Aldo Schiavone’s new biography on Cleopatra, just translated into English by Patrick Baker, starts on the eve of a battle which was to define political power for centuries, if not millennia.
On the Greek coast, two armed naval forces confronted each other, their respective armies camped on land.
On the one side, Antony and Cleopatra, and on the other Agrippa and the odious Octavian.
Schiavone imagines the Egyptian queen looking to the man at her side and thinking deep on what brought her to this point: “Unfortunately, in the moment of truth, she was destined to have Antony at her side, her beloved but unequal Antony, not Caesar”.
It was Cleopatra’s decision to confront Octavian’s forces by sea, driven by her lack of confidence in her paramour.
In Schiavone’s telling, she had lost faith in Antony’s ability to command, following his defeat against Parthian forces five years earlier. Since then her husband had been softened by luxury and dissipation.
On those September days, as the whole Mediterranean had seemingly shrunk to one small expanse of sea, the theatre of this confrontation, Cleopatra possibly reflected that she and Antony had wasted critical time and lost opportunities.
Now as they engaged with the enemy, Antony tried to execute the only military tactic he knew (a form of envelopment).
But the key ships refused to move at the critical moment.
Plutarch, a major source for this period, records that Cleopatra ordered her ships to retreat, forcing Antony to do the same, in the hope he could regroup later.
Schiavone argues instead that the Egyptian queen only retreated when she saw Antony’s ships had not moved and even his men had lost faith in their former leader.
In Schiavone’s estimation, Cleopatra was a canny politician, who judged and played other men, not from pure calculation, but also without self-illusion over their weaknesses.
She realised early on that Antony seemed to have a skill in alienating friends and allies.
Schiavone notes that the King of Armenia abandoned him during his excursion against the Parthians (but argues against Cleopatra’s similar abandonment a few years later at Actium).
He writes that Cleopatra could dominate her man and this troubled her, “the alarm bells were ringing”.
Although the book sidesteps questions of whether Cleopatra was born to an Egyptian mother, her intelligence and education finesse sparkles through:
“She appears gifted with a dazzling and trained intelligence, exhilarated but not exhausted by a controlled and continuous mobilization of her senses”.
The romanticism of the character of Cleopatra is eluded, even if Schiavone calls upon the insights of Shakespeare, Shaw and Tiepolo to illustrate key moments in her life.
So much of what we know about Cleopatra comes from Plutarch and Schiavone lightly discusses source criticism: a joy for some and a necessary pain for others.
For example, Philotas of Amphissa, a friend of Plutarch’s grandfather, wrote a gossipy account of the court of Cleopatra and Antony in Alexandria.
This is the fun bit.
Stories of them dressing up in disguise and running amok in Alexandria to trick the citizens and the party with the pearl dissolved in vinegar are well known.
In another story, the group are fishing and Antony gets his assistants to hook big fish to his line to impress his lady friend.
Cleopatra realises this and gets someone to add a smoked herring to his line.
This story has a lesson.
“Imperator hand your rod over to the Kings of Pharos and [Canopus]”, she tells him. “It is your job to hunt cities, kingdoms and continents”.
At the heart of the book is a grim political reckoning.
When Antony returns back to Alexandria and meets Cleopatra for the first time after defeat at Actium, Plutarch writes that he was either angry at Cleopatra or ashamed.
Schiavone argues that if he was angry at Cleopatra’s supposed betrayal, he would simply not meet her again. So he was shamefaced at his defeat.
We cannot know.
But this version has an emotional truth to it.
The rest is history.
As the net was pulled in, Antony and Cleopatra had nowhere to go.
They killed themselves, one after the after.
Their sons were murdered by Octavian, except for her daughter Cleopatra Selene II, who later became a client queen.
We can never know the ramifications of that fleeting moment at Actium.
Schiavone ends his short book reflecting on what might have been if the East had not become Roman.
This is a perfect short book, plot driven with the right level of histographical detail and a rich, unique prose style.
Although the translator, rather fussily, tells his readers in his introduction, those seeking ‘aesthetic ecstasy’ should read the original Italian, the English book has a hardwon poetry, uncommon in ancient history books.
“Caesar had become isolated’, we are told, “a kind of outsize lone wolf who thought it necessary to vie only with history and its myths”.
While Mark Antony spent his youth ‘devoted to travel, women, new debts and a precarious political apprenticeship’, as recalled by Cicero’s Philippics, themselves a ‘photorealistic picture, painted with poison’.
It was a joy to read and brought new insights to a rightly much studied period of history.
