Cleopatra and Antony Read online

  The Gauls were brave, volatile men who frequently quarrelled amongst themselves. They were long-haired and moustached, and like their women wore chunky gold or silver armlets. Their southern neighbors mocked them as uncivilized because they wore trousers. Their homeland, Transalpine Gaul, lay, as its name suggests, beyond the Alps, occupying roughly the area of modern-day France and Belgium. In 58 the Romans controlled only a relatively small southeastern portion of this territory.

  Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, undertaken without the formal authorization of the Senate, is well documented in his own book De Bello Gallico. Although it is designed as political propaganda for himself (it is written in the third person and the name Caesar appears more than 770 times), Caesar was always clear and usually fair, admitting his mistakes and praising the deeds of his juniors. Caesar’s clarity is summed up by this advice to other writers: “Avoid an unfamiliar word as a sailor avoids the rocks.” However, the format of Roman books would make them anything but clear to modern readers. They were written on papyrus rolls up to thirty feet long and the texts had no punctuation, no paragraphs, no spaces between words and no capital letters.

  Caesar’s first success was to repulse the Helvetii who invaded the Rhone Valley. He next headed north, marching and fighting through the winter to reach the North Sea. One of his subordinates, Crassus’ young son Publius, subdued the west of Gaul, and Caesar gloried in his report to the Senate that he had brought peace and Roman rule to the whole of the country. Back in Rome everyone rejoiced. Cicero, newly returned from exile, led the praise, “Regions and nations unreported to us in books, or in first-hand accounts, or even by rumors, have now been penetrated by our general, our army and the arms of the Roman people.”

  Auletes, then a humble supplicant in Rome, must have hoped that some of those arms and armies might soon be put at his disposal to help him regain his throne but, as so often in Egypt’s relationship with Rome, internal Roman politics once again took precedence over the pleadings of kings. He and Cleopatra would have to wait.

  *Allowing women to recline on couches was a daring (some said decadent) innovation. Previously they had had to sit demurely on stools or chairs.

  *The Romans relished soft, squishy meats and sows’ udders are a frequently mentioned delicacy, as are sows’ vulvas and wombs. Plutarch recorded that the best sows’ wombs were obtained by jumping on the sow when she was heavily pregnant to bring on a miscarriage. Udders too, he related, were at their finest after this revolting treatment. To consume these delicacies, diners used knife, spoon and mostly fingers (forks were unknown until the fourteenth century AD).

  *Pontifex maximus means “chief bridge builder”—in early times the chief priest had had responsibility for the all important Tiber Bridge. The title was subsequently appropriated in turn by the Roman emperors and by the Pope.

  *Cato was not only the antithesis of Caesar politically. Unlike the dandy Caesar, he deliberately dressed in black rather than the then fashionable purple and, to emphasize his contempt for comfort and luxury, walked everywhere, sometimes barefoot.

  *Although Roman leaders of the period in practice achieved much by illegitimate and violent means, like many recent dictators—and unlike rulers of medieval times—they almost invariably sought the appearance of legitimacy by standing for office in elections, although electors were too afraid to vote for any other candidate, if indeed other candidates were prepared to stand. Similarly, they took care to have their decisions approved within preexisting but subverted power structures such as the Senate.

  CHAPTER 5

  Crossing the Rubicon

  IN FACT, it would be another two years before Auletes would be able to buy Rome’s military assistance in restoring his kingdom to him. Cicero’s return had followed further upheavals in Rome. Pompey had virtually disappeared from public life. Genuinely unsure of what more he wanted to achieve, he retired to seek solace with his young wife, Caesar’s daughter Julia, provoking popular mockery that he was just an uxorious, sex-mad old general. Clodius, glorying in his own rising power and Pompey’s declining popularity, began to provoke him, at one stage threatening Pompey with the seizure of his mansion and blockading the house.

  Like Caesar, Pompey was highly conscious of his dignitas—a word that embraces not only our concept of dignity but also those of status, honor and self-esteem. Such a public display of disrespect was entirely too much for him. Goaded into action, he sponsored another tribune, Milo, to recruit gangsters of his own to oppose Clodius. Rome had no police force. The army was not permitted to enter the city. Gang warfare therefore escalated unchecked: “The Tiber was full of bodies, the public sewers choked with them and the blood streaming from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges.” Slowly Pompey began to exert himself. Among his first actions was to secure Caesar’s consent to Cicero’s return, hence the latter’s paean to the Gallic conqueror.

  Clodius in turn sought the support of his long-term financier Crassus, who, still keen to keep Pompey in his place, backed him. In consequence, feelings between the two triumvirs became so intense that Pompey told Cicero that Crassus had been behind Clodius’ plots all along and wanted to have him killed.

  The triumvirate appeared doomed but then, unexpectedly, in spring 56 Crassus and Pompey made peace at a summit meeting brokered by Caesar in Lucca. The upshot was that Crassus and Pompey would become consuls again in 55—the year Antony stormed Pelusium and opened the road for Auletes to return to Alexandria.

  It soon emerged what else had been in the reconciliation for Crassus and Pompey, and also for Caesar. After their consulships, Crassus would take a five-year command in Syria and Pompey a similarly lucrative period in Spain. Caesar would get another five years to carry on his work in Gaul. Crassus was intent not just on ruling Syria but, having jealously mocked Pompey’s Alexandrian pretensions, now wished to outdo him by conquering the only remaining eastern superpower, the Parthians (the rulers of Persia), before marching further east toward India, just as Alexander had done, heaping the Roman people and, more importantly, himself with glory and loot.

  Crassus crossed the Euphrates in the spring of 53 and headed out into the sandy Mesopotamian wastes. Drawn ever onward, deeper into this wilderness, pursuing the shapes of Parthian horsemen on the shimmering horizon, Crassus’ splendid legions became increasingly exhausted. Then, not far from a town named Carrhae, the Parthian army materialized through the haze. Attacked by armored heavy cavalry and bewildered by the famous Parthian shot—clouds of arrows fired by mounted archers who wheeled away as they delivered their deadly volleys—the Roman soldiers began to die where they stood in their defensive formations. As the casualties mounted, the lines started to break. The parched legionaries tried to close up into a smaller perimeter, but to no avail. A few, maintaining their discipline, managed eventually to fight their way back to the frontier. Ten thousand became prisoners but twenty thousand died in the gritty desert sands, among them Crassus and his son Publius, who had fought so well with Caesar in Gaul. Crassus’ head was taken to the Parthian king, who ordered it to be deployed as a stage prop in a production of Euripides’ Bacchae that he happened to be watching at the time.

  Crassus had failed even to equal his rival Pompey’s exploits, let alone those of the legendary Alexander. It would be twenty more years before another Roman triumvir—Antony—crossed into the desert to avenge Crassus and attempt to relive Alexander’s dream. This time he would be financed by one of the great Macedonian’s distant descendants—Cleopatra.

  The triumvirate was now a duumvirate. Soon after the summit in Lucca, Caesar faced a series of rebellions in Gaul, culminating in that led by a chieftain named Vercingetorix. As astute an analyst of what was possible militarily as he was of practical politics, Caesar was as meticulous in his planning as he was neat and elegant in his person. He moved quickly, acted decisively and, undogmatic, was prepared to change his tactics as events unfolded to maintain the pressure on his opponents. Unfazed by having to confront numerical
ly superior forces, he won his legions’ hearts by always leading from the front, often on foot, as well as by his commitment to reward them well.

  Antony had joined Caesar in Gaul following his success in helping restore Auletes to the Egyptian throne. He was among Caesar’s commanders at his last great battle in Gaul at Alesia, near present-day Dijon, where Caesar besieged Vercingetorix in his hilltop fortress. Told by his scouts that a massive relieving army of Gauls was, in turn, about to attack him in the rear, Caesar ordered some of his heavily outnumbered legionaries to about-face and build ramparts at the Roman army’s rear to allow the battle to be joined on two sides. Antony was in the thick of the four days of hard fighting. In his Gallic Wars Caesar praised his young commander in particular for his calmness and leadership during a nighttime attack by the Gauls, when Antony and another officer skillfully moved legionaries around their defensive perimeter to reinforce weak points and successfully held off the Gauls.

  Throughout the battle the red-cloaked Caesar was himself visible everywhere, encouraging his troops until, when he believed his opponents exhausted, he ordered his cavalry to charge. The weight and ferocity of their attack routed his besiegers. Those Gauls who could fled. Those inside the fortress who could not surrendered, including Vercingetorix. Caesar had now finally subdued Gaul, killing, so he calculated, nearly 1.2 million Gauls in battle, to say nothing of the numbers of civilians killed, dispossessed or enslaved with his many prisoners of war. As a result of his efforts, Rome was no longer solely a Mediterranean power. Its legions now also guarded the Atlantic and the North Sea; its merchants and traders had even greater dominions from which to profit.

  * * *

  While Caesar was facing the Gallic rebels, in Rome the Senate should have been giving thought as to how best to govern the extensive new territories being acquired. Instead, politics in the capital had deteriorated yet further into petty factionalism and corruption, particularly following Crassus’ death at Carrhae. Pompey remained uncertain of what he wanted—absolute power or the respect of the Senate. In August 54, his much-loved wife, Julia, died after a miscarriage. When elections were postponed because bribery had become so blatant and universal that the Senate felt compelled to act, some senators turned to Pompey, suggesting that he assume dictatorial power—a proposal that, unsurprisingly, was anathema to Cato.

  Cato now put forward as his favored candidate in the much-postponed consular elections Milo, Pompey’s former henchman, who had long since fallen from Pompey’s favor. Pompey was not amused and neither was Clodius, Milo’s long-standing adversary. Clodius, under the guidance of his strong-minded, politically astute wife, Fulvia—who would one day marry Antony and be an equally forceful presence in his life—had, under Caesar’s patronage, been attempting to become a mainstream politician. Both outraged and threatened by Milo’s candidature, he returned, probably with relish, to his street-fighting past.

  Yelling and heavily armed mobs rampaged through Rome’s streets once more. Then, in January 52, the two gang leaders and their gangs clashed on the Appian Way. A javelin wounded Clodius in the shoulder, and his supporters carried him bleeding into a neighboring inn. Milo’s men rushed in after them, dragged Clodius out and lynched him.

  Fulvia, instead of collapsing into paroxysms of grief, had her husband’s mangled and naked body retrieved from where it was lying in the street—ironically, next to an altar of the Good Goddess—and coolly orchestrated revenge. First she summoned more of Clodius’ supporters from the slums. Then, when they arrived, she exhibited her husband’s body to them in the lobby of her house. Carefully and dramatically, she revealed his wounds one by one as the onlookers’ indignation rose. The next day, with her encouragement, the mob transported Clodius’ corpse to the Senate, where they cremated it using the furniture and papers as makeshift fuel for the pyre, which consumed the Senate building as well as Clodius’ remains. Rival gangs fought among the flames. Every respectable Roman leader was appalled. Even Cato turned to Pompey to rescue the republic from mob rule. Pompey answered the call of duty with alacrity, speedily restoring order, and Milo was exiled. Basking in the glory and respect he had always thought his due, Pompey remarried. He did not accept Caesar’s offer of his seventeen-year-old great-niece Octavia—thirty-seven years Pompey’s junior and another future wife of Antony—but instead took the hand of the beautiful and highly patrician Cornelia, the young widow of Crassus’ son Publius. Pompey was now moving toward the republican faction and away from Caesar and the popular party but, again enraptured by the charms of a young wife, he did not act decisively.

  It was Caesar who took the lead by seeking to extend his command in Gaul until he could once more legally stand for the consulship in 48. The hard-line republicans and traditionalists such as Cato opposed the proposal, suspecting that Caesar merely wanted to preserve his armies intact and himself, as an officeholder, immune from prosecution by his enemies for exceeding his authority until after winning the consulship, when, with his veterans at his elbow, he could ram through legislation augmenting his own powers and rewarding his loyal followers. Pompey procrastinated, unwilling to abandon Caesar entirely, but in the end he came down in favor of the Senate, reassuring his new followers grandiloquently that if Caesar intervened militarily, “I only have to stamp my foot and all over Italy legions and cavalry will rise from the ground.”

  Tensions rose further in what Cicero called “a struggle for personal power at the state’s expense” as Caesar maneuvered to bolster his position. Although still in Gaul, he secured a strong man to represent him in Rome: Antony. Under Caesar’s patronage, Antony was elected tribune. In the face of the hostility of most of the Senate he displayed not only the physical courage he had shown previously but also a fiery oratory in defending Caesar and virulently attacking Pompey. In January 49, using the powers of the tribunes, restored after Sulla’s death, Antony vetoed a Senate bill that ordered Caesar to surrender his command or be outlawed as an enemy of the people. The Senate’s response was to eject Antony from their midst and threaten him with death if he returned, as well as to grant Pompey emergency powers. Antony and some other of Caesar’s supporters disguised themselves as slaves and, hiding in the backs of carts, fled toward northern Italy, where Caesar, encamped with a single legion, was awaiting the outcome of the Senate vote.

  Before Antony could reach him, Caesar heard reports of what had happened in Rome and realized that he had to act decisively, albeit unconstitutionally, if he was to win power or indeed, in all probability, preserve his life. On January 10, 49, his legion crossed the cold waters of the river Rubicon in the Apennines, which formally marked the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul, one of the provinces Caesar commanded, and Rome. Caesar’s laconic comment “Let the dice fly high,” made as he gave the order to advance, shows that he knew the gamble he was taking. In marching out of his province in arms toward Rome he was committing treason, breaking one of Sulla’s laws that had not been overturned.

  Antony joined Caesar at Rimini. Having taken the irrevocable step, Caesar advanced quickly on Rome. The Senate remained suspicious of Pompey and refused to grant him all the freedoms he required to marshal an effective resistance. Thus Pompey took a decision that was sound militarily but disastrous politically. He abandoned Rome, proclaiming that any senator or official who remained was a traitor. Caesar cleverly responded that he, on the other hand, would consider any who were not openly against him as with him.

  Pompey retreated swiftly south and, only sixty-five days after Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, Pompey and his troops left Italy for Greece. Pompey was convinced that his best chance of success lay in exploiting the riches and resources of the East, where he had enjoyed so many triumphs and had so many supporters, including, he believed, the Ptolemies. Caesar, who pursued Pom-pey pell-mell to his departure port of Brundisium and nearly succeeded in blocking the embarkation of the republicans, decided against immediate pursuit since his was the inferior navy. Instead, he determined to cross to Spain to defeat
Pompey’s supporters in the provinces, where Pompey had so long been absentee governor. Before departing he appointed Antony as his governor in Italy. That he did so demonstrated trust not only in Antony’s political and military judgment but also in his loyalty—a trust that was not misplaced.

  Caesar soon defeated Pompey’s followers and, satisfied that he need no longer fear attack from the rear, returned to Italy. Here too the situation had remained sufficiently calm under Antony’s rule for Caesar to feel confident in 48 to cross the Adriatic and face Pompey himself.

  This time Caesar entrusted Antony with a military role—to bring five legions of reinforcements across the Adriatic to back up his initial landings. It took Antony three months to get the troops across, because of storms and the activities of the powerful republican navy under Caesar’s old foe Bibulus. Caesar’s forces were in a perilous situation until Antony and his troops arrived, but once they did, the combined force began to advance. Nevertheless, their first attempt to surround and destroy Pompey’s troops, at their main base at Dyrrhachium on what is now the Albanian coast, ended in a serious setback. Caesar himself admitted that Pompey should have won “total victory if only he knew how to be a winner.” Undaunted, a few weeks later, in the hot, high summer of 48, Caesar offered battle to Pompey and the squabbling forces of the republic further inland on the plains of Thessaly at Pharsalus.

  The republicans had never quite trusted their general, complaining that Pompey still had his own agenda to secure absolute power, was addicted to command and disrespectfully enjoyed treating former consuls and praetors like slaves. Pompey himself did not wish to risk all in a major battle, realizing correctly that he had the resources, including twice as many troops, to withstand a long campaign of attrition better than his opponents. But since, as in Plutarch’s words, “he was the kind of man who was swayed by what people thought of him and was ashamed to lose face before his friends, he was forced to change his mind.” Pompey gave the order to prepare for battle the next day, August 9, 48. It would be the largest battle ever fought between Romans.