Yet his – and Antony’s – mastery remained that of a despot. The triumvirate, which had been hurriedly renewed in 37 after its expiry the year before, had no foundations in precedent, only in the exhaustion and misery of the Roman people. The sense of helplessness that the Republic had inspired in other peoples was now its own. As early as 44 BC, following Caesar’s assassination, one of his friends had warned that Rome’s problems were intractable – ‘for if a man of such genius was unable to find a way out, who will find one now?’17 Since then the Roman people had found themselves ever more storm-racked and adrift. The lodestars of custom were gone, and there seemed nothing to take their place.
No wonder, then, that despair and dislocation should have begun to breed in the Republic’s citizens strange fantasies:
Now comes the crowning age foretold in the Sibyl’s songs
,
A great new cycle, bred of time, begins again.
Now virginal Justice and the golden age returns
,
Now its first-born is sent down from high heaven.
With the birth of this boy, the generation of iron will pass
,
And a generation of gold will inherit all the world.18
These lines were written in 40 BC, in the very teeth of Italy’s suffering. Their author, P. Vergilius Maro – Virgil – was from the fertile basin of the River Po, an area where the land commissars had been particularly active. In other poems Virgil had hauntingly depicted the miseries of the dispossessed, nor was his vision of Utopia any the less despairing in its inspiration. Such had been the scale of the catastrophe that had overtaken the Roman people that vague prophetic longings of the kind that Greeks or Jews had long indulged in appeared the only consolations left to them. ‘The Sibyl’s songs’: these were not the Sibyl’s songs as they appeared in the books on the Capitol. They contained no prescription for appeasing the gods’ anger, no programme for restoring peace to the Republic. They were dreams, nothing more.
And yet dreams, to autocrats, had their uses. Whatever Virgil’s talk of messianic babies sent from heaven, there were clearly only two candidates for the role of saviour – and of these two, it was Antony, not Octavian, who had the most suggestive traditions ready to hand. The East, bled white by successive sides in Roman civil wars, yearned for a new beginning even more passionately than did Italy. Visions of apocalypse still swirled through the imaginings of Greeks and Egyptians, Syrians and Jews. Mithridates had demonstrated how an ambitious warlord could turn such hopes to his advantage; but no one had ever done so who was not an enemy of Rome. To present oneself as the saviour god long promised by eastern oracles: no more monstrous crime, for a citizen of the Republic, could possibly have been imagined. For more than a century now proconsuls had been travelling to the East, hearing themselves hailed as divine, mimicking Alexander, handing out crowns – and always dreaded to follow where such indulgences might lead. The Senate would not permit it; the Roman people would not permit it. But now the Republic was dead, and Antony was a triumvir, owing nothing to either the Senate or the Roman people. And temptation came in the form of a great and enchanting queen.
Cleopatra, who had won Caesar’s affections by hiding in a carpet, had wooed Antony with overblown spectacle from the start. She knew him of old – his flamboyance, his love of pleasure, his dressing-up as Dionysus – and had calculated accordingly how best to win his heart. In 41 BC, during Antony’s progress through the East, she had sailed from Egypt to meet him, her ship’s oars made of silver, its poop sheathed with gold, her pages dressed as Cupids, her handmaids as sea nymphs, herself as Aphrodite, goddess of love. Antony had summoned her – an unconscionable humiliation – but Cleopatra, wafting into his headquarters amid the goggling of its stupefied inhabitants, had magnificently turned the tables. Not that she had been foolish enough to hog the limelight for too long. Instead, she had presented Antony with his own part to play in the extravaganza. ‘And the word went out everywhere, that Aphrodite had come to feast with Dionysus, for the common good of Asia.’19 No role could have been better designed to tickle Antony’s fancy – no bed-partner either. Just as he had been intended to do, he had speedily made Cleopatra his mistress, and passed a delightful winter with her in Alexandria. Matrons back in Rome would swear by Egyptian methods of birth control, but Cleopatra – at least while taking world leaders to bed – had no time for fiddling around with diaphragms of crocodile dung. As with Caesar, so with Antony, she soon got herself pregnant. Having delivered Caesar a son, Cleopatra now went one better. Aphrodite gave Dionysus twins.
Here, for the father, was the glimmering of a perilous temptation. To found a line of kings: this was the ultimate, the deadliest taboo. No wonder that Antony turned his back on it. For four years – belying the gossip that he was besotted with Cleopatra – he avoided his mistress. Octavia, beautiful, intelligent and loyal, provided him with ample compensations, and for a while – settled in Athens, attending lectures with his intellectual bride – Antony presented a model of uxoriousness. Yet even when with Octavia he could not forget the more glittering possibilities to which Cleopatra had opened his eyes. Outrageous stories began to be told: that Antony was holding orgies in the theatre of Dionysus, dressed like the god in a fetching panther skin; that he was leading torchlit processions up to the Parthenon; that he was pestering the goddess Athena with drunken marriage proposals. All most un-Roman – and the stories were no doubt much improved by the retelling. Not that there was any great scandal in Athens, or among the rest of Antony’s subjects. Just the opposite, in fact: in the East it was rather expected that a ruler be a god.
By 36 BC, when Antony and Octavian faced each other as twin masters of the Roman world, undistracted by rivals, the character of their rule was being influenced ever more by the different traditions of their power bases. For both men the challenge was the same: to secure a legitimacy that was not merely of the sword. Here Octavian, as the ruler of the West, had a crucial advantage. Both he and Antony were Roman, but only he had Rome. When Octavian returned to the capital from the defeat of Sextus he was greeted, for the first time, with genuine enthusiasm. The innate conservatism of his fellow citizens had survived the loss of their freedom, and now, grateful for the peace that Octavian had won them, they paid homage in the language of their ancient rights. They offered the conqueror a sacred privilege: the inviolability of a tribune. Only in a restored Republic would this have any meaning – and Octavian, by accepting it, was signalling his anticipation of just such a prospect. Not that this guaranteed anything, of course, for by now the Romans had learned better than to put their trust in rhetorical flourishes. Even so, with Sextus’ fleet sunk and Lepidus banished in ignominious retirement, Octavian could at last start to flesh out his claims to be labouring in the cause of peace. Taxes were rescinded, grain supplies re-established, commissioners appointed to bring order to the countryside. Documents relating to the civil wars were ostentatiously burned. The annual magistrates began to have their responsibilities restored. Back to the future indeed.
But not all the way, of course – not yet. Octavian had no intention of surrendering his triumviral powers while Antony held on to his, and for Antony, far distant from his native city, the restoration of the Republic hardly registered as a pressing issue. Instead, his ambitions were tending in a very different direction. For three hundred years, ever since Alexander, dreams of universal empire had haunted the imaginings of the Greeks, dreams that the Republic too, in the end, had come to share. Yet its suspicion of them had lingered, and even the greatest of its citizens – even Pompey, even Caesar himself – had feared to pursue them to the limits. So too had Antony – who had fled the temptings of a Macedonian queen to become the husband of a sober Roman matron. But four years had passed, four years of naked power such as no citizen had ever exercised in the East before – and the temptations, as they were fed, continued to gnaw. In the end Antony proved too self-indulgent, too besotted by his own pretensions, to resist them. Octavia – who was to remain loyal to her husband’s memory to the very end – was sent back to Rome. Meanwhile, once again, Aphrodite was summoned to the presence of the new Dionysus.