Antony and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  The worse conditions became, the more cheerful Antony and his legates became, rationing out sections of the army between them, jollying the men, telling them how brave they were, how hardy and uncomplaining. Squares were down now to maniples, and only three men deep. Over the pass, it would have to be century squares, but neither Antony nor anyone else thought the pass a likely site for attack—no room.

  The worst of it was that though each legionary’s pack held warm breeches, socks, the wonderful waterproof circular sagum, and neck scarves, still he froze, unable to warm himself by a fire. With two-thirds of the march completed, the army had finally run out of its most precious commodity—charcoal. No one could bake bread, cook pease pottage; the men trudged now chewing raw grains of wheat, their only sustenance. Hunger, frostbite, and sickness began to be so severe that even Antony couldn’t cheer the most sanguine among his soldiers, who muttered about dying in the snow, of never seeing civilization again.

  “Just let us get over the pass!” Antony cried to his Armenian guide, Cyrus. “You’ve led us true for two nundinae—don’t let me down, Cyrus, I beg you!”

  “I won’t, Marcus Antonius,” the man said in atrocious Greek. “Tomorrow will see the front squares start to cross, and after that I know where we can get charcoal.” His dark face grew darker. “Though I should warn you, Marcus Antonius, not to trust the King of Armenia. He has always been in contact with his brother of Media, and both of them are the creatures of King Phraates. Your baggage train was too tempting, I am afraid.”

  This time Antony listened; but there were still a hundred miles to go to Artaxata, and the mood of the legions was growing steadily bleaker, creeping toward insurrection.

  “Mutiny, even,” Antony said to Fonteius with half his troops on one side of the ranges and the other half still crossing or waiting to cross. “I daren’t let my face be seen.”

  “That’s true for all of us,” Fonteius answered cheerlessly. “They’ve been on raw wheat for seven days, their toes are black and dropping off, their noses too. Terrible! And they’re blaming you, Marcus—you, and only you. The malcontents are saying that you should never have let the baggage train out of your sight.”

  “It isn’t really me,” Antony said drearily, “it’s the nightmare of a fruitless campaign that didn’t give them a chance to show their stuff in battle. As they see it, all they did was sit in a camp for a hundred days looking at a city giving them the medicus—up your arse, Romans! Think you’re great? Well, you’re not. I understand—” He broke off when Titius hurried up, looking afraid.

  “Marcus Antonius, there’s mutiny in the air!”

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Titius.”

  “No, but this is serious! Tonight or tomorrow or both. At least six legions are involved.”

  “Thank you, Titius. Now go and balance the books, or count up how much the soldiers are owed, or something—anything!”

  Off went Titius, for once unable to come up with a solution.

  “It will be tonight,” Antony said.

  “Yes, I agree,” said Fonteius.

  “Will you help me fall on my sword, Gaius? One of the most vexing things about such heavy chest and arm muscles is that they curtail my reach. I can’t get a decent hold on my sword hilt to make the thrust deep and sure.”

  Fonteius didn’t argue. “Yes,” he said.

  The pair huddled inside a small leather tent all that night, waiting for the mutiny to begin. To Antony, already devastated, this was a fitting end to the worst campaign a Roman general had waged since Carbo was chopped to pieces by the German Cimbri, or Caepio’s army died at Arausio, or—most horrible of all—Paullus and Varro were annihilated by Hannibal at Cannae. Not a single shining fact to illuminate the abyss of total defeat! At least the armies of Carbo, Caepio, Paullus and Varro had perished fighting! Whereas his grand army was never offered one tiny opportunity to show its mettle—no battles, just impotence.

  I cannot blame my soldiers for mutinying, Antony thought as he sat with his unsheathed sword in his lap, ready. Impotence. That’s what they feel, just as badly as I do. How can they tell their grandsons about Marcus Antonius’s expedition into Median Parthia without spitting at the memory? It’s shabby, decomposed, utterly beggared of pride or distinction. Miles gloriosus, that’s Antonius. The vainglorious soldier. Perfect material for a farce. Strutting, posturing, full of himself and his own importance. But his success is as hollow as he is. A caricature as a man, a joke as a soldier, a failure as a general. Antonius the Great. Hah.

  And then the mutiny vanished into the thin air of that high pass as if no legionaries had ever talked of it. Morning saw the men keep on crossing, and by midafternoon the pass was way behind. From somewhere Antony found the strength to go among the men, pretending that he for one had never even heard a whisper of mutiny.

  Twenty-seven days after breaking camp before Phraaspa, the fourteen legions and handful of cavalry reached Artaxata, their bellies filled by a little bread and as much horsemeat as they could force down. Cyrus the guide had told Antony where to plunder enough charcoal for cooking.

  The first thing Antony did in Artaxata was to give Cyrus the guide a bag of coins and two good horses, and push him off at the gallop by the quickest route south. Cyrus’s mission was urgent—and secret, especially from Artavasdes. His destination was Egypt, where he was to seek an audience with Queen Cleopatra; the coins Antony had given him, struck in Antioch the previous winter, were his passport to the Queen. He was instructed to beg her to come to Leuke Kome bearing aid for Antony’s troops. Leuke Kome was a small port near Berytus in Syria, a less public place by far than ports like Berytus, Sidon, Joppa. Cyrus went with gratitude and speed; to have stayed in Armenia once the Romans departed would have been a death sentence, for he had led the Romans well, and that was not what Armenian Artavasdes had wanted. The Romans were supposed to wander, lost, without food or fuel, until every last one of them was dead.

  But, with fourteen under-strength legions warmly camped on the outskirts of Artaxata, King Artavasdes had no choice other than to fawn and beseech Antony to winter there. Not trusting a word that Artavasdes said, Antony refused to linger. He forced the King to open his granaries, then, adequately provisioned, he marched on for Carana in the face of storms and snow. The legionaries, it seemed inured now, trudged over those last two hundred miles immensely cheered because they had fires at night. Wood was scarce in Armenia too, but the Armenians of Artaxata hadn’t dared to argue when Roman soldiers descended on their woodpiles and confiscated them. The thought of Armenians perishing from the cold did not move the Romans in the slightest. They hadn’t marched chewing raw wheat thanks to eastern treachery!

  Antony reached Carana, from whence the expedition had set out the previous Kalends of May, halfway through November. All of his legates had seen the flat mood, the confusion, but only Fonteius knew how close Antony had come to suicide. Knowing this, but very reluctant to confide it to Canidius, Fonteius took it upon himself to persuade Antony to continue south to Leuke Kome. Once there, he could, if necessary, send another message to Cleopatra.

  But first, Antony was made to know the worst by an inflexible Canidius. Theirs had not been an always amicable relationship, for Canidius had seen the shape of the future early in the campaign, and been all for retreat immediately. Nor had he approved of the way the baggage train had been assembled and conducted. However, all of that was in the past, and he had come to terms with himself, his own ambitions. His future lay with Mark Antony, no matter what.

  “The census is in and complete, Antonius,” he said dourly. “Of the auxiliary foot, some thirty thousand, none has survived. Of the Gallic cavalry, six out of ten thousand, but their horses are gone. Of the Galatian cavalry, four out of ten thousand, but their horses are gone. All slaughtered for food over the last hundred miles. Out of sixteen legions, two—Statianus’s—have vanished, their fate unknown. The other fourteen have sustained heavy but not mortal casualties, mostly frostbite
. Men missing toes will have to be retired and sent home by wagon. They can’t march without toes. However, the sagum saved most fingers. Each legion save for Statianus’s two was up to strength—nearly five thousand soldiers, more than a thousand noncombatants. Now, each legion is down to fewer than four thousand, and perhaps five hundred noncombatants.” Canidius drew a breath and looked anywhere but at Antony’s face. “Here are the figures. Auxiliary foot, thirty thousand. Auxiliary cavalry, ten thousand, but twenty thousand horses. Legionaries, fourteen thousand will never fight again, plus another eight thousand from Statianus. And noncombatants, nine thousand. A total of seventy thousand men, twenty thousand horses. Twenty-two thousand of them are legionaries. Half the army, though not the best half. By no means all dead, yet they may as well be.”

  “It will look better,” said Antony, mouth quivering, “if we say a third dead, a fifth incapacitated. Oh, Canidius, to lose so many without fighting a battle! I can’t even claim a Cannae.”

  “At least no one passed beneath the yoke, Antonius. It isn’t a disgrace, it’s simply a disaster due to weather.”

  “Fonteius says I should continue to Leuke Kome to wait for the Queen, send her another message if necessary.”

  “Good thinking. Go, Antonius.”

  “Bring the army on as best you can, Canidius. Fur or leather socks for everyone, and when you encounter a snowstorm, wait it out in a good camp. Hugging the Euphrates will be a little warmer, I imagine. Just keep them moving, and promise them a wander in the Elysian Fields when they reach Leuke Kome—warm sun, lots to eat, and every whore I can round up in Syria.”

  Clemency had gone the way of all the horses once charcoal had appeared between the mountain pass and Artaxata. Legs dangling nearly to the ground, Antony set off from Carana on a local pony, accompanied by Fonteius, Marcus Titius, and Ahenobarbus.

  He reached Leuke Kome a month later, to find the little port bewildered at his advent; Cleopatra had not come, nor was there any word from Egypt. Antony sent Titius off to Alexandria, but with little hope; she hadn’t wanted him to undertake this campaign, and she was not a forgiving woman. There would be no aid, no money to patch up what remained of his legions, and while to him it was at least something of an achievement to have gotten the legions out decimated but not annihilated, she was more likely to mourn for the lost auxiliary levies.

  Depression clamped down and became a despair so dark that Antony took to the wine flagon, unable to face the thoughts of icy cold, of rotting toes, of mutiny on one terrible night, of rank after rank of hating faces, of troopers loathing him for the loss of their beloved horses, of his own pathetic decisions, always wrong and always disastrous. He, and no one else, bore the blame for so many deaths, so much human misery. Oh, unbearable! So he drank himself into oblivion, and kept on drinking.

  Twenty and thirty times a day he would reel out of his tent, a brimming beaker in one hand, stagger the short distance to the shore, and look toward the shipless, sailless harbor mouth.

  “Is she coming?” he would ask anyone near. “Is she coming? Is she coming?” They thought him mad, and ran away the moment they saw him emerge from his tent. Is who coming?

  Back inside he would bolt to drink some more, then outside: “Is she coming? Is she coming?”

  January became February, then the end of February, and she never came, nor sent a message. Nothing from Cyrus or Titius.

  Finally Antony’s legs wouldn’t bear him anymore; he lolled over the wine flagon in his tent and tried to say “Is she coming?” to anyone who entered.

  “Is she coming?” he asked the movement of the tent flap at the beginning of March, a meaningless gabble to those who didn’t know from long experience what he was trying to say.

  “She is here,” said a soft voice. “She is here, Antonius.”

  Soiled, stinking, Antony somehow managed to get to his feet; he fell on his knees and she sank down beside him, cradling his head against her breast as he wept and wept.

  She was horrified, though that was just a word; it didn’t even begin to describe the emotions that roiled in Cleopatra’s mind and devastated her body during the days that followed as she talked to Fonteius and Ahenobarbus. Once Antony had wept himself to sleep and could be bathed, put into a more comfortable bed than his military camp stretcher, the painful process of sobering up and doing without the wine taxed Cleopatra’s ingenuity to its limits; he was not a good patient, given his state of mind—he refused to talk, grew angry when denied wine, and seemed to regret ever having wanted Cleopatra there.

  Thus it had to be Fonteius and Ahenobarbus who talked to her, the former very willing to help in any way he could, the latter making no attempt to disguise his dislike and contempt for her. So she tried to divide the horrors she was told into categories, in the hope that, by approaching things logically, sequentially, she might see more clearly how to go about the healing of Mark Antony. If he was to survive, he must be healed!

  From Fonteius she got the full story of that doomed campaign, including the night when suicide had seemed the only alternative. Of the blizzards, ice, and thigh-deep snow she had no comprehension, having seen snow only during her two winters in Rome, and they were not hard, she had been assured at the time; the Tiber hadn’t frozen over, and the sparse snowfalls had been an enchantment, an utterly silent world coated in white. Not, she divined, remotely comparable to the retreat from Phraaspa.

  Ahenobarbus concentrated more on painting graphic pictures for her, of feet and noses rotting from frostbite, of men chewing raw wheat, of Antony driven mad by the treachery of everyone from his allies to his guides.

  “You paid for this debacle,” Ahenobarbus said, “without ever stopping to think of equipment that wasn’t included and should have been, like warmer clothing for the legionaries.”

  What could she answer? That such were not her concerns, but lay within the province of Antony and his praefectus fabrum? If she did, Ahenobarbus would attribute her answer to self-preservation at Antony’s expense; clearly he would hear no criticism of Antony, preferring to lay the blame at her door just because her money had funded the expedition.

  So she said, “Everything was already in place when my money became available. How was Antonius going to conduct his campaign if my money hadn’t turned up?”

  “There would have been no campaign, Queen! Antonius would have continued to sit in Syria, in colossal debt to the purveyors of everything from mail shirts to artillery.”

  “And you would rather he went on that way than have the money to pay and be able to conduct his campaign?”

  “Yes!” snapped Ahenobarbus.

  “That implies that you don’t consider him a capable general.”

  “Infer what you like, Queen. I say no more.” And Ahenobarbus stormed off, radiating hatred.

  “Is he right, Fonteius?” she asked her sympathetic informant. “Is Marcus Antonius incapable of commanding a great enterprise?”

  Surprised and flustered, Fonteius privately cursed Ahenobarbus’s irascible tongue. “No, Your Majesty, he’s not right, but nor was he saying quite what you thought. If you hadn’t accompanied the army to Zeugma with the intention of going farther, and spoken your mind at councils, men like Ahenobarbus would have had no criticism to make. What he was saying was that you bungled the venture by insisting that it be conducted in a certain way—that, without you, Antonius would have been a different man, and not gone down to defeat without a battle.”

  “Oh, that isn’t fair!” she said, gasping. “I laid no kind of command on Antonius! None!”

  “I believe you, lady. But Ahenobarbus never will.”

  When the army began to limp into Leuke Kome three nundinae after the Queen of Egypt had arrived there, it found the little harbor choked with ships and a number of camps spread around the town’s outskirts. Cleopatra had brought physicians, medicines, what seemed like a legion of bakers and cooks to feed the soldiers better fare than their noncombatant servants gave them, comfortable beds, clean sof
t clothing; she had even gone to the trouble of having her slaves pluck all the sea urchins from the shallows of a large beach so everyone could bathe free of the worst scourge beaches at this end of Our Sea contained. If Leuke Kome wasn’t exactly the Elysian Fields, to the average legionary it seemed akin to them. Spirits soared, especially among the men whose toes hadn’t perished.

  “I’m very grateful,” Publius Canidius said to her. “My boys need a real holiday, and you’ve enabled them to have it. Once they’ve mended, they’ll forget the worst of their ordeals.”

  “Except for rotten toes and noses,” Cleopatra said bitterly.

  17

  Portus Julius was finished in time for Agrippa to train his oarsmen and marines all through the mild winter that saw Lucius Gellius Poplicola and Marcus Cocceius Nerva assume the consulship on New Year’s Day. As usual, partisan won out over neutral; the impartial third at negotiations to frame the Pact of Brundisium, Lucius Nerva, lost to the brother who was Octavian’s adherent. There in Rome to hold a watching action for Antony, Poplicola was given the job of governing Rome; Octavian didn’t want him trying to claim any victories over Sextus Pompey for Antony’s faction, still large and very vocal.

  Sabinus had been an adequate supervisor of the construction of Portus Julius and wanted the high command, but his tendency to be hard to get along with rendered him unsuitable in Octavian’s eyes; while Agrippa was busy at Portus Julius, Octavian went to the Senate with his proposals.

  “Having been consul, you rank with Sabinus,” he said to Agrippa when that worthy came to Rome to report, “so the Senate and People have decreed that you, not Sabinus, will be commander-in-chief on the land, and admiral-in-chief on the water. Under me, of course.”

  Two years governing Further Gaul, a consulship and Octavian’s trust in his initiative had worked upon Agrippa powerfully. Where once he would have blushed and disclaimed, now he simply swelled a little and looked pleased. His degree of self-importance—none—had not altered, but his confidence in himself had mushroomed without manifesting Antony’s fatal flaws; no laziness, erratic attention to detail, or reluctance to deal with correspondence from Marcus Agrippa! When Agrippa received a letter, it was answered immediately, and so succinctly that its recipient experienced no doubt whatsoever about the nature of its contents.