Cleopatra and Antony Read online

  Somewhat paradoxically, given the legitimacy they had just conferred on Caesar, at Cicero’s urging the senators also immediately agreed on an amnesty for Caesar’s assassins. They would not be prosecuted and no inquiry would be held into the murder. For the moment this suited Antony. In the vacuum following Caesar’s death he needed to achieve some kind of political equilibrium in order to maintain his authority as consul and, with the help of the politically attuned Fulvia, begin to sound out new allies and confirm existing ones. The Liberators were invited to come down from the Capitol while Antony and Lepidus sent their own children to the hill as hostages. A formal public reconciliation followed, after which Antony and Lepidus played host to Caesar’s murderers at dinner. Clearly any vengeance for Caesar was to be a dish consumed cold. Dio Cassius described a tense evening during which “Antony asked Cassius, ‘Have you perchance a dagger under your arm even now?’ To which he answered: ‘Yes, and a big one, if you too should desire to make yourself tyrant.’ ”

  That same day, March 17, Caesar’s will was read out in Antony’s house, and Cleopatra and the world learned that it contained no reference to her or to their son, Caesarion. Most disturbing to Cleopatra were the intentions of the heir Caesar had named, Octavian. He would never look favorably on a child who, though Caesar had not acknowledged him publicly, was almost universally believed to be his son and blatantly and brazenly bore his name.

  Cleopatra’s mind must have been in turmoil. At the flash of the assassins’ knives, she had lost both her main emotional bulwark and her political support. She and her son were alone in a hostile and uncertain environment whose political systems were alien to her own and where she had been seen as a pernicious influence on the murdered leader. She would have known that with Caesar dead, Antony was, in theory at least, the most powerful man in Rome. Perhaps in those first difficult days she contemplated turning to him, recalling his courage and compassion after his triumph at Pelusium, when he had counseled moderation, not murder, to her vengeful father, Auletes. Yet she would not have known whether she could trust him entirely.

  Emotionally, Cleopatra needed time to mourn and to reflect on her feelings for Caesar. A clever, gifted man endowed with the glamour and charisma of great power, he was not only the father of her child but perhaps also a father figure, supplanting the memory of the weak and pleading pipe player Auletes. Though she had engineered her liaison with him, she no doubt felt affection, passion, even love for him. Letters written to Cicero by his friend Atticus suggest the close bonds between them—they had attended fashionable parties together and were regarded as a couple.

  Like so many mistresses through history, Cleopatra did not attend her lover’s funeral. On March 20, five days after his murder and with the Senate’s agreement, Antony, who had a ready appreciation of theater and its power over the popular imagination, staged a public funeral for Caesar. This was a far cry from the fate Brutus had originally planned—the late dictator’s still-warm body being impaled on the executioner’s hook, dragged swiftly to the Tiber and tossed into the water like that of a common criminal. Antony’s stated plan was to bear Caesar’s corpse on an ivory funeral couch draped with purple and gold cloth through the Forum to the Campus Martius, where he would be cremated on a vast pyre by the tomb of his daughter, Julia. Antony carefully orchestrated the procession, hiring musicians and masked, wailing professional mourners to walk in it, clad in the robes Caesar had worn at his Triumphs. When it reached the Forum the cortege paused before the speaker’s platform and the ivory couch was set down. Here, in front of the couch, Antony, in the absence of any close male relative, delivered the laudatio or eulogy.

  Shakespeare’s Antony begins by declaring that praising Caesar is not his business. The real Antony did praise Caesar and very cleverly. A herald solemnly read a list of all the decrees passed by the Senate and people of Rome in Caesar’s honor and intoned the oath of loyalty sworn to him by every senator. Next he related every war and battle won by Caesar, all the prisoners, kings among them, and all the rich booty he had brought to Rome. When the herald finished this rehearsal of greatness Antony mounted the rostrum to address the hushed crowd. He played his audience expertly. Voice cracking, he reminded them what manner of man Rome had lost, exhibiting the bloodstained toga Caesar had been wearing when he was assassinated.

  A wax effigy of Caesar, which had probably been concealed behind or within the draped couch, was then produced and hoisted high above the crowd. Operated by a mechanical device, it slowly rotated to reveal the all too realistic simulations of every one of the twenty-three livid wounds hacked into Caesar’s body. The crowd erupted in grief and anger, tearing down anything wooden it could find to build an impromptu pyre for the dead leader. Wailing women tossed in their bracelets and necklaces. As the flames crackled and burned, angry mobs sought out the houses of the plotters and were restrained only with difficulty from burning them to the ground. A tribune unfortunate enough to share the name of Cinna with one of the assassins was mistaken for him and ripped apart. The mob paraded his head through the streets on the point of a spear before it realized its error. Eight years previously Fulvia had, by displaying the wounds of her dead husband, Clodius, to the mob, provoked a surge of emotion that led to the Senate house being consumed as Clodius’ funeral pyre. Now her new husband’s oratory and display of Caesar’s body led to the reconstructed building going up in flames once more.

  Antony had succeeded magnificently in mobilizing the loyalty of the people to the dead Caesar. In the process he demonstrated the power of the late dictator’s name and established himself, at least for the present, as the leader of the pro-Caesarean party. The moral victory that Brutus and Cassius had believed was theirs had been plucked from them. Antony had also shown himself strong, decisive and capable of maintaining order, if anyone could. He had mastered the crisis, but what to do next was more difficult. He was perhaps uncertain, like Pompey before him, of what he wanted to achieve politically—whether autocracy or some form of republican government. Significantly, Antony’s next move, within just a few weeks of Caesar’s death, was to take the highly symbolic measure of bringing before the Senate a motion abolishing the dictatorship for good. This may have indicated no more than a consciousness of the need to conciliate the more moderate republicans, but perhaps more likely it indicated a disinclination to aim for sole power, at least for the present. Yet his relationship with the republicans and others would undergo many twists over the next few months as he pragmatically sought to preserve and enhance his position.

  While Antony was lauded for his good sense and moderation, the streets of Rome were no longer safe for Brutus and Cassius, and by mid-April they and many of their fellow conspirators thought it only prudent to withdraw to their country estates. A dyspeptic and depressed Cicero lambasted them for having “the spirit of men but the common sense of boys.” The bookish, high-principled Brutus and his associates had courageously removed the dictator but devised no strategy for dismantling his apparatus of power and obliterating his regime. If the conspirators had thought about it at all, they had naïvely assumed that with Caesar dead, the old republican system would simply resurrect itself of its own accord. This was, in Cicero’s view, “absurd.” “Freedom has been restored and yet the republic has not,” he raged. In particular, he blamed the conspirators for not having seized the initiative and convened the Senate themselves immediately after murdering Caesar instead of allowing Antony time to react and use his position as consul to take control. Cicero fumed that had he had his way, Antony would have been killed as well, leaving both Senate and Caesarians more obviously leaderless.

  Cicero too decided to leave Rome, heading to the purer air of the Bay of Naples to wait on events. His despair at the political situation added to recent turmoil within his family and deep personal grief. In early 45 Tullia, the daughter to whom he had been so devoted that enemies accused him of incest with her, had died in childbirth. Perhaps Cicero saw her death as punishment for having di
vorced his wife of more than thirty years—a woman who, in a society in which only 50 percent of people reached adulthood, only 30 percent forty years of age and a mere 13 percent sixty, would achieve the remarkable feat of living to 103—in favor of one of his nubile and rich young wards, Publilia. The marriage had taken place mere weeks before Tullia’s death. When teased for wedding such a young girl, the sixty-one-year-old Cicero had leerily responded, “She’ll be a woman tomorrow.” In his anguish at his daughter’s death and Publilia’s apparent lack of sympathy, Cicero had sent his new wife back to her family and asked his friends to prevent either the girl or her family from seeking him out while he arranged a divorce. Now, a year later, moving between his assorted villas overlooking seas just beginning to grow warmer in the early spring sunshine, he contemplated the shipwreck of his political fortunes and the loss of the republic he held so dear and whose arcane procedures he was so adept at manipulating. His response was not to acquiesce in its fall but rather a newfound steely resolve to use any means possible to prevent this.

  By this time, Cleopatra had also decided that her most prudent course would be to quit Rome and take Caesarion back to safety in Egypt. In mid-April, a month after Caesar’s murder, Cicero was writing dismissively to his friend Atticus, “I see nothing to object to in the flight of the queen.” The term the hostile Cicero used to describe her exit from Rome was flight, a word implying panic, which probably belies the calculation behind her decision. Three weeks later, after lamenting the miscarriage suffered by Tertia, Cassius’ wife and Brutus’ half sister—all too probably induced by the stress of Caesar’s murder at the hands of the two men closest to her—Cicero added somewhat mysteriously, “I am hoping it is true about the queen and that Caesar.” This seems to be a reference to some misfortune that had befallen Cleopatra and Caesarion on their journey back to Egypt. Perhaps reports had reached Rome suggesting that they might be dead. Though not short of things to talk about, Rome was clearly abuzz with a story or scandal about Cleopatra that refused to go away. On May 17 Cicero noted that the rumor about the queen was finally dying down, but a week later he was still embroiled in speculation, writing again, “I am hoping it is true about the queen.”*

  Whatever Cicero may have hoped, papyrus documents show that by late July 44 Cleopatra, Caesarion and her brother-husband Ptolemy XIV were safely back in Egypt. About a month later, Cleopatra’s fifteen-year-old co-ruler was dead. The historian Josephus, writing in the first century AD, believed Cleopatra had poisoned Ptolemy and he was probably correct. Cleopatra was as accomplished as any Roman at seizing the moment and perhaps even more cold-bloodedly ruthless. Paramount in her mind, now that she had lost her Roman supporter, was the need to safeguard her own position and that of her son, Caesarion. Her half brother would have seen the child, as he grew older, as a rival. The traumatic events of her girlhood at the Alexandrian court, especially her sister’s murder at the hands of Auletes, could hardly have demonstrated more clearly that, individually, the Ptolemies had most to fear from those nearest to them. Only a few years thereafter, her elder half brother had attempted to eject her from the throne. Sharing power with him had only given rise to factionalism and was in any case probably not best suited to her nature. As Josephus wrote of her character, “If she lacked one single thing that she desired, she imagined that she lacked everything.” And if Cleopatra did kill her brother, she was following a long tradition. Plutarch, writing with lofty disapproval, thought such activities an inherent characteristic of the Hellenic dynasties: “With regard to the assassination of siblings, it was a well-established habit . . . as widely used as were the propositions of Euclid by mathematicians, it was legitimized by the kings, in order to guarantee their security.”

  Even if she was not the direct agent of her brother’s death, Cleopatra would not have agonized long over it. She could now elevate her son to the throne beside her. He was far too young to question her or to take any part in decision making. Like all parents, she would have believed that her relationship with her child would avoid previous familial mistakes. Like all mothers, she wanted both to protect Caesarion and to see him succeed. Her ambition for him and for his security and that of her dynasty would henceforth become a major driving force. For obvious reasons, as their joint reign began, she abandoned her previous title of Philadelphus, “brother-loving.” Caesarion, ruling as Ptolemy XV Caesar, was called Theos Philopater Philometer, “God Who Loves His Father and Mother.” The adored father, as Cleopatra wished to state clearly to the world—and doubtless to Octavian in particular—was Julius Caesar. Her son allied Egypt with Rome, East with West, a geopolitical claim no other familial union would be able to make until she and Antony became lovers.

  To drive that message home to her people, Cleopatra milked the symbolism of her identification with Isis. The goddess was a potent image in people’s minds—the embodiment of the power of the moon, of the sea and the Nile, of the underworld and of the life beyond. The earliest surviving Greek or Roman account of the myth of Isis is Plutarch’s. He wrote of how Isis and her twin brother, Osiris, the offspring of sky and earth, fell in love while still in the womb. Their uterine bond was absolute. When Osiris was later murdered and dismembered into fourteen parts by his envious brother, Seth, a distraught but devoted Isis managed to find all the pieces except one—the phallus. Using magic in place of the missing sexual organ, Isis managed to become pregnant and give birth to a son, Horus, who was not only Osiris’ child but a reincarnation of the god himself. After the ides of March, Cleopatra could use the imagery of Isis to present the murdered Caesar as Osiris and Caesarion as Horus, his divine and undisputed son.

  To honor her dead lover further, the grieving Cleopatra commissioned a carved bust of Caesar to be placed in the still-incomplete Caesareum. A surviving head of green diabase stone, quarried only in Egypt, may well be that image. It shows a man with thinning hair and crow’s feet but an intent and masterful gaze.*

  If anything had induced Cleopatra to leave Rome quickly—if not in a panic, as Cicero sneeringly alleged—it was probably the news that the eighteen-year-old Octavian was on his way to Rome to claim his inheritance. Octavian had been born in 63, at the time of the Catiline conspiracy. The son of a wealthy novus homo, the first of his family to reach the Senate, who had died when Octavian was only four, he had grown up with the knowledge that his route to power would depend as heavily on patronage as on his own abilities. He had already acquired the skill of self-publicity. According to Suetonius, at his coming-of-age ceremony, “the seams of the senatorial gown which Caesar had allowed him to wear split and it fell at his feet.” Bystanders might have interpreted this as an evil portent but Octavian seized the moment to declare, “I shall have the whole senatorial dignity beneath my feet.” Whether made on the spot or invented with his advisers sometime afterward, this priggish statement from one so young would have been deeply impressive to Roman ears.

  It was Octavian’s great good fortune that his mother, Atia, was Caesar’s niece, making him one of Caesar’s closest male relatives. Young as he was, he had already striven to cultivate this relationship. His determination, despite shipwreck and illness, to join his great-uncle on campaign in Spain in 45 had greatly pleased and impressed Caesar. That year Caesar had asked the Senate to raise Octavian’s family to patrician rank. (The patricians were the descendants of Rome’s ancient nobility. The number of acknowledged patrician families had remained unaltered since 450, but Caesar had gained the right to nominate new members to their ranks.)

  Busts of the young Octavian depict a fine-boned face, slighty protuberant ears, a long neck and light, slender shoulders very different from those of the muscular, bull-necked Antony. Octavian was probably no more than five feet six or seven inches tall, according to Suetonius—short by Roman standards. Suetonius added that, “one did not realize how small a man he was, until someone tall stood close to him.” Though generally negligent about his appearance, Octavian was sensitive about his height and had his foot
gear made with “rather thick soles to make him look taller.” His body was dotted with birthmarks, which his flatterers in later years proclaimed were configured like the constellation of the Great Bear. He also apparently suffered from gallstones all his life and had “a weakness in his left hip, thigh and leg, which occasionally gave him the suspicion of a limp.” This perhaps explains why “he loathed people who were dwarfish or in any way deformed, regarding them as freaks of nature and bringers of bad luck.” His red-blond hair was curly and unkempt and, in later years, to save time, he “would have two or three barbers working hurriedly on it together.”

  Immediately on learning of Caesar’s death—Atia wrote to him on the very evening of the murder—Octavian left Apollonia in Macedonia, where he had been training with Caesar’s troops for the Parthian campaign and, in his spare time, studying Greek literature. Though his mother urged him to come at once, she also warned him to be cautious. He slipped across the Adriatic, landing on a deserted beach south of Brundisium. After sending members of his retinue ahead to check that all was well, he made his way to the town where, to an earsplitting welcome from the garrison, he learned for the first time that he had become Caesar’s adopted son and heir to both his name and his fortune.

  Yet Octavian allowed neither the crowd’s adulation nor the news of his inheritance to go to his head. Only the omnipresent blotches on his skin, which modern doctors suggest were produced by nervous eczema, betrayed his anxieties. He mastered any youthful impulse to dash straight to Rome. Instead, showing the same cool ability for political analysis and calculation that would one day make him emperor, he decided first to call on Cicero and other influential republicans, who had removed themselves from the capital until things quieted down, to assess their feelings toward him. Cicero did not give him a particularly warm welcome. He had loathed Caesar and was glad he was dead. He had no wish to entertain the ambitious great-nephew with the piercing gray-eyed gaze whom Caesar had been grooming since he was sixteen. “I cannot see how he can have his heart in the right place,” Cicero wrote, and made his feelings clear, refusing to address his visitor as “Gaius Julius Caesar,” as Octavian now wished to be called. Nevertheless, such was his vanity that, despite himself, Cicero found Octavian’s deference gratifying, writing, “The young man is quite devoted to me.”