Cleopatterer final

In a world entranced by rhetoric— addicted to "honeyballs of phrases, every word and act besprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame" —the plausible reliably trumped the actual. Octavian had at his disposal plenty of generous veins to mine. The depredations of the East alone — that intoxicating, intemperate, irrational realm supplied a mother lode of material. Like its queen, Egypt was beguiling and voluptuous; the modern association between the Orient and sex was hoary already in the first century. Already Africa was the address of moral decay. From there it was no great leap to transform the Antony of the Donations into a power-crazed, dissolute, Eastern despot: "In his hand was a golden scepter, at his side a scimitar; he wore a purple robe studded with huge gems; a crown only was lacking to make him a king dallying with a queen." It was the diadem and golden statues business all over again; the accessories of kingship unnerved Romans even more than did autocracy itself, which they had tolerated in a more subtle version for at least a decade. In Octavi-an's account, Antony was irredeemably contaminated by the Oriental languor and the un-Roman luxuries of the East as, arguably, Caesar and Alexander the Great had been before him. In turn Octavian would soon enough discover that Egypt conferred on its conqueror a mixed blessing, a literal embarrassment of riches. Like a prodigious trust f und, it convinced men they were gods. Octavian wrung the most mileage from Antony's affair with Cleo-Patra. She allowed him to recycle the oldest trope: the allergy to the Powerful woman was sturdier even than that to monarchy, or to the depraved East. Whether or not Cleopatra controlled Antony, she unequivocally permitted Octavian to control the narrative.
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 If Antony was to send his body to her, what would he conceivably deny her? And for what would she hesitate to ask? Octavian seems to have been the one who decided that Cleopatra plotted to make Rome a province of Egypt, an idea very unlikely to have crossed her quick mind. He had on his side the familiar type, the scheming, spendthrift wife, for whom no diamond is large enough, no house spacious enough. As Eutropius put it centuries later, Antony began a war at the urging of the queen of Egypt, who "longed with womanly desire to reign in the city as well."* Already it was acknowl-edged "that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women." Whole families had been ruined on their account. And already—the fault as ever of the sultry, sinuous, overtly subversive East—Egyptian women had caused their share of trouble. They were endowed with insatiable ardor and phenomenal sexual energy. One husband was not Hnee cor-ralled the evidence. enough for them. They attracted and ruined men. Octavian only cor-lad found a cunning disguise for a civil war, which four years earlier he had declared officially over, and into which he had prom-ised again to lead his men. How much more palatable, how much more credible, that Antony should be destroyed by an illicit love than by his countrymen! It was by no means difficult to rally legions or tax the populace, or set fathers against sons with the claim that Cleopatra was poised to conquer them as she had conquered Antony. As Lucan formulated the battle cry a century later, "Would a woman—not even Roman—rule the world?" The logic was simple. The Egyptian queen had subdued Antony. Rome, Octavian warned, was next. At the end of October he declared war—on Cleopatra.
THE DECLARATION COULD not have been unexpected. It may even have come as a relief. Cleopatra must all the same have been surprised by its terms. She had engaged in no hostilities toward Rome. She had comported herself like the ideal vassal—if a vassal with privileges. She had maintained order in her kingdom, supplied Rome when called upon to do so, materialized when summoned, aggressed upon no neighbors. She had done everything in her power to uphold and noth-ing to diminish the surpassing greatness of Rome. Traditionally, a three-step process preceded a Roman declaration of war: The Senate submitted a demand for restitution, followed after a month by a sol-emn reminder that satisfaction was still wanting. Three days later, a messenger traveled to enemy territory, formally to open hostilities. Octavian summoned Cleopatra neither for an accounting nor an air-ing of charges. He made no overtures through diplomatic channels. Instead, deft as ever with the mise-en-scene, he dusted off the ceremo-nial portion of the process. In a military cloak he personally launched a spear drenched in pig blood toward the East, from a ritual patch of "hostile soil" in Rome. (There is speculation that he invented this ancient rite for the occasion, that Octavian was making up the history as he went along. He was very good at restoring traditions, including those that had never existed.) There were no official charges for the simple reason that none could be leveled. Insofar as Cleopatra was accused of any hostile intent, she was condemned "for her acts," con-veniently left unspecified. Octavian gambled that Antony would remain true to Cleopatra, a loyalty that—under the circumstances — allowed Octavian to charge that his compatriot "had voluntarily taken up war on the side of the Egyptian woman against his native country."
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Octavian enlisted an asp. Arriving on the scene after his messengers, h , he attempted to resuscitate Cleopatra. He called in the psylli, Libyans believed to enjoy a magical immunity to snake venom. By taste they were said to be able to determine what kind of snake had bitten; by murmuring spells and sucking at the wound they were said to be able to extract death from an icy corpse, The psylli who knelt over Cleopa-tra worked no miracles. The Egyptian queen could not be revived. That was not altogether surprising. Neither Dio nor Plutarch was at all sure of the asp, who surely crept into the story later rather than arriving in Cleopatra's lifetime, amid a basket of figs. Even Strabo, who landed in Egypt shortly after her death, was unconvinced. For any number of reasons Cleopatra was unlikely to have recruited an asp, or an Egyptian cobra, for the job. A woman known for her crisp decisions and meticulous planning would surely have hesitated to entrust her fate to a wild animal. She had plenty of quicker, less painful options. It was as well a little too convenient to be killed by the royal emblem of Egypt; the snake made more sym-bolic than practical sense. Even the most reliable of cobras cannot kill three women in quick succession, and the asp is a famously sluggish snake. An Egyptian cobra, bristling and hissing and puffing itself up to its six-foot splendor, could hardly have hidden in a fig basket or remained hidden in one for long. The job was too great and the basket too small. Poison was a more likely alternative, as Plutarch seems to imply with his survey of Cleopatra's experiments. Most likely she swallowed a lethal drink—the hemlock and opium of Socrates would have done the trick—or applied a toxic ointment. Hannibal had resorted to poison when backed into a corner 150 years earlier; Mithradates had attempted the same. Cleopatra's uncle, the king of Cyprus' had known precisely what to have on hand when Rome had come calling in 58. Assuming she died of the same cause as Charmian assuming she died in the state in which she was discovered, Cleopatra
suffered little. There were no shuddering paroxysms, which cobra venom would ultimately have induced. This toxin's effect was more narcotic than convulsive, the death peaceful, swift, and essentially painless. "The truth of the matter," Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears, "no one knows."
Dismissed for nearly two hundred years, the snake clings tenaciously to the story. Cleopatra's asp is the cherry tree of ancient his-tory, a convenience, a shorthand, most of all a gift to painters and sculptors through the centuries. It made poetic sense and good art. (So did the naked breast, also not part of the original tale.) And the snake multiplied immediately: Horace wrote "sharp-toothed ser-pents" into an ode. Virgil, Propertius, and Martial would follow suit. The beast or beasts figure in every early account. Octavian would further clinch the deal by displaying a model of Cleopatra with an asp in his triumph. Not only was the snake a potent symbol of Egypt, where coiled cobras had adorned pharaonic brows for millennia, but snakes crawled all over Isis statues as well. They had insinuated themselves in the Dionysian cult. Iconography aside, it is easy to see what some-one is trying to communicate when he pairs a lady with a snake. Alexander the Great's mother— as murderous and maniacal a Macedonian princess who ever lived—kept serpents as pets. She used them to ter-rify men. Before her came Eve, Medusa, Electra, and the Erinyes; when a woman teams up with a snake, a moral storm threatens some-he sent Octavian may have confused the issue for all time with his call to the psylli. He controlled the historical record every bit as firmly as he was said to have controlled his adolescent sexual urges. Very likely us off, for thousands of years, in the wrong direction. He may have done so intentionally. There is an alternate version of the death; it has long been clear that we may be missing something here, that one farce of August io could well conceal another, that the greatest  deathbed scene in history is perhaps not what it seems.
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The Egyptian victory was celebrated with particular élan, not only because it could afford to be. There was a civil war to camouflage. Cleopatra's statue remained in the Forum. It was the least Octa-vian could do for the woman whose golden couches and jeweled pitch-ers financed his career. Cleopatra allowed him to discharge every one of his obligations. She guaranteed Roman prosperity. So vast were the funds Octavian injected into the economy that prices soared. Interest rates tripled. As Dio summed up the transfer of wealth, Cleopatra saw to it that "the Roman empire was enriched and its temples adorned.' Her art and obelisks decorated its streets. Soundly defeated, she was
nonetheless celebrated, in the beauty of a foreign city. With the riches
carne a rush of Egyptomania. Sphinxes, rearing cobras, sun disks, acanthus leaves, hieroglyphs, proliferated throughout Rome. Lotus blossoms and griffins decorated even Octavian's personal study. Cleo-patra earned a second backhanded tribute: In her wake, a golden age of women dawned in Rome. High-born wives and sisters suddenly enjoyed a role in public life. They interceded with ambassadors, coun-seled husbands, traveled abroad, commissioned temples and sculp-tures. They become more visible in art and in society. They joined Cleopatra in the Forum. No Roman woman would ever attain the exalted status or enjoy the unprecedented privileges granted Livia and Octavia, which they owed to a foreigner, to whom they served as counterweight. Livia compiled a fat portfolio of properties, one that would include lands in Egypt and palm groves in Judaea. Octavia would go down in history as the un-Cleopatra, supremely modest, prudent, and pious. Cleopatra got a promotion as well, from pretext to punctuation point. If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and— as would be apparent within a decade or so —as a monarchy. Having learned from Casesars example, he did so subtly. Octavian was never a "king," always a"princeps," or "first citizen." For a title that was at once sufficiently grand and free of all monarchical odor, he turned to 'Augustus," to signify that the man formerly known as Gaius Julius Caesar was more than human, that he was precious and revered. There was some irony in fact that the West quickly began to resemble Cleopatra's East, the more so as Octavian had advertised Cleopatra as a threat to the Republic, something she had never intended.