Read Cleopatra and Antony Online
Authors: Diana Preston
Antony also hoped to profit from Parthia’s internal problems. The Parthian king Orodes, distraught at the death of his son Pacorus at Roman hands, had named his next son, Phraates, as his heir. Unwilling to wait, Phraates had promptly murdered his father and more than thirty of his brothers and other close relations to take the throne. In the resulting chaos, a group of important Parthian noblemen had defected to Antony, including Monaeses, governor-general of Parthia’s western frontier. Antony rewarded him with a substantial stretch of land in Roman Syria. All seemed to augur well for a successful campaign.
After ordering Canidius Crassus, his most senior and able general, to begin further preparatory campaigns in the Caucasus, Antony left Antioch with Cleopatra and some of his legions in the spring of 36. However, by the time they reached Zeugma on the Euphrates, Cleopatra had discovered that she was again pregnant. No doubt reluctantly, the queen, who numbered both Parthian and Median among the many languages she spoke, accepted Antony’s instruction to return home. She would have much preferred to accompany the momentous expedition, participating as an allied leader and sharing in the spoils, in much the same way as her ancestor Ptolemy had accompanied Alexander. She would also have wanted to remain by Antony’s side to keep herself and not Octavia in the forefront of his mind and affections and to ensure that when the campaign ended he returned to his family in Alexandria—not to the one in Rome.
Antony and his legions marched northeast up the Euphrates to Carona (modern Ezerum), where he rendezvoused with Canidius Crassus and the troops of his allies. Antony’s army comprised sixty thousand Roman legionaries, ten thousand cavalry from Roman Spain and Gaul and an allied contingent of some thirty thousand, among whom the largest component, nearly half, was supplied and led by Antony’s new ally, Artavasdes of Armenia. To satisfy the logistical needs of such an army in hostile territory, Antony had also procured a large supply convoy. Knowing that there was little good timber available on his chosen route to fabricate them, he assembled in advance a strong siege train of battering rams, catapults and other heavy equipment to assault the fortified towns of Media and Parthia. The battering rams were iron-capped tree trunks that swung on iron chains from large frames and could be propelled by brute manpower into the masonry and gates of enemy towns. Plutarch, who is said to have used for this part of his history a lost account of the campaign by Dellius, one of Antony’s leading generals and the man who had summoned Cleopatra to Tarsus, wrote that one of the battering rams was as long as eighty feet and that the whole siege train needed three hundred wagons to transport it.
Midsummer had passed before Antony led his army out from Ezerum, rumor of whose size and magnificence had already, according to Plutarch, terrified even the Indians living beyond Bactria and made the whole of Asia tremble. Antony’s first objective was to capture the Median capital of Phraaspa, possibly for use as a winter base from which he could launch his final assault on Parthia the following spring, once the cold and snow had departed.
*
However, like many Roman generals before and after operating outside lands they knew well, Antony seems to have taken insufficient account of the terrain he would encounter and the vast distances he would have to cover. He miscalculated how long it would take to get to Phraaspa and in particular how cumbersome and slow his extensive siege train would prove to be over the upland country. Impatient to make progress, Antony took a fatal decision to divide his forces. He himself led the major body forward more quickly, leaving the siege train to follow at its own pace under the protection of two understrength legions commanded by the general Statinius and a contingent of troops from Pontus led by their newly appointed king, Polemo.
When Antony’s main body of men arrived beneath the walls of Phraaspa, the city refused to surrender, and Antony, bereft of his siege equipment, was compelled to set his men to constructing a great earth rampart by the wall from which they could fire down into the city. In the meantime, Phraates, the Parthian ruler, had heard that Antony had left his siege train to follow behind and immediately ordered a force of fifty thousand mounted archers to encircle and attack it. They were led by Monaeses, whose allegiance to Antony had proved short-lived and probably had been a deceptive ruse from the start. The Parthians were using compound bows that could outdistance the simpler Roman bows and gave their arrows such velocity that they could penetrate the legionaries’ armor. Deprived of any ability to maneuver to confront their enemy by the need to protect their lumbering, heavy equipment, Antony’s forces were soon overwhelmed. Statinius was killed, Polemo and many others were captured, the siege equipment was burned, and the Parthians acquired more Roman standards. Antony’s reluctant ally, the Armenian king Artavasdes, gave up on the Roman cause at this point, according to Plutarch, and decamped back to Armenia, taking all his men with him, further damaging the morale of Antony’s remaining forces, who, with his desertion, perhaps already numbered scarcely more than three quarters of those who had set out.
No sooner had Artavasdes departed than the Parthians themselves appeared at Phraaspa “flushed with their success” and taunting the Romans as they galloped around their position. Antony, strong in a crisis, decided that to leave his men inactive would only further damage their morale and so he took out a strong force, including all his remaining cavalry, ostensibly on a foraging expedition but in fact in a bid to entice the Parthians into a pitched battle. As usual, the Parthians kept their distance, firing arrows from the safety of their saddles as they circled the Roman columns. Suddenly Antony gave the order for his own cavalry to charge. Yelling and screaming, they plunged into the Parthian ranks before they could disperse and were soon followed into the heaving mêlée by Antony’s battle-hardened legionaries. The shock of their combined assault unnerved the Parthians and put them to flight. Antony sent his men in pursuit but did not succeed in inflicting serious casualties or taking many prisoners.
Almost as soon as he returned to Phraaspa and the siege, the Parthian horsemen were back, again harassing his camp and relentlessly firing their arrows from a distance. Next, a sortie by the Medes from their city panicked the Roman legionaries on the artificial mound Antony had ordered to be built overlooking the wall. They fled ignominiously back to the main camp. Determined to maintain discipline, Antony inflicted decimation on those who fled, dividing them into groups of ten and then executing one of their number chosen by lot.
*
As the siege wore on, the circling Parthian horsemen began to shout overtures for a truce. Fearing the onset of winter, Antony agreed to negotiations.
†
His starting demand was for the return of Roman eagles and any surviving prisoners lost at Carrhae and elsewhere. However, Phraates refused this concession and Antony had to content himself with the promise of safe passage out of the country. The Parthians did not even keep this promise and harried the retreating Roman columns constantly.
Antony once more showed his great courage and leadership in adversity. Rallying his men, he insisted that they keep in formation, with the infantry marching in hollow squares protected by javelin throwers and slingers and, beyond that, by a screen of cavalry who were instructed to keep close order and not to be enticed into pursuing apparently fleeing Parthian horsemen. Plutarch records how Antony won the loyalty of his men:
All whatever their rank or fame would have sacrificed their lives for Antony. They surpassed the behavior of ancient Romans. Among the many reasons for this were Antony’s high birth, his eloquence, his straightforward manner, his prodigious generosity, his sense of humor and his geniality. By the way he shared in the distress and difficulties of the ill and the unfortunate, granting them as best he could whatever they wanted, he made even the wounded and the sick as eager to serve him as those who were well and strong.
Despite all their bravery, Antony’s men still suffered heavy losses on their retreat along a shorter and even more mountainous route shown to them by a local guide. However, their discipline endured. On one occasion they saved themselves and their comrades by forming the famous Roman
testudo
(tortoise) formation for protection as they descended one of the jagged, barren and steep hills common in the area with the Parthians firing down on them from above. Plutarch described how:
The Roman shield-bearers wheeled around and enclosed the lightly armored troops within their ranks, dropping down on one knee and holding out their shields as a defensive barrier. The men behind then held their shields over the heads of the first rank while the third rank did the same for the second rank. The resulting shape looks very like a roof and is the surest protection against arrows, which merely glanced off it. The Parthians however mistook the Romans falling on to one knee as a sign of exhaustion and so dropped their bows, grabbed their javelins and rushed to join battle at close quarters. But the Romans suddenly leapt to their feet roaring their battle cry and lunged forward with their spears, killing the front ranks of the Parthians and putting all the rest to flight.
Nevertheless, starvation weakened the men, who turned to eating roots, some of which proved so poisonous as to provoke diarrhea, vomiting, delirium and then death. Only once on their harrowing twenty-seven-day retreat, as they neared one of the final barriers to their crossing back into Armenia, the river Araxes, did their discipline fail. Antony had ordered a night march to avoid a Parthian assault of which he had been warned. During the march the Romans seem to have given way to panic. Perhaps unsettled at some rumor of attack, they lost all cohesion and floundered in the dark, turning violently on one another, plundering their own baggage wagons and even stealing Antony’s drinking vessels. Antony contemplated the necessity for suicide, summoning one of his bodyguards and making him swear that on his command he would run him through “and cut off his head to prevent the enemy capturing him alive or recognizing him in death.”
However, rising, as usual, to a practical crisis, Antony mastered any despair he felt and took the sensible decision to halt the march and make camp. This eventually led to the restoration of order and calm. The feel of the cool breeze from the river on their cheeks reassured the troops of its proximity. The next day, once more in good order, they crossed. The watching Parthian horsemen made a show of unstringing their bows—a sign that they would pursue them no further.
Once back in Armenia, Antony reviewed the ragged ranks of his troops to find that, in addition to the desertion of all Artavasdes’ contingent, he had lost some twenty-five thousand men, half through illness and disease. Much as he and his men might have wanted to, Antony was in no position to punish the Armenian king for his desertion but had to be friendly toward him to secure rations and safe passage.
As soon as he could, Antony seems to have sent a message to Cleopatra asking her to join him and to bring supplies before ordering his legions to continue their retreat back through Syria to the Mediterranean coast. It was deep, cold winter and there were incessant snowstorms, and eight thousand more of his men fell on the march. When Antony finally completed his retreat from Phraaspa, which modern historians have likened to Napoleon’s 1812 retreat from Moscow, he had showed great leadership but, just like Napoleon, had sacrificed his best troops and lost his best chance for world domination.
Also like Napoleon, once certain his troops were safe from further attack, Antony himself had hurried ahead to assess the consequences of failure and plan for the future. He arrived at the small port of Leuke Come (White Village), on the Syrian coast, to which he had summoned Cleopatra. However, released from the day-to-day rigors of command, he seems to have collapsed, losing his resolution and wandering around aimlessly longing for Cleopatra’s arrival. Plutarch wrote: “He missed her terribly . . . Before long he devoted his time to drinking himself into a stupor, although he could not recline at the table for long before leaping to his feet in the middle of a drinking session to go to look for Cleopatra’s coming.”
Plutarch was wrong in ascribing Antony’s distress solely to an overwhelming desire to be reunited with Cleopatra, which, he alleged, had also led him, “as if he had been drugged or bewitched,” to rush the Parthian campaign. However, Antony no doubt yearned for her arrival, not only for the fresh resources she would bring and the strategic advice her astute brain could provide, but also for her emotional consolation and support at a time when his grand ambitions had been shattered.
He was even more in need of her comfort and reassurance when news reached him that while he had been retreating in defeat and despair, Octavian had finally succeeded in crushing Sextus Pompey. After a series of humiliating naval defeats earlier that year that had left Octavian almost suicidally depressed, on September 3, 36, his navy, trained and led by Agrippa, had vanquished Sextus at the battle of Naulochus off the Sicilian coast. Sextus had fled to Asia Minor and Octavian was enjoying the prestige of military success that had so long eluded him.
Octavian had also used the situation, without any consultation with Antony, to get rid of Lepidus. He had summoned the triumvir and his legions from Africa to assist in the assault on Sextus. Lepidus had invaded Sicily from the west and, following Sextus’ defeat at sea, had pushed eastward to take and sack Messina. By this point, eight of Sextus’ legions had surrendered to him. With a combined force of twenty-two legions, Lepidus, so long kept on the margins by Octavian and Antony, made an ill-judged attempt to claim Sicily for himself. Octavian’s response was to enter his camp with only a handful of men, whereupon Lepidus’ legionaries at once went over to him. A contemptuous Octavian spared the groveling Lepidus his life but dismissed him from the triumvirate, took over his fertile, corn-producing province of Africa and sent him into ignoble exile in a seaside resort south of Rome. It was an ominous clearing of the decks.