Augustus

The Romans took an unsentimental view of sexual relations. Romantic love, as we know it, was rare. Public displays of affection were frowned on, as was excessive sexual activity. Marcus Porcius Cato the Censor, who lived in the second century B.C., set the standard for conventional good behavior when he expelled a man from the Senate for kissing his wife in the street.

A Roman man, almost invariably locked into a marriage of convenience (although second or later unions often permitted a freer choice), did not suffer feelings of moral guilt about sex, nor did he feel necessarily bound to any particular sexual object. He would not have understood modern terms such as “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality,” which categorize people as sexual types. What he did was the issue, not what he was.

To judge by the literary sources, it did not greatly matter whether the randy husband fancied a young man or woman. The poet Horace was not untypical of his age:

When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl

Or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know

You can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension?

Not me. I like sex to be there and easy to get.

According to Suetonius, Horace had his bedroom lined with mirrors; he brought hookers or rent boys there and enhanced his pleasure by turning his own sexual experience into pornographic imagery.

Two chief concerns governed sexual conduct. First, a free male citizen should be the one who performed the penetrative or insertive act, who was the “active” rather than the “passive” partner. For him to be sodomized was shameful, a betrayal of his masculinity. Anyone who was known to enjoy being buggered was scorned. This was why Julius Caesar deeply resented the story that in his youth he had been the catamite of the king of Bithynia, and the gibe of a political opponent that he was “every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.”

Second, an adulterer or fornicator was meant to restrict his attentions to noncitizens and slaves, as in Horace’s case; freeborn boys and women were out of bounds. Although there is plenty of evidence that this was a custom honored mostly in the breach, it was essential that there should be no doubt as to the identity of a Roman citizen’s father. This was why Octavian ordered a favorite freedman of his to commit suicide after he had been convicted of adultery with Roman matrons. In addition, foreign genes should not be permitted to enter the Roman gene pool; only citizens could marry citizens, and to wed a foreigner was frowned on; if not illegal, such a union was unrecognized by the law, especially when it came acknowledging heirs in a will.

What all of this signified so far as Antony was concerned was straightforward: he could not marry Cleopatra, who was as non-Roman as they came, but if he wanted to conduct an affair with her it would be odd if anyone complained. Roman women, such as Octavia, well understood the conventions; her husband’s extramarital dallying did not strain her loyalty to him. It was her loving brother who could not stand the idea of her betrayal by Antony’s entanglement with an eastern temptress.

Surprising information started trickling out of the east during the autumn and winter of 36–35 B.C. Personal letters from officers and others to their families and friends indicated that Antony’s laurel-wreathed communiqués did not tell the whole truth about the Parthian war. Indeed, Octavian and the political elite in Rome were intrigued to learn that Antony’s campaign had come perilously close to defeat. A careful but confidential investigation was commissioned to establish the facts.

This was what had actually happened. Antony followed Julius Caesar’s original plan of campaign, and to begin with things went well. Rather than struggle across the desert plains of Mesopotamia, harried by the Parthian cavalry, and slowly lose a war of attrition, he marched through the independent and (he expected) friendly kingdom of Armenia. He then turned south and invaded Media Atropatene (roughly speaking, today’s Azerbaijan), with a view to besieging and capturing its capital, Phraata.

Unfortunately, Antony made four bad mistakes. Because he had launched his attack in June, he could not afford setbacks or he would find himself campaigning in winter. He placed confidence in a senior Parthian defector, who was in fact spying for his king. To compound this error, Antony failed to impose garrisons and to take hostages from the Armenian king, Artavâzd. It may be that he had neither the time nor enough troops to do this, but the consequence was unfortunate.