Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  Even though Antony, “undermined in confidence and suspicious of everything,” made an example by executing two other would-be deserters, having one, a senator, torn apart by horses and subjecting the other, an Arab ruler, to torture, presumably to find out who else was wavering, Enobarbus’ was not the last defection. Antony needed quick, decisive and successful military action to prevent his forces—and with them his chances of victory—from dissipating through desertion and disease.

  After an abortive attempt by the fleet to break out of the gulf, Canidius Crassus, Antony’s land commander, urged him to withdraw his army northeastward over the Pindos Mountains to Macedonia and Thrace, where he could recruit further troops and face Octavian with a good chance of success. Although previously a vocal advocate of Cleopatra’s presence in the camp, he now recommended to Antony that he send her home to Egypt.

  The surviving accounts of the campaign (by Dio Cassius and Plutarch) record almost nothing of Cleopatra until this time. Two of the most significant glimpses of her are in the form of jokes. In the first, when Octavian’s forces, in their initial advance from the Greek coast, captured a place called Toryne, whose name can mean “ladle” or “stirring spoon,” she punned, “What is so terrible in Octavian sitting on a ladle?”—a joke that in translation at least says more for her courage than for her fabled wit. (In Cleopatra’s defense, some scholars suggest that toryne was also a slang word for “penis,” investing the joke with a cruder but more effective humor.) In the second incident, she was the target of a joke, or rather jibe, by Dellius, who upbraided her after they had been besieged that the wine they were now obliged to drink was sour, whereas even Sarmentus, a page at Octavian’s court, whom gossip alleged was also Octavian’s catamite, quaffed the best Italian vintages.

  It is hard to comprehend the strength of character Cleopatra must have needed during her time at Actium, both as a woman and as the ruler of Egypt. As far as is known, none of the other leaders had their wives or mistresses with them as Antony had. There would have been no noblewomen other than those in her own retinue with whom she could discuss events. She had to be constantly alert to Antony’s moods, which were probably exacerbated by drink and the paranoia and depression it induced, not to mention the inactivity he so hated and a real consciousness of his declining fortunes.

  Also, Cleopatra cannot but have been aware that she was a divisive force in the testosterone-charged camp, disliked and distrusted not only by the republicans but also by her fellow eastern rulers for her privileged status. At least as important as protecting her personal position, she had to protect the interests of her Egyptian kingdom, whose treasury was funding much of the war and much of whose treasure, in the form of gold and silver, was with her in the camp. Her fate and that of her family and her kingdom were inextricably linked to Antony’s. She could never succeed without him. Yet without her, Antony’s position, though weakened financially, would be enhanced politically.

  There was, she knew, a valid alternative to Canidius’ strategy of abandoning the fleet and marching over the mountains to Macedonia. This was to load the ships with the best of the legionaries and all the treasure and head south toward Egypt, Syria and Libya, where there were at least seven legions to be added to the hardened core that got away with the fleet. Egypt was, as previous centuries had shown, easy to defend, and there they could recoup their strength. Those of Antony’s legions left ashore at Actium could march back overland as best they could, since if the fleet successfully broke out, Octavian and Agrippa’s best forces would be bound to follow it. Such a strategy had considerable advantages over the whole army marching to Macedonia. The latter would be risky in itself, and any victory, unless a complete rout, would be difficult to follow up because if Antony abandoned his ships in the gulf, Octavian would have absolute dominance of the sea.

  Historical accounts don’t reveal whether Cleopatra made these arguments privately to Antony. However, they do record that she attended an army council where, presumably the only woman and surrounded by hostile, uniformed Romans, she put these arguments and succeeded in convincing Antony, who in turn carried most of his supporters with him. But Dellius, so adept at switching horses at the right time that one ancient writer called him “the circus rider of the civil wars,” went over to Octavian and disclosed Antony’s plans.

  At around this time, Octavian ordered a commando squad to infiltrate Antony’s camp and attempt to capture or kill him as he walked down beside the palisades to the harbor accompanied by only a single member of his staff. However, they leapt from concealment too soon and, mistaking the staff officer for Antony, carried him off while Antony made his escape with less than dignified haste.

  Before Antony and his commanders could attempt a breakout, they had to review the number of ships and rowers available to them. According to Plutarch, Antony had been reduced to “press-ganging from long-suffering Greece, travellers, mule drivers, reapers and boys not yet of military age” to man his vessels. Yet even so, disease, deprivation and desertion meant that there were more ships than rowers to man them. The ships had been lying at anchor for months and some were likely to have become unseaworthy through worm infestation or slow through the accumulation of barnacles and other marine life. Antony no doubt had as many of the best ships careened and rewaxed as he could in the time available and burned the worst. Then began the process of selecting which legions were to embark. Plutarch described how those chosen were reluctant: “an infantry centurion, covered with scars from very many battles for Antony, burst into tears as Antony was passing and said, ‘Imperator, why do you despise these wounds and this sword of mine and pin your hopes on wretched planks of wood. Let Egyptians and Phoenicians fight at sea but give us land, that is where we’re accustomed to stand.’ ”

  It was equally important not to alarm the soldiers, including Antony’s elite legion, the Larks, into thinking that they would be left to fight their way alone over the mountains against superior forces. When galleys were prepared for battle, sails were usually left ashore to lighten the vessels and thus to make them more maneuverable as well as to free space for fighting men. However, on this occasion sails were needed, since it was a breakout that was intended and sails would allow a galley to make six knots in open waters while the rowers rested. When the legionaries spotted sails, spars and rigging being loaded aboard, Antony calmed their concerns by asserting that the added speed they would give would be necessary in a victorious pursuit so that not a single one of his enemies should escape. However, no one seems to have noticed Cleopatra’s preparations. Her treasure would have been stowed on her ships discreetly and her retinue taken aboard perhaps under cover of darkness.

  The battle that was at hand would decide the fate of the Mediterranean world and would be the last major naval engagement there for many hundreds of years, not surpassed until Lepanto in 1571. Antony had himself rowed around the fleet, encouraging his men to stand firm and fight exactly as if they were ashore. Octa-vian, all too aware of Antony’s intentions and conscious of the power omens held for his superstitious troops, put it about, according to Plutarch, that as the preparations for battle were being made, “while it was still dark and he was walking towards the ships he met a man driving a donkey. He asked the man’s name and the man said, ‘My name is Lucky and my donkey’s name is Victor.’ This is why when Octavian later erected a display of captured ships’ prows near by he also set up a bronze statue of a donkey and a man.”

  At last all was ready, and on September 2, 31, the rowers bent their backs to the oars as Antony’s galleys began to move slowly through the water. The twenty thousand legionaries and two thousand auxiliaries aboard tugged nervously at their equipment, conscious that even if they could swim, if they fell into the water they would be impeded by their mail coats, which they could not discard without great risk of being wounded. After some initial maneuverings to get into formation, the ships headed slowly for the mouth of the gulf, past the encampments and fortifications of the fifty thous
and or so troops who had been left to fight their way out as best they could under Canidius Crassus. As they emerged into the open sea, Antony’s ships deployed into four squadrons, three of which, containing a total of perhaps 230 ships, formed a double line stretching from one shore to the other in order to protect the fourth squadron, the sixty or so Egyptian ships which were positioned to their rear.

  Octavian’s four hundred ships, with perhaps as many as forty thousand legionaries on board, had been early to sea and formed up in an opposing line. He stationed his vessels some way to the seaward of Antony, anxious to lure him further forward and thus to lessen his chances of retreating back into the gulf if necessary.

  At first, very little happened as the seminaked rowers rested on their oars, sweating as the heat rose in the airless confines of the rowing decks. While the conditions that day were not recorded, by noon at that time of year the temperature can easily exceed 90° Fahrenheit (33° Celsius) and the difference in the temperature of the air over the sea and land produces an onshore breeze that starts to rise at about this time and strengthens as the afternoon wears on. Even though his sails were stowed, Antony was at some risk of being blown back on shore, so he could wait no longer and headed for the enemy. Plutarch described how the rowers in Antony’s large ships could not get up sufficient speed, and hence momentum, to ram and that Octavian’s admirals also preferred close-quarters action to ramming the reinforced sides of Antony’s ships and thus risking damaging their own, more slender vessels. Hence, “the fight resembled a land battle or more precisely an assault on a walled town. Three or four of Octavian’s ships would cluster round one of Antony’s while the marines wielded catapults, spears, javelins and flaming missiles; the troops on Antony’s ships even shot at the enemy with catapults mounted on wooden towers.”

  All of a sudden, Cleopatra’s ships took advantage of the turn of the breeze to the northwest and a break in the lines of fighting ships to hoist their stowed sails and to make off fast southwest for the Peloponnese. Since this change of wind was a daily occurrence and would have been well known to those encamped in the area for months, this was no doubt what had been intended ever since the council of war, even if later propagandists presented her flight as outright cowardice and treachery. When he saw the Egyptian fleet was away, Antony turned his own ships to follow. Few, however, could disengage from the fierce combat. Even Antony himself pragmatically had to switch from his own massive flagship to a swifter galley before he could do so. Thus he laid himself open to the charge of deserting his men for the sake of his mistress, a charge that rang down the centuries until Shakespeare dubbed him a “doting mallard.” But there was logic as well as love in his actions. If, as he planned, he could rebuild his forces, all could still be saved.

  Some of Antony’s ships had already been captured. Some raised their oars aloft as a token of surrender. Others took refuge back in the gulf. Yet others fought on well into the night, which Octavian spent aboard one of the swift Liburnian vessels, supervising the closing stages of the battle. Dio Cassius probably exaggerated when he recounted how Octavian’s ships turned to fire as their main weapon. But the battle continued with Octavian’s sailors tossing jars of flaming pitch onto Antony’s larger galleys from their more maneuverable vessels, as well as throwing torches lashed to javelins into their flammable and pitch-coated sides. When the ships were well aflame, some, presumably the rowers belowdecks, were, according to Dio, “roasted in the midst of the holocaust as if they were in ovens,” while the legionaries were incinerated in their armor as it grew red-hot.

  By morning, Octavian’s victory was long since complete and all was quiet save for the sound of the waves lapping on the beach strewn with pieces of wreckage and the occasional sodden corpse.

  *Such devices are still in common use on the Nile today for irrigation.

  CHAPTER 21

  After Actium

  THAT SAME MORNING, Antony was sitting in the dawn light “in silent self-absorption, holding his head in both hands” in the prow of Cleopatra’s gilded flagship as its purple sails carried him southward. According to Plutarch, he had been sitting there since first coming aboard the previous evening after his vessel had come up with Cleopatra’s, and had taken up his lonely position straightaway without seeing her. He had been stirred briefly into action only when a small flotilla of Octavian’s fast Liburnian vessels had begun to gain on Cleopatra’s fleet to harass them in their retreat. Antony rose and ordered the steersmen and rowers to turn his larger ships round to face his pursuers. All the Liburnians but one backed off, feeling themselves strong enough only to pick off stragglers, like hyenas around an animal migration, rather than to engage in a fleet action. One, however, came on, right up to Antony’s ship. A man brandished his spear from its deck and yelled toward him, “I am Eu-rycles of Sparta and thanks to Octavian’s good fortune I have the chance to avenge my father’s death.” For some reason, he failed to attack Antony’s ship but rammed another of his largest vessels, spinning it around, and went on to attack a second, which was full of domestic equipment.

  As Antony’s fleet began to pull away from the frenzied mêlée around the two stricken vessels, which he had abandoned to their fate, he resumed his vigil in the prow. He would remain there without seeing or speaking to Cleopatra the whole three days it took the fleet to reach Taenarum, one of his surviving fleet bases, at the southern tip of the Peloponnese.

  Both his thoughts and those of Cleopatra, keeping her distance elsewhere in the vessel, can only be imagined. The full implications of the previous day’s engagement would have weighed heavily on Antony. Up until the last moment, he may well have hoped that the initial stages of the sea fight would be so successful that he could convert a planned retreat into a great victory. Now he knew he could not. He had probably at least expected that more of his fleet would have escaped with him. As it was, he was fleeing Greece just as Pompey had done seventeen years earlier, saving himself and leaving his armies behind. In doing so he was inevitably losing credibility as a Roman leader, ceding the Roman world to Octavian. Admittedly, unlike Pompey, he had left an undefeated army of fifty thousand men in Greece, but the realistic and experienced field commander within him would have known that their morale would have been further lowered by the outcome of the sea battle and the sight of him fleeing after the Egyptian queen. Perhaps he wondered whether his decision to leave Canidius Crassus in charge of the land forces had been correct or whether he might have done better going ashore himself to rally his remaining troops, leading them to Asia in person and sharing their privations as he had done in his finest hours—the retreat over the Apennines from Mutina thirteen years ago and that from Parthia four years previously. He needed time, perhaps even a drink, to compose himself.

  Cleopatra’s intuition would have told her not to approach her lover while he was sunk in melancholic introspection. Her own spirits would have been higher than Antony’s. She was returning to her kingdom, where she still controlled immense riches and a large population in a land with good natural defenses. She was free of the carping and hostile glances of Roman senators. Previously, Antony could have hoped to succeed without her, but now their fates were inextricably linked. Any future either had would be together and in the East.

  The balance of power in her relationship with Antony had tipped further. Henceforward it would lie almost exclusively with Cleopatra. Antony was now in his early fifties and his usual self-confidence in the face of adversity was crumbling. He was suffering a failure of will and did not believe, deep down, that he was making a retreat to victory.

  Once they were ashore at Taenarum, Plutarch described how “Cleopatra’s ladies in waiting managed to get them to talk to each other, then persuaded them to share a meal and go to bed together.” Mutual love and dependence are not hard to discern amid the sulks, histrionics, recriminations and final pleasure of reconciliation. However, Antony had more to solace him than the soft words and warm embrace of Cleopatra. Quite a few transport ships a
nd other remnants of his army gathered in the little port. Encouraging reports came in that the land army was holding together in its retreat. In return, Antony sent messages to Canidius Crassus, ordering him to bring the troops across to Asia as soon as he was able.

  Even according to the critical Plutarch, Antony was “in misfortune the most nearly a virtuous man.” Thus, remaining a realist about his chances, in a typical gesture of magnanimity, he publicly released many of his friends and clients from their obligations to him. Although with tears in their eyes they refused the gift of a ship filled with treasure “in coined money and valuable royal utensils of silver and gold,” many took the opportunity to depart for Corinth, where Antony commended them into the safe care of his procurator while they “made their peace with Octavian.” Resupplied and with political and emotional equilibrium at least somewhat restored, Cleopatra and Antony reembarked and headed for Egypt.

  Back in northern Greece, Canidius Crassus had indeed started his fifty thousand troops on the northeastward crossing of the rugged hills and mountains toward Macedonia. But they had not marched far before Octavian’s forces, confident and exulting in their maritime victory, overtook them. Both sides were reluctant to fight. Although Octavian would be likely to win, he could not be sure of this. As his victories in the east had shown, Canidius was an experienced and resourceful general. Therefore, Octavian sent blandishments to Canidius’ troops through his heralds, appealing to them over the heads of their senior officers to come to terms. Antony’s legionaries, under the leadership of their veteran centurions, drove a hard bargain in the full knowledge of the alternative price they could extract in blood. After seven days of negotiations, Octavian’s wooing succeeded. Antony’s legions would go over to Octavian on the condition that they would receive equal treatment with those in Octavian’s ranks in terms of benefits and rewards on discharge. The most prestigious legions, such as the Larks, would be assimilated whole rather than their men being split up individually within Octavian’s army. This agreement reflected not only Octavian’s trust but also the esprit de corps of the legions.