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.
She could not have asked for a better stage set. Tarsus was surrounded on all sides by craggy, forested mountains, lush with wildflowers. An administrative center as well as a seat of learning, it was—as its native son Paul the Apostle put it a generation later—“no mean city.” Tarsus was celebrated for its schools of philosophy and oratory. It boasted fine fountains and baths, a splendid library. Through the city ran a swift and cold, blue-green river, as crystal clear as the Nile was turbid. On arriving in Tarsus three centuries earlier, Alexander the Great had thrown down his arms and hurled himself, streaked with dust and sweat, into the icy waters. (He was carried, half-conscious, back to his tent. The recovery took three days.) Surrounded by rich farmland, famed for its vineyards, Tarsus worshipped the gods of fertility. It was the kind of place where two deities, one established, the other aspiring, could feel at home, and be set off to advantage. Tarsus was inclined to spectacle and able to facilitate one; it was a city in which you could readily fill a one-talent flower order, which was to say that while its citizens were newly Roman, its culture remained unabashedly Greek. Faced with the same conundrum as Cleopatra, the Tarsans had celebrated Cassius and Dolabella on their arrivals, only to be brutally mistreated by each man in turn. Cassius had overrun the city, exacting vast sums, forcing the Tarsans to melt temple treasures and to sell women and children, even old men, into slavery. Cosmic spectacles and flower budgets aside, its people enthusiastically embraced Cassius’s enemies. Antony released the city from its misery.
Cleopatra was in Tarsus only a few weeks but had no need to stay longer. Her effect on Antony was immediate and electrifying.* The first on the scene, Plutarch expounds on her Cilician success and allows her a promotion. While in 48 she was before Caesar a “bold coquette,” by 41 she hails from the take-no- prisoners school of seduction. Her conversation is beguiling; her presence sparkling; her voice delicious. She makes quick work of Antony. The cooler-blooded Appian also concedes instant defeat. “The moment he saw her, Antony lost his head to her like a young man, although he was 40 [sic] years old,” he marvels. The drama understandably overwhelms the history; it is difficult to trudge soberly through that rustling sea of roses, to strain truth—especially political truth—from the lush, adjectival overload. We hear more of Antony’s conquest than of Caesar’s for the simple reason that the chroniclers were as eager to discourse on one as they were reluctant to discourse on the other. As Antony must appear the lesser man, Cleopatra becomes a more powerful woman. She played in 41 not only to a different audience, but to a different choir.
Did the confluence of needs add up to a romance? Surely it added up to an easy rapport. As Plutarch noted of another history-making liaison, it was very much a love affair, “and yet it was thought to harmonize well with the matters at hand.” Of all the Romans in all the towns in all the empire, Cleopatra had particular reason to cultivate this one. Antony had equal reason to do the same. If it was convenient for Cleopatra to fall in love, or in step, with the man to whom she essentially answered, it was no less so for Antony to fall in with the woman who could single-handedly underwrite his military ambitions. His Parthian obsession was a bold stroke of luck for her.
We know that Antony pined for Cleopatra months later, though she wound up with all the credit for the affair. As one of her sworn enemies asserted, she did not fall in love with Antony but “brought him to fall in love with her.” In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventurer and the adventuress. There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia. The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can at least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. So Cleopatra has Antony under her thumb, poised to obey her every wish, “not only because of his intimacy with her,” as Josephus has it, “but also because of being under the influence of drugs.” To claim as much is to acknowledge her power, also to insult her intelligence.
Whether or not anyone lost his or her head to the other, it is difficult to believe sex failed to figure in the picture early on. Antony and Cleopatra were at the height of their power, reveling amid heady perfume to sweet music, under kaleidoscopic lights, on steamy summer nights, before groaning tables of the finest food and wine in Asia. And while he was unlikely to have been a slave to his love for Cleopatra, as various chroniclers assert, the truth was that wherever Mark Antony went, sexual charm inevitably followed. His tunic tucked high on his rolling hips, he had slept his way across Asia at least once; he was fresh from his liaison with another client queen. Plutarch assigns him “an ill name for familiarity with other people’s wives.” He himself later dated the relationship with Cleopatra from the torrid Tarsan summer.
The immediate effects of the meeting were practical: Cleopatra stayed a few weeks and accomplished a great deal. By the time she sailed home, Antony had in hand her list of demands. Given what he had presumably exacted in exchange, they were not outlandish. They reveal that Cleopatra did not feel as secure as she pretended. She was keenly aware that another queen of Egypt waited in the wings. Antony lost no time in simplifying her life. He ordered Arsinoe forcibly removed from the Temple of Artemis. Cleopatra’s sister met her end on those marble steps, before the ornate ivory doors that their father had donated to the facade years earlier. She was the last of
