Cleopatra: A Life (25 page)

Did the confluence of needs add up to a romance? Surely it added up to an easy rapport. As Plutarch noted of another history-making liaison, it was very much a love affair,
“and yet it was thought
to harmonize well with the matters at hand.” Of all the Romans in all the towns in all the empire, Cleopatra had particular reason to cultivate this one. Antony had equal reason to do the same. If it was convenient for Cleopatra to fall in love, or in step, with the man to whom she essentially answered, it was no less so for Antony to fall in with the woman who could single-handedly underwrite his military ambitions. His Parthian obsession was a bold stroke of luck for her.

We know that Antony pined for Cleopatra months later, though she wound up with all the credit for the affair. As one of her sworn enemies asserted, she did not fall in love with Antony but
“brought him to fall in love
with her.” In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventurer and the adventuress. There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia. The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can at least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. So
Cleopatra has Antony under her thumb, poised to obey her every wish,
“not only because of his intimacy
with her,” as Josephus has it, “but also because of being under the influence of drugs.” To claim as much is to acknowledge her power, also to insult her intelligence.

Whether or not anyone lost his or her head to the other, it is difficult to believe sex failed to figure in the picture early on. Antony and Cleopatra were at the height of their power, reveling amid heady perfume to sweet music, under kaleidoscopic lights, on steamy summer nights, before groaning tables of the finest food and wine in Asia. And while he was unlikely to have been
a slave to his love
for Cleopatra, as various chroniclers assert, the truth was that wherever Mark Antony went, sexual charm inevitably followed. His tunic tucked high on his rolling hips, he had slept his way across Asia at least once; he was fresh from his liaison with another client queen. Plutarch assigns him
“an ill name for familiarity
with other people’s wives.” He himself later dated the relationship with Cleopatra from the torrid Tarsan summer.

The immediate effects of the meeting were practical: Cleopatra stayed a few weeks and accomplished a great deal. By the time she sailed home, Antony had in hand her list of demands. Given what he had presumably exacted in exchange, they were not outlandish. They reveal that Cleopatra did not feel as secure as she pretended. She was keenly aware that another queen of Egypt waited in the wings. Antony lost no time in simplifying her life. He ordered Arsinoe forcibly removed from
the Temple of Artemis
. Cleopatra’s sister met her end on those marble steps, before the ornate ivory doors that their father had donated to the facade years earlier. She was the last of the four siblings; there would be no further mischief from that quarter.
“Now Cleopatra had put to death
all her kindred,” a Roman chronicler sputters, “till no one near her in blood remained alive.” That was true, although it was also true that Arsinoe had left her sister little choice. Caesar had spared her after the public humiliation in Rome.
Arsinoe had conspired
against Cleopatra ever since. (Isis too is merciful yet just, delivering up the wicked to those
against whom they plot.) And Cleopatra was capable of clemency. Antony called in the high priest of the temple, who had proclaimed Arsinoe queen. The Ephesians were beside themselves, and paid a call on Cleopatra to beg for the priest’s pardon. She prevailed upon Antony to release him. The priest could recognize no further exiled Ptolemies. He posed no danger now. Antony was not so forgiving with the pretender who had been traveling about Asia passing himself off as Ptolemy XIII, as some have suggested he might well have been. (No body had surfaced at the end of the Alexandrian War after all.) He was executed. The rogue naval commander on Cyprus who had supported Cassius against Cleopatra’s orders—he may have been in league with Arsinoe—had fled to Syria, where he sought refuge in a temple. He was dragged out and killed.

This was the kind of behavior that could suggest a man was besotted.
“So straight away
,” concludes Appian, “the attention that Antony had until now devoted to every matter was completely blunted, and whatever Cleopatra commanded was done, without consideration of what was right in the eyes of man or god.” It was equally the kind of behavior that suggested that Cleopatra had made some material promises between feasts. Nor did Antony deviate entirely from custom. On leaving Cleopatra in 47, Caesar too had applied himself to settling provincial affairs,
“distributing rewards
both individually and communally to those who deserved them, and hearing and deciding old disputes.” Antony took under his protection those kings that applied to him, making of them firm friends. He established chains of command and raised taxes. The difference lay in what came next. Late in the fall, Antony dispatched his army to various winter quarters. And though provincial affairs remained in disarray, though the Parthians hovered about the Euphrates, aggressively eyeing Syria, Antony headed south, to join Cleopatra in Egypt.

THE TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD WHO
greeted him in Alexandria may or may not have been at the height of her beauty—a moment a woman knows always to be several years behind her—but she was a manifestly
more confident Cleopatra even than the one who had greeted Julius Caesar seven years earlier. She had traveled abroad and given birth. She ruled unchallenged, and unchallenged had weathered severe political and economic storms. She was a living deity with an irreproachable consort, one who relieved her of the obligation to remarry. She had the support of her people and presumably their enthusiastic admiration as well; she had involved herself more closely with native Egyptian religious life than any Ptolemaic predecessor. Not coincidentally we hear her voice for the first time now, in Alexandria, entertaining her patron and partner. She is self-assured, authoritative, saucy.

In light of what came later, Mark Antony’s Egyptian visit was assumed to have been Cleopatra’s idea and Cleopatra’s doing. Ingeniously, seductively, or magically, she spirited him away.
“He suffered her to hurry
him off to Alexandria,” as Plutarch has it. It was of course equally possible that Antony invited himself. He was after all doing what he was meant to do: reshaping the East and raising money. He could advance no further in his Parthian plans without Egyptian funds. He may have felt this was his best chance of securing the monies that a clever queen had promised but not yet delivered. Asia had proved poorer than anyone had realized. Egypt was rich. There was legitimate reason to survey a client kingdom, especially one that would prove an ideal base for an Eastern campaign; Antony would need a powerful fleet, something Cleopatra could provide. The alternative was forever untangling provincial affairs, which played neither to Antony’s strengths nor interests. The administrative details had bored even Cicero. The deputations arrived one after another; under the circumstances, Antony could only have been eager to travel to one of the few Mediterranean countries
“not ruled by himself.”
He had been a gifted schoolboy. He was still in many ways a schoolboy. He was also a gifted, straight-thinking strategist. If Cleopatra did not pursue him he had every reason to pursue her, or at least to proceed agreeably and diplomatically, allowing her to feel as if hers were the upper hand, as he had so graciously done in Tarsus. He had already seen
Alexandria, a city that the visitor did not easily forget, one that seemed to have swallowed the whole of Greek culture in one gulp. No one in his right mind would opt to spend the winter elsewhere than in its satiny light, despite its January deluges, especially in the first century BC, especially as the guest of a Ptolemy.

Either out of deference to Cleopatra’s authority or to avoid Caesar’s mistake, Mark Antony traveled to Egypt without a military escort or the insignia of office, “adopting the dress and way of life of an ordinary person.” He lived very little like one. Cleopatra labored to provide him with a magnificent reception. She saw to it that he indulged in
“the sports and diversions
of a young man of leisure” and that Alexandrian life answered to its reputation. There are cities in which to spend a fortune and cities in which to make one; only in the rare great city can one accomplish both. Such was Cleopatra’s Alexandria, a scholarly paradise with a quick business pulse and a languorous resort culture, where the Greek penchant for commerce met the Egyptian mania for hospitality, a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons, with the hustle of heterodoxy and the aroma of opportunity thick in the air. Even the people-watching was best there.

For Antony and Cleopatra euphoric entertainment followed prodigal feast, in observance of a sort of pact the two made, one they termed the Inimitable Livers.
“The members
,” Plutarch explains, “entertained one another daily in turn, with an extravagance of expenditure beyond measure or belief.” From an odd, under-the-stairs friendship comes an intimate view of Cleopatra’s kitchen that winter. A royal cook promises to secret his friend Philotas into the palace to witness the preparations for one of her suppers; he will be astonished by the goings-on. The kitchen is predictably electric with shouting and swearing, at cooks, waiters, and wine stewards; amid the frezy sit mounds of provisions. Eight wild boars turn on spits. A small army of staff bustles about. Philotas, a young medical student, marvels at the size of the crowd expected for dinner. His friend can only laugh at his naïveté. Quite the opposite, he explains. The
operation is at once highly precise and entirely imprecise:
“The guests are not many
, only about twelve; but everything that is set before them must be at perfection, and if anything was but one minute ill-timed, it was spoiled. And, said he, maybe Antony will dine just now, maybe not this hour, maybe he will call for wine, or begin to talk, and will put it off. So that,” he continued, “it is not one, but many dinners must ready, as it is impossible to guess at his hour.” Having overcome his surprise and completed his education, the wide-eyed Philotas went on to become a prominent physician, who told his fabulous tale to a friend, who handed it down to his grandson, who happened to be Plutarch.

By all accounts Mark Antony was an exhausting and expensive houseguest. As a younger man he had headed off on military campaigns with a train of musicians, concubines, and actors in tow. He had—according to Cicero, anyway—made of Pompey’s former home a pleasure palace, filled with tumblers, dancers, jesters, and drunks. His tastes remained consistent. Cleopatra had her hands full.
“It is no easy matter to create harmony
where there is an opposition of material interest and almost of nature,” Cicero had observed years earlier, and Cleopatra’s differences from Antony were marked. She worked overtime to accommodate, despite what must have been a multitude of claims on her time; she already had a full-time job. Antony visited Alexandria’s golden temples, frequented gymnasiums, attended scholarly discussions, but evinced little interest in Egyptian lore, in the architectural, cultural, or scientific underpinnings of a superior civilization. He could not have helped but visit Alexander’s tomb, for which there was a Roman mania. He made a trip to the desert, to hunt. Cleopatra may have accompanied him; it was likely that she rode, and either owned or sponsored racehorses. There is otherwise no indication that Antony left Lower Egypt, or traveled to the sites. He was no Julius Caesar. Instead, amid echoing colonnades and a menagerie of glossy sphinxes, along streets named for his lover’s illustrious forebears, between the closely packed limestone houses, he raised juvenile pranks to high art. Cleopatra made herself at all times available and amenable, contributing
“some fresh delight
and charm to Antony’s
hours of seriousness and mirth.” If her days were full, her nights were fuller, though her guest needed little instruction. He was a practiced hand at nocturnal rambles, lavish picnics, disguised reunions. He already knew how to crash a wedding. At no time did Cleopatra let him out of her sight. This too was politics of a sort; her kingdom was well worth a prank. “She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him, and watched him as he exercised himself in arms,” Plutarch tells us. “And when by night he would station himself at the doors or windows of the common folk and scoff at those within, she would go with him on his round of mad follies, wearing the garb of a serving maiden.” Antony disguised himself for those excursions as a servant, usually incurring a round of abuse—often blows—before returning, wholly amused with himself, to the palace.

His capers went over well in Alexandria, a city that conformed in every way to Antony’s inclinations and that before him dropped its defenses. It was lighthearted and luxury-loving; Antony was all muscle and mirth. He liked nothing so much as to make a woman laugh. From his youth, when he had studied military exercises and oratory abroad, he was an admirer of all things Greek. He spoke in the florid, Asiatic style, with less bombast than poetry. A later Roman chided the Alexandrians for their buffoonery. A twang of the harp string and they were off and running:
“You are forever being frivolous
and heedless, and you are practically never at a loss for fun-making and enjoyment and laughter.” This was not a problem for Antony, at his ease among low-rent entertainments and roving musicians, in the street or at the racetrack.