[amazon 030016534X full] Adrian Goldsworthy, Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 480 pp., $35.00.

CLEOPATRA VII—“the Female Horus,” “the Great One,” “the Mistress of Perfection,” “the New Isis,” “Father-Loving Goddess” (to give her at least some of her proper titles)—was Egypt’s queen. Cleopatra was not, however, an Egyptian, and she had no direct historical association with the Egypt of the pharaohs. In fact, she lived far closer in time to us than she did to the builders of the great pyramids. She was Greek, the last—as it turned out—of a line of monarchs descended from one of Alexander the Great’s most trusted generals, Ptolemy I, who after Alexander’s death moved to Babylon, invaded Egypt and appointed himself pharaoh in 305 BCE. The Ptolemies venerated Egyptian gods (many of whom, however, also existed in Greek mythology) and performed the religious rituals of the pharaohs who came before them. They also assumed pharaonic titles. But Cleopatra was the first of her dynasty to be able to speak Egyptian (and if Plutarch, the Greco-Roman biographer whose Life of Antony is almost the only source we have for the story of the two lovers, is to be believed, Mede, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Parthian and “Troglodyte”—the language of the peoples of southern Egypt and northern Sudan—were part of her vast lexicon as well).

Still, as Adrian Goldsworthy tartly remarks in his latest offering on the fate of the Roman Empire, Cleopatra was “no more Egyptian culturally or ethnically than most residents of modern-day Arizona are Apaches.” But this is a woman who made her tantalizing way through Caesar and then Antony—all for the sake of a little female ambition to preserve her Egyptian empire. In the span of the eighteen years in which she consumed these lovers, she may well have turned herself into the source of Rome’s collapse centuries later.

IT ALL started with Caesar’s arrival in Alexandria sometime in 48 BCE in search of financial support—and with an eye toward putting an end to the struggle for succession between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII (to Caesar’s advantage one way or another). Cleopatra, so legend and Plutarch have it, was smuggled into Caesar’s palace in Alexandria wrapped in a carpet. The story is probably apocryphal and the carpet more likely to have been a laundry bag. But no matter how she succeeded in gaining access to Caesar, she seems to have immediately persuaded him both to become her lover (Goldsworthy speculates, on what evidence he does not say, that “it is more than likely that Cleopatra was a virgin” at the time) and—which may have required rather more effort—to support her cause. Within the year, Ptolemy had been drowned in the Nile, his army had been destroyed and Cleopatra had been confirmed as queen.

For months after her triumph, she dallied with Caesar very much as she would later dally with Antony. The now-weary fifty-two-year-old, who had been campaigning almost without interruption for a decade, could finally relax, explains Goldsworthy in a rare moment of romantic whimsy, in “the company of his clever, exciting and beautiful young lover, helping him to forget his age and his cares.”

Caesar, however, was more determined politically, less forgetful of his cares and perhaps less entranced than Antony was to be. In any case, in 47 BCE he left Egypt never to return. Later that year, Cleopatra gave birth to a son whom she called Ptolemy but whom the Alexandrians referred to as Caesarion, “Little Caesar.” Behind these rococo sexual maneuvers, Goldsworthy speculates that “passion seems certain and genuine love most likely developed.” What emerges most clearly, however, is what Goldsworthy is best at describing, not passion and love—with which he gives the impression of feeling slightly uncomfortable—but Cleopatra’s overarching ambition to hold on to power as the ruler of a prosperous and politically acquiescent Egypt at whatever cost. She may indeed have developed “genuine love” for Caesar and Antony, but both were vital to her political survival. And with the passing of one came the adoption of the other.

In the wake of the civil wars which erupted after Julius Caesar’s assassination on March 15—the Ides of March—44 BCE, Mark Antony, Octavian and M. Aemilius Lepidus were appointed the three “triumvirs” by the Roman Senate to restore order (the Second Triumvirate). Lepidus, the governor of Spain and parts of Gaul, was soon forced into exile by Caesar’s nephew and designated heir, Octavian, who took charge of Rome itself and most of the empire in Europe. Antony (Caesar’s second in command until his death) was given the east; and the richest, most important part of the east was that Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt. Antony was quickly and summarily entranced by Cleopatra and her lands.

The seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal (inventor of the syringe and a forerunner to the digital computer) once famously remarked: “the face of the earth would have been different if Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter.” Perhaps then Mark Antony, consul of the Roman Republic, might not have spent so much time with her in Alexandria, dallying in gilded barges on the Nile, hunting and fishing, feasting off golden and bejeweled tableware amid clouds of rose petals. If Cleopatra had been less captivating, for whatever reason, Mark Antony would have had more time to attend to affairs of state in Rome. Had he done that he might have prevented Octavian (later to become the emperor Augustus) from undermining his political standing at home by depicting him as plotting not only to rule the republic jointly with a foreign queen who worshipped cattle and strange animal-headed gods but also to move its capital to Alexandria. Perhaps then the republic would have been saved from Octavian, his imperial ambitions and the military state that would eventually lead to Rome’s destruction.

IN BOTH the popular and contemporary Roman imagination, something unmistakably “oriental” clung, and still clings, to Cleopatra’s image. Her Roman detractors used it against her, accusing her and Antony of allowing, in the words of the philosopher Seneca, “foreign customs to reach into the empire, and vices of which the Romans knew nothing.” And every movie version has her dressed in fanciful, ancient Egyptian costumes as if she were the granddaughter of Nefertiti. She was twenty-eight when Antony fell under her spell—the age, in Plutarch’s view, when “a woman’s beauty is at its most superb, and her mind at its most mature.”

The question of Cleopatra’s beauty (although less often her mind) has been a source of fascinated and frequently titillating debate ever since. (There is even a web site called “Was Cleopatra Beautiful?”) Goldsworthy himself considers the evidence, with perhaps too much solemnity, and comes to the conclusion, as have so many others, that she could have been either fair or dark, tall or short, blond or brunette, slim or plump (Goldsworthy favors plumpness, “especially in her teenage years”). The trouble with all the evidence is that none of it is contemporary, and some of it dates from over a century after Cleopatra’s death. If the only authenticated representations we have are anything to go by, her famous nose was slightly too long and slightly too hooked. Certainly Goldsworthy is right in saying that she “was not another Helen of Troy, a mythical figure about whom the most important thing was her beauty. She was no mere passive object of desire, but a very active political player in her own kingdom and beyond.”

In all probability it was not so much her looks which enthralled Antony as her intelligence. Her conversation, according to Plutarch, was “irresistibly engaging”; she was highly educated, as were all aristocratic Greek and Roman women of the period, and she had the advantage of being the mistress of a wealthy and lavish court. Whatever gifts of body and mind Cleopatra possessed, she employed them on her lover to devastating effect. “Plato,” observed Plutarch dryly, “speaks of four kinds of flattery, but Cleopatra knew a thousand.” And it was from this heightened level of thrall that Antony lost himself an empire.

AFTER THE Second Triumvirate came to an end in 33 BCE, Octavian and Antony were no longer forced to rule Rome together; disagreements between the two men quickly led to an all-out civil war for control of the republic. War was declared against Cleopatra, and by extension Antony, a year later.

Antony might have been able to defeat Octavian at the famous Battle of Actium on September 2, 31 BCE, that pitted the soon-to-be emperor’s men against those of Antony and Cleopatra had it not been for Antony’s all-too-toxic love of his Egyptian goddess. Antony’s forces were substantially larger than Octavian’s, and sheer size counted for a great deal in the ancient world. Actium was fought partly on land and partly at sea, and Antony had twice as many ships as Octavian, and they were heavier, larger and better armed. Astern of his own fleet, there were sixty more ships provided and directed by Cleopatra herself. They would prove to be his undoing.

Despite his initial advantages, Antony was slow to prepare his forces, and he was outmaneuvered by Octavian’s brilliant and experienced admiral, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Then, at a crucial moment in the naval battle, Cleopatra fled, sailing straight through a gap between the two fleets and out of reach of Octavian’s ships. Had Antony let her go, he could still have won the day. Instead, at that moment, says Plutarch, Antony “proved the truth of the saying which was once uttered as a jest, namely that a lover’s soul dwells in the body of another.” Instead of regrouping his ships, he immediately abandoned them and “hurried after the woman who had already ruined him and would soon complete his destruction.”

In the version of the battle given by Virgil, the great epic poet of Augustan Rome, Antony’s army and Antony’s fleet were made up of:

Barbarian aids, and troops of eastern kings;

The Arabians near, and the Bactrians from afar,

Of tongues discordant and a mingled war:

And, rich in gaudy robes, and midst the strife,

His ill fate follows him—the Egyptian wife.¹

It is almost possible to hear the hiss of disgust in that last line, the hiss, too, of that famous asp, rumored to be Cleopatra’s final undoing: sequiturque nefas—Aegyptia coniunx. This is how his countrymen were to remember the man Shakespeare dubbed the “triple pillar of the world,” a noble Roman corrupted by insidious foreign ways, in thrall to an alien and “oriental” woman. “Henceforth then, let no one consider him to be a Roman citizen,” sneered the Greek senator Cassius Dio over half a century later, “but rather an Egyptian: let us not call him Antony, but rather Sarapis [Osiris], nor think of him as ever having been consul or imperator, but only gymnasiarch.”

Cleopatra transformed her lover into Shakespeare’s “strumpet’s fool.” Without her gripping beauty, Antony might have returned in triumph to Rome with Octavian in chains. Instead, he and Cleopatra fled back to Alexandria where both committed suicide. Caesarion’s unhappy fate was to be murdered by Octavian shortly thereafter, thus finishing off any potential further rivals.

OCTAVIAN WAS to go on to be the architect of what is known as the “Principate,” the period during which Rome was ruled not by a system of elected officials but by a “princeps” (“chief man of the state”) who was also an “emperor.” This arrangement lasted from its creation in 27 BCE until the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the west in the fifth century. What we think of today as the “Roman Empire,” as distinct from the “Roman Republic,” was originally Octavian’s creation. But—and this was the real point of Pascal’s question—if Antony had assumed power in 31 BCE, might he not have restored the republic and thus preserved the power sharing between the plebeians and the patricians which Machiavelli later identified as the source of Rome’s success?

As it was, the Principate gradually transformed the nascent Roman Empire into a population-in-arms; a military culture which embraced the entire free male population. Toward the end, Roman society became a place in which scribes were soldiers, bishops were soldiers, local governors were soldiers and, of course, the emperor was a soldier. The state was under the yoke of the army, and the military was at best uncontrollable and incapable, as all armies have subsequently proved to be, of adequately managing civil life or the finances of the state. Octavian’s (and Mark Antony’s) descendants, known as the “Julio-Claudians,” showed themselves each more corrupt and abusive than the last, until finally Nero, who reportedly ordered the murder of his mother and preferred playing his lyre to dealing with a Rome deep in crisis, was declared by the Senate, in a rare moment of solidarity, “a public enemy.” The tyrannical emperor committed suicide to “widespread general rejoicing.”

Nero’s immediate successors from Galba (68–69 CE) to Domitian (81–96 CE) rose and fell through persistent conflict and internal divisions within the Roman legions. In one famous year, 69 CE, there were no fewer than four of them. A relatively brief respite under the Antonines, from Nerva in 96 CE to Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE (the “Five Good Emperors,” as they have come to be known), was followed by a long succession of crises until finally in 476 CE the German chieftain Odoacer deposed the last of the western emperors, Romulus Augustus (named ironically after Rome’s founder and spoken of contemptuously as Augustulus—“Little Augustus”). The Roman Empire in the east, now generally referred to as the Byzantine Empire, would survive for almost a millennium. But the unity of the Roman world, and what we identify as Roman culture, had effectively expired long before poor Augustulus limped into exile.

HAD ROME preserved its republican constitution, the worst of this might have been prevented. A reinvigorated republic might have built an economic and civil infrastructure to support its ever-expanding military power; it might have been better equipped to defeat, or absorb, the Germanic tribes which finally engulfed it in the fourth and fifth centuries. It might also have been better placed to resist the temptations of an obscure cult founded by a carpenter’s son from Judaea claiming to be God and embraced in the fourth century by the emperor Constantine in the mistaken hope that a universalizing religion might be able to keep his universal empire from unraveling altogether. Its catastrophic dismemberment, which was Constantine’s and Christianity’s final legacy, might never have taken place. The dreams of a united Europe, which haunted nineteenth-century nationalists and the ideological architects of the European Union alike, might have been a continuing reality. If Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter, might we not all be Romans still?

Adrian Goldsworthy does not mention Pascal. He is not much interested in counterfactuals, the “what-ifs” of history. But it is obvious from his highly readable biography of the two players in this most contentious of all historical dramas that the answer he would give to all the above questions is no. Because even before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE—aiming to challenge his rival Pompey to control Rome (which he clearly successfully accomplished)—the institutions of the republic were in an advanced state of decay, undermined by a series of economic crises which had transferred immense power and wealth into the hands of those like Caesar and Pompey who had the resources to corrupt and control the Senate. Caesar’s brisk description of it as “nothing, merely a name without body or shape” was about right.

And though Antony was in many respects a creation of Julius Caesar, he was not a great leader. Yes, it was Antony who staged the famous charade in which Caesar was offered the crown of the ancient (and still-hated) kings of Rome only to refuse it three times to the uproarious approval of the mob. And yes, it was of course Antony who, after Caesar’s assassination, masterminded the leader’s public funeral. And yes, although he undoubtedly lacked the oratorical skills which Shakespeare attributes to him, by mixture of showmanship (a wax effigy of Caesar was lifted up on a crane so that the spectators could see the place of every knife wound) and cunning (he read, with tears in his eyes, Caesar’s will listing the generous benefactions he had made to the people) he succeeded in turning the Roman mob against the conspirators (Brutus included), so that by the next day they had fled the city. But Antony was unlikely to have ruled Rome with the necessary intelligence and guile to prevent its now-seen-as-inevitable collapse. He was not, sadly, a better leader than Octavian—and in many ways besides ambition, he was Octavian’s lesser.

Antony is frequently represented as a bluff, uncompromising soldier with a barrack-room sense of humor and a barrack-room sense of pleasure. He liked to drink, he liked to eat, he liked to gamble, he liked to brawl; and as one courtier said of him, he was “inimitable at sex.” In most respects (except possibly sex) he was quite unlike his mentor. Caesar, as well as being a dandy (he even designed his own toga), was a brilliant orator, great Latin stylist and—although very little of what he wrote has survived—a not-inconsiderable political thinker. By contrast, Antony’s contribution to classical literature was a single text (now lost) entitled “On his own Drunkenness.” True, almost all we know about Antony is heavily tainted by Octavian’s highly efficient propaganda machine. It is also true that a number of old republicans in the Senate preferred him to Octavian, although this may only have been because he was the devil they knew. But in the end, and on what evidence we do have, Goldsworthy is surely right in saying that “Antony did not fight and lose against Octavian for any vision of the Republic, but for personal supremacy.”

Had he won at Actium, he would, in all likelihood, have acted very much as Octavian did, only the consequences would have been very different. From Goldsworthy’s careful reconstruction of Antony’s career, both before and after he met Cleopatra, it is obvious that he was much lacking in comparison to his rival, who in many respects merited the title “Revered One.” Augustus succeeded in finally bringing peace to the empire. He established a centralized system of government. He reigned in the power of local aristocrats and reformed and hugely extended the rule of law. He also radically overhauled the tax system, on which his crucial ability to pay his troops depended, and held a census, the first of its kind, of the entire empire. It is very doubtful that Antony would have been able or would have wished to do any of these things. It is also hard to imagine the author of “On his own Drunkenness” presiding, as Augustus did, over the “Golden Age” of Latin literature—the age of Virgil and Ovid, of Horace, Tibullus and Propertius, and of Livy, perhaps the greatest of the Roman historians. Octavian’s mistake in the end was to make possible the ultimate triumph of the military over the civil sphere—the initial catalyst to Rome’s decline.

THESE REMOTE struggles matter so much, and have done, for so many generations. We are still enthralled by Rome, not merely as a source of extreme human behavior (and it had plenty of that), but as some kind of model, both of what to emulate and what to avoid. Though Goldsworthy does not claim to give us the answer, the book has considerable advantage over most of the other “Antony and Cleopatra” histories on the shelves, providing a very detailed political and military account of the development of the two most important centers of the ancient world after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE.

The modern United States is very, very different from ancient Rome. But it is not only governed from a place called the Capitol; its constitution, despite declaring itself to be democratic, is, as James Madison intended it to be, a variation on the Roman “mixed constitution”—of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy. And like the ancient Roman Republic, although very much despite its better interests and declared intentions, it seems to have acquired a number of overseas commitments frequently decried, usually with more vehemence than reflection, as an “empire.”

Many of the spate of books comparing the United States to Rome (although the number seems to have dropped off since the arrival of the present administration) have done little more than press a rather crude polemical point about the pitfalls of arrogance and overreach, the inherent evils of all empires and consequently of most recent U.S. foreign policy. But the analogies between the United States and first republican, and then imperial, Rome have been part of the ideological history of Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” since its creation. And there is something to be learned from the Roman example, if only because the Roman world lasted for so long, covered so much territory (at its height about 5 million square miles; the continental United States is a little over three and a half million), embraced so many different peoples and underwent so many transformations—from a small, democratic (in the ancient sense of the term) city-state to a worldwide Hellenistic monarchy presided over by a God-Emperor.

One thing the intertwined stories of Antony and Cleopatra, and of Caesar and Cleopatra, may be able to tell us about is the long-term danger inherent in excessive executive power. The republic may have been rotting through corruption and the steady erosion of respect for the law and public office even before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But it was finally brought to an end first by the struggle between Caesar and Pompey, and then between Antony and Octavian. Both of these, despite the very different personalities involved, had one thing in common: they were both attempts, highly successful in the end, to wrest authority permanently from the Senate. The Roman Empire remained in name, until the end, the empire of the Senate and the People of Rome (SPQR), a phrase carried over from the republican era. The legions continued to fight under the standard which bore the letters SPQR. The title Octavian first took for himself, “princeps,” had strong republican associations (it was the name given to the head member of the Senate); the word “imperator” was a republican term, meaning only he who exercises imperium (“authority”), and was a generic title used by all Roman commanders. Unlike Caesar, Augustus knew about the power of names. To appear republican was good enough to win the hearts and minds of the people. But he also managed to erase all the liberties once enjoyed by both plebeians and patricians alike, so that by the time of his death in 14 CE, the political realities once enshrined in the phrase “the Senate and the People” had become nothing more than a façade.

There were, of course, structural weaknesses in the Roman state which have no obvious parallels today. Despite its great size and wealth, it was a relatively ramshackle affair compared with any modern nation, at least in the developed world. But its greatest flaw, what made Caesar and Antony possible, was what had also made it great: its empire. It is often forgotten that most of what today is thought of as the Roman Empire had been acquired under the republic. Britain, Dacia to the east of the Danube, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Armenia were taken by the emperors (most, with the exception of Britain, by Trajan between 101 and 117 CE). But the full force of Roman expansion had stopped by the first century BCE. It was that empire which had made Caesar and Antony the mightiest of subjects, providing the resources that allowed them to vie for power. Caesar invaded Rome from Gaul; Antony hoped to invade it from Egypt. Without the existence of vast overseas territories and subservient client populations to assist them, the wars both men fought with and against their fellow citizens would not have been possible. Never once did they place the national interest—had they had such a concept—before that of their own.

ALTHOUGH EMPIRES do not necessarily have to be, or to become, some kind of autocracy, most if not all of them in fact have. (Britain, for all Lord Macaulay’s talk in 1833 of its mission to export “European institutions” to India and elsewhere, was really no exception.) The lesson which George W. Bush’s advisers were rumored to have seen in imperial Rome, that in a “unipolar” world—of the kind first-century Europe and Asia arguably were—executive power cannot be allowed to be fettered by quarrelsome allies, was entirely the wrong one. It was not Augustan Rome they should have been looking at, or even the Rome of the public-works-oriented Trajan and the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius. It was what lay in wait in the third century, when weak and ineffectual emperors, all creatures of the army, followed one another in rapid succession. The miracle about the fall of the Roman Empire, as Edward Gibbon observed, was that it took so long. I do not in fact think that the United States is in any meaningful sense an empire nor, except briefly in 1898 and within the territory of the continental United States, has it ever been. One of the thoughts Goldsworthy’s book might leave us with, however, is that despite all the encouragement it has received, America would do well if, in its own national interest, it never attempts to become one.

Anthony Pagden is a professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

¹ Virgil, Aeneid, 8: 908–912. The translation is by John Dryden.