Augustus

Antony’s final mistake was to let his slow baggage train (with all the siege equipment for Phraata) travel at its own speed with a relatively light guard. The well-informed Parthians turned up out of the blue with a force of fifty thousand mounted archers, who set on fire all the siege equipment and destroyed it. The Armenian king and his forces defected.

This was a catastrophe, for it would no longer be possible to take Phraata, where Antony had intended to winter. He was forced to march back the way he had come, now through incessant snowstorms. More than twenty thousand men, one third of the army, were lost in the month it took to march to the comparative safety of Armenia, where the king saw no advantage in trying to impede the Roman retreat.

Antony was very upset and, rightly, blamed himself. He had all his silver plate cut up and distributed to the soldiers as an improvised bonus to keep them happy. Several times he prepared for suicide, asking his sword bearer to be his executioner. Like any good general, he went around the hospital tents to comfort the wounded; if Plutarch is right, his men realized that his need for comfort was as great as theirs. They “greeted him with cheerful faces and gripped his hand as he passed: they begged him not to let their sufferings weigh upon him, but to go and take care of himself.”

At last the battered army reached Syria. Messengers had been sent ahead to ask Cleopatra to bring money and clothing for the soldiers. The legions waited by the sea for the queen to arrive. Antony’s self-confidence was still at a low ebb and he started drinking heavily. Unable to bear the waiting, he kept jumping up and running to the shore to look for Egyptian sails.

Cleopatra took her time, but when she appeared she brought everything that was needed. Once the soldiers were fully supplied, their general returned to Alexandria, there to do some hard thinking about how to proceed.

At Rome, Octavian absorbed the news of his colleague’s discomfiture. He could see that from a strictly military perspective Antony had suffered only a setback—serious, certainly, but by no means a total disaster.

No records exist of Octavian’s secret intentions; it may be that like many politicians he was merely an intelligent opportunist, and did not cherish a long-term ambition to oust Antony and become sole master of the Roman world. However, the evidence of his behavior—his patience and pertinacity, his persistent reluctance to do more than a bare minimum to help his fellow triumvir, his ruthlessness with other competitors—suggests a covert plan.

Always the realist, though, Octavian knew better than to strike too soon. The correct approach, he decided, would be to accept his colleague’s account of his campaign at face value, and in no way to question it. So victory celebrations were staged, sacrifices conducted, and festivals held. On the face of it this was convenient for Antony, who, it was said, soon came to believe his own propaganda and convinced himself that in escaping from Media and Armenia he had won the day.

Octavian was aware that Antony would need to replace the men he had lost, but never allowed him to raise troops in Italy as he was entitled to do. He was also determined not to fulfill his promise in the Treaty of Tarentum to send Antony four legions in return for the ships he had received. He wrote to his colleague saying, with hidden but barbed sarcasm, that in the light of his resounding victory Antony ought to have no trouble raising any additional soldiers he might need in his own half of the empire.

To add injury to insult, Octavian sent his sister, who had been living in Rome since last seeing Antony in Greece, to join her husband. She brought with her large stores of clothing for his troops, money, presents for Antony’s staff, and two thousand picked men, splendidly equipped with full armor, to serve as his Praetorian Guard (that is, the ex officio bodyguard of a general). She was also accompanied by seventy warships, the survivors of those Antony had lent to her brother. This apparently kind and thoughtful gesture was, in fact, multiply wounding.

First of all, the provision of help for Antony’s troops betrayed Octavian’s knowledge of the real outcome of the Parthian campaign. Second, the dispatch of two thousand soldiers rather than the twenty thousand promised was an almost laughable insult. Third, it was widely known that Antony was living with Cleopatra, and sending his wife to him was mischievously tactless.

Charitable historians have conjectured that Octavian wanted to apply pressure on his colleague with a view to detaching him from Cleopatra. But Octavian knew his Antony by now. He probably guessed that Antony would react intemperately, and show himself in a bad light.