Antony and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  Oh, how right he was! Without him, she was nothing. No army, no genius as soldier or ruler. Now more than ever in the past, she understood that her first—perhaps her only—task was to woo Antony away from his allegiance to Rome. All sprang from that.

  I am not, she thought, beginning to pace, a monster in any of the guises he says I assume. I am a monarch whom destiny has put in a position of potential power at a moment in time when I can strike for complete autonomy, regain Egypt’s lost territories, be a great figure on the world’s stage. My ambitions are not even for myself! They are entirely for my son. Caesar’s son. Heir to more than Caesar’s name, immortalized already in his title, Ptolemy XV Caesar, Pharaoh and King. He must fulfill his promise, but it is too soon! For ten more years I must struggle to protect him and his destiny—I have no time to waste loving other people, people like Marcus Antonius. He senses it; these long months apart have struck off the shackles I forged to keep him chained to my side. What to do? What to do?

  By the time Antony rejoined her, jovial, loving, eager for bed, she had resolved on her course of action. Which was to talk Antony around, make him see that Octavian would never let him become undisputed First Man in Rome, therefore what use in continuing to cleave to Rome? She had to convince him—sober, possessed of his self-control—that the only way he could ever rule Rome alone was to go to war against Octavian the obstacle.

  Her first step was to arrange for Antony to parade through Alexandria in as similar a way to a Roman triumph as she dared. That was easier because the only Roman of companion status he had brought with him was Quintus Dellius, under orders from her to deflect Antony’s analytical powers away from the form of a Roman triumph. After all, he had no legions with him, not even a cohort of Roman troops. There would be no pageant floats, she decided, just huge flat-bedded wagons behind garlanded oxen that bore carefully designed scaffolds and frames on which to display this or that looted treasure. Nor would he ride in anything remotely resembling the antique four-wheeled car of a Roman triumphator; he would wear pharaonic armor and helmet and drive himself in a pharaonic two-wheeled chariot. Nor would there be a slave holding a laurel wreath over his head to whisper in his ear that he was but a mortal man. In fact, laurels had no place at all; she pleaded that Egypt had no true laurel trees. Her hardest battle was to convince Antony that King Artavasdes of Armenia must be put in golden chains and led behind a donkey as a prisoner; in a Roman triumph the prisoners of high enough status to be part of the parade were decked out in all their royal finery and walked as if free men. Antony consented to the chains, thinking it removed any hint of a Roman triumph.

  What he didn’t count on was Quintus Dellius, whom Cleopatra had instructed to write a mischief-making note to Poplicola in Rome.

  What a scandal, Lucius! At last the Queen of Beasts has prevailed. Marcus Antonius has triumphed in Alexandria rather than in Rome. Oh, there were differences, but none to write home about. Instead, I am compelled to write home full of the similarities. Though he says the plunder is greater than Pompeius Magnus took from Mithridates, the truth is that while it is indeed great, it is not that great. Even so, it belongs to Rome, not to Antonius. Who, at the end of his parade down Alexandria’s wide streets to deafening cheers from thousands upon thousands of throats, entered the temple of Serapis and dedicated the spoils to—Serapis! Yes, they will remain in Alexandria, the property of its queen and boy king. By the way, Poplicola, Caesarion is the image of Caesar Divus Julius, so I hate to think what might happen to Octavianus were Caesarion ever to be seen in Italia, let alone Rome.

  There were many evidences of the hand of the Queen of Beasts throughout. King Artavasdes of Armenia was led in chains, can you imagine it? Then, when the parade was ended, he was imprisoned rather than strangled. Not Roman custom at all. Antonius said not one word about the chains or the spared life. He is her dupe, Poplicola, her slave. All I can think is that she drugs him, that her priests concoct potions you and I, simple Romans, cannot even comprehend.

  I leave it to you to decide how much of all this should be disseminated—Octavianus would make much of it, I fear, to the point of declaring war on his fellow triumvir.

  There! thought Dellius, laying down his reed pen. That ought to prick Poplicola into tattling at least some of it—enough at any rate to filter as far as Octavianus. It gives him munitions, yet it exonerates Antonius. If war is what she wants, then war will eventually come. But it should be a war that, once Antonius wins it, will allow him to retain his Roman position and have no trouble in establishing sole rule. As for the Queen of Egypt—she will fade into obscurity. I know that Antonius is far from her slave; he still owns himself.

  Dellius didn’t have the intelligence to sniff out the most secret of Cleopatra’s ambitions, nor to scent the depth of Octavian’s subtlety. A paid servant of the Double Crown, he did as he was told without question.

  Before he could find a messenger and a ship to send his short missive to Rome and Poplicola, he was writing a perturbing postscript:

  Oh, Poplicola, it goes from bad to worse! Utterly deluded, Antonius has just participated in a ceremony in the Alexandrian gymnasium, bigger since the city was rebuilt than the agora, and so the site of all public meetings. A huge podium was constructed inside the gymnasium, with five thrones upon its tiers. On top, one throne. Next step down, one throne. Step lower than that, three baby thrones. On the highest Caesarion sat, dressed in full pharaonic regalia. I have seen it often, but will briefly describe it for you: a red and-white, two-part thing on the head, very big and heavy—the Double Crown, it is called. Pleated white linen dress, broad collar of gems and gold around the neck and shoulders, a wide gem-studded gold belt, many bracelets, armlets, anklets, rings for fingers and toes. Hennaed palms, hennaed soles of the feet. Amazing. Female Pharaoh, Cleopatra, sat on the next step down. Same regalia, except that her dress was made of cloth-of-gold and covered her breasts. On the step below her sat the three children she has borne Antonius. Ptolemy Alexander Helios was fitted out in the garb of a king of Parthia—tiara, rings of gold around the neck, frilly, jeweled blouse and skirt. His sister, Cleopatra Selene, was in something halfway between pharaonic and Greek; she sat in the middle. And on her other side sat a little boy not yet three, tricked out like a king of Macedonia—a wide-brimmed purple hat with the diadem tied around its crown, purple chlamys, purple tunic, purple boots.

  The crowd was huge, overflowing the gymnasium, said to hold a hundred thousand—though, being familiar with the Circus Maximus, I doubt it. They had rigged up bleachers, but these were interrupted by athletic stuff. Cleopatra and her four children stood at the bottom of the dais at first, while none other than Marcus Antonius rode in on a magnificent Median horse, a dappled grey with black muzzle, mane, and tail. Its tack was dyed purple leather, bossed and fringed in gold. He slid off the horse and walked to the dais. He was wearing a purple tunic and purple cloak, but at least his golden armor was Roman in style. I add that I, his legate, was seated close by, with a good view of proceedings. Antonius took Caesarion by the hand and led him up the steps of the dais to the top throne, and seated him. The crowd cheered loudly. Once the boy was in place, Antonius kissed him on both cheeks, then stood and roared out that by the authority of Rome, he proclaimed Caesarion King of Kings, ruler of the world. The crowd went wild. Then he took Cleopatra to her lower throne and seated her. She was proclaimed Queen of Kings, ruler of Egypt, Syria, the islands of the Aegean, Crete, Rhodes, all Cilicia, and Cappadocia. Alexander Helios (his tiny fiancée was perched on the step alongside him) was proclaimed King of the East—everything east of the Euphrates, and everything south of Caucasus. Cleopatra Selene was proclaimed Queen of Cyrenaica and Cyprus, and little Ptolemy Philadelphus was proclaimed King of Macedonia, Greece, Thrace, and the lands around the Euxine Sea. Did I say Epirus? He got that too.

  Throughout all this Antonius was as solemn as if he truly believed in what he was doing, though later he told me that he did it simply to shut down Cleopatra�
��s nagging. The fact that as a goodly number of the lands mentioned belong to Rome or the Parthians, it boggled imagination to witness these five people pronounced sovereign over places they do not—and cannot—rule.

  Oh, but the Alexandrians thought it was wonderful! I have rarely heard such cheers. After the crowning ceremony was over, the five monarchs climbed down from the dais and mounted a kind of wagon, just a flatbed with five thrones atop it. I add that Egypt must be swimming in gold, because the ten thrones used were all of solid gold, studded with so many gems that they flashed and glittered more than a Roman whore in glass beads. This wagon, drawn by ten white Median horses—a load light enough that they didn’t strangle—was paraded right down Royal Avenue, then right down Canopic Avenue, and ended its journey at the Serapeum, where the chief priest, a man named Cha’em, conducted some religious ritual. The people were feasted on ten thousand huge tables just groaning with food—something that had never been done before, I understand, and done at Antonius’s request. It was an even wilder bun fight than a Roman public feast.

  The two events—Antonius’s “triumph” and the donation of the world to Cleopatra and her children—have left me winded, Poplicola. I have nicknamed the latter the Donations. Poor Antonius! He’s caught fast in that woman’s toils, I swear it.

  Again I leave it to you how much of this you disseminate, but of course Octavianus will have his own spies’ reports, so I don’t think you can conceal the matter for long. If you are aware what’s afoot, you may have a fighting chance.

  The letter went off to Rome; Dellius settled down in his delightful little palace inside the Royal Enclosure to spend the winter with Antony, Cleopatra, and her children.

  Antony and Caesarion were great friends, and elected to do everything together, be it crocodile or hippo hunting on Nilus, war exercises or chariot racing in the hippodrome, or swimming in the sea. Try though Cleopatra did, she couldn’t trick Antony into guzzling wine; he refused to take so much as a sip of it, saying frankly that once he tasted it, he would go on a binge. That he didn’t trust her and was aware of her intentions was manifest in the way he sniffed at the contents of his goblet to make sure it held water.

  Caesarion noticed all of it, and grieved. Alone among them, he saw both sides. His mother, he knew, did everything to further not her own ends, but his, Caesarion’s, while Antony, very much in love with her, strenuously resisted her attempts to turn him away from Rome. The trouble was, the youth reflected, that he wasn’t sure he wanted what his mother wanted for him; he had no sense of destiny, for all that his father had, and his mother too. Thus far his experience of his world told him that there was so much work to do in Alexandria and Egypt alone that he would never live to finish it, were he to live a hundred years. In a curious way he was more like Octavian than Caesar, for he yearned to have what he did perfect down to the finest detail, and shrank from the idea of taking additional burdens on his shoulders that would inevitably make it impossible for anything to be done properly. His mother didn’t own this reluctance—how could she? Born and reared in a nest of vipers like Ptolemy Auletes, her idea of sovereignty was to leave the fiddling work of daily administration to others, and those others were as likely to be successful sycophants as truly talented.

  He knew well what his mother’s limitations were. He also knew why she was attempting to strip Antony of his Romanness, his independence, and his judgment. Nothing else than world dominion would satisfy her, and she saw Rome as her enemy. Rightly so; a power as entrenched as Rome would not yield to her without war. Oh, if only he were older! Then he could face Cleopatra as her genuine equal, and inform her adamantly that what she wanted for him was not what he wanted. As it was, he had so far said nothing to her about his own sentiments, understanding that she would dismiss his opinions as those of a boy. But he wasn’t a boy, he had never really been a boy! Owning his father’s precocious intelligence and a kingly position from early childhood, he had lapped at knowledge like a starving dog at a pool of blood, not for any reason other than that he loved to learn. Every fact was taken in, stored for immediate recollection as needed, and, when sufficient knowledge on a subject had been assimilated, to analyze. But he was not enamored of power, and didn’t know whether that was true of his father as well. Sometimes he suspected that it was; Caesar had risen to Olympian heights because not to rise would have seen him exiled and stripped of all mention in Rome’s annals. Not a fate Caesar could tolerate. But he hadn’t tried very hard to live, somehow Caesarion knew that. My tata, whom I remember as a toddling child so vividly that his face, his tall strong body leap to the inside of my eyes this very moment. My tata, whom I miss desperately. Antonius is a marvelous man, but Caesar he is not. I need my tata here to advise me, and that cannot be.

  Emboldened, he sought out Cleopatra and tried to tell her how he felt, but it fell out as he had expected. She laughed at him, pinched his cheek, kissed him lovingly, and told him to run away and do the things boys of his age should. Hurt, isolated, with no one he felt he could turn to, he moved further from his mother mentally and began not to come to dinner. That he might have gone to Antony never occurred to him; he saw Antony as Cleopatra’s quarry, didn’t think that Antony’s response would be any different from hers. The dinner omissions became more numerous in exact proportion to Cleopatra’s increasingly remorseless browbeating of her husband, whom she treated, Caesarion thought, more like a son than a partner in her enterprises.

  There were, however, enjoyable days, sometimes longer periods; in January the Queen took Philopator out of his shed and sailed down Nilus to the First Cataract, even though it was not the right season to inspect the Nilometer. For Caesarion, a wonderful trip. He had made the journey before, but when he was younger; now he was fully old enough to appreciate every nuance of the experience, from his own godhead to the simplicity of life along the mighty river. The facts were stored away; later, when he was Pharaoh in truth, he would give these people a better life. At his insistence they stopped in Coptus and took the overland caravan route to Myos Hormus on the Sinus Arabicus; he had wanted to take the longer path to Berenice, far down the Sinus, but that Cleopatra refused to do. From Myos Hormus and Berenice the Egyptian fleets set out for India and Taprobane, here they returned bearing their cargoes of spices, peppercorns, ocean pearls, sapphires, and rubies. Here too the Horn of Africa fleets were harbored; they carried ivory, cassia, myrrh, and incense from the African coast around the Horn. Special fleets brought home gold and jewels sent overland to the Sinus from Aethiopia and Nubia; the country was too rugged and Nilus too convulsed by cataracts and rapids to use the river.

  On their return journey, sailing now on the current, they paused at Memphis, entered the precinct of Ptah, and were shown the treasure tunnels that branched out a long way toward the pyramid fields. Neither Caesarion nor Antony had seen them, but Cha’em, their guide, was careful not to let Antony see where and how the entrance was accessed; he was led blindfold, and thought it a great joke until, his eyes freed, he beheld the wealth of Egypt. For Caesarion it was an even bigger shock; he hadn’t begun to grasp how much there was, and spent the rest of the long journey marveling at his mother’s parsimoniousness. She could afford to feed all of Alexandria to the point of gluttony, and yet she grumbled at his pathetic little free grain dole!

  “I do not understand her,” he muttered to Antony as Philopator sailed into the Royal Harbor.

  A remark that sent Antony into fits of laughter.

  22

  The conquest of Illyricum was to take three years, but the first of them, that same year Antony was supposed to have been senior consul, was the hardest, simply because it took a year to understand how to go about the business handily. As with any enterprise of Octavian’s, it was meticulously planned insofar as any military venture could be. Governor of Italian Gaul for the duration of the Illyrian campaign, Gaius Antistius Vetus was to deal with the restless tribes living in the Vale of the Salassi on the northwestern frontier; though many hundre
ds of miles away from Illyricum, Octavian wanted no part of Italian Gaul at the mercy of barbarian tribes, and the Salassi were still a nuisance.

  The actual Illyrian campaign was divided into three separate theaters: one on the sea, two on the land.

  Back in favor, Menodorus was given command of the Adriatic fleets; his job was to scour the islands off Istria and Dalmatia and sweep the Liburnian pirates from the sea. Statilius Taurus was given command of the group of legates who drove east from Aquileia over the pass of Mount Ocra toward the town of Emona and, eventually, the headwaters of the Savus River. Here dwelled the Taurisci and their allies, who perpetually raided Aquileia and Tergeste. Agrippa was to strike southwest from Tergeste into the lands of the Delmatae and the town of Senia; from that point Octavian would assume the command himself, turn east, cross the mountains, and descend upon the Colapis River. Once on the river, he would march to Siscia, at the confluence of the Colapis and the Savus. This was the wildest, least-known country.

  The propaganda commenced well in advance of the campaign, for Illyricum’s subjugation was a part of Octavian’s scheme to make it plain to the people of Italia and Rome that he, and he alone, cared about their safety as much as he cared about their welfare. Once Italian Gaul was freed from all outside threat, the entire alp-fringed Italian haunch would be as safe as the leg.