He continued to be perplexed by his brother-in-law’s ability to control the conversation. While commanding a reputation for stolid probity, Octavian managed in 38 to slip out of his marriage on the day his wife gave birth, to wed Livia, six months’ pregnant with her previous husband’s child. It was a marriage that delivered Octavian to the upper ranks of Roman society, making him Antony’s equal. (Despite the connection to Caesar, Octavian’s lineage was not noble.) Repeatedly he managed to cripple and confound his brother-in-law: If he promised one thing he delivered another. If Antony headed east Octavian summoned him west—then neglected to appear. He allowed Antony to recruit soldiers on Italian soil, next to impossible, as Octavian governed that territory. It made for a tenuous balancing act, but one that Antony was determined to maintain. He swallowed his pride and masked his irritation, even as his patience was rubbed raw.
Matters came finally to a head late in the spring of 37, when the two met alongside a river, in the south of the Italian peninsula, to air several seasons of grievances. Octavia helped to broker a peace, delivering an impassioned Helen of Troy speech. She had no desire to watch her husband and brother destroy each other. The result was the Pact of Tarentum, a renewal of the expired triumvirate. Antony would be recognized as dictator in the East through December 33. He emerged satisfied: “Nearly everything,” notes Dio, “was going as he wished.” He prepared at last for his campaign and headed east, to Syria. Octavia and their two daughters accompanied him as far as western Greece, where he sent them back. Octavia was pregnant again. Further travel, Antony protested, would be detrimental to her health. Already she had six children—including those from prior marriages—in her care. He was eager that, as he put it, “she might not share his danger while he was warring against the Parthians.” This was all perfectly true.
If Octavian was a flinty master of indirection, capable of appearing to cooperate while doing no such thing, Antony was a quick-change artist, given to dramatic about-faces. In Athens he was one day the layabout, languidly attending festivals in Octavia’s company and neglecting public business, the next, having rethought his wardrobe and snapped to attention, the sharp-minded military man, a tornado of activity, all diplomatic business, at the magnetic center of an entourage. Something gave way in the last months of 37. Possibly the long list of insults, disillusionments, and dodges suddenly added up. Possibly he burst with pent-up frustration. He was a soldier, whose glorious campaign had been postponed and postponed. His lieutenant reaped a series of victories in the East, victories that were rightfully his. Perhaps Antony realized that between them his wife and brother-in-law were holding him in check, that he was being played for the fool, that collaboration seemed less and less possible. Certainly the obvious way to secure the upper hand at home was with a blazing military victory abroad. To crush the Parthians was to eliminate Octavian, a strange sort of assymetrical accounting, not entirely unlike Auletes’ Roman calculation of two decades earlier.
Plutarch offers a different explanation for the reversal of 37. He acknowledges the Parthian fixation but cites as well “a dire evil which had been slumbering for a long time.” Antony’s friends assumed that over the course of three and a half years that hankering had released its hold, charmed away by Octavia, or at least “lulled to rest by better considerations.” In Plutarch’s account the desire suddenly smoldered, to grow more and more combustible as Antony traveled east, where ultimately it reignited and burst into flames. Plutarch meant to get his history right but it should be remembered that he was making of Antony’s life a cautionary tale. His Antony is a talented man brought to ruin by his own passion; the moral may have been more important than the details. Whatever the circumstances, safely arrived in Syria, Antony defied both his better instincts and cool counsel. He sent a messenger to Alexandria. Cleopatra was to meet him in Antioch, the third great city of the Mediterranean world. This time she set sail posthaste. Not long after the couple’s arrival in the Syrian capital, coins circulated bearing joint portraits of Antony and Cleopatra. It is unclear who is meant to be on the obverse and who on the reverse, which was, in brief, the intermittent riddle of the next seven tumultuous years. Antony never saw Octavia again.
VII
AN OBJECT OF GOSSIP FOR THE WHOLE WORLD
“The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of.”
—THUCYDIDES
SHE HAD NO need to indulge in costume drama this time around. Cleopatra knew before she sailed that fall that Mark Antony was heading east, finally to settle the Roman score with Parthia, a campaign he had delayed now for four years. She knew of his preoccupation from their riotous winter together. From Caesar she would have heard details of the original plans for that expedition. As he made his way toward Antioch, Antony reorganized Asia Minor, carving out kingdoms for those he trusted and those who supported him. He established a stable frontier; it was essential that he shore up his rear before proceeding east. To the same end Antony and Octavian had together arranged a kingship for Herod when he had finally washed up in Rome that winter. Of Idumaean and Arab descent, Herod was by no means the obvious candidate for the Judaean throne. His tenacity rather than his heritage secured him the crown. No dynast more eloquently explained away his misguided loyalty to Cassius; it would fairly be said of Herod that he had “slinked into” power. Antony had known his father, also a friend to Rome. And he had met Herod as a teenager. The personal rapport counted for a good deal.
A rough-edged opportunist, Herod was endearingly reckless, a master of the miraculous escape. The evidence suggests a fascination with him in Rome, on Octavian’s part as much as on Antony’s. Not coincidentally, Herod was as much a swashbuckler when it came to raising funds as throwing a javelin; he had an astonishing talent for plucking gold from thin air. (His subjects had some insight into his methods.) The Senate unanimously confirmed the kingship after which Octavian and Antony escorted Herod between them to the Capitol, a signal honor. Consuls and magistrates led the way. Antony argued that the appointment would be advantageous to the Eastern campaign; he afterward threw a banquet in the new king’s honor. By some accounts Herod owed his throne equally to Cleopatra. The Senate was as much motivated by fear of her as by admiration of him. They distinctly preferred two monarchs in the region to one. There was ample reason to be wary of a client queen at the head of a rich kingdom, with her finger on Rome’s grain supply.