Cleopatra: A Life

AN OBJECT OF GOSSIP FOR THE WHOLE WORLD

“The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of.”

—THUCYDIDES

SHE HAD NO need to indulge in costume drama this time around. Cleopatra knew before she sailed that fall that Mark Antony was heading east, finally to settle the Roman score with Parthia, a campaign he had delayed now for four years. She knew of his preoccupation from their riotous winter together. From Caesar she would have heard details of the original plans for that expedition. As he made his way toward Antioch, Antony reorganized Asia Minor, carving out kingdoms for those he trusted and those who supported him. He established a stable frontier; it was essential that he shore up his rear before proceeding east. To the same end Antony and Octavian had together arranged a kingship for Herod when he had finally washed up in Rome that winter. Of Idumaean and Arab descent, Herod was by no means the obvious candidate for the Judaean throne. His tenacity rather than his heritage secured him the crown. No dynast more eloquently explained away his misguided loyalty to Cassius; it would fairly be said of Herod that he had “slinked into” power. Antony had known his father, also a friend to Rome. And he had met Herod as a teenager. The personal rapport counted for a good deal.

A rough-edged opportunist, Herod was endearingly reckless, a master of the miraculous escape. The evidence suggests a fascination with him in Rome, on Octavian’s part as much as on Antony’s. Not coincidentally, Herod was as much a swashbuckler when it came to raising funds as throwing a javelin; he had an astonishing talent for plucking gold from thin air. (His subjects had some insight into his methods.) The Senate unanimously confirmed the kingship after which Octavian and Antony escorted Herod between them to the Capitol, a signal honor. Consuls and magistrates led the way. Antony argued that the appointment would be advantageous to the Eastern campaign; he afterward threw a banquet in the new king’s honor. By some accounts Herod owed his throne equally to Cleopatra. The Senate was as much motivated by fear of her as by admiration of him. They distinctly preferred two monarchs in the region to one. There was ample reason to be wary of a client queen at the head of a rich kingdom, with her finger on Rome’s grain supply.

That logic worked as well to Cleopatra’s advantage. Antony could risk no upheavals in Egypt. She alone could rule that kingdom with authority. Clearly few could run the country better. As ever, she left Alexandria secure in the knowledge that no Roman could succeed against Parthia—a rich, immense, and well-defended empire—without her financial support. In other words, as she made her way north that fall, along the rocky coast of the eastern Mediterranean, she knew that the balance of power had subtly shifted. For all of Antony’s bravado, despite his superb army, she was very much in possession of the upper hand. Vanity having changed little in two millennia, it seems fair to assume that she and her attendants took scrupulous pains with her appearance. She had not seen Mark Antony in three and a half years, years any woman would want to render invisible. She had heard about Octavia, the round-faced, gleaming-haired beauty. There was no call for ambrosial robes, gem-encrusted party favors, wall-to-wall roses this time around, however. Cleopatra had something better. On this trip she took the children.

In Antioch, a miniature, less profligate version of Alexandria, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene met their father for the first time. He acknowledged the twins as his own. It could only have been a joyous meeting. Antony had Hellenistic pretensions. He had insinuated himself into the Ptolemaic dynasty; his children were now in line for the Egyptian throne. Moreover, he had a new son, something Octavia, a paragon on every other front, had not produced. (Antony had two older sons, by Fulvia.) Some have gone so far as to suggest that it was precisely her failure to provide a male heir—one who would fulfill Virgil’s prophecy and usher in the much-awaited golden age—that drove Antony into the arms of Cleopatra. Generally Antony liked children and did not believe it possible to have too many. He was fond of saying that “noble families were extended by the successive begettings of many kings.” He was hardly the kind of man who could have resisted a Greek-speaking minor deity of a three-year-old who dressed as a royal, who addressed Antony as Father, and who—if sculpture can be trusted—in his fleshy face and mop of bouncing curls resembled him as well. Establishing a divine claim had been at the top of Antony’s agenda for years. He had been edging that way since Philippi, following the example of his illustrious mentor. With his illegitimate children, Antony legitimately stepped—as a modern historian has put it—“into his predecessor’s bedroom slippers.” It was especially appropriate that he do so in Antioch, a scenic, well-provisioned river city at the foot of a majestic mountain, with a colonnaded downtown grid and an ample supply of stadiums and gardens, monumental fountains and natural springs. Bathed in westerly breezes from May to October, Antioch was sunny and windless in winter, with delightful baths and a lively market. Well inclined toward Caesar, who had commissioned a statue of himself there after leaving Cleopatra in 47, the Syrian capital warmly welcomed his celebrated protégé.

Cleopatra had every personal reason to delight in the long-delayed family reunion, but the political satisfactions were greater still. Antony had taken her fishing advice. He was doing what she felt—or for her own reasons led him to believe—he did best. Devoting himself to a worthy sport, he was reeling in “cities, provinces, and kingdoms.” It is not inaccurate to say that “realms and islands were as plates dropped from his pocket,” as would be suggested later; for the most part there was a compelling logic to Antony’s dispositions. He engaged in a long-needed, often-attempted ordering of the restive East. In a multiethnic, multicultural region of shifting alliances—one that had resisted thirty years of Roman efforts at reorganization—he recognized talent, rewarded competence and loyalty. As Antony liked to say, “The greatness of the Roman empire was made manifest not by what the Romans received, but by what they bestowed.” Consolidating kingdoms, he ably merged territories and assigned lands. He redrew geography.

He was in his element, and manifestly invincible. No one doubted his imminent triumph over the dreaded Parthians. Rarely had anyone assembled “an army more conspicuous for prowess, endurance, or youthful vigor.” Antony’s “made all Asia quiver.” It was the greatest force he would command, its men uniquely devoted to their largehearted, freewheeling general. Each preferred his good opinion to their very lives, a devotion born, Plutarch effuses, of “the nobility of his family, his eloquence, his frank and open manners, his liberal and magnificent habits, his familiarity in talking with everybody.” Antony’s mood was contagious; there were high spirits all around. Handing out gifts is always uplifting, and munificence was something he did especially well. It was a corollary to his embrace of large families. In sunny Antioch—the two likely stayed at the island palace, nestled in the bend of the placid river—Cleopatra had reason to congratulate herself, and to believe that, emerging from five years of chaos and confusion, she had backed the right horse.

Upon her September arrival Antony moreover made her an extraordinary present. Not only did he acknowledge his three-year-old twins, but he showered a vast collection of territories on their mother. He confirmed her authority over the island of Cyprus, which even Caesar had not officially granted her. The memory of its loss, and the effects of that monumental loss, could only have burned bright. To Cleopatra’s lands he added as well wooded Coele-Syria (part of which is today Lebanon); lush, far-off Cyrene (in modern Libya); a generous swath of cedar-heavy Cilicia (the eastern coast of Turkey); portions of Crete; and all but two cities of the thriving Phoenician coast. In several cases Antony eliminated sovereigns—if an offense could not be found, one could always be fabricated—so that Cleopatra might assume their territories. As of 37 Cleopatra ruled over nearly the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, from what is today eastern Libya, in Africa, north through Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, to southern Turkey, excepting only slivers of Judaea.

Antony’s military needs and Roman score-settling largely determined the size and shape of the grant. So did his opinion of Cleopatra; she was proficient, reliable, resourceful. This was what Rome looked for in its client rulers, who had several advantages over Roman appointees, one of which was that they did not need to be paid. More to the point, Antony needed a navy. By the time of the Tarentum treaty he had delivered one hundred bronze-beaked galleys and ten triremes to Octavian. Cleopatra knew how to build ships. For good reason Antony assigned timber-rich provinces to a monarch who had the tradesmen and the resources to transform them into a worthy fleet; in that regard no one in the Mediterranean world was as valuable to Antony as was Cleopatra. As Plutarch acknowledged, her gifts were but some among many distributed to Eastern rulers. At the same time, she was one of the rare sovereigns who remained in place; Antony regularly circumvented established dynasties in making appointments. And Cleopatra received a far more generous gift than that bestowed on any other ruler. By September 37, she had nearly reconstituted the Ptolemaic Empire in its third-century glory.

For good reason she declared a new era for Egypt. Cleopatra’s sixteenth regnal year was henceforth to be known as the year one, a double dating she continued throughout her reign. And at thirty-two she redefined herself, assuming an original title. Among the many unconventional privileges Cleopatra enjoyed, naming herself surely figured among the most significant, on par with choosing her consort or managing her own income. She was henceforth “Queen Cleopatra, the Goddess, the Younger, Father-Loving and Fatherland-Loving.” She was as astute a manipulator of nomenclature as of much else, and a good deal has been read into that title. With it Cleopatra announced not only a new age but a full-scale political reorientation. She may have appended the final term to discourage murmurs that she was selling out to the Romans; with it Cleopatra signaled to her subjects that she was first and foremost their pharaoh.^* Certainly the imagery on her coins is reassuringly consistent with that of previous Ptolemies. By any name she was as powerful a figure as existed on the non-Roman stage. When Antony had vanquished the Parthians, she would be empress of the East. Various coastal cities acknowledged as much, issuing coins in Antony and Cleopatra’s honor. She had every reason to be ecstatic. There was not a smudge on the horizon.

Cleopatra could only have looked forward to celebrating the new dawn in Alexandria. Having sacrificed all after the Ides of March, she had not only regained a foothold but fared better this time around. Their pride in the newly established empire aside, how did her subjects take to her close collaboration with a second Roman? There is no trace of scandal. Her people remained focused on the practical implications of Cleopatra’s diplomacy. “It seems to me,” an eminent scholar has suggested, “that the loves and births of a female pharaoh struck them as divine matters, and that they questioned their queen only when her tax collectors pressed too stringently.” She had cleverly solved a political puzzle. The lack of resistance at home may indicate as well that she was not unduly generous with Mark Antony. She may have agreed to pay for his legions, but that Cleopatra could afford without oppressive levies on her people. Nor was there reason to believe Antony’s territorial dispositions set off alarms in Rome. They were part of a consistent foreign policy. They enriched the coffers and secured the frontiers. In Egypt, Cleopatra’s popularity could only have been at an all-time high.

In light of the gift, many have concluded that Mark Antony and Cleopatra married in Antioch that fall, an awkward proposition as Antony already had a wife. And given his munificence, many have assumed that Cleopatra specified what she would like on the occasion, to which request Antony acceded. There is no evidence of either in Plutarch, the sole source for the reunion, and not a chronicler inclined to omit such a transaction. He allows only that Antony acknowledged their mutual children, by no means tantamount to marriage. Certainly Antony had as much if not more to be gained as did Cleopatra: Even Plutarch could not call it a mistake for the Roman triumvir to ally himself with the richest woman in his world. His immediate, practical needs dovetailed neatly with her long-range imperial ambitions. There is less evidence of a wedding than of Cleopatra’s thirst for territory, which manifested itself for the first time now. Either in 37 or the following year, she is said to have pestered Antony for the bulk of Judaea. He apparently refused. (His tenacity on that front has been held up as evidence that he was not putty in her strong hands. He withheld the grant, hence he was not out of his mind with love. Just as possibly, Cleopatra knew her limits and never asked for Judaea, which leaves open the question of Antony’s emotional state.) It is unlikely that she had to haggle for territory, though she was well positioned to do so. Antony needed to finance a campaign, pay an army, supplement a navy. Cleopatra needed nothing. Hers was the better negotiating position.

Whatever transpired between the two, the perception among the other client kings in the region was that Antony was deeply, resolutely attached to Cleopatra. It is more difficult to read what was in her heart, at least in 37. We have a few hints, however. Before or after Egypt expanded to its third-century proportions, before or after she reset the calendar, Antony and Cleopatra resumed their sexual relationship, picking up where they had left off in Tarsus. And evidently Antony’s presence meant as much to Cleopatra as did his patronage. In March or April 36, she accompanied him along the broad, flat road from Antioch to the edge of the Roman empire, an overland trip that took her hundreds of miles out of her way. It was unnecessary for her and less comfortable than it might otherwise have been, as she was again pregnant. Antony and Cleopatra said their good-byes on the banks of the Euphrates, where the river narrowed into a deep channel, in what is today eastern Turkey. He crossed the wooden bridge into Parthian territory, to march north with his resplendent army, through the vast obstacle course of steppes and rugged mountains that stretch beyond the Euphrates. Cleopatra headed south.

SHE TOOK THE long way home, making a kind of triumphal, overland tour of her new possessions. Many were happy to receive her; some of the despots Antony eliminated on her behalf had been nefarious. Around Damascus, for example, Cleopatra now ruled a territory previously controlled by a tribe of predatory, archery-obsessed bandits. With her entourage she wound her way over the rolling hills and rugged cliffs of modern-day Syria and Lebanon, through twisting passes and deep ravines, to wind up on the crest of a mountain chain, between two lofty hills, in Jerusalem. Surrounded by turreted walls and a series of square, thirty-foot towers, Jerusalem was an eminent commercial center, rich in the arts. Cleopatra had business with Herod, who—though an untiring negotiator—could not have been in any great hurry to discuss it.

When last they had met, Herod had been a fugitive and a suppliant. He now sat uneasily on the Judaean throne, king of a people he had had to conquer in order to rule.^* Presumably Cleopatra and her retinue stayed with the newly established sovereign, a collector of homes and a man with a Ptolemaic taste for luxury, though his legendarily opulent palace south of the city had yet to be built. Probably Cleopatra was Herod’s guest at his home in the Upper City of Jerusalem, by her definition more of a fortress than a palace. In the course of the visit she met Herod’s fractious extended family, with whom she was about to enter into a subversive correspondence. Herod had the misfortune to share an address with several implacable enemies, first among them his contemptuous, highborn mother-in-law, Alexandra. She represented but one aggravation in Herod’s largely female household. He lived as well with his insinuating mother; a grievance-loving, overly loyal sister; and Mariamme, the cool, exceptionally beautiful wife who had married him as a teenager, and who, to his frustration, somehow could never get past the fact that Herod had murdered half of her family. Though Cleopatra had assisted him three years earlier, though they shared a patron and were together navigating the same roiling Roman waters—each was doing his best to sustain a skittish, peculiar country in the shadow of a rising superpower—he had no need for yet another domineering woman. Unlike the others, this one moreover had designs on his treasury.

For Cleopatra’s visit we have only one source, hostile to his native East, much taken with Rome, working at least partially from Herod’s account. The Jewish historian Josephus obscures but cannot entirely camouflage what transpired: Herod and Cleopatra spent some intensive time in each other’s company, part of it hammering out the details of his obligations. Antony had granted Cleopatra the exclusive right to the Dead Sea bitumen, or asphalt, glutinous lumps of which floated to the surface of the lake. Bitumen was essential to mortar, incense, and insecticide, to embalming and caulking. A reed basket, smeared with asphalt, could hold water. Plastered with it, a boat is waterproof. The concession was a lucrative one. Also Cleopatra’s were the proceeds of Jericho, the popular winter resort, lush with date-palm groves and balsam gardens. Very likely she rode out across a searing desert to inspect those two hundred acres in the Jordan River valley, where Herod had a secondary palace. All other scents paled in comparison to sweet balsam, which grew exclusively in Judaea. The fragrant shrub’s oil, seed, and bark were precious. They constituted the region’s most valuable export. As for Jericho’s dates, they were the finest in the ancient world, the source of its most potent wine. In modern terms, it was as if Cleopatra had been granted no part of Kuwait, only the proceeds of its oil fields.

Herod found the transaction particularly painful as Judaea was a poor country, parched and stony, with few fertile areas, no port, and a rapidly expanding population. His revenues were a risible fraction of Cleopatra’s. At the same time his ambitions exceeded his territory; he had no desire to be “King of a wilderness.” There appears to have been some bickering over terms, in a negotiation that proved Cleopatra more intently focused on bitumen deliveries than seductions. She was relentless and unsparing; the result was highly favorable to her. Herod agreed to lease the Jericho lands for 200 talents annually. He consented as well to guarantee and collect the rent on the bitumen monopoly from his neighbor, the Nabatean king. By agreeing to do so Herod spared himself the company of any of Cleopatra’s agents or soldiers. Otherwise the arrangement worked entirely to her benefit, all the more so as it made both men miserable. It left Herod to extract funds from a sovereign who had denied him refuge during the Parthian invasion, and who made his payments only under duress. Purposely and effectively, Cleopatra set two men who disliked her, a Jew and an Arab, against each other. (Malchus, the Nabatean sovereign, would have his revenge later.) Herod nonetheless upheld his end of the agreement with Cleopatra. He felt that “it would be unsafe to give her any reason to hate him.”

The visit was by all other measures an unsuccessful one. The two inveterate charmers failed entirely to endear themselves to each other. Cleopatra may have patronized her fellow sovereign. As his royal mother-in-law tirelessly reminded him, Herod was a commoner. Nor was he exactly Jewish, given his mother’s religion; in the eyes of the Jews Herod was a gentile, while in all other eyes he was a Jew. He was as a consequence perennially insecure about his throne, a situation not unfamiliar to Cleopatra, who may have exacerbated it. Her Aramaic may have been better than his Greek; several years her senior, Herod was little educated, sorely deficient in history and culture, sensitive on both counts. (It says a good deal that when he decided to remedy the situation years later he hired the finest tutor in the business, one who—in addition to his own literary and musical accomplishments—had the best credential possible: he had been tutor to Cleopatra’s children.) It could not have helped that Herod would have appeared graceless in Cleopatra’s silken presence.

Where passions run high, the reverse of the great foreign policy axiom can also prove true: the friend of one’s friend is one’s enemy. Perhaps Herod felt about Cleopatra the way you inevitably do about someone whose palace puts yours to shame. She may have been too flush with her Antioch success to conciliate; she may well have hinted that she coveted Herod’s land. Debts are difficult to acknowledge, and each owed the other. Cleopatra had underwritten Herod’s flight to Rome. His father had rushed to Caesar’s aid in Alexandria. In any event the famously entertaining Herod had a violent reaction to his visitor. He doubtless arranged a series of royal banquets for Cleopatra. And arguing that he would be providing a community service, he recommended to his council of state that they arrange as well for her murder. It could easily be done, while she was in Jerusalem and at their mercy. He would eliminate a covetous, conniving neighbor, but everyone stood to benefit, Antony most of all. Heatedly Herod explained himself: “In this way, he said, he would rid of many evils all those to whom she had already been vicious or was likely to be in future. At the same time, he argued, this would be a boon to Antony, for not even to him would she show loyalty if some occasion or need should compel him to ask for it.”

Herod buttressed his case in the usual way; as ever, the diabolical woman was the sexual one. In addition to all else, he explained to his advisers, the Egyptian hussy had “laid a treacherous snare for him”! Declaring herself overcome with love, she had attempted to force herself upon him, “for she was by nature used to enjoying this kind of pleasure without disguise.” Herod had as much reason as anyone to observe that Cleopatra was a tough negotiator. And if you are being taken advantage of by a woman, it is convenient to turn that woman into a sexual predator, capable of unspeakable depravity, “a slave to her lusts.” (It was not such a great leap. “Cupidity” and “concupiscence” have the same Latin root.) Having managed to evade her unblushing proposals, Herod took his offended sensibilities to his council. The woman’s lewdness was an outrage.

Herod’s advisers begged him to reconsider. He was being rash. The risks were too great, as Cleopatra herself—closely guarded, well surrounded, and surely more astute about the political ramifications—surely knew. His council offered Herod a little lesson in the perverse dynamics of affection, one that might have come in handy later. In the first place, Antony would fail to appreciate Cleopatra’s murder even were its advantages pointed out to him. Second, “his love would flame up the more fiercely if he thought that she had been taken from him by violence and treachery.” He would emerge a man obsessed. Herod would be roundly condemned. He was, Herod’s advisers emphasized, out of his league with this woman, the most influential of the day. Could he not bring himself to take the high road?

Cleopatra was of course far too smart to seduce—or attempt to seduce—a small-time sovereign. She had nothing to gain by trapping Herod in such a way. It was unlikely that she would seduce a subordinate of her patron, especially improbable that she would fling herself into Herod’s arms at a time when she was—by now quite visibly; it was nearly summer—pregnant with Antony’s child. A Roman legion was stationed in Jerusalem to secure Herod’s throne. Those men were unlikely to remain silent. Artful though he was, Herod had, as later events would reveal, a limited understanding of the human heart. With difficulty, his council dissuaded him from any assassination attempts. He would have no defense, the plot “being against such a woman as was of the highest dignity of any of her sex at that time in the world.” Herod could afford neither to offend Cleopatra nor allow her any reason whatever to hate him. Surely he could bring himself to shrug off the dishonor her brazen advances had caused him?^*

Assuming these deliberations reached Cleopatra’s ears, it is difficult not to hear her cackling with delight. She had and knew she had Antony’s loyalty. She had better reason to consider disposing of Herod, who alone stood between her and full possession of the eastern coastline. As she well knew, his land had at several junctures belonged to the Ptolemies. In the end Herod’s council calmed him. Respectfully and politely, he escorted his visitor through the blazing heat of the Sinai to the Egyptian border. If Cleopatra knew of the discussions—and it is difficult to believe that she did not—theirs must have been a charged, tedious trip over molten sand. Surely it was so for the resentful Judaean king. At Pelusium he sent Cleopatra off, heavily pregnant and laden with gifts, a very different return than the furtive one she had made from that outpost in 48.

Early in the fall, one blessed with a copious flood, she gave birth to her fourth child. In the ancient world perhaps more than in any other there was a good deal in a name; she called her new son Ptolemy Philadelphus, baldly evoking the glory days of the third century, the last time her family had reigned over as great an empire as did Cleopatra, the Goddess, the Younger, Father-Loving and Fatherland-Loving, in 36.

TO HEROD’S CHAGRIN, he was not so easily rid of this grasping, business-minded woman. During her stay at the Judaean court Cleopatra had made a few friends, to whom she was about to prove devilishly helpful. Shortly after the return to Egypt, she received word from Alexandra, Herod’s mother-in-law. The Hasmonean princess had found in the Egyptian queen a sympathetic spirit, reason enough for Herod to have resented his royal visitor. He would condemn Cleopatra for having coolly eliminated most of her family—it was a rich accusation, coming from someone who had murdered his way to the throne and would continue his bloody spree for decades—but he had equal reason to envy her for having done so. For the most part, class and religious differences accounted for Herod and Alexandra’s mutual antipathy. Not only was Herod Jewish on the wrong side, but the Idumeans were new converts to Judaism. The Jews had little use for them. Herod’s wife and her family were by contrast noble-born descendants of generations of Jewish high priests, an office said to have originated with Moses’s brother. In 37 Herod ventured outside that family to appoint a new high priest. He did so although there was an obvious and immensely appealing candidate at hand: Mariamme’s sixteen-year-old brother, the tall, disarmingly attractive Aristobulus. Herod preferred an undistinguished official in the lucrative, commanding office; its trappings alone conferred a kind of otherworldly power. Fitted with a gold-embroidered diadem, the high priest ministered to his people in a floor-length, tasseled blue robe, set with precious stones and hung with tinkling golden bells. Two brooches fixed a purple, scarlet, and blue cape, also studded with gems, upon his shoulders. Even on a lesser individual, the accessories were enough “to make one feel that one had come into the presence of a man who belonged to a different world.”

In bypassing his young brother-in-law Herod set off a maelstrom in his household. To Alexandra—daughter of a priest and widow of a prince—the appointment was an “unendurable insult.” With the help of a traveling musician she smuggled word of the indignity to Cleopatra, on whom she felt she could count for female solidarity, especially royal female solidarity. She knew Cleopatra had little patience with Herod and that she had Antony’s ear. Could she not intercede with him, implored Alexandra, to obtain the high priesthood for her son? If Cleopatra did so, Antony appears to have had greater matters on his mind than the domestic affairs in Herod’s household. He made no effort to intervene, although at some later date in 36 the double-jointed Dellius turned up in Jerusalem on unrelated business. Dellius had been the one to lure Cleopatra to Tarsus; the match of the conspiring mother-in-law and the contortionist adviser was almost too perfect. Alexandra’s children were uncommonly handsome, to Dellius’s eye more “the offspring of some god rather than of human beings.” As ever, pulchritude sent his lively mind whirring. He persuaded Alexandra to have portraits painted of Mariamme and Aristobulus and to submit them straightaway to Antony. Were the Roman triumvir to set eyes upon them, promised Dellius, “She would not be denied anything she might ask.”

Alexandra did as Dellius asked, which suggests either naïveté on her part or something more toxic. She could be trusted to detect a plot from one hundred paces away and to supply one, should none be brewing. If Josephus can be taken at his word, Dellius intended to recruit sexual partners of both genders for Antony. In receipt of the portraits Antony hesitated, at least so far as Mariamme was concerned. He knew Cleopatra would be furious. Josephus leaves unclear whether Cleopatra was likely to object on moral grounds or out of jealousy. She would in any event be slow to forgive. Evidently Antony did not hesitate to send for Mariamme’s brother. Here Herod changed his mind. For his part, he deemed it unwise to send the most powerful Roman of his time a striking sixteen-year-old boy, “to use him for erotic purposes.” Instead Herod assembled his council and his family, to complain of Alexandra’s incessant complots. She colluded with Cleopatra to usurp his throne. She schemed to replace him with her son. He would do the right thing and appoint her son to the priesthood. Dellius’s proposition may obliquely have prompted the concession; Aristobulus’s appointment would keep him in Judaea, out of Antony’s clutches and far from Cleopatra’s schemes. Alexandra responded with a flood of tears. She begged her son-in-law for forgiveness. She regretted her “usual outspokenness,” her heavy-handedness, doubtless an unhappy consequence of her rank. She was overcome with gratitude. Henceforth she would be obedient in all ways.

Aristobulus had barely donned the brilliant robes of the priesthood when Alexandra found herself under house arrest, with round-the-clock surveillance. Herod continued to suspect his mother-in-law of treachery. Alexandra exploded with rage. She had no intention of living out her life “in slavery and fear” and turned to the obvious address. To Cleopatra went “a long sustained lament about the state in which she found herself, and urging her to give her as much help as she possibly could.” Again taking a page from Euripides—“it is right for women to stand by a woman’s cause”—Cleopatra contrived an ingenious escape. She sent a ship to convey Alexandra and Aristobulus to safety. She would provide asylum for them both. It was now that—either on Cleopatra’s counsel or her own initiative—Alexandra arranged for two coffins to be built. With her servants’ assistance, she and Aristobulus climbed inside, to be carried from Jerusalem to the coast, where Cleopatra’s ship waited. Unfortunately, one of the servants betrayed Alexandra; as the fugitives were conveyed from the palace, Herod stepped from the darkness to surprise them. Though he yearned to do so he did not dare punish Alexandra, for fear of inciting Cleopatra. Instead he made a great show of forgiveness, while quietly vowing revenge.

By October 35 Herod was at his wits’ end with his wife and her family. His mother-in-law was in league with his greatest rival. With a far more legitimate claim to the throne, his brother-in-law commanded a dangerous degree of popular devotion. For Herod, the sight of the young man, with his noble bearing and his impeccable good looks, in his majestic robes and golden headdress, presiding at the altar over the Sukkoth festivities, was unbearable. In his subjects’ affection for the high priest he read a rebuke to his kingship. Meanwhile Herod was undone in the intimacy of his home by his wife, whose “hatred of him was as great as was his love of her.” She manifested little of the lewdness Herod condemned in Cleopatra and had taken to groaning aloud at his embrace. He could not retaliate, even indirectly, against his mother-in-law, too closely bound to Cleopatra. He could neutralize his overly promising brother-in-law, however. In the course of the unseasonably hot fall, Herod invited Aristobulus to join him at Jericho for a swim in the palace pool, nestled amid formal gardens. With friends and servants, the two roughhoused in the cool water at dusk. By nightfall, the seventeen-year-old Aristobulus had—amid the merrymaking—been held underwater a little too long. The high priest was dead.

Grand shows of counterfeit emotion followed on both sides. Herod arranged for an expensive, incense-heavy funeral, shed abundant tears, and mourned loudly. Alexandra bore up bravely and quietly, the better to avenge her son’s murder later. (Only Mariamme was candid. She denounced both her husband and his uncouth mother and sister.) In no way deceived by Herod’s account of the accident, Alexandra wrote again to Cleopatra, who commiserated with her. The loss was tragic and unnecessary. Alexandra could entrust the unseemly matter to her; she would take it up with Antony. On his return from Parthia Cleopatra urged him to punish Aristobulus’s murderer. Surely it was not right, she contended hotly, “that Herod, who had been appointed by him as king of a country which he had no claim to rule, should have exhibited such lawlessness toward those who were the real kings.” Hers was a petition in favor of proper convention, of knowing one’s station, for the rights of sovereigns. Antony agreed she had a point.

Herod’s fears of Cleopatra’s influence were well founded. A summons arrived in due course from the Syrian coast; he was to explain himself to Antony. Having proceeded thus far by bribery and bravado, Herod was not generally cowed by authority. He tended rather to merry displays of presumption. And though he was said to have headed off timidly, he proved as adept at defusing the situation as had Cleopatra, six years earlier, in Tarsus, which was another way of saying either that Mark Antony had no great gift for calling client kings to account, or that he was powerless in the presence of a master sycophant. The visit does reveal Antony to have been in no way putty in Cleopatra’s hands. Herod arrived with lavish gifts and equally lavish explanations. He handily neutralized Cleopatra’s arguments. Surely, Antony assured him, “it was improper to demand an accounting of his reign from a king, since in that case he would not be a king at all, and those who had given a man this office and conferred authority upon him should permit him to exercise it.” He purportedly said the same to Cleopatra, who would do well to concern herself less with Herod’s affairs—or so Herod claimed, while boasting of the many honors Antony had shown him. The two dined together daily. Antony invited Herod to accompany him as he transacted business. And all this “in spite of Cleopatra’s bitter charges.” There was nothing but goodwill between the two men; the Judaean king reported that he was safe from that “wicked woman” and her insatiable greed.

He was on that count slightly mistaken, although Herod did manage more or less to extricate himself from the feminine machinations at home. Within months of his return, his maniacally vindictive sister convinced him that her husband and Mariamme had had an affair in his absence. It was a surefire way of dispensing both with a malignant sister-in-law and an unwanted husband. The claim was perfectly calibrated to fluster an unloved, besotted man; it worked the desired effect. (As Euripides observed in a Hellenistic favorite among his plays, “There seems to be some pleasure for women in sick talk of one another.”) Without so much as a hearing, Herod ordered his brother-in-law to be put to death. And for good measure, he threw Alexandra into prison, on the grounds that she must at least in some part be responsible for his troubles. Herod was someone whose loyalties could be bought and who assumed the same of others. He was forever revising his will.

Even without Alexandra’s assistance, Cleopatra would continue to cause Herod headaches—or attempt to—for a few years longer. He was said to have fortified Masada out of fear of her, stockpiling grain, oil, dates, and wine in the fortress. He could not rest easy with the Egyptian queen in the neighborhood.^* And Herod’s female relations continued to seethe with hatred for his wife. They easily convinced him that Mariamme had in the end secretly sent her portrait to Antony. Herod had “a ready ear only for slander” and inclined always toward those who indulged it; he liked to be proved right in his dire delusions. The accusation “struck him like a thunderbolt” and caused him to obsess anew about Cleopatra’s deadly schemes.^* Surely this was her doing: “He was menaced, he reckoned, with the loss not merely of his consort but of his life.” He sentenced his wife to death. As she was led to her execution her mother leapt out at her, to scream and pull at her hair. She was, Alexandra berated her daughter, an evil, insolent woman, insufficiently grateful to Herod, and entirely deserving of her fate. Mariamme walked serenely past, without acknowledging her mother. She was twenty-eight. In an additional proto-Shakespearean twist, Herod was undone by her death. His desire for Mariamme only increased; he convinced himself that she was still alive; he was physically incapacitated. He suffered precisely as his advisers had predicted Antony would if deprived of Cleopatra. Ultimately Herod left Jerusalem on an extended, recuperative hunting trip. Alexandra hatched a few new conspiracies in his absence. He ordered her execution on his return.

THROUGHOUT 36 MARK ANTONY reported on his dazzling success in Parthia to Rome; the city held festivals, and performed sacrifices, in his honor. Cleopatra’s intelligence may have been better. She was well over a thousand miles from the snowy theater of action but closer than was the Italian peninsula. She was every bit as invested in Antony’s victory; she had the resources to arrange for regular emissaries. Nonetheless she may have been surprised by the messenger who arrived in Alexandria late in the year. He had an urgent summons, unlike any she had previously received. Probably a month in coming, it brought a season of exhilarations to an end. Antony and his army had returned from their Parthian adventure. It had taken them nearly to the Caspian Sea, in what is today northern Iran. Theirs had been a mere jaunt compared to Alexander the Great’s, but they had made an eighteen-hundred-mile trek all the same. They camped now in a small village south of modern-day Beirut, with an excellent harbor, in which Cleopatra could land without difficulty. Antony implored her to join him posthaste, and to bring with her substantial gold, provisions, and clothing for his men. She had by no means expected to see him so soon. Parthia could hardly have been conquered in a matter of months. Caesar had anticipated a campaign of at least three years.

Plutarch reports that Cleopatra was slow in coming, but it is unclear whether she actually delayed or if it only seemed as if she did to Mark Antony, for whom she could not arrive quickly enough. It was winter; heavy rains and gale winds lashed the Mediterranean. She had supplies to assemble and a fleet to prepare. She needed either to collect or mint silver denarii. She had given birth months earlier. She knew she was heading toward disturbing news. For his part, Antony was restless and agitated, though Plutarch may have erred in imputing cause and effect, alleging that Antony was beside himself because Cleopatra was dilatory. The purported delay had little to do with the authentic distress. Antony attempted to distract himself by drinking heavily—already it was acknowledged that “there is no other medicine for misery”—but was without the patience to sit through a meal. He interrupted each one to run to shore, where he scanned the horizon again and again for Egyptian sails, irregular behavior in a precise and precisely disciplined Roman camp, where everyone dined together. Plutarch accuses Cleopatra of having dawdled but the point is that she came, in a season of short days and long nights, with the requested items, probably arriving soon after Antony’s forty-eighth birthday. She delivered “an abundance of clothing and money.” Both Plutarch and Dio retail a disgruntled rumor: Some claimed that she brought clothing and supplies but that Antony settled his own gold on his men, passing the monies off as a gift from Cleopatra, who had little patience for his Parthian obsession. Either way he was buying goodwill toward Egypt, clearly a priority for him, and at a time when he could ill afford to do so.

Slow-moving Egyptian queens aside, Antony had every reason for despair. There had been no dazzling success in Parthia, only a demoralizing campaign followed by a disastrous retreat. From the start he had made strategic mistakes. Given the size of his army and the length of their march, he had left his siege equipment behind. He could not always find the Parthians but they could always find him: swarms of talented archers and pikemen repeatedly ambushed the regular Roman rows. Antony had relied on the Armenians—Parthia’s western neighbor—for military aid. They had not proved the faithful allies he anticipated. Not for the first time, they lured the Romans into “a yawning and abysmal desert” only to abandon them. No battle had been as costly as the retreat. Having marched for thirty miles in darkness, Antony’s exhausted men threw themselves upon brackish water. Starving, they feasted on poisonous plants that made them stagger and vomit. Convulsions, dysentery, and delusions followed. What stagnant water and poisonous plants failed to claim, the heat in Armenia and the unending snows of Cappadocia did. Ice congealed on beards. Toes and fingers froze.

By the time he reached the Syrian coast, by the time he had begun obsessively to scan the horizon for Cleopatra, Antony had lost nearly a third of his splendid army and half his cavalry. In eighteen modest battles he had secured few substantial victories; in his catastrophic retreat, he lost some 24,000 men. In something of a backhanded compliment, Cleopatra would be assigned blame for his Parthian missteps. “For so eager was he to spend the winter with her that he began the war before the proper time, and managed everything confusedly. He was not master of his own faculties, but, as if he were under the influence of certain drugs or of magic rites, was ever looking eagerly towards her, and thinking more of his speedy return than of conquering the enemy,” Plutarch explains. Yet again, Cleopatra was said to have thrown off Antony’s timing. Or yet again Antony fumbled, and Cleopatra wound up with the blame.

The campaign proved as revealing as it was disastrous. Repeatedly Antony found himself outwitted by a cunning enemy, deceived by friends. The Parthian months were less about loving the wrong woman than trusting the wrong men. Antony was a compassionate general, so much “sharing in the toils and distresses of the unfortunate and bestowing upon them whatever they wanted” as to elicit more loyalty from the wounded than the able. He seemed sorely deficient in the vengeance department. The Armenian king, Artavasdes, had encouraged Antony to invade neighboring Media (modern Azerbaijan, a land of fierce tribes and towering mountain ranges), then double-crossed him. His men encouraged him to call Artavasdes to account, which Antony refused to do. He “neither reproached him with his treachery nor abated the friendliness and respect usually shown to him.” He knew how to play on the heartstrings; when he needed to rally his men against dismal odds, he “called for a dark robe, that he might be more pitiful in their eyes.” (Friends dissuaded him. Antony made the appeal to his troops in the purple robe of a Roman general.) The greatest casualty of the expedition was arguably his peace of mind. At least once he was on the brink of suicide. He was badly shaken, as only a commander who in the past had proved resourceful, valorous, omnipresent, could be. Worse yet, after the wretched expedition—having lost tens of thousands of his men, distributed what remained of his treasure, and begged to be put to death—he convinced himself in Syria “by an extraordinary perversion of mind,” that, by escaping as he had, he had actually won the day.

Such was the exhausted, distraught man Cleopatra found on the Syrian coast. Despite the charges that she had shortchanged him, her arrival brought relief to his hungry troops, demoralized and in tatters. She very much played the bountiful, beneficent Isis. Of how she handled delusional Antony we have no clue. She must have been taken aback by what nine months had done to a well-drilled, superbly supplied army. From the start there were irritations and tense differences of opinion in the Syrian camp. It was at this time that Cleopatra urged Antony to punish Herod for his mistreatment of Alexandra and that Antony instructed Cleopatra not to meddle, a message she was unaccustomed to hearing. Under the circumstances, it would have struck her as particularly undeserved. She remained with Antony for several weeks, at the center of the regularly spaced tents, the improvised Roman city, as he pondered his next steps. Word had reached him that the Median and Parthian kings had quarreled in the wake of his retreat, and that the Median king—whose lands abutted Parthia—now proposed to join forces with Antony. Revived by the news, he began to prepare a fresh campaign.

Cleopatra was not the only woman to come to Antony’s rescue. He had too a very loyal wife. She applied for permission to fly to her husband’s aid, permission her brother cheerfully granted. Octavian could well afford to send supplies. His own campaigns had gone well. And Octavia’s trip was essentially an ambush. In 37 Octavian had promised Antony 20,000 men for Parthia, which he had not delivered. With his sister, he now sent an elite corps of 2,000 handpicked, sumptuously armored bodyguards. For Antony to accept them was to forfeit 18,000 men, at a time when he desperately needed to replenish the ranks. To decline was to insult his rival’s sister. For Octavian, eager for a plausible excuse for a breach, it was an irresistible opportunity; Antony could not do the right thing. Octavia hastened to Athens, sending word ahead to her husband. Dio has Antony in Alexandria at this time, while Plutarch implies that he and Cleopatra remained on the Syrian coast. Two things are certain: Antony and Cleopatra were at this juncture very much together. And Antony held Octavia off. She was to come no farther. He was set to depart again for Parthia. In no way fooled by his message, Octavia sent a personal friend of Antony’s to pursue the matter—and to remind Antony of his wife’s many virtues. What, asked that envoy, loyal to both husband and wife, was Octavia to do with the goods she had with her? Here she came close to showing up Cleopatra, which may have been the point. Octavia had in hand not only the richly equipped praetorian guards, but a vast quantity of clothing, horses and pack animals, money of her own, and gifts for Antony and his officers. Where was she to send them?

She was throwing down the gauntlet, to which Cleopatra responded, though not in kind. In Octavia she recognized a serious rival, alarmingly close at hand. Her loyal representative was on Cleopatra’s territory. Cleopatra had heard reports of Octavia’s beauty. Roman men could be catty, too; those who had set eyes on her would later wonder aloud about Antony’s preference for the Egyptian queen. “Neither in youthfulness nor beauty,” they concluded, “was she superior to Octavia.” (The two women were in fact the same age.) Cleopatra worried that Octavia’s authority, her brother’s influence, “her pleasurable society and her assiduous attentions to Antony,” would make Octavia irresistible. The sovereign who had proceeded by bold maneuver and steely calculation here attempted—or was said to attempt—a different tack, resorting to loud, choking sobs, depending on the occasion the first or last weapon in a woman’s arsenal. Plutarch sniffs that Cleopatra pretended to be desperately in love with Antony; in a Roman account, she cannot even secure credit for an authentic emotional attachment. If his report can be believed—it reads a little like a cartoon frame spliced into a nuanced narrative—she was as effective a woman as she was a sovereign. She could have offered Fulvia a very valuable tutorial. Cleopatra neither begged nor bargained. She did not raise her voice. Instead she swore off food. She appeared languid with love, undone by her passion for Antony. (Already the hunger strike was the oldest trick in the book. Euripides’ Medea too waged one, to win back a wayward husband.) Cleopatra affected “a look of rapture when Antony drew near, and one of faintness and melancholy when he went away.” She dragged herself about, dissolved in tears, which she made a great show of drying whenever Antony turned up. She meant of course to spare him any distress.

Cleopatra rarely did anything alone, and for her wail-and-whimper act recruited a supporting cast. Her courtiers worked overtime on her behalf. Mostly they upbraided Antony. How could he be so heartless as to destroy “a mistress who was devoted to him and him alone”? Did he not grasp the difference between the two women? “For Octavia, they said, had married him as a matter of public policy and for the sake of her brother, and enjoyed the name of wedded wife.” She hardly bore comparison to Cleopatra, who, although a sovereign, the queen of millions, “was called Antony’s mistress, and she did not shun this name nor disdain it, as long as she could see him and live with him.” Hers was the noblest of sacrifices. She was neglecting a great kingdom and her many responsibilities, “wearing her life away, as she follows with you on your marches, in the guise of a concubine.” How could he remain indifferent? There was no contest between the two women. Cleopatra would forsake all, “as long as she could see him and live with him; but if she were driven away from him she would not survive it,” a conclusion she effectively supported with her shuddering gasps and inanition. Even Mark Antony’s closest friends chimed in, enthralled by Cleopatra, and doubtless well aware of Antony’s leanings.

As campaigns went, this one involved skirmishes if not outright battles; the atmosphere around Antony and Cleopatra was highly charged. The tactics also proved highly effective. Cleopatra’s theatrics melted Antony. The reproofs of his friends flattered him. A man of disorderly passions, Antony seemed to count on chiding, to which he gamely responded. He was a happy subordinate, arguably at his best in that role. Plutarch has him taking more pleasure in the rebukes than he did in any commendations: Scolded for his hard-heartedness, he “failed to see that by this seeming admonition he was being perversely drawn towards her.” He convinced himself that she would kill herself were he to leave her. It was particularly difficult for him to be angry under the circumstances; he had already the death of one loyal, intelligent woman on his conscience. Whatever else could be said of Antony he was compassionate, as any of his men could attest. He rebuffed Octavia. She returned to Rome a woman scorned in all eyes but her own. She refused to dwell on the insult; when her brother ordered her to leave the marital home, she refused to do so. Again she renounced the Helen of Troy role, claiming that “it was an infamous thing even to have it said that the two greatest commanders in the world plunged the Romans into civil war, the one out of passion for, and the other out of resentment in behalf of, a woman.”

Cleopatra showed no such disinclination. With Antony’s affections went the throne of Egypt. To lose him to Octavia was to lose everything. Hers was a virtuoso performance that yielded enduring results. From this point on the two were inseparable, for which Dio credits “the passion and witchery of Cleopatra” and Plutarch “certain drugs or magic rites.” Antony’s men—and Octavia—instead acknowledge a very real affection. Geography suggests as much as well. Antony remained with Cleopatra in Alexandria for the winter. He had a sliver of a practical reason to do so, as he intended to march east again come spring. As of the winter of 35 it is impossible to deny a full-blooded romance, if by romance we mean a congenial, intimate past, a shared family, a shared bed, and a shared vision of the future.

CLEOPATRA’S BLUE-RIBBON RENDITION of the lovesick female distracted Antony from a second Parthian offensive, which he postponed, to be at her side. She was thin and pale. Her state of mind worried him. In 35 she did, very intentionally, throw off his timing. An Eastern triumph remained as critical for Antony as ever, if not more so; while he licked his Parthian wounds, Octavian had been piling up successes. He had crushed Sextus Pompey and sidelined Lepidus. (With bribes, Octavian also lured Lepidus’s eighteen legions out from under him.) Only Antony and Octavian remained. And only an Eastern victory could once and for all secure Caesar’s glorious mantle. Antony had unfinished business as well with the Armenian king, who he belatedly decided should be held accountable for the catastrophic outing. Cleopatra has been assumed not to have smiled on Antony’s military ambitions and to have preferred his attentions directed elsewhere. Certainly Parthia was of less concern to her than were Roman politics; Egypt was for the most part insulated against an Eastern invasion. At the same time that kingdom was entirely vulnerable to Rome. Military glory was by no means the coin of her realm; a Parthian expedition would have struck her as futile on many counts. It is easy to hear how the argument might have gone, important to remember it a matter of speculation. What would have made eminent good sense for Antony was a return to Rome, from which he had been absent for five years. That outing Cleopatra must have resisted with every fiber of her theatrical being. An Eastern expedition was expensive, but by her calculation a trip to Rome—a return to Octavia and Octavian—would have been infinitely more costly.

Antony remained sorely in need of a victory. He was also eager to settle a score. “In his endeavor to take vengeance on the Armenian king with the least trouble to himself,” he sent the ever-inventive Dellius east, to Armenia. As usual, Dellius had a proposition. It this time amounted to the traditional diplomatic bandage. Would Artavasdes, the Armenian monarch, not like to promise his daughter to Cleopatra and Antony’s six-year-old son, Alexander Helios? Cleopatra presumably signed off on this appeal, which would have established a Ptolemy on the Armenian throne. It would also have secured a peaceful alliance with a mountain kingdom crucial to a Parthian invasion and divided in its loyalties. Several times a Roman ally, Armenia was in both sympathy and civilization Parthian. The offer evidently made less sense to Artavasdes, a supple and unflinching statesman. He resisted Dellius’s blandishments and his bribes. Antony countered in the spring by invading Armenia. In little time he subdued the country, declaring it a Roman province. This was vengeance more than victory; Armenia was a strategically located buffer state but by no means a great power. And Antony knew the conquest satisfied his men, who had for months howled that Artavasdes had cost them Parthia. In anticipation of a larger campaign, Antony left the bulk of his army in the East for the winter. He returned to Alexandria in triumph, taking with him not only the collected treasure of Armenia, but its king, his wife, their children, and the provincial governors. Out of deference to their rank, he bound the royal family in chains of gold.

This time Cleopatra received a jubilant message from her lover. She issued orders for an extravagant ceremony to mark his return. She likely took her cues from Antony: her immediate family were not conquerors. Processions were, however, a Ptolemaic specialty. The sphinx-lined avenues of Alexandria were designed for them, and the Roman triumph derived from them. That of autumn 34 was sensational. Antony sent his captives ahead of him into the city, which he entered in his purple cloak, aboard a chariot. Presumably they paraded past the marble colonnades and the awnings of shuttered shops, along the Canopic Way, lined with vibrant banners and cheering spectators. Here was the kind of show at which Ptolemies excelled. To this one Antony and Cleopatra added a new twist. As he marched his booty and captives into the heart of the city Antony presented them to the queen of Egypt, in ceremonial attire on a lofty, golden throne, atop a silver-plated platform, amid her adoring subjects.

Antony had long been good at paying homage to his mistresses; Cleopatra received not only the spoils of his campaign, the royal treasury and its officials, but the proud Armenian king and his family, in their golden fetters. A discordant note was struck when the fresh-faced Artavasdes arrived before her. The Armenian king was neither a fool nor a philistine; he wrote histories and intricate speeches. For years he had shrewdly played Parthia and Rome off against each other. True to tenacious form, he approached but would neither sink to his knees before her nor acknowledge her rank. Instead he addressed her by name. All coercion was futile; though treated harshly, no member of the Armenian royal family would prostate himself before the queen of Egypt. (It is notable that despite the misbehavior, Artavasdes survived the display. In Rome a captive king was rarely so lucky, no matter how well he behaved.) It was Cleopatra’s first experience of a royal humiliation and a monarch’s proud resistance. There was every reason why they should have made an impression. A lavish banquet for the people of Alexandria followed, with celebrations at the palace and with public entertainments. She distributed coins and food freely.

The military-themed procession was an oddity to the Alexandrians, though it had at least Ptolemaic roots. There was no precedent for the splendid ceremony that followed. Several days later a throng filled Alexandria’s colonnaded gymnasium, west of the city’s main crossroads, minutes from the palace. Six hundred feet long, the city’s largest structure, the gymnasium stood at the center of Alexandria as at the center of its intellectual and recreational life. It was the opera hall of its day; a gymnasium’s presence was what made a town a city. In the open court of the complex that fall day the Alexandrians discovered another silver platform, on which stood two massive golden thrones. Mark Antony occupied one. Addressing her as the “New Isis,” he invited Cleopatra to join him on the other. She appeared in the full regalia of that goddess, a pleated, lustrously striped chiton, its fringed edge reaching to her ankles. On her head she may have worn a traditional tripartite crown or one of cobras with a vulture cap. By one account Antony dressed as Dionysus, in a gold-embroidered gown and high Greek boots. In his hand he held the god’s fennel stalk. An ivy wreath circled his head. It seemed a second act of the exultant play begun in Tarsus, when—as Cleopatra made her way upriver—word preceded her that Venus had arrived to revel with Dionysus for the happiness of Asia.

Cleopatra’s children occupied four smaller thrones at the couple’s feet. In his husky voice Antony addressed the assembled multitude. By his command Cleopatra was henceforth to be known as “Queen of Kings.” (On coins, she was “Queen of Kings, whose sons are Kings.” The titles would change with the territory, so that an Upper Egypt stela of four years later has her as “Mother of Kings, Queen of Kings, the Youngest Goddess.”) As for her consort, thirteen-year-old Caesarion, Antony promoted him to King of Kings, a pointed recycling of an Armenian and Parthian title. Antony conferred these honorifics in the name of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra’s husband and Caesarion’s father, an unusual case of flaunting a lover’s prior sexual history. Also on Caesar’s behalf, Antony proceeded to name his sons with Cleopatra as King of Kings. Producing the boys in turn, he assigned vast territories to each; the Eastern-inflected names came in handy now. At his cue, little Alexander Helios stepped forward, in the loose leggings and caped tunic of a Persian monarch. On his head he wore an upright, pointed turban topped with a peacock feather. His territories stretched to India; he was to rule over Armenia, Media, and—once his father had conquered it—Parthia. (He was again promised in marriage, this time to the daughter of the Median king, Artavasdes’ traditional enemy.) Two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, the fruit of Antony and Cleopatra’s Antioch reunion, was an Alexander the Great in miniature. He wore the high boots, the short purple cloak, and the brimmed woolen hat—in this case wrapped with a diadem—of a Macedonian. To him went Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia, the lands west of the Euphrates. Cleopatra Selene was to preside over Cyrene, the Greek settlement in what is today eastern Libya, hundreds of miles across the desert. The distributions made, each of the two younger boys rose to kiss his parents. They were then surrounded by a colorful phalanx of bodyguards, Armenians in Alexander’s case, Macedonians in Ptolemy’s.

In such a way Antony parceled out the East, including lands not yet in his possession. For the young woman who fourteen years earlier had smuggled herself into Alexandria to plead for her diminished kingdom, it was a sensational reversal. Cleopatra stood divine and indomitable, less queen than empress, the supreme Roman commander at her side. Her rule extended over a vast swath of Asia, its frontiers established and now at peace. She was protected by Roman legions; with her children, she now reigned, at least nominally, over more land than had any Ptolemy in centuries. On coins minted for the occasion—with them she became the first foreigner to appear on a Roman coin—she appears majestic, authoritative. She has also aged. Her mouth is fuller, and she is noticeably fleshier, especially around the neck.

It is impossible to say whose ambition had brought about the sparkling ceremony, to be known later as the Donations of Alexandria. It is especially difficult to locate Cleopatra’s fingerprints; the truth is smudged forever by Roman manhandling. At least in part the message of the day was clear. On their golden thrones sat what even a coolheaded modern historian has reasonably called “the two most magnificent people in the world.” Together they seemed to resurrect if not expand upon the dream of Alexander the Great, promoting a universal empire, one that transcended national boundaries and embraced a common culture, that reconciled Europe and Asia. They announced a new order. Cleopatra presided over the ceremony and the citywide banqueting that followed not only as a sovereign but as a deity after all, with the divine Caesar’s son on one side, Dionysian Antony on the other. Old prophecies evidently resurfaced now. The Jews linked Cleopatra’s rule with a golden age and with the coming of the Messiah. The queen of Egypt answered the call for an Eastern savior. She would rise above Rome for a better world. In conflating the political and the religious, the imagery was all on Cleopatra’s side.

Mark Antony had a habit of jumping to conclusions, and in many ways the Donations were an exercise in wishful thinking. Certainly they made no difference to the administration of the lands in question, many of them governed by Roman proconsuls. The Armenian king was still very much alive. Parthia was not Antony’s to distribute. A two-year-old child was in no position to rule. As much as the ceremony was a stunning act of assimilation and appropriation, entirely Ptolemaic in its gigantism, it was probably not intended solely for the Alexandrians. Pageantry was never lost on them, but by 34 Cleopatra’s subjects needed no confirmation of her steady rule, of her divinity, her supremacy, or even of Antony’s role in her court. They knew him already more as Dionysus than as Roman magistrate. The two may have intended to formalize arrangements for a subdued but still messy East; Antony may have meant only to rebuke those monarchs who had defied him in Parthia. Or Antony and Cleopatra may have been delivering a powerful, unsubtle message to Octavian. His power derived solely from Julius Caesar. He might well be Caesar’s adopted son, but Caesar’s natural son was, Antony and Cleopatra emphasized, very much alive, nearly adult, and suddenly sovereign over a vast expanse of territory. That message was particularly crucial at a time when Octavian was said to be busy behind the scenes undermining Antony’s efforts in Armenia, where he attempted to suborn Artavasdes.

Even if Antony and Cleopatra were not broadcasting to Rome, it is from Rome that our accounts derive. It is impossible to disentangle what the two may have meant to convey; what Rome actually heard; and what the propagandists turned out, magnified and distorted. The language of the display was Eastern. Especially in 34, it translated poorly. Antony should have known better than to emphasize Caesarion’s paternity. (He may well have known better. Plutarch does not mention the inflammatory remarks.) Octavian had reason to play up the insult, as he did the un-Roman magnificence. It was incumbent on him to blunt the potent symbolism, to turn a military triumph and royal pageant into a drunken revel and a specious, silly costume drama. One did not pay tribute to Julius Caesar in Alexandria, after all. Nor did one celebrate a triumph outside Rome, far from the Roman gods. And why this riotous celebration of an Armenian victory when Parthia remained to be punished?

Whatever his message, Antony meant the Donations as an official act. He sent reports of the triumph and the ceremony back to Rome, for Senate ratification. Devoted friends intervened, aware that his dispatches would be read in an unflattering light. Antony appeared “theatrical and arrogant,” precisely the crimes that had cost Caesar his life. If he intended to dazzle his compatriots with the gorgeous display, the laws of optics worked differently from what he had remembered. Rome had to shield her eyes from the glare of golden thrones. Definitions were less fluid in that city, where Antony’s dual role as commander in the West and monarch in the East taxed the orderly Roman mind. He dangerously mixed his metaphors. If Cleopatra were the queen of those territories, what role was the Roman commander to play? Antony had after all claimed no territories for himself. Cleopatra’s title was preposterously, objectionably large, an insult not only to Rome, but to her fellow sovereigns. She had long occupied an exceptional position in the Roman constellation of client kings. She now outranked them in both wealth and influence. And Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship was problematic. What was a foreign woman doing on a Roman coin? It did not help that Antony shared denarii with a woman not his wife. He appeared to be distributing Roman lands to a foreigner.

Only one man wanted Antony’s dispatches published. Octavian did not succeed, although he did manage to suppress reports of the Armenian victory. He had no intention of allowing Antony a Roman triumph, which would have counted for a very great deal. The Donations may have been at the time little more than an exercise in Alexandrian grandiosity, in Ptolemaic boasting, a provocative display of symbols, Antony’s version of erecting a golden statue of Cleopatra in the Forum. At best the celebrations were simply tone-deaf. At worst they were an insult to Octavian, a brazen power play. The intention hardly mattered given how the exercise looked in Rome, which was how Octavian wanted it to: as an empty gesture, a farcical overreaching by two slightly demented, power-drunk dissolutes, “a Dionysiac revel led by an eastern harlot.” With the Donations a munificent Antony handed out plenty of gifts, none more generous than that he settled on Octavian.