The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt / A Study in the Origin of the Roman Empire

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

Antony, meanwhile, having quieted the dissensions amongst his supporters, gave himself up to merry-making in his habitual manner; and presently he caused the Athenians to recognise him formally as Dionysos, or Bacchus, come down to earth. In anticipation of a certain Bacchic day of festival he set all the carpenters in the city to make a huge skeleton roof over the big theatre, this being then covered with green branches and vines, as in the caves sacred to this god; and from these branches hundreds of drums, faun-skins, and other Bacchic toys and symbols were suspended. On the festal day Antony sat himself, with his friends around him, in the middle of the theatre, the afternoon sun splashing down upon them through the interlaced greenery; and thus, in the guise of Bacchus, he presided at a wild drinking-bout, hundreds of astonished Athenians watching him from around the theatre. When darkness had fallen the city was illuminated, and, in the light of a thousand torches and lanterns, Antony rollicked up to the Acropolis, where he was proclaimed as the god himself.

Many were the banquets given at this time both by Antony and Cleopatra, and the behaviour of the former was often uproarious and undignified. On one state occasion he caused much excitement by going across to Cleopatra in the middle of the meal and rubbing her feet, a ministration always performed by a slave, and now undertaken by him, it is said, to fulfil a wager. He was always heedless of public opinion, and at this period of his life the habit of indifference to comment had grown upon him to a startling extent. Frequently he would rudely interrupt an audience which he was giving to one of the vassal kings by receiving and openly reading some message from Cleopatra written upon a tablet of onyx or crystal; and once when Furnius, a famous orator, was pleading a case before him, he brought the eloquent speech to an abrupt end by hurrying off to join the Queen outside, having entirely forgotten, it would seem, that the orator’s arguments were being addressed to himself.

An event now occurred which threw the whole of the Antonian party into a state of the utmost anxiety. Two of the leading men at that time in Athens deserted and went over to Octavian. One of these, Titius, has already been noticed in connection with the arrest and execution of Sextus Pompeius; the other, Plancus, was the man who made so great a fool of himself at Alexandria when he painted himself blue and danced naked about the room, as has been described already.[112] Velleius speaks of him as “the meanest flatterer of the Queen, a man more obsequious than any slave”; and one need not be surprised, therefore, that Cleopatra was rude to him, which was the cause, so he said, of his desertion. These two men had both been witnesses to Antony’s will, a copy of which had been deposited with the Vestal Virgins; and as soon as they were come to Rome they informed Octavian of its contents, who promptly went to the temple of Vesta, seized the document, and, a few days later, read it out to the Senate. Many senators were scandalised at the proceedings; but they were, nevertheless, curious to hear what the will set forth, and therefore did not oppose the reading. The only clause, however, out of which Octavian was able to make much capital was that wherein Antony stated that if he were to die in Rome he desired his body, after being carried in state through the Forum, to be sent to Alexandria, there to be buried beside Cleopatra.

The two deserters now began to spread throughout Italy all manner of stories derogatory to Antony, and to heap abuse upon the Queen, whom they described as having complete ascendancy over her husband, due, they were sure, to the magical love-potions which she secretly administered to him. When we consider that the accusations made by disreputable tattlers, such as Plancus, were all concerned with Antony’s devotion to her, we may realise how little there really was to be brought against her. Antony, they said, was under her magical spell; he had allowed the Ephesians to hail her as Queen; she had forced him to present to her the library of Pergamum (a city not far from Ephesus), consisting of 200,000 volumes; he was wont to become drunken while she, of course by magic, remained sober; he had become her slave and even rubbed her feet always for her, and so on. Such rubbishy tales as these were the basis upon which the fabulous story of Cleopatra’s terrible wickedness was founded, and presently we hear her spoken of as “the harlot queen of incestuous Canopus, who aspired to set up against Jupiter the barking Anubis, and to drown the Roman trumpet with her jangling systrum.”[113]

The friends of Antony in Rome, alarmed by the hostile attitude of the majority of the public, sent a certain Geminius to Athens to warn their leader that he would soon be proclaimed an enemy of the State. On his arrival at the headquarters, he was thought to be an agent of Octavia, and both Cleopatra and Antony treated him with considerable coldness, assigning to him the least important place at their banquets, and making him a continual butt for their most biting remarks. For some time he bore this treatment patiently; but at length one night, when both he and Antony were somewhat intoxicated, the latter asked him point-blank what was his business at Athens, and Geminius, springing to his feet, replied that he would keep that until a soberer hour, but one thing he would say here and now, drunk or sober, that if only the Queen would go back to Egypt all would be well with their cause. At this Antony was furious, but Cleopatra, keeping her temper, said in her most scathing manner: “You have done well, Geminius, to tell your secret without being put to torture.” A day or two later he slipped away from Athens and hurried back to Rome.

The next man to desert was Marcus Silanus, formerly an officer of Julius Cæsar in Gaul, who also carried to Rome stories of Cleopatra’s power and Antony’s weakness. Shortly after this Octavian issued a formal declaration of war, not, however, against Antony but against Cleopatra. The decree deprived Antony of his offices and his authority, because, it declared, he had allowed a woman to exercise it in his place. Octavian added that Antony had evidently drunk potions which had bereft him of his senses, and that the generals against whom the Romans would fight would be the Egyptian court-eunuchs, Mardion and Potheinos;[114] Cleopatra’s hair-dressing girl, Iras, and her attendant, Charmion; for these nowadays were Antony’s chief state-councillors. The Queen was thus made to realise that her husband’s cause in Rome was suffering very seriously from her presence with the army; but, at the same time, were she now to return to Egypt she knew that Antony might play her false, and the fact that war had not been declared upon him but upon her would give him an easy loophole for escape. To counteract the prevailing impression in Italy Antony despatched a large number of agents who were to attempt to turn popular opinion in his favour, and meanwhile he disposed his army for the final struggle. He had decided to wait for Octavian to attack him, partly because he felt confident in the ability of his great fleet to destroy the enemy before ever it could land on the shores of Greece, and partly because he believed that Octavian’s forces would become disaffected long before they could be brought across the sea. The state of war would be felt in Italy very soon, whereas in Greece and Asia Minor it would hardly make any difference to the price of provisions. Egypt alone would supply enough corn to feed the whole army, while Italy would soon starve; and Egypt would provide money for the regular payment of the troops, while Octavian did not know where to turn for cash. Indeed, so great was the distress in Italy, and so great the likelihood of mutinies in the enemy’s army, that Antony did not expect to have to fight a big battle on land. For this reason he had felt it safe to leave four of his legions at Cyrene, four in Egypt, and three in Syria; and he linked up the whole of the sea-coast around the eastern Mediterranean with small garrisons. The army which he kept with him in Greece consisted of some 100,000 foot and 12,000 horse, a force which must certainly have seemed adequate, since it was greater than that of the enemy. Octavian had at least 250 ships of war, 80,000 foot, and 12,000 horse.

When winter approached Cleopatra and Antony advanced with the whole army from Athens to Patrae, and there went into winter quarters. Patrae stood near the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, on the Achaian side, not much more than 200 miles from the Italian coast. The fleet, meanwhile, was sent farther north to the Gulf of Ambracia, which formed a huge natural harbour with a narrow entrance; and outposts were placed at Corcyra, the modern Corfu, some 70 miles from the Italian coast. In the period of waiting which followed, when the storms of winter made warfare almost out of the question, Antony and Octavian exchanged several pugnacious messages. Octavian, constrained by the restlessness of his men and the difficulty of providing for them during the winter, is said to have written to Antony asking him not to protract the war, but to come over to Italy and fight him at once. He even promised not to oppose his disembarkation, but to offer him battle only when he was quite prepared to meet him with his full forces. Antony replied by challenging Octavian to a single combat, although, as he stated, he was already an elderly man. This challenge Octavian refused to accept, and thereupon Antony invited him to bring his army over to the plains to Pharsalia and to fight him there, where Julius Cæsar and Pompey had fought nearly seventeen years before. This offer was likewise refused; and thereafter the two huge armies settled down once more to glare at one another across the Ionian Sea.

Octavian now sent a message to Greece inviting the Roman senators who were still with Antony to return to Rome where they would be well received; and this offer must have found many ready ears, though none yet dared to act upon it. Several of these senators felt disgust at their leader’s intemperate habits, and were deeply jealous of the power of Cleopatra, whose influence did not seem likely to serve the cause of the Republic. The declaring of war against the Queen and not against themselves had touched them sharply, and to add to their discomfort in this regard news now came across the sea that Octavian, in making his official sacrifices to the gods at the opening of hostilities, had employed the ritual observed before a campaign against a foreign enemy. He had stood, as the ancient rites of Rome prescribed, before the temple of Bellona in the Campus Martius, and, clad in the robes of a Fetial priest, had thrown the javelin, as a declaration that war was undertaken against an alien enemy.

Now came disconcerting rumours from the Gulf of Ambracia which could not be kept secret. During the winter the supplies had run out, and all manner of diseases had attacked the rowing-slaves and sailors, the result being that nearly a third of their number had perished. To fill their places Antony had ordered his officers to press into service every man on whom they could lay their hands. Peasants, farm hands, harvesters, ploughboys, donkey-drivers, and even common travellers had been seized upon and thrust into the ships, but still their complements were incomplete, and many of them were unfit for action. The news caused the greatest anxiety in the camp, and when, in March B.C. 31, the cessation of the storms of winter brought the opening of actual hostilities close at hand, there was many a man at Patrae who wished with all his heart that he were safe in his own country.

The first blow was struck by Octavian, who sent a flying squadron across the open sea to the south coast of Greece, under the command of his great friend Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. This force seized Methone, and appeared to be seeking a landing-place for the main army; and Antony at once prepared to march down and hold the coast against the expected attack. But while his eyes were turned in this direction Octavian slipped across with his army from Brindisi and Tarentum to Corcyra, and thence to the mainland, marching down through Epirus towards the Gulf of Ambracia, thus menacing the ill-manned fleet lying in those waters. Antony thereupon hastened northwards with all possible speed, and arrived at the promontory of Actium, which formed the southern side of the mouth of the Gulf, almost at the same moment at which Octavian reached the opposite, or northern, promontory. Realising that an attack was about to be made upon the fleet, Antony drew his ships up in battle array, manning them where necessary with legionaries; and thereupon Octavian gave up the project of immediate battle. Antony then settled himself down on his southern promontory where he formed an enormous camp, and a few days later he was joined there by Cleopatra.