Cleopatra: A Life

ILLICIT AFFAIRS AND BASTARD CHILDREN

“For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god.”

—HESIOD

CLEOPATRA TURNED THIRTY-FIVE without a change in her considerable and accumulating good fortune; the year ahead promised to be among the happiest and most auspicious of her reign. With her hybrid family, she had ingeniously solved the Roman problem, the consort problem, the shrinking-empire problem. She no longer needed to be propped up by foreign troops. Nor could any Alexandrian critic conceivably object to her friendship with a Roman. She had tamed that power, and augmented Egypt through its largesse. With the Donations she experienced a surge of popularity; her shipyards were busy, as she doubled the size of Antony’s navy. The revenues flowed in. From Damascus and Beirut in the east to Tripoli in the west, cities minted coins in her honor. She had made good on a third-century poet’s promise, by which a Ptolemy—simultaneously safeguarding and supplementing his inheritance—outweighs all other monarchs in wealth, given “the abundance that flowed hourly to his sumptuous palace from every quarter.”

Antony obliged her in her greatest desire: After the celebrations, he did not return to Rome, where he might have fleshed out his army with new recruits and neutralized Octavian’s influence. Nor did he even journey to Antioch, a logical base for an Eastern operation. Instead he settled down for a third festive winter in Alexandria, an imperial city that felt increasingly like the home of a new empire. In vivid illustration of the point, Cleopatra either put the finishing touches on or began to enjoy the newly constructed Caesareum, her vast harborside complex, which she may have modeled on the Forum of Rome. Fusing Egyptian and Greek styles, the Alexandrian version was slathered with gold and silver, stuffed with paintings and statuary, embellished with “galleries, libraries, porches, courts, halls, walks, and consecrated groves, as glorious as expense and art could make them.” Cleopatra stood at the helm of the mighty power that a nervous Roman had a century earlier predicted Egypt might one day be, “if ever that kingdom found capable leaders.”

Around her assembled loyal, long-serving advisers, dedicated Romans, and an extended family, which by year’s end included the teenaged Marcus Antonius Antyllus, the elder of Antony’s two sons by Fulvia. Cleopatra took the children’s schooling seriously. In the wake of the Donations she entrusted their education in part to Nicolaus of Damascus, a lanky diplomat’s son several years her junior, with a ruddy face, an affable temperament, and a taste for Aristotle. Handy with an anecdote, Nicolaus was a gifted logician, the kind of man you could rely on to finish your speech, persuasively and eloquently, if you happened to dissolve into tears before you reached its end. He moved into the palace. Under his guidance Cleopatra’s children read philosophy and rhetoric but especially history, which their new tutor deemed “the proper study of kings.” Genial though Nicolaus may have been, he was sharp-tongued when necessary and a relentless taskmaster. His idea of leisure would be to add 25 volumes to his comprehensive history of the ancient world, already 140 volumes long, and a project its author compared to the labors of Hercules. Around the children the festivities and frivolities continued. Many threw themselves into court life with enthusiasm. Lucius Munatius Plancus, one of Antony’s closest advisers and a former provincial governor, appeared at a dinner naked and painted blue. He entertained Cleopatra’s banqueters with his best sea nymph imitation, wriggling across the floor on his knees, attired only in a fish tail and a crown of reeds.

The taste for indulgence was contagious, or possibly inherited. At dinner one night a physician from young Antyllus’s retinue began to pontificate, boorishly and interminably. When a second court physician stopped him in his windy tracks—it was the former medical student who had toured Cleopatra’s kitchen—Antyllus whooped with delight. With a wave of his arm, he gestured to the sideboard. “All of this I bestow upon thee, Philotas,” he exclaimed, forcing a collection of gold beakers on the quicker-witted of his guests. Philotas hardly took the teenager at his word but nonetheless found himself presented with a bulging sack of elaborately worked, antique vessels. (He headed off with its cash equivalent instead.) Throughout the city the music, mimes, and stage productions continued. As one clever stonemason saw it, the merry pact that joined Antony and Cleopatra merited an alternate interpretation. From December 28, 34, survives a basalt inscription, presumably from a statue of Antony. Whatever Cleopatra made of his ardent affections, the Alexandrians wholly reciprocated. The sporting Antony is hailed in stone not as an “Inimitable Liver” but—the pun requires more of a stretch in Greek than in English—the “Inimitable Lover.”

Official business was by no means neglected among the revelries. Cleopatra continued to receive petitions and envoys, to participate in religious rites, to mete out justice. She supervised economic discussions, met with advisers, and presided over the innumerable Alexandrian festivals. Increasingly state business included Egypto-Roman business. Legionnaires had been posted in Egypt for half of Cleopatra’s lifetime; in one account, her Roman bodyguards now inscribed her name on their shields. And in a mutually beneficial arrangement, Roman futures were decided in Alexandria rather than the other way around. In 33 Cleopatra dictated an ordinance to a scribe, in which she awarded a substantial tax exemption to one of Antony’s top generals. Publius Canidius had served in Parthia and distinguished himself in Armenia. For his services, Cleopatra accorded him a waiver of export duties on 10,000 sacks of wheat and import duties on 5,000 amphorae of wine. He was exempted from land taxes in perpetuity, a privilege Cleopatra extended equally to his tenants. Even Canidius’s farm animals were to be above taxes, requisition, seizure.^* It was an agile way to keep Antony’s men both loyal and local, in the unlikely event that the enchantments of Alexandria proved insufficient. It was also a more effective way of courting an ambitious Roman than paying bribes, which, it has been noted, “only made them come back for more.” Much of their business the Roman triumvir and the Egyptian queen transacted together. Cleopatra frequented the marketplace with Antony, “joined him in the management of festivals and in the hearing of lawsuits.” At her urging, Antony took charge of the city’s gymnasium, as he had done in Athens. As de facto leader of the Greek community, he directed its finances, teachers, lectures, athletic contests. With Cleopatra he posed for painters and sculptors; he was Osiris or Dionysus to her Isis or Aphrodite. In mid-33 Antony marched again to Armenia, where he arranged a peace with the Median king. They would henceforth serve each other as allies, against the Parthians and, if need be, against Octavian. Asia was now quiet. Antony returned to Alexandria with the Median princess Iotape, Alexander Helios’s intended.

WITH THE DONATIONS Antony and Cleopatra had sent Octavian one unmistakable message. Whatever they intended for the East, their plans did not include him. The two men were still in touch, closely and more or less cordially. Envoys and informers frequently sailed between them. They continued to correspond with mutual friends. They were joined in the triumvirate through the end of 33. (They were free now of both Lepidus and the intractable Sextus Pompey, with whom they had dispensed. Defeated by Octavian, Sextus was executed, most likely on Antony’s orders.) Antony had reason to feel invulnerable, and sent another message to Octavian at about this time. He would relinquish his powers and restore a republic in Rome if Octavian would agree to do the same. Antony may have been bluffing. He may have been expending cheap political capital; Roman titles, and the composition of the Roman government, were of little concern to him in the East, where he seemed inclined to remain. He got a straightforward reply, which may even have been the one he expected. For some time it had been clear where the long Alexandrian sojourn, the repudiation of Octavia, the recognition of Caesarion, were leading; friends had surely kept Antony and Cleopatra apprised of the mood in Rome. Early in the year, Octavian rose in the Senate to deliver a virulent, direct assault on his colleague. From that point on it is impossible to say which was greater: Alexandria’s royal extravagances, or Rome’s version of them; Cleopatra’s ambition, or Rome’s version of it; Antony’s affections for Cleopatra, or Rome’s version of his affection. Cleopatra’s palace was certainly the most luxurious building in the Mediterranean world in 33, but it never looked as magnificent as it did from Rome that winter.

Antony and Octavian had years of bad blood on which to trade. When finally the floodgates opened, they unleashed a torrent. Each accused the other of misappropriating lands. Octavian demanded his share of the Armenian spoils. Antony sputtered that his men had received no part of Octavian’s distributions in Italy. (Octavian replied that if Antony wanted land he was free to carve up Parthia, an accusation that must have stung.) Octavian condemned Antony for the murder of Sextus Pompey, a murder that Octavian had himself celebrated in Rome, and that had followed Sextus’s defeat at Octavian’s hands.^* Antony denounced Octavian for having unlawfully forced aside Lepidus. And what had happened to his right to raise troops in Italy? Octavian had long obstructed those efforts, to which he had agreed by treaty. He left Antony to assemble an army of Greeks and Asiatics. For that matter, where was the remainder of the fleet Antony had lent Octavian four years earlier? And the 18,000 men Octavian had promised in exchange? Antony had been scrupulously faithful to their agreements. Octavian had not, repeatedly summoning Antony to meetings at which Octavian failed to appear. As ever, nothing worked as effectively as personal invective, the more scurrilous the better. Antony taunted Octavian with accounts of his humble origins. He was descended on his father’s side from rope makers and money changers, on his mother’s from bakers and keepers of perfume shops. For good measure Antony threw in an African grandfather. Worse, Octavian the parvenu harbored divine pretensions. When grain shortages plagued Rome, he and his wife, Livia, had thrown a lavish banquet. Their guests arrived in costume, as gods and goddesses. They ate obscenely well, with Octavian presiding over the table in the guise of Apollo. Octavian was moreover a coward. He had disappeared for days on end at Philippi. His gifted lieutenant, Marcus Agrippa, fought his battles for him. Possibly to deflect attention from Cleopatra and certainly overlooking his Median arrangements, Antony ridiculed Octavian for attempting to marry off his daughter to a barbarian, for the sake of a political alliance. Not all of the accusations were false or even vaguely fresh. Some were neatly repackaged from 44, when Cicero’s account of Antony’s misdeeds had been so extensive that, it was conceded, no one man could ever suffer adequate punishment for them all.

Where Antony alleged that Octavian was disabled by fear, Octavian asserted that Antony was undone by drink. On that front Octavian had several advantages: He was a modest drinker, or at least advertised himself as one. Alexandria threw a better party than did Rome. And Octavian had history on his side. It was fairly easy to claim that Antony had disappeared into a bacchanal, the more so as Octavian was in Rome while Antony was not. In his defense Antony countered with a satiric pamphlet, “On His Drunkenness.” Generally 33 was a heyday for poets, lampoonists, apologists, graffitists, as for all lovers of idle talk and outlandish fictions. Intrigue came more naturally to Octavian than to Antony, but both men displayed a pitiless talent for defamation. Octavian resorted to indecent verse. Antony distributed slanderous handbills. Each man engaged propagandists. Many practices once acceptable were suddenly objectionable. Antony took charge of the gymnasium in Alexandria, which was unspeakable—whereas his having done so five years earlier, with Octavia, in Athens, had elicited no comment. Similarly, Antony’s affair with Cleopatra had once afforded an endless source of ribald dinner jokes. Such had been the case over the summer of 39, in the celebration near Naples; Cleopatra was where the conversation wound up as the evening reached full tilt, when the lusty “good fellowship was at its height.” She was a laughing matter no longer.

The pummeling continued both above and below the belt. Between them Antony and Octavian covered the usual schoolyard litany: effeminacy, sodomy, cowardice, unrefined—or overly refined—practices of personal hygiene. Octavian was “a veritable weakling.” Antony had passed his prime. He could no longer win any contest save those in exotic dancing or the erotic arts. Antony sneered that Octavian had slept with his illustrious granduncle. How else to account for his unexpected adoption? Octavian countered with something sturdier and more pertinent, if equally untrue: Cleopatra had not slept with his granduncle. Caesarion was hardly the divine Caesar’s son, news Octavian enlisted a pamphleteer to disseminate. Antony condemned Octavian’s hasty marriage to Livia, hugely pregnant with another man’s child on her wedding day. He decried Octavian’s habit of making off with the wives of his banquet guests and returning them, disheveled, to the table. He advertised Octavian’s well-known (and in all probability invented) habit of procuring and deflowering virgins. (According to Suetonius, Octavian seduced scientifically. He targeted the wives of his enemies, to learn what the husbands were saying and doing.) In the depravity department Octavian had no need to resort to fictions. He had his weapon close at hand. In defiance of Roman custom and his impeccable Roman wife, Octavian’s fellow triumvir disported himself in a foreign capital with a rapacious queen, on whose account he had lost his head, forsaken his illustrious country, and shed all remnant of his manly Roman virtues. What self-respecting Roman would, as Cicero had put it, foolishly prefer “invidious wealth, the lust for despotism” to “stable and solid glory”? In many ways the contest boiled down to one of magnificence versus machismo.

At some point in the year Antony replied to Octavian privately, with a letter of which one scrap survives. He does not sound like a man spoiling for a fight. Nor does he sound out of his mind with love, in the throes of a transporting passion. The seven surviving lines dedicated to Cleopatra have been translated in countless ways, from the indecorous to the risqué to the raunchy. The last is the most precise. Antony’s tone was unsurprising for Rome, where political and financial considerations determined upper-class marriages. Sex could be had anywhere. What, demanded Antony in 33, had come over Octavian? Why the fuss exactly? Could it really matter so much that he was “screwing the queen”? Octavian was no model husband himself, as they both knew.^* Nor was he an innocent. He had amply enjoyed what Antony termed their “amorous adventures and youthful pranks.” It was only sex after all, and hardly qualified as news; as Octavian well knew, Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra had been going on for nine years. (He dated it from Tarsus.) It is not entirely clear whether he meant to legitimize the affair or to diminish it. The line that follows “screwing the queen” can be rendered as “she is my wife” or “is she my wife?” Given the rapid-fire rhythm of his queries, Antony seems intent on downplaying the liaison. He was after all writing to his brother-in-law. His implication appears to be: “She isn’t my wife, is she?” The answer was in any event immaterial. “Does it really matter,” Antony concluded, “where and in whom you get it up?” No matter how his final phrase is rendered, its verb belongs to the animal kingdom. It is unclear how closely those seven vulgar lines hewed to reality; what has come down to us may well be a paraphrase, more salacious than the original. Octavia aside, Antony and Cleopatra were not married by Roman standards, as Cleopatra well knew. In any event she here stepped into—or was fitted into—her greatest role. Octavian needed nothing further with which to bludgeon his rival. Judging from the fragments that remain, it was Octavian who turned the Alexandrian idyll into a sultry love affair.

As the clock ticked toward the end of the triumvirate, unlikely to be renewed, Antony and Cleopatra decamped for Ephesus. Ephesus had been the first city to recognize Antony as Dionysus incarnate and to have welcomed him at the city gates with loud cheers and a musical medley. After Philippi he had offered up splendid sacrifices and generous pardons there, to a people brutalized by Caesar’s assassins. The city of 250,000 remained kindly disposed toward him. He arranged now for the Ephesians to greet Cleopatra as his royal mistress. A rich banking center of narrow streets and shady, marble colonnades, Ephesus enjoyed a magnificent location. Built in a steep-sided valley, it gave onto rugged mountains on one side, the sea on the other. Ephesus boasted several remarkable temples, of which the most celebrated was that of Artemis, where both Cleopatra’s father and sister had sought asylum, and before the slender Ionic capitals of which her sister had met her end.

Strategically located across the Aegean from Athens, at the edge of a fine harbor, Ephesus was also the ideal address at which to establish a military base. From the coast of Asia Minor Antony set about assembling a navy, dispatching word to every client king in the region. They answered with fleets and submitted to oaths of loyalty. Cleopatra was the greatest single supplier of materiel, furnishing 200 of Antony’s 500 warships, fully manned, along with 20,000 talents and all the supplies required to sustain a vast army—in this case, 75,000 legionnaires, 25,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry—for the duration of a war. She was unlikely to have hesitated before doing so. Improbably, Octavian’s star had ascended in Rome. He had piled up victories as Antony bogged down in the East. For the two triumvirs to coexist peacefully was difficult. For an implacable, ambitious Octavian and Caesarion to coexist was impossible. Unlike Parthia, this campaign was as vital to Cleopatra as to Antony. She had every reason to throw herself, and Egypt, into it. On the last day of 33, the triumvirate officially expired.

EARLY IN JANUARY 32 a new consul spoke out forcefully in the Roman Senate in praise of Antony. He went on to savage Octavian. On hearing of the denunciation, Octavian paid the Senate a visit, with a bodyguard of soldiers and supporters. They made no effort to conceal the daggers beneath their togas. In 44 Cicero had wondered if Caesar’s adopted son intended to stage a coup; he did so now. Offering his own scalding stream of accusations, he terrified the opposition into silence. “By certain documents,” Octavian promised to demonstrate that Antony constituted a threat to Rome. He fixed a date on which he would present his evidence. The opposing consuls had seen the daggers; they knew better than to await that session, and secretly fled the city. Nearly four hundred senators followed, sailing to Ephesus, where they reported on the political climate in Rome. Surely Antony underestimated Octavian’s strength and position. And he allied himself with Cleopatra at great risk. She seriously compromised the cause.

Many of Antony’s colleagues—at least a third of the Senate was with him—argued for her removal. Yet again Antony bowed to reason and agreed to dismiss Cleopatra. He ordered her “to sail to Egypt, and there await the result of the war.” She refused, possibly, as Plutarch asserts, because she feared that Octavia would again intervene, to prevent a war that Cleopatra knew for her own sake to be essential; possibly because she mistrusted Antony’s judgment; possibly because it would have been irresponsible to do otherwise. She was no warrior queen; recent Ptolemies had not evidenced a great taste for warfare. They did not die on the battlefield, as did other Eastern monarchs. They subscribed to the belief that an empire could be acquired with money, rather than money with an empire. She was, however, her men’s commander in chief, responsible for their preparations and operations. She was as well Antony’s paymaster. A sober struggle of wills ensued. This time Cleopatra refrained from swooning hunger strikes. She took the opposite approach, assisted by Canidius, Antony’s gifted general, whom she allegedly bribed to argue her case. He may just as easily have been impressed with her. Surely, Canidius protested, it was not fair to banish an ally so instrumental to their campaign? She fed the troops. She provided the fleet. She was as capable as any man. Did Antony not understand that the Egyptian crews would be demoralized by her departure? Those men formed the backbone of his navy. They would fight for their queen, not necessarily for a Roman general. Were Antony to refute his Egyptian affections he would moreover offend his Eastern allies. Cleopatra challenged Antony to explain how she “was inferior in intelligence to any one of the princes who took part in the expedition, she who for a long time had governed so large a kingdom by herself, and”—she appended a compliment—“by long association with Antony had learned to manage large affairs.” Either her arguments made sense or her war chest did. She got her way.

In April 32 Antony and Cleopatra sailed with Antony’s staff to the island of Samos, off the coast of modern-day Turkey. Samos was a stepping-stone to Greece, where the struggle for control of the Roman world would most likely take place. While the couple settled in on the mountainous island their troops were ferried west, across the Aegean, an operation that would have required a good month. Antony’s veterans had returned from Armenia; along with the Eastern recruits, he had assembled some nineteen legions. Whatever the military or political preoccupations of the summer, they are lost to us, obliterated by Plutarch’s descriptions of the merrymaking on Samos. The lush resort island was the ideal place to throw a party, and Antony was well positioned to do so. He had time on his hands. Octavian made much of the extravagance, which has come down to us as another Dionysian revel. Just as every king and prince east of Athens contributed forces, so every dramatic artist reported to Samos. They arrived in throngs. For days on end the lute players and flutists, actors and dancers, acrobats and mimes, harpists and female impersonators—“a rabble of Asiatic performers”—delivered a resplendent, multilingual festival of music and theater. “And while almost all the world around was filled with groans and lamentations,” Plutarch relates through pursed lips, “a single island for many days resounded with flutes and stringed instruments; theatres there were filled, and choral bands were competing with one another.” Every city also sent animals for sacrifice; the client kings “vied with one another in their mutual entertainments and gifts.” The question on all minds was how Antony and Cleopatra would stage a triumph that could conceivably surpass the prodigal prewar festivities.

In May Antony and Cleopatra made the short trip west, to hilly Athens. The revels continued in the theaters and the vast, marble-seated stadium of that city, which had welcomed Antony as Dionysus nine years earlier, and where he may now have embraced the role most closely. It seemed that no one who could afford to had passed through Athens without contributing a sculpture, a theater, a gymnasium of creamy marble; when they did not, the Athenians erected the statue for them. (Cleopatra’s forebears had bestowed a gymnasium, east of the marketplace.) While sports and drama distracted Antony, two matters clarified themselves, in quick succession. Cleopatra spent her summer in the storied city where Antony had spent the bulk of his years with Octavia. Antony’s wife had attended lectures in his company. They had conceived a second child there. She remained a vivid presence; her statues adorned the venerable city, as did inscriptions in her honor. The Athenians embraced her as a goddess. The annual religious festival paid her tribute. This was unacceptable to Cleopatra, for whom much had changed in the fourteen years since she had lived quietly across town from Caesar’s wife. She had heard enough of what Lucan would term “illicit affairs and bastard children.” Cleopatra was moreover the first Ptolemaic queen to set foot in Athens, a city that had reason to warm to her: At various junctures it had relied on her family—for grain, for military assistance, for political refuge—since the beginning of the third century. Athens had erected statues to earlier Ptolemies, including Cleopatra’s great-aunt. Cleopatra focused, however, an another woman; she had kept careful account of the tributes accorded Octavia. She was jealous. She went on the offensive, attempting “by many splendid gifts to win the favor of the people,” in other words to blot out her predecessor’s traces. Realistic and reasonable, the Athenians obliged, to Antony’s delight. They voted his lover multiple honors. They planted statues of Cleopatra and Antony in the Acropolis, at the center of the city. On one occasion Antony appeared amid a delegation to pay Cleopatra tribute, delivering up a speech on the city’s behalf.

From the summer of 32 dates too a remarkable gift: Antony bestowed on Cleopatra the library of Pergamum, the only collection that rivaled Alexandria’s. The four rooms of that scenic hilltop library housed some 200,000 scrolls; for centuries, busts of Homer and Herodotus had kept them company. History has made of Antony’s gift a wedding present, or recompense for the volumes Caesar inadvertently destroyed in the Alexandrian War. In context, the largesse required no explanation. Pergamum was not far from Ephesus. It is likely that Antony and Cleopatra paid a visit to that city, a few days’ ride away. For years too the way to assemble a collection had been to plunder someone else’s. Already there was some tradition of this in Rome, where libraries were still in their infancy.

For the most part the reports of Antony’s disorienting, degrading passion for Cleopatra date from the Athenian summer. If in Alexandria he had distracted her from state business, the tables now turned. He attended principally to her. “Many times, while he was seated on his tribunal and dispensing justice to tetrarchs and kings, he would receive love-billets from her in tablets of onyx or crystal, and read them,” Plutarch tells us. (Antony was not the first to receive love letters on state occasions. Caesar too had received “wanton bits” during Senate sessions. That mistress did not write on onyx tablets, however.) At one juncture Cleopatra happened to ride conspicuously past the courts on the shoulders of her servants as Antony presided over a legal case. A distinguished Roman orator held the floor, or did until Antony caught sight of Cleopatra. He then “sprang up from his tribunal and forsook the trial, and hanging on to Cleopatra’s litter escorted her on her way.” It was ignoble behavior; a Roman could indulge in as diversified, as lurid, a sexual life as he pleased, but he was meant to be discreet and unsentimental in his affections. Pompey had made himself a laughingstock for his indecent habit of falling in love with his own wife. In the second century a senator was expelled from that assembly for kissing his wife in public, in full view of their daughter. Antony had been reprimanded years earlier for having openly nuzzled his wife. He was said these days to rise during banquets, before his assembled guests, to massage Cleopatra’s feet “in compliance with some agreement and compact they had made.” (The relationship proceeded by pacts, wagers, and competitions, something Cleopatra evidently brought to the table. Antony was little inclined to formalities.) The gesture was in itself offensive; one had servants for such indulgences. And the stories—of what another age might term gallantry or devotion, of what the East deemed proper obeisance, of what were in Rome indecencies and indignities—piled up. Antony fawned over Cleopatra, which was what eunuchs did. He trailed her litter through the streets, among her attendants. And this, sniffed the Romans, heaping upon the Egyptian queen the usual abuse of the other woman, when she was not even beautiful!

From Octavian’s point of view, the Athenian reports were too good to be true, as they may well have been. For all of the martial preparations, for all of the governmental irregularities in Rome, despite the gathering sense of inevitability, there was no real cause for a rupture; Antony and Octavian remained two men in search of a conflict. They found one in 32. Antony evidently felt some degree of attachment to Cleopatra or felt with her invincible: In May, he divorced Octavia. From Athens, he instructed her to leave their comfortable home. We cannot know how much that gesture was directed at Octavia and how much at her brother. Coming as it did after years of disingenuous reconciliations and flimsy agreements, after a season of slanders, it may only have preempted a salvo from the other direction. Octavia could have elected to end the marriage herself. The divorce itself was simple, an informal procedure for which there was no paperwork. Its ramifications were more complex. As Plutarch remarks on the death of Pompey’s wife and Caesar’s daughter, the family alliance “which had hitherto veiled rather than restrained the ambition of the two men was now at an end.” Cleopatra could only have been thrilled; already she had enlisted a friend of Antony to distract him from all thoughts of his wife. Octavian was overjoyed. Octavia was bereft. Tearfully she packed her bags. With her she took her children by Antony, as well as his second son by Fulvia. There were no recriminations. Octavia worried only that she would be said to have precipitated a war.

Insofar as a propaganda-free chronology can be established, relations were strained in Antony’s camp well before the divorce. For all of the later assertions that highborn Romans lay powerless and enchanted at her feet, in 32 we hear no chime, no caress of Cleopatra’s silvery voice. There were as many opinions on the looming conflict as there were advisers to Antony. For a variety of reasons, many of them legitimate, some continued to see Cleopatra as a liability. A military camp was no place for a woman. Cleopatra distracted Antony. She should not take part in a council of war; she was no general. Antony could not enter Italy in the presence of a foreigner and was unwise to wait to do so. He frittered away his advantage, on the Egyptian queen’s account. The criticism did not bring out the best in her. At one point Antony’s associates in Rome dispatched his friend Geminius to Athens, to plead their case. Antony must defend himself at home, where he was badly battered by Octavian. Why allow himself to be portrayed as a public enemy, in thrall to a foreigner? Geminius was an inspired choice for the delicate mission, having had some experience himself with what it is to fall unwisely and unreasonably in love. Cleopatra assumed that Octavia had dispatched him and treated Geminius accordingly. She kept him as far as possible from Antony. At dinner she seated him among the least significant guests. She pelted him with sarcasm. Geminius endured the insults in silence, patiently holding out for an audience with Mark Antony. Before it was accorded, Cleopatra challenged Geminius, in the midst of a raucous dinner, to explain his errand. He replied that its details “required a sober head, but one thing he knew, whether he was drunk or sober, and that was that all would be well if Cleopatra was sent off to Egypt.” Antony erupted in fury. Cleopatra was more brutal. She commended Geminius for his honesty. He had spared her from having to torture him. Several days later he fled to Rome, to join Octavian.

Cleopatra’s courtiers failed equally to recommend themselves to the Romans, dismayed by the “drunken tricks and scurrilities” of the Egyptians. For reasons that are unclear, Plancus, the dancing fish of the Alexandrian revel, deserted as well, to return to Rome. He was disgusted. The defection may have had nothing to do either with Cleopatra or her advisers. A born courtier, Plancus inclined to the path of least resistance. He betrayed every bit as well as he bowed and scraped. “Treachery,” it would be said, “was a disease with him.” He was, however, a man of impeccable political instincts. Something had clearly transpired to make him doubt that Antony—despite his outsize power and prestige, his years of experience—could prevail over Octavian. Plancus counted among Antony’s closest advisers. For some time he had been in charge of Antony’s correspondence. He knew his secrets. He fled to Octavian with fulsome reports of foot massages, prodigal banquets, and high-handed queens, as well as with information concerning Antony’s will, to which Plancus had been a witness. Octavian at once pried that document from the Vestal Virgins, with whom it should have been safe. In it he found, or claimed to find, a number of scandalous passages. These he helpfully annotated so that he might read them aloud to the Senate. Most members of that body had no desire to participate in his transgression. A man’s will was to be opened after his death, which was why it happened to be illegal to unseal such a document before the event. Those qualms vanished as Octavian neared the end of his presentation, to reveal a heinous provision. Even if he should die in Rome, Antony had directed that his body “should be borne in state through the Forum and then sent away to Cleopatra in Egypt.”^*

Genuine or not, the clause ignited a brilliant bonfire, for which Octavian had relentlessly stockpiled kindling. In his January coup he had promised the Senate documentary evidence against Antony. He now richly delivered. Suddenly reports of Athenian excess, of Antony’s subservience to Cleopatra, the sensational, salacious details of which had been widely understood to be falsehoods, appeared credible. In a world entranced by rhetoric—addicted to “honeyballs of phrases, every word and act besprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame”—the plausible reliably trumped the actual. Octavian had at his disposal plenty of generous veins to mine. The depredations of the East alone—that intoxicating, intemperate, irrational realm—supplied a mother lode of material. Like its queen, Egypt was beguiling and voluptuous; the modern association between the Orient and sex was hoary already in the first century. Already Africa was the address of moral decay. From there it was no great leap to transform the Antony of the Donations into a power-crazed, dissolute, Eastern despot: “In his hand was a golden scepter, at his side a scimitar; he wore a purple robe studded with huge gems; a crown only was lacking to make him a king dallying with a queen.” It was the diadem and golden statues business all over again; the accessories of kingship unnerved Romans even more than did autocracy itself, which they had tolerated in a more subtle version for at least a decade. In Octavian’s account, Antony was irredeemably contaminated by the Oriental languor and the un-Roman luxuries of the East as, arguably, Caesar and Alexander the Great had been before him. In turn Octavian would soon enough discover that Egypt conferred on its conqueror a mixed blessing, a literal embarrassment of riches. Like a prodigious trust fund, it convinced men they were gods.

Octavian wrung the most mileage from Antony’s affair with Cleopatra. She allowed him to recycle the oldest trope: the allergy to the powerful woman was sturdier even than that to monarchy, or to the depraved East. Whether or not Cleopatra controlled Antony, she unequivocally permitted Octavian to control the narrative. He had at his disposal a whole grab bag of Cicero’s rantings against Fulvia, that avaricious, licentious virago. Diligent as ever, Octavian improved upon them. In his expert hands the Egyptian affair blossomed into a tale of blind, irresponsible passion. Antony was under the influence of some powerful narcotic, “bewitched by that accursed woman.” Writing closest to events, Velleius Paterculus provided the official version, distilled to pure cause and effect: “Then as his love for Cleopatra became more ardent,” explains Velleius, acknowledging Antony’s embrace of Eastern vices, “he resolved to make war upon his country.” Cleopatra does not so much corrupt Antony as she “melts and unmans him.” In Octavian’s version, she is masterful and Antony servile, a radically different account of the relationship than that which the sporting Mark Antony had supplied months earlier. Even while conceding that the charges were questionable, every chronicler subscribes to the party line. Antony became “a slave to his love for Cleopatra,” “he gave not a thought to honour but became the Egyptian woman’s slave,” he surrendered his authority to a woman to the extent that “he was not even a master of himself.” The construct was old enough to have a mythical equivalent, to which Octavian eagerly appealed. Antony claimed descent from Hercules. Octavian let no one forget that Hercules spent three years, disarmed and humiliated, as the slave of the rich Asian queen Omphale. She removes from him his lion skin and his club, and—donning his lion skin herself—stands over him as he weaves.

To the charges Octavian fixed an imaginative twist. He needed after all to rally an exhausted, hungry country, depleted after nearly two decades of civil war. To the hot baths and the mosquito nets, the golden accessories and jeweled scimitars, the illicit affair and bastard children, he added a rousing fillip. “The Egyptian woman demanded the Roman Empire from the drunken general as the price of her favors; and this Antony promised her, as though the Romans were more easily conquered than the Parthians,” relates Florus. Dio arrived at the same conclusion, by way of more tenuous logic: “For she so charmed and enthralled not only him but all the rest who had any influence with him that she conceived the hope of ruling even the Romans.” Cleopatra already had the Pergamum library. She had Herod’s balsam gardens. Reports circulated that Antony pillaged the best art from the temples of Asia—including famed colossi of Heracles, Athena, and Zeus that had stood in Samos for centuries—to gratify the Egyptian queen. If Antony was to send his body to her, what would he conceivably deny her? And for what would she hesitate to ask?

Octavian seems to have been the one who decided that Cleopatra plotted to make Rome a province of Egypt, an idea very unlikely to have crossed her quick mind. He had on his side the familiar type, the scheming, spendthrift wife, for whom no diamond is large enough, no house spacious enough. As Eutropius put it centuries later, Antony began a war at the urging of the queen of Egypt, who “longed with womanly desire to reign in the city as well.”^* Already it was acknowledged “that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women.” Whole families had been ruined on their account. And already—the fault as ever of the sultry, sinuous, overtly subversive East—Egyptian women had caused their share of trouble. They were endowed with insatiable ardor and phenomenal sexual energy. One husband was not enough for them. They attracted and ruined men. Octavian only corralled the evidence.

He had found a cunning disguise for a civil war, which four years earlier he had declared officially over, and into which he had promised never again to lead his men. How much more palatable, how much more credible, that Antony should be destroyed by an illicit love than by his countrymen! It was by no means difficult to rally legions—or tax the populace, or set fathers against sons—with the claim that Cleopatra was poised to conquer them as she had conquered Antony. As Lucan formulated the battle cry a century later, “Would a woman—not even Roman—rule the world?” The logic was simple. The Egyptian queen had subdued Antony. Rome, Octavian warned, was next. At the end of October he declared war—on Cleopatra.

THE DECLARATION COULD not have been unexpected. It may even have come as a relief. Cleopatra must all the same have been surprised by its terms. She had engaged in no hostilities toward Rome. She had comported herself like the ideal vassal—if a vassal with privileges. She had maintained order in her kingdom, supplied Rome when called upon to do so, materialized when summoned, aggressed upon no neighbors. She had done everything in her power to uphold and nothing to diminish the surpassing greatness of Rome. Traditionally, a three-step process preceded a Roman declaration of war: The Senate submitted a demand for restitution, followed after a month by a solemn reminder that satisfaction was still wanting. Three days later, a messenger traveled to enemy territory, formally to open hostilities. Octavian summoned Cleopatra neither for an accounting nor an airing of charges. He made no overtures through diplomatic channels. Instead, deft as ever with the mise-en-scène, he dusted off the ceremonial portion of the process. In a military cloak he personally launched a spear drenched in pig blood toward the East, from a ritual patch of “hostile soil” in Rome. (There is speculation that he invented this ancient rite for the occasion, that Octavian was making up the history as he went along. He was very good at restoring traditions, including those that had never existed.) There were no official charges for the simple reason that none could be leveled. Insofar as Cleopatra stood accused of any hostile intent, she was condemned “for her acts,” conveniently left unspecified. Octavian gambled that Antony would remain true to Cleopatra, a loyalty that—under the circumstances—allowed Octavian to charge that his compatriot “had voluntarily taken up war on the side of the Egyptian woman against his native country.” At the end of 32 the Senate deprived Antony of his consulship and relieved him of all authority.^*

Antony and Cleopatra did their best to spin the underhanded provocation. They were obligatory allies now. Under the circumstances, they cried, how could anyone trust a blackguard like Octavian? “What in the world does he mean, then, by threatening us all alike with arms, but in the decree declaring that he is at war with some and not with others?” Antony implored his men. His double-dealing colleague schemed only to sow dissension, the better to rule as king over them all. (In that he was no doubt correct. Octavian would have found a way to initiate a war with Antony even if Antony had thrown over Cleopatra.) Why would anyone associate with a man who unceremoniously disenfranchised a colleague, who illegally seized the will of a friend, companion, kinsman? Octavian was without the courage to declare himself openly, Antony thundered, although he “is at war with me and is already acting in every way like one who has not only conquered me but also murdered me.” The experience, the popularity, the numbers, were all on Antony’s side; he was the skilled commander behind whom stood the most powerful dynasts in Asia. Five hundred warships, a land army of nineteen legions, more than 10,000 cavalry, answered to his orders. It made no difference that he had no authority in Rome. A third of the Senate was at his side.

For twelve years Antony had contended that Octavian plotted to destroy him. Realistically and opportunistically, Cleopatra could only have agreed. The couple were finally right. Antony was equally correct that in a contest of disingenuousness he could not rival his former brother-in-law. (Cleopatra might have, but she was obliged to let Antony do the talking.) It was most unfortunate that Antony had made himself a traitor to Rome, clucked Octavian. He was heartsick about the state of affairs. He had felt so affectionately toward him that he had entrusted him with a share in the command and with a much-loved sister. Octavian had not declared war even after Antony had humiliated that sister, neglected their children, and bestowed upon another woman’s children the possessions of the Roman people. Surely Antony would see the light. (Octavian had no such hopes for Cleopatra. “For I adjudged her,” he scoffed, “if only on account of her foreign birth, to be an enemy by reason of her very conduct.”) He insisted that Antony would “if not voluntarily, at least reluctantly, change his course as a result of the decrees passed against her.” Octavian knew full well that Antony would do no such thing. He and Cleopatra were well beyond that point. Matters of the heart aside, he was the most faithful of men. The situation with Octavian was moreover untenable. It would be difficult to say to whom Cleopatra was more vital in 32: the man to whom she was the partner, or the man to whom she was the pretext. Antony could not win a war without her. Octavian could not wage one.

Philippi had bought Antony a decade of goodwill; it abruptly came to an end now. In the fall he and Cleopatra moved west to Patras, an undistinguished town at the entrance of the Gulf of Corinth. From that point they established a defensive line up and down the west coast of Greece, distributing men from Actium in the north to Methoni in the south. The intention seems to have been to protect the supply lines to Alexandria, along with Egypt itself, on which Octavian had after all declared war. Cleopatra profited from the pause to issue coins, on which she appears as Isis. Antony sent considerable quantities of gold back to Rome, distributing bribes left and right. He had the greater force but labored all the same to undermine the loyalty of Octavian’s men. The bulk of those funds were presumably Cleopatra’s. Octavian’s war levies meanwhile set off riots in Rome. Also back and forth over the winter went various spies and senators, their loyalties fragile and mercurial. Many had faced this quandary at least once before: whom to flee, and whom to follow? It was a test of personalities rather than principles. Elsewhere it seemed as if a magnet had passed over the Mediterranean world, drawing the skittering sides into a taut alignment that “as a whole far surpassed in size anything that had ever been before.” The sovereigns Antony had installed in 36 turned out in full force. Among others, the Libyan, Thracian, Pontic, and Cappadocian kings joined him, with their fleets.

The winter passed in a fever pitch of inertia. For the second time the usually rash Antony appeared slow to open a campaign, one for which Cleopatra could only have been impatient. With every month she was running up considerable expenses. (The rule of thumb was 40 to 50 talents per legion per year, which put Cleopatra’s summer outlay for the infantry alone in the vicinity of 210 talents.) It was difficult to escape the impression that Antony, the most famous soldier alive, had no desire for an epic battle. Of an earlier occasion it would be said of Caesar that “he sought a reputation rather than a province,” an assertion that was arguably more true of his protégé. Octavian invited Antony to an absurd staged encounter. Antony challenged Octavian to a duel. Neither materialized. Mostly the two sides confined themselves to insults and idle threats, to “spying upon and annoying each other.” The air pulsed with rumor, much of it generated by Octavian. In 33 he expelled the multitude of astrologers and soothsayers from Rome, ostensibly to purge the growing Eastern influence, actually better to control the story line. In their absence it was easier to elicit the kinds of omens Octavian preferred; he wanted to be the only one in the prophecy business. So it was that Antony and Cleopatra’s statues in the Acropolis were said to have been struck by lightning and to lie in sorry ruins. Eighty-five-foot-long two-headed serpents appeared. A marble statue of Antony oozed blood. When the children of Rome divided themselves into Antonians and Octavians for a fierce two-day-long street battle, the miniature Octavians prevailed. The truth was closer to that suggested by two talking ravens. Their equitable trainer had taught the first to squawk, “Hail Caesar, our victorious commander.” The other learned: “Hail Antony, our victorious commander.” A smart Roman had every reason to hedge his bets—and to believe that with their hotheaded rhetoric, their personal agendas, Antony and Octavian were perfectly interchangeable. Even those on intimate terms with both conceded that each “desired to be the ruler, not only of the city of Rome, but of the whole world.”

While the funds and experience were largely on Antony and Cleopatra’s side, so too were the ambiguities, beginning with the matter—not necessarily more transparent in 32 than it is today—of their marriage. As a foreigner, Cleopatra could not under Roman law become Antony’s wife, even after his divorce. Only by the more supple, accommodating logic of the Greek East could the two have been said to have married. From the Egyptian point of view the question was irrelevant. Cleopatra had no need to be married to Antony, who was without any official status in Egypt, which she ruled with Caesarion. Antony was there a queen’s consort and patron, not a king. That was unproblematic in Egypt. It was a muddle to Rome. Was Cleopatra meant to play a role in the West? Again there was no category for her, or rather there was: If she was not a wife, she was by definition a concubine. In which case why did Antony stamp her image on Roman coins? Antony and Cleopatra’s joint intentions too were murky. Did they mean to realize the dream of Alexander the Great, to unite men across national boundaries and under one divine law, as the prophecy had it? Or did Antony intend to set himself up as an Oriental monarch, with Cleopatra as empress? (He made it easy for Octavian: a Roman surrendered his citizenship if he formally attached himself to another state.) Their agenda may have been better defined—probably they meant to establish two capitals—but generally they taxed the category-loving Roman mind. And they turned the client king arrangement on its head. A foreigner was meant to be subservient, not equal, to a Roman. As such, it was easy for Octavian to make a case for the transgressive, insatiable woman, intent on conquest. He did so convincingly and enduringly. One of the greatest twentieth-century classicists has Cleopatra working through Antony, like a parasite, to realize ambitions she may never have considered. The military intentions were opaque as well. For what precisely was Antony fighting? He might well mean to restore the Republic, as he claimed, but what then to make of the mother of his three half-Roman children?

For Octavian, by contrast, all was crystalline and categorical, or at least it was once he had passed off a personal vendetta as a foreign war. His argument had cleaner lines and better visuals. He made a splendid, splashy appeal to xenophobia. Surely his men—“we who are Romans and lords of the greatest and best portion of the world”—were not going to be rattled by these primitives? Not for the last time, the world divided into a masculine, rational West and a feminine, indefinite East, on which Octavian declared a sort of crusade. He fought against something but for something as well: for Roman probity, piety, and self-control, precisely those qualities his former brother-in-law had shrugged off in his embrace of Cleopatra. Antony was no longer a Roman but an Egyptian, a mere cymbal player, effeminate, inconsequential, and impotent, “for it is impossible for one who leads a life of royal luxury, and coddles himself like a woman, to have a manly thought or do a manly deed.”^* Octavian savaged even Antony’s literary style. And incidentally, had anyone noticed that Antony drank? Octavian stressed his role as Caesar’s heir less often. Instead he went in for tales of his own divinity, which he broadcast widely. Few in Rome failed to hear of his descent from Apollo, to whom he was dedicating a fine new temple.

In reducing Antony to a cymbal player Octavian accomplished an especially difficult feat. He publicly acknowledged what many men who have faced a woman across a tennis net have since noted: in such a contest, there is greater pride to be lost than glory to be gained. By the Roman definition, a woman hardly qualified as a worthy opponent. Coaxing a tinny accusation into a series of resonant chords, later scored for a full orchestra, Octavian rhapsodized about Cleopatra. He endowed her with every kind of power, to create an enduring grotesque. This brutal, bloodthirsty Egyptian queen was no latter-day Fulvia. She was a vicious enemy, with designs on all Roman possessions. Surely the great and glorious people who had subdued the Germans, trampled the Gauls, and invaded the Britons, who had conquered Hannibal and burned Carthage, were not going to tremble before “this pestilence of a woman”? What would their glorious forefathers say if they learned that a people of singular exploits and vast conquests, to whom every region of the world had now submitted, had been trodden underfoot by an Egyptian harlot, her eunuchs, and her hairdressers? Indeed they faced a formidable array of forces, Octavian assured his men, but to win great prizes, one waged great contests. In this one the honor of Rome was at stake. It was the obligation of those destined “to conquer and rule all mankind” to uphold their illustrious history, to avenge those who insulted them, and “to allow no woman to make herself equal to a man.”^*

EARLY IN 31 Octavian’s superb admiral, Agrippa, made a swift, surprise crossing to Greece. A longtime friend and mentor to Octavian, he supplied the military acumen his commander lacked. Agrippa disrupted Antony’s supply lines and captured his southern base. In his wake, Octavian transferred 80,000 men from the Adriatic coast across the Ionian Sea. The move forced Antony north. His infantry was not yet in place; he was wholly taken aback. Cleopatra attempted to calm him by making light of the enemy’s sudden presence in a fine natural port (it was probably modern Parga) on a spoon-shaped promontory. “What is there dreadful in Caesar’s sitting at a ladle?” she scoffed. Straightaway, Octavian offered battle, which Antony could not yet manage. His crews were incomplete. By an early morning feint he forced Octavian to withdraw. Weeks of taunts and skirmishes followed, as Octavian roamed freely among the harbors of western Greece, and as Antony settled his legions on a sandy spit of land at the southern entrance to the Ambracian Gulf. Actium offered an excellent harbor, if in a damp, desolate area; Antony and Cleopatra could not have been long in realizing that the swampy lowland, thick with ferns and grasses, was infinitely more suitable as a battle site than as a campsite. The weeks passed in attempted engagements and attenuated decisions. Octavian could not lure Antony out to sea. Antony could not coax Octavian out on land. He remained more intent on cutting Antony’s supply lines, at which, over the spring and early summer, he proved highly proficient. Cleopatra may have affected perfect insouciance about his landing but the truth was that in the wake of a series of inexplicable, slow-motion decisions—they may not have made sense even before Octavian’s eulogists got hold of them—Antony and Cleopatra began to cede the advantage. Meanwhile the question of strategy hung heavily over Antony’s head: to meet Octavian on land or at sea? For the most part the two armies glared at each other across the narrow strait, from one grassy promontory to the other.

From the distance Antony’s camp must have offered a splendid sight, with its vast and variegated armies, the flashes of gold-spangled purple-red robes. Towering Thracians in black tunics and bright armor mingled with Macedonians in fresh scarlet cloaks, Medians in richly colored vests. A Ptolemaic military cloak, woven with gold, might feature a royal portrait or a mythological scene. The scruffy Greek lowland blazed with costly equipment, with gleaming helmets and gilded breastplates, jeweled bridles, dyed plumes, decorated spears.^* The bulk of the soldiers were Eastern, as were an increasing number of rowers, many of them raw recruits. With them assembled an ecumenical collection of arms: Thracian wicker shields and quivers joined Roman javelins and Cretan bows and long Macedonian pikes.

Cleopatra footed much of the bill but contributed something else too; unlike Antony, she could communicate with the assembled dignitaries of the East. She spoke the language of the Armenian cavalry, the Ethiopian infantry, the Median detachments, as well as that of royalty. There was a code of behavior among Hellenistic sovereigns. Most had experience of powerful queens. And Canidius had not misspoken. By her presence, Cleopatra reminded her fellow dynasts that they were battling for something other than a Roman republic, in which they had no interest. They had little sympathy for either Antony or Octavian, against either of whom they might just as easily have aligned, as they had aligned against Rome in 89, with Mithradates. Had she not launched herself directly into the heart of Roman affairs with her call on Caesar in 48, Cleopatra would have been in precisely their position. She and Antony turned away only one sovereign, naturally the most enthusiastic of the bunch. Herod arrived with money, a well-trained army, equipment, and a shipment of grain. He delivered as well some familiar advice. Were Antony only to murder Cleopatra and annex Egypt, his troubles would be over. Herod’s army and provisions remained but his stay in camp was brief. For his priceless counsel he was packed off to fight Malchus, the Nabatean king, said to be delinquent with his bitumen payments. Simultaneously Cleopatra ordered her general in that stony region to frustrate both monarchs’ efforts. She preferred that they destroy each other.

Closer up all was not quite so rosy. The wait—in a vast, multiethnic military camp, under less than salubrious conditions—took its toll. As the temperature rose, conditions deteriorated. Cleopatra’s presence did little for morale. No doubt accurately, Herod wrote his dismissal down to her. That she occupied a vital position in camp and did little to apologize for that position is clear; as Egypt’s commander in chief, she believed war preparations and operations to be her duty. She seems to have assumed that Antony was the only friend she needed. She was unwilling to be silenced, ironic given how little of her voice survives; there would be none of Queen Isabella of Spain’s deferential “May your Lordship pardon me for speaking of things which I do not understand.” It is impossible to say what came first, the Roman humiliation at Cleopatra’s presence, or Cleopatra’s superciliousness with the Romans. Antony’s officers were said to be ashamed of her and of her status as equal partner. His closest companions objected to her authority. She had backed herself into a corner: To relax her guard was to be sent home. To maintain it was to offend. She may have been rattled too. There were stormy scenes with Antony.

Cleopatra failed in particular to endear herself to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, arguably Antony’s most distinguished supporter. A proud Republican, Ahenobarbus had led the consuls who had fled to Ephesus the previous spring. He was resolute and incorruptible. From the start he and Cleopatra had trouble. He refused to address her by her title; to him she remained simply “Cleopatra.” She attempted to buy him off, only to discover that Ahenobarbus was as straight-spined as Plancus was invertebrate. True to his reputation, Ahenobarbus was vocal, too. He made no secret of his opinion that she was a liability. And he believed a war could be avoided. Implicated in and condemned for Caesar’s murder, later proscribed, Ahenobarbus had fought at Philippi against Antony. The two reconciled afterward, since which time Ahenobarbus had occupied every high office and counted among Antony’s most devoted adherents. He had been instrumental in opposing Octavian. He had fought to suppress the damaging news of the Donations. Already Ahenobarbus’s son was promised to one of Antony’s daughters. Together the two men had survived all kinds of adversity: They had been through Parthia together, where Ahenobarbus proved himself stalwart and a leader. When Antony had been too despondent to do so himself, Ahenobarbus had addressed the troops on their commander’s behalf. As morale deteriorated in Actium the senior statesman this time took a different route. In a small boat, he defected to Octavian. Antony was devastated. True to form, he sent his former colleague’s baggage, friends, and servants to join him. Cleopatra disapproved of his magnanimity.

She could not have been unaware of the discomfort her presence caused in the sweltering, mosquito-infested camp, where her retinue and tents made for a discordant sight, and where her immense flagship, the Antonia, with its ten banks of oars and carved and decorated bow, presumably evoked little pride. Rations were curtailed. The men were hungry, the mood sour. Cleopatra sat on a pile of closely guarded treasure. A Roman soldier liked to see his general eating stale bread and sleeping on a simple pallet. Cleopatra disturbed that equation. From all sides Antony—his tent positioned squarely at the center of the vast camp—heard that Cleopatra should be sent away, to which pleas he remained deaf. Even the trusted Canidius, who had earlier argued on her behalf, wanted her gone. She knew of the ridicule Fulvia had inspired. Even in Egypt, female commanders were not popular, as Cleopatra understood from her sister’s short career during the Alexandrian War. She had no experience of armed conflict on this scale. Herod’s theory was that Antony would not send her away as “his ears, it seems, were stopped by his infatuation.” Why, then, did she not step aside, as she had with Caesar?

Octavian had declared war on her alone. She had every reason to demand vengeance. She had been shunted aside by military advisers before, to wind up in the Sinai desert, homeless and disenfranchised. She had been ill served by intermediaries; she may have been unwilling to entrust Egypt’s fate to Antony alone. All was at stake: The future of the Ptolemaic dynasty hung in the balance. Were Octavian and Antony to come to terms now, she would be the price of that accord. The real mystery of 31 is less why Cleopatra remained than why—having expertly neutralized cultural collisions in Egypt, having artfully assuaged Roman egos—she neglected to work her charm on Antony’s officers. In camp she seems to have been an infuriating and exhausting presence. Many were treated to the scorn she had heaped on the straight-talking Geminius. Friends of Antony and Roman consuls alike suffered at her hands, universally reported to have been “abused by Cleopatra.” She was vindictive, peremptory, brittle. Experience had not made her any more tractable than she had been as a teenager, with her brothers’ advisers. She was after all accustomed to exercising supreme authority, poor at taking orders. Meanwhile morale plunged as Octavian’s blockade tightened around the gulf, as swarms of mosquitoes descended upon the camp, and as an epidemic—it was likely malaria—set in. Conditions were deplorable. Relief came only toward midday, when with a rustle the wind picked up from the west. For a few hours a fresh, brisk breeze swept in, growing stronger as it pivoted from west to north, to subside as the sun set.

Months passed in readiness and inactivity, and with them a gradual reordering of the odds. While the idea had presumably been to trap Octavian in the Ambracian Gulf, Antony and Cleopatra found themselves bottled up in the bright blue bay, a shifting of realities to which they were slow to adjust. Notes Plutarch: “The chief task of a good general is to force his enemies to give battle when he is superior to them, but not to be forced himself to do this when his forces are inferior.” Antony had long relinquished that advantage. By August he had no choice but to enlist whole towns to carry supplies overland to camp. Plutarch’s great-grandfather was among those miserably pressed into service, to make the trek over mountain paths to the gulf, sacks of wheat on their shoulders, whips at their backs.

What the blockade, the disease, the debilitating inactivity, the heat, did not affect, the desertions did. Slaves and client kings alike abandoned the cause. Antony made an example of two near-deserters, a senator and a Syrian king, tortured and executed to discourage imitators. Antony was himself rattled, enough so to attempt a solitary stroll along the fortifications, toward the sea, in the course of which Octavian’s men nearly succeeded in kidnapping him. Ahenobarbus’s defection affected him deeply; he was afterward fiercely paranoid. By one account, he distrusted even Cleopatra, whom he suspected of attempting to poison him. To prove her innocence she was said to have prepared a lethal drink, only to intercept the goblet as Antony raised it to his lips. Had she intended to kill him she would not have done so, would she? She then sent for a prisoner, to whom she handed the potion. It had the advertised effect. (The story is suspect, as Cleopatra could hardly proceed without Antony. He was unlikely to have forgotten as much, even in an agitated state.) Cleopatra quarreled as well with Dellius, who had spent his summer recruiting mercenaries. The two came to blows at dinner one night, when Dellius complained of the wine. It was sour, he scoffed, while in Rome Octavian’s staff downed the finest vintages. Dellius emerged from the tussle convinced that Cleopatra meant to murder him. One of her physicians, he claimed, confirmed as much. It was a perfectly legitimate excuse for his third and final defection. He fled to Octavian, depriving Antony of what Caesar had termed the mightiest of weapons: surprise. With Dellius went Antony’s battle plans.

Toward the end of August Antony called a war council. Sixteen weeks of blockade had taken a toll. The situation was bleak. Supplies were short; the night air was crisp. Winter would soon be upon them. Antony needed finally to resolve the question that had plagued him through the scorching summer. Tactics came more easily to him than did strategy; he could be indecisive. If she had not already done so, Cleopatra now fell out even with Canidius. He preferred to march north and to decide the contest on land. They were Romans after all; to wage battle atop scudding waves was in his opinion folly. Antony had never before commanded a fleet. He could yield the sea to Octavian without shame. There were moreover recruits to be had in Macedonia and Thrace. Of course Canidius knew well that to fight on land was to sacrifice Cleopatra’s fleet and with it her usefulness. Cleopatra knew that to sacrifice the fleet was to imperil Egypt. Her chests of silver denarii could not be carted across mountains. She argued vigorously for a naval engagement. Her reasons were perfectly sound: Antony was seriously outnumbered on land. He could not ultimately cross to Italy without a fleet. Nor was it easy to move an army over mountains; five years had not erased the memory of Parthia. There was another consideration as well, an analogue that no one involved in the Actium deliberations could have ignored. For his showdown with Caesar, Pompey too had marshaled a massive, noisy, polyglot force of Asiatic kings and princes in Greece. Cleopatra had contributed sixty ships to that fleet. Ahenobarbus had been present, as had his father, who had perished in the battle. Antony had commanded with distinction on the opposite side. In August 48 Pompey had elected to ignore his navy, far superior to Caesar’s. Hardly was the day out when he realized that he had blundered grievously in opting for a land battle. The result was utter carnage, a speechless, senseless commander, robbed of his army, his wits, and his pride, and—days later—decapitated off the coast of Egypt.

ANTONY OPTED FOR a naval campaign. Plutarch has him swayed by emotion. More likely the most experienced general of his day meant neither to accommodate Cleopatra nor to showcase her navy but bowed in the end to necessity. Octavian had not only a more coherent narrative but a more cohesive force, an army of Latin-speaking, well-drilled Romans. The land advantage was his. At sea the two sides were more evenly matched. Antony explained as much to his restless men, few of whom could swim. He did not care to open a campaign with a defeat. “I have chosen to begin with the ships, where we are strongest and have a vast superiority over our antagonists, in order that after a victory with these we may scorn their infantry also.” (Elaborating on the same theme, Octavian proved himself more psychologically astute: “For in general it is a natural characteristic of human nature everywhere, that whenever a man fails in his first contests he becomes disheartened with respect to what is to come.”) Despite the explanations, a battle-worn veteran threw himself upon Antony with an emotional appeal. He displayed an astonishing collection of scars. How could Antony insult those wounds, to invest his hopes “in miserable logs of wood”? The soldier pleaded with his commander: “Let Egyptians and Phoenicians do their fighting at sea, but give us land, on which we are accustomed to stand and either conquer our enemies or die.” Antony—“better endowed by nature than any man of his time for leading an army by force of eloquence”—looked upon him kindly but could not manage a reply.

Over the last days of August a familiar smell greeted Cleopatra. The afternoon breeze lifted the acrid odor of flaming cedar and resin throughout camp. It was a smell she knew from the Alexandrian harbor seventeen years earlier; in what must have seemed to be a regular Roman tradition, Antony dragged some eighty of her ships to the beach and set fire to them. He no longer had the crew to man the fleet and could not risk its falling into Octavian’s hands. That was no secret; the blaze was bright and pungent. A storm soon extinguished the lingering wisps of smoke; for four days, gale winds and drenching rains lashed the coast. By the time the weather cleared only warped fittings and scorched rams remained. Under cover of darkness on the evening of September 1 Cleopatra’s officers secretly loaded her chests of treasure onto the massive Antonia. Several transport ships took on additional monies, as well as a hoard of royal tableware. Masts and bulky sails went aboard both Cleopatra’s ships and Antony’s. By sunrise Antony had embarked 20,000 soldiers and with them thousands of archers and slingers, wedging a colossal number of men into slivers of space. The sky was crystal clear and the sea a glassy sheet as they rowed out, with a crash and clatter of oars, to the mouth of the gulf. There Antony’s three squadrons stationed themselves in close, crescent formation. Cleopatra and her remaining sixty ships took up the rear, as much to head off deserters as for protection. She was not meant to take part in the fighting.

Outside the strait Antony’s men discovered Octavian’s fleet assembled in a similar formation, about a mile off. The gulf resounded with the high-pitched blasts of trumpets; criers and officers urged the men on. And Antony’s 240 ships, oars poised, prows pointed, facing Octavian’s 400, sat through the morning, prepared to fight, hulls crammed together, creaking and motionless, as the land armies watched from shore. Finally at midday Octavian ordered his northernmost squadron to row backward, in an attempt to draw Antony out. His ships advanced into open water. Instantly the air was thick with shouts, onshore and on the water. From the lofty towers of Antony’s fleet a dense hail of stones and arrows and metal shards rained down. On Octavian’s side oars shattered and rudders snapped. Despite the sea churning beneath her, it was from Cleopatra’s perspective an odd floating land battle, with Octavian’s men playing the cavalry and Antony’s men repelling the assault from their floating fortresses, the largest of which loomed ten feet above the waterline. The fierce ramming and grappling continued inconclusively until late in the afternoon. At about three o’clock Octavian’s left wing shifted, to outflank Antony’s; Antony’s in turn edged north. The center of the line dissolved. Suddenly Cleopatra’s squadron hoisted sail and—expertly plying the wind—broke coolly through the middle of the battle, past the flying slings and missiles, beyond the spears and axes of the enemy line, sowing confusion on all sides. Octavian’s men looked on in amazement as Cleopatra sped south in her majestic flagship, its purple sails billowing. For the most part the enemy was powerless to overtake her. Their shock only increased when, moments later, Antony transferred from his flagship to a swift galley and followed behind, with forty ships of his personal squadron.

Octavian’s men were arguably less bewildered, as Plutarch has it, than impressed. Antony and Cleopatra had slipped away with a third of the remaining fleet and all of her treasure. Clearly the flight had been prearranged; there would have been neither valuables nor sails stowed on Cleopatra’s ships otherwise. She timed her move perfectly to take advantage of the brisk and favorable rise in the wind. And from Dellius, Octavian had known of the blockade-breaking plan. Antony and Cleopatra had had no intention of prolonging a battle. Earlier in the month they had already once attempted to force their way through the blockade. If they could nudge Octavian out to sea they could escape to Egypt; they made this sally only in order to do so. In the prebattle speech Dio supplies him, Octavian alerts his men to precisely this course of events: “Since, then, they admit that they are weaker than we are, and since they carry the prizes of victory in their ships, let us not allow them to sail anywhere else, but let us conquer them here on the spot and take all these treasures away from them.” On September 2 a few of Octavian’s swift ships—light, highly maneuverable galleys, with streamlined prows—indeed headed off in pursuit.

On the high seas Cleopatra signaled to Antony. With two companions he climbed over the whitecaps to board the Antonia. The reunion was not a happy one; Antony neither saw nor spoke to Cleopatra, on account of what sounds more like shame than anger. Something had gone very wrong. Probably Antony’s men were not meant to have remained behind. Cleopatra had earlier argued that the bulk of the army return with her to Egypt. The fleet had either been unable to escape or had elected not to do so. They may have preferred to fight a Roman rather than follow a foreigner; certainly there were mutinous murmurs in camp. Antony and Cleopatra may have planned the maneuver only in case of necessity, and alone or together acted peremptorily. Or Cleopatra may have made her exit prematurely. She must have been longing to sail off to Alexandria, a city that—were she vanquished off the coast of Greece—she knew she would never see again. Dio suggests that Antony fled because he (erroneously) read a concession of defeat in Cleopatra’s departure. Or all went precisely according to plan, and its repercussions emerged only after the fact; we are left to square unintelligible decisions with obscure accounts. In any event Antony could not have bowed his head in defeat, as the engagement—less a skirmish than a melee—continued inconclusively for some time. Even Octavian would not know by day’s end who had prevailed. Whether the plan had been misconceived or had miscarried, the I-told-you-so’s hang palpably in the salty breeze. If Plutarch can be believed, Antony choked on his helplessness. Ignoring Cleopatra, “he went forward alone to the prow and sat down by himself in silence, holding his head in both hands.” He stirred only at dusk, when two of Octavian’s galleys materialized in the distance. Antony commanded the flagship to be swung around so that he might stand and face the enemy head on. A skirmish ensued, from which the Antonia escaped, but to which Cleopatra sacrificed a command ship and a second vessel, packed with a quantity of rich plate and furniture.

Having fended off the assailants, Antony returned to the prow. Head bowed, he stared listlessly out to sea, the hero of Philippi, the new Dionysus, reduced to a great brooding hulk, the powerful arms and shoulders startlingly still. The cruise south was a bitter one, infected by mutual anxieties and private losses. It was also quiet. Antony spent three days alone, “either in anger with Cleopatra, or wishing not to upbraid her.” While it may have been forged of desperation, the plan had at one time seemed a sensible one. Antony could not now escape the impression that he had deserted his men. They had remained steadfast while kings, senators, officers, had abandoned him. He had left them in the lurch, to find himself in an untenable position with Cleopatra. The outcome of the battle of Actium remained unclear, as it would for several days, but he understood the implications of what he had done and how it appeared. A Roman commander was meant to stare down defeat, to persist regardless of all debilitating odds. And history was entirely palpable to Mark Antony; in Rome he lived grandly in a house decorated by ninety bronze rams captured at sea. (They were Pompey’s.) He understood what glory had just slipped, forever, through his fingers.

After three days Cleopatra put in for water and supplies at Taenarum, the southernmost point of the Peloponnesian peninsula. (Fittingly, it was the cape where Hercules was believed to have searched for the entrance to the underworld.) There two of her servants, Iras the hairdresser and Charmion the lady-in-waiting, urged a reconciliation. With some coaxing, the two women persuaded Antony and Cleopatra to speak, eventually even “to eat and sleep together.” Several transport ships joined them, with news of what had transpired after their Actium departure. The battle had intensified and continued on for hours. Antony’s fleet had held out but was ultimately destroyed. For some time the surf delivered up bodies and timber, flecked—if a particularly colorful account can be believed—with the purple and gold spangles of the East. Antony’s land forces held firm. At the end of the meeting Antony attempted to distribute gifts to his men. From one of the transport ships, he handed around gold and silver treasures from Cleopatra’s palace. In tears, his men refused the prizes. Their commander showered them instead with affection. He would, he promised, arrange for them to be hidden away safely until they could agree on terms with Octavian. With Cleopatra he continued on across the Mediterranean, to the flat coast of Egypt. They made landfall in a desolate outpost in the northwestern corner of the country, where they separated, along an expanse of sandy beach.

Antony headed to Libya, where he had posted four legions. He planned to regroup. Cleopatra, her fleet lost, her treasure partly dispersed, her ally ruined, hurried to Alexandria. She had left Actium before anyone else, and in a powerful, well-equipped ship. If she moved rapidly she could outsail news of the fiasco. She knew what it was to return to Egypt under catastrophic conditions and took precautions: she ordered some quick floral arranging. When she glided past the lighthouse of Alexandria the following day she did so serenely, her ships garlanded with wreaths of flowers. Accompanied by flute players, an on-deck chorus chanted victory songs. To those who rowed out to meet her Cleopatra imparted the news of her extraordinary triumph, presumably without a trace of dryness in her throat. Nearly simultaneously, Antony’s nineteen legions and 12,000 cavalry—having finally given up hope that their commander would return to them, and after a week of stubborn negotiation—surrendered to Octavian, who was only just beginning to grasp the scale of his victory.