desire. Switching marital partners sometimes took place with as little emotional turmoil as we might feel in switching phone companies. Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.) divorced his wife Marcia and arranged for her to marry his friend Hortensius, in order to strengthen the friendship and family connections between the two men. We don’t know how Marcia felt about this, but we do know that her father and Cato jointly betrothed her and that she remarried Cato after Hortensius died. Some Roman husbands were so little troubled by possessive feelings that they joined with a wife’s previous husbands to build a tomb for her after she died.27
A husband rarely displayed such open-mindedness about a wife’s sexual behavior while she was married to him, but this had as much to do with fear that she might bear another man’s child as with love-based jealousy. One of the most important functions of marriage for the propertied classes was the production of legitimate children who would honor the father in his old age, show respect to the ancestors and clan gods, and perpetuate the family’s property. A Greek orator in the fourth century B.C. explained: “We have hetaerae [courtesans specially trained to be pleasing companions] for pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our body, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be the trusted guardians of our household.” Under the Roman Republic, census takers determined if a Roman citizen was single by asking: “Have you married for the purpose of creating children?”28
When Greek husbands eulogized their departed wives, they seldom talked of their mutual love or the personal qualities they treasured in their wives. The most common words of praise for a wife were that she showed “self-control,” an attribute connected in Greek thought to female chastity and to a wife’s protection of her husband’s property. Under Athenian law, a man’s seduction of another’s wife was punishable by death, but the rape of another man’s wife merited only a monetary fine. The Athenians reasoned that a rapist did not pose a threat to the husband’s household property because the woman could be counted on to dislike the rapist. But “he who achieves his end by persuasion,” said the legislators, gained access not only to the woman’s body but to her husband’s storeroom.29
Even people with little property to protect took a calculating approach to marriage. Today we often talk about working at our marriages, meaning that we try to cultivate and nurture the personal relationship between husband and wife. But until two hundred years ago people who were not part of the highest elites of society worked in their marriages.
Marriage was one of the ways farmers and peasants organized the growing workload that accompanied the transition from hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies. Intensive agriculture or herding made a sexual division of labor within the household necessary for survival. The Greek poet Hesiod told men: “Get first a house and a wife and an ox to draw the plough.”30
The rules that governed marriage and divorce in the upper classes were usually more relaxed for commoners. States did not generally get involved in validating marriages or regulating divorces unless substantial property or political privileges were involved. In ancient Egypt, marriage was a private matter. Propertied families usually drew up private marriage contracts, but for commoners there were no special rituals or licenses necessary to get married. A marriage came into existence when a man established a household with a woman. This loose definition of marriage also held true in ancient Rome.31
But formalized or not, something akin to marriage was essential for the survival of almost any commoner who was not a slave. Some historians believe that the lower classes of the ancient world were the only people who had the luxury of selecting marriage partners on the basis of love. But most commoners understood the need for a prudent approach to choosing a mate, and practicality usually trumped sentiment.
A woman needed a man to do the plowing. A man needed a woman to spin wool or flax, preserve food, weave blankets, and grind grain, a hugely labor-intensive task. A woman was also needed to bear more children to help in the fields. And households in ancient chiefdoms and kingdoms usually were required to work for their rulers as well as for themselves. Some rulers demanded that each household provide a certain amount of male services, such as plowing, and a certain amount of female ones, such as spinning or weaving. When men were called away from their farms or trades to work on state-sponsored building projects, such as irrigation systems, public storehouses, or temple complexes, someone had to take care of the house and fields in their absence.32
Slaves were forbidden to marry and set up their own households. But for everyone else, the intense demands on household production in ancient states practically forced people to marry or cohabit. Single-person households simply could not survive. In Rome, this became a problem during the late republic and early empire, when frequent military campaigns drained the supply of freemen living in Rome. Some freewomen reportedly sought husbands among slaves, threatening the interests of the slaveowners and causing considerable status anxiety among Roman commentators. Seneca labeled such unions “Marriage more shameful than adultery.” In A.D. 52 a law was passed enslaving any freeborn woman who cohabited with a slave without the knowledge or consent of his master. In the third century A.D., the emperor Septimus Severus ruled that it was illegal for a Roman woman to free one of her slaves in o
rder to marry him.33
On the other hand, the upper classes sometimes required their subjects or employees to marry. Around 160 B.C., the Roman statesman and moralist Cato the Elder wrote a book telling wealthy Roman landowners how to run their estates. He said the estate’s overseer needed a wife to relieve him of all housework, “since he ought to go out with the slaves at first light, and return at twilight, exhausted by the work he has done.”Assuming it was the landowner rather than the overseer who would choose the wife, Cato recommended that she should be neither ugly nor beautiful, for “ugliness will disgust her partner, while excessive beauty will make him lazy.”34
Even when lower-class individuals got to choose their own mates, beauty and attraction were seldom the primary criteria. A strong arm was generally more important in a prospective spouse than a shapely leg. In many villages, choice of a mate was restricted by sparse population and poor transportation. You could not get too picky when you might meet only a handful of potential marriage partners in your entire life. Few individuals of modest means had either the inclination or the opportunity to seek a soul mate. What they really needed was a work partner.
The same consideration held true somewhat higher on the economic ladder. Among landowners and craftsmen, choosing a wife was like hiring your most important employee. The Old Testament contains a detailed job description:
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall
have no need of spoil.
She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her
hands.
She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her
household, and a portion to her maidens.
Marriage, a History Page 9
