Cleopatra: A Life (22 page)

Mark Antony was more than twice Octavian’s age. He had
“all the prestige
of his long service with Caesar.” Over the previous two years he had exercised great, if not always decorous, authority. He had moreover already liquidated Octavian’s inheritance, as he had earlier made a shambles of Pompey’s former home, liberally bestowing magnificent tapestries and furniture on friends. He did not need to be reminded that he had narrowly missed out on adoption by the man he too admired above all others. Nor did he need to be lectured by a diminutive, self-righteous upstart. He was much taken aback. In his rich, raspy voice, he reminded the young man before him that political leadership in Rome was not hereditary. Comporting himself as if it were had got Caesar murdered. Antony had run plenty of risks to ensure that Caesar was buried with honors, plenty more for the sake of his memory. It was entirely thanks to him, he testily informed Octavian,
“that you in fact possess
all the distinctions of Caesar’s that you do—family, name, rank and wealth.” Antony owed no explanations. He deserved gratitude rather than blame. Unable to resist, as he often was, Antony added a little poison dart to his message, upbraiding the stripling for his disrespect, “and you a young man and I your senior.” Octavian was moreover mistaken if he believed Antony coveted political power or resented the newcomer’s position. “Descent from Hercules is quite good enough for me,” huffed Antony, who—broad-shouldered, bull-necked, ridiculously handsome, with a thick head of curls and aquiline features—entirely looked the part. As for money, there was none in his hands. Octavian’s brilliant father had left the treasury quite empty.

Explosive though it was, that interview came as a relief to the Senate, to which there was only one danger greater than a public feud between the two Caesarians. Antony wielded political power. Octavian was respected, and surprisingly popular. Enthusiastic demonstrations greeted him throughout his travels. Far better that the two rivals obstruct each other, went the thinking, than that they join forces. Antony noted as much in his garden that spring morning. Octavian was fresh from his studies. Certainly in the course of them he had learned that the populace
considered it their business to prolong discord, that they built up demagogues for the pleasure of knocking them down, that they encouraged them to destroy each other. He was of course right. And no one was better at fomenting dissension than Cicero, who could always be counted on, as a contemporary put it, to
malign the prominent, blackmail the powerful, slander the distinguished
. He now gamely obliged.

To Cicero the contest was a baneful one between weakness and villainy. In truth there were a dizzying number of options. Among Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius remained very much in the picture. A bold young man with a gift for assembling armies, Pompey’s son was in Spain with the greater part of the Roman navy. Sextus Pompey had on his side his own father’s still-bright reputation; he, too, was looking to avenge a parent and recover an inheritance. (He arguably had a greater claim on vengeance. As an adolescent, he had witnessed his father’s beheading off the coast of Egypt.) The consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, having succeeded Antony as Caesar’s second in command, having dined with Caesar the night before his murder, dreamed too of succeeding Caesar. He controlled a faction of Caesar’s army. Additional legions reported to additional consuls. Brutus had unexpectedly raised his army in record time.
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It seemed that Octavian alone was without a command.

The most influential man in Rome after the Ides, Cicero found himself in much the same bind as Cleopatra. Which side to join? He could see that neutrality would on this occasion—the fifth civil war of his lifetime—not be possible. At the same time, he knew all the parties in question and was enchanted by none. In 44 Octavian struck him as a mere schoolboy, a nuisance rather than a prospect.
“I don’t trust his age
and I don’t know what he’s after,” Cicero carped. It was difficult to imagine Octavian—a pale-faced teenager in a city that preferred its complexions
ruddy—as a commander in chief. He proferred himself as leader, and yet was so naïve as to believe that Rome could keep a secret! (It is interesting that few deigned to take Octavian seriously at eighteen, at which age Cleopatra already ruled Egypt.)

By May 44, when Cicero felt Rome no longer safe for him, he settled on Dolabella, though with a wrinkle. That dashing commander had for four years been his son-in-law. Dolabella and Cicero’s daughter had divorced during her pregnancy; Dolabella had subsequently been slow to repay the dowry, as he was obliged to do. Once an ardent Caesarian, Dolabella turned after the Ides against his former benefactor. He pretended even to have been party to the conspiracy, which he publicly approved. Cicero cheered loudly from the sidelines. As of May 1 his former son-in-law was
“my wonderful Dolabella.”
Stocky, long-haired Dolabella delivered a star performance of a speech. Cicero slobbered in admiration. Dolabella had so eloquently defended the assassins that Brutus could practically wear a crown himself! Surely, Cicero assured him, Dolabella knew already of his deep regard? (More likely, Dolabella knew of just the opposite.) Dolabella destroyed a makeshift column, raised to Caesar’s memory. He suppressed pro-Caesarian demonstrations. Cicero’s esteem only grew.
“No affection was
ever more ardent,” he effused. The Republic rested on Dolabella’s shoulders.

A week later Cicero was through with his former son-in-law.
“The gall of the man!”
he spat, declaring himself a bitter enemy. What had happened in the interim? Despite the fusillade of compliments, Dolabella had neglected to make good on his debt. There was a moment of reprieve; Cicero could not help but repeatedly congratulate Dolabella for a brilliant tirade against Antony, long the way to Cicero’s heart. On that count too, personal animosities trumped political issues. Trusted associates of Caesar both, Dolabella and Mark Antony had for several years been at odds following a certain indiscretion on the part of Antony’s then wife. (For the same reason, she abruptly became his ex-wife.) Sometimes it indeed seemed as if there were only ten
women in Rome
. And in Cicero’s view, Mark Antony had slept with every one of them.

Politics have long been defined as
“the systematic organization
of hatreds.” Certainly nothing better described Rome in the years following the Ides, when enmity rather than issues divided Caesar’s assassins, Caesar’s heirs, and the last of the Pompeians, each of whom, it seemed, had an army, an agenda, and ambitions of his own. Among the bumper crop of personal vendettas, none was more savage than that of Cicero and Mark Antony. The bad blood went back decades. Antony’s father had died when he was ten, leaving so many debts that Antony had declined his inheritance. His stepfather, a celebrated orator, had been sentenced to death on Cicero’s orders. From his father, Mark Antony inherited a joyful, capricious temperament. He was given to sulks and sprees. His mother—by all accounts a force of nature—appeared to have fostered in her reckless son a taste for competent, strong-minded women. Without them Antony arguably would have self-destructed well before March 44. Already his personal life was something of a catastrophe. He cemented the family reputation for insolvency while still in his teens. His sterling military reputation was eclipsed only by his fame as a reveler; he left tutors half-dead in
his carousing wake
. He was given to good living, great parties, bad women. He was generous to a fault, always easier when the house you are rashly giving away is not yours in the first place. What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony:
“He was a spendthrift
of money and chastity—his own and other people’s.” The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar’s charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous.

After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour—at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra was not yet reinstalled in Alexandria when the first tensions were felt. They were entirely public:
“All over the city
,” Appian relates, “Octavian would climb up on to any elevated spot and accuse Antony at the top of his voice.” Antony might treat him with as much indignity as he liked, he might condemn him to a life of poverty, thundered Octavian, but would he please “stop
plundering his property until the citizens have had their legacy?” He could then take all the rest. Antony hotly bellowed back. He was insulting and obstructionist wherever possible. The Senate did nothing to discourage either man, preferring instead, as Dio has it and as Antony had predicted,
“to set them at odds
with each other.” Antony’s men urged reconciliation, all the more crucial as the assassins consolidated their forces. Antony apologized. He promised to control his temper
provided that Octavian did
the same. One uneasy truce followed another. Antony broke the second with a sensational charge: in October he accused Octavian of bribing Antony’s bodyguards to murder him. (In truth Octavian had only tried to bribe them to defect, a practice of which he would make a regular habit. As for Mark Antony’s safety, Octavian offered personally to stand guard at his bedside.) Most believed the charge preposterous. Some did not, which left Octavian apoplectic. On one occasion he was reduced to pummeling the locked door of Mark Antony’s house in an attempt to clear his name,
wildly shouting oath after oath
at the servants and at a plank of wood.

Courted assiduously by Octavian, who wrote to him daily, Cicero played for time. It was a delicate business. Were Octavian to come to power, the assassins were lost. Moreover, Octavian was at once alarmingly impressionable and curiously resistant to advice from his elders. Cicero had particular difficulty with the young man’s florid encomiums of Caesar.
“On the other hand
,” Cicero reasoned, “if he is beaten, you can see that Antony will be intolerable, so one can’t tell which to prefer.” Antony was bent on plunder, Octavian blinded by vengeance. Cicero hemmed and hawed, fixing finally on one certainty, which he repeated like a mantra:
“The man who crushes
Mark Antony will have finished this ghastly and perilous war.” By the fall of 44, defending the commonwealth, or what remained of it, became to Cicero synonymous with mauling Antony, against whom he fulminated for the next six months. It was in the course of those harrowing weeks that Cleopatra found herself entangled with Antony and Octavian’s real enemies,
collaborating as she was, ingenuously and disingenuously, with Dolabella and Cassius.

In the rabid attacks we know as the Philippics Cicero set out to destroy Caesar’s former lieutenant. Antony was at best “an audacious rascal,” at worst an erratic, drunken, filthy, shameless, depraved, licentious, pillaging madman. “In truth,” asserted Cicero, “
we ought not to think of him
as a human being, but as a most outrageous beast.” Certainly Antony gave Cicero plenty to work with. He had mismanaged funds. He had indulged in scandalous affairs. He had appropriated property. He had made a spectacle of himself, at one point allegedly attaching lions to a chariot for a joyride through Rome. Excess and conviviality were his middle names. His colorful stunts accounted in large part for his popularity; to his men he was irresistible. There had been ample carousing, even if
“the fume of debauch”
did not attach itself to Antony quite as tenaciously as Cicero insisted. He was all the same happy to retail and amplify tales of Antony’s indignities. The morning he had opened his mouth to speak in the Senate and instead vomited the putrid remains of a wedding feast into his lap was not one Cicero would ever let him forget. Antony was henceforth “the belching, vomiting brute,” prone to “spewing rather than speaking.” He had no ambition beyond providing for Rome’s actors, gamblers, pimps. On this subject Cicero was inexhaustible. As he had admitted long before:
“It is easy to inveigh
against profligacy; daylight would soon fail me if I were to endeavour to expose everything which could be said upon that topic: seduction, adultery, wantonness, extravagance, the topic is illimitable.”
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So he proved on the subject of Mark Antony.

As the abuse continued, two new themes emerged. Octavian inevitably
went from being “the boy” to “my young friend” to “this extraordinary youngster” to “that heaven-sent young man,” on whom Rome’s hopes rested. Also as Cicero ranted, Antony gained a partner in crime. Summoning every speck of evidence, rumor, and innuendo, Cicero included Fulvia, Antony’s wife of three years, in his rabid denunciations. Fulvia had participated equally in doling out appointments, auctioning off provinces, embezzling state funds, asserted Cicero. He indicted her for her greed, her ambition, her cruelty, her guile. He charged Antony with the worst crime that could be leveled against Caesar’s former lieutenant: Mark Antony, he bellowed,
“would prefer to answer
to a most audacious woman than the Senate and Roman people.” With his have-you-no-decency offensive Cicero settled an invaluable inheritance on Octavian, who would avail himself of each and every line, without once crediting the best ghostwriter in history.

BY NOVEMBER 43
Octavian and Antony had little choice but to join forces. It was that winter that Brutus and Cassius united in the eastern Aegean, Cassius having relinquished his expedition against Cleopatra. The assassins were well armed and well funded; bowing to necessity, Antony and Octavian swallowed their mutual disdain and submitted to a formal alliance. In it they included Lepidus, who commanded a particularly spirited army. Late in the month the three came together on a small island in the midst of present-day Bologna,
“to exchange enmity
for friendship.” They frisked one another for concealed daggers and sat down to talk, in full view of their armies. There they remained for two days of dawn-to-dusk discussions, unsurprising given the conflicting agendas. As the Roman historian Florus put it much later:
“Lepidus was actuated
by a desire for wealth, which he might expect to gain from confusion in the State; Antony desired vengeance upon those who had declared him an enemy; Caesar [Octavian] was spurred on by the thought that his father’s death was still unpunished and that the survival of Cassius and Brutus was an insult to his departed spirit.” At the end of two days the three nonetheless hammered out an
agreement, essentially appointing themselves dictators for five years and carving up the empire among them. Each man swore to uphold the terms and joined hands. On the mainland, their exultant armies saluted one another. The agreement—to be known later as the Second Triumvirate—was to take effect as of January 42. Cleopatra could only have been relieved. Together Octavian and Antony had a chance. She was in no position to head off the combined forces of Brutus and Cassius, who would show no mercy to an ally of Caesar’s, less so to one who ruled with his child.