Cleo additionally

Explosive though it was, that interview came as a relief to the Sen-ate, to which there was only one danger greater than a public feud between the two Caesarians. Antony wielded political power. Octa-vian was respected, and surprisingly popular. Enthusiastic demon-strations greeted him throughout his travels. Far better that the two rivals obstruct each other, went the thinking, than that they join forces. Antony noted as much in his garden that spring morning. Octavian was fresh from his studies. Certainly in the course of them he had learned that the populace considered it their business to pro-long discord, that they built up demagogues for the pleasure of knocking them down, that they encouraged them to destroy each other. He was of course right. And no one was better at fomenting dissension than Cicero, who could always be counted on, as a contemporary put it, to malign the prominent, blackmail the powerful, slander the distinguished. He now gamely obliged. To Cicero the contest was a baneful one between weakness and villainy. In truth there were a dizzying number of options. Am°4 Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius remained very much in the Pic ture. A bold young man with a gift for assembling armies, Pompey 5
Man Is by Nature a Political Creature • 157
son was in Spain with the greater part of the Roman navy. Sextus Pompey had on his side his own father's still-bright reputation; he, too, was looking to avenge a parent and recover an inheritance. (He arguably had a greater claim on vengeance. As an adolescent, he had witnessed his father's beheading off the coast of Egypt.) The consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, having succeeded Antony as Caesar's sec-ond in command, having dined with Caesar the night before his murder, dreamed too of succeeding Caesar. He controlled a faction of Caesar's army. Additional legions reported to additional consuls. Brutus had unexpectedly raised his army in record time.* It seemed that
Octavian
alone was without a command.
The most influential man in Rome after the Ides, Cicero found himself in much the same bind as Cleopatra. Which side to join? He could see that neutrality would on this occasion—the fifth civil war of his lifetime—not be possible. At the same time, he knew all the
parties in question and was enchanted by none. In 44 Octavian struck him as a mere schoolboy, a nuisance rather than a prospect. "I don't trust his age and I don't know what he's after," Cicero carped. It was difficult to imagine Octavian— a pale-faced teenager in a city that preferred its complexions ruddy—as a commander in chief. He profferred himself as leader, and yet was so naïve as to believe that Rome could keep a secret! (It is interesting that few deigned to take Octavian seriously at eighteen, at which age Cleopatra already ruled Egypt.)
and
For Cleopatra's visit we have 'only one source, hostile to his native East, much taken with Rome, working at least partially from Herod's account. The Jewish historian Josephus obscures but cannot entirely camouflage what transpired: Herod and Cleopatra spent some inten-sive time in each other's company, part of it hammering out the details of his obligations. Antony had granted Cleopatra the exclusive right to the Dead Sea bitumen, or asphalt, glutinous lumps of which floated to the surface of the lake. Bitumen was essential to mortar, incense, and insecticide, to embalming and caulking. A reed basket, smeared with asphalt, could hold water. Plastered with it, a boat is waterproof The concession was a lucrative one. Also Cleopatra's were the proceeds of Jericho, the popular winter resort, lush with date-palm groves and bal-sam gardens. Very likely she rode out across a searing desert to inspect those two hundred acres in the Jordan River valley, where Herod had a secondary palace. All other scents paled in comparison to sweet balsam, which grew exclusively in Judaea. The fragrant shrub's oil, seed, and bark were precious. They constituted the region's most valuable export. As for Jericho's dates, they were the finest in the ancient world, the source of its most potent wine. In modern terms, it was as if Cleopatra had been granted no part of Kuwait, only the proceeds of its oil fields. Herod found the transaction particularly painful as Judaea was a poor country, parched and stony, with few fertile areas, no port, and a rapidly expanding population. His revenues were a risible fraction of Cleopatra's. At the same time his ambitions exceeded his territorY; he had no desire to be "King of a wilderness." There appears to have been some bickering over terms, in a negotiation that proved Cleopatra more intently focused on bitumen deliveries than seductions. She was relent-less and unsparing; the result was highly favorable to her. Herod agreed to lease the Jericho lands for zoo talents annually. He consented as well to guarantee and collect the rent on the bitumen monopoly from his neighbor, the Nabatean king. By agreeing to do so Herod spared him-self the company of any of Cleopatra's agents or soldiers. Otherwise the arrangement worked entirely to her benefit, all the more so as it made both men miserable. It left Herod to extract funds from a sovereign who had denied him refuge during the Parthian invasion, and who made his payments only under duress. Purposely and effectively, Cleo-patra set two men who disliked her, a Jew and an Arab, against each other. (Malthus, the Nabatean sovereign, would have his revenge later.) Herod nonetheless upheld his end of the agreement with Cleopatra. He felt that "it would be unsafe to give her any reason to hate him." The visit was by all other measures an unsuccessful one. The two inveterate charmers failed entirely to endear themselves to each other. Cleopatra may have patronized her fellow sovereign. As his royal mother-in-law tirelessly reminded him, Herod was a commoner. Nor was he exactly Jewish, given his mother's religion; in the eyes of the Jews Herod was a gentile, while in all other eyes he was a Jew. He was
as a consequence perennially insecure about his throne, a situation not unfamiliar to Cleopatra, who may have exacerbated it. Her Ara-maic may have been better than his Greek; several years her senior, D Herod was little educated, sorely deficient in history and culture, sen-sitive on both counts. (It says a good deal that when he decided to remedy the situation years later he hired the finest tutor in the busi ness, one  who—in addition to his own literary and musical accom-plishrnent Cleopatra appeared , Wr graceless in Cleopatra's silken presence. heres had the best credential possible: he had been tutor to — 's children.) It could not have helped that Herod would have passions run high, the reverse of the great foreign policy

and

Also on Caesar's behalf, Antony proceeded to name his sons with Cleopatra as King of Kings. Producing the boys in turn, he assigned vast territories to each; the Eastern-inflected names came in handy now. At his cue, little Alexander Helios stepped forward, in the loose leggings and caped tunic of a Persian monarch. On his head he wore an upright, pointed turban topped with a peacock feather. His territories stretched to India; he was to rule over Armenia, Media, and—once his father had conquered it—Parthia. (He was again promised in marriage, this time to the daughter of the Median king, Artavasdes' traditional enemy.) Two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, the fruit of Antony and Cleopatra's Antioch reunion, was an Alexander the Great in minia-ture. He wore the high boots, the short purple cloak, and the brimmed woolen hat—in this case wrapped with a diadem—of a Macedonian. To him went Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia, the lands west of the Euphrates. Cleopatra Selene was to preside over Cyrene, the Greek settlement in what is today eastern Libya, hundreds of miles across the desert. The distributions made, each of the two younger boys rose to kiss his parents. They were then surrounded by a colorful phalanx of bodyguards, Armenians in Alexander's case, Macedonians in PtolernY's. In such a way Antony parceled out the East, including lands not yet in his possession. For the young woman who fourteen years earlier had smuggled herself into Alexandria to plead for her diminished kingdom, it was a sensational reversal. Cleopatra stood divine and indomitable, less queen than empress, the supreme Roman air
mander at her side. Her rule extended over a vast swath of Asia, its frontiers established and now at peace. She was protected by Roman legions; with her children, she now reigned, at least nominally, over more land than had any Ptolemy in centuries. On coins minted for the occasion—with them she became the first foreigner to appear on a Roman coin—she appears majestic, authoritative. She has also aged. Her mouth is fuller, and she is noticeably fleshier, especially around the neck It is im. possible to say whose ambition had brought about the spar-kling ceremony, to be known later as the Donations of Alexandria. It is especially difficult to locate Cleopatra's fingerprints; the truth is smudged forever by Roman manhandling. At least in part the mes-sage of the day was clear. On their golden thrones sat what even a coolheaded modern historian has reasonably called "the two most magnificent people in the world." Together they seemed to resurrect if not expand upon the dream of Alexander the Great, promoting a universal empire, one that transcended national boundaries and announced embraced common culture, that reconciled Europe and Asia. They nn  a new order. Cleopatra presided over the ceremony and the citywide banqueting that followed not only as a sovereign but as a deity after all, with the divine Caesar's son on one side, Dionysian Antony on the other. Old prophecies evidently resurfaced now. The Jews linked Cleopatra's rule with a golden age and with the coming of the Messiah. The queen of Egypt answered the call for an Eastern savior. She would rise above Rome for a better world. In conflating the Political and the religious, the imagery was all on Cleopatra's side. Mark Antony had a habit of jumping to conclusions, and in many ways the Donations were an exercise in wishful thinking. Certainly they made no difference to the administration of the lands in ques-tion, many of them governed by Roman proconsuls. The Armenian king was still very much alive. Parthia was not Antony's to distribute.
At best the celebrations were simply tone-deaf. At worst they were an insult to Octavian, a brazen power play. The intention hardly mattered given how the exercise looked in Rome, which wa how Octavian wanted it to: as an empty gesture, a farcical overreach ing by two slightly demented, power-drunk dissolutes, "a Dionysia, revel, led by an eastern harlot." With the Donations a munificent An tony handed out plenty of gifts, none more generous than that he set tied on Octavian.