Whatever his message, Antony meant the Donations as an official act. He sent reports of the triumph and the ceremony back to Rome, for Senate ratification. Devoted friends intervened, aware that his dispatches would be read in an unflattering light. Antony appeared “theatrical and arrogant,” precisely the crimes that had cost Caesar his life. If he intended to dazzle his compatriots with the gorgeous display, the laws of optics worked differently from what he had remembered. Rome had to shield her eyes from the glare of golden thrones. Definitions were less fluid in that city, where Antony’s dual role as commander in the West and monarch in the East taxed the orderly Roman mind. He dangerously mixed his metaphors. If Cleopatra were the queen of those territories, what role was the Roman commander to play? Antony had after all claimed no territories for himself. Cleopatra’s title was preposterously, objectionably large, an insult not only to Rome, but to her fellow sovereigns. She had long occupied an exceptional position in the Roman constellation of client kings. She now outranked them in both wealth and influence. And Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship was problematic. What was a foreign woman doing on a Roman coin? It did not help that Antony shared denarii with a woman not his wife. He appeared to be distributing Roman lands to a foreigner.
Only one man wanted Antony’s dispatches published. Octavian did not succeed, although he did manage to suppress reports of the Armenian victory. He had no intention of allowing Antony a Roman triumph, which would have counted for a very great deal. The Donations may have been at the time little more than an exercise in Alexandrian grandiosity, in Ptolemaic boasting, a provocative display of symbols, Antony’s version of erecting a golden statue of Cleopatra in the Forum. At best the celebrations were simply tone-deaf. At worst they were an insult to Octavian, a brazen power play. The intention hardly mattered given how the exercise looked in Rome, which was how Octavian wanted it to: as an empty gesture, a farcical overreaching by two slightly demented, power-drunk dissolutes, “a Dionysiac revel led by an eastern harlot.” With the Donations a munificent Antony handed out plenty of gifts, none more generous than that he settled on Octavian.
VIII
ILLICIT AFFAIRS AND BASTARD CHILDREN
“For talk is eviclass="underline" It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god.”
—HESIOD
CLEOPATRA TURNED THIRTY-FIVE without a change in her considerable and accumulating good fortune; the year ahead promised to be among the happiest and most auspicious of her reign. With her hybrid family, she had ingeniously solved the Roman problem, the consort problem, the shrinking-empire problem. She no longer needed to be propped up by foreign troops. Nor could any Alexandrian critic conceivably object to her friendship with a Roman. She had tamed that power, and augmented Egypt through its largesse. With the Donations she experienced a surge of popularity; her shipyards were busy, as she doubled the size of Antony’s navy. The revenues flowed in. From Damascus and Beirut in the east to Tripoli in the west, cities minted coins in her honor. She had made good on a third-century poet’s promise, by which a Ptolemy—simultaneously safeguarding and supplementing his inheritance—outweighs all other monarchs in wealth, given “the abundance that flowed hourly to his sumptuous palace from every quarter.”
Antony obliged her in her greatest desire: After the celebrations, he did not return to Rome, where he might have fleshed out his army with new recruits and neutralized Octavian’s influence. Nor did he even journey to Antioch, a logical base for an Eastern operation. Instead he settled down for a third festive winter in Alexandria, an imperial city that felt increasingly like the home of a new empire. In vivid illustration of the point, Cleopatra either put the finishing touches on or began to enjoy the newly constructed Caesareum, her vast harborside complex, which she may have modeled on the Forum of Rome. Fusing Egyptian and Greek styles, the Alexandrian version was slathered with gold and silver, stuffed with paintings and statuary, embellished with “galleries, libraries, porches, courts, halls, walks, and consecrated groves, as glorious as expense and art could make them.” Cleopatra stood at the helm of the mighty power that a nervous Roman had a century earlier predicted Egypt might one day be, “if ever that kingdom found capable leaders.”
Around her assembled loyal, long-serving advisers, dedicated Romans, and an extended family, which by year’s end included the teenaged Marcus Antonius Antyllus, the elder of Antony’s two sons by Fulvia. Cleopatra took the children’s schooling seriously. In the wake of the Donations she entrusted their education in part to Nicolaus of Damascus, a lanky diplomat’s son several years her junior, with a ruddy face, an affable temperament, and a taste for Aristotle. Handy with an anecdote, Nicolaus was a gifted logician, the kind of man you could rely on to finish your speech, persuasively and eloquently, if you happened to dissolve into tears before you reached its end. He moved into the palace. Under his guidance Cleopatra’s children read philosophy and rhetoric but especially history, which their new tutor deemed “the proper study of kings.” Genial though Nicolaus may have been, he was sharp-tongued when necessary and a relentless taskmaster. His idea of leisure would be to add 25 volumes to his comprehensive history of the ancient world, already 140 volumes long, and a project its author compared to the labors of Hercules. Around the children the festivities and frivolities continued. Many threw themselves into court life with enthusiasm. Lucius Munatius Plancus, one of Antony’s closest advisers and a former provincial governor, appeared at a dinner naked and painted blue. He entertained Cleopatra’s banqueters with his best sea nymph imitation, wriggling across the floor on his knees, attired only in a fish tail and a crown of reeds.
The taste for indulgence was contagious, or possibly inherited. At dinner one night a physician from young Antyllus’s retinue began to pontificate, boorishly and interminably. When a second court physician stopped him in his windy tracks—it was the former medical student who had toured Cleopatra’s kitchen—Antyllus whooped with delight. With a wave of his arm, he gestured to the sideboard. “All of this I bestow upon thee, Philotas,” he exclaimed, forcing a collection of gold beakers on the quicker-witted of his guests. Philotas hardly took the teenager at his word but nonetheless found himself presented with a bulging sack of elaborately worked, antique vessels. (He headed off with its cash equivalent instead.) Throughout the city the music, mimes, and stage productions continued. As one clever stonemason saw it, the merry pact that joined Antony and Cleopatra merited an alternate interpretation. From December 28, 34, survives a basalt inscription, presumably from a statue of Antony. Whatever Cleopatra made of his ardent affections, the Alexandrians wholly reciprocated. The sporting Antony is hailed in stone not as an “Inimitable Liver” but—the pun requires more of a stretch in Greek than in English—the “Inimitable Lover.”
Official business was by no means neglected among the revelries. Cleopatra continued to receive petitions and envoys, to participate in religious rites, to mete out justice. She supervised economic discussions, met with advisers, and presided over the innumerable Alexandrian festivals. Increasingly state business included Egypto-Roman business. Legionnaires had been posted in Egypt for half of Cleopatra’s lifetime; in one account, her Roman bodyguards now inscribed her name on their shields. And in a mutually beneficial arrangement, Roman futures were decided in Alexandria rather than the other way around. In 33 Cleopatra dictated an ordinance to a scribe, in which she awarded a substantial tax exemption to one of Antony’s top generals. Publius Canidius had served in Parthia and distinguished himself in Armenia. For his services, Cleopatra accorded him a waiver of export duties on 10,000 sacks of wheat and import duties on 5,000 amphorae of wine. He was exempted from land taxes in perpetuity, a privilege Cleopatra extended equally to his tenants. Even Canidius’s farm animals were to be above taxes, requisition, seizure.* It was an agile way to keep Antony’s men both loyal and local, in the unlikely event that the enchantments of Alexandria proved insufficient. It was also a more effective way of courting an ambitious Roman than paying bribes, which, it has been noted, “only made them come back for more.” Much of their business the Roman triumvir and the Egyptian queen transacted together. Cleopatra frequented the marketplace with Antony, “joined him in the management of festivals and in the hearing of lawsuits.” At her urging, Antony took charge of the city’s gymnasium, as he had done in Athens. As de facto leader of the Greek community, he directed its finances, teachers, lectures, athletic contests. With Cleopatra he posed for painters and sculptors; he was Osiris or Dionysus to her Isis or Aphrodite. In mid-33 Antony marched again to Armenia, where he arranged a peace with the Median king. They would henceforth serve each other as allies, against the Parthians and, if need be, against Octavian. Asia was now quiet. Antony returned to Alexandria with the Median princess Iotape, Alexander Helios’s intended.