Rome's Revolution: Death of the Republic and Birth of the Empire (Ancient Warfare and Civilization) by Richard Alston

Author:Richard Alston [Alston, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-05-05T18:30:00+00:00

FIGURE 5

Cleopatra: A head of Cleopatra depicting her in the tradition of Greek queens.

Antony and Cleopatra is the story that has everything, but as a story, it risks not making sense. In large part, that is because of the layers of interpretation and the multiple retellings with which we are faced. We cannot read about Antony and Cleopatra without acknowledging somewhere in the back of our heads the many films, plays, artworks, novels, and other representations that lie between us and the ancient pair. Nor is it enough to strip away those interpretations to get to the “real” story, not because there is no real story but because the first retellings of the story already have about them an aura of myth, and it seems likely that even while the couple held court in Alexandria, mythic stories circulated about their behavior.1 Our main sources on Antony and Cleopatra are Plutarch and Dio. Plutarch, whose Life of Antony was the ultimate basis of the Shakespearean play, was writing after more than a century of myth building, and Dio composed his version another century later. Plutarch’s interest was not primarily in the history and politics of the episode but in drawing moral lessons, and the mythic elements of the story suited his purposes rather more than any realistic historical evaluation of the pair.

This concern with morality has been shared by many of those who have turned their attention to Antony and Cleopatra. The result has been that the story has come to focus on their intimate relationship. The issue has become character, not power, partly because how to be good is a question that everyone has always needed to consider, while how to run an empire is of more specialist interest. Antony and Cleopatra could be depicted as having been very bad, and the bad are much more entertaining than the good. The historian Dio, from 250 years later, exemplifies the quality of the ancient analysis in his succinct summary: “Antony was enslaved to his desire and by the witchcraft of Cleopatra.”2

The story became one of love, and love was separated from the politics, placed into a realm of irrationality as opposed to the supposedly always rational male realm of political life. Antony and Cleopatra were tragic heroes long before Shakespeare. Yet if Cleopatra, with her oriental sexuality, has been the dark, seductive heart of the tale for modern audiences, for the ancients it is Antony’s fatal, tragic flaw that makes the drama. As Antony and Cleopatra became symbols of the madness of love, so Octavian and his allies, in their imperial grandeur, became the enemies of love. In such a universe of black and white, Roman history is made into a morality tale of sex versus empire, passion versus reason, which resonates across the ages in its emotional familiarity and simplicity.

For a slave to love, Antony was remarkably absent from his mistress. He spent much of the time from 40 onwards in Italy, Asia, Syria, Armenia, and Media. Alexandria may have been his winter resort of choice, but the great lovers managed to survive long periods apart.

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