Octavian seems to have encountered little or no resistance in his advance on Alexandria. He passed the fashionable suburb of Canopus and set up camp near the racecourse or hippodrome, just outside the city walls. When he received the news that Pelusium was lost, Antony rushed back to Alexandria and, on its outskirts, surprised and routed an advance guard of enemy cavalry. Elated by the victory, he returned to the palace and embraced Cleopatra while still in full armor. He then introduced to her a soldier who had displayed unusual valor in the engagement. As a reward, the queen gave him a golden helmet and breastplate. He took them, and that night deserted to Octavian.
With hopeless bravado Antony challenged his onetime colleague to single combat, as if they were a pair of Homeric heroes. He can hardly have anticipated an acceptance. Octavian responded dismissively: “There are many different ways by which Antony can die.”
On July 31, Antony decided to launch an all-out attack by land and sea on the following day. At dinner he ate and drank particularly well, telling the people around him that he did not expect to survive the battle. That evening, or so the story goes, about the hour of midnight, when all was hushed and a mood of dejection and fear of its impending fate brooded over the whole city, suddenly a marvellous sound of music was heard…as if a troop of revellers were leaving the city, shouting and singing as they went…. Those who tried to discover a meaning for this prodigy concluded that the god Dionysus, with whom Antony claimed kinship and whom he had sought above all to imitate, was now abandoning him.
Gods were imagined to leave besieged cities before they fell—Troy, Athens, Jerusalem. If the story has a basis in fact, perhaps Alexandrians were hearing Octavian, supported by a soldiers’ chorus, conducting an evocatio; in this ceremony, a Roman general used to call on the gods of an enemy city to change sides and migrate to Rome.
On August 1, as soon as it was light, Antony sent his fleet eastward to meet Octavian’s ships, and he drew up his remaining land forces on rising ground between the city walls and the hippodrome. The upshot was an almost comic fiasco. The ships raised their oars and surrendered without a fight; the fleets immediately combined and set a new course for the city. The cavalry deserted and the foot soldiers ran away.
Antony made his way back inside the walls of Alexandria and fell into a rage. He is reported to have shouted out that Cleopatra had betrayed him to the very men whom he was fighting for her sake. Terrified, she had word sent that she was dead.
There was only one thing now to be done. Antony went to his room and took off his armor. He asked his body servant to run him through, but the man suddenly turned away and fell on his sword instead. Antony then stabbed himself in the stomach and fell on the bed. The wound not only failed to kill him but soon stopped bleeding. Racked with pain, he begged bystanders to put him out of his misery, but they ran from the room.
The queen heard what had happened and sent word for Antony to be brought to her. She was hiding in a large mausoleum she had commissioned, which stood half complete in the palace grounds near a temple of Isis. Fearful of being surprised, she refused to unseal the doors, and she and two woman servants laboriously pulled the dying man with ropes up to a high window. Plutarch writes of the queen “clinging with both hands to the rope and with the muscles of her face distorted by the strain.” Cleopatra beat and scratched her breasts in the traditional manner of a grieving widow, and smeared her face with blood from Antony’s wound. He did his best to calm her, and, true to character to the last, called for and drank a cup of wine before expiring.
One of Antony’s bodyguards brought Octavian the dead man’s bloodstained sword, and it is said he withdrew into his tent and wept. Usually he kept his feelings under control, and we hear of him breaking down in tears on only one other occasion: when he received an account of Julius Caesar’s funeral. If he did weep now, it could have been the result of a snapping of tension after years of struggle rather than empathy. Octavian had never gotten on with Antony, and he is unlikely to have grieved for a man whom he had schemed to clear from his path for most of his public career. Alternatively, the incident was invented, and merely illustrated the victor’s highly developed skill at news management.
Octavian may have been the ruler of the Roman world, but he had never seen a great Hellenistic megalopolis before. He was familiar with cities that, like Rome and Athens, had grown untidily and organically over many centuries—crowded, noisy, ugly conurbations devoid of wide avenues and splendid vistas. So Alexandria made a great impression on him.
Founded in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great, the twenty-five-year-old Macedonian king who conquered the Persian empire, the city was built on a narrow bar of land with the Mediterranean on one side and a shallow lake, called Maraeotis (today’s Lake Mariout, smaller and shallower than in ancient times), on the other. A little way offshore lay an island, Pharos, with its celebrated lighthouse, which was three miles long and gave protection from storms.
As in a modern American city, the street plan was based on a grid. A mile-long mole or dike was built between the shore and the island of Pharos, so creating two harbors, the Great harbor on the east side and the Eunostus (or Happy Return) harbor to the west. A canal from Lake Maraeotis in the south connected the city to the Nile and so to Egypt both as a production center and a market.
The city was a runaway success. In the first century B.C., the total population may have been about the same size as that of Rome, up to one million. With its grand overall look, Alexandria, rather like Haussmann’s Paris in the nineteenth century, became a center for culture and fashion throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Strabo called it the “greatest emporium of the inhabited world.”
Octavian was now free to enter the city, and on foot he led his men through the Gate of the Sun, not far from the hippodrome outside the walls, and along one of the city’s main streets, the Canopic Way. Nervous crowds had gathered. Octavian made a point of being accompanied by Areius, an Alexandrian citizen and a well-known philosopher and rhetorician. This friendly gesture was presumably calculated to allay the fears of the people, for it was an accepted custom of war that a captured city could be given over to pillage by the victors.
Octavian and his party made their way to the Gymnasium, where the triumvir and the queen had probably held the ceremony of the Donations of Alexandria. The place was packed: when Octavian came in and mounted a speaker’s dais, the audience was beside itself with fear and all present fell on their faces. He announced that he had no intention of holding the city at fault for the conduct of its rulers. At Areius’ request, he granted a number of pardons.
Octavian’s next destination was the Royal Palace, which lay north of the Canopic Way; here he would find the queen. He sent ahead as his envoy an eques called Gaius Proculeius, a close friend of his whom, it so happened, Antony in his last moments had recommended to the queen. Proculeius was under instruction to do whatever was needed to capture her alive.