Cleopatra and Antony (16 page)

There were many such scenes of great courage. Appian praised the fidelity “of wives, of children, of brothers, of slaves who rescued the proscribed or . . . died with them when they did not succeed in their designs. Some even killed themselves on the bodies of the slain.” He described how one man “was concealed by his wife, who communicated the secret to only one female slave. Having been betrayed by the latter, she followed her husband’s head as it was carried away, crying out, ‘I sheltered him; those who give shelter are to share the punishment.’ As nobody killed her or informed on her, she came to the triumvirs and accused herself before them. Being moved by her love for her husband, they pretended not to see her. So she starved herself to death.” Antony’s elderly republican uncle Lucius Caesar, whom Antony had agreed to place on the list to please Octavian since he had supported Caesar’s murderers and as a quid pro quo for Cicero, was saved by Antony’s own mother, Julia, who interposed herself between the old man and the soldiers who came to murder him.

Cicero did not escape. As with Louis XVI trying to flee the mobs of revolutionary France, his indecision proved fatal. He had fled to sea from Astura in a small boat in the hope of escaping down the coast but, retching with seasickness, had ordered the boatman to make once more for land. Disembarking, Cicero had tottered on foot northward again toward Rome but, reaching the Appian Way, halted. Fearing he would be recognized and arrested on this thronging highway, he turned back toward Astura, where he spent a dreadful night tormented by “terrible thoughts and desperate plans.” His attendants persuaded the hesitant, nervous orator to take to sea again and sail south to his villa at Caieta near Formiae.

Here Cicero stayed, hoping the madness would pass him by, but a search party flushed him out. He tried to escape by litter but pursuing soldiers caught up with him in a wood. Cicero had once written, “What gladiator of ordinary merit has ever uttered a groan or changed countenance? Who of them has disgraced himself, I will not say on his feet, but who has disgraced himself in his fall? Who after falling has drawn in his neck when ordered to suffer the fatal stroke?” Now, accepting his own fall, the haggard, unshaven old man unflinchingly stretched his own wrinkled neck to the soldiers’ blades and paid the price of his outspoken Philippics against Antony. His head and hands were nailed to the rostra, the speaker’s platform before the Senate house where he had delivered so many speeches. Fulvia, wife to Clodius as well as to Antony and with a double dose of vengeance to extract, apparently spat in his blood-smeared face and, yanking out his once voluble tongue, impaled it with a hairpin.

Fulvia was less than sympathetic to the plight of some fourteen hundred wealthy Roman women whose relatives had been proscribed and who were themselves being taxed to fill the triumvirs’ coffers. Led by Hortensia, daughter of the famous orator Hortensius, they forced their way into the Forum: “You have already deprived us of our fathers, our sons, our husbands, and our brothers . . . but if in addition you take away our property you will reduce us to a condition unsuitable to our birth, our way of life, and our female nature,” Hortensia argued. “Why do we share in the punishments when we did not participate in the crimes?” With the crowd shouting their support, the triumvirs gave ground, reducing the number of women subject to the tax to four hundred. Using the money they had sequestered, they now concentrated their efforts on planning to take the fight to Brutus and Cassius in their eastern exile.

Cleopatra’s natural affinity was of course with those seeking to avenge Caesar’s death and, after careful thought, she had encouraged the legions left by Caesar in Alexandria to go to Dolabella’s aid. However, at some point they had defected to Cassius. Hopelessly outnumbered, in July 43, the month when Octavian’s soldiers had demanded the consulship for him, Dolabella took refuge in the seaport of Laodicea and, when Cassius bribed the town’s commanders to throw open the gates, ordered his slave to decapitate him.

The aid she had sent Dolabella had left Cleopatra exposed to reprisals by Cassius, and her position was weakening. Her governor in Cyprus had also gone over to Cassius, sending him ships to bolster his fleet, while in Ephesus Cleopatra’s younger half sister and rival, Arsinoe, was planning a comeback. In the Temple of Artemis, the high priest was already hailing her as Egypt’s new queen.

There seemed every danger that, eager for Egypt’s wealth, Cassius would move into Egypt, plunder its treasuries himself and depose Cleopatra in favor of the more compliant Arsinoe. If that happened, who knew what the fate of Caesarion would be? Cassius had killed the father. Why should he spare the son? At one of the most perilous moments of Cleopatra’s short reign, she was fortunate that Brutus asked Cassius to hurry to Smyrna for a council of war. By the end of 43 Cassius had arrived in Asia Minor.

The reason for this urgent consultation was the news that Antony and Octavian, having buried their differences, were moving against them. To build up their own forces, Cassius increased his already heavy demands on the eastern kingdoms for money and men but, mindful of who was by far the richest ruler in the east, renewed his demands on Cleopatra in particular. Once again she must have agonized. Cassius and Brutus were closer geographically than Antony and Octavian. Defying them was risky. But yet again Cleopatra decided to link her fate to Antony and Octavian. An important factor was the triumvirs’ decision to sanction Caesarion’s right to sit beside her on the throne of Egypt as a reward for her previous help to Dolabella. The passing of such a decree, as they astutely deduced, was exactly the way to appeal to Cleopatra, both as mother and as dynast.

Cleopatra informed Cassius, with perfect truth, that the Nile had failed to rise to its usual bountiful level and that the harvest that year had been poor. Desperate for food, some Egyptians were binding themselves to others as servants for many years—a device to bypass the law forbidding free people to sell themselves into slavery. One woman engaged herself as a servant for ninety-nine years. There had also been an outbreak of plague. In the Museon in Alexandria, one of Cleopatra’s personal physicians, Dioscurides Phacas, tracked the spread of the disease. In the world’s first medical treatise, he documented the plague’s terrible course, from the swollen lymphatic glands to the black, evil-smelling, suppurating boils of the victims. With her own people suffering so badly, Cleopatra argued that she could spare no men or food for Cassius. He, however, was skeptical of such excuses. When he learned that Antony and Octavian were massing their troops at Brundisium ready for ferrying across the Adriatic to Macedonia, he dispatched one of his admirals to the southern point of the Peloponnese with a fleet of sixty ships, a legion of men and orders to intercept any ships that Cleopatra might try to send to the aid of Antony and Octavian.

Indeed, not only had Cleopatra, despite her apparent economic distress, managed to build and equip a fleet in the shadow of the Pharos in Alexandria but, in one of the bold, theatrical gestures at which she was so gifted, she was planning to do what no queen of the East had done since the fifth century, when Queen Artemesia of Halicarnassus led a squadron of ships to assist her Persian ally Xerxes against the Greeks at Salamis: to be the admiral of her own navy. She would lead it to support the triumvirs.
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Only the weather defeated Cleopatra. Storms beat back her ships long before they met any challenge from Cassius. Many were wrecked, some of their broken hulls drifting northward to be washed up on the beaches of Greece. Cleopatra herself, laid low with seasickness aboard her flagship, managed to regain Alexandria. She at once began preparing a second fleet but events were moving so swiftly that by the time it was ready the battle between Caesar’s avengers and Caesar’s murderers was over.

Even without Egyptian aid, the Caesarean forces had dodged the enemy squadrons sent against them by Cassius and Brutus and landed safely in Macedonia. Here Octavian fell ill, apparently with dropsy—a disease in which watery fluid collects in body tissue. While he remained behind to recover, Antony marched their twenty-eight legions over the mountains to take up position near the town of Philippi and await the arrival of the enemy forces. Antony had with him some of the most tried and trusted legions, many of whom had previously served Julius Caesar and who had long been eager to avenge his death.

Caesar’s uncle Marius had reformed the legions more than fifty years earlier, making the army into a professional one subject to rigorous discipline and drill, rather than a citizen militia. He had stopped the practice of disbanding legions at the end of each campaign and given them numbers and emblems, in particular the legions’ eagle. Made of silver and gold and mounted on a long pole, it was carried by a standard-bearer who had a special lion-skin headdress, and it served as a rallying point to be defended to the death. Its capture was a lasting disgrace. At full strength, which was rare, each legion consisted of some six thousand men split into ten cohorts of six hundred men each. Each cohort had its own symbol—for example, a golden hand—and contained six centuries of one hundred men, each led by that backbone of the Roman army, the centurion—a career soldier distinguished from the ordinary legionary by the transverse crest on his helmet.

Another of Marius’ changes had been to make the legions more mobile and less vulnerable by reducing the baggage train. He made the legionary carry more of his own food and equipment, including sixteen days’ rations, a cooking pot and two stakes as a contribution to the palisade thrown round the camp for protection. All this gear, the legionaries joked, turned them into “Marius’ mules.” Burdened with such a heavy pack, weighing some sixty pounds, the legionary was subject to frequent training runs with full kit, like modern soldiers.

A legionary’s weapons were the sword and the spear. The sword had a double cutting edge and a stabbing point. The spears—six-foot-long javelins—were designed so that the soft iron of their neck would bend on impact, thus preventing the spear from being thrown back if it missed its target and hit the ground, and also making it more difficult to pull from a wound if it did not. Unlike most armies of the time and for a long time afterward (until the seventeenth century, in fact), the Roman legionary had a standard uniform—a leather jerkin over which he wore chain-mail armor. (The latter was soon to be displaced by a leather or metal breastplate.) His bronze helmet had protective cheek pieces and was pear-shaped, rising to a lead-weighted topknot surmounted by the crest. His shield was oval and slightly cylindrical, to curve around and protect his body. It was made of leather-covered wood with a metal boss. The legionary went bare-legged but on his feet wore sturdy leather sandals, lacing up above and around his ankles and with their soles studded with iron nails.

Brutus and Cassius did not rush to battle, preferring to leave the Caesarean forces to run short of supplies and patience. Instead, after attempting to ensure the loyalty of their legions, of which they were much less certain than Antony was of his, by payments to each man of fifteen hundred denarii, they carefully drew up their troops in a strong position on high ground west of Philippi—Brutus’ troops on the right flank were protected by mountains and Cassius’, on the left, abutted marshland. Antony decided to confront his enemies head-on and boldly encamped his own troops in the plain beneath the high ground where his opponents sat. To remedy his inferior position, he had his men rapidly throw up a series of towers and fortifications. During this period, determined to share in what he hoped would be a glorious victory, Octavian joined Antony as soon as he felt strong enough, but he would remain physically below par throughout the campaign.

Still confident in their ability to wear down their opponents by cutting off their supplies, Brutus and Cassius made no move. Frustrated by his failure to draw them into battle, in October 43 Antony formulated a plan secretly to build a causeway through the marshes to outflank them. Drawing his main army into battle formation to deflect his enemies’ attention by suggesting that a frontal attack was imminent, Antony ordered others of his men to work under the cover of the high reeds to construct the causeway. To do so they piled up embankments of earth and stone and used timber to bridge the deepest parts of the squelching marsh. After ten days of this work, Antony succeeded in getting a body of his men across the causeway and led them in an attack on the perimeter of Cassius’ fortification. The weight of their charge swiftly put Cassius’ men to flight and they fell back on their camp proper. However, Antony’s legionaries smashed through the gates, despite showers of missiles from the defenders above. Soon the camp was Antony’s, and Cassius fled up the hill toward Brutus’ position. Because of the confusion of battle and the all-pervasive clouds of dust obscuring the plain, Cassius, who in any case had poor sight, thought that he saw signs that Brutus too had been defeated. Without waiting for confirmation, a despairing Cassius killed himself, according to Plutarch with the very dagger he had used against Caesar. However, far from dead, Brutus had, in fact, taken advantage of the engagement to capture Octavian’s camp. Caesar’s heir was not there. According to some, he had taken refuge deep in the marshes.

The result of the battle had been inconclusive and Brutus’ army still had the better position and better supplies. Indeed, the same day as the battle at Philippi, the Liberators’ navy had destroyed a convoy bringing two more legions as well as provisions to Antony and Octavian. However, Cassius’ death had unsettled the republican forces. There were desertions among some of the contingents of their eastern allies. Growing impatient, just like Pompey’s men before Pharsalus, the majority clamored for action and revenge. Antony did his best to provoke his opponents further by regularly leading out his troops in battle array and having them yell alternately at Brutus’ men accusations of cowardice and offers of bribes if they would desert.