Augustus, page 20
In 34 BC Antony took the field again, capturing through subterfuge his former ally, the king of Armenia. It was a success of sorts, but little to set against the failure of his attack on Parthia. Returning to Alexandria, he staged a grand victory procession, the king walking in gold (or, in another source, silver) chains with other royal captives, followed by a chariot in which Antony was dressed as Dionysius. The culmination was his reception by Cleopatra, seated on a throne perched atop an ornately decorated platform. The whole thing smacked too much of a Roman triumph, but played out in a foreign city and not in Rome, and for the benefit of a foreign queen rather than citizens. Whatever the truth, Caesar and his allies happily portrayed it as such.19
Later in the year Antony and Cleopatra presided at another ceremony, celebrated in the spectacularly lavish style beloved of the Ptolemies. The so-called ‘Donations of Alexandria’ confirmed the queen’s power and that of Caesarion as her co-ruler, and granted large swathes of the eastern provinces to the couple’s three children – Alexander Helios was given Parthia and Media, neither of which were under Antony’s or Rome’s control. Cleopatra was named ‘Queen of kings, whose sons are kings’, and no doubt this was intended to confirm her rule and her dominance over her children, the oldest now a teenager, which would soon make him a potential rival. There was no actual change to the administration of the east, and it is hard to know what Antony intended as the truth swiftly became buried under a mass of hostile propaganda. Antony’s closest allies suppressed his own report of the event because it was so damaging.20
Criticism of Antony grew steadily – if not from Caesar himself then from those close to him. Antony was in thrall to a sinister eastern queen and her decadent courtiers. A poem written by Horace a few years later captured the mood of this criticism:
‘The shame of it! A Roman enslaved to a woman (you future generations will refuse to believe it) carries a stake and weapons, and in spite of being a soldier can bear to serve a lot of shrivelled eunuchs, while the sun gazes down on the degenerate mosquito net among the army’s standards.’21
Antony was depicted as a drunk, perhaps even drugged or controlled by magic potions given to him by Cleopatra. He had ceased to behave like a Roman, or remember that he was a servant of the Republic. The contrast with Caesar, victorious, working for the good of the state, celebrated by the Senate and People of Rome, and living with his Roman wife, was emphasised at every turn. Antony claimed descent from Hercules, and so the story of the demigod being duped by Omphale into wearing a dress and spinning wool, while she carried his club and wore his lion skin, was revived in literature and art.22
The exchange was not one-sided. Antony wrote an open letter, attacking Caesar for his double standards in criticising the affair with Cleopatra: ‘Why have you changed? Is it because I’m screwing the queen? Is she my wife? (Of course not!) Have I just started this or has it been going on for nine years? How about you – is it only (Livia) Drusilla you screw? Congratulations, if when you read this letter you have not been inside Tertulla or Terentilla, Rufilla or Salvia Titiseniam, or all of them. Does it really matter where or in whom you dip your wick?’23
Caesar’s womanising was well known, but it was one thing to have numerous affairs with Romans and quite another to appear tied to one foreign mistress. Cleopatra was a Greek, and the Romans had a complex relationship of admiration mingled with a sense of their own cultural inferiority and contempt for a conquered people. Worse, she was ruler of Egypt, and there were plenty of ancient stereotypes of Egyptian barbarians with their animal-headed gods. Caesar and his allies had plenty of material with which to work. Antony’s own conduct did little to help his cause. In his only published work, entitled On His Drunkenness (de sua ebrietate), he defended himself against criticism of his drinking, perhaps by implying that he was never incapacitated or under the influence while performing official duties – we cannot know the details as the work has not survived. Simply having to justify his conduct showed that the damage had been done.24
Antony attacked more than he defended, and the mud slung on both sides was well within the tradition of Roman political invective and rarely troubled by any concern for the truth. The slurs of Caesar’s conduct at Philippi were revived, and reinforced with stories of his defeat by Sextus Pompey and apparent cowardice. Caesar was a vile degenerate, who had prostituted himself to Julius Caesar to gain the dictator’s favour. Since then, he had planned to wed the infant Julia to the king of some tiny Illyrian tribe, and even considered marrying the king’s daughter – surely more damning than any dalliance with Cleopatra and it did not matter if it was not true. The aristocratic Antony naturally returned to his contempt for the obscurity of his rival’s real – rather than adopted – family. It was only at this late stage that Caesarion began to assume some importance. This was not in his own right, but simply because a natural son of Julius Caesar showed that the self-proclaimed Imperator Caesar, son of the god, was no blood descendant at all. Caesar commissioned Oppius, one of the dictator’s old subordinates, to write a pamphlet ‘proving’ that Caesarion was not the dictator’s child at all. Antony replied by claiming that he had heard Julius Caesar acknowledge the boy.25
It is easy to blame Caesar entirely for the slide into conflict. He ultimately won, and therefore is readily seen as the driving force behind events, but in truth both of the triumvirs were jealous of power and neither showed much reluctance for a final confrontation. In the summer of 33 BC Antony’s legions were concentrated on the Euphrates. Any thought of another attack on Parthia was swiftly abandoned, if it was ever seriously contemplated, and instead he ordered them to begin the long march of more than 1,000 miles to the coast of Asia Minor. The only possible enemy to the west was Caesar.26
Two of Antony’s senior subordinates, Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus – former admiral of Brutus and Cassius – and Caius Sosius became consuls on 1 January 32 BC. The renewed five-year term of the triumvirate had probably expired at the end of the previous year, leaving Caesar and Antony with command of armies and provinces in spite of their lack of formal power. Domitius Ahenobarbus praised Antony, and criticised Caesar indirectly. Sosius followed up with a bitter personal attack, and presented a motion to the Senate condemning Caesar which was blocked by a tribune’s veto before a vote could be taken. Tactfully absent from meetings up to this point, at the next session Caesar arrived escorted by troops, and accompanied by friends who took care to reveal that they were carrying ‘concealed’ daggers. Whether or not he still held any legal imperium, he calmly sat on his chair between the two consuls to show his de facto power. Ahenobarbus and Sosius took the hint and left Rome, travelling unmolested to meet Antony in Greece. Some others began to follow them.27
Not all the traffic was one-way. Soon afterwards the former consul Lucius Munatius Plancus arrived in Rome, along with his nephew, Marcus Titius, consul designate for the next year and the man who had actually ordered the execution of Sextus Pompeius. Plancus had an unenviable reputation as a turncoat, but his decision was seen as an indication of the way the wind was blowing. Until recently he was an active participant in the revels of Antony and Cleopatra. It was he who held the stakes when she famously bet her lover that she would present them with the most expensive of meals, and declared the queen the winner when she dissolved a fabulously expensive pearl earring in wine and swallowed it. There was a story that he had played the part of the sea god Glaukon at another feast with an Olympian theme, and the former consul donned an artificial fishtail, painted his skin and danced in the nude. Now he had abandoned Antony. As one cynical senator put it, ‘Antony must have done a great many things to make you leave him!’28
Munatius Plancus had knowledge to trade as well as his simple presence. As a witness to Antony’s will, he was aware of the damaging nature of some of its clauses. The document was stored in the Temple of Vesta in Rome, and although the Chief Vestal Virgin refused to hand over the will, Caesar went in and took it, having extracts read out at a public meeting in the Forum. The contents – or at least those Caesar chose to reveal – were inflammatory. Antony formally acknowledged Caesarion as Julius Caesar’s son – an odd thing to include in his will – and gave legacies to his own children by Cleopatra. There must also have been proper legacies to his legitimate Roman children, but that was ignored. More damning was his wish that his body be interred in Alexandria with Cleopatra, even if he should die in Italy.29
None of our ancient sources suggest that the will was a forgery and they were surely right. Instead Caesar carefully distorted and worsened the impression made by an already embarrassing document which should never have been made public. His own behaviour was in deliberate contrast. Only thirty, he had already begun work on an immense tomb for himself and his family. Aristocratic monuments had in the past been intended to promote the glory of their families and to be noticed, but this project dwarfed anything that had gone before. It soon became known as the Mausoleum, after the famous tomb of the Carian king Mausolos, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Three hundred Roman feet in diameter, with a forty-foot-high wall topped in a dome-shaped mound and with a colossal statue of Caesar at its crown, the scale was blatantly monarchic, once again emphasising that Imperator Caesar was different from other men. Even more importantly it was in Rome, although on the Campus Martius outside the formal boundary of the City, as befitted a tomb. Caesar was a Roman through and through, and unlike Antony had no thought of being interred anywhere save in Rome itself. Rumours spread that the latter wanted to move the capital to Alexandria – matching an earlier rumour that Julius Caesar had planned the same thing. Another tale claimed that Cleopatra’s favourite oath was ‘as surely as I will dispense justice on the Capitol’; it did not matter that the stories conflicted, for the message was that Antony took her orders and no longer had Rome’s interests at heart.30
Cleopatra was the enemy. That was the constant theme of the propaganda campaign, because it was easier for people to pretend that they fought a foreign threat to Rome than that yet another civil war between rival Roman warlords was about to break out. Ostensibly it was not to be a choice between Caesar and Antony, but a rallying cry to protect Rome. All of Italy – tota Italia – took an oath to serve under Caesar’s leadership in this war in a carefully managed gesture of solidarity. Colonies of Antony’s veterans were given the freedom to refuse if they chose, although very few took up this offer, and none at all showed any inclination to muster to fight for him. Some senators – perhaps numbering in hundreds – fled to join Antony, and modern historians tend to be impressed by this. Some were under obligation to him, and perhaps others simply judged him most likely to win, or were desperate enough to hope for revolution. The last few surviving conspirators rallied to Antony since they had little prospect of welcome by Julius Caesar’s heir. Caesar boasted that over 700 senators took an oath to serve under his command, and even if this was a generous estimate it was still by far the majority of the senatorial order. A few remained openly neutral, the most famous being Asinius Pollio, who commented that he would ‘stand apart from your quarrel and be a spoil of the victor’.31
In the summer of 32 BC Caesar led the Roman Republic as it formally declared war on Cleopatra. In the distant past, the college of priests known as fetiales oversaw the declaration of war and peace. Archaic ritual was revived – or just possibly invented in a plausibly traditional guise – so that Caesar could preside as a fetial in a sacrifice made in the Temple of Bellona, god of war. A spear was dipped in the victim’s blood, grievances recited, and then the spear was flung into a patch of earth symbolically representative of Cleopatra’s Egyptian kingdom.32
Antony’s army and fleet were already mustering on Greece’s western coast. It was too late in the season for either side to strike, but it seems that Antony’s plan was to wait and fight the war in Greece. It was the same plan adopted unsuccessfully by Pompey in 48 BC, and Brutus and Cassius in 42 BC. Yet Sulla was the only Roman based in Greece ever to win a civil war, and he did so by crossing to Italy and fighting the war there. Antony was relying on the sheer size of his armies and fleet, and trusting that the enemy would make a mistake and be crushed. Like other recent wars, this one would be fought on an immense scale. Cleopatra was at Antony’s side, and her presence caused friction with some of his senior subordinates. It would certainly have been deeply damaging had he crossed to Italy, and perhaps this was one more reason why he was reluctant to do so. The result was to hand the initiative over to the enemy.33
Agrippa began the attack – and it was probably he who masterminded the entire campaign and certainly led at all the key moments, systematically smashing Antony’s cause. In a series of lightning attacks he raided and destroyed several of Antony’s bases, threatening his supply lines. As the enemy reeled from these blows, Caesar – consul for the third time in this year – himself sailed with the main army and landed in Epirus, occupying a town called Torone or ‘ladle’. Cleopatra joked that they should not worry if Caesar ‘sat on a ladle’ – the word was a slang term for penis – but the truth was that the enemy was across the Adriatic and Antony had not yet concentrated sufficient of his forces to face them. Caesar closed on Antony’s main base at Actium on the Gulf of Ambracia, beginning a blockade that was soon pressed by land and sea. From the end of spring throughout the summer Antony’s men failed to break this stranglehold or draw the enemy into a battle on their own terms. All the while their ranks were thinned by disease, for their camp lay in an unhealthy spot, and malaria and dysentery were rife. Caesar’s men watched and waited as their enemy grew weaker and as the months passed the Caesareans won numerous small victories, on one occasion coming close to taking Antony himself. Deserters – some of them ordinary soldiers or auxiliaries, and others senators like Domitius Ahenobarbus – slipped quietly away from Antony’s camp to be welcomed by Caesar. No one went in the other direction.34
On 2 September 31 BC Antony’s fleet sailed out to challenge the enemy. At least some of the vessels carried masts and sails on their decks, when it was normal to dispense with these cumbersome objects for battle. Warships manoeuvred exclusively by rowing when fighting, and the decision is a clear sign that Antony contemplated breaking out with some or all of the fleet. Perhaps he still hoped to change his fortunes by winning a naval battle, but was also planning for failure – scarcely an optimistic frame of mind for a commander. It took hours for the fleets to form in battle lines, and then more time passed as they faced each other, neither side wanting to fight too close inshore. When Antony’s men eventually resumed their advance, Agrippa had his ships back water for some distance to give more sea room. Then they tried to outflank the enemy – Caesar’s fleet was probably a little more numerous, and its captains and crews were certainly far more skilful after the bitter war against Sextus Pompey. Both fleets included many big warships, and when the fighting began it proved hard to cripple these with ramming. Instead, much of the fighting was with missiles and by grappling and boarding the enemy. As individual ships manoeuvred for advantage, the neat lines broke up and gaps appeared.
The Battle of Actium
Taking advantage of the wind from the north-north-west, which usually picks up as the day goes on, Cleopatra and a squadron of ships under her command suddenly hoisted their sails and came from behind the main fleet to sail right for a big gap opened in the centre of the battle. Ignoring the fighting warships, they kept going, while Antony left his flagship and caught up with them in a lighter vessel. Some seventy to eighty ships escaped, carrying with them a good deal of Cleopatra’s treasury, but this represented at most a quarter of the fleet and probably less. The rest were left to fight, and some of them continued to do so with great determination. Eventually, the survivors withdrew sullenly back into the harbour. Antony’s fleet had lost some 5,000 men and a number of ships. Antony himself had lost the war, even if he and his lover had escaped with much of their money. His legions resisted the attempts of his commander, Publius Canidius, to march them away. Instead they negotiated a good deal before defecting to join Caesar. The remnants of the fleet surrendered with them.35
Antony survived, but all the money in the world would not buy him an army and navy to replace the ones he had lost, nor repair the damage to his reputation. A Roman aristocrat should never admit defeat, and certainly should not abandon his men to flee with his mistress. Caesar had more immediate problems than hunting down his rival. He had left Maecenas to control Italy and Rome itself – a job the latter performed with subtlety and skill, in spite of the fact that he remained an equestrian with no official office and had not become a senator. Now there was pressure from time-served legionaries for immediate demobilisation and instant delivery of the bounties and farms promised to them. Former Antonians added to his own men in pressing for their rewards. It was no simple task to supervise the movements and partial demobilisation of some forty legions. Agrippa was sent to help deal with the problem, and Caesar himself followed before the end of the year. Faced with threats of mutiny or rebellion, he made generous promises. On the other hand he wanted to avoid a return to the upheaval which had fed rebellion at the time of the Perusine War. No land in Italy was to be found through confiscation, which meant that money was needed to fund purchases. Caesar headed east again, looking for plentiful supplies of hard coin.36
