THE SHADOW OF ROME

 

Cleopatra, on her return to Egypt in 44, found Alexandria still securely hers, thanks to the legions which Julius Caesar had left with her three years before, and the rest of the country quiet in the hands of the local officials. Provincial Egypt was accustomed to progress quite comfortably without interference from the capital, provided that no famine came to disturb the regularity of life among the peasantry. Soon after the queen’s home-coming, however, trouble arose both in the capital and in the country. Egypt was visited by famine, owing to an unusually small rise of the Nile; and at Alexandria the Roman garrison mutinied. With regard to the latter event, we find Cicero writing to Atticus from Puteoli in the October of 44 mentioning that he has heard that the Alexandrian legions are up in arms, and that while awaiting the arrival of Cassius in Syria they have sent for Bassus.

After Caesar’s death and her flight from Italy, Cleopatra can have desired nothing so much as to be allowed to manage the affairs of her kingdom without interference from Rome. But there were two reasons why this could not be. In the first place the legions at Alexandria were only regarded by the Romans as a loan to her, and in the second Egypt was far too rich a. country not to be called upon to furnish aid to the contending parties in the Roman Empire. Civil war was on the point of breaking out again. Three of Caesar’s murderers, Cassius and the cousins Marcus and Decimus Brutus, were determined to keep the provinces which the dead man had assigned to them, while the Caesarians were equally determined to take the governorships out of their hands. Decimus Brutus was already in Cisalpine Gaul in the spring of 44, but Cassius and Marcus Brutus found Dolabella and Antony bent on depriving them of Syria and Macedonia. The province of Syria would carry with it the right of conducting the war against the Parthians, and was therefore highly desirable to any ambitious man, anxious to command a large army. In the Parthian expedition the Alexandrian legions might be expected to take part, which accounted for their excitement about the arrival of Cassius in the East.

The Bassus mentioned by Cicero was an exPompeian, who had turned bandit in Syria and maintained himself successfully against Caesar’s officers. That Caesar’s former legions should have called him to them is an indication of the curiously mixed state of Roman political affairs at this time. A still more striking example of this is furnished by the man who disputed with Cassius the right to the governorship of Syria, for immediately after the Dictator’s murder he gave out that he had been aware of the conspiracy and approved of its outcome. Publius Cornelius Dolabella was a young man of the worst moral character (although Cicero, whose son-in-law he had been for a few years, now attempted to defend it), a bankrupt with the rest of his class, and an utterly unscrupulous politician of the demagogic order. Caesar, however, who so often took up these young men of ruined character, had not only given him work in the African and Spanish campaigns, but had actually nominated him, though he was only twenty-five years of age, to be consul in the second half of 44, taking his own place when he should go on the Parthian expedition. Dolabella had forcibly assumed the consulship immediately after Caesar’s murder, and after a period of coquetting with the conspirators, whom he endeavoured to reassure by numerous acts of violence against the Caesarians, had at last joined forces with Antony, previously his enemy owing to an intrigue between Dolabella and Antony’s cousin and second wife, Antonia. Now, without waiting for his term of office as consul to expire, he set out for Syria to forestall Cassius, at present engaged with Marcus Brutus in collecting troops and funds to enable them to enter their provinces with safety. On his way east Dolabella sent his friend Allienus to Alexandria to fetch the legions there to join his standard.

Cleopatra was placed in a very difficult position. That she must part with her legions was evident. But to whom was she to surrender them ? She dare not be on the losing side, and it was at present impossible to tell which side would win or, indeed, who would be on the two sides. We do not know how much she learnt about Roman politics during her visit to Italy ; nor would a knowledge of the politics before Caesar’s death have helped her to a clear view about the parties after it. Cassius, of course, was an antiCaesarian, who, she might guess, would have the support of the remnants of the old Pompeian and Senatorial section at Rome. Dolabella was now once again a pronounced Caesarian and could claim to be backed by Antony. But news of the ambiguous relations between Antony and Julius Caesar’s heir Octavian must surely have reached Egypt.

In the circumstances Cleopatra seems to have allowed herself to be guided by her inclinations. When Cassius’s requisition reached her she “excused herself on the ground that Egypt was at that time suffering from famine and pestilence,” says Appian, “but she was really acting with Dolabella on account of her relations with the elder Caesar.” Dion makes her afterwards obtain the Roman Government’s consent to her association of Caesarion with herself on the throne of Egypt in return for her assistance to Dolabella. It seems quite likely that she hoped for such a reward at the same time that she ventured to throw in her lot with a man who claimed to represent the party of her dead lover rather than with one of his murderers.

Allienus was therefore allowed to leave Alexandria with the legions of the garrison ; and, in addition, an Egyptian fleet made ready to sail for the Syrian coast. But matters did not turn out as Cleopatra and Dolabella wished. The latter, when he reached Asia Minor on his way to Syria, found already installed as governor of the Roman province of Asia Trebonius, who was one of the so-called tyrannicides. There was an apparently amicable interview between the two men at Smyrna, but Dolabella very soon decided to throw off the mask. He seized Trebonius and put him to death, the first of the Dictator’s murderers to pay the penalty for his crime. Then in the spring of 43, hearing that Cassius had arrived in Cilicia, he marched against him. Dolabella’s good luck, however, was at an end. The wavering Roman Government had already declared him a public enemy and reassigned Syria to Cassius. The latter had succeeded in intercepting Allienus and the Alexandrian legions in Palestine and had brought the troops over to his own side. Moreover, at the same time that he had sent his requisition to Cleopatra herself, Cassius had demanded assistance also from Serapion, her viceroy in Cyprus, which we find now again definitely acknowledged as an Egyptian possession. Serapion, without waiting to consult his queen, sent what ships he had to Cassius, being no doubt afraid to refuse the demand of a Roman provincial governor. While the Cyprian vessels reached Cassius, the Egyptian fleet was stopped by unfavourable winds from setting out to Dolabella’s assistance. Everything now had gone against the young scoundrel. Cassius with greatly superior forces drove him to take refuge in the Syrian coast town of Laodicea, where he committed suicide in July, leaving his army to join the enemy.

Although Dolabella is not a man of great importance in himself, he is one of those who, like Aulus Gabinius, Caelius Rufus, and Quintus Dellius, should be kept in mind when we consider the savage strictures of the Latin writers upon the shameless morality and general worthlessness of the Egyptians and other non-Romans.

The catastrophe at Laodicea must temporarily have caused Cleopatra to fancy that she had backed the wrong horse and would be called upon to pay the usual penalty for doing so. Cassius after his victory was in tremendous force in Syria, and determined to secure Egypt for the Republican cause. He also suspected Cleopatra of designing to send the Egyptian fleet, which had been unable to help Dolabella, to join Antony and Octavian, who had at last become reconciled and with Lepidus had formed another triumvirate in imitation of that of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. The condition of Egypt, “wasted by famine and having now no considerable foreign troops,” as Appian says, invited attack. But at the moment when Cassius was about to invade the country he received a message from Marcus Brutus which checked him. Brutus had at first been as successful in Macedonia as Cassius had been in Syria, and had captured Caius Antonius, who had been conducting the struggle against him on behalf of his celebrated brother. On the formation of the Second Triumvirate, followed by a fierce proscription of the enemies of the three parties to it, Brutus put Caius Antonius to death—in revenge for the death of Cicero, it was said. Then, in preparation for the threatened invasion of Greece by Antony and Octavian, he crossed to Asia Minor and sent word to Cassius that their object must be “ not to get dominion but to deliver their country.” On this Cassius abandoned his designs on Egypt and marched to join Brutus at Smyrna.

It was now the end of 43. Cleopatra was relieved of the apprehension of an immediate invasion, but could not feel safe as long as the war continued. Being already committed against the party of Cassius—although, as we have seen, the Alexandrian legions had gone over to him and the Egyptian warships had failed to reach Dolabella—she made an attempt to put herself on good terms with the Triumvirs. She got together again a large fleet and started with it herself from Alexandria. It has been suggested that she did not consider herself very secure in her capital now that the Roman legions were gone. It seems rather doubtful, however, whether her effort to join the Caesarians was more than half-hearted. Antony appeared to doubt her sincerity when he summoned her to Tarsus. Her excuse then, as reported by Appian, was that “she had set sail personally for the Adriatic with a fleet, defying Cassius and Murcus, who was lying in wait for her ; but a tempest had wrecked her fleet and prostrated her with sickness, so that she was unable to put to sea again until the victory [of Philippi] had already been won.” 

This Murcus of whom she spoke was Cassius’s admiral, who with sixty ships had been set to watch at Taenarum (Cape Matapan) lest the Egyptian fleet should attempt to cross to join the forces of the Triumvirs. It certainly looks as if Cleopatra’s defiance of him did not go very far.

Consequently the autumn of 42 arrived and the battle of Philippi was fought without the queen having definitely ranged herself on the side of the Triumvirs. Thereby Egypt was spared an expense which she could ill afford in a time of shortage of the Nile’s rising, of famine, and of disease ; but also there was a reckoning to pay with the victors, to which it was impossible to look forward with easy feelings.

Antony and Octavian had promised their troops five thousand denarii (£200) apiece as a reward for their exertions at Philippi. Octavian now went back to Rome entrusted with the duty of raising money in the West, while Antony took charge of the East. Cassius and Brutus had already made a heavy demand on the cities of Asia Minor, but Antony on his arrival outstripped the Republican extortioners. The unfortunate Asiatic Greeks endeavoured to appease him by the reception which they gave him, taking heart from the way in which he had behaved in Greece itself on his way from Philippi to Asia. Plutarch describes him there as listening to learned discourses, attending the games and religious ceremonies, and rejoicing in being called Philhellene, and, still more, Philathenian. To Athens, at whose university he placed his eldest son, he was very generous, presenting her with Aegina and four other islands in the Aegean which in earlier days had been part of her maritime empire.

To the inhabitants of Asia Minor he showed himself in another aspect. The glamour of Athens did not extend to them. Besides, he must have money, and not only for his troops. Antony, “the colossal child, capable of conquering the world, incapable of resisting a pleasure,” as Renan calls him, had not become a different man from what he had been in his youth, so venomously described by Cicero. After the hard campaign of Philippi, where he had fought so well and had thrown Octavian so completely in the shade, he plunged joyfully into the sea of excess to which every one pointed him the way. Kings were at his door, says Plutarch, and the wives of kings, vying with one another in beauty and in eagerness to win him with their favours. The townspeople seconded the efforts of the princes. At Ephesus he was saluted as “Dionysos the Giver of Joy, the Beneficent,” and escorted by women dressed as Bacchantes and men and boys as Satyrs and Pans into a city filled with ivy-wreaths and thyrsi, with psalteries, pipes, and flutes. It cannot be wondered at that Antony “let his passions lead him back to his regular habits of life, while Anaxenor, a fluteplayer, and Xouthos, a piper, and Metrodoros, a dancer, and a rabble of other such Asiatics crept in and managed his household for him.” Commenting on the title which the Ephesians gave to him, Plutarch remarks that Antony might be the Joy-giver and the Beneficent to some, but to the majority he wore another aspect of the god Dionysos, that of the Cruel and the Savage, “for he took their property from the well-born and gave it to the worthless and the flatterers, and some got the substance of many still living by asking for it as if they were already dead.” His demand on Asia Minor was for ten years’ taxation, to be paid in two years ; and all the rebatement that the subservient cities could obtain from him was that he consented to accept nine years’ taxes instead of ten.

A brave attempt has been made in recent years by Professor Guglielmo Ferrero* to represent Antony as quite a different man from what the ancient writers make him out to be; as no slave to his passions, but a serious and strenuous statesman, who was completely justified in accepting an “alliance” with Cleopatra because the resources of Egypt enabled him to prosecute that war against the Parthians which he took up as a legacy from Julius Caesar. If we accept Professor Ferrero’s picture, we are bound to reject a great many, indeed most, of the features of Antony’s portrait in Plutarch, who is responsible through the agency of his adapter Shakespeare for the world’s view of Antony. But, apart from the reluctance which we must feel in abandoning Plutarch (who of all ancient historians certainly inspires his readers with most confidence in his good faith), we may be pardoned if we find more interesting than convincing the Italian professor’s conceptions of Antony and of his great rival Octavian, the future Augustus.

Whatever he became toward the end of his days (and there seems some reason for suspecting that his brain did not remain in his last years unaffected by his excesses throughout life), Antony was doubtless originally a better man than the majority of the classical authors except the kindly Plutarch allowed him to be. In the hands of Cicero, his bitter personal enemy, and of the Augustan writers his character stood no chance ; and like all the awful examples of antiquity, including even his own great-grandson the Emperor Nero, he has been painted so black that common sense is forced to suspect some other colours beneath the blackness. It is difficult, however, to discern in him many attributes of a hero. He was a fine soldier, as he showed at Pharsalia and Philippi; perhaps a great general, if we judge him by his conduct in Southern Gaul in 43 and in the retreat from Parthia in 36. To his troops he appealed as a man who could drink with their strongest heads, talk with them as an equal in their own language and tolerate their familiarity, while his gift of bombastic eloquence inspired them with courage and his open-handedness after victory with gratitude. To his friends also he was generous, with the generosity of a spendthrift, having learnt at the best school for debt. Plutarch represents him as being led astray in his youth by his friendship with Caius Scribonius Curio, which “fell upon him like some pestilence, for Curio himself was intemperate in his pleasures and, to make Antony more manageable, hurried him into drinking and the company of women and extravagant and licentious expenditure.” Curio, although very much more deeply in debt himself, became security for Antony, who owed £60,000. Curio’s father, a friend of Cicero, getting to hear of this, forbade Antony the house. The young man then made an excursion into politics under the guidance of Clodius, perhaps hoping that reckless mob-leader might help him to cancel his debts. But after a while he judged it prudent to dissociate himself from so suspicious a companion, and betook himself to the University of Athens, where he took up the study of oratory—the Asiatic style, Plutarch tells us, “ boastful and swaggering and full of empty pride.” He seems to have acquired some taste for Greek letters and always remained attached to his alma mater ; but' it was doubtless as the Paris of the Roman world that the Greek city appealed to him most. The cultured luxury of Athens rather than the culture in itself attracted him.

While at Athens Antony also prepared himself for the army, and at the age of twenty-five he was, as we have seen, sufficiently advanced to be put in command of the cavalry of Aulus Gabinius in Syria and Egypt. Returning to politics, he became an adherent of Julius Caesar, partly because his friend Curio was a Caesarian and partly because his own mother Julia, “ a woman who could compare with the noblest and most virtuous of her day,”* was a daughter of the Lucius Julius Caesar Who had been consul in 90 and was therefore a kinswoman of the future Dictator. With his great abilities and his military talent, Antony could but make his mark in the Caesarian party. His extravagant profligacy, however, and his ever-growing debts— before leaving Rome he owed £60,000, at the age of thirty-eight £400,000—led him to adopt means of raising money which discredited Caesar’s Government when it was left in his charge after Pharsalia. To meet the expenses incurred by his lavish gifts to actresses, actors, dancers, musicians, and all the rest of the entertaining community in whose society he so delighted, he laid hands on property confiscated from political enemies. This conduct and his incapacity for dealing with the internal affairs of Italy brought him into temporary disgrace with Caesar. He was restored to favour in sufficient time to find himself at the Dictator’s death certainly the most powerful figure in the State, but at the same time not trusted by any section except the soldiery, who recognised in Antony one who was emphatically a man.

We have alluded to the personal appearance of Antony and to the tradition of his descent from Hercules. This tradition, says Plutarch, Antony liked to recall by appearing in public in a tunic girt up to his thigh, with a thick cloak about him, and with a large sword hanging at his side. Now after his victory at Philippi he was destined to meet his Omphale, a character in the legend of Hercules which must surely have occurred to his mind when he was living with Cleopatra in Alexandria years afterwards. Already he had shown himself very susceptible to women’s influence. The actresses and other beauties of the day in Rome were well acquainted with his generosity, and his connection with the courtesan Cytheris was notorious at home and abroad. He had also married in succession three wives by the time he was thirty-seven. Of the first nothing is known except that she was named Fadia and was the daughter of a freedman. The second was his first cousin Antonia, daughter of the Caius Antonius who was Cicero’s colleague in his famous consulship. She misconducted herself with Dolabella, Cicero’s charming son-in-law, then a professed friend of Antony, and was in consequence divorced by her husband. In 46 b.c. he married Fulvia, widow of Clodius and of Curio. Fulvia’s attachment to Antony is one of the most remarkable features in the story of his life, and, taken in conjunction with the undoubted love of his fourth wife Octavia and with the sentiments toward him attributed to Cleopatra, argues a fascination about him which we might otherwise hardly suspect. Fulvia in her intercourse with Antony, however, was not merely influenced, but herself influenced him in her turn.

Plutarch points out that Cleopatra was indebted to Fulvia for training Antony to feminine domination, “inasmuch as Cleopatra received him quite tamed and disciplined from the beginning to obey women.”

It could be wished that Plutarch had been able to furnish us with a little more information about Fulvia, wife of two such extraordinary men as Clodius-and Antony, to say nothing of Curio.

The same writer, after a long but not unduly severe criticism of some prominent traits of Antony’s nature, especially his simplicity, affability, and openness to flattery, says: “Such was his disposition, upon which came as a crowning evil his love for Cleopatra, which stirred up and inflamed many passions still latent in him and utterly destroyed whatever reserve of good there was in him.” Plutarch’s view, if it has the disadvantage of being shared by the writers whose attitude toward Antony was unfairly biassed by their desire to exalt Octavian, has at least the merit of presenting a more consistent and intelligible explanation of the story of Antony and Cleopatra than can be given by one who rejects Plutarch with the other classical historians. If Antony and Cleopatra are to be statesman and stateswoman merely, and not victims of an infatuation, it is necessary to rewrite the whole history of the years 42-30 BC. But we cannot rewrite the facts of the battle of Actium, and they most strongly support the traditional view about the Triumvir and the Egyptian queen.

 

CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY

 

Cleopatra was twenty-eight when the famous meeting with Antony took place; “at an age,’’ Plutarch remarks, “when woman’s beauty is most brilliant and her intellect at its full maturity.’’ Nearly three years had elapsed since she had fled from Italy, after the death of the man whose place Antony was to take as her lover as well as Rome’s representative in the East. These three years she had spent in Egypt, where, in spite of her early unpopularity in Alexandria, she had succeeded in getting her child by Caesar recognised as Son of the Sun and joint ruler with herself over the kingdom, although we do not know in what year the association of mother and son was reckoned to begin.* The occurrence of a famine had not brought disaster to her authority in Egypt, and she had managed to save her country from being involved in the civil struggle in the Roman Empire which had culminated at Philippi. She had been obliged to part with the bodyguard left to her by Caesar, but she had kept her fleet at home instead of sending it to join that of Antony and Octavian in the Adriatic. It only remained for her now to furnish an explanation of her conduct to the victorious Triumvirs, or, rather, to that member of the Triumvirate who was in the East.

The vassal kings of Asia Minor and Syria had hastened to prostrate themselves at Antony’s feet. Alone of the nations dependent or semidependent on Rome, Egypt was not represented at his Asiatic court. Whatever Cleopatra’s motive for staying away, she certainly piqued Antony. He determined to renew his acquaintance with the queen who appeared to flout his authority ; for it is impossible to believe that his only object was to secure the co-operation of Egypt in the campaign against the Parthians. He therefore despatched to Alexandria an agent charged with the duty of summoning Cleopatra to meet him in Cilicia. The man whom he chose was a young Roman knight named Quintus Dellius, of infamous morals and of the most elastic political conscience; for in Asia Minor he had associated himself in turn with Dolabella, Cassius, and Antony, and was to desert the last-named again before the battle of Actium. Although he became a friend of the Emperor Augustus, of Maecenas, and of the Roman literary world in general, including Horace he did not succeed in concealing his reputation for viciousness from posterity, and so remains as an example of that gilded youth of which not even Rome herself, who produced them, could be proud.

Dellius apparently had never seen Cleopatra before he came on his errand to Alexandria. According to Plutarch, he no sooner looked on her face and noted her ready tongue and versatile wits than he felt sure that not only would Antony never dream of doing her any harm, but she would have the greatest influence over him. “So he set himself at once to pay court to her, and encouraged the Egyptian, with a quotation from Homer, to ‘ go bedecked in her best attire ’ to Cilicia and not to fear Antony, the gentlest and kindest of generals.” Later scandal made Dellius accepted by Cleopatra as a lover ; but it was so easy to bring such an accusation against her that it would have been surprising had it not been brought. The queen prepared to go to the Triumvir, secure in the knowledge that she was more fascinating now at twenty-eight than when as an inexperienced girl she had conquered the heart of Julius Caesar. She did not start from Alexandria empty-handed, but with an abundance of money and valuable gifts, “ such as might be expected from so great an  estate and so wealthy a kingdom as hers,” says Plutarch, adding : “Yet she went to Cilicia relying chiefly upon her own seductions and charms.”

Still maintaining her attitude of reluctance, Cleopatra made no undue haste to come to Tarsus, where Antony awaited her, but allowed several letters from him and his friends to reach her before she actually set out. At last her fleet reached the mouth of the river Cydnus, twelve miles up-stream from which lay the capital of Cilicia. Plutarch’s description of the wonderful scene is familiar to most readers from Shakespeare’s adaptation in “ Antony and Cleopatra,” Act II, Scene 2. Yet we may be allowed to quote from his narrative how Cleopatra,

“As if in mockery, sailed up the river in a vessel with a gilded stem, with sails of purple outspread, and with silver oars moving in time to the sound of flutes and pipes and harps. She herself, decked like Aphrodite in a picture, lay under an awning bespangled with gold, while boys like painted Cupids stood on either side fanning her. At the helm and by the rigging stood her most beautiful slave-women in the guise of Nereids and Graces. Marvellous odours from many censers spread to the banks, along which’ some of the multitude followed her from the river-mouth, others coming down from the city to gaze upon the spectacle. As the crowd from the market-place also poured forth,  at last Antony was left sitting alone upon the tribunal, while the rumour spread about that Aphrodite was come to feast with Dionysos for the common good of Asia.”

Cleopatra’s ruse succeeded to the utmost of her expectation. Antony, instead of seeing her before him ‘in the attitude of a suppliant, felt constrained to send her an invitation to dinner ; to which she replied that it was more suitable that he should come to dine with her. Thereupon, in the words which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of his Enobarbus,

Our courteous Antony,

Whom ne’er the word of “ No ” woman heard speak,

Being barber’d ten times o’er, goes to the feast ;

 And, for his ordinary, pays his heart 

For what his eyes eat only.

Of Antony’s “ordinary” we have fortunately a description which the third-century Egyptian author Athenaeus quotes from an earlier writer, Socrates the Rhodian, whose works are lost. Plutarch only records that Antony found a preparation greater than he expected, and that he was especially surprised at the great number of the lights, the illuminations being hung down over the diners in squares and circles, so as to make a scene seldom equalled. But Socrates relates how Cleopatra prepared A royal entertainment, in which every dish was golden and inlaid with precious stones, wonderfully chased and embossed. The walls were hung with cloths embroidered in purple and gold. And she had twelve triple couches laid, and invited Antony to a banquet and desired him to bring with him whatever companions he pleased. And he, being astonished at the magnificence of the sight, expressed his surprise ; and she, smiling, said she made him a present of everything he saw, and invited him to sup with her again the next day and to bring his friends and captains with him. Then she prepared a banquet far more splendid than the former one, so as to make the first appear contemptible ; and again she presented to him everything that there was on the table. And she desired each of his captains to take for his own the couch on which he lay and the goblets which were set before each couch. And when they were departing she gave to all those of the highest rank litters, with slaves as litter-bearers; and to the rest she gave horses, adorned with gold trappings ; and to every one she gave Ethiopian boys to bear torches before them. And on the fourth day she paid more than a talent [nearly £250] for roses ; and the floor of the chamber for the men was strewn a cubit deep, nets being spread over the blooms.”

Plutarch says that Antony entertained Cleopatra in his turn, and was anxious to surpass her in magnificence. So poor was his success, however, that he was the first to jest at the coarseness and rusticity of his own entertainment; while she, “seeing that his raillery was that of the soldier, not of the polished courtier, fell at once freely and boldly into the same manner toward him.” She made no such mistake as treating Antony as she had treated Julius Caesar. She keyed herself down to his pitch in the way which has gained for her the reputation of being the cleverest of all royal courtesans; although any one who embarks upon the hopeless task of defending Cleopatra’s character is quite entitled to point out that adaptability to masculine environment is no certain proof of a woman’s looseness of morals.

Once again there had occurred in the case of Antony what Dion Cassius remarked with regard to Caesar. ‘‘He had already become the advocate of her whose judge he had intended to be.” Cleopatra had been summoned to Tarsus to explain how it was that she had not assisted the Triumvirs against Brutus and Cassius. Appian states that Antony did actually censure her for not sharing the task of avenging Caesar, and that she, instead of apologising, enumerated what she had done, which included the despatch of her bodyguard to Dolabella, the refusal of assistance to Cassius, and the fitting out of a fleet and her own departure with it from Alexandria, frustrated by the storm which wrecked the ships. Antony abandoned the pretence of sitting in judgment on the queen. Some may believe that he pardoned her in consideration of her promise of help in the war against the Parthians. Appian, agreeing with all other ancient writers, remarks that “ Antony was amazed at her wit as well as her beauty, and became her captive as if he were a young man, although he was forty years of age.”

“ Straightway,” continues the same historian, “Antony’s interest in public affairs began to dwindle. Whatever Cleopatra ordered was done, regardless of laws human or divine.” Although he was a man naturally inclined to good-humoured clemency toward opponents, with the exception of a few personal enemies, such as Cicero (who had put to death in 63 his stepfather, Cornelius Lentulus) and Hortensius (whom, rather than Brutus, he considered responsible for the death of his brother, Caius Antonius, and had executed over Caius’s tomb in Macedonia), Antony consented now to the perpetration of the deed which has left the greatest stain on Cleopatra’s reputation. The Princess Arsinoe, after she had been made to figure in Caesar’s Egyptian triumph, had been allowed to leave Rome and seek refuge in Asia Minor. For safety she adopted a plan equivalent to the more modern resource of taking the veil. She had gone to the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus and thrown herself as a suppliant before the altar of the goddess. The megabyzos or high-priest had received her kindly and had even treated her as if she were a queen. When Cleopatra came to meet Antony at Tarsus, Arsinoe was still at Ephesus and might well have considered herself safe against her sister’s hatred. But Cleopatra evidently did not forgive Arsinoe even when retired from the world, and assassins were sent who slew the unfortunate princess in the sanctuary. We do not know whether there was any pretext of a plot to set Arsinoe again upon the throne of Egypt which she had once held for a few weeks as the representative of her sister and the elder of her two brothers. It might be imagined that Cleopatra felt secure enough in Egypt, with Antony’s patronage, to overlook the fact that Arsinoe still lived. But it was not the custom of the Lagidae, women or men, to show mercy to their nearest kindred. Arsinoe followed her wretched brothers to the grave, even more directly than they victims to the ambition of a sister.

Cleopatra’s vindictiveness was not appeased by the murder of Arsinoe. An attempt was made to call to account the megabyzos of Ephesus for his reception of the fugitive as though she were a queen. But the Ephesians, proud of the sanctity of their five-hundred-year-old temple, succeeded in obtaining mercy for the priest. Cleopatra, however, prevailed upon Antoily to order the execution of a man claiming to be Ptolemy XIV, saved from the battle against Caesar on the Nile, and of Serapion, the Cyprian viceroy who had allowed Cassius to commandeer his fleet. Both of these had sought an asylum in Phoenicia, but they failed to escape from the wrath of Cleopatra.

“I am persuaded that he has been bewitched by that accursed woman.” So Octavian is reported by Dion Cassius to have remarked later with regard to Antony’s infatuation for Cleopatra. Unless we are convinced by the eloquence of Professor Ferrero and believe that Antony was merely eager to secure Cleopatra as his ally against Parthia, we may think that Octavian would have been justified in making his remark already in 41 b.c. For, after sending the queen ahead of himself to Alexandria while he settled the affairs of Syria in the usual method, by bestowing the petty vassal thrones upon princes who had won his favour, he put the military command of the province in the hands of a lieutenant and then followed Cleopatra to Egypt. How he spent the winter there must be left for the next chapter. Here we may stop to glance at the condition of affairs in the world from which Antony did not hesitate to withdraw himself in order to give himself up to the enjoyment of the Alexandrian winter-season with Cleopatra.

When after the battle of Philippi Antony went east, while Octavian returned to Rome, still suffering from the sickness which had caused him to play so small a part in the battle, the situation in Italy was not easy for the Triumvirs, both owing to the extravagant promises which they had made to their troops, and because the sea south of Italy remained in the hands of Sextus Pompeius, younger brother of Cleopatra’s former friend, and last representative of the old Pompeian party. Sextus Pompeius was in a position to cut off Rome’s corn-supplies from over-seas, and so cause a bread-famine. The distribution of land among the soldiers victorious at Philippi led to discontent in Italy, and to friction between the followers of Antony and Octavian respectively. Antony had a number of agents to look after his interests in Rome, including his wife Fulvia and his brother Lucius. Lucius Antonius, one of the consuls for 41, was decidedly Republican in his views, and is reported by Appian as saying : “I shall always set my country above personal gratitude and above family.” His willingness to support his brother was strengthened by the jealousy with which he watched Octavian wielding power usurped from the State. His view was that his brother should lay down the triumvirate simultaneously with his colleagues, and, accepting the consulship instead, restore the legal government of their forefathers. Fulvia, on the other hand, untroubled by Republican scruples, is represented by the ancient historians as intentionally stirring up trouble in Rome in order to bring her husband home from the East.* Thus, although both brother and wife were claiming to uphold his cause, neither in reality when precipitating a crisis with Octavian was acting in consultation with Antony, who did not desire to be distracted from his schemes of empire in the East.

Lucius and Fulvia, nevertheless, pressed matters so far that at length they were compelled (or said they were compelled) to fly from Rome to Praeneste. From here they wrote to Antony complaining that their lives and those of his children were in danger from Octavian. These letters Antony may never have received. At any rate he took no notice of them. Lucius Antonius, without waiting to hear from his brother, made ready for war. Setting up the standard of the Republic he marched on Rome, in Octavian’s absence, and seized it, driving out Lepidus, the insignificant third partner in the Triumvirate. In sallying out from Rome, however, to cut off reinforcements coming to Octavian from the North, Lucius was himself cut off and obliged to take refuge in the Etrurian town of Perusia, the modern Perugia. This was in the autumn of 41. Octavian kept Perusia closely blockaded until the following spring, when the garrison was compelled by famine to surrender. Lucius Antonius was pardoned by Octavian; but some executions were carried out among his adherents, while the town was accidentally burnt to the ground. The break-up of the militant Antonian party in Italy was complete. Fulvia, taking her children with her, fled to Greece, and a number of other prominent people started to make their way to Antony himself.

While matters had been going thus ill for Antony in Italy, Asiatic affairs had gone even worse. When he followed Cleopatra to Alexandria near the end of 41, he left his officer Decidius Saxa, a Spanish protege of the Dictator Caesar, in command of the troops in Syria, and on the watch against any movement of the Parthians. He had distributed among his Syrian friends the small principalities of the country, including Judaea, of which he made the brothers Herod and Phasael tetrarchs. Herod had obtained his reward for his second change of front. Having been a Caesarian, he had joined Cassius, only to become a fervent Antonian upon Antony’s arrival in Asia. The princes dispossessed to make way for Antony’s nominees took the obvious step of appealing to the only other great power of which they had any knowledge except Rome, the Parthians. This rather mysterious nation had recovered from the checks to its expansion which had been administered by Mithridates of Pontus and Tigranes of Armenia, and, emboldened by the fact that Rome had not yet been able to avenge the defeat and death of Crassus at Carrhae twelve years before, was ready to interfere actively in the affairs of the Levant. Several circumstances seemed to favour the Parthians. Asia Minor and Syria had suffered heavily from Antony’s exactions, and could bear no love toward his rule. The expelled princes had left adherents behind them. The Roman garrisons consisted in part of troops which had once served under Cassius, and were therefore unsound. And, lastly, the Parthians had with them an actual renegade, Quintus Labienus, an associate of Cassius and Brutus, who had lived at the Parthian court since before the battle of Philippi, and who had considerable influence  with King Orodes. In conjunction with the king’s son Pacorus, Labienus led an expedition across the Euphrates and into the Roman provinces of Asia and Syria. Decidius Saxa made a vain attempt to stop them, but was defeated; and by the spring of 40 Rome’s Levantine provinces were in Parthian hands. The newly established princes of Syria had been driven from their thrones. Phasael was slain, and Herod was in flight toward Egypt. In the province of Asia every town had yielded except the Carian Stratonikeia. Labienus was exultingly calling himself Imperator and Parthicus for his victories over the soldiers and subjects of his own native country. The disgrace of Carrhae had been surpassed. And meanwhile Antony was in Egypt.

Professor Ferrero, in his defence of his hero, remarks that, “if it is beyond doubt that Antony gave himself up to pleasures this winter in the immense and sumptuous palace of the Ptolemies it is certain also that he devoted attention to serious matters, nay even to the most serious matter which could occupy the chief man of the Republic, the most illustrious magistrate of the Empire.” We must now see what were the pleasures for which Antony found time when not devoting his thoughts to the war against Parthia, for we shall then be better able to judge how strict his attention to the coming war was likely to have been.

 

THE “ INIMITABLES ”

 

Plutarch remarks that Cleopatra so captivated Antony that, while his wife Fulvia was fighting his quarrel in Rome against Octavian and while the Parthians were threatening Syria, he " suffered himself to be carried off by her to Alexandria, there to stay and amuse himself like a boy in holiday-time, squandering on pleasure what Antiphon calls the most costly of all treasures, Time.” The old Greek biographer cannot be accused of undue severity when he thus criticises Antony’s conduct in going to Egypt for the winter of 41-40 ; nor, as it has been proved by inscriptions, of an over-vivid imagination when he proceeds to describe how there was founded at Alexandria a club called the Amimetobioi or Inimitable Livers, “whose members entertained one another daily in turn, at a cost extravagant beyond belief.” There have been found, indeed, in Egypt two Greek inscriptions, one on the pedestal of a statue of Antony styling him “The Inimitable, the Well-doer,” and the other a dedication to “Antonios the Great and Inimitable.”

Alexandria abounded in clubs copied, with due regard to the absolute rule of the Ptolemies, from the similar institutions, the Eranoi, Hetairiai, Thiasoi, and so on, in the free cities of Greece and Asia Minor. We hear, however, but little of these Alexandrian societies, whether political, social, or religious, beyond one or two allusions in Plutarch, Athenaeus, and Dion Chrysostom, and no details are ever forthcoming of their organisation. Ptolemy IV Philopator was represented as spending a good deal of his disreputable reign in the company of women and revelling clubmen. The club of the Amimeiobioi founded by Cleopatra in conjunction with Antony was clearly on the same lines as those patronised by her ancestor Philopator.

The “inimitability” of the life led by these gay revellers was chiefly due, it must be confessed, to the fact that until the time of the multimillionaires of to-day there has been scarcely any one who could compete in riches with the last queen of the always wealthy line of the Lagidae. Cleopatra, however, had an advantage over the later plutocrats in that she was endowed with more artistic taste than they—and we may say this in spite of her many displays of ostentation only worthy- of sons of the kings of modern finance—and that she had a background for her splendid follies far more magnificent than any city of the present time can provide. Set in the midst of parks and gardens beautiful with palms, sycomores, and mimosas, with aromatic shrubs, with roses, violets, and all the choicest flowers known to the ancient world, with ponds full of lotus and of nenuphars ; surrounded by the mansions of the rich, the vast public buildings, and the majestic temples of the gods of Egypt and of Greece ; approached through avenues of sphinxes, between obelisks, and across courtyards sheltered from the sun by hangings of heavy purple cloth,—the Royal Palace of the Lagidae itself would seem to have caused contemporary writers to despair of doing it justice, or if any description was ever written it has unhappily been lost. We can imagine, however, to some extent from the account, preserved by Athenaeus and quoted in Chapter V, of the floating palaces of the Ptolemies how sumptuous must have been the permanent residence of the wealthiest kings on earth.

Here, in a masterpiece constructed out of every beautiful wood, stone, and metal which could be brought together, and enriched by sovereign after sovereign of her family, Cleopatra entertained her friends with all the luxury which Greece, Egypt, Persia, and Rome combined had been able to devise. And did not the heroine of M. Pierre Louys’s “Une Volupte Nouvelle” say that the only fresh joy which modem civilisation has been able to discover is that of smoking ? The pleasures of the table have always occupied a pre-eminent place in an environment of general extravagance, and, since the model of Alexandria was very closely followed under the Roman Empire, we can gather from the writings of Nero’s friend Petronius how positively terrifying must have been the banquets which were set before the guests who lay on the silver couches in the banqueting-halls of Cleopatra’s Palace, built up on huge columns, thronged with slaves lovely or grotesque and entertainers of every profession and nationality, and heavy with the odour of incense and strewn roses. We must not pause, however, to discuss the question of ancient gastronomy. It will suffice perhaps to mention a fact which Plutarch recalls as being told to his grandfather by a Greek doctor, who knew one of the royal cooks at Alexandria during Cleopatra’s reign and was taken by him into the Palace kitchens.

“He saw everything in great abundance,” says Plutarch, “ including eight wild boars roasting, which made him wonder at the number of the guests. Hereupon the cook laughed, and told him that the party at supper was not very large, only about a dozen ; but it was necessary that everything served up at table should be perfect, which the loss of a moment of time might prevent. Antony might perchance wish to sup immediately, he said, and then might delay matters by asking for a cup of wine or by engaging in some conversation. Accordingly, he continued, not one supper is prepared but many, since the exact hour is hard to conjecture.”

It was not merely the food (and the wines) which made the Alexandrian banquets so astonishing. Cleopatra was noted for nothing more splendid than her table-service, which was so remarkable that a later royal lady, Zenobia Queen of Palmyra, three centuries after her, was satisfied with none but Cleopatran plates and dishes, it was said. Now Athenaeus relates that, whereas formerly vessels of earthenware were considered good enough, “ when the Romans altered the way of life, giving it a more expensive direction, then Cleopatra, arranging her style of living in imitation of them, since she was unable to change the name called gold and silver plate keramon [earthenware]; and she gave her guests what she called the kerama to carry away with them.” This, Athenaeus adds, was very costly. Plutarch, too, narrates, on the authority of his grandfather’s friend, how Antony’s son, Antyllus, when he went to live with his father at Alexandria, imitated Cleopatra’s generosity with her plate, and how, when the doctor seemed unwilling to take the gift, the slave who had brought them to him said :  “Why do you hesitate, you fool? Do you not know that the giver is Antony’s son, and that he has authority to make presents of so many things of gold?”

This last tale, though illustrative of the ways of the “Inimitables,” belongs to a later period than Antony’s first winter in Alexandria. So also, perhaps, does that told by Pliny of Cleopatra’s wager to spend ten million sesterces at a single banquet. Antony accepted the bet, and, as the meal was no more magnificent than usual, toward the end of it he began to rally Cleopatra on her wager. Thereupon she told him he had so far only seen the accessories and, taking one of two immensely valuable pearl earrings from her ears, put it into a cup of vinegar. The judge of the bet was Plancus, the same man to whom Horace addresses an ode. He gave his decision in favour of the queen and stopped her from sacrificing the other earring, which, according to Pliny, was afterwards found by Octavian among Cleopatra’s treasure seized at Alexandria, and by him cut in two to decorate the ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheum at Rome. Perhaps it need hardly be remarked that this story, although it has obtained great celebrity, is not necessarily true. But the same remark, unfortunately, applies also to most tales in history, modern as well as ancient.

In the midst of all this magnificence and prodigious waste, Cleopatra took heed that Antony should not grow merely surfeited with luxury. Although he was a very different kind of man from Julius Caesar, it required wit as well as wealth to keep even him in bondage. Plutarch pictures her to us as constantly inventing something new to charm or amuse him ; and, while leaving him neither night nor day, accommodating herself to all his desires, whether he diced or drank or hunted or exercised himself at arms. As he was not devoid of a certain superficial culture, he had no objection to putting on the dress of a Greek and the fashionable white shoes of Athens and attending lectures at the Museum. But at times his animal spirits required in their turn an outlet which neither the polite exercises of a Greek gymnasium nor military training could provide. Then, when he put on the clothes of a slave and went out by night to divert himself, Cleopatra would dress herself like him and share in his escapades. For Antony by no means confined himself to the mild adventures for which Haroun Al-Raschid sought. Rather, like not a few princes since the Caliph’s days, he went out looking for opportunities for wild horseplay, and he so far succeeded that he always returned home “ well loaded with abuse and sometimes even with blows.”

Plutarch truly observes that to go into details about the follies committed in Alexandria would be “ mere trifling.” He allows himself, however, to relate the story of Antony’s fishing. This is perhaps too well known to need repetition—how Cleopatra, to raise a laugh against her lover, who had employed divers to fasten already caught fish to his line, invited a number of guests to admire his skill, and then sent down a diver to put on the.hook a salted fish, which he drew up amid great merriment. It is interesting, nevertheless, as showing how she took advantage of Antony’s good-natured toleration of a joke against himself; and also how she appreciated another prominent trait in his character, his capacity for accepting flattery. For, having raised the laugh against him, she soothed him with these words:  “ Leave the fishing-rod,

Great General, to us sovereigns of Pharos and Canopus. Your game is cities and kings and continents.”

In some cities the spectacle of an eminent foreigner indulging in the most foolish diversions in their midst might be expected to cause feelings of annoyance. But the lively people of Alexandria took in good part the antics of the Roman general whom their queen had introduced to them. His volatile humour and love of amusement struck a sympathetic chord in them, and they remarked that Antony kept the tragic mask for the Romans, but wore the comic mask with them. Probably Antony did himself no ill turn when he showed the Alexandrians how he could unbend. He gained a popularity with them which we do not hear of as having fallen to Julius Caesar before him.

The ancient writers, especially those who were some centuries removed from the time of the Amimetobioi, abound in these stories about the revels in Alexandria under the presidency of Cleopatra and Antony. They are, however, very vague as to the date when the incidents which they profess to record took place. There will be an opportunity to refer to the subject again in another chapter. For the present we must leave the “ Inimitable Life,” and return to the political situation which faced Antony at the beginning of the year following his association of his fortunes with those of Cleopatra.

 

THE BREAK BETWEEN CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY

 

In the spring of the year 40 news reached Alexandria which brought to an end the follies of Antony, Cleopatra, and their companions. It was necessary for the Triumvir to quit Egypt and put himself once more in touch with affairs, which had by no means stood still while he had “ squandered the most costly of all treasures.” Information from Italy of the fall of Perusia does not appear to have come to him until later, but he must have heard before he left Alexandria something about the struggle waged between his brother Lucius and his colleague Octavian ; and that the Parthians were masters of Syria and Asia Minor he learnt from the mouths of fugitives arriving in Alexandria from the lost provinces. The honour of the Roman Empire was damaged, and Antony could no longer remain passive. “With difficulty then,” says Plutarch, “and like a man aroused from sleep and a drunken debauch, he set out to meet the Parthians and advanced as far as Phoenicia.”

Antony’s first intention no doubt was to organise a resistance against the Parthian invaders of Rome’s eastern provinces. But on arrival at Tyre he found the military situation hopeless unless he could bring into the field the legions belonging to him in Macedonia, Italy, and Gaul. His forces in Asia Minor and Syria had practically ceased to exist. Moreover, letters which now reached him from Fulvia showed him the imperative necessity of delay until he should make certain of the position of affairs at home. Leaving Tyre, he sailed with a fleet of two hundred ships to Cyprus, Rhodes, and the coast of Asia Minor. On his way he fell in with the refugees flying from Italy in search of him, and learnt for the first time of the fall of Perusia and the wreck of his cause, at least temporarily, at Rome. He was filled with consternation and with anger against the foolish and inconsiderate zeal of his family. While he had desired to maintain peaceful relations with Octavian until he should have settled with the Parthians and consolidated his position in the eastern half of the Empire, Lucius and Fulvia had not only embroiled him with the other Triumvirs but deprived him of a footing in Rome and cut off from him the hope of assistance from the West for his Parthian campaign. Acting from different motives and neither wishing to work him harm, both his wife and his brother had done Antony a very bad turn. Lucius Antonius (whose sympathy with the views of Marcus was no more complete than that of Lucien Bonaparte with the views of Napoleon) ceased henceforward to be an active agent of his brother. Fulvia, however, was on her way to meet her irate husband, who left the Asiatic coast and sailed to Athens to receive her explanations.

From the sequel it may be imagined that the interview between husband and wife was of a painful character. While Antony violently upbraided her for her share in the ruin of his affairs at Rome, it is impossible to believe that Fulvia omitted to speak to him of his liaison with Cleopatra, one of the chief causes of her own mischievous political activity. If she had not heard of the “ Inimitable Livers,” at least she must have known about the meeting at Tarsus and the intimacy in Syria of the Roman general and the Egyptian queen. On a temperament such as we must attribute to Fulvia from the evidence which the classical historians have given us, the effect of the interview at Athens was disastrous. Her end was almost suicide. She proceeded to Sikyon, while Antony went to rejoin his fleet and sail north-westward along the coast of Greece. At Sikyon she was taken ill and died. According to Appian, “ it was said that she was dispirited by Antony’s reproaches and fell sick, and it was thought that she had become a willing victim to disease on account of the anger of Antony, who had left her when she was ill and had not even visited her when he was going away.”

Appian cruelly comments : “ The death of this turbulent woman, who had stirred up so disastrous a war on account of her jealousy of Cleopatra, seemed extremely fortunate to both of the parties who were rid other ”—her husband’s, that is to say, and Octavian’s. But he adds: “ Antony, nevertheless, was much saddened by this event, for he considered himself in some degree the cause of it.”

Antony had good reason to blame himself, for Fulvia, whatever her faults, was strongly attached to him and had done much for him. When he married her, his third wife, in 46 he was not only penniless but also out of favour with Julius Caesar. Fulvia brought him money and also influence, as being the widow of a Caesarian soldier, and had rescued him from the clutches of Cytheris, a star of the demi-monde and the stage— we might almost say of the music-halls, for the lady was a “mime.” It took Fulvia some time to overcome the influence of Cytheris, but having done so she dominated him herself until he came under the still stronger power of Cleopatra.

Fulvia sprang from a well-to-do provincial family, her father being one Marcus Fulvius, sumamed Bambalio (“the stammerer”), whom Cicero abuses in his usual choice fashion in the Third Philippic as “a man of no account, a contemptible creature,” and brutally ridicules even for the impediment in his speech. When we read of Fulvia piercing with a hairpin the tongue of the beheaded orator, we cannot but recall what that tongue had uttered against her father and her husband. To her father’s wealth Fulvia no doubt owed her three marriages into the Roman aristocracy. Her first was with Publius Clodias Pulcher, whose good looks which gained him his last name were joined with an utter vileness of character. When Clodius died in a political brawl with another ruffian in 52, Fulvia married Caius Scribonius Curio, the profligate friend of Antony. Curio died in battle in Africa in 46, and in the same year the widow married his friend. In the story of Antony’s life she stands out as a strong-minded, bold, and ambitious woman, who contributed not a little to spur him on toward the chief place in the State. When he became Triumvir, she attempted to gain an influence also over the only important member of his pair of colleagues. She succeeded indeed in persuading Octavian to wed her daughter by Clodius. But he sent Claudia back to her without consummating the marriage, unable to tolerate the imperiousness of his mother-in-law. From this moment Fulvia became a bitter foe to Octavian. But if she could hate and be cruel (and the tale of her treatment of Cicero’s head is the only definite evidence of this), she was at least capable of lasting affection toward a man who deserved none too well of her. It scarcely seems just of Professor Ferrero to speak of her as “unsexed by the passion for power.”

Fulvia bore two sons to Antony, the elder of whom went to the University of Athens (whence it probably comes that he is commonly known by the half-Greek name of Antyllus, a seeming contraction of Antonillus), and was put to death by Octavian in b.c. 30 ; while the younger, Julus, or Iullus, after being favourably treated by Octavian when he had become the Emperor Augustus, was also put to death by him in b.c. 2 in punishment for an intrigue with Julia, the notorious daughter of the Emperor.

The death of Fulvia removed from out of Cleopatra’s way a woman who had many claims to be considered her peer in ability and strength of character. But it also paved the way for a reconciliation with Octavian, which kept Antony from returning to Cleopatra for four years. When he left Fulvia to die at Sikyon, Antony does not seem to have made up his mind how to treat Octavian and Lepidus. There were still nearly three years to run of the triumviral compact, and it was perfectly possible to disown the action of Lucius Antonius and Fulvia which had led to the Perusian War. On the other hand, among the fugitives who had come to meet Antony at Athens was his mother Julia, who, though by birth a member of the Caesar family, had been received with great courtesy by the outlaw Sextus Pompeius and had been assisted by him on her way to her son. Touched by his politeness and perhaps little inclined totrust her young kinsman Octavian, Julia urged her son to consider the question of an alliance with Pompeius. One of the results of the dissensions at Rome in 41-40 had been that Pompeius, already strong enough to defy the Government established after Philippi, found himself better off than ever. Service with a man of his stamp, dashing, adventurous, and no stickler for discipline, attracted many weary of the condition of affairs at home, where food was scarce and the outcome of the Triumvirs’ ambitions obscure. Pompeius therefore, who had already been joined by Cassius’s old admiral Murcus with the ships under his command, and was daily adding to his forces, had every reason for demanding to be taken into account in the division of the Empire if the Triumvirs could not unite to crush him. Appian charges him with lacking wisdom in not invading Italy while the partisans of Antony were quarrelling with Octavian. The pirate king, however, must have known better than the historian writing nearly two centuries later what his chances would be if he abandoned the sea and assailed by land a government still in command of big armies of veteran troops.

Antony, in reply to his mother’s suggestion of an alliance with Pompeius, did not absolutely decline to entertain the idea. On the contrary, he expressed his willingness to consider it if Octavian should refuse to adhere to their compact. In order to find out what were Octavian’s intentions, after leaving Athens he made for Corcyra and from there crossed the Adriatic to the Italian coast. He had with him still the two hundred ships which he had brought from Asia, and on his way he fell in with Domitius Aheno-barbus, who ever since Philippi had remained at sea with a portion of the former Republican fleet. Ahenobarbus, like Sextus Pompeius, was an outlaw, but for some reason he had not made common cause with Pompeius. Antony gained him and his men over by one of those displays of courage which so endeared him to his followers. Sailing to meet the ex-Republicans with only five of his own ships, he was enthusiastically received by them, and Ahenobarbus, willing or unwilling, could do nothing but put himself at the Triumvir’s disposal.

Thus strengthened, Antony approached the harbour of Brundisium. The garrison there promptly declined to allow him to enter the town, saying that Ahenobarbus was a public enemy and Antony therefore the introducer of an enemy. Antony landed his troops and commenced the siege of the place, while sending messages encouraging Sextus Pompeius to attack Italy. The alliance desired by Julia seemed for the moment an accomplished fact.

Octavian had been absent in Gaul, whither he had gone to secure, with bribes and promises, the legions on duty there and to prevent them from being won over by Antony. He now marched south and, reaching Brundisium, shut up in turn the beleaguering forces of Antony. But when a fierce struggle seemed about to take place, Octavian’s army demanded a reconciliation between the two chiefs. So great was Antony’s prestige among the soldiery that even legions which looked for everything to his adversary refused to fight against him now that he was present in person in Italy. Octavian was not in a position to disregard the wishes of his troops, and there was no alternative but to seek the means of approaching Antony diplomatically. It was at this moment that news reached Brundisium of the death of Fulvia. Not only was a powerful enemy to Octavian removed, but there was a possibility of a new combination. It was quite in accordance with precedent to make use of a matrimonial alliance to bring two rivals together in such a situation. Julius Caesar in 59 had given his daughter Julia to Pompey. Octavian himself had only recently taken to wife Scribonia, sister of Lucius Libo, father-in-law of Sextus Pompeius, in the hope of making better relations possible between himself and Sextus. Having a newly widowed sister on his hands, he was ready to listen to suggestions of his friends that he should try to bind Antony to himself with her aid. He wrote to his kinswoman Julia, and a meeting was arranged between the two leading Triumvirs at Brundisium in September of the year 40.

Thus came about the celebrated Treaty of Brundisium, in which Professor Ferrero sees an anticipation by three centuries of the division of the Roman world into the Empires of the East and the West, and a proof of Antony’s adherence to views which Cleopatra had been impressing on him at Alexandria, that it was worth while to resign all claims to the barbarous and poverty-stricken West if he could thereby secure the rich and civilised East, centring round Egypt. Hitherto Antony had claimed his share in the government of Italy ; now he abandoned Italy with all the Western possessions of Rome.

It must be admitted that if Antony, in agreeing at Brundisium to an entirely new partition of the Empire between Octavian and himself (for the share assigned to the third Triumvir Lepidus, namely, the province of Roman Africa, was negligible), was following ideas instilled into his head by Cleopatra, he coupled his consent with a proceeding not at all in harmony with the other scheme with which Professor Ferrero credits Cleopatra. For, instead of taking advantage of Fulvia’s death to wed the Queen of Egypt, he accepted the offer which Octavian’s advisers had persuaded the ruler of the West to make and took to wife Octavia. The Italian writer, however, sees in this a confirmation of his view that “Antony had been induced to spend the preceding winter at Alexandria rather by his political plans than by his love for Cleopatra,’’ since, “ when events obliged a temporary change of purpose, he did not hesitate to marry Octavia instead of Cleopatra.’’*

After the conclusion of the Treaty of Brundi-sium Antony dropped for nearly four years out of Cleopatra’s history. Doubtless she did not cease during that period to keep herself well informed of his movements, nor to endeavour to bring back to her side the man who, like Julius Caesar before him, had left her expecting a child by himself. Plutarch preserves a curious story of an Egyptian diviner in Antony’s suite, whom it is reasonable to look upon as an agent of Cleopatra. It seems that after Antony went to Rome with Octavia and Octavian, he found much reason to complain that, whenever he indulged in games of dice, etcetera, with his brother-in-law, luck invariably ran against him. Thereupon the Egyptian diviner, “ whether it was to please Cleopatra or in food faith, spoke freely to Antony, telling him that, however great and splendid his fortune, it was obscured by that of Caesar [Octavian] and advising him to remove as far as possible from the young man. ‘ For your genius,’ he said, ‘ is afraid of Caesar’s genius, and although it stands proud and erect when alone it is humbled by his genius when it is near and becomes abashed.’ ”

Most of the year 39, following his agreement with Octavian, was spent by Antony at Rome, where the Triumvirs were busily engaged in dealing both with the still unsatisfied veterans from Philippi and with the gravely discontented populace of Italy and its capital, whom the blockade successfully maintained by Sextus Pompeius along the southern coast of the peninsula kept in a perpetual state of famine. At length so great was the force of public opinion that the Triumvirs, unable to see their way to deal with Pompeius by naval and military methods, consented to make a convention with him. By the Treaty of Misenum the pirate was officially recognised by the rulers of Rome as worthy of a share in the Empire, being left in possession J of Sicily and Sardinia, presented with the Peloponnese for five years, and promised a .consulship at the end of this term, while his daughter was betrothed to Octavian’s six-year-old nephew, Marcellus, son of Octavia by her first husband. At last, for the first time since 45, the Empire enjoyed domestic peace, and the rejoicings were general.

Toward the end of the year Antony left Rome  for Athens, taking with him Octavia and their newly born daughter Antonia the elder, afterwards grandmother of the Emperor 'Nero. He contemplated beginning in the following spring that war against the Parthians which he had been too weak to wage when he left Alexandria in the spring of 40, and had already begun operations through his lieutenants Bassus, Plancus, and his new adherent, Ahenobarbus. In the meantime he was perfectly content to spend his winter at Athens in the company of Octavia, “ with whom he was very much in love, being by nature excessively fond of women,” remarks Appian. Octavia, the only good woman who had any influence over his life, had apparently succeeded in driving thoughts of Cleopatra from his head. With her he passed a very different winter season from that of a year ago in Alexandria. He lived the life of a Greek gentleman, wearing the Athenian dress, discussing art, letters, and philosophy with the citizens, attending the lectures at the University, accepting the post of gvmnasiarch and superintending the games, and generally comporting himself with decency. The Athenians made much both of him, whom they knew of old, and of Octavia, who won their hearts at once. Dion Cassius relates that among the honours bestowed upon him by the citizens were the title of “the New Dionysos” and the betrothal to him of their patron goddess Athene ; adding that Antony thereon asked for a marriage portion of a million drachmae (about £40,000)— which scarcely harmonizes with his usual behaviour toward Athens, if in keeping with his rude style of humour.

As it does not enter within the scope of this book to deal with the career of Antony except where it affects the life of Cleopatra, we must glance very rapidly at the events between the end of 39 and the beginning of 36 b.c. In the early summer following his sojourn with Octavia in Athens, Antony crossed to Syria and took over the command against the Parthians and their allies from Ventidius Bassus. Bassus had done far too well for his chief’s satisfaction, and was indeed the only Roman general to triumph for a success over the Parthians, inflicting upon them a heavy defeat, which was followed by the flight and death of the renegade Labienus. After some unimportant and not over-glorious operations against Antiochus of Commagene, one of the Parthians’ vassals, Antony returned to Athens to spend his second winter there with Octavia, still with no apparent thought of Cleopatra. The term of the first Triumvirate of Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus ended on December 31st, B.c. 38, and it looked at first as if its end would be followed by an open rupture between the two principal Triumvirs in 37 over the case of Sextus Pompeius, with whom Octavian had quarrelled, in violation of the Treaty of Misenum. After nearly four months, however, during which Antony waited threateningly off the coast of South Italy with a fleet of three hundred ships, a peaceful meeting was brought about at Tarentum between Antony and Octavian, with the aid of Octavia, of whose devotion to him her husband was glad to avail himself, whether or not his first ardour for her had now cooled, as is suggested by his behaviour only a few months later in Corcyra.

Octavia’s intervention saved the situation. At Tarentum the Triumvirate was renewed for another period of five years, beginning from January ist, 37, and Antony agreed to abandon Sextus Pompeius, giving his brother-in-law one hundred and thirty warships for use against him, in exchange for which he was to receive twenty-one thousand Italian legionaries to enable him to carry the war against the Parthians into the enemy’s country. There appeared now no obstacle to prevent either of the great rivals from carrying out the schemes dear to his heart. Octavian, indeed, proceeded at once to his task of making himself complete master of the West by removing first Pompeius and then Lepidus out of his path. Thanks to the reinforcements which he had received, he had nothing to fear with Antony away. It must have been with feelings of great satisfaction that he saw his brother-inlaw sail from the Italian coast.

 

THE LIAISON RENEWED

 

The time was approaching when Antony was to fall again under the sway from which the fiery Fulvia had been unable, while the gentler Octavia found the means for more than three years, to withdraw him. He was at last on his way to take up the command in that invasion of Parthia which gave a constitutional excuse for his Empire of the East, otherwise a mere usurpation of authority arranged between himself and Octavian. On his voyage from Italy he took Octavia with him as far as Corcyra, where he bade her farewell and left her to return home with their infant daughter and the two boys Antyllus andljulus. The anxiety which he expressed that she should not expose herself to danger may have been genuine, for she was expecting a second child by him, the daughter afterwards known as Antonia the younger ; or it may, as his enemies thought, have been a pretext for getting rid of a woman of whom he was already tired and setting himself free to follow his inclinations. The point cannot be decided, for his immediate conduct is ambiguous; but in either case he ceased from this moment to live with Octavia and saw neither her nor Rome again.

On leaving Corcyra Antony made straight for Syria, without pausing to visit Egypt. But as he approached Syria, in the words of Plutarch, “that great evil which had long slept, the passion for Cleopatra which seemed to have been lulled and charmed into oblivion by better considerations, blazed forth again and recovered strength. At last, like Plato’s ‘restive and ungovernable beast in the human soul,’ kicking away all that was good and wholesome, he sent Fonteius Capito to fetch Cleopatra to Syria.”

It was late in the year 37 that Cleopatra rejoined the lover whom she had not seen since his departure from Alexandria in the spring of 40. When his career separates itself from hers, unfortunately we cease to have more than the briefest allusions to her in the ancient historians, and the archaeologists are unable to help us with any Egyptian records from which to fill in the blank in her story. We know that as a result of her intercourse with Antony in Syria and Alexandria she bore, not long after he left her, the twins to whom were given the names of Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, the Sun and the Moon. We also read in the pages of J osephus how she received a visit from Herod, whose flight from the Parthians brought him a fugitive to the Egyptian frontier soon after Antony’s departure from Alexandria. His brother Phasael had been killed by the invaders, and Herod himself was on the way to seek from the masters of Rome his own restoration to Judaea and his confirmation as king of the territory over which he and Phasael had hitherto jointly ruled as tetrarchs. “He reached Pelusium,” says Josephus, “where he could not obtain a passage from those that lay at anchor there. So he had an interview with the governors of the place. And they, out of respect to the fame and dignity of the man, conducted him to Alexandria. And when he came to the city he was received by Cleopatra with great splendour, for she hoped he would be commander of her forces in the expedition which she was now about ; but he rejected the queen’s solicitations.”*

We should have liked to hear more about this meeting of Cleopatra and Herod, even from the pen of Josephus, who is elsewhere violently hostile to the queen and is always absurdly eulogistic of Herod. They must have met before, for Herod led one contingent of the army which relieved Julius Caesar from his siege in Alexandria in 47 ; and they were destined to meet again and become bitter enemies. It is impossible to , test the assertion of Josephus about her friendly treatment of him now and her desire that he should become “commander of her forces” in some unknown expedition. Ptolemy VII had a celebrated Jewish general, Onias ; Cleopatra III two Jewish officers, Chelkias and Ananias ; but Herod, in spite of his participation in the expedition which accomplished the relief of Caesar, had done nothing to deserve such military fame as Josephus would have us believe was his hero’s. It is probable that Josephus is merely drawing on his exceedingly vivid imagination for this offer of Cleopatra to Herod.

After Herod’s departure in search of Antony and Octavian, there begins a period of complete silence about Cleopatra and about Egypt generally until Antony’s reappearance in the East. What was she doing these four years ? As M. Houssaye remarks, “ the mind refuses to picture her in mourning garb, weeping in the interior of her palace ” ; and we would rather fancy her “ continuing her gay and gorgeous existence, giving up to pleasure the time left to her by public ceremonies, audiences, councils of State, and conferences with engineers and architects.” A very considerable amount of temple-building and repair and decoration of already existing temples was carried out during the rule of Cleopatra. The subject of Cleopatra as a builder is mentioned later,* and here it need only be said that at no period in her reign did she have so much opportunity for whatever personal attention she may have given to architectural work as during her separation from Antony, although there are no inscriptions which enable us definitely to assign any of her surviving monuments to these years.

With regard to her foreign policy at this time we are equally without information. Josephus’s remark about an intended expedition is unsupported by any other writer. We find a subsequent allusion to her favour of the cause of Sextus Pompeius, but it is very vague. Pompeius was certainly in a position to communicate with the Queen of Egypt, being sole master of the Mediterranean between Southern Italy and the mouths of the Nile, and as son of his father, as well as brother of Cnaeus the younger, must naturally have made some appeal to Cleopatra. Beyond this, however, it is impossible to go. We are at liberty to imagine the queen occupying herself with the government of Egypt by herself and the young Caesarion, and watching anxiously the movements of the Roman leaders ; kept in touch, it may be, with Antony’s affairs by the Egyptians who had remained with him after he left Alexandria.

When Fonteius Capito appeared at her court with a message from her lover of four years ago, we hear of no such delay on her part as she exhibited when she went to meet him at Tarsus in 41. She hastened to join Antony in Syria.

At Antioch the old relationship was renewed, and was followed by a most astonishing proceeding on the part of Antony. Plutarch says that on her arrival he “added to her dominions no small or trifling gift, but Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, Cyprus, a large part of Cilicia, and also that part of Judaea which produces the balsam, and as much of Nabathaean Arabia as faces the Outer Sea” —the Red Sea, that is to say, as opposed to the Mediterranean. We know also that he struck coins for circulation in Egypt, bearing his head and the titles Imperator and Triumvir translated into Greek. From this and from the existence of another coin with Cleopatra’s head on one side, Antony’s on the other, and an inscription showing that it was issued “ (in the reign) of Queen Cleopatra, in the twenty-first which is also the sixth year of the Goddess,” it is argued by several modem writers* that Antony definitely married Cleopatra at Antioch in BC 39, that she began to reckon a new era in her reign because of this, and that his “no small or trifling gift” was his wedding present to her.

With regard to this theory of a marriage between Antony and Cleopatra at Antioch, it is extremely improbable that a general agreement of opinion can ever be obtained. It is too much to hope for fresh evidence from ancient sources. Ingeniously though the case for the marriage has been argued, the absence of allusion to such an event in the classical writers contemporary with or subsequent to the age of Cleopatra, Antony, and Octavian, is too extraordinary to be passed over lightly. Had Antony gone straight from the arms of his legal wife, sister of the great colleague with whom he had just concluded a five-years’ treaty, leaving her with two little daughters by him, and without waiting even for the lapse of a few months contracted a marriage which in Roman eyes was bigamous and intolerable, is it possible that we should not find this monstrous action made one of the chief charges against him by the adherents of Octavian, in fact by all Roman writers ? But Antony, it may be said, did not inform Rome of what he had done. News, however, even in those days travelled across the Mediterranean, especially if it should be news of a bigamous marriage entered upon by one of the two leading men of the Roman world with an Egyptian queen. 

Antony did not lack enemies in Syria, and even indifferent persons would not be likely to keep silence about so startling a piece of scandal.* Had this ceremony at Antioch taken place, it is incredible that events should have taken the slow course which they did between Antony’s arrival in Syria and the outbreak of the war which led to the battle of Actium.

But for the existence of the coins it is certain that no one would attempt to demonstrate a marriage between Antony and Cleopatra in b.c. 37 ; and all that the really important coin proves is that Cleopatra began to reckon a new era in the fifteenth year of her reign, as indeed Porphyry too states. This she might well do as having become in the fifteenth year queen of a greatly enlarged kingdom. The presence of Antony’s head on a coin issued five years later, with the double era on it, is also natural, seeing that in b.c. 32 there is no doubt he considered himself her husband. What we do not find is a coin of 37 with the heads of Antony and Cleopatra and the double era. Antony’s coins with the

* Professor Ferrero, indeed, says that " Octavian must have been deeply vexed when he heard of this strange political marriage ” (” Grandeur and Decadence of Rome,” IV. p. 8). True, he must ; and are we to believe that none of the Augustan historians even mentioned the fact ? As far as the question of secrecy is concerned, Professor Ferrero says that " Antony married Cleopatra with all the dynastic ceremonies of Egypt ” (article in Putnam's Magazine). The argument from the coins, moreover, involves publicity of the marriage to prove which their aid is invoked.

Greek versions of his Roman titles, whatever they may indicate, assuredly do not show him claiming to be King of Egypt and husband of Egypt’s Queen.

Nevertheless, if Antony did not actually venture upon a step which would have cut him off morally from all his countrymen, by marrying a second wife while one was still living unrepudiated by him, he did not hesitate to acknowledge as his the twin children whom Cleopatra had born after his parting from her at Alexandria, and, according to Plutarch, justified himself by an allusion to his ancestor Hercules, whose offspring were not all from one mother. We do not know what justification, if any, he attempted of his donations to the mother of Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. By his gifts now Antony was indeed restoring to Egypt territory which had been hers in the reign of Ptolemy III Euer-getes ; but in the interval it had all fallen under the power of Rome. He might have pleaded, perhaps, the example of Julius Caesar, if it is true that the Dictator temporarily gave back Cyprus to Arsinoe and Ptolemy XV, and the example in any case was an evil one.

It is probable that Cleopatra, finding Antony in so generous a mood, wished him to add to her dominions all of Syria which had formerly been Egyptian : the portion known as Coele-Syria before the Roman conquest, including both Phoenicia and Judaea. But while Antony presented her with Phoenicia as well as the now-narrowed Coele-Syria, he was disinclined to dispossess, even in her favour, his cunning and wealthy friend Herod. The Roman Senate at the desire of himself and Octavian had formally recognised Herod as King of Judaea, and his deputy in Syria proper, Sosius, had restored him to the throne, storming Jerusalem with Herod one Sabbath day in J uly 37, and putting to death Antigonus, last of the Asmonaean dynasty and nominee of the Parthians. Antony therefore made a compromise. The Egyptian queen appears to have coveted particularly the perfumeproducing districts of Judaea and Arabia. Her country had always been renowned both for the production of sweet-scented oils and aromatic substances and for the importation of them from abroad, from Syria, Ethiopia, Arabia, from " the country of the Troglodytes,” and from India ; and under the Ptolemies they formed a royal monopoly of enormous value. Cleopatra, most luxurious of the Lagidae and a woman devoted to all the arts of beauty, was eager to make herself mistress of the celebrated gardens at Jericho, where the balsam grew, and of similar rich districts in the territory of the Nabathaean Arabs, lying between the Dead Sea and the northern end of the Red Sea. To gratify her Antony assigned to her these gardens, while leaving the Kings Herod and Malchus in possession of the rest of their realms. We also hear of cedar-forests at Amaxia, in the portion of Cilicia which Antony transferred to her.

Already Cleopatra had good reason for congratulating herself upon the foresight which led her to look to Antony as a successor to Julius Caesar for the partner in her ambitious schemes of securing her kingdom from the menace of annexation and restoring the glories of her most successful predecessors. She had to pay a price, it is true, and not only with the favours of her person. She was rich as well as beautiful. Therefore in return for his “ profuse gifts which ” (we are not surprised to read in Plutarch) “ much vexed the Romans,” Antony exacted from her an ample contribution to the cost of his expedition into Parthia, for which ever since he had taken the command out of the hands of Bassus in 38 his subordinates had been preparing under his direction, and for which he had made the exchange of forces with Octavian at Tarentum. Minor princes such as Herod no doubt paid their shares, but the one purse to which it was essential to have access was that of Cleopatra. So, while we may not be prepared to accept the story of Antony’s diplomatic marriage to secure a wealthy ally against the Parthians, we must allow that Antony mingled passion and calculation in his treatment of Cleopatra now. Full insight into the workings of his mind we cannot hope to get, and we must beware of making him too subtle. All that we know of his character indicates that he was essentially a man who took short views.

Having made his astonishing rearrangement of the map of the East, Antony started for Lesser Armenia, whence he proposed to commence his aggressive movement against Parthia. Cleopatra accompanied him as far as the river Euphrates, where she bade him farewell and set off in the direction of Egypt, travelling overland. On her way she paid a visit to Herod. “ She went into Judaea by Apamea and Damascus,” writes Josephus in his “ Jewish Wars.” “ Then did Herod appease her ill-will toward him by large presents and also hired from her those places which had been tom away from his kingdom, at a yearly rent of two hundred talents. He conducted her also as far as Pelusium and paid her all the court possible.” In his “ Antiquities of the Jews ” Josephus gives a much more lurid account of this meeting between Cleopatra and Herod, representing her as openly and shamelessly attempting to seduce the virtuous king. “ And perhaps she had some passion for him, or else (as is more probable) she laid a treacherous snare for him if adulterous intercourse with him should come about.” But Herod, continues Josephus, had long borne no goodwill toward Cleopatra and now refused to comply with her proposals. He conceived the idea of putting her to death and called together a council of his friends, to whom he unfolded his plan. The friends, however, scared at the suggestion, succeeded in restraining him through fear of the consequences. So he “paid court to Cleopatra and conducted her on her way to Egypt.”

The two accounts of Josephus, if not contradictory, give very different impressions of this encounter between two great intriguers; and it is very much to be regretted that we have no allusion to the incident elsewhere than in the pages of this most prejudiced and untrustworthy historian. No one would have a right to condemn the worst of queens, even as bad a woman as the partisans of her enemy Octavian made her out to be, on such unsupported statements as that of the writer who could make a hero of Herod and display such inability as Josephus to look on any character or event without the narrowest race-prejudice.

Whether or not she actually ran any risk of death at the hands of Herod (and Josephus is scarcely likely, perhaps, to have invented this portion of his tale, while we hear of Herod later trying to persuade Antony to take the step of which he himself was afraid), Cleopatra reached her kingdom unscathed; and once again a period of obscurity, though happily in the present case only a short period, occurs in her history. It is to this period that we must assign the birth of Ptolemy, her youngest child by Antony.

It is toward the end of the winter after she had left Syria for Alexandria that we learn how Cleopatra received an urgent appeal from Antony to meet him on his way back from Parthia. His news was of the worst. With an army of not far short of one hundred thousand men he had accomplished little beyond anticipating Napoleon’s ruinous march with the Grand Army into and out of Russia. Starting late in the summer of 36, instead of going into winter quarters in Armenia he had attempted to reach Phraata, the capital of the Median vassals of the Parthian kings, before the season became too severe for military operations. Hastening with the bulk of his army ahead of his siege-train, he allowed the latter to fall into the hands of those Cossacks of the Roman world, the Median and Parthian mounted archers, and arrived at Phraata without any means of besieging the city effectually. Nothing remained but to’ retreat through Armenia, assailed alike by a relentless enemy and by unmerciful weather. The Armenian king, Artavasdes, on whose help he had relied, after urging him on against his own namesake, Artavasdes, King of Media Atropatene, had proved treacherous. While the Median had lent vigorous aid to the Parthians, the Armenian had left Antony in the lurch. At such a crisis Antony appeared at his best. In the course of twenty-seven days he persuaded his men to fight eighteen battles, and finally he brought them, like Xenophon’s heroic Ten Thousand (whom, according to Plutarch, he often recalled to memory), down from the Armenian highlands to the sea. The strength of his main army was said to have been reduced from seventy to thirtyeight thousand. The extent of the disaster was doubtless exaggerated by the ancient writers, taking their cue from the Augustan historian Dellius, the same man whom we have already met as Antony’s messenger to Cleopatra in Chapter VIII; for Dellius after his desertion of Antony before Actium was not likely to have lost an opportunity of pleasing his new master by depreciating his former patron and friend.*

Nevertheless, it was with a mere wreck of his Grand Army that Antony reached the Phoenician coast. The survivors of his forces were in rags, and he was without money to pay them. He sent at once for Cleopatra. Ancient opinion attributes Antony’s undue precipitation in marching on Phraata to his desire to rejoin Cleopatra speedily, which may be admitted to be absurd. 

Still it can hardly have been only the Queen of Egypt, with her enormous wealth, whom Antony wished to see now after his arrival in Phoenicia. He had a personal need of her society, and there is an air of reality about Plutarch's description of his state of mind. “ As she was slow in coming, he became uneasy and restless, soon giving way to drunkenness, yet unable to sit long at table ; and while his companions were drinking he would often spring up to look out, until Cleopatra arrived by sea.” She joined him at Leuke Rome, the “ White Village ” lying between Sidon and the Modem Beirut, bringing with her clothing and supplies for the troops.

After making a distribution of clothes and money (he could give no more than about thirty shillings apiece) among his men, and putting Munatius Plancus in command of the army in Syria, Antony retired with Cleopatra to Alexandria until it should be time for him to renew the war against Parthia. The blow which he had received was heavy, and placed him very unfavourably as compared with Octavian, who, through the ability of his subordinates and certainly not owing to his own military capacity, which was small, had strengthened his position wonderfully during 36. Sextus Pompeius had been defeated and sent flying from Sicily in August, and in September Lepidus, after a brief and futile struggle against Octavian’s domination, had given up his share in the Triumvirate and retired into private life, leaving his conqueror to add the province of Africa to his portion of the Empire. This annexation of an extra province was later made a ground of complaint by Antony against Octavian.

The eviction of Sextus Pompeius from his temporary kingdom in Sicily had another disadvantage for Antony beside strengthening his rival. The dispossessed chieftain fled east, and coming to Asia Minor began to make preparations, ostensibly to attack Octavian. He sent friendly messages to Antony, but declined to accept an invitation to visit Alexandria. Neither party could trust the other. Sextus had good reason to remember Egypt, for he had been an eyewitness of his father’s murder there twelve years before. Antony on his side had little inducement to believe in the good faith of a man who had spent years as an outlaw, living on the plunder of his fellow-countrymen; and even while the envoys from Sextus were in Alexandria he discovered proofs of secret negotiations between their master and the Parthians. Emboldened perhaps by the fact that Antony took no steps to punish him for this treachery, Sextus began to scheme against Domitius Ahenobarbus, the chief-in-command in the province of Asia. Antony’s lieutenants were not as forgiving or as careless as he was. A price was put upon the head of Sextus, and he was pursued until he fell into the hands of Titius in Phrygia. By him he was carried to Miletus and there put to death, thus suffering a fate not dissimilar from that of his father and his brother.

The responsibility for the death of the last of the Pompeii was disputed. Titius, after he had deserted Antony for Octavian, found himself very unpopular in Rome for having carried out the execution ; but he could plead that he was only a subordinate. “ Some say that Plancus and not Antony gave the order,” remarks Appian, “ others that it was written by Plancus with Antony’s knowledge, the latter being ashamed to write it on account of the name Pompeius and because Cleopatra was favourable to him [Sextus] on account of Pompey the Great. Still others think that Plancus, being aware of the facts, took upon himself to give the order as a matter of precaution, fearing lest the co-operation of Cleopatra with Pompeius should breed dissension between Antony and Caesar [Octavian].”

Thus everything conspired to make the ruin and death of Sextus Pompeius profitable to Octavian and harmful to Antony. The expulsion of the pirate king from Sicily removed from Rome the pressure of the food-famine under which the city had been labouring for many years except in the brief intermission of the Treaty of Misenum, and helped Octavian greatly in his attempt to win favour from a populace which had hitherto always eyed him askance and liked him least of the Triumvirs. On the other hand, the shameful end of the last of a great family, a man not in himself unpopular though the cause of much suffering to his country, brought obloquy on Antony, in whose dominions it occurred.

We hear little as to how Antony spent the time with Cleopatra in Alexandria between his return from his first unsuccessful Parthian campaign and his start on a second expedition. Political affairs must have engaged most of his attention, for we are not told of further revels at this period. There was a very difficult task waiting to be performed, and no such failure as the march on Phraata could be risked again. While the preparations were on foot for the new campaign there came to Alexandria a messenger with news of great importance, Polemon, Antony’s nominee to the throne of Pontus, whom he had been obliged to leave a prisoner in the hands of the Parthians when making his disastrous retreat. Polemon announced that the Median Artavasdes had fallen out with the Parthians over the division of the spoil left behind by the Romans and was now willing to join Antony in a war against his former allies. Antony gladly accepted the offer, and in order to secure his advance toward Parthia still further sent an invitation to the other Artavasdes to come to Alexandria. He invited him “as a friend,” according to Dion Cassius; but the Armenian knew better than to trust himself to the hospitality of a man whom he had betrayed and all but ruined. He preferred to take the risk of war rather than the friendship which was offered him at Alexandria.

Without waiting any longer, therefore, Antony set out for Syria, taking with him Cleopatra. If it was her idea to accompany him, events proved her wisdom. When he reached Syria he received a letter from his lawful wife stating that she had started from Rome to meet him. The faithful Octavia, although she cannot have been ignorant of the fact that Antony had returned to the arms of Cleopatra, had been so moved by the news of his misfortunes in Armenia that she had determined to do what she could to help him to retrieve his losses. She had begged her brother to allow her to leave Rome, and Octavian had consented “ as most say, not with the design of pleasing her, but in order that if she were grievously insulted and neglected he might have a fair excuse for war.” Taking with her not only money and clothing for his troops but also two thousand picked soldiers to reinforce him, she made for Athens, whither she perhaps hoped that her husband would come to meet her, if only in remembrance of the time which they had spent there together in 38 and 37. Had she pressed on at once to Syria, who can say what would have happened? But Antony was by no means prepared to see an encounter between Octavia and Cleopatra. He wrote to his wife ordering her to stay at Athens, as he was going eastward. Octavia stopped at Athens but wrote to Antony again, asking whither he wished her to send what she was bringing him. The letter was entrusted to a certain Niger, a friend of Antony, who had the courage to speak on her behalf and tell him how good a woman he was wronging. Cleopatra grew alarmed at Octavia’s bid for control over Antony, whom, knowing his disposition, she dared not see exposed to the danger of a meeting with his wife. She therefore had recourse to a ruse which is thus described by Plutarch :

“She pretended to be desperately in love with Antony and wasted her body by spare diet; and she assumed an expression of strong passion when he approached her and one of sorrow and depression when he went away. She contrived also to be seen often in tears, which she would wipe away and affect to conceal, as if she did not wish Antony to see them. Her friends, too, were busy on her behalf, accusing Antony of hardness of heart, for he was causing the death of a woman who was devoted to him only. Octavia, they said, came to him in her brother’s interest and enjoyed the advantages of the name of his wife ; while Cleopatra, queen over so many people, was only called the lover of Antony—a title which she did not refuse nor disdain as long as she might see him and live with him. But if she were driven away from him she would die.”

Cleopatra succeeded in outbidding Octavia. Antony sent to his wife a command to return to Rome. She went back and, refusing to take her brother’s advice that she should leave Antony’s  house there in token of a definite separation from him, continued to live as before, looking after the upbringing not only of her own daughters but also of Antony’s sons by Fulvia. “Thus she unintentionally harmed Antony,” comments Plutarch, “ since he was hated for doing wrong to such a woman.” Antony in the meanwhile, relieved of the fear of an encounter with his wife, now found that the season was too far advanced for any expedition that year and decided to return to Alexandria with Cleopatra and wait for the following spring. His only act in preparation for the coming war was to betroth Alexander Helios to the daughter of the Armenian Artavasdes, whom he had not yet made up his mind to treat as an enemy; or, at least, had not yet in his power.

Early in the spring of 34 he was back again in Syria. But instead of attacking the Parthians he marched into Armenia, seized the capital Artaxata, and took prisoners Artavasdes and his family. Then leaving a garrison sufficiently large to hold the country he turned back toward Egypt. With a view to binding the alliance which he had contracted with Media in the previous year he betrothed Alexander Helios to Iotapa, daughter of the other Artavasdes, in place of the child whom he now had among his captives.

 

THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST

 

Although Antony’s conquest of Armenia had been neither arduous nor very glorious, since the king had not been prepared to resist him, he determined to celebrate it in a way that should be memorable. He was returning from a newly vanquished country, laden with abundant spoil and accompanied by trains of captives, including the whole of the royal family. He had therefore all the materials for a triumph such as a successful Roman general could claim—except the city in which to celebrate it. This was in the hands of a rival who was by no means likely to listen favourably to any request coming from a man who not only disputed the mastery of the Roman world with him but had also insulted him un-pardonably by his treatment of his sister. If Antony required a triumphal procession, he must have it somewhere else than in Rome. No Roman had ever triumphed elsewhere. Indeed the idea had been deemed unthinkable. But no Roman, also, had stood in the position of Antony ; and in unprecedented circumstances it was necessary to create and not wait for precedents. Alexandria now was the virtual capital of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, a city superior to Rome itself in magnificence, and clearly the only possible substitute for Rome as the scene of the procession which Antony intended to accompany his car. He would ride, therefore, through the streets of Alexandria, defying both Rome and Octavian.

We need not believe that in deciding to act thus Antony was consciously setting up an Empire of the East in opposition to the already existing Empire of the West which had developed itself out of the Roman Republic. As he showed later, when he attempted to submit his astounding acts for ratification by the Senate, he continued to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. He cannot have abandoned the idea of returning to his native land after the conquest of the Parthians as Sulla had returned after conquering Mithridates. What we know of Antony’s character impels us to attribute his Alexandrian triumph much rather to his love of gorgeous display, in the gratification of which Cleopatra had given him many lessons, than to the promptings of far-seeing statesmanship. Antony founded for a few years, it is true, an Eastern Empire with its capital at Alexandria ; but he did so, not because he was a constructive genius, ahead of his times, but because he was a successful soldier carried away by the force of events and by an ambition scarcely any longer sane. Although the comparison is a very superficial one, the French critic who called Antony “a Roman Boulanger” is nearer to the truth than those who would make him a great statesman.

The Armenian triumph, as it travelled along the splendid wide Canopic Way, crowded with sightseers and gaily decorated, toward the huge temple of Serapis at the western end of Alexandria, must have been a worthy rival to almost any that had passed along the Via Sacra to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill at Rome. In his capacity of victorious Imperator, Antony rode in the customary car drawn by four white horses. Before him on foot went King Artavasdes, loaded with golden chains (“ so that nothing might be lacking to his honours,” remarks the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus), with his wife and sons. Behind came long strings of other Armenian captives, chariots carrying pictorial representations of the conquered country or loaded with booty, and deputations from the subject cities bearing golden crowns voted to the victorious general. The escort consisted of Roman legions, with their shields perhaps already inscribed with the C in honour of Cleopatra, marching under their eagles to the sound of their brazen trumpets, and the troops of auxiliary cavalry and Oriental allies, drawn from all parts of the Levant, that went to make up the motley army of Antony. The procession moved slowly westward from the royal quarter through Rhakotis until it came to the temple of the god who replaced at this point Jupiter Capitolinus and was one day to merge with Jupiter in one of his aspects at Rome. Now came a very unRoman feature of the ceremony. A platform had been erected in front of the Serapeum, all plated with silver, and upon it had been placed a golden throne. On this sat Cleopatra, dressed in the straight narrow robe of the goddess Isis, with the hawk-headed and cow-horned crown upon her head, waiting in stately repose to receive the homage of the conqueror and his captives. The Armenian royal family, however, unexpectedly declined to humble themselves before her, and, heedless of the threats of their guards, insisted on addressing her simply by her name. Artavasdes, in spite of the treachery of his conduct towards Antony in 36 BC, was a cultured man, who had written tragedies, and was too proud, even in his present abasement, to lend himself to the farce of the divine Cleopatra. He and his family, it was said, suffered harsh treatment for their obstinacy ; but happily there was no execution at the end of the procession, such as commonly disgraced a Roman triumph, and the life of Artavasdes himself was spared at least until four years later.

The day wound up with a banquet given to the whole of Alexandria. But Antony had an even more astonishing spectacle in store for the city than that which had just been witnessed. The people were summoned to the grounds of the Gymnasium, where they once more saw a platform of silver, supporting this time two large and four smaller thrones of gold. On the large thrones sat Antony and Cleopatra, on the smaller Caesarion, the twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, and the baby Ptolemy. The ceremony began by Antony proclaiming Cleopatra Queen of Egypt, Cyprus, and Coele-Syria, with Caesarion as co-regent. Then he announced that he gave to Alexander Armenia, Media, and Parthia; to Ptolemy Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia ; and to Selene Cyrenaica and the neighbouring portions of Libya. Alexander and Ptolemy were led forward on the platform, dressed one in Median costume and an upstanding tiara, such as the kings of the Medes and Armenians wore, the other in Macedonian cloak and boots and a cap with a diadem about it, like the successors of Alexander the Great. The boys saluted their parents and were then surrounded by bodyguards composed of Armenians and Macedonians respectively. Plutarch says that Caesarion, Alexander, and Ptolemy were all assigned the title of “ King of Kings,” Dion that it was given to Cleopatra and Caesarion only. We know from an inscription found on the island of Delos that the title was actually applied to Caesarion. Cleopatra cannot well have been left out if the son who ruled Egypt with her was thus honoured. But there seems no reason why Antony’s own sons should not have shared the honour with Caesar’s offspring and the mother of them all. There was always room in the East for many a “King of Kings.”

Antony had provided the Alexandrians in the course of a few days with two very magnificent pageants. In the first they had witnessed their city exalted to a level with Rome and sharing a privilege which had never before been shared by any other city with Rome. In the second they had seen their country transformed into a central power round which were grouped three semidependent kingdoms, ruled over by children of their queen, and stretching eastward to Persia, northward to the Caucasus, and westward to the modem Tripoli. Truly a wonderful change had been wrought since the days when Ptolemy Auletes had struggled so hard, and at such an expense to his people’s pockets, to preserve Egypt from the fate of becoming a mere Roman province.

If we regard Antony as a truly great man, whose character has been grossly calumniated owing to the fact that the victorious cause pleased not only the gods but also all the historians of Imperial Rome, we still must find it difficult to explain how he could take away from his native land nearly the whole of its Eastern possessions, to divide them between his mistress and her children by him and by Julius Caesar and yet expect to be considered a Roman citizen, capable of maintaining relations with the Senate and people of Rome. But we do find him in the year following his “Alexandrian donations,” as his contemporaries called them, actually endeavouring to get these ratified by Rome, whose pride he had outraged and whose laws he had flouted by the whole course of his conduct in Egypt. There only appears to be one reasonable way of accounting for his extraordinary attitude; and that is, as has already been suggested in this book, to suppose that his brain had begun to be affected.

His fellow-countrymen could not have had much doubt about the fate which overtook Antony owing to the life which he had led for so many years. They found no difficulty in believing the tale that he was perpetually drunk, while Cleopatra shared his excesses and yet kept sober by means of her ring of amethyst, that stone which was credited with the virtue of preserving a clear head for its wearer. The historian Florus draws a lurid picture of Antony’s ruin. “ This Egyptian woman,” he writes, “ asked of the drunken general as the price of her embraces the gift of the Roman Empire, and Antony promised it to her, as though Romans were easier to conquer than Parthians. Forgetting his country, his name, his toga, and the insignia of his office, he had degenerated wholly, in thought, feeling, and dress, into that monster of whom we know. In his hand was a golden sceptre, at his side a scimetar; his purple robes were clasped with great jewels, and he wore a diadem on his head that he might be a king to match the queen he loved.”

Velleius similarly writes about the degradation of Antony and his followers, especially Plancus, for whom he seems to have a special detestation. Antony, he says, having ordered that he should be called “ the new Liber Pater ” (that is, Bacchus), was carried through the streets of Alexandria, in a car like the god’s, garlanded with ivy, wearing a golden crown, with buskins on his feet, and a thyrsus in his hand. As for Plancus, “ the meanest flatterer of the queen, more obsequious than any slave, and the instigator and minister of Antony’s vilest excesses,” Velleius describes him as dancing at a banquet, in the character of the seagod Glaucus, naked and painted blue, with a chaplet of reeds upon his head and a fish-tail dragging behind him. For an ex-consul, this certainly appears an extraordinary performance.

Dion Cassius, though less sensational than the two Latin authors, relates that so much had Cleopatra made Antony her slave that he accepted from her the post of gymnasiarch (or superintendent of the games) at Alexandria, and that he called her queen and mistress and had her name put upon the shields of the Roman legionaries. “ And he went to the Agora with her, conducted the festivals for her, tried cases with her, and rode about with her, or else she rode in a chariot while he walked on foot among the eunuchs.”

Much of this attack upon Antony, it may be said, is mere invective, and in any case we have no means of sifting out the grains of truth among the harvest of charges brought by writers under the Empire against the enemy of the first Emperor. The supposition, however, that Antony had begun to pay the penalty for his past life is both legitimate and satisfactory in view of what was to come. It would be surprising if more than thirty years of violent excesses of every kind, combined with twenty years of good fortune, nearly ten of them years of unrestrained power, had not produced a harmful effect upon a mind never so strong as the body in which it worked. It is difficult for a debauchee who has become a demi-god f to remain perfectly sane. If any proof is required of Antony’s mental alienation beyond his delusion that his acts were capable of ratification by Rome, it may be found in his proceedings before and during the battle of Actium. If the Antony of Mutina, of Pharsalia and Philippi, of the retreat from Armenia, had then ceased to exist, and had been replaced by a man of tottering mind, it is at least possible to explain a battle which on any other hypothesis is an incomprehensible mystery.

 

THE PRELUDE TO ACTIUM

 

As must have been foreseen by any man whose mental balance had not been destroyed, the news of Antony’s proceedings at Alexandria was bound to be carried to Rome speedily and to create a profoundly unfavourable impression there. Nothing could better serve the cause of Octavian, already successful in overcoming much of the prejudice which had formerly existed against him among his fellow-citizens, than that Antony should be seen by them in the light of a robber of his country for the benefit of a woman—and an Egyptian woman!—for whom he had ignominiously discarded his legal Roman wife. For one who had declared his  willingness to give up all his extraordinary powers after Antony’s return from the Parthian War, “ being persuaded that Antony too would be ready to lay down his powers now that the civil wars were ended,” it was most convenient that his rival should show a determination to keep what he had got, in defiance of promises and of general hopes. The longerAntony remained leagued with Cleopatra and the more he bestowed upon her, the greater became Octavian’s chance of being chosen to represent the Roman People in a war waged to chastise a rebel against its authority ; and the smaller, too, would grow the number of those willing to throw in their lot with Antony when the time for a decisive struggle arrived.

For, in spite of the enormous strain which he put upon their loyalty, Antony still continued to have many adherents in Rome, the fascination of his greatness and the fear of Octavian’s designs combining to keep together a party which looked to him as the ultimate saviour of the State. As appeared later, many of the aristocracy thought that only he had the power to re-establish the old Republic. There were also, among the devotees of the cult of Julius Caesar, those who believed that Caesarion should have been the Dictator’s heir, not Octavian. Antony’s friends were ready to encourage such belief by circulating the story that there had been a later will, suppressed after the death of Julius, by which it was to Caesarion the son, and not to Octavian the grand-nephew, that the heritage had been left. This was a point which touched Octavian sorely; and, according to Dion Cassius, it was Antony’s recognition of Caesarion as a legitimate son of Julius which determined Octavian’s mind to war.

Civil war, however, was not yet talked about at the beginning of 33, when, after his third winter in Alexandria, Antony set out for Armenia. The Roman world still expected him to fight the Parthians, for Crassus remained unavenged, and his eagles had not been recovered. Armenia had been conquered and garrisoned the previous year, apparently with a view to making it a base for a campaign farther into the heart of Western Asia. But did Antony any longer intend to invade Parthia ? His action on reaching Armenia indicated either that he did not feel himself strong enough for such a task or that he knew he must husband his strength for some other purpose. He contented himself with some readjustment of the boundaries of his allies in the Caucasus, assigning to Polemon of Pontus the region known as Lesser Armenia and to Artavasdes of Media a slice of Greater Armenia. With Artavasdes also he made an exchange of troops, giving some infantry in return for some mounted archers. Finally he obtained from Artavasdes the standards which the Medes had captured from his own rearguard when they surrounded it and his siege-train in the winter of 36. With this poor substitute for Crassus’s eagles Antony returned to Asia Minor. Thus he never accomplished the task of conquering the Parthians, the legacy of Julius Caesar and the reason for which he was given his extraordinary command in the East. The glory of bringing back the spoils of Crassus he left to the representatives of Augustus thirteen years later, when scenes of most remarkable enthusiasm were witnessed at Rome.

Antony brought back with him also the youthful daughter of Artavasdes, Iotapa, the betrothed of Alexander Helios, whom her father had entrusted to him to be educated at Alexandria. With her he hurried back to Alexandria, leaving orders for his sixteen legions under the command of Canidius to proceed to Ephesus and wait his return to them.

Matters had been taking such a course in 33 that it was now recognised as impossible that war could be much longer averted between the two halves of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, all the ancient historians are so confused in their presentation of the order of events that they have put it out of the power of modern writers to attain any certainty. It would appear as if Antony did not apply to the Roman Government for a ratification of his rearrangement of the East—“the donations of Alexandria”—until late in 33, which is very strange, seeing that the rearrangement took place at the end of 34 and could not but be known in Rome early in the following year. It is possible, of course, that Antony sent his application, together with his report on the conquest of Armenia, to his agents early, but that Octavian managed to prevent it being laid before the Senate. It never came up officially, in fact, as will be seen. Antony’s two chief supporters in Rome were Caius Sosius, who as governor of Syria had helped Herod to storm Jerusalem in 37 and set himself again on the throne of Judaea; and Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, of whom, too, we have already heard. These two were consuls designate for the year 32, in accordance with the allocation of offices made by Octavian and Antony at Tarentum. While still only designate they had no official standing and had no means of forcing an opportunity to lay Antony’s request formally before the Senate. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that Antony should have been obliged to wait until the beginning of 32, when Sosius and Ahenobarbus took office, before he could bring forward a matter which was the subject of common public discussion in Rome.

Delay, no doubt, suited Octavian’s purpose admirably. The term of the Second Triumvirate, in spite of Lepidus having dropped out, was due to last until December 31st, BC 33, to which date it had been extended by the Treaty of Tarentum. If that term should expire with Antony’s acts unratified, Antony would clearly be in an unpleasant position when called upon to lay down his extraordinary power, as he had professed himself willing to do. Octavian could well afford to wait until the New Year, when he had means at his disposal of dealing with troublesome consuls like Sosius and Ahenobarbus. Antony, on his part, if he could not compel the Senate to consider his acts, could do nothing else but wait, since any violent procedure would strip away the last rags of legality which hung about his conduct in the East.

While they watched for the coming of January 32, the masters of the East and the West amused themselves by exchanging abusive letters, of which the scandal-loving Suetonius professes to preserve some, including a fragment from Antony which inspires Professor Ferrero to make the unjustifiable remark that decency was unknown to the ancients.* From the day of their first meeting after the death of Julius Caesar the antipathy between the two rivals who had divided his inheritance had been intense, and the causes for bitterness now, after an acquaintance of twelve years, were innumerable. Yet it is somewhat astonishing that they could descend to vulgar abuse of one another in order to relieve their feelings. It seems at least to show that neither looked forward to the possibility of outwardly friendly relations after the expiry of the Treaty of Tarentum.

Antony had chosen as his winter residence the town of Ephesus. We may wonder whether, when she came thither, it occurred to Cleopatra to think of her sister Arsinoe, who had perished there a victim to her hatred. She came in state befitting her first foreign tour since her proclamation at Alexandria as queen of an enlarged Egypt, and watched with Antony the gathering together of forces, military and naval, and supplies of money and stores. Her own contribution, according to Plutarch, included two hundred ships (a quarter of the Antonian fleet), twenty thousand talents (nearly £5,000,000), and war-supplies for the whole army. She might well have claimed to be Antony’s right hand and his most indispensable ally. He at least would not have disputed such a claim ; but there were soon coming those who denied her right to be with him at all.

January brought with it the crisis for which the Roman world had been waiting. Hitherto Antony’s supporters in Rome had been unable to demand a public hearing of the communications which they had received from their chief. Octavian, however, if Plutarch is correct, had complained both in the Senate and before the people of the illegal division of the East. The followers of Antony had retorted with complaints about Octavian’s annexation of Sicily and the province of Africa and his neglect to provide for Antony’s veterans as he had promised. Thereupon Octavian asked for his share of Armenia, and suggested that the Antonian veterans did not require land in Italy, as they had Media and Parthia, which they had added to the Roman Empire by their brave conduct under their general.

It is possible that Plutarch’s account of these recriminations is a loose summary, misplaced as to time, of the arguments in the Senate at the opening of the New Year. Sosius, having been obliged to wait until January ist, lost no time, now that he and Ahenobarbus were consuls, before inviting Octavian to lay down his extraordinary powers and return to the rank of an ordinary citizen, under penalty of being declared a public enemy. Octavian, having foreseen the danger of such a demand while Antony could still claim to have the Parthian War to finish, did not enter the Senatehouse, but procured one of the tribunes of the people to prevent by the time-honoured Roman method of the veto the Senate’s vote. On the next day for business he came into the Senate well escorted and demanded that the consuls shouldread Antony’s letters to themselves. They in turn claimed the right to read instead Antony’s report on the Armenian campaign. Octavian used his influence as President of the Senate to prevent this, and finished by inviting Sosius and Ahenobarbus to attend next day to h ear him bring forward proofs of Antony’s crimes. Seeing that Octavian was too strong for them, and that the opportunity of carrying out Antony’s instructions, which they had hoped their office would give them, was not coming, the consuls abandoned constitutional methods and left Rome for the coast and for Asia Minor, to report their failure at headquarters. With them went a large body of Senators, about four hundred, as it appears later, and other supporters of Antony, whom Octavian diplomatically allowed to depart unhindered. The whole mob of fugitives crossed the sea and presented themselves before Antony at Ephesus, calling on him to sail for Italy and “ restore the Republic.” At Ephesus, of course, they found not only Antony but also Cleopatra, first in his councils and in every way treated as a great queen, not like the other kings of Asia Minor and Syria, mere vassals of the Empire. To the majority of the Antonian fugitives from Rome this discovery came as a most unpleasant shock, and they positively declined to humble themselves before the Egyptian woman. How strongly expressed their opinion must have been may be gathered from the fact that Antony asked Cleopatra to return to Egypt and wait until the war should be over. Plutarch attributes this request to the persuasions of “ Domitius and certain others.” Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, scion of one of the oldest families in Rome, is described by Velleius Paterculus later as the only man among Antony’s followers who was never known to address Cleopatra except by her name ; that is to say, he never called her queen. Now already, on his arrival at Ephesus, he led the demand for her dismissal from the camp of him whom he desired to see give Rome once more her old constitutional government.

Cleopatra, however, would not allow herself to be driven away so easily. Antony might waver, uncertain whether he could afford to put his mistress’s society, or even her undoubted value as an ally, above the good-will of the men who had upheld his cause in Rome and were now furnishing him with his pretext for a forcible return to his native land. But Cleopatra could not hesitate where her whole influence over Antony was at stake. She had many reasons for fearing either his success in the war while she was absent or his reconciliation with Octavian. Fortunately for her, she had one resource which had never failed to procure advocates for her father or herself. Publius Canidius Crassus was Antony’s most trusted general, the commander who had led his legions from Armenia to Ephesus. To him she gave a large bribe, says Plutarch, that he might represent to Antony the injustice of sending away one from the war who had contributed so much toward it, and the inadvisability of discouraging the big Egyptian contingent in his fleet. “ And, besides, he could not see to which of the kings who had joined the expedition Cleopatra was inferior in understanding, having for a long time by herself governed a vast kingdom, and having learnt in Antony’s company the handling of great affairs.”

“ These arguments prevailed,” Plutarch adds, “ for it was fated that all the power should come into the hands of Caesar [Octavian].” Cleopatra was not sent away, but remained with the Antonian army, to be the cause of many dissensions between the leader and his subordinates, and to drive into the camp of Octavian some of the most influential of the latter before the crowning disaster of Actium decided the fate of the Empire.

When the military and naval assembly at Ephesus was complete by the arrival of the refugees from Rome and the forces supplied by the subject and semi-dependent kings and cities of the East, Antony toward the end of April in the year 32 moved his headquarters to the island of Samos, where he gave himself up to a round of gaieties in the company of Cleopatra and the pick of the public entertainers of the day, to whom he had sent an invitation to meet him and provide him with amusement. The contrast between the heavy exactions which Antony had made with a view to the war and the merriment at Samos provokes Plutarch to observe that, “while nearly all the world around was lamenting and groaning, this one island was full of the sound of pipes and of stringed instruments, and the theatres were packed.” In spite of the burdens which their share in the coming struggle entailed upon them, the allies felt constrained to make their contributions also to the revels at Samos, which were accordingly on so vast a scale as to cause the question to be asked :  “How will they behave after victory who make such costly banquets to celebrate their preparation for war?”

When the Samian festivities were ended, Antony went a stage farther in the direction of his goal, but only to Athens, where he stopped and again gave himself up to the pleasures of the moment. This was the first visit of Cleopatra to Athens. Her wish to see the place was as great as the pleasure professed by the citizens at seeing her. Cleopatra was particularly stirred by a recollection of the favour which Octavia had gained when she wintered in the ancient city six years before, and in her endeavour to blot out the memory of Antony’s wife she showed herself a most generous benefactress to the Athenians. They in their turn voted her many public honours, sending to her a deputation to announce the vote, at the head of which was Antony himself in his capacity of a freeman of the city. Among other distinctions they accorded to her a statue in the Acropolis, which was set up beside the statue already erected to Antony. It could not be expected that this image of Cleopatra should be preserved after the ruin of the Antonian cause; and so, unhappily, the world has lost an opportunity of knowing how one of its heroines appeared to a Greek sculptor.

While introducing Cleopatra to Athens and renewing in her society his acquaintance with the culture and amusements of the city, Antony did not entirely neglect business affairs. At least he took a step which brought war perceptibly nearer, if it was not an actual declaration of war. There met him at Athens Antyllus, the elder of his sons by Fulvia, now in about his fourteenth year. Hitherto the boy had lived chiefly with his stepmother Octavia, from whom he may now have brought a last appeal to Antony. If this was so, Antony’s reply was prompt and brutal. He kept Antyllus at Athens, but called together a meeting of the Senatorial members of his party and put before them the question of his formal repudiation of his wife. In view of the Roman dislike of Cleopatra, who would clearly have been the only gainer by such a divorce, it was natural that he should find among the Senators considerable opposition to his scheme. But Cleopatra’s gold was again set to work, and in the end Antony felt himself justified in signing the letter casting off Octavia. This he sent at once to Rome by the hand of agents charged with the duty of ejecting Octavia from his house in Rome. “ It is reported,” says Plutarch, “that when she left the house, she took all the children of Antony with her, except the elder son by Fulvia (for he was with his father), and that she w’ept and lamented that she too would be looked upon as one of the causes of the war. The Romans pitied not her but Antony, especially those who had seen Cleopatra, a woman who had no advantage over Octavia either in beauty or in youth.”

Octavian had been accused in 35, as we have seen, of being willing to expose his sister to a cruel rebuff from Antony, in the hope of finding a pretext for war. He certainly had such a pretext now, and at the same time the opportunity of a strong appeal to Roman sentiment against foreigners. For what reason, he might ask, had Antony divorced Octavia except to be free to make the Egyptian woman his wife, which he could not, in Roman eyes, as long as he was bound to Octavia? Indeed, there appears no other reason, unless we impute to Antony an act of wanton brutality against the wife of whose faithfulness to himself he had hitherto taken advantage to further his interests at Rome. It is true that we do not even now read of any formal marriage to Cleopatra after the repudiation of Octavia. But, whatever view we take of the Antioch marriage question mentioned in Chapter XI, we must admit that Antony had treated Cleopatra as though she were actually his legal wife at the time of the astonishing donations of Alexandria. It was perhaps to clear himself of a possible charge of polygamy brought by Ahenobarbus and his other supporters from Rome that after their arrival in the East he took the step of divorcing Octavia.

But the result was anything but favourable to his popularity among his Roman friends. Cleopatra, elated by her victory over Octavia, became more insufferable to them, and now desertions began to take place of those most disgusted with the state of affairs which they found prevailing at Antony’s headquarters, or least scrupulous about abandoning what they had once professed to consider the constitutional cause. Two of the earliest to join Octavian were able to win his favour by a breach of confidence which damaged Antony seriously. These were Titius, the executioner of Sextus Pompeius, and his uncle Munatius Plancus, who had so distinguished him self in his masquerade as Glaucus at Alexandria.

“Titius and Plancus,” says Plutarch, “both men of consular rank, being insulted by Cleopatra, whose design of joining the campaign they had been foremost in resisting, escaped to Caesar and gave information about the contents of Antony’s will,* with which they were acquainted, having been witnesses to it. The will was deposited with the Vestal Virgins, who refused to give it up at Caesar’s request, telling him that if he wished to have it he must come and take it himself.” Octavian had no scruples against going to the temple of Vesta and seizing the will. Having done so, he read it out to the Senate— to the dissatisfaction of many, Plutarch records, who thought it unfair to call a man to account during his lifetime for what he wished done after his death. The clause to which Octavian drew particular attention was that in which Antony asked that even if he should die in Rome his body, after being carried in state through the Forum, should be sent to Cleopatra in Alexandria.

In spite of the honourable scruples of part of the Senate against the seizure and reading of the will, the act was a good stroke of policy on the part of Octavian. And Antony’s enemies followed it up by spreading abroad many scandalous stories concerning his devotion to Cleopatra. He had presented to her, they said, the great library of Pergamum, with its two hundred thousand volumes. (Was this to compensate for whatever damage had been done to the Alexandrian Library in 48 ?) He was in the habit of receiving her love-letters, on tablets of onyx or crystal, and reading them while sitting on the tribunal trying cases. On one occasion, while Furnius, ex-tribune of the people, was pleading in court before him, he had noticed Cleopatra’s litter crossing the Forum, whereon he jumped up, left the court, and accompanied her home. At banquets he would get up from the table and give a secret signal to Cleopatra to follow him; and so on. Tales about Cleopatra’s behaviour were added to increase the effect. Her favourite oath was alleged to be, “As surely as one day I shall administer justice on the Capitol,” and she was represented as having made use of drugs to overthrow Antony’s wits and make him her slave. No need was seen of justice to “ the harlot queen of incestuous Canopus, who aspired to set up against our Jupiter the barking Anubis, and to drown the Roman trumpet with her rattling sistrum,”  as the poet Propertius wrote in a fiercely patriotic mood.

It is a remarkable thing that, in spite of Antony having so long left Octavian master of Rome, in spite of the departure of his friends among the aristocracy, and in spite of the steady campaign of slander against him and Cleopatra, there still continued to be, even in the second half of the year 32, a very considerable body of opinion in his favour at Rome. He had apparently given every opportunity to his rival, yet Octavian did not feel himself in a position to take up arms against him as against a public enemy. Octavian was no doubt throughout life inclined to act upon that version of “ More haste, less speed,” which he made his motto.* But it was not mere dilatoriness which prevented him from acting. Lack of money, which did not trouble Antony (thanks largely to the wealth of Cleopatra), forced Octavian to wring taxes out of Italy in a way which excited violent discontent, and inclined the waverers to look to Antony as a deliverer from tyranny. He might be the slave of a “ harlot queen,” and all else evil that Octavian’s friends called him, but at least he did not appear to the Italians in the light of a rapacious tax-collector. The days of his financial misdoings in Rome as Master of the Horse to Julius Caesar were by now forgotten, while his fame as a great soldier did not fade so rapidly from the memory.

Public opinion in Rome and throughout Italy not being ripe yet for a declaration against Antony, Octavian had no choice but to wait until he should have matured it with the aid of his agents and their stories of the fate threatening the Empire if Cleopatra’s lover should ever reach the capital. The heads of the Antonian party still left in Rome, realising that in the end Octavian’s policy would succeed, sent an urgent message to Greece, calling on their chief not to delay until he should be proclaimed a public enemy. They chose to convey the message a man called Geminius, who -had at least one qualification for his task, that he was not afraid to speak plainly. On his arrival at Antony’s headquarters he was regarded with great suspicion by Cleopatra, who feared he might come from Octavia with an offer of fresh intervention between her former husband and her brother. He was subjected to insult and assigned a lowly place at the banquets given by Antony and Cleopatra to their friends. At last he was directly challenged at table to say why he had come to Greece. Geminius replied that he would give the reason when he was sober ; but that he knew one thing, drunk or sober, and that was that all would be well if Cleopatra would take her departure to Egypt. “You have done well, Geminius,” sneered Cleopatra, “to confess the truth without waiting for torture.” After this Geminius judged it wise to return to Rome ; not so much that he feared Cleopatra’s threats as because he saw that it was useless to attempt to separate Antony from her. Plutarch, who tells the story of the mission of Geminius, says that “ the satellites of Cleopatra drove away also many others of Antony’s friends, who could not put up with their excesses in drink and their coarse behaviour.” Among those who left Plutarch mentions Marcus Silanus, a former lieutenant of Julius Caesar in Gaul, and Dellius ; but he is in error in making Dellius desert at this point.

Undoubtedly Cleopatra’s attitude toward his friends from Rome was a most unfortunate factor in Antony’s situation ; for the longer he delayed coming to close quarters with Octavian, the more disillusioned became the members of the Roman nobility who had tried to constitute him champion of the Republic, and the more numerous grew those who repented of having attached themselves to one who had suffered himself to forget so much of Roman ways since he had last been seen in his native land. Professor Ferrero defends Antony’s inactivity on the ground that, as his troops were devoted to him and beyond the power of Octavian’s ill-furnished purse to corrupt. 

it was good policy to make Octavian come to fight him away from his own base in Italy. Still there is obvious force in the ancient opinion mentioned by Plutarch, that his delay in beginning the war was Antony’s greatest error. When once he had completed his preparations, he was in the position to force the hand of an unready opponent. Every month found Octavian better equipped, and the disgust of Antony’s Roman adherents increased.

Yet Antony’s power of initiative seemed paralysed. He clearly felt that his influence over the Roman section of his followers was in danger, or he would not have made the proclamation to his troops, promising that within two months* after his victory over Octavian he would lay down his extraordinary authority and restore to the Senate and People of Rome all their old prerogatives. He also employed agents to spread money and promises on his behalf up and down Italy. But he seemed incapable of making any decisive move. In the autumn of 32, indeed, more than a year since his setting out from Alexandria, he sailed along the Greek coast as far as Corcyra, and looked as if contemplating a crossing of the Adriatic. But on the appearance of some hostile cruisers in the neighbouring waters he abandoned the idea (if he really entertained it), and leaving a naval outpost at Corcyra and the bulk of his fleet off the north-west coast of Greece, himself went into winter quarters with Cleopatra in the Peloponnesian town of Patrae, the modern Patras.

The enemy’s ships, which Antony is said to have taken for the vanguard of Octavian’s fleet, were in reality a squadron under Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who had been a fellow-student of Octavian at Apollonia at the time of Julius Caesar’s death, and had since become his brain and right hand combined as far as affairs of war were concerned. Although there had as yet been no formal declaration, a state of war virtually existed from the middle of the summer of 32. After months of preparation of the ground, Octavian and his advisers decided, probably in July, to bring the whole of Italy to take the solemn oath known as the conjuratio, which was considered justifiable only by imminent danger to the fatherland. In the record of his deeds drawn up by the Emperor Augustus, of which the sole surviving example, discovered in 1701 at Angora in Asia Minor, is known as the monument of Ancyra, Augustus boasts that “ The whole of Italy of its own accord took the oath to me and called upon me to lead it in the war in which I was victorious at Actium.” One is reminded of the phrase “ as lying as an epitaph,” for it was by no means without opposition that the oath was extorted from some of the Italian towns, and Bononia refused altogether to take it. However, Octavian was sufficiently encouraged by the manner in which Italy submitted to the conjuratio to consider that he had a warrant from his countrymen to make war. He only awaited the opening of the New Year, with the change of consuls, to proceed to a formal declaration. In the meantime Agrippa put off from the Italian coast and began to reconnoitre in the direction of Greece.

As soon as January arrived, while Antony and Cleopatra still remained at Patrae, Octavian took the last step necessary before invading Greece. On the first of the month Antony was stripped by Senate and People of the extraordinary authority which had been his since the formation of the Triumvirate in 43— “ the authority which he had surrendered to Cleopatra,” says Plutarch —and was further pronounced unworthy to be consul for the coming year, as had been arranged between him and Octavian at Tarentum. Those Romans who were with him were invited to leave him before the fighting began, and in order to show that this was not a civil war, Octavian went through the ceremonies only observed before attacking a foreign enemy. In the robes of a Fetial priest, he stood in front of the temple of Bellona in the Campus Martius and threw the javelin. It was against Cleopatra that war was declared. Plutarch adds the information that Octavian declared that Antony was out of his senses owing to the philtres administered to him by Cleopatra, and that “ those against whom the Romans had to fight were Mardion the eunuch and Potheinos and Iras, Cleopatra’s tirewoman, and Charmion, the directors of all affairs of importance.”

If this speech, put into his mouth, represents any actual words of his, Octavian appears to have been eager to impress on his followers that it was a very contemptible foe against whom they were starting out to fight, and scarcely to have troubled about consistency; for it was the army directed by this pack of women and eunuchs which, according to the former stories spread by his friends, menaced the very Capitol of Rome.

 

EAST AGAINST WEST

 

The beginning of that momentous year in European history, 31 B.c., found Antony and Cleopatra still in their Peloponnesian winter quarters, with their army cantonned along the western coast of Greece from the Corinthian Gulf to the promontory of Actium, on the southern side of the entrance to the Ambracian Gulf, now known as the Gulf of Arta. A naval outpost was stationed at Corcyra, but the bulk of the fleet wintered in the Ambracian Gulf, whose great size and narrow mouth made it a safe shelter from storms for the largest navies. The Antonian forces were provisioned from Asia Minor and Egypt, and in order to secure his communications, Antony left no fewer than eleven of his legions detached from his main army. Of these four were in Egypt, four in Cyrenaica (where it was necessary to guard against an attack from Roman Africa), and three in Syria. With so large an army as he had under his command Antony was able to leave all these legions behind him, and still met his rival on terms of numerical superiority. The idea of using any part of his immense strength for the purpose of creating a diversion seems never to have occurred to him.

Octavian’s forces were the first to move when the advent of spring permitted naval and military activity. Octavian established himself at Brun-disium with his army, while his fleet lay between there and Tarentum, and his faithful Agrippa led a squadron into the Ionian Sea and began cutting off the supplies on their way to Greece from, Egypt. Agrippa also made as though to descend upon the Peloponnesus, which may account for Antony’s delay in leaving Patrae for the North. Before coming to close quarters the two chiefs resumed their acrimonious correspondence of the year before. Octavian wrote from Brun-disium, begging Antony not to waste time but to come with all his forces, when he would provide Antony’s ships with safe harbours and retreat with his army one day’s ride from the sea until Antony had landed. “Antony answered this boastful language in like strain, challenging Caesar [Octavian] to single combat, although he was older than Caesar ; and if he declined this he proposed that they should decide the matter with their armies at Pharsalia, as [Julius] Caesar and Pompey had done before.”* Octavian so far accepted the second part of Antony’s invitation that he set sail from Brundisium and, taking Corcyra on his way, reached the coast of Epirus and proceeded to disembark his army at the town of Toryne in Epirus. With him he brought not only his troops and fleet, but also the whole of the Senate except those with Antony. The presence of these seven or eight hundred aristocrats from Rome was a demonstration that it was his party which represented the Republic ; and was also (as M. Bouchd-Leclercq remarks) a sure way of guaranteeing the fidelity of Italy.

The sudden vigorous action of Octavian seems to have taken Antony by surprise, and the latter’s friends were in consternation at the unhindered landing of the enemy in Epirus. Cleopatra endeavoured to raise their spirits by a jest, which Plutarch records and which we must suppose a genuine utterance, since it is certainly not brilliant enough to have been worth inventing afterwards. “ What does it matter if Caesar is sitting on a ladle ? ” she asked, Toryne meaning a ladle. It is unfortunate that we have not some better and less obscure example than this preserved of the verbal wit for which Cleopatra was famed. Antony, however, took the invasion of Greece more seriously than his consort. He left Patrae hurriedly, and, sending orders to all his forces in Greece to proceed to Actium, made his own way thither. In March he had established his headquarters on the promontory south of the Ambracian Gulf, while Octavian, leaving the “ladle,” had come down as far as the northern shore of the same gulf.

Plutarch in his summary of the forces fighting on both sides in the campaign of Actium attributes to Antony five hundred warships, including many with no less than eight or ten banks of oars, one hundred thousand infantry, and twelve thousand cavalry. The allied kings under his banner were Bogud of Mauretania, Tarkondimotos of Upper Cilicia, Archelaos of Cappadocia, Philadelphos of Paphlagonia, Deiotarus (son of Cicero’s client) and Amyntas of Galatia, Mithridates of Commagene, and Sadalas of Thrace. Contingents were also furnished by the kings of Armenia and Pontus, by the Arab chief Malchus, and by Herod the Great. Herod would have been present in person, had it not been that he was engaged, by Antony’s orders, in chastising the Nabathaean Arabs for failing to pay their tribute to Cleopatra. As Renan, following Josephus, points out, Cleopatra unwittingly did a great service to her old enemy Herod, for his absence from Actium made it easier for him to gain Octavian’s pardon afterwards, and to secure his position on the throne of Judaea.

Octavian’s forces are given by Plutarch as two hundred and fifty warships, eighty thousand infantry, and twelve thousand cavalry. They were thus inferior, both on sea and on land, to the Antonians. Antony’s naval superiority, however, as we shall see, was more apparent than real. As regards his army, his numerical advantage and the wide experience of his legionaries were counterbalanced to a great extent by the presence of so large a body of allies, far inferior to Roman and Roman-trained troops. But what reduced the disparity in numbers, such as it was, to insignificance was the difference in leadership between forces. Octavian, poor and dilatory warrior as he always was either by land or by sea, had Agrippa’s fine brain to supply his deficiencies in the art of war. Antony, now reduced to a mere shadow of the great general that he had once been, had no doubt many able officers under him, but the only adviser to whom he would listen was Cleopatra, whose interests in the campaign were not the same as his own ; at least they were not the interests of Antony the Roman. In spite of the accusations of the Augustan writers, it is not at all probable that Cleopatra was desirous of “ administering justice on the Capitol.” She wished above all to preserve the Egyptian Empire which had been handed down to her, the last of the Lagidae. She was not likely to gain her end by surrendering Antony to the Roman nobles who had fled to him at Ephesus. If Antony was to conquer, he must conquer as her consort, and not in such a way as immediately after victory to be forced to leave her and devote himself to the governance of Rome. She therefore kept away from him as much as possible all such Romans as she had not secured to herself —all those, in fact, who were likely to advise him for his real advantage. Unable herself to become the brain of his army, she reduced it to the state of a patient in one of those cases which occasionally come under the observation of medical men, when owing to an injury to the head the brain has ceased to work properly, and its place has been usurped by lower nerve-centres, leading to a multiplication of personalities in the same body.

It was in March that the armies of Octavian and Antony first confronted one another across the Ambracian Gulf, while Antony’s fleet held the Gulf and Agrippa cruised outside. For over five months the general position remained roughly the same, but there were frequent changes of attitude on the part of the two antagonists which are perplexing to follow in the accounts of the ancient historians. Octavian on his arrival north of the Gulf seemed anxious to “ decide the matter with their armies,” as Antony had challenged him to do. But Antony had not yet brought together again all his troops from their winter quarters and was unready to give battle at once. Plutarch says that “Antony was so mere an appendage to Cleopatra that, though he had a great superiority on land, he wished the decision to rest with the navy, to please Cleopatra.” His navy, however, was unable to put to sea. It was indeed almost caught unprepared by Octavian when he reached the northern shore of the Ambracian Gulf. The unhealthiness of the winter in the Gulf, which Antony and Cleopatra themselves had escaped by going south to Patrae, had reduced by a third the crews of his ships, and it was necessary to resort to the press-gang among the unfortunate inhabitants of Greece (“ which had indeed suffered much,” says the Greek Plutarch) to fill up the vacancies. But even the impressment of stray travellers, muleteers, farm-hands, and boys could not make the Antonian fleet fit for battle yet, if it were strong enough to avert all danger of the enemy forcing the narrow entrance to its harbour of refuge. Agrippa was therefore left practically master of the Ionian Sea.

Owing no doubt to this impotence of the fleet, the Roman nobles in Antony’s camp began to make their influence felt in spite of Cleopatra’s opposition, and for a moment it appeared as if Antony were becoming a soldier again. He sent out Dellius and Amyntas the Galatian to gather reinforcements in Macedonia and Thrace, and tried to shut Octavian up in the peninsula on which he had established his camp and to force him through want of drinking-water to risk a battle against superior numbers. But a series of disasters befell the Antonians. A cavalry engagement went in favour of Octavian, whereon King Deiotarus went over to the victors. His fellow-Galatian followed his example, instead of performing the task entrusted to him by Antony, and appeared in Octavian’s camp with his two thousand auxiliary cavalry. Worse still, the consul Domitius Ahenobarbus, whose presence with Antony was in itself a protest against Octavian’s claim to be fighting in the cause of Rome against a foreign foe, vanished from Actium and left it in no doubt that he had abandoned the Antonian party in disgust. Antony attempted to minimise the effect of this desertion by giving out that Ahenobarbus had departed because he found himself unable to do without his mistress Servilia, whom he had left in Rome. He also took care to send the fugitive’s baggage and slaves after him, behaving with magnanimity in the eyes of Plutarch, who adds : “Domitius indeed, as if he repented after the discovery of his treachery, died immediately.” Ahenobarbus had been ill with fever when he quitted Actium, and we learn in Suetonius’s “Nero” that he died a few days after his coming to Octavian.

At sea even heavier blows were suffered by the Antonians. Hopes had been entertained that with the aid of reinforcements from the south the navy would be strong enough to put out from the Ambracian Gulf and fight that naval battle for which Cleopatra was pressing. But Agrippa went to meet the reinforcements and cut them off, following up his success by seizing Antony’s recent winter residence in the Peloponnese. He then came back and defeated near Actium the consul remaining with Antony, Sosius, who had ventured to come out from the Gulf with part of the fleet. Combined with his ill-success on land, these naval defeats weakened Antony’s position at Actium considerably, and he was now the blockaded rather than the blockader. It looked as if he might be forced to cut his way through the enemy on land. His chief officer Canidius (who, it will be remembered, had been induced by Cleopatra to take her side at Ephesus)  changed his mind at the sight of the danger,” says Plutarch, “ and advised Antony to send Cleopatra away to Egypt and retreating to Thrace or Macedonia to decide matters by a battle there.” Promises of aid were held out by the Dacians. But Antony remained passive, and seemed incapable either of independent thought or of adopting the plans of others. He appeared as if possessed by panic. Unstrung by the desertions, he agreed to the torture and execution of lamblichus of Emesa, one of his Syrian allies, and suffered a Roman Senator, Quintus Postu-mius to be torn to pieces. He could not even trust Cleopatra. Pliny preserves the story of his fear at this period lest she should be plotting to do away with him and of the lesson which Cleopatra taught him. At a banquet (for there was of course no cessation of banquets at Actium) she took from her head a wreath of flowers and dipped it into a cup of wine, which she handed to Antony. He raised the cup to his lips and was about to drink, when she told him that the wreath was poisoned. He might see therefore how easy it would have been - for her to remove him “ if she could have done without him.” Cleopatra’s wit, however, does not appear to have been able to kill his suspicions, if those suspicions on their part did not kill his love.

Antony really ran a risk, but of a very different kind. Plutarch tells how he used to pass along the lines leading from his camp to the naval station, with no apprehension of danger. Octavian was informed of this and of the chance of seizing him as he passed. Some men were sent to lie in wait for him, but they sprang out of their ambush too soon and only captured a man walking in front of him, while Antony himself escaped by running for his life.

This story seems to indicate that the blockade of Antony’s camp had become very close. The months which had elapsed since first the two armies had faced one another across the waters of the Gulf had all gone in favour of Octavian, and it is probable that by August Antony began to find his supplies running short. Some means of escape from an untenable position must be discovered. Plutarch only sees the hand of Cleopatra in the decision as to means. ” The advice of Cleopatra prevailed,” he says, “that the war should be settled by a naval battle, although she was already contemplating flight and making arrangements not with a view to victory but to secure the best retreat when all should be lost.” Leaving aside for the moment the question of Cleopatra’s treachery to Antony, we may ask whether at this stage it was any longer possible to carry out Canidius’s proposal for a break into Macedonia or Thrace. The scanty details which we have seem to show that this was impossible or at least very hazardous..

It would have involved, moreover, leaving the navy bottled up in the Ambracian Gulf. Cleopatra might with good reason object to the sacrifice of her portion of the fleet, and it is hard to believe that Antony would have been justified in abandoning all his ships even if he felt confident of success on land. The anxiety of his army that the decision should be left to them is intelligible, but certainly fails to prove that Antony would have done well to listen only to his troops.

The battle of Actium presents a problem which has puzzled historians from the First Century AD to the present day. All are agreed that Antony and Cleopatra were jointly responsible for the plan upon which the battle was fought, although there is no such unanimity as to what that plan was. Of the two most trustworthy ancient writers, Plutarch does not commit himself to any statement that Antony intended to desert Actium for Egypt, but he notes the suspicious circumstance that he ordered his ships to go out to battle with their sails on board. Cleopatra’s flight he attributes to selfish fear for her life, and Antony’s pursuit of her to a lover’s infatuation. Dion Cassius makes the two agree upon escaping to Egypt, if possible, only putting ' up so much of a fight as was necessary to cover the retreat. Then, with apparent inconsistency, in his account of the battle he speaks of Cleopatra’s sudden panic, which communicated itself to Antony and led to the flight of both. Of modem writers, M. Bouche-Leclercq gives the clearest exposition of events. Inclining to Dion’s first view, he says :  “The plan of embarking his best troops on the fleet, forcing the blockade, and going to seek elsewhere, perhaps in Egypt, a more favourable situation and new chances of success, was a plan which the circumstances of the case as much as Cleopatra must have suggested to Antony.” “Still,” he adds, “ if there was a plan of escape agreed upon between Antony and Cleopatra—as is only probable—it must be admitted that it was carried out in extraordinary fashion, and that both of them had sudden inspirations, unforeseen in their scheme.”* To this point we must return later.

It was almost the end of August before Antony decided to attempt to release himself from his position at Actium. On the 29th he gave orders to prepare for a sea-fight. As a preliminary he burnt all such ships as he could not man or did not consider seaworthy, including all but sixty of the Egyptian squadron. He kept three hundred, and on the largest and best of them he commanded twenty thousand heavy-armed infantry and two thousand bowmen to embark. The order was received with great sorrow by his soldiers. An old centurion, bearing the scars of many wounds, said to him, with tears in his eyes : “ General, why do you distrust these wounds and this sword and rest your hopes upon miserable timbers? Let the Egyptians and Phoenicians fight by sea, but let us have the land, on which we are accustomed to die standing or conquer the enemy ! ” Not being acquainted with Antony’s scheme, his veterans could not comprehend his despoiling of their ranks as though the army were but an adjunct to the fleet. He merely answered them with an encouraging smile, and a wave of the hand, while he met his captains’ astonishment at the command to put their sails on board by saying that he did not wish a single one of the enemy to escape.

Even more likely to betray the scheme than this shipping of the sails would have been the fact that Cleopatra had all her personal treasure put on board her own vessels. But this was done by night, secretly, according to Dion. And as if to discourage the idea that the struggle on land was to be discontinued, an assault was delivered on Octavian’s camp on August 30th. It was not pressed home, however ; for all that Antony was doing was waiting for a subsidence of the sea and wind, which prevented naval movements over the end of the month. At last on September 2nd a calm sea and absence of wind permitted the Antonian warships to make their way through the neck of the Ambracian Gulf, little more than half a mile wide, in the direction of the open sea. Antony himself was rowed round the fleet in a small boat, visiting every vessel and putting heart into his soldiers and the ships’ captains. In spite of the deterioration of his mental powers, he still retained his followers’ trust and affection, as was shown by the gallant fight which they were to make that day and by their unwillingness to believe that he had deserted them.

Octavian was prepared for his opponent’s sortie from the Gulf, though it is uncertain whether or not he was given a clue to the real object of it by the last batch of deserters who came to him from the Antonian camp. Among these was Dellius, performing the last change of face in his versatile career. Dellius is said, perhaps, on the authority of his own history of the war, to have been warned that Cleopatra had designs against his life. It was hardly necessary for him to find excuses for an action so consistent with his whole record. He was welcomed by Octavian, to whom he may possibly have been in a position to impart some information about Antony’s preparations. It is extremely unlikely, however, that he knew positively of any design to retreat to Egypt under cover of a seafight.

The course of the battle of Actium up to the incident which made it so famous in history need only be described very briefly here. Octavian’s fleet waited in the open sea for Antony to emerge from the neck of the Gulf, Octavian himself commanding the right wing and Agrippa the left. Antony was on the right of his fleet, Sosius on the left, and Cleopatra with her sixty Egyptian ships in the rear. The Antonians were slow in leaving the straits, but at the sixth hour, as a sea wind was getting up, the left wing became impatient and began to move forward. Octavian drew back his ships to lead the enemy on, and gradually the fight grew general. Owing to the great size of Antony’s vessels and the smallness and speed of Octavian’s the battle somewhat resembled that between the English Admirals and the Spanish Armada in 1588. It was still more like the battle of Prevesa in September 1538, when near the same Gulf of Arta the corsair Barbarossa with his light cruisers defeated Andrea Doria and the great warships of the Venetians and their allies. Octavian and Agrippa avoided the charges of the heavy galleons and endeavoured by use of their superior pace and agility to concentrate the attention of three or four of their ships against one of the enemy. But Antony’s hulls had been specially protected by balks of timber fastened together with iron, and towers on the decks enabled the defenders to discharge their missiles on the heads o f the boarding-parties. So matters went on, victory inclining to neither side, until Cleopatra’s disastrous intervention on the scene.

The afternoon was wearing on and the breeze from the west-north-west, Vergil’s Iafiyx, was springing up, according to its daily wont in the Ionian Sea, when a stir was observed behind the main portion of Antony’s fleet. To quote from Plutarch’s graphic story of the battle, “ all at once Cleopatra’s sixty ships were seen to be raising their sails for the purpose of escape and flying through the midst of the combatants ; for they were stationed behind the big ships and by making their way through them they caused confusion. The enemy watched them wonderingly as they took advantage of the wind and shaped their course toward the Peloponnese.” Antony now clearly showed the truth of the saying that the lover’s soul dwells in another’s body, continues Plutarch, for no sooner did he see her ship sailing off than, forgetting everything and abandoning those who were fighting and dying for him, he sprang into a five banked galley and started in pursuit. Cleopatra, recognizing him, signalled to him to come alongside her flagship and took him on board. Plutarch adds nothing to what he said in a previous chapter about Cleopatra’s motive in flying so suddenly. Dion Cassius represents that, unable to support the strain of the indecisive struggle and devoured by impatience and anxiety, she took to flight and gave the signal to her subjects to do the same; whereupon Antony, persuaded that it was not Cleopatra’s order but fear which had compelled them, started off after them. Both writers agree in making Cleopatra fly without giving warning to Antony and in representing him as following her as soon as he saw her leave.

So, before the battle had. been won or lost—several hours indeed before fighting ceased—the fate of the war was determined. The second part of the problem of Actium remains to be considered. All the circumstances point to Dion Cassius being correct in attributing to Antony and Cleopatra a set plan of cutting their way through the blockade and making for Egypt, especially the two facts mentioned by Plutarch (who speaks of no such plan and is therefore making out no case), namely, the putting on board of the sails and the embarkation of Cleopatra’s treasure. So, too, does the complete inactivity of Canidius’s army during the sea-fight, for if the attempt to run the blockade should fail it was necessary to have the land position on the Ambracian Gulf intact. If then we may take for granted a set plan before the battle, to what must be attributed its miscarriage ? Did Cleopatra yield to a sudden panic and start prematurely, taking along with her the Egyptian contingent and leaving the rest of the fleet to their fate ?

It would be easy to adopt Plutarch’s theory of an entirely selfish motive for Cleopatra’s action, in which case her flight could scarcely be called premature ; for she would then be deliberately betraying Antony. But, as we shall see when we come to the general question of Cleopatra’s attitude toward Antony, the evidence for her treachery to him is small. Her flight from Actium, moreover, was sufficiently slow to enable him to overtake her flagship before it had got out of touch with the enemy, and she recognized him and signalled to him to come on board. Dion’s suggestion of a nervous breakdown on the part of Cleopatra is more convincing and is not really contradictory of his previous statement about the scheme of escape with the fleet. Cleopatra, although she had been in battle before, had never been in a sea-fight and may well have become alarmed, strong-minded as she was in the face of most dangers, at the terrific contest going on before her eyes. She is represented as having been upset by the evil omens which had appeared (as usual in Roman and other histories alike) to presage the result of the war. Among those which the careful Plutarch records are the destruction by lightning of the Herakleion at Patrae while Antony was wintering there with Cleopatra, and the blowing down of the figure of Dionysos in the group of the “ Battle with the Giants” at Athens—Antony both claiming descent from Herakles and liking to identify himself with Dionysos. But, worse still, some swallows which had made their nest under the stern of Cleopatra’s flagship, called the Antonias in honour of her lover, had been evicted by other swallows and their nestlings destroyed! That such trivialities should produce any effect on the ancient mind* might cause wonder if it were not so easy to find modern parallels.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that Cleopatra sailed out to battle depressed by superstitious fear and that the first hours of the fight completed the destruction of her courage. She knew that she was the enemy against whom Rome had declared war, and that her capture meant an ignominious fate for her and her children, especially her boy Caesarion. For him at least the end of the nestlings on the Antonias must be a sure omen, when Octavian came to deal with him. If she could escape alive to Egypt, there was always hope of a recovery. Her position had been worse in 48 when she fled from Ptolemy XIV and Potheinos, and at least as bad in 43 when Egypt was threatened by Cassius. When the Iapygian wind sprang up, with its promise of a quick journey southward, she could not resist the temptation to take advantage of it at once. It was upon this wind that the escape of the fleet, planned by Antony with her, depended. Anticipating therefore the proper moment for the manoeuvre (which should presumably have been chosen by Antony), she hoisted at her masthead the sign for the Egyptain ships to turn south and made oft down the breeze. Knowing Antony as she did, she must have expected him to follow, and indeed was apparently in no way surprised that he did so immediately.* Antony’s pitiably weak state of mind stood clearly revealed. He crowned many months of incapacity with an act of gross cowardice. The general who should himself have punished deserters, Velleius Paterculus remarks, was himself the deserter from his own army. And this was the man who had shown himself so brilliant in attack at Pharsalia and Philippi, so great in retreat at Mutina and amid the snows of Armenia. Surely no more terrible example of the ruin of a mind has ever been shown by any soldier in the history of the world.

 

THE “DIE-TOGETHERS ”

 

Taken upon Cleopatra’s ship, Antony made no attempt to see her. Making his way to the prow, he sat down in silence, holding his head in both his hands. Neither Cleopatra nor any one else on board ventured to break in upon his misery. Only the enemy distracted his attention for a while. Some of the swift cruisers on the model known as “ Liburnian,” which did such good service for Octavian at Actium, were in pursuit of the flying Egyptian squadron and came so close that Antony was constrained to take notice of them. He ordered the Antonias to turn round and confront the foremost Liburnians, fearing no doubt that with their rams they might crash into his stern. All were beaten off except one, which still continued the pursuit. Antony standing at the prow called out to ask who it was that was chasing him. “ Eurykles, son of Lachares, come to avenge my father’s death,” was the reply. Lachares, it appears, had been executed by Antony for robbery. His son, however, failed to avenge him, for (according to Plutarch’s explanation) there were in the Egyptian fleet two admiral-ships with brazen beaks, and he charged into the wrong one. This he captured, and also another vessel carrying the royal table-service, while the Antonias got safely away. When the danger was past, Antony returned to his former attitude near the prow, and there remained three whole days without moving. At the end of the three days the ship reached the most southerly point of the Peloponnesus, and put in at Cape Taenarum, where a halt was made in order to allow other fugitives from Actium to join the leaders.

Here at Taenarum Antony and Cleopatra exchanged their first words since they had sailed out through the neck of the Ambracian Gulf to battle. Plutarch says that the women who were in attendance on Cleopatra—such as Iras and Charmion—“ first brought them to speak to one another and then to sup and sleep together.” Antony had hitherto remained on the spot to which he had gone as soon as he set foot on the Antonias, plunged in stupor. Cleopatra we must suppose to have remained out of sight, perhaps too prostrated after her breakdown on September 2nd to attempt to approach her lover. It is clear from Antony’s subsequent conduct, after reaching the African coast and during his first weeks in Alexandria, that his renewal of relations with Cleopatra at Taenarum did not lift him out of the melancholy into which he had fallen from the moment when he allowed himself to betray his own cause and abandon for ever his career as a citizen of Rome. But for one or two brief flickers before the final darkness, his light had burnt out.

The news which followed him to Taenarum was not calculated to arouse him from his despondency. He learnt how the sea-fight had ended. Those who manned the fleet for the most part had not perceived his flight or had refused to believe that he had done more than go after the Egyptian squadron to bring it into action again. The battle had continued without intermission until the tenth hour, and then the Antonians, if roughly handled, were still undefeated and had lost no more than five thousand men in the four hours of fighting. But the sea was running heavily against them and toward nightfall they drew oft and retired within the entrance to the Gulf. Next morning a message was received from Octavian inviting both fleet and army to surrender. With this suggestion the fleet seems to have complied, since Antony was able to hear of its loss at Taenarum. If Antony had left orders behind for it to follow him to Egypt, either the orders were not transmitted or else the realisation of his cowardice left his seamen unwilling to risk anything more on his behalf. Some few of the ships must have been able to escape to Taenarum, but the fleet as a whole yielded itself up to Octavian. The land forces, still intact under the command of Canidius, to the number of nineteen legions of infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, rejected the enemy’s offer and continued to expect their general back again. “ So much fidelity and courage did they show,” says Plutarch, “ that even when his flight was well known they kept together seven days and paid no regard to Caesar’s messages to them.”*

Learning that the troops still stood firm, Antony sent an order overland to Canidius to bring them back through Macedonia to Asia Minor, and then continued his voyage with Cleopatra in the direction of Egypt. The fugitives reached a point on the African coast near Parae-tonium, the western “ horn ” of Egypt, corresponding to Pelusium on the eastern frontier. From here he sent Cleopatra to Alexandria, so that she might arrive before the news of Actium, while he remained behind. Plutarch represents him “ taking his fill of solitude, wandering about with two friends, one a Greek rhetorician, Aristokrates, and the other a Roman, Lucilius ”—a man whom he had spared after the battle of Philippi because he had shown himself so loyal a friend to Brutus. It is impossible that Antony’s visit to Paraetonium was unconnected with the fact that, during the campaign of Actium, he had left four legions in Cyrenaica, whom he might now expect to be able to take to Alexandria. But here the news came that their commander, Pinarius, had gone over with them to Octavian’s adherent Cornelius Gallus (the friend to whom Vergil addresses his tenth Eclogue), who had proceeded straight to Roman Africa from Actium and had communicated the result of the battle to Pinarius. On hearing of this new result of his own misdeeds, Antony made an attempt at suicide. His friends, however, stayed his hand and induced him to rejoin Cleopatra in Alexandria.

The queen, knowing that she would be the first refugee from Actium to reach her capital, took vigorous steps to secure the city before anything should be discovered. While Antony was indulging in vain melancholy two hundred miles away, she put on a brave face. Decorating her ships gaily, she sailed into the harbour with music playing and every indication of a triumph after victory. Having once established herself in the Palace and got control of the garrison, she was mistress of the situation. When authentic information of the disaster penetrated to Alexandria, it was too late for revolt, and all seditious mur-murers were promptly punished with death—a fate which, according to Dion, also befell many of the foremost citizens “both because they were always discontented with her and because they were now elated at her misfortune.” If there was any panic now, it was not in the heart of Cleopatra. Back in her realm of Egypt, she recovered the courage of the Lagid women which seemed to have momentarily deserted her on September 2nd. Her mind was full of schemes, and she had no scruples about the means of carrying them out. The unhappy captive king, Artavasdes of Armenia, who had been six years a captive in Alexandria since the day when he had walked in golden chains down the Canopic Way to the temple of Serapis, was put to death, and his head was sent to his Median namesake. Was this because she contemplated the possibility of proceeding to Asia Minor with Antony and effecting a junction with Canidius, and therefore wished to conciliate the Artavasdes the Mede. Another plan which she certainly entertained— “the great and hazardous undertaking” which, according to Plutarch, Antony found her contemplating when he arrived from Paraetonium— was to transport all the Egyptian warships from the Mediterranean across the Isthmus of Suez into the Red Sea, and to sail in them with her treasure and troops out of reach of war and slavery. The isthmus was then about thirty-five miles wide in its narrowest part, and the transport had actually begun when Antony came back to Alexandria. Then the burning by the Naba-thaean Arabs of the first ships, and Antony’s belief that the army of Canidius still held out and would make its way to Asia Minor, induced Cleopatra to give up her idea.

All such schemes, however, required money, and while the punishment of some of those foremost citizens who had been unwise enough to show their joy over her mishaps enabled her to replenish her treasury from their property, she also laid hands on the riches of the temples. So at least we are told by Dion, who says that she “ did not even spare the holiest shrines.” Such conduct is at variance with Cleopatra’s general behaviour toward the native religion, as far as we can gather from the manner in which the priesthood supported her during her reign. But it is of course true that her position was so desperate that she may have decided to risk even the enmity of the priests and the faithful in her collection of money for the purpose of making a last bid for escape from the power of Rome.

In the midst of Cleopatra’s activity at Alexandria, Antony rejoined her from Paraetonium with news of the defection of the legions under Pinarius. After his abortive attempt at suicide, his spirits had temporarily revived, and, pointing out that there was still the army left behind at Actium to be considered, he induced Cleopatra to give up thoughts of looking for a new kingdom beyond the Red Sea. But all hopes about the army of Actium were soon shattered. Canidius himself appeared in Alexandria to announce that it existed no more.

The general had been unable to carry out the order to lead his men into Macedonia with a view to crossing to Asia Minor. When it reached him, indeed, fresh desertions to Octavian had already begun among the Roman nobles still in the Antonian camp and among the allied kings. Canidius may not have felt secure against treachery if he should attempt the task which Antony himself had refused and make an effort to break through the encircling army. At any rate, he declined to try and escaped from his camp secretly. The soldiers’ loyalty, which had survived the departure of Antony and the sui render of the fleet, was not proof against this last abandonment. On September 9th, seven days after the sea-fight, the whole great army laid down its arms and yielded to Octavian a bloodless victory on land to follow his cheaply purchased success by sea.

All of Greece was at once Octavian’s. Asia Minor, in which Antony had left no troops, made haste to follow suit, and the small kings of the Levant were eager not to be left behind. Didius, Antony’s governor in Syria, imitated the example of Pinarius in Cyrenaica, and at last the whole Empire of the East was but a heap of ruins, with Egypt alone left standing in the midst.

This succession of blows, coming with bewildering rapidity, dashed to pieces Antony’s short regrowth of sanity. Plutarch’s account of his behaviour is extraordinary, but there seems no reason for rejecting so circumstantial a narrative, unless we come to it with some view of his character which necessitates the rejection of the bulk of the ancient records of his life as fables. It seems that in his Greek reading Antony had been struck with the story of Timon the misanthropist of Athens, the worthy who justified his unique friendship with Alkibiades on the ground that “ he liked the young man because he knew that he would be the cause of much evil to the Athenians,” and left as his own epitaph the lines :

Here from the load of life released I lie;

Ask not my name, but take my curse and die !  

Antony now, leaving the city and the company of his friends, had a mole built out into the waters of the Great Harbour and a dwelling erected on it, in which he lived the life of a recluse. “He expressed himself content with the existence of Timon, whose fortunes he considered his own to resemble ; for he too had been wronged by his friends and treated with ingratitude, and therefore distrusted and hated all men.” From the lips of the commander who had deserted his fleet and army at Actium the talk about ingratitude fell oddly. But Antony’s sense of humour was not subtle, even in the days when he was in full possession of his faculties.

The length of time for which Antony kept up his pitiful comedy in his “Timonium” is not specified by Plutarch, who makes him, however, bring his solitary life to an end by letting Cleopatra take him to the Palace for festivities in connection with the registration of Caesarion’s coming of age and the assumption of the legal dress of Roman manhood by Antyllus, who had remained with his father since meeting him at Athens in 32. Caesarion having been born in June 47, it is difficult to see what occasion was chosen for proclaiming his majority; but Dion, as well as Plutarch, makes such a proclamation take place, stating that Antony intended it to encourage the Egyptians, “ seeing that they now had a man as king.” The double celebration must have been arranged for some date in the winter of 31-30 and marked the renewal of the revels in Alexandria ten years, and again three years, before. Tasting once more the pleasures of the joyous life, Antony abandoned misanthropy and surrendered himself to extravagance of the other extreme. The Inimitable Life was revived, but with a new note in its gaiety. “ Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ” was the club’s motto more emphatically than ever, and to mark their spirits the members no longer called themselves the Amimetobioi but the Synapothanou-menoi, the “ Die-togethers.” All the old exquisite luxury and shameless prodigality were there, but grown more reckless from the knowledge that the end was at hand.

For, if we may trust Plutarch, no hope of escape was entertained at Alexandria. Not only did the friends of Antony “ enrol themselves as intending to die together,” but also

“ Cleopatra collected all kinds of deadly poisons and experimented concerning their degrees of painlessness by administering them to prisoners lying under sentence of death. When she found that the quick-acting poisons brought about a speedy but painful death, while the less painful were not rapid in action, she made trial of animals, which were daily set on one another in her presence. And she found that the bite of the asp alone brought on drowsy numbness, with no spasms or groans, but with a gentle perspiration over the face and a dulling of the senses, which quietly ceased to act and resisted all attempts to stimulate them, as if the victim were in deep slumber.”

This story of Cleopatra experimenting with poisons and her discovery of the “ asp ”* has become very famous. Those who reject the account of her death by the bite of this reptile would probably refuse belief also to the experiments. But, as we shall see, the reasons for denying the story of Cleopatra’s suicide which all ancient writers accepted are slight; and if she was acquainted with the qualities of the venom of this particular reptile, whichever it was, she must have observed them in action beforehand.

Whatever be the amount of exaggeration in the legend of Cleopatra’s experiments with poisons, there does not seem any ground for doubting that she felt the necessity of preparing for the worst. If she had ever hoped that Octavian would lack strength or courage to come east to attack herself and Antony, the course of events since the battle of Actium had undeceived her. Octavian had not indeed followed his great-uncle’s example and made straight for Alexandria after his victory in Greece. He had a very good reason for not doing so, apart from the lesson which Julius Caesar’s Alexandrian experience had taught; for he was still as hampered by the want of funds as he had been throughout his struggle against Antony. Cleopatra had taken the precaution of carrying her treasure-chests away with her when she fled. Antony had stripped Greece and Asia Minor of all the money which he could wring out of them. And Octavian had, in addition to his own troops, the whole army of Canidius looking for pay at his hands. He could therefore neither forgo (even if he had wished) the conquest of Egypt nor yet embark upon the task at once. Forced to temporise once more, he sent back to Italy such of his own veterans as had completed their term of service, putting them under the charge of Agrippa and Maecenas and giving them promises instead of money. Before the end of the year, after arranging the affairs of Greece to his satisfaction and receiving from the Athenians and others the statues and honours which only a few months before they had been bestowing so enthusiastically upon Antony and Cleopatra, he crossed over to Asia Minor.

Every change of fortune in Rome’s civil wars was followed by dynastic rearrangements in Asia Minor and Syria, and Octavian’s victory at Actium was no exception to the rule. All such of Antony’s nominees as had not deserted him betimes were swept away and replaced by new princes, who doubtless did not fail to make in return a present to their patron. But money did not come to Octavian by any means as quickly as he desired. In the New Year he was obliged to return for a month to Italy, where the outcry of the veterans at the tardiness of their reward for the campaign of Actium had become very threatening. Borrowing from the wealthiest of his personal friends, Octavian succeeded in diminishing for a time the discontent of the veterans and also of the principal sufferers from his recent impositions at Rome, the freedmen. Then he hastened back east and began to prepare in Syria for the invasion of Egypt. On his way to Syria he was met at Rhodes by Herod, who for some reason had not yet come to make his submission to the conqueror of Actium. According to Josephus, he had paid a visit to Alexandria and had made a last attempt to persuade Antony to put Cleopatra to death and declare the incorporation of Egypt into the Roman Empire. Whether this was so or not, when Herod made his appearance at Rhodes, his well-known antipathy to Cleopatra, coupled with his wealth, was a strong argument in favour of a good reception of his advances. Octavian pardoned him and, when revising the list of Syrian rulers, left him on the throne of Judaea.

Barely had Octavian arrived in Syria when he found an embassy from Alexandria begging for an audience. The leading envoy was the tutor of the children of Antony and Cleopatra, a Greek named Euphronios, the most trustworthy man whom they could now discover when desertion had robbed Antony of so many of his Roman friends. Euphronios and his companions were charged with commissions alike from Antony and from Cleopatra. Antony merely asked that he might be allowed to retire into private life at Athens, if Egypt were to be forbidden to him. Cleopatra begged that the kingdom of Egypt might be given to her children, sending to Octavian the crown, sceptre, and chariot of the Pharaohs in order that he might bestow them again. According to Dion Cassius, Cleopatra had also sent agents to corrupt Octavian’s staff and attempt his assassination. Such a story was inevitable in the campaign of evil charges against the Egyptian queen. It is more astonishing to read Plutarch’s version of Octavian’s reply to Cleopatra’s request on behalf of her children— namely, that “ she might obtain anything within reason if she would either kill Antony or drive him away.”* Plutarch is far less an adherent of the Caesarian tradition than Dion. Yet it is strange that he should have ventured to suggest such underhand dealings on the part of the founder of the line of Emperors at Rome—unless he was only repeating what was already known through earlier historians, such as Dellius. Octavian’s early record hardly encourages us to deny the possibility of his suggestion to Cleopatra that she should not merely betray but even kill Antony ; but we should scarcely have expected the fact of the suggestion to be stated so baldly as it is by Plutarch.

The Egyptian Embassy returned to Alexandria without accomplishing much. If Octavian sent secretly such a message to Cleopatra as is given above, entrusting it to an agent of his own, who accompanied the ambassadors to Alexandria, to Antony he declined to make any answer at all.

Antony attempted to soften his heart by sending to him as a captive the senator Turullius, the last survivor among the murderers of Julius Caesar. Octavian did what was expected of him, in that he put Turullius to death ; but he took no other notice of the sender of this victim to the shade of Julius. Next Antony despatched Euphronios again, accompanied by Antyllus and furnished with a large sum of money. Octavian accepted the money, but was deaf to the prayers of Antyllus on his father’s behalf. He made it evident that no terms could be hoped for by his former colleague except unconditional surrender or death.

With Cleopatra the case was different. Whatever may have been the real intentions of Octavian toward her at this moment, he was anxious to encourage her to hope for leniency at his hands. Can he have heard of her researches into the action of various poisons and have feared lest a sudden desperate resolve on her part might rob him of his chance of capturing her and her treasures ? This fear is attributed to him after he had entered Egypt. But he had already begun to dangle before her eyes temptations to live, while he was still in Syria. The man whom he had sent back with the first Egyptian embassy was his freedman Thyrsus, an Alexandrian by birth. Thyrsus had been brought to Rome as a boy-slave by Gabinius, and after passing into the hands of Octavian had been set free and treated by him with great favour, which continued until, under the Empire, he offended his patron by his outspokenness and fell into disgrace. Plutarch describes him “ a man not lacking in judgment and, coming as he did from a young general, not likely to fail in persuasive address to a haughty woman who prided herself wonderfully upon her beauty.” With regard to this " wonderful pride in her beauty,” it must be remembered that this forms part of Plutarch’s interpretation of Cleopatra’s character. It is a very natural deduction from her history, if direct evidence is absent.

Dion Cassius, who if less romantic than Plutarch is more fond of scandal, represents Thyrsus as being entrusted by Octavian with warmer messages to Cleopatra than those of mere encouragement. This hardly seems probable.* But it is not surprising that Antony was suspicious about the long interviews between his consort and the envoy of Octavian. He seized Thyrsus therefore, had him whipped, and sent him back to Syria, writing to Octavian that the man’s airs had offended him, and that if he took the matter ill he might in turn whip Hipparchus (Antony’s freedman), who was in his hands. It is not recorded whether Octavian took advantage of this generous offer. The lot of freedmen was none too happy in the Roman world.

Plutarch says that, after the incident of the punishment of Thyrsus, Cleopatra, with a view to allaying Antony’s suspicions, paid more court than usual to him, keeping her own birthday in a mean manner, suitable to her condition, while celebrating that of Antony with such magnificence and expense that many of those who came to the feast poor went away rich. We do not know the date of either of these birthdays, but if Plutarch’s tale is true both of them must have fallen within the five months beginning with March and ending with July.

The strange negotiations which had been in progress between Alexandria and Syria came to an end in the summer of 30 with nothing accomplished. No doubt Octavian had desired to accomplish nothing, except to gain time until he should be ready to invade Egypt. Since the battle of Actium he had behind him the whole force of public opinion in the Empire, and had no reason for hesitating to press Antony, to the uttermost. All the popularity of the once great Triumvir had vanished, and the long-prosecuted campaign of abuse at Rome had gained its end after the disgraceful scene of September 2nd, b.c. 31. So far from Octavian needing to delay before marching on Alexandria, the speedier his advance the better. At his goal there awaited him not only certain victory, but also the wealth of Egypt, wherewith to redeem his promises to his vast army of veterans and to pay back to his friends the moneys which he had been compelled to borrow from them to meet the most urgent calls on his purse after Actium. Even so procrastinating a disposition as Octavian’s could not waver now. He prepared to advance on Alexandria himself by way of Pelusium, while orders were sent to Cornelius Gallus in Roman Africa to approach the capital from the other “ horn ” of Egypt.

After the failure of the negotiations, Antony and Cleopatra must have felt that the death whose approach they had already sighted in the winter of 31-30 was close at hand. With regard to Cleopatra’s alleged hope of avoiding it by betraying Antony, in which Dion believes, being followed by later historians like Zonaras of the Twelfth Century a.d., there is only this to be said. There is nothing to prove the treachery, and the accusation is a very obvious one to make against an enemy of Rome. Doubtless the contemporary Roman historians, now lost, first gave currency to the story. Whether we accept it or not must depend entirely upon our estimate of Cleopatra’s character. Nothing else will help us to form an opinion upon the point ; certainly not Antony’s feeble cries that he was betrayed, of which we shall hear later. But for the words of Dion and later writers we should only see a picture of Cleopatra loyally carrying out the conditions of her membership of the “ Die-togethers,” while preparing at the same time with Antony to make a last desperate struggle for freedom and life with the resources in treasure and troops which still remained to Egypt.

The idea of flight to some remoter region had perhaps not been altogether abandoned yet, even if Cleopatra had been persuaded to give up her scheme of sailing down the Red Sea to found a new kingdom. A retirement from the Nile Delta into Upper Egypt was perhaps dismissed as not putting the fugitives beyond the reach of the Roman armies.* Antony is credited with an idea of escaping to Spain and carrying on a war against Octavian there, as Cnaeus Pompeius had attempted to do against Julius Caesar. But, if he seriously entertained this idea, he left it until it was too late to carry it out. With hostile armies on both frontiers of Egypt and the Mediterranean commanded by the Roman fleet, there was no hope of reaching Spain with a force large enough to begin warfare there.

Since then it was necessary to die, it only remained to die in a way which should benefit the enemy least. Cleopatra erected for herself a tomb near the Temple of Isis Lochias, in the north-east corner of Alexandria ; and here she collected together, says Plutarch, “ the most precious of the royal treasures, gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony, ivory, and cinnamon, and also a great quantity of firewood and tow,” evidently intending, like the legendary Sardanapalus (with whose story she was doubtless familiar), to put out of her conqueror’s reach as much as she could in addition to her own person. Antony, on his part, hastened along the coast to the western boundary of Egypt, and made an attempt to bring back to their former allegiance the garrison of Paraetonium, which was composed of the troops of Pinarius. When, however, he came near the walls of the fortress, his voice was drowned by the sound of trumpets blown from within, and a sudden sortie of the defenders compelled him to run for his life to his ships and, after losing some of these by fire, to return to Alexandria.

Meanwhile, the other frontier had been crossed by the army led by Octavian. Once again in its history Pelusium surrendered tamely to the invaders. Antony, never free from suspicion now, believed that the commander Seleucos had betrayed the fortress with Cleopatra’s connivance. To prove her good faith, in a manner familiar to the ancients, she handed over to him the traitor’s wife and children that he might put them to death. Whether Antony did so, we do not hear.

With Pelusium lost, and only a small army under his command, Antony made no attempt to dispute Octavian’s advance, but awaited him at Alexandria. While on his way, Octavian, learning of Cleopatra’s preparations for a holocaust of her treasures, continued to forward to her messages encouraging her to look for kind treatment at his hands. The thought of the capture of Alexandria without the royal treasures, increased by the exactions and confiscations made by Cleopatra after her return from Actium, was by no means to Octavian’s taste. The queen’s millions were more necessary to him, indeed, than the city itself.

By the end of July, Octavian was on the outskirts of Alexandria, having marched so far without being compelled to strike a blow. Now came the last flicker of Antony’s spirit before the darkness. For a moment he became once more the brilliant cavalry-leader of his young manhood. He sallied out from the city gates, and, attacking Octavian’s horsemen, not only defeated them, but chased them back to their camp. Flushed with his success, he hastened back to the palace, still in his armour, to embrace Cleopatra. With him he brought one of his men, who had especially distinguished himself in the fight. Cleopatra presented a reward to this soldier in the shape of a golden breastplate and helmet. “The man took them” says Plutarch, seizing with delight on a picturesque incident, “and in the night deserted to Caesar.”

Antony also attempted to use another weapon against his enemy by sending into his camp offers of £60 apiece to all deserters. But it was too late for bribes to succeed, since Octavian was able to point out to his men that all the wealth of Alexandria was already theirs, the place being doomed. To a challenge to single combat—a renewal of the challenge before the Actium campaign—he replied with the words, “ Antony had many ways of dying.”

The truth of this remark, with its inference that there was nothing else to expect save death, was obvious enough to the man for whose hearing it was intended ; and Antony’s mind had not decayed so far that he had forgotten that for a soldier the best death is in battle. So, although he knew the inadequacy of his forces, and was ready to see treachery everywhere, particularly in the conduct of her for whom he had ruined himself, he prepared to give battle both by land and by sea. Plutarch describes him for us on the night before his death, July 31st, bidding the slaves at supper pour out the wine and feast him cheerfully, for they knew not whether they would be doing this for him on the morrow or be serving other masters, while he lay a corpse, a thing of no account. Noticing that his words affected his friends to tears, he endeavoured to cheer them with the thought that the alternatives next day were either a glorious death or victory. Plutarch, again with a literary artist’s eye for the romantic, goes on to tell of a strange happening at Alexandria that night, after the last banquet over which Antony was ever to preside.

“ About the middle of the night, it is said, while the city was silent and depressed with fear and expectation of what was to come, of a sudden sounds of music were heard from all sorts of instruments, with shouts of a crowd crying and leaping like satyrs, as if a company of revellers were leaving the city tumultuously; and the course of the procession seemed to be through the midst of Alexandria to the gate leading in the direction of the enemy, at which point the noise was loudest as it surged out. Those that reflected upon this portent were of the opinion that the god to whom Antony had always most likened himself and with whom he claimed kinship was deserting him.”

This truly mysterious occurrence is mentioned by no one else, and we are ignorant whence Plutarch derived his story. From a pious point of view, it was certainly appropriate that the god should give a sign that he was abandoning the cause of Antony, the New Dionysos.

Antony, however, was busy from daybreak on August ist posting his troops on “ the hills in front of the city,” that is to say, on rising ground to the east of Alexandria. The fleet meanwhile advanced from the harbour toward Octavian’s ships. The number and composition of this fleet are unknown. From its conduct it is evident that the seamen had been bought by Octavian ; for, as soon as it came in touch with the Romans, the rowers paused to salute them with their oars, and then took their vessels over to the enemy before Antony’s eyes, the two fleets uniting in one and advancing against Alexandria. While this was happening, the battle had commenced on land ; but it was of short duration. Antony’s cavalry deserted early, and his infantry, the few remains of his many legions, were defeated. Neither the glorious death nor the victory of which he had spoken to his friends the night before had fallen to his lot. A third alternative, which he had not contemplated, was waiting him— to breathe his last, a defeated man, in the arms of Cleopatra, “ dying where he had lived.”

 

THE ENDING OF A TRAGEDY

 

It was with the name of Cleopatra upon his lips that Antony re-entered Alexandria on the day of his death. With her name, however, was coupled not a blessing, but a curse. Once more he spoke of treachery ; he had been betrayed by her to those against whom he was fighting for her sake. Whether Cleopatra saw him as he returned to the Palace, or whether she trusted only to reports as to his state of mind, she was so alarmed that, accompanied only by her women Iras and Charmion, she fled to the tomb which she had built near the Temple of Isis Lochias, and sent messengers to tell Antony that she was dead. This tomb was a large two-storied building, in which, it will be remembered, she had already gathered' her treasures so as to be able to destroy them all by fire if necessary. It had folding doors, secured by bolts and bars, which were now used to prevent any one entering. But Antony did not attempt to verify the news of Cleopatra’s death. He accepted the story of her suicide, and prepared to follow her example. Plutarch represents him as murmuring to himself :  “Why still delay, Antony, since Fate has taken away the one excuse for loving life?”. He then retired to his bedchamber with a faithful slave named Eros, whom he had already warned to be ready to perform the duty which was now required of him. As he took off the armour in which he had fought that morning, he apostrophised thus the woman whom he had so recently accused of betraying him:  “ Cleopatra, it is not at the loss of you I am grieved, for soon I shall come to the same place with you, but that I, being such a general, am proved inferior in courage to a woman.”

With this anticipation of his descendant Nero’s “Qualis artifex pereo!” Antony turned to Eros, and bade him do his duty. Eros drew his sword, but, instead of striking at his master, ran himself through and died. Looking down at the slave’s body at his feet, Antony cried: “ Well done, Eros ! What you cannot do for me yourself you teach me how to do.” With this he apparently tried to rip himself up, in the style of a Japanese committing seppuku or hara-kiri, and flung himself, wounded and senseless, on the bed. He had not, however, done his work so well as Eros, and, though his hurt was mortal, it was not immediately fatal. The flow of blood ceased, and he regained consciousness. Seeing people around him—they had perhaps come into the room attracted by the noise—he called to them to put an end to him. Instead of complying, they fled in terror, and left him writhing in agony.

At this point another messenger came from Cleopatra—Diomedes, her secretary—to inform him that she was not dead, and to bring him to her. Antony raised himself up, as if now he could still go on living, and called his slaves to carry him to where Cleopatra awaited him. On the way to the tomb he hastened their steps with prayers and threats, and when they arrived before the doors he was still breathing and conscious. The doors were not opened for him for fear, perhaps, of others beside him effecting an entry at the same time and seizing the treasures ; but Cleopatra herself looked out of a window in the upper story and let down ropes, which Antony’s slaves attached to the litter on which they had brought their master. Then, with the help of Iras and Charmion, she drew the litter up to the window. “ The eye-witnesses,” remarks Plutarch, “say that never was there a more piteous sight; for Antony was hauled up, stained with blood and wrestling against death, stretching out his hands toward Cleopatra as he hung in the air. It was no easy task for women ; and Cleopatra, with straining arms and contracted features, laboured at the ropes, while those below encouraged her and shared in her agony. When she had taken him in and laid him down, she rent her garments over him and beat her breasts, smearing her face with his blood, calling him lord and husband and general, and almost forgetting her own sorrows in lamentation for his.”

Plutarch somewhat mars the effect of his admirable narrative by representing Antony as finding time before he breathed his last breath to give Cleopatra advice as to how she might best look after her own honour, and to bid her, instead of lamenting his late misfortunes, think him happy for what he had achieved, and for his not ignoble end. Shakespeare, however, succeeded in embodying all Plutarch’s rhetoric in the death-scene in his fourth Act, down to the words :

I lived, the greatest prince o’ the world,

The noblest ; and do now not basely die

Nor cowardly put off my helmet to

My countryman—a Roman, by a Roman

Valiantly vanquished.

In this manner died Antony at the age of fifty-three, after a connection with the Egyptian queen lasting over twelve years, including the long interval in 40-36BCduring which he did not see her at all. It is perhaps unnecessary to add anything to what has been said of Antony already, particularly in Chapter VII, except to call attention to the way in which the last actions of his life support the idea of his mental decay. It is impossible to recognise the once great Triumvir in the hesitating bungler, complaining of treason, unable to exercise influence over his troops, unable to find the glorious death in battle of which he could talk over the wine the night before, unable even to direct his sword steadily against himself, and only saved from a truly sorry ending by the pathos which his reconciliation with Cleopatra lent to his final hour. In the close of his life there remains nothing which can arouse any admiration for Antony except the continuance of his affection for Cleopatra. But for this very infatuation, which inspired his countrymen with such disgust, the Antony of August 1st—the Antony, indeed, of the years 31-30—would seem but a futile and contemptible phantom lingering on in history after the disappearance of the hero whose name be bore.

Cleopatra was not long left alone with her dead lover in the tomb. In fact, a messenger arrived from Octavian just as Antony was dying. From this we may gather that the Romans had entered Alexandria very soon after their easy victory outside the walls. Octavian’s envoy was a knight of the name of Proculeius, of whom we know little except that he is supposed to be the Proculeius mentioned by Horace with praise for his care for his brothers. He had instructions to try to secure Cleopatra alive. Octavian had learnt of Antony’s suicide through one of the palace-guards, who had come to him bringing the blood-stained sword with which the deed had been done, and was anxious to prevent Cleopatra from following Antony’s example after setting the tomb on fire. At first sight it appears strange that Cleopatra did not take this course. The classical writers, including Dion and perhaps even Plutarch, are content with the explanation that she hoped to be able to seduce Octavian as she had seduced his great-uncle and Antony before him. It is hardly necessary, however, to imagine this, and we have not the same motive as the ancients for making out Cleopatra to have been an entirely abandoned woman. A key to her conduct seems to be furnished by her conversation with Proculeius as given by Plutarch. When the Roman knight arrived she refused to open the doors of the tomb to him, but talked to him from inside the building while he stood outside. She asked for a guarantee that her kingdom should be given to her children ; and Proculeius, after encouraging her and telling her to trust all occurred on the same day, August 1st, BC 30. But this is what appears from a comparison of the accounts of the various ancient historians.

Octavian in all things, was obliged to return from his mission empty-handed.

It was anxiety for her children that prevented Cleopatra from committing suicide. A selfinflicted death would save her from the humiliation of being carried a prisoner to Rome, but would leave Caesarion and her three children by Antony upon whom the conqueror might wreak his vengeance. Caesarion had already been sent with his tutor Rhodon to “India by way of Ethiopia,” it would appear from Plutarch. But, as indeed turned out, he was not yet out of harm’s way; while Alexander, Selene, and Ptolemy were still in Alexandria, as far as we know. From the beginning of her negotiations with Octavian, Cleopatra had asked but one thing, the inheritance of Egypt for her offspring.

The last of the Lagidae, whatever her faults and crimes, cannot be denied the possession of maternal instinct and of pride in her family. She wished to know, before she died, that her children would be spared, and would wear the crown which she had received from her father.

Dion, it must be noted, makes Cleopatra send a messenger to Octavian before Proculeius came to her. There is nothing to show whether Plutarch’s or Dion’s version is correct; but the point is not of much importance, for even if Dion is right the mission of Proculeius would only be Octavian’s answer to Cleopatra’s inquiry as to what terms he offered her. In any case, when Octavian found that Cleopatra refused to admit his envoy within the tomb he sent him back again in company with Cornelius Gallus, giving them instructions to force their way in somehow. By a ruse they succeeded in cheating Cleopatra’s vigilance. Gallus this time held her in conversation through the closed door, while his companion climbed to the window in the upper story by means of a ladder. Then, followed by two slaves, Proculeius came downstairs and took Cleopatra in the rear.

Either Charmion or Iras saw the intruders first, and cried out : “Unhappy Cleopatra, you are taken alive!”. The queen turned round and, seeing Proculeius, seized a dagger which she had about her and tried to stab herself. The Roman was too quick for her. He snatched the dagger from her hand, telling her that “she wronged both herself and Caesar by attempting to rob him of the chance of showing magnanimity and to fix on the mildest of generals the stigma of bad faith and relentlessness.” The door was opened for Gallus, and, after Cleopatra had been searched for poison, Octavian was informed of his agents’ success. He sent his freedman, Epaphroditus, with orders to watch carefully lest she should attempt suicide, but otherwise to be indulgent to her.

Octavian had obtained all that he could desire. Antony was dead, Cleopatra was a prisoner, and her treasures and the whole city of Alexandria were his. He had received the news of Antony’s suicide at first with studied correctness of conduct, retiring within his tent and weeping over his former colleague and brother-in-law. Did he remember, we may wonder, his great-uncle’s behaviour over the death of Pompey? Unfortunately he could not resist calling his friends to him and reading to them from the correspondence between himself and Antony, to show how reasonable he had been, and how insolent and arrogant was Antony in his replies. Julius Caesar had not thus indulged in recriminations against his dead rival; and Octavian, accustomed as he was to think out the effect of his actions, would have done well to imitate the reticence of his kinsman.

In his formal entry into Alexandria Octavian made no mistake. Everything was designed to produce an excellent impression. The conqueror came into the city peacefully holding the hand of his friend, the Pythagorean philosopher Areios, a Greek of Alexandrian birth, whom he had taken as his moral guide. He came to the Gymnasium, went in, and, mounting upon a platform which had been set up for him, addressed the terror-stricken crowd who bowed themselves to the ground before him. There could hardly have been a greater contrast than that between the receptions given by the Alexandrians to Julius Caesar and to Octavian. The younger man had taken no risk with the turbulent citizens. He had them completely at his mercy. He hastened, however, to put them out of suspense, bidding them rise from the ground, as he forgave them—firstly for the sake of their founder Alexander, secondly because of the beauty and greatness of their city, and thirdly to please his friend Areios. This last touch is peculiarly characteristic of the coming Augustus, so anxious to show, himself the friend of culture and of learned men.

Continuing on his course of studied generosity, Octavian allowed Cleopatra to bury the body of her dead lover. “Although many, both kings and commanders, asked for the body to bury it, Caesar did not take it from Cleopatra,” says Plutarch; “but it was interred by her own hands sumptuously and royally, and she received for that purpose all that she wished.”

After the funeral of Antony, Cleopatra seems to have been seized once more with the desire, which Proculeius had frustrated before, of putting an immediate end to her life. Plutarch relates that the violence of her lamentations brought on a fever, which she tried to make a pretext for starving herself to death. She had as an accomplice her physician Olympos. But Octavian got wind of her design, and to prevent her from cheating him of his triumph by suicide threatened her with action against her children, by which threats Cleopatra was “ thrown down as by engines of war,” in Plutarch’s phrase, and allowed herself to be kept alive. Octavian also decided to visit her himself. The following is the Greek historian’s account of this famous interview :

“Cleopatra chanced to be lying on a mattress, meanly dressed, and as he entered she sprang up in a single robe and fell at his feet with her head and face in the greatest disorder, her voice trembling, and her eyes dim with tears. There were also visible many marks of the blows which she had inflicted on her breast, and indeed her body seemed in no better plight than her mind. Yet that charm of hers and her bold confidence in her beauty were not completely extinguished, but though she was thus circumstanced they still shone out and were manifest in her looks. When Caesar had bidden her lie down and had taken a seat near her, she began to make a sort of justification, and tried to attribute all that had happened to necessity and to fear of Antony. But, as Caesar met her with an answer at every point, of a sudden she changed her tone, and began to move him to pity with her prayers, as though clinging most eagerly to life.. Finally she handed to him a list of all her treasures ; and when Seleukos, one of her stewards, declared that she was concealing some things, she sprang up, and, catching him by the hair, belaboured him with blows on the face. As Caesar smiled and restrained her, she asked:  ‘Is it not scandalous, Caesar, that, when you have condescended to visit me and speak to me in my present condition, my slaves should make accusations against me because I have kept back some women’s ornaments, not to adorn myself, poor wretch, but in order to give a few things to Octavia and your wife Livia, that through them I may make you kinder and more favourable to me?’. Caesar was pleased with these words, being fully persuaded that she wished to live. So, when he had told her that he left these things in her care, and that in every other way he would treat her better than she expected, he went away, thinking that he had deceived her. But he had deceived himself.”

Plutarch, it may be seen, does not hesitate to charge Octavian with intended bad faith toward Cleopatra. He goes on to say that she learnt that he meant to leave Egypt for Syria, while sending her and her children away in three days’ time. This could only mean that she was to go to Rome, to await Octavian’s triumph. Her informant was a young man named Dolabella, son of that Dolabella with whom we are already acquainted. Although he was on Octavian’s staff, he was, according to Plutarch, “ not without a certain liking for Cleopatra ” (perhaps because of her conduct toward his father), and therefore revealed his general’s intentions to her.

The discovery of the fate reserved for her dashed to the ground whatever little hopes Cleopatra had entertained of influencing Octavian, and determined her to take the only remaining course to avoid shame. Since the fall of Alexandria she had repeatedly uttered the passionate exclamation :  “I will not be led in triumph!”. Now she knew that she was destined to that degradation which her sister Arsinoe had undergone at Rome, and the Armenian Artavasdes and his family had suffered before her own eyes at Alexandria. She, with her children, must walk in chains— no doubt golden, like those of Artavasdes—along the Sacred Way to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, she who four years before, robed as , Isis, had sat on a throne of gold in front of the temple of Serapis and watched a Roman Ivt-fierator riding in his car along the Canopic Way to present his trophies to her and bow himself in reverence to her incarnation of her favourite goddess. This was to be the end of dreams of an Eastern Empire under a new dynasty founded by herself, the last of the Lagidae, and her sons by the two great Romans who had been her lovers— this or death.

To a woman of her pride the choice was obvious. While she had nourished hope of obtaining Octavian’s consent that her sons should inherit Egypt, she had been willing to live, perhaps trusting that she would be allowed to reside in Alexandria as dowager queen. But if all Octavian’s promises of “magnanimity” and of “better treatment for her than she expected” meant nothing, then the only thought to which she could attend was :  “I will not be led in triumph!”. To release herself it would be necessary to cheat the vigilance of Octavian, determined to keep all means of suicide out of her reach. But if Octavian could be deceitful, he had not the wit of the Egyptian queen. Many modern writers have cast doubt upon the famous story of Cleopatra’s last ruse, whereby she won the death which she desired, in spite of those who watched her to see that she did not escape from their master’s power. Apart, however, from antiquity’s firm belief in the story, at the time of her death and afterwards, there is about it something which seems to compel belief, unless it can be proved that no such reptile as is required by the story could have been procured by Cleopatra ; and this proof is not forthcoming. It is true that Plutarch mentions rival legends, but this is only natural in the case of a death attended with considerable mystery.

Before taking the last step, Cleopatra asked and obtained permission from Octavian to perform the ceremony of pouring libations on the tomb of Antony. Plutarch puts in her mouth what must be merely a pretty rhetorical exercise, after the manner dear to even the most conscientious of ancient historians, ending with an appeal to Antony :  “ If there be any power in the gods of Italy (since these of this land have deserted us), deliver not up your wife still living, nor let yourself be triumphed over in me. Hide me here, bury me with you, for of my ten thousand ills there is none so grievous as this short time that I have been parted from you.”

Having embraced the coffin and put flowers upon it, Cleopatra prepared herself for the death for which she had prayed. She, whose name was connected with all that was elaborate in the arts of bathing and of dining, first bathed herself and then partook of her last banquet. At the end of the meal a countryman came to the palace which was her prison, bringing with him a basket of figs. The sentries at the door challenged him, but seeing the figs let him pass. On his arrival Cleopatra took a letter which she had already written, sealed it, and despatched it to Octavian. Then she bade all leave her except the two women whose faithfulness to her has made them famous, and had the door of the room closed. She was never seen again alive. When Octavian received her letter and opened it, he found in it a request that she might be buried with Antony. He guessed at once what had happened, and sent messengers to ascertain the truth. They found the sentries unaware of anything unusual, but on opening the door saw Cleopatra stretched dead on a golden couch, dressed in her royal robes. Of the two waiting-women, Iras lay dying at her mistress’s feet, while Charmion, though she also had but a few moments to live, was setting straight the crown upon the dead queen’s head. “ What work is here ? ” Shakespeare following Plutarch, makes one of the men ask :

“Charmian, is this well done?”

“It is well done, and fitting for a princess

Descended from so many royal kings!”

So saying, Charmion too fell dead by the side of the couch.

“Now it is said,” continues Plutarch, “that the asp was brought in covered with the figs and leaves, Cleopatra having so ordered, that the reptile might fasten upon her body without her being aware of it. But when she lifted up some of the figs and saw it, she exclaimed, ‘Here then it is!’ and baring her arm offered it to be bitten. Others tell how the asp was kept in a pitcher, and that Cleopatra drew it out with a golden distaff and irritated it until it sprang at her arm and clung to it. But the real truth nobody knows ; for it was also said that she carried poison about her in a hollow pin,* which she hid in her hair. Yet no spots broke out upon her body nor any other marks of poison. Nor was the reptile found within the Palace ; but some professed that they observed its trail near the sea, in that direction whither the chamber faced and where the windows were. Some also say that Cleopatra’s arm was seen to have two small indistinct punctures; and it appears that Caesar believed this, for at the triumph a figure of Cleopatra was carried with the asp clinging to her.”

Octavian, we are told, although vexed by Cleopatra’s death (which robbed his triumph of the feature to which the Romans most looked forward), admired her nobility of mind and ordered her body to be buried with royal ceremonial beside that of Antony. He also refrained from throwing down the statues erected to her, while removing all Antony’s statues. This honour to Cleopatra is attributed by Plutarch not to Octavian’s generosity, but to the fact that one of her friends, Archibios, gave him a present of two thousand talents (£487,000) to spare the statues. Octavian soon showed how unwise Cleopatra would have been to trust to his vague promises of good treatment in response to her prayers on behalf of her children. Hardly had she removed her own person from his power when he put to death her first-born, the sharer in her rule over Egypt. Caesarion, as we have seen, had been sent out of harm’s way with his tutor Rhodon, provided with treasure for his support. He had probably not left the confines of Egypt, however, when Rhodon persuaded him to return to Alexandria, saying that Octavian meant him to rule over the kingdom. Caesarion, therefore, came back and put himself in the hands of the kinsman who had always refused to recognise his connection with the Dictator. It is said that Octavian hesitated what to do with his voluntary captive until Areios (who, if the tale is true, was as bad a villain as most of the Alexandrian Greek teachers of his time) decided him by misquoting Homer* to the effect that “ a multitude of Caesars is no good thing.” So died, after a nominal reign of about a dozen years, the last Son of the Sun, Ptolemy XVI, happily too late for his mother to know how truly she had feared on his behalf.

As he showed no mercy to a boy related to himself by blood, it was hardly to be expected that Octavian would spare Antony’s children. The death of the eldest of them, however, contented him. Antyllus had attempted to escape, but was betrayed by another of the infamous gang of tutors of the day, a man named Theodores. His head was cut off by the soldiers to take to Octavian (to whose daughter Julia, Antyllus had once been betrothed), and his body left lying in the chapel erected by Cleopatra to Julius Caesar, at the foot of whose statue he had vainly sought safety. Theodores took the opportunity of stealing a valuable jewel which his pupil had been used to wear about his neck, for which he was seized and crucified. We do not hear whether Rhodon was as suitably rewarded as his fellow-scoundrel.

The death of Cleopatra’s and Antony’s eldest sons appeared to satisfy the thirst for innocent blood, the shedding of which is a sufficient criticism of the remark of Velleius that “it did honour both to Caesar’s fortune and to his clemency that not one of those who bore arms against him was put to death by him.” Their joint children, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene, and Ptolemy, were unharmed, and we next hear of them in Rome, being brought up by the excellent Octavia in the company of her two daughters Antonia major and minor, as they are known in history, and J ulus, the brother of Antyllus. Cleopatra Selene lived to marry Juba the Numidian, who as an infant had figured in Julius Caesar’s triumph with Arsinoe and Vercingetorix. Juba was both a learned man (one of the most learned of his day, in fact, although only a few fragments of his works survive) and a wise diplomatist, for he sided with Octavian and was given as a reward the kingdom of Numidia which his father had forfeited to Rome. Five years later his patron, now the Emperor Augustus, gave him Mauretania in exchange for Numidia, and here he reigned in peace with his bride and her two brothers, whom he received as guests.

There is no record of the line of Cleopatra the Great being carried on by Alexander Helios or by Ptolemy, son of Antony ; but a son was born to Juba and Cleopatra Selene, to whom was given the Lagid name of Ptolemy. He seems to have succeeded his father on the throne of Mauretania about 19 AD. Little is known of him except that he was very rich, and that in 40 AD he was invited to Rome by the ferocious madman Caligula, great-grandson both of Antony (by Octavia) and of Octavian. He was put to death in Rome, and thus, as far as we know, the last descendant of Cleopatra the Great and of Antony perished at the hands of a descendant of Antony and Octavia.