by Stacy Schiff
After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour—at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra was not yet reinstalled in Alexandria when the first tensions were felt. They were entirely public: “All over the city,” Appian relates, “Octavian would climb up on to any elevated spot and accuse Antony at the top of his voice.” Antony might treat him with as much indignity as he liked, he might condemn him to a life of poverty, thundered Octavian, but would he please “stop plundering his property until the citizens have had their legacy?” He could then take all the rest. Antony hotly bellowed back. He was insulting and obstructionist wherever possible. The Senate did nothing to discourage either man, preferring instead, as Dio has it and as Antony had predicted, “to set them at odds with each other.” Antony’s men urged reconciliation, all the more crucial as the assassins consolidated their forces. Antony apologized. He promised to control his temper provided that Octavian did the same. One uneasy truce followed another. Antony broke the second with a sensational charge: in October he accused Octavian of bribing Antony’s bodyguards to murder him. (In truth Octavian had only tried to bribe them to defect, a practice of which he would make a regular habit. As for Mark Antony’s safety, Octavian offered personally to stand guard at his bedside.) Most believed the charge preposterous. Some did not, which left Octavian apoplectic. On one occasion he was reduced to pummeling the locked door of Mark Antony’s house in an attempt to clear his name, wildly shouting oath after oath at the servants and at a plank of wood.
Courted assiduously by Octavian, who wrote to him daily, Cicero played for time. It was a delicate business. Were Octavian to come to power, the assassins were lost. Moreover, Octavian was at once alarmingly impressionable and curiously resistant to advice from his elders. Cicero had particular difficulty with the young man’s florid encomiums of Caesar. “On the other hand,” Cicero reasoned, “if he is beaten, you can see that Antony will be intolerable, so one can’t tell which to prefer.” Antony was bent on plunder, Octavian blinded by vengeance. Cicero hemmed and hawed, fixing finally on one certainty, which he repeated like a mantra: “The man who crushes Mark Antony will have finished this ghastly and perilous war.” By the fall of 44, defending the commonwealth, or what remained of it, became to Cicero synonymous with mauling Antony, against whom he fulminated for the next six months. It was in the course of those harrowing weeks that Cleopatra found herself entangled with Antony and Octavian’s real enemies, collaborating as she was, ingenuously and disingenuously, with Dolabella and Cassius.
In the rabid attacks we know as the Philippics Cicero set out to destroy Caesar’s former lieutenant. Antony was at best “an audacious rascal,” at worst an erratic, drunken, filthy, shameless, depraved, licentious, pillaging madman. “In truth,” asserted Cicero, “we ought not to think of him as a human being, but as a most outrageous beast.” Certainly Antony gave Cicero plenty to work with. He had mismanaged funds. He had indulged in scandalous affairs. He had appropriated property. He had made a spectacle of himself, at one point allegedly attaching lions to a chariot for a joyride through Rome. Excess and conviviality were his middle names. His colorful stunts accounted in large part for his popularity; to his men he was irresistible. There had been ample carousing, even if “the fume of debauch” did not attach itself to Antony quite as tenaciously as Cicero insisted. He was all the same happy to retail and amplify tales of Antony’s indignities. The morning he had opened his mouth to speak in the Senate and instead vomited the putrid remains of a wedding feast into his lap was not one Cicero would ever let him forget. Antony was henceforth “the belching, vomiting brute,” prone to “spewing rather than speaking.” He had no ambition beyond providing for Rome’s actors, gamblers, pimps. On this subject Cicero was inexhaustible. As he had admitted long before: “It is easy to inveigh against profligacy; daylight would soon fail me if I were to endeavour to expose everything which could be said upon that topic: seduction, adultery, wantonness, extravagance, the topic is illimitable.”* So he proved on the subject of Mark Antony.
As the abuse continued, two new themes emerged. Octavian inevitably went from being “the boy” to “my young friend” to “this extraordinary youngster” to “that heaven-sent young man,” on whom Rome’s hopes rested. Also as Cicero ranted, Antony gained a partner in crime. Summoning every speck of evidence, rumor, and innuendo, Cicero included Fulvia, Antony’s wife of three years, in his rabid denunciations. Fulvia had participated equally in doling out appointments, auctioning off provinces, embezzling state funds, asserted Cicero. He indicted her for her greed, her ambition, her cruelty, her guile. He charged Antony with the worst crime that could be leveled against Caesar’s former lieutenant: Mark Antony, he bellowed, “would prefer to answer to a most audacious woman than the Senate and Roman people.” With his have-you-no-decency offensive Cicero settled an invaluable inheritance on Octavian, who would avail himself of each and every line, without once crediting the best ghostwriter in history.
BY NOVEMBER 43 Octavian and Antony had little choice but to join forces. It was that winter that Brutus and Cassius united in the eastern Aegean, Cassius having relinquished his expedition against Cleopatra. The assassins were well armed and well funded; bowing to necessity, Antony and Octavian swallowed their mutual disdain and submitted to a formal alliance. In it they included Lepidus, who commanded a particularly spirited army. Late in the month the three came together on a small island in the midst of present-day Bologna, “to exchange enmity for friendship.” They frisked one another for concealed daggers and sat down to talk, in full view of their armies. There they remained for two days of dawn-to-dusk discussions, unsurprising given the conflicting agendas. As the Roman historian Florus put it much later: “Lepidus was actuated by a desire for wealth, which he might expect to gain from confusion in the State; Antony desired vengeance upon those who had declared him an enemy; Caesar [Octavian] was spurred on by the thought that his father’s death was still unpunished and that the survival of Cassius and Brutus was an insult to his departed spirit.” At the end of two days the three nonetheless hammered out an agreement, essentially appointing themselves dictators for five years and carving up the empire among them. Each man swore to uphold the terms and joined hands. On the mainland, their exultant armies saluted one another. The agreement—to be known later as the Second Triumvirate—was to take effect as of January 42. Cleopatra could only have been relieved. Together Octavian and Antony had a chance. She was in no position to head off the combined forces of Brutus and Cassius, who would show no mercy to an ally of Caesar’s, less so to one who ruled with his child.
The new triumvirs addressed as well the pressing question of finances. The money was all in Asia, where it streamed freely into the assassins’ coffers. In Rome the treasury remained empty. That state of affairs led inevitably to the sticky subject of personal enemies. The three men withdrew to compile a list in private. There was some high-level horse trading as they offered up “their staunchest friends in return for their bitterest enemies.” In such a way Antony sacrificed a much-loved uncle for Cicero. Lepidus threw over a brother. Your chances of survival were especially poor if you had funds at your disposal. “Extra names were constantly added to the list, some from enmity, others only because they had been a nuisance, or were friends of enemies, or enemies of friends, or were notably wealthy,” Appian tells us. Separately the triumvirs hastened with their men to Rome, where they presided over a season of bloodletting. “The whole city,” notes Dio, “filled with corpses,” often left in the street to be devoured by dogs and birds, or cast into the river. Some of the proscribed descended for safety into wells or filthy sewers. Others took refuge in chimneys.*
Having abandoned various plans for escape, Cicero was at his country villa, south of Rome, on December 7, 43. He had lain down for a rest when a crow flew in the window and began to peck at the bedcovers. His servants read this as a sign of impending danger; they begged Cicero to allow them to carry him to the sea. He would be wel
l hidden in the dense wood along the way. Reluctantly he climbed into his litter, a copy of Euripides in his hand. Minutes later a centurion broke down the door of his villa. Exacting the information he needed, he ran ahead to intercept the litter on the path. Cicero ordered his terrified servants to set him down among the trees; he wanted to look his murderer in the eye. The great man was unkempt and haggard, “his face wasted with anxiety.” Drawing the curtain fully open, he stretched his neck out as far as he could, so that it might be cut properly. He suspected that he was in the hands of an amateur, as indeed he was. With some inexpert sawing, Cicero’s head was severed from his body. By Antony’s prior command the hands that had penned the Philippics were hacked off as well, to be sent from the seaside for display in the Senate. It was said that Fulvia—a longtime enemy of Cicero’s for her own reasons—first spit on the head, forcing open the mouth and piercing the tongue with a hairpin. In the end two thousand prominent Romans lay dead, including nearly a third of the Senate. The triumvirs found themselves unopposed in Rome, at the command of forty-three legions, and broke, the proscriptions having proved less profitable than anticipated.
Ten months later the armies of Cassius and Brutus met those of Antony and Octavian near Philippi, on a broad plain in eastern Macedonia. Two battles ensued, of unprecedented scale and dire import. One side offered to lead Rome toward autocracy. The other fought still for a republic. All was complicated by the fact that the forces were well seasoned and similarly trained; it was difficult for either to achieve supremacy over an enemy that spoke the same language, shared the same tactics, and had submitted to identical training. The two armies of more than 100,000 men met in fierce, face-to-face combat, amid choking clouds of dust, with drawn swords and bare hands, over the crash of shields, shouts of exhaustion and terrible groans, and, ultimately, with horrific casualties on both sides. Only after a second engagement did Octavian and Antony—their men on the brink of starvation—prevail over the Republicans. Cassius committed suicide, dispatching himself with the same dagger he had sunk into Caesar. Brutus threw himself upon his sword. The victors approached his corpse differently. Antony removed his expensive purple cloak and laid it carefully over the body, to be buried with his brilliant former colleague. Shortly thereafter Octavian arrived on the scene. He ordered Brutus’s head severed from the body and displayed in Rome.*
Philippi was still a battle of ideas; in its wake, liberty and democracy could be said to have fallen, Caesar’s death to have been avenged. Antony now shaved the beard he had grown in mourning. No issue divided Mark Antony and Octavian, who would have to invent one; they were two men in search of a conflict. Across the Mediterranean, Cleopatra—managing domestic crises of her own—would have been within her rights to wonder why the Romans did not subscribe to the tidier monarchical model, given the bloodshed their personal ambitions had over the previous years cost them. As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.”
Again in 42 Antony and Octavian divided the Mediterranean world between them, this time shunting Lepidus aside. With signed agreements in hand they parted ways. Antony emerged in his glory, very much the senior member of the partnership. The military victory had been his; he took from Philippi a reputation for invincibility, one that would inspire terror for years to come. He headed east, to restore order and raise funds. Octavian had spent the better part of the month sick, carted about the battle site on a litter. He headed west to regain his health. He was to demobilize the army and distribute lands to the veterans, paid only at the end of a campaign. The world was now in the hands of two men who got on as well as any with diametrically opposed interests and radically different dispositions, one of them ruthless, calculating, patient, the other sentimental, simple, impulsive, which is to say that civil war would rage for the rest of Cleopatra’s lifetime. Had it not, we are unlikely ever to have heard of the last queen of Egypt, who stepped into a role that—in part thanks to Cicero—seemed scripted for her in advance.
VI
WE MUST OFTEN SHIFT THE SAILS WHEN WE WISH TO ARRIVE IN PORT
“Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.”
—ARISTOTLE
EVEN AFTER DELLIUS’S visit, even after the specific instructions, Cleopatra stalled. She had ample reason to do so. The situation was volatile, the stakes immense. Having adroitly maneuvered her way through years of reckless Roman infighting and backstabbing, she had no intention of making a false step now. Dellius had not pressed for explanations but she owed them all the same. She had remained above the fray when the Caesarians needed her. She had issued no declarations of neutrality. Intentionally or not, she had backed her lover’s murderer. She had little choice but to offer an accounting. As a client queen, as a friend and ally of Rome, she also had little choice but to cultivate and mollify Mark Antony. While she may well have preferred to steer clear of him—she had a perfectly good idea what he wanted—Antony controlled the East. Egypt fell under his purview. He was moreover the much-lauded hero of Philippi, where he had seemed uncannily to have been everywhere and accomplished everything at once. As he and his legions had made their way across Asia he was greeted by adoring crowds in Athens, as a god in Ephesus. At forty-two, curly-haired and square-jawed, he was still a chiseled, broad-shouldered paragon of rude health. He installed himself in Tarsus, the flourishing, administrative capital of Cilicia, near the southeastern coast of modern Turkey. To that lush plain, encircled by the steep mountains of southern Asia, he summoned Cleopatra. The requests arrived one after the other. She let them pile up.
Was she temporizing for effect, or engaged in elaborate preparations? She could never be accused of dithering, though at several junctures she did wait purposefully for the air to clear. Presumably this was one of those moments. Plutarch assures us that she entertained no fears, although they would have been warranted; others were punished for their lack of cooperation. Instead he wrote the delay down to strategy. Cleopatra believed Dellius’s reassuring reports but had greater faith yet in her own powers. They had now blossomed. Caesar “had known her when she was still a girl and inexperienced in affairs,” asserts Plutarch, “but she was going to visit Antony at the very time when women have most brilliant beauty and are at the acme of intellectual power.” (As an astute commentator has noted, this “puts the height of beauty encouragingly late and the height of intellectual power depressingly early.” Cleopatra was not yet thirty.) With “the greatest confidence in herself, and in the charms and sorceries of her own person,” she headed off, not because she was at last ready, or could hesitate no longer, but essentially propelled by scorn. She received many letters from Antony and from his associates, but “she took no account of these orders.” Ultimately she sailed, concludes Plutarch, “as if in mockery” of the Roman. It was late summer.
Confident though she may have been, contemptuous though she may have appeared, Cleopatra left nothing in her preparations to chance. It was as if she knew she was playing not only to Mark Antony but far beyond him as well. Certainly she had heard of the elaborate scenes that had greeted Antony elsewhere. Incense and entertainment had followed him across the continent. In Ephesus the women of the town had met him dressed as bacchantes, the men as fauns and satyrs. Singing his Dionysian praises, they had led him into the city, full of ivy-wrapped wands, resonant with pipes and flutes and harps and shouts of acclaim. The invitations poured in; all Asia paid tribute and vied for his favor. From Dellius as from others, Cleopatra would have known she was entering a sort of sweepstakes for Antony’s attention. She seemed determined to conjure a display so stunning it would propel Plutarch to Shakespearean heights, as it would elicit from Shakespeare his richest poetry. And she succeeded. In the annals of indelible entran
ces—the wooden horse into Troy; Christ into Jerusalem; Benjamin Franklin into Philadelphia; Henry IV, Charles Lindbergh, Charles de Gaulle, into Paris; Howard Carter into King Tut’s tomb; the Beatles onto Ed Sullivan’s stage—Cleopatra’s alone lifts off the page in iridescent color, amid inexhaustible, expensive clouds of incense, a sensational, simultaneous assault on every sense. She must have made the seven-hundred-mile trip across the Mediterranean by naval galley, pausing for overnight stays, as she had earlier, along the coast of the Levant. At the mouth of the Cydnus sat a lagoon, in which Cleopatra likely transferred her entourage to a local barge, reconfigured and exquisitely decorated for the trip upriver, probably fewer than ten miles in antiquity. A fully manned galley would have traveled with 170 rowers; for her purposes, she may have eliminated as many as a third. An escort of supply ships followed behind. She traveled with an elaborate stage set. Often with Cleopatra there is but a slim convergence between the life and the legend. Tarsus is one of the rare points where the two fully overlap.
