Horace’s Odes 1.37, conventionally known as the Cleopatra Ode, begins with a declaration that (apparently) seems to leave very little room for hesitation: nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero / pulsanda tellus (1.37.1–2). Now is the time to drink; now the earth is to be struck with an unfettered foot. The repeated nunc gives the opening the quality of an announcement made at the precise moment when a prohibition has been lifted. The occasion is the defeat of Cleopatra and the end of the conflict that brought Octavian into confrontation with Antony and Egypt. For a Roman audience, the political associations would have been immediate. The danger has passed, the enemy has been defeated, and the wine that had remained untouched can at last be brought out. There is, at first, something almost reassuringly uncomplicated about the poem’s account of the occasion-- Cleopatra is introduced as a threat to the Capitol, surrounded by a contaminatum ... gregem (1.37.9), a polluted company of men, and described through the vocabulary of excess and impaired judgment: impotens, ebria, and furorem. She is a queen who has allowed the sweetness of fortune to intoxicate her, whose expectations have become detached from political reality, and whose ambitions have supposedly brought Rome to the edge of destruction. The language is familiar enough from Roman accounts of foreign monarchy that a reader might reasonably expect the poem to proceed towards the conventional humiliation of a defeated enemy. Yet Horace does not end with the defeat of Cleopatra, or even with the anticipated capture of a foreign monarch. His final words are non humilis mulier triumpho (1.37.32): a woman who would not be brought low by a triumph.
However, between the opening celebration and this last description, Cleopatra has become a rather different figure. The woman who appeared at first as an irrational threat to Rome is now generosius, more nobly disposed, than the alternatives available to her. She looks upon the destruction of her kingdom voltu sereno, with a composed expression, and is deliberata morte ferocior (1.37.29), more fierce through her deliberate determination concerning death. Horace has not withdrawn the earlier accusations, nor does he pause to tell us that his judgment of Cleopatra has changed. There is no apology, and no explicit correction of the political language with which the poem began. The change occurs instead through the arrangement of the poem, through the movement from one set of descriptions to another, and, rather importantly, through the amount of attention Cleopatra is finally permitted to receive.
The difficulty, then, is not simply that Horace praises a woman whom he has previously insulted. It is that the poem requires both representations to remain available to the reader. Cleopatra must be dangerous enough for her defeat to justify the celebration with which the ode opens, but she must also be sufficiently formidable for her refusal to submit to Octavian to acquire significance. If she were merely the foolish and intoxicated monarch of the opening stanzas, her final composure would be difficult to explain. If she were already the courageous and self-possessed queen of the closing lines, the language of Roman deliverance would become rather less persuasive. Horace does not resolve this difficulty by choosing one Cleopatra over the other. He allows the political language of victory to produce a figure who eventually becomes more interesting than that language can comfortably accommodate.
The opening is less straightforwardly Roman than it first appears. Horace’s nunc est bibendum adapts the beginning of Alcaeus, fragment 332, conventionally transmitted as νῦν χρῆ μεθύσθην, an exhortation to drink following the death of Myrsilus, a tyrant. The relationship is particularly appropriate: Alcaeus associates drinking with the removal of an oppressive political figure, and Horace transfers the recognizable form of that celebration to the defeat of Cleopatra. The Greek poem supplies a precedent through which a contemporary Roman event can be understood. A. T. Davis, in “Cleopatra Rediviva,” draws attention to the significance of this Alcaean background and to the way in which Horace’s opening invites a reader familiar with Greek lyric to recognize the political occasion beneath the drinking song.
The adaptation is not, however, an exact repetition of the circumstances of the Greek poem. Alcaeus celebrates the death of a tyrant; Horace celebrates the defeat of a queen whose position was bound up with a Roman civil conflict. Antony, a Roman general and former member of the triumvirate, was central to the struggle, but he disappears from the poem almost entirely. By concentrating on Cleopatra, Horace gives the conflict the appearance of a confrontation between Rome and a foreign monarch rather than another episode in which Romans fought Romans. The omission is politically useful. A Roman audience can celebrate the removal of an external threat without being asked to dwell on the fact that the enemy had been supported by a substantial Roman army and commanded, in part, by a Roman.
The Greek model is followed by a distinctly Roman scene:
- Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero*
- pulsanda tellus, nunc Saliaribus*
- ornare pulvinar deorum*
- tempus erat dapibus, sodales.*
The Salii, the ancient priesthood associated with Mars and its ritual dances, bring the proposed celebration into the sphere of Roman religious custom. The pulvinar deorum, the sacred couch on which divine images were placed during a lectisternium, similarly evokes a public religious ceremony rather than an ordinary banquet. Horace is not simply inviting his companions to drink. He imagines a celebration in which drinking, ritual, and the restoration of the Roman state belong to the same occasion. The word sodales is useful here: it can refer to companions or associates, but it also carries associations with religious and social groups. Those invited to celebrate are friends at a banquet and, at the same time, members of a community whose security has apparently been restored.
The shift from nunc est to tempus erat is less obvious but worth noticing. The first two lines announce that the time has now arrived; the third and fourth suggest that the appropriate moment for decorating the couches of the gods had previously been unavailable. Horace explains why in the next stanza: antehac nefas depromere Caecubum / cellis avitis (1.37.5–6). Until now, it would have been nefas to bring the Caecuban wine out of the ancestral cellars. The word gives the delay a religious and moral weight. This is not merely wine that has been saved for a special occasion, although it is certainly that too. Its association with the ancestral household makes its release a sign that the conditions preventing ordinary Roman celebration have finally passed.
The contrast with the Mareoticum of line 14 becomes important later. Caecuban wine belongs to the Roman household, to inheritance, and to a tradition that precedes the immediate political crisis. Cleopatra’s association with Mareotic wine, by contrast, will become part of the poem’s account of her impaired judgment. The distinction is not simply between Italian and Egyptian wine. Horace constructs two forms of drinking: one communal, ritualized, and appropriate to the restoration of Roman order; the other associated with an individual whose confidence has become excessive. Michael Commager’s discussion of the poem’s contrasting forms of drinking, alongside Davis’s treatment of the Alcaean opening, helps to bring out the extent to which the drinking imagery is doing political work.
There is nevertheless an irony in the fact that Horace uses Greek lyric to give Roman victory its literary form. The opening’s supposedly Roman celebration depends upon the adaptation of a Greek political drinking song. Horace does not have to abandon Greek literary culture in order to distinguish Roman victory from foreign disorder; he makes the distinction through a Greek model. The same dependence on Greek literary conventions will become apparent when the poem turns to Cleopatra herself. The political identity of the ode is Roman, but its literary resources are not exclusively Roman, and those resources will make it increasingly difficult to keep the defeated queen within the narrow role assigned to her at the beginning.
Cleopatra’s first extended description begins with regina, a title that is hardly neutral in this setting. Horace does not name her. He identifies her through her royal status, a status that carries particular political associations in Roman literature, where kingship could be connected with foreign domination and the rejection of traditional Roman values. In dum Capitolio / regina dementis ruinas (1.37.6–7), regina is placed close to Capitolio, producing an opposition between the foreign monarch and the central religious and political symbol of Rome. Cleopatra is not merely an enemy of Octavian. She is presented as a threat to the Capitol itself, and dementis ruinas attributes to her an irrational plan for the destruction of the Roman state.
The historical circumstances are less convenient. Cleopatra’s kingdom was not an expanding military power comparable to Rome, and the conflict that ended with her defeat was also a struggle between Roman political factions. Antony’s position cannot be separated from the events at Actium, however little space Horace gives him. Octavian’s presentation of the war had already worked to turn a conflict involving Roman rivals into a struggle against a foreign enemy. Horace’s decision to leave Antony unnamed participates in that representation. The political anxieties of the civil wars are concentrated in Cleopatra, who can be made to appear responsible for a threat to Rome that is, in historical terms, considerably more complicated. Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution remains useful for the political background, particularly for understanding the process by which Octavian’s struggle with Antony was presented as a war against Cleopatra and Egypt.
The following lines make the characterization more emphatic:
contaminato cum grege turpium
morbo virorum, quidlibet impotens
sperare fortunaque dulci
ebria.
The vocabulary is deliberately unpleasant. Grex suggests a herd rather than a group of politically significant associates; contaminato makes them polluted, while turpium and morbo add the language of degradation and disease. Horace is not offering a description of Cleopatra’s advisers that could be tested against an administrative record. He is using invective to make her court appear as a source of moral disorder. The phrase quidlibet impotens sperare then turns from her associates to Cleopatra herself. She is impotens, unable to govern her expectations, and ebria with the sweetness of her apparent success.
The adjective ebria anticipates the later description of her mind as lymphatam Mareotico (1.37.14). At first her intoxication is metaphorical: she has been made drunk by fortuna dulci, by the apparent sweetness of success. A few lines later, the image acquires a more concrete association with Egyptian wine. Political misjudgment is thus expressed as a kind of drunkenness. Cleopatra cannot distinguish between the success she believes she possesses and the danger that is approaching her. The language is effective, although it creates a problem for the poem. If Cleopatra is surrounded by a degraded group of associates and is herself incapable of judging her circumstances, the threat she supposedly presents becomes rather less impressive. Horace needs her to be dangerous enough to justify Octavian’s achievement, but also foolish enough to make that achievement appear inevitable.
The poem’s later treatment of Cleopatra makes this opening characterization harder to accept as a complete account of her character. It is worth placing the language beside Vergil’s introduction of Dido in Aeneid 1. Dido is also identified as a queen, but her first appearance emphasizes her capacity for rational government and her generosity towards the Trojans:
in primis regina quietum
accipit in Teucros animum mentemque benignam
(Aeneid 1.303–304).
She receives the Trojans with a peaceful disposition and a generous mind. The contrast with Horace’s regina dementis ruinas is striking. Both women are foreign queens whose political positions will become entangled with Rome, but Vergil initially grants Dido the qualities of a capable ruler, whereas Horace places Cleopatra under suspicion almost as soon as he names her.
Dido’s characterization, of course, does not remain untouched by the language of disorder. In Aeneid 4, the vocabulary of furor and demens becomes increasingly prominent as her relationship with Aeneas develops. Janice M. Benario’s “Dido and Cleopatra” draws attention to verbal and thematic similarities between Vergil’s Dido and Horace’s Cleopatra, including the language of madness and the ways in which the political interests of Rome shape the fate of each queen. The comparison is useful partly because the two women do not begin from the same position. Dido is first shown as politically capable and then increasingly represented through the language of emotional disorder; Cleopatra is introduced through that disorder and only later given the opportunity to display qualities that the opening has concealed.
Horace’s poem is much shorter than Vergil’s fourth book, and Cleopatra has little space in which to establish an identity independent of the political language directed against her. That makes the change in the later stanzas especially important. The poem could have continued to describe her as the irrational foreign queen who had threatened Rome. Instead, it begins to describe what she does, rather than merely what she is said to represent.
Before turning to the similes, it is worth separating the events of Actium from the account Horace makes of them. The battle took place in 31 BCE; the final defeat of Antony and Cleopatra followed in Egypt in 30. Horace compresses these events into a continuous-seeming pursuit in which Octavian appears to drive Cleopatra from Italy and towards her eventual defeat. The compression is not simply a matter of poetic convenience. It gives Octavian the role of an active and decisive commander, while Cleopatra’s flight becomes the measure of his success.
sed minuit furorem
vix una sospes navis ab ignibus,
mentemque lymphatam Mareotico
redegit in veros timores
Caesar, ab Italia volantem
remis adurgens (1.37.12–17).
Her madness is diminished when scarcely one ship escapes the flames; Caesar, pressing forward with his oars, brings her mind, intoxicated by Mareotic wine, back to genuine fear as she flees from Italy. The verbs assign the initiative to Octavian. He pursues; she flies. He brings her back to reality; she has mistaken the sweetness of fortune for security. The movement is psychological as well as military: the man who defeats her at sea also corrects the condition of her mind.
The historical situation was not quite so continuous. Cleopatra escaped from Actium with a portion of her fleet and preserved resources that remained important to the struggle in Egypt. Antony’s decision to follow her had serious consequences for his remaining forces and political standing. Octavian did not simply pursue her from Italy in the uninterrupted fashion suggested by Horace’s compressed account. The poem is therefore not a neutral reconstruction of the battle. Its narrative makes the Roman commander appear relentless and the queen’s survival part of the story of his military effectiveness. The absence of Antony is again useful: the reader is given a confrontation between Octavian and Cleopatra, rather than a conflict whose Roman participants would complicate the celebration.
The pursuit leads into the two central similes:
accipiter velut
molles columbas aut leporem citus
venator in campis nivalis
Haemoniae, daret ut catenis
fatale monstrum.
Octavian is compared to a hawk pursuing gentle doves, or to a swift hunter pursuing a hare across the snowy fields of Thessaly, intending to place the fatale monstrum in chains. At first the comparisons seem to do exactly what the preceding lines have prepared them to do. The hawk is a natural predator; the hunter possesses the speed and skill to overtake his prey. Octavian’s superiority appears almost inevitable. The adjectives sharpen the contrast: the doves are molles, gentle or soft, while the hunter is citus, swift. One side acts; the other is pursued.
But the similes are not entirely flattering to the pursuer. Doves and hares are not formidable enemies. They are vulnerable creatures, and the comparison creates a disproportion between the apparent scale of Cleopatra’s threat and the weakness of the animals chosen to represent her. If she is the dangerous monarch who threatened the Capitol, why does the poem now make her resemble such defenceless prey? The imagery strengthens Octavian’s position while diminishing the opponent whose defeat is supposed to demonstrate his greatness. It is possible to admire the hunter and still notice what is being hunted.
Mary Margolies DeForest’s “The Central Similes of Horace’s Cleopatra Ode” is particularly valuable here, not least because she follows the imagery into its Homeric associations. The hawk pursuing doves recalls the comparison of Achilles pursuing Hector in Iliad 22.139–140. Horace’s citus and the reference to Haemonia, a geographical name associated with Thessaly, further situate the passage within a Greek heroic landscape. Octavian’s pursuit is consequently elevated beyond an ordinary military operation. He resembles an epic hero pursuing an opponent whose defeat has a significance beyond the immediate conflict.
The Homeric association, however, brings with it a poem in which the defeated enemy is not simply an object of contempt. Hector’s death is among the most emotionally significant events in the Iliad, and the poem’s final movement towards Priam and Achilles makes it difficult to regard the victor as the only figure whose dignity matters. Achilles’ triumph over Hector does not end the tragedy; it creates the conditions for the recognition of a shared human vulnerability. The allusion may therefore do more than elevate Octavian. It also recalls a literary tradition in which the defeated opponent can possess qualities that the victor must, eventually, acknowledge. Horace does not reproduce the moral movement of the Iliad, but the Homeric comparison makes it possible for the reader to bring that wider tradition to the pursuit.
The second simile adds another layer. The hunter pursuing the hare across Thessaly has been associated with the heroic tradition of monster-killing, especially once the passage arrives at fatale monstrum. Octavian can be imagined as a hero pursuing a creature whose destruction is necessary for the restoration of order. Nisbet and Hubbard, as well as DeForest, discuss the associations of this language with heroic hunting and the defeat of extraordinary threats. Yet fatale monstrum is not quite as simple as “fatal monster.” Monstrum can denote something unnatural or extraordinary, but it also belongs to the semantic field of portent and warning, related to monere, to warn or remind. Fatale carries its own associations with fate and impending doom. The expression may therefore suggest not merely a monstrous creature but a portentous, doom-laden figure.
J. V. Luce’s “Cleopatra as Fatale Monstrum (Horace, Carm. 1.37.21)” is especially useful because of the phrase’s position. It occurs at the point where the hostile description of Cleopatra gives way to the account of her final conduct. The expression is not simply another insult added to the opening invective. It stands at the boundary between two representations of the queen, and the next word makes the transition difficult to miss: quae.
The shift from the neuter monstrum to the feminine quae is grammatical, but it also changes the reader’s attention. Cleopatra has been described as an extraordinary threat, almost an object within the language of Octavian’s pursuit; now she reappears as a woman who acts. The poem does not introduce a new character. It returns to the same one, but the terms through which she is understood have changed. The possibility that fatale monstrum carries associations of portent or warning makes the transition still more suggestive: the figure who has been treated as a threat may also be understood as a sign of the political and human consequences of the victory.
DeForest takes the similes further, suggesting that the choice of dove and hare may contain references to the Ptolemaic dynasty. The doves may evoke Aphrodite, with whom Ptolemaic queens were associated, while the hare, lagōs in Greek, may recall Lagos, traditionally connected with the founder of the dynasty. On this reading, the animals do not simply represent a vulnerable Cleopatra; they may direct the reader towards her dynastic origins and the longer history of the Ptolemies.
The suggestion is attractive, although it is necessarily more speculative than the Homeric connection. A possible verbal relationship between lagōs and Lagos does not establish that Horace intended the reader to recognize it, and the argument should not be made to carry more weight than the evidence allows. Still, the details of the similes invite attention. Horace could have chosen almost any predator and prey to communicate the inequality of the pursuit. Instead, he gives us doves, a hare, and the snowy fields of Thessaly. DeForest’s interpretation is worth retaining as a possibility because it reminds us that the imagery may have a historical depth beyond the immediate scene. Cleopatra belongs to a dynasty descended from the Macedonian successors of Alexander, whose own political history emerged from the displacement of earlier empires. Her defeat can thus be placed within a longer succession of dynastic fortunes, although the poem never spells out that history. Rome’s victory may look final to those celebrating it, but the political world from which Cleopatra comes has itself been shaped by the rise and fall of powers.
The next stanza begins:
fatale monstrum. Quae generosius
perire quaerens nec muliebriter
expavit ensem nec latentis
classe cita reparavit oras.
The quae brings Cleopatra back from the category of monstrum to the position of a grammatical subject. What follows is a sequence of actions and refusals. She seeks to die more nobly; she does not shrink from the sword in a womanish manner; she does not attempt to escape towards hidden shores with a swift fleet. The repeated nec gives the passage its firmness. One possible course is rejected, then another. Cleopatra’s conduct is no longer described through the verbs of Octavian’s pursuit. She is not merely fleeing from him. She is deciding what she will and will not do.
Generosius is a comparative, and its implied comparison is not entirely explicit. More nobly than what? The alternatives are perhaps capture, humiliation, and the loss of royal dignity; they may also be the forms of submission expected of a defeated enemy. The word carries associations with genus, with birth and ancestry, and so Cleopatra’s conduct may be presented as worthy of her dynastic position. Either way, the emphasis is no longer on the irrationality of her ambition. Her final actions are evaluated according to a standard of nobility that the opening stanzas had not allowed her.
The participle quaerens matters as well. Cleopatra is seeking a particular end. Her fate is not presented simply as something that happens to her, nor is she carried passively towards it by the force of events. The language gives her a degree of agency at precisely the moment when her political power has disappeared. The queen who could not control her expectations in the opening is now able to control the terms on which she will meet defeat.
There is, nevertheless, an uncomfortable gendered assumption in nec muliebriter. Cleopatra is praised because she does not respond in a supposedly womanish fashion. The phrase assumes that fear and submission are feminine weaknesses, while courage and self-command belong to a more masculine vocabulary of virtus. Her conduct is admirable partly because she refuses to conform to the category against which the poem measures her. This is not an entirely uncomplicated tribute to a woman. Horace praises Cleopatra by invoking standards that Roman moral discourse often associated with men.
The final stanza does not, however, simply turn her into a man. Horace calls her non humilis mulier. She remains a woman, but she is not a submissive one. The word mulier is important because it restores the female identity that muliebriter had seemed to make a negative standard. The poem does not escape its gendered assumptions so much as make them harder to maintain. Cleopatra possesses the courage and self-command that the poem initially associates with the absence of feminine weakness, but she possesses them as a woman, and her refusal to submit is precisely what gives the final description its force.
Her voltu sereno (1.37.26) makes the contrast with the opening still clearer. Cleopatra looks upon her defeated kingdom with a composed expression. At the beginning, she was ebria with the sweetness of fortune and lymphatam Mareotico, her mind distorted by Mareotic wine. At the end, she confronts the collapse of her political position without losing her composure. The movement is from intoxication to self-possession, from an inability to judge circumstances to a deliberate decision about how to meet them.
It is worth asking whether Cleopatra has actually changed, or whether the reader has simply been allowed to see something that the opening description concealed. Horace gives us no independent access to her thoughts, and he does not explain why the woman who was previously represented as irrational can now behave with such control. Perhaps the earlier account was never intended to be complete. The first half of the poem presents Cleopatra through the political language of the victor; the latter half gives attention to her conduct after the collapse of her kingdom. The change may lie less in Cleopatra herself than in the terms through which the poem allows her to be seen.
This is also the difference between fortuna dulci ebria and deliberata morte ferocior. At the beginning, Cleopatra’s confidence is presented as an inability to recognize the instability of fortune. At the end, her determination is the product of deliberation. Both descriptions concern her response to political circumstances, but the poem attaches different moral values to that response. Her earlier confidence is excessive; her final resolve is controlled. Michael Hendry’s “More on Puns in the Cleopatra Ode” is worth consulting in this connection. Hendry suggests possible additional wordplay involving asperas, deliberata, and the opening reference to drinking. These proposals are tentative, and they need not be accepted as proof of Horace’s intention. They do, however, draw attention to the importance of individual words in the poem. The possible associations of deliberata with weighing and considering are particularly relevant to the contrast between intoxication and judgment.
The opening drinking scene now looks rather different. Horace invites his Roman companions to drink because the danger has passed, while Cleopatra is said to have been intoxicated by her own apparent success. The two forms of drinking are initially presented as opposites: Roman celebration is communal and appropriate; Cleopatra’s intoxication is individual and destructive. Yet the Roman celebration depends upon the defeat of a woman whose final conduct demonstrates the self-command that the opening denied her. The distinction has not disappeared, but it is no longer as secure as it seemed when the poem began.
The final lines bring Cleopatra’s conduct back to the political occasion:
deliberata morte ferocior,
saevis Liburnis scilicet invidens
privata deduci superbo
non humilis mulier triumpho.
Her determination is associated with her refusal to be carried away in the Roman triumph. The Liburni evoke the swift warships that would have taken her as a captive, while deduci describes the process of being led away. For Octavian, the triumph would have been the public culmination of his victory. For Cleopatra, it would have meant being displayed as a defeated monarch, her sovereignty reduced to an object in another ruler’s spectacle. The adjective superbo can convey magnificence and pride, but it can also suggest arrogance. Its meaning is not entirely settled by the Roman celebration that precedes it.
The placement of non humilis mulier is particularly effective. The phrase comes between superbo and triumpho, interrupting the expected movement towards the triumphal conclusion. The reader has spent much of the poem being prepared to celebrate Octavian’s success, but the final words make Cleopatra’s dignity inseparable from the spectacle that would have displayed her humiliation. The triumph remains Roman and victorious, yet the person who would have occupied its most important place is now described as someone who could not be made humble.
A Roman triumph was not simply a military parade. It was a public demonstration of authority in which captured wealth, prisoners, and defeated enemies made the victor’s power visible. A foreign monarch would have been particularly valuable to such a spectacle because her presence could give the victory a human form. Cleopatra’s refusal therefore has a political significance beyond personal pride. By avoiding the role of captive, she denies Octavian one of the most effective forms of symbolic confirmation that his victory could have supplied. She cannot reverse the military outcome, but she can refuse to participate in its public representation.
This is not to say that Horace denies Octavian his victory. The poem does not suggest that Cleopatra has defeated Rome, or that the political settlement has somehow failed. The opening celebration remains in place. But the triumph becomes harder to imagine as an uncomplicated expression of Roman superiority once the poem has made its intended captive worthy of admiration. Octavian has defeated Cleopatra militarily; he cannot make her willingly occupy the role that would complete the spectacle. The distinction is small in practical terms and rather large in poetic ones.
The final phrase also makes the poem’s treatment of Cleopatra more difficult to separate from its treatment of Roman power. The opening requires a foreign queen who can be represented as a threat to the Capitol. The conclusion gives that same queen a dignity that makes her humiliation seem less straightforwardly desirable. Horace does not abandon the political language of victory, but he has allowed the defeated figure to acquire an importance that the language of triumph cannot entirely contain. The poem ends not with the restoration of an uncomplicated Roman order, but with the image of a woman who refuses to be made small by the ceremony that would have celebrated her defeat.
The comparison with Dido is especially productive because Vergil’s fourth book offers a much more extended examination of political authority, desire, and the loss of self-command. Both women are foreign rulers whose circumstances become entangled with Rome’s future, and both are described through the vocabulary of furor. Their situations are not identical, however. Dido’s disorder is associated with her love for Aeneas and the abandonment of her political responsibilities; Cleopatra’s supposed disorder is associated with ambition, intoxication, and the threat she is said to pose to Rome.
Dido’s first appearance is notably different from Cleopatra’s introduction. Vergil describes her as dux femina facti (Aeneid 1.364), a woman who led the undertaking. Her authority is practical and visible: she has established Carthage through her own initiative and commands the respect of those around her. The fourth book gradually changes the terms through which she is represented. When Juno and Venus arrange the circumstances that bring Dido and Aeneas together, Vergil writes:
his dictis impenso animum flammavit amore
spemque dedit dubiae menti solvitque pudorem
(Aeneid 4.54–55).
Dido’s mind is set alight with love, hope is given to her uncertain mind, and her restraint is loosened. The political ruler introduced in the first book becomes increasingly associated with furor, furens, and demens. Her emotional condition is placed in tension with Aeneas’s responsibility towards the future mission that will lead to Rome.
The wounded-deer simile makes this change particularly visible:
uritur infelix Dido totaque vagatur
urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerva sagitta,
quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit
pastor agens telis
(Aeneid 4.68–71).
Dido wanders through the city like a deer struck by an arrow, unaware of the hunter who has wounded her. The image emphasizes vulnerability and the destructive consequences of her relationship with Aeneas. It resembles Horace’s later comparison of Cleopatra to a dove and a hare, although the differences matter. Vergil’s deer has already been wounded; the arrow remains lodged in its body. Horace’s Cleopatra is pursued, but the animal imagery is followed by an account of her own decisions. The similes initially make both queens vulnerable, but Horace moves away from the position of the hunted animal and towards a description of the woman who refuses capture.
Dido’s final speech contains its own mixture of anger, grief, and recognition:
vixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi,
et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago
(Aeneid 4.653–654).
Vixi gives the speech a sense of completion. Dido presents her life as a course that has been run, a life whose direction was given by fortuna. Her final words contain more than despair; they also register the scale of what she has built and what has been lost. Yet her death remains inseparable from her abandonment by Aeneas and the destruction of the future she had imagined with him.
Horace’s Cleopatra is not presented in this way. Antony is absent, and the poem does not explain her conduct through romantic attachment. Her concern is with the preservation of her royal identity and her refusal to become an object in Octavian’s triumph. The difference is important. Both queens are placed within narratives that privilege Rome’s future, but Cleopatra’s final dignity is expressed through a political decision rather than through the collapse of a personal relationship. Dido’s final speech looks back over a life and its abandoned possibilities; Cleopatra’s final conduct looks towards the spectacle she refuses to enter.
The comparison should not be made into a competition over which poet offers the more admirable queen. Vergil’s Dido belongs to a much larger exploration of Roman destiny and the costs of Aeneas’s mission, while Horace’s Cleopatra is the central figure in a shorter political lyric. Still, the two poems reveal how readily the language of madness and disorder can coexist with an acknowledgment of a foreign queen’s abilities and dignity. Neither poet allows the political position of the queen to exhaust her character.
Vergil’s direct representation of Cleopatra on the Shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8 provides a useful counterpoint. The shield presents Actium within a larger composition of Roman history, and Cleopatra appears as part of the scene celebrating Octavian’s victory. Vergil’s language is openly hostile:
sequiturque (nefas) Aegyptia coniunx
(Aeneid 8.688).
Antony is followed by his Egyptian wife. The parenthetical nefas makes the narrator’s disapproval explicit, while the phrase Aegyptia coniunx places Cleopatra’s foreign identity at the centre of the description. She appears as a foreign influence accompanying a Roman general, and the arrangement makes the conflict look like a confrontation between Roman order and an inappropriate alliance with Egypt.
Her departure from Actium is described in a more elaborate and emotionally suggestive passage:
ipsa videbatur ventis regina vocatis
vela dare et laxos iam iamque immittere funis.
illam inter caedes pallentem morte futura
fecerat ignipotens undis et Iapyge ferri,
contra autem magno maerentem corpore Nilum
pandentemque sinus et tota veste vocantem
caeruleum in gremium latebrosaque flumina victos
(Aeneid 8.707–713).
Cleopatra is carried away by the winds, pale in anticipation of her future death, while the Nile mourns for her and opens its waters to receive the defeated. The scene is politically celebratory, but its imagery grants the queen a degree of pathos. Egypt itself seems to mourn her departure. The river becomes a figure of welcome and refuge, and the defeated are received into its embrace.
Benario draws attention to the phrase pallentem morte futura, which recalls Vergil’s earlier description of Dido as pallida morte futura (Aeneid 4.644). The verbal resemblance is striking. Both women are associated with an anticipated death, and both are made vulnerable through the language of the future. The connection does not make Dido and Cleopatra interchangeable, but it allows the reader to recognize a recurring pattern in Vergil’s treatment of foreign queens whose fates become entangled with Roman history.
There is nevertheless a difference between Vergil’s Cleopatra and Horace’s. On the shield, she is part of a larger historical and visual composition celebrating Octavian’s victory. Her individual character is subordinate to the political meaning of Actium. Horace, by contrast, gives Cleopatra the latter half of the poem and allows her conduct to complicate the victory being celebrated. The distinction is not that Vergil is incapable of sympathy, or that Horace abandons Roman political loyalties. Rather, the two poems distribute attention differently. Vergil’s shield makes Cleopatra one element in a representation of Roman history; Horace makes her the figure around whom the meaning of the final triumph begins to turn.
Sergio Casali’s “The Making of the Shield: Inspiration and Repression in the Aeneid” offers a useful way of thinking about the relationship between political celebration and literary representation in Vergil. The shield is certainly encomiastic, but it is also selective. Its account of Roman history depends upon what is displayed, what is compressed, and what is left outside the image. The shield does not provide a neutral account of the past; it arranges the past into a form that can be seen as the future of Rome.
Horace’s ode works through a comparable selection. Antony is absent; Cleopatra is not named; the events of Actium and the subsequent defeat in Egypt are compressed into a pursuit between Octavian and a foreign queen. These omissions initially make the political story easier to tell. But the poem’s later attention to Cleopatra makes the omissions more noticeable. Once she has been given a voice of sorts through her actions, her composure, and her refusal to be led in triumph, the reader can begin to wonder what the opening account has left out. What would the conflict look like if Antony were restored to the scene? What might become visible if Cleopatra were allowed to occupy more than the role of Rome’s defeated antagonist?
The poem does not answer these questions, and it would be a mistake to treat its final praise as a concealed rejection of Octavian’s victory. Horace remains within the political world of the celebration with which he begins. Yet he also allows that celebration to encounter a limit. The Roman triumph depends upon turning the defeated into evidence of Roman power; Cleopatra’s final characterization makes that conversion incomplete. She has lost her kingdom, her fleet, and the political struggle, but the poem does not allow her to become merely the object of another man’s achievement. Its last words belong to the woman who would not be humbled by the triumph, and the celebration must proceed with that woman still in view.