Plutarch informs us that Rome never witnessed Cleopatra humiliated in Octavian' s triumph: her death pre-empted that.1 While pro-Octavian propaganda succeeded in reviling the Egyptian queen to Roman audiences during her life, the Roman sources show us that in death Cleopatra could be even more demonized. To the poets and elegists, Cleopatra's roles were multiplied and embellished - she was portrayed (never by name) not only as an insatiable lover and power-crazed queen, but also as a controversial subject to be inveighed against in Vergil'sAeneid, Horace's Odes, and Propertius' Elegies.2 Indeed, the reputation she was commonly to have in later centuries (as guileful arch- seductress and royal courtesan) was almost entirely a creation of this propaganda and scathing Roman traditions of her. Bradford (1971: 11) explains that 'those who are defeated rarely have the opportunity ofwriting their own version of history, since it is usually written by the victors. As with Carthage, so with Cleopatra: the biassed accounts we possess were written by the conquering Romans. That she was finally defeated in her attempt to keep Egypt free from Roman rule is recorded by the poets and historians who lived under the Roman Emperors, the first of whom was the Octavian/Augustus who achieved her ruin. Inthose days ofimperial patronage it was inevitable that writers should be sycophants, and in extolling the virtues of Augustus it was natural that they should portray the woman who had tried to prevent Rome from dominating the Mediterranean as evil, treacherous, and given to sexual excess.'
While the propaganda of Octavian seemed to suit Plutarch' s aims best in the narration of hisLife of Antony, I have attempted to show, in chapter one ofthis dissertation, that Plutarch was by no means unsympathetic towards her. Not so with the earlier Roman sources. Their repugnance for a woman who, next to Hannibal, came closest to subjecting Rome to foreign rule, is almost without exception undiluted, and save for a few, fleeting glimpses of admiration for Egypt's last Ptolemaic queen, Cleopatra was remembered as afatale monstrum. Actium was interpreted essentially as a war between two RomanImperatores vying for Rome, but, for Octavian who, in the years preceding
I Ant. 85-6.
2 Pelling (2001 :294-95).
Actium, had been trying to canvas the support ofRomans and Italians, it would be easiest to declare Cleopatra as the national enemy instead of another Roman citizen who was still remembered favourably by many influential Romans. Later historians, including Plutarch, attempted to review history through a new lens of truthfulness, admitting that Actium was essentially a battle between Romans, one of whom was married to Cleopatra. Roman poets, on the other hand, were 'not committed even to a semblance of truth and consequently found the figure of the Eastern queen, by turns a drunken whore and a formidable fury, too good to resist. Antony, if he appears at all, becomes a barbarized Eastern potentate, in Vergil' s words, a "victor from the peoples of the Dawn and the Red Sea, bringing with him Egypt and the strength of the orient and remote Bactria"3 - no mention of his Roman allies or of civil wars...,4
Inthe aftermath ofActium, Octavian, and consequently the imperial poets ofhis day, made the most of Cleopatra's defeat, hailing the new emperor as the saviour of Rome, worthy son of the deified Caesar, and protege of Apollo. As he had done in Antony's absence from Rome, so Octavian allowed writers to shape people's perceptions of Cleopatra in her absence.s Romans had witnessed and laboured through enough years ofcivil war, conscriptions, assassinations and death to welcome any era ofpeace that Octavian' s victory might represent, and Roman writers such as Vergil were only too happy to glorify their leader and victor as the bringer of peace to Rome. If that meant damning the memory of Cleopatra and Antony in order to exalt Octavian, so be it. Thus in the allusions of the Augustan poets, 'though they may have been willing to see a certain grandeur in Cleopatra's death, they were wholeheartedly of the opinion that Augustus was right and Antony and Cleopatra wrong. For these writers were Italians, and the policy of Antony and Cleopatra would have meant the end ofItaly's complete supremacy over the Greek east. ... So each of them was ready enough to celebrate the crowning mercy ofActium, and each of them did so, in his own poetically memorable and historically misleading fashion.,6
3 Verg.Aen. 8.686-88.
4 Williams (200 I: 198-99).
5 ibid., 199.
6 Grant (1972:244).
2.2. Vergil
As with most other Roman sources, with the exception ofVelleius Paterculus, Vergil did not write much about Cleopatra. Numerous attempts have been made to view hisAeneidas some kind of allegory,? in which Dido represents Cleopatra, but not once does he refer to her by name and there is only one passage in his great epic poem which we can conclusively state refers to Cleopatra.
In order to understand Vergil' s views on Cleopatra and Egypt, one needs to understand the context ofVergil's life, his literary aims, and his standing in Roman society.
Born in c. 70 RC.in Mantua, Vergil entered life at a time Italy was handicapped by war, civil unrest and an absence ofhope for the future, and although offarming parents, he was nevertheless afforded an excellent education, first in Milan and later in Rome. As a student ofrhetoric under the same man who taught Augustus, Vergil was destined for a public career.8 However, his shyness proved his unsuitability for public speaking - Vergil pleaded just one case in court and there spoke very unimpressively,9 and, instead he turned to poetry (inspired by the Hellenistic writer, Theocritus) and to the escapist philosophy of Epicurus.10 The slave revolt under Spartacus, with its legacy of miles of crucified slaves;11 the Catilinarian conspiracy; the wars between Marius and Sulla, and Julius Caesar and Pompey; the assassination ofCaesar; the Battle ofPhilippi; the beheading ofCicero; the battle against Sextus Pompeius; and, finally, Actium; represented the political context in which Vergil's life unfolded. Vergil himselftook no part in the civil wars, in politics or in Roman society.
Apart from his briefappearance in court, he had no ambition as a lawyer or senator. In fact, his only recorded public appearances were to present readings of his work in its developmental stages.
Interestingly however, Vergil did write a hymn to be sung for Antony's wedding to Octavia,12 but on what further terms he was acquainted with Antony is uncertain. In his personal context, Vergil had witnessed in 41 B.C. the confiscation ofhis family property, for the resettlement ofdemobilised
7 See Griffm (1985:187) for a discussion of such an allegory, as well as pages 51-55 of this dissertation.
8 Levi (1998 :23).
9 Williams (1987:1).
10 Ogilvie (1980: 116).
11 This happened just before his birth.
12 Vergil's FourthEclogue;Levi (1998:51).
soldiers after Philippi, and it was hardly surprising, then, that Vergil appeared to be disillusioned with the world of politics and military arbitration. However, it was this event which obliged Vergil to travel to Rome to negotiate for his property's return, and while in Rome he met with Octavian, and secured not only the return of his land but also a meeting with the Roman patron of the arts, Maecenas, who became Vergil's patron for the rest of his life.
But it is in his enormously successful epic poem, theAeneid, that our interest, for purposes of this study, lies.