Triple Pillar of the World

In the late summer​ of 32 BC, Rome declared war on Ptolemaic Egypt and its powerful queen, Cleopatra. In front of the Temple of Bellona, the Roman goddess of war, a member of an archaic priestly order called the fetiales cast a wooden spear into a small square of land that had been ritually designated as Egyptian soil. With the gods and Roman citizenry as witnesses, all appropriate legal formalities having been observed, the republic could go to war assured that it was a just one: bellum iustum. The spear-throwing fetialis might have been the great-nephew, adoptive son and heir of the deified Julius Caesar, whom we call Octavian until his designation as Augustus five years later, in 27. Octavian was responsible for ‘reviving’ this ritual declaration of war and the priesthood that administered it. It’s possible that he invented both: in the course of a very long career, he regularly asserted his respect for the mos maiorum – ancient Roman custom – and claimed great antiquity for brand new practices of his own devising. He was, after all, the man who instituted Roman autocracy while declaring the restoration of the republic.

Among the various successor kingdoms to the empire of Alexander the Great, Egypt had always been the least threatening to Rome. Fabulously rich, protected by their country’s geography but reliant on mercenary armies, Ptolemaic kings had difficulty projecting military power as far as Crete or Cyrenaica, never mind the parts of mainland Greece and Asia Minor in which Rome was actively interested. But Octavian needed the pretence of this ceremony. His just war had to be ostentatiously directed against a foreign foe because it was in fact the latest paroxysm of the civil strife that had plagued the republic for much of the preceding half-century. Its target was Marcus Antonius, the noble Mark Antony, Octavian’s colleague, rival and, until a few months earlier, when Antony divorced Octavian’s sister, his brother-in-law. Cleopatra provided ships and financing from Egypt’s bottomless treasury, but the armies that would soon confront each other on the Ionian coast of Greece were Roman, commanded by Roman dynasts, each with a claim to rule as Caesar’s true heir.

Antony and Octavian had staved off lethal dissension for as long as they could, keeping their provocations within the bounds of plausible deniability, choosing not to escalate even when the affronts to their dignitas – a word vastly more capacious and meaningful to the well-born Roman than our ‘dignity’ – would have justified war in any court of public opinion. Such forbearance could not last for ever and, by 32 BC, it was simply a matter of how the final break would come. Octavian’s position was strong, but Antony was the better general and had consolidated a large and prestigious, if unharmonious, coalition. With half the Senate and both consuls in Antony’s camp, Octavian could not be seen to launch yet another Roman civil war. He needed instead to attack the fatale monstrum Cleopatra, who had ensnared a noble Roman with her wicked magic and was planning to install the sinister, baboon-headed gods of Egypt on Rome’s hallowed Capitol.

That was intolerable, not just to Octavian, but to the honour of every decent Roman and the safety of all Italy: a powerful argument. By ancient standards, Rome was amazingly open to new blood and the incorporation of outsiders into its citizenry. At the same time, Roman ideology was fiercely contemptuous of foreign cultures, especially effeminate Greeks and barbarous easterners. Antony understood this, and knew that while Cleopatra travelled with him he could not take the offensive. To do so would prove Octavian’s propaganda right. And so he waited in Greece, his fleet anchored in the Ambracian Gulf, his armies crowded into the peninsulas that formed it. Idle armies are always dangerous and Antony himself was a man of action, impatient of constraint, at his best when on the move. He attempted to force a battle but was outmanoeuvred, and then the desertions started. Client kings took their armies home, prominent senators sloped off to join, or rejoin, Octavian. Antony faced a choice: march his legions deep into mainland Greece and resume the fight the following spring, or wager on a sea battle. He decided to throw the dice, entrusting the extraction of his legions to a trusted lieutenant, but he hedged his bets. His ships carried sails as well as oarsmen, which they would not have done had he thought victory likely. On 2 September 31 BC, the fleet left harbour. Cleopatra’s squadron, carrying the treasury, broke through a gap in the enemy line and sailed off for Egypt. Antony followed her. His cause collapsed. Much of his fleet retired into the gulf, the ships that did not were sunk at the victor’s leisure and Antony’s legions refused to fight. He had bet wrong.

Antony’s true motives at Actium are buried in legend and hostile propaganda. So too is the record of his final winter, passed at Alexandria in the company of Cleopatra. The ending is well known: turncoat legions declared for Octavian and advanced on Egypt from Cyrenaica; the garrison at Pelusium, near modern Port Said, surrendered, leaving the eastern route to Alexandria wide open. Antony’s remaining troops were routed and, retreating to the palace, he fell on his sword on or about the first day of August 30 BC. Cleopatra, until now a consummate political survivor, hoped to negotiate, but to no avail. She did cheat Octavian of a royal captive to lead in triumph, however, choosing suicide on 10 August, whether by the fabled bite of an asp or some more conventional method. She was given a royal funeral and interred alongside Antony. Caesarion, the son she had borne to Julius Caesar, was dead within the month. Of her three children with Antony, two graced the victor’s triumph, the younger boy having died en route to Rome. The elder, Alexander Helios, was quietly dispatched, but Cleopatra Selene was raised by Octavian’s sister and eventually married to the king of Mauretania. On 29 August, Octavian became the pharaoh of Egypt.

Famous as its dénouement might be, the career of Marcus Antonius is somewhat shadowy. He was born a nobilis, which under the republic meant he had a consul as ancestor: since the expulsion of the kings, the Roman people each year elected two supreme magistrates, known as consuls, to lead the state in peace and war, and it was this consular pair who gave their name to the year in the Roman calendar. Mark Antony’s branch of the Antonii had been ennobled by the successes of his grandfather, another Marcus Antonius, a brilliant orator who won a consulship in 99 BC after a successful command in the eastern Mediterranean. In the vicissitudes of the civil wars of the 80s, he fell foul of the ageing Gaius Marius and was executed in 87, four years before his famous grandson’s birth to the older of his sons, yet another Marcus Antonius. This Marcus was genial, his career successful rather than brilliant; his younger brother, Gaius, Mark Antony’s uncle, sided with Marius’ enemy Sulla and had a career marked by notorious venality and successfully pliable allegiances. The fact that Antony’s father and uncle both survived the violent eclipse of their father reminds us that Rome’s aristocracy was so intertwined by birth, marriage and remarriage, friendship and patronage, that the mortal sins of fathers were only rarely inflicted on their offspring. Benevolent as far as it went, that custom was something Antony never forgot; it was his bad luck eventually to find himself locked in conflict with Octavian, for whom aristocratic custom meant nothing.

Antony’s father married a Julia, a member of a patrician clan that dated back to before the foundation of the republic. The marriage produced a daughter and three sons. Mark Antony, the eldest boy, was born on 14 January 83, his brothers Gaius and Lucius soon after that, but their father died young, before he was old enough to run for consul. We know nothing of Antony’s youth or early career, but he would have received the education of any good Roman aristocrat and he became a fine if florid orator himself. His mother swiftly remarried, to Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, a patrician and ex-consul who was executed for his role in the conspiracy of Catiline in 63. Cicero, consul that year, was merciless towards the conspirators but spared Julia and her sons by Marcus Antonius from collateral damage. Indeed, the great orator and statesman maintained cordial relationships with the Antonii for more than twenty years, even if it is the vitriol of his Philippics against Antony that posterity remembers.

Antony’s uncle Gaius led the military campaign against Catiline, and that could have been the young Antony’s first military service. He almost certainly accompanied his uncle to Macedonia as a junior officer and is known to have led an allied cavalry unit in Roman Syria, where he befriended the Idumaean chieftain Antipater and his son, the future Herod the Great of Judaea. The Mark Antony we know emerges properly into the light of history during Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul. When or in what precise capacity he went there is unclear, but he had risen to be one of Caesar’s legates when we meet him at the double siege of Alesia, the climactic battle that put an end to the uprising of the conquered Gauls under Vercingetorix. By that point, in 52 BC, Antony was thirty years old and so eligible to stand for quaestor, the first rung on a young Roman’s political career and the office that granted membership of the Senate.

Rome​ in these years was a chaos of infighting among ever shifting aristocratic factions, each with different connections to the great strongmen Pompey and Caesar, whose ally Crassus had died in June 53 fighting the Parthians in Syria. Working out the precise admixture of family, friendship and ambition that explains who sided with whom at any given moment is a monumental challenge, but one must also remember, as Jeffrey Tatum reminds us in his lucid account, that ‘not everything in Rome was about Pompey and Caesar.’ It’s easy to forget, because we know what happened next, but also self-evidently true, as we know from our own experience: however horrifying the political catastrophe unfolding around us, we still devote ourselves primarily to the interpersonal and institutional jostling of our own little lives. So it was at Rome, and in those arenas, Antony’s name, pedigree and talent on the battlefield gave him immediate and lasting advantage. He was quaestor in 51 and in the summer of 50 won election as tribune of the plebs for the following year: it would prove a momentous one, because Caesar’s enemies, Marcus Porcius Cato chief among them, combined to require that he give up his extraordinary command in Gaul and return to Rome, where they could ruin him through spurious prosecutions in the courts. Caesar, who valued his dignitas more than his life, refused to stand down. After much vacillation, Pompey came down on the side of Caesar’s enemies and, entering his tribunate as Caesar’s friend, Antony attacked Pompey for his faithlessness, reminding the Senate of the brutality Pompey had inflicted when still the adulescens carnifex, the ‘young butcher’ of the dictator Sulla’s civil wars. Fierce debate raged in the Senate in December 50 and January 49, with every attempt at compromise scuppered, until Caesar faced an ultimatum: disarm or be declared a public enemy. Antony and a fellow tribune fled the senate house to join Caesar as he rallied his troops, crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome.

The story of the civil war has often been told: it took Caesar four years to bring the various constellations of his enemies to heel, but Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus in Thessaly was decisive. Antony commanded the crucial left wing of the Caesarian army in this battle, although it was earlier in the same campaign, as Caesar’s forces were being pressed to their limits at their Adriatic beachhead of Dyrrachium, that his genius for tactical leadership was most clearly on display. Pompey fled to Egypt, where the young king Ptolemy XIII had him murdered. The pursuing Caesar found himself embroiled in a civil war between Ptolemy and his older sister, Cleopatra, whose victory he eventually secured while she was pregnant with his son, whom she would name Ptolemy Caesarion. In autumn 47, Caesar returned to Italy as dictator with Antony his magister equitum, or master of horse, and thus his second in command.

The chronology of Antony’s career is somewhat hazy in the next years, with a period of crippling debt, divorce and remarriage to the formidable Fulvia, great-granddaughter of a consul and previously married into one of Rome’s great patrician clans. There was also a sojourn in Athens, where Antony’s hellenophilia was given free rein, and service as Caesar’s legate, possibly mopping up Pompeian diehards in Spain. On the return journey to Rome, Antony was given the honour of riding alongside Caesar, and he was soon elected Caesar’s consular colleague for the year 44, despite being only 38, four years too young to be eligible according to traditional standards.

When his friend and patron was assassinated on 15 March 44 BC, Antony was left as sole consul, the most important man in the republic. Caesar had been planning to depart Rome for a Parthian campaign on 18 March. His assassins, many of them close friends and allies in the wars against Pompey, had differing motives, from the abstract and philosophical to the pragmatic recognition that Caesar’s ascendancy spelled an end to the electoral rough and tumble that Roman aristocrats cherished as the measure of their self-worth. In February 44, Caesar had ostentatiously refused the royal crown proffered three times by Antony during the Lupercalia, a festival of misrule that made it possible to mask the gesture’s seriousness; but his consistently regal behaviour, and especially his failure to stand to greet his fellow senators, was thought intolerable. Caesar was playing by new rules that he had written, but too many great men looked back wistfully to the old oligarchy. He was stabbed to death at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Terrified senators stampeded, retreating to their palaces and townhouses, and Rome fell into suspended political animation.

Antony had control of Caesar’s will and his treasury and was in a good position to stand firm against the assassins – the self-styled Liberators – while pursuing compromise: by friendship or kinship, he was related to many of them. Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral on 20 March, though we may think we know it from Shakespeare, is neither preserved verbatim nor reliably recorded in the hostile and conflicting evidence that has survived, but it was clearly a tour de force, in which he laid claim to leadership of the Caesarian party. Thanks to Cicero’s speeches, his letters, and those of his correspondents which are preserved alongside his own, we can chart the intricacies of politics in 44 and 43 almost day by day. The arrival on the scene of Caesar’s great-nephew and adoptive heir again scrambled alliances and loyalties, though Octavian was only eighteen and held no public position. Antony, it is clear, underestimated him, but then so did everyone else, not least Cicero: he may never have actually uttered the words ‘laudandum adulescentem ornandum tollendum’, but the sentiment has a Ciceronian ring (‘the boy should be praised, decorated and set aside’), misguided though it proved.

The months between March 44 and October 42 occupy eighty pages of Tatum’s book and even so only scratch the surface complexity of events. In Italy, virtually every configuration of alliances was tested and found wanting. Octavian, his deified father’s legions at his back, managed to extort an unprecedented consulate for himself. Finally, in November 43, Antony and Octavian, with Aemilius Lepidus, another eminent Caesarian, patched up an alliance at Bologna and had a law passed making them plenipotentiary ‘triumvirs for the restoration of the republic’ for the next five years. Proscriptions of the triumvirs’ joint and individual enemies followed: Cicero and Antony’s uncle Lucius were among those sacrificed, along with many rich men of no political account whose fortunes were covetable. Antony then led the pursuit of Caesar’s assassins to Greece, where they had raised new legions after bleeding the eastern provinces dry to pay for them. It was Antony, too, who won the great victory at Philippi in Macedonia, where Brutus, Cassius and many of the last champions of the old republic fell on the battlefield. Octavian, either ill or feigning illness, had no share in the glory that, by common consent, acclaimed Antony the greatest general of his day.

After Philippi, Octavian faced the delicate and dangerous task of settling tens of thousands of demobilised veterans in colonies across Italy and the provinces. Antony’s more satisfying task was the regulation of the east where, for the better part of a decade, his will was law. Like Pompey before him, he attached kings, cities, even whole peoples to his personal clientela, and redrew the borders of provinces and kingdoms from the Black Sea to the Red. His arrangements were sensible and well founded, as shown by how few of them the victorious Octavian altered after his rival’s suicide. The two strove for years to maintain their precarious equilibrium after the sidelining of Lepidus, despite the continuing nuisance of Pompey’s son Sextus – a free agent in command of a powerful fleet – and even after the failure of Antony’s campaigns in Parthia. Although a Parthian victory would have brought him untold glory, the annexation of Armenia was a consolation prize worth having: as yet untapped by Roman business interests, the conquered kingdom was in Antony’s gift, which meant that getting and staying in his good graces was essential to senators with a nose for profit. It was only Octavian’s ability to play patron in the towns and the countryside of Italy that allowed him, eventually, to rally tota Italia against Antony and his Egyptian consort. Even that required shabby manoeuvring that was beneath the dignity of a true Roman noble, of a Caesar or an Antony: Octavian’s seizure and publication of Antony’s will was a particularly grotesque breach of faith, no matter how much xenophobic propaganda it could fuel (Antony proclaimed Caesarion Caesar’s heir, named his children by Cleopatra his own heirs and asked to be buried beside her in Alexandria). Octavian’s total lack of scruple and Antony’s undoubted reliance on Cleopatra gained Octavian enough aristocratic support to enable him to risk a final confrontation. Actium, Alexandria and the establishment of autocracy at Rome followed.

Without early and long training in the intricacies of the late republic, writing its history can seem impossibly daunting. There is too much information, too unevenly distributed. Short life expectancies, frequent divorce and strategic adoption make for tangled family trees and a surfeit of homonymous individuals that lead the inexpert or unwary into error. Meanwhile, the authorial voice of Caesar, and still more that of Cicero, dominate the evidentiary landscape. When it comes to Antony, our occluded picture rests on the hostile contemporary polemic of Cicero’s Philippics and a long, artful Life by Plutarch, written two centuries after the fact. Both Shakespeare’s portrayal of Antony, and the no less canonical scholarly version in Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution (1939), hew very close to Plutarch, and both of these lie behind the Antony of the BBC Two/HBO co-production Rome. The series is more or less worthless as history, but thanks to a superb performance by James Purefoy, it does capture the essence of the Marcus Antonius who emerges from our sources: sensual, handsome, boundlessly arrogant, casual in his cruelty, and an utterly fearless soldier and general – the qualities that brought him down in the end. Tatum does his best to resist this beguiling portrait. He reads Plutarch and Cicero against the grain, he rejects any notion of character as destiny, and yet the same Antony still emerges, if slightly nuanced – which shows that whether Plutarch’s Antony was his own invention or captures some fundamental truth about the historical man, it remains indelible, seductive, and the only Antony we have.