A noble ruin, p.50
A Noble Ruin, page 50
XII
Fierce wars and faithful loves
Antony in Antioch
Leaving Italy, Antony travelled directly to Syria and to its capital, Antioch. During his absence, Sosius had achieved victory in Judea and pacified the region. Antony now imposed a final settlement. Herod was installed in Jerusalem. His rival, the pertinacious Antigonus, was publicly executed, grim proof of the eradication of Parthian influence within Roman domains and a clear if frightening signal to the kingdom that Herod was there to stay.1 The stability of Syria and its surrounding principalities was a crucial prerequisite to Antony’s invasion of Parthia. For this reason, Lysanias, the ruler of Chalcis who had cooperated with the Parthians and supported Antigonus, was deposed and executed. His kingdom, however, was not added to Herod’s. Instead, Antony entrusted it to Cleopatra, who administered it through a vassal, a certain Zenodorus, possibly Lysanias’ son.2 This assignment was only one part of an extensive allocation of cities and territories to Egyptian suzerainty. Much of the Phoenician coast was also handed over to the queen, along with rich, fertile portions of the interior.3 Although it is all too easy to attribute this dispensation to Antony’s fondness for Cleopatra, it is necessary to recognize the importance of this region to Rome’s strategic interests in the east. No local figure was obviously up to the task of ensuring order during Antony’s expedition. Not even Herod: for all his promise, recent events had brought to the fore his almost total reliance on Roman support. Egypt and its queen offered Rome a more seasoned, more reliable administration.4 Too often it is asserted that Antony acted as he did because he needed Cleopatra’s money. That, however, was his for the taking. What Antony required was the queen’s indisputable talent as a monarch.
Antony dispatched Gaius Fonteius Capito to Alexandria to fetch the queen.5 We need not doubt the splendour of the entertainments which greeted her in Antioch, even if our sources in this instance pass them over. A regal reception and ceremonies suitable for marking this significant increase in Egypt’s possessions were incumbent on the triumvir. Nor should we discount the affections rekindled by their reunion. Cleopatra introduced Antony to his twin children, whose paternity he publicly acknowledged.6 Perhaps, as Plutarch reports, he did so by evoking his Herculean heritage: the great hero fathered children throughout the world, so Plutarch’s Antony observes, thereby furnishing the genesis of many races and cities; leaving behind a race of kings, he declaimed, likewise fitted Roman greatness—and his own nobility. This gesture, doubtless part of a public pageant, did nothing to render the twins Roman citizens. But it elevated their importance in Egypt. Indeed, the transactions at Antioch—the expansion of Cleopatra’s domains, the recognition of her children by Antony—were events that, for the queen, ushered in a new age: the year 37 officially became the year 1 as Egypt looked to its future.7 As for Antony, these occasions once again registered throughout the east his recurring claim that he was no ordinary Roman governor, a conspicuous element of his administration since he became the New Dionysus. Not everything was purely for show however. Spending the winter together, Antony and Cleopatra renewed their sexual relationship—intimacy that was perhaps especially welcome after his disappointments at Tarentum—and by the new year the queen was pregnant with Antony’s child. In 36 she bore him a son, Ptolemy Philadelphus.8
However voluptuous or playful he may have been in Cleopatra’s company, at Antioch Antony was a busy man. It was now that he finished off the details of his reorganization of the provinces and client kingdoms in the east. Amid these negotiations, Cleopatra perhaps acquired control of some cities in Crete. Perhaps, too, she also hoped to make gains in the Cyrenaica, but this region, along with the bulk of Crete, remained a Roman province.9 Cleopatra made further requests for territories along the Levant, but these, too, Antony refused.10 Fond of her though he plainly was, an efficient and tolerable administration came first—and in any case it was useful for Antony to sustain a healthy rivalry among Rome’s subject states.
Plutarch and Dio alike insist that Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra elicited strong disapproval in Rome.11 This is unlikely. As we have seen, their diplomatic intercourse was an act of prudence: Egypt was the obvious choice for securing stability in this part of the east. By the time news of his conduct at Antioch became known in Italy, Antony was leading Roman legions into Parthia, hardly, in the eyes of anyone who was not already his enemy, the conduct of a disloyal or unsound citizen. Gossip, perhaps malicious gossip, there may have been. Disapprobation, too, by anyone so prudish as to be upset by Antony’s uninhibited womanizing. But serious complaints about Cleopatra came later.
Marriage with Cleopatra, Part One
And yet it has often been claimed, and the claim remains a pervasive one, that, at Antioch, Antony married Cleopatra, an action certain to provoke reproaches, even outrage, in Rome.12 This assertion requires clarification. Because Cleopatra was not a Roman citizen, she and Antony lacked the capacity to make a marriage in accordance with Roman law.13 Antony divorced Octavia in 32, but until then he remained, from any Roman perspective, a married man, and in Rome polygamy was impossible: Cleopatra, if she was anything, was Antony’s mistress. Egyptian law, however, was something different, nor did Hellenistic custom forbid a sovereign from marrying as she pleased, especially if her marriage advanced the fortunes of her realm. The sensibilities of a Roman noble, by contrast, discouraged stepping outside Roman law and taking a foreign wife. Caesar, who knew something about Egyptian romance, took it as a mark of Alexandrian depravity that Roman soldiers serving in Egypt abandoned ‘the name and moral order of the Roman people’ in order to take local wives and with them father children.14 Clearly he distinguished between his affair with Cleopatra, which was man of the world stuff, and anyone’s settling down in an illicit, alien union, which was disgraceful. Did Antony?
Complaints over Cleopatra’s seduction of Antony, central to Octavian’s rhetoric of outrage when he was mobilizing Italy for the war at Actium, stimulated contemptuous allegations that she was his foreign wife, an oxymoron deployed to portray Octavia as a woman wronged and Antony as beyond the Roman pale.15 In the Aeneid, Cleopatra is Aegyptia coniunx—an Egyptian wife—and the poet has no words for such an abomination: nefas he calls it, ineffably evil.16 Some historians, by contrast, shied away from the word. Livy, it appears, preferred to say that Antony began to behave towards Cleopatra as if she were his wife; Strabo employs similar language. Velleius deprecates Antony as Cleopatra’s love-slave, not her husband.17 And Dio, although ever so capacious a depository of Antonian inculpation, never censures him for marrying the queen. Plutarch has it both ways. For him, Cleopatra is usually Antony’s mistress, but, in his Comparison of Demetrius and Antony, she becomes his wife.18
The Elder Seneca, by contrast, is straightforward. He cites a humorous, bilingual graffito scrawled in Athens: ‘Octavia and Athena to Antony: consider yourself divorced’. This inscription is clearly a fiction generated by the false story of Antony’s sacred marriage to Athena. Seneca, who believes in its authenticity, explains it (and somewhat spoils the joke) by way of observing that, while he was married to Octavia, Antony also took Cleopatra as his wife.19 Seneca’s credulity over Antony’s sacred marriage is beside the point here. His certainty that Antony and Cleopatra were married is unambiguous. But Seneca is cataloguing instances of eloquence and cleverness: he is not writing as a historian. Other imperial writers, like Seneca, including some commentators and historians, also take it for granted that Antony and Cleopatra were married.20
Part of the problem for ancient writers lies in an uncertainty felt by some of them over applying the vocabulary of marriage, and even for modern historians the controversy can easily descend into quibbling about semantics. This was true even when Antony and Octavian were exchanging unkindly misinformation and distorting calumny. In a public letter penned in 33, lobbed at Octavian amid their propaganda war, Antony makes it clear that he grasped what was at stake in the Roman reception of his relationship with the Egyptian queen.21 For this reason, he clothes it in formulations appealing to the coarse but nevertheless pervasive sensibilities of Roman men of his class:
What has changed you? The fact that I am entering the queen? Is she my wife? Have I just begun this or has it been going on for nine years? As for you, is it only Drusilla you enter? You would be doing well if it’s the case that, when you read this letter, you haven’t just entered Tertullia or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia or Titisenia—or the lot. Does it matter to you in whom you insert your engorged cock or where you do it?
This letter, like any specimen of Roman invective, is designed to say bad things about its victim and, at the same time, portray its author in a plausibly positive light.22 Here Antony sets an epistolary scene in which he and Octavian are two men whose sex lives are not confined to their home lives. As we have seen before, such conduct, if perhaps less than sterling, was unobjectionable in Rome—nor uncommon. Antony does not attempt to portray himself as a paragon of marital fidelity: indeed, to do so would be ridiculous for a man who had paraded about Italy with Cytheris in tow. He admits at once to a sexual relationship with Cleopatra, an affair hardly unknown to Octavian when he arranged his sister’s marriage: hence the precise indication of the liaison’s long-standing nature and his complaint that Octavian lacks constancy (‘What has changed you?’). But Antony’s affair with Cleopatra—he is explicit on this point—is not a marriage.23 How could it be when he is married to Octavia?
Antony’s Latin makes it clear that he does not even make love with Cleopatra: he enters her, an activity in which Octavian also engages with several women whom Antony lists. This verb, inire, is a word more often applied to animals than people.24 And when it is used of women and men, it is cold and utilitarian and devoid of anything even hinting at sentimentality or affection. We see this starkly put in Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, the Cure for Love, in a passage where the poet is giving his pupil (this poem takes the shape of an instruction manual) frank advice on how to prepare for a tryst.25 A young man, advises Ovid, in order to avoid premature orgasm in the arms of his beloved, should procure prior gratification:
I recommend you enter (inire is the verb) somebody else first.
Simply find anyone in whom your first moment of pleasure
may expend itself.
It is obvious that Ovid has in mind a slave or prostitute—anyone to hand, really. And the very word he uses to communicate this brand of sexual exploitation is inire.
In this letter, then, there is nothing un-Roman in Antony’s attitude towards Cleopatra. By contrast, Octavian’s serial seductions are depicted as shocking. Here he is a man who cannot resist debauching aristocratic, Roman women. Not sexually satisfied with Drusilla, that is, with his wife Livia, Octavian also enters a string of women the identity of whom eludes but whose status is unquestionably distinguished. It is not that Octavian is an indiscriminate adulterer strictly speaking. It is rather that Octavian has only one standard: his women must be of the right class—and therefore women who are out of all bounds in legal and moral terms. Despite their elevated social standing, however, Octavian treats them as if they were slaves or foreigners (inire again). Sexual depredations of this kind, Antony need hardly spell it out, are outrages typical of a tyrant.26 Romans could hardly forget the rape of Lucretia or the dreadful fate of Verginia.27 Octavian, readers of this letter are warned, is coming for your wives and daughters.
Antony makes it clear he is not that kind of triumvir. Here he is too fine a gentleman even to embarrass the aristocracy by naming names. Amid so much coarseness in this letter, its author reveals a sound social delicacy. Modern historians sometimes complain that Antony uses only cognomina (nicknames) and refuses to name nomina (clan names), which renders it impossible to identify the women he has in mind here.28 That, of course, was precisely the point. Antony sleeps with the queen of Egypt. He has been doing so for several years and so it can hardly stand as a legitimate reason for changing one’s view of him. And his sexual relationship with Cleopatra, like his past sexual relationship with Fadia or with Cytheris, is merely a matter of harmless utility. It is Octavian who is dangerously lubricious.
As late as 33, then, Antony could publicly declare himself not married to Cleopatra—at least to a Roman audience. And it also to an audience of Roman men that he portrays his relationship with Cleopatra in terms that are, for her, debasing. Now the queen of Egypt was too astute to fail to grasp the politics of Roman invective. She knew, as do we, that this letter is a performance. But it tells us that nothing at Antioch or later at Alexandria could unambiguously be denominated a marriage. Antony’s very real intimacy with Cleopatra, however it was understood by the two of them or perceived by others, soon became an unsimple affair which, in the years after this winter in Antioch, developed in sudden, unexpected ways. When Antony presided over the Donations of Alexandria, which took place in 34, their relationship as parents and partners became implicated in geopolitical aspirations affecting nearly the whole of eastern Mediterranean and therefore fair game for attacks by his political enemies. At the same time, as we have seen, Antony could insist that Cleopatra was not his wife. And in Cleopatra’s Egypt, no document denominates Antony the queen’s consort.29 Nonetheless, something marvellous, or perhaps alarming, certainly unprecedented, had, by the time of the Donations, come into the world. To that we shall recur.
Evidence for a marriage, or something very much like it, occurring at Antioch is sometimes seen in three issues of tetradrachms produced in Syria.30 These coins carry, on one side, a portrait of Cleopatra, denominated in Greek ‘Queen Cleopatra, the Newer Goddess’, and, on the other, Antony, who is (in Greek) ‘Antony, thrice imperator, triumvir’.31 The exact site of their minting is uncertain, and it has been proposed that more than one mint was involved in their production. One likely source, however, is Antioch.32 On the prevailing view, these coins began to be issued in 36 and were closely connected with Antony’s promotion of Cleopatra.
Now, if these coins are so early as 36, they are indeed so extraordinary that one must conclude they signal a momentous development in Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra, even if one need not deem it a marriage. Instead of sharing a coin with another Roman magistrate or with his wife, Antony here, unprecedentedly and uniquely, shares it with a foreign monarch. That was indeed a gesture likely to stimulate consternation in Rome, nor could it go unnoticed in the east, where it must designate Cleopatra’s superiority over any rival potentate. For these reasons alone, however, this issue could only complicate rather than stabilize conditions in the east or in Rome at just the moment when Antony was planning to march into Parthia. Now there are several other issues depicting Antony and Cleopatra on the same coin, but these come later and under political circumstances that, as we shall see, render them not less remarkable but readily comprehensible. Our tetradrachms, by contrast, are distinct and highly significant outliers—if they appeared in 36.
In fact, however, this dating is highly provisional.33 There is no question but that these coins were in circulation by 33: one of them was reused and restamped in that year by the Parthian king Phraates.34 But there certainty ends. Antony’s arrangements at Antioch, so clearly designed to impose order and security during his absence, are inadequate as a justification for tethering these unquestionably provocative coins to 36. It is far more likely that they belong closer to the other issues portraying Antony and Cleopatra together, which is to say, sometime around late 35 or 34.35 Nonetheless, there is no denying these coins possess a kind of pushmi-pullyu quality: if there was a marriage, they make a kind of sense in 36, their brazenness notwithstanding, but they only make a kind of sense at that time if there was a marriage. For that very reason, however, on the question of whether a marriage actually took place at Antioch, they cannot be probative.
At Antioch Antony recognized his Egyptian children, very probably in a public ceremony. He expanded Cleopatra’s realm, so much so that it justified the inauguration of a new age for Egypt. That these actions were significant ones is undeniable. But Antony then marched away and there is no reason for us to believe he had specific plans ever to return to Cleopatra. His expedition into Parthia was intended to consume more than one year, perhaps as many as three. And, after winning victory there, Antony knew he would be confronted with whatever contests and challenges were thrown up in winding down the triumvirate and restoring the republic. We may, then, safely lay aside any suggestion that, in any sense of the word, Antony and Cleopatra were married at Antioch.
War with Parthia
It was at Antioch that Antony received the formal submission of Armenia’s king, Artavasdes. Canidius’ forceful acquisition of Armenia and this kingdom’s return to an alliance with Rome were commemorated by Antony on a denarius the reverse of which exhibited an Armenian tiara amid titulature noting Antony’s status as a conqueror.36 An Armenian embassy to Antioch conveyed the king’s renewed enthusiasm for Rome and his urgent advice that Antony march into Parthia by way of his kingdom.37 Other eastern monarchs, too, were consulted about the war with Parthia.38 This expedition, and its strategy, were Antony’s central concern during his winter in Antioch.
