Antony and Cleopatra. Colleen McCullough

had raged as to whether it had been the horse archers who won Carrhae, or the cataphracts. Men clad in chain mail from head to foot, the cataphracts bestrode big horses also clad in chain mail. The source of the argument was social; horse archers were peasants, whereas cataphracts were noblemen.

      So when Pacorus and Labienus led their army into Syria at the beginning of February in the year of the consulship of Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus and Gnaeus Asinius Pollio, its Parthian content consisted solely of cataphracts. The nobles had won the struggle.

      Pacorus and Labienus crossed the Euphrates River at Zeugma and there separated. While Labienus and his mercenaries drove west across the Amanus into Cilicia Pedia, Pacorus and the cataphracts turned south for Syria. They swept all before them on both fronts, though Cleopatra’s agents in the north of Syria concentrated on Pacorus, not Labienus. Word flew to Alexandria.

      The moment Antony heard, he was gone. No fond farewells, no protestations of love.

      ‘Does he know?’ asked Tach’a of Cleopatra.

      No need for clarification; Cleopatra knew what she meant. ‘No. I didn’t have a chance – all he did was bellow for his armor and apply the goad to men like Dellius.’ She sighed. ‘His ships are to sail to Berytus, but he wasn’t sure enough of the winds to risk a sea voyage. He hopes to reach Antioch ahead of his fleet.’

      ‘What doesn’t Antonius know?’ Caesarion demanded, most put out at the sudden departure of his hero.

      ‘That in Sextilis you’ll have a baby brother or sister.’

      The child’s face lit up, he leaped about joyfully. ‘A brother or a sister! Mama, Mama, that’s terrific!’

      ‘Well, at least that’s taken his mind off Antonius,’ said Iras to Charmian.

      ‘It won’t take her mind off Antonius,’ Charmian answered.

      Antony rode for Antioch at a grueling pace, sending for this or that local potentate in southern Syria as he passed through, at times issuing his orders to them from horseback.

      Alarming to find out from Herod that among the Jews opinion was divided; a large group of Judaic dissenters actually seemed avid to be ruled by the Parthians. The leader of the pro-Parthian party was the Hasmonaean Prince Antigonus, Hyrcanus’s nephew but no lover of Hyrcanus or the Romans. Herod neglected to inform Mark Antony that Antigonus was already dickering with Parthian envoys for the things he coveted – the Jewish throne and the high priesthood. As Herod was not very interested in these furtive dealings or the Sanhedrin mood, Antony continued northward ignorant of how serious the Jewish situation was. For once Herod had been caught napping, too busy trying to cut his brother Phasael out for the hand of the Princess Mariamne to notice anything else.

      Tyre was impossible to take except from within. Its stinking isthmus, fouled by hills of rotting shellfish carcasses, gave the center of the purple-dye industry the protection due an island, and no one would betray it from within; no Tyrian wanted to have to send purple dye to the King of the Parthians for a price fixed by the King of the Parthians.

      In Antioch, Antony found Lucius Decidius Saxa striding up and down nervously, the watchtowers atop the massive city walls lined with men straining to see into the north; Pacorus would follow the Orontes River, and he wasn’t far away. Saxa’s brother had come from Ephesus to join him, and refugees were streaming in. Ejected from the Amanus, the brigand king Tarcondimotus told Antony that Labienus was doing brilliantly. By now he was supposed to have reached Tarsus and Cappadocia. Antiochus of Commagene, ruler of a client-kingdom that bordered the Amanus ranges on the north, was wavering in his Roman allegiance, said Tarcondimotus. Liking the man, Antony listened; a brigand, maybe, but clever and capable.

      After inspecting Saxa’s two legions, Antony relaxed a little. Once Gaius Cassius’s men, these legionaries were fit and very experienced in combat.

      More upsetting by far was the news from Italia. His brother Lucius was immured inside Perusia and under siege, while Pollio had retreated to the swamps at the mouth of the Padus River! It made no sense … Pollio and Ventidius vastly outnumbered Octavian! Why weren’t they helping Lucius? Antony asked himself, entirely forgetting that he hadn’t answered their pleas for guidance – was Lucius’s war a part of Antony’s policy, or was it not?

      Well, no matter how grave the situation in the East was, Italia was more important. Antony sailed for Ephesus, intending to go on to Athens as soon as possible. He had to find out more.

      * * *

      The monotony of the first stage of the voyage gave him time to think about Cleopatra and that fantastic winter in Egypt. Ye gods, how he had needed to break out! And how well the Queen had catered for his every whim. He truly did love her, as he loved all the women with whom he associated for longer than a day, and he would continue to love her until she did something to sour him. Though Fulvia had done more than merely sour, if the fragments of news he had from Italia were anything to go by. The only woman for whom his love had persisted in the teeth of a thousand thousand transgressions was his mother, surely the silliest woman in the history of the world.

      As was true of most boys of noble family, Antony’s father had not been in Rome overmuch, so Julia Antonia was – or was supposed to be – the one who held the family together. Three boys and two girls had not endowed her with a scrap of maturity; she was terrifyingly stupid. Money was something that fell off vines and servants people far cleverer than she. Nor was she lucky in love. Her first husband, father of her children, had committed suicide rather than return to Rome to face treason charges for his bungling conduct of a war against the Cretan pirates, and her second husband had been executed in the Forum Romanum for his part in the rebellion led by Catilina. All of which had happened by the time that Marcus, the eldest of the children, had turned twenty. The two girls were so physically huge and Antonian-ugly that they were married off to rich social climbers in order to bring some money into the family to fund the public careers of the boys, who had run wild. Then Marcus ran up massive debts and had to marry a rich provincial named Fadia, whose father paid a two-hundred-talent dowry. The goddess Fortuna seemed to smile on Antony; Fadia and the children she had borne him died in a summer pestilence, leaving him free to marry another heiress, his first cousin Antonia Hybrida. That union had produced one child, a girl who was neither bright nor pretty. When Curio was killed and Fulvia became available, Antony divorced his cousin to marry her. Yet another profitable alliance; Fulvia was the richest woman in Rome.

      Not precisely an unhappy childhood and young manhood; more that Antony had never been disciplined. The only person who could control Julia Antonia and her boys had been Caesar; he wasn’t the actual head of the Julian family, just its most forceful member. Over the years Caesar had made it plain that he was fond of them, but he was never an easy man, nor one whom the boys understood. That fatal lack of discipline combined with an outrageous love of debauchery had finally, in the grown man Mark Antony, turned Caesar away from him. Twice had Antony proven himself not to be trusted; to Caesar, one time too many. Caesar had cracked his whip – hard.

      To this day, leaning on the rail watching the sunlight play on the wet oars as they came out of the sea, Antony wasn’t sure whether he had meant to participate in the plot to murder Caesar. Looking back on it, he was inclined to think that he hadn’t truly believed that the likes of Gaius Trebonius and Decimus Junius Brutus had the gumption or the degree of hatred necessary to go through with it. Marcus Brutus and Cassius hadn’t mattered so much; they were the figureheads, not the perpetrators. Yes, the plot definitely belonged to Trebonius and Decimus Brutus. Both dead. Dolabella had tortured Trebonius to death, while a Gallic chieftain separated Decimus Brutus from his head for a bag of gold supplied by Antony himself. Surely, reflected Antony, that proved that he hadn’t really plotted to kill Caesar! Mind you, he had long ago decided that a Rome without Caesar would be an easier one for him to live in. And the greatest tragedy was that it probably would have been, were it not for the emergence of Gaius Octavius, Caesar’s heir. Who, aged eighteen, promptly set out to claim his inheritance, a precarious enterprise that saw him march twice upon Rome before his twentieth birthday. His second march had seen him elected Senior Consul, whereupon he had had the temerity to force his rivals, Antony