On i August Octavian attacked, and Alexandria fell. First came a naval fiasco in the harbour: Antony's whole fleet deserted to Octavian. Then came an infantry exchange, which Octavian once again won decisively. Antony returned to the palace, and he died. Plutarch and after him Shakespeare tell the story magnificently - the false news that Cleopatra is dead, the slow removal of the armour, the slave who kills himself rather than strike his lord, the bungled death-blow, the wretched writhing as Cleopatra and her maids haul him into the mausoleum. At least we can believe that in the tumult Antony heard confused reports, and he may well have falsely believed that Cleopatra had taken her own life: it was the natural thing to do. But in fact Octavian's men took her captive first, and she lived on for nine more days.331
Octavian himself entered Alexandria without resistance, and in a careful speech announced his forgiveness of the city. But his mercy had
Plut. Ant. 7J.
Macrob. Sat. ш.9.6; Serv. ad Aen. xn.841; doubted by Rawson 1973 (f 203).
33° Hall 1972 (в 240); Le Gall 1976 (d 210).
63
331 For the date of her death (probably 10 August) cf. Skeat 1953 (c 219) 98-100.
its bounds. He took the treasure, of course. Caesarion was hunted down and killed; so was Antyllus, Antony's eldest son; there were other victims too, including Cassius Parmensis, the last of Iulius Caesar's assassins, and Canidius Crassus, the general of the Actium campaign. But many were spared, including Cleopatra's other children - at least for the present.[160] They were being kept for the triumph, and the taunts of the Roman crowd. And so, it seems, was Cleopatra herself: but here Octavian's plan went astray.
The story of her death is still more extraordinary than Antony's, and very hard to estimate. The ancient sources, especially Plutarch and Dio,[161] had no doubt that Octavian was trying to prevent her suicide, and used threats to her children to ensure that she stayed alive. This was, of course, to make certain that she would be displayed humiliatingly at his triumph in Rome; and, for the ancient sources, it was when Cleopatra realized the horror of this fate that she finally determined to kill herself. She bathed herself, and dressed in her finest regal attire - a strange version of the bathing and dressing that were important parts of a real funeral. Then she clasped the asp to her arm; she took her seat on the regal throne, flanked by the devoted maids Iras and Charmion who chose to join their mistress in death. The guards burst in to find them there in their tableau of death; Cleopatra had won her final marvellous victory. And it was the most appropriate of deaths, for the double cobra was an old Ptolemaic symbol, the uraeus-. on a Ptolemaic head-dress the cobras would rear up, as if to strike any enemy of the throne.[162] Now Cleopatra's very life had become hostile to her. It was right for the royal cobra to strike.
The version goes back very close to the events themselves. In outline it had taken shape by the time Horace wrote his Cleopatra Ode a few years later.[163] But modern scholars are sceptical.[164] They point to the advantages to Octavian of having her dead: even as it was, trouble continued in Egypt for some months,[165] and it would have been more perilous if Cleopatra had remained a potential figurehead. Would it not be better for Octavian to remove her? If actual murder was too crude, then at least he could leave poison, or indeed cobras, pointedly available — a glamorous equivalent of the revolver on the officer's table. Yet such a view raises more difficulties than it solves. It leaves it unclear why Octavian should have allowed her to live on for those nine days; we are even told that he foiled two earlier suicide attempts.[166] Octavian must have known his mind well before the city was taken. In the turmoil of the first day Cleopatra could readily have died, and it would have been easy to portray it as suicide, doubtless by a barbaric method. Octavian would have spoken regretfully of the mercy he would have shown: that sort of scene was to become commonplace in the early Principate. But the implications of the story we have are very different, and much less flattering to Octavian. No one could escape the inference that he was trying to keep her alive against her will, but was outwitted. Octavian was usually a more accomplished propagandist than this. It is surely better to assume that, if he kept her alive at all, he genuinely did want her for the triumph, just as his supporters wished.[167] Some of the details may well be fictional[168] - perhaps the famous story of the basket of figs, for instance. But, at least in outline, her splendid, serene, triumphant death is probably history, not legend.
XIII. RETROSPECT
Why did Antony and Cleopatra lose? Of course one can point to their political errors, and Octavian's greater shrewdness. There was Antony's insensitivity to the western crisis, which misled him into keeping his legions on the eastern frontier for too long; there was the indelicacy with which he flaunted his liaison with Cleopatra; there were the Donations of Alexandria — pure spectacle, but once again so damaging before an Italian audience. On the other side, there was Octavian's adept manipulation of Italian public opinion, exploiting propaganda with greater power and insight than had ever been done before. It is so easy to isolate these facts that we naturally assume they were decisive. They certainly made a difference: how big a difference, one may doubt. It remains true that, with Antony so confined to the East, Italy would have favoured Octavian overwhelmingly in any case; it remains true that, once all the politics had been played out, at the beginning of the } 1 campaign Antony still looked as if he would win. The East was as solid for him as the West for Octavian, and the military factors were on his side. Octavian certainly outwitted Antony in their political exchanges; but it was not this that finally brought the victory.
Perhaps it is easier to isolate the decisive moments. One is obvious, the autumn of 36, when Antony was failing in Parthia and Octavian was crushing Sextus: a suggestive contrast for the Italian public to ponder, and also a startling one — victory could not have been expected to dwell with the weak unmilitary Octavian rather than Antony, the greatest captain of the world. But there are at least two more turning-points. One, rather inconspicuously, was the death of Calenus in 40. It was that which robbed Antony of Gaul, and turned him so firmly eastwards; and, in the longer term, that gave Octavian not merely Gaul but also the whole West. And Calenus' death was just an accident, just Antony's bad luck. The second was the first stage of the Actium campaign itself, with Octavian's swift unimpeded crossing and, more important, Agrippa's series of debilitating thrusts on Antony's scattered forces. It was then that, within a few weeks, Antony started to look the loser rather than the winner; thereafter, the fighting simply ran its course. The true history of those few weeks remains hard to grasp. Why was Antony so dilatory in his resistance? Why was Octavian able to take over the decisive land station at Actium so easily? We shall never know; perhaps once again luck played a great part. But those few weeks decided the future of the Mediterranean world.
Octavian's greater political shrewdness should suggest a different reflection. Antony and Cleopatra might well have won the Actium campaign. If they had, the task of settling the world would in some ways have been easier for them. Their marriage — for marriage, unequivocally, it would then have been — would provide a most attractive register to describe and suggest a new harmony of West and East. That would be particularly true in any culture which thought of its royalty as gods: this would be a divine marriage, a most certain guarantee of the world's prosperity. But such cultures were the cultures of the East: Antony and Cleopatra would be both gods and monarchs, and the fate of Iulius Caesar made clear how sensitive such topics were in Rome. Antony had shown his statesmanship in other ways, especially in his penetrating judgment of the individuals he raised to power in the East, and in the style and range of his settlement. But his failure to appease Italian sentiment would surely have turned out to be a decisive flaw. The union of the Greco-Roman world was always a precarious thing, and it is hard to think that it could have survived the continuing dominion of Cleopatra and Antony. Looking a generation ahead, one could see what might happen: two worlds, not one, with Antyllus (perhaps) succeeding to some sort of control in the West, and Caesarion a more traditional monarch in the East. Or rather, that was the best that could be hoped for;