For twelve years Antony had contended that Octavian plotted to destroy him. Realistically and opportunistically, Cleopatra could only have agreed. The couple were finally right. Antony was equally correct that in a contest of disingenuousness he could not rival his former brother-in-law. (Cleopatra might have, but she was obliged to let Antony do the talking.) It was most unfortunate that Antony had made himself a traitor to Rome, clucked Octavian. He was heartsick about the state of affairs. He had felt so affectionately toward him that he had entrusted him with a share in the command and with a much-loved sister. Octavian had not declared war even after Antony had humiliated that sister, neglected their children, and bestowed upon another woman’s children the possessions of the Roman people. Surely Antony would see the light. (Octavian had no such hopes for Cleopatra. “For I adjudged her,” he scoffed, “if only on account of her foreign birth, to be an enemy by reason of her very conduct.”) He insisted that Antony would “if not voluntarily, at least reluctantly, change his course as a result of the decrees passed against her.” Octavian knew full well that Antony would do no such thing. He and Cleopatra were well beyond that point. Matters of the heart aside, he was the most faithful of men. The situation with Octavian was moreover untenable. It would be difficult to say to whom Cleopatra was more vital in 32: the man to whom she was the partner, or the man to whom she was the pretext. Antony could not win a war without her. Octavian could not wage one.
Philippi had bought Antony a decade of goodwill; it abruptly came to an end now. In the fall he and Cleopatra moved west to Patras, an undistinguished town at the entrance of the Gulf of Corinth. From that point they established a defensive line up and down the west coast of Greece, distributing men from Actium in the north to Methoni in the south. The intention seems to have been to protect the supply lines to Alexandria, along with Egypt itself, on which Octavian had after all declared war. Cleopatra profited from the pause to issue coins, on which she appears as Isis. Antony sent considerable quantities of gold back to Rome, distributing bribes left and right. He had the greater force but labored all the same to undermine the loyalty of Octavian’s men. The bulk of those funds were presumably Cleopatra’s. Octavian’s war levies meanwhile set off riots in Rome. Also back and forth over the winter went various spies and senators, their loyalties fragile and mercurial. Many had faced this quandary at least once before: whom to flee, and whom to follow? It was a test of personalities rather than principles. Elsewhere it seemed as if a magnet had passed over the Mediterranean world, drawing the skittering sides into a taut alignment that “as a whole far surpassed in size anything that had ever been before.” The sovereigns Antony had installed in 36 turned out in full force. Among others, the Libyan, Thracian, Pontic, and Cappadocian kings joined him, with their fleets.
The winter passed in a fever pitch of inertia. For the second time the usually rash Antony appeared slow to open a campaign, one for which Cleopatra could only have been impatient. With every month she was running up considerable expenses. (The rule of thumb was 40 to 50 talents per legion per year, which put Cleopatra’s summer outlay for the infantry alone in the vicinity of 210 talents.) It was difficult to escape the impression that Antony, the most famous soldier alive, had no desire for an epic battle. Of an earlier occasion it would be said of Caesar that “he sought a reputation rather than a province,” an assertion that was arguably more true of his protege. Octavian invited Antony to an absurd staged encounter. Antony challenged Octavian to a duel. Neither materialized. Mostly the two sides confined themselves to insults and idle threats, to “spying upon and annoying each other.” The air pulsed with rumor, much of it generated by Octavian. In 33 he expelled the multitude of astrologers and soothsayers from Rome, ostensibly to purge the growing Eastern influence, actually better to control the story line. In their absence it was easier to elicit the kinds of omens Octavian preferred; he wanted to be the only one in the prophecy business. So it was that Antony and Cleopatra’s statues in the Acropolis were said to have been struck by lightning and to lie in sorry ruins. Eighty-five-foot-long two-headed serpents appeared. A marble statue of Antony oozed blood. When the children of Rome divided themselves into Antonians and Octavians for a fierce two-day-long street battle, the miniature Octavians prevailed. The truth was closer to that suggested by two talking ravens. Their equitable trainer had taught the first to squawk, “Hail Caesar, our victorious commander.” The other learned: “Hail Antony, our victorious commander.” A smart Roman had every reason to hedge his bets—and to believe that with their hotheaded rhetoric, their personal agendas, Antony and Octavian were perfectly interchangeable. Even those on intimate terms with both conceded that each “desired to be the ruler, not only of the city of Rome, but of the whole world.”
While the funds and experience were largely on Antony and Cleopatra’s side, so too were the ambiguities, beginning with the matter—not necessarily more transparent in 32 than it is today—of their marriage. As a foreigner, Cleopatra could not under Roman law become Antony’s wife, even after his divorce. Only by the more supple, accommodating logic of the Greek East could the two have been said to have married. From the Egyptian point of view the question was irrelevant. Cleopatra had no need to be married to Antony, who was without any official status in Egypt, which she ruled with Caesarion. Antony was there a queen’s consort and patron, not a king. That was unproblematic in Egypt. It was a muddle to Rome. Was Cleopatra meant to play a role in the West? Again there was no category for her, or rather there was: If she was not a wife, she was by definition a concubine. In which case why did Antony stamp her image on Roman coins? Antony and Cleopatra’s joint intentions too were murky. Did they mean to realize the dream of Alexander the Great, to unite men across national boundaries and under one divine law, as the prophecy had it? Or did Antony intend to set himself up as an Oriental monarch, with Cleopatra as empress? (He made it easy for Octavian: a Roman surrendered his citizenship if he formally attached himself to another state.) Their agenda may have been better defined—probably they meant to establish two capitals—but generally they taxed the category-loving Roman mind. And they turned the client king arrangement on its head. A foreigner was meant to be subservient, not equal, to a Roman. As such, it was easy for Octavian to make a case for the transgressive, insatiable woman, intent on conquest. He did so convincingly and enduringly. One of the greatest twentieth-century classicists has Cleopatra working through Antony, like a parasite, to realize ambitions she may never have considered. The military intentions were opaque as well. For what precisely was Antony fighting? He might well mean to restore the Republic, as he claimed, but what then to make of the mother of his three half-Roman children?
For Octavian, by contrast, all was crystalline and categorical, or at least it was once he had passed off a personal vendetta as a foreign war. His argument had cleaner lines and better visuals. He made a splendid, splashy appeal to xenophobia. Surely his men—“we who are Romans and lords of the greatest and best portion of the world”—were not going to be rattled by these primitives? Not for the last time, the world divided into a masculine, rational West and a feminine, indefinite East, on which Octavian declared a sort of crusade. He fought against something but for something as well: for Roman probity, piety, and self-control, precisely those qualities his former brother-in-law had shrugged off in his embrace of Cleopatra. Antony was no longer a Roman but an Egyptian, a mere cymbal player, effeminate, inconsequential, and impotent, “for it is impossible for one who leads a life of royal luxury, and coddles himself like a woman, to have a manly thought or do a manly deed.”* Octavian savaged even Antony’s literary style. And incidentally, had anyone noticed that Antony drank? Octavian stressed his role as Caesar’s heir less often. Instead he went in for tales of his own divinity, which he broadcast widely. Few in Rome failed to hear of his descent from Apollo, to whom he was dedicating a fine new temple.
In reducing Antony to a cymbal player Octavian accomplished an especially difficult feat. He publicly acknowledged what many men who have faced a woman across a tennis net have since noted: in such a contest, there is greater pride to be lost than glory to be gained. By the Roman definition, a woman hardly qualified as a worthy opponent. Coaxing a tinny accusation into a series of resonant chords, later scored for a full orchestra, Octavian rhapsodized about Cleopatra. He endowed her with every kind of power, to create an enduring grotesque. This brutal, bloodthirsty Egyptian queen was no latter-day Fulvia. She was a vicious enemy, with designs on all Roman possessions. Surely the great and glorious people who had subdued the Germans, trampled the Gauls, and invaded the Britons, who had conquered Hannibal and burned Carthage, were not going to tremble before “this pestilence of a woman”? What would their glorious forefathers say if they learned that a people of singular exploits and vast conquests, to whom every region of the world had now submitted, had been trodden underfoot by an Egyptian harlot, her eunuchs, and her hairdressers? Indeed they faced a formidable array of forces, Octavian assured his men, but to win great prizes, one waged great contests. In this one the honor of Rome was at stake. It was the obligation of those destined “to conquer and rule all mankind” to uphold their illustrious history, to avenge those who insulted them, and “to allow no woman to make herself equal to a man.”*
EARLY IN 31 Octavian’s superb admiral, Agrippa, made a swift, surprise crossing to Greece. A longtime friend and mentor to Octavian, he supplied the military acumen his commander lacked. Agrippa disrupted Antony’s supply lines and captured his southern base. In his wake, Octavian transferred 80,000 men from the Adriatic coast across
