CHAPTER SIX
…The princesses of the house of the Ptolemies had always apparently been very much averse to taking casual lovers, especially from outside the royal house. They were not, like later Roman imperial ladies, both murderous and adulterous. They were murderous and chaste.
Michael Grant, Cleopatra1
Cleopatra now ruled Egypt for three difficult but essentially peaceful years. Seneca tells how, for ‘two years in succession, under Cleopatra’s administration, during her tenth and eleventh years [42 and 41] the Nile did not flood’.2 These worryingly low inundations resulted in failing crops, high inflation and, despite an extensive relief programme, hunger, plague and civil unrest. Persistent inflation would force Cleopatra to lower the silver content of her coins, making them compatible, in terms of silver content, with the Roman denarius. At the same time she increased the production of bronze coins at the Alexandria mint, while cutting their weight by as much as 75 per cent. To prevent traders simply weighing out the reduced-value coins, she had them inscribed with their official denominations (40 and 80 drachmas), a simple but highly effective move which forced acceptance of the coin’s nominal value.
On 12 April 41 a decree was issued to protect city-dwelling landowners from harassment by over-zealous tax collectors. Josephus tells us that Cleopatra was able to feed the people of Alexandria but ‘refused to distribute the necessary grain to the Jews’, presumably because they were not full citizens.3 This allegation is unconfirmed and, given the strong Jewish support for Cleopatra and Caesar during the Alexandrian Wars, seems unlikely, particularly as we find Cleopatra now renewing a grant of asylum originally made for a Jewish temple (possibly the temple in the Delta town of Leontopolis) by either Ptolemy III or Ptolemy VIII. Southern Egypt coped well under these trying conditions: a stela set up at Karnak some time between 44 and 39 mentions the heroic efforts of theepistratagos Callimachos, who apparently saved the city during the years of famine. His achievements were to be celebrated by public festivals held on his birthday.
On 14 July 41, in Cleopatra’s Year 11, the high priest of Ptah, Pasherenptah III, died. His funerary stela (known as the Harris Stela), recovered from his Sakkara tomb and now in the British Museum, tells a story of elite Egyptian life outside Alexandria. Pasherenptah came from a long line of hereditary priests who formed a parallel, supportive religious dynasty to the Ptolemies. Pasherenptah himself appears at the top of his stela, wearing the panther skin and the side-lock hairstyle (a ponytail worn on the side of an otherwise shaven head) that identify him as a priest of Ptah of Memphis. Below, in a beautifully carved hieroglyphic text, we read a series of offering formulae for the deceased, then an autobiography.4 This tells how, as a newly appointed priest just fourteen years old, Pasherenptah officiated at the coronation of Auletes, whom he, in his Egyptian text, describes as the ‘Young Osiris’ rather than the ‘New Dionysos’. Relationships between the king and his priest were cordial. Pasherenptah travelled to Alexandria, where he was crowned with a golden chaplet and made a priest of Auletes’s own cult, and Auletes paid frequent visits to Memphis, where he stayed at the Serapeum palace with ‘his chiefs, his women and royal children’.5 The king was happy to play his part in the regular religious festivals, maintaining an obvious royal presence in the traditional cults. There was just one sadness. Pasherenptah had several daughters, but no son to follow him as high priest of Ptah. Finally, when he was forty-three years old, the god Imhotep heard his prayers. A much-wanted son was born and named Imhotep in honour of the god; later Imhotep would be known as the high priest of Ptah Pedibastet III. The limestone stela (also in the British Museum) of Tayimhotep, wife of Pasherenptah III, tells us that she died at thirty years of age, a year before her husband. Her autobiography confirms the story of her son’s miraculous birth and ends with a poignant plea:
The west, it is a land of sleep,
Darkness weighs on the dwelling-place,
Those who are there sleep in their mummy-forms.
They wake not to see their brothers,
They see not their fathers, their mothers,
Their hearts forget their wives, their children …
Say to me ‘You are not far from water’.
Turn my face to the north wind at the edge of the water,
Perhaps my heart will then be cooled in its grief.6
In spite of her economic problems, Cleopatra found herself in a more secure position than ever before. With both her brothers dead, her sister in exile and their supporters removed, she had absolute power and no obvious rival to form a rallying point for dissidents. Her coruler was an infant who, although invaluable for propaganda purposes, posed no threat to her authority. Caesarion, Ptolemy Caesar Theos Philopator Philometor (‘the Father-Loving, Mother-Loving God’), was proclaimed king of Egypt in Alexandria in the summer of 44.
In the wider Mediterranean world things were far from peaceful. The second triumvirate of Caesar’s friend Mark Antony, his great-nephew and heir Octavian and his supporter Marcus Aemilius Lepidus had united in their determination to capture Caesar’s principal assassins, Brutus and Cassius. They were intent on public revenge and Egypt – still, in spite of her suffering, the richest land in the eastern Mediterranean – was expected to provide practical help. Meanwhile, Brutus and Cassius, having realised that they had few friends in Rome, were looking to the eastern provinces for support and they, too, expected Egypt to help. When Cassius occupied Syria and formed an alliance with the powerful king of Parthia (whose extensive territories covered much of modern Iran and Iraq), Cleopatra was forced to take sides. She hesitated as long as she could, then committed herself by returning the four Roman legions, stationed in Egypt by Caesar in 48, to the triumvirs’ general, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, who was now in Syria. As an acknowledgement of her support, or as payment for services rendered, the triumvirs officially recognised Caesarion as coruler of Egypt. This decision would, it was hoped, persuade Cleopatra, mother of Caesar’s natural son, to continue to support Octavian, Caesar’s legal heir.
Cassius had been able to intercept and subvert Cleopatra’s Roman troops. They had changed sides without putting up a fight and were now stationed with his own legions along Egypt’s north-eastern border. When Cassius appealed directly to Cleopatra for aid – surely a prelude to invasion – she pleaded famine, plague and a manpower shortage that would prevent her from taking any direct part in the war. Meanwhile, Serapion, strategos or governor of Cyprus, had unilaterally declared his support for Cassius and had supplied him with ships. It seems that Serapion was planning to depose Cleopatra in favour of Arsinoë IV, who, currently living in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, had maintained close contact with Cyprus. When, in 42, Brutus summoned Cassius and his troops to Smyrna, the threat of invasion lifted and Cleopatra breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Now openly on the side of the triumvirs, Cleopatra raised a fleet and set sail to join Octavian and Antony in Greece. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), a mighty Mediterranean storm blew up, her ships sustained serious damage and Cleopatra herself fell ill, possibly with seasickness. As Egyptian wreckage washed up on the Greek shore, the badly battered fleet limped home to Alexandria. It is impossible not to suspect that this may have been another delaying tactic. If so, it was successful. While Cleopatra waited for a second fleet to be made ready, news came that Brutus and Cassius had committed suicide following a heavy defeat at the two battles of Philippi in Macedon in October 42. Two men now effectively held power in Rome: Octavian, Caesar’s twenty-one-year-old great-nephew and legal heir, controlled the bulk of Rome’s western empire; while Antony, Caesar’s forty-year-old friend and general, controlled Gaul and the eastern provinces of Achaea (Greece), Asia, Bithynia-Pontus and Cilicia. Lepidus, who was eventually to be given control of Africa, remained a triumvir but was a political nonentity. There remained just one problematic region. Sextus Pompey, the younger son of Pompey the Great, had occupied part of Sicily and could not be dislodged. His ships – pirate ships – were threatening the vital Mediterranean trade networks.
Octavian left the battlefield of Philippi ill – it was widely believed that he was dying – and returned to Rome, leaving Antony to establish control over his eastern territories. Cleopatra and Caesarion were extremely vulnerable in Egypt. They needed a protector and Antony was their natural ally. Not only was he the controller of the east, he was the dominant triumvir: older, more popular and demonstrably healthier than the sickly Octavian. Antony, in turn, needed money. He had promised each of his veterans a reward of 500 drachmas, which he had no means of paying, and he had vowed to resurrect the campaign against the Parthian empire that Julius Caesar had been planning at the time of his death. Success against Parthia would finally avenge Crassus, and would demonstrate to the whole world that Antony was Caesar’s natural, if not his legal, heir. Antony spent the winter of 42/1 raising funds in Greece, then moved on to Ephesus. Here the priestesses of the Artemis temple were persuaded to greet him as the living incarnation of Dionysos the Gracious, ‘Giver of Joy’. He was welcomed into a celebrating city filled with ivy, thyrsos wands, harps, pipes and flutes, dishevelled women dressed as maenads and men and boys dressed like satyrs and Pans. The political implications of this religious honour would not have been lost on Octavian. While he was confined to Rome, the eastern territories were starting to identify Antony as the successor of all the former earthly Dionysoi, including Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies of Egypt and Pompey the Great. As Caesar had been granted posthumous divine honours in 42, his adopted heir Octavian could legitimately claim to be the ‘Son of the Divine Julius’, but this must have seemed poor compensation. Octavian fought back the only way he could: by circulating rumours of his own familial relationship with the Olympian Apollo, who, as an Italian god of light, might reasonably be considered the theological opposite of the dark, eastern Dionysos. Soon everyone knew the story of his mother, Atia, who had fallen asleep in the temple of Apollo and been ravished by a snake. Nine months later, Octavian was born, and Atia was left with an indelible snake mark on her stomach.
Ephesus was not Antony’s first brush with divinity. He came from an impoverished junior branch of the Antonius family, and Plutarch tells us that his father, Antonius Creticus, was ‘a man of no great repute in public life, nor illustrious, but kindly and honest and generous’. Both his father and his stepfather were careless with money and when Creticus died he left such steep debts that his son refused to inherit his estate. Perhaps to compensate for this undistinguished background, Antony claimed descent from Anton, one of the sons of Heracles. This gave him a distant kinship with the Ptolemies, who also claimed Heracles as an ancestor through Arsinoë, mother of Ptolemy I, and who were occasionally depicted wearing his trademark lion-skin headdress. Antony did not don a skin, but he did, or so Plutarch claims, emulate his hero in public by wearing a tunic hitched up to his thigh, a heavy cloak and a large sword: ‘a shapely beard, a broad forehead, and an aquiline nose were thought to show the virile qualities peculiar to the portraits and statues of Heracles’. In citing Heracles as an ancestor, Antony was clearly thinking of his hero’s bravery and exceptional strength, and maybe even of his multiple fruitful relationships with women. Later, under the influence of Octavian’s propaganda, others would draw a crueller comparison. At one stage in his colourful career Heracles had been sold into slavery. He became the property of Omphale, the forceful queen of Lydia, who dressed him in women’s clothing and forced him to spin and weave at her command. When Omphale donned his discarded lion-skin garment, Heracles’s humiliation was complete. Yet Heracles the slave and Omphale the mistress were known to be lovers, and Omphale bore Heracles’s children. The parallels between the weak Antony and the unnaturally forceful Cleopatra were obvious.
The tryphe of the Hellenistic courts was far more to Antony’s taste than the puritanism of Rome, and he found much to appreciate in the cult of Dionysos, with its ecstatic rituals, and its heavy consumption of wine. Antony had enjoyed a well-documented dissolute youth when, heavily influenced by his friends, he indulged in binge drinking, promiscuous sex and immoderate expenditure that left him heavily in debt. A distinguished military career and a growing reputation as a politician and orator followed, but the tendency to overindulge was never quite suppressed. Military life brought out the best in him: Antony was a brave and able soldier, a generous man well regarded by his troops. But the dull routine of civilian life brought out the worst. Plutarch gives a report of his behaviour when, with Julius Caesar busy in Egypt, he was left unsupervised to maintain order and promote Caesar’s cause in Rome:
[Men of worth and uprightness] loathed his ill-timed drunkenness, his heavy expenditures, his debauches with women, his spending the days in sleep or in wandering about with crazed and aching head, the nights in revelry or at shows, or in attendance at the nuptial feasts of mimes and jesters. We are told, at any rate, that he once feasted at the nuptials of Hippias the mime, drank all night, and then, early in the morning, when the people summoned him to the forum, came before them still surfeited with food and vomited into his toga, which one of his friends held at his service. Sergius the mime also was one of those who had the greatest influence with him, and Cytheris, a woman from the same school of acting, a great favourite, whom he took about with him in a litter on his visits to the cities, and her litter was followed by as many attendants as that of his mother.7
Plutarch is, of course, deliberately painting a portrait of a weak man made weaker by over-indulgence; he is preparing us for Antony’s first encounter with Cleopatra. The consistent emphasis on Antony’s drinking links him firmly in the Roman reader’s mind with disreputable Dionysiac rituals, while repeated references to his sex life invite the manly reader to imagine not a stud, but a man who is somehow softened by his constant association with women. Plutarch was by no means the only classical writer to consider eros, or sexual desire, a form of madness. Heterosexual sex was, in theory at least, an unclean act forced on men by women and nature: an activity to be endured in the dark rather than enjoyed in the daylight.8
Antony was a much-married man. His first wife, Fadia, was the daughter of a freedman. We know little about this most unsuitable union, but it seems that Fadia’s father, Quintus Fadius Gallus, had been able to provide a dowry large enough to tempt a chronically impoverished young aristocrat. Fadia soon disappeared, and it is assumed that she and her children, with their embarrassing origins, died young. Antony’s next and far more suitable wife was his first cousin Antonia. She bore him a daughter, also named Antonia, and then was divorced in 47 on the grounds of adultery with the notorious rake Dolabella. Antony undoubtedly allowed himself a great deal of sexual licence while expecting his long-suffering wife to remain chaste, but the speed with which he subsequently remarried suggests that Antonia, like Fadia before her, was simply discarded when the chance of a better wife came along. In 47/6 Antony married Fulvia, widow of the murdered popular hero Publius Clodius. This was an extremely advantageous match. Fulvia was beautiful, intelligent and capable, and her role as the mother of Clodius’s young children gave her great political standing.9Furthermore, she was immensely wealthy and Antony was in desperate need of funds, as Caesar was now forcing him to pay for Pompey’s estate, which he had ‘bought’ and squandered. Fulvia bore Antony two sons, Marcus Antonius (Antyllus) and Julius Antonius, and did much to protect his interests while he was campaigning away from Rome:
She was a woman who took no thought for spinning wool or housekeeping, nor would she deign to bear sway over a man of private station, but she wished to rule a ruler and command a commander. Therefore Cleopatra was indebted to Fulvia for teaching Antony to endure a woman’s sway, since she took him over quite tamed, and schooled at the outset to obey women.10
Now, with Fulvia fully occupied in Rome, Antony was travelling with the well-known courtesan Volumnia Cytheris. This did not prevent him from casting his eye over other women. In the summer of 41 he was rumoured to have had an affair with the beautiful Glaphyra, the daughter-in-law of Archelaos, the twice-married husband of Berenice IV, and to have fathered her son Archelaos.
Antony, now stationed in the Cilician city of Tarsus (in the south of modern Turkey), was busy raising funds, rewarding those who had been loyal to the triumvirate and punishing those who had not by demanding ten years’ back-tax to be paid within two years. Cleopatra can hardly have been surprised when first a series of letters, then an emissary, Quintus Dellius, arrived in Alexandria to summon her to Tarsus. She was to answer the charge that she and her strategos Serapion had aided the traitor Cassius. Whatever the truth of the matter, this would be a hard charge to disprove and Antony, his eyes firmly fixed on Egypt’s wealth, would need to be persuaded of her innocence. As always, Cleopatra hesitated, considering her options. It would be surprising if she had not already met Antony during her visit(s) to Rome. She may even have met him much earlier: Appian, for one, believed that Antony had fallen in love with the teenage Cleopatra while campaigning in Egypt with Gabinius.11 Her personal knowledge of Antony the man allowed Cleopatra to settle on a tactic that would give her genius for showmanship full rein. If Antony was Dionysos, she would greet him as Isis, consort of Dionysos-Osiris. Cleopatra sailed along the Cydnus River to enter Tarsus in a gilded ship fitted with silver oars and a splendid purple silk sail. Flutes, pipes and lutes played on deck, and powerful incense perfumed the air. Cleopatra herself reclined beneath a gold-spangled canopy dressed in the robes of Isis (a colourful dress covered by a black mantle, we must assume), attended by beautiful small boys dressed as Cupids. The people of Tarsus flocked to the harbour to watch this spectacular arrival, leaving Antony alone and disconcerted in the marketplace. When he sent the queen an invitation to dine that night she declined, declaring that she would rather he ate as her guest. She entertained him with a banquet so splendid that the usually verbose Plutarch simply refuses to attempt a description, and they sat together that evening on the deck of her boat amidst a multitude of twinkling artificial lights.
Plutarch is quite clear that Cleopatra deliberately set out to seduce Antony and that he, more naïve than Caesar, almost immediately succumbed to her practised charms:
… Caesar and Pompey [Gnaius Pompeius] had known her when she was still a girl and inexperienced in affairs, but she was going to visit Antony at the very time when women have the most brilliant beauty and are at the acme of intellectual power. Therefore she provided herself with many gifts, much money, and such ornaments as high position and prosperous kingdom made it natural for her to take; but she went putting her greatest confidence in herself, and in the charms and sorceries of her own person.12
Again, he sets the scene for what is to come by telling us that, while Cleopatra deliberately schemed to captivate the simple Antony, Antony’s decision to ally himself with Cleopatra was a decision taken with the heart, not the head. Dio agrees that the weak Antony is easily corrupted by power, by Cleopatra and by the luxury with which she surrounds herself:
It is indeed true that he had earnestly devoted himself to his duties so long as he had been in a subordinate station and had been aiming at the highest prizes, but now that he had got into power, he no longer paid strict attention to any of these things, but joined Cleopatra and the Egyptians in general in their life of luxurious ease until he was entirely demoralized.13
It is important to see through this propaganda and to remember that Antony was not only a bluff, naïve, simple fellow; he was also an extremely ambitious and capable man.
Athenaeus tells the story of that first evening together.14 In a room decorated with purple and gold wall hangings Cleopatra served delicious food on golden plates inlaid with precious stones; she ended the banquet by presenting all her golden plates to Antony. The next night’s banquet was even more splendid and Antony went home with yet more golden tableware, while his invited guests were allowed to keep their couches and their goblets. Banquets were times when luxury could come dangerously close to debauchery. The connection between eating, drinking and sex was an obvious one, and the dynastic Egyptians had chosen to decorate their tombs, places of rebirth, with images of perpetual banquets where men and women sat before tables groaning with produce. Cleopatra, it is suggested, habitually used the banquet as a means of seduction. She feasted with Caesar, a man so remarkably abstemious that he legislated against personal luxury, lavish food, extravagant clothing and pearls. And now she feasted with Antony, a notoriously weak and lazy man. Indeed, if we take the accounts of the classical writers at face value, it seems that Cleopatra and Antony did nothing other than eat, drink and fornicate. The sheer amount of food consumed, and wasted, at Cleopatra’s court is enough to make a restrained man, in this case Plutarch, shudder:
Philotas, the physician of Amphissa, used to tell my grandfather, Lamprias, that he was in Alexandria at the time, studying his profession, and that having got well acquainted with one of the royal cooks, he was easily persuaded by him (young man that he was) to take a view of the extravagant preparations for a royal supper. Accordingly, he was introduced into the kitchen, and when he saw all the other provisions in great abundance, and eight wild boars a-roasting, he expressed his amazement at what must be the number of guests. But the cook burst out laughing and said: ‘The guests are not many, only about twelve; but everything that is set before them must be at perfection, and this an instant of time reduces. For it might happen that Antony would ask for supper immediately, and after a little while, perhaps, would postpone it and call for a cup of wine, or engage in conversation with someone. Wherefore, he said, ‘not one, but many suppers are arranged; for the precise time is hard to hit.’15
Octavian, a moral, upright man who famously wore homespun clothes made (or so he fondly imagined) by his wife and daughter, could not be seduced either by Cleopatra or by her food. In his one interview with her he refused to meet the queen’s eye and, after her death, he melted down all the gold plates in the Alexandria palace.
Pliny the Elder tells the story of Cleopatra’s earrings, inherited from ‘oriental kings’ and made from the largest pearls ever discovered.16 One day, bored and irritated by the quality of the food served at Antony’s table, Cleopatra wagered that she could serve him a banquet worth ten million sesterces (this at a time when the annual pay for a legionary soldier was a mere 900 sesterces). The next evening she offered Antony the choicest of foods. Then, as dessert, she called for a cup of sour wine, removed a pearl earring, dropped the pearl in the wine and, as it dissolved, drank. With a few swallows she had consumed her banquet. This is of course, as many observers have pointed out, an unlikely if not totally impossible tale. Pearls, being almost 90 per cent calcium carbonate, will dissolve in an acid solution; they will dissolve much faster if ground to a powder by a pestle and mortar first. Egyptian vinegar was famed for its strength. If Cleopatra’s sour wine (vinum acer, or vinegar) was strong enough, and if she allowed enough time – experiment would suggest more than twenty hours for a large whole pearl in cold vinegar – the pearl would indeed dissolve, neutralising the acid. Cleopatra, who acquired a considerable posthumous reputation as an alchemist, may well have known this. Whether the resulting mixture would have been palatable, or indeed drinkable, is another matter. Some historians have suggested that Cleopatra’s pearl-wine mixture may have been considered an aphrodisiac. More prosaically, Ullman’s experiments indicate that the pearl-wine mixture, correctly made, may have acted as an antacid. However, to assume that Cleopatra was actually manufacturing her own post-banquet pick-me-up is probably an assumption too far.17
What happened to the other earring? Tradition holds that Antony’s friend Lucius Munatius Plancus prevented Cleopatra from dissolving it and, after the queen’s death, it was cut in two and placed in the ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome. As both Venus and the pearl came from the sea, and both symbolised love, this was an entirely appropriate donation.
Two other Roman pearl-drinking stories exist. Both Horace and Pliny tell the tale of the spendthrift son of the actor Aesopus who drank a pearl taken from the ear of the wealthy lady Metella. Metella’s pearl was, however, smaller than Cleopatra’s, and was valued at just a million sesterces. Suetonius tells us that Caligula, a notorious eccentric, drank pearls dissolved in vinegar; he also, apparently, bathed in perfume and fed his guests on bread and meat made of gold. These multiple tales do not, of course, mean that Cleopatra’s story must be immediately dismissed as an urban myth. Cleopatra may have inspired, or been inspired by, the son of Aesopus, while Caligula may have been inspired by Cleopatra. Nor does the need to boil, crush or steep the pearl in acid necessarily render the story invalid. Cleopatra, acknowledged mistress of the public spectacle, could have stage-managed her act and Antony, flushed with wine and love, is unlikely to have noticed. It is quite obvious that Cleopatra could simply have swallowed the pearl whole, although swallowing, and presumably retrieving the pearl later, would have turned the grandest of gestures into a cheap trick. We know that Cleopatra did wear pearls, as her later coins show her wearing either a lengthy rope of pearls wrapped twice around her neck or, less likely, a shorter pearl necklace and a pearl-embroidered dress. Pearls had no place in traditional Egyptian jewellery, which employed brightly coloured semiprecious stones set in gold, but a Roman fashion for ostentatious pearl-wearing had started in 61, when, following his victory over Mithridates, Pompey commissioned his own portrait to be rendered in pearls. Suetonius tells us that Julius Caesar invaded Britain to collect freshwater pearls, and that back in Rome, as part of an enforced austerity drive, he attempted to restrict the wearing of pearls to those ‘of a designated position and age’.18 Pliny, who clearly disapproved of pearls and all they stood for, records the tale of Lollia Paulina who wore pearl and emerald jewellery worth forty million sesterces and carried the receipts at all times to impress strangers!
On balance, it seems unlikely that the world’s most expensive banquet was consumed in quite the way that Pliny describes. This does not matter overmuch; it is what we have come to expect from Cleopatra tales. What does matter is that Pliny apparently believed the tale and used it to spread the propaganda of a Cleopatra who was cunning, recklessly extravagant, and selfish (she alone consumes the ‘banquet’): unnatural and worrying traits for a Roman man to encounter in any woman. At the same time, her easy outwitting of Antony does not bode well for his future. A subsequent story, also told by Pliny, sees Cleopatra poisoning the flowers in her crown before challenging Antony, who is refusing to eat or drink anything that has not been tasted by a slave, to drink a flower-wine mixture. This story has a more sinister ending: Cleopatra stops the trusting Antony from drinking her poisoned flowers and ‘she ordered a prisoner who had been led in to drink it and he promptly died’.19 Again, Cleopatra has outwitted the innocent Antony with consummate ease.
Cleopatra feasted with Antony, but she bargained with him too. She would gladly agree to the execution of the traitor Serapion who, having fled Cyprus, had taken refuge in the Phoenician city of Tyre. She would also part-finance Antony’s Parthian campaign. But he, in return, must agree to protect her crown and her land. This protection included the removal of the sister who posed a constant threat to Cleopatra and Caesarion and who, as Cleopatra might well have argued, had almost certainly sided with Serapion and Cassius. Dragged from her sanctuary, Arsinoë was murdered on Antony’s order, then buried in Ephesus, possibly in the imposing city-centre tomb, today known as the Octagon, which has yielded the remains of an anonymous woman in her twenties. At the same time Antony disposed of a troublesome young man who was claiming to be the long-lost, undrowned Ptolemy XIII.
Cleopatra returned to Egypt and Antony followed a month later. He was to spend the winter of 41/40 relaxing in Alexandria and, perhaps, like Caesar before him, considering the possibility of generating revenue from Egypt. In Alexandria he found that he enjoyed all the popularity that Caesar had lacked. The Alexandrians had not forgotten how Antony had allowed Archelaos an honourable burial, or how he had used his influence to dissuade Auletes from massacring innocent citizens, and they were impressed by his current demeanour. While Caesar had forced himself on Alexandria with all the subtlety of a miniature Roman invasion, Antony appeared as a private individual, happy to abandon his Roman toga for a Greek chlamys, a military-style cloak, pinned on one shoulder, which could be worn either alone or over other garments. If the classical authors are to be believed, Cleopatra and Antony enjoyed a carefree, almost childish winter. Together they formed a drinking society, ‘The Inimitable Livers’ (amimetobioi, corrupted by a wag named ‘Parasite’, on an Alexandrian statue base, to ‘The Inimitable Lovers’), which met every night to drink, feast, dice, hunt and, a particular favourite, wander the streets of Alexandria in disguise, playing tricks on the hapless citizens. Plutarch believed that the new society was simply an excuse for Cleopatra to spend all her time with Antony: she could not bear, or could not risk, letting him out of her sight even for an evening. An alternative interpretation is that the Inimitable Livers was a group of Dionysiac initiates who met regularly, not for random debauchery but to perform sacred religious rites that required the consumption of alcohol. Certainly Cleopatra’s amethyst ring, which reportedly bore the inscription methe (drunkenness), can be accepted as referring to mystical rather than actual inebriation, as the amethyst itself was associated with temperance. Velleius gives a flavour of the long Alexandrian evenings spent carousing when he tells how Plancus was persuaded to perform at one of Cleopatra’s banquets: with his naked body painted blue, a crown of reeds on his head and a fish’s tail swinging behind, Plancus played the part of the sea god Glaucus.20
Plutarch tells us that already, by their second evening together, Cleopatra had ‘recognised in the jests of Antony much of the soldier and the common man, and adopted this manner also towards him, without restraint now, and boldly’. Antony was a famous joker. He jested with his men, and roared with laughter when they in turn played tricks on him. He had even attempted to joke with the serious Fulvia, but she had proved less than receptive to his humour:
Antony tried, by sportive ways and youthful sallies, to make even Fulvia more light-hearted. For instance, when many were going out to meet Caesar after his victory in Spain, Antony himself went forth. Then, on a sudden, a report burst upon Italy that Caesar was dead and his enemies advancing upon the country, and Antony turned back to Rome. He took the dress of a slave and came by night to his house, and on saying that he was the bearer of a letter to Fulvia from Antony, was admitted to her presence, his face all muffled. Then Fulvia, in great distress, before taking the letter, asked whether Antony was still alive; and he, after handing her the letter without a word, as she began to open and read it, threw his arms about her and kissed her.21
The Ptolemies, too, were fond of a good joke. Athenaeus tells of a trick played by Ptolemy II on Sosibios.22 Ptolemy had instructed his treasurers that when Sosibios asked for his salary, he was to be told that it had already been paid. This they did and Sosibios brought his complaint of underpayment before the king. Ptolemy looked at the records and slowly read out the names of those who had definitely been paid: Soter, Sosigenes, Bion and Apollonos. As he explained to Sosibios, by taking elements from each name –SOter, soSIgenes, Blon, ApollonOS – he could prove that Sosibios had indeed received his salary. Presumably the unpaid Sosibios was duty-bound to find this amusing. Cleopatra’s own sense of humour – aimed directly at the boyish Antony – had an equally unsophisticated twist:
He [Antony] was fishing once, and had bad luck, and was vexed at it because Cleopatra was there to see. He therefore ordered his fishermen to dive down and secretly fasten to his hook some fish that had been previously caught, and pulled up two or three of them. But the Egyptian saw through the trick, and pretending to admire her lover’s skill, told her friends about it, and invited them to be spectators of it the following day. So great numbers of them got into the fishing boats, and when Antony had let down his line, she ordered one of her own attendants to get the start of him by swimming onto his hook and fastening on it a salted Pontic herring. Antony thought he had caught something, and pulled it up, whereupon there was great laughter, as was natural, and Cleopatra said: ‘Commander, hand over your fishing-rod to the fishermen of Pharos and Canopus; your sport is the hunting of cities, realms, and continents.’23
In 40, Cleopatra gave birth to twins whom she named Alexander and Cleopatra. Antony had already left Alexandria. He would not make any effort to see either Cleopatra or his Egyptian children for three and a half years, although it seems that he did employ spies to keep him up to date with events in Egypt. This lengthy split is far from the behaviour of a lovesick swain and suggests that Antony may have considered the months spent with Cleopatra as little more than a brief holiday away from his ordinary life. Cleopatra, who had used Antony to help her fulfil her duty to produce more children, may well have felt the same way.
In late February or early March 40, the Parthians launched a dual attack on the Roman territories of Syria and Asia Minor. Antony rushed from Alexandria to Tyre, where he received the devastating news that many of the Roman client kings had defected to the cause of the Parthians. The still-loyal Herod of Judaea had been forced to flee to Egypt and, arriving in Pelusium, had been escorted by boat to Alexandria. Here he turned down Cleopatra’s offer of troops and borrowed a ship to travel to Rhodes, from where he made his way to Rome.
Worse was to come. While Antony had been focusing his attention on his eastern territories and, perhaps, on Cleopatra, Octavian had achieved what must have seemed an impossibility. He had convinced his troops that he, not Antony, was the real hero of Philippi and was slowly but surely eroding Antony’s support in Rome. Lucius Antonius, consul in 41, had been doing all he could to protect his older brother’s interests, and had worked with the energetic Fulvia to discredit Octavian and subvert his supporters. Fulvia and Lucius had raised their own army, with Fulvia personally forming two legions from her husband’s veterans, and had declared war on Octavian. They had a great deal of popular support – country dwellers were angry that Octavian had displaced them to settle 100,000 of his veterans on their land – but without Antony’s active help they were never going to succeed and Antony, many hundreds of miles away in Alexandria, was unable or unwilling to intervene. After some negotiations, and some desultory fighting, Lucius had found himself besieged in the hill town of Perusia (Perugia), where conditions soon became so desperate that the slaves, denied any part of the heavily rationed food supplies, were forced to eat grass and leaves. Twenty miles from Perusia, the smoke from their fires clearly visible to Lucius, camped troops loyal to Antony; their leaders, however, refused to take any action against Octavian without a direct order from Antony, and Antony remained silent. The slingshots that Octavian’s troops now fired over the town walls were inscribed with demoralising obscene graffiti:
I’m aiming for Fulvia’s cunt!
Baldy Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, open your arses!24
In late February 40, the starving Lucius surrendered. Octavian executed the council of Perusia (permitting just one man, who had previously made a public condemnation of Caesar’s assassins, to live) and allowed his troops to sack the city, but the relieved soldiers were allowed to go free, as was Lucius. Meanwhile, Fulvia had already fled Italy. Antony met his wife in Athens, where a bitter quarrel ended with Antony abandoning the seriously ill Fulvia. She died soon after their meeting, allowing Antony, who must have known that Fulvia had always acted in his best interests, to shift responsibility for the entire débâcle on to his late wife.
Fulvia’s death left Antony free to marry Cleopatra, but marriage to a foreigner, no matter how pro-Roman, was not necessarily the most sensible move at this most sensitive of times. In early October 40 the Treaty of Brundisium (Brindisi) saw the reorganisation of the triumvirate. Antony was required to prove his loyalty to Octavian by relinquishing his control of Gaul and by making a diplomatic marriage with his recently widowed half-sister Octavia. Their wedding was celebrated just weeks after the birth of Antony’s Egyptian twins. Octavia, a good and dutiful Roman wife, was to give Antony two daughters, Antonia Maior (future grandmother of the emperor Nero) and Antonia Minor (future grandmother of the emperor Claudius). Early in 38 the couple settled in Athens, where Antony was again hailed as the New Dionysos, consort of the goddess Athena Polias, while the modest Octavia became his earthly consort, the ‘Divine Benefactress’. As Antony relaxed into the luxurious lifestyle of an eastern monarch, his soldiers, under thecommand of Publius Ventidius, began the first, successful stage of his Parthian campaign. Antony himself travelled eastwards in 38 and captured the city of Samosata (Samsat) on the Euphrates.
Silver tetradrachm of Mark Antony: one of many issues showing Antony on one face and Cleopatra on the other, possibly produced at Antioch.
From 40 to 30, Cleopatra ruled an increasingly prosperous Egypt. It is in this last decade of her reign that we can catch a fleeting glimpse of some of the humdrum, day-to-day, unremarkable work that must have filled Cleopatra’s hours. A papyrus decree issued on 23 February 33, for example, deals with the privileges to be granted to the family of Antony’s great friend Publius Candidus [Crassus]. The family is to be allowed to export grain and import wine tax-free, and lands and servants are also to be exempt. On the bottom of the document is the single Greek word ginestho, ‘let it be so’, written in what some but by no means all experts believe might be Cleopatra’s own handwriting.25 This papyrus, once stored in the Alexandrian archives, was later recycled into a cartonnage mummy case and buried with a Roman mummy. The mummy case was recovered in the Faiyum cemetery of Abusir el-Melek in 1903–5 and was eventually dismantled, revealing the hidden document. Theoretically, anyone in Ptolemaic Egypt was free to petition the king or queen, and archaeologists have recovered a whole archive of relatively trivial correspondence from the Memphite Serapeum, dated between 200 and 150 and addressed to ‘King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra’. We have already seen, in Chapter 1 (pages 22–3), Ctesicles’ petition about his wayward daughter addressed directly to Ptolemy III; this may be compared with a petition written c. 220 ‘to King Ptolemy’ by Philista, a lady who has been scalded by a careless Egyptian bath attendant. In practice, it seems unlikely that the monarch would have dealt personally with such matters, and we know that Philista’s complaint was actually reviewed by the strategos Diophanes.26
In the spring/summer of 37 Antony, Octavia and Octavian met at Tarentum (Taranto), where an agreement was reached to renew the triumvirate for a further five years. In addition, Antony agreed to supply Octavian with two squadrons (120 warships) that he could use against Sextus, whose pirate ships were causing an intolerable disruption to trade. Octavian, in return, was to provide Antony with four legions (20,000 men) that he could use against the Parthians. To seal the agreement, Antony’s son by Fulvia, the nine-year-old Marcus Antonius (Antyllus), was betrothed to Octavian’s two-year-old daughter, Julia. Satisfied, Antony and Octavia set sail together for Corfu. Here they parted, and Antony sent the pregnant Octavia to live under her brother’s protection in Rome.
Antony had handed over his 120 ships, but had not received the promised troops. Belatedly, he realised that he could not rely on Octavian. He travelled to Antioch, then summoned his military ally and financial backer Cleopatra. Or, as Plutarch puts it:
… the dire evil which had been slumbering for a long time, namely, his passion for Cleopatra, which men thought had been charmed away and lulled to rest by better considerations, blazed up again with renewed power as he drew near to Syria. And finally, like the stubborn and unmanageable beast of the soul, of which Plato speaks, he spurned away all saving and noble counsels and sent Fonteius Capito to bring Cleopatra to Syria.27
Cleopatra spent the winter of 37/6 in Antioch, locked in negotiations with Antony. Egypt had enjoyed four years of stability and growing prosperity and, personal relationships aside, she was in a far stronger bargaining position than she had been in Tarsus. She could provide the fleet and provisions that Antony needed, but in exchange she asked for the return of the lost eastern empire of Ptolemy II Philadelphos. Antony agreed: not necessarily because he had been driven mad by his infatuation with Cleopatra, but because he needed Cleopatra’s help and, in his view, the return of the lands was fully in line with Roman policy, which was happy to allow a certain amount of autonomous government by tried and trusted client monarchs. Octavian’s reaction, and the propaganda that he was later able to make out of Antony’s donation of whole provinces to Cleopatra without consulting the Senate, suggest that not everyone agreed.
Almost overnight, Cleopatra was given control of Cyprus, Crete, Cyrenaica (Libya), large parts of Coele-Syria, Phoenecia, Cilicia and Nabataea. The only land missing was Judaea, which had recently been declared the property of the newly installed king Herod. Even without Judaea, Cleopatra was the wealthiest monarch in the world, and she was able to increase her wealth further by striking deals with the Jews and the Nabataeans for the lease of land and the right to extract bitumen from the shore of the Dead Sea. Herod even agreed to collect taxes on her behalf.
Antony now acknowledged the twins, who went through a naming or renaming ceremony to become Alexander Helios (sun) and Cleopatra Selene (moon):
… he heightened the scandal by acknowledging his two children by her, and called one Alexander and the other Cleopatra, with the surname for the first of Sun, and for the other of Moon. However, since he was an adept at putting a good face upon shameful deeds, he used to say that the greatness of the Roman empire was made manifest, not by what the Romans received, but by what they bestowed; and that noble families were extended by the successive begettings of many kings. In this way, at any rate, he said, his own progenitor was begotten by Heracles, who did not confine his succession to a single womb, nor stand in awe of laws like Solon’s for the regulation of conception, but gave free course to nature, and left behind him the beginnings and foundations of many families.28
Cleopatra and Selene were two well-established Ptolemaic names and, as the moon was associated with Isis in her role as Queen of Heaven, both were highly suitable for Cleopatra’s daughter. Alexander was also a Ptolemaic name, one which carried memories of Alexander the Great; while Helios, the sun, was not only the traditional twin of the moon, it was a name that associated the young Alexander with the Egyptian solar cults, both traditional (the cult of Re and the cult of Horus, son of Isis and Osiris/Dionysos) and new (the cult of Serapis). Outside Egypt Helios was linked with Apollo, Octavian’s own divine inspiration.
Once again Cleopatra and Antony were lovers. Whether this was a part of the bargain, or whether there was genuine passion on both sides, is impossible to determine. The following year, in late summer 36, Cleopatra was to bear a second son, Ptolemy Philadelphos, whom she named, following her reacquisition of the Ptolemaic empire, after the illustrious Ptolemy II. Returning from Antioch in triumph, Cleopatra proclaimed a new era. The year from 1 September 37 to 31 August 36 was now to be known as ‘Year 16 that is Year 1’ and this double dating system would continue until ‘Year 22 that is Year 7’, the year of Cleopatra’s death. The glorious new age was accompanied by new titles. Phoenician coins now show an obverse portrait of Basilissa Cleopatra Thea Neotera (The Younger Queen Cleopatra Thea, or, Queen Cleopatra the Younger Goddess), with a reverse portrait of Antony. Cleopatra Thea is an obvious reference to our Cleopatra’s great-great-aunt Cleopatra Thea, queen of Syria. In 37 a contract from Heracleopolis, Egypt, makes reference to Thea Neotera Philopator kai Philopatris (the Father-Loving and Homeland-Loving Younger Goddess).29Caesarion’s title, the ‘father-Loving and Mother-Loving God’ remains unchanged.
In May 36, Antony resumed his Parthian campaign, starting with a long and tiring march northwards through Syria, then eastwards through Armenia. The campaign began well but quickly turned into a humiliating disaster, with the loss of over 30,000 men – approximately two-fifths of his army. Antony, left with just twenty-five legions under his command, was forced to make a weary winter retreat to Syria. Once again Cleopatra was summoned from Egypt, and once again she hesitated, perhaps because she had just given birth, or because she needed time to collect supplies, or because she needed time to consider her position. For Antony’s Parthian humiliation had coincided with Octavian’s defeat of Sextus, and Octavian had further strengthened his position by forcing Lepidus into retirement and seizing his remaining territories. The balance of power had shifted and Octavian was beginning to pose a serious challenge to Antony’s authority. In January 35, Cleopatra met Mark Antony in the obscure Phoenician port of Leuce Come (White Village). She brought supplies of warm clothing and food, but not enough money to pay the troops. A few weeks later both Antony and Cleopatra retired to Alexandria.
Octavia, meanwhile, had been living the virtuous life of a true Roman matron, caring for her own and Antony’s various children, and dividing her time between Athens and Rome. In the spring of 35 she left Rome for Greece on the first leg of a journey, planned by her brother, to bring 2,000 troops (not the 20,000 promised) and seventy ships from Octavian to Antony, plus a contribution of money, cattle and gifts from her own purse. Disconcerted, Antony ordered Octavia to stay in Rome (according to Dio) or Athens (Plutarch), but to send the soldiers on. Plutarch tells us that this very public rejection of Octavia was Cleopatra’s fault; that she had used all her feminine wiles to persuade Antony not to receive his wife:
Cleopatra perceived that Octavia was coming into a contest at close quarters with her, and feared lest, if she added to the dignity of her character and the power of Caesar her pleasurable society and her assiduous attentions to Antony, she would become invincible and get complete control over her husband. She therefore pretended to be passionately in love with Antony herself, and reduced her body by slender diet; she put on a look of rapture when Antony drew near, and one of faintness and melancholy when he went away. She would contrive to be often seen in tears, and then would quickly wipe the tears away and try to hide them, as if she would not have Antony notice them. And she practised these arts while Antony was intending to go up from Syria to join the Mede [attack the Parthians]. Her flatterers, too, were industrious in her behalf, and used to revile Antony as hard-hearted and unfeeling, and as the destroyer of a mistress who was devoted to him and him alone. For Octavia, they said, had married him as a matter of public policy and for the sake of her brother, and enjoyed the name of wedded wife; but Cleopatra, who was queen of so many people, was called Antony’s beloved, and she did not shun this name nor disdain it, as long as she could see him and live with him; but if she were driven away from him she would not survive it …30
Plutarch’s explanation is most unlikely, as is Dio’s claim that Cleopatra used witchcraft to turn Antony against Octavia. It is more reasonable to assume that, with his relationship with Octavian fast breaking down, Antony’s political marriage had become an irrelevance. He had decided that the way ahead lay with Cleopatra. This was not the first time that Antony had discarded a no longer useful wife. But his rejection of the virtuous Octavia in favour of an illicit alliance with a foreigner did not go down well in Rome, where Octavia, still considering herself married, continued to look after Antony’s children in his house. Octavia was as strong in her own way as Fulvia had been. As a conspicuously wronged wife, she had an important role to play in her brother’s propaganda and, as Antony’s reputation plummeted to an all-time low, Octavia’s grew from strength to strength. In 33 Octavian, happy to make political capital out of his virtuous sister, gave her sacrosanctitas (sacrosanctity: the right to be protected), the highest honour that could be awarded to a married Roman woman. For the time being at least, she eclipsed her sister-in-law Livia as Rome’s most prominent woman.
Cleopatra and Antony spent the winter of 35/4 in Alexandria. The following spring Cleopatra travelled with Antony as far as the Euphrates, then made a lengthy royal progress home through her new territories, stopping at Apamea on the Orontes, Emesa, Damascus and Jerusalem, where she again met Herod and, according to Josephus, made an unsuccessful attempt to seduce him:
When she was there, and was very often with Herod, she endeavoured to have criminal conversation with the king; nor did she affect secrecy in the indulgence of such sort of pleasures; and perhaps she had in some measure a passion of love to him; or rather, what is most probable, she laid a treacherous snare for him, by aiming to obtain such adulterous conversation from him: however, upon the whole, she seemed overcome with love to him. Now Herod had a great while borne no good-will to Cleopatra, as knowing that she was a woman irksome to all; and at that time he thought her particularly worthy of his hatred, if this attempt proceeded out of lust; he had also thought of preventing her intrigues, by putting her to death, if such were her endeavours. However, he refused to comply with her proposals, and called a counsel of his friends to consult with them whether he should not kill her, now he had her in his power; for that he should thereby deliver all those from a multitude of evils to whom she was already become irksome, and was expected to be still so for the time to come; and that this very thing would be much for the advantage of Antony himself, since she would certainly not be faithful to him …31
No other historian tells this tale, which is, to say the least, highly unlikely. In fact Cleopatra and Herod had much in common and would have done well to set aside their territorial dispute and join forces. However, Cleopatra’s blatant interference in Jewish politics, and her friendship with his forceful mother-in-law Alexandra, did not endear her to Herod. In 36 Alexandra had written to Cleopatra, asking her to influence Herod’s choice of high priest. Cleopatra had referred the matter to Antony, and Alexandra’s seventeen-year-old son, Aristobulus, had been duly given the position. When Aristobulus was (most predictably) murdered within a year of his appointment, Alexandra again wrote to Cleopatra asking her to help avenge her son’s murder. Cleopatra again referred the matter to Antony, and Herod was summoned to Rome to account for his deeds. Returning home, Herod had resolved his domestic problems by having the more troublesome members of his family either jailed or killed.
In 34 Antony captured King Artavasdes of Armenia, along with most of his family and his treasure. This was hardly the major eastern victory that he had anticipated. Nevertheless, that autumn Antony re-entered Alexandria dressed in the golden robe of Dionysos, crowned with ivy leaves and carrying a thyrsos wand. Before his chariot walked Artavasdes, his wife and two sons, festooned with either silver or golden chains. Cleopatra received Antony sitting on a golden throne on a silver dais before the temple of Serapis, but his captives refused to pay homage to her. Dio, rather chillingly, tells us:
the barbarians addressed no supplications to her, nor made obeisance to her, though much coercion was brought to bear upon them and many hopes were held out to them to win their compliance, but they merely addressed her by name; this gave them a reputation for high spirit, but they were subjected to much ill-treatment on account of it.32
Octavian, watching from Rome, was not amused. Antony’s Dionysiac celebration too closely resembled a triumph, a strictly Roman sacred celebration. Antony, it seemed, considered Alexandria a capital to rival Rome.
Soon after Antony’s triumphal return came the elaborate public celebration known today as the ‘Donations of Alexandria’. The ceremony was held in the packed gymnasium, where the royal couple appeared before their people on a silver dais. Cleopatra, splendid in the robes of the New Isis, sat on a golden throne, while Antony sat on a silver throne beside her. The royal children were given lesser thrones slightly beneath their parents. Antony delivered a lengthy speech, ostensibly in honour of Julius Caesar, during which he outlined ambitious plans for his eastern lands. Cleopatra was officially recognised as the ‘Queen of Kings and her Sons who are Kings’. Her coruler Caesarion, now formally acknowledged by Antony as the legitimate son of Caesar, took his rightful place as pharaoh of Egypt, ‘King of Kings’, yet was still expected to sit below his mother and stepfather. The younger children had been dressed in the national clothing of the rulers of Persia (Alexander Helios), Cyrenaica (Cleopatra Selene) and Macedonia (Ptolemy Philadelphos). The message was again clear and unsubtle. Cleopatra and Caesarion were the joint rulers of Egypt and the associated territories of Cyprus, Libya and Coele-Syria. In addition, Caesarion was the true heir to Rome and her western territories. Alexander Helios was destined, somewhat optimistically, given that Egypt did not yet own the bulk of these lands, to rule all territories to the east of the Euphrates, including Armenia and Parthia. Cleopatra Selene was to rule Cyrenaica and Crete, while Ptolemy Philadelphos was given parts of Syria and Cilicia, plus all Roman lands to the west of the Euphrates. The three young children would acknowledge allegiance to Cleopatra and Caesarion, while Antony, as head of the royal family, would effectively rule the world. Nothing could have been calculated to displease Octavian more. For the first time, he started to criticise Antony in pubic.
Octavian and Antony were still in correspondence. A private letter from Antony to Octavian survives in Suetonius:
What has come over you? Do you object to me sleeping with Cleopatra? But we are married; and it is not even as if this is anything new – the affair started nine years ago. And what about you? Are you faithful to [Livia] Drusilla? My congratulations if, when this letter arrives, you have not been to bed with Tertulia, or Terentilla, or Rufilla, or Salvia Titisenia – or all of them. Does it really matter so much where, or with whom, you perform the sexual act?.33
Here, more than ever, the translation of the original Latin affects our understanding of Antony’s message. The verb ineo, translated as ‘sleeping with’, is a rather crude term often used to describe animal mating. Octavian would have understood that Antony was not being over-polite about his relationship with Cleopatra, and some modern authorities have stressed this point by using the translation ‘screwing’ or ‘fucking’ the queen.34 But the interesting phrase from our point of view is uxor mea est, which can with equal validity be translated as a statement, either ‘she is my wife’ or – as in Robert Graves’s translation quoted above – ‘we are married’, or as a question – ‘is she my wife?’ Either way, it seems that Antony, legally still married to Octavia, considers himself somehow married to Cleopatra. It has been argued that this might mean a theoretical, divine marriage, the union of Dionysos/Osiris with Aphrodite/Isis. Certainly, any mortal marriage that the already married Antony might undertake and, indeed, any marriage with a foreigner could have had no validity under Roman law.
It is generally assumed that Cleopatra would have wished to be legally married to Antony.35 Quite why modern historians should make this assumption – reducing the powerful Cleopatra to the status of a weak mistress who longs to be an ‘honest woman’ – is not clear. She is unlikely to have been over-concerned about her children’s legitimacy as, in Egypt and her territories, their position as children of the world’s most powerful queen goddess would have been unchallenged. In any case, under Egyptian law, there was no formal civil or religious wedding ceremony and a marriage simply required that a couple should live together for the purpose of begetting children. Cleopatra might therefore have legitimately considered herself married to Antony and Caesar, even if they did not consider themselves married to her. The Romans, who looked long and hard at Cleopatra, never saw a wife. They saw an unnatural, immodest woman who preyed on other women’s husbands. From this developed the myth of the sexually promiscuous Cleopatra, and claims of torrid affairs with Gnaeus Pompey, Pompey the Great, Ptolemies XIII and IV (incest!), Caesar, Antony, Herod and countless others, including slaves. A harsh legacy indeed for a woman who probably had no more than two, consecutive, sexual relationships.