Read Cleopatra and Antony Online
Authors: Diana Preston
Respectable Roman life was an orderly one of prudence, restraint and duty. Romans were early risers. Perhaps consequently there was little luxury in the bedchamber. Furniture there was minimal—usually just the couch that gave the room its name (the
cubiculum
), a chest to store clothes and a chair. Mosaics depict sumptuous-looking bronze couches with ivory feet but, compared with the soft beds of the East, they were not all that comfortable, with their sprung base of rope interwoven with webbing on which was placed a mattress and a bolster that served as a pillow. Like the rest of the house, bedrooms were kept warm in winter by portable charcoal braziers and by hot air centrally produced by a furnace in the basement and circulated through a network of ducts.
Roman men did not undress to go to bed, removing only their cloak and toga and keeping the rest of their clothes on. These comprised a loincloth knotted around the waist and a simple tunic of two widths of linen or wool sewn together to make a shirt that was pulled over the head and fastened around the waist with a belt. Different social classes wore different types of tunic—a soldier’s military tunic, as favored by Antony, was shorter than a civilian’s, while those of Roman senators had vertical purple stripes. If, like Octavian, a man felt the winter cold, he might wear several tunics.
After a simple breakfast of water, fruit, fresh bread and honey, the Roman male prepared for the day. Though he cleaned his teeth in the morning with a bicarbonate of soda mixture, he preferred to bathe in early afternoon, either at the public baths or, if an important man like Antony, in his own small baths at home. Antony would have had a slave especially trained as a barber to shave him. The Romans did not have soap and so the barber used only razor and water, making the whole process a painful one and cuts so frequent that, according to Pliny the Elder, a special plaster made of spiderwebs soaked in oil and vinegar was devised to stanch them.
The poet Martial lists having to wear the heavy, expensive and voluminous toga only rarely as one of the keys to a good life, along with good health and inherited wealth. Nevertheless, the toga had a symbolic significance—only freeborn Romans could wear it. The garment had evolved from the cloak and took its name from
tegere
(to cover). Spun from soft wool, the toga worn by the ordinary Roman was an unbleached brown but senior officials edged their togas with a broad purple band and triumphant generals wore purple togas bordered with gold. (The purple dye came from seashells.)
The toga comprised a semicircle of cloth with a diameter of up to eighteen feet. About six and a half feet of the straight edge was draped over the left shoulder, across the back, under the right arm, over the chest and then over the left shoulder again, and the folds arranged so that the curved edge formed the garment’s hem. The toga had no fastening, requiring the wearer to keep his left arm crooked to keep the draperies in place.
As aristocrats, Octavia and Antony probably slept apart so their own slaves could tend them. Roman women also kept their underclothes on at night—loincloths, a form of brassiere and a long tunic. They too bathed in the afternoon. Their daytime outer garment was the long, flowing stola, nipped in at the waist by a belt and colored using a variety of dyes—the saffron crocus for yellow, woad for blue, madder for red, oak gallnuts for black and salt of tartar for white. The dresses of women such as Octavia were richly embroidered, often with gold thread, which, like their elaborate jewelry, caught the light.
Octavia would have employed a special slave—her
ornatrix
—to dress her hair and help with her makeup. Hairstyles in this period were relatively simple compared with later imperial tastes. Octavia wore her hair in a soft topknot—the
nodus
—from which a thin braid, drawn back along a central parting, joined two side braids in a smooth knot on the nape of her neck, a style she invented and which set a fashion in Rome. Makeup, though, was elaborate. The
ornatrix
first used lanolin—the grease from unwashed sheep’s wool—as a foundation and then applied white chalk powder to Octavia’s forehead and arms, red ochre to her cheeks and black charcoal to her eyebrows and eyelids. A heady perfume completed her toilette. When she was ready to go out, Octavia draped a shawl, the
palla
, over her shoulders, securing it with a
fibula
—a brooch that was both shaped and functioned like a safety pin, though infinitely more decorative. A cloth called a
mappa
, which she could use to dab off dust and perspiration, dangled from her wrist. Slaves held parasols over her to protect her from the sun and fanned flies away.
Yet Octavia’s life was more than the comfortable routine of the wealthy, well-connected and fashionable Roman matron. As she settled into her new life as wife to one of the two most powerful men in Rome and sister to the other, she had done as much as anyone to restore peace and stability. However, her role as peace broker between a power-hungry brother and an ambitious husband was far from over.
I
N ROME THE HEARTFELT relief that civil war had been averted inspired the thirty-one-year-old Vergil to compose his famous Fourth Eclogue. Underscored by a plaintive yearning for peace and plenty, it predicted the arrival of a savior-child who would preside over a time of universal goodwill among men:
Now comes the crowning age foretold in the Sibyl’s songs,
A great new cycle, bred of time, begins again.
Now virginal Justice and the golden age return,
Now its first-born is sent down from lofty heaven.
With the birth of this boy, the generation of iron will pass,
And a generation of gold will inherit all the world.
Vergil was vague about the identity of the child’s parents. Possibly he was referring to Octavian and his aging bride, since Scribonia was pregnant, though the ludicrous aspects of the marriage make this unlikely. Far more plausible is that Vergil meant Antony and Octavia, who were soon expecting a child.
News of Octavia’s pregnancy would have been deeply worrying to Cleopatra and threatening to her twins by Antony, whom he had not yet seen. With Antony apparently content with his new wife and position in Rome and showing no sign of wishing to return to her, the outlook must have seemed bleak. Yet throughout her life Cleopatra, as a successful ruler, had learned the art of patience. Unlike her elder sisters, she had not overtly plotted for her father’s throne. When Antony had summoned her to Tarsus, she had not rushed to obey. Even such apparently impetuous acts as throwing herself at Caesar’s feet had been the result of careful calculation. She must have known that, however difficult, her best chance lay in waiting, knowing that before long her ambitious lover would return east to pursue his campaign against Parthia and, to do so, he would need Egypt’s wealth. She never seems to have considered abandoning her relationship with Antony or, indeed, her country’s close ties with Rome.
And Cleopatra had immediate problems of her own. With her lover and supposed protector absent and apparently distracted from the affairs of the east, she had to safeguard her own position on the Egyptian throne. This meant being on the lookout for internal dissent—there had been periodic outbreaks of nationalist feeling against the Ptolemies for most of their three-hundred-year reign. It also meant managing her country’s economy, the base of her power, prudently and carefully. As a result of the damage done to Egypt’s economy by her father’s debts, earlier in her reign Cleopatra had been forced to debase the country’s silver currency yet further. However, she had since revived the production of bronze in her mint in Alexandria and become the first Ptolemy to introduce separate denominations within Egypt’s bronze coinage and to establish a standard system of bronze weights to restore people’s confidence in the purchasing power of their coins. As a result of Cleopatra’s innovative reforms, her citizens calculated the worth of their coins by the denominations marked on them, rather than by the value of the metal of which they were composed.
Cleopatra also wished to ensure that Egyptian agriculture—source of so much of her wealth—was prospering. She knew that nothing was so likely to cause civil discontent as shortages of grain or overexploitation of the workforce by greedy, grafting officials. A decree of April 41 reveals her close scrutiny of what was happening. Learning that local administrators were imposing unreasonable burdens on holders of estates outside Alexandria and hence on their peasants, she declared herself “exceedingly indignant.” Citing her “hatred of evil” and determination to halt abuses, she ordered the excessive demands to stop:
Nor shall their goods be destrained for such contributions, nor shall any new tax be required of them, but when they have once paid the essential dues, in kind or in money, for corn-land and for vine-land, which have molested for anything further, on any pretext whatsoever.
Evidence suggests that such decrees, written down by scribes, would have been authorized by Cleopatra’s addition of the single word
ginesthoi
(let it be so).
At the same time, Cleopatra had to navigate through complex regional politics—in particular those of neighboring Judaea. In 40, displaced by the Parthians, the thirty-two-year-old Herod had hastened to Alexandria to seek Cleopatra’s help. He could not be entirely certain of his reception. His ambition was to regain the remainder of his territories intact from the Parthian invaders and the usurping Antigonus and his followers. However, Judaea had once been part of the Ptolemaic empire and Cleopatra, as he rightly suspected, nurtured hopes of someday regaining it.
For the moment, though, Cleopatra and Herod, as staunch allies of Rome, shared a common interest—first to contain and then to repulse the fanatically anti-Roman Parthians, who, if not stopped, might threaten the very borders of Egypt. According to Josephus, Cleopatra received Herod with great splendor and even offered him a command in her own army, perhaps as a way of keeping some control over him. However, still grieving over news that his brother Phasael had committed suicide in a Parthian prison cell, Herod was determined to go to Rome to beg for aid in regaining his lost lands. After some hesitation Cleopatra agreed to provide him with a ship to take him as far as Rhodes, where he could obtain other transport to take him on to Rome.
Cleopatra must have soon regretted her generosity. Arriving in Rome in the autumn of 40, not long after the Pact of Brundisium, Herod persuaded the triumvirs to convince the Senate not only to appoint him ruler of Judaea in place of Hyrcanus, now a captive of the Parthians, but also to award him the title of king of the Jews, an honor previously denied to Hyrcanus. In addition, Herod was awarded substantial territorial additions north of Jerusalem and a coastal strip to the southwest that probably included the port of Gaza, terminus of the Arabian spice route. Most unwelcome of all to Cleopatra was that, unsolicited, several of Antony’s supporters had spoken up for Herod in the Senate. In her eyes, their desire for a renewed and strong Judaea was more than a device to counter the Parthians—it was a signal that Rome did not wish Egypt to be the but wait for more propitious times to push her own claims.
Josephus recorded that Herod had been warned he would find Italy “very tumultuous and in great disorder,” which he did. The Pact of Brundisium had not ushered in Vergil’s “golden age.” Rome’s citizens were hungry and angrily demanding bread—a situation for which Sextus Pompey was largely to blame. Affronted to have received nothing concrete out of the Pact of Brundisium and by Antony’s apparent disinclination to act on his promise to try to reconcile him with Octavian, he had resumed his disruption of Rome’s grain supplies, attacking ports and shipping and seizing Sardinia and Corsica to add to his Sicilian strongholds. When Octavian and Antony, raised taxes on slaves and inheritances to pay for troops to fight Sextus, rioting mobs took to the streets to protest. Reports of Octavian’s lavish parties and feasts so angered people that they surrounded and began to stone him in the Forum. His life was saved by Antony, who, hearing of his predicament, quickly assembled troops to attack the protestors and himself bravely pushed through the mêlée to snatch the injured Octavian to safety—a clear indication of his loyalty to Octavian at this time.
With Sextus’ rampaging growing ever more blatant and ever more damaging to the authority of the triumvirs, Antony urged Octavian to seek a meeting with him. The encounter took place in somewhat bizarre circumstances in the spring of 39. The setting was Misenum at the northern end of the Bay of Naples, where so many of the Roman elite had built their luxurious holiday villas. Fearful of treachery, Antony and Octavian would not trust themselves to a shipboard meeting, and Sextus would not accept one on land. Sextus ordered the erection of two platforms supported on wooden piles a little way offshore and near the harbor mole and calculated their positioning to the inch. The platforms were near enough for men to be able to hear one another but too far apart for an assassin to leap between them. Antony and Octavian climbed onto the platform nearest the shore where their troops were waiting, while Sextus occupied the seaward perch close to his flagship.
Sextus’ demands were ambitious—he wanted nothing less than to join the triumvirate. When the existing triumvirs refused, the strange conference adjourned while Sextus consulted his wife, Julia—Scribonia’s niece—and his mother, Mucia, who begged him to moderate his demands. Back on his platform with the warm waters of the Mediterranean lapping around him, Sextus shouted across to Octavian and Antony fresh ultimata, which the triumvirs finally accepted. In return for a huge payment, Sextus would cease raiding shipping and ensure that Rome received her grain. He was also to be consul for 38, to be left in control of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica and to acquire the Pelopon-nese, which Antony agreed to hand over. Sextus also won concessions for his followers, including the many republican exiles who had fled to him and who were now to be allowed to return home and receive partial compensation for their estates. Only those who had been complicit in Caesar’s death were excluded. The agreement was signed, sealed and dispatched for safekeeping to the Vestal Virgins in Rome.
To celebrate, Sextus invited Antony and Octavian to dine aboard his magnificent flagship, an invitation the two men now felt sufficiently confident to accept. Before dinner, Sextus resentfully chided Antony that this vessel was “the only family home Pompey has left,” a rebuke for Antony’s having appropriated the mansion of Pompey the Great on Rome’s Palatine Hill. Plutarch went on that at the height of the party, when, in typical male fashion, “jokes about Antony and Cleopatra were flying thick and fast” as the wine flowed, one of Sextus’ commanders whispered to him in an undertone, “Shall I cut the ship’s cables and make you master of Rome, not just Sicily and Sardinia?” In other words, once out to sea, they could murder the triumvirs. Sextus thought for a moment in silence then replied, “You ought to have done it without telling me about it beforehand. For now, let’s be satisfied with things as they are. It’s not my way to break a promise.”
It was perhaps Sextus’ last and best chance, as his treaty with the triumvirs did not endure long. Disgruntled that Antony, with Octavian’s connivance, was denying him tribute from the Peloponnese, which he believed was his, Sextus resumed his blockade of Rome’s grain. Captured pirates who confessed under torture that they were in Sextus’ pay gave Octavian every justification to resume hostilities.
Octavian also took advantage of the situation to get rid of his wife, Sextus’ relation. On the very day that Scribonia gave birth to their daughter Julia, Octavian divorced her because, or so he said, “I could not bear the way she nagged at me.” Octavian’s brutal act in fact had less to do with either Scribonia’s failings or Sextus’ renewed hostility than with a consuming new passion. The object of the hot and urgent desires of the usually cool and restrained Octavian was a young married woman, the beautiful nineteen-year-old Livia Drusilla of the ancient house of the Claudii, his future empress and, as Suetonius believed, “the one woman whom he truly loved until his death.” Her patrician husband was the staunchly republican Tiberius Claudius Nero, with whom she had escaped after the fall of Perusia, where he had fought on Antony’s brother’s side. After surviving a terrifying series of adventures, he was one of the exiles permitted to return to Rome following the pact with Sextus. Livia herself was at the time heavily pregnant—some claimed, probably incorrectly, with Octavian’s child—and already had a two-year-old son, Tiberius. However, none of this—husband, child, pregnancy—mattered to Octavian, who was determined to have her.
Some accounts, including that of the historian Tacitus, suggest that Octavian virtually abducted Livia from her husband’s house. Nevertheless, anxious to retain at least some semblance of propriety, Octavian sought advice from the priests on the delicate matter of how soon he could marry a woman pregnant at the time of her divorce. Faced with an unprecedented situation, the priests agreed the marriage could take place as soon as the child was born. In January 38, just three days after giving birth to her second son, Drusus, Livia duly married Octavian, given away by her complaisant former husband. To Octavian’s great disappointment, though their marriage would last fifty years, she would never bear him a child. Unlike those of Antony and Tiberius Claudius Nero, none of Octavian’s descendants would be emperors.
Antony and Octavia were not at the wedding. In the autumn of 39, shortly after Octavia had given birth to a daughter, Antonia, they had sailed together for Athens so that Antony could prepare for his Parthian campaign. Plutarch claimed that Cleopatra’s astrologer, still attached to Antony’s household, had advised him to go: “Either as a favor to Cleopatra, or because he wanted to tell the truth, he spoke frankly to Antony and told him that despite his great brilliance . . . he was being eclipsed by Octavian and he advised him to put as much distance as possible between himself and the young man.” If Cleopatra had had a hand in urging Antony eastward, it did her little immediate good: Antony made no attempt to contact her.
Whatever Cleopatra may have hoped, Antony, it seems, was still enjoying the novelty of a quiet domestic life with Octavia. Athens suited them both. Octavia liked conversing with Athens’ philosophers, while Antony, a longtime admirer of the Hellenic world, relished the more relaxed atmosphere. Just as he had done in Alexandria, he put aside his Roman garb for a Greek tunic and white shoes. Appian wrote, “He took his meals in the Greek fashion, passed his leisure time with the Greeks and enjoyed their festivals in company with Octavia with whom he was very much in love, being by nature excessively fond of women.” Their marriage was honored by a sacred marriage between Antony and the goddess of the city, Athena, with whom the Athenians associated Octavia. Both were hailed as “beneficent gods.”
As well as a cultured, pleasant place, Athens was also Antony’s military headquarters. His plan was for his generals to drive the Parthians from the territories they had occupied in Asia Minor, Syria and Judaea while he reserved the glorious conquest of Parthia for himself. The campaign was, in fact, already well under way even before Antony reached Athens. Earlier in 39, his skillful commander Publius Ventidius, a veteran of Caesar’s campaigns and an ally of Antony since his darkest hour after Mutina, had defeated the Roman renegade Labienus and the Parthians under his command in the Taurus mountains. The next step was to conquer Armenia.