CHAPTER 23
OCTAVIAN APPEARED BOTH ASTOUNDED and angered by Cleopatra’s death. It was, Dio Cassius wrote, “as if all the glory of his victory had been taken away from him”—in their final tussle Cleopatra had outwitted him. This was doubtless what she had intended. Though grief at losing Antony and fears for the future had been her primary motives for choosing to die, her decision had been more than a desperate way out. Throughout her life she had struggled, sometimes fought, for control over her destiny and the right to her throne. Her death was a way of reasserting her power, of converting humbling defeat into victory, of regaining what a Roman would call her dignitas.
According to Suetonius, in hopes of reviving the motionless queen, Octavian summoned snake charmers “to suck the poison from her self-inflicted wound.” This could, of course, have been playacting. Since his initial efforts to keep Cleopatra alive, the ever cautious Octavian might have changed his view and decided that, on balance, a dead Cleopatra was preferable to a live one. After all, the Roman crowds had not reacted well to the sight of Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe marching in chains in Caesar’s Triumph. The charismatic Cleopatra similarly might have aroused their sympathy. Also, the public disgracing of her might have seemed an affront to Caesar, who had erected her glittering image in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. It is just conceivable that Octavian helped engineer Cleopatra’s suicide by priming Dolabella to reveal the humiliating fate he had in store for her and her children and by relaxing the surveillance she was under. Yet more likely, Cleopatra had indeed convinced Octavian that life was still dear to her, so he failed to anticipate her suicide.
The manner and mystery of Cleopatra’s death were eagerly debated in Alexandria and in Rome. The snake idea quickly gained currency. Although those searching her apartments found no serpents lurking there, some claimed to have seen a snake’s slithering track along the shore beneath the windows while others reported “two faint puncture marks” on Cleopatra’s lifeless arm. Death by snakebite appears to have been the version Octavian believed—at least publicly. Plutarch noted that he ordered a gigantic image of Cleopatra with a snake clinging to her arm to be carried in his Egyptian Triumph in 29.
But if Cleopatra did indeed die by a serpent’s bite, it is unlikely that an asp was responsible. Plutarch’s claim that the prisoners bitten by asps on Cleopatra’s instructions perished quietly and painlessly was wrong. Asp is a general term used to describe various small vipers of North Africa and Arabia.* A viper’s venom poisons the blood, causing an immediate burning sensation and bringing on giddiness, nausea and desperate thirst. The infected part of the body turns purple and begins to swell and the victim loses all control of bodily functions, sometimes helplessly vomiting, urinating and defecating, before finally passing out. This hardly would have been the death chosen by a divine monarch so conscious of appearances.
Cleopatra more probably selected as her instrument of suicide the blackish brown or yellow Egyptian cobra or uraeus common in the marshlands of the Nile delta. Cobra venom is a nerve poison rather than a blood toxin and a cobra’s bite leaves only puncture marks on the skin—like those noted by eyewitnesses on Cleopatra’s body—with no discoloration or swelling. The victim begins to feel sleepy as paralysis takes hold, leading to coma and a slide into death. Such an end would have been both painless and dignified. Also, the cobra or uraeus would have appealed to Cleopatra. Not only was it sacred to Isis but it was also the symbol of the royal house of Egypt—the rearing cobras on the royal crown symbolized their protection of the wearer and a spitting defiance to any would-be enemy. Cleopatra would have considered the imagery of the cobra a suitable farewell message to Octavian.
Yet even this solution begs further questions. The Egyptian cobra would have been hard for Cleopatra to conceal—the smallest cobra capable of killing a human being is around four feet long. An even bigger serpent—perhaps as long as six feet—would have been required to kill Iras and Charmion as well as their mistress. How could a reptile of such size have been smuggled into Cleopatra’s chambers? Perhaps, as several writers believed, including Horace and Vergil, there was more than one snake. Whatever the case, the legendary basket of figs carried into Cleopatra’s chamber of death seems an inadequate camouflage. But Cleopatra never lacked courage or ingenuity—somehow, in those burning days of high summer in Alexandria, she found a way of arranging her death to her satisfaction.
Whatever his feelings toward her in life, Octavian seems to have been impressed by Cleopatra’s dignity and firmness of purpose at her end. He granted her last request to be buried beside Antony “with the kind of splendid ceremony suitable for a queen.” Octavian’s compassion did not, however, extend to Caesarion. Cleopatra’s suicide had done nothing to protect her eldest son, around whom so many of her hopes had been built. Suetonius related how Octavian dispatched cavalry in pursuit of Caesarion with orders to kill him. Other accounts tell of how the sixteen-year-old was lured back to Alexandria, perhaps through the treachery of his tutor Rhodon. However he was captured, the results were the same. Caesarion was just too dangerous to be allowed to live and was immediately executed. Octavian’s adviser Arius had counseled him that “too many Caesars is not a good thing,” and Octavian had agreed.
Antony’s elder son by Fulvia, Antyllus, was also murdered. He had taken refuge by a statue of Julius Caesar, probably in the Caesareum. Despite his screams for mercy, he was dragged from the statue and his head hacked off. His tutor took advantage of the scuffling and confusion surrounding his pupil’s killing to steal a valuable jewel that Antyllus had always worn around his neck. Despite the tutor’s attempts to conceal the stone by sewing it into his belt, his theft was discovered and Octavian ordered him to be crucified. Though he was not such a threat as Caesarion, Antyllus suffered for having donned the toga virilis and formally come of age during the last months of Cleopatra and Antony’s rule. Octavian also would have been mindful that, several years earlier, Antony had declared Antyllus his heir and issued coins bearing both their heads.
However, Octavian spared all Antony’s other children, whether by Cleopatra or by Fulvia, and of course Antony’s daughters by Octavia. Cleopatra Selene and her two full brothers, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, were made to march close to the image of their dead mother in Octavian’s Egyptian Triumph, which, according to Dio Cassius, “surpassed all others in luxury and magnificence.” They were then placed in the care of the virtuous and maternal Octavia, together with their half brother, Antony’s younger son by Fulvia, Iullus Antonius. Perhaps significantly, although she lived until 11 BC, Octavia never remarried. Perhaps she too had really loved Antony.
In his own account of his life, Octavian claimed that after the conquest of Alexandria he pardoned all Antony’s Roman supporters who sought clemency, but he was, as so often, stretching the truth. He showed no mercy to the two surviving assassins of Julius Caesar who had been with Antony or to Antony’s loyal general Canidius Crassus and several others, including a Roman senator who had run Cleopatra’s woolen mill. All were executed.
Octavian did, however, spare Alexandria, together with its citizens, as he had promised. Although he ordered all statues of Antony to be toppled and removed, he allowed those of Cleopatra to remain—a concession secured by a rich Alexandrian for a payment of two thousand talents. Octavian also continued work on the Caesareum—Cleopatra’s still incomplete memorial to his adoptive father. To make the building yet more imposing, he ordered two rose granite obelisks to be moved from Heliopolis and erected in front of it. The hieroglyphs on them reveal that they were originally erected by Tutmoses III in front of Heliopolis’ temple to the sun in the first half of the fifteenth century BC.*
Octavian also put his men to work, improving Egypt’s canal system and dredging the mud from some of the Nile tributaries. The purpose was not so much to benefit the Egyptians but to improve the transport of Egyptian grain to Rome, where it soon met one third of the capital’s needs. Cargo fleets of up to five hundred ships at a time transported it across the Mediterranean to make Roman bread.
Territories Antony had given Cleopatra became Roman provinces once more and Herod regained the lands he had lost to the Egyptian queen. He governed Judaea with increasing ruthlessness, suppressing any dissent and killing three of his sixteen sons for plotting against him—an act that caused Octavian to remark that it was better to be Herod’s pig than his child. In his final years, crazed with pain from a disease—perhaps cancer—that was putrefying his still-living body, Herod became yet more paranoid and cruel.
The fate Cleopatra had once feared for her country and striven to avoid overtook it: Egypt was annexed to Rome. However, the country remained so rich, so important and so potentially dangerous as a focal point for dissent and rebellion that Octavian appointed not a senator to govern it but a member of the knightly or equites class. Furthermore, he made the governor report not to the Senate but directly to himself. Egypt thus became unique in the empire as Octavian’s personal fief. Senators were not even allowed to visit Egypt, never mind live there, without Octavian’s explicit personal consent. The first occupant of the governor’s post was Cornelius Gallus, who successfully put down rebellions and led military expeditions up the Nile and into Ethiopia. But despite his relatively humble background, Egypt appears to have seduced Gallus with delusions of grandeur, as it had so many others before him. He began openly disparaging Octavian when drunk, erecting great numbers of statues of himself throughout the country and having a list of his achievements chiseled into one of the pyramids. Octavian summoned him to Rome, where in 26 he was forced to commit suicide for his hubris.
Octavian’s personal attitude toward Egypt was equivocal but pragmatic. Before leaving the country he had visited Alexander’s mausoleum, where he inspected the iconic leader’s embalmed body and, according to Suetonius, showed his veneration by crowning the head with a golden diadem and strewing the body with flowers. Dio Cassius claimed he went further, inadvertently breaking off a piece of Alexander’s nose, which he had touched, no doubt, out of curiosity. Octavian refused an invitation to view the bodies of the Ptolemies in their mausolea, insisting that he “came to see a King, not a row of corpses.” Nor would he visit the Apis bull, remarking that he was “accustomed to worship gods not cattle.”
Yet Octavian was sufficiently concerned with administrative continuity to allow—no doubt with an appropriate show of reluctance—for the last regnal year of Cleopatra’s rule to be followed in the official Egyptian calendar by the first year of his own, as well as allowing himself to be referred to formally as the “father of the country.” He added his name to those inscribed on the Temple of Dendera, the exterior walls of which depicted the graceful forms of Cleopatra and Caesarion, and placed his granite portrait next to that of Cleopatra’s father, Auletes, in a temple he had built to Isis. Later he permitted his wife, Livia, to appear on the Egyptian coinage—something that never occurred elsewhere and which may have been a concession to the Egyptian concept of joint rule. Such Egyptian coins even bore the double cornucopia—the badge of the Ptolemies—on the reverse.
In Rome, the conquest of Egypt and, in particular, the acquisition of the contents of Cleopatra’s vast treasuries triggered a financial boom. Allegedly keeping only one of Cleopatra’s jeweled drinking cups for himself, Octavian ordered all the rest of her opulent gold and silverware to be melted down. Keen to retain the loyalty of his legions, he paid a special premium of about a year’s pay to the soldiers who had participated in the Alexandrian campaign as well as a general premium of the same amount to all his soldiers. He also spent a great deal of money buying land on which to settle his veterans, since he was eager to reduce the size of the armies swiftly to peacetime levels and thus lessen the potential for revolt. Rates of interest in Rome and Italy tumbled from 12 to 4 percent and the price of land doubled, producing a feel-good effect throughout the country. Octavian took the opportunity to underline his own part in this prosperity by minting coins as a beneficent victor and the founder of a new, yet stronger, prouder Rome. He also gave four hundred sesterces to each male citizen of Rome. The Roman population, which had yearned for so long for an end to civil wars and anarchic upheavals, was content even at the price of losing some liberties as Octavian strengthened his grip. As Dio Cassius wrote, “They forgot all the hardships they had suffered and accepted Octavian’s triumph with pleasure as though the enemies he had conquered had all been foreigners.”
Octavian had, like his adoptive father Julius Caesar, shown a single-minded focus in the fourteen years since Caesar’s murder. He had been determined throughout to achieve his ambition of sole power. To do so, he had chosen well in his supporters, in particular Agrippa, and had delegated to them sufficient authority—but no more—to achieve his purposes. He had been prepared to trim to the prevailing winds in his early alliances with Caesar’s murderers but had never lost sight of his ultimate objective. Perhaps, unlike Antony, he had never seen the triumvirate as anything other than an expedient and temporary arrangement. He had been prepared cynically to break commitments he made to Antony during this period despite his sister Octavia’s intervention on her husband’s behalf. He had an innate hypocrisy that allowed him to square in his mind his own ambition with the public good and his version of events with the truth. As a consequence, he had shown himself a master of public relations and propaganda. Unlike Antony, who emerges from all the accounts as the more impulsive and warmhearted personality and, to most tastes, the more likeable, the buttoned-up, self-contained Octavian never took a decision without, like a chess player, weighing not just its immediate impact but also its long-term strategic benefit. He never made a speech without calculating its effect. Suetonius alleged that Octavian “did not even make statements to individuals, or even to his wife Livia, except by writing them down and reading them aloud, lest he say too much or too little by speaking casually.”
As a consequence of his defeat of Cleopatra and Antony, Octavian was now well on his way to becoming the princeps, or chief citizen, of the Roman state, a title he assumed in 27, together with the appellation “Augustus,” with its implication of dignity, stateliness, even sanctity. As de facto first emperor of Rome, he remained, just as Cleopatra and Antony had been, conscious of his image—sufficiently so, in fact, to order an official portrait of himself depicting a calm, elevated leader to be widely copied and circulated throughout the Roman world. It served as the basis for a variety of surviving sculptures and other portrayals. Significantly, when the Senate offered to name one of the months after him, he asked that it should not be the month of his birth, as in the case of Julius Caesar and July, but Sextillis, the old sixth month but now, under the Julian calendar, the eighth—the month of his victory over Cleopatra and Antony. This became August.
After forty-four years of successful autocratic rule, during which he centralized the administration of the empire and banished conflict to its borders, where skirmishes with barbarians continued but did not threaten, Augustus died in AD 14. Ironically, many of his centralizing measures and, in particular, his concentration of all power in the hands of a single unelected leader resembled the way the Ptolemies had ruled Egypt. After Augustus’ cremation, his ashes were placed in his great round mausoleum set in a public park, which, it was said, he had designed taking the tomb of Alexander in Alexandria as his inspiration.
By now Rome also contained many artifacts transported from Egypt. Immediately following the return to Italy of Augustus and his veterans and over the subsequent decades a sort of “Egyptmania” had taken hold. Citizens eagerly imported pharaonic works of art. Sometimes obelisks were reerected in Roman squares to celebrate victories, sometimes in temples to Roman gods and at other times simply to beautify public spaces or to act as giant sundials.* Rarely did those installing them in their picturesque new settings have any consciousness of the original purpose of the works, a sphinx being considered a must-have for any large Roman garden. Egyptian landscapes incorporating such elements as Nile scenes, lotuses, pyramids and crocodiles became commonplace in frescoes and decorative relief sculptures. There was also a fashion for Egyptian jewelry in the form of scarab rings and amulets.
Many Romans even chose to have their ashes buried in pyramid-shaped tombs. They did so irrespective of their religion, but the other major Egyptian exports to Rome were the cults of Isis, Osiris and other gods. These gods had initially been imported at the beginning of the first century BC but after Cleopatra’s defeat freed them from association with a foreign enemy they began to flourish. The cult of Isis offered life after death to its converts, together with exotic and elaborate rituals accompanied by music, chanting and the burning of incense. Each day before sunrise, the priests presented the statue of Isis to her seated followers who had gathered, shaking their metal rattles in her honor and to drown out any extraneous sounds intruding into the complex rites of the cult. They remained deep in prayer until the sun had risen to be blessed by the assembled worshippers who also celebrated the resurrection of Osiris, god of the underworld, at the daily rebirth of the sun. At two o’clock in the afternoon, a second ceremony was held for the adoration of the sacred water of the Nile. So popular were the cults that the worship of these Egyptian deities continued in some quarters of Rome until the city’s fall.
The eventual fates of the surviving children of Cleopatra, Antony and Octavian were various and in some cases curious. Cleopatra Selene was married to a young man who as a small boy had, like her, been displayed in a Roman Triumph. This was Juba, the erudite Numidian prince who in 25 was made the ruler of the client kingdom of Mauretania (in present-day Morocco). Their son, whom they named Ptolemy, succeeded his father in AD 23. Cleopatra Selene’s two brothers are assumed to have accompanied her to her new kingdom and, from here, the boys for whom such grand futures were announced by Antony on his silver dais at the Donations of Alexandria passed into obscurity.
Antony’s two daughters by Octavia left a greater mark on history. Both remained in Rome and one became the mother and both became grandmothers of emperors, albeit notorious ones. The elder Antonia became the grandmother of Nero, while the younger Antonia became the mother of Claudius and grandmother of Caligula.* Octavian allowed Antony’s surviving son by Fulvia, Iullus Antonius, to claim his family inheritance. Under Octavian’s patronage he enjoyed a successful career in Rome, becoming a consul and governor in Asia Minor as well as a poet. However, in 2 BC, age forty-one, he became caught up in a sex scandal involving Octavian’s thirty-six-year-old daughter, Julia. She had first been married to Octavian’s faithful school friend and admiral Agrippa, who died in 12 BC, and at the time of the scandal was wife to Tiberius, the son of her stepmother, Livia, by her first husband.
Like several other well-born men, Antonius was accused of indulging in sexual debauches with Julia, “who refrained from no sex act possible to a woman.” Allegedly, she had been seen in the dead of night carousing and fornicating in the Forum with Antonius and the others, as well as drunkenly clambering and cavorting over the rostra where Cicero’s head had once been nailed and from which her father had addressed the populace urging the moral regeneration of Rome. The men were charged with treason and some, including Antonius, were forced to commit suicide or executed. Tiberius divorced Julia. As unforgiving of his only daughter’s weaknesses as he was of those of others, Octavian exiled her to an offshore island. Presumably because drink had played a part in her downfall, rather than just for spite, he ordered her guards to allow her no wine. She shared her abstemious life with her mother, Scribonia, abruptly divorced herself by Octavian so many years previously and who voluntarily followed her daughter into exile. Although eventually allowed to return to the mainland, Julia remained in close confinement until she died fourteen years later. She lived to see her former husband, Tiberius, succeed Octavian as emperor since her sons by Agrippa had died before their grandfather.
Sexual excess continued to play a part in Roman politics. Other women of the imperial family were banished for their appetites. As emperor, Octavian introduced legislation governing the behavior of women, promoting marriage, punishing adultery and generally emphasizing that a woman’s place was in the home bearing children. Nevertheless, Suetonius alleged that well into old age Octavian himself retained “a passion for deflowering girls—who were collected for him from every quarter, even by his wife.”
Predictably, it was Cleopatra who was the ultimate icon of sexual depravity in Roman eyes. Oil lamps depicted her squatting on a giant phallus. Stripped of humanity, intellect and feeling, she was beginning her long, distorted journey through history as the epitome of the scheming, predatory whore, her true story ignored and then forgotten.
*Cerastes vipera (often called “Cleopatra’s asp”), Vipera berus, Vipera aspis and Cerastes cornutus are all described as asps.
*The obelisks remained in their new location long after the Caesareum itself had vanished until one was acquired by a Briton, placed in a cylinder of steel on a pontoon boat suitably named Cleopatra and towed toward Britain. During a wild storm in the Bay of Biscay, the tow ropes broke, six men were killed or drowned and the obelisk was adrift for six days, but it was rescued and eventually reached London, where, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, it still stands on the Thames embankment. The other obelisk was transported to New York at the expense of the millionaire William Vanderbilt and in 1881 erected in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
*One such sundial, which Octavian ordered to be brought to Rome and placed in the Campus Martius, is now in the city’s Piazza di Monte Citorio.
*In ad 40 Caligula murdered Ptolemy of Mauretania—Cleopatra and Antony’s grandson and so, of course, his cousin. The reason was that Ptolemy had dared to wear a more gorgeous purple mantle to the amphitheater than Caligula.