Part 5

Domitius Ænobarbus and C. Sossius were elected consuls 32 B. C. Both were partisans of Antony, and made vain attempts to save him by unmasking Octavius to the senate, but the majority declared against them. Dreading the anger of the implacable Perusian lover of justice they went into exile with several of the senators. They could not at once join Antony, who was in Armenia, negotiating the marriage of his very youthful son, Alexander, with Jotapa, daughter of the king of Media. They announced to him by letter that Octavius was hastening his preparations, and that immediate hostilities might be expected. Antony, like a good general, determined, in order to get the start of his enemy, to carry the war into Italy. He immediately sent Canidius with sixteen legions to the sea-coast of Asia Minor, and himself proceeded to Ephesus, where all his allies were directed to unite their contingents. Cleopatra was the first to arrive, with two hundred vessels of from three to ten banks of oars, and a war subsidy of twenty thousand talents (one hundred thousand francs).

It would have been better for Antony had this fleet remained in Egyptian waters, this money in the treasury of the Lagidæ, and Cleopatra herself in Alexandria. This bewitching but fatal being brought to the Roman camp her gorgeous licentiousness and her unbridled desire of pleasure. At Ephesus where she landed, at Samos whither they afterwards proceeded, the mad follies of Alexandria were renewed. The constant arrivals of kings, governors, deputations from cities bringing to Antony troops and vessels served as a pretext for magnificent feasts and innumerable dramatic representations. A thousand comedians and rope-dancers were collected, and whilst the whole world, says Plutarch, echoed with the noise of arms and the groans of men, at Samos nothing was heard but laughter and the music of flutes and citharæ. Time passed quickly in these pleasures, and there was not an hour to lose if the offensive were to be taken. Until then the friends and captains of Antony, Dellius, Marcus Silanus, Titius, Plancus, all equally yielding to the seductions of Cleopatra, had made no effort to separate their leader from this fatal woman. Now the great game was to be played, and in this game they staked, as it were, their lives against the dominion of the world. They appealed to Antony. Ænobarbus, the only one of the Antonites who had never hailed Cleopatra as queen, was spokesman, and declared plainly that the Egyptian must be sent back to Alexandria till the close of the war. Antony promised to send her. Unfortunately for him, Cleopatra heard of this proceeding. Now less than ever would she leave Antony alone, exposed to the final appeals of Octavia her former successful rival; she knew too well the vacillating mind and weak soul of Antony. Would he have strength to refuse a reconciliation so much desired in the camp as well as at Rome, which would consolidate its threatened power and secure peace to the empire? Cleopatra won over Canidius, after Ænobarbus the most noted captain of the army of the East; and by dint of prayers, coquetry, and money, it is said, she persuaded him to espouse her cause. He represented to Antony that it was neither just nor wise to send away an ally who furnished to the war supplies so considerable; that he would thus alienate the Egyptians, whose ships formed the main strength of the fleet. He added that Cleopatra was, in the council, inferior to none of the kings who were to fight under the orders of Antony; she, who had so long governed alone so great an empire, and who, since they had been associated together, had acquired still greater experience in affairs. He talked against reason, but he spoke in accordance with the heart of Antony, and Cleopatra remained with the army.

Meanwhile the friends that still remained to Antony in Rome despatched one of their number, Geminius, to make a last attempt to free him from his mistress. Geminius for days tried in vain to see Antony alone. Cleopatra, who suspected the Roman of working in the interests of Octavia, never left her lover for an instant. At length, at the close of a supper, Antony, half-drunk, called upon Geminius to declare instantly the object of his coming. “The matters of which I have to speak,” replied Geminius angrily, “cannot be discussed after drinking; but what I can tell you as well drunk as sober is that all would be well if Cleopatra returned to Egypt.” In a rage, the queen exclaimed: “You do well to speak before the torture compels it.” Antony was no less enraged. The next day Geminius, feeling by no means in safety, reëmbarked for Italy.

The vindictive Egyptian also bore malice against the friends of Antony who had joined with Ænobarbus to procure her departure. Sarcasms, offenses, insults, and ill offices were all employed by her so effectually that Silanus, Dellius (her former lover, it is said), and Plancus and Titius, both persons of consular dignity, abandoned the party of Antony.

As much to revenge themselves on their former leader as to conciliate their new master, Plancus and Titius on their return to Rome revealed to Octavius certain clauses in the will of Antony, the divulging of which would complete his ruin in the minds of the people. Antony, recognizing Cæsarion as the son of Cæsar, was dividing the Roman East among his other children and the queen of Egypt, and willed that even should he die in Rome, his body should be transported to Alexandria and delivered to Cleopatra. The two officers added that they were positive as to these dispositions, as, at the desire of Antony, they themselves had read the will, had affixed their seal, and had deposited it in the college of the Vestals. Octavius demanded the will. The Vestals declared that they would not give it up, but that if he would come and take it himself they could not prevent him. Octavius felt no scruple in doing so; he took the will and read it before the Senate. The Conscript Fathers, it must be confessed, were no less indignant at the violation of the will of Antony than at the contents of the document itself. Octavius, however, had the excuse of acting for the good of the people. The skillful and patient politician was about to attain his end. He procured also a _senatus-consultum_ (a judgment of the Senate), by which Antony was deposed from the consular dignity, and the same day, January 1, 31 B. C., he declared war, not on Antony, but on the queen of Egypt. This was a last tribute to public opinion—Cæsar would not risk the odium of arming Roman against Roman.

He knew well that Antony would not desert Cleopatra, and therefore by conducting his legions against the detested Egyptian, he would throw on Antony the responsibility of the civil war.

Antony and Cleopatra passed at Athens the autumn of 32 and part of the winter of 31 B. C. Whilst their soldiers were exhausting all the cities of Greece by enormous requisitions, and completing their crews by means of the press-gang, dragging sons from their mothers, and husbands from their wives, the lovers continued to lead their gay life. Spectacles, public games, interminable feasts, and mad orgies incessantly succeeded each other. Jealous of the memory which Octavia had left in Athens, where her beauty was still talked of, Cleopatra would fain have effaced it by her pomp, her flatteries, and her largesses to the people. The Athenians, setting little value on honors, even now somewhat obsolete, which it was in their power to bestow, determined to offer Cleopatra the “Freedom of the City,” and decreed that a statue should be erected to her. The decree was presented to her by deputies, among whom figured Antony as an Athenian citizen. The document was read to the queen, after which her virtues and merits were eulogized in an eloquent address. The vanity of Cleopatra was gratified, but her hatred unappeased. She exacted from Antony his repudiation of Octavia, and that from Athens itself, that city where the couple had spent three happy years, he should send to Rome his command for her to depart from his house. Octavia quitted it, clad in mourning and weeping, and leading with her the two children of Antony. The unhappy woman loved him still.[13]

VII.

Antony had not abandoned his original design of preventing the combining of the forces of Octavius by carrying the war into Italy; but he had lost much time. In the spring of 31 B. C., his army and fleet being concentrated at Actium, at the mouth of the Gulf of Ambracia, he was preparing to join them when he learned that some Roman vessels were coasting the shores of Epirus. It was but the vanguard of Agrippa’s fleet, but the presence of this vanguard showed that the preparations of Octavius were in a very advanced state, if not complete. The time for surprising him was past. Antony decided, before forming new plans, to wait till the Romans should have defined their plan of the campaign. The fleet and the army, therefore, remained at Actium, but as the place was unwholesome and a stay there wearisome, Antony went to Patras with Cleopatra. Early in August he received the important news that the Roman fleet had just anchored off the coast of Epirus, that the troops were landing, and that Octavius was already at Toryne. Antony at once set out for Actium, much excited and very ill pleased that the enemy so quickly and so easily had taken up its position. Cleopatra jested with his uneasiness: “What a misfortune,” said she, “that Octavius should be sitting upon a dipper!”—in Greek Toryne means a dipper.

The army of Antony, consisting of nineteen legions and twelve thousand cavalry, and numerous auxiliaries, Cilicians, Paphlagonians, Cappadocians, Jews, Medes, Arabs, amounted to one hundred and ten thousand men. His fleet numbered nearly five hundred vessels of three, five, eight, and ten banks of oars. These last, built in Egypt, were veritable floating fortresses, surmounted with towers and furnished with powerful war-engines. Octavius had eighty thousand foot soldiers recruited in Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Gaul, ten thousand horse, and but two hundred and fifty vessels, triremes with rostra and light Liburnian galleys in about equal numbers. If the land forces were about of equal effective strength the disproportion between the naval forces was immense; but the ships of Octavius made up for their inferiority of numbers by their superiority of manœuvring, and the excellence of their crews, who had all been with Agrippa during the long Sicilian war. On the contrary, Antony’s sailors were comparatively few, and most of them were going into battle for the first time; his heavy ships were clumsy in their evolutions,—as the hyperbolical Florus expressed it: “The sea groaned under their weight, and the wind exhausted itself in moving them.”

The army of Antony occupied the northern point of Acarnania, with a strong detachment on the coast of Epirus, which was directly opposite. Firmly entrenched within defenses raised during the winter, he commanded the narrow passage into the Gulf of Ambracia in which his fleet was moored. Octavius had pitched his camp in Epirus, at a short distance from the advanced posts of Antony. Antony held an excellent position for defense, which enabled him to resist successfully the attacks of the Romans: for the Pass of Actium could not be forced; but he was blockaded on the side of the sea whence almost all his stores and munitions must reach him.

For several days the two armies were face to face. Octavius, desirous to engage, endeavored by every feint to draw his adversary into action either on land or sea. Antony, uneasy, anxious, hesitating, could not decide what step to take. He embarked the greater portion of his troops and transferred them to the coast of Epirus, as if to attack the Roman camp; then he changed his mind and recrossed into Acarnania. The officers of Antony, auguring ill of the manœuvring qualities of his huge vessels, and, at the same time, full of confidence in the valor of the legionaries, counseled him to fight the battle on land. This was also the desire of the army. At a review he was accosted by an old centurion all seamed with scars: “Oh, Emperor, dost thou distrust these wounds and this sword, that thou puttest thy hope in rotten wood? Let the men of Egypt and Phœnicia fight on the sea, but to us, give us the land where we are used to hold our own, and where we know how to conquer or to die.” But Antony was disturbed by sinister omens. In many places his statues and those of Cleopatra had been struck by lightning; at Alba a marble statue, erected in honor of the triumvir, had been found covered with sweat. “A sign still more alarming,” says Plutarch, “some swallows, having built their nests under the stern of the _Antoniad_, Cleopatra’s flagship, other swallows came, drove the first away, and killed their young ones.” Frequent defeats in the skirmishes around Actium, the desertion of Domitius Ænobarbus, who suddenly passed over to the enemy, the defection of two of the allied kings, who, with their forces, abandoned the army, confirmed these evil omens in the superstitious soul of Antony. He suspected everything and everybody—his fortune, his soldiers, his friends, Cleopatra herself. Seeing her sad, discouraged, a prey to gloomy thoughts—for she, too, dwelt on the omens of the swallows of the _Antoniad_ and the shattered statues—he fancied that she wished to poison him, that by this crime she might secure the favor of Octavius. For days he would take neither food nor drink that she had not first tasted. Out of pity for her lover, Cleopatra lent herself willingly to this caprice. One night, however, at the close of the supper, she took a rose from her crown and lightly dipped it into a cup of wine which she handed smilingly to Antony. He put it to his lips, when she arrested his hand and gave the poisoned wine to a slave to drink, who immediately fell to the floor writhing in mortal agony. “O Antony!” exclaimed Cleopatra, “what a woman you suspect. See now that neither means nor opportunities to slay you would fail me if I could live without you!”

The anxiety and depression reached the army, encamped in an unwholesome situation, and with reduced supplies. One day, Canidius himself, hitherto so eager for battle, counseled the abandonment of the fleet, and to carry the war into Thrace, where Dikome, king of the Getæ, promised to send reënforcements. But what need was there of reënforcements, since they were already superior in numbers to the enemy? Cleopatra offered another opinion, if no less shameful, at any rate more sensible. Flight against flight, it would be better to go to Egypt than to Thrace. She proposed to leave part of the army in Greece, to garrison the fortified towns; to embark the rest, and set sail for Egypt, passing through the fleet of Octavius. After fresh hesitation, Antony adopted this plan, though assuredly it was bitter to flee from an army whose leader he despised. All tends to the belief, besides, that Antony hoped to destroy the Roman fleet in the naval engagement that must ensue on issuing from the narrow passage of Actium. If he gained the victory he would be able to regain his position and attack the demoralized army of Octavius; if the victory remained doubtful—for with so powerful a fleet he could not admit the supposition of a defeat—he would sail for Egypt. The retreat would be but a last resource.

Desertion and disease had greatly reduced the crews of the galleys. Antony decided to burn one hundred and forty of them in order to fill up with their crews the remainder of the fleet. Twenty-two thousand legionaries, auxiliaries, and slingers were put on board the ships. Not to discourage the soldiers and sailors, it was concealed from them that these preparations for battle were indeed preparations for retreat. The secret was so well kept, that it was a surprise to the pilots when they received orders to carry the sails with them. They recollected that in battle the vessels were worked with oars only. Antony had it reported that the sails were carried the better to pursue the enemy after the victory.

On the morning of September 2d the vessels of Antony formed in four grand divisions, crossed the channel of Actium, and, issuing thence, were disposed in battle array opposite the fleet of Octavius, who was awaiting them at eight or ten stadia from the land. On the side of Antony, he himself, with Publicola, commanded the right wing; Marcus Justus and Marcus Octavius the center, and Cœlius the left wing. Cleopatra commanded the reserve with sixty Egyptian vessels. On the side of the Romans, Octavius commanded the right wing, Agrippa the left, and Arruntius the center. About noon the battle began. The troops on land, who were under arms and motionless near the shore, saw not, as is usual in sea-fights, the galleys rush at each other seeking to strike with their rostra or beaks of steel. On account of their slow rate of speed, the heavy vessels of Antony could not strike with that impetuosity which gives force to the shock, and the light galleys of the Romans feared to break their rostra against those enormous ships, constructed of strong beams joined with iron. The battle was like a succession of sieges, a combat of moving citadels with moving towers. Three or four Roman galleys would unite to attack one of Antony’s vessels, so huge, says Virgil, that they looked like the Cyclades sailing on the waters. The soldiers cast grappling-irons, fired burning arrows on the decks, attached fire-ships to the keels, and rushed to board them, while the powerful batteries placed at the summit of the towers of the beleaguered ship showered down on the assailants a hail of stones and arrows. At the very first the Roman right wing, commanded by Octavius, gave way before the attack of the division under Cœlius. At the other extremity Agrippa, having designed a movement to surround Antony and Publicola, these turned on their right and thus uncovered the center of the line of battle. The swift Liburnian galleys improved the opportunity to attack the vessels of the two Marcuses, in the rear of which was the reserve under Cleopatra. Success and reverse went hand in hand; the two sides fought with equal fury, and the victory was doubtful, but the nervousness of Cleopatra was to be the ruin of Antony’s cause. For hours she had suffered a fever of agony. From the deck of the _Antoniad_ she anxiously watched the movements of the fleets. In the beginning she had hoped for victory; now, terrified by the clamor and tumult, her only desire was to escape. She awaited with ever-increasing impatience the signal for retreat. Suddenly she noticed the right wing moving towards the coast of Epirus, the left putting to sea, and the center, which protected her, attacked, separated, broken, penetrated by the Roman Liburnians. Then, “pale with her approaching death”—_pallens morte futura_—listening only to her terror, she ordered the sails to be hoisted, and with her sixty vessels she passed through the midst of the combatants and fled towards the open sea. In the midst of the battle Antony perceived the motion of the Egyptian squadron, and recognized the _Antoniad_ by its purple sails; Cleopatra was fleeing, robbing him at the decisive moment of his powerful reserve; but the queen could not order the retreat, he alone could give the signal for that. There is some mistake—a feint, perhaps a panic. Antony in his turn hoists the sails of his galley, and rushes in the wake of Cleopatra. He will bring back the Egyptian vessels and restore the chances of the battle. But before overtaking the _Antoniad_ the unhappy man has time to think. Cleopatra has deserted him either through cowardice or treason; he can bring back to Actium neither her nor her fleet. Next he thinks he will return to the combat, which is now only a rout, to die with his soldiers—to _die_ without seeing Cleopatra once more! he cannot do it. A fatal power drags him after this woman. He reaches the _Antoniad_, but then he is overcome with his disgrace. He refuses to see the queen. He seats himself on the prow of the vessel, his head on his hands, and remains thus for three days and three nights.

VIII.

The Egyptian fleet and some other vessels which had followed the fugitives put into the port of Cænopolis, near Cape Tenarum. Often repulsed by the obstinate silence of Antony, Cleopatra’s women finally succeeded in bringing about an interview between the lovers. They supped and passed the night together. O, wretched human weakness!

Some of his friends who had escaped from Actium brought them news. The fleet had made an obstinate resistance, but all the vessels which were not sunk or burned were now in possession of Octavius. The army still maintained its position, and appeared to be faithful. Antony at once sent messengers and despatched Canidius with orders to recall those troops, and himself embarked for Cyrenaica, where he still had several legions. One of his vessels bore his jewels, his valuables, and all the services of gold and silver which he had used at his entertainments of the kings, his allies. Before departing from Cænopolis, Antony divided all this wealth among a few of his friends, whom he constrained to seek an asylum in Greece, refusing to allow them any longer to follow his fatal fortunes. When parting from them he talked in the kindest manner, seeking to console them and regarding their tears with a sad but kindly smile.

Cleopatra had sailed from Greece some days before Antony. She was in haste to return to Egypt, fearing that the news of the disaster of Actium might provoke a revolution. To mislead the people for a few days, and thus gain time to take her measures, she entered the port of Alexandria with all the parade of a triumph. Her ships, their prows adorned with crowns, resounded with the songs of victory and the music of flutes and sistra. No sooner was she reinstalled in the palace than she put to death many whose intrigues she feared. These executions, which benefited the royal treasury, for death involved the confiscation of the wealth of the real or pretended guilty, delivered Cleopatra from all fear of an immediate revolution, but she none the less felt a mortal terror about the future. She still suffered from the horror of Actium;—at times haunted by the idea of suicide, she contemplated a death as pompous as had been her life, and she erected at the extremity of Cape Lochias an immense tomb, in which to consume herself and her treasures. At other times she thought of flight, and by her orders a number of her largest ships were transported with great reënforcements of men, engines, and beasts of burden across the isthmus to the Red Sea. She had a vision of embarking with all her wealth for some unknown country of Asia or Africa, there to renew her existence of lust and pleasure.