Both Plutarch and Dio retail a disgruntled rumor: Some claimed that she brought clothing and supplies but that Antony settled his own gold on his men, passing the monies off as a gift from Cleopatra, who had little patience for his Parthian obsession. Either way he was buying goodwill toward Egypt, clearly a priority for him, and at a time when he could ill afford to do so.
Slow-moving Egyptian queens aside, Antony had every reason for despair. There had been no dazzling success in Parthia, only a demoralizing campaign followed by a disastrous retreat. From the start he had made strategic mistakes. Given the size of his army and the length of their march, he had left his siege equipment behind. He could not always find the Parthians but they could always find him: swarms of talented archers and pikemen repeatedly ambushed the regular Roman rows. Antony had relied on the Armenians—Parthia’s western neighbor— for military aid. They had not proved the faithful allies he anticipated. Not for the first time, they lured the Romans into “a yawning and abysmal desert” only to abandon them. No battle had been as costly as the retreat. Having marched for thirty miles in darkness, Antony’s exhausted men threw themselves upon brackish water. Starving, they feasted on poisonous plants that made them stagger and vomit. Convulsions, dysentery, and delusions followed. What stagnant water and poisonous plants failed to claim, the heat in Armenia and the unending snows of Cappadocia did. Ice congealed on beards. Toes and fingers froze.
By the time he reached the Syrian coast, by the time he had begun obsessively to scan the horizon for Cleopatra, Antony had lost nearly a third of his splendid army and half his cavalry. In eighteen modest battles he had secured few substantial victories; in his catastrophic retreat, he lost some 24,000 men. In something of a backhanded compliment, Cleopatra would be assigned blame for his Parthian missteps. “For so eager was he to spend the winter with her that he began the war before the proper time, and managed everything confusedly. He was not master of his own faculties, but, as if he were under the influence of certain drugs or of magic rites, was ever looking eagerly towards her, and thinking more of his speedy return than of conquering the enemy,” Plutarch explains. Yet again, Cleopatra was said to have thrown off Antony’s timing. Or yet again Antony fumbled, and Cleopatra wound up with the blame.
The campaign proved as revealing as it was disastrous. Repeatedly Antony found himself outwitted by a cunning enemy, deceived by friends. The Parthian months were less about loving the wrong woman than trusting the wrong men. Antony was a compassionate general, so much “sharing in the toils and distresses of the unfortunate and bestowing upon them whatever they wanted” as to elicit more loyalty from the wounded than the able. He seemed sorely deficient in the vengeance department. The Armenian king, Artavasdes, had encouraged Antony to invade neighboring Media (modern Azerbaijan, a land of fierce tribes and towering mountain ranges), then double-crossed him. His men encouraged him to call Artavasdes to account, which Antony refused to do. He “neither reproached him with his treachery nor abated the friendliness and respect usually shown to him.” He knew how to play on the heartstrings; when he needed to rally his men against dismal odds, he “called for a dark robe, that he might be more pitiful in their eyes.” (Friends dissuaded him. Antony made the appeal to his troops in the purple robe of a Roman general.) The greatest casualty of the expedition was arguably his peace of mind. At least once he was on the brink of suicide. He was badly shaken, as only a commander who in the past had proved resourceful, valorous, omnipresent, could be. Worse yet, after the wretched expedition—having lost tens of thousands of his men, distributed what remained of his treasure, and begged to be put to death—he convinced himself in Syria “by an extraordinary perversion of mind,” that, by escaping as he had, he had actually won the day.
Such was the exhausted, distraught man Cleopatra found on the Syrian coast. Despite the charges that she had shortchanged him, her arrival brought relief to his hungry troops, demoralized and in tatters. She very much played the bountiful, beneficent Isis. Of how she handled delusional Antony we have no clue. She must have been taken aback by what nine months had done to a well-drilled, superbly supplied army. From the start there were irritations and tense differences of opinion in the Syrian camp. It was at this time that Cleopatra urged Antony to punish Herod for his mistreatment of Alexandra and that Antony instructed Cleopatra not to meddle, a message she was unaccustomed to hearing. Under the circumstances, it would have struck her as particularly undeserved. She remained with Antony for several weeks, at the center of the regularly spaced tents, the improvised Roman city, as he pondered his next steps. Word had reached him that the Median and Parthian kings had quarreled in the wake of his retreat, and that the Median king—whose lands abutted Parthia—now proposed to join forces with Antony. Revived by the news, he began to prepare a fresh campaign.
Cleopatra was not the only woman to come to Antony’s rescue. He had too a very loyal wife. She applied for permission to fly to her husband’s aid, permission her brother cheerfully granted. Octavian could well afford to send supplies. His own campaigns had gone well. And Octavia’s trip was essentially an ambush. In 37 Octavian had promised Antony 20,000 men for Parthia, which he had not delivered. With his sister, he now sent an elite corps of 2,000 handpicked, sumptuously armored bodyguards. For Antony to accept them was to forfeit 18,000 men, at a time when he desperately needed to replenish the ranks. To decline was to insult his rival’s sister. For Octavian, eager for a plausible excuse for a breach, it was an irresistible opportunity; Antony could not do the right thing. Octavia hastened to Athens, sending word ahead to her husband. Dio has Antony in Alexandria at this time, while Plutarch implies that he and Cleopatra remained on the Syrian coast. Two things are certain: Antony and Cleopatra were at this juncture very much together. And Antony held Octavia off. She was to come no farther. He was set to depart again for Parthia. In no way fooled by his message, Octavia sent a personal friend of Antony’s to pursue the matter—and to remind Antony of his wife’s many virtues. What, asked that envoy, loyal to both husband and wife, was Octavia to do with the goods she had with her? Here she came close to showing up Cleopatra, which may have been the point. Octavia had in hand not only the richly equipped praetorian guards, but a vast quantity of clothing, horses and pack animals, money of her own, and gifts for Antony and his officers. Where was she to send them?
She was throwing down the gauntlet, to which Cleopatra responded, though not in kind. In Octavia she recognized a serious rival, alarmingly close at hand. Her loyal representative was on Cleopatra’s territory. Cleopatra had heard reports of Octavia’s beauty. Roman men could be catty, too; those who had set eyes on her would later wonder aloud about Antony’s preference for the Egyptian queen. “Neither in youthfulness nor beauty,” they concluded, “was she superior to Octavia.” (The two women were in fact the same age.) Cleopatra worried that Octavia’s authority, her brother’s influence, “her pleasurable society and her assiduous attentions to Antony,” would make Octavia irresistible. The sovereign who had proceeded by bold maneuver and steely calculation here attempted—or was said to attempt—a different tack, resorting to loud, choking sobs, depending on the occasion the first or last weapon in a woman’s arsenal. Plutarch sniffs that Cleopatra pretended to be desperately in love with Antony; in a Roman account, she cannot even secure credit for an authentic emotional attachment. If his report can be believed—it reads a little like a cartoon frame spliced into a nuanced narrative—she was as effective a woman as she was a sovereign. She could have offered Fulvia a very valuable tutorial. Cleopatra neither begged nor bargained. She did not raise her voice. Instead she swore off food. She appeared languid with love, undone by her passion for Antony. (Already the hunger strike was the oldest trick in the book. Euripides’ Medea too waged one, to win back a wayward husband.) Cleopatra affected “a look of rapture when Antony drew near, and one of faintness and melancholy when he went away.” She dragged herself about, dissolved in tears, which she made a great show of drying whenever Antony turned up. She meant of course to spare him any distress.
Cleopatra rarely did anything alone, and for her wail-and-whimper act recruited a supporting cast. Her courtiers worked overtime on her behalf. Mostly they upbraided Antony. How could he be so heartless as to destroy “a mistress who was devoted to him and him alone”? Did he not grasp the difference between the two women? “For Octavia, they said, had married him as a matter of public policy and for the sake of her brother, and enjoyed the name of wedded wife.” She hardly bore comparison to Cleopatra, who, although a sovereign, the queen of millions, “was called Antony’s mistress, and she did not shun this name nor disdain it, as long as she could see him and live with him.” Hers was the noblest of sacrifices. She was neglecting a great kingdom and her many responsibilities, “wearing her life away, as she follows with you on your marches, in the guise of a concubine.” How could he remain indifferent? There was no contest between the two women. Cleopatra would forsake all, “as long as she could see him and live with him; but if she were driven away from him she would not survive it,” a conclusion she effectively supported with her shuddering gasps and inanition. Even Mark Antony’s closest friends chimed in, enthralled by Cleopatra, and doubtless well aware of Antony’s leanings.
As campaigns went, this one involved skirmishes if not outright battles; the atmosphere around Antony and Cleopatra was highly charged. The tactics also proved highly effective. Cleopatra’s theatrics melted Antony. The reproofs of his friends flattered him. A man of disorderly passions, Antony seemed to count on chiding, to which he
