When Dellius arrived at Alexandria he was struck by Cleopatra’s charm, and suspected that Antony would be too. Knowing that the triumvir routinely fell for pretty women, he advised the queen to wear her most alluring attire when presenting herself to him. Antony was a gentleman, he added, and she had nothing to fear from him.
Impressed by Dellius, Cleopatra took his advice. She came to meet the triumvir at Tarsus, sailing up the river Cydnus to the city in a splendid barge. Plutarch evoked the scene brilliantly (perhaps adding some color):
[She] was in a barge with a poop of gold, its purple sails billowing in the wind, while her rowers caressed the water with oars of silver which dipped in time to the music of the flute, accompanied by pipes and lutes. Cleopatra herself reclined beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed in the character of Aphrodite.
Antony was waiting in state on a dais in the central square of Tarsus to give the queen a formal welcome. Rumors spread through the crowds of bystanders of the floating spectacle that was sailing up the river into port and mooring at the quayside. Gradually they drifted away to have a look, leaving Antony and his entourage alone in the marketplace.
Word spread that Aphrodite (whom many worshippers identified with Isis) had come to revel with Dionysus “for the happiness of Asia.” This notion doubtless originated with Cleopatra, but it shows that Antony’s religious propaganda featuring himself as the New Dionysus was evidently working its way into the public mind. She herself well understood the role of religion in royal self-promotion. If she was consciously presenting herself as Aphrodite, she was at one level making a direct sexual offer; but, more profoundly, she was also putting in a claim to be Antony’s divine partner.
The triumvir sent the queen a message inviting her to dinner, but she had already determined what the next step in their relationship should be. Well-informed about Rome’s leading personalities, she will have known that Antony’s character was essentially simple and easy to read. He greatly enjoyed the display of wealth. He was easygoing and had a broad sense of humor that belonged to “the soldier rather than the courtier,” as Plutarch put it. He loved practical jokes. These were not exactly the tastes to which Cleopatra, educated in the sophisticated court of the Ptolemies, was accustomed, but in his company she made every appearance of sharing them.
The queen countered the triumvir’s invitation to dinner with one of her own; always complaisant with the ladies, he gracefully gave way and attended a banquet on board ship. On the following day, the queen dined with Antony. The gustatory exchanges were repeated for four days.
At a certain point, business supplanted pleasure. Antony required practical support from Cleopatra for the invasion of Parthia. She agreed to provide it, but on certain conditions. She required the execution of a few inconvenient personages, and in particular of her hated half sister, Arsinoe, who had briefly seized her throne and had been given sanctuary at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Antony obliged.
The queen now invited him to spend the winter with her at Alexandria. The couple sailed off to Egypt, where Antony laid aside the garb of a Roman official and wore an informal tunic in the Greek manner. The couple formed a dining club called the Inimitable Livers and spent much of their time enjoying themselves.
In February or March of 40 B.C., bad news reached Egypt. Having decided not to await Antony’s planned attack on them, the Parthians had launched an invasion of Syria. The triumvir quickly set off for Asia Minor.
Mark Antony’s critics have made much of his oriental debauchery, as though he were acting in an original and shocking way. In fact, he did nothing out of the ordinary but rather behaved very much as he had always done. There are no reports that, at this stage of life, he was sexually promiscuous. He had sex with the queen, but with no one else. (She gave birth to twins, Alexander and Cleopatra, later in the year.) However, he was not in love with her and left Egypt without qualms. The couple were not to meet again for three and a half years. He had spent a most enjoyable holiday, and that was all.
Something more serious, though, was taking place in his personality: a gradual and growing loss of focus. The Greek word for this process was eklusis, the term for the unstringing of a bow. Dio remarks that Antony “had earnestly devoted himself to his duties so long as he had been in a subordinate situation and had been aiming at the highest prizes; but now that he had got into power, he no longer paid strict attention to these things.”
When things are as bad as they can be, fate finds a way to deliver another blow. One of the consuls in 41 B.C. was Lucius Antonius, Mark Antony’s brother, who decided to launch a military challenge against Octavian. He was in collusion with Mark Antony’s wife, the virago Fulvia. At this time she played an active and influential political role, to the point where she seemed to be as much of a consul as those elected to that office.
The two played a double game, simultaneously sympathizing with dispossessed Italian farmers and telling the legionaries that Octavian was acting disloyally to the absent Mark Antony, for whom they claimed to speak. All would be well, they argued, once Mark Antony returned to Italy. Lucius backed a protest against Octavian in Rome, managed to raise eight legions, and occupied the capital. He then marched north, hoping to link with two Antonian generals and their armies. However, the generals were unsure of Antony’s wishes and held aloof.
Fulvia raised troops and, most unusually for a Roman woman, issued orders directly herself. Dio writes: “And why should anyone be surprised at this, when she would wear a sword at her side, give out the watchword to the soldiers, and on many occasions give speeches directly to them?”
Octavian kept his nerve. He was not at ease on the battlefield, and was helped, or more likely masterminded by, his boyhood friend Agrippa, who had a gift for generalship. He and Salvidienus outmaneuvered Lucius, who took refuge in the strongly fortified hill town of Perusia (today’s Perugia, in Umbria), where he waited for the Antonian generals to come to his relief. Fulvia, infuriated, pressed them to do so, but Agrippa confronted them before they had succeeded in joining forces. Still without instructions from Antony, the generals were unenthusiastic about pressing on to Perusia in the first place and pulled back. Lucius was on his own.
Meanwhile, Octavian sealed the town with a ditch and rampart seven miles long. At one point in the siege he was surprised by a sudden sortie by the enemy while holding a sacrifice outside the town walls, and was lucky to escape with his life.
Both sides hurled stone and lead slingshot at each other. About eighty of these lead balls have been discovered by archaeologists and many have brief, extremely rude messages scratched on them. Examples include “I seek Fulvia’s clitoris”; “I seek Octavian’s arse”; “Octavian has a limp cock”; “Hi, Octavius, you suck dick”; “Loose Octavius, sit on this”; and, rather more feebly, “Lucius is bald.”
Lucius’ men launched numerous attacks on the enemy, including one by night, but they all failed. The formal act of surrender was carefully stage-managed. The defeated legions laid down their weapons and were pardoned. Octavian placed their commander and some of his senior followers under discreet arrest. They were later freed, and Lucius was sent to be governor of Spain (there was no point needlessly annoying his brother).
Despite the appearance of clemency, the triumvir appears to have been coldly and bitterly angry for what he had been obliged to endure. Perusia was given over to the troops to plunder, and accidentally burned to the ground. Other prisoners of war were less fortunate than Lucius and his intimates. According to Suetonius,
[Octavian] took vengeance on crowds of prisoners and returned the same answer to all who sued for pardon or tried to explain their presence among the rebels. It was simply: “You must die!” According to some historians, he chose 300 prisoners of equestrian or senatorial rank, and offered them on the Ides of March at the altar of the god Julius, as human sacrifices.
This story is repeated by Dio, and is very possibly true. Although human sacrifice was forbidden by senatorial decree
in 97 B.C., it runs through Roman history as a recurrent ritual idea. Roman religious ceremonies contain traces of the practice, with dolls replacing human victims. On three occasions, during times of great crisis during the third and second centuries, two pairs of Gauls and Greeks, each a man and a woman, were buried alive in the cattle market (forum boarium) as a human sacrifice. In the sixties B.C., Catilina was reported to have sacrificed a boy and eaten his entrails. The most recent recorded instance took place during Julius Caesar’s triumph at Rome in 46 B.C., when, in a fury, he had had two rioting soldiers sacrificed to Mars.
Lucius surrendered in January or February 40 B.C., only a few weeks before the anniversary of the assassination. A commemorative altar had been erected on the site of Caesar’s cremation in the Forum, and this was where Octavian conducted the mass sacrifice. It shocked Roman opinion to the core, both for its scale and for the status of the victims. So far as the divi filius was concerned, it was the end of a story; four years had passed and now he had finally slaked the blood thirst of his deified adoptive father. The drama of murder and revenge had run its course.
The butchery came at a price, for the public long and bitterly recalled
…our fatherland’s Perusian graves,
The Italian massacre in a callous time.
What did Lucius and Fulvia mean by this disastrous enterprise? Did Antony know and approve of what his wife and brother were doing? These are hard questions to answer. Although Lucius does not give the impression of being particularly able, Fulvia was evidently energetic and experienced.
She may have been irritated by, even jealous of, Antony’s infidelity with Cleopatra. However, such behavior was commonplace and wives were expected to take it in stride. A political motive is much more plausible. Octavian was a nuisance, and here was a chance to eliminate him—a chance that Lucius and Fulvia seized, to give Antony the supreme power he scarcely seemed to covet.
Antony claimed that he was completely ignorant of much that was done in his name, and that he learned of what was happening in Italy too late to influence the course of events. However, Octavian and others wrote him many letters about the situation. It would have been amateurishly odd for Fulvia to act without her husband’s knowledge. We must conclude that Antony knew perfectly well what Lucius and Fulvia were up to, although it may not have been his idea. He was anxious to be regarded as a man who kept his word, and wanted to exploit the outcome whatever it happened to be. So he turned a blind eye.
The Perusian war proved that Antony and his supporters were poorly organized and prone to miscalculation. By contrast, it greatly strengthened Octavian’s political position and provided evidence of his staying power. Now twenty-three years old, he was no longer a virginal boy over-protected by his mother, but a fully grown adult and one of Rome’s two most powerful citizens. The year and a half since Philippi had been miserable, unglamorous, and testing, but it had brought out the best in him. He had succeeded in every endeavor.
His reputation for physical cowardice in the field was probably not unjustified; he was never at ease as a soldier. But Octavian had demonstrated something better—a dogged moral courage that saw him impose an unpopular but necessary policy of land confiscation and nearly cost him his life when confronting angry soldiers in the Campus Martius.
He would not shirk what needed to be done and moved patiently from task to task. This methodical approach to politics had two important dimensions: Octavian was naturally cautious and avoided impulsive gestures; and he showed an unforgiving fury to anyone who crossed him.
So far as contemporaries were concerned, the inexperienced triumvir was no nine days’ wonder, as some had predicted or hoped he would be. He had earned himself a permanent place at the head of affairs. Barring accident or ill health, he was there to stay.
We have relatively little information about Octavian’s personal life; what we do have falls broadly into two categories—dynastic marriages and stories put about by his enemies.
Julius Caesar’s heir was the finest match in Rome. Since he was only of middling provincial stock (despite his connection with the patrician Julii), it was in his interest to ally himself to blue blood. This would not only increase his personal social status but also be a signal that he wanted a political reconciliation with the aristocracy, thinned by the civil wars but still powerful, if only as an obstacle.
Probably in the spring or early summer of 43 B.C., Octavian married the daughter of Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus, a member of Rome’s most ancient nobility. However, the union lasted only a few months, for Mark Antony and Octavian, uncomfortable colleagues, agreed that it would be wise to cement their political deal, enshrined in the Second Triumvirate, with a family bond. Antony’s wife, Fulvia, had a daughter, Claudia, by her first husband, a lordly rabble-rouser, Publius Clodius Pulcher. She was only just of marriageable age and too young to have sex, but a match was arranged.
A girl was considered ready for wedlock at about twelve, a boy at fourteen. Husband and wife must both have reached puberty. Children could be betrothed provided that they were old enough to understand what was being put to them—say, from seven upward.
We are told rather more about Octavian’s sex life away from the marriage bed, by his opponents. Politicians often publicized the sexual peccadilloes of those with whom they disagreed, and were expected to be capable of producing scabrous lampoons. Octavian was no laggard in this regard; and a scabrous verse attributed to him survives, which is very probably authentic. It broadcasts a cheerfully indecent explanation of the motives that underlay Fulvia’s political activity. One can imagine the guffaws in the Forum and among the soldiery.
Because Antony fucks Glaphyra [a current mistress], Fulvia is determined to punish me by making me fuck her in turn. I fuck Fulvia? What if Manius [a freedman of Fulvia] begged me to sodomize him, would I do it? I think not, if I were in my right mind. “Either fuck me or let us fight,” says she. Ah, but my cock is dearer to me than life itself. Let the trumpets sound.
Octavian was accused of loose living. His girlishly attractive appearance doubtless inspired Sextus Pompeius to accuse him of effeminate homosexuality, of being a “queen.”
Lucius Antonius asserted that Octavian had sold his favors to Aulus Hirtius, the consul who lost his life at Mutina in 43 B.C., for the princely sum of 300,000 sesterces. The incident supposedly took place in Spain in 45 B.C., during the last campaign of the civil war, which culminated in Caesar’s victory at Munda. This was not long before Caesar returned to Italy and wrote his will. Lucius added, perhaps to lend verisimilitude to his claims, that Octavian used to soften the hair on his legs by singeing it with red-hot walnut shells.
With their circumstantial detail, these allegations just might be true, though that is unlikely. It does appear that the young triumvir won a reputation with the Roman mob for sleeping with men, whether or not it was deserved. One day at the theater an actor came onstage representing a eunuch priest of Cybele, the Great Mother. As he played a tambourine, another performer exclaimed, “Look how the queen’s finger beats the drum!” Since the Latin phrase can also mean “Look how this queen’s finger sways the world!” the audience delightedly applied the line to Octavian, who was watching the show, and burst into enthusiastic applause.
Most evidence suggests that Octavian, in fact, preferred sleeping with women, and he was widely credited with multiple adultery. It was probably during his early years of power that a private banquet he gave caused a public scandal. The event became known as the Feast of the Divine Twelve. It was a costume party with a difference; guests were invited to dress up as one or other of the gods and goddesses of Olympus. Octavian came as Apollo (always his favorite deity), god of the sun and of healing, and patron of musicians and poets. Suetonius notes that Antony mentioned the affair in a “spiteful letter,” but adds that an anonymous popular ballad confirmed it.
Apollo’s part was lewdly played
By impious Caesar; he
Made merry at a t
able laid
For gross debauchery.
What made the scandal worse was that the feast allegedly took place at a time of food shortage (caused, presumably, by Sextus Pompeius’ blockade). On the next day people were shouting “The gods have gobbled all the grain!” and “Caesar is Apollo, true, but he’s Apollo of the Torments”—this being the god’s aspect in one city district at Rome.
In the spring of 40 B.C., Antony was on his way to arrange his Parthian expedition when he learned that Perusia had fallen and that Fulvia had been forced to flee Italy. Antony met her at Athens and spoke very sharply to her, blaming her for the debacle. What she replied is unknown, but she was deeply shaken; an able woman, she had done everything in her power to advance her husband’s interests, and this was her recompense. The couple traveled to Sicyon, a port on the Gulf of Corinth, where Fulvia fell ill. We do not know what her sickness was, but it was exacerbated by a bout of depression. According to Appian, she “aggravated her illness deliberately,” which suggests self-harm.
Another lady paid Antony a visit: his mother, Julia, who had left Italy for her safety and taken refuge with Sextus Pompeius in Sicily. She conveyed a message from Sextus, offering an alliance against Octavian. Antony replied cautiously; if he went to war with Octavian he would regard Sextus as an ally; if not, he would try to reconcile them.
Meanwhile, the political situation was darkening. Antony’s ally Quintus Fufius Calenus, the governor of all Gaul beyond the Alps, unexpectedly died. As soon as he heard the news, Octavian rushed off to take control of Calenus’ eleven legions, which the dead man’s terrified son handed over to him without offering any resistance.
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