Roman Military Disasters by Paul Chrystal

Author:Paul Chrystal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Ancient / General
ISBN: 9781473873957
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2015-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Virgil’s audience would have appreciated the poignancy of Dido’s threats. Rome did indeed pay the price for Aeneas’ duplicity; it paid with the devastating Punic Wars. Aeneas was indeed haunted by Dido, meeting again at arm’s length in their frosty underworld encounter. The Dido episode resonates uncomfortably with the political upheaval caused so recently by Cleopatra, a foreign queen eerily reminiscent of Dido, whose facility for global power-play would be likened to the unnatural skills of Dido as sorceress.

More graphically, Cleopatra takes centre-stage on Aeneas’ highly symbolic shield ekphrasis, which describes the armour given to him by Venus to fight for the establishment of Rome and the genesis of its proud history. She is called regina – ‘the queen’ – twice, still a dirty word so long after the fall of the monarchy; her gods are monsters, monstra, which assume the shape of all kinds of species and are ranged against the Roman pantheon; her defeat and her flight to Egypt are thrown into full relief.33

Horace excoriates the ‘mad queen’ – regina demens – in his famous poem celebrating her defeat at Actium: ‘now the time has come to drink, get up and dance and feast!’ Horace was sure that Cleopatra was plotting the death and destruction of Roman rule; her retinue is made up of eunuchs, squalid, diseased and drunk; she too is inebriated, she is a doom monster – fatale monstrum. Nevertherless, he concedes, patronisingly, that, in death, she does not act muliebriter (like a woman): she has no terror of the sword and bravely brings on the snakes, thus avoiding a humiliating appearance in a Roman triumph. The poem echoes sentiments first introduced in the Epodes, written soon after Actium, in which Horace sneers at the Roman soldiers under Antony and Cleopatra: they are enslaved by a woman and answer to eunuchs, and they have all gone soft with their un-Roman use of the canopium, the mosquito net.34

Propertius is no less hostile. Cleopatra features in a poem in which she is compared with Cynthia. Cynthia is the poet’s domina; she dominated him just as Cleopatra dominated Antony; Propertius is enslaved by a woman, just as Antony was. Calling a mistress domina, and calling their love for that domina servitium amoris (slavery of love) were two of the outrageous ways in which the love poets controversially turned the usual man-woman relationship on its head. In the real world, the man was always the dominant partner; a real Roman would never be a slave to love. Insinuating Cleopatra into the poem embroils her in the decadent, un-Roman world of the love poets where women ruled, men were slaves, were love-sick or languished – ‘exclusus’ – locked-out on the doorstep, were cuckolded as pathetic lovers whose only combat experience was in the war of love, ‘militia amoris’.35 Propertius, of course, was one of the champions of this roué lifestyle; his portrait of Cleopatra here is probably one of the first instances of her as an embodiment of woman’s domination of men, a symbol which has endured down the years.

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