Cleopatra: A Life (28 page)

SHE HAD NO
need to indulge in costume drama this time around. Cleopatra knew before she sailed that fall that Mark Antony was heading east, finally to settle the Roman score with Parthia, a campaign he had delayed now for four years. She knew of his preoccupation from their riotous winter together. From Caesar she would have heard details of the original plans for that expedition. As he made his way toward Antioch, Antony reorganized Asia Minor, carving out kingdoms for those he trusted and those who supported him. He established a stable frontier; it was essential that he shore up his rear before proceeding east. To the same end Antony and Octavian had together arranged a kingship for
Herod
when he had finally washed up in Rome that winter. Of Idumaean and Arab descent, Herod was by no means the obvious candidate for the Judaean throne. His tenacity rather than his heritage secured him the crown. No dynast more eloquently explained away his misguided loyalty to Cassius; it would fairly be said of Herod that he had
“slinked into”
power. Antony had known his father, also a friend to Rome. And he had met Herod as a teenager. The personal rapport counted for a good deal.

A rough-edged opportunist, Herod was endearingly reckless, a
master of the miraculous escape. The evidence suggests a fascination with him in Rome, on Octavian’s part as much as on Antony’s. Not coincidentally, Herod was as much a swashbuckler when it came to raising funds as throwing a javelin; he had an astonishing talent for plucking gold from thin air. (His subjects had some insight into his methods.) The Senate unanimously confirmed the kingship after which Octavian and Antony escorted Herod between them to the Capitol, a signal honor. Consuls and magistrates led the way. Antony argued that the appointment would be advantageous to the Eastern campaign; he afterward threw a banquet in the new king’s honor. By some accounts Herod owed his throne equally to Cleopatra. The Senate was as much motivated by fear of her as by admiration of him. They distinctly preferred two monarchs in the region to one. There was ample reason to be wary of a client queen at the head of a rich kingdom, with her finger on Rome’s grain supply.

That logic worked as well to Cleopatra’s advantage. Antony could risk no upheavals in Egypt. She alone could rule that kingdom with authority. Clearly few could run the country better. As ever, she left Alexandria secure in the knowledge that no Roman could succeed against Parthia—a rich, immense, and well-defended empire—without her financial support. In other words, as she made her way north that fall, along the rocky coast of the eastern Mediterranean, she knew that the balance of power had subtly shifted. For all of Antony’s bravado, despite his superb army, she was very much in possession of the upper hand. Vanity having changed little in two millennia, it seems fair to assume that she and her attendants took scrupulous pains with her appearance. She had not seen Mark Antony in three and a half years, years any woman would want to render invisible. She had heard about Octavia, the round-faced, gleaming-haired beauty. There was no call for ambrosial robes, gem-encrusted party favors, wall-to-wall roses this time around, however. Cleopatra had something better. On this trip she took the children.

In Antioch, a miniature, less profligate version of Alexandria, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene met their father for the first time. He
acknowledged the twins as his own. It could only have been a joyous meeting. Antony had Hellenistic pretensions. He had insinuated himself into the Ptolemaic dynasty; his children were now in line for the Egyptian throne. Moreover, he had a new son, something Octavia, a paragon on every other front, had not produced. (Antony had two older sons, by Fulvia.) Some have gone so far as to suggest that it was precisely her failure to provide a male heir—one who would fulfill Virgil’s prophecy and usher in the much-awaited golden age—that drove Antony into the arms of Cleopatra. Generally Antony liked children and did not believe it possible to have too many. He was fond of saying that
“noble families were extended
by the successive begettings of many kings.” He was hardly the kind of man who could have resisted a Greek-speaking minor deity of a three-year-old who dressed as a royal, who addressed Antony as Father, and who—if sculpture can be trusted—in his fleshy face and mop of bouncing curls resembled him as well. Establishing a divine claim had been at the top of Antony’s agenda for years. He had been edging that way since Philippi, following the example of his illustrious mentor. With his illegitimate children, Antony legitimately stepped—as a modern historian has put it—
“into his predecessor’s bedroom slippers.”
It was especially appropriate that he do so in Antioch, a scenic, well-provisioned river city at the foot of a majestic mountain, with a colonnaded downtown grid and an ample supply of stadiums and gardens, monumental fountains and natural springs. Bathed in westerly breezes from May to October, Antioch was sunny and windless in winter, with delightful baths and a lively market. Well inclined toward Caesar, who had commissioned a statue of himself there after leaving Cleopatra in 47, the Syrian capital warmly welcomed his celebrated protégé.

Cleopatra had every personal reason to delight in the long-delayed family reunion, but the political satisfactions were greater still. Antony had taken her fishing advice. He was doing what she felt—or for her own reasons led him to believe—he did best. Devoting himself to a worthy sport, he was reeling in “cities, provinces, and kingdoms.” It is not inaccurate to say that
“realms and islands
were as plates dropped from
his pocket,” as would be suggested later; for the most part there was a compelling logic to Antony’s dispositions. He engaged in a long-needed, often-attempted ordering of the restive East. In a multiethnic, multicultural region of shifting alliances—one that had resisted thirty years of Roman efforts at reorganization—he recognized talent, rewarded competence and loyalty. As Antony liked to say,
“The greatness of the Roman empire
was made manifest not by what the Romans received, but by what they bestowed.” Consolidating kingdoms, he ably merged territories and assigned lands. He redrew geography.

He was in his element, and manifestly invincible. No one doubted his imminent triumph over the dreaded Parthians. Rarely had anyone assembled
“an army more conspicuous
for prowess, endurance, or youthful vigor.” Antony’s
“made all Asia quiver.”
It was the greatest force he would command, its men uniquely devoted to their largehearted, freewheeling general. Each preferred his good opinion to their very lives, a devotion born,
Plutarch
effuses, of
“the nobility of his family
, his eloquence, his frank and open manners, his liberal and magnificent habits, his familiarity in talking with everybody.” Antony’s mood was contagious; there were high spirits all around. Handing out gifts is always uplifting, and munificence was something he did especially well. It was a corollary to his embrace of large families. In sunny Antioch—the two likely stayed at the island palace, nestled in the bend of the placid river—Cleopatra had reason to congratulate herself, and to believe that, emerging from five years of chaos and confusion, she had backed the right horse.

Upon her September arrival Antony moreover made her an extraordinary present. Not only did he acknowledge his three-year-old twins, but he showered a vast collection of territories on their mother. He confirmed her authority over the island of Cyprus, which even Caesar had not officially granted her. The memory of its loss, and the effects of that monumental loss, could only have burned bright. To Cleopatra’s lands he added as well wooded Coele-Syria (part of which is today Lebanon); lush, far-off Cyrene (in modern Libya); a generous swath of cedar-heavy Cilicia (the eastern coast of Turkey); portions of Crete; and all but two cities of the
thriving Phoenician coast. In several cases Antony eliminated sovereigns—if an offense could not be found, one could always be fabricated—so that Cleopatra might assume their territories. As of 37 Cleopatra ruled over nearly the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, from what is today eastern Libya, in Africa, north through Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, to southern Turkey, excepting only slivers of Judaea.

Antony’s military needs and Roman score-settling largely determined the size and shape of the grant. So did his opinion of Cleopatra; she was proficient, reliable, resourceful. This was what Rome looked for in its client rulers, who had several advantages over Roman appointees, one of which was that they did not need to be paid. More to the point, Antony needed a navy. By the time of the Tarentum treaty he had delivered one hundred bronze-beaked galleys and ten triremes to Octavian. Cleopatra knew how to build ships. For good reason Antony assigned timber-rich provinces to a monarch who had the tradesmen and the resources to transform them into a worthy fleet; in that regard
no one in the Mediterranean world
was as valuable to Antony as was Cleopatra. As Plutarch acknowledged, her gifts were but some among many distributed to Eastern rulers. At the same time, she was one of the rare sovereigns who remained in place; Antony regularly circumvented established dynasties in making appointments. And Cleopatra received a far more generous gift than that bestowed on any other ruler. By September 37, she had nearly reconstituted the Ptolemaic Empire in its third-century glory.

For good reason she declared a new era for Egypt. Cleopatra’s
sixteenth regnal year
was henceforth to be known as the year one, a double dating she continued throughout her reign. And at thirty-two she redefined herself, assuming an original title. Among the many unconventional privileges Cleopatra enjoyed, naming herself surely figured among the most significant, on par with choosing her consort or managing her own income. She was henceforth “Queen Cleopatra, the Goddess, the Younger, Father-Loving and Fatherland-Loving.” She was as astute a manipulator of nomenclature as of much else, and a good deal has been read into that title. With it Cleopatra announced not only a new age but a
full-scale political reorientation. She may have appended the final term to discourage murmurs that she was selling out to the Romans; with it Cleopatra signaled to her subjects that she was first and foremost their pharaoh.
^*
Certainly the imagery on her coins is reassuringly consistent with that of previous Ptolemies. By any name she was as powerful a figure as existed on the non-Roman stage. When Antony had vanquished the Parthians, she would be empress of the East. Various coastal cities acknowledged as much, issuing coins in Antony and Cleopatra’s honor. She had every reason to be ecstatic. There was not a smudge on the horizon.

Cleopatra could only have looked forward to celebrating the new dawn in Alexandria. Having sacrificed all after the Ides of March, she had not only regained a foothold but fared better this time around. Their pride in the newly established empire aside, how did her subjects take to her close collaboration with a second Roman? There is no trace of scandal. Her people remained focused on the practical implications of Cleopatra’s diplomacy.
“It seems to me
,” an eminent scholar has suggested, “that the loves and births of a female pharaoh struck them as divine matters, and that they questioned their queen only when her tax collectors pressed too stringently.” She had cleverly solved a political puzzle. The lack of resistance at home may indicate as well that she was not unduly generous with Mark Antony. She may have agreed to pay for his legions, but that Cleopatra could afford without oppressive levies on her people. Nor was there reason to believe Antony’s territorial dispositions set off alarms in Rome. They were part of a consistent foreign policy. They enriched the coffers and secured the frontiers. In Egypt, Cleopatra’s popularity could only have been at an all-time high.