CHAPTER SEVEN
For Rome, who had never consented to fear any nation or people, did in her time fear two human beings: one was Hannibal and the other was a woman.
W. W. Tarn, Cambridge Ancient History1
With the relationship between Octavian and Antony damaged beyond any hope of repair, a fierce propaganda war erupted in Rome. Octavian accused Antony of murdering Sextus Pompey, of bringing Rome into disrepute by unlawfully imprisoning the king of Armenia, of seizing Egypt and other foreign territories. He demanded his fair share of the spoils. Antony in turn accused Octavian of stealing a pregnant bride (Livia Drusilla) from her husband, unlawfully removing Lepidus from office and misappropriating lands belonging to both Lepidus and Sextus. He, too, demanded his fair share of the spoils. Octavian’s campaign received a major boost when Antony’s friend Plancus, whom we last met naked and dancing as a blue fish in Alexandria (page 156), joined forces with his nephew Marcus Titius and defected. Plancus and Titius were able to reveal the secrets of Antony’s will, held for safe-keeping with the Vestal Virgins. Octavian seized the document and read extracts (or rather, he read what he claimed to be extracts from Antony’s will) before the Senate. Antony’s affirmation that Caesarion was indeed the true heir of Caesar was considered highly provocative. His legacies to his children by Cleopatra were considered both illegal and a sign of his degeneracy; he should not have ranked his foreign-born bastards as equals with his Roman children. His sentimental wish that, wherever in the world he died his body be carried in state through the Roman Forum, then sent to Egypt for burial, was greeted with hoots of derision.
Tales of Antony’s unnatural subservience to Cleopatra spread like wildfire. Cleopatra had demanded, and received, the vast libraries of Pergamon; she had recruited Roman soldiers into her bodyguard; she had made Antony rub her feet like a slave at an official banquet (and everyone knew what foot-rubbing led to!); she had sent letters which distracted Antony while he presided in court. Cleopatra had only to appear and Antony would drop everything and run after her. Antony was, like Caesar before him, planning to abandon Rome and establish a new capital in Egypt. He was assuming un-Roman, foreign ways; he called his headquarters ‘the palace’. He sometimes wore an oriental dagger at his belt, and was often seen reclining on a gilded couch or a chair. He even pissed in a gold chamber pot! Worst of all, as Dio tells us:
He posed with her [Cleopatra] for portrait paintings and statues, he representing Osiris or Dionysos and she Selene or Isis. This more than all else made him seem to have been bewitched by her through some enchantment. For she so charmed and enthralled not only him but also the rest who had any influence with him that she conceived the hope of ruling even the Romans; and whenever she used an oath her strongest phrase in swearing was by her purpose to dispense justice on the Capitol.2
Officially, Octavian found this laughable. As far as he was concerned, the only link between Antony and the world-conquering Dionysos was his excessive drinking. If Antony was to be Dionysos, let him be the savage Dionysos Omestes, eater of flesh, who stole from the wealthy to give to his sycophantic followers. Octavian, the moderate Roman, would challenge him as Apollo.
With Octavian’s propaganda becoming increasingly effective, Antony was forced to publish a pamphlet (De Sua Ebrietate, ‘On His Sobriety’, now lost3) defending himself against charges of drunkenness. It was his turn to launch a spate of personal attacks. Octavian was a man of despicably humble origins; he had been Caesar’s catamite; he had betrothed his daughter to a barbarian; he was a coward who dared not fight; he removed the hairs on his legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells. At a time of shortages, when the people of Rome were hungry for bread, Octavian had hosted a private banquet, ‘The Feast of the Divine Twelve’ (cena dodekatheos), at which he and his eleven guests, blasphemously disguised as gods and goddesses, had consumed a vast amount of food. Octavian was indeed Apollo; not the archer god of light and learning, but his darker aspect, Apollo Tortor, the tormentor.
Cleopatra and Antony spent the winter of 33/2 assembling a fleet in Ephesus. Here they were joined by the current consuls, Gaius Sosius and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, old friends of Antony who brought with them as many as 300 senators – confirmation that by no means everyone in Rome had been swayed by Octavian’s rhetoric. Cleopatra’s presence was not universally welcomed; the senators liked to believe they were supporting Antony against Octavian rather than Egypt against Rome, and they felt that there was no room for a woman in a war cabinet. But Antony, recognising Cleopatra’s experience and intelligence, and of course the fact that she was making a substantial financial contribution to his campaign, argued that she should stay. Now, as the impecunious Octavian struggled to finance a fleet, Cleopatra, Antony and their forces travelled to the island of Samos, where they boosted morale by holding an impressive festival of music and drama:
For just as all the kings, dynasts, tetrarchs, nations, and cities between Syria, the Mareotic Lake, Armenia, and Illyria had been ordered to send or bring their equipment for the war, so all the dramatic artists were compelled to put in an appearance at Samos; and while almost all the world around was filled with groans and lamentations, a single island for many days resounded with flutes and stringed instruments; theatres there were filled, and choral bands were competing with one another. Every city also sent an ox for the general sacrifice, and kings vied with one another in their mutual entertainments and gifts. And so men everywhere began to ask: ‘How will the conquerors celebrate their victories if their preparations for the war are marked by festivals so costly?’4
In May 32 Cleopatra and Antony transferred their troops to the Greek mainland and took up residence in Athens. Dio tells us that the Athenians, who had earlier respected Octavia, extended the same courtesy to Cleopatra, and a statue of the queen as Isis was erected on the Acropolis. It was now, while living in Athens, that Antony formally divorced Octavia, sending representatives to remove her from his house in Rome. Finally, in late 32, came a move to Patras in the northwestern Peloponnese. The fleet was by now moored in over a dozen different harbours along the west coast of Greece, stretching from Actium in the north to Methone in the south. Had they invaded Italy at this time, they might well have triumphed. But Antony believed that the Romans would unite against a ‘foreign invasion’ if Cleopatra remained in command of her troops, while Cleopatra’s Egyptian troops would not necessarily follow his command if their queen went home. So together Antony and Cleopatra waited for Octavian’s forces to leave Italy so that they might fight their battle on neutral territory.
In late 32 Antony was formally stripped of all his titles by the Roman Senate. Then, at last, Octavian donned ritual garments, stood before the temple of Bellona on the Campus Martius, hurled a wooden javelin against an invisible foreign enemy and, invoking the most ancient of rites (rites which he appears to have rewritten for the occasion), declared war on Cleopatra. The charge against her was the remarkably vague ‘for her acts’. Theoretically, the ancient rites demanded that Octavian should seek compensation from Cleopatra before hurling his javelin: this part of the ritual was, however, ignored. It is hard to see what Cleopatra’s heinous anti-Roman ‘acts’ might have been.5 Throughout the civil war she had acted as a faithful Roman vassal, supplying assistance to Pompey in 49; preparing a fleet for Antony and Octavian in 42; responding to various summonses to Alexandria (Caesar, 48), Tarsus (Antony, 42) and Antioch (Antony, 37). The truth is, of course, that Octavian had realised that his troops would agree to fight a foreign enemy, but would not fight Antony, who was still, despite all the negative propaganda, a popular figure. As Antony was likely to stand by Cleopatra, he would, by his own deeds, become a true quasi-foreign enemy of Rome.
Plutarch tells us that the omens, published by Octavian and therefore highly suspect, did not look good for the couple. Pisaurum (modern Pesaro, Umbria), a city colonised by Antony, was swallowed by an earthquake, a selection of heroic and divine statues linked with Antony was destroyed, and marble statues were seen to ooze blood or sweat for many days. In Rome the schoolboys formed parties, the Antonians and the Caesarians, which fought for two days before the Caesarians emerged victorious. In Etruria a two-headed serpent eighty-five feet in length appeared from nowhere and did a great deal of damage before it was killed by a bolt of lightning. It is interesting to contrast these omens with the prophecies recorded in the Sibylline Oracles, a collection of twelve books of predictions formally attributed to various Sibyls between 200 BC – AD 400, but actually deriving from other sources. Book 3 of the Oracles was written by Egyptian Jewish scholars. The bulk of their prophecies date to the reign of Ptolemy VI and look forward to the arrival of a ‘king from the sun’ – an Egyptian (Ptolemaic?) messiah. But a passage written much later, shortly before the battle of Actium, equates Cleopatra with ‘The Mistress’ (despoina), an eastern saviour intent on destroying Rome at the dawn of a golden age:
Of Asia, even thrice as many goods
Shall Asia back again from Rome receive…
O virgin, soft rich child of Latin Rome,
Oft at thy much-remembered marriage feasts
Drunken with wine, now shalt thou be a slave
And wedded in no honourable way.
And oft shall mistress shear thy pretty hair,
And wreaking satisfaction cast thee down
From heaven to earth…6
Later still, after the battle, Cleopatra is transformed into an eschato-logical adversary, an anti-saviour who will indeed rule the world, but who will bring about its destruction.
Suddenly there was action of the most unwelcome sort. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Octavian’s highly experienced admiral, took the Egyptian naval base of Methone, on the tip of the Peloponnese. From this base Octavian’s ships were able to work their way along the coast, attacking Cleopatra’s supply ships and targeting Antony’s dispersed fleet. Meanwhile, Octavian’s army had taken Corecyna (Corfu), landed unopposed on the Greek mainland and marched south to strike camp at low-lying, swampy Actium on the Gulf of Ambracia. Cleopatra and Antony fled north to Actium and struck camp on the opposite side of the gulf to Octavian. Soon after, their joint fleet was trapped by Octavian’s ships in the bay. Conditions in their camp deteriorated quickly: the supply lines had been cut, many of the men were suffering from a distressing combination of malaria and dysentery, and morale was at rock bottom. High-profile supporters, Ahenobarbus included, were deserting in droves and Antony was forced to execute a fleeing Roman senator as a warning. In August Antony’s ships made a serious but unsuccessful attempt to escape the blockade.
Plutarch – who, historians believe, gained much of his information from a deserter who joined Octavian in time to take part in the sea battle – tells us that Cleopatra and Antony had raised an army of not fewer than 500 warships, 100,000 legionaries and armed infantry and 12,000 cavalry. They were supported by an impressive list of kingly allies: Bocchus of Libya, Tarcondemus of Upper Cilicia, Archelaos of Cappadocia, Philadelphos of Paphlagonia, Mithridates of Com-magene and Sadalas of Thrace. Polemon of Pontus sent an army, as did Malchus of Nabataea, Amyntas of Lycaonia, Galatia, the king of the Medes, and Herod, the king of the Jews. Cleopatra supplied at least sixty Egyptian ships and commanded her own fleet. Octavian, with a mere 250 ships, 80,000 infantry and approximately 12,000 cavalry, was outnumbered, but his fleet was both better armed and better prepared, and although Octavian himself was a far from seasoned campaigner, Admiral Agrippa had all the experience that he lacked. Aware of Agrippa’s reputation, Antony’s friend and general Crassus, a man who, as we have already seen, had a considerable financial interest in Egypt, advised that the fleet should be abandoned and that the troops should march northwards to fight in better circumstances in Macedon. Dio tells us that Cleopatra, reluctant to abandon her ships, disagreed with Crassus, and that Antony sided with her. Her plan, formulated after observing a series of bad omens (swallows nesting on her ships and around her tent; milk and blood dripping from beeswax; several statues of herself and Antony in the guise of gods being struck down by thunderbolts), was to flee to Egypt and regroup:
In consequence of these portents and of the resulting dejection of the army, and of the sickness prevalent among them, Cleopatra herself became alarmed and filled Antony with fears. They did not wish, however, to sail out secretly, nor yet openly, as if they were in flight, lest they should inspire their allies also with fear, but rather as if they were making preparations for a naval battle, and incidentally in order that they might force their way through in case there should be any resistance. Therefore they first chose out the best of the vessels and burned the rest, since the sailors had become fewer by death and desertion; next they secretly put all their most valuable possessions on board by night.7
Dio is worth quoting at length here, because he makes it quite clear that Cleopatra and Antony were united in their plan to take the fleet to Egypt. The fact that they loaded sails on to their warships makes it fairly certain that their troops, too, knew that something unusual was afoot.
After some minor skirmishes, more defections from Antony’s camp, a bizarre and quickly foiled attempt to kidnap Antony (reported by Plutarch), several days of bad weather and a couple of lengthy and inspirational speeches from the two leaders, the sea battle flared up on 2 September 31. Antony’s ships emerged from the Gulf of Ambracia and faced out to sea in three divisions, protecting Cleopatra’s fleet, which was held in reserve behind the central division. From the beginning things went badly. Octavian’s ships kept out of range, drawing Antony’s fleet further and further out to sea so that they might become dispersed. Antony’s ships were hopelessly undercrewed and unable to fight efficiently. Antony himself commanded the right division facing Octavian’s left division, commanded by Agrippa. Here things went according to plan and there was some brisk fighting, but the central and left divisions underperformed, allowing Octavian to take an early advantage. At some point the battleships from the central and left divisions stopped participating in the battle and retreated into the gulf. Soon after, possibly at a prearranged signal, Cleopatra’s sixty ships hoisted their sails, broke through Octavian’s line and sailed away at full speed. Antony abandoned his large flagship, transferred his flag to a quinquereme, and chased after Cleopatra with about forty of his personal squadron:
… Antony made it clear to all the world that he was swayed neither by the sentiments of a commander nor of a brave man, nor even by his own, but, as someone in pleasantry said that the soul of the lover dwells in another’s body, he was dragged along by the woman as if he had become incorporate with her and must go where she did. For no sooner did he see her ship sailing off than he forgot everything else, betrayed and ran away from those who were fighting and dying in his cause, got into a five-oared galley, where Alexas the Syrian and Scellius were his only companions, and hastened after the woman who had already ruined him and would make his ruin still more complete. Cleopatra recognized him and raised a signal on her ship; so Antony came up and was taken on board, but he neither saw nor was seen by her. Instead, he went forward alone to the prow and sat down by himself in silence, holding his head in both hands.8
It is perhaps inevitable that Plutarch would interpret this as the cowardly or devious Cleopatra running away from the battle. He was faced with the unenviable task of showing Antony in a sympathetic light while making it clear to his readers that Octavian is the real hero of Actium, and he achieved this by making Cleopatra into the villain of his piece. It is less easy to understand how so many modern historians, with full access to Dio, have made the same assumption.
Octavian thought of chasing after Cleopatra’s ships, but quickly realised that he would be unable to catch her and so continued with the battle. Antony’s fleet fought on, but their situation was hopeless. Octavian’s own memoir tells us that the sea battle ended at 4 p.m. with some 5,000 of Antony’s men lost and 300 of his ships taken; Tarn has used these figures to calculate that between ten and fifteen of Antony’s ships must have sunk.9 Meanwhile, Antony’s ground forces had started the long march north but had been caught by Octavian’s troops. Tempted by generous bribes, the bulk of Antony’s soldiers defected, bringing a swift and relatively painless end to the confrontation. Crassus was able to escape under cover of nightfall and make his way back to Antony. Octavian, who already had enough ships, burned many of Antony’s vessels lest they fall into the wrong hands. His failure to capture Cleopatra’s war chest, now safely on its way to Egypt, meant that he would be embarrassingly short of money to pay his victorious veterans. Nevertheless, in celebration of his success, Octavian dedicated ten complete ships from Antony’s captured fleet to Apollo, and founded the city of Nicopolis. The battle of Actium, hardly the greatest of victories, was to be remembered as a triumph for Octavian, Agrippa and Apollo, and as the beginning of the end for Cleopatra, Antony and Egypt.
It is hard not to feel sympathy for Antony, sitting day after day on deck with his head in his hands. Without knowing exactly what did happen at Actium, it is impossible to imagine the thoughts going through his mind, but although he and Cleopatra (and their treasure chest) lived on to fight another day, he must have realised that he was running out of men prepared to fight for his cause. Only after the ship had docked at Taenarum (modern Cape Matapan, the southernmost point of the Peloponnese) did Cleopatra and Antony meet. Soon after, encouraged by Cleopatra’s ladies-in-waiting, they were dining and sleeping together again.
Separated from Cleopatra again, Antony made his way across the Mediterranean to the Greek town of Paraetonium (modern Mersa Matruh) on the Egyptian–Cyrenaican border. Here he was horrified to find that a garrison of previously loyal troops had defected to Octavian. Their general, Lucius Pinarius Scarpus, not only refused to receive Antony, but executed Antony’s messengers and all those among his own troops who were inclined to support him. Faced with this betrayal, Antony contemplated suicide, but was persuaded by friends to rejoin Cleopatra in Alexandria instead.
Cleopatra, worried about the very real danger of civil unrest, had gone straight to Alexandria. Arriving ahead of the news from Actium, she was able to fool her people by entering the harbour in triumph, with garlands draped over the front of her boat and musicians playing victory songs. Then, or so Dio tells us, having lulled her people into a false sense of security, she embarked upon a remarkable killing spree designed to rid the city of all potential enemies. The hostage king of Armenia and his family were executed and many prominent citizens were murdered and their property seized. Temple and state assets, too, were confiscated, until Cleopatra had amassed a huge war chest, which she apparently intended to use to finance her escape and – if at all possible – pay for an army to regain her throne. That Cleopatra needed to maximise her assets makes sense, even though she had apparently managed to save her treasure from the disaster of Actium. The killing spree, however, seems highly implausible, given that she was likely to need the support of the people of Alexandria in the very near future.
It still seemed reasonable to make extravagant plans. One idea, to flee by boat to Spain, meet up with the last remnants of Pompey’s rebels and provoke a revolt against Octavian, was dropped when it became obvious that Agrippa’s ships, still patrolling the Mediterranean, would make a sea crossing far too dangerous. Instead, determined to flee to India via the Red Sea, Cleopatra ordered that her fleet be transported overland via the Wadi Tumilat to the Gulf of Suez. This was not as desperate a move as it might now seem; the dynastic Egyptians had regularly transported boats from the Nile overland to the Red Sea. But the plan had to be abandoned when the first boats were captured and burned by the Nabataean king, Malchus, who, still smarting from Antony’s cavalier treatment of his land, wished to demonstrate his loyalty to Octavian. Antony arrived in Alexandria to find Cleopatra’s partially completed mausoleum packed with all kinds of treasure and protected by piles of flammable material. If attacked, she intended to torch the mausoleum and destroy her fortune. The very thought must have filled Octavian with horror. He needed Cleopatra’s wealth to compensate his underpaid veterans, who had been teetering on the verge of mutiny since the battle of Actium.
Severely depressed, Antony spent some time living in solitude on the Alexandrian peninsula of Lochias, where he built the Timoneion, a shrine named after the legendary recluse Timon of Athens. His return to Cleopatra’s palace saw the disbanding of the Inimitable Livers in favour of a new society, ‘The Partners in Death’ (synapotha-noumenoi), a smaller, more close-knit group of friends who chose to face the inevitable by carousing more than ever.
The winter of 31/30 saw the sixteen-year-old Caesarion and his fourteen-year-old stepbrother Antyllus officially come of age. Caesarion was enrolled into the Alexandrian ephebes, the list of young male citizens, while Antyllus donned the purple-hemmed toga virilis that showed the world that he was a citizen of Rome. Dio correctly identifies this as a propaganda exercise: a means of reminding the conservative Egyptians that the dynastic line would continue through their adult male king, and the population as a whole that the two sons could replace Cleopatra and Antony should the worst happen. Antyl-lus, Antony’s oldest son and principal heir, had already appeared on a gold coin alongside his father. Now a stela dated to Year 22, which is Year 7 of the female king Cleopatra ‘and of the king Ptolemy called Caesar, the Father-Loving, Mother-Loving God’ (21 September 31; just nineteen days after the battle of Actium), shows Caesarion dressed as a traditional Egyptian king as he makes offerings of lettuce and wine to the ithyphallic fertility god Min and his consort Isis, and offerings of wine to the earth god Geb and his temple companion the crocodile-headed Sobek. The stela, recovered from Koptos and now in the British Museum, confirms that life outside Alexandria was continuing much as before. It details two contracts drawn up by a guild of thirty-six linen manufacturers concerning the expenses of the local sacred bull.
Plutarch tells us that it was at this time that Cleopatra started to experiment with various poisons:
Cleopatra was getting together collections of all sorts of deadly poisons, and she tested the painless working of each of them by giving them to prisoners under sentence of death. But when she saw that the speedy poisons enhanced the sharpness of death by the pain they caused, while the milder poisons were not quick, she made trial of venomous animals, watching with her own eyes as they were set upon another. She did this daily, tried them almost all; and she found that the bite of the asp alone induced a sleepy torpor and sinking, where there was no spasm or groan, but a gentle perspiration on the face, while the perceptive faculties were easily relaxed and dimmed, and resisted all attempts to rouse and restore them, as is the case with those who are soundly asleep.10
Octavian, still in Asia Minor, received a stream of messages from Egypt. Plutarch tells us that Cleopatra begged to be allowed to abdicate in favour of her children, while Antony asked that he might be allowed to retire as a private person to Athens. Antony never received a reply, but Cleopatra was informed that Octavian would consider her request if she either killed or at least renounced Antony. These most sensitive of negotiations were conducted through Thyrsus, Octavian’s freedman. Cleopatra had so many private conversations with Thyrsus that Antony, made tense and irritable by his situation, became suspicious of his motives, had him flogged and returned him to Octavian with a terse message: ‘If you don’t like what I have done, you have my freedman Hipparchus; hang him up and give him a flogging, and we shall be quits.’11 As Antony grew increasingly suspicious of Cleopatra’s motives, she responded with flattery, throwing a lavish celebration for his birthday while virtually ignoring her own. However, Dio adds that, unknown to Antony, Cleopatra had already sent Octavian a golden sceptre and a golden crown, together with the royal throne that represented her kingdom. Now Cleopatra, reading Octavian well, attempted to bribe him with vast amounts of money (presumably the treasure stored in her mausoleum), while Antony, reading Octavian less well, sought to remind him of their friendship and their shared adventures. Desperate, he surrendered Publius Turullius, one of Caesar’s assassins, and offered to take his own life if, in return, Cleopatra might be saved. Octavian put Turullius to death, but made no formal reply. Next Antony sent Antyllus to Octavian with a large gift of gold. Octavian took the money, but sent the boy back without an answer.
The summer of 30 saw Egypt under double attack. Cornelius Gallus had assumed command of Scarpus’s Paraetonium troops and now launched land and sea assaults from the west. Antony hastened to negotiate, feeling that he might be able to persuade the soldiers (who had once been his) to change sides, but it was in vain: Dio tells us that Gallus had his trumpeters play a fanfare to drown out Antony’s words. Then, from the east, Octavian crossed the Sinai land bridge and captured Pelusium. An uncomfortable, persistent rumour that Cleopatra had actually given Pelusium to Octavian in return for clemency for herself and her children does not square with the story that Cleopatra had the wife and children of Seleucos, the unsuccessful defender of Pelusium, put to death. Octavian marched westwards across the Delta, crossing the Nile branches to strike camp near the hippodrome, immediately outside Alexandria’s Canopic Gate, and Antony returned just in time to defend the city against his advance cavalry. Rushing into the palace, sweaty and bloody from the battle, he presented his bravest soldier to Cleopatra. She rewarded the soldier with a valuable gift of golden armour; he repaid her generosity by defecting to Octavian that night, taking the precious armour with him.
Trapped and impotent in Alexandria, Antony resorted to bribery. Leaflets promising generous rewards were tied to arrows and shot into Octavian’s camp. As it was obvious to everyone that Antony would never be in a position to honour his promises, no one was tempted by the offer. Next Antony challenged Octavian to single combat, but Octavian refused to be drawn. Finally, he resolved to meet Octavian in battle. That night, Antony’s gods left him. They could be heard passing though the gates of Alexandria, making their way towards Octavian.
During this night, it is said, about the middle of it, while the city was quiet and depressed through fear and expectation of what was coming, suddenly certain harmonious sounds from all sorts of instruments were heard, and the shouting of a throng, accompanied by cries of Bacchic revelry and satyric leapings, as if a troop of revellers, making a great tumult, were going forth from the city; and their course seemed to lie about through the middle of the city toward the outer gate which faced the enemy, at which point the tumult became loudest and then dashed out. Those who sought the meaning of the sign were of the opinion that the god to whom Antony always most likened and attached himself was now deserting him.12
Graeco-Roman gods were prone to desert those who were about to lose in battle. The disaster at Troy was preceded by desertion, and Domitian would later dream that Minerva had left him because ‘she could no longer protect him because she had been disarmed byJupiter’.13 Abandoned by Dionysos-Osiris, Antony would become mortal, and vulnerable, once again.
On the morning of 1 August the godless Antony led his troops through the city gate towards the hippodrome, while his Egyptian fleet sailed eastwards to meet the Roman ships. To his horror his fleet surrendered straight away, raising their oars to salute Octavian. His cavalry, having witnessed the loss of the fleet, immediately deserted. His infantry remained loyal, but it was a one-sided battle and, heavily defeated, Antony retreated into Alexandria, wrestling with the unbearable thought that Cleopatra may have betrayed him. Almost immediately, he heard the rumour that Cleopatra had committed suicide. Antony knew that his time had come. He unbuckled his breastplate and asked his faithful slave Eros to help him to die. Eros drew his sword, but stabbed himself rather than his master. As Eros collapsed at his feet, Antony stabbed himself in the stomach. Plutarch, unable to resist a dramatic moment, tells us that he cried out as he fell, ‘Cleopatra, I am not grieved to be bereft of you, for I shall straightway join you; but I am grieved that such a leader as I am has been found to be inferior to a woman in courage.’14 At this vital point, as Antony lay fatally wounded, Cleopatra’s secretary, Diomedes, arrived with the news that the queen was not, after all, dead.
Together with her lady-in-waiting Charmian, her hairdresser Eiras and, perhaps, an anonymous eunuch who is mentioned by Dio but not by Plutarch, Cleopatra had barricaded herself in the mausoleum that housed her treasure. The tomb and its attached temple of Isis are now lost beneath the waters of the Mediterranean, but we can deduce from Plutarch’s description of Cleopatra’s final days that this was a substantial two-storey structure: a windowless ground floor with a stairway leading up to a windowed, galleried upper floor. Still under construction at her death, it would be completed by Octavian when he authorised the burial of Egypt’s last queen. Now Antony, weak from loss of blood, was taken to the tomb, hauled up the walls and dragged inside through an upper-floor window so that he might die in Cleopatra’s arms. Octavian entered Alexandria unopposed to find Cleopatra trapped in her mausoleum with Antony’s body. A system of stone portcullises and stout doors sealed the ground floor and ensured that no one could enter or leave. This was a serious problem; there was a very real danger that Cleopatra might burn both herself and her treasure. Octavian wished to keep Cleopatra alive so that she could be exhibited in his Roman triumph and, far more importantly, he wished to keep her fabulous treasure intact.
Octavian’s top priority had to be to extract Cleopatra from her flammable tomb. He sent his persuasive friend Gaius Proculeius to the mausoleum to negotiate and, if at all possible, to persuade Cleopatra to return to her palace. Conversing through a grille in the locked door, Cleopatra refused to move and again asked that her children be spared. Proculeius made no promises, but told her to be of good cheer and to trust Octavian. The next day Cornelius Gallus was sent to talk through the mausoleum door. With Cleopatra distracted, the resourceful Proculeius used a ladder to gain access to the upper part of the mausoleum. Accompanied by two servants, he climbed through the window that had earlier admitted Antony. The three crept downstairs towards Cleopatra, but were spotted by one of Cleopatra’s women, who, according to Plutarch, let out a shriek: ‘Wretched Cleopatra, you are taken alive!’ Cleopatra turned, saw Proculeius and, drawing a dagger from her girdle, stabbed herself, inflicting a non-fatal wound. Proculeius disarmed her and had the presence of mind to shake her clothing to see if she was hiding any poison in her garments.
Octavian was at last able to recover the treasure that would allow him to pay his debts. Such was the feeling of relief that interest rates in Rome plunged from 12 to 4 per cent.15 Back in Alexandria, Cleopatra was put in the care of a freedman, Epaphroditus, who was instructed to use utmost vigilance to keep her alive. Dio tells us that, following Antony’s funeral, Cleopatra moved from her tomb to her palace, where she fell ill from grief and the effects of her stab wound. Plutarch does not mention the move but he agrees about the illness: he tells us that Cleopatra was sick from grief and that her breasts had become inflamed by constant beating. This had led to a fever, which Cleopatra welcomed. She had stopped eating and was looking forward to death. Octavian could only persuade her to start eating again by threatening her children.
Cleopatra and Octavian met for the first time, probably on 10 August and presumably in her palace. Plutarch tells us that Octavian found the sick Cleopatra in the most miserable of conditions; that she threw herself at his feet; that she was dishevelled, with sunken eyes and a trembling voice; and that she bore obvious bruising on her bosom. Nevertheless, beneath the mask of grief, it was still possible for Octavian to detect vestiges of a spirited woman. Cleopatra lay on her bed, Octavian sat beside her, and Cleopatra launched into a flood of self-justification, blaming everything on her fear of Antony. As it became obvious that Octavian was not convinced by her tale she changed tack and started to beg for mercy. Finally she presented Octavian with a complete list of her treasures. When Seleucus, one of her servants, intervened to point out that Cleopatra’s list was in fact incomplete and that she had kept some treasure back, Cleopatra was quick to explain that she had retained some gifts for Octavia and Livia, who, she hoped, might intercede on her behalf. Convinced that she had in fact attempted to keep some treasure for herself, Octavian deduced that Cleopatra was far from suicidal.
Dio tells a very different story. His Cleopatra is still very much the alluring woman who captivated Caesar and Antony, and who is now hoping to captivate Octavian in the same way. She receives Octavian in a splendid apartment, where she reclines on a couch dressed in the most becoming of mourning garments. The room is decorated with portraits of Octavian’s adoptive father, Caesar. Seizing the initiative, she starts the conversation by reminding Octavian of her links with his adoptive father. She even reads aloud extracts from Caesar’s love letters. Thankfully Octavian, a good Roman husband, is able to resist her feminine wiles. He does not look her in the eye, but merely begs her to be of good cheer. Realising that things are not going too well, Cleopatra starts to plead with Octavian to let her die to join Antony. When this, too, fails to generate a response, she tells Octavian that she is now happy to place her trust in Octavian and Livia. Again, it seems, her intention is to convince Octavian that she is not suicidal.
It is difficult for the modern reader to work out just who is bluffing whom here. The obvious answer is that Cleopatra, who wishes to die, is bluffing Octavian, who wishes to keep her alive. The preplanned and somewhat clumsy revelation about her hidden treasure is therefore a ruse designed to convince Octavian that she still hopes to live. Alternatively, it may be Octavian who is bluffing. He wishes Cleopatra to die, but does not want to be seen to kill her.16 Having determined that Cleopatra should die by her own hand, he is nevertheless concerned to ensure that posterity will remember him as a good man who did everything he could to save the queen’s life. He knows that Cleopatra has already made two suicide attempts – by stabbing and by starvation – and can surely, if so inclined, prevent her from making a third simply by locking her up. Would Cleopatra have wished to die by her own hand? Suicide is barely mentioned in Egyptian myths and writings, where the only clear evidence for self immolation comes from the trial records which confirm that some of those found guilty of murdering Ramesses III were permitted to kill themselves rather than face public execution. But suicide was, under the appropriate circumstances, a Greek virtue, and Greek mythology includes a surprising number of females who hang or stab themselves following the loss of a loved one (Ariadne, Calypso and Thisbe) or as a sacrifice in order that others might live (Alcestis, Iphigenia). These deaths are all seen as rational responses to unkind fate. Cleopatra, killing herself after the death of Mark Antony, and with her children’s future to consider, fits well into this mould. There was, of course, good Ptolemaic precedent for suicide. Cleopatra’s uncle Ptolemy, king of Cyprus, had taken poison rather than be captured by the Romans.
Plutarch tells us that Cleopatra’s suicide was triggered by a secret (or deliberately leaked?) message from a member of Octavian’s staff, telling her that Octavian had resolved to send the queen and her children to Rome within the next three days. Realising that her time had run out, Cleopatra requested that she be allowed to visit Antony’s tomb (which was almost certainly her own mausoleum) to pour libations for him. She was carried to the tomb, where she embraced Antony’s remains and uttered a beautifully composed speech, which is likely to owe more to Plutarch’s literary talents than to Cleopatra’s own spontaneous oratory:
‘Dear Antony, I buried you but lately with hands still free; now, however, I pour libations for you as a captive, and so carefully guarded that I cannot either with blows or tears disfigure this body of mine, which is a slave’s body, and closely watched that it may grace the triumph over you. Do not expect other honours or libations; these are the last from Cleopatra the captive. For though in life nothing could part us from each other, in death we are likely to change places; you, the Roman, lying buried here, while I, the hapless woman, lie in Italy, and get only so much of your country as my portion. But if indeed there is any might or power in the gods of that country (for the gods of this country have betrayed us), do not abandon your wife while she lives, nor permit a triumph to be celebrated over myself in my person, but hide and bury me here with you, since out of all my innumerable ills not one is so great and dreadful as this short time that I have lived apart from you.’17
Returning to the palace, Cleopatra bathed, dressed and dined in splendour, enjoying as part of her final meal a basket of figs sent in from the county. The meal over, she gave a sealed tablet to Epaphroditus, for delivery to Octavian. Then she dismissed her servants, keeping only Charmian and Eiras by her side, and retired for the night. The decision to die in front of her female servants made good practical sense, as even the dead needed a chaperone. One of the horrors of a female suicide was that the body might be glimpsed naked, or partially naked, by strangers. Reading Cleopatra’s message, a final request to be buried beside Antony, Octavian realised that the queen was about to kill herself. Soldiers ran to the palace and pushed past the guards, who stood, oblivious, outside her room. Opening the doors, they found Cleopatra lying dead on a golden couch. Eiras lay dying at her feet, while Charmian, already feeling the influence of the poison, was desperately trying to straighten the diadem on her mistress’s brow. Dio tells us that Octavian summoned psylli (Libyan snake-charmers famous for curing snakebites by sucking out the venom) to minister to Cleopatra, but they were too late.
Here we have the classic sealed-room mystery. Cleopatra, Eiras and Charmian are found dead or dying, with only (possibly) a couple of puncture marks on the queen’s body to suggest how they died. Why, then, is it so widely accepted that Cleopatra had chosen death by snake? Dio tells what he knows of Cleopatra’s passing:
No one knows clearly in what way she perished, for the only marks on her body were slight pricks on the arm. Some say she applied to herself an asp which had been brought in to her in a water-jar, or perhaps hidden in some flowers. Others declare that she had smeared a pin, with which she was wont to fasten her hair, with some poison possessed of such a property that in ordinary circumstances it would not injure the body at all, but if it came into contact with even a drop of blood would destroy the body very quietly and painlessly; and that previous to this time she had worn it in her hair as usual, but now had made a slight scratch on her arm and had dipped the pin in the blood. In this or in some very similar way she perished, and her two handmaidens with her. As for the eunuch, he had of his own accord delivered himself up to the serpents at the very time of Cleopatra’s arrest, and after being bitten by them had leaped into a coffin already prepared for him.18
Plutarch gives more detail. He has already prepared us for the possibility of Cleopatra’s suicide by detailing her experiments with poison, but he, too, seems less than convinced by the story of the snake:
It is said that the asp was brought with those figs and leaves and lay hidden beneath them, for thus Cleopatra had given orders, that the reptile might fasten itself upon her body without her being aware of it. But when she took away some of the figs and saw it, she said: ‘There it is, you see,’ and baring her arm she held it out for the bite. But others say that the asp was kept carefully shut up in a water jar, and that while Cleopatra was stirring it up and irritating it with a golden distaff it sprang and fastened itself upon her arm. But the truth of the matter no one knows; for it was also said that she carried about poison in a hollow comb and kept the comb hidden in her hair; and yet neither spot nor other sign of poison broke out upon her body. Moreover, not even was the reptile seen within the chamber, though people said they saw some traces of it near the sea, where the chamber looked out upon it with its windows. And some also say that Cleopatra’s arm was seen to have two slight and indistinct punctures; and this Caesar [Octavian] also seems to have believed. For in his triumph an image of Cleopatra herself with the asp clinging to her was carried in the procession. These, then, are the various accounts of what happened.19
As many historians have observed, suicide by snakebite is not the easy matter that it might first appear, particularly when one snake is expected to kill three people. At best it would be a risky business with a high chance of failure. One cannot, after all, force a reluctant snake to bite and, even if the snake does bite, not every bite injects poison and not every poisoned bite kills. And, as most of the poison is injected with the first bite, it is unlikely that one snake would kill three adults with three consecutive strikes. In Cleopatra’s case, the preliminaries would have been fraught with the additional danger of detection. If we accept Octavian’s often expressed desire to keep Cleopatra alive, we must assume that she was effectively on ‘suicide watch’: an order for a snake would have had to be smuggled out of the palace, and the snake would have had to be smuggled back in. Although relatively slender, the Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, the principal suspect, can grow to just over six feet in length. An adult cobra, or three, would have needed an exceptionally large fig basket or water jar.
However, in the absence of any obvious weapon, death by snakebite was accepted by everyone as a symbolically suitable means of female royal suicide. Egypt is currently home to some thirty-nine varieties of snake and there seems no reason to assume that things were very different in antiquity.20 The dynastic Egyptians had a love-hate relationship with these snakes. They knew all too well that snakes could kill, but they also knew that snakes played an important role in pest control. A snake living beside the granary was infinitely preferable to a nest of rats. This ambivalent attitude is best expressed in the pantheon, home to both good and bad snakes. The serpent Apophis was pure evil: every night he attacked the boat of the sun god Re as it sailed through the dark and dangerous underworld. Fortunately Re had the tightly coiled good snake god Mehen to protect him. Female snake deities were considered to be exemplary mothers. We have already met Wadjyt, ‘The Green One’, the cobra goddess of the Nile Delta, who appears as the uraeus that decorates and protects the royal crown. Meretseger, ‘She Who Loves Silence’, guarded the dead of the Theban cemetery. Renenutet, a deadly hooded cobra, was the goddess of the harvest. She protected granaries and families and, as a divine nurse, cared for both babies and the king. Isis, herself a famously good mother, occasionally appeared as the snake Isis Thermoutharion. Alexandria even had its own protective snake deity. The Alexander Romance tells how the workmen who built the city were pestered by a snake. Alexander had the snake killed, then built a sanctuary on the spot where it had died. Soon the sanctuary filled with snakes, which squirmed into the neighbouring houses. These were known as the Agathoi Daemones, ‘The Good Spirits’.
The Macedonian royal family, too, took a keen interest in snakes. We have already read the story of Nectanebo II assuming the form of a snake to father Alexander the Great (page 132). A variant on this tale is told by Plutarch:
A serpent was once seen lying stretched out by the side of Olympias as she slept, and we are told that this, more than anything else, dulled the ardour of Philip’s attentions to his wife, so that he no longer came often to sleep by her side, either because he feared that some spells and enchantments might be practised upon him by her, or because he shrank from her embraces in the conviction that she was the partner of a superior being. But concerning these matters there is another story to this effect: all the women of these parts were addicted to the Orphic rites and the orgies of Dionysos from very ancient times, and imitated in many ways the practices of the Edonian women and the Thracian women about Mount Haemus, from whom, as it would seem, the word ‘threskeuein’ came to be applied to the celebration of extravagant and superstitious ceremonies. Now Olympias, who affected these divine possessions more zealously than other women, and carried them out in wilder fashion, used to provide the revelling companies with great tame serpents, which would often lift their heads from out the ivy and the mystic winnowing-baskets, or coil themselves about the wands and garlands of the women, thus terrifying the men.21
16. A sandstone stela of unknown provenance showing Isis and Dionysos as intertwined snakes. Isis wears an Egyptian-style crown on her Classical style coiffure; Dionysos bears a passing resemblance to Serapis. The pair recall the Agathos Daimon of Alexandria.
17. The ‘Alabaster Tomb’ of Alexandria: resting place of Alexander the Great?
18. The god Serapis, consort of Isis and patron deity of Alexandria.
19. A wooden model of Osiris, consort of Isis and king of the dead. Osiris has the body of a wrapped mummy. He wears the crown of Egypt on his unwrapped head, and carries the crook and flail which signify his authority.
20. The Egyptian goddess Isis. The queen wears a sheath dress and a short wig. The throne symbol on her head signifies her name Aset or Isis.
21. Isis as the ideal mother. A 26th Dynasty faience Isis nurses her infant son Horus. Here the queen wears a long wig and a uraeus.
22. Amaryllis, a 1st century AD priestess of Isis in Athens, depicted on her funerary stela. Amaryllis wears the knotted robe associated with the goddess.
23. Isis carries the sistrum, or sacred rattle, which has the power to stimulate the gods.
24. Cleopatra stands in a supportive position behind her son Ptolemy Caesar (Caesarion). She wears the tight sheath dress, long wig, and complicated crown (a modius double plumes, cow horns and solar disk) worn by many Egyptian queens before her. Caesarion appears as an entirely typical Egyptian king.
25. Roman bust of green basalt, believed to represent Mark Antony. The bust was acquired at Canopus in c. 1780, and bought in 1828 at auction by William John Bankes.
26. Octavian: The Emperor Augustus. Bronze statue recovered from the Aegean Sea.
It is therefore not surprising that, when lost on his way to the oracle of Zeus-Ammon, Alexander was guided on his way by talking snakes. Even the infant Heracles, ‘ancestor’ of Mark Antony, Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies, had a run-in with a pair of snakes sent by Hera to kill him.
Octavian had allowed Cleopatra to organise Antony’s funeral as she wished:
though many generals and kings asked for his body that they might give it burial, Caesar [Octavian] would not take it away from Cleopatra, and it was buried by her hands in sumptuous and royal fashion, such things being granted her for the purpose as she desired.22
We are not told what form this burial took. During the first century BC Roman burial customs varied from region to region, with inhumation being preferred in the eastern empire and cremation in the west. Antony, as a western Roman, may therefore have expected to be cremated, and indeed Plutarch writes of Cleopatra ‘embracing the urn which held his ashes’, and again, ‘she wreathed and kissed the urn’.23 Plutarch may, of course, have been succumbing to his own cultural expectations. The fact that Cleopatra was able to visit Antony in his tomb a mere twelve days after his death suggests that he had not been mummified, as mummification was a lengthy practical and sacred ritual, taking seventy days. However, the rock-cut tombs of southern Egypt, with their eclectic mix of Egyptian, Greek and Roman styles, confirm just how appealing the elaborate traditional burial customs were to Egyptians of non-Egyptian heritage. Alexander the Great is purported to have been embalmed, and the fact that the tombs of the Ptolemies were places of pilgrimage suggests, without proving, that they too were mummified. In Alexandria, the early excavators, Evaristo Breccia and Achille Adriani, found hundreds of mummified bodies in the cemeteries of Ras el-Tin and Anfushy. All these mummies were badly decomposed and all are now lost. But the tombs have yielded coins of both Cleopatra and Augustus (Octavian), proving that inhumation preceded by mummification was practised in Alexandria at the time of Cleopatra’s death. It is interesting that no mummies are recorded for the other necropoleis of Alexandria, including the most recently excavated Gabbari cemetery, which has produced hundreds of simple interments.
Now Octavian made plans for Cleopatra’s funeral:
Caesar [Octavian], although vexed at the death of the woman, admired her lofty spirit; and he gave orders that her body should be buried with that of Antony in splendid and regalfashion. Her women also received honourable interment by his orders.24
The joint tomb of Cleopatra and Antony is today, like all the other Ptolemaic royal tombs, lost beneath the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.