Julius Caesar’s deputy, Cleopatra’s second lover, Marcus Antonius is the perennial supporting act.
Julius Caesar’s deputy, Cleopatra’s second lover, Marcus Antonius is the perennial supporting act. In books about Caesar (like Adrian Goldsworthy’s recent biography) or about Cleopatra (mine among them), he appears as a partner, in the ballet-dancing sense of a burly chap whose prime task is to lift a more glittering other into the spotlight. Now he has been allotted half a book: but Goldsworthy is not the man to give him his due of appreciation. Author and subject are absurdly mismatched.
Goldsworthy begins by telling his readers that Cleopatra ‘was not really that important’, but he does allow her some intelligence and charm. Towards Antony he is more hostile. The ancient sources abundantly demonstrate that Antony was a popular commander and an adroit politician, but to Goldsworthy he was a ‘clumsy’ man who owed his successes to happy accident, and whose defeat and death, far from being tragic, form the fitting end to the career of a ‘vulgar’ drunkard who was ‘not an especially good general’.
Cleopatra and Antony alike were adepts in a form of public ceremony in which martial display and religious ritual merged. Their spectacles were gorgeous. Golden diadems and silver thrones, flute-players and handmaidens, clouds of incense, embroidered silks, rose-petals and blazing lights: all these were props in a form of propagandist theatre that made the world its stage and which employed the trappings of luxury and mythological imagery to cogent political purpose. Goldsworthy, who might have got on well with Cato the Censor (the paragon of Roman republican virtue who thought gardens a waste of good farmland), can’t abide it.
When Antony posed as Dionysus in Greece he was borrowing the god’s charisma to reinforce his own public image and flatter his Greek and Oriental dependents: Goldsworthy sees only stupid drunkenness and a health and safety problem (a chariot drawn by lions, he frets, would have been ‘absurdly impractical and dangerous’). When Cleopatra, wearing the moon- and-stars-embroidered robes of the goddess Isis, sat enthroned in Alexandria’s gymnasium, while Antony proclaimed each of their three children monarchs of yet-to-be conquered realms, the couple were announcing their vision of a projected new empire in the East, and displaying a sophisticated sense of the way appearances can help mould reality. Goldsworthy sees only self-delusion, and silly dressing-up by which ‘nothing was actually changed’. This is partly realism: but it’s partly the primness that makes him scold so at one of Antony’s Roman supporters who danced at an Alexandria feast as the god Glaucus, in blue body-paint and a fish-tail — ‘scarcely the behaviour of a former consul’. Impersonating the gods might be dangerous, but it was not, in the first century BC, mere foolishness. Goldsworthy must know it, but momentarily the historian disappears to be replaced by nanny.
The book is structured symmetrically, a chapter on Cleopatra, a chapter on Antony, until — two-thirds of the way through — they finally meet. Its prose is plain, and not always lucid. Its form is that of a chronologically ordered double biography, of the now outmoded kind that begins with its subjects’ forebears. We hear much about the earlier Ptolemies and Cleopatras (their habitual incest, their propensity for fratricide) and — on the Roman side — an account of the Punic Wars, which is a bit like devoting the first chapters of a modern politician’s biography to the first world war.
Even when we finally arrive in the couple’s lifetimes, Goldsworthy has an intractable problem to wrestle with, and the words ‘we simply do not know’ recur. He is driven to bulk out his book with other material, such as the layout of Alexandria and the constitution of the Roman republic.
Yet for all his breadth of knowledge, he is cautious to a fault when it comes to interpretation. He recounts the events that surrounded the collapse of the Roman republic into bloody chaos. When the crisis that gave Antony his chance of power comes with Julius Caesar’s murder, Goldsworthy tells us who marched where and who fought against whom, but doggedly refrains from attempting an overview that might have made sense of all the hurly-burly.
He is at his best on battles. His accounts of what happened at Pharsalus, Philippi and Actium are detailed and clear. Philippi, where Antony (with very little help from Octavian) defeated Caesar’s assassins, he considers Antony’s greatest success, though even here he sees no brilliance. For once he allows himself a simile (one borrowed from Appian): Antony’s legionaries drive Brutus’s back ‘step by step, like men pushing heavy machinery’.
When it comes to Actium he finally justifies his disapproval of Antony. He writes that modern scholars have ‘strained every nerve’ to excuse Antony’s behaviour in foolishly committing himself to fighting at sea, and then in escaping after Cleopatra, abandoning two-thirds of his fleet and his entire army. I am one of them, and I stand rebuked. Goldsworthy’s account of an Antony demoralised by earlier failures, making one wrong decision after another, and at last — disgracefully — saving himself, is persuasive, and fits all the sources. That Cleopatra was not really a dazzlingly beautiful seductress will come as no shock to most of Goldsworthy’s readers, but that Antony — according to the legend, the great Roman she led astray — was not much of a hero in the first place is a new disappointment. Nanny, alas, is always right.
Lucy Hughes-Hallet is the author of Cleopatra: Queen, Lover, Legend (Pimlico) and Heroes (Harper Perennial)
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