Read Online A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom - Free Book Online Page B

many later-day interpreters who have revised the story, but the historical facts alone can stand by themselves as testimony to romance on an epic scale. And however legendary, their story sheds light on the status of wives in the Roman empire.
    Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, had had a short affair with Julius Caesar, which had produced a son named Caesarion. Later, in 41 B . C . E ., after Caesar’s death, when Antony was part of the second Roman Triumvirate (shared with Octavius and Lepidus), he summoned Cleopatra to South- ern Turkey, where they began their fateful liaison. Antony had already been married three times before he met the Egyptian queen, but he was still ripe for falling passionately, madly, and irrevocably in love.
    While Antony’s third wife, Fulvia, maintained his home in Rome and acted as a deputy husband on his behalf in his quarrels against Octavius (who would later become emperor under the name of Augustus), Antony spent the winter of 40–41 B . C . E . with Cleopatra in Alexandria. All the Roman accounts of their union depict Cleopatra as the seductive foreigner, whose “Oriental” ways played havoc with Antony’s upright warrior mentality. But what do we really know of the give-and-take between them? Only, that their bodies comingled sufficiently to pro- duce twins, a boy and a girl named Alexander and Cleopatra.
    In the meantime, Fulvia was forced to flee Rome for political rea- sons, and as she was coming to meet her husband, she fell sick and
    died. Obliged to return to Rome to set his affairs in order, Antony man- aged to reconcile himself with Octavius. To seal the arrangement that would divide up the empire into three regions, Antony was expected to marry Octavius’s sister, Octavia. Since both Octavia and Antony had recently lost their spouses, they were considered perfect for one another. Octavia was expected to take over the care of Antony’s two young sons. This, as a good Roman spouse, she was quite prepared to do, but did she know that Antony also had two more children, the twins recently born to Cleopatra? In any event, both parties agreed to celebrate their nuptials in Rome, after receiving from the Senate a dis- pensation of the law by which a widow was not permitted to marry until ten months after the death of her husband. (Then, as now, annul- ments and dispensations are the purview of the powerful.) Antony struck a coinage to celebrate his wedding to Octavia. It was the first time that a living woman’s portrait appeared on a Roman coin—an honor bestowed upon her as Antony’s wife.
    For several years Antony managed his two marriages, the official one in Rome, the unofficial one in Egypt. He and Octavia produced two daughters. But the balance was tipping in favor of Cleopatra, as could be sensed from the coins Antony issued in 37 B . C . E . with his portrait on the one side and Cleopatra’s on the reverse. 39 A year later, in Italy, Octavia received the startling news that her husband and the Egyptian queen were married. The lawyers assured her that, since Cleopatra was a foreigner and since Romans of the citizen class were legally bound to marry other Romans, this was not a binding marriage. Prepared to for- give all, Octavia traveled East in 35 B . C . E . bringing the troops and gold her husband so desperately needed. At Athens she found a letter, order- ing her to send on the provisions, and to return, herself, to Rome. Three years later, Antony sent her a formal notice of divorce. According to Plutarch writing a century after the events, “Antony sent orders to Rome to have Octavia removed out of his house. She left it, we are told, accompanied by all his children, except the eldest by Fulvia, who was then with his father, weeping and grieving... .” 40 Hence she lived under the wing of her brother, Octavius, who would soon become sole ruler of the Roman empire.
    Octavius had every reason to be displeased with Antony’s treatment of his sister, divorced so cavalierly