Cleopatra, page 11
Engineering a disastrous military defeat seems like a recklessly elaborate and foolish way for a clever queen to rid herself of a lover, even one who may have begun to become an encumbrance. Later she would try to persuade Octavian that she preferred him to Antony. We can imagine that as he prepared to meet Antony at Actium, Octavian would have seen the obvious advantages of Cleopatra’s defection, which might in fact have ended the war. And Cleopatra would have known that. One of the puzzles that can never be solved is the question of why she encouraged Antony to wage a war in a way that she must have suspected would guarantee a loss.
Lacking enough sailors to man them, Antony set fire to over a hundred Egyptian ships and ignored the entreaties of a centurion who had fought in many of his wars and begged him to fight this one on land. Inclement weather forced a delay of several days, but at last the battle began. The heavily armored ships crashed into one another, the confrontation seeming less like a naval engagement than an assault on a walled city. Though Antony’s ships were bulkier and more heavily fortified, Octavian’s were swifter and capable of surrounding—and attacking—each of Antony’s ships with several of their own.
And then the unthinkable happened—or in any case the unpredictable, to anyone, of course, but Cleopatra. Her sixty ships unfurled their sails, sliced through the front lines, and fled the battle, heading toward the Peloponnese. When Antony saw what was happening, he turned his own ship and followed Cleopatra.
Here it was that Antony made clear that he was governed by the motives not of a leader or of a brave man, or even by his own judgment; instead, just as someone jokingly said that the soul of a lover lives in someone else’s body, he was dragged along by the woman as if he had been born part of her, and must go wherever she went. For as soon as he saw her ship sailing away he forgot everything, betrayed and ran away from those who were fighting and dying for him, and went . . . to pursue the woman who had already begun his ruin and would in due course complete it.
Plutarch cannot get over it. Antony is beyond forgiveness, and Plutarch can only respond by shrinking the powerful Roman to the size of a homunculus: a captive soul. Antony has been deprived of all agency, wrecking his career and his reputation, and about to end his life as an Egyptian queen’s humiliated love slave.
In the Roman era—perhaps in any time—little could be more shameful or shocking than a leader deserting his men and following a woman. In the first century BCE, Antony’s act may have seemed more extreme than it might today; it was certainly more unusual, given the low status and the low regard for Roman women. But there has never been a time when the world has applauded a man who did what Antony did. Incidences of male leaders sacrificing everything for a woman have been rare enough to count on one hand. A furor greeted Edward VIII’s abdication of the British throne in 1936 for love of the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. And he was simply stepping out of the line of succession, not leaving a fleet of armored ships and thousands of sailors to die. Antony’s soldiers, many of whom had experienced his compassionate and responsible leadership, were at first unable to believe that he had deserted them, and remained at their posts for ten days, until, abandoned by their general, Publius Canidius Crassus, they went over to Octavian’s side.
The story contributed to the myth of the freakishly powerful and destructive Cleopatra, the woman whom Dante consigned to hell and whom later writers would condemn for her greed, cruelty, and excess. Actium is the turn in the narrative at which, for these writers, Cleopatra reveals her “true” nature as a woman capable of destroying a man—not just a man, but a Roman, not just a lover but a general and a triumvir. She may well have ordered the deaths of two siblings and waged a war in which a third was killed, but this was different. If one is looking to make a case against the Egyptian queen—as many have—this is the event that reveals her potential for betrayal, and for evil.
Though Antony was taken aboard Cleopatra’s ship, she failed to greet him, and they ignored each other. Instead—in yet another of Plutarch’s details that suggests either the presence of an eyewitness or an active imagination—he went to the bow of the ship and sat alone, silently, holding his head in his hands. More than that of the prankster disguising himself as a servant, more even than that of the orator inciting his fellow Romans to violence after Caesar’s murder, this image of Antony—alone, silent, holding his head, doubtless contemplating the end of his military career and quite possibly his life—is what stays with us.
Antony emerged from his isolation and misery only once, for a brief hostile confrontation with one Eurycles, a Spartan who threatened to hurl a spear at him from a nearby ship and announced that he was avenging the death of his father, whom Antony had beheaded as punishment for a robbery. Eurycles then attacked and seized another of Antony’s admiral’s ships, heavily laden with expensive household goods—an assault that could only have increased Antony’s humiliation. Antony returned to his solitude and silence, refusing to speak to Cleopatra, though it was unclear whether he was angry at her or ashamed to be in her presence.
It was not until they docked at Taenarum, in the southern Peloponnese, that Cleopatra’s maids brokered some sort of reconciliation between the lovers and they consented to eat and sleep together.
Meanwhile, at Actium, Antony’s fleet acknowledged defeat.
The Battle of Actium furthered the expansion of the Roman Empire and effectively ended the increasingly shaky construct of an independent Ptolemaic Egypt. But despite centuries of speculation, no one has offered a conclusive explanation of why Cleopatra took her ships and sailed away.
Given her background and history, it would have been unlikely for her to flee out of sheer instinct and terror. Some have suggested that she had on board a significant amount of treasure that she was reluctant to sacrifice. It has also been theorized, not unreasonably, that when she saw that defeat was unavoidable, she decided to save her own life and whatever she could salvage. Why should she and her sailors die because of a factional quarrel between two Romans? Had it really been her idea to fight Octavian at sea? We will never know her reasons. We can surmise that her betrayal of Antony was unintentional, since his victory would have allowed her to survive and permitted her country’s autonomy to endure at least for a while. Her future under Octavian’s rule promised to be grim.
After his victory, Octavian traveled on to Athens, where he helped secure the loyalty of the Athenians by distributing what remained of the available grain supplies. Plutarch’s great-grandfather Nicarchus, who was in Greece at the time, described the people’s relief when they learned that Antony was no longer in charge since he had ordered his soldiers to whip the unfortunate laborers forced to carry grain to his ships.
Only when they reached the Libyan coast did Cleopatra finally head for Egypt. Antony remained alone, aimlessly wandering about, contemplating his recent losses and his uncertain future. By the time he returned to Alexandria, Antony—whose general in charge of his Libyan operations had gone over to Octavian—had decided to kill himself and was only dissuaded by the intercession of friends. Several times Antony would ask one of his men to kill him, a reckless and alarming request that would ultimately result in the grotesque nightmare of his death.
Cleopatra was forced to take control as Antony, succumbing to despair and defeat, retreated to a cottage he had built on the beach, where he planned to live out his life as a hermit. It is hard to imagine that this failed to warn Cleopatra that from then on Antony was likely to be more of a hindrance and a burden than a help.
Cleopatra’s behavior suggests that she was becoming increasingly desperate. Until that point, she had acted with careful calculation, rather like an expert chess player plotting the succession of moves most likely to produce the most favorable outcome. But Antony’s defection and dissolution appears to have shaken her confidence and resolve. Part of her brilliance as a politician had derived from her ability to identify and enlist the strongest and most dependable allies. But now it must have seemed as if there were no longer a visible or viable source of counsel, of either personal or military support—as if there were no one left to seduce or dazzle into coming to her aid.
However we may chafe at Shakespeare’s portrayal of the thirty-nine-year-old queen as bordering on the geriatric, we can well imagine that having ruled for two decades, having survived the intense demands and pressures of her position, she may have felt tired. She had just fled a war in which her lover and principal ally had been ignominiously defeated, disgracing himself and destroying his reputation by running after a woman rather than remaining to fight alongside his men. And now he had retreated to a shack on the beach. For the first time since she had persuaded Julius Caesar to help her defeat her brother and allied herself with Antony, she was left to face the old threat—Roman imperial expansion—without an influential Roman to intercede on her behalf. And even as her independence, her survival, and the integrity of her country might have seemed threatened, she was still determined to ensure that her children would not be made to suffer or die along with her.
Her first instinct was to flee—to abandon the country she had loved, the people who had depended on her for two decades. She considered ordering her soldiers and sailors to drag her fleet across the isthmus that separated Egypt from the Arabian Sea. Even if it meant leaving Egypt forever, she might at least act as a sort of decoy, drawing Rome’s fury to herself and allowing her children to continue to rule. Presumably she would take treasure with her, so Octavian would no longer be driven by greed for the gold and jewels he knew, or imagined, her to possess. But she could not seriously have believed that after everything that had occurred Rome would want to continue its relationship with its “friends and allies” among the Ptolemies.
Predictably, Cleopatra’s escape plan proved impractical, and she had no choice but to throw in her lot with that of her despondent and progressively useless lover. On learning that his soldiers and supporters had deserted him and that he no longer had any power outside Egypt, Antony was persuaded to leave his hut and return to the royal palace. There he and Cleopatra distracted themselves with more banquets and feasts and together with their friends founded an ominous-sounding fellowship they called the “Partners in Death”—apparently a kind of mass suicide pact among associates who agreed that they were willing to die together.
Even as she prepared Caesarion to rule in her place and attempted to find a refuge to which she and Antony could flee, Cleopatra seems to have been preparing for death. She allegedly began to experiment with a variety of poisons, trying them out on condemned prisoners. Whether or not this story is true, it provided the subject for Alexandre Cabanel’s monumental painting Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (1887), a work that measures 65 by 110 inches, and a section of which adorns the cover of the 2010 Oxford University Press paperback edition of Duane W. Roller’s biography, Cleopatra. Reclining diagonally across the image, Cleopatra could not be lovelier, a sensual dark-haired beauty, more or less naked to the waist, with pale, luminous breasts. Her crown is ornamented with a tiny cobra and around her plump hips are layers of filmy, brightly colored skirts. Her legs are stretched out in front of her, and she is reclining on one arm, languidly stretching the other along the top of her red and gold divan. On the carpet beside her is a leopard with glittering green eyes. Dangling a bouquet from her fingers, she gazes off to her right at something that in the cover detail we cannot see. We do see her naked arm, and a servant girl, also naked to the waist, fanning Cleopatra.
Invisible beyond this section of the painting, a man writhes on the ground in agony, and a dead man is being carted off by two attendants, his corpse sagging between them. Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners is an example of orientalism at its most egregious. The image is informing its viewers (or confirming them in their view) that life is cheap in the East, where, if a queen is thinking of killing herself, she can try out the poisons on human guinea pigs to find the least painful—or, if she’s so inclined, the most tortuous—way to end a life. Cleopatra’s beauty, her partial nudity, her sensuality, the brightness of the colors and her disregard for casual murder feeds into every stereotype that the West has ever created about the East, and offers further “evidence” to support the Roman sentiment that imperial conquest was a necessary solution to the excesses and evils endemic to Africa and Asia.
Even the idea of poison was considered suspect and Asiatic, though poisoning has been common throughout the West from antiquity to the current moment, most notably among the agents of Vladimir Putin. Despite the evidence to the contrary, poisoning has also been considered a particularly female means of committing suicide or eliminating an enemy, though in fact it appears to be an equal-opportunity weapon.
Cabanel’s subject was not original. Plutarch goes on at length about Cleopatra’s human and animal researches. Having formed and enrolled in her Partners in Death, she busied herself “collecting all sorts of deadly poisons and testing them for painlessness by having them administered to prisoners condemned to death. When she saw that the quick-acting ones induced painful deaths, while the gentler ones acted slowly, she next tried wild animals, observing them as they attacked one another. This she did every day; and by testing all of them she found that only the bite of the asp brought on a sleepiness and lethargy, without convulsions or groans, producing only a gentle sweat on the face, while the faculties were easily relaxed and clouded.”
The painter could have chosen any of the scenes from Plutarch in which the queen appears. But this one excited his imagination—or perhaps he hoped its conflation of sex and death might be the most commercial. If we wonder why Cleopatra has been cast as an oversexed enchantress who traded her body for power and ruined the lives of two heroic men, we have only to look at this painting to understand why it was believed that she deserved the bite of the venomous snake. Conversely, it is hard to imagine this languorous, pretty girl rebuilding a city, winning a war against her brother, functioning as a diplomat, governing a country, and raising four children.
However we may discount the fantasies and projections of later painters and writers, evidence suggests that the subject of suicide—the quickest and least painful way to die—did hang heavily in the air of the royal place during Cleopatra’s final months.
CHAPTER SIX
The Snake
Cleopatra and Antony grew increasingly desperate as they attempted to negotiate with Octavian, who after the couple’s humiliating defeat at Actium had little reason to negotiate himself. Yet they continued to beg for mercy from a notoriously unmerciful opponent, whose record showed the lengths he would go to exact revenge. In the war against Caesar’s assassins, a captive begged to have his body buried after he was executed, and Octavian said he would leave that matter to the birds. He ordered a father and son to decide which of them would die first, then killed them both, one after the other. Three hundred prisoners who pleaded for their lives were told, “You must die,” and slaughtered. This militates against the idea, so important to Julius Caesar and others, that one measure of Roman superiority was the compassion that they—unlike their barbarian enemies—showed to their conquered foes.
Octavian’s pressing concern in his dealings with Antony and Cleopatra was to ensure that the couple could not recoup their forces and continue the war. The odds against this might seem overwhelming unless we factor in the Romans’ belief that the Egyptian queen was capable of magic. They also had some worry that the defeated couple might find a sanctuary in a region (possibly Gaul) that would accept them and, more to the point, welcome Cleopatra’s gold. Octavian feared that her fortune might slip forever out of Rome’s grasp.
As Antony grew more melancholy and less helpful, the queen seems to have understood that she was fighting not only for her country but for her life and the lives of her children. In Cassius Dio’s account, Antony seems increasingly pathetic. Appealing to Octavian, man to man, he defended “his connexion with the Egyptian woman and recounted all the amorous adventures and youthful pranks that they had shared” (book 51), apparently forgetting that this was the last thing he should have been telling a leader who, despite his own infidelities, prided himself on being upright and moral.
All Antony’s overtures to Octavian received responses that were, at best, sarcastic and dismissive. When Antony again offered to engage Octavian in hand-to-hand combat, Octavian replied that Antony would have to find another way of killing himself. Antony offered to commit suicide if Cleopatra were allowed to live. That he was said to have been suicidal since the defeat at Actium makes this voluntary self-sacrifice appear considerably less selfless and dramatic than it otherwise might.
Antony sent Antyllus, his son with Fulvia, to deliver a generous payment, which Octavian confiscated before sending Antyllus back with nothing to show for his efforts. Cleopatra’s gifts to Octavian included a gold throne, a crown, and a scepter, signals of her willingness to cede her relative independence in return for . . . what? Underneath everything else was Rome’s growing sense that Egypt was weak, its leadership chaotic, and could be had almost for the asking and with little loss of Roman life.
The annexation of Egypt would be a coup that would accomplish what Octavian’s predecessors had only considered, a conquest that would be a step toward transforming himself from Octavian into the Emperor Augustus: the new title he would be given by the Senate in 27 BCE, three years after the death of Cleopatra.
Cleopatra appears to have tried every conceivable option. Perhaps she and Antony could live as private citizens and Egypt could be turned over to their children. In the unlikely hope that this might happen, Cleopatra stepped up her grooming of Caesarion as her replacement. The usually resourceful, savvy queen put wishful thinking above common sense, imagining that Octavian would welcome a king of Egypt whose mother had raised him to believe that he was Caesar’s rightful heir.
