Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (28 page)

After some minor skirmishes, more defections from Antony’s camp, a bizarre and quickly foiled attempt to kidnap Antony (reported by Plutarch), several days of bad weather and a couple of lengthy and inspirational speeches from the two leaders, the sea battle flared up on 2 September 31. Antony’s ships emerged from the Gulf of Ambracia and faced out to sea in three divisions, protecting Cleopatra’s fleet, which was held in reserve behind the central division. From the beginning things went badly. Octavian’s ships kept out of range, drawing Antony’s fleet further and further out to sea so that they might become dispersed. Antony’s ships were hopelessly undercrewed and unable to fight efficiently. Antony himself commanded the right division facing
Octavian’s left division, commanded by Agrippa. Here things went according to plan and there was some brisk fighting, but the central and left divisions underperformed, allowing Octavian to take an early advantage. At some point the battleships from the central and left divisions stopped participating in the battle and retreated into the gulf. Soon after, possibly at a prearranged signal, Cleopatra’s sixty ships hoisted their sails, broke through Octavian’s line and sailed away at full speed. Antony abandoned his large flagship, transferred his flag to a quinquereme, and chased after Cleopatra with about forty of his personal squadron:

… Antony made it clear to all the world that he was swayed neither by the sentiments of a commander nor of a brave man, nor even by his own, but, as someone in pleasantry said that the soul of the lover dwells in another’s body, he was dragged along by the woman as if he had become incorporate with her and must go where she did. For no sooner did he see her ship sailing off than he forgot everything else, betrayed and ran away from those who were fighting and dying in his cause, got into a five-oared galley, where Alexas the Syrian and Scellius were his only companions, and hastened after the woman who had already ruined him and would make his ruin still more complete. Cleopatra recognized him and raised a signal on her ship; so Antony came up and was taken on board, but he neither saw nor was seen by her. Instead, he went forward alone to the prow and sat down by himself in silence, holding his head in both hands.
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It is perhaps inevitable that Plutarch would interpret this as the cowardly or devious Cleopatra running away from the battle. He was faced with the unenviable task of showing Antony in a sympathetic light while making it clear to his readers that Octavian is the real hero of Actium, and he achieved this by making Cleopatra into the villain of his piece. It is less easy to understand how so many modern historians, with full access to Dio, have made the same assumption.

Octavian thought of chasing after Cleopatra’s ships, but quickly realised that he would be unable to catch her and so continued with the battle. Antony’s fleet fought on, but their situation was hopeless. Octavian’s own memoir tells us that the sea battle ended at 4 p.m. with some 5,000 of Antony’s men lost and 300 of his ships taken; Tarn has used these figures to calculate that between ten and fifteen of Antony’s ships must have sunk.
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Meanwhile, Antony’s ground forces had started the long march north but had been caught by Octavian’s troops. Tempted by generous bribes, the bulk of Antony’s soldiers defected, bringing a swift and relatively painless end to the confrontation. Crassus was able to escape under cover of nightfall and make his way back to Antony. Octavian, who already had enough ships, burned many of Antony’s vessels lest they fall into the wrong hands. His failure to capture Cleopatra’s war chest, now safely on its way to Egypt, meant that he would be embarrassingly short of money to pay his victorious veterans. Nevertheless, in celebration of his success, Octavian dedicated ten complete ships from Antony’s captured fleet to Apollo, and founded the city of Nicopolis. The battle of Actium, hardly the greatest of victories, was to be remembered as a triumph for Octavian, Agrippa and Apollo, and as the beginning of the end for Cleopatra, Antony and Egypt.

It is hard not to feel sympathy for Antony, sitting day after day on deck with his head in his hands. Without knowing exactly what did happen at Actium, it is impossible to imagine the thoughts going through his mind, but although he and Cleopatra (and their treasure chest) lived on to fight another day, he must have realised that he was running out of men prepared to fight for his cause. Only after the ship had docked at Taenarum (modern Cape Matapan, the southernmost point of the Peloponnese) did Cleopatra and Antony meet. Soon after, encouraged by Cleopatra’s ladies-in-waiting, they were dining and sleeping together again.

Separated from Cleopatra again, Antony made his way across the
Mediterranean to the Greek town of Paraetonium (modern Mersa Matruh) on the Egyptian–Cyrenaican border. Here he was horrified to find that a garrison of previously loyal troops had defected to Octavian. Their general, Lucius Pinarius Scarpus, not only refused to receive Antony, but executed Antony’s messengers and all those among his own troops who were inclined to support him. Faced with this betrayal, Antony contemplated suicide, but was persuaded by friends to rejoin Cleopatra in Alexandria instead.

Cleopatra, worried about the very real danger of civil unrest, had gone straight to Alexandria. Arriving ahead of the news from Actium, she was able to fool her people by entering the harbour in triumph, with garlands draped over the front of her boat and musicians playing victory songs. Then, or so Dio tells us, having lulled her people into a false sense of security, she embarked upon a remarkable killing spree designed to rid the city of all potential enemies. The hostage king of Armenia and his family were executed and many prominent citizens were murdered and their property seized. Temple and state assets, too, were confiscated, until Cleopatra had amassed a huge war chest, which she apparently intended to use to finance her escape and – if at all possible – pay for an army to regain her throne. That Cleopatra needed to maximise her assets makes sense, even though she had apparently managed to save her treasure from the disaster of Actium. The killing spree, however, seems highly implausible, given that she was likely to need the support of the people of Alexandria in the very near future.

It still seemed reasonable to make extravagant plans. One idea, to flee by boat to Spain, meet up with the last remnants of Pompey’s rebels and provoke a revolt against Octavian, was dropped when it became obvious that Agrippa’s ships, still patrolling the Mediterranean, would make a sea crossing far too dangerous. Instead, determined to flee to India via the Red Sea, Cleopatra ordered that her fleet be transported overland via the Wadi Tumilat to the Gulf of Suez. This was not as desperate a move as it might now seem; the dynastic
Egyptians had regularly transported boats from the Nile overland to the Red Sea. But the plan had to be abandoned when the first boats were captured and burned by the Nabataean king, Malchus, who, still smarting from Antony’s cavalier treatment of his land, wished to demonstrate his loyalty to Octavian. Antony arrived in Alexandria to find Cleopatra’s partially completed mausoleum packed with all kinds of treasure and protected by piles of flammable material. If attacked, she intended to torch the mausoleum and destroy her fortune. The very thought must have filled Octavian with horror. He needed Cleopatra’s wealth to compensate his underpaid veterans, who had been teetering on the verge of mutiny since the battle of Actium.

Severely depressed, Antony spent some time living in solitude on the Alexandrian peninsula of Lochias, where he built the Timoneion, a shrine named after the legendary recluse Timon of Athens. His return to Cleopatra’s palace saw the disbanding of the Inimitable Livers in favour of a new society, ‘The Partners in Death’ (
synapotha-noumenoi
), a smaller, more close-knit group of friends who chose to face the inevitable by carousing more than ever.

The winter of 31/30 saw the sixteen-year-old Caesarion and his fourteen-year-old stepbrother Antyllus officially come of age. Caesarion was enrolled into the Alexandrian
ephebes
, the list of young male citizens, while Antyllus donned the purple-hemmed
toga virilis
that showed the world that he was a citizen of Rome. Dio correctly identifies this as a propaganda exercise: a means of reminding the conservative Egyptians that the dynastic line would continue through their adult male king, and the population as a whole that the two sons could replace Cleopatra and Antony should the worst happen. Antyl-lus, Antony’s oldest son and principal heir, had already appeared on a gold coin alongside his father. Now a stela dated to Year 22, which is Year 7 of the female king Cleopatra ‘and of the king Ptolemy called Caesar, the Father-Loving, Mother-Loving God’ (21 September 31; just nineteen days after the battle of Actium), shows Caesarion dressed
as a traditional Egyptian king as he makes offerings of lettuce and wine to the ithyphallic fertility god Min and his consort Isis, and offerings of wine to the earth god Geb and his temple companion the crocodile-headed Sobek. The stela, recovered from Koptos and now in the British Museum, confirms that life outside Alexandria was continuing much as before. It details two contracts drawn up by a guild of thirty-six linen manufacturers concerning the expenses of the local sacred bull.

Plutarch tells us that it was at this time that Cleopatra started to experiment with various poisons:

Cleopatra was getting together collections of all sorts of deadly poisons, and she tested the painless working of each of them by giving them to prisoners under sentence of death. But when she saw that the speedy poisons enhanced the sharpness of death by the pain they caused, while the milder poisons were not quick, she made trial of venomous animals, watching with her own eyes as they were set upon another. She did this daily, tried them almost all; and she found that the bite of the asp alone induced a sleepy torpor and sinking, where there was no spasm or groan, but a gentle perspiration on the face, while the perceptive faculties were easily relaxed and dimmed, and resisted all attempts to rouse and restore them, as is the case with those who are soundly asleep.
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Octavian, still in Asia Minor, received a stream of messages from Egypt. Plutarch tells us that Cleopatra begged to be allowed to abdicate in favour of her children, while Antony asked that he might be allowed to retire as a private person to Athens. Antony never received a reply, but Cleopatra was informed that Octavian would consider her request if she either killed or at least renounced Antony. These most sensitive of negotiations were conducted through Thyrsus, Octavian’s freedman. Cleopatra had so many private conversations with Thyrsus
that Antony, made tense and irritable by his situation, became suspicious of his motives, had him flogged and returned him to Octavian with a terse message: ‘If you don’t like what I have done, you have my freedman Hipparchus; hang him up and give him a flogging, and we shall be quits.’
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As Antony grew increasingly suspicious of Cleopatra’s motives, she responded with flattery, throwing a lavish celebration for his birthday while virtually ignoring her own. However, Dio adds that, unknown to Antony, Cleopatra had already sent Octavian a golden sceptre and a golden crown, together with the royal throne that represented her kingdom. Now Cleopatra, reading Octavian well, attempted to bribe him with vast amounts of money (presumably the treasure stored in her mausoleum), while Antony, reading Octavian less well, sought to remind him of their friendship and their shared adventures. Desperate, he surrendered Publius Turullius, one of Caesar’s assassins, and offered to take his own life if, in return, Cleopatra might be saved. Octavian put Turullius to death, but made no formal reply. Next Antony sent Antyllus to Octavian with a large gift of gold. Octavian took the money, but sent the boy back without an answer.

The summer of 30 saw Egypt under double attack. Cornelius Gallus had assumed command of Scarpus’s Paraetonium troops and now launched land and sea assaults from the west. Antony hastened to negotiate, feeling that he might be able to persuade the soldiers (who had once been his) to change sides, but it was in vain: Dio tells us that Gallus had his trumpeters play a fanfare to drown out Antony’s words. Then, from the east, Octavian crossed the Sinai land bridge and captured Pelusium. An uncomfortable, persistent rumour that Cleopatra had actually given Pelusium to Octavian in return for clemency for herself and her children does not square with the story that Cleopatra had the wife and children of Seleucos, the unsuccessful defender of Pelusium, put to death. Octavian marched westwards across the Delta, crossing the Nile branches to strike camp near the hippodrome, immediately outside Alexandria’s Canopic Gate, and
Antony returned just in time to defend the city against his advance cavalry. Rushing into the palace, sweaty and bloody from the battle, he presented his bravest soldier to Cleopatra. She rewarded the soldier with a valuable gift of golden armour; he repaid her generosity by defecting to Octavian that night, taking the precious armour with him.

Trapped and impotent in Alexandria, Antony resorted to bribery. Leaflets promising generous rewards were tied to arrows and shot into Octavian’s camp. As it was obvious to everyone that Antony would never be in a position to honour his promises, no one was tempted by the offer. Next Antony challenged Octavian to single combat, but Octavian refused to be drawn. Finally, he resolved to meet Octavian in battle. That night, Antony’s gods left him. They could be heard passing though the gates of Alexandria, making their way towards Octavian.

During this night, it is said, about the middle of it, while the city was quiet and depressed through fear and expectation of what was coming, suddenly certain harmonious sounds from all sorts of instruments were heard, and the shouting of a throng, accompanied by cries of Bacchic revelry and satyric leapings, as if a troop of revellers, making a great tumult, were going forth from the city; and their course seemed to lie about through the middle of the city toward the outer gate which faced the enemy, at which point the tumult became loudest and then dashed out. Those who sought the meaning of the sign were of the opinion that the god to whom Antony always most likened and attached himself was now deserting him.
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