When Cleopatra carried Antony back to Alexandria to recuperate after his exertions, it seems to me that she spoke to him very directly in regard to his future plans. She seems to have pointed out to him that Roman attempts to conquer Parthia always ended in failure, and that it was a sheer waste of money, men, and time to endeavour to obtain possession of a country so vast and having such limitless resources. Wars of this kind exhausted their funds and gave them nothing in return. Would it not be much better, therefore, at once to concentrate all their energies upon the overthrow of Octavian and the capture of Rome? Antony had proved his popularity with his men and their confidence in him and his powers as a leader, for he had performed with ultimate success that most difficult feat of generalship—an orderly retreat. Surely, therefore, it would be wise to expend no further portion of their not unlimited means upon their eastern schemes, but to concentrate their full attention first upon Italy. The Parthians, after all, had been turned out of Armenia and Syria, and they might now be left severely alone within their own country until that day when Antony would march against them, in accordance with the prophecies of the Sibylline Books, as King of Rome. Cleopatra had never favoured the Parthian expedition, though she had helped to finance it as being part of Julius Cæsar’s original design; and she had accepted as reasonable the argument put forward by Antony, that if successful it would enhance enormously his prestige and ensure his acceptance as a popular hero in Rome. The war, however, had been disastrous, and it would be better now to abandon the whole scheme than to risk a further catastrophe. Antony, fagged out and suffering from the effects of his severe drinking-bout, appears to have acquiesced in these arguments; and it seems that he arrived in Alexandria with the intention of recuperating his resources for a year or two in view of his coming quarrel with Octavian. In Syria he had received news of the events which had occurred in Rome during his absence at the wars. Octavian had at last defeated Sextus Pompeius, who had fled to Mytilene; and Lepidus, the third Triumvir, had retired into private life, leaving his province of Africa in Octavian’s hands. His rival, therefore, now held the West in complete subjection, and it was not unlikely that he himself would presently pick a quarrel with Antony.
The comforts of the Alexandrian Palace, and the pleasures of Cleopatra’s brilliant society, must have come to Antony as an entrancing change after the rigours of his campaign; and the remainder of the winter, no doubt, slipped by in happy ease. The stern affairs of life, however, seem to have checked any repetition of the frivolities of his earlier stay in the Egyptian capital; and we now hear nothing of the Inimitable Livers or of their prodigious entertainments. Antony wrote a long letter to Rome, giving a more or less glowing account of the war, and stating that in many respects it had been very successful. Early in the new year, B.C. 35, Sextus Pompeius attempted to open negotiations with the Egyptian court; but the envoys whom he sent to Alexandria failed to secure any favourable response. Antony, on the other hand, learnt from them that Sextus was engaged in a secret correspondence with the Parthians, and was attempting to corrupt Domitius Ahenobarbus, his lieutenant in Asia. Thereupon he and Cleopatra determined to capture this buccaneering son of the great Pompey and to put him to death. The order was carried out by a certain Titius, who effected the arrest in Phrygia; and Sextus was executed in Miletus shortly afterwards. This action was likely to be extremely ill received in Rome, for the outlaw, in the manner of a Robin Hood, had always been immensely popular; and for this reason Antony never seems to have admitted his responsibility for it, the order being generally said to have been signed by his lieutenant, Plancus.
Shortly after this the whole course of events was suddenly altered by the arrival in Alexandria of no less a personage than the King of Pontus, who, it will be remembered, had been captured by the Parthians[99] at the outset of Antony’s late campaign, and had been held prisoner by the King of Media. The latter now sent him to Egypt with the news that the lately allied kingdoms of Media and Parthia had come to blows; and the King of Media proposed that Antony should help him to overthrow his rival. This announcement caused the greatest upheaval in Cleopatra’s palace. Here was an unexpected opportunity to conquer the terrible Parthians with comparative ease; for Media had always been their powerful ally, and the Roman arms had come to grief on former occasions in Median territory. Cleopatra, however, fearing the duplicity of these eastern monarchs, and having set her heart on the immediate overthrow of Octavian, whose power was now so distinctly on the increase, tried to dissuade her husband from this second campaign, and begged him to take no further risks in that direction. As a tentative measure Antony sent a despatch to Artavasdes, the King of Armenia, who had deserted him after his defeat in Media, ordering him to come to Alexandria without delay, presumably to discuss the situation. Artavasdes, however, showed no desire to place himself in the hands of his overlord whom he had thus betrayed, and preferred to seek safety, if necessary, in his own hills or to throw in his lot with the Parthians.
Antony was deaf to Cleopatra’s advice; and at length accepting the proposal conveyed by the King of Pontus, he prepared to set out at once for the north-east. Thereupon Cleopatra made up her mind to accompany him; and in the late spring they set out together for Syria. No sooner had they arrived in that country, however, than Antony received the disconcerting news that his Roman wife Octavia was on her way to join him once more, and proposed to meet him in Greece. It appears that her brother Octavian had chosen this means of bringing his quarrel with Antony to an issue; for if she were not well received he would have just cause for denouncing her errant husband as a deserter; and in order to show how justly he himself was dealing he despatched with Octavia two thousand legionaries and some munitions of war. As a matter of fact the legionaries served actually as a bodyguard for Octavia,[100] while their ultimate presentation to Antony was to be regarded partly as a payment for the number of his ships which had been destroyed in Octavian’s war against Sextus, and partly as a sort of formal present from one autocrat to another. Antony at once sent a letter to Octavia telling her to remain at Athens, as he was going to Media; and in reply to this Octavia despatched a family friend, named Niger, to ask Antony what she should do with the troops and supplies. Niger had the hardihood to speak openly in regard to Octavia’s treatment, and to praise her very highly for her noble and quiet bearing in her great distress; but Antony was in no mood to listen to him, and sent him about his business with no satisfactory reply. At the same time he appears to have been very sorry for Octavia, and there can be little doubt that, had such a thing been possible, he would have liked to see her for a short time, if only to save her from the added insult of his present attitude. He was an irresponsible boy in these matters, and so long as everybody was happy he really did not care very deeply which woman he lived with, though he was now, it would seem, extremely devoted to Cleopatra, and very dependent upon her lively society.
The Queen, of course, was considerably alarmed by this new development, for she could not be sure whether Antony would stand by the solemn compact he had made with her at Antioch, or whether he would once more prove a fickle friend. She realised very clearly that the insult offered to Octavia would precipitate the war between East and West, and she seems to have felt even more strongly than before that Antony would be ill advised at this critical juncture to enter into any further Parthian complication. To her mind it was absolutely essential that she should carry him safely back to Alexandria, where he would be, on the one hand, well out of reach of Octavia, and, on the other, far removed from the temptation of pursuing his Oriental schemes. Antony, however, was as eager to be at his old enemy once more as a beaten boy might have been to revenge himself upon his rival; and the thought of giving up this opportunity for vengeance in order to prepare for an immediate fight with Octavian was extremely distasteful to him. Everything now seemed to be favourable for a successful invasion of Parthia. Not only had he the support of the King of Media, but the fickle King of Armenia had thought it wise at the last moment to make his peace with Antony, and the new agreement was to be sealed by the betrothal of his daughter to Antony’s little son Alexander Helios. Cleopatra, however, did not care so much about the conquest of Parthia as she did for the overthrow of her son’s rival, who seemed to have usurped the estate which ought to have passed from the great Cæsar to Cæsarion and herself; and she endeavoured now, with every art at her disposal, to prevent Antony taking any further risk in the East, and to urge his return to Alexandria. “She feigned to be dying of love for Antony,” says Plutarch, “bringing her body down by slender diet. When he entered the room she fixed her eyes upon him in adoration, and when he left she seemed to languish and half faint away. She took great pains that he should see her in tears, and, as soon as he noticed it, she hastily dried them and turned away, as if it were her wish that he should know nothing of it. Meanwhile Cleopatra’s agents were not slow to forward her design, upbraiding Antony with his unfeeling hard-hearted nature for thus letting a woman perish whose soul depended upon him and him alone. Octavia, it was true, was his wife; but Cleopatra, the sovereign queen of many nations, had been contented with the name of his mistress,[101] and if she were bereaved of him she would not survive the loss.”
In this manner she prevailed upon him at last to give up the proposed war; nor must we censure her too severely for her piece of acting. She was playing a desperate game at this time. She had persuaded Antony to turn his back upon Octavia in a manner which could but be final; and yet immediately after this, as though oblivious to the consequences of his action, he was eager to go off to Persia at a time when Octavian would probably attempt to declare him an enemy of the Roman people. Of course, in reality the Queen was no more deeply in love with Antony than he with her; but he was absolutely essential to the realisation of her hopes, and the necessity of a speedy trial of strength with Octavian became daily more urgent. For this he must prepare by a quiet collecting of funds and munitions, and all other projects must be given up.
Very reluctantly, therefore, Antony returned to Alexandria, and there he spent the winter of B.C. 35–34 in soberly governing his vast possessions. In the following spring, however, he determined to secure Armenia and Media for his own ends; and when he transferred his headquarters to Syria for the summer season[102] he again sent word to King Artavasdes to meet him in order to discuss the affairs of Parthia. The Armenian king, however, seems to have been intriguing against Antony during the winter; and now he declined to place himself in Roman hands lest he might suffer the consequence of his duplicity. Thereupon Antony advanced rapidly into Armenia, took the King prisoner, seized his treasure, pillaged his lands, and declared the country to be henceforth a Roman province. The loot obtained in this rapid campaign was very great. The legionaries seized upon every object of value which they observed: and they even plundered the ancient temple of Anaitis in Acilisene, laying hands on the statue of the goddess which was made of pure gold, and pounding it into pieces for purposes of division.
On his return to Syria Antony entered into negotiations with the King of Media, the result of which was that the Median Princess Iotapa was married to the little Alexander Helios, whose betrothal to the King of Armenia’s daughter had, of course, terminated with the late war. As we shall presently see, it is probable that the King of Media had consented to make the youthful couple his heirs to the throne of Media, for it would seem that he had no son; and thus Antony is seen to have once more put into practice his jesting scheme of founding royal dynasties of his own flesh and blood in many lands. Antony then returned to Alexandria, well satisfied with his summer’s work, but “with his thoughts,” as Plutarch says, “now taken up with the coming civil war.” Octavia had returned to Rome, and had made no secret of her ill-treatment. Her brother, therefore, told her to leave Antony’s house, thus to show her resentment against him; but she would not do this, nor did she permit Octavian to make war upon her husband on her account, for, she declared, it would be intolerable to have it said that two women, herself and Cleopatra, had been the cause of such a terrific contest. Nevertheless, there was little chance of the quarrel being patched up; and Antony must have realised now the wisdom of Cleopatra’s objection to an expensive and exhausting campaign in Parthia.
On his return to Alexandria in the autumn of B.C. 34, Antony set the Roman world agog by celebrating his triumph over Armenia in the Egyptian capital. Never before had a Roman General held a formal Triumph outside Rome; and Antony’s action appeared to be a definite proclamation that Alexandria had become the rival, if not the successor, of Rome as the capital of the world. It will be remembered that Julius Cæsar had talked of removing the seat of government from Rome to Alexandria; and now it seemed that Antony had transferred the capital, at any rate of the Eastern Empire, to that city, and was regarding it as his home. Alexandria was certainly far more conveniently situated than Rome for the government of the world. It must be remembered that the barbaric western countries—the unexplored Germania, the newly conquered Gallia, the insignificant Britannia, the wild Hispania, and others—were not of nearly such value as were the civilised eastern provinces; and thus Rome stood on the far western outskirts of the important dominions she governed. From Alexandria a march of 600 or 800 miles brought one to Antioch or to Tarsus; whereas Rome was nearly three times as far from these great centres. The southern Peloponnesus was, by way of Crete, considerably nearer to Alexandria than it was to Rome by way of Brundisium. Ephesus and other cities of Asia Minor could be reached more quickly by land or sea from Egypt than they could from Rome. Rhodes, Lycia, Bithynia, Galatia, Pamphylia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Armenia, Commagene, Crete, Cyprus, and many other great and important lands, were all closer to Alexandria than to Rome; while Thrace and Byzantium, by the land or sea route, were about equidistant from either capital. As a city, too, Alexandria was far more magnificent, more cultivated, more healthy, more wealthy in trade, and more “go-ahead” than Rome. Thus there was really very good ground for supposing that Antony, by holding his Triumph here, was proclaiming a definite transference of his home and of the seat of government; and one may imagine the anxiety which it caused in Italy.
The Triumph was a particularly gorgeous ceremony. At the head of the procession there seems to have marched a body of Roman legionaries, whose shields were inscribed with the large C which is said to have stood for “Cleopatra,” but which, with equal probability, may have stood for “Cæsar,” that is to say, for the legitimate Cæsarian cause. Antony rode in the customary chariot drawn by four white horses, and before him walked the unfortunate King Artavasdes loaded with golden chains, together with his queen and their sons. Behind the chariot walked a long procession of Armenian captives, and after these came the usual cars loaded with the spoils of war. Then followed a number of municipal deputations drawn from vassal cities, each carrying a golden crown or chaplet which had been voted to Antony in commemoration of his conquest. Roman legionaries, Egyptian troops, and several eastern contingents, brought up the rear.