Empire: World History - 134. Cleopatra: The Would-Be Empress of Rome

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

With Julius Caesar dead, Cleopatra turned to another of Rome’s dominant figures. She became entwined with Mark Antony, the ruler of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, but even with their enormous combined power the destructive tendrils of Roman politics were inescapable. Just like all of the Mediterranean, Alexandria dwelt in the shadow of Rome and so when Octavian, Julius Caesar’s chosen heir, turns on the couple in an attempt to become the sole emperor of Rome, their future looks uncertain. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Stacy Schiff to discuss Cleopatra as she reaches the peak of her powers and then, not long after, her doom. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. And welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durember. And once again, we are joined by our fabulous guest. We enjoyed talking to her so much in the last episode, Stacey Schiff. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and biographer of Cleopatra.

And in the last episode of this podcast, Stacey, we were talking about her rise, you know, this sort of teen girl having to deal, you know, it's a sibling rivalry that's murderous and bloody. She manages to catch the eye of Caesar, she has a baby with Caesar, she gives birth to the baby at the Festival of ISIS, cementing this connection with the divine, which already is in people's minds in Egypt. You also sort of mentioned something. I just wanted to maybe just touch on it again before we launch into her trip to Rome. And what a different experience that will prove to be for her.

But Egypt is a land of antiquity. I mean, you were talking about how Alexandria is so sophisticated. It is full of books and learning and culture and fun compared to a rather puritanical Roman comparison. But history is, well, they've been around for a very long time, the Egyptians, and they know it. There's much longer period between Cleopatra and the pyramids than between Cleopatra and us. There's a sense, and I think the Romans are smitten by this. There are 28 centuries of history here. So this really is, I mean, all of antiquity seems to have lodged itself in Egypt. And yes, from our perspective, you realize it when you realize that Nefertiti and Cleopatra are 1300 years apart.

I mean, there's an extraordinary swath of history here that we tend to eclipse. So you have all of that scholarship and you have all of that time. and you have obviously the monuments in the middle. To anyone who comes from anywhere else in the world, this is just as it is for us today, right? This is an extraordinary wealth of culture. So Stacey, she's had a baby, but baby's not met the baby daddy yet.

So, I mean, does she decide she's going to go to Rome and say, behold, your son and maybe heir? And how does his wife take all of this? And how does Rome take all of this? Presumably she's an open-minded woman at this stage, what you say of Julius Caesar's tendencies. The one thing we left out here, or I left out, is that in title anyway, she's now married to her other brother. So, in fact, they're both married to other people, at least, you know, by the nomenclature, when she has Caesar's child.

I don't think it happened quite the way you put it in a date, but it may have happened close to that. She does go to Rome in probably 46. And she set sail from the great Alexandrian harbor past the Farras Lighthouse. And makes her way up the coast of what is today, the eastern Mediterranean, up the coast of Israel, and, Lebanon, along the coast of southern Turkey, you hugged the coast, you couldn't really cross the Mediterranean, along the southern coast of Turkey, and then to the west coast of Italy, which is presumably where she docked. And yes, that too would have been a procession of tremendous magnificence. We know that her father, when he was in Rome, always traveled with a hundred colorfully

attired swordsmen. And I can't imagine Cleopatra intended to be less given to pageantry than was her father. Moreover, she needed to take with her exquisite gifts that would impress upon the Romans than light of Egypt. So there would have been beautiful fabrics, iridescent threads, spices, possibly animals, I mean, she would have been traveling with quite an entourage and quite a few ships' worth of gifts. And in that manner, she makes her way, presumably at Caesar's invitation, because I don't think one showed up uninvited at such a moment, when Caesar and Caesarian would have met for the first time. And alas, we do not have Calpurnia's reaction to this other child of her husband's. Yeah, I'm just guessing it won't have been thrilled. I'm just on it

I think it was especially not thrilled because this is Caesar's only son, and that would have been a momentous thing from Caesar's point of you. Right. What do the Roman people make of this woman who is stolen Caesar's heart? And is it known that Caesarian is Julius Caesar's son, or is this a secret that is only known in the palace? If it had been meant to be a secret, it would have been a difficult one to keep because he evidently begins to resemble Caesar very early on. So it is not something that they keep secret, nor is Cleopatra's presence in Rome something one could keep secret, partly for the reason I just mentioned. She makes quite a splash. She's got an enormous retinue. It's very difficult for her because this is an assignment she has never had before. She has to make herself inconspicuous, or at least less conspicuous. And this is a woman who obviously has not known the word inconspicuous before. Rome does not smile on women. Rome does not smile on foreign empresses in Rome surely would not have smiled on the mother, Caesar's son. it would have been a very difficult assignment. We know very little about it, except from Cicero, who took an early and very serious dislike to Cleopatra. He despised her. He had his own reasons to

despise her. Part of the problem here is that Cicero, Cicero is the most vocal voice we have for these years. He's the most assiduous recorder of these years. And you can't get past him. There's really nothing to counter what he says. And Cicero had just lost a daughter who was essentially of Cleopatra's generation and he didn't like Cleopatra's father. He was a great Republican, obviously. He didn't like Egypt. And he really didn't like women who had better libraries than he did. So there were all kinds of reasons. And he asked Cleopatra for a book, which he never delivered. So there were all kinds of reasons here for him to dislike Cleopatra. It's out of clear if he's speaking for the population at large or purely for himself. But it is a somewhat illogical thing for Cleopatra to have spent either two short stays or one long stay,

between 46 and 44 BC, and that second date will say something to you. She is in Rome when Caesar is murdered. And there's no direct connection between her presence in Rome and the Ides of March, but if you have been accused of comporting yourself like a king, consorting with a foreign queen is probably not particularly wise. So there's good reason to believe that Cleopatra makes Caesar more unpopular with both the populace and with the Senate? I have a very hard time believing otherwise. We know that he puts a stature of Cleopatra up in the forum. That is something that was generally not done. I should say that he comes back to Rome so smitten with ideas he has absorbed in Egypt that he immediately institutes all kinds of revisions. Calendar is revised. He starts

building a causeway. All sorts of Egyptian engineering comes back to Rome with Caesar. But one thing he does, which would not have been popular, was to construct this statue of her in the forum, and which really goes against the grain of everything on Good Roman believed in. So it's very difficult to believe that he felt that he was on solid political ground and his affection for Cleopatra. I mean, I'm just wondering what she thought of Rome, because, you know, there she is. She's protein feminist, you know, all-powerful, women are empowered in ancient Egypt.

And Rome isn't like that. What is the position of women in Rome? It's a wonderful one in Eurypides where he says, if only women were to be found nowhere but in my lap. Ew. I know. I pretty much kind of covered it. I mean, you know, a Roman woman's jewels were her children.

Cleopatra had really excellent jewelry. A Roman woman was meant to be silent. Everything about both Rome the town, which is to say that, you know, very dark and unsophisticated backwater. Cramped and dirty. Very cramped. Very dirty. No music, no dancing. Two things of which there was a tremendous amount in Alexandria.

A Roman thought that to dance was to basically make a fool of yourself. There's that Cicero line. then no one dances while he is sober unless he's a lunatic. Exactly. There's a real just distrust for and despair about Greek generally, Greek culture generally, which is thought to be dissolute. And Cleopatra is not only a representative of that realm, but she's a woman. So her presence could not have been much smiled upon.

For her father, that mission we know was very difficult. Presumably she too was handing out gifts and great items of great luxury to people, but it could not have been an easy assignment. Is she living with Caesar? She lives at his country estate up in the hill, and Calpurnia lives in town. But it does not seem to have been a secret that Cleopatra was lodged there.

Very complicated. It's a really complicated love life, but also he leaves her alone for a while as well, even though she's in the midst of people who despise her in a place that doesn't understand her, in a place that doesn't value her at all. And she also finds herself alone. Why does he leave her?

Well, he has conquest to make. I mean, it's very, it's very hard to be Julius Caesar. There are always places you need to go conquer. So his leaving town isn't all that surprising. Obviously, business came politics and business came first. And I don't know how often even the two of them were together when he was in Rome. So that's a difficult one to answer. It would be unlikely that she would have risked being away from Egypt for what I think ends up to a year and a half.

That's why you think is the two trips. It may be two trips. It's an arduous, arduous trip to have made, but to have assumed that your country was going to remain stable, given the number of stresses we've just discussed for 18 months seems to me improbable as well. So what are the motives? Why is she there? What's she hoping to achieve by the streams? You know, I feel that Caesar staying in Egypt for those months after the Alexandrian war was his illogical adventure. And I feel that Cleopatra going to Rome was hers, or at least staying in Rome. So suggestion of a real love. It's not just a passing encounter.

Either a real love or there is this child in the mix, Caesar has never before had a son, or again, she is retracing the history of her father, there is a need to go to Rome to somehow solidify that support and to be seen by the rest of Caesar's entourage. Why it turns into either the two long, two short stays or the one long stay does seem to be illogical. But yes, there was business to be transacted, there was a relationship to be confirmed, and there may have been some sort of passion between the two of them. That's something that we'll never now. Well, I mean, we've sort of done a Dowell and jumped forward and now we're jumping back again. This is a terrible calabony, Stacey, that I'm accused of being non-chronological. He gives away the endings all the time. I have the same weakness. I understand. Okay, well, look, you know, the aides of March happen and Caesar is bumped off. I mean, where does that leave Cleopatra's standing in Rome? I suppose it's pretty easy. You know, he's unpopular, you know, partly thanks to his relationship with her. But what about in Egypt as well? You were besties with Caesar just yesterday. Now what happens?

So she races for rum, which we know she leaves Roe very quickly. Rum is in a state of utter disorder after Caesar's death. Rots in the streets. Utter chaos. Yeah, it's utter chaos. No one's sure who's on who. It's very dangerous for her to get. She's lost her benefactor, obviously. She races back to Egypt. She seems really at that point to just have sort of secured her hold on the throne. Caesar was not the chief of the enterprise in Egypt. She is. So really all of it's important is that she come back and, App Supreme, which indeed is what she manages to do. She knows that whatever happens, however, she's going to have to make peace with whoever fills Caesar's shoes is going to be.

And she is pregnant again by Caesar. She's pregnant again when she leaves. I think she miscarries. Something happens to that. She seems to be pregnant from what Cicero says. There is no child, at least of whom we have in a cat. So that child may have been lost in the flight. In the flight to Egypt. How about that? But the question of those next years, as Roman and politics sort themselves out and as alliance after alliance is broken is with whom to sigh. And that for Cleopatra becomes a real headache because, you know, the alliances shift daily, the news comes slowly and she doesn't want to end up on the losing song. Okay. When does she decide that Mark Antony is the horse to back?

And I mean, do we know about where they met, how they met and whether their eyes also locked in passion from the first moment? I mean, what do we know of this? So first of all, let's have a portrait of Mark Anthony. Mark Anthony is a soldier's soldier. He's a lad. He's a kind of manly man. Rough and tough and gruff. That's how you like a Milita. All of the above, immensely good-looking, a little bit disillute, a little bit undisciplined, politically astute on sort of alternate days of the week, if you will.

Very popular with his men who are happy to die for him, a champion reveler, and in a very different way from Caesar, himself deeply charismatic. They probably crossed paths earlier. They almost certainly would have known each other in Rome in some capacity. We have no record. Marquesne had made an earlier trip to Egypt. as well when they may have met. And he was with Julius Caesar.

He was part of Caesar's entourage. He goes on a mission to Egypt for a different reason. And they may have met at that point when Cleopatra was younger. The record is unclear. But she meets him in Silicier, in Southeast Turkey. And this is her again setting off on a boat and going to him. She set her sights on him and is marked his card. I love the way that you said she set her sights on him.

Well, she's summoned by him. I mean, this is the great entrance we all know from Shakespeare, who stole it almost word for word from Plum. dark. And this is a summons which she had received months earlier, but she's very slow to respond to. She isn't sure if she should be basically sided with Mark Anthony. She ultimately does make the trip in the splendor that we know from Shakespeare, dressed as Hera going to comport with Dionysus for the sake of the world. She's being fanned by her staff dressed as Cupid's on the boat. They're dispensing incense as they make their way up the river. They're a lyres strumming. It's quite

an appearance. It really does seem like a goddess. But the river is the river between the Mediterranean coast and Tarsus. That's right. The river Sidness, which goes up to Tarsus. The entire town of Tarsus races out to meet this extraordinary apparition. I think the last person to come see her is actually Mark Antony, who'd been holding court in the forum. And she and Anthony then get into this wonderful tussle over who's going to give the first dinner to entertain whom. And she pulls rank as an empress. She falls rank. As she has every right to do. As she has every right to do against this, you know, a coarse soldier, and then pulls out all the stops to set the tables for this dinner that we know from Plutarch at which the silver of the table wear is gold and the implements are silver,

and Mark Anthony's men go home at the end of the evening with all of the gem-encrusted plates and goblets with which they have drunk and eaten in the course of the evening. And she will only up the ante at the course of the next days when Mark Anthony's men are given horses and slaves and candelabra as they head off at the end of the evening. She's laced lights through the trees. She set the tables with these exotic fabrics. You don't get gift packs like that these days at dinners, do you? These are like the best swag bags you have ever, exactly.

That's amazing. So people are carrying off fixtures, fittings, and slaves saying, I'll take that with me. The thing I've wondered about is when she makes that trip to what is today Turkey, how many ships did it take? I mean, she knew she was going to have to make, right? I mean, she has to make this impression because the way that she is essentially endearing herself to Mark Antony is with the splendor of Egypt, right? She needs her for his military ambitions.

She needs him for political reasons. But in order to impress upon him her fortune, she must arrive with... Quite a lot of tableware. She's giving away free gold plates every night. So much tableware, exactly. And it was a cast of thousands, too. Well, okay, so, I mean, if you're Mark Antony,

you're going to be a bit impressed. You know, and your men are going to be quite happy that they've had a lovely evening. Delightful, delightful evening out. Come back with, you know, arm force of gold. and trinkets. So does he then decide immediately that he's going to go back to Egypt and visit her? Or, I mean, how much time elapses before Mark Anthony decides to return the favor? That will take a while because work Anthony is dead set and something which is somewhat hard

for us to understand today, which is the conquest of Parthia, which is the military mission on which Julius Caesar had been focused for so long. And what somehow seems to be, like, I don't even know, it's like the golden ring. If you can conquer Parthia, you will be the ruler of the world. And this is not an easy thing because the part of the past. Parthians are very, very formidable enemies with the Parthians shot and their archers and all the rest of it. And also they are a long march from Turkey. So a long march over difficult land. So that is what Mark Antony's sights are really set on that conquest at that moment, and Cleopatra is there to help facilitate his military ambitions. It should probably be mentioned, however,

that nine months or so after they meet in Tarsus, she does bear twins who are Mark Antony's. So again, quite quick seduction by doing the math? So, you know, I'm troubled by the word seduction. I would like to believe it was a seduction too. But perhaps the best way to put it is in a way that Pluchark described another relationship, which is that it accorded well with the agenda at hand. I mean, it made every sense for the two of them to a lie. They were both of them extraordinarily attractive people for all kinds of reasons.

And they do seem to have fallen into, you know, a very quick relationship. How long is this now since Caesar's dead? Yeah, and also, is Mark Anthony married at the time, or is he about to marry? I mean, what is his marrott? What is his status? on this website. They're always married. They're always married. I'm sorry. They're always married, but she does seem to get pregnant, always at the right time by the right man. You've got to give her credit for that. I'm impressed by her. The answer to the question is that Caesar dies at 44 and this is

41. So spend three years since the death of Caesar. So decent morning time. She's fine, but Mark Anthony is married at the time. That is correct. What happens to his poor wife? All these jilted women who are going to be making voodoo dolls of Cleopatra? Roman women tend to get offered by Roman men as kind of personal guarantees to sort of seal business arrangements. Mark Encinny is married to Folvia at the outset. Fulvia will at one point try to offer to come to bring military reinforcements to him, partly to undo his attraction to Cleopatra. This brings on possibly the only incident we know of Cleopatra really kind of losing her cool,

which is that she is so nervous about Marguentany being re-flamed by his wife, that she goes on a sort of hunger strike. and enlists all her courtiers to remind Mark Anthony that she is following him all over the world and she's deeply loyal to him and, you know, she has this entire empire of her own and she's neglecting it all just to be at his side. And the end result of that is that Folvia will not come and that she will die shortly thereafter. And Cleopatra can resume eating again. But she does have this moment of some really, you know, this Plutarch, it's this very odd moment of just putting on this extraordinary act. to try to keep her man close at hand.

And it's the only one that we know where she just sort of just becomes this immensely vulnerable, you know, very hurt sort of flailing female. Yeah, I mean, just before we go to the break, just between us girls, is she a bit bunny boilery? I mean, the behaviour is quite intense. Or are we still team Cleo here, Stacey?

I'm afraid I'm team Cleo. Okay. You're thinking this is bad behavior? I think, well, I'm just thinking it's also convenient that the wife suddenly dies. therefore clearing the way. I mean, I'm not saying that she has a hand in this, but it's convenient timing, no? You know, she has a knack for timing. As I said, the pregnancies are always brilliantly timed. I can't really implicate her in the death of fovia. She's about to get bad news because

Mark Anthony will then marry Octavian's sister, Octavia, who is a flawless, very beautiful woman. Actually, the Romans will always say, you know, I don't understand why he's with Cleopatra. Octavia is much more beautiful. So Cleopatra has done with lustrous hair and beautiful skin and Cleopatra doesn't stack up well necessarily next to Octavia, so there's a bigger threat on the horizon, but she doesn't quite know that yet. Okay, well, look, join us after the break when we find out what happens next. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about the tangled love life and boy, is it tangled, of Anthony and Cleopatra. So, I mean, just talk me through. So he's got a wife who then dies conveniently, and he's being pushed towards another beauty who is beloved by the

court, Octavian's sister Octavia. Can you give us a little more of an idea of their standing, Octavian and Octavia, in the love and esteem of Rome, but also power, the power play in Rome? We should also say who they are. They are Julius Caesar's adopted children. At the death of Caesar, when his wheel is opened, everyone is stunned to see that he makes his heir this adolescent grandfew named Octavian, who is a sallow-faced, not particularly promising, young man a little bit awkward in his demeanor, by no means has the personality of a Mark Anthony, and who will prove to be a rather remarkable political player, in fact, but who early on just seems to be this kind of sallow-faced young man who faints under the heat and the heat

and is not someone who one would have thought was going to be the ultimate rival of Cleopatra, but of course who will be her undoing in the end. And so he's also presumably threatened by the fact that the rivals to him, in many ways is Caesarian, who is Julius Caesar's actual full son, not some distant grandnephew who may have been adopted. Cesarian really does kind of muck up the narrative because no one really knows what to do with Cesarian because he is indisputably Julius Caesar's son. But the real problem becomes what to do between an among Mark Antony and Octavian

and several other heirs to Caesar's mantle, who over these years go through any number of different permutations as to who's in power and who's allied with whom. and ultimately in a bid to make peace between Mark Antony and Octavian, who would like to divide between them the world, Octavia, Octavian's beloved sister, is offered to the newly widowed Mark Antony in marriage. And that is meant to be a deal that is going to kind of keep Cleopatra out of the picture. But also bring peace to Rome. There's been endless civil war for many years.

Correct. There have been two generations of civil war at this point. The Romans are exhausted by it. And Octavian, in his credit, has promised that there will be no more civil war. So he now needs to deliver on that promise. So this is a crucial moment. On one hand, Anthony is obviously drawn to Cleopatra. She's bearing his children.

But on the other hand, the fate of the whole political west of the Roman Empire hangs on him. It's his job to make sure he's not fighting with Octavian, that he's co-empering in a responsible manner. Is that the right phrase, co-emperor? I like that phrase. Yeah. And they go through every possible piece of nomenclature at this point. The idea is that the east will belong to Mark Antony and the west to Octavia, that there somehow should be able to be sort of a negotiated piece between the two of them.

And as if you, I mean, you've got that power struggle. So you've sort of settled, you settle the waters a little bit if you manage to get Octavian and Mark Antony on side, and they do that through marriage with Octavia. And certainly it seems like they're sort of happily wed for a while. But then Cleopatra, you can always count of. Cleopatra to make things more complicated, because here she is, heavily pregnant, and gives birth to not one but two of Mark Anthony's children. She has twins. Tell us about that. She has twins with Mark Anthony, a son and a daughter. But then Mark Anthony will feel,

I guess you would call it the Siren Song of the East again. And despite this negotiated agreement, we'll find himself drawn back to the East. And he and Cleopatra will have yet another child together. Well, excellent. Well, what about, tell us, just, I mean, let's not skip over the twins, because she does give them. I mean, I think they're quite, you know, the names of great power and expectation as well, isn't it? The boy is named Alexander Helios and the daughter Cleopatra Selin, right? And there's an attempt with the children a little bit later. Essentially, it's, again, it's Mark Antony and Cleopatra in Alexandria, to divide the world, to divide Cleopatra's kingdom and the kingdom that Mark Antony has not yet conquered among these children.

And the ceremony at which that is done, which will be known later as the donations of Alexandria, is the ceremony that Octavian uses as his greatest piece of ammunition against Mark Antony to prove that Mark Antony is caught up in the serpenting wiles of this Eastern woman and is essentially making decisions which are meant to undermine Rome. And it will not be that difficult for Octavian shortly thereafter to say that Cleopatra has in fact designs upon Rome that she is meaning to conquer Rome as part of this extraordinary kingdom. Does he see his future? I mean, do we know, actually, let me just put it, what is he thinking? And what happens to his wife? Well, what is thinking really is, I mean, there is this unsettled

score with the Parthian campaign. There really is this desire to sort of go off to the east and make a really notable conquest. And in fact, there will be a small victory, which he will parlay into a seemingly much larger one when he comes back to Alexandria to celebrate. it. But there is this allure of, you know, this military campaign. Cleopatra is clearly part of that. There is some obvious inclination to spend time in Alexandria, which is a city that obviously meets Mark Antony's requirements perfectly. It's a perfect city in which to revel. Cleopatra certainly knows how to entertain her man. It's a city to which she takes very happily. And it puts him right at the edge of where he needs to be in terms of a military campaign. I mean, what this does is that it allows

Octavian a reason to say that Cleopatra has designs upon the Roman Empire. Octavian realizes that he cannot continue this civil war, which is a deeply unpopular concept, but to say that this foreign woman, this wanton, this wanton hussy, this great seductress, actually means to try to conquer Rome and that Mark Antony is in her thrall. That is a reason to declare war and he will ultimately declare war on Cleopatra. Okay, and do we have any idea about her response to this? Is she frightened? Does she, perceive it as a real pressing life-ending threat? If she believed in Mark Antony, she should not have.

And there was really no reason to think that Octavian, with very little military experience at this point, was going to be able to prevail over Mark Anthony. We have absolutely no indication of what she's thinking at this moment. But we do know that she is, we'll do everything in her power over this next year to help to supplement Mark Antony's men to pull in all kinds of Thracian and Macedonian and Pontic mercenaries to join him. and to make her home in a military camp. Using her wealth.

Using her wealth, exactly. She's funding this entire campaign and to make her home for the second time in her life in an all-male military camp. And it's also, it's going to tick everybody off. Because they're just not thinking straight, are they? They're doing everything that possibly could to alienate Rome and anyone who could be an ally of Mark Anthony.

Because they have little thrones made for the children and they sit on thrones themselves, all of these things, which would be hateful to somewhere that has gone through the struggles that Rome has gone through. And doesn't Mark Antony declare that she's Cleopatra, the queen of kings, and provocative things like that, which are just, I mean, they just seem a bit stupid. You know, like, try to court trouble. This is the way to do it.

It is a colossal misstep, if you have any understanding at all of Rome, which Cleopatra surely would have had from the time she had spent there. And what's your explanation of it? I mean, Shakespeare makes this case for Mark Anthony losing basically all his common sense. So in this thrall of passion, is that the deduction you make from reading the sources? I wouldn't necessarily say those is his common sense in the course of his passion, but Mark Anthony was not overly gifted with common sense. So this politically rather awkward, if not suicidal move, does appear to be Mark Antony's.

You don't ever see Cleopatra questing for power. That is not something that appears to be on her agenda in the Ptolemaic makeup, really. that's a Roman, it's very much a Roman given, not at all an Egyptian one. So I can't help but think this is largely Mark Anthony who's pushing these things along. And you know, again, this may have been a question of optics. He had been gone from Rome for so long. He did not know what the operative feeling was in Rome at this point. And he then, in May 32 BC, it divorces Octavia, which again presumably doesn't help anything. Tant amount to war. It is. It's a declaration of war. Exactly. Her brother has to retain the family honor, presumably. Well, let's hop, skip and jump to the war that will eventually be both Mark

Anthony and Cleopatra's downfall. Now, if I had made that chronological break, I would be accused as telling the story. But anyway, so Octavia is divorced. Effectively, war is declared. Where does the war happen? Where geographically does the theatre of action move to now? The war, insofar as it's a war, becomes a battle. And that battle is fought in southern Greece at Actium, which is where Mark Anthony and Cleopatra find themselves camped not necessarily for particularly good reasons and where they, over a series of months, delay to their own discredit because they can't, a Mark Anthony in particular, can't decide whether he means to wage war at sea or whether he means to wage war on land. And he ultimately opts for a naval battle, which does not make his men happy,

but he feels that he is going to be outclassed easily on land. And so the ships are the way to go. and we have very confused accounts of what actually happens at the Battle of Actium. There's not just the fog of war, but there is a need afterward to turn Actium, which is more of a sort of scuffle than an actual downright battle, into a resounding victory for Octavian. In the middle of the battle that day by mid-afternoon, Cleopatra will sail through the enemy lines on her own ship, which was clearly something that had been prearranged,

that she was going to do this, with her treasure and her sails aboard ship. And again, we know the outcome, and we assume it's a major mistake, but wasn't Cleopatra's Navy meant to be remarkable? Wasn't Mark Antony quite reasonable in thinking that the massive Egyptian Navy would see off Octavian, who had no military experience? The tension in the camp, and this led to tremendous amounts of ill will against Cleopatra, was precisely that. She wanted a naval battle. His men did not, for the most part, know how to fight a naval battle. Most of them did not know how to swim. So there was a tremendous resistance to Cleopatra.

No one was really particularly happy to have her there in the first place. She doesn't seem to have played her cards very politically among Mark Anistony's friends and associates. And then in the end, the determination to fight at sea is something that further undoes his man. Okay. So, I mean, the defeat at Actium, he takes it hard, Mark Anthony. Does he actually try to end his life because of the humiliation of all of this? So what we're told by the ancient sources is that Cleopatra heads off. Anthony follows, something seems to have gone tremendously long, and we don't know what it is. He's lost a lot of his army, too, hasn't he? I mean, he was originally not a naval commander.

He was a land commander. These are men who he's fought with over many campaigns, over many years, and rather like Napoleon leaving his army in Egypt, Mark Anthony's slightly gone off and left the men who depended on him, who he's fought with all these years, to be arrested by Octavian and probably come to horrible ends. Before the battle, one of his men comes to his men, comes to him and displays all of his scars and says, you know what I've done to earn these scars, you know the battles we've been through. How can you be asking you, essentially, to board a ship? Yes, there's a tremendous resistance to the idea. But he's somehow not just disappointed, but somehow surprised by the result of what happens that day. We're not quite sure why.

And from Plutarch, we know that he essentially sulk for the next few days, refuses to speak to Cleopatra, turns into something of a hermit. Where does he sulk? Where geographically is he now? Is he back in Egypt? too. Starting aboard ship and ultimately off the coast, he will build himself a little hut. Oh, a sulky hut. He'll build a special place. Wow. A little key for him. That is the first reaction in any case. The second reaction is, let's celebrate. And there's this kind of mad, you know, we know that Octavian can make his way across the ocean in the middle of a winter. So there's this mad sense of, this is our last gasp. Let's celebrate for all its worth.

Revel in that goes on in Alexandria where the two of them are reconciled. And how quickly do they realize that it's all over, that Octavian has surrounded Anthony's troops, that they've been liquidated, that all the alliances are now tilting towards Octavian and that the whole balance of power has completely changed after Acton. Is that something they realized straight away or is it something that dawns over the course of that winter? It takes a bit of time because it's a bit of time before Anthony hears that his men have all of them changed songs. So when he learns that, he realizes that he has truly lost. It's unclear whether Octavian even realizes that day that he's won the battle. That's how obscure really what happens that day tends to be. How interesting, because again, for us, it's a very final thing.

And in the Shakespeare play, it's a very final thing. It's all over after Actium. What is charming, though, all these people sort of running to turn their backs on Mark Antony, all of his allies. And Fred's Cleopatra never does. She doesn't, does she? I mean, she's a kind of wily woman who always has a plan B, but she sticks with him.

She sticks with him, and she also doesn't, she doesn't quail even after, even when the cards are very visible to them both. Antity at this point is pretty much in despair. He's not pouting. He's at least feeling defeatist. Cleopatra over these months is experimenting with ways to get to Spain. She's experimenting with ways to take her ships across land, as if she were building the Suez Canal into the Gulf of Suez and to get to India. She's experimenting with all these incredibly resourceful ideas while Anthony is off. essentially sulking. And then you have the truly Shakespearean ending where, you know, just like in

Romeo and Juliet, I mean, you really ought to take us to the end of this, where true love seems to do them both in, in a way that will seem familiar to those people who have ever read or watched Romeo and Juliet. Tell us what happens. When it's clear that Octavian is arriving, there are all kinds of attempts to make some sort of deal. Essentially, Cleopatra asks if she could possibly leave her kingdom to her children, if the children can be spared. Mark Antony says, I'll do away with myself, if that will save Cleopatra's life. Octavian isn't willing to negotiate in any of these things. Realizing that the jig is up, Mark Antony decides finally, as Octavian is approaching to

do himself in, and he attempts to stab himself with a very long knife in typical Mark Anthony fashion, he fails to kill himself. He then asks his faithful retainer to finish the job, and the retainer refuses to do so. So here you have Mark Anthony sort of half dead or half alive, Cleopatra has by this time built herself essentially a mausoleum in which she has barricaded herself, she hears of the state of Mark Antony. And this is when we have that tremendously moving scene of her, Mark Antony, the bloodied Mark Antony, placed in a basket, being lifted by pulleys up into her mausoleum where she holds him in her arms. And she does, at this point, appear to be bereft. I mean, she appears to be utterly destroyed by the loss of Warg Anthony. Over the next few

days, she will bury Mark Antony. She will barricade herself into her mausoleum. She will twice try to commit suicide herself but be stopped by Octavian's men who are sent to spend some time with her to make sure she doesn't do away with herself. Because what does he want to do, Octavian? Why is he trying to stop her from killing herself? There are two reasons, if we're reading the ancients correctly. One is that she still controls the great treasure of Egypt, which is the point of the enterprise here for Octavian. And the other is that he would very much like to display her in his triumph when he gets back to Rome, which needless to say is the last thing Cleopatra ever would want. It would be to lead her through the streets and humiliation.

An utter humiliation. Yeah. And that is obviously the end that she is trying to avoid. She desperately tries to negotiate. She does request a meeting with him. We know of that meeting from Suchark and from Dio. They're utterly irreconcilable, the two accounts of the meeting. But she does try to negotiate and gets nowhere.

It's the only meeting of which we know between Cleopatra and Octavian. She realizes at this point, essentially, that she's out of options and asks finally for one of the men who is meant to be watching over her to make sure that she doesn't do anything amiss, to take a letter to Octavian. And in the time that he's gone, she and two of her ladies in waiting or with her in the mausoleum, take some kind of poison. By the time Octavian gets the letter, he realizes what has probably happened. He races to the mausoleum, but too late, and finds that two and a half of them are dead, that one of the ladies in waiting is still alive, but that Cleopatra is not. And he panics immediately, thinks that there, or seems to think, that she has killed herself by snake bite, which is why we have this idea that she's killed with a snake.

and he calls for these ancient Libyan experts who were meant to be able to suck poison from a wound and therefore save some wood. He calls for them to come. And obviously, they work to no avail. And that is the death of Cleopatra. I mean, it is, in that respect, the stories seem pretty accurate, you know, in the big hyperbole of this grief-stricken woman who just decides to take even her ending into her own hands. It's a very operatic ending no matter how you play it. I think it's probably been played wrong because the snake always seems to return to the picture. I mean, women and snakes, you know, it's a pretty obvious combination.

If you want to indicate moral decay, you just pair a woman with a snake. And the snake was the symbol of Egypt. There are all kinds of reasons to put the snake back into the picture. Obviously, she had recourse to any number of poisons, and that's what she must have used. But it's a very operatic ending, and it's an ending which earns her the great respect of Rome because women who managed to swallow hot coals or throw themselves out windows, or in any case, prove that they had what was considered to be a kind of male courage, were always the objects of great admiration.

So in her end, finally, Cleopatra earns the respect of Rome. And Egypt, does Egypt mourn for her as well? Egypt mourns for her. It's a very tricky situation with which Octavian has left, because the ISIS imagery and the Cleopatra imagery is so tightly tied up that he can't exactly send his men around Egypt toppling ISIS statues, because that would be, you know, obviously far too provocative. So he's unable, immediately, it seems, to eradicate her image entirely in Egypt.

He will use an effigy of her during his triumph in Rome, because of course it's essential that she'd be at that triumph to represent her country. But he will get out, he will leave Egypt as quickly as he can. And obviously, at this point, Egypt loses its autonomy, which it will not regain for several thousand more years. Oh, Stacey, I mean, it's been such an extraordinary romp through history. And I just had everything in it. It does.

It's one of the stories. It's one of the great stories of history. It is. And sort of implausible in all sorts of ways. It was one of those things that you'd never anticipate. I know, I was here for all of it. It was amazing. Anyway, very huge thanks to Stacey Schiff.

And, well, that's it. That's it from us today. So it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnann. Goodbye from me, William Dremple.