Read Cleopatra and Antony Online
Authors: Diana Preston
Popular anger against Antony mounted when, for seven evenings in a row, a bright comet flared in the sky to the north, as if symbolizing the spirit of the divine Caesar elevated to heaven.
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To ensure people did not forget the portent, Octavian ordered a flaming star to be placed on the forehead of Caesar’s statue. “You, boy, you owe everything to your name,” Antony taunted Octavian. But the boy was quietly outflanking the man in the propaganda war to which Roman politics had descended, making every use of his name to stake his claim to be Caesar’s political as well as personal heir.
Whatever the two protagonists said in public, it must have been obvious to them both that they coveted the same thing—to succeed Julius Caesar as the most powerful man in Rome. Each may have had his own ideas about how such power should be deployed and it also must have been obvious that a confrontation was not far away.
Perhaps influenced by Servilia’s behind-the-scenes lobbying and with Octavian becoming ever more aggressive, Antony decided to conciliate the Liberators. He may well have recognized that, in any contest for the leadership of the hard-line Caesarians alone, he would be likely to lose out to Octavian and that therefore his best chance of success lay in capturing the middle ground. Accordingly, to find somewhere they could go with honor but where they would pose little threat to stability, in late July Antony convinced the Senate to award Brutus the governorship of Crete and Cassius the governorship of Cyrenaica. He addressed the Senate with such silkily conciliatory words that, learning of them, Cicero abandoned a proposed journey to Athens to visit his son, who was studying there. Instead he turned his steps back toward Rome, hoping but perhaps not expecting to find a less aggressively autocratic Antony acknowledging the authority of the Senate.
However, Antony’s conciliatory tactics, by giving his critics courage to speak out, backfired. When the Senate met on August 1, Caesar’s father-in-law, Piso, who had once offered to mediate between Caesar and Pompey, lambasted Antony for dictatorial behavior and fraudulent use of Caesar’s papers. Suspecting the hand of Brutus and Cassius behind the attack, Antony tossed aside the velvet glove and, in an instant reversal of tactics, immediately issued a consular edict threatening Brutus and Cassius with force for reneging on various official responsibilities. He also wrote them an aggressive letter. Their reply of August 4 was equally mettlesome. “We are amazed that you are so little able to control your animosity that you reproach us with the death of Caesar,” they said self-righteously before themselves issuing an implicit threat by noting that Caesar had not lived long once he began to play the king. By late August 44 both Brutus and Cassius had abandoned Italy, not for the provinces they had been allocated but for Macedonia and Syria.
Cicero reached Rome in time to attend a Senate meeting called by Antony on September 1 and was cheered by the crowds as he entered the city. One of Antony’s purposes in summoning the Senate was to propose a special day to honor Julius Caesar each year, an overt bid to woo the pro-Caesarean party and anathema to Cicero. Weary from his journey and wanting time to assess the situation, the sixty-two-year-old stayed away from the Senate. Interpreting his absence as a slight to his dignity, Antony threatened to pull Cicero’s house down and did not attend the Senate himself the following day. Cicero, however, did and launched the first of a series of increasingly vitriolic attacks on Antony, which he nicknamed the “Philippics.”
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To the old statesman, any means of attack was valid. Antony had become to him as great a menace to the republic and its traditions of senatorial authority as any Catiline or Caesar. Cicero used the Philippics to detail Antony’s supposed sexual depravities, calling him “a public whore” and raking up his affair with Curio, in which he alleged Antony had been the shameful, passive partner. His assault embraced Fulvia, whom he portrayed as a malignant influence, just as she had been on his old enemy, her previous husband, Clodius. “Life is not merely a matter of breathing,” he lectured an uncertain Senate. “The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude—but our city is not.” Liberty, he insisted, was worth dying for. Lathering himself into self-righteous indignation, he pilloried Antony as a drunken, vomiting, womanizing wastrel who, hell-bent on his own glory, continued to abuse the constitution and the Senate.
Antony withdrew to his villa in the country to consider his response. On September 19 he marched into the Senate, “not to speak but as usual spew up his words,” as Cicero sneered to Cassius. Cicero himself was not there to hear Antony’s accusations of how, when Cicero was consul, he had put citizens to death without trial after the Catiline conspiracy, including Antony’s own stepfather, and had set Caesar and Pompey at one another’s throats.
Cicero bided his time. He knew that what people feared most was a bloodbath and that Antony’s strength was that he offered stability to a Rome still dazed by events and demoralized by memories of civil war. Cicero needed to find an alternative figurehead, and his gaze fell on the slender, sharp-eyed young man whom several months earlier he had snubbed—Octavian. Over the next few months the two would become allies of expedience. Octavian would conveniently forget, for the time being at least, that Cicero had celebrated Caesar’s murder, while the elder statesman would flatter himself that, whatever Octavian’s unfortunate forebears, he was an intelligent, impressionable young man who could be molded in a more republican image, a man infinitely better than that “gladiator looking for a massacre,” as he had derided Antony.
Caesar’s heir was by now locked in a tribal dance with Antony as complex as any internal power struggles of the Ptolemies. Alarmed by Antony’s breach with the Senate and his growing hostility toward Octavian, Antony’s officers pleaded with him to avoid an open break. He responded by staging a public reconciliation with Octavian on the Capitol. But just two days later came sensational news of a plot orchestrated by Octavian to murder Antony. Octa-vian probably correctly vigorously protested his innocence and claimed it was all a conspiracy to discredit him. Nevertheless, on October 9, claiming his life was at risk, Antony departed for Brundisium with Fulvia to greet the four legions he had summoned home from Macedonia to enable him to oust Decimus Brutus from Cisalpine Gaul. As his officers feared, he was becoming isolated and hence vulnerable to his enemies.
Cicero, who was among the first, most vindictive and influential of these, accused Antony of planning first to bribe the legions and then to bring them to Rome “to subjugate us.” Octavian, though, was the one doing the bribing, sending agents to Brundisium equipped with propaganda leaflets intended to vilify Antony and buy the legionaries over to him. He also traveled around Campania with carts brimming with money, recruiting his own troops. This was entirely illegal, since he did so without the Senate’s authority, but Octavian’s lavish offers of more than two years’ pay up front soon attracted three thousand eager volunteers from the colonies of Caesar’s veterans.
Antony, meanwhile, was having a hard time in Brundisium with the legionaries newly arrived from Macedonia. Soldiers throughout this period rightly sensed they had more to gain in terms of payments, pensions and plunder from a single strong man than from the diffuse rule of the Senate, but they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Antony in the role of a strong, independent leader. Why had he weakly allowed their beloved Caesar’s assassins to go free? they demanded. And, less nobly, why was the bounty he was offering them so much less than what Octavian was promising his recruits? So dangerous was the situation that Antony had lists of the dissenters drawn up and ordered those whose names were randomly selected from amongst them by lot to be battered to death in front of himself and Fulvia. So close was she standing that blood spattered her face. Having, as he thought, quelled the mutiny, Antony sent three legions north and hurried back to Rome with the remaining legion, the elite “Larks,” to take firm control of the city and then to deal with Octavian and his illegal army by whatever means necessary.
Learning of Antony’s advance, Octavian was sufficiently alarmed to send repeated and urgent messages to Cicero asking what to do, even offering to lead the republicans in a war against Antony. After some agonizing, Cicero stilled any doubts he had about his ability to control Octavian and advised him to take his men to Rome as fast as possible, believing, as he wrote to a friend, he would “have the city rabble behind him and respectable opinion too if he convinces them of his sincerity.” Octavian reached the city before Antony, on November 10, and camped on the Campus Martius outside its walls. Here he addressed his forces, damning Antony while lauding his adoptive father, Caesar. However, his veteran recruits had marched to Rome under the impression they were to fight against the Liberators. Antony, they protested, had been loyal to Caesar, just as he had been to the soldiers he commanded. Appian related how some, disillusioned and upset, “asked if they could return to their homes.” Helpless to stop his new army from breaking up, Octavian watched as at least two thirds of his force melted away. In despair, he withdrew the remnants north.
Antony arrived with his Larks several days later. Delighted that Octavian had put himself so clearly in the wrong by flouting the law and bringing the forces he had raised illegally to Rome, he ordered the Senate to meet on November 24, declaring that any senator who was absent would be considered a traitor. He heaped more verbal ordure on Octavian’s head. Caesar’s heir was, he said, provincial, effete and the descendant of manual laborers—all deep insults to a Roman of his time and class. Antony even contemplated trying to declare Octavian an enemy of the state, but while he pondered whether he would win sufficient support for this drastic step, alarming reports reached him that two of his Macedonian legions, including the veteran Martian legion still smarting from Antony’s treatment of them at Brundisium, had deserted to Octavian, seeing him as the more likely to avenge Caesar and reward them well. Thus they readjusted the balance of power once again.
Accordingly, Antony decided to set off for Cisalpine Gaul to dislodge Decimus Brutus. Once in control of this strategically important province, he reasoned, he could retrench and deal with his other enemies. Before leaving, on November 28 Antony again summoned the Senate, this time to what was a highly irregular evening meeting, at which he reallocated the provinces between his supporters. A number of senators and wealthy citizens, unnerved by Octavian’s recent illegal and bellicose acts, so reminiscent of Caesar at his most dictatorial, swore their allegiance to Antony and bade him a reluctant farewell as he marched north. According to Appian, “He got a splendid send-off.”
The news filtering through to Cleopatra during those months must have been as confused and fragmented as the situation itself. For the moment, with the three-year-old Caesarion by her side on the throne as Ptolemy XV Caesar, she could concentrate only on strengthening her hold on the country. The fact that no serious unrest seems to have occurred during her absence in Rome suggests that her authority had not been challenged and that her officials had governed well.
Cleopatra was fortunate to have inherited a centralized, sophisticated and efficient system of land management, which had survived down the centuries since the time of Ptolemy I and provided stability. Officials graded all agricultural land according to its productivity. The choicest land was allocated to the crown, then leased back to the peasants under strict rules about which crops to cultivate, when to sow, when to reap, how much to hand over to the government as rent and how much seed corn to retain. The headman of each village supervised the farmers, reporting to a hierarchy of Greek and Macedonian officials, at whose apex was Cleopatra—the country’s greatest farmer, industrialist and merchant.
These arrangements ensured an annual stream of grain into the royal granaries. After supplying the needs of the population, Cleopatra, who held the monopoly in grain production and sale, could dispose of surpluses on the world market. Her other monopolies included olive oil (a vital commodity used in everything from food production to skin care and lighting), salt, perfume, the brewing of beer, and the tall, triangular-stemmed and feathery papyrus that grew in dense, bright green thickets in the swamplands of the Nile delta.
“No one has the right to do what he wishes,” an early Ptolemaic decree had informed Egypt’s citizens, “but everything is organized for the best.” However, Rome’s new conflicts would not leave Egypt and its well-regulated administration untroubled for much longer and Cleopatra would once again be forced to take sides.
S
TORMING INTO NORTHERN ITALY—Cisalpine Gaul—which Dec-imus Brutus, insisting that he was upholding the rights of the Senate and the people of Rome, was refusing to relinquish, Antony besieged him in Mutina (Modena) and began pounding the town with boulders flung from his
ballista
(siege catapults), which used torsion energy to throw missiles long distances.
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One particular kind was known as the “wild ass” because of its kickback. He was anxious for a quick victory since, on January 1, his own consulship would end and he suspected that his enemies were likely to persuade the pusillanimous Senate to send to Decimus’ aid the new consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, both former generals of Caesar’s but now inclining to the republican cause. Indeed, by early December, Cicero was back in Rome and urging war against Antony. He was also openly and lavishly praising Octavian, calling him by his adoptive name of Caesar in public for the first time.
By now Octavian had the support of five legions and also archers, cavalry and even some elephant units. Unleashing some of his finest oratory, Cicero cajoled the Senate into raising Octavian to the rank of senator and conferring on him the right to command an army, thus legalizing his leadership of the troops he had originally raised from the veteran colonies to march on Rome. Together with the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, the Senate commanded Octavian to go to the aid of Decimus Brutus. It was a strange mission—Caesar’s adoptive son succoring one of Caesar’s murderers against Caesar’s most seasoned and trusted lieutenant—but for the moment this does not appear to have troubled Cicero, who had his mind set on the elimination of Antony. As for Octavian, for the moment he was prepared to temporize.
To Antony, Octavian’s actions must have signaled just how far he was prepared to go to achieve his ambitions. Antony’s friends, still struggling to avert a war, convinced the vacillating Senate to dispatch ambassadors to Antony, but this proved futile. The ambassadors’ arrival did not distract him for one moment from his bombardment. In a determined mood, he rejected their demands that he withdraw south across the Rubicon—the border of Cisalpine Gaul—but keep at least two hundred miles from Rome and submit to the Senate. Instead he issued his own unrealistic counterdemands. These included the recall of Brutus and Cassius from their eastern commands, confirmation of the legality of his and Caesar’s actions (including his own seizure of funds after Caesar’s murder), the grant to him of the province of Transalpine Gaul for five years and rewards for his legionaries.
Reeling at the hubris of Antony’s ultimatum, or at least pretending to, Cicero urged the Senate to declare a state of war and denounce Antony as a public enemy. However, Antony’s determined mother, Julia, and wife, Fulvia, donning mourning garments, lobbied the senators on his behalf. As a result, more moderate voices arguing for the declaration of a “state of emergency,” not a war, once again prevailed. Though Antony’s demands were refused, he was not yet outlawed, and his siege of Mutina continued. Furthermore, his allies in the Senate tried to engineer another embassy to Antony. Cicero was to be one of the ambassadors, but his sudden withdrawal sabotaged the mission, as he no doubt intended. With Octavian and Hirtius already in position near Mutina, the war that Cicero was trying so passionately to promote moved closer.
In late March the Senate dispatched a further four legions, this time of new recruits, north under Pansa to join Octavian and Hirtius. Learning of this, Antony decided to intercept them en route and on April 14 ambushed them as they passed through a village. Unknown to him, the inexperienced recruits had been joined by more seasoned soldiers—the Martian Legion which had defected from him. The struggle, on boggy ground, was bloody and protracted. According to Appian, the legionaries fought with determination in a grim silence punctuated only by the clash of weapons and human groans. Each side suffered heavy losses. A javelin struck Pansa in the side and mortally wounded him. Antony eventually emerged the victor. However, as his forces returned to camp weary and sweat-soaked but singing songs of victory, they were ambushed in turn by fresh waves of troops sent by Hirtius. Only with difficulty did Antony manage to extract his men and withdraw to safety as night fell. He left behind on the battlefield two legionary eagles and sixty standards, as well as many of his veteran men. During the night Antony sent search parties to rescue as many as he could. Appian described how the rescuers “set the survivors on their own horses, swapping places with some, and lifting others up beside them or encouraging them to cling to the horses’ tails and run along with them.”
On the brink of capturing Mutina, whose inhabitants were starving, Antony was not inclined to give in and raise the siege, but six days later, on April 21, Hirtius and Octavian infiltrated his camp while Decimus Brutus led a sally out of the besieged town. In the ensuing confused struggle, Octavian, who had reputedly hidden away during the previous battle, is said to have carried one of the legionary eagles after its bearer fell, and Hirtius was killed in the fighting around Antony’s tent. Antony’s men eventually recaptured their camp and forced Decimus Brutus’ men back into Mutina. But recognizing he could not take the town while being constantly harassed from the rear, Antony decided to withdraw over the chill passes of the Apennines. His hope was to join forces with Lepidus, who the previous year had taken up his post as governor of the provinces of Narbonese Gaul (Provence) and Nearer Spain and was currently in southern Gaul with seven legions—provided, of course, that Lepidus was still loyal to him.
According to Plutarch, “Antony’s nature was to excel in difficult circumstances” and in the retreat he showed his finest qualities. “Antony was an incredible example to his men: for all his extravagant and indulgent lifestyle, he did not hesitate to drink stagnant water and eat wild fruits and roots . . . tree-bark was eaten.” As the cold and hungry men crossed the mountains, they and their leader “ate animals which had never before been tasted by man.”
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When news of the second battle at Mutina reached Rome on April 26, the Senate finally felt sufficiently secure in its ascendancy to declare Antony and his supporters public enemies and to order Decimus Brutus, to whom they awarded a Triumph, to hunt them down. Cicero was now at his most politically influential since the time of the Catiline conspiracy. At his behest, the Senate also confirmed Cassius and Brutus in the provinces of Syria and Macedonia that they had seized and gave them authority over all the other governors in the east. However, amid the general rejoicing and self-congratulation, the Senate failed to award any significant honors to Octavian. Though Cicero had argued for the relatively minor distinction of an
ovatio
for him, he probably thought it timely to bring Caesar’s young heir, whom just a few weeks earlier he had been extolling as “this heaven-sent boy,” to heel. A pun, a witticism of a perhaps overconfident Cicero, caused much mirth among his friends: “
lau-dandum,
ornandum, tollendum
”—“Octavian must be praised, honored and extolled”—but the last word also means “removed.”
This joke, which was swiftly reported to Octavian, would prove unwise. The situation was polarizing, and Octavian was about to reassess his options and, after a careful calculation of the risks, make his choices. On one side were Cassius and Brutus, the murderers of Octavian’s adoptive father, who as every day passed were being given luster and legitimacy by an increasingly conservative, anti-Caesarean Senate urged on by Cicero. Between them they had seventeen legions. On the other side were the basically pro-Caesarean forces of Antony, with whom, personal rivalry apart, Octavian had far more political affinity and whose military skill he would need to defeat the considerable forces of Cassius and Brutus. Octavian, with the glory of Caesar’s name behind him, and Antony, with his military strength and experience, should, he reasoned, be a powerful combination.
Octavian therefore judged that his own status had been sufficiently raised and that of Antony sufficiently diminished by the previous round of fighting to make any future alliance between them one of equals, and refused either to pursue Antony himself or give aid to others sent to annihilate him. He also profited from the deaths of the two consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, to enhance his position. Discarding Cicero as Cicero had assumed he could discard him, Octavian arranged in July 43 for four hundred of his centurions to march to the Senate to demand the consulship for him. When the Senate prevaricated, a company commander named Cornelius threw back his cloak, put his hand on his sword hilt and brazenly cried, “If you do not make him consul, this will.” Opposition ceased. On August 19, still only nineteen, Octavian entered Rome as the youngest consul ever, his disregard for the Senate now as clear as that of his adoptive father. According to some, at his first taking of the auspices, twelve vultures circled in the hot skies above—the same number that had appeared to Rome’s founder, Romulus.
Octavian used his new powers to have himself formally recognized as Caesar’s heir and to demand vengeance on his murderers. Soon after, he set off north again with his legions to find Antony. In his absence, his docile cousin Pedius, selected to be his co-consul, persuaded the cowed Senate to rescind its condemnation of Antony as an enemy of the state. The stage was artfully set for the grand reconciliation of the two Caesarean leaders.
Meanwhile, in Gaul, Antony had located Lepidus, whom Cicero and the Senate had been attempting to win over with ever more spectacular inducements. Instead, or so accounts relate, having found Lepidus’ camp, Antony just wandered in, a wild-haired, bearded and smiling figure, to be saluted by Lepidus’ men, who recognized him immediately. Moments later, amid the cheers of the legionaries, he and Lepidus embraced. Lepidus wrote nonchalantly to the Senate that his soldiers had forced his hand. Decimus Brutus’ position was now hopeless. His armies swiftly deserted him and Antony’s men hunted him down and killed him.
Lepidus now brokered a meeting between Antony and Octavian, which took place around the end of October on an island in the Lavino River near Bononia (Bologna). It was staged with the care of a gathering of Mafia chiefs. Antony and Octavian approached from opposite sides of the river, each with five legions. Having scoured the island to ensure there were no lurking assassins, Lepidus, the go-between, waved his cloak to signify that all was well. Each man then crossed to the island with a bodyguard of three hundred. Before sitting down in full view of their men to begin negotiations, each gave the others body searches to check for concealed weapons. Two days later, the three told their jubilant troops that they had reached agreement. They would be
viri rei publicae
constituendae
(three men responsible for restoring the government of the republic), with consular powers for five years. Historians would call this the Second Triumvirate. It was, to all intents and purposes, another dictatorship.
With the eastern half of the empire largely in the hands of their adversaries, the three triumvirs carved up Rome’s western empire between them “as if,” Plutarch wrote, “it were an ancestral estate.” Antony was to have Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, Octavian received Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and Lepidus—who was to remain as consul in Rome while Antony and Octavian made war on Cassius and Brutus—was to retain Narbonese Gaul and to acquire, in addition to his existing province of Nearer Spain, the remainder of Spain. To reward their veteran soldiers, on whom their future success depended, the triumvirs agreed to appropriate private land from some of Italy’s richest towns and redistribute it once final victory was theirs.
The troops greeted the news with roars of support. They also cheered the news that, to confirm their new bonds, Octavian had given up the woman he had been engaged to wed and would instead marry Clodia, Antony’s stepdaughter, the scarcely pubescent child of Clodius and Fulvia. What they were not yet told was that, like Sulla thirty-nine years earlier, the triumvirs had drawn up lists of opponents to be punished—“proscribed”—for their role in Caesar’s murder. Anyone so proscribed would have no option but to flee Italy or face death, and all his property would be forfeit to the state. Prominent on the list, at Antony’s insistence, was Cicero. Although revenge on their enemies would be sweet, a major purpose was to raise money for the forthcoming war in the east to smash Brutus and Cassius and establish their own preeminence beyond dispute. In consequence, as Appian noted, many unfortunates were outlawed solely “on account of their wealth.”
The triumvirs dispatched a band of executioners in advance to deal with seventeen key men on the list, including Cicero, and followed with their legions to Rome, which they entered separately on three successive days. A nervous Senate had no choice but to endorse the dictatorial powers the three men had already grabbed for themselves and in so doing sanctioned its own demise as a meaningful political entity. Panic spread through the city as the lists of the proscribed—perhaps as many as three hundred senators and three thousand of Rome’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens—were made public. Large rewards awaited those prepared to “become hunting dogs for the murderers for the sake of the rewards,” as Appian put it. The head of any of the proscribed brought a reward of twenty-five thousand denarii if brought in by a free man and ten thousand denarii if brought by a slave.
Appian described the desperate plight of the fugitives: “Some descended into wells, others into filthy sewers. Some took refuge in chimneys. Others crouched in the deepest silence under the thick-set tiles of their roofs. Some were not less fearful of their wives and ill-disposed children than of the murderers.” Some unfaithful but influential wives took advantage of the witch hunt to have their husbands’ names added to the list to be rid of them. Other women, however, offered Antony sex in return for their husbands’ lives.
Fulvia used the situation to settle some scores. Appian wrote of a man named Rufus who “possessed a handsome house near that of Fulvia, the wife of Antony, which she had wanted to buy, but he would not sell it, and although he now offered it to her as a free gift, he was proscribed. His head was brought to Antony, who said it did not concern him and sent it to his wife.” According to Appian, the murders even extended to orphan children “on account of their wealth. One of these, who was going to school, was killed, together with the attendant, who threw his arms around the boy and would not give him up.”