This time there was to be no backtracking from the affair. In Rome the scandal exploded. Ever since the Republic had begun involving itself in the affairs of the East there had been nothing more calculated to generate moral outrage than the spectacle of a citizen going native – and Antony, if reports were to be believed, was going native with a vengeance. The horrors of his behaviour seemed to have no limits. Why, he used a golden chamberpot, sheltered himself on the parade ground beneath mosquito nets, even massaged his mistress’s feet! Extravagance, effeminacy, servility: the charge-sheet was a familiar one to any Roman politician. Antony, playing the bluff man of the world, chose to treat it all with disdain. ‘So what if I’m fucking the Queen?’ he complained to Octavian. ‘What does it matter where you shove your erection?’20
But Antony was being disingenuous. His offences were not limited to the field of sex. Nor, even though the slanders that branded Cleopatra a whore were a staple of Roman misogyny, were they necessarily to be discounted for that reason. Her enemies were right to fear her, and to mistrust her seductions. These were not merely, as the cruder propagandists had it, the delights of her body, but charms more insidious and perilous by far. When Cleopatra whispered into Antony’s ear, her most honeyed words were not of sensual pleasure, but promises of godhead and universal empire.
And Antony, smitten by such dreams, began to trample where even Caesar had feared to tread. Having previously turned his back on dynastic ambitions, he now began to parade them. First, he acknowledged his children by Cleopatra. Then he gave them provocative, even inflammatory, titles: Alexander Helios, ‘the Sun’, and Cleopatra Selene, ‘the Moon’. Mingling the divine with the dynastic, these names may have been suited to Alexandria, but they could not have been more calculated to raise hackles back in Rome. Did Antony even care? His fellow citizens, watching him pander to the cheers of servile Greeks and Orientals, frowned in perplexity. And then, just when it seemed as though his offensiveness could go no further, came his – and Cleopatra’s – most spectacular stunt of all.
In 34 BC the crowds of Alexandria were invited to witness the inauguration of a dazzling new world order. The ceremony was presided over by Antony, Roman triumvir and new Dionysus. By his side sat Cleopatra, Macedonian queen and Egyptian pharaoh, splendidly robed as the new Isis, mistress of the heavens. Before them, arrayed in equally exotic national dress, stood Cleopatra’s children by both Caesar and Antony. To the Alexandrians, these princes and princesses were presented as saviour-gods, the inheritors of a dawning universal harmony, long promised, now drawing near. Young Alexander, garbed as a Persian king of kings, was promised Parthia and all the realms beyond it. Other children, more modestly, were presented with territories that it was actually within the power of Antony to give. The fact that some of these were provinces of the Republic, held in trust for the Roman people, failed to inhibit his generosity. This was partly because, in one sense, he was not being generous at all. Antony had no real intention of handing over the administration of Roman provinces to his children, and to that extent at least the ceremony was show and nothing more. But show mattered – and the message Antony had wished it to proclaim could also be found on his silver coins, jingling in purses throughout the East. His head stamped on one side, Cleopatra’s on the other: a Roman and a Greek; a triumvir and a queen. A new age was dawning in which Roman rule would be blended into what the Sibyl had prophesied: the divinely ordained synthesis of East and West, all differences shrunk, presided over by an emperor and an empress of the world.
But Alexandria’s meat, of course, was the Republic’s poison. Back in Rome, Antony’s friends – of whom there were still many – were appalled. Antony himself, alerted to the public-relations disaster, hurriedly wrote to the Senate. He offered, in a grand but vague manner, to lay down his triumviral powers – to restore the Republic. But too late. The gleaming white toga of constitutionalism had already been filched. Distracted as he had been by his grandiose Eastern dreams, Antony turned his gaze back to Rome to discover a most disconcerting sight: the heir of Caesar, adventurer and terrorist, posing resplendent as the defender of the Republic, the champion of tradition and his people’s ancient freedoms. And not only posing, but carrying the role off with great style.
True, not everyone was convinced by the young Caesar’s impersonation of a constitutionalist – and the mask itself might still occasionally slip. In 32 BC, wishing to browbeat the consuls, both of whom were supporters of Antony, Octavian entered the Senate House with armed guards and stationed them menacingly behind the magistrates’ chairs of state. The show of strength had the desired effect: opponents of Octavian’s regime were immediately smoked out. The two consuls fled to Antony in the East, and with them went almost a third of the Senate, some three hundred senators in all. Many of these were Antony’s placemen, but some, the heirs to a ruined cause, had more principled reasons for refusing to stomach a Caesar as the shield of the Republic. One of the two consuls who fled to Antony, for instance, was Domitius Ahenobarbus, the son of Julius Caesar’s old foe. Also in Antony’s camp – inevitably – was the grandson of Cato.
Octavian jeered at their choice of loyalties. That such men should end up as courtiers to a queen! Domitius actually made a point of snubbing Cleopatra whenever he could, and was constantly urging Antony to send her packing back to Egypt, but Octavian had always been a master at landing punches below the belt. In the summer of 32 BC, tipped off by a renegade, he even took the supremely sacrilegious step of raiding the temple of Vesta, where Antony had deposited his will, and seizing the document from the hands of the Vestal Virgins. The contents, eagerly pored over, duly proved as explosive as Octavian had anticipated. Stern-faced and censorious, he listed them for the benefit of the Senate. Caesarion to be legitimised; Cleopatra’s children awarded vast legacies; Antony himself, on his death, to be buried by Cleopatra’s side. It was all very shocking – perhaps suspiciously so.
Yet if there was much that was factitious about Octavian’s propaganda, it was not all spin. Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra, formalised in 32 when he divorced Octavia, was instinctively recognised by most Romans for what it was – a betrayal of the Republic’s deepest principles and values. That the Republic itself was dead did not make these any less mourned, nor its prejudices any less savage. To surrender to what was unworthy of a citizen: this was what the Romans had always most dreaded. It was flattering, therefore, to a people who had become unfree to pillory Antony as unmanly and a slave to a foreign queen. For the last time, the Roman people could gird themselves for war and imagine that both the Republic and their own virtue were not, after all, entirely dead.