hand by a known representative of the Queen herself, and only if it bears the Royal seal.
VII. Letter: Cleopatra to Marcus Antonius, from Alexandria
(winter, 35 B. c.)
My dear husband, the Queen has ordered that the needs of your brave army be filled; and your wife like a trembling girl flies to meet you, as rapidly as the uncertain winter sea will carry her. Indeed, even as you read this letter, she is no doubt at the prow of the ship that leads the line of supply, straining her eyes in vain for the Syrian coast where her lover waits, cold in the weather, but warm in the anticipation of her lover's arms.
As a Queen, I rejoice at your success; as a woman, I bewail the necessity that has kept us apart. And yet during these hurried days since I received your letter, I have concluded (can I be wrong?) that at last woman and Queen may become one.
I shall persuade you to return with me to the warmth and comfort of Alexandria, and to leave the completion of your success in Parthia for another day. It will be my pleasure to persuade you as a woman; it is my duty to persuade you as a Queen.
The treasons that you have seen in the East have had their birth in the West. Octavius plots against you still, and libels you to those whose salvation is to love you. I know that he has tried to subvert Herod; and I am persuaded by all the intelligence that I can gather that he is responsible for the defections of the provincial legions that hampered your success in Parthia. I must convince you that there are barbarians in Rome as well as in Parthia; and their use of your loyalty and good nature is more dangerous than any Parthian arrow. In the East there is only plunder; but in the West there is the world, and such power as only the great can imagine.
But even now my mind wanders from what I say. I think of you, the mightiest of men-and I am woman again, and care nothing for kingdoms, for wars, for power. I come to you at last, and count the hours as if they were days.
VIII. Letter: Gains Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius (12 B. c.)
How delicately you put things, my dear Livy; and yet, beneath that delicacy, how clear are your brutal alternatives! Were we 'deceived' (and therefore fools), or did we 'withhold' some information (and were therefore liars)? I shall reply somewhat less delicately than you question.
No, my old friend, we were not deceived about the matter of Parthia; how could we have been deceived? Even before we got Antonius's account of the campaign, we knew the truth of it. We lied to the Roman people.
I must say that I am a good deal less offended by your question than by what I perceive to lie behind it. You forget that I am an artist myself, and know the necessity of asking what to ordinary people would seem the most insulting and presumptuous things. How could I take offense at that which I myself would do, without the slightest hesitation, for the sake of my art? No, it is what I perceive in the tenor of your question that begins to give me offense; for I think (I hope I am wrong) I detect the odor of a moralist. And it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind. And it would be a heavy burden for even the deepest friendship to bear.
As I have said, we lied; and if I give the reasons for the lie, I do not explain in order to defend. I explain to enlarge your understanding and your knowledge of the world.
After the Parthian debacle, Antonius sent to the Senate a dispatch describing his 'victory' in the most glowing and general terms; and demanded, though in absentia, the ceremony of a triumph. We accepted the lie, allowed it currency, and gave him his triumph.
Italy had been racked by two generations of civil wars; the immediate history of a strong and proud people was a history of defeat, for none is victor in a civil strife; after the defeat of Sextus Pompeius, peace seemed possible; the news of such an overwhelming defeat might have been simply catastrophic, both to the stability of our government and to the soul of the people. For a people may endure an almost incredible series of the darkest failures without breaking; but give them respite and some hope for the future, and they may not endure an unexpected denial ofthat hope.
And there were more particular reasons for the lie. The defeat of Sextus Pompeius had been accomplished only shortly before we got the news from Parthia; the auxiliary legions had been disbanded and settled on the lands promised them; the prospect that they might be called again would have wholly disrupted all land values outside of Rome, and would have proved disastrous to an already precarious economy.
Finally, and most obviously, we still had some hope that Antonius might be deflected from his Eastern dream of Empire and become once again a Roman. It was a vain hope, but at that time it seemed a reasonable one. To have refused him his triumph-to have told your 'truth' to all of Rome-would have made it impossible for him ever to have returned in honor or in peace.
In my account of these events, I have been saying 'we;” but you must understand that for nearly three years after the defeat of Sextus Pompeius, Octavius and Agrippa were only occasionally in Rome; most of their time was spent in Illyria, securing our borders and subduing the barbarian tribes that theretofore had ranged freely up and down the Dalmatian shore-lands, and had even pillaged villages on the Adriatic coast of Italy itself. During this time I was entrusted with the official seal of Octavius. These decisions were mine, though in every instance, I am proud to say, they were approved by the Emperor, though often after the fact. I remember once he returned to Rome, briefly, to recuperate from a wound received in a battle against one of the Illyrian tribes; and he said to me, only half-jokingly, I think, that with Agrippa at the head of his army and with me, however unofficially, at the head of his government, he felt that the security of the nation demanded that he relinquish any pretense to either position, and for his own pleasure become the head of my stable of poets.
Marcus Antonius… The charges and countercharges that have come down through the years! But beneath them, the truth was there, though the world may never fully apprehend it. We played no game; we had no need to. Though many senators in Rome, being of the old Party and somehow irrationally reversing allegiances and seeing Antonius as the only hope of recapturing the past, we knew to be against us and for Antonius, yet the people were for us; we had the army; and we had sufficient senatorial power to carry at least the most important of our edicts.
We could have endured Marcus Antonius in the East as an independent satrap or Imperator or whatever he chose to call himself, so long as he remained a Roman, even a plundering Roman; we could have endured him in Rome, even with his recklessness and ambition. But it was being forced upon us that he had caught the dream of the Greek Alexander, and that he was sick from that dream.
We gave him his triumph; it strengthened his senatorial support, but it did not draw him back to Rome. We offered him the consulship; he refused it, and did not return to Rome. And in what was really a last desperate effort to avert what we knew was coming, we returned to him the seventy ships of his fleet that had helped us defeat Sextus Pompeius, and we sent two thousand troops to augment his depleted Roman legions. And Octavia sailed with the fleet and soldiers to Athens, in the hope that Antonius might be dissuaded from his awful ambition and return to his duty as husband, Roman, and triumvir.
He accepted the ships; he enlisted the troops; and he refused to see Octavia, nor even gave her dwelling in Athens, but sent her forthwith back to Rome. And as if to leave no doubt in the minds of any of his contempt, he staged a triumph in Alexandria -in Alexandria-and presented a few token captives, not to a Senate, but to Cleopatra, a foreign monarch, who sat above even Antonius himself and upon a golden throne. It is said that a most barbaric ceremony followed the triumph-Antonius robed himself as Osiris, and sat beside Cleopatra, who was gowned as Isis, that most peculiar goddess. He proclaimed his mistress to be Queen of Kings, and proclaimed that her Caesarion was joint monarch over Egypt and Cyprus. He even had struck coins on one side of which was a likeness of himself and on the other a likeness of Cleopatra.
As if it were an afterthought, he had sent to Octavia letters of divorce, and had her evicted without ceremony or warning from his Roman dwelling.
We could not then evade what must ensue. Octavius returned from Illyria, and we began to prepare for whatever madness might come from the East.
IX Senatorial Proceedings, Rome (33 B. c.)
On this day Marcus Agrippa, Consular and Admiral of the Roman Fleet, Aedile of the Roman Senate, does declare, for the health and welfare of the Roman people, and for the glory of Rome, the following:
