Cleopatra and Antony Page 12

  Caesar’s true motives for sending for Cleopatra are as intriguing as they are opaque. He was far too wise not to have realized that there was no political imperative for Cleopatra’s presence and indeed some downside to it. Perhaps his action had something to do with his own self-image. With her would come Caesarion—reassuring confirmation that, though middle-aged, Caesar was virile and vigorous. He would also have been curious to see his only son, by then nearly a year old.

  In addition, the thought of his royal mistress witnessing his pomp and power must have been highly appealing. Even before he had marched back into Rome, the Senate had awarded him unique privileges in order to appease his ambition. He was to be dictator for the next ten years—an unprecedented period—and have the right to nominate magistrates. He was also to be prefect of morals, a new position that caused some sniggering but would allow him to censor and control his opponents. The supplicatio, the traditional festival of prayers and thanksgiving to honor a victor, was to last forty days compared with the fifteen that had celebrated Caesar’s successes in Gaul in 57, and his triumphal chariot was to be placed before the statue of Jupiter on the Capitol, together with a bronze statue of Caesar, bestriding a globe to symbolize his mastery of the world. The inscription would hail him as a demigod.

  The Senate also awarded Caesar his Triumphs. Between September 20 and October 1 Caesar held four great parades marking his victories over Gaul, Egypt, Pontus and Africa. The processions, each lasting a day, began in the Campus Martius and ended before the Temple of Jupiter. Here Caesar ascended the hundred steps, passed through the great bronze gates and sacrificed white bulls before laying his laurels in the lap of the god. The marveling crowds were shielded from the autumn sun by silken awnings extending all the way up to the Capitol. Among the impressive trophies and gorgeous treasures carried by the marching columns were signs boasting of the number of battles fought and enemies killed. The tally was fifty battles and between one million and two million slain, excluding his fellow Roman citizens. Caesar, wearing a rippling purple toga, rode in his triumphal chariot pulled by three white horses. His face was painted with red lead in tribute to Jupiter, who had made Rome great and whose representative Caesar was. His balding head was wreathed in laurels and in his hand he grasped an eagle-headed scepter. Lest in these moments of glory he forget his mortality, as was traditional, a slave holding a golden wreath above his head whispered repeatedly in his red-tinted ear, “Remember you are human.”

  In the procession celebrating Caesar’s victory in the Alexandrian War, mock flames rose from a model of the phallic Pharos lighthouse borne through the streets as Caesar’s men belted out raucous songs celebrating their leader’s sexual feats in Egypt. The crowds roared their approval at pictures portraying the bloody deaths of Pothinus and Achillas, but their greatest interest was in the pathetic figure of Cleopatra’s half sister, Arsinoe, stumbling along in chains with the other prisoners at the head of the procession. Prisoners were usually executed immediately after a Triumph. Vercingetorix, who had been kept caged for six years after his capture, had been executed immediately after the Gallic Triumph. However, the sight of the young princess roused the pity of the Roman crowd. Caesar read the people’s mood and spared her the strangling that was the traditional fate of conquered rulers. He permitted Arsinoe to leave Rome and, like her father, Auletes, before her, to seek sanctuary in the vast white marble temple of Artemis at Ephesus, whose fine ivory doors had been installed by her father.

  As he had when he displayed Arsinoe, Caesar also misjudged when, as part of his African Triumph, he arranged for a float depicting Cato’s suicide to be drawn through the streets. It was usually considered bad taste to gloat over the defeat of fellow Romans, but Caesar’s justification was that Cato and those who had fought with him had been mere mercenary lackeys of King Juba. Their deaths, he argued, had been the just deserts of collaborators. The people of Rome wept openly at the representation of Cato’s lonely end, stoically ripping out his own guts. The infant son of the dead King Juba, another Juba, was also carried in the African procession and, as a child, was spared. Plutarch observed that “it was a highly fortunate captivity for him, since instead of being an uncultured Numidian, he came to be counted among the most learned writers of Greece.”*

  Among the many celebrations that Caesar arranged to accompany his Triumphs were five days of wild-animal shows. Such shows, which almost inevitably culminated in a hunt, or rather slaughter, of the exhibits, had a long history but had become ever more spectacular in the past few decades. Lions, ostriches (known for some reason to the wits in the audience as sea sparrows) and leopards (known as African mice) had been exhibited for some time as, of course, had bulls, bears and stags. More recent imports were hippopotamuses and crocodiles.† But Caesar, like his predecessors, strove to dream up ever more novel displays. Some of his spectaculars were achieved by sheer numbers—on one occasion he loosed four hundred snarling lions. He also delighted the crowds by producing creatures entirely new to them, being the first to import a giraffe, probably from Egypt. Another novelty was Thessalian bullfighting, where mounted riders chased the bull until the beast was so exhausted the riders could leap from their saddles, grip the bull’s horns and, in theory at least, with a quick twist break the bull’s neck.

  Elephants had been shown for nearly a quarter of a century, and Romans felt very sympathetic toward them. At Pompey’s games in 55, some had escaped into the crowd and the spectators, excited by both pity for the beasts and fear for their own safety, had shaken their fists at Pompey. Cicero had written that there was “a feeling that the monsters had something human about them.” Rather than pitting elephants against other elephants or bulls, as was customary, Caesar fitted them with “castles,” presumably like howdahs, from which men fought as part of two contending armies in a mock battle involving five hundred infantry, thirty cavalry and twenty elephants. The battle was enacted in the Circus Maximus, from which, according to Suetonius, Caesar removed the central barrier around which the chariots ran to allow the camps to be pitched facing each other.

  Another of Caesar’s innovations was a dramatic naval battle staged in a large pool on the Campus Martius in a swampy area near the Tiber where four thousand oarsmen and two thousand costumed warriors—gladiators and condemned prisoners—bloodily reenacted a naval battle. The games bored Caesar himself and, at the climax of a later spectacular, he was observed in his box pointedly attending to his government papers rather than watching. However, the crowds took a different view. According to Suetonius, “Such huge numbers of visitors flocked to these shows from all directions that many of them had to sleep in tents pitched along the streets or roads, or on rooftops; and often the pressure of the crowd crushed people to death. The victims included two senators.”

  Some young men of the patrician classes even took part in the horse-riding events at the games, racing each other in the Circus Maximus. Each rode a pair of horses roped together, vaulting from one to the other at the end of every lap.* Not content with providing spectacular shows, Caesar feasted so many citizens as part of the celebrations that he had to provide twenty thousand couches.

  Yet just as interesting to the people of Rome as these lavish festivities was the arrival in their city of the exotic queen of Egypt with her retinue of eunuchs and slaves, baby son, Caesarion, and thirteen-year-old brother-husband, Ptolemy. The exact timing of Cleopatra’s arrival is unclear. She may have missed the Alexandrian Triumph and Arsinoe’s public humiliation, and in any event, however violent her hostility to her half sister, it hardly would have been seemly for her to watch Arsinoe’s disgrace in person or, indeed, a Roman Triumph celebrating the defeat of her countrymen, albeit her enemies. A greater disappointment may have been Caesar’s decision to spare her sister—as long as Arsinoe was alive she was a potential risk to Cleopatra and her son. Cleopatra would later look to Antony to free her of that danger.

  In Rome, Cleopatra, her husband and their respective entourages were inst
alled in mansions in the beautiful gardens of Caesar’s estate on the right bank of the Tiber. In the warmth of an Italian summer, less shatteringly hot than in her own more easterly capital, Cleopatra must have been hoping that this interlude would strengthen the emotional bonds between herself and Caesar. As she would have known, he was not a faithful man, and his opportunities for sexual encounters, even with queens, were legion. His affair with the beautiful Eunoe, queen of Mauretania, was the subject of common gossip and he had almost certainly been sleeping with her during his African campaign. But now it was Cleopatra with her diaphanous garments, rich jewels, compelling sexuality and agile intellect who could fill Caesar’s horizon and drive thoughts of other women from his mind.

  Her armory of course included the child he had not yet seen—the boy whose paternity became the subject of avid speculation among Rome’s chattering classes. Caesar did not publicly acknowledge the boy as his own, though Antony would later claim that he had done so in private, but Cleopatra’s choice of name for him was a blatant statement to the world that he did nothing to deny. Perhaps she also hoped to become pregnant by Caesar again and give birth this time in Rome. The thoughts of Caesar’s childless wife of thirteen years, Calpurnia, living in their town house, about the arrival of the Egyptian queen and her son are unrecorded but can be guessed.

  *In later years he would marry the daughter of Cleopatra and Antony.

  †Later, Nero had polar bears chasing seals.

  *They rode bareback and, of course, without stirrups, which were not used in Europe until 750 years later.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Slave of the Times”

  POLITICIANS ON THEIR WAY UP—or indeed on their way down—crowded the mansion where Cleopatra held court, hoping to persuade her to use her influence with Caesar on their behalf. To ingratiate themselves with her they had to force themselves to put aside their traditional Roman contempt for royalty and the luxury of the East. Cleopatra, however, seems to have felt sufficiently confident in her relationship with Caesar to see no need to solicit the support of important Romans. The Senate had soon dutifully and obediently ratified a treaty endorsing Cleopatra and her half brother as friends and allies of the Roman people.

  The power and ability to snub were enjoyable for a proud woman whose father had been a laughingstock in Rome, forced to go cap in hand to moneylenders. Among those offended by Cleopatra’s hauteur was Cicero, who had not taken an active part in the civil war but remained one of the most influential conservative figures now that the fight was once more being fought with words, not swords. “I hate the Queen,” he later wrote in a letter to his friend Atticus. “Her arrogance, when she was living across the Tiber in the gardens . . . I cannot recall without profound bitterness.” Yet even he acknowledged her erudition. She offered to obtain him some books from Alexandria, causing him to reflect that, despite the scandalous stories circulating about her in Rome, “her promises were all things that had to do with learning, and not derogatory to my dignity, so I could have mentioned them even in a public speech.” If politicians incurred Cleopatra’s contempt, she was generous to singers and musicians for creating the sophisticated, cultured ambience she was used to and appreciated in Alexandria.

  Whether Antony visited Cleopatra’s salon in the fragrant gardens along the Tiber is unknown. He had anyway recently remarried. Having thrown out the wife—his cousin Antonia—he suspected of cuckolding him with Dola-bella, he had wed Fulvia, widow of the murdered tribune Clodius, whose bloodstained body she had so astutely and theatrically revealed to the mob.

  After Clodius, Fulvia had married Curio, who, like Clodius, Antony and Fulvia herself, had once been a member of Rome’s fast young set. According to Cicero and others, he had also once been Antony’s lover. “No boy bought for the sake of lust was ever so much in the power of his master as you were in Curio’s,” wrote Cicero of Antony. Yet Curio had been equally besotted and had even offered to stand surety for Antony’s huge debts. Desperate to end an affair that had become the scandal of Rome, Curio’s father, who had repeatedly had Antony thrown out of his house, on Cicero’s advice bought Antony off, settling his debts himself, provided that the two young men parted.

  Curio had been killed fighting for Caesar in Africa. Antony seemed to Fulvia a suitable—and malleable—replacement. So ambitious that Plutarch described how “a private citizen was beneath her notice—she wanted to rule magistrates and give advice to generals,” she schooled Antony carefully, restrained his excesses and encouraged him to be more single-minded in his pursuit of power than was his natural wont. When, in later years, Cleopatra took Antony as her lover, she “owed Fulvia the fee for teaching Antony to submit to a woman, since she took him over after he had been tamed and trained from the outset to obey women.”

  Though some hoped to profit personally from Cleopatra’s influence over Caesar, others pondered the implications of his infatuation with her. In particular they noted Caesar’s ambitious plans for the remodeling of Rome. Was he trying to fashion a new Alexandria on the Tiber?

  Rome, unlike Alexandria, was an unplanned city, which had grown organically. At the time of Cleopatra’s visit it lacked the grandeur, grace and elegance of her own capital. Before the visitor reached the city itself, he passed the shantytowns where country people, lured to the city by free grain and constant amusements, had their dwellings. He also passed the great necropolises, where the ashes of the richer Romans were buried after their ceremonial cremations, since tradition prohibited burials within the city boundaries. Many of the necropolises were covered with graffiti either extolling or vilifying politicians. These crumbling tombs provided excellent cover for muggers and shelter for poor prostitutes, “those filthy sluts who conceal their trade in tombs.” The bodies of the poor were simply taken out of the city by night and tossed with all the other rubbish into huge pits near the Esquiline Gate. Here foraging animals, such as the wild gray wolves of Italy who reputedly suckled Romulus and Remus, disinterred them, gnawing the flesh and leaving piles of bones strewn along the roadside.

  Rome itself was still built entirely on the east bank of the Tiber, but on the west bank were the premises of a mass of smoky, smelly industries banned from the city proper, partly because of their noxious fumes, partly because of the risk of fire. Among them were the making of matches, glassblowing and metalworking as well as tanning. The last relied on the copious use of human urine brought from the city in overflowing vats, which the tanners and fullers had positioned at convenient locations to attract those either too lazy to seek out the public toilets or too poor to pay the trifling fee they demanded.

  After passing by the Campus Martius, the open space along the banks of the Tiber outside the walls that was used for large meetings and other public events, the visitor entered the city through one of the main gates in the walls. He was immediately confronted by a maze of rubbish-littered streets and alleys so narrow and winding that Caesar had introduced a law prohibiting wagons being driven along them during daytime; all porterage had to be on the backs of men or animals. If he needed to look for landmarks, perhaps on one of the seven hills, each between 100 and 150 feet high, around which everyone knew the city was constructed, the visitor’s line of sight was often blocked by the tenement buildings known as insulae or islands where most of Rome’s population, approaching a million people, lived. These five- or six-story tenement buildings cut off much of the sunlight from the narrow streets, usually had shops on the bottom floor, and were poorly and flimsily constructed, prone to fire and entirely without sanitation or running water. So many people simply emptied chamber pots from the upper stories on to the heads of passersby that a law had to be introduced regulating how much compensation those doused could claim. The wealthy Crassus had been one of the most unscrupulous developers of such tenements. Cicero still was. In a letter to Atticus he lamented that “two of my shops have collapsed and others are showing cracks so that even the mice moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants.” But then he ch
eered up, reporting that he had “a building scheme underway which should turn this loss into a source of profit.”

  Of the seven hills, the Capitol Hill was reserved for the gods and topped by the Temple of Jupiter. The smartest private addresses were on the Palatine Hill, where Cicero himself lived, though even here lack of space meant the gardens were small.* The Aventine Hill, opposite the Palatine, had a more mixed and bohemian population. In the broad valley between the two hills was the Circus Maximus—the oldest entertainment venue in Rome, supposedly first used for chariot racing in the time of the kings. Over the years, it acquired first wooden stands and then, in 329 BC, starting stalls for the chariots. Charioteers raced under the colors of factions such as the red or the white. Attendance could reach 250,000, still the largest crowd recorded at a sporting stadium. Circulating vendors kept the partisans well supplied with food and, in particular, drink. They roared each faction on and placed bets on the outcome.

  The charioteer was a striking figure in his tunic in team colors, holding a long whip and a knife in his hand. The latter was used to cut the traces if he crashed, the only way he could save himself. Once the race started, he would lean out almost horizontally over his galloping horses. Four was the most common number but some races even involved chariots with ten horses. Races were over seven miles in distance and usually lasted a quarter of an hour. The trickiest moments were the tight turns, where the driver needed to seize the inside position, slow his team enough to make the turn and deny opponents any gap to squeeze through. Another of the driver’s skills was to crowd opposing chariots into one another in the hope of causing collisions, which were indeed frequent. There were rumors of charioteers being bribed to hold back their horses or of horses being doped by rivals. The races were particularly popular with the young since men and women were allowed to sit together and share the excitement, unlike in the theater and amphitheater, where they were segregated.