Just as quietly she raised the bar, enough to make the initial banquet look spartan. Antony returned on his fourth evening to a knee-deep expanse of roses. The florist’s bill alone was a talent, or what six doctors earned in a year. In the rippling Cilician heat the perfume must have been intoxicating. At evening’s end the trampled roses alone remained behind. Again Cleopatra divided the furnishings among her guests; by the end of the week, Antony’s men carted home couches, sideboards, and tapestries, as well as a particularly considerate gift on a searing summer night: “litters and bearers for the men of high rank, and horses decked out with silver-plated trappings for the majority of them.” To facilitate their returns, Cleopatra sent each man off as well with a torch-carrying Ethiopian slave. As much as the splendor of her camp “beggared description,” the ancients did not stint on their accounts, few of which may actually have done justice to the wonders at hand. In this Cleopatra was by no means alone. “Kings would come often to [Antony’s] doors, and the wives of kings, vying with one another in their gifts and their beauty, would yield up their honor for his pleasure.” Cleopatra did so only most lavishly and inventively. For this trip, six-year-old Caesarion stayed home.
Plutarch paid tribute to Cleopatra’s “irresistible charm” and to the “persuasion of her discourse,” but Appian alone attempted to re-create the conversation of the first Tarsan meetings. How did Cleopatra justify her behavior? She had done nothing to avenge Caesar’s death. She had assisted Dolabella, a would-be assassin, and a man on whose account Antony had divorced a wife. Her lack of cooperation had been stunning. She sounded no faltering notes of humility and extended no apologies, offering only a bold recitation of fact. Proudly she catalogued all she had done for Antony and Octavian. Indeed she had aided Dolabella. She would have done so more generously yet had the weather complied; she had attempted personally to deliver up a fleet and supplies. Despite repeated threats, she had resisted Cassius’s demands. She had not flinched before the ambush she knew lay in wait for her, but had met with the tempest that had shattered her fleet. Only ill health had prevented her from setting out again. By the time she had recovered, Mark Antony was the hero of Philippi. She was unflappable, witty, and—as Antony might have surmised from the masquerade as Venus—entirely blameless.
At some point the two broached the question of money, which to a great extent explained Cleopatra’s sumptuous display. It was one way to prove your utility to a man in search of funds. The Roman coffers remained empty. The triumvirs had promised each soldier 500 drachmas, or a twelfth of a talent; they had well above thirty legions in their service. It was more or less incumbent on Caesar’s successor—if not on the victor of Philippi—to plan a Parthian campaign, and Antony did so as well. The Parthians had favored the assassins. They were land-hungry and restless. Antony had a humiliating Roman defeat of 53 to avenge; the Roman general who had last ventured beyond the Tigris had not returned. His severed head had wound up as a prop in a Parthian production of Euripides; his eleven legions had been slaughtered. A dazzling military victory would once and for all guarantee Antony’s supremacy at home. And whenever a Roman dreamed of Parthia, his thoughts turned inevitably, necessarily, to Cleopatra, the only monarch who could fund such a massive operation.
Eventually Mark Antony reciprocated, inviting Cleopatra to a feast of his own. Unsurprisingly, he “was ambitious to surpass her in splendor and elegance.” Also unsurprisingly, he was defeated on both counts. Cleopatra would be credited later with addling Antony’s judgment and in one early respect this may have been true; most Romans would have known better than to attempt to beat a Ptolemy at the luxury game. Again Cleopatra proved marvelously supple, more adept than Antony at playing by someone else’s rules. As bluff Antony poked fun at himself for his inferior fare, as he disparaged the “meagerness and rusticity” of his feast, Cleopatra joined in. She was entirely irreverent on his account, a made-to-order companion for a man who went out of his way for a good joke and who laughed at himself every bit as heartily as at others. Cleopatra took to Antony’s humor with earthy gusto: “Perceiving that his raillery was broad and gross, and savored more of the soldier than the courtier, she rejoined in the same taste, and fell into it at once, without any sort of reluctance or reserve.” Having established herself as a sovereign, having flaunted her wealth, she assumed the role of boon companion. It is unlikely that anyone in her entourage had ever seen this particular Cleopatra before.
THE ABILITY TO molt, instantly and as the situation required, to slide effortlessly from one idiom to another, her irresistible charm, were already well established. Cleopatra was additionally fortunate in her circumstances. Whether or not the two enjoyed more than a passing acquaintance, Cleopatra and Mark Antony had a number of things in common. No one else had as much reason to be displeased by Caesar’s will or to resent the appearance of his adopted heir. Each held firmly to a shred of the Caesarian mantle. Antony had vouched for Caesarion’s divinity in the Senate and begun to conjure with that idiom himself; Cleopatra was not the only one engaging in a cosmic costume drama. Unlike most Romans, Antony had longtime experience with quick-thinking, capable women. His own mother had challenged him to kill her when the two found themselves on opposing sides of a political issue. Antony had no problem entertaining a woman at a political summit or a financial conference, as the meeting in Tarsus plainly was, despite Cleopatra’s efforts to transform it into a cult spectacle. Fulvia was wealthy and well connected, as shrewd and courageous as she was beautiful. For her Antony had thrown over his long-term mistress, the most popular actress in Rome. Nor was Fulvia one to stay home and spin wool. Rather “she wished to rule a ruler and command a commander.” Over the winter she not only represented Antony’s interests in Rome but meddled ferociously in public affairs “so that neither the senate nor the people transacted any business contrary to her pleasure.” She had gone from senatorial house to senatorial house door-knocking for her husband. She settled his debts. She would raise eight legions for him. In his absence the previous year she had stood in for him politically and militarily, on one occasion evidently donning a suit of armor.
Nor did Cleopatra’s divine pretensions set Antony’s teeth on edge. On his way to Tarsus he had been hailed—as Cleopatra knew—as the new Dionysus. That god, too, had made a triumphant tour across Asia. Here Antony not only supplied Cleopatra’s cue but recapitulated a Ptolemaic role: Her family claimed descent from the ecstasy-inducing god of wine. They were devotees of his mystical cult. Cleopatra’s father had added “The New Dionysus” to his title. Her brother had briefly done so as well. A theater of Dionysus adjoined the palace in Alexandria; Caesar had made it his command post in 48. Mark Antony might all the same have thought harder about the identification. While his cult was wildly popular, while he was the preeminent Greek god of the age, Dionysus was a newcomer to the Olympian pantheon, where he remained the odd man out. He was congenial, mischievous, and high-spirited but—with his lush, perfumed curls—trailed languidly behind him a reputation for effeminacy. He was distinctly foreign. And he was the gentlest of the gods. One of Cleopatra’s ancestors had invoked his Dionysian pedigree to justify having absented himself from battle. Worst of all, Dionysus dulled the wits of men and empowered women. Had the East gone after Philippi to Octavian rather than to Antony, Cleopatra would no doubt have adapted, but she would have been at a grave disadvantage. She spoke many languages, some better than others.