The Rest Is History - 197. Antony & Cleopatra

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

After centuries of Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s relationship being told and fictionalised by Plutarch and Shakespeare alike, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook uncover what history tells us about this power couple. They reveal how the rise of Octavian as a threat caused Mark Antony to turn to Cleopatra for support. It was a relationship that had less to do with romance and love, and more to do with monetary and territory gains. The release date of the final episode in this series (Cleopatra's Downfall) is Monday 20th June. However, members of The Rest Is History Club get all episodes RIGHT NOW, so head to restishistorypod.com to sign up. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold, purple the sails, and so perfumed that the winds were lovesick with them. The oars were silver, which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made the water which they beat to follow faster as amorous of their strokes. For her own person, it beggared all description. She did lie in her pavilion, cloth of gold of tissue, her picturing that Venus where we see the fancy outwork nature. On each side her stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids, with diverse fans whose winded seemed to glow the delicate

cheeks which they did cool and what they undid did so dominic that's famous famous speech from shakespeare's antony and cleopatra yeah describing cleopatra's arrival at the port of tarsus in the south of what's now turkey to meet mark antony and at last you know fans of the romance of Tarsus in the south of what's now Turkey to meet Mark Antony. And at last, fans of the romance of Antony and Cleopatra, we have got to Antony. So in the previous two episodes, we described the context for Cleopatra. We described her relationship with Julius Caesar. And when we left her, she is pretty secure on her throne. She's bumped off anyone who might be a threat to her. But meanwhile, out in the broad world, Caesar's assassins are preparing to face down his Avengers. And there are essentially three significant players in the army of Caesar's

Avengers. There's a bit of a cipher called Lepidus. Master of the horse. Master of the horse, not much. It doesn't do much else. Then there is Julius Caesar's adopted son, who takes the name Julius Caesar, but who is generally known as Octavian. And then there is Caesar's most significant kind of second in command, his right-hand man, the man who's consul when Caesar gets murdered, Mark Antony. Well, this is the point, Tom, where I should say the thing that I've been waiting to say. Yesterday, my son and I were casting the film of Cleopatra. So Gal Gadot, as we discussed in episode one, wants to make a Cleopatra film.

So Gal Gadot is Cleopatra. My view is that Oscar Isaac, who some people may know as Moon Knight from the Marvel series or Poe Dameron from Star Wars, should be Mark Antony. And do you know who would play Octavian? No. Well, you want someone young, but somebody who appears, as Octavian did,

to be ordinary and to be kind of pleasant, but has an inner steel. Timothy Chalamet. No, it's Tom Holland. It's Spider-Man. Tom Holland. Yes, that's very good. Wouldn't he be good as Octavian?

Yes, he would. Oh, very good. But that would be terrible for you, of course, because when people Googled Tom Holland, Rome, or something. But he'd be quite good for the sales of Rubicon. He would. Oh, very good. But that would be terrible for you, of course, because when people Googled Tom Horne, Rome or something. But it'd be quite good for the sales of Rubicon. It would. Which I should just mention. So we've been selling your book on Cleopatra for children is out.

Do you mind if I just mention my book, Rubicon, which is about this very period? The audience would love it. And what's more, I should do it for you. Because if you want a sort of a deep dive into the intrigues, the Roman intrigues behind all this, the death of the Roman Republic, the great drama of the death of Julius Caesar, the fall of Pompey, the checker career of Mark Antony and the rise of Octavian, Tom's book Rubicon is absolutely the book for you. I mean, that's the book that really

made you, isn't it? That's the book that established your historical career. It is. So it's very close to my heart. It's very sweet of you to big it up like that. It doesn't have an endorsement from Ian McEwan or somebody like that. Yeah, it was his book of the year. It was in The Guardian. I remember reading it.

Top punch in the air. They're like novelists recommending it. Exactly. We all are birds of a feather. So anyway, yes. list to recommend exactly we all are birds of a feather um so anyway yes so so there's this cleopatra is sort of off stage in this at this period isn't she's gone back to alexander well she's being leaned on by the assassin so that's brutus and cassius to send a fleet and there's an opportune storm that prevents the yeah prevents the fleet from going so basically cleopatra you

know sits it out she's she's being neutral which is, just to go back to the geopolitics, to remind people of this into the first two episodes, this is such a difficult situation for her because she knows that the Romans have been eyeing up Egypt for so long. She knows that if she makes one wrong choice, and that's the end of her, her dynasty, and Egypt's independence probably. So sitting it out is probably better than jumping into the civil war, but still risky.

Yeah, still risky. And so she's watching as, you know, it's a bit of an action replay, isn't it? Caesar and Pompey are farceless. So there's another showdown in Greece, this time at Philippi, in which Antony, really, rather than Octavian, am I right in saying? Wins the day against Brutus. Octavian's sick in his tent. Yeah.

Tom Holland is sick in his tent. Which is later used by Anthony to beat Octavian, isn't he? He says, you're just a weed and you sat it out pretending to be ill. So she gets the news of all this. And then Octavian and Anthony do this division. And Lepidus. I mean, Lepidus gets North Africa. But let's park Lep do this division and lepidus i mean the sofia lepidus gets north africa but let's let's park lepidus so lepidus gets phased out we'll just forget about him we'll forget about him so essentially the world gets divided in two

yeah and anthony at this point tom i'm right in thinking am i that anthony appears to be very much the senior partner the east is richer more cosmopolitan, more cities. Well, also, Italy is a massive poison chalice because there are vast numbers of legions on both sides and they have to be settled. They have to be found land. So that is going to require whoever goes back to Italy to requisition land, which will make him incredibly unpopular. So that's why Antony thinks, I will go off to the East. I will, you know, screw gold out of all these kings and queens. And then I'll have a crack at the Parthians, the old enemy. Win glory that way. And the screwing the gold, that's why he sends this bloke, Quintus Delius, to Alexandria and says, I want Cleopatra to come to Tarsus.

Because he's basically wants to screw gold out of her. Yeah. Isn't he? Yeah. He wants to exploit her. Because that passage you read at the beginning from Shakespeare, that is Shakespeare's, I mean, frankly, almost word for word rendition of Plutarch describing. I mean, we already had Cleopatra in the last episode in her famous carpet incarnation or sort of bed sack incarnation rolling out to Greek Julius Caesar. So now she makes this tremendous entrance at Tarsus.

Yes. She's dressed as, I mean, there are different, do you think she was dressed as Isis? Well, some people say dressed as Aphrodite, but she's certainly dressed as a goddess, isn't she? She's both because there's no sharp division. She's multiple things. The context for this is that Antony is laying down the law and there's a lot of big dick energy here. He is the guy on the scene. He is making sure that everybody knows that he is the top guy. He's summoning Cleopatra to make it clear to Cleopatra that she has to do what he says. And so for Cleopatra as queen, it's a humiliation that she is having to answer the summons. It's about making clear to Antony and

to everybody that she is a queen and perhaps a goddess. And so therefore, she's not someone to be bossed around like that. But at the same time, Plutarch says this. She is doing what she did with Caesar, which is trying to appeal to her understanding of this guy's character. So she's met Antony. She knows Antony. It's not like they've never met before. She's very, very familiar with Antony. What's Antony like?

Because Antony is not your standard, serious, sober Roman general, is he? He's a very shrewd political player. He is hard-nosed brutal he's very charismatic he likes a drink uh he identifies with dionysus yes he loves dressing up he loves dressing up so there's all these kind of stories about how he dresses up as dionysus and frolics around the acropolis in athens i mean he really is the Justin Trudeau of Roman generals. Kind of. He's a very efficient general. This is why he's come to power with Caesar.

But compared to Caesar, he is coarse. He's not as an intellectual in the way that Caesar was. And there's a deep strain of vulgarity. And if you listen to that account, the Shakespeare mediating Plutarch, it has the kind of beauty of great poetry. But if you boil it down and think, well, what would that actually look like? It would be a bit vulgar. It's all bling, isn't it? It's all bling.

Because then she throws a series of parties for him. And if you read the Plutarch and the other accounts, it's kind of golden couches golden crockery tapestries yeah the lighting is arranged so everything looks purple and gold so it looks like a kind of russian oligarchs boudoir and at the end of the evening she's always saying to him well you say the gold plates have some more you know gold tablecloths or whatever but anthony loves all this he doesn't see through it he just thinks oh this is brilliant loads of bling i think he absolutely sees through it and i think that if anyone is exploiting anyone at this stage it's antony is exploiting cleopatra but that does change quite quickly it does but but at this stage antony is if he wants the money he needs to pay off his legions yeah if cleopatra wants to shut

chuck gold-plated him brilliant you know and he can sleep with her at the same time she gets a quid pro quo which is that he agrees to wipe out her sister, who you described as a baggage in the previous episode, Arsinoe. It's quid pro quo, as it was with Caesar and Cleopatra as well. But what Cleopatra also dangles in front of Antony is what she dangled in front of Caesar, which is the prospect of a kind of dynastic union. So a kind of mutant Roman Hellenistic, Republican monarchical kind of fusion. And the way in which Cleopatra frames this is by, you know, it's alluded to in the Shakespeare, you alluded to it, by casting herself as a goddess, by casting herself as Isis, by casting herself as Aphrodite, by hinting at the role that she

plays as the Queen of the Heavens. Because of course, if Antony sleeps with the Queen of the Heavens, then that dignifies him and casts him as Heracles or Dionysus or whoever, whichever god, Osiris, whichever god he wants to play. And so Antony plays with, you know, he's starting to toy with that. Well, he loves this, doesn't he? But the truth is that he is not head over heels with her. You know, in Shakespeare's play, it opens with, this is the period where it opens. He is kind of hanging out with her. Cleopatra has this kind of the famous line, oh, on the sudden the Roman thought hath struck him. You know, Antony needs to go back and kind of resume his responsibilities. That's not what happened.

Antony is absolutely on top of his brief at this point. He's in Alexandria screwing money out. What I was about to say, so this was in Tarsus in southern Turkey, what's now southern Turkey, in the late summer of 41. At the end of 41, Anthony goes to Alexandria. Interestingly, he doesn't go as Julius Caesar did, surrounded by soldiers and all that sort of thing. He goes with no pomp for a kind of winter holiday. A city break. Yeah, a city break.

And he dresses as an ordinary citizen. He doesn't go surrounded by pageantry and stuff. And that's when you get the first stories about the two of them having banquets and living the sort of life of Riley, stories about them dressing up and going out on the town and all this kind of thing. Now, at that point, Tom, don't you think at that point, what was initially a romance of convenience and romance is using, I'm stretching the term, a relationship of convenience. The fact that he is there on the city break over the winter months, that there is clearly some kind of spark there that goes beyond the nakedly

political. Unquestionably, there's a spark there. But I think unquestionably, Antony is making the running. So one piece of evidence for that is that Cleopatra has reappropriated Cyprus. Yes. Had been taken from her. Antony takes it back. He's not handing out things to her. He's taking from her. It's all take, take, take. And if he can take from her, you know, erotic pleasure and divine status and dynastic pretensions, then that's great. And it's telling. I think you said that with too much relish. It's telling that just as Cleopatra gets pregnant with caesar she also gets pregnant

with anthony and being cleopatra you know she never does anything by half she gives him twins alexander helios alexander the sun yeah and cleopatra selene the moon yeah but obviously the name alexander that's the name we talked about these podcasts right at the beginning as the sequel to our alexander the podcast, and everybody thinks they are living through the sequel to the life of Alexander the Great. And obviously that is a name. Cleopatra's imperial ambitions are right there in that name, aren't they? They are. For Antony, it's equivalent of a kind of dog weeing on the lamppost.

He's marking out his territory because having done it, having got her pregnant, he then leaves and he doesn't see her for four years. Well, that's the fascinating thing, isn't it? So that's what's sort of missing in your standard sort of glamorised, ultra-romantic versions of the story, that he then, he goes off, he goes back to Athens where his wife Fulvia is. Fulvia dies. Fulvia is a terrifying woman. So we mentioned Cicero in the previous episode. Cicero and Antony hated each other. Cicero had been sensationally rude about Antony. Cicero had also had a running feud with Fulvia's first husband, Clodius.

So Fulvia really hated Cicero. And when Cicero gets beheaded on the orders of the Triumvirs, the Antony, Lepidus and Octavian, his severed head is taken to Fulvia and she takes out her hairpins and stabs the tongue that uttered the orations against Antony up against Octavian when he comes back to try and sort out all the land for the legions. Fulvia kind of raises a war against him. I mean, she's a very, very formidable woman. And clearly, Antony likes very strong, powerful women. To use your terminology, Tom, she really is a baggage.

She really is a baggage. Well, yeah, she's a very, very strong, potent, formidable woman. But she drops dead, doesn't she? She does, yeah. And Anthony's reaction to that is not, oh, great, I can marry Cleopatra. It's actually to form a marriage alliance with his fellow triumvir and his partner and rival, Octavian. He marries Octavia. He does. So they have a conference, a summit at he marries Octavia. He does.

So they have a conference, a summit at Brandisium on the hill of Italy, at which Lepidus is there. And the son of Pompey the Great, who's been kind of running a rackety, piratical kind of kingdom based in Sicily. And they construct what's supposed to be a kind of concordat. But effectively, what Antony and Octavian are doing is dividing the world between them. And from this point on, I mean, Sextus Pompey gets eliminated very rapidly after this. Lepidus gets parked. He becomes Pontifex Maximus, so the chief priest, but he becomes a nobody. And Octavian goes back to Rome. And after all the hostility and the unpopularity that he's had to endure, kind of settling the legions, he is now starting to bond with the

Roman people. He's starting to tickle their tummies, give them what they want, provide them with the assurance of peace. Antony goes back to the East. But as you say, the symbol of their alliance and of their willingness to live with each other is that Antony marries Octavian's sister, Octavia. But that goes quite well, doesn't it? She's a lovely person. Yeah, because Octavia is a very, very impressive woman. Yeah. She's studied philosophy. She's intelligent.

She's beautiful. Yeah, she's kind. Kind and incredibly loyal to Antony. And she's loyal to Antony right the way through. For those first three or four years, he's not ostentatiously pining for Cleopatra. I mean, Cleopatra's forgotten. No, absolutely not. So they're there in Athens.

He dresses up as Dionysus. All that kind of stuff. He's being nice to people. Plays at being a philosopher, all that kind of thing. Yeah. So in a way, at this point, 40, 39, 38 BC, the world is in balance. Octavian has the West, Cleopatra is in Egypt and just doing her thing and organizing grain shipments and studying the Nile and building temples.

Antony is in the East with Octavia. And I suppose, do you think that situation, Tom, was inherently unstable? Or do you think that stability could have persisted? I think it's inherently unstable. Because of the rivalry between Octavian and Antony, do you think? Because I think Octavian was too ambitious and too shrewd to tolerate the idea of not ruling the whole world. I think Antony might have been.

I mean, they're both pretty terrifying men. Octavian, who we haven't really talked about because he obviously is going to go on to become Augustus, arguably one of the central characters in all human history. You know, right up there in terms of, you and I were asked the other day

at a public event when we, about political leadership and he is the absolute acme, the paradigmatic example of political leadership. But Octavian, and the extraordinary thing about him, I mean, I said he could be played by Tom Holland, by Peter Parker, is that he is young, he is untried, he's obscure. I mean, by this point, he's had a political education and a half. Sure, he was connected by families of Julius Caesar, but he's not a great commander. He's not. You know, he inherits Caesar's name and Caesar's money.

Yeah. And he's 18. You know, he goes straight to Rome and he uses this and he plays everybody off. You know, he double crosses Cicero. At one point he's fighting Antony, then he makes an alliance with anthony he is a politician of absolute transcendent genius by the the kind of the early 30s he is in a position to make his his wealth and his status as the effective master of rome really really tell really count and do you think tom so you've got this guy in Italy who has Anthony previously undoubtedly looked down on as a sort of beardless boy who had been too ill to fight at the crucial Battle of Philippi and who is transforming himself into this incredibly adept politician. he feels he has to do something spectacular to compete and that's what or do you think he always wanted to invade Parthia which is this great fatal move that will change all of their lives

I think that it's the kind of the classic situation where you have the elder statesman who starts to feel threatened by the kind of the young upstart I think that's absolutely part of it but I think it's also it's about claiming the mantle of caesar uh octavian has obviously done that because he is literally you know he's he's not known as octavian yeah he's called caesar he is julius caesar that's his name and anthony wants to to take over the role that caesar was going to do before his assassination and conquer parthia um and that has a kind of mythic resonance that again plays with all this stuff that he's doing with Cleopatra because you know that Alexander conquered Persia there's the sense that Dionysus came from the east at the head of a great army so there's kind of echoes there uh you know it's a

great labor like Hercules did so there's all kinds of of reasons for why he wants to do this you know as you as you intimate it's really the kind of the great turning point in the relationship of Antony with Octavian, but also, and not coincidentally, with Cleopatra. So perhaps we should come to that after the break. We're in 37 BC. Antony wants to invade Parthia. He's about to be reunited with Cleopatra. And we will see you after the break.

Don't go away. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. So, Mark Antony has it in mind to invade Parthia.

This is the Persian Empire, basically, isn't it, Tom? It's the inherited state to the Persian Empire that had been overthrown by Alexander. So the Parthians come from the north of Iran. They're a kind of aristocracy, warrior aristocracy. They are the superpower in their own minds anyway, aren't they? They are a lesser power than Rome, but they are too formidable to be readily digestible. Their military is of a kind that Rome is not suited to fighting. So Rome's strength is obviously its infantry, its heavy infantry, the legions, highly trained, the most efficient infantry in the world. But the Parthian

strength is very mobile horse archers. And this has already led to a crushing defeat for a Roman army at the Battle of Cari, where Caesar and Pompey's erstwhile colleague Crassus had come a cropper. And so that's also a part of what Antony wants to do. He wants revenge for Crassus. But he needs money. And the person to get it from is his ex-lover. His old flame, Cleopatra. Cleopatra. So Cleopatra, all this time... I mean, the reason we're telling so much of it through the Roman lens is because that's the sources, as we've said in previous episodes. The narrative sources are Roman. So she appears when the Romans meet her. And then when she's off stage, we don't really know. So as far as we know, she has been in Alexandria quite happily,

bringing up her children. And I think up and down the nile so yeah she is dedicating temples she's being sculpted as a pharaoh on various that's right there's a temple egypt a dendera that shows her with caesarian yeah ptolemy caesar so she is playing the role of pharaoh with great gusto and doing it very successfully they're very very successful she's not being kicked out there aren't riots and rebellions of any significance against her. I mean, she's loved, I think. Yeah. She's loved by the Egyptians.

So that's all going splendidly. But then what appears to be a triumphant moment, but actually turns out to be sort of bitterly ironic, she is summoned by Antony to Antioch in this magnificent setting, beautiful city. The great capital of the Seleucid Empire. So the extinct rival of the Ptolemies she arrives and it's at this point that Antony starts to make Tom I would argue

some poor decisions strategically poor decisions so first of all she pitches up with the twins that she had had his twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene who are about three I think he acknowledges them doesn't he as his own he does and something else that has happened is that octavia has also given her a child but it's a girl so cleopatra has given him a boy so he does this presumably because he's desperate for cleopatra's money do you think yeah definitely and also octavian is becoming more overt in his hostility as well yeah but then But then the other thing he does, so there are two moments called donations in Cleopatra's career, and this is the first,

the donations of Antioch, where Antony basically awards her a lot of territory. So what's now Lebanon, Gaza, Silesia, Cyrene in Libya, the lands around Jericho,

which are very rich in balsam trees, which are prized. Yeah, it takes us from Herod. Yeah, Herod's not very... Herod, of course, is a... I mean, we won't sort of probably spend too much time on Herod, but Herod is a sort of a minor player in all this, isn't he? Cleopatra and Herod hate each other.

At this point, Antony is giving her a lot of territory that used to belong to the Ptolemaic Empire. Suddenly, she's ruling much bigger. What's going on here? These are territories that have timber. So particularly Lebanon, famously. And timber enables you to build a fleet so anthony is looking ahead because what's happening in italy is that octavian and his uh right hand man uh best friend marcus gripper have built a massive naval base in the bay of naples which ostensibly they've used to defeat the young Pompey. And they have done that.

But obviously, if there's going to be a war between the two great leaders of the world, sea power is going to be crucial. And Antony at this point doesn't have a fleet. So essentially, he's subcontracting the task of building a fleet to Cleopatra, I think is what's going on. I think that's the prime. So even at this stage, he's looking ahead to a showdown for the future of the world. Yeah, I think so.

And he needs Cleopatra as his partner. Yeah. Despite the fact he's married already. I think Octavian's hostility, the fact that Octavia has only given him a girl rather than a boy, and Cleopatra has given him a son, and the fact that, you know, Cleopatra's just very, very rich, and she brings all this kind of potential for a kind of monarchical type rule, I think it persuades him, I'm going to tilt that way. And of course, at this point, if you're Cleopatra, this looks great. So she adopts a new calendar in

Egypt. She says, this is year one, not year 16 in my reign, to sort of mark the fact that it's a new empire, as it were, or a revived empire. And they have these very complicated titles, don't they? So previously been Cleopatra, the father-loving goddess, and now she's the father-loving, homeland-loving goddess to sort of cement the fact that she is the mother of the country who has rebuilt the empire and all this stuff. And if you're Cleopatra, it looks at this point, what are we, 37 BC, as if you've played your cards pretty well, no? I mean, Antony, there's no reason to doubt. I think you've played your cards dazzlingly well.

Yeah. I mean, you're the partner and a guy who looks like he's going to take over the world. So off Antony goes in the spring of 36 to Parthia, and he's going to go through kind of vaguely what's now Armenia. He's got a deal with it. Well, it was Armenia then. Yeah. Well, Armenia sort of shifts. Yeah. go through kind of vaguely what's now armenia he's got a deal with armenia then yeah well armenia sort of shift yeah yeah um he's got a deal with the armenian king who's art of as these cleopatra goes with him as far as the euphrates and then turns back to so that she can inspect

her new kingdoms sort of lebanon stuff and off anthony goes to attack the province of media at atropatine which is um sort of i guess northwestern iran tom that's probably about right which is where the party has come from now in the meantime cleopatra goes back to alexandria she has a fourth child so and she and anthony clearly got it on again yeah um she has a child called ptolemy philadelphus and i think that's so suggestive the name because it's the second ptolemy at the peak of called Ptolemy Philadelphus and I think that's so suggestive the name because it's the second Ptolemy at the peak of the Ptolemaic empire yeah it's called Ptolemy Philadelphus the first one is Alexander so it couldn't be clearer what her ambitions are but and she's obviously waiting for news from from Parthia that all has gone well and Anthony

has carried all before him but it doesn't quite work out does, does it? Basically, it all goes wrong for Antony. He comes back with the tail between his legs, and Cleopatra essentially has to come and kind of rescue him. Well, he turns up near Beirut. So she gets a message to come and see him in Beirut and bring basically clothes, supplies. Because Beirut is a Roman colony, so it's as Roman a place as you'll get in the Near East.

And supposedly she arrives and basically his men are bedraggled miserable anthony's kind of staring at his feet and crying and it's all gone horribly wrong they've got stuck in the mountains they get to a citadel called fraspa and they don't manage to take it and then they decide to go back again sort of napoleon in moscow or something and they freeze in the mountains. Anthony, at one point, has a breakdown and thinks he wants to kill himself. And suddenly, in this one moment, all the aura of invincibility

and kind of inevitable triumph just has completely disappeared from him. And I would say, I don't know if you think of this, I would say Mark Antony is never really the same man again after the failure of the Parthian expedition. Well, as you say, the aura of a kind of military prowess has received a knock, but I think he actually recovers pretty well. Essentially what he decides at this point is he's going to go all in with Cleopatra. You know, he is going to play the Hellenistic card. He's going to draw on the incredible resources that the Greek kingdoms in the Near East have always had, and of which Cleopatra

is the living embodiment. Of course, the relationship is now a much more equal one. He is a diminished figure. Cleopatra, her status has been raised. And it's from this point on, I think, that Cleopatra can credibly dream of establishing a dominion that would be a kind of Hellenistic Roman co-dominion that would bring her to a pinnacle of power and fame and glory, greater probably than she had dared to dream of. So Antony, he's failed to take to take path here but he does have a kind of consolation expedition doesn't he a couple of years later armenia has armenia yeah he captures the bloke art of astes who'd previously been his ally who he blames for the failure of his expedition he comes back to alexandria and i think this whatever the spring of 34 and then there's

these two extraordinary events so one is he holds a triumph in Alexandria. So the Romans call it a triumph because, you know, this is a standard ritual within the streets of Rome and you can only hold a triumph in Rome. Yeah. But the Ptolemies have had this tradition of military parades in Egypt as well. Because the Romans take against this, don't they? They're shocked. Octavian does. Because when Antony's come back from parthia octavia also has offered to come and to bring troops you know because this is meant to be the agreement yes of course and anthony says to her no don't come and this is an open insult this is the one of the first points where roman historians say he was bewitched by cleopatra she had a hissy fit and broke down in tears and basically browbeat him into doing this.

We'll come to how this is all being spun in Rome perhaps later on. But essentially in Rome, Octavian spin doctors are saying he has become emasculated because this is what happens to weak Romans in the East. The East is wealthy. It's effeminate. It's sapping. Even the greatest heroes succumb. And Antony has been comparing himself to Heracles. But one of the notorious episodes in Heracles' life is when he becomes a slave of a queen called Omphale. And Omphale puts on Heracles' lion skin, the armor that he's been always traditionally wears, and makes Heracles put on her dress and spin at the

loom. People start to say, this is what's happened to Antony. He is, you know, Cleopatra is on Fale. Antony is an effeminized Heracles. And essentially he's become a traitor to Rome. And so this spin that the parades that have been held in Alexandria are a deliberate parody of the triumphs in Rome and therefore Antony's disrespecting Rome and Roman tradition. You know, it's kind of, it's brilliant. As you say, there is a second episode, which is even, provides even more grist to Octavian's propaganda mill.

So this, again, is a brilliant example of how, you know, from Cleopatra's point of view, this is her apotheosis, the second episode. But of course, for Octavian, it is an absolute gift. And this is, thisotheosis the second episode but of course for octavian it is an absolute gift and this is this happens at the gymnasium the area where people would stroll and do sports and all this kind of thing you know because it's a greek city alexandria and it's called the donations of alexandria isn't it and it's this incredible if you read their descriptions this incredible spectacle where people just all pile in so it's a great sort of public festivity and anthony leads on he comes on stage with

cleopatra and their children and julius caesar's uh son caesarian and he basically introduces them all to the crowd according to the sources and says caesarian is the true heir of julius caesar alexander helios is the king of Armenia and Media. Even though he doesn't rule them. Exactly. Cleopatra Selene is the queen of Crete and Cyrene. And little Ptolemy Philadelphus, who's a toddler, is the king of Phoenicia, Syria, and Silesia.

And they're all dressed in kind of national dress of these places. I mean, Ptolemy Philadelphus has basically been given the path in empire, which Antony's just failed to conquer. So the whole thing is a kind of, on one level, castle in the sky, but on the other level, it's presenting Antony's rule as something that is, in a way, not founded exclusively on Roman predominance. So he's offering a kind of, to all the peoples of the East, a model of what a Roman-Egyptian kind of fusion might look like. Well, it's a sort of successor to Alexander's empire, isn't it? Kind of. It's Greek and it's Asian.

It includes Persia. And yet his thing, so from Cleopatra's point of view, this really is the apogee, because she is being told that she and her children rule all the East, are the masters of the world and all this stuff, even though they don't actually control half of these lands. But how can Antony not see that from the point of view of Rome, this is the most colossal PR disaster to be giving away all this territory to kind of Eastern princelings? I mean, at this point, or do you think he's just desperate and he doesn't care? No, I don't. I mean, he's got all to play for. Essentially, the challenge that has faced Julius Caesar and all his heir, everyone who's followed after him, is how do you square a Republican system of government with a universal empire? This is this is the problem and this is a challenge that people in the east have been facing as well and that you know they're richer

they're kind of more antiquated there are traditions there that can be exploited caesar had recognized that anthony has recognized that anthony is clumsier and less kind of ideologically proficient than caesar had been caesar had up murdered, but the temptation had been such that he was willing to have a go. Basically, Antony is tempted by, you know, it's the same temptation. It's the idea of stepping beyond the kind of resentful kind of Republican traditions that you get in Rome, where everyone is always jealous of each other. It provides the kind of the dazzling prospect that you might be able to establish a monarchical tradition, a dynasty, draw on all this kind of the dazzling prospect that you might be able to establish a monarchical tradition, a dynasty, draw on all this kind of great inheritance of Middle Eastern monarchy,

Near Eastern monarchy, Greek monarchy, while at the same time remaining Roman. And in the long run, this is basically where Rome ends up, you know, by the fourth century, fifth century, Constantinople would be a city that in a way is pretty comprehensible to Antony. And his only problem is that he's 400 years too early. Yes, to square this kind of global rule with Roman traditions is a challenging, challenging thing. The approach that you're going to take is basically, by this point, based on where the two challenges are situated. So Antony is situated in Alexandria. So obviously, if those traditions are to hand, those are the ones that he's got to play with.

You know, he doesn't have any choice. Octavian is back in Rome. He can play the Roman card. We should stop our third episode here. And when we look at the fourth episode, we should come back and we should look at what Octavian is saying about Antony and Cleopatra, because this is really crucial to how posterity has come to see them and their romance and everything. Agreed. Could I take us out with a poem by the great Alexandrian poet, Constantine Cavafy? He briefly stayed in Liverpool as a child. So he's a kind of scouse Alexandrian. He was obsessed with this

period of history, with the Hellenistic period of Alexandria. And he wrote a fabulous poem about the donations of Alexandria called The Alexandrian Kings. The Alexandrians flocked to view the children of Cleopatra, Kazarian and his little brothers, Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first time had been brought out to the gymnasium to be proclaimed kings there, amidst the gleaming company of soldiers on parade. Alexander, him they named king of Armenia, Media and the Parthians. Ptolemy, him they named king of Cilicia, Syria and Phoenicia. Caesarian was standing furthest forward, dressed in rose-toned

silk, on his breast a clutch of hyacinths, his belt paired lines of sapphires and amethysts, his shoes laced by white ribbons pinned with rose-blush pearls, him they named higher than the younger ones, him they named King of Kings. The Alexandrians certainly understood that these were words and histrionics. But the day was warm and poetic, the sky a clear wide blue, the Alexandrian gymnasium a triumphant artistic feat. The courtier's luxury at its crest, Caesarian all grace and beauty, the son of Cleopatra, blood of the Larchids. And the Alexandrians raced to the festive name day and worked themselves into raptures and called out cheers in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew, enchanted by the lovely spectacle.

Even though they very clearly knew the value of these things, what inane words made up these titled kings. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news

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