Antony and
Cleopatra are famous. With just a handful of others, including Caesar,
Alexander the Great, Nero, Plato and Aristotle, they remain household names
more than two thousand years after their spectacular suicides. Cleopatra is the
only woman in the list, which in itself is interesting and a testament to her
enduring fascination. Yet most often Antony and Cleopatra are remembered as a
couple, and as lovers — perhaps the most famous lovers from history.
Shakespeare's play helped them to grow into fictional characters as well, and
so their story can now be numbered alongside other tales of passionate, but
doomed romance, as tragic as the finale of Romeo and Juliet. It is unsurprising
that the tale has been reinvented time after time in print, on stage and, more
recently, on screen. Since they both had strongly theatrical streaks, this
enduring fame would no doubt have pleased them, although since neither was
inclined to modesty it would probably not have surprised them or seemed less
than their due.
The story is
intensely dramatic, and I cannot remember a time when I had not heard of Antony
and Cleopatra. As young boys, my brother and I discovered a small box
containing coins collected by our grandfather, a man who had died long before
either of us was born. A friend spotted one of them as Roman, and it proved to
be a silver denarius, minted by Mark Antony to pay his soldiers in 31 B.C. for
a campaign partly funded by Cleopatra — the same coin shown in the photograph
section in this book. Already interested in the ancient world, the discovery
added to my enthusiasm for all things Roman. It seemed a connection not only
with a grandparent, but also with Marcus Antonius the Triumvir, whose name
circles the face of the coin with its picture of a warship. We do not know
where our grandfather acquired this and the other coins — an eclectic mixture,
several of which are from the Middle East. He may have picked them up in Egypt,
where he served with the Royal Field Artillery during the First World War. It
is certainly nice to think that.
So in some ways,
Antony and Cleopatra have always had a special place in my interest in the
ancient past, and yet the desire to write about them is fairly recent. A lot
has been written, most especially about the queen, and it seemed unlikely that
there could be much more worth saying. Then, a few years ago, I fulfilled a
long-held ambition by working on Caesar: The Life of a Colossus, which amongst
other things involved looking in far more detail at his affair with Cleopatra,
as well as Antony's political association with him.
Some of what I
found surprised me, and — though this was less unexpected — there were vast
differences to the popular impression of the story. If it was valuable to look
at Caesar's career with a straightforward chronology, and to emphasise the
human element in his own behaviour and that of his associates and opponents, it
soon became clear that most other aspects of the period would benefit from the
same approach.
For all their
fame, Antony and Cleopatra receive little attention in formal study of the first
century b.c.. Engaged in a power struggle, they were beaten and so had little
real impact on later events. Academic history has long since developed a deep
aversion to focusing on individuals, no matter how charismatic their
personalities, instead searching for ‘more profound' underlying trends and
explanations of events. As a student I took courses on the Fall of the Roman
Republic and the creation of the Principate, and later on as a lecturer I would
devise and teach similar courses myself. Teaching and studying time is always
limited, and as a result it was natural to focus on Caesar and his
dictatorship, before skipping ahead to look at Octavian/Augustus and the
creation of the imperial system. The years from 44–31 b.c, when Antony's power
was at its greatest, rarely receive anything like such detailed treatment.
Ptolemaic Egypt is usually a more specialised field, but, even when it is
included in a course, the reign of its last queen — poorly documented and
anyway in the last days of long decline — is seldom treated in any detail. The
fame of Cleopatra may attract students to the subject, but courses are, quite
reasonably and largely unconsciously, structured to stress more ‘serious'
topics, and shy away from personalities.
Antony and
Cleopatra did not change the world in any profound way, unlike Caesar and to an
even greater extent Augustus. One ancient writer claimed that Caesar's
campaigns caused the death of one million people and the enslavement of as many
more. Whatever the provocation, he led his army to seize Rome by force, winning
supreme power through civil war, and supplanted the Republic's democratically
elected leaders. Against this, Caesar was famous for his clemency. Throughout
his career he championed social reform and aid to the poor in Rome, as well as
trying to protect the rights of people in the provinces. Although he made
himself dictator, his rule was generally benevolent, and his measures sensible,
dealing with long-neglected problems. The path to power of his adopted son,
Augustus, was considerably more vicious, replacing clemency with revenge.
Augustus' power was won in civil war and maintained by force, and yet he also
ruled well. The Senate's political freedom was virtually extinguished and
popular elections rendered unimportant. At the same time he gave Rome a peace
it had not known in almost a century of political violence and created a system
of government that benefited a far wider section of society than the old
Republic.
Antony and
Cleopatra proved themselves just as capable of savagery and ruthlessness, but
the losers in a civil war do not get the chance to shape the future directly.
Apart from that, there is no real trace of any long-held beliefs or causes on
Antony's part, no indication that he struggled for prominence for anything
other than his own glory and profit. Some like to see Cleopatra as deeply
committed to the prosperity and welfare of her subjects, but this is largely
wishful thinking. There is no actual evidence to suggest that her concerns went
any further than ensuring a steady flow of taxation into her own hands, to
cement her hold on power. For only a small part of her reign was she secure on
the throne, at the head of a kingdom utterly dependent on
Roman goodwill,
and it would probably be unreasonable to expect her to have done more than
this.
Julius Caesar
was highly successful. He was also highly talented across a remarkable range of
activities. Even those who dislike the man and what he did can readily admire
his gifts. Augustus is an even harder figure to like, especially as a youth,
and yet no one would fail to acknowledge his truly remarkable political skill.
Caesar and his adopted son were both very clever, even if their characters were
different. Mark Antony had none of their subtlety, and little trace of profound
intelligence. He tends to be liked in direct proportion to how much someone
dislikes Octavian/Augustus, but there is little about him to admire. Instead,
fictional portrayals have reinforced the propaganda of the 30s b.c.,
contrasting Antony, the bluff, passionate and simple soldier, with Octavian,
seen as a cold-blooded, cowardly and scheming political operator. Neither
portrait is true, but they continue to shape even scholarly accounts of these
years.
Cleopatra was
clever and well-educated, but unlike Caesar and Augustus the nature of her
intelligence remains elusive, and it is very hard to see how her mind worked or
fairly assess her intellect. It is the nature of biography that the author
comes to develop a strong, and largely emotional, attitude towards his or her
subject after spending several years studying them. Almost every modern author
to come to the subject wants to admire, and often to like, Cleopatra. Some of
this is a healthy reaction to the rabid hostility of Augustan sources. Much has
to do with her sex, for as we noted at the start, it is a rare thing to be able
to study in detail any woman from the Greco-Roman world. Novelty alone
encourages sympathy — often reinforced by the same distaste for Augustus that
fuels affection for Antony. In itself sympathy need not matter, as long as it
does not encourage a distortion of the evidence to idealise the queen. There is
much we simply do not know about both Antony and Cleopatra — and indeed most
other figures from this period. The gaps should not be filled by confident
assertions drawn from the author's own mental picture of Cleopatra as she ought
to have been.
