Cleopatra and Antony Read online

  Also, if not Caesar, who was the father of the child with whom Cleopatra was swelling visibly? To strengthen her alliance with a protector who she suspected might be incapable of impregnating her, Cleopatra could have taken another, clandestine, lover. Yet the women of the inbred house of Ptolemy were obsessively proud of their lineage and it seems highly unlikely that Cleopatra would have found a man she considered suitable as a Caesar surrogate. It is also implausible that such a careful tactician as Cleopatra would have risked her budding relationship with Caesar by such a trick in the hothouse atmosphere of the palace, where little remained secret for long.

  With matters successfully concluded, including access to Egypt’s treasure houses to replenish his coffers, Caesar should have left Egypt at once. Though he had appointed Antony his deputy or magister equitum (master of the horse) in Italy while he pursued Pompey to Egypt, and knew he could depend on his loyalty, much required his urgent personal attention. Rome’s civil war was not yet over. Pompey’s supporters were rallying in Africa while, in Asia Minor, King Pharnaces of Pontus was threatening to become as great a menace to Rome as his father, Mithridates, who had taken such pleasure in slaughtering Italian women and children. Instead, using the somewhat lame excuse that the seasonal winds that blew into the harbor mouth continued to make the departure of his fleet difficult, the usually highly disciplined Caesar entirely atypically chose to linger by Cleopatra’s side. According to Suetonius, he would feast with his lover until the sun rose over the city to challenge the light of the Pharos.

  In the early spring of 47, it seems that Caesar embarked with Cleopatra on a cruise up the Nile. Egyptian royal barges were the stuff of fantasy—sumptuous floating palaces of fragrant cedar and cypress about three hundred feet long, forty-five feet wide and sixty feet high, hung with costly fabrics and sparkling with gems, all supported on twin, catamaran-like hulls. Lying on silken couches and cooled by peacock-feather fans, the lovers could dally as they floated past the rich bright green farmlands along the Nile, Caesar adorned with the wreaths of flowers that were a Ptolemaic fashion.

  However, it was more than a pleasure trip. For Cleopatra, there was a strategic purpose in showing herself to the wider Egyptian population beyond Alexandria. Cleopatra was unpopular in her idiosyncratic, cosmopolitan capital, but her relationship with the people of the countryside and especially those of Upper Egypt was warmer. They remembered her homage to the Buchis bull at Her-monthis early in her reign and it was to them that she had first turned for help when forced to flee Alexandria. Now they could see their Isis restored to divine majesty with her powerful Roman ally by her side.

  From Caesar’s point of view, there was also some political point to this pleasurable river trip—to demonstrate the power of Rome. Appian claims that four hundred ships accompanied the barge. Suetonius states that the plan was to sail to the southernmost part of Egypt, “nearly to Ethiopia,” but that, echoing the reluctance of Alexander’s troops to advance into India, Caesar’s men grew restive and the trip was curtailed. Perhaps the hardened legionaries, hungry for home, wondered what was the point of drifting along the Nile, apart from allowing their leader a scenic sexual interlude—certainly when Caesar finally returned to Rome, his men would sing ribald verses about his enthusiastic couplings with the Egyptian queen. In Rome, Cicero too was wondering where Caesar was, writing, “Caesar seems to be so stuck in Alexandria that he is ashamed even to write about the situation there.”

  Soon after their return to Alexandria, in late June or early July 47, Caesar at last left Egypt, marching with his troops across the hot deserts into Syria. He was not leaving his heavily pregnant mistress unprotected. To defend her—and to guard Rome’s interests—he left behind three legions under the command of a courageous but humbly born officer named Rufio, the son of an emancipated slave. In so doing, Caesar was disregarding the long-established practice whereby only officers who were also senators could command Rome’s legions. Yet, mirroring his fears over appointing a governor, Caesar was wary of ceding too much power in Egypt to a potential rival. The son of a former slave was a safer bet.

  For the first time since the death of her father, Cleopatra had a protector. Although he would be many miles away from her, he had the power to reach out to her should danger threaten. It is perhaps indicative of her gratitude, her relief and even her love for him that she began building a vast and ostentatiously splendid monument to Caesar—the Caesareum—on the harbor. It must have been a pleasing distraction as she awaited the arrival of the child that would be tangible proof of her alliance with the most powerful man in Rome. An inscription in Memphis suggests that Cleopatra gave birth in early September 47, just a few weeks after Caesar’s departure. The child was a son and, with their usual pointed wit, the Alexandrians called him Caesarion, “little Caesar.” Cleopatra herself called him Ptolemy Caesar and, even more portentously, an inscription at Hermonthis on the Upper Nile welcomed the baby as “the child of Amon Ra created through the human agency of Julius Caesar.” In celebration, Cleopatra ordered the day of his birth to be celebrated as a feast of Isis and also issued new coins in Cyprus. They made no mention of her new husband, Ptolemy XIV. Instead they depicted Cleopatra as Isis suckling her newborn son, the divine child Horus. The reverse side depicted a double cornucopia—an ancient symbol of the Ptolemies signifying a new golden age.*

  Cleopatra also ordered bas-reliefs to be carved on the outer walls of the Temple of Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of love, music, joy and fertility, founded by Auletes at Dendera. On one side of the hundred-foot rear wall she and Caesarion were depicted on a monumental scale making offerings of burning incense to Hathor and her infant son. The exact date of these carvings is unknown, but the imagery was carefully chosen—Hathor’s consort, the triumphant Horus, did not dwell within the same temple. Instead, he lived far away to the south in the temple of Edfu. Once a year, in the Festival of the Beautiful Embrace, an image of Hathor was carried by barge to Edfu. The situation was a neat parallel to Cleopatra’s relationship with the absent Caesar. On the other side of the wall, Cleopatra and Caesarion were again depicted, this time making offerings to Isis and her brother-husband Osiris. Cleopatra, shown in the Egyptian style as a slender-bodied, near-naked figure with a protuberant navel, was identifying herself with Hathor and Isis and her son with Horus. The message to her Egyptian subjects was clear: Cleopatra, queen and goddess, had given Egypt—and the Ptolemies—a divine heir.*

  *For a long time historians believed that the Library of Alexandria itself was consumed in the flames but although up to forty thousand volumes may have been destroyed in the warehouses, it is now thought that the library itself survived until its destruction during riots in early Christian times. Only one document remains—a papyrus of 235 BC written in Greek discovered in a mummy case in which it had been used as lining. The original is in the National Library of Austria but a facsimile is in the new Library of Alexandria, built some two hundred meters east of where the original library is thought to have stood.

  *The date of Caesarion’s birth has been much debated. Some have claimed, on the basis of conflicting dates mentioned by Plutarch and dates mentioned in other ancient sources, that Caesarion was not in fact born until shortly after Caesar’s death. However, the inscription on the stele from Memphis appears to refer specifically to Caesarion and is widely accepted. (In fact, it gives his date of birth as June 23, 47, but this is because it was probably not inscribed until after the introduction of the new Julian calendar. Under the old calendar still in force in 47, June 23 equates to early September 47.)

  *Cleopatra also dedicated a temple of birth bearing images of herself and Caesarion at Hermonthis, where, early in her reign, she had worshipped the Buchis bull. It was destroyed in the nineteenth century.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Veni, Vidi, Vici”

  CAESAR’S EMOTIONS ON PARTING from Cleopatra are not recorded but he was immediately preoccupied. According to the author of The Alexandrian War, as soon as
Caesar reached Syria he learned that “there was much that was bad and unprofitable in the administration at Rome” and that rivalries among the tribunes were producing “dangerous rifts.” Caesar, though, did not rush home. Instead, he turned his attention to King Pharnaces of Pontus. Attempting to regain his father’s territories, Pharnaces had recently defeated a Roman army sent to stop him and was now inciting other local rulers to rebel. So lightning-quick and easy was Caesar’s victory over Pharnaces in Pontus that he could write boastfully to a friend, “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). He added that it was little wonder that Pompey had built a reputation as a great general if all the eastern enemies he had fought had been of this caliber.

  On September 24, 47, Caesar finally landed back in Italy and hurried to Rome to assess the “dangerous rifts” for himself. The problems were formidable—restive, time-served legions eager for disbandment, breakdowns in law and order and economic stagnation. Antony had not performed as well this time as he had during Caesar’s absence fighting against Pompey’s supporters in Spain.

  The thirty-six-year-old Antony had, of course, proved his talents as a military commander early in Egypt and later in Gaul. His men loved him for his courage, judgment and stamina and also for his generosity. Like Caesar, he had an effortless charm and understood how to inspire loyalty and devotion. Plutarch noted how he had the common touch—the ability to make himself one of the lads: “his swaggering air, his ribald talk, his fondness for carousing in public, sitting down by his men as they ate, or taking his own food standing at the common-mess table made his own troops delight in his company and almost worship him.” An imposing physical appearance enhanced his endearingly bluff manner. A handsome bull of a man with wild curls, broad shoulders and muscular thighs, he exuded strength and energy. Cicero would sneeringly deride him as resembling a prizefighter.

  Antony could also be a clear-thinking, imaginative, decisive administrator—otherwise Caesar would not have twice left him in charge of Italy in critical times. However, growing quickly bored with the routines of political and administrative life, which held little appeal for him as a natural man of action rather than reflection, Antony had given way with gusto to his sensual, self-indulgent side. Lost in a sybaritic whirl of parties, drinking and lovemaking, his favorite companions had become actors, musicians and courtesans. With ill-placed brio, he had taken to riding about in a chariot drawn by lions in imitation of Bacchus or to taking his favorite actress with him when he visited other cities on official business, reputedly providing her with a retinue larger than he accorded his mother, Julia. Racked by hangovers and bleary-eyed after all-night drinking bouts, he struggled to get out of bed in the morning. On one occasion, after a particularly heavy night, he astonished members of the popular assembly who had summoned him to an early meeting by arriving still worse for wear and throwing up in front of them into a cloak thoughtfully held out for him by one of his friends. When riots broke out in support of attempts by the tribune Dolabella to introduce a decree canceling all debts, a lethargic Antony had at first done nothing, then reacted with unnecessary violence. One reason for his sudden brutality was said to be a growing suspicion that Dola-bella was cuckolding him with his wife, Antonia.

  Convinced that Antony’s had not been a safe pair of hands, Caesar, for the moment at least, dropped him, leaving him without any official role. He had himself elected as consul for the following year, 46, and chose a relative nonentity, Lepidus, whom he thought could be trusted to show no initiative, to be his co-consul and to replace Antony as master of the horse. To sweeten his political supporters, Caesar increased the number of priesthoods and praetor-ships and appointed his cronies to them. To seduce the populace, he ordered landlords to freeze their rents for a year. He also placed a ban on some of the 94 luxury foods that made up such a key part of the conspicuous consumption envied and despised in equal measure by those unable to afford it. Cicero later complained that having to eat turnips rather than oysters and eels had given him violent diarrhea.

  At the same time, Caesar needed money. The civil war was not over and he needed to be able pay his armies to fight for him. After Pharsalus, Cato, one of the most important surviving republicans, had fled to the Roman province of Africa (modern-day Tunisia) and with the help of King Juba of Numidia (northern Algeria) had gathered a large force to continue the fight against Caesar. To raise the necessary funds, Caesar ordered towns across Italy to send gold and took out loans. He also auctioned off the property of those opponents he had not pardoned. Antony was among those who made foolishly high bids, mistakenly convinced that, as Caesar’s friends, they would never be expected to pay up. Antony moved into Pompey’s luxurious town house, which he had acquired at one of the auctions—according to Plutarch, ransacking and rebuilding it “as if it were not grand enough as it was”—only to be shocked when officials arrived to demand the money he owed for it.

  But even with money, Caesar found it hard to raise the army he needed. Many of his experienced legionaries were tired. They wanted to disband and settle into the quiet life on a nice piece of land they believed was their due. Some, including Caesar’s beloved Tenth Legion, marched to the Campus Martius, where they asked to be released. Caesar handled them with consummate skill. Addressing them as quirites, fellow citizens rather than fellow soldiers, implying they were already free of the army, he agreed to release them. They would receive their promised rewards, he assured them, but only when he returned in triumph from Africa with the new army he would recruit to replace them. This had the anticipated effect—the legionaries, shocked not to be considered indispensable, clamored to accompany the leader whom most of them revered and to share in the glory of his expedition.

  That glory was hard won. High winds scattered Caesar’s ships as they sailed for Africa from Sicily and, once they had arrived, food soon became scarce. The horses wrinkled their lips at their sparse diet of rinsed seaweed and grass. At the same time, Caesar’s adversaries played hit-and-run, avoiding offering battle. However, in April 46 Caesar engaged the Pompeian forces at Thapsus. Some accounts suggest that while he was drawing up his forces Caesar suffered what Plutarch called “one of his usual fits,” presumably an epileptic attack. This may explain why, for the only time in Caesar’s career, his soldiers attacked before he gave the order. Whatever the case, victory was swift and complete.

  News of it reached Cato, left in command of a fortress at Utica on the coast twenty miles from the tumbled ruins of Carthage. Ever since Caesar had forced Pompey out of Italy, the forty-eight-year-old Cato had refused to cut his hair or beard. After Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus, as a mark of mourning, he had eaten sitting, rather than reclining as a Roman should, and had lain down only to sleep.

  At dinner, after hearing the news of Thapsus, Cato began to debate philosophy with his friends. The Romans had compensated themselves for the absence of an integrated theology by the contemplation of the sophisticated philosophies of the Greeks, from whose relatively abstract theorizing they derived practical guidance. Two philosophies were prevalent. One was Epicureanism, whose eponymous founder, Epicurus, propounded salvation by common sense and happiness through peace of mind. He dismissed divine providence and the immortality of the soul as illusory. Man should enjoy the world as it is, rejoicing in nature. The universe was limitless. Knowledge was generated through man’s inquiring mind and he should strive to understand and enjoy nature’s bounty. Remarkably for a man who lived more than two millennia ago, Epicurus emphasized that man should cease depleting the planet’s resources through his insatiable greed.

  The other was the somewhat somber Stoic philosophy named after the stoa or painted covered passage leading from the Athens marketplace where its originator, Zeno, propounded it. His thesis was that man is a rational being who should lead a virtuous life practicing civic duty, self-discipline and tolerance and respect for others. He should accept and endure whatever fate held in store for him with dignity. In so doing, while conquering himself and
his fears, he could take pride in rising spiritually above the vicissitudes of life. Cato was, unsurprisingly, a Stoic, who in the dinnertime conversation that night was adamant that only such a good man could be free. Stoic philosophy predisposed its followers to seek “a good death,” even if it was by their own hand, and this was the course Cato determined to follow.

  After retiring for the night, Cato stabbed himself in the abdomen. When his son, alerted by the sound of his father’s body crashing to the floor and knocking over an abacus, discovered what he had done, he summoned physicians to push his father’s protruding intestines back into his body cavity and sew up the wound, but Cato ripped off the dressings. According to Appian, he “opened the suture of the wound, enlarged it with his nails like a wild beast, plunged his fingers into his stomach and tore out his entrails.” His final advice to his grieving son was, “In present conditions it is impossible to engage in politics in a manner befitting a Cato, and to engage in them in any other way would be disgraceful.” By the time Caesar reached Utica, Cato was already in his grave, a potent martyr for the austere old republican values, as he had intended. Just before his death he had said, “I am not willing to be indebted to the tyrant for his illegal actions. He is acting contrary to the laws when he pardons men as if he were their master when he has no sovereignty over them.”

  In late July 46, Caesar, decked with the laurels of victory, marched back into Rome. The Senate was apprehensive. The followers of the traditions of the elders could only hope that, like Sulla, he would swiftly renounce his powers after rewarding his friends, thus leaving their unwritten constitution basically unchanged. It cannot have encouraged them that at around this time Caesar sent messengers to Egypt summoning Cleopatra to join him. The publicly proclaimed purpose of Cleopatra’s visit was to reaffirm the bonds between Egypt and Rome but the prospect of the Egyptian queen’s arrival must have stoked senatorial concern that Caesar might be seeking autocratic power in Rome similar to that which Cleopatra wielded in Egypt.