Cleopatra and Antony Page 14

  Unsurprisingly, resentment focused on the continued presence by Caesar’s side of his Egyptian mistress, whose statue gleamed portentously within the temple of Venus. While Romans were indulgent, even admiring, of their leaders’ sexual peccadilloes while on campaign, back in Rome it was a different matter. Sex was seen as diminishing physical prowess—the week before a fight, gladiators’ penises were fitted with an apparatus of metal bolts to prevent them ejaculating and diluting their strength. Additionally, sexual overindulgence, indeed any kind of overindulgence or lack of self-control, was viewed as a character defect. Caesar was condemned, not admired, for succumbing to Cleopatra’s sexual magnetism. If a man could not govern his own appetites, how could he govern other people?

  Some, though, saw Cleopatra as something far more dangerous than just Caesar’s mistress. To them she epitomized an unwholesome, alien, royal and despotic influence on republican Rome. Stories spread that the besotted Caesar intended to shift his capital to Alexandria—even that he planned to marry Cleopatra. Suetonius related that a tribune, Helvius Cinna, “admitted to several persons that he had a bill drawn up in due form, which Caesar had ordered him to propose to the people in his own absence, making it lawful for Caesar to marry what wives he wished, and as many as he wished, for the purpose of begetting [legitimate] children.” The accusation was probably fabricated but the very fact that such stories gained credence shows the suspicion and resentment toward the Egyptian queen, for if Caesar wished to take another wife, surely it would be Cleopatra.

  Caesar, though, was thoroughly preoccupied with what he intended to be the most glorious and ambitious campaign of his career—crushing the Parthian Empire. Rome had not yet avenged the Parthians’ humiliating defeat of Crassus at Carrhae in 53, and their horsemen were now menacing Rome’s eastern provinces, raiding into Syria. The Parthians were originally seminomads from the southeastern shores of the Caspian Sea. In the decades following Alexander’s defeat of the Persians they had increased their territories to include Mesopotamia, and by this time their empire extended from the borders of Roman Syria in the west to the Indus in the east, and to the south embraced much of Persia, giving them a dominant position across the eastern trade routes. The conquest of Parthia would therefore be an immense undertaking in which the support of Rome’s allies—especially the wealthy Cleopatra—in providing money, ships and men would be essential. However, the rewards would be commensurately great.

  It is impossible to know what was in Cleopatra’s mind during her time in Rome, but her detractors were probably right to fear her intentions. In Alexandria she had deliberately bound herself to the Roman world’s most powerful man to secure her personal position. Now in Rome she perhaps began to glimpse an important, even central role for her kingdom in what might follow. For Cleopatra, the future in early 44 must have seemed ripe with possibilities. Like Caesar, she was capable of thinking on a grand scale, innovatively pushing forward the boundaries of the practicable. If Caesar conquered Parthia, he would be leader of the Mediterranean world’s only remaining superpower. What could he then not do for those he owed—and, indeed, for those he loved? And what better heir to this great empire than a boy with the blood of Alexander’s people and also of Caesar in his veins, her beloved Caesarion?

  The date set for Caesar’s departure from Rome for the Parthian campaign was March 18, 44, and, as the winter months passed, Cleopatra was probably also planning her own return to Egypt, from where she could directly oversee the Egyptian aid to be sent to Caesar. She would also be closer to Caesar and able speedily to join him and share in his expected triumphs.

  Others were less enthusiastic about Caesar’s eastern adventure, which he himself estimated would take three to four years to accomplish. Although the campaign would remove him from Rome, they knew that during his absence he would appoint compliant cronies to rule on his behalf. Caesar’s powers to dictate how Rome would be governed seemed removed by only a hair’s breadth from those of a king. When the custodians of the Sibylline Books conveniently “discovered” a prophecy that “only a king can conquer the Parthians,” this fed the rumors that Caesar intended to use the Parthian campaign as a springboard to kingship.

  So did Caesar’s behavior, which was becoming increasingly autocratic. His arrogant attitude was no doubt influenced by his belief that the Senate needed to be subjected to his strong, executive direction in order for the empire to be ruled effectively—and by the increasing impatience and intolerance of an aging man with many plans and little time for the constitutional process and the tedious business of conciliating opponents for whom he had long felt only contempt. Also, one of the driving forces behind his career had always been his consciousness of his dignitas and the respect to which he felt himself entitled. Perhaps he felt that by now his achievements were such that he and his actions were beyond question or scrutiny.

  When, without warning, Caesar resigned as consul and named two supporters as consuls for the remainder of 45, it caused great offense. He seemed to be treating the consulship as a mere gift for services rendered rather than a serious office held on behalf of the people. He also extended eligibility for citizenship to more parts of the empire and increased the number of senators from six hundred to nine hundred to enable him to reward his supporters and friends. The new senators included a number of freedmen, even Gauls. While these actions wisely reflected the growing diversity of the Roman empire and gave a greater stake in Rome’s success to those living in her provinces, Roman traditionalists joked about senators wearing trousers who were such strangers to Rome they could not find their way to the Senate house. To them Caesar’s reforms seemed a gesture of contempt toward Rome’s ancient institutions and their own treasured privileges.*

  Whatever the senators’ private fears, in public, as if uncertain what else to do, they continued hectically heaping honors upon Caesar, declaring his birthday a public holiday and conferring on him the right to sit on a golden chair in the Senate and wear the golden wreath of the ancient Etruscan monarchs. Caesar had already taken to appearing in the high red boots of the Alban kings. In addition, the Senate sycophantically agreed that Caesar was to have his own shrine and his own priest—Antony—and, on his death, was to become Divus Julius (Julius the god). Most significantly of all, Caesar was appointed dictator perpetuus (dictator for life), an honor he accepted in February 44 after only a little hesitation. His head now appeared on Roman coins—the first time any living Roman had been so honored and dangerously close, in the eyes of some, to the personality cult surrounding royal rulers such as Cleopatra in Egypt.

  All that was lacking was the title of king. The previous month, when a man had hailed Caesar as Rex, he had replied that no, he was Caesar. However, when the tribunes had the man arrested, Caesar punished them, not the man. A few days after Caesar had become dictator for life, he presided from his gilded chair on the speaker’s rostrum over the feast of the Lupercalia. This was an ancient spring fertility ritual. First, priests sacrificed a dog and some goats. Then the goats were skinned and well-born young men wound the skins around their otherwise naked bodies and, glistening with oil, ran through the streets lightly striking women with strips of the fresh hairy goat hide to make them fertile or, if pregnant, to ensure a safe and easy delivery.

  As consul for 44, Antony was participating. Even though at thirty-eight he was beyond his first youth, he was still proud of his physique. Clad only in his bloody goatskin loincloth, he ran up to the platform in the Forum where Caesar was seated on his golden throne and wearing his golden wreath. Several times he tried to place a laurel-decked diadem on Caesar’s head. Whether Caesar knew in advance of Antony’s gesture is unclear. What is certain is that there was no responding roar of enthusiasm from the crowd. Instead, “a groan echoed all round the Forum.” According to Plutarch, “The amazing thing was that, although they were already, for all practical purposes, under the rule of a king, they rejected the title, as if it represented the loss of freedom.” Caesar firmly decl
ined the diadem and ordered it to be sent to the Capitol and dedicated to Jupiter, Rome’s only king.

  Despite this public act of self-denial, many still suspected Caesar of aiming at the ultimate prize and of having contrived the whole thing with Antony to test public reaction. Cicero later asked, “Where did this diadem come from?” and claimed that “it was a premeditated crime prepared in advance.” Caesar’s behavior seemed to bear this out. In one notable outburst he shouted that the republic “was nothing—a mere name without form or substance.” He added that Sulla had been a dunce to resign his dictatorship.

  Despite the fact that Caesar had pardoned both Brutus, Cato’s nephew and Caesar’s rumored son, and Cassius, a former officer of Pompey the Great after Pharsalus and had even made them praetors for 44, they had lost faith that he would ever restore the republic inaugurated by the coup of Brutus’ ancestor, Lucius Brutus, against Tarquin. They believed that Caesar made policy in private with his advisers and cronies and then, rather than discuss it with his peers in the Senate as tradition demanded, cut out the Senate and went directly to the people and to his soldiers to secure backing for his decisions. Both thought Caesar’s death would lead to the restoration of the Senate’s supremacy. Wanting to make a clean sweep, Cassius had argued for the deaths not only of the dictator but of his deputy in the dictatorship, his master of the horse, Lepidus, of Antony and a host of others. Brutus, however, insisted that their target was one man only—Caesar. The day they chose was March 15, three days before Caesar was due to depart on his Parthian campaign. The place, perhaps symbolically, was to be a meeting of the Senate, the institution whose powers Caesar had so diminished. The assassins pondered inviting Cicero to join the plot but decided he was too old, timorous and, above all, indiscreet to be of any use.

  Caesar perhaps had some intimation that Brutus and Cassius were his foes. According to Plutarch, when someone warned him that Antony and Dolabella were subversives, he replied, “I’m not afraid of these fleshy, long-haired men, so much as those pale, lean ones,” that is, Cassius and Brutus. But, contemptuous of danger and confident no one would wish to risk reigniting civil war by killing him, Caesar ignored a rash of graffiti scrawled on public monuments. Among them were the words “If only you were alive now” daubed on a statue of Brutus’ king-ousting ancestor, and the following verse scribbled on Caesar’s own statue:

  Brutus was elected consul

  When he sent the kings away;

  Caesar sent the consuls packing,

  Caesar is our king today.

  Caesar had dismissed his two-thousand-strong guard and was moving openly about the city, almost as if tempting fate. Anxious friends urged him to appoint a new bodyguard, but he ignored them. He would rather die, he said, than spend his life anticipating death. When the augur Spurinna predicted that Caesar would meet his doom on the ides, which fell on March 15, Caesar shrugged this off as well.

  On the night of March 14 Lepidus invited him to dinner. The two men are said to have discussed what manner of death was preferable, and Caesar’s choice was a death that came swiftly and without warning. The next day, Caesar woke feeling groggy and ill and reluctant to attend the meeting of the Senate he had called, which was to take place in Pompey’s great stone theater. Calpurnia, unnerved by a night of terrifying dreams in which she cradled Caesar’s murdered body in her arms, begged him to stay at home. Caesar offered sacrifice, and the diviners’ unfavorable reading of the omens provided by the sacrificed animal’s entrails added to his unease. He decided to send Antony to the meeting of the Senate in his place. However, Decimus Brutus, one of the plotters, opportunely happened to call at Caesar’s house and laughingly derided the diviners and managed to persuade Caesar to change his mind.

  Just before noon, Caesar was borne by litter to Pompey’s theater, where the Senate was awaiting him in an assembly hall. As he climbed down, a Greek scholar who had learned something of the plot pushed forward to thrust a scroll into his hand, crying out, “Read this one yourself, Caesar, and read it soon. The matters it mentions are urgent and concern you personally.” The insistence in the man’s voice convinced Caesar to keep hold of the scroll instead of passing it as usual to his servant, but he did not unroll it. Seeing Spurinna standing by the entrance to Pompey’s theater where the Senate would meet, Caesar remarked sarcastically that the ides of March had come. The augur replied, “Yes, they have come, but they have not yet gone.”

  While Gaius Trebonius, the man who almost a year earlier had attempted to draw him into the conspiracy, detained Antony on a pretext, Caesar entered the building. The senators rose to greet him as he made his way to his chair beneath the statue of his rival Pompey, which he himself had ordered to be reerected. Some of the sixty conspirators were ranged behind it. Others now pushed through the ranks of senators, as if eager to present a petition to him. When Caesar waved them away, one of the supposed petitioners grabbed at Caesar’s toga with both hands. This was the agreed signal for the attack. Caesar turned the first blade, that of Casca, aside before it could penetrate deep into his throat, but the other conspirators closed around, each determined to deliver the dagger blow they had promised. Their knives thrust into his body until finally Caesar, bleeding copiously from twenty-three stab wounds, crumpled at Pompey’s feet. He pulled his bloodstained purple toga over himself to hide his dying moments from the round-eyed senators watching in horrified disbelief. Suetonius wrote that “Caesar uttered no word after the first blow . . . although some say that when he saw Brutus about to strike he reproached him in Greek with, ‘You too, my son!’ ”

  The bloodstained assassins tumbled half crazed from Pompey’s theater and, running across the Campus Martius, entered the city and ran onward to the Forum shouting, “Liberty!” Waving his dripping dagger in the air, Brutus declared the tyrant dead and wished long life to the republic. But there were no answering cheers. Instead, as the news spread, panicking people tripped over one another in their hurry to get home and barricade their doors against the chaos they feared was about to burst over them. For Cleopatra, it was a terrible moment. She and her son had lost their protector. All she could do now was try to save their lives.

  *Octavian’s actual name was Gaius Octavius and he later became Gaius Julius Caesar and even later the emperor Augustus, but to save confusion he is referred to here as Octavian.

  *Caesar also offered citizenship to individuals or groups of individuals with skills needed to keep Rome running—for example, any foreign doctor willing to work in Rome.

  PART IV

  Isis Alone

  CHAPTER 11

  “Flight of the Queen”

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER CAESAR’S MURDER, Antony fled, according to some, disguised in the nondescript garments of a slave. He took refuge first in a friend’s house and then in his own—the grand mansion on the Palatine that had once been Pompey’s and for which Caesar had made Antony pay in full—which he barricaded. In the uneasy hours that followed he must have wondered, like Cleopatra, whether the assassins would also come for him. But as the hours passed, he began to take heart, especially when a messenger sent by “the Liberators,” as the assassins were styling themselves, brought word that they wished to treat with Antony. Rome, they insisted, must not be plunged into further bloodshed. Lepidus, Caesar’s master of horse, who commanded the only troops in Rome, also contacted Antony. He had marched his legion to the Campus Martius and, in the gray dawn light of March 16, had seized the Temple of Ops, Rome’s treasury, and occupied the Forum. Lepidus was demanding immediate vengeance on Caesar’s killers.

  Antony would have sensed, as he discussed his plans with his wife, Fulvia, that this was his moment. If he acted quickly, he could take control, becoming the leader of Rome rather than playing the loyal supporting role. Given his present position, restraint, not chaos, would best serve his ends. Needing to get his hands on the levers of power with as little fuss as possible, he made his way to Caesar’s house, where the stiffening corpse now lay, and asked Calpu
rnia to hand over Caesar’s papers and the huge sums of money in their house, which the grief-stricken widow did without demur. Next, Antony sent a message to Lepidus urging him to hold back from military action and promising him the post of pontifex maximus if he did so. Then, by dint of his authority as the surviving consul and thus the highest officer of state, he summoned the Senate to meet the following morning, March 17, in the Temple of Tellus, close to his house.

  When the senators arrived they found the temple ringed by Lepidus’ troops. Antony needed all his skill to control the debate in a nervy Senate, many of whose members sympathized with the Liberators, who did not themselves dare attend. Their attempted appeals to the populace had met with a sullen response and, isolated and apprehensive, they remained on the Capitol, protected by the battle-scarred gladiators they had hired to defend them. Their fate, as they knew, depended on what their supporters in the Senate could achieve. Some senators argued that Caesar’s murderers should be feted and rewarded as public benefactors. Others, taking courage, insisted that Caesar had been a tyrant, all of whose acts should be annulled. Antony cannily pointed out that the majority of those present owed their positions to ordinances of Caesar and asked whether they were really proposing to renounce their appointments.

  Self-interest won the day. New elections would be expensive and the results uncertain. Even Cicero, whose sympathies lay with the conspirators, recognized that, for the present, there was no alternative and reluctantly supported Antony. The senators hastily confirmed Caesar’s acts, accomplished or in gestation, as being “for the good of the state.” This gave Antony carte blanche to bring forward all manner of schemes that Caesar had been planning—or so he claimed. He could also, in the months ahead, nominate anyone he wished to official positions, blandly maintaining that he was only fulfilling the dead Caesar’s wishes. Wits called the new appointees charonides—men who owed their power to Charon, ferryman of the underworld, who it appeared was now, on his return journey, conveying the dead Caesar’s wishes to Antony, his living representative.