Nothing about the battle of Actium had been as brilliant as the blaze of invective that preceded it; most of the drama, and many of the casualties, came after the unspectacular fact. It was anticlimactic in the extreme, which could not be said of the months that followed in Alexandria. Yet again Cleopatra’s plans had miscarried. Yet again she cast about vigorously to ensure that all was not lost. All was a whirl of feverish activity at the palace; Plutarch has her not only looking to Spain and India but experimenting daily with deadly poisons. To one end or another she made a collection of these, testing them on prisoners and on venomous animals to determine which toxin yielded the most expeditious, least painful results. She was neither humbled nor panic-stricken but every bit as inventive as she had been when the first reverse of her life had landed her in the desert. The word “formidable” sooner or later attaches itself to Cleopatra and here it comes: she was formidable—spirited, disciplined, resourceful—in her retreat. There were no hints of despair. Two thousand years after the fact, you can still hear the fertile mind pulsing with ideas.
The same could not be said for Antony. He roamed restlessly about North Africa, mostly with two friends, a rhetorician and an especially clever, steadfast officer. Antony dismissed the rest of his entourage. The relative solitude comforted him. He counted on marshaling reinforcements but in Cyrene discovered that his four legions had defected. Crushed, he attempted suicide. The two friends intervened, to deliver him to Alexandria. He arrived at the palace without the expected reinforcements, and, concedes Dio, “without having accomplished anything.” It was probably late in the fall, toward the end of the sowing season. Cleopatra was in the midst of her ill-fated Red Sea venture. She settled for fortifying the approaches to Egypt. She may also have contemplated Octavian’s assassination. For his part, Antony withdrew from the city and from society. He ordered a long causeway built into the Alexandrian harbor, at the end of which he fixed a modest hut, near the foot of the lighthouse. He declared himself an exile, a latter-day Timon of Athens, “for he himself also had been wronged and treated with ingratitude by his friends, and therefore hated and distrusted all mankind.” Dio slips in a bitter note of sympathy; he cannot help but marvel at the great number of people who—having received lavish honors and favors from Antony and Cleopatra—left them now in the lurch. Cleopatra appeared not to stumble over the injustice. Her understanding of gratitude may have been more realistic than Antony’s. She accepted the rude truths more easily than did he.
Antony did not last long as a hermit and turned up at the palace soon enough. Cleopatra purportedly coaxed him out, to the lush groves and the colorful royal lodges on which he had turned his back. If indeed she did so, it was one of the less difficult assignments of her life. The news continued to be bleak: Canidius appeared in Alexandria to report that Antony’s land forces had in the end surrendered to Octavian. Many of them joined that army; Octavian had now more men than he could use. He burned what remained of the captured warships. Antony and Cleopatra learned next of Herod’s defection, especially painful as they had sent their most persuasive messenger to plead for his continued loyalty. (It was the friend whom Cleopatra had enlisted to clear Antony’s head of Octavia.) Not only did he fail with Herod, but he took advantage of his trip to defect. The Roman governor of Syria also went over to Octavian, as would Nicolaus of Damascus.
The recriminations were kept to a minimum. Cleopatra appears to have looked to the future rather than to the past, to have calculated that Antony was well beyond the tickle and tease of admonition, the love bites. She subscribed to Plutarch’s counsel on rebuke: better in time of calamity to opt for sympathy over blame, for “at such a time there is no use for a friend’s frankness or for words charged with grave and stinging reproof.” Antony was, however, a different man, the storied audacity and “irresistible courage” wrung from him by Actium. Cleopatra was left with two projects, to minister to her distressed lover and to plot their escape. Somehow she comforted Antony, or numbed him, so that the dire reports seemed to agitate him less. She addressed his frustrations and calmed his suspicions. She did the thinking for them both.
By relinquishing hope Antony discovered that he could relinquish anxiety as well; he returned to the palace and—never in need of an occasion—“set the whole city into a course of feasting, drinking, and presents.” Together Antony and Cleopatra staged too an elaborate coming-of-age party for their sons by their previous marriages, fifteen-year-old Antyllus and sixteen-year-old Caesarion. By the Greek reckoning, Caesarion was now of military age.* For his part Antyllus was ready to shed the purple-edged toga of a Roman child. In a mingling of traditions, Antony and Cleopatra ushered the boys into adulthood. Both enlisted in the military to boost Egyptian morale. For days banquets and revels and feasts distracted the city. Dio asserts that Antony and Cleopatra staged the celebrations to stoke a new spirit of resistance; to her subjects Cleopatra conveyed the message that they were “to continue the struggle with these boys as their leaders, in case anything should happen to the parents.” Come what may, the Ptolemaic dynasty would survive, and with a male sovereign to boot. Indeed Caesarion was hailed as pharaoh in inscriptions that autumn. Antony and Cleopatra might just as well have desperately been throwing sand in Octavian’s face. They had sons, by which the future was calibrated. He had none.
Over the fall a flurry of envoys traveled back and forth, with bribes and proposals from one side, threats and promises from the other. Initially Cleopatra pleaded for the only thing that mattered to her: Could she pass down her kingdom to her children? To lose her life was one thing; to sacrifice her children—and with them her country—was unthinkable. They were now between the ages of seven and seventeen; she pinned her hopes on Caesarion, whom she had already promoted to rule in her absence. Later she sent Octavian a golden scepter, crown, and throne. She would abdicate in exchange for clemency, suggests Dio, “for she hoped that even if he did hate Antony, he would yet take pity on her at least.” Antony hoped to be allowed to live as a private citizen in Egypt or—if that was asking too much—in Athens. Octavian had no time for Antony’s proposal but he answered Cleopatra. Publicly he threatened her. Privately he replied that he would be perfectly reasonable with her on one condition: she was to arrange for Antony’s execution, or at the very least his exile. (Octavian kept the gifts.) Antony tried again, defending his relationship with Cleopatra, reminding Octavian of their family ties, their “amorous adventures,” their shared pranks. To prove his sincerity he delivered up a remaining assassin of Caesar’s, then living with Antony. He proposed something else as well. He would kill himself “if in that way Cleopatra might be saved.” Again he elicited only an icy silence. The assassin was put to death.
The sad truth was that Antony had nothing to offer. Cleopatra had a stronger hand, with the greatest treasure still outside Roman control. Octavian could not succeed without her famed gold and pearls and ivory. They had long motivated his men; more than anything else, Cleopatra’s hoard held his rank and file in check. So much were Antony and Cleopatra alone, so regular were the desertions, that they had no emissary to entrust with these messages. They were left to press one of the children’s tutors into service. With his third overture Antony dispatched fifteen-year-old Antyllus and a vast quantity of gold. Octavian kept the gold and dismissed the boy. It is unclear how sincere the proposals were; Dio suggests that Antony and Cleopatra were simply biding their time while plotting revenge. The overtures were in any event no less genuine than the replies. Octavian could not truly expect Cleopatra to murder Antony. Her brother had won no points for eliminating the distressed and defeated Pompey seventeen years earlier. Nor had she any guarantee that Octavian would honor his end of the bargain. Was he likely to pardon a woman on whom he had so theatrically declared war? Cleopatra might well agree to disassociate herself from Antony, but she hardly had reason to go further. She knew an ambush when she saw one. Octavian would have to figure out how to dispense with his former brother-in-law himself.