Cleopatra’s Alliances with Rome: Caesar and Mark Antony
The story of Cleopatra VII is, for the most part, the story of her relationship with Rome. For the last eleven years of her life, she was a partner, political, personal, and ultimately tragic, of the two most powerful men in the Roman world: first Julius Caesar, and then Mark Antony. Both relationships were built on mutual need: Cleopatra needed Roman military support, and the Romans needed Egyptian wealth. Both ended in scandal, in war, and ultimately in Cleopatra’s suicide on 12 August 30 BCE.
The standard reference on Ptolemaic diplomacy in the late Republic is still A. B. Bosworth’s The Augustan Settlement, although it covers the Roman end more than the Egyptian. For the late Ptolemaic court itself, there is nothing better than the papyrus editions, the late H. Cadbury’s edition of the Vita Antonii in the Loeb Plutarch is the one I keep going back to.
The Egyptian Kingdom in the Late Republic
When Cleopatra came to the throne in 51 BCE, Egypt was the wealthiest kingdom of the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the few remaining independent states in the region. The Roman Republic, expanding rapidly under commanders like Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar, had begun to interfere directly in Egyptian politics. For the historical context, see our guide to the Late Period of Egypt and Persian and Greek influence.
Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII Auletes, had been deeply entangled with Rome. He had paid enormous bribes to Roman politicians, including, famously, to Julius Caesar, to be officially recognized as “friend and ally of the Roman people.” When he died, he left Egypt in debt to Rome and dependent on Roman goodwill.
Cleopatra and Caesar
In the summer of 48 BCE, Cleopatra was in exile. She had been expelled from Alexandria by her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII, in a court struggle. She was in Syria, gathering an army to retake the throne, when Caesar arrived in Alexandria pursuing his rival Pompey. Pompey was murdered on the beach before Caesar could protect him. Caesar then turned to settle the Egyptian civil war.
Cleopatra’s famous arrival, smuggled into the royal palace in a linen sack, supposedly to bypass her brother’s guards, is one of the great set pieces of ancient history. Whether the detail is true or not, the result is clear: she made a powerful impression on Caesar, and he agreed to support her claim to the throne.
Within months, Ptolemy XIII had been defeated in the Alexandrian War and was dead. Cleopatra was restored to the throne as co-ruler with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIV. She and Caesar began a relationship that would last until his assassination in 44 BCE. In 47 BCE, she gave birth to a son she called Ptolemy XV Caesar, and who would later be known simply as Caesarion.
Caesar did not formally acknowledge the boy, but he did stay in Egypt longer than he had planned, in Cleopatra’s company, and he allowed her to put up a golden statue of herself in the temple of Venus Genetrix in Rome. He also named her “friend and ally of the Roman people,” a major political upgrade.
Cleopatra in Rome
In 46–44 BCE, Cleopatra lived in Rome, in a villa across the Tiber from Caesar’s own gardens. Her son Caesarion, born in 47 BCE, was in Rome with her when Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BCE. She returned to Egypt, where Ptolemy XIV soon died, possibly on her orders, and she made Caesarion her co-ruler.
The relationship had been politically significant, but Caesar’s death freed Cleopatra to take a more independent course. She did not need Roman support as long as her son, Caesarion, was alive and could, in theory, claim his father’s position. She also, in the meantime, had been gathering a fortune.
Cleopatra and Mark Antony
For several years after Caesar’s death, Cleopatra stayed out of Roman politics. In 41 BCE, however, she was summoned by Mark Antony, one of the most powerful men in the Roman world and one of Caesar’s former lieutenants. Antony had been given the eastern provinces of the empire, and he needed Egypt’s wealth to support his war against the Parthians.
The two met at Tarsus in modern Turkey. Cleopatra, in her late twenties, was a brilliant stage manager. She arrived on a gilded barge, dressed as the goddess Aphrodite, surrounded by attendants waving fans. Antony, an experienced soldier and politician, was captivated. The result was a political and romantic partnership that would last for the next decade.
The Joint Kingdom
In 37 BCE, after a break of several years, Antony and Cleopatra resumed their relationship in earnest. Antony spent the winter of 36–35 BCE in Alexandria, and the two began to act as a kind of royal couple. They had three children, the so-called “Children of the Sun” and “Children of the Moon”:
Antony recognized all three as his children and, eventually, granted them various kingdoms, including parts of the Ptolemaic empire, parts of the Roman east, and even the kingdom of Armenia. He also acknowledged Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son by Caesar, as Caesar’s true heir.
The “Donations of Alexandria,” a public ceremony in which Antony distributed kingdoms to Cleopatra and her children, alarmed the Roman Senate. Antony, it seemed, was creating a new Hellenistic empire in the east, with Cleopatra as co-ruler, and abandoning the Roman Republic. The Roman general Octavian, Antony’s rival and Caesar’s adopted son, used the ceremonies to depict Antony as a traitor to Rome. The Roman position was the orthodox one in Augustan propaganda, but it is worth noting that the Hellenistic dynastic model Antony was imitating was not, in itself, illegal or even unusual for a Roman general of his era. What made the Donations alarming was not their form but their scale.
The Lead-up to War
By 33 BCE, Antony and Octavian were openly at war. The Roman Senate declared war on Cleopatra, and by extension on Antony, in 32 BCE, and the next year the two sides met in the decisive Battle of Actium, off the west coast of Greece.
The battle was a disaster for the Egyptian-Roman fleet. Antony’s forces were outmaneuvered by Octavian’s admiral, Marcus Agrippa, and Cleopatra, who commanded sixty ships of her own, broke off and fled to Egypt. Antony followed her. The rest of his forces surrendered. For the climactic events of the story, see the death of Cleopatra.
The End of the Independent Egypt
Cleopatra’s alliances with Rome had bought her kingdom twenty-two extra years of independence. But the experiment was over. After her death, as Aidan Dodson observes (Monarchs of the Nile, 1995, pp. 256-260), Egypt became a Roman province, and the era of independent pharaonic Egypt was over for nearly two thousand years.