The World

The assassins wanted to restore the republic but had no plans. Antony, now consul, outmanoeuvred them: at Caesar’s funeral in the Forum, he hailed Caesar’s divinity and greatness and displayed his bloodied toga, so inflaming the crowd that they drove the assassins out of Rome. (They set up headquarters in Greece). Sturdy and curly-haired, violent and virile, a cold-blooded politician, mediocre general and impulsive showman, the forty-two-year-old Antony was no understudy to Caesar: he craved power for himself. A playboy who studied philosophy in Athens, he was an enthusiast for seductions and banquets, often half soused. He sometimes dressed in Herculean lionskins and drove round Rome in a convoy of Britannic chariots, bearing his mistress, the courtesan Cytheris – and his mother. Now he abandoned Cytheris to marry Fulvia, a fierce political arbiter, once married to the demagogic agitator Clodius – a move much mocked by Cicero. Disdaining Caesar’s callow heir Octavian, now officially named ‘Caesar’ himself, Antony finally allied with him, launching a hit list – a proscription – through which Antony took revenge on Cicero for his witticisms. ‘There’s nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier,’ Cicero told the hitman, ‘but do try to kill me properly.’ Antony nailed his victim’s hands and head to the rostrum in the Forum, while Fulvia cut out his tongue and pierced it with her hatpin – an ugly display even by Roman standards.

Now that Rome was secured, Antony and Octavian pursued the assassins to Greece, where they were defeated and driven to suicide. Then they divided the empire, Antony taking the east, Octavian the west.

Antony had inherited Caesar’s Parthian expedition. As he mustered forces in Tarsus (Syria), Cleopatra, now twenty-eight, came to secure his support, arriving in her royal barge as a royal Isis–Aphrodite. Like Caesar, he had a taste for eastern monarchs, having just had an affair with the ex-courtesan queen of Cappadocia, Glaphyra.^*

On their first night together, Antony fell for Cleopatra. She celebrated in Ptolemaic style – with Bacchic banquets and sibling murder: she had Antony kill her sister Arsinoe. During his wild stay in Alexandria, she gave birth to twins. But soon afterwards, in 40 BC, Antony negotiated a new partnership with Octavian and jilted Cleopatra to marry Octavian’s sister Octavia. The two leaders now focused on retaking Judaea and Syria from the Parthians, appointing a young Jewish ally, Herod, as king of an enlarged Judaea.

In 38, Antony went east to attack Parthia – and returned to Cleopatra, giving her new territories in Lebanon, Israel and Cyprus, while together they had another son. But his army was obliterated in what is today Azerbaijan and he barely made it back to Syria. Cleopatra sailed up the coast with supplies. Her support, along with her tantrums and their shared children, convinced him that his destiny lay with her, so he abandoned Octavia in Athens.

Antony and the queen paraded through Alexandria as Dionysios and Sarapis, then married. She was enthroned as queen of kings, Caesarion as king of kings, acclaimed as son of Caesar, and their three children received kingdoms. Octavian criticized this unvirile eastern debauchery, to which Antony replied: ‘Do you object to me screwing Cleopatra? But we are married and it’s not as if it’s anything new.’ Indeed Octavian was a hypocrite, being an avid adulterer himself. Octavian, whose wife Scribonia was then pregnant, had recently fallen in love with Livia, the clever and beautiful twenty-year-old pregnant wife of Tiberius Claudius Nero, one of the Claudian clan and an Antony supporter, who agreed to divorce her. Octavian divorced Scribonia on the day his daughter Julia was born and married Livia, three days after she gave birth, at a sumptuous ceremony embellished with deliciae – half-naked boy slaves – and attended by her compliant ex-husband. ‘And what about you? Are you faithful to Livia?’ Antony naively asked Octavian. ‘What does it really matter where or with whom one gets it up?’

It did matter, politically. Octavian revealed Antony’s will, which acclaimed Caesarion as Caesar’s son and left everything to Cleopatra, with whom he wished to be buried, presumably embalmed pharaonically in Alexandria. Octavian denounced Cleopatra as a fatale monstrum, and the Senate declared war on her. Antony and Cleopatra mustered impressive resources – 250 galleys and 20,000 troops.^* If Octavian won, his empire would speak Latin and be based in Rome; if Antony, it would be Greek-speaking, ruled from Alexandria – and today we would all speak Greek rather than Latin languages. They fought for the Mediterranean world.

CLEOPATRA’S SNAKE, ALEXANDER’S NOSE