Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  Cicero was entirely wrong. To Octavian, he was an arrogant, cantankerous but potentially useful old man who probably had been complicit in Caesar’s murder. Visiting him had simply been prudent. Cicero had also misread Octavian as an inexperienced youth who would probably get his comeuppance in Rome, where there would be plenty of ambitious men to challenge the dictator’s heir. He had not discerned Octavian’s diamond-hard determination, belied as it was by the slender, almost puny body. As the historian Velleius Paterculus later put it, the self-contained Octavian was a man who “spurned mortal advice and preferred to aim at dangerous eminence rather than at safe obscurity.” To that extent, he was not so different from Cleopatra. She could have chosen “safe obscurity” rather than unrolling from a carpet at Caesar’s feet.

  Octavian did not receive the comeuppance Cicero had anticipated. Knowing the excitement and interest it would cause, he planned his arrival in Rome in late April 44 with care. To avoid any seeming arrogance or presumption, he separated from most of his followers and entered the city with only a few attendants. Yet, according to Suetonius, his arrival in Rome did not go unmarked—a shimmering, rainbow-like halo ringed the sun, though the skies were clear. Many took it as an omen from the gods of great things to come.*

  Octavian had intentionally chosen to arrive while Antony was away attending to the resettlement of large groups of Caesar’s veterans in Campania. As soon as Antony marched back into Rome, Octavian requested an interview. The young man’s arrival put Antony in a quandary. Until now Antony had been the acknowledged leader of the Caesarians but also had managed to hold the Senate. He had achieved a delicate balance, but if Octavian began to press for vengeance against Caesar’s murderers, maintaining that equilibrium would become impossible. If he openly supported Octavian, he risked alienating much of the Senate and, of course, the Liberators and their factions, while if he refused, he would anger Caesar’s friends and veterans. Antony therefore must have reasoned that he needed metaphorically to play for time, both to think and to assess his potential rival. He did so clumsily, at their first meeting literally keeping Octavian waiting in an anteroom. When he was finally ushered in, Antony was blunt and dismissive and, when Octavian asked him to hand over Caesar’s papers and money, downright unhelpful. Falling back on technicalities, he argued that Octavian’s adoption as Caesar’s son had not yet been formalized and that separating out Caesar’s money from public funds would take time.

  Off to a bad start, the relationship between the two men, who should have had much in common, would soon get much worse. On a personal level, Antony was probably suspicious of the motives of the young Octavian and jealous of him. Caesar had named Antony, his most trusted commander, as one of several secondary heirs, while Octavian had inherited nearly everything. Antony’s resentment of Octavian may explain why he soon began a propaganda campaign against Octavian to denigrate his lineage and diminish his dignity. He alleged that one of his great-grandfathers “had been only a freedman, a ropemaker . . . and his grandfather a money-changer.” Another great-grandfather, Antony sneered, had kept a bakehouse and a perfumery. Antony would also deploy the usual Roman smear tactics of accusing Octavian of playing the passive role in a homosexual relationship, alleging that “Julius Caesar made him submit to unnatural practices as the price of adoption.” Antony’s brother, not to be outdone in accusations of unmanliness, claimed that Octavian “used to soften the hairs on his legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells.” A desire to diminish Octavian’s unique relationship to Caesar and thus his status may also explain why, if Suetonius is correct, Antony told the Senate “that Caesar had, in fact, acknowledged Caesarion’s paternity.”

  Yet for the moment, the quiet-spoken albeit insistent Octavian seemed a less immediate threat than did Caesar’s murderers and certain to support any move against them. Antony was particularly worried what would happen when the Liberators took command of the provinces and the armies assigned to them before Caesar’s death, fearing that they might use them as power bases to gather forces and money for a move on Rome. One of them, Decimus Brutus, was already in Cisalpine Gaul and thus in control of the key northern gateway into Italy. In early June, Antony managed, through a vote in the popular assembly, to strip him of the province and have himself appointed governor in his place for the next five years. This angered the Senate, who thought it their right to control provincial appointments and jealously guarded this prerogative. Antony also pressured the Senate into giving Brutus and Cassius special commissions to oversee Rome’s corn supplies from Asia and Sicily rather than their assigned provinces. This was exile under another name. The two men were left angered and humiliated but could not decide how to assert themselves. Cicero at around this time went to an inconclusive council of war attended by Cassius, Brutus and their wives at which Brutus’ mother, Servilia, played a key role. Her promise to use her still considerable influence at least to get the corn commissions revoked was one of the few actions agreed upon. Cicero wondered why he had bothered to go, commenting, “I found the ship breaking up, or rather already wrecked. No plan, no thought, no method.”

  Octavian, however, did have method and probably a greater certainty about his long-term goals than any other of the Roman leaders. He began to build alliances and to pressure and undermine Antony, who, he claimed with justice, was obstructing the legislation that would ratify his adoption by Caesar. He also claimed that Antony had helped himself to money belonging either to himself, as Caesar’s heir, or to the Roman treasury and now would not, or could not, free the money to honor Caesar’s bequests. In July, Octavian staged lavish games in his adoptive father’s honor and used the occasion to fulfill Caesar’s legacy to the people of Rome, stipulated in his will, of three hundred sesterces a man. Octavian made abundantly clear to the public that he was paying this from his own purse, although he may in fact have used some of the contents of Caesar’s war chest for the Parthian campaign, which he was said to have seized on his way to Rome. He also attempted to display the golden throne and wreath that the Senate had granted Caesar. Seemingly anxious to avoid a confrontation between the Caesarian and anti-Caesarian factions by Octavian’s glorifying of Caesar, Antony refused to allow even this, causing the crowds to bellow their disapproval.

  Popular anger against Antony mounted when, for seven evenings in a row, a bright comet flared in the sky to the north, as if symbolizing the spirit of the divine Caesar elevated to heaven.* To ensure people did not forget the portent, Octavian ordered a flaming star to be placed on the forehead of Caesar’s statue. “You, boy, you owe everything to your name,” Antony taunted Octavian. But the boy was quietly outflanking the man in the propaganda war to which Roman politics had descended, making every use of his name to stake his claim to be Caesar’s political as well as personal heir.

  Whatever the two protagonists said in public, it must have been obvious to them both that they coveted the same thing—to succeed Julius Caesar as the most powerful man in Rome. Each may have had his own ideas about how such power should be deployed and it also must have been obvious that a confrontation was not far away.

  Perhaps influenced by Servilia’s behind-the-scenes lobbying and with Octavian becoming ever more aggressive, Antony decided to conciliate the Liberators. He may well have recognized that, in any contest for the leadership of the hard-line Caesarians alone, he would be likely to lose out to Octavian and that therefore his best chance of success lay in capturing the middle ground. Accordingly, to find somewhere they could go with honor but where they would pose little threat to stability, in late July Antony convinced the Senate to award Brutus the governorship of Crete and Cassius the governorship of Cyrenaica. He addressed the Senate with such silkily conciliatory words that, learning of them, Cicero abandoned a proposed journey to Athens to visit his son, who was studying there. Instead he turned his steps back toward Rome, hoping but perhaps not expecting to find a less aggressively autocratic Antony acknowledging the authority of the Senate.

  H
owever, Antony’s conciliatory tactics, by giving his critics courage to speak out, backfired. When the Senate met on August 1, Caesar’s father-in-law, Piso, who had once offered to mediate between Caesar and Pompey, lambasted Antony for dictatorial behavior and fraudulent use of Caesar’s papers. Suspecting the hand of Brutus and Cassius behind the attack, Antony tossed aside the velvet glove and, in an instant reversal of tactics, immediately issued a consular edict threatening Brutus and Cassius with force for reneging on various official responsibilities. He also wrote them an aggressive letter. Their reply of August 4 was equally mettlesome. “We are amazed that you are so little able to control your animosity that you reproach us with the death of Caesar,” they said self-righteously before themselves issuing an implicit threat by noting that Caesar had not lived long once he began to play the king. By late August 44 both Brutus and Cassius had abandoned Italy, not for the provinces they had been allocated but for Macedonia and Syria.

  Cicero reached Rome in time to attend a Senate meeting called by Antony on September 1 and was cheered by the crowds as he entered the city. One of Antony’s purposes in summoning the Senate was to propose a special day to honor Julius Caesar each year, an overt bid to woo the pro-Caesarean party and anathema to Cicero. Weary from his journey and wanting time to assess the situation, the sixty-two-year-old stayed away from the Senate. Interpreting his absence as a slight to his dignity, Antony threatened to pull Cicero’s house down and did not attend the Senate himself the following day. Cicero, however, did and launched the first of a series of increasingly vitriolic attacks on Antony, which he nicknamed the “Philippics.”*

  To the old statesman, any means of attack was valid. Antony had become to him as great a menace to the republic and its traditions of senatorial authority as any Catiline or Caesar. Cicero used the Philippics to detail Antony’s supposed sexual depravities, calling him “a public whore” and raking up his affair with Curio, in which he alleged Antony had been the shameful, passive partner. His assault embraced Fulvia, whom he portrayed as a malignant influence, just as she had been on his old enemy, her previous husband, Clodius. “Life is not merely a matter of breathing,” he lectured an uncertain Senate. “The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude—but our city is not.” Liberty, he insisted, was worth dying for. Lathering himself into self-righteous indignation, he pilloried Antony as a drunken, vomiting, womanizing wastrel who, hell-bent on his own glory, continued to abuse the constitution and the Senate.

  Antony withdrew to his villa in the country to consider his response. On September 19 he marched into the Senate, “not to speak but as usual spew up his words,” as Cicero sneered to Cassius. Cicero himself was not there to hear Antony’s accusations of how, when Cicero was consul, he had put citizens to death without trial after the Catiline conspiracy, including Antony’s own stepfather, and had set Caesar and Pompey at one another’s throats.

  Cicero bided his time. He knew that what people feared most was a bloodbath and that Antony’s strength was that he offered stability to a Rome still dazed by events and demoralized by memories of civil war. Cicero needed to find an alternative figurehead, and his gaze fell on the slender, sharp-eyed young man whom several months earlier he had snubbed—Octavian. Over the next few months the two would become allies of expedience. Octavian would conveniently forget, for the time being at least, that Cicero had celebrated Caesar’s murder, while the elder statesman would flatter himself that, whatever Octavian’s unfortunate forebears, he was an intelligent, impressionable young man who could be molded in a more republican image, a man infinitely better than that “gladiator looking for a massacre,” as he had derided Antony.

  Caesar’s heir was by now locked in a tribal dance with Antony as complex as any internal power struggles of the Ptolemies. Alarmed by Antony’s breach with the Senate and his growing hostility toward Octavian, Antony’s officers pleaded with him to avoid an open break. He responded by staging a public reconciliation with Octavian on the Capitol. But just two days later came sensational news of a plot orchestrated by Octavian to murder Antony. Octa-vian probably correctly vigorously protested his innocence and claimed it was all a conspiracy to discredit him. Nevertheless, on October 9, claiming his life was at risk, Antony departed for Brundisium with Fulvia to greet the four legions he had summoned home from Macedonia to enable him to oust Decimus Brutus from Cisalpine Gaul. As his officers feared, he was becoming isolated and hence vulnerable to his enemies.

  Cicero, who was among the first, most vindictive and influential of these, accused Antony of planning first to bribe the legions and then to bring them to Rome “to subjugate us.” Octavian, though, was the one doing the bribing, sending agents to Brundisium equipped with propaganda leaflets intended to vilify Antony and buy the legionaries over to him. He also traveled around Campania with carts brimming with money, recruiting his own troops. This was entirely illegal, since he did so without the Senate’s authority, but Octavian’s lavish offers of more than two years’ pay up front soon attracted three thousand eager volunteers from the colonies of Caesar’s veterans.

  Antony, meanwhile, was having a hard time in Brundisium with the legionaries newly arrived from Macedonia. Soldiers throughout this period rightly sensed they had more to gain in terms of payments, pensions and plunder from a single strong man than from the diffuse rule of the Senate, but they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Antony in the role of a strong, independent leader. Why had he weakly allowed their beloved Caesar’s assassins to go free? they demanded. And, less nobly, why was the bounty he was offering them so much less than what Octavian was promising his recruits? So dangerous was the situation that Antony had lists of the dissenters drawn up and ordered those whose names were randomly selected from amongst them by lot to be battered to death in front of himself and Fulvia. So close was she standing that blood spattered her face. Having, as he thought, quelled the mutiny, Antony sent three legions north and hurried back to Rome with the remaining legion, the elite “Larks,” to take firm control of the city and then to deal with Octavian and his illegal army by whatever means necessary.

  Learning of Antony’s advance, Octavian was sufficiently alarmed to send repeated and urgent messages to Cicero asking what to do, even offering to lead the republicans in a war against Antony. After some agonizing, Cicero stilled any doubts he had about his ability to control Octavian and advised him to take his men to Rome as fast as possible, believing, as he wrote to a friend, he would “have the city rabble behind him and respectable opinion too if he convinces them of his sincerity.” Octavian reached the city before Antony, on November 10, and camped on the Campus Martius outside its walls. Here he addressed his forces, damning Antony while lauding his adoptive father, Caesar. However, his veteran recruits had marched to Rome under the impression they were to fight against the Liberators. Antony, they protested, had been loyal to Caesar, just as he had been to the soldiers he commanded. Appian related how some, disillusioned and upset, “asked if they could return to their homes.” Helpless to stop his new army from breaking up, Octavian watched as at least two thirds of his force melted away. In despair, he withdrew the remnants north.

  Antony arrived with his Larks several days later. Delighted that Octavian had put himself so clearly in the wrong by flouting the law and bringing the forces he had raised illegally to Rome, he ordered the Senate to meet on November 24, declaring that any senator who was absent would be considered a traitor. He heaped more verbal ordure on Octavian’s head. Caesar’s heir was, he said, provincial, effete and the descendant of manual laborers—all deep insults to a Roman of his time and class. Antony even contemplated trying to declare Octavian an enemy of the state, but while he pondered whether he would win sufficient support for this drastic step, alarming reports reached him that two of his Macedonian legions, including the veteran Martian legion still smarting from Antony’s treatment of them at Brundisium, had deserted to Octavian, seeing him as the more likely to avenge C
aesar and reward them well. Thus they readjusted the balance of power once again.

  Accordingly, Antony decided to set off for Cisalpine Gaul to dislodge Decimus Brutus. Once in control of this strategically important province, he reasoned, he could retrench and deal with his other enemies. Before leaving, on November 28 Antony again summoned the Senate, this time to what was a highly irregular evening meeting, at which he reallocated the provinces between his supporters. A number of senators and wealthy citizens, unnerved by Octavian’s recent illegal and bellicose acts, so reminiscent of Caesar at his most dictatorial, swore their allegiance to Antony and bade him a reluctant farewell as he marched north. According to Appian, “He got a splendid send-off.”

  The news filtering through to Cleopatra during those months must have been as confused and fragmented as the situation itself. For the moment, with the three-year-old Caesarion by her side on the throne as Ptolemy XV Caesar, she could concentrate only on strengthening her hold on the country. The fact that no serious unrest seems to have occurred during her absence in Rome suggests that her authority had not been challenged and that her officials had governed well.