In 30 B.C., Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII died by suicide after they were defeated by Octavian’s forces in a civil war.
But what if Antony and Cleopatra had defeated Octavian, the man who became Rome’s first emperor? Would they have become rulers of Rome? How would history have been different?
Civil war
First, it helps to understand what led to the war. In the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C., three major factions fought for power: Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew, adopted son and heir; Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s generals; and Brutus and Cassius, both senators. However, the senators were soon defeated and died by suicide.
Before Caesar died, he had a relationship with Cleopatra VII, the ruler of Egypt. Cleopatra had a son named Caesarion whom she claimed was fathered by Caesar. But he never acknowledged the boy as his son. After Caesar died, Cleopatra and Antony became a couple and had three children, although they likely didn’t officially marry.
During this time, there had been an uneasy power-sharing agreement between Octavian, who was based in Rome, and Antony, who was based in Alexandria. But then, civil war for control of Rome and its territories erupted in 32 B.C.
The turning point in the civil war was the Battle of Actium, which occurred on Sept. 2, 31 B.C. During this battle, the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra was destroyed, and Octavian gained control of the Mediterranean Sea. While further battles occurred on land, Antony and Cleopatra’s forces could not recover from the loss of their fleet.
Cleopatra and Antony died in 30 B.C., and Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Empire as a province in 30 B.C. Soon after, in 27 B.C., the Roman senate gave Octavian the title “Augustus,” and he became the first emperor of the Roman Empire.
But what might have happened if the lovers had triumphed over Octavian?
Cleopatra restricted?
There are a wide range of possibilities in this “what if” scenario, scholars said.
One possibility is that Cleopatra’s power would have been restricted to Egypt and parts of the Middle East. Some scholars said Cleopatra would have had a hard time playing a large role in the Eternal City. “I don’t see a role for Cleopatra in Rome,” Jeffrey Tatum, a professor of classics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, told Live Science in an email, noting that Octavian’s supporters had used propaganda to villainize Cleopatra.
Lee Fratantuono, a professor of ancient classics at Maynooth University in Ireland, agreed, noting Cleopatra, who was an Egyptian ruler of Macedonian descent, would not have been accepted by the people of Rome. “Her presence at his side roused patriotic sentiment in Italy, and it is highly unlikely that Antony could have achieved long-term success in the central and western Mediterranean with her prominently in the picture,” he told Live Science in an email.
Antony had sons and stepsons from his previous marriages, and he might have tried to insert them into power in Rome instead of himself. Antony “had what Octavian did not — an abundance of children and stepchildren, especially male ones, that he could utilise,” Jane Draycott, a senior lecturer of classics at the University of Glasgow, told Live Science in an email.
Antony and Cleopatra, along with their children, may have been more focused on Egypt and the Near East, where the Romans faced a formidable opponent in the Parthian Empire in what is now largely Iran. Antony may have wanted to spend his time fighting them rather than trying to govern Rome itself, Draycott said.
Cleopatra as queen?
Another possibility is that despite opposition to Cleopatra, she could have still come to power in Rome, ruling alongside Antony, who would have become an emperor, Prudence Jones, a classics professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, said in an email.
If they had achieved this, “we might expect to see greater balance between the eastern and western parts of Rome’s empire,” Jones said, as Egypt was an important part of the eastern part of the empire.
“If power were more balanced between the eastern and western parts of the empire, rather than having power centralized at Rome, European history could look quite different,” Jones told Live Science. “Western Europe might have remained rural for a longer period of time with a lesser degree of Romanization, particularly in Gaul and Britain if more resources had been directed eastward. Greek culture might have had more of an influence on all of Europe, with perhaps fewer Romance languages and more modern languages related to Greek.”
Egypt might “have retained a degree of independence and functioned as a client kingdom,” Jones said. Perhaps Antony would have avoided centralizing the Roman Empire’s government to the degree Octavian did.
We “can’t assume that Antony would have had Octavian’s desire for and skill in developing bureaucracy,” Jones said. “With less central control, the Roman Empire might have been more of a Greco-Romano-Egyptian confederation.”
Giving it back to the senate?
Another possibility is that rather than try to control Rome himself or through his sons and stepsons, Antony might have handed the city and some of its territories back to the senate and kept Rome as a republic, Tatum said.
It’s possible that “he would have handed the republic back to the senate and the assemblies,” Tatum wrote in his book “A Noble Ruin: Mark Antony, Civil War, and the Collapse of the Roman Republic” (Oxford University Press, 2023). “Relishing his wealth and prestige from a distance, perhaps even from Alexandria, he could have exercised influence without dominating affairs and changing the fundamental nature of the republic.”
It’s also possible that whatever decisions Antony and Cleopatra made could have triggered another civil war with other aristocrats battling for control of Rome and its territories, Tatum said in an email.
