gamely responded. He was a happy subordinate, arguably at his best in that role. Plutarch has him taking more pleasure in the rebukes than he did in any commendations: Scolded for his hard-heartedness, he “failed to see that by this seeming admonition he was being perversely drawn towards her.” He convinced himself that she would kill herself were he to leave her. It was particularly difficult for him to be angry under the circumstances; he had already the death of one loyal, intelligent woman on his conscience. Whatever else could be said of Antony he was compassionate, as any of his men could attest. He rebuffed Octavia. She returned to Rome a woman scorned in all eyes but her own. She refused to dwell on the insult; when her brother ordered her to leave the marital home, she refused to do so. Again she renounced the Helen of Troy role, claiming that “it was an infamous thing even to have it said that the two greatest commanders in the world plunged the Romans into civil war, the one out of passion for, and the other out of resentment in behalf of, a woman.”
Cleopatra showed no such disinclination. With Antony’s affections went the throne of Egypt. To lose him to Octavia was to lose everything. Hers was a virtuoso performance that yielded enduring results. From this point on the two were inseparable, for which Dio credits “the passion and witchery of Cleopatra” and Plutarch “certain drugs or magic rites.” Antony’s men—and Octavia—instead acknowledge a very real affection. Geography suggests as much as well. Antony remained with Cleopatra in Alexandria for the winter. He had a sliver of a practical reason to do so, as he intended to march east again come spring. As of the winter of 35 it is impossible to deny a full-blooded romance, if by romance we mean a congenial, intimate past, a shared family, a shared bed, and a shared vision of the future.
CLEOPATRA’S BLUE-RIBBON RENDITION of the lovesick female distracted Antony from a second Parthian offensive, which he postponed, to be at her side. She was thin and pale. Her state of mind worried him. In 35 she did, very intentionally, throw off his timing. An Eastern triumph remained as critical for Antony as ever, if not more so; while he licked his Parthian wounds, Octavian had been piling up successes. He had crushed Sextus Pompey and sidelined Lepidus. (With bribes, Octavian also lured Lepidus’s eighteen legions out from under him.) Only Antony and Octavian remained. And only an Eastern victory could once and for all secure Caesar’s glorious mantle. Antony had unfinished business as well with the Armenian king, who he belatedly decided should be held accountable for the catastrophic outing. Cleopatra has been assumed not to have smiled on Antony’s military ambitions and to have preferred his attentions directed elsewhere. Certainly Parthia was of less concern to her than were Roman politics; Egypt was for the most part insulated against an Eastern invasion. At the same time that kingdom was entirely vulnerable to Rome. Military glory was by no means the coin of her realm; a Parthian expedition would have struck her as futile on many counts. It is easy to hear how the argument might have gone, important to remember it a matter of speculation. What would have made eminent good sense for Antony was a return to Rome, from which he had been absent for five years. That outing Cleopatra must have resisted with every fiber of her theatrical being. An Eastern expedition was expensive, but by her calculation a trip to Rome—a return to Octavia and Octavian—would have been infinitely more costly.
Antony remained sorely in need of a victory. He was also eager to settle a score. “In his endeavor to take vengeance on the Armenian king with the least trouble to himself,” he sent the ever-inventive Dellius east, to Armenia. As usual, Dellius had a proposition. It this time amounted to the traditional diplomatic bandage. Would Artavasdes, the Armenian monarch, not like to promise his daughter to Cleopatra and Antony’s six-year-old son, Alexander Helios? Cleopatra presumably signed off on this appeal, which would have established a Ptolemy on the Armenian throne. It would also have secured a peaceful alliance with a mountain kingdom crucial to a Parthian invasion and divided in its loyalties. Several times a Roman ally, Armenia was in both sympathy and civilization Parthian. The offer evidently made less sense to Artavasdes, a supple and unflinching statesman. He resisted Dellius’s blandishments and his bribes. Antony countered in the spring by invading Armenia. In little time he subdued the country, declaring it a Roman province. This was vengeance more than victory; Armenia was a strategically located buffer state but by no means a great power. And Antony knew the conquest satisfied his men, who had for months howled that Artavasdes had cost them Parthia. In anticipation of a larger campaign, Antony left the bulk of his army in the East for the winter. He returned to Alexandria in triumph, taking with him not only the collected treasure of Armenia, but its king, his wife, their children, and the provincial governors. Out of deference to their rank, he bound the royal family in chains of gold.
This time Cleopatra received a jubilant message from her lover. She issued orders for an extravagant ceremony to mark his return. She likely took her cues from Antony: her immediate family were not conquerors. Processions were, however, a Ptolemaic specialty. The sphinx-lined avenues of Alexandria were designed for them, and the Roman triumph derived from them. That of autumn 34 was sensational. Antony sent his captives ahead of him into the city, which he entered in his purple cloak, aboard a chariot. Presumably they paraded past the marble colonnades and the awnings of shuttered shops, along the Canopic Way, lined with vibrant banners and cheering spectators. Here was the kind of show at which Ptolemies excelled. To this one Antony and Cleopatra added a new twist. As he marched his booty and captives into the heart of the city Antony presented them to the queen of Egypt, in ceremonial attire on a lofty, golden throne, atop a silver-plated platform, amid her adoring subjects.
Antony had long been good at paying homage to his mistresses; Cleopatra received not only the spoils of his campaign, the royal treasury and its officials, but the proud Armenian king and his family, in their golden fetters. A discordant note was struck when the fresh-faced Artavasdes arrived before her. The Armenian king was neither a fool nor a philistine; he wrote histories and intricate speeches. For years he had shrewdly played Parthia and Rome off against each other. True to tenacious form, he approached but would neither sink to his knees before her nor acknowledge her rank. Instead he addressed her by name. All coercion was futile; though treated harshly, no member of the Armenian royal family would prostate himself before the queen of Egypt. (It is notable that despite the misbehavior, Artavasdes survived the display. In Rome a captive king was rarely so lucky, no matter how well he behaved.) It was Cleopatra’s first experience of a royal humiliation and a monarch’s proud resistance. There was every reason why they should have made an impression. A lavish banquet for the people of Alexandria followed, with celebrations at the palace and with public entertainments. She distributed coins and food freely.
The military-themed procession was an oddity to the Alexandrians, though it had at least Ptolemaic roots. There was no precedent for the splendid ceremony that followed. Several days later a throng filled Alexandria’s colonnaded gymnasium, west of the city’s main crossroads, minutes from the palace. Six hundred feet long, the city’s largest structure, the gymnasium stood at the center of Alexandria as at the center of its intellectual and recreational life. It was the opera hall of its day; a gymnasium’s presence was what made a town a city. In the open court of the complex that fall day the Alexandrians discovered another silver platform, on which stood two massive golden thrones. Mark Antony occupied one. Addressing her as the “New Isis,” he invited Cleopatra to join him on the other. She appeared in the full regalia of that goddess, a pleated, lustrously striped chiton, its fringed edge reaching to her ankles. On her head she may have worn a traditional tripartite crown or one of cobras with a vulture cap. By one account Antony dressed as Dionysus, in a gold-embroidered gown and high Greek boots. In his hand he held the god’s fennel stalk. An ivy wreath circled his head. It seemed a second act of the exultant play begun in Tarsus, when—as Cleopatra made her way upriver—word preceded her that Venus had arrived to revel with Dionysus for the happiness of Asia.
Cleopatra’s children occupied four smaller thrones at the couple’s feet. In his husky voice Antony addressed the assembled multitude. By his command Cleopatra was henceforth to be known as “Queen of Kings.” (On coins, she was “Queen of Kings, whose sons are Kings.” The titles would change with the territory, so that an Upper Egypt stela of four years later has her as “Mother of Kings, Queen of Kings, the Youngest Goddess.”) As for her consort, thirteen-year-old Caesarion, Antony promoted him to King of Kings, a pointed recycling of an Armenian and Parthian title. Antony conferred these honorifics in the name of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra’s husband and Caesarion’s father, an unusual case of flaunting a lover’s prior sexual history. Also on Caesar’s behalf, Antony proceeded to name his sons with Cleopatra as King of Kings. Producing the boys in turn, he assigned vast territories to each; the Eastern- inflected names came in handy now. At his cue, little Alexander Helios stepped forward, in the loose leggings and caped tunic of a Persian monarch. On his head he wore an upright, pointed turban topped with a peacock feather. His territories stretched to India; he was to rule over Armenia, Media, and—once his father had conquered it— Parthia. (He was again promised in marriage, this time to the daughter of the Median king, Artavasdes’ traditional enemy.) Two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, the fruit of Antony and Cleopatra’s Antioch reunion, was an Alexander the Great in miniature. He wore the high boots, the short purple cloak, and the brimmed woolen hat—in this case wrapped with a diadem—of a Macedonian. To him went Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia, the lands west of the Euphrates. Cleopatra Selene was to preside over Cyrene, the Greek settlement in what is today eastern Libya,
