C
Cleopatra reËntered Alexandria without opposition, but the civil war which threatened between the adherents of CÆsar and the republicans made her situation difficult and her crown precarious. The ally of the Roman people, she could not remain neutral in the struggle; but at the risk of the victors’, whoever they might be, making her pay the penalty of her desertion by annexing Egypt to the empire, she inclined to the Triumvirs; for the partisans of CÆsar had been less inimical to her while in Rome, and Antony, through policy indeed, rather than friendship, had spoken in favor of her son’s succession. On the other hand, if the Triumvirs possessed the West, their adversaries were almost the masters of the East, and directly threatened Egypt. At the very commencement of hostilities Cassius, who with eight legions occupied Syria, called upon Cleopatra to send him reËnforcements, and almost at the same time one of the lieutenants of Antony, Dolabella, besieged in Laodicea, addressed the same demand to her. Cassius was seemingly victorious, Dolabella the reverse; prudence would have advised to side with the former, nevertheless Cleopatra remained faithful to her tacit alliance with the CÆsarians. Four Roman legions, two left by CÆsar and two composed of the veterans of Gabinius, were stationed at Alexandria. The queen commanded them to set out for Laodicea, but the envoy of Dolabella, Allienus, who had taken the command of these troops, came upon the army of Cassius in Syria. Whether from pusillanimity or premeditated treachery, Allienus united his legions with those of the enemy against whom he was leading them, and only a single Egyptian squadron, which Cleopatra had also despatched to Laodicea, reached Antony.
Soon after the departure of the legions, 43 B.C., the young king Ptolemy died suddenly. Cleopatra was accused of having him poisoned. This crime, which is far from being authenticated, is by no means improbable. It may be that when Cleopatra by the departure of the Roman soldiers found herself without any reliable troops, she dreaded either a conspiracy in the palace or an insurrection which would drive her from the throne to place on it her brother. Six years previously the same circumstance had resulted to the advantage of her other brother, and Cleopatra had nearly fallen a victim. Immediately on the death of Ptolemy XIII., the queen took as the sharer of the throne her young son Ptolemy-CÆsarion, then four years of age.
Stationed at Cyprus was an Egytian fleet. Cassius sent orders direct to the navarch Sarapion, who commanded it, to unite with the republican fleet, and the latter obeyed without even referring to his sovereign. Not satisfied with the four legions and the squadron which he had already received from Cleopatra, much against her will, indeed, Cassius again sent her word to furnish him new supplies of troops, ships, provisions, and money. The queen, who feared an invasion, which she was without forces to repel, sought to temporize. She expressed her regrets to Cassius that she could not at once send him aid, Egypt being ruined by famine and pestilence. Famine indeed reigned there by reason of an insufficient inundation of the Nile, but Egypt was not ruined for all that, and whilst Cleopatra was evading the demands of Cassius she was preparing a new fleet to assist the Triumvirs. Cassius was not deceived by the diplomacy of Cleopatra’s envoy. He determined to invade Egypt. He had already set out on his march when Brutus, on the approach of the army of Antony, summoned him into Macedonia. Then Cleopatra sent her fleet to join the party of the CÆsarians, but on the way this fleet was dispersed and almost utterly destroyed by a tempest. Throughout this war ill-fortune seemed to pursue Cleopatra—with the best will to second the Triumvirs she had been able to give them almost no assistance; on the contrary, she had furnished reËnforcements to the republicans, who, well knowing that these reËnforcements had been most unwillingly supplied, desired to take vengeance for her reluctance.
The battle of Philippi freed Cleopatra from her anxiety on the score of the republicans; but she had still to fear the penalty of her apparent desertion of the Triumvirs. After his victory over Brutus, Antony overran Greece and Asia Minor for the purpose of levying tribute, and was everywhere received as a conqueror. Cities and kings vied with each other in adulation, heaped up honors and lavished gifts on him to secure immunity for the succor they had afforded, willingly or by force, to the vanquished party. At Athens, Megara, Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tarsus embassies and royal visits followed each other. To preserve to their kingdoms a quasi-autonomy, every petty sovereign of Asia hastened to obtain from the powerful triumvir a new investiture of his crown. Cleopatra alone, whether from queenly pride or womanly art, remained in Egypt and sent no ambassador; she seemed to pretend to ignore that the victory at Philippi had rendered Antony the master of the East.
The silence of Cleopatra surprised and irritated Antony. Perhaps 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.
?? ????t?d???: “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.
