Antony and Cleopatra Part 2: Roman Politics
When Romulus slew Remus, offering the blood of a king and a brother to the gods, he did so out of neither envy or hatred, but of piety. In the ancient world, when festivals commenced, oxen were sacrificed. On the eve of battles, goats and chickens were gutted and their entrails examined. But on an occasion such as the founding of Rome, the Eternal City, an offering worthy of the city’s future greatness must be presented to the divine. So exquisite was the flesh of Remus, that not only did the gods forgive Romulus for fratricide, but also granted Rome their highest blessing, consecrating the sacrificial grounds as a sanctuary in which the power of law and republican virtues held sway over all men. This was the Pomerium of Rome, the inviolable heart of the Roman Republic in which weapons and foreigners alike were forbidden. When Tarquinius Superbus, the last monarch to rule over Rome, was expelled, the Romans added a new creed to their Pomerium—no sovereign may tarnish the sanctity of Romulus’s altar with their unwanted presence.
And thus, as the triumphal procession of Marcus Antonius and Kleopatra VII Philopatros proceeded toward the boundaries of the Pomerium, the masses watched in hushed silence. It was just months prior that they had joined Caesar Octavianus in denouncing Kleopatra as a public enemy, a foreign menace, a malicious queen, a godless blasphemer, and a cavorting whore. And now, seated high atop a palanquin, the oriental monarch was about to set foot in the most sacred of sanctuaries, where her presence was by nature a horrid violation of Rome’s ancient creed. She would not be the first monarch to enter the Pomerium since Tarquinius Superbus, but others marched barefoot, bound in clanking chains and fated for execution, whereas Kleopatra was garbed in Tyrian purple, her brows adorned with a splendid gemstone diadem and her couriers loudly proclaiming her royal titles. Behind her rode on a fine stallion her precocious firstborn, the product of her union with Gaius Iulius Caesar—Ptolemaios Caesarion, basileios and pharaoh of Aegypt. He was likewise condemned by Octavianus and the Roman populace as an unwanted bastard, the result of his mother’s uncontrollable lust. Now he sat clad in gleaming panoply, his pale features and pale eyes bearing an uncanny resemblance to his Roman father. Three other horses trailed Caesarion’s steed, and they belonged to Aleksandros Helios, basileios of Armenia, Kleopatra Selene, basileisa of Kyrenaika, and Ptolemaios Philodelphos, basileios of Syria and Parthia, all of whom technically had no legal rights as they were not born of a Roman womb.
Caesar Octavianus might have gone, but his phantom lingered in his old seat of power, casting a long shadow of suspicion and prejudice over the victorious Antonio-Kleopatrid regime. Xenophobia and misogyny, as well as an inherent disdain for monarchy, had long been prevalent in Roman culture. Octavianus had expertly weaponised them to his advantage, turning the men of the west against his eastern rivals. In the Orient, Antonius and Kleopatra ruled over peoples who adored them for their Hellenic identity, but in the west, they had to govern men who were repulsed by that very same quality. It was unlikely that Rome would ever truly accept Kleopatra. She was too alien, too feminine, and too powerful, and the constituency and culture which she represented had historically been anathema in Roman senatorial politics. But her children were different. The son of Caesar and the half-Hellenic children of Antonius would be granted Roman citizenship—an honour never before afforded to vassal monarchs. But even then, they could not remain in Rome for long during the tumult brought about by the conclusion of the civil wars, nor could they ever participate in Roman politics. Kleopatra and her dynasty belonged to the Hellenic east, and it was there that they must rule, avoiding direct affiliation with the Senate and far away from the public gaze. Marcus Antonius must pacify the populations of Western Europe without the aid of his brilliant consort.
But Marcus Antonius would not have to rule by his lonesome. Along with the three foreign children he sired with Kleopatra, he was father to four more fully Roman children—Marcus Antonius Antyllus, Iullus Antonius, brothers born of Fulvia, and the two daughters, Antonia Major and Antonia Minor, begotten from Antonius’s unhappy marriage with Octavia, Caesar Octavianus’s elder sister. This second generation of Romans formed the solid foundation for a prosperous political dynasty, provided that Marcus Antonius could establish it without incurring the ire of his Roman brethren.
Caesar Augustus had legalised his autocratic powers by shunning all association with traditional monarchy, synthesising instead from the old magistracies a new office that granted him all the executive privileges he needed to rule the Oecumene. Imperator Caesar Augustus was an entirely republican title, for it was merely the conglomeration of a variety of civil posts and honours duly granted to him by a grateful Senate to oversee the restoration of the Roman Republic. The young man understood well the sentiments of his peers—the very same who assassinated Gaius Iulius Caesar for his apparent desire to be enthroned as rex. Marcus Antonius now faced the same predicament as his old friend, only that his ties to monarchy were far more intimate. As husband to a Hellenic basileisa and father to a new generation of oriental sovereigns, Antonius would have no choice but to embrace despotism. Unlike Caesar Augustus, who provided the senatorial aristocracy with an ideological compromise, Marcus Antonius would have had to decimate the ranks of the Senate if he was to avoid Caesar’s fate. Another round of proscriptions was likely to have be ordered, purging Rome of the regime’s enemies once and for all. Many of the greatest and noblest families of Rome would have now faced extinction, the blood of their last scions flowing down the streets of the Capitoline, and those that remained would have had to rely entirely upon the Antonio-Kleopatrid dynasty to gain political prominence. Whereas Caesar Augustus bound the swirling whirlpool of conflicting interests at the heart of the Roman Empire to himself through sublime politics, Marcus Antonius did so with brute force. He would then be appointed to an extraordinary post much like the one Caesar Augustus created—tribunician sacrosanct status, consular legislative powers, and military command of all available legions—and most likely endowed the same illustrious titles of “imperator” and “augustus” by an obedient Senate. His regality might then be conferred through the adoption of sacred religious titles such as pontifex maximus and rex sacrorum, which, like the Hellenic monarchical traditions associate earthly authority with personal ties to the divine.
Once again, although their methods diverged greatly from one another, the Augustan and the Antonio-Kleopatrid regimes achieved nearly identical results in Rome. Both took control of the quarrelsome senatorial aristocracy by establishing complete dominance, and then exploited the cumbersome mechanisms of the old constitution of the city state to legitimise their statuses as despots. This historical isomorphism was not born of coincidence, but caused by the greater unseen forces which directed the course of Roman history. The warlords of the first century BCE were products of their time—champions of the legionaries whose lands were stolen by wealthy magnates, who turned Italia into a patchwork of vast lucrative slave plantations assembled with the spoils of conquest. The commanding officers always received the vast majority of the loots come the fall of cities and kingdoms, whilst the legionaries were awarded only their meagre share. The influx of wealth was so ludicrous, and the distribution of it so unequal, that Roman society was utterly overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of its income. The constitution designed to govern a city state by ancient statesmen was crushed by Rome’s own greatness come the second century BCE, and when sacred traditions and republican precedences broke down, greed and ambition consumed the hearts of senators and commoners alike. To restore their power and partake in enjoying the spoils of empire, the masses who filled the ranks of the legions looked to their own generals—creating rival power bases in distant provinces with the plundered wealth of barbarian nations. Gaius Marius, Gaius Iulius Caesar, Caesar Octavianus, and Marcus Antonius were all champions of this same movement. They proposed laws which restored lands and political capital to the poor whilst depriving the rich of their privileges. In response, the elites of Rome combined their resources to create champions of their own. Publius Cornelius Sulla, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Gaius Cassius Longinus acted as the swords of the aristocracy, carving out Rome’s future in the battlefields of civil strife.
There was only one solution to this world-shattering social issue—destruction of the aristocracy. Men once said veritably that the Roman Senate was an assembly of kings, for each senator was taught since birth to believe in his own superiority—a supreme confidence which imbued them with limitless ambition. A Roman man was taught since birth to dominate his peers, both in battle and in politics, and thus it was the goal of every senator to rule over others. The genius of the republican constitution had been its ability to direct this aristocratic aggression against external forces, so that in the sacred space of the Pomerium harmony and unity could be preserved. There were more than five hundred senators, and the Cursus Honorum had been designed so as to prevent anyone from accumulating enough prestige to overshadow all others, and thus there was equilibrium.
Once Rome defeated Carthage and the age of conquests dawned, the senators gained access to the wealth of empires. It was inevitable, therefore, for the men of the senatorial aristocracy to ride the undercurrents of social tension, and wage wars upon one another for supremacy. Although senators often crudely aligned their policies with the interests of a few constituent groups, their disputes were never of the ideological nature. The civil wars were fought not because Marcus Antonius and Caesar Augustus had different visions for the future of Rome—although their divergent political philosophies contributed to the escalation of their disagreement—the ambitions and demands of their benefactors and constituencies were the primary catalysts for civil strife. Both regimes understood the realities of geopolitics, and knew well the direction in which Rome must evolve if it was to recover from the fiery traumas of the first century BCE, hence we need not believe that Antonius would implement measures that contradict his rival’s. They were both enlightened heads of state, supported by regimes that comprised of men from the same senatorial class, and knew well from observation as well as experience the necessity to deprive the senators of their autonomy.
The point where fiction and history differs once again could be found in the specific mechanisms of imperial administration. Kleopatra and the Hellenic traditions which she embodied exerted profound influence over Antonius, and for the first time in this series, an individual’s personality was to decide the narrative, for Antonius alone was receptive to the advice of Kleopatra. Basileios Aleksandros, and all his Diadochoi, governed through charisma and brilliance, as well as an informal body of advisors known as the “philoi”, or “friends”, whom the monarch appointed at will to serve in powerful administrative posts. Although the burden of imperial governance was shared by the philoi, control of the military belonged to the basileios and basileios only. Caesar Augustus’s regime was highly reminiscent of this Hellenic model of autocracy, as he held exclusive control of all legioned provinces whilst sharing those devoid of arms. Marcus Antonius’s empire had long been organised in a different manner. The richest and most productive lands, found in the Orient, had all been assigned to Kleopatra and her Hellenic aristocracy to govern in Rome’s stead. She held her own court in Aleksandreia, thus alleviating Antonius of the need to manage two frontiers simultaneously. Antonius would hence have no need to further divide the western provinces, especially due to the lingering resentment in these breeding grounds of warlords. Just as Caesar Augustus kept a watchful eye on the east throughout his reign, Antonius would have had to guard his authority in the west with vigilance. As such, the concept of governorships awarded to proconsuls and propraetors would be abolished, replaced by a new network of equestrian and senatorial legates who owed their appointments directly to the imperial regime. The Antonio-Kleopatrid administration in the west would therefore share many similarities with the ways in which the Diadochoi ruled Aleksandros’s old empire, with the ruler acting as the nexus of all political power, and from whom all prospective senators and equestrians must derive their right to rule.
Artist Credit: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4OA9L
Veni Vidi Veritatem 