wounded pride was not the only sentiment in the soul of the triumvir.
When he was commanding the cavalry of Gabinius he had seen Cleopatra,
then fifteen years old; he had seen her again at Rome, the year of
Cæsar’s death. Without agreeing wholly with Appian, that Antony was
already in love with the queen of Egypt, it may be credited that her
beauty and her attractions had made on him a deep impression. He
remembered the “Siren of the Nile,” and amid the visits of so many
kings and powers it was, above all, hers that he awaited, but awaited
in vain. In the position of Antony, however, to speak was to be obeyed.
He commanded Cleopatra to repair to Tarsus, to vindicate before his
tribunal her ambiguous conduct during the civil war. Antony enjoyed in
advance this deliciously cruel pleasure: the beautiful Cleopatra, the
haughty queen of Egypt, the woman at whose feet he had seen the divine
Julius, coming to him as a suppliant.
Quintus Dellius, a creature of Antony’s, was appointed to bear the
message to Cleopatra. This Dellius, an unscrupulous intriguer and
agreeable man of pleasure, had by turns betrayed all men and all
parties. He was called “The Hunter of the Civil Wars”—_Desultor
bellorum civilium_. He was destined to die the friend of Horace, who
dedicated an ode to him, and the friend of Augustus who enriched him.
In the meanwhile he was going to make use of Cleopatra to enable him to
attain still higher favor with Antony. At the first audience granted
him by the beautiful queen, he understood the passion of Cæsar and
foresaw that of Antony. Feeling that Cleopatra would captivate the
triumvir at the first glance, he saw at once the advantage to be gained
in the near future from the patronage of the Egyptian queen; and from
the envoy of Antony he suddenly became the courtier of Cleopatra,
and from an ambassador an intermeddler. He exhorted the queen to
hasten into Cilicia, assuring her that, despite his appearance and
manners suitable to the amphitheater, the rough soldier of Pharsalia
and Philippi was not so ferocious as he seemed. “Never,” said he,
“will Antony call tears to eyes so beautiful, and far from causing
you the least pain he will fulfil your every wish.” Dellius found no
difficulty in persuading Cleopatra: she saw, shining through his words,
the dawn of a new fortune equal to that which she had dreamed of as
the mistress of Cæsar. According to a somewhat doubtful tradition,
Dellius might have succeeded in more than securing the attention of
Cleopatra: he might have made himself beloved by her. Be this as it
may, the queen, yielding to his counsels, determined to set out for
Tarsus, but in order to enhance the value of the proceeding and to make
it more effective she was careful not to precipitate it, and under
various pretexts she often delayed her departure, notwithstanding
the entreaties of Dellius and the messages constantly increasing in
earnestness despatched by Antony.
On a day when the triumvir on his judgment-seat was giving public
audience in the midst of the agora of Tarsus, a great uproar arose on
the banks of the Cydnus. Antony inquired what it meant. Flatterers as
all Greeks are, the Cilicians replied that it was Aphrodite herself
who, for the happiness of Asia, was coming to visit Bacchus. Antony
liked to assume the name of Bacchus. The crowd which thronged the
public square rushed in a body to the shore. Antony was left alone
with his lictors in the deserted agora—his dignity kept him there, but
he fidgets in his curule chair, till finally curiosity gains the day.
Unaccustomed to self-control, he, also, descends to the strand. The
sight is worth the trouble—a vision divine which carries one back to
the dawn of mythologic times. Cleopatra is entering Tarsus, ascending
the Cydnus on a vessel plated with gold over which float sails of
Tyrian purple. The silver oars rise and fall in measured cadence to
the music of Greek lyres and Egyptian harps. The queen, the goddess
Cleopatra, lying beneath an awning of cloth of gold which shades the
deck, appears as the painters usually represent Aphrodite, surrounded
by rosy children like the Loves, beautiful young girls scarcely clad
with lightest drapery as Graces and sea-nymphs, bearing garlands of
roses and the lotus-flower and waving great fans of the feathers of
the ibis. On the prow of the vessel other Nereides form groups worthy
the brush of Apelles; Loves suspended to the yards and rigging seem
descending from the skies. Incense and spikenard kept burning by slaves
surround the vessel with a light and odorous vapor which sends its
perfume to both banks of the stream.
Antony at once despatched one of his favorites to Cleopatra to request
her to sup with him that same night. Cleopatra, availing herself
doubtless of her title of goddess rather than of that of queen—a queen
of Egypt was nobody in comparison with a triumvir—made response that it
was she who invited Antony to supper, and the Roman did not decline the
invitation. He went at the hour appointed to the palace, which several
days previously Cleopatra had had secretly prepared with gorgeous
magnificence. The banquet-hall, sumptuously adorned, shone with the
brilliancy of chandeliers, candelabra, and a multitude of golden
sconces arranged symmetrically in circles, lozenges, etc. The feast,
worthy of its decorations, abounded in nectarean wines served in vases
of solid gold, and in rare and artistic viands prepared by a master
hand. Antony was a great gastronomist, and three months before this had
given his cook a house for a dish that pleased him. He would have given
a whole town to the cook of Cleopatra. As for the beautiful Egyptian,
the triumvir was already willing to give her the whole world. The next
day Antony gave a supper to the queen. He hoped to surpass, by means
of money, the magnificence of his reception, but he was the first to
recognize his inability to rival her as an Amphitryon, and, clever man
that he was,[3] he jested gaily in Cleopatra’s presence at his meanness
and coarse taste. Probably in these two entertainments there was no
mention of the grievances, real or pretended, with which Rome charged
Cleopatra. Antony had no longer any thought of summoning her before his
tribunal as a suppliant—the suppliant would have been Antony himself
if Cleopatra had rejected his advances. Henceforth it was the queen
that commanded; the all-powerful triumvir had become the “slave of the
Egyptian woman,” as Dion Cassius indignantly exclaims.
The first advantage Cleopatra took of her power was to have her son, by
Cæsar, Ptolemy-Cæsarion, recognized as legitimate heir to the crown of
Egypt. At Antony’s request the decree was immediately ratified by his
colleagues, Octavius and Lepidus. Antony alleged as a pretext for this
favor to Cleopatra, the services she rendered to the Romans during the
civil war. After having satisfied her ambition, Antony became without
difficulty the executor of her revenge. Like most women the beautiful
queen was vindictive, and like Dionysius the Tyrant, she carried her
prudence to the extent of crime. Her sister Arsinoë had escaped from
Rome, where she had contributed to Cæsar’s triumph; she had found
an asylum at Miletus. Whether Cleopatra feared that, ambitious and
intriguing as she had already shown herself in the War of Alexandria,
she might again create trouble in Egypt, or simply to avenge herself
for Arsinoë’s former conduct, the queen besought Antony to have her put
to death. One crime more or less weighed but little on the conscience
of the proscriber of the year 711 A. U. C. The unfortunate Arsinoë was
murdered in the temple of Artemis Leucophryne, where she had sought
refuge from the hired assassins of Antony. An Egyptian, also a refugee
in Asia Minor where he passed himself off as Ptolemy XII., drowned as
was well-known in the Nile, was also put to death. Cleopatra bore an
ill-will, the cause of which is not known, also to Megabyses, of the
great temple of Ephesus. He was arrested by Antony’s order, and his
life was saved only by the interference of the magistrates of the city,
speaking in the name of the people, who rose in insurrection to rescue
him. At the same time, Sarapion, the former commander of the Egyptian
squadron at Cyprus, was beheaded by the order of Antony, thus avenging
Cleopatra for the defection of her officer and Antony for the aid given
to Cassius. When Cleopatra arrived at Tarsus in the summer of 41 B. C.,
Antony was preparing to march against the Parthians. At the end of a
month the concentration of his troops was accomplished, the fleets
ready, and no obstacle remained to the departure of the army. But this
month had been passed with Cleopatra, and Antony had found it very
short. Listening only to his passion, he put off the expedition till
the spring and followed the queen into Egypt.
Then began that mad life of pleasure and debauchery, that long and
sumptuous orgy, which even in the third century of our era, and after
the excesses of Nero and Heliogabalus, was still quoted in the Roman
world, though then slaves to every corruption and exhausted in efforts
of magnificence, as an inimitable model.
Οι Αχιμητοδιοι: “Those whose life is inimitable.” This, moreover, was
the name assumed by Antony and Cleopatra and the intimate companions of
their pleasures.[4] Plutarch and Dion relate that festival succeeded
to festival, entertainment to entertainment, and hunting parties to
excursions on the Nile. Cleopatra quitted Antony neither day nor night.
She drank with him, she gambled with him, hunted with him, she was
even present at his military exercises when by chance this man of war,
remembering that he was a soldier, took a fancy to review his legions.
It is further related that Cleopatra was incessantly inventing some
new diversion, some unexpected pleasure. But this list is very brief,
this sketch a very modest and faint description to give an idea of
the superb orgies, the unrestrained voluptuousness, and the nameless
prodigalities of the “Inimitables.” Pliny alone of the ancient writers
has summed them up, perhaps unknown to himself, in the legend, more or
less symbolic, of the Pearl. One day, says this writer, when Antony was
extolling the luxuriousness and profusion of a certain entertainment,
he exclaimed that no other could surpass it. Cleopatra, who always
affected to put no limit to the possible, replied that the present
feast was a wretched affair, and she laid a wager that the next day
she would give one on which she would expend ten millions of sesterces
(two millions one hundred thousand francs). Antony took the bet. The
next day the feast, magnificent as it was, had nothing to distinguish
it from the preceding, and Antony did not fail to rally Cleopatra. “Per
Bacchus,” cried he, “this would never cost ten millions of sesterces!”
“I know that,” replied the queen, “but you see only the accessories. I
myself will drink alone the ten millions,” and at once detaching from
her ear a single pearl—the largest and most perfect ever seen—she threw
it into a golden cup, in which it was dissolved in the vinegar there
prepared, and swallowed at one draught the acid beverage. She was about
to sacrifice the second pearl when L. Plancus, the umpire of the wager,
arrested her hand by declaring that she had won.[5]
Picture to yourself the most costly materials, marbles, breccia,
granites, ebony and cedar woods, porphyry, basalt, agate, onyx,
lapis-lazuli, bronze, silver, ivory, and gold; conceive the most
imposing Egyptian, the most beautiful Grecian architecture, imagine
the Parthenon and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, the Pavilion of
Rameses, and the ruins of Apollinopolis Magna; recreate the royal
palaces of Alexandria, which, with their dependencies, their gardens,
their terraces, rising one above another, made up a third of the
city: reconstruct the massive enclosures—those double pylons into
which opened avenues bordered with sphinxes; those obelisks, those
magnificent propylæa, those saloons three hundred feet long and a
hundred and fifty wide, supported by vast columns, in which rise
double rows of pillars ten meters in circumference and twenty meters
in height, bursting into lotus blossoms at their summits; those
sanctuaries with their screens enameled in gold and tortoiseshell,
and studded with gems; those long picture galleries adorned with
the paintings of Zeuxis, Apelles, and Protogenes; those magnificent
thermæ with their calidaria, their basins of hot and cold water, their
retiring-rooms with walls of red porphyry, their porticos adorned
with statues; those gymnasia, theaters, hippodromes, those stages
covered with saffron powder, those triclinia where the couches of
embossed silver rested on Babylonian carpets; those atria with their
uncovered roofs, sustained by Corinthian columns with capitals of
golden bronze, by day shaded by purple awnings, the silk of which
was worth its weight in gold, and at night open to the starry sky.
See, at all seasons, blooming in the gardens roses and violets, and
scatter the pavements of onyx and mosaics four times a day with fresh
flowers; people this scenery with crowds of slaves, pipers, players
of the harp and psaltery, dancers, actors, Atellans [of the drama,
as at Atellan, of lascivious character, Atellanæ], acrobats, mimes,
gymnasts, ballet-dancers, and serpent-charmers. Load these tables with
oysters from Tarentum, lampreys dressed with garum, bonitos cooked
in fig-leaves, pink ousels, quails, pheasants, swans, geese livers,
stews made of the brains of birds, hares cooked rare and dusted with
coriander seeds, truffles as large as the fist which were assumed to
fall from the sky like aërolites, cakes of honey and wheat flour, and
the most delicious fruits of the Mediterranean basin. In the kitchens,
roasting before the fires on immense hearths, for the entertainment of
fifteen guests, twelve wild boars, spitted successively at intervals
of three minutes, so that, according to the duration of the feast,
one of these animals might be exactly cooked at the very moment it
was required to be served. Cool in snow the old Cæcuban wine, the
Falernian ripened for twenty years, the wines of Phlemtes, Chios,
Issa, the imperial wine of Lesbos, the ripe wine of Rhodes, the sweet
wine of Mitylene, the Saprian, smelling of violets, and the Thasos,
said to “rekindle failing love.” Light up the lamps, the torches, and
the chandeliers, wind the pillars with streamers of fire; open the
mouths of the bronze colossi that the icy water may flow and cool the
atmosphere, and the breasts of Isis that the sweet waters may perfume
it; call in the choirs of singing women with their harps and cythera,
and the females who dance nude with castanets of gold in their hands;
add to them representations of comedies, the farces of mimes, the
tricks of jugglers, and the phantasmagorias of the magicians; offer
mock engagements in the harbor, and in the hippodrome chariot races
and combats between lions; summon the masqueraders and witness the
processions where cluster, around the golden car of Bacchus and the
Cyprian, fifteen hundred satyrs, a thousand cupids, and eight hundred
beautiful slaves as nymphs and mimes. Finally, imagine all that Asiatic
pomp, Egyptian state, and Grecian refinement and depravity, and Roman
power and licentiousness blended in a single form—a sensual and
splendid woman, delighting in pleasure and sumptuousness—can achieve
with such elements and you will have some idea, though very vague and
feeble, of the “Life Inimitable.”
Sometimes Antony and Cleopatra indulged in more vulgar pleasures.
Disguised, she as a barmaid, and he as a porter or a sailor, they
ran, by night, about the streets of Alexandria, knocking at the doors
of houses, abusing belated pedestrians, entering low lodging-houses,
and quarreling with drunken men. To the great delight of Antony these
frolics usually ended in fights. Despite his strength and skill, the
Roman did not always win, and Cleopatra was sometimes well splashed
with mud; but victors or vanquished, the lovers returned happy to the
palace, quite willing to renew their adventures. The secret, however,
escaped, and thenceforth the royal pair were handled more cautiously,
without being entirely spared.[6]
These follies did not turn the Alexandrians against the triumvir as
much as might have been supposed. If they had little esteem for him,
they liked him for his good humor, and the ease with which he was
approached. They delighted to say: “Antony wears for the Romans a
tragic mask, but here he lays it aside, and assumes for us the mask of
comedy.” His intimate companions and his officers, who shared without
scruple his voluptuous and unbridled excesses, were still less inclined
to resent them, for, like himself, they yielded to the bewitching charm
of Cleopatra. They loved, they admired her, they bore cheerfully her
snubs and sarcasms, and were not shocked, even if in the midst of a
feast, at a sign from Antony, she quitted the banquet hall with him,
and returning after a short absence resumed her position on the couch
of the triclinium. They studied to please and divert her, each strove
to be the vilest toady to the queen—“humillimus assentator reginæ”—for
a smile of Cleopatra they sacrificed all dignity. Once, L. Plancus, a
man of consular dignity, crowned with rushes, a fish’s tail attached to
his loins, and his naked body painted blue, actually performed in her
presence the dance of Glaukos.
With Cæsar, Cleopatra had instinctively played the part of a crowned
Aspasia, ever bewitching, but uniting dignity with grace, concealing
the courtesan beneath the robe of a queen, ever equable in mood,
expressing herself in the choicest language, talking politics, art,
literature, her marvelous faculties rising without effort to the level
of the lofty intelligence of the dictator: with Antony, Cleopatra, at
first through policy, afterwards through love, played the part of a
Laïs born by chance to a throne. Seeing at once that the inclinations
of Antony were coarse and low, that his wit was commonplace and his
language very loose, she immediately set herself to the same tone. She
kept pace with this great drinker, remaining even till dawn with the
foaming flagons and goblets continually replenished; she accompanied
him by night into the suspicious streets of Rhakotis, the old portion
of Alexandria; she jested cynically, sang amatory songs, recited
licentious poems; she quarreled with him, provoking and returning
both abuse and blows. Nothing delighted Antony like the sight of that
ravishing little hand threatening and beating him, or to hear from
those divine lips, fit for the choruses of Sophocles or the odes of
Sappho, the same words that he had heard bandied among the guard of the
Esquiline gate and in the unmentionable dens of the Suburra.
[Illustration]
V.
In the winter of 39 B. C. the war of Persia recalled Antony into
Italy. Through ambition or resentment against Octavius, and also, says
Plutarch, through jealousy, Fulvia his wife had fomented this war. She
hoped that these disturbances would compel Antony to leave Cleopatra,
in order to defend his power threatened in Rome. Fulvia had succeeded
but too well. Antony, it is true, was sailing towards Brundusium with
two hundred sail, but the victorious Octavius was all-powerful in
Italy, his adversaries dispersed or proscribed; she herself had fled
and was dying, without a hope of again seeing her husband. Antony heard
of her death while touching at a port in Sicily. This, in the end, made
a peace easy. Antony had taken no part in the war of Persia; Fulvia
alone, aided by her father-in-law, had excited it; her death rendered
an accommodation possible between Antony and Octavius. Cocceius Nerva,
Pollio, and Mecænas contrived an interview at Brundusium. They were
reconciled and made a new division of the empire: Octavius took the
West, as far as the Adriatic; Antony, the East; and Lepidus had to be
content with the Roman possessions in Africa.
The treaty of Brundusium gave great satisfaction at Rome, where,
after so much dissension and bloodshed, peace was ardently desired.
To secure the fulfilment of it, the friends of the Triumvirs sought
to unite them by family ties, and they proposed a marriage between
Antony, who had just lost his wife, and Octavia, sister of Octavius,
the widow of Marcellus. This noble woman, who to the rarest qualities
added great beauty of person, could not fail, they thought, to secure
and fix the love of Antony; she would thus maintain harmony between
the brothers-in-law, to the great advantage of both and the good of
the state. Octavius gladly accepted the project, and notwithstanding
the passion he still entertained for Cleopatra, Antony, in view of the
political advantages of this union, took good care not to refuse. The
marriage was forthwith celebrated. The law forbade widows to marry
before the tenth month, but the senate granted a dispensation to the
sister of Octavius.
Antony remained at Rome during nearly the whole year 39 B. C. He lived
in perfect accord with Octavius and shared with him the government of
the empire; but although he had an equal part in authority and honors
he felt that he was only second in Rome. In his justifiable pride as
an old soldier, an accomplished warrior, the lieutenant of Cæsar at
Pharsalia, and commander-in-chief at Philippi, he was indignant when
he thought of the supremacy, acknowledged by all, of this almost
beardless youth. A famous Egyptian soothsayer, whom probably Cleopatra
herself had despatched to Rome, encouraged Antony in these ideas by
his predictions and horoscopes. “Your tutelar genius dreads that of
Octavius,” said he constantly. “Proud and lofty when alone, he loses
power when you are with Octavius. Here your star is eclipsed; it is
only away from Rome—it is in the East that it shines in full luster.”
A new revolt of the Parthians gave Antony a pretext for leaving Rome.
He set out with Octavia, and touched first at Athens. There he remained
during the winter of 39–38 B. C., forgetting not only the Parthians
(leaving his lieutenant Ventidius to conduct the war against them), but
Alexandria, the “Life Inimitable,” and Cleopatra herself.[7] Doubtless
he did not love his new wife, the beautiful Octavia, as ardently as he
had loved Cleopatra, or in the same way, but assuredly he did love her.
As feeble in will as powerful in body, Antony, the slave of woman, was
easily dominated. Erewhile Fulvia had enslaved him, then Cleopatra had
bewitched him, now he yielded to the quiet charm of Octavia.