Cleopatra, page 8
In an attempt to determine Cleopatra’s true loyalties, and perhaps to reprimand her for her failure to more vigorously support the allies of her dead lover and the father of her son, an emissary—the disloyal and opportunistic Quintus Dellius—arrived to arrange a meeting between Cleopatra and Antony, a meeting that would dramatically change the course of Cleopatra’s life.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mark Antony
And so we approach the moment when Plutarch’s attention turns to Cleopatra, who so fully engaged his interest that, as is often said, she hijacked his Life of Antony. Though this is a bit of a stretch, Plutarch’s treatment of Cleopatra has something in common with Tolstoy’s portrayal of Anna Karenina. That is, we can watch both writers becoming fascinated, admiring, even a little in love with the woman they set out to condemn for her waywardness and depravity.
Plutarch describes the generous and noble household in which Antony was raised, a family idyll interrupted when Antony’s stepfather was put to death by Cicero for taking part in a conspiracy, an event that inspired Antony’s lifelong hatred of Cicero—and that contributed to the joy that Antony would have when he had the orator executed.
Soon enough, Antony’s good character succumbed to the corrupting influences of his friends, first Gaius Scribonius Curio, and then Publius Clodius Pulcher. In Plutarch’s telling, Clodius seems to have been something of a rogue and a sociopath. Clodius’s exploits included dressing as a woman to sneak in to see Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, with whom he was in love, and who was celebrating a sacred rite that only women were permitted to witness. Later, Antony would marry Clodius’s widow, Fulvia—the woman, Plutarch jokes, whom Cleopatra should have paid tuition for teaching Antony to obey a woman.
Egypt enters Antony’s history early on, when he supports Cleopatra’s father in his bid for Roman aid. He was the one who persuaded Gabinius—founder of the army that later terrorized Alexandria—to invade Egypt and restore Ptolemy XII to the throne that Berenice had seized. Antony soon distinguished himself as a military commander and strategist, leading his army through deep sands and sodden marshes, then across a narrow pass to defeat Berenice’s army at Pelusium. He was not only victorious but merciful, a true Roman hero. He dissuaded the enraged Ptolemy from executing the rebel soldiers. This is a recurring theme in Plutarch: the Roman soldier’s compassion for the vanquished versus the “less civilized” Eastern thirst for enemy blood; it is yet another example of the imperialist myth of cultural, religious, and moral superiority.
Though it is impossible to imagine what Cleopatra knew, it seems unlikely that an intelligent teenager would not have understood that Mark Antony—who, Plutarch claims, Cleopatra met as a girl—had helped save her father and her kingdom. Plutarch tells us that Antony left Alexandria having won the respect of both the Alexandrians and the Roman soldiers.
Plutarch admires Antony, at least at first—before he began taking orders from a woman. He was handsome, a stylish dresser. Plutarch cannot list his worst qualities—he is boastful, loud, badly behaved—without adding in the same sentence that these traits were part of what made him popular. Antony was beloved of his men, relaxed and forgiving on the subject of love affairs, both his own and other people’s.
But Antony had a fatal flaw. He was, Plutarch tells us, excessively susceptible to the bad influence of others, and so we are prepared for the destructive effects of the woman who will be in Plutarch’s view the worst influence of all.
When Antony failed to broker an agreement between the supporters of Caesar and Pompey, he disguised himself as a servant to bring Caesar the bad news. (This was the first of several times that Antony put on the costume and manners of the lower classes, sometimes because it seemed safer and more expedient, and sometimes for his own amusement.) Antony and Cicero had not stopped despising each other, and Cicero blamed Antony for inciting the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, comparing him to Helen of Troy (another instigator of conflict): how invidious it must have been for a Roman to be compared to a woman, even a mythical beauty. Writing a century later, Plutarch disagrees with Cicero: Caesar would never have attacked Pompey because he got a bad report from Antony. Rather, Caesar was moved by what has always motivated conquerors, the love of power and the “desire to be first and greatest.”
When Caesar left Rome to fight Pompey in Spain, he appointed Antony tribune, a role in which Antony managed to lower his standing with the Roman people. The prevailing opinion was that he was overly free with his men, too lazy and preoccupied with pleasure to listen to complainants and petitioners, and given to sleeping with other men’s wives. But his brilliance as a military strategist helped Caesar win a series of battles, culminating in the decisive Battle of Pharsalus, where Antony played a major role in Pompey’s defeat.
Back in Rome, Antony became even more unpopular. The Romans despised his drunkenness, his reckless spending, his love affairs, “his days spent in sleeping or walking about distracted and hung over.” One morning, after an all-night wedding, Antony arrived at the Forum so sick from drink that a friend had to hold his toga out of the way when he vomited. He hosted mimes, musicians, and prostitutes at al fresco dinners and rode in a chariot pulled by lions.
When it was rumored that Caesar had been killed in Spain and his enemies were marching toward Rome, Antony, again dressed as a servant, went incognito to see Fulvia, telling his wife that he had a note from her husband. When she asked whether Antony was dead, he threw off his disguise, put his arms around her and kissed her. Plutarch’s tone is neutral as he describes this “boyish jest,” the practical joke that Antony played in the hope of making Fulvia “more lighthearted.” The modern reader may be struck by the aggression, if not the outright cruelty, of a man tricking his presumably loving wife into believing that he was dead: a joke unlikely to make a woman more lighthearted.
Though Plutarch refuses to blame Antony for the start of the war with Pompey, he holds him at least partly responsible for the murder of Caesar. During a drunken celebration, Antony insisted on crowning Caesar with a diadem woven with laurel, and though Caesar deflected the gesture, it convinced his enemies that he intended to declare himself king. After Caesar’s assassination Antony went into hiding, reappearing in disguise as a servant. Soon after, he would give the dramatic funeral oration that moved the Romans to burn Caesar’s body and attack the Forum.
Following the death of Julius Caesar, Antony, Octavian, and the Roman general Marcus Aemilius Lepidus went to war against Caesar’s assassins. Both sides sought Cleopatra’s allegiance, and after some delay—suggesting that her decision was more of a political than an emotional one, more about cautiously securing the future of Egypt than avenging her married lover—she dispatched her fleet to Greece in support of those who had been loyal to Caesar. She herself outfitted her navy and served as its commander, an assumption of power that would have startled the Romans, with their narrow view of a woman’s role. It might even have surprised her fellow Egyptians, who were unused to seeing a queen prepared to lead her ships into battle. A combination of bad weather and Cleopatra’s seasickness conspired to keep the Egyptian navy from participating in the fighting.
By then, Brutus and Cassius, two of the assassins, had been defeated at the Battle of Philippi. Three hundred men believed to be political enemies were killed, and the victors, having formed the so-called Second Triumvirate, assumed control of the Senate and the empire.
Reading Plutarch, one can watch him weighing the balance of strength and weakness, vice and virtue, good and bad fortune in the men about whom he writes. Ultimately, in his Life of Antony, he comes up against the event that for him tips the scales toward a harsher and more negative view of his subject.
That turning point occurs during the formation of the Second Triumvirate. Each of the three men was required to sacrifice an ally to be murdered by one of the others. Octavian turned Cicero over to Antony, Antony gave up his uncle Lucius Caesar, and Lepidus either murdered his brother Paulus or had him killed. “Nothing, in my opinion,” writes Plutarch, “has ever surpassed the cruelty and savagery of this barter; for in this trading of murder for murder they were equally guilty of the lives they surrendered and of those they seized, though they were even guiltier in the case of their friends, whom they murdered without even hating them.”
Antony seems to have taken special satisfaction in silencing Cicero. He ordered that the orator be decapitated, and his right hand—which had written so much and so vituperatively against Antony—be cut off. Antony is said to have burst out laughing when the severed head and hand were brought to him. It will be remembered that when Ptolemy XIII’s men brought Caesar the head of Pompey, his former friend, ally, and relative, and only later his enemy in a civil war, he turned away and wept. But Mark Antony had no love for the man who had had his stepfather put to death and later led the Senate to declare him an enemy of the state, and he ordered these ghoulish trophies displayed in the Forum.
Plutarch is now on his way to building his case against Antony, who, in his position as triumvir, seized and installed himself in Pompey’s former home. Refusing to meet government officials and ambassadors, he hosted “mimes, jugglers, and drunken flatterers” and carried on in a way that his fellow Romans saw as an insult to the spirit of Pompey, who had been a serious military and disciplined political leader. Later, Plutarch will use the excessive luxury and expense of Cleopatra’s hospitality as yet another mark against her. But it is clear that these aspects of Antony’s character were apparent well before his affair with Cleopatra. The lovers would encourage and (as we would say now) enable each other’s tendency toward dissipation and extravagance, behaviors unlikely to endear them to their subjects.
For this, at least, we have evidence, one of Plutarch’s primary sources: Philotas of Amphissa, a friend of Plutarch’s grandfather, who had studied medicine in Alexandria. Friendly with a cook in Cleopatra’s kitchen, he was the source of a story about the debauched excesses of Cleopatra’s hospitality. Before a dinner that Cleopatra was hosting with Mark Antony, Philotas’s friend noticed eight wild boars turning on spits and assumed the party would be huge. No, said the cook. There were only twelve guests. But the meal had to be flawless, regardless of when it was served, so multiple dinners had to be made—multiple boars roasted—to ensure that everything would be cooked to perfection whenever Antony and Cleopatra decided they were hungry. One wonders if this story was known outside the palace, and if so what effect it had on the suffering Egyptians still paying off the expenses of war, the debt to Rome, the taxes.
Later Philotas became one of the doctors treating Antony’s son and after the collapse of the Ptolemaic dynasty, he moved to Delphi. A second anecdote he told Plutarch’s grandfather concerned Antony’s son, who gave Philotas some golden cups just for having made an amusing remark at dinner. Presumably, the story was included in the Life of Antony to illustrate how Antony’s profligacy and the arrogance of his generosity were being passed down from father to son.
Through his Life of Antony, Plutarch offers us an ongoing and cumulative catalogue of his subject’s flaws: Antony was wasteful in his spending; he robbed good people and diverted the money to flatterers and criminals; he seized an innocent person’s house and gave it to his cook as a reward for a single delicious dinner. He was excessively trustful, almost simple, overconfident—but sincerely repentant when he knew he had done wrong. And yet, for Plutarch, all these faults pale beside “the crowning evil that befell him,” the love for Cleopatra that awakened and fueled his own most excessive and wanton impulses, and corrupted him and overcame his better nature.
And so the hero surrenders to the witch and, unlike the more fortunate or cannier Odysseus, dies, still under her spell.
When the Second Triumvirate took control of the empire, the overseeing of Egypt was assigned to Antony, and through his envoy, Quintus Dellius, he summoned Cleopatra to a meeting at Tarsus.
They had met when she was “still a girl and ignorant of the world; but she was to meet Antony at the time of life when women’s beauty is most splendid, and their intellects have fully matured. Hence she furnished herself with many gifts, much money, and such adornments as a woman of so wealthy a kingdom might afford, but she went placing her surest hopes in herself, and in her own magic arts and charms.”
What did Plutarch mean by magic arts and charms? Did the words have the metaphorical meaning that they do today? The superstitious Romans, so heavily invested in auguries, oracles, and omens, would have been more likely to believe that she had employed witchcraft to make herself irresistible.
Cleopatra ignored Antony’s summons, choosing instead “as if in mockery” to orchestrate her own arrival in a golden barge with purple sails, its oars beating in time to the music of flutes, fifes, and harps. By then it was known that a certain amount of pageantry had greeted and followed Antony throughout the most recent stages of his career. His Dionysian reception by the citizens of Ephesus—the women dressed as bacchantes, the men as satyrs—would have set a perverse sort of standard that Cleopatra might have felt obliged to equal or outdo.
En route to Tarsus, she lay under a canopy of gold cloth, dressed as the goddess of love, surrounded by boys, costumed as painted cupids, fanning her, and her maids, dressed like “Nereids and Graces, some stationed at the rudder, some at the ropes.” The image conjured up is less of a ship than a parade float, an elaborate display in a Mardi Gras, Carnevale, or Tournament of Roses, but decorated with real gold and jewels, and with the queen of Egypt reclining at its center.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1885 painting The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, 41 BC, is one of the few orientalist paintings in which Cleopatra appears fully clothed. In fact the queen is dressed somewhat modestly (possibly in deference to Victorian moral standards), in a pale blue gown with a leopard-skin cloak, lounging seductively under the canopy of her golden barge. Antony peers through the opening in the curtains at the woman who—the suggestion is implicit but unmistakable—will soon become his lover.
Plutarch describes the clouds of musky perfume that wafted from the ship to the shore as crowds lined the banks to watch the flotilla pass. He appears to be describing a combination of seduction, theatrical performance, military campaign, and religious rite: “And a rumor spread everywhere that Aphrodite had come to revel with Dionysus for the good of Asia.” As we have already seen, the figure of Dionysus had a complex significance in the ancient world, in which the god was viewed both as a celebrant, a champion of debauchery and pleasure, and a dangerous and destructive force, a melding of Egyptian and Greek gods. One can’t help wondering whether this “rumor” would have reached Cleopatra’s ears; surely she would have recalled that one of the names her father chose for himself was “the new Dionysus,” and that his Dionysiac tendencies did nothing to endear him to the Egyptian people or inspire their confidence in his leadership.
Even Antony, apparently not the most perceptive of men, would have recognized that hers was no purely official or strictly diplomatic mission. Private dinners followed the queen’s arrival, hospitality competitions between the pair so conclusively won by Cleopatra that Antony could only laugh at his own “rustic awkwardness.”
What follows is an anecdote that must be pure invention, unless we suppose that their conversation was somehow overheard. Here it is in Dryden’s translation of Plutarch: “She perceiving that his raillery was broad and gross, and savored more of the soldier than the courtier, rejoined in the same taste, and fell into it at once, without any sort of reluctance or reserve.”
What are we to make of this? Is Plutarch implying that Cleopatra was like Antony, that she had been waiting for him to unleash the coarseness within her? Do we assume that the queen of Egypt loved dirty jokes? Perhaps, if she had spent time with Caesar at his villa or among her own courtiers. (In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, she and her ladies-in-waiting are remarkably bawdy.) Or does Plutarch mean that the queen—aware that her country was at risk because the Triumvirate had essentially handed Egypt over to Antony—adapted herself to her audience of one? Like so many women, she became, at least in this one detail, what a man wanted her to be. Or was the anecdote simply Plutarch’s way of telling us that the lovers had found their soulmates?
Tellingly, this is the point at which Plutarch informs us that it was not Cleopatra’s less than extraordinary beauty so much as her presence, the charm of her conversation, the bewitching (again, perhaps, in a dual sense) nature of everything she did, the musical voice in which she spoke more than seven languages, including the demotic Egyptian that none of her predecessors had bothered to learn, that proved irresistible.
When Antony left Fulvia, charging her to continue on his behalf his struggle with Octavian, he allowed himself to be carried off to Alexandria, in Dryden’s words, “there to keep holiday, like a boy, in play and diversion, squandering and fooling away in enjoyments that most costly, as Antiphon says, of all valuables, time.” Within the space of a paragraph, Antony has become Cleopatra’s plaything, playmate, and love slave. “She kept him always under her wing, freeing him neither day nor by night.”
Once again, we are reminded of the status of most Roman women. With few exceptions (two or three of whom were at one time married to Antony), women were passive, fettered, and generally ignored except in their roles as wives, mistresses, and mothers. The multilingual, intelligent, and brave young queen was, to Plutarch, Cicero, and other classical authors, not only an oddity but a seditious example for other women.
Charm. Bewitch. Beguile. Yet again, magic is the undercurrent beneath the narrative that Plutarch has begun to tell, the story of two strong people engaged in a romance of love and death, a tale so dramatic and intense that it inspired Shakespeare to borrow it, more or less whole, and has contributed to our apparently undying interest in Cleopatra.
