Similarly, Antony’s affair with Cleopatra had once afforded an endless source of ribald dinner jokes. Such had been the case over the summer of 39, in the celebration near Naples; Cleopatra was where the conversation wound up as the evening reached full tilt, when the lusty “good fellowship was at its height.” She was a laughing matter no longer.
The pummeling continued both above and below the belt. Between them Antony and Octavian covered the usual schoolyard litany: effeminacy, sodomy, cowardice, unrefined—or overly refined—practices of personal hygiene. Octavian was “a veritable weakling.” Antony had passed his prime. He could no longer win any contest save those in exotic dancing or the erotic arts. Antony sneered that Octavian had slept with his illustrious granduncle. How else to account for his unexpected adoption? Octavian countered with something sturdier and more pertinent, if equally untrue: Cleopatra had
At some point in the year Antony replied to Octavian privately, with a letter of which one scrap survives. He does not sound like a man spoiling for a fight. Nor does he sound out of his mind with love, in the throes of a transporting passion. The seven surviving lines dedicated to Cleopatra have been translated in countless ways, from the indecorous to the risque to the raunchy. The last is the most precise. Antony’s tone was unsurprising for Rome, where political and financial considerations determined upper-class marriages. Sex could be had anywhere. What, demanded Antony in 33, had come over Octavian? Why the fuss exactly? Could it really matter so much that he was “screwing the queen”? Octavian was no model husband himself, as they both knew.* Nor was he an innocent. He had amply enjoyed what Antony termed their “amorous adventures and youthful pranks.” It was only sex after all, and hardly qualified as news; as Octavian well knew, Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra had been going on for nine years. (He dated it from Tarsus.) It is not entirely clear whether he meant to legitimize the affair or to diminish it. The line that follows “screwing the queen” can be rendered as “she is my wife” or “is she my wife?” Given the rapid-fire rhythm of his queries, Antony seems intent on downplaying the liaison. He was after all writing to his brother-in-law. His implication appears to be: “She isn’t my wife, is she?” The answer was in any event immaterial. “Does it really matter,” Antony concluded, “where and in whom you get it up?” No matter how his final phrase is rendered, its verb belongs to the animal kingdom. It is unclear how closely those seven vulgar lines hewed to reality; what has come down to us may well be a paraphrase, more salacious than the original. Octavia aside, Antony and Cleopatra were not married by Roman standards, as Cleopatra well knew. In any event she here stepped into—or was fitted into—her greatest role. Octavian needed nothing further with which to bludgeon his rival. Judging from the fragments that remain, it was Octavian who turned the Alexandrian idyll into a sultry love affair.
As the clock ticked toward the end of the triumvirate, unlikely to be renewed, Antony and Cleopatra decamped for Ephesus. Ephesus had been the first city to recognize Antony as Dionysus incarnate and to have welcomed him at the city gates with loud cheers and a musical medley. After Philippi he had offered up splendid sacrifices and generous pardons there, to a people brutalized by Caesar’s assassins. The city of 250,000 remained kindly disposed toward him. He arranged now for the Ephesians to greet Cleopatra as his royal mistress. A rich banking center of narrow streets and shady, marble colonnades, Ephesus enjoyed a magnificent location. Built in a steep-sided valley, it gave onto rugged mountains on one side, the sea on the other. Ephesus boasted several remarkable temples, of which the most celebrated was that of Artemis, where both Cleopatra’s father and sister had sought asylum, and before the slender Ionic capitals of which her sister had met her end.
Strategically located across the Aegean from Athens, at the edge of a fine harbor, Ephesus was also the ideal address at which to establish a military base. From the coast of Asia Minor Antony set about assembling a navy, dispatching word to every client king in the region. They answered with fleets and submitted to oaths of loyalty. Cleopatra was the greatest single supplier of materiel, furnishing 200 of Antony’s 500 warships, fully manned, along with 20,000 talents and all the supplies required to sustain a vast army—in this case, 75,000 legionnaires, 25,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry—for the duration of a war. She was unlikely to have hesitated before doing so. Improbably, Octavian’s star had ascended in Rome. He had piled up victories as Antony bogged down in the East. For the two triumvirs to coexist peacefully was difficult. For an implacable, ambitious Octavian and Caesarion to coexist was impossible. Unlike Parthia, this campaign was as vital to Cleopatra as to Antony. She had every reason to throw herself, and Egypt, into it. On the last day of 33, the triumvirate officially expired.
EARLY IN JANUARY 32 a new consul spoke out forcefully in the Roman Senate in praise of Antony. He went on to savage Octavian. On hearing of the denunciation, Octavian paid the Senate a visit, with a bodyguard of soldiers and supporters. They made no effort to conceal the daggers beneath their togas. In 44 Cicero had wondered if Caesar’s adopted son intended to stage a coup; he did so now. Offering his own scalding stream of accusations, he terrified the opposition into silence. “By certain documents,” Octavian promised to demonstrate that Antony constituted a threat to Rome. He fixed a date on which he would present his evidence. The opposing consuls had seen the daggers; they knew better than to await that session, and secretly fled the city. Nearly four hundred senators followed, sailing to Ephesus, where they reported on the political climate in Rome. Surely Antony underestimated Octavian’s strength and position. And he allied himself with Cleopatra at great risk. She seriously compromised the cause.
Many of Antony’s colleagues—at least a third of the Senate was with him—argued for her removal. Yet again Antony bowed to reason and agreed to dismiss Cleopatra. He ordered her “to sail to Egypt, and there await the result of the war.” She refused, possibly, as Plutarch asserts, because she feared that Octavia would again intervene, to prevent a war that Cleopatra knew for her own sake to be essential; possibly because she mistrusted Antony’s judgment; possibly because it would have been irresponsible to do otherwise. She was no warrior queen; recent Ptolemies had not evidenced a great taste for warfare. They did not die on the battlefield, as did other Eastern monarchs. They subscribed to the belief that an empire could be acquired with money, rather than money with an empire. She was, however, her men’s commander in chief, responsible for their preparations and operations. She was as well Antony’s paymaster. A sober struggle of wills ensued. This time Cleopatra refrained from swooning hunger strikes. She took the opposite approach, assisted by Canidius, Antony’s gifted general, whom she allegedly bribed to argue her case. He may just as easily have been impressed with her. Surely, Canidius protested, it was not fair to banish an ally so instrumental to their campaign? She fed the troops. She provided the fleet. She was as capable as any man. Did Antony not understand that the Egyptian crews would be demoralized by her departure? Those men formed the backbone of his navy. They would fight for their queen, not necessarily for a Roman general. Were Antony to refute his Egyptian affections he would moreover offend his Eastern allies. Cleopatra challenged Antony to explain how she “was inferior in intelligence to any one of the princes who took part in the expedition, she who for a long time had governed so large a kingdom by herself, and”—she appended a compliment—“by long association with Antony had learned to manage large affairs.” Either her arguments made sense or her war chest did. She got her way.
In April 32 Antony and Cleopatra sailed with Antony’s staff to the island of Samos, off the coast of modern- day Turkey. Samos was a stepping-stone to Greece, where the struggle for control of the Roman world would most likely take place. While the couple settled in on the mountainous island their troops were ferried west, across the Aegean, an operation that would have required a good month. Antony’s veterans had returned from Armenia; along with the Eastern recruits, he had assembled some nineteen legions. Whatever the military or political preoccupations of the summer, they are lost to us, obliterated by Plutarch’s descriptions of the merrymaking on Samos. The lush resort island was the ideal place to throw a party, and Antony was well positioned to do so. He had time on his hands. Octavian made much of the extravagance, which has come down to us as another Dionysian revel. Just as every king and prince east of Athens contributed forces, so every dramatic artist reported to Samos.
