Cleopatra: A Life

WE MUST OFTEN SHIFT THE SAILS WHEN WE WISH TO ARRIVE IN PORT

“Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.”

—ARISTOTLE

EVEN AFTER DELLIUS’S visit, even after the specific instructions, Cleopatra stalled. She had ample reason to do so. The situation was volatile, the stakes immense. Having adroitly maneuvered her way through years of reckless Roman infighting and backstabbing, she had no intention of making a false step now. Dellius had not pressed for explanations but she owed them all the same. She had remained above the fray when the Caesarians needed her. She had issued no declarations of neutrality. Intentionally or not, she had backed her lover’s murderer. She had little choice but to offer an accounting. As a client queen, as a friend and ally of Rome, she also had little choice but to cultivate and mollify Mark Antony. While she may well have preferred to steer clear of him—she had a perfectly good idea what he wanted—Antony controlled the East. Egypt fell under his purview. He was moreover the much-lauded hero of Philippi, where he had seemed uncannily to have been everywhere and accomplished everything at once. As he and his legions had made their way across Asia he was greeted by adoring crowds in Athens, as a god in Ephesus. At forty-two, curly-haired and square-jawed, he was still a chiseled, broad-shouldered paragon of rude health. He installed himself in Tarsus, the flourishing, administrative capital of Cilicia, near the southeastern coast of modern Turkey. To that lush plain, encircled by the steep mountains of southern Asia, he summoned Cleopatra. The requests arrived one after the other. She let them pile up.

Was she temporizing for effect, or engaged in elaborate preparations? She could never be accused of dithering, though at several junctures she did wait purposefully for the air to clear. Presumably this was one of those moments. Plutarch assures us that she entertained no fears, although they would have been warranted; others were punished for their lack of cooperation. Instead he wrote the delay down to strategy. Cleopatra believed Dellius’s reassuring reports but had greater faith yet in her own powers. They had now blossomed. Caesar “had known her when she was still a girl and inexperienced in affairs,” asserts Plutarch, “but she was going to visit Antony at the very time when women have most brilliant beauty and are at the acme of intellectual power.” (As an astute commentator has noted, this “puts the height of beauty encouragingly late and the height of intellectual power depressingly early.” Cleopatra was not yet thirty.) With “the greatest confidence in herself, and in the charms and sorceries of her own person,” she headed off, not because she was at last ready, or could hesitate no longer, but essentially propelled by scorn. She received many letters from Antony and from his associates, but “she took no account of these orders.” Ultimately she sailed, concludes Plutarch, “as if in mockery” of the Roman. It was late summer.

Confident though she may have been, contemptuous though she may have appeared, Cleopatra left nothing in her preparations to chance. It was as if she knew she was playing not only to Mark Antony but far beyond him as well. Certainly she had heard of the elaborate scenes that had greeted Antony elsewhere. Incense and entertainment had followed him across the continent. In Ephesus the women of the town had met him dressed as bacchantes, the men as fauns and satyrs. Singing his Dionysian praises, they had led him into the city, full of ivy-wrapped wands, resonant with pipes and flutes and harps and shouts of acclaim. The invitations poured in; all Asia paid tribute and vied for his favor. From Dellius as from others, Cleopatra would have known she was entering a sort of sweepstakes for Antony’s attention. She seemed determined to conjure a display so stunning it would propel Plutarch to Shakespearean heights, as it would elicit from Shakespeare his richest poetry. And she succeeded. In the annals of indelible entrances—the wooden horse into Troy; Christ into Jerusalem; Benjamin Franklin into Philadelphia; Henry IV, Charles Lindbergh, Charles de Gaulle, into Paris; Howard Carter into King Tut’s tomb; the Beatles onto Ed Sullivan’s stage—Cleopatra’s alone lifts off the page in iridescent color, amid inexhaustible, expensive clouds of incense, a sensational, simultaneous assault on every sense. She must have made the seven-hundred-mile trip across the Mediterranean by naval galley, pausing for overnight stays, as she had earlier, along the coast of the Levant. At the mouth of the Cydnus sat a lagoon, in which Cleopatra likely transferred her entourage to a local barge, reconfigured and exquisitely decorated for the trip upriver, probably fewer than ten miles in antiquity. A fully manned galley would have traveled with 170 rowers; for her purposes, she may have eliminated as many as a third. An escort of supply ships followed behind. She traveled with an elaborate stage set. Often with Cleopatra there is but a slim convergence between the life and the legend. Tarsus is one of the rare points where the two fully overlap.

The queen of Egypt’s presence was always an occasion; Cleopatra saw to it that this was a special one. In a semiliterate world, the imagery mattered. She floated up the bright, crystalline river, through the plains, in a blinding explosion of color, sound, and smell. She had no need for magic arts and charms given her barge with gilded stern and soaring purple sails; this was not the way Romans traveled. As they dipped in and out of the water, silver oars glinted broadly in the sun. Their slap and clatter provided a rhythm section for the orchestra of flutes, pipes, and lyres assembled on deck. Had Cleopatra not already cemented her genius for stage management she did so now: “She herself reclined beneath a gold-spangled canopy, dressed as Venus in a painting, while beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood at her sides and fanned her. Her fairest maids were likewise dressed as sea nymphs and graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. Wondrous odors from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.” She outdid even the Homeric inspiration.

Word traveled quickly, more quickly than did the fanciful, fragrant vision, which was surely the point. From the start of the journey a multitude assembled along the bank of the turquoise river to follow Cleopatra’s progress. As she floated toward Tarsus proper the city’s population ran out to await the remarkable sight. In the end Tarsus emptied entirely, so that Antony, who had been conducting business in the sweltering marketplace, found himself sitting quite alone on his tribune. To him Cleopatra sent word—as much a marvel of diplomatic craft as of cosmic staging—that Venus was arrived “to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia.”

It was a very different approach from that of the girl in the hemp sack, though it yielded comparable results. There is no better proof that Cleopatra had the gift of languages and glided easily among them. As Plutarch notes, she was especially fluent in flattery. She manipulated its dialects like an expert: “Affecting the same pursuits, the same avocations, interests and manner of life, the flatterer gradually gets close to his victim, and rubs up against him so as to take on his coloring, until he gives him some hold and becomes docile and accustomed to his touch.” She could not better have calibrated her approach had she known her audience intimately. It is possible that she and Antony had met years earlier, when he had come to Alexandria on the mission that restored her father. (She had been thirteen at the time.) During Caesar’s Egyptian stay, Mark Antony had sent an agent to Alexandria on personal business. He was buying a farm from Caesar, a transaction of which Cleopatra may also have known. Very likely she and Antony had crossed paths in Rome, where they had plenty of business in common. His reputation was in any event familiar to her. She knew about his wild youth and his periodically messy adulthood. She knew him to be given to theater, if not melodrama. She knew him to be politically astute only on alternate days of the week, in equal measure ingenious and foolhardy, audacious and reckless. Certainly the spectacle of her arrival confirms that she knew of his tastes. She was among the few in the world who could indulge them. For all the travails of the previous years, she remained the richest person in the Mediterranean.

Antony replied to Cleopatra’s greeting with a dinner invitation. What happened next was revealing of both parties and the kind of behavior Cicero had deplored in each. Antony was a little too amenable, Cleopatra decidedly high-handed. It was the mark of status to give the first dinner; she insisted that he come to her, with whatever friends he desired. Such was the prerogative of her rank. From the start she seems to have meant to make a point. She did not answer summonses; she delivered them. “At once, then, wishing to display his complacency and friendly feelings, Antony obeyed, and went,” Plutarch manages to tell us, before finding himself so dazzled by the scene before him as to be—even in Greek—at a loss for words. Cleopatra’s preparations defied description. Antony thrilled especially to the elaborate constellations of lights she had strung through the tree branches overhead. They cast a gleaming lace of rectangles and circles over the sultry summer night, creating “a spectacle that has seldom been equaled for beauty.” It was a scene so stunning that Shakespeare deferred to Plutarch, who had already pulled out all the adjectival stops for him. Surely something curious is afoot when the greatest Elizabethan poet cribs from a straight-backed biographer.

Either that evening or on a subsequent one Cleopatra prepared twelve banquet rooms. She spread thirty-six couches with rich textiles. Behind them hung purple tapestries; embroidered with glimmering threads. She saw to it that her table was set with golden vessels, elaborately crafted and encrusted with gems. Under the circumstances, it seems likely that she, too, rose to the occasion and draped herself in jewels. Pearls aside, Egyptian taste ran to bright semiprecious stones—agate, lapis, amethyst, carnelian, garnet, malachite, topaz—set in gold pendants, sinuous, intricately worked bracelets, long, dangling earrings. On his arrival Antony gaped at the extraordinary display. Cleopatra smiled modestly. She had been in a hurry. She would do better next time. She then allowed “that all these objects were a gift for him, and invited him to come and dine with her again on the next day along with his friends and commanders.” At meal’s end she sent her guests off with everything they had admired: the textiles, the gem-studded tableware, and the couches as well.

Just as quietly she raised the bar, enough to make the initial banquet look spartan. Antony returned on his fourth evening to a knee-deep expanse of roses. The florist’s bill alone was a talent, or what six doctors earned in a year. In the rippling Cilician heat the perfume must have been intoxicating. At evening’s end the trampled roses alone remained behind. Again Cleopatra divided the furnishings among her guests; by the end of the week, Antony’s men carted home couches, sideboards, and tapestries, as well as a particularly considerate gift on a searing summer night: “litters and bearers for the men of high rank, and horses decked out with silver-plated trappings for the majority of them.” To facilitate their returns, Cleopatra sent each man off as well with a torch-carrying Ethiopian slave. As much as the splendor of her camp “beggared description,” the ancients did not stint on their accounts, few of which may actually have done justice to the wonders at hand. In this Cleopatra was by no means alone. “Kings would come often to [Antony’s] doors, and the wives of kings, vying with one another in their gifts and their beauty, would yield up their honor for his pleasure.” Cleopatra did so only most lavishly and inventively. For this trip, six-year-old Caesarion stayed home.

Plutarch paid tribute to Cleopatra’s “irresistible charm” and to the “persuasion of her discourse,” but Appian alone attempted to re-create the conversation of the first Tarsan meetings. How did Cleopatra justify her behavior? She had done nothing to avenge Caesar’s death. She had assisted Dolabella, a would-be assassin, and a man on whose account Antony had divorced a wife. Her lack of cooperation had been stunning. She sounded no faltering notes of humility and extended no apologies, offering only a bold recitation of fact. Proudly she catalogued all she had done for Antony and Octavian. Indeed she had aided Dolabella. She would have done so more generously yet had the weather complied; she had attempted personally to deliver up a fleet and supplies. Despite repeated threats, she had resisted Cassius’s demands. She had not flinched before the ambush she knew lay in wait for her, but had met with the tempest that had shattered her fleet. Only ill health had prevented her from setting out again. By the time she had recovered, Mark Antony was the hero of Philippi. She was unflappable, witty, and—as Antony might have surmised from the masquerade as Venus—entirely blameless.

At some point the two broached the question of money, which to a great extent explained Cleopatra’s sumptuous display. It was one way to prove your utility to a man in search of funds. The Roman coffers remained empty. The triumvirs had promised each soldier 500 drachmas, or a twelfth of a talent; they had well above thirty legions in their service. It was more or less incumbent on Caesar’s successor—if not on the victor of Philippi—to plan a Parthian campaign, and Antony did so as well. The Parthians had favored the assassins. They were land-hungry and restless. Antony had a humiliating Roman defeat of 53 to avenge; the Roman general who had last ventured beyond the Tigris had not returned. His severed head had wound up as a prop in a Parthian production of Euripides; his eleven legions had been slaughtered. A dazzling military victory would once and for all guarantee Antony’s supremacy at home. And whenever a Roman dreamed of Parthia, his thoughts turned inevitably, necessarily, to Cleopatra, the only monarch who could fund such a massive operation.

Eventually Mark Antony reciprocated, inviting Cleopatra to a feast of his own. Unsurprisingly, he “was ambitious to surpass her in splendor and elegance.” Also unsurprisingly, he was defeated on both counts. Cleopatra would be credited later with addling Antony’s judgment and in one early respect this may have been true; most Romans would have known better than to attempt to beat a Ptolemy at the luxury game. Again Cleopatra proved marvelously supple, more adept than Antony at playing by someone else’s rules. As bluff Antony poked fun at himself for his inferior fare, as he disparaged the “meagerness and rusticity” of his feast, Cleopatra joined in. She was entirely irreverent on his account, a made-to-order companion for a man who went out of his way for a good joke and who laughed at himself every bit as heartily as at others. Cleopatra took to Antony’s humor with earthy gusto: “Perceiving that his raillery was broad and gross, and savored more of the soldier than the courtier, she rejoined in the same taste, and fell into it at once, without any sort of reluctance or reserve.” Having established herself as a sovereign, having flaunted her wealth, she assumed the role of boon companion. It is unlikely that anyone in her entourage had ever seen this particular Cleopatra before.

THE ABILITY TO molt, instantly and as the situation required, to slide effortlessly from one idiom to another, her irresistible charm, were already well established. Cleopatra was additionally fortunate in her circumstances. Whether or not the two enjoyed more than a passing acquaintance, Cleopatra and Mark Antony had a number of things in common. No one else had as much reason to be displeased by Caesar’s will or to resent the appearance of his adopted heir. Each held firmly to a shred of the Caesarian mantle. Antony had vouched for Caesarion’s divinity in the Senate and begun to conjure with that idiom himself; Cleopatra was not the only one engaging in a cosmic costume drama. Unlike most Romans, Antony had longtime experience with quick-thinking, capable women. His own mother had challenged him to kill her when the two found themselves on opposing sides of a political issue. Antony had no problem entertaining a woman at a political summit or a financial conference, as the meeting in Tarsus plainly was, despite Cleopatra’s efforts to transform it into a cult spectacle. Fulvia was wealthy and well connected, as shrewd and courageous as she was beautiful. For her Antony had thrown over his long-term mistress, the most popular actress in Rome. Nor was Fulvia one to stay home and spin wool. Rather “she wished to rule a ruler and command a commander.” Over the winter she not only represented Antony’s interests in Rome but meddled ferociously in public affairs “so that neither the senate nor the people transacted any business contrary to her pleasure.” She had gone from senatorial house to senatorial house door-knocking for her husband. She settled his debts. She would raise eight legions for him. In his absence the previous year she had stood in for him politically and militarily, on one occasion evidently donning a suit of armor.

Nor did Cleopatra’s divine pretensions set Antony’s teeth on edge. On his way to Tarsus he had been hailed—as Cleopatra knew—as the new Dionysus. That god, too, had made a triumphant tour across Asia. Here Antony not only supplied Cleopatra’s cue but recapitulated a Ptolemaic role: Her family claimed descent from the ecstasy-inducing god of wine. They were devotees of his mystical cult. Cleopatra’s father had added “The New Dionysus” to his title. Her brother had briefly done so as well. A theater of Dionysus adjoined the palace in Alexandria; Caesar had made it his command post in 48. Mark Antony might all the same have thought harder about the identification. While his cult was wildly popular, while he was the preeminent Greek god of the age, Dionysus was a newcomer to the Olympian pantheon, where he remained the odd man out. He was congenial, mischievous, and high-spirited but—with his lush, perfumed curls—trailed languidly behind him a reputation for effeminacy. He was distinctly foreign. And he was the gentlest of the gods. One of Cleopatra’s ancestors had invoked his Dionysian pedigree to justify having absented himself from battle. Worst of all, Dionysus dulled the wits of men and empowered women. Had the East gone after Philippi to Octavian rather than to Antony, Cleopatra would no doubt have adapted, but she would have been at a grave disadvantage. She spoke many languages, some better than others.

She could not have asked for a better stage set. Tarsus was surrounded on all sides by craggy, forested mountains, lush with wildflowers. An administrative center as well as a seat of learning, it was—as its native son Paul the Apostle put it a generation later—“no mean city.” Tarsus was celebrated for its schools of philosophy and oratory. It boasted fine fountains and baths, a splendid library. Through the city ran a swift and cold, blue-green river, as crystal clear as the Nile was turbid. On arriving in Tarsus three centuries earlier, Alexander the Great had thrown down his arms and hurled himself, streaked with dust and sweat, into the icy waters. (He was carried, half-conscious, back to his tent. The recovery took three days.) Surrounded by rich farmland, famed for its vineyards, Tarsus worshipped the gods of fertility. It was the kind of place where two deities, one established, the other aspiring, could feel at home, and be set off to advantage. Tarsus was inclined to spectacle and able to facilitate one; it was a city in which you could readily fill a one-talent flower order, which was to say that while its citizens were newly Roman, its culture remained unabashedly Greek. Faced with the same conundrum as Cleopatra, the Tarsans had celebrated Cassius and Dolabella on their arrivals, only to be brutally mistreated by each man in turn. Cassius had overrun the city, exacting vast sums, forcing the Tarsans to melt temple treasures and to sell women and children, even old men, into slavery. Cosmic spectacles and flower budgets aside, its people enthusiastically embraced Cassius’s enemies. Antony released the city from its misery.

Cleopatra was in Tarsus only a few weeks but had no need to stay longer. Her effect on Antony was immediate and electrifying.^* The first on the scene, Plutarch expounds on her Cilician success and allows her a promotion. While in 48 she was before Caesar a “bold coquette,” by 41 she hails from the take-no-prisoners school of seduction. Her conversation is beguiling; her presence sparkling; her voice delicious. She makes quick work of Antony. The cooler-blooded Appian also concedes instant defeat. “The moment he saw her, Antony lost his head to her like a young man, although he was 40 [sic] years old,” he marvels. The drama understandably overwhelms the history; it is difficult to trudge soberly through that rustling sea of roses, to strain truth—especially political truth—from the lush, adjectival overload. We hear more of Antony’s conquest than of Caesar’s for the simple reason that the chroniclers were as eager to discourse on one as they were reluctant to discourse on the other. As Antony must appear the lesser man, Cleopatra becomes a more powerful woman. She played in 41 not only to a different audience, but to a different choir.

Did the confluence of needs add up to a romance? Surely it added up to an easy rapport. As Plutarch noted of another history-making liaison, it was very much a love affair, “and yet it was thought to harmonize well with the matters at hand.” Of all the Romans in all the towns in all the empire, Cleopatra had particular reason to cultivate this one. Antony had equal reason to do the same. If it was convenient for Cleopatra to fall in love, or in step, with the man to whom she essentially answered, it was no less so for Antony to fall in with the woman who could single-handedly underwrite his military ambitions. His Parthian obsession was a bold stroke of luck for her.

We know that Antony pined for Cleopatra months later, though she wound up with all the credit for the affair. As one of her sworn enemies asserted, she did not fall in love with Antony but “brought him to fall in love with her.” In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventurer and the adventuress. There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia. The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can at least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. So Cleopatra has Antony under her thumb, poised to obey her every wish, “not only because of his intimacy with her,” as Josephus has it, “but also because of being under the influence of drugs.” To claim as much is to acknowledge her power, also to insult her intelligence.

Whether or not anyone lost his or her head to the other, it is difficult to believe sex failed to figure in the picture early on. Antony and Cleopatra were at the height of their power, reveling amid heady perfume to sweet music, under kaleidoscopic lights, on steamy summer nights, before groaning tables of the finest food and wine in Asia. And while he was unlikely to have been a slave to his love for Cleopatra, as various chroniclers assert, the truth was that wherever Mark Antony went, sexual charm inevitably followed. His tunic tucked high on his rolling hips, he had slept his way across Asia at least once; he was fresh from his liaison with another client queen. Plutarch assigns him “an ill name for familiarity with other people’s wives.” He himself later dated the relationship with Cleopatra from the torrid Tarsan summer.

The immediate effects of the meeting were practical: Cleopatra stayed a few weeks and accomplished a great deal. By the time she sailed home, Antony had in hand her list of demands. Given what he had presumably exacted in exchange, they were not outlandish. They reveal that Cleopatra did not feel as secure as she pretended. She was keenly aware that another queen of Egypt waited in the wings. Antony lost no time in simplifying her life. He ordered Arsinoe forcibly removed from the Temple of Artemis. Cleopatra’s sister met her end on those marble steps, before the ornate ivory doors that their father had donated to the facade years earlier. She was the last of the four siblings; there would be no further mischief from that quarter. “Now Cleopatra had put to death all her kindred,” a Roman chronicler sputters, “till no one near her in blood remained alive.” That was true, although it was also true that Arsinoe had left her sister little choice. Caesar had spared her after the public humiliation in Rome. Arsinoe had conspired against Cleopatra ever since. (Isis too is merciful yet just, delivering up the wicked to those against whom they plot.) And Cleopatra was capable of clemency. Antony called in the high priest of the temple, who had proclaimed Arsinoe queen. The Ephesians were beside themselves, and paid a call on Cleopatra to beg for the priest’s pardon. She prevailed upon Antony to release him. The priest could recognize no further exiled Ptolemies. He posed no danger now. Antony was not so forgiving with the pretender who had been traveling about Asia passing himself off as Ptolemy XIII, as some have suggested he might well have been. (No body had surfaced at the end of the Alexandrian War after all.) He was executed. The rogue naval commander on Cyprus who had supported Cassius against Cleopatra’s orders—he may have been in league with Arsinoe—had fled to Syria, where he sought refuge in a temple. He was dragged out and killed.

This was the kind of behavior that could suggest a man was besotted. “So straight away,” concludes Appian, “the attention that Antony had until now devoted to every matter was completely blunted, and whatever Cleopatra commanded was done, without consideration of what was right in the eyes of man or god.” It was equally the kind of behavior that suggested that Cleopatra had made some material promises between feasts. Nor did Antony deviate entirely from custom. On leaving Cleopatra in 47, Caesar too had applied himself to settling provincial affairs, “distributing rewards both individually and communally to those who deserved them, and hearing and deciding old disputes.” Antony took under his protection those kings that applied to him, making of them firm friends. He established chains of command and raised taxes. The difference lay in what came next. Late in the fall, Antony dispatched his army to various winter quarters. And though provincial affairs remained in disarray, though the Parthians hovered about the Euphrates, aggressively eyeing Syria, Antony headed south, to join Cleopatra in Egypt.

THE TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD WHO greeted him in Alexandria may or may not have been at the height of her beauty—a moment a woman knows always to be several years behind her—but she was a manifestly more confident Cleopatra even than the one who had greeted Julius Caesar seven years earlier. She had traveled abroad and given birth. She ruled unchallenged, and unchallenged had weathered severe political and economic storms. She was a living deity with an irreproachable consort, one who relieved her of the obligation to remarry. She had the support of her people and presumably their enthusiastic admiration as well; she had involved herself more closely with native Egyptian religious life than any Ptolemaic predecessor. Not coincidentally we hear her voice for the first time now, in Alexandria, entertaining her patron and partner. She is self-assured, authoritative, saucy.

In light of what came later, Mark Antony’s Egyptian visit was assumed to have been Cleopatra’s idea and Cleopatra’s doing. Ingeniously, seductively, or magically, she spirited him away. “He suffered her to hurry him off to Alexandria,” as Plutarch has it. It was of course equally possible that Antony invited himself. He was after all doing what he was meant to do: reshaping the East and raising money. He could advance no further in his Parthian plans without Egyptian funds. He may have felt this was his best chance of securing the monies that a clever queen had promised but not yet delivered. Asia had proved poorer than anyone had realized. Egypt was rich. There was legitimate reason to survey a client kingdom, especially one that would prove an ideal base for an Eastern campaign; Antony would need a powerful fleet, something Cleopatra could provide. The alternative was forever untangling provincial affairs, which played neither to Antony’s strengths nor interests. The administrative details had bored even Cicero. The deputations arrived one after another; under the circumstances, Antony could only have been eager to travel to one of the few Mediterranean countries “not ruled by himself.” He had been a gifted schoolboy. He was still in many ways a schoolboy. He was also a gifted, straight-thinking strategist. If Cleopatra did not pursue him he had every reason to pursue her, or at least to proceed agreeably and diplomatically, allowing her to feel as if hers were the upper hand, as he had so graciously done in Tarsus. He had already seen Alexandria, a city that the visitor did not easily forget, one that seemed to have swallowed the whole of Greek culture in one gulp. No one in his right mind would opt to spend the winter elsewhere than in its satiny light, despite its January deluges, especially in the first century BC, especially as the guest of a Ptolemy.

Either out of deference to Cleopatra’s authority or to avoid Caesar’s mistake, Mark Antony traveled to Egypt without a military escort or the insignia of office, “adopting the dress and way of life of an ordinary person.” He lived very little like one. Cleopatra labored to provide him with a magnificent reception. She saw to it that he indulged in “the sports and diversions of a young man of leisure” and that Alexandrian life answered to its reputation. There are cities in which to spend a fortune and cities in which to make one; only in the rare great city can one accomplish both. Such was Cleopatra’s Alexandria, a scholarly paradise with a quick business pulse and a languorous resort culture, where the Greek penchant for commerce met the Egyptian mania for hospitality, a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons, with the hustle of heterodoxy and the aroma of opportunity thick in the air. Even the people-watching was best there.

For Antony and Cleopatra euphoric entertainment followed prodigal feast, in observance of a sort of pact the two made, one they termed the Inimitable Livers. “The members,” Plutarch explains, “entertained one another daily in turn, with an extravagance of expenditure beyond measure or belief.” From an odd, under-the-stairs friendship comes an intimate view of Cleopatra’s kitchen that winter. A royal cook promises to secret his friend Philotas into the palace to witness the preparations for one of her suppers; he will be astonished by the goings-on. The kitchen is predictably electric with shouting and swearing, at cooks, waiters, and wine stewards; amid the frezy sit mounds of provisions. Eight wild boars turn on spits. A small army of staff bustles about. Philotas, a young medical student, marvels at the size of the crowd expected for dinner. His friend can only laugh at his naïveté. Quite the opposite, he explains. The operation is at once highly precise and entirely imprecise: “The guests are not many, only about twelve; but everything that is set before them must be at perfection, and if anything was but one minute ill-timed, it was spoiled. And, said he, maybe Antony will dine just now, maybe not this hour, maybe he will call for wine, or begin to talk, and will put it off. So that,” he continued, “it is not one, but many dinners must ready, as it is impossible to guess at his hour.” Having overcome his surprise and completed his education, the wide-eyed Philotas went on to become a prominent physician, who told his fabulous tale to a friend, who handed it down to his grandson, who happened to be Plutarch.

By all accounts Mark Antony was an exhausting and expensive houseguest. As a younger man he had headed off on military campaigns with a train of musicians, concubines, and actors in tow. He had—according to Cicero, anyway—made of Pompey’s former home a pleasure palace, filled with tumblers, dancers, jesters, and drunks. His tastes remained consistent. Cleopatra had her hands full. “It is no easy matter to create harmony where there is an opposition of material interest and almost of nature,” Cicero had observed years earlier, and Cleopatra’s differences from Antony were marked. She worked overtime to accommodate, despite what must have been a multitude of claims on her time; she already had a full-time job. Antony visited Alexandria’s golden temples, frequented gymnasiums, attended scholarly discussions, but evinced little interest in Egyptian lore, in the architectural, cultural, or scientific underpinnings of a superior civilization. He could not have helped but visit Alexander’s tomb, for which there was a Roman mania. He made a trip to the desert, to hunt. Cleopatra may have accompanied him; it was likely that she rode, and either owned or sponsored racehorses. There is otherwise no indication that Antony left Lower Egypt, or traveled to the sites. He was no Julius Caesar. Instead, amid echoing colonnades and a menagerie of glossy sphinxes, along streets named for his lover’s illustrious forebears, between the closely packed limestone houses, he raised juvenile pranks to high art. Cleopatra made herself at all times available and amenable, contributing “some fresh delight and charm to Antony’s hours of seriousness and mirth.” If her days were full, her nights were fuller, though her guest needed little instruction. He was a practiced hand at nocturnal rambles, lavish picnics, disguised reunions. He already knew how to crash a wedding. At no time did Cleopatra let him out of her sight. This too was politics of a sort; her kingdom was well worth a prank. “She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him, and watched him as he exercised himself in arms,” Plutarch tells us. “And when by night he would station himself at the doors or windows of the common folk and scoff at those within, she would go with him on his round of mad follies, wearing the garb of a serving maiden.” Antony disguised himself for those excursions as a servant, usually incurring a round of abuse—often blows—before returning, wholly amused with himself, to the palace.

His capers went over well in Alexandria, a city that conformed in every way to Antony’s inclinations and that before him dropped its defenses. It was lighthearted and luxury-loving; Antony was all muscle and mirth. He liked nothing so much as to make a woman laugh. From his youth, when he had studied military exercises and oratory abroad, he was an admirer of all things Greek. He spoke in the florid, Asiatic style, with less bombast than poetry. A later Roman chided the Alexandrians for their buffoonery. A twang of the harp string and they were off and running: “You are forever being frivolous and heedless, and you are practically never at a loss for fun-making and enjoyment and laughter.” This was not a problem for Antony, at his ease among low-rent entertainments and roving musicians, in the street or at the racetrack.

He had too an admirable past on which to trade. As a young officer he had urged clemency at the Egyptian frontier, when on his return Cleopatra’s father had condemned his disloyal troops to death. Antony had intervened, to secure their pardons. He had arranged for a royal burial for Berenice’s husband, also against Auletes’ wish. The goodwill was not forgotten. The Alexandrians happily embraced Antony and played along with his disguises, by which they were hardly fooled. Like their queen, they joined in his “coarse wit” and met him on his merry terms. They declared themselves much obliged to him for donning “the tragic mask with the Romans, but the comic mask with them.” Antony effectively tamed a people that only seven years earlier had met Caesar with javelins and slingshots, as much a tribute to Cleopatra’s firm grasp of power as to Antony’s charm. Certainly it was easier to take to a Roman, who—unlike Westerners before and since—did not play the superiority card. Antony moreover appeared in a square-cut Greek garment rather than a Roman toga. He wore the white leather slippers that could be seen on the feet of every Egyptian priest. He made a very different impression than had his red-cloaked commanding officer, whose influence still hung heavily in the air. It enhanced Cleopatra’s allure. If Caesar could feel with Cleopatra as if he were cozying up to Alexander the Great—and no Roman ever marched east without the image of Alexander before him—Antony could feel as if he were communing with Caesar as well.

Appian has Antony exclusively in the company of Cleopatra, “to whom his sojourn in Alexandria was wholly devoted.” He sees in her a poor influence. Antony “was often disarmed by Cleopatra, subdued by her spells, and persuaded to drop from his hands great undertakings and necessary campaigns, only to roam about and play with her on the sea-shores.” More likely the opposite was true. And while Cleopatra focused exclusively and intently on her guest, she did so without sacrificing her competitive spirit, her sense of humor, or her agenda. Here are the two on an Alexandrian afternoon, relaxing on the river or on Lake Mareotis in a fishing boat, surrounded by attendants. Mark Antony is frustrated. He commands whole armies but on this occasion somehow cannot coax a single fish from the teeming, famously fertile Egyptian waters. He is all the more mortified as Cleopatra stands beside him. Romance or no, to prove so incompetent in her presence is a torture. Antony does what any self-respecting angler would: Secretly he orders his servants to dive into the water and fasten a series of precaught fish to his hook. One after another he reels these catches in, a little too triumphantly, a little too regularly; he is an impulsive man with something to prove, never particularly good at limits. Cleopatra rarely misses a trick and does not miss this one. She feigns admiration. Her lover is a most dexterous man! Later that afternoon she sings his praises to her friends, whom she invites to witness his prowess for themselves.

A great fleet accordingly heads out the following day. At its outset Cleopatra issues a few furtive orders of her own. Antony puts out his line, to instantaneous results. He senses a great weight and reels in his catch, to peals of laughter: From the Nile he extracts a salted, imported Black Sea herring. Cleopatra profits from the ruse to prove her superior wit—Antony was not the only one who felt compelled to impress—but also to remind her lover deftly, firmly, sweetly, of his greater responsibilities. She is no scold, having instead mastered that formula for which every parent, coach, and chief executive searches: She has ambition, and no trouble encouraging the same in others. “Leave the fishing rod, General, to us,” Cleopatra admonishes, before the assembled company. “Your prey,” she reminds Antony, “are cities, kingdoms, and continents.” An expertly mixed cocktail of flattery, one that answered perfectly to Plutarch’s definition: “For such a rebuke as this is just like the bites of a lecherous woman; it tickles and provokes, and pleases even while it pains you.”

If Cleopatra treated Antony like a schoolboy on holiday, that was precisely how he appeared in Rome, to which he turned his back over these convivial months. He celebrated his forty-third birthday in Alexandria and yet distinguished himself mostly for his capers and caprices, ironic given that his original charge against Octavian was that he was a mere boy. (Few accusations stung a Roman more deeply. This one so riled Octavian that he would pass a law prohibiting anyone from referring to him as such.) Where Cleopatra failed to urge Antony toward his public responsibilities, dire dispatches that arrived at the end of the winter did. From the east came word that the Parthians were causing a commotion. They had invaded Syria, where they had murdered Antony’s newly installed governor. From the west came equally disturbing word. Fulvia had created a dangerous diversion. With Antony’s brother, she had incited a war against Octavian, in part to lure her husband away from Cleopatra. Having met with defeat, she had fled to Greece.

In or just before April Antony sprang into action, marching overland to meet the Parthians. He got no farther than northern Syria when he received a miserable letter from Fulvia. It left him with little choice but to renounce his offensive and—with a fleet of two hundred newly built ships—change course for Greece. Antony had not been unaware of his wife’s activities, about which both sides had written him repeatedly. A winter delegation had further expanded on the details. He had evidenced little interest; he was as ill inclined to reproach his wife as to break with Octavian. Fulvia’s disturbances may well have kept her husband in Alexandria every bit as much as did Cleopatra’s diversions. Certainly Antony was slow to bestir himself, for which he would be taken to task later. As Appian acidly notes of the repeated and increasingly urgent communiqués: “Although I have made enquiries, I have failed to find out with any certainty what Antony’s replies were.” Fulvia felt herself to be in danger. She feared even for their children, not unreasonably. A century later she was largely forgotten. It was tidier to indict the Alexandrian Antony for being “so under the sway of his passion and of his drunkenness that he gave not a thought either to his allies or to his enemies.”

THE REUNION IN Greece was stormy. Antony was severe with his wife. She had overstepped her bounds and overplayed his hand. Plutarch thought Cleopatra much in Fulvia’s debt, “for teaching Antony to endure a woman’s sway, since she took him over quite tamed, and schooled at the outset to obey women.” Fulvia may well have taught her husband to obey a woman but could not persuade him either to challenge Octavian or to aspire to more than half an empire. Repeatedly she exhorted him to ally with Pompey’s son, Sextus. Together the two could handily eliminate Octavian. Antony would not hear of it. He had signed an accord. He did not violate his agreements. (Weeks later, on the high seas, Antony confronted one of Caesar’s assassins. He had been proscribed, had opposed Antony at Philippi, and now approached swiftly, with a full fleet. A terrified aide suggested that Antony turn aside. He would consider no such thing, swearing “that he would rather die as a result of a breach of treaty than be recognized as a coward and live.” He sailed on.) To repair the damage with Octavian, Antony left without saying good-bye. Fulvia was ill when he did so. Many of the charges against her may have been invented; impugning independent-minded women was a subspecialty of the Roman historian. And Fulvia had had plenty of accomplices. Antony’s procurer had encouraged her, having repeatedly and maliciously pointed out “that if Italy remained at peace, Antony would stay with Cleopatra, but if there were a war, he would come back without delay.”

With his new fleet Antony headed to the Adriatic. In his absence Fulvia became seriously depressed and died. The cause is unclear. Appian supposes she may have taken her own life out of spite “because she was angry with Antony for leaving her when she was sick.” She may simply have been exhausted from the incessant meddling. She could not have been much mourned in Alexandria. Antony on the other hand was deeply affected by the death, for which he berated himself. He had not even returned to see his wife in her illness. Others held him responsible too, writing the neglect down—as Dio chides—to “his passion for Cleopatra and her wantonness.” Fulvia had been handsome and serious-minded and devoted. She had come to the marriage with money, influential friends, and shrewd political instincts. She had borne Antony two sons. If in truth she was a virago, she was, as has been pointed out, “at least an infinitely loyal virago.” Antony had thrived at her side.

Fulvia’s death was arguably her most pacific act. It opened the way for a reconciliation between Octavian and Antony, “now rid of an interfering woman whose jealousy of Cleopatra had made her fan the flames of such a serious war.” As it was easy to write an absurd and costly war down to a woman’s machinations, so it was easy to write off an accord to her demise, the more so as no one was inclined to fight in the first place. Sextus Pompey remained active at sea. He had vigorously blocked the grain routes to Rome. Incessant war had destroyed Italian agriculture. Rome was a starving, unruly city, at the limits of its endurance. The countryside was in revolt. Soldiers lobbied for the funds Antony was to have obtained abroad and had yet to distribute. Friends stepped in as go-betweens, again reconciling the two men, who again divided the world between them, with Octavian making out more handsomely than he had two years earlier.

This was the Treaty of Brundisium, of early October 40. By its terms, Antony was to battle the Parthians, while Octavian was to fend off or reach an agreement with Sextus Pompey. Some eight months later, the three men would accordingly sign a new agreement in Misenum, across the bay from Naples, the summit of Pompeii in the background. No sooner had those pacts been drafted, no sooner had the men embraced, than “a great and mighty shout arose from the mainland and from the ships at the same moment.” Even the mountains resounded with joy. In the ensuing harborfront chaos many were trampled, suffocated, or drowned, as “they embraced one another while swimming and threw their arms around one another’s necks as they dived.” Armed conflict had again been averted, although the all-night Brundisium celebrations spoke as loudly as did the agreements themselves. In tents along the coast both camps feted each other through a day and a night. (Octavian did so in the Roman fashion, Antony in the Asiatic and Egyptian style, which passed without comment.) All the same, when they did so at Misenum “their ships were moored close by, guards were stationed around, and those actually attending the dinner carried daggers concealed beneath their clothing.” Conspiracies brewed and plots were extinguished throughout the cordial banqueting.

To join the two men personally after Brundisium, Octavian offered up his adored half sister to Antony. Here was the one realm in which a Roman woman commanded a premium: She made for an invaluable personal guarantee, especially when it came to closing a political deal. Circumspect and sober, Octavia had at twenty-nine all the makings of the long-suffering political wife. She was intelligent but not independent, a mediator rather than a manipulator. While she had studied philosophy, she harbored no political ambitions. “A wonder of a woman,” she was an acknowledged beauty, graceful, fine-featured, with a glossy mane of magnificent hair. Conveniently, she had been widowed months earlier. She was precisely what the situation required, an eminently qualified counterweight to Cleopatra, from whom she was intended to divert Antony. By his own admission he remained under that faraway spell. “His reason was still battling with his love,” as Plutarch has it, and as Antony’s men well knew. They ribbed him mercilessly about the affair. By law a widow was to wait ten months before remarrying, to allow for the birth of any progeny. All parties counted so fervently on Octavia to “restore harmony and be their complete salvation” that the Senate hurriedly passed an exemption. At the end of December 40 the Brundisium festivities continued in Rome, where Antony and Octavia celebrated their marriage.

Rome was hardly in a festive mood—it was famished, plundered, exhausted—but the news must especially have rankled in Alexandria. The pacts of 40 and 39 could not have surprised but may have alarmed Cleopatra. Antony’s marriage was one thing, his commitment to his brother-in-law another. It was not in Cleopatra’s best interest for Antony and Octavian to join forces. Octavian was her mortal enemy, a walking, plotting insult to her son. On the other hand, she knew her man. Antony would be back. She did not need to make any advances, as the Parthians could be counted on to do so. She may well have come to feel perversely grateful to the Parthians, who distracted the Romans from Egypt. They accentuated her importance; Antony could hardly effect his part of the Brundisium bargain without her. Cleopatra had fair reason to believe that reconciliation fragile if not hollow. Antony and Octavian could reconcile as many times as they liked. The enmity—as Fulvia had forcefully argued months earlier—would not vanish. Cleopatra could have guessed at the daggers and did not need to. She had informers in Antony’s camp, who conveyed news of every detail—of the plots and counterplots, the skirmishing and banqueting—to Alexandria.

She was in contact at least indirectly with Mark Antony, to whom she sent a caller that winter. The Parthians swept through Phoenicia, Palestine, and Syria, to plunder Jerusalem at the end of the year. Herod, the thirty-two-year-old Judaean tetrarch, or prince—Rome would crown him king only the following year—managed a harrowing escape. Having settled his family at the fortress of Masada, he cast about for asylum. It was not immediately forthcoming; his neighbors were unwilling to displease the invaders. Herod made his way finally to Alexandria, where Cleopatra received him in style. She knew him primarily as an excitable friend of Antony’s and as a fellow Roman client but had additional reason to be favorably disposed toward him: Herod’s father had twice assisted in Ptolemaic restorations, both hers and that of her father. In 47 he had personally launched a vigorous, artful assault on the eastern frontier and rallied Egypt’s Jews to Caesar’s cause. Like their fathers, Cleopatra and Herod were former Pompeians, late converts to Caesar. They had a common enemy in the Parthians.

Herod was moreover an entertaining companion, glib and keen, fanatical in his loyalties, expert in his displays of deference. Evidently Cleopatra attempted to enlist the dashing prince in an expedition, either of her own, into Ethiopia, or with Antony, in Parthia. It was unsurprising that she should offer him a command. Jewish officers had long served in the Ptolemaic forces, and Herod was particularly distinguished. An expert horseman, he could throw a javelin with unerring precision. He declined the offer. In the end Cleopatra supplied him with a galley—she seemed forever to be handing out ships—in which to make a risky winter crossing to Rome, an unusual kind of hospitality, and one that involved Herod in a shipwreck off the coast of Cyprus. (He washed up in Rome only weeks later, to be welcomed warmly by Octavian and Antony.) In the worst light, Cleopatra’s was a diversionary tactic. Grateful though she may have felt toward Herod’s family, she had no great interest in encouraging her neighbor’s friendship with Antony.

We have no idea how or if Cleopatra delivered another piece of news, which likely preceded Herod across the Mediterranean. At the end of the year she gave birth to twins. Their father was absent—he was at about this time either marrying Octavia or on the verge of doing so—but the children did not want for glorious antecedents. In naming them Cleopatra made no concessions to their paternal heritage. She went Rome one better: she named Antony’s children Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, at once summoning the sun; the moon; her great-aunt, the remarkable second-century Ptolemaic queen; and the greatest commander of the age, the one who had tamed even the Parthians, and to whom she alone among reigning sovereigns maintained a link. Given the way she was stockpiling successors, Cleopatra was arguably doing more to unite East and West than had anyone since Alexander the Great. The sun and the moon figured in the Parthian king’s title; Cleopatra may have been sending him a message. Surely there was no better way to inaugurate a golden age than with a sun god. We know nothing of Antony’s reaction to the news but Octavian’s would have been yet more interesting. In some roundabout way, Cleopatra had seen to it that the two men were, by way of her children, again related.

She did not have to broadcast word of the sensational births. News that the enterprising queen of Egypt had borne a son named Alexander—whose father was Mark Antony and whose half brother was a child of Caesar—constituted a banner headline in 39 BC. It was enough to make Cleopatra, to borrow a much later phrase, an object of gossip for the whole world.

FROM 40 TO 37, Cleopatra lived as in a Greek drama; all the violence occurred offstage. Reports were conveyed to her from a distance. She parsed them carefully. With the Treaty of Brundisium, the Mediterranean world breathed a sigh of relief, if one that felt cold on the back of the Egyptian neck. Antony’s marriage was a thrilling solution for a worn and depleted Roman people. Throughout Italy Antony and Octavian were “immediately praised to the skies for bringing peace: men were rid of war in their own country and of the conscription of their sons, rid of the violence of military outposts and of the desertion of their slaves, rid of the plundering of farmland and of the interruption to agriculture, and rid above all of the famine which had brought them to the limits of their endurance.” In the countryside people sacrificed, “as if to savior gods,” a role both Antony and Octavian embraced. Statues were erected to the peace and coins minted. With the celebrations came misty-eyed dreams and colorful prophecies. Suddenly a rosy age of brotherhood and prosperity dawned. Virgil wrote his much palpated Fourth Eclogue at this time, possibly to celebrate the marriage of Antony and Octavia, certainly to summon a golden age. The poet pinned messianic hopes on a child who was yet to be born, a savior who would usher in a new dawn and reign over a world of piety, peace, and plenty.

For those breathless prophecies to be realized the world had to wait a little longer. In the spring of 38 Octavia dutifully produced a child. It was a daughter, however, rather than the much-heralded son. And the Parthians continued their westward advance, delighted to exploit Rome’s internal distractions. Cleopatra too kept a careful eye on the invaders as they neared her border. They were intent on expansion; the empire of their Persian predecessors had included Egypt. Antony dispatched a trusted general to engage the Parthians. Much to Antony’s annoyance, he did so beautifully, soaking up the glory for which his commander thirsted. And hungry Rome exploded again in riots. The unrest had been so great earlier that Octavian had found himself surrounded in the Forum by a seething mob, which castigated him for having exhausted the public funds. Paving stones met his attempts to explain himself. The bombardment continued even as the blood began to flow. Antony had swooped in to effect a spectacular rescue, snatching Octavian, with some difficulty and amid shouts and screams, from his assailants. He escorted his fellow triumvir to his house, for what was a very different visit from their initial interview there.

Otherwise Antony’s brother-in-law was not proving a cooperative partner, as Fulvia earlier had warned him, and—from thousands of miles away—as Cleopatra managed still to do. A friendly spirit prevailed between the two men, on congenial terms and best behavior. All the same Mark Antony—the war hero, the senior statesman, the popular favorite—seemed continually to be bested by his stubborn and sickly brother-in-law. Certainly he had reason to be astounded by Octavian’s very ability to continue on the scene. Octavian had already been several times on his deathbed. Continually coughing and sneezing, susceptible to sunstroke, a reluctant warrior, he hardly seemed a worthy match for the barrel-chested, mighty-thighed Mark Antony. Octavian was morose, paranoid, fastidious. He wore lifts in his shoes. And yet at every juncture he continued to surprise Antony. A victim of his own easygoing confidence, acting from what he perceived to be his superior position, Antony regularly found himself manipulated. He engaged in a rivalry he had not even considered one, with a “rash boy” who had come from nowhere. Antony was without guile, of which he was often oblivious. Octavian was without charm, equally lost on him. He was the kind of man who would later brag about the number of triumphs he had been offered but had not celebrated, which amounted to boasting about his humility. Antony would never for a minute have turned down such honors and cheerfully admitted as much.

Somehow Octavian managed to best his elder even in casual games of skill and chance. Whether the two bet on a cockfight or played cards, when they cast lots to decide political matters, if they tossed a ball between them, Mark Antony inevitably, improbably, wound up diminished. (It is easy to see why: Octavian could spin any outcome to his advantage. If he lost excessive amounts at the gaming table, it was, he explained, only because he “behaved with excessive sportsmanship.”) At Antony’s side Cleopatra had installed a soothsayer; many in Rome believed that an astrologer could predict a human career with as much accuracy as a solar eclipse. Antony spoke of his frustation to the seer, who cast his horoscope. Speaking either the truth or for his employer, he offered up a frank analysis. Antony’s prospects were splendid, but fated to be eclipsed by Octavian’s. The problem, explained the seer, was that Antony’s “guardian genius” lived in fear of his colleague’s, “and though it has a spirited and lofty mien when it is by itself, when his comes near, yours is cowed and humbled by it.” He was to steer clear of his colleague. The explanation made sense to Antony, who held the astrologer in new esteem and approached his brother-in-law with new wariness. In what was perhaps a veiled invitation to Alexandria, the seer “advised Antony to put as much distance as possible between himself and that young man.”

He got only as far as Athens, where he settled for the winter, and which he made his headquarters for the next two years. He passed the winter of 39 much as he had passed the previous one, in a comfortable, cultivated city of superb architecture and fine statuary. He left lieutenants in the field but did no more than look over their reports. He dismissed his entourage. He made the rounds of lectures and festivals, with a few friends and attendants or with Octavia, with whom he appeared deeply happy. Again he exchanged the purple cloak of a commander for Eastern dress. Again he exultantly passed himself off as Dionysus, his preferred form of address. He allowed Octavia—who quickly bore him a second daughter—to be hailed as Athena. We know how those tributes registered in Alexandria as Cleopatra collected every detail of them. They were particularly galling as they verged on the sacred and the imperial. What a difference an address—or a change of consort—makes: there would be no Roman hand-wringing in 39 over Antony’s winter of dissipation. In Athens he dressed like a Greek and reveled like a Greek, but he did so under the watchful eye of the virtuous Octavia. It was moreover difficult to attack his divine pretensions when Octavian affected the same. He threw a costume party for which he dressed as Apollo. Only Antony, however, conspicuously built a hut of branches, decorated it with drums, tambourines, greenery, animal skins, and other Dionysian props, and “lay inside with his friends, beginning at dawn, and got drunk.” He summoned musicians from Italy to entertain at his hillside den. At times he moved his installation up to the Acropolis, “and the entire city of Athens was illuminated by the lamps that hung from the ceilings.”

He continued to be perplexed by his brother-in-law’s ability to control the conversation. While commanding a reputation for stolid probity, Octavian managed in 38 to slip out of his marriage on the day his wife gave birth, to wed Livia, six months’ pregnant with her previous husband’s child. It was a marriage that delivered Octavian to the upper ranks of Roman society, making him Antony’s equal. (Despite the connection to Caesar, Octavian’s lineage was not noble.) Repeatedly he managed to cripple and confound his brother-in-law: If he promised one thing he delivered another. If Antony headed east Octavian summoned him west—then neglected to appear. He allowed Antony to recruit soldiers on Italian soil, next to impossible, as Octavian governed that territory. It made for a tenuous balancing act, but one that Antony was determined to maintain. He swallowed his pride and masked his irritation, even as his patience was rubbed raw.

Matters came finally to a head late in the spring of 37, when the two met alongside a river, in the south of the Italian peninsula, to air several seasons of grievances. Octavia helped to broker a peace, delivering an impassioned Helen of Troy speech. She had no desire to watch her husband and brother destroy each other. The result was the Pact of Tarentum, a renewal of the expired triumvirate. Antony would be recognized as dictator in the East through December 33. He emerged satisfied: “Nearly everything,” notes Dio, “was going as he wished.” He prepared at last for his campaign and headed east, to Syria. Octavia and their two daughters accompanied him as far as western Greece, where he sent them back. Octavia was pregnant again. Further travel, Antony protested, would be detrimental to her health. Already she had six children—including those from prior marriages—in her care. He was eager that, as he put it, “she might not share his danger while he was warring against the Parthians.” This was all perfectly true.

If Octavian was a flinty master of indirection, capable of appearing to cooperate while doing no such thing, Antony was a quick-change artist, given to dramatic about-faces. In Athens he was one day the layabout, languidly attending festivals in Octavia’s company and neglecting public business, the next, having rethought his wardrobe and snapped to attention, the sharp-minded military man, a tornado of activity, all diplomatic business, at the magnetic center of an entourage. Something gave way in the last months of 37. Possibly the long list of insults, disillusionments, and dodges suddenly added up. Possibly he burst with pent-up frustration. He was a soldier, whose glorious campaign had been postponed and postponed. His lieutenant reaped a series of victories in the East, victories that were rightfully his. Perhaps Antony realized that between them his wife and brother-in-law were holding him in check, that he was being played for the fool, that collaboration seemed less and less possible. Certainly the obvious way to secure the upper hand at home was with a blazing military victory abroad. To crush the Parthians was to eliminate Octavian, a strange sort of assymetrical accounting, not entirely unlike Auletes’ Roman calculation of two decades earlier.

Plutarch offers a different explanation for the reversal of 37. He acknowledges the Parthian fixation but cites as well “a dire evil which had been slumbering for a long time.” Antony’s friends assumed that over the course of three and a half years that hankering had released its hold, charmed away by Octavia, or at least “lulled to rest by better considerations.” In Plutarch’s account the desire suddenly smoldered, to grow more and more combustible as Antony traveled east, where ultimately it reignited and burst into flames. Plutarch meant to get his history right but it should be remembered that he was making of Antony’s life a cautionary tale. His Antony is a talented man brought to ruin by his own passion; the moral may have been more important than the details. Whatever the circumstances, safely arrived in Syria, Antony defied both his better instincts and cool counsel. He sent a messenger to Alexandria. Cleopatra was to meet him in Antioch, the third great city of the Mediterranean world. This time she set sail posthaste. Not long after the couple’s arrival in the Syrian capital, coins circulated bearing joint portraits of Antony and Cleopatra. It is unclear who is meant to be on the obverse and who on the reverse, which was, in brief, the intermittent riddle of the next seven tumultuous years. Antony never saw Octavia again.