While these negotiations, which he may well have tacitly condoned, were reaching their conclusion, Canidius and his senior officers, all loyal to Antony, slipped away. In promoting the negotiations and bringing them to a successful conclusion, Octavian showed his high diplomatic skills, marrying clemency and expediency to his propaganda advantage, just as he was already making the most of his victory at Actium.
The poet Horace had, it appears, been present at Actium and wrote in its immediate aftermath how “the wild queen plotting destruction to our capital and ruin to the empire with her pack of diseased half-men [eunuchs]” had had all her fleet burned. Horace went on to vilify Antony’s devotion to Cleopatra, “a Roman to a woman slave by sale,” and cited his passion as a central reason for Antony’s defeat. However, he did not accuse Cleopatra of cowardice or treachery by flying from the battle, thus confirming that, like Octavian and others who were eyewitnesses, he was aware all along that a breakout was Antony’s prime intention, whatever later historians, including Plutarch, portrayed.
Octavian did not set out in immediate pursuit of Cleopatra and Antony. He knew that his final victory was assured provided he retained control of Italy and conciliated some of those Greek and eastern states that had so recently supported them. In furtherance of this latter aim, he traveled to Eleusis, a community on a landlocked bay neighboring Athens. Here in the square stone hall of the sanctuary, once the largest public building in Greece, he sought initiation into the secret rituals of the goddesses Demeter and Kore, who were associated with both the settled rhythms of life and the seasons and the development of civilization, law and morality. He probably timed his visit to coincide with the great early autumn festival of the goddesses, to which initiates flocked from all over the Greek-speaking world. By his action, Octavian was demonstrating to a large and influential audience both his respect for Greek culture and religion and his embrace of more regular, civilized deities than the wild, anarchistic Dionysian and Bacchanalian cults of his opponents.
From Athens, Octavian traveled across to Samos, where Cleopatra and Antony had held their celebration of music and dance, and made it his winter headquarters preparatory to reordering the administration of Asia Minor, which was now swiftly falling into his hands without a fight. However, he had not been on the island long before disturbing news reached him from Rome.
Already during the Actium campaign, Marcus Lepidus, the son of the deposed triumvir and the nephew of Brutus, had been incriminated in a plot to murder Octavian on his return to Italy and been executed. Now disturbances had broken out among the veterans released from the legions and eager for their rewards, as well as among the public, resentful of the high taxation to fund the wars and fearing the expropriation of their land to assuage the veterans’ demands. Octavian hastily returned to Italy to pacify his veterans with initial payments and promises of more to come in the future. He also vowed only to expropriate land from communities that had taken Antony’s part and even then promised the victims land in overseas colonies. However, Octavian knew that unless he gained swift access to the great riches of Egypt, he would not be able to hold off the conflicting demands for too much longer. Returning to Samos, he began to plan his political campaign to woo away yet more of Antony and Cleopatra’s remaining supporters and to consider what his military strategy should be against the rump of their forces.
On their return to Egypt from the Peloponnese, Cleopatra and Antony had separated. Cleopatra made straight for Alexandria to secure her capital. Politically astute as ever and conscious of the fickleness of the Alexandrian mob, she feared that her people might rise against her if they learned of her defeat before she landed. Therefore, according to the historian Dio Cassius, she arranged for her ships to be decked with garlands just as if she had won a great victory and had her sailors chant songs of triumph as the ships made their way past the Pharos lighthouse into the inner harbor. Once safely ashore and installed in the royal palace, she acted quickly and ruthlessly to bolster her position. Again according to Dio Cassius, she had many of “the leading Egyptians executed on the grounds that they had always been ill disposed to her and were now exulting in her setback. Their estates yielded her a great wealth, and in her efforts to equip her forces and seek fresh allies she plundered other sacred and secular sources, not even exempting the most holy shrines.”
It is perhaps unlikely that Cleopatra would have risked arousing her subjects’ religious sensibilities by such crude actions, but she was clearly engaged in raising funds and placing her kingdom on a war footing. In a bid to conciliate the king of Media, Cleopatra had Artavasdes, the king of Armenia, who had been a prisoner in Egypt since the time of Antony’s Armenian triumph and the Donations of Alexandria, executed and she had his head sent to the Median king, his longtime adversary. Throughout she seems to have shown tenacity and determination in adversity and a single-minded desire to do everything she could to continue resistance to Octavian and to protect her kingdom and her family.
In sharp contrast, Antony’s confidence had imploded as his troubles mounted. Never among the most emotionally stable of men, he had once more slumped into depression and inactivity. After leaving the Peloponnese, he had first gone to Cyrenaica in the hope of rallying his four legions stationed there. However, their commander had already declared for Octavian and refused to see Antony, killing the members of the embassy he sent ahead and executing some of his own legionaries who protested at his treatment of Antony’s delegation. Plutarch describes how Antony wandered aimlessly up and down the hot, desolate and deserted beach where he had landed, with only two friends for company. One was a Greek orator and the other a Roman soldier whose devotion Antony had won by sparing his life in the aftermath of Philippi when he had impersonated Brutus to allow the republican leader to escape. Through the combined efforts of their philosophical and comradely cajoling, these two very different men dissuaded Antony from his plan to commit suicide. Eventually, he went back on board his ships for the journey of more than 160 miles east to Alexandria.
Once there, Antony relapsed into ever deeper despair. He ran a jetty out into the harbor and on it had a house built over the sea. Here, according to Plutarch, he spent his time “in exile from the world of men,” calling his residence the Timoneum after that of the bad-tempered, misanthropic recluse Ti-mon of Athens. Antony, whose paranoia was becoming more acute, claimed that, like Timon, he had reason to hate the world: “he too had been wronged and treated with ingratitude by his friends and so had come to mistrust and hate all mankind.”
What Cleopatra, never mind his troops, made of Antony’s overblown displays of despair is not recorded, but they can have given no one confidence in his future chances of success. Around this time, Cleopatra began to consider how she might save herself and her family if Egypt was overrun or, indeed, if Antony followed through on his threats and committed suicide in his despair. She contrived what Plutarch called “an extraordinary enterprise.” She determined to move some of her fleet down through the Nile and Egypt’s elaborate pattern of waterways to the Arabian Gulf, whence she could flee with her treasure “far from the dangers of slavery and war.” Cleopatra may have hoped that even if she could not prevent Octavian’s invasion of the Nile delta, by assembling a fleet in the Red Sea, where Octavian had no ships, she could put pressure on him to come to terms.
Either because the ships she had in mind were too big for the small canal between the Nile and the Red Sea or because it had become silted up, she had some of the ships mounted on wooden rollers and dragged overland. The Egyptians had for many centuries been skilled at moving heavy objects long distances to build their great monuments. Cleopatra probably also knew about the techniques developed to transport vessels on wheels along a paved road of some four miles between the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs to save having to circumnavigate the Peloponnesian coast.
Despite her ingenuity and the heroic efforts of her sailors, Cleopatra’s plans came to nothing. Probably egged on by the Roman governor of Syr
ia, who had just defected from Antony to Octavian, the Nabataean king Malchus and his men sallied forth on their camels from their stronghold of Petra, overcame the forces accompanying Cleopatra’s ships and burned them all. Malchus’ actions were an unwelcome reminder to Cleopatra of political realities. She had recently intervened with Antony to prevent Malchus’ kingdom from being crushed by Herod. However, the likely outcome of Octavian’s struggle with Antony weighed more heavily on the Nabataean king’s mind than thoughts of gratitude, particularly since he had the prospect of recovering his income from the Dead Sea bitumen deposits that Cleopatra had persuaded Antony to make over to her.
At about this time, Canidius Crassus brought in person to Alexandria the news of the loss of his legions, which Antony must by now have long suspected. This blow was almost immediately followed by another—the news of the defection of Herod of Judaea, together with his powerful forces. Given his long-standing alliance with Antony, Herod had realized that his throne was vulnerable. He therefore determined first to remove the one credible rival to his position, the former ruler of Judaea, Hyrcanus—now in his seventies and the last survivor of the former royal line, with its evocative links to the high priesthood. Herod trumped up some charges of treachery with the help of forged letters and condemned Hyrcanus to strangulation. But he still did not think he was safe to leave his kingdom to visit Octavian. Believing his wife, Mariamme, and his mother-in-law, Alexandra, might plot against him once more, he locked the two women up in one fortress, while he placed his children by Mariamme in the fortress of Masada on the Dead Sea, some distance away, under the care of his own mother and sister Salome, as hostages for Mariamme’s good behavior. Determined that Mariamme and her detested mother should not benefit from any plotting, he also left strict instructions that the two women should be summarily killed if news came of his own death.
Satisfied with his precautions, Herod set off for Rhodes to make his peace with Octavian, just as Auletes had gone to solicit Cato nearly thirty years previously. Once arrived, Herod carefully removed his royal diadem before his audience with Octavian, to demonstrate that he was counting on nothing. He then made his plea to retain his throne. He was, he claimed, a loyal man by nature, who would be as true to Octavian as he had been for so long to Antony. Playing to Octavian’s propaganda that Cleopatra was the real enemy who had besotted Antony and lured him from the path of Roman virtue, he stressed, quite possibly truthfully given his strained relationship with Cleopatra, that he had frequently but fruitlessly counseled Antony to dispense with the Egyptian queen.
The politician in Octavian recognized that his interests would be best served by disturbing the eastern status quo as little as possible in the run-up to his attack on Egypt. Therefore, he graciously confirmed Herod on his throne, whereupon the latter departed well satisfied back to Judaea.
Plutarch wrote that when Antony heard of the defection of Canidius Crassus’ legions and of Herod, “none of this news upset him. It was as if he was pleased to put aside his hopes since in so doing he could also let go his worries.” Antony had, in the best Stoic traditions, reconciled himself to the inevitable. He abandoned the Timoneum and returned to the royal palace and Cleopatra. Together they “set the city on a course of eating, drinking and displays of generosity.” Now both, not just Cleopatra alone, wore a brave face before their associates and the public alike. They dissolved their club, the Society of Inimitable Livers, but formed another, “just as devoted to sensuality, self-indulgence and extravagance as the previous one but they called it ‘The Society of Partners in Death.’ Their friends enrolled themselves in it as those who would die together and they all spent their time in a hedonistic round of banquets.” Although Cleopatra had celebrated her own birthday quietly, she marked Antony’s publicly with “extremely showy and costly festivities” to appeal to that side of his nature, which was somewhat childlike in its love of ostentation and need for attention and reassurance. In fact, many of the guests came poor to the banquets but departed rich.
Cleopatra and Antony also took a decision that would have dire consequences for Caesarion and for Antyllus, Antony’s son by Fulvia. They had Caesarion, who was about sixteen, made a member of the youth organization that in the Greek world signified acceptance into manhood, while Antony gave Antyllus, only fourteen, the toga virilis, making him a Roman adult. The public celebrations and revelries filled the city’s broad streets for many days. They were probably helpful in maintaining public morale, underlining as they did the continuance of both Cleopatra’s and Antony’s lines, “since [the populace] would have these boys as their leaders should any disaster overtake their parents.” However, their entry into manhood made both young men formally liable to adult penalties.
At the same time as they were sponsoring this show of outward defiance, Cleopatra and Antony were privately considering whether they could come to any compromise settlement with Octavian. Although they knew they were thereby revealing their weakness, each sent peace envoys to him. The detail and sequence of their peace initiatives are obscure and vary from source to source. They clearly dispatched their children’s tutor as their spokesman. He brought with him from Cleopatra one of her royal crowns and a golden scepter as well as other of the Egyptian royal insignia, asking Octavian on her behalf to allow her children to inherit the royal throne of Egypt. On behalf of Antony, the tutor asked that he might be allowed to retire into private life in Athens if not in Egypt, just as the other triumvir, Lepidus, had been allowed to do elsewhere after his defeat.
According to Dio Cassius, Octavian made no response to Antony’s request but prudently kept Cleopatra’s gifts: “His official response to her was a threatening one including the pronouncement that if she would disband her forces and renounce her throne he would then consider what should be done with her. But he also sent her a secret message that if she would kill Antony he would pardon her and leave her kingdom intact.”
On another occasion, Antony sent his young son Antyllus to Octavian with a large sum in gold and a request for terms. Octavian again kept the money but made no reply. Later, Antony sent another emissary, once more bearing gifts of money. A measure of his despair is that this time the usually loyal Antony also sacrificed Publius Turullius, one of Julius Caesar’s assassins who had been among his own entourage for some time, handing him over to Octavian, who had him executed. Antony, showing a selfless love for Cleopatra, even offered to kill himself if this meant that Cleopatra would be saved. Octavian again gave no answer.
The sources agree that Octavian was keen to wean Cleopatra away from Antony. They suggest that he thought he could flatter her and appeal to her vanity. To this end, he sent Thyrsus to her. Plutarch depicted him as a man of considerable intelligence “who could speak persuasively on his young commander’s behalf to a haughty woman with an astonishingly high opinion of her own beauty.” Octavian briefed Thyrsus to flatter Cleopatra by suggesting that Octavian was in love with her. “He hoped that since she believed she had the power to inspire passion in all mankind she might dispose of Antony and keep herself and her treasure unharmed.”
In the event, Antony became jealous and suspicious of Thyrsus’ long, private meetings with Cleopatra and had him thoroughly flogged before sending him back to Octavian with a letter at the same time ironic, sheepish and defiant, admitting that Thyrsus’ insolent and supercilious behavior had infuriated him at a time when his temper was short because of all his troubles. “If you find what I’ve done intolerable,” he added, “you’ve got my freedman Hip-parchus. You can string him up and flog him and then we’ll be quits.” (Hip-parchus was the son of Antony’s steward and had deserted to Octavian shortly after Actium.)
Cleopatra was very unlikely to have been taken in by Octavian’s protestations of love but may have been seeing what information she could charm out of Thyrsus. Other suggestions that at around this time she was actively seeking to betray Antony lack credibility since they occur only in the later sources, wherein Octavian’s denigration of
Cleopatra had reached its maturity. Contemporaneous writers such as Horace and Vergil, who were by no means favorable to Cleopatra, accused her of many things but not of seeking to betray Antony during these final, desperate days. Cleopatra would have known that the war had been declared on her and not Antony, that Octavian wanted Egypt’s treasure and that her fate and Antony’s were bound together. It also seems hard to believe that, survivor though she was, she would have considered deceiving the man to whom she had been faithful for so long—the father of three of her children and, to all intents and purposes, her husband.
By now it was the height of summer in the year 30 and Octavian had set out with his confident legions to invade Egypt. When he came ashore in Phoenicia he found King Herod awaiting him. Eager to please his new overlord, Herod provided lavish entertainments and accommodations and provisioned Octavian’s armies with both water and wine as they marched onward through the hot deserts of Gaza and Sinai and on to the very borders of Egypt.
CHAPTER 22
Death on the Nile
PELUSIUM FELL QUICKLY to Octavian’s forces. Cleopatra punished the town’s governor for yielding too readily by ordering the execution of his wife and children. Dio Cassius claimed that Cleopatra herself had engineered the town’s surrender to curry favor with Octavian and Plutarch noted a rumor that she had connived at its fall. Yet, like the earlier claims of her perfidy, this scarcely seems plausible.
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