XV
A LONG FAREWELL
31–30 B.C.
Now the tourist resort of Mersa Matrouh, this small coastal town commands a large and beautiful lagoon with miles of sandy beach. In this delightful spot (promoted today as a “corner of paradise”), Antony plunged into the deepest gloom. He had hoped to make contact with four of his legions in Cyrene, but they declared for Octavian and refused to meet him. He sent Cleopatra ahead to Alexandria, where her ships arrived garlanded as if in victory. Before the truth came out, she had any potential opponents killed. In the meantime, her disconsolate paramour was able, in Plutarch’s dry words, “to enjoy all the solitude he could desire.”
Octavian sent a victory dispatch to Rome, but, patient and methodical as ever, was in no hurry to deal with Antony and Cleopatra. He decided to spend the oncoming winter on the island of Samos.
Many more soldiers were under arms than were needed or could be afforded. Octavian sent Italian veterans above a certain age back to Italy for formal discharge, but gave them neither land nor money because for the moment he had none. There were soon disgruntled mutterings, and Agrippa was sent back to deal with the problem.
There was other evidence that the regime was unpopular. Maecenas uncovered a plot to assassinate Octavian on his return to Italy. It was ineptly masterminded by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, son of the self-seeking former triumvir and a nephew of Marcus Brutus. “A young man whose good looks exceeded his prudence,” he was put to death. Dio writes that Antony and Cleopatra schemed to “actually kill [Octavian] by treachery.” Were they, one wonders, ever in touch with young Lepidus?
It is a sign of Octavian’s managerial good sense that while he was away from Rome, he was willing to delegate powers to Agrippa and Maecenas, men who had been at his side throughout the long adventure and whom he trusted completely. He allowed them to read in advance his dispatches to the Senate, and correct them if they so wished. He had a duplicate made of his seal ring—the image of a sphinx—so that they could seal his letters up again.
The Donations of Alexandria were swiftly canceled. While deposing many minor princelings, Octavian confirmed on their thrones most of the major client kings—Amyntas of Galatia, who had defected to him with his cavalry; Polemo of Pontus, who had stayed behind in his kingdom; and Archelaus of Cappadocia. These were capable rulers, who knew it would be in their interest to remain loyal to whoever was in charge of the Roman empire. His former colleague was a good judge of character and Octavian saw no reason to disturb the arrangements he had made. So far as directly governed provinces were concerned, trustworthy colleagues were appointed in due course as proconsuls; for example, Cicero’s son, Marcus, frequently drunk but a safe pair of hands, was given Syria.
The newly formed province of Armenia was irretrievably lost, for its deposed king had seized the distraction of the Actium campaign to reclaim his realm. Octavian coolly ignored this insult to Roman power and interests. The question of what to do about the eastern frontier—the Armenians, the Medes, and behind them the fierce Parthians, who still held the lost standards of Crassus—would have to wait. He was too busy.
In January of 30 B.C., Agrippa wrote to Octavian on Samos that he was unable to handle the Italian veterans, who were now openly mutinous, and that his presence was urgently needed. This was the worst possible time of year to undertake a long sea journey, but there was nothing for it. When Octavian disembarked at Brundisium, he was met by the entire Senate (except for a couple of praetors and the tribunes), many equites, and large numbers of ordinary citizens. He received an enthusiastic welcome. It was usual for senators to meet a returning statesman outside the gates of Rome, but for them to travel three hundred miles was a unique honor. Official Rome recognized that it was now under the control of one unchallenged ruler.
Not willing to be left behind, the angry veterans marched down to Brundisium as well. Octavian wasted little time in meeting their demands, although he did not have enough ready cash to pay them all off on the spot and was obliged to issue promises postdated to the expected fall of Alexandria. The veterans were reluctantly satisfied, and after a month on Italian soil Octavian returned to Samos, where he laid plans for the invasion of Egypt.
In theory, Antony and Cleopatra had no reason to despair, for they still ruled half the Roman empire, and all its financial and human resources should have been at their disposal. But since Actium, people of power in the eastern provinces were unwilling to supply yet more soldiers to bolster what they judged to be a lost cause.
When Antony eventually arrived in Alexandria from Paraetonium, he abandoned the palace and his friends, living by himself in a quayside house beside Alexandria’s great lighthouse, more than three hundred feet high, on the island of Pharos. On January 14, 30 B.C., he entered his fifty-fourth year. The queen eventually tempted him from self-indulgent misery by throwing a spectacular birthday party for him. According to Plutarch,
Cleopatra and Antony now dissolved their celebrated Society of Inimitable Livers and instituted another, which was at least its equal in elegance, luxury and extravagance, and which they called the Order of the Inseparable in Death. Their friends joined it on the understanding that they would end their lives together, and they set themselves to charm away the days with a succession of exquisite supper parties.
The couple knew that with the arrival of spring Octavian would march against them. They had no realistic prospect of escaping to some other part of the world, although they had briefly thought of Spain and Cleopatra had tried and failed to organize an expedition to Arabia. The star-crossed lovers were cornered. Their only recourse now was to negotiate and, assuming that failed, to prepare for a last, futile stand.
The queen had plenty of money and still commanded the loyalty of her people. An army and a fleet were assembled. To cheer up the Alexandrians, a great ceremony—almost as splendid as the Donations of Alexandria—was held, at which the sixteen-year-old king of kings, Ptolemy XV Caesar, alias Caesarion, and Antony’s son by Fulvia, the fourteen-year-old Antyllus, officially came of age.
Octavian received a succession of envoys from Alexandria who laid various proposals before him. He listened, but conceded nothing. Although he declined to make his own position clear, his policy was in fact straightforward: he wanted to win the great prize of Egypt, that rich, self-contained, and exotic realm which had attracted the greedy gaze of eminent Romans for more than a century—and he wanted to win it for himself, not simply for Rome.
Octavian’s plan of attack was yet another pincer movement. Four Antonian legions that had switched loyalties would invade from Cyrenaica, which lay west of Egypt; in a signal mark of favor, Octavian appointed to command them the thirty-year-old Gaius Cornelius Gallus, although he was only an eques and previously best known as a fine lyric poet.
Octavian marched through Syria at the head of a substantial army toward the Egyptian frontier. The campaign was unlikely to be problematic, so this time Agrippa’s services were not required. Octavian judged himself capable of managing on his own.
At last Antony bestirred himself. Believing that there was a good chance of winning over his legions, he marched back, at the head of a strong force of infantry and a powerful fleet, to Paraetonium where Gallus had installed himself. But his attempt to win back the legionaries and take the town failed, and his ships were trapped in the harbor and either burned or sunk.
The rest of Antony and Cleopatra’s forces were stationed at Pelusium, a port on the easternmost edge of the Nile delta. It straddled the coastal route that skirted the Sinai desert and, being the only means of entry by land into Egypt from the east, was strategically important. Pharaohs throughout the ages had always taken care to give it a strong garrison. However, Pelusium fell with little or no resistance, perhaps surrendered by Cleopatra or else quickly stormed. If the former, she was creating a distance between herself and Antony—as may well be, for her first loyalty was always to her kingdom and the preservation of her own power. This and other accounts of her behavior during this time may have been lifted from Octavian’s propaganda, which often stressed the queen’s eastern deviousness and Antony’s humiliating status as a dupe. However, it is perfectly possible that Cleopatra saw no advantage in going down with Antony and tried to save herself.