Cleopatra, page 9
Antony and Cleopatra play dice, drink, and hunt. Dressed as servants—this is the fourth time that Plutarch shows us Antony disguised as a member of the lower classes—the couple lurk outside windows and mock the people inside. The besotted general reacts good-humoredly to a joke that Cleopatra plays on him: after he boasts of his skill at fishing, she orders a servant to attach a salted fish from the far-off Black Sea to his line. When he reels in the obvious hoax, to the great amusement of those present, Cleopatra turns her prank into an occasion for flattery (for which Plutarch suggests she had a kind of genius) by telling Antony that his skill with a fishing rod is unimportant because he is meant to hunt cities and continents.
“While Antony was amusing himself with such child’s play,” he was informed that Fulvia had lost the battle with Octavian and that the Parthians were overrunning Asia. Awakening from the sweet dream he was sharing with Cleopatra, Antony headed for Parthia, then changed course and sailed to Rome to help Fulvia. Plutarch—and Antony’s circle, it seems—still could not forgive Fulvia for her ambition, her lack of womanly skills and feminine modesty.
Soon after Antony heard the rumor that Fulvia had started the war with Octavian in order to bring him home from Alexandria, she died, conveniently for Antony, who was now able to blame his wife for the conflict. Octavian seems to have found this convincing; in any case he seemed willing to agree that an overly ambitious and aggressive woman was responsible for their troubles.
Octavian and Antony agreed to divide the empire between them, an agreement cemented when Octavian proposed that Antony marry his beloved, widowed, virtuous, and Roman sister, Octavia.
The passage that follows this betrothal interrupts Plutarch’s account of the exploits, virtues, and failings of his hero to offer us something reminiscent of Renaissance drama, or a nineteenth-century novel. We might skim past it as we follow Antony, rushing off to make peace with Sextus Pompeius, Pompey’s son, who was still unhappy about his father’s death and was leading a fleet of pirate ships to plunder the coast of Sicily. But it is our introduction to Octavia, whose marriage to Antony would become immensely important as the story of Antony and Cleopatra was reworked by Shakespeare and others.
The element of the love triangle enters into the drama, with all its emotions: jealousy, rivalry, grief. This turn in the story will be used to give the Egyptian queen the feelings of a woman as opposed to the thoughts of ruler, who might sensibly worry that Antony’s marriage might weaken her political influence on him and, by extension, on Rome. Antony, now a widower, will not deny his passion for Cleopatra but will not marry her because his reason was “still battling with his love for the Egyptian.” And so Antony’s struggle with himself and his own desires becomes a parallel narrative to his increasingly hostile conflict with Octavian.
After receiving a dispensation from the Senate that allowed Octavia to marry soon after her husband’s death, she and Antony were wed. Plutarch may be unwillingly fascinated by Cleopatra, but he can praise Octavia, the ideal Roman woman, without reservation.
“Everyone was promoting this marriage, hoping that Octavia, who in addition to her great beauty had dignity and intelligence, would, when Antony came to know her, and she had won his heart (as such a woman naturally must), restore harmony between all parties and be their salvation.” Indeed the marriage was extremely popular. It seemed—falsely, as it would turn out—an ingenious way of ensuring a lasting peace between two men whose enmity had threatened to weaken and divide the empire.
A problem that dramatists and filmmakers have grappled with ever since is how hard it is to avoid making Octavia more sympathetic than Cleopatra. With his preference for the virtuous and beautiful Octavia, Plutarch makes us see Cleopatra as the temptress whose hold on Antony, her ability to make him choose her over the superior Roman wife, can only be the result of recklessness, bad behavior, and the power of sex.
Complicating matters even further was the fact that around the time of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, Cleopatra gave birth to twins. She named them Alexander Helios (the sun) and Cleopatra Selene (the moon), an immensely bold gesture that seems designed to increase the notoriety—and the outrage—that the children’s birth occasioned.
At a banquet celebrating a diplomatic accord that Antony negotiated with Sextus Pompeius, the guests were said to have told jokes about Antony—newly married to one woman and in love with another, involved in a love triangle that his friends apparently considered comical.
In case we need more evidence that Cleopatra was cannier than her Roman lover, Plutarch tells us about the Egyptian soothsayer whom she sent along with Antony when he went off to battle the Parthians. Was it her idea? Did she convince Antony that he needed the services of a clairvoyant? The idea of the fortuneteller/soothsayer fit neatly into the ancient world’s fervid interest in Egyptian magic, a fascination evident as far back as the book of Exodus, with its account of the pharaoh’s court magicians turning rods into serpents.
The fortuneteller, who seems to have been all that Cleopatra could have wished, informed Antony that Octavian was not to be trusted. Neither Plutarch nor Antony seems to have suspected that Cleopatra might be the spirit voice speaking through the soothsayer, urging her lover to distance himself from the man who had brokered a marriage between Antony and Octavia. What better spy to have in the army of your distant, newly married lover than an Egyptian seer with the power to foretell the future and give Antony exactly the sort of advice that Cleopatra would have wanted him to have?
According to Plutarch, the soothsayer was good at his job, especially when his gloomy prognostications were confirmed by other dire portents. Antony consistently lost at cockfights and at the games of dice he played with Octavian’s men. The rift between Antony and Octavian was widening, and Plutarch suggests, somewhat improbably, that Antony’s annoyance and frustration over losing these games were what eventually turned his thoughts back to Cleopatra.
Meanwhile he left Italy and took Octavia and their baby daughter to spend the winter in Greece. In Athens, where he soon had a second daughter with Octavia, he lived in apparent contentment. Again, he referred to himself as Dionysus, drank heavily, consorted with musicians, and hosted lavish entertainments.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Final Act Begins
The tensions between Antony and Octavian intensified until Octavia attempted and succeeded in brokering a temporary rapprochement. With an eloquence that Plutarch intends to express her dignity and intelligence, she warned Octavian that were the conflict between him and her husband to continue, she would go from being the most blessed of women to the most wretched, and that regardless of which side triumphed, she would be the loser. Her pleas moved her brother’s heart—indeed, the hearts of both combatants. In the spring of 37, the two men met in southern Italy; after an exchange of ships and soldiers, Antony left for Asia.
And so begins the last act in the story of Antony and Cleopatra. Like the fatal flaw that inevitably ruins the hero, like the snake in the garden waiting to sink its fangs into the hand that gathers the flowers, what Plutarch terms the “terrible mischief” that had lain dormant in Antony—the sinful fixation on Cleopatra from which he seemed to have been briefly distracted by his marriage to Octavia—was once again awoken. Plutarch goes on to blame the catastrophic failure of the Parthian campaign on Cleopatra, and Antony’s ungovernable passion for her.
Antony again left for Syria to rejoin the struggle against the Parthians, and promptly sent for the Egyptian queen to join him in Antioch. Plutarch attributes his decision to the erotic hold that Cleopatra continued to maintain over him despite the years he had spent living in apparent domestic happiness with Octavia. But it seems equally likely that Antony understood that the Parthian army was large, skillful, and well equipped, and the backing and support of Egypt would be immensely useful—indeed crucial—in winning a victory against the Syrian aggressors.
Upon Cleopatra’s arrival, Antony rewarded her with extravagant gifts of territory: Phoenicia, parts of Judea, Syria, much of Cilicia, a large part of the Eastern Mediterranean coast, and also Cyprus. The island where Cleopatra’s uncle had killed himself rather than surrender his home to the Romans was now being returned. Indeed, much of the land that had belonged to the early Ptolemies—and been substantially reduced over the years—was now being restored to the Egyptian kingdom. Antony’s gifts were not only romantic but strategic; the regions he bestowed on Cleopatra were rich in the natural resources that would allow him to expand his military capacities. Cleopatra responded by renaming herself “Queen Cleopatra, the Goddess, the Younger, Father-Loving and Fatherland-Loving”—a title intended to emphasize her new powers and prominence, as well as her continued loyalty to Egypt.
The Romans were furious at this willful disposition of their hard-won lands, and their outrage grew as Antony formally acknowledged the twins he had with Cleopatra, children who were now three and a half years old.
After sending Cleopatra back to Egypt, a journey that was for her a triumphal procession, Antony marched through Arabia and Armenia, joined en route by an army—Romans, Iberians, Celts, Armenians—of more than a hundred thousand.
That fall, Cleopatra gave birth to her third son, whom she named Ptolemy Philadelphus.
In Plutarch’s view, Antony’s weakness for Cleopatra had already begun to undermine his better judgment. Running throughout his Life of Antony is the theme of excess, which seems to have been part of Antony’s nature, a predilection unleashed early on by the influence of his friends. He and Cleopatra would bring it out in each other, like a form of flirtation or a sexual game involving escalating risks and dares. Beginning with their meeting on Cleopatra’s golden barge, they made a point of outdoing each other in everything from the generosity of their gifts to the lavishness of their hospitality to the confidence they had in their increasingly rash decisions.
The recurrence of this love, like a malarial fever, so sickened Antony that as the Parthian expedition continued and faltered, its leader (according to Plutarch) could no longer think clearly and seemed unable to concentrate on waging war. One reason why the specter of Cleopatra hovers so ominously over Plutarch’s narrative of the Parthian campaign may be that Plutarch is thought to have used as his source an eyewitness account of the expedition written by Antony’s friend, the slippery and ambitious Quintus Dellius, whose relationship with Cleopatra was believed to have been one of a barely tempered mutual hostility. His involvement with the couple had begun early on when he was sent to persuade the queen to meet Antony at Tarsus.
There is an undying appetite for cautionary tales about men who destroy themselves for a woman. And so, Plutarch tells us, everything Antony did was done thoughtlessly, like a man with no control, who, “under the influence of certain drugs or enchantments . . . was forever glancing in her direction and thinking more of his speedy return than of conquering his enemies.” We have returned to the realm of magic, to the catastrophic effects of a spell so powerful that all Antony’s experience as a general and a military strategist deserted him.
What follows in Plutarch’s Life of Antony is an annotated list of the bad decisions a commander makes when his mind is not focused on the war. Almost by accident, Antony won several victories, but the costs were disastrous. A brave and talented officer, Flavius Gallus, emerges out of the narrative only to be pierced with four arrows in a battle that killed three thousand men and wounded five thousand more.
Antony’s sympathy and care for his wounded soldiers was so heartfelt and moving that Plutarch was again won over, swayed by the devotion of Antony’s men. Their loyalty had many reasons, such as “his noble birth, his eloquence, the simplicity of his manners, his munificent generosity, and his lively and gracious conversation; and at the present time, by sharing the toils and sorrows of those suffering, and giving them whatever they needed, he made the sick and wounded more eager for duty than the healthy.”
Though Plutarch was highly critical of Antony, increasingly so as Antony allowed his vices to overpower his virtues and permitted his strengths to be subverted and dismantled by Cleopatra’s influence, passages such as this reveal something beyond simple respect and admiration for Antony’s capability as a military leader. They suggest a response closer to genuine admiration for the hero’s generous, expansive, fatally flawed character. The modern reader might add to this accounting of Antony’s strengths the fact that at a time when Roman women were considered incapable of owning property or of making their own decisions, Antony married or was involved with Fulvia, Cleopatra, and Octavia, three of the era’s (or any era’s) most powerful and self-activated women.
Of course that was not what endeared him to Plutarch. His fondness was for the man’s man, the leader beloved by his men. That particular vein of affection would run through the portraits of Antony that followed, in Shakespeare and up until our own time.
Here, for example, in Octavian, Antony and Cleopatra (1934) the British historians W. W. Tarn and M. P. Charlesworth offer a complex, nuanced, rounded, and ultimately forgiving portrait:
Though [Antony] remained a blunt and jovial soldier, the darling of his troops, whom he understood and cared for, he had some statesmanlike qualities; in politics at Rome since Caesar’s murder he had shown rapidity of decision and resource. . . . But his nature was full of contradictions. Cruel enough when roused, he was soon returned to his usual good nature; sometimes great in adversity, in prosperity he preferred luxury and amusement; straightforward and often loyal himself, he trusted others and was easily flattered and deceived. His worst trouble was women; they existed, he believed, for his pleasure, and they gave him ample reason for his belief. . . . Though he desired power, it was largely for the sake of pleasure; hence he himself might have been content with half the world, had he not been caught between two stronger forces.
No remotely similar passage appears in the classical histories about Cleopatra. Though more recent biographers—Roller, Grant, and Schiff, among others—have catalogued her extraordinary achievements and made strong cases for her ambition, intelligence, capability, and courage, for the confidence and resourcefulness with which she fought to preserve her dynasty during the final two decades of its existence, no one (with the possible exception of Shakespeare) has made a case for her having displayed the sort of human warmth for which Antony has been credited. No longer vilified, as she was for so many centuries, she is now respected—but respect is not the same as sympathy. Much has been made of her charm, but again, charm is not to be confused with humanity, and besides, her charm is mostly seen as having been weaponized against the powerful and hapless men who wandered into her sights. Plutarch’s grudging fascination with her, especially near the end of his Life of Antony, fails to find in her anything nearly as moving as the empathy and love that Antony showed for his soldiers.
Literature offers many portraits of her as a libertine and a seductress, but nowhere among the classical authors do we find a scene of her interacting with the children she clearly cared so much about and went to such lengths to protect. All we know about her relationship with Caesarion concerns her attempts to have him acknowledged as Caesar’s son and designated as her successor. Not until the 1963 film Cleopatra does Caesarion (who in the film appears to have been an only child) assume a major role—a part that turns on several historical inaccuracies. In the film, Julius Caesar is seen cooing affectionately over the infant that in life he never acknowledged as his own. And by the time of Cleopatra’s death, her on-screen son is a handsome, curly-haired boy of about thirteen, when in fact he was eighteen when his mother died, still, at the very last, attempting to make him her heir.
As the Parthian campaigns deteriorated further, each catastrophe outdid the last for sheer carnage and horror. Antony’s soldiers suffered a famine so severe they were forced to dig for roots and forage wild food, among them an herb that killed them after driving them mad. Once they had eaten the herb, the soldiers entirely lost their memory and busied themselves in moving heavy rocks from place to place, as if it were the most important task in the world. Ambushed by the Parthians, maddened by thirst, the survivors drank from a polluted river and became desperately ill. In the battle that followed, Antony lost thousands of soldiers, both from disease and injuries.
Antony’s failure of leadership was so drastic that it would have been obvious to him that his military career was essentially over. And perhaps he could have retired to Alexandria with Cleopatra if he had not been drawn into another war—a death match against Octavian, a conflict that would not only doom the lovers but would put an end to Egypt’s independence.
Thousands more soldiers perished as Antony marched through the wintry landscape of Armenia, arriving at last on the shores of the Mediterranean, where he awaited Cleopatra. Once more, Plutarch includes the sort of telling detail that suggests he either invented the incident he needed or was in possession of a firsthand account. Though Antony attempted to temper his impatience and anxiety by indulging in yet more drunken revelry and carousing, he kept leaping up from the table to see if Cleopatra had arrived.
Finally, her ship sailed into port, where she distributed money and clothing to her lover’s battered and demoralized soldiers, and where Antony attempted to frame his disastrous defeat in the Parthian campaign as a victory.
A summons from the king of the Medes promised Antony that he would contribute heavily to a renewed campaign against the Parthians. But before Antony could leave, Octavia reentered the story, this time as a pawn in Octavian’s scheme to intensify his conflict with Antony.
When the loving wife and mother asked her brother for permission to rejoin her husband, Octavian agreed—not, according to Plutarch, because he wanted to make his sister happy but rather because he suspected that Antony would mistreat her and was seeking an additional grievance against his fellow triumvir. Again, Octavia is hugely sympathetic, a loyal, patient, selfless, long-suffering Roman wife who—we know from the start—could not possibly hope to triumph against the wicked Egyptian seductress.
