The city of Ephesus was situated near the mouth of the river Caystrus in the shadow of the Messogis mountains, not far south of Smyrna, and overlooking the island of Samos. Standing on the coast of Asia Minor, near the frontier which divided Lydia from Caria, it looked directly across the sea to Athens, and was sheltered from the menacing coasts of Italy by the intervening Greek peninsula. Ephesus, I need hardly remind the reader, was famous for its temple, dedicated to Diana of the Ephesians. The building was constructed of white marble and cypress- and cedar-wood, and was richly ornamented with gold. Many statues adorned its colonnades, and there were many celebrated paintings upon its walls, including a fine picture of Alexander the Great. Diana was here worshipped under the name Artemis, and was often identified with Venus, with whom Cleopatra claimed identity. Here Antony and Cleopatra collected their forces, and soon the ancient city came to be the largest military and naval centre in the world. Cleopatra had brought with her from Egypt a powerful fleet of two hundred ships of war, and a host of soldiers, sailors, workmen, and slaves. She had drawn 20,000 talents (i.e., £4,000,000) from her treasury; and, besides this, she had brought a vast amount of corn, foodstuffs, clothing, arms, and munitions of war. From Syria, Armenia, and Pontus, vessels were arriving daily with further supplies; and Antony’s own fleet of many hundred battleships and vessels of burden was rapidly mobilising at the mouth of the river. All day and all night the roads to the city thundered with the tread of armed men, as the kings and rulers of the East marched their armies to the rendezvous. Bocchus, King of Mauritania; Tarcondimotus, ruler of Upper Cilicia; Archelaus, King of Cappadocia; Philadelphus, King of Paphlagonia; Mithridates, King of Commagene; Sadalas and Rhœmetalces, Kings of Thrace; Amyntas, King of Galatia, and many other great rulers, responded to the call to arms, and hastened to place their services at the disposal of Antony and his Queen.

CLEOPATRA AND HER SON CÆSARION.

REPRESENTED CONVENTIONALLY UPON A WALL OF THE TEMPLE OF DENDERA

One cannot help wondering whether these mighty men realised for what they were about to fight. They were flocking to the standard of a man who had held supreme power over their countries for many years, and whose rule had been kindly and easy. They owed a great deal to him,—in some cases their very thrones; and, were he now to be defeated by his rival, they would probably fall with him. Success, however, seemed certain in view of Antony’s enormous forces; and they therefore felt that the assistance which they gave would undoubtedly bear abundant fruit, and that their reward would be great. Antony, of course, told them, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, that he was fighting to some extent on behalf of the Roman Republic, in order to free the country from the oppression of an autocratic rule, and to restore the old constitution. He was not such a fool as to admit that he was aiming at a throne: Julius Cæsar had been assassinated on that very account, and a declaration of this kind would likewise alienate a large number of his supporters in Rome. He still had numerous friends in the capital, men who disliked the forbidding personality of Octavian, and who admired his own frank and open manners. Moreover, a considerable body supported him in memory of the great Dictator, regarding Antony as the guardian of young Cæsarion, whose rights they had at heart. A story, of which we have already heard, had been circulated in regard to Julius Cæsar’s will. It was said that the document which decreed Octavian the heir was not the Dictator’s last testament, but that he had made a later will in favour of Cleopatra’s son, Cæsarion, which had been suppressed, probably by Calpurnia. Thus, to many of his Roman friends, Antony was fighting to carry out the Dictator’s wishes, and to overthrow the usurping Octavian. Was this, one asks, the justification which he placed before the consideration of the vassal kings? At any rate Dion Cassius states definitely that Antony’s recognition of Cæsarion’s right to this great inheritance was the real cause of the war.

It does not seem to me that this point is fully recognised by historians; but it is very apparent that Antony’s position at Ephesus would have been almost untenable without a justification such as that of the championing of Cæsarion. It was plain to every eastern eye that he was acting in conjunction with Egypt and with Cleopatra; and all men now knew that the Queen was his legal wife. It was obvious that, if successful, he would enter Rome with the Queen of Egypt by his side. Yet, at the same time, he was denying that he intended to establish a monarchy in Rome on the lines proposed by the Dictator, and he was talking a great deal of rubbish about reviving the Republic. There is, surely, only one way in which these divergent interests could be made to fit into a scheme capable of satisfying both his Roman and his Oriental supporters, and would serve as a professed justification for the war: he was going to establish the Dictator’s son, Cæsarion, in his father’s seat, and to turn out the wrongful heir, Octavian. He himself would be the boy’s guardian, and would act, at any rate in Italy, on republican lines. Cleopatra, as his wife, would doff her crown while in Italy, but would assume it once more within her own dominions, just as Julius Cæsar had proposed to do in the last year of his life.[110] Of course it must have been recognised that the throne of Rome would ultimately be offered to him, and that he would hand it on to Cæsarion in due course, thus founding a dynasty of the blood of the divine Julius; but this fact was kept severely in the background. If Cæsarion and his cause had not formed part of the casus belli, it is unlikely that Antony would have been at all widely supported in Rome; and what man would have tolerated the armed presence of Cleopatra and her Egyptians, save in her capacity as mother of the claimant and wife of the claimant’s guardian? Without Cæsarion, what was Antony’s justification for the war? I can find very little. He would have been fighting to turn out Octavian, who, in that case, would have been the rightful and only heir; he would have been introducing Cleopatra into Roman politics with the obvious intention of creating a throne for her, the very step which had been Cæsar’s undoing; and he would have been offering her royal view of life in exchange for Octavian’s republican sentiments, not as something of which the best had to be made under the circumstances, but as a habit of mind desirable in itself. His apparent deference to Cleopatra, and the manner in which she shared his supremacy, must have been liable to cause much offence in Rome and in Ephesus, and would never have been tolerated had she not been put forward as Julius Cæsar’s widow and the mother of his son.

The armies marching into the city comprised soldiers of almost every nation. There were nineteen Roman legions; troops of Gauls and Germans; contingents of Moorish, Egyptian, Sudanese, Arab, and Bedouin warriors; the wild tribesmen from Media; hardy Armenians; barbaric fighting men from the coast of the Black Sea; Greeks, Jews, and Syrians. The streets of the city were packed with men in every kind of costume, bearing all manner of arms, and talking a hundred languages. Never, probably, in the world’s history had so many nationalities been gathered together; and Cleopatra’s heart must have been nigh bursting with feminine pride and gratification at the knowledge that in reality she had been the cause of the great mobilisation. They had come together at Antony’s bidding, it is true; but they had come to fight her battles. They were here to vindicate her honour, to place her upon the throne of the World. With their forests of swords and spears they were about to justify those nights, nearly sixteen years ago, when, as the wild little queen of little Egypt, she lay in the arms of Rome’s mighty old reprobate. In those far-off days she was fighting to retain the independence of her small country and her dynasty: now she was Queen of dominions more extensive than any governed by the proudest of the Pharaohs, and she would soon see her royal house raised to a height never before attained by man. It was her custom at this time to use as an oath the words, “As surely as I shall one day administer justice on the Capitol”; and, proudly acting the part of hostess in Ephesus, she must have felt that the great day was very near. Already the Ephesians were hailing her as their Queen, and the deference paid to her by the vassal kings was very marked.

In the spring of B.C. 32 some four hundred Roman senators arrived at Antony’s headquarters. These men stated that Octavian, after denouncing his rival in the Senate, had advised all who were on the enemy’s side to quit the city, whereupon they had set sail for Ephesus, leaving behind them some seven or eight hundred senators who either held with Octavian or pursued a non-committal policy. War had not yet been declared, but no declaration seemed now to be necessary.

A Map
Illustrating the War between
Cleopatra and Octavian.