Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

Between them Antony and Octavian covered the usual schoolyard litany: effeminacy, sodomy, cowardice, unrefined—or overly refined—practices of personal hygiene. Octavian was “a veritable weakling.” Antony had passed his prime. He could no longer win any contest save those in exotic dancing or the erotic arts. Antony sneered that Octavian had slept with his illustrious granduncle. How else to account for his unexpected adoption? Octavian countered with something sturdier and more pertinent, if equally untrue: Cleopatra had not slept with his granduncle. Caesarion was hardly the divine Caesar’s son, news Octavian enlisted a pamphleteer to disseminate. Antony condemned Octavian’s hasty marriage to Livia, hugely pregnant with another man’s child on her wedding day. He decried Octavian’s habit of making off with the wives of his banquet guests and returning them, disheveled, to the table. He advertised Octavian’s well-known (and in all probability invented) habit of procuring and deflowering virgins. (According to Suetonius, Octavian seduced scientifically. He targeted the wives of his enemies, to learn what the husbands were saying and doing.) In the depravity department Octavian had no need to resort to fictions. He had his weapon close at hand. In defiance of Roman custom and his impeccable Roman wife, Octavian’s fellow triumvir disported himself in a foreign capital with a rapacious queen, on whose account he had lost his head, forsaken his illustrious country, and shed all ...