The Classical World (63 page)

Like the Parthian venture, Cleopatra had Julius Caesar’s imprint. Together, they would allow the ‘new Dionysus’ to counter Octavian’s trump card, his name as the new ‘Caesar’: Cleopatra also had the little Caesarion, the son, they still said, of Julius Caesar’s own blood. Antony even wrote to the Senate to insist on the boy’s parentage. Seeing the chance and the danger, Octavian began the most overt war of spin-doctoring yet mounted in the ancient world. He made fun of Antony’s women in coarse verses; he dismissed him as a drunk voluptuary in thrall to a queen of Egypt and her animal-gods; in due course, he would even open Antony’s will and allege that he planned to transfer the capital to Alexandria and be buried beside the Nile. Staid opinion in the towns of Italy might believe these shocking, but riveting, stories. At Rome, many senators were less bothered. Antony defended himself in a pamphlet ‘On His Own Drunkenness’ (sadly
lost to us) and wrote an earthy letter, observing that Cleopatra was not his wife, that Octavian had all sorts of drearylittle women on the side and that ‘what did it matter where a man stuck his cock?’
¹⁰
Octavian was also said to have a ‘prettyboy’, Sarmentus, presumably a slave.

The year 36 nonetheless proved pivotal. In it, Octavian at last succeeded in defeating Sextus Pompeius at sea. The credit for the naval victorybelonged to his officer Agrippa, but Octavian won popular favour by having the prisoners executed in a show at Rome. Sextus did escape but only to be put to death in the East a year later. Instead, Octavian took the ‘sacrosanct’ protection of a tribune both for himself and for poor Octavia who could be cleverly represented as Antony’s ‘abandoned’ wife: he vowed the spoils of victory to a massive new temple of Apollo in Rome beside which he would place his own house, not far from the supposed ancient ‘hut of Romulus’.
¹¹
Antony, by contrast, had to cover up a campaign against Parthia which went badlywrong. After a change of direction, Antony had marched north from Syria, then east through Armenia, apparently hoping to win by a pitched battle. However, the Parthians were a mobile enemy who would keep retreating despite the loss of a fort or city. Antony was fighting a war as if it was the previous one, his campaign with Julius Caesar in the very different setting of Gaul.
¹²
His army was huge, about two-thirds bigger than Alexander’s in western Asia, and more than 30,000 of his soldiers died on their cold, hungry retreat during winter 36/5. Antony was left to celebrate a hollow victory. In 35 he prepared to invade Armenia again, and Octavian artfully compromised him: he sent him troops (a mere 2,000 of those promised in 37) and his Octavia as an envoy. Antony took the troops, but forbade Octavia to meet him: he was too involved with Cleopatra. In summer 34 he did regain Armenia, but reports of his celebration were alarming. He and Cleopatra sat on golden thrones in the gymnasium in Alexandria; he gave her yet more territory and named her ‘queen of kings’. He gave royal titles to their young son and daughter (called the Sun and the Moon) and, above all, he named Caesarion, now seventeen years old, the ‘king of kings’.
¹³
Caesar’s adopted heir, Octavian, was right to be alarmed, but there was an extravagance here which he could attack instead. Among all the propaganda, it does seem that
Antony was overplaying his relationship. In my view, Cleopatra still fascinated him.

At the end of 33 the triumvirs’ second five-year term would expire. Back in Rome, ‘Caesar’ held his second consulship and was winning favour with the common people through the public works of his trusted lieutenant, Agrippa. The long-neglected drains and sewage were cleaned out in the city; Agrippa even travelled symbolically down the city’s main sewer: he developed links with the chariot-racing factions in the Circus Maximus and there were plans to improve the Campus Martius, a popular open space. Nonetheless, in 32 the consuls would be Antony’s men and Antony himself could return, be consul for 31 and be voted a vast personal province, with a supposed Parthian triumph behind him. Octavian had to strike back. After a bad start to 32, he boldly called ‘all Italy’ to swear an oath of allegiance to him. The move had echoes of a military emergency, in which a Roman leader would traditionally call for men to band together and save their cause.
¹⁴
Next, the oath was taken by the western provinces, Octavian ‘Caesar’s’ second wing of support. He then declared war in public by re-enacting an ancient Roman rite, but cleverly declared war on Cleopatra only. Old Roman values, Italian steadiness against Egyptian corruption, the new ‘Caesar’s’ care for his troops and for the Roman plebs: these were Octavian’s public messages, but Antony still had more legions. More than three hundred senators fled Rome to join his side.

With Cleopatra and his fleet beside him, Antony eventually took up his position around Actium on the north-west coast of Greece. However, important desertions from his camp began early, probably when the newly arrived senators saw that Cleopatra was indeed at large in their camp. A first-class general could have won the war, but, as the Parthian march had shown, Antony was only second class. Octavian’s fleet was allowed to cross unopposed from Italy and then to blockade Antony’s smaller fleet in the bay just north of the island of Leucas. Delay induced disease, hunger and desertion in Antony’s camp. The obvious tactic, a difficult one, was for Antony to try to break through at sea and escape. Cleopatra was evidentlyalerted (she did not simply desert) because the fleet went into battle with their sails at the ready: when the battle began on 2 September she and her
sixty ships escaped through a gap in Octavian’s centre. Antony quickly sailed after her. Actium is the last major sea-battle in antiquity, but although Octavian won the campaign (actually, it was Agrippa again who won it for him), there was very little fighting. Cleopatra and Antony won their objective, by escaping.

At first Antony fled to Greece and Cleopatra to Egypt. Finally the two were reunited in Alexandria, and as they waited for the follow-up, the club of ‘Inimitable Lives’ became refounded as ‘Those about to Die Together’. Antony, the new Dionysus, even founded a shrine to the legendary Timon of Athens, the man without true friends.
¹⁵
After a brief return to Italy, Octavian arrived in Egypt in the summer of 30
BC
, but Antony’s offers to fight a duel were not accepted. Desertions continued apace and despite a brief flurry by the cavalry, by 1 August 30 Octavian held Alexandria. Antony wounded himself almost fatally and the greatest death scene in history began.

Detailed accounts of it were soon written byeyewitnesses, including the doctor Olympus.
¹⁶
It is probably to him that we owe the account of Cleopatra’s retreat into her Mausoleum, up to whose window the dying Antony was then hauled on ropes by herself and her maids. We are not sure what he said to her, but he certainlydied in her company. When the new Caesar entered, he wept over his great rival, now dead before him. It was a customary emotion on these occasions, just as Antony had once wept over the corpse of Brutus the Liberator, a fellow Roman senator. The obvious plan was to retain Cleopatra for exhibition in the triumph at Rome, but nine days later she outwitted it. Some said she had hidden poison in a hairpin, but Octavian accepted the cause was snakebite. Either in a water-jar or a basket of figs, two Egyptian asps were smuggled to her. She held one to her arm, not to her breast, and her serving-maids Iris and Charmian died beside her. Young Caesarion was caught and killed.

It is easy to say that the ‘right man won’, steady Octavian against flamboyant Antony. Certainly no issue of principle, no notion of greater freedom or fairer justice divided the two. It was a straight power struggle between rivals, in which respected Romans had remained on terms with both sides, men like the rich, civilized Atticus, who stayed a friend of both. Others had simply done something ‘last minute’ and changed sides, like Plancus or Ahenobarbus or Dellius,
known as the ‘circus-rider’ of the Civil Wars. At Rome, on the Capitol, there was even said to have been a man with two crows on his arm, one of which he had trained to say ‘Hail, Caesar, Victorious Commander’, one ‘Hail, Antony, Victorious Commander’, as the circumstances required.
¹⁷

Nonetheless, Antony had had his aims and a style to match them. The great campaign in the East had been a disaster, but the subsequent appointment of a friendly king in Armenia was to be a long-running Roman solution to the Parthian question. His other choices as ‘friendly kings’ in the East were successful too. Had Antony won, Rome would have had a very special tie with Egypt and Alexandria. Unlike Octavian, Antony had no need to compensate for militarymediocrity and to seek glory by conquering in Europe. Thousands of barbarian lives might have been spared during the next fifty years, while a regeneration of the ravaged Greek cities could have been brought forward. There would also have been no shortage of heirs. Cleopatra already had two sons by the triumvir (whose paternity-rate, at least, was so much higher than Octavian’s). As for the ‘Augustan’ poets of the future, they need not have lost their Italian voices. Patronage had won them over to Octavian in the 30s, but patronage would certainly have won them back to Antony.
¹⁸
Horace would then have been spared the need to write morally correct public poetry: there was so much for him to enjoy in Antony’s less reputable entourage. Propertius retained a soft spot for it anyway,
¹⁹
and as for Virgil, his masterpiece, the
Georgics
, was already finished. Dionysus, surely, would have been much more exciting to him than his next obligatory hero, the tongue-tied Aeneas. Through Virgil’s genius, Bacchus would somehow have flowered poeticallyat Rome. The winner would have been Ovid. The wit and the polished detachment of his poetrywould have found a real centre in Rome’s flamboyant couple, Antony and Cleopatra. They would have lived out his themes of love and myth, bringing his life and poetry into harmony. But members of the senatorial order still had their ‘moral’ values and loved ‘liberty’, not eastern queens: they would have had them murdered first.

The Making of the Emperor

On fifty-five occasions the Senate decreed that thanksgivings should be offered to the immortal gods on account of the successes on land and sea gained by me or my legates under my auspices. The days on which thanksgivings were offered according to the decree of the Senate numbered eight hundred and ninety. In my triumphs nine kings or children of kings were led before my chariot. As I was writing this, I had been consul thirteen times and I was in the thirty-seventh year of tribunician power
.

Augustus, in
The Achievements of the Divine Augustus (
Res Gestae
), in the edition of
AD
14

The new ‘Caesar’s’ victory at Actium was represented as the welcome triumph of sober values. In fact it was followed promptly by reports of a conspiracy at Rome. The son of the third triumvir, Lepidus, is said to have had plans to assassinate Octavian and he had to be put down by Octavian’s man on the spot, the obliging non-senator Maecenas.
¹
The plot, if genuine, was perhaps associated with that long-running trouble, the settlement of so manyveteran soldiers. After Actium it was the reason why Octavian had had to return briefly to Italy in case the protests became too serious.

After the further victory in Egypt, in August 30, the immense riches of the country were brought under Roman ‘domination’, as the new rule was called. After Antony’s example, it was obviously too risky to entrust Egypt to a senator. Octavian chose a knight as governor, Cornelius Gallus, who had distinguished himself in the recent fighting;
he was also a noted poet, which Alexandrians would like. The province was actually called ‘Alexandria and Egypt’ and Alexandrians were to be important in administering it. Octavian would never use the equestrian order as a whole as a counterweight to the more political Senate, but in this exceptional case he realized that a knight was a safer bet.
²
The precedent persisted and senators were banned (as were important knights) from visiting Egypt without the emperor’s permission. These decisions were ratified at Rome, presumably in 30/29. Treasure in Egypt vastly increased Octavian’s capacity for gifts to the Roman public. Its grain was also crucial for Rome’s food-supply: after fifty years, the ‘Egyptian question’ was settled in one player’s favour, thanks to civil war.

Having won, how was the new ‘Caesar’ to rule? Nobody could have imagined that he would dominate for forty-four years and that the powers which he assumed by stages would become the mainstays for those we call the ‘Roman emperors’ for the next three centuries. Like Augustus, all emperors would refer to their consulships, their ‘tribunician power’, their role as Commander (
Imperator
) of the armies. Hadrian would have a particular respect for Augustus, who was his role-model in so many ways. He had a portrait-head of Augustus on his seal-ring and he kept a bronze bust of the boy Octavian among the household gods in his bedroom. But we can see, as Hadrian perhaps could not, how Augustus’ years as ‘First Citizen’ (
Princeps
) had been a bumpy ride. They marked a fundamental change in freedom and justice, with attempted consequences for luxury too.

In 30 and 29 one side of ‘Caesar’s’ position was made clear to him. Ever since Alexander the Great, cities and individuals in the Greek-speaking East had become used to negotiating personally with kings and princes. They had no interest whatsoever in the arcane details of the old Roman constitution and had already regarded Roman commanders of the late Republic as personal dynasts. Octavian stepped easily into this role. He personallywrote to cities in the East and praised personal friends in them who had helped him in the recent troubles. He even referred to his wife Livia’s keen efforts on behalf of the island of Samos:
³
Greeks were used to royal families and helpful queens, although royalty was anathema to Roman traditionalists. Greeks were also used to offering living rulers ‘godlike
honours’. The new ‘Caesar’ drew a cautious line here. Temples to ‘Rome and Deified Julius’ could be put up byRoman citizens in places like Ephesus: cult for himself while alive was un-Roman. Greeks, however, could put up temples to himself and Rome in the central cities of their provincial assemblies. Other cities would simply pay him cult outside Rome without asking permission.