salted fish and flattery

Today some Roman history ... told by a Greek and involving fishing rods.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, Caesar's ally, Marc Antony, played a central role in the military campaign against the assassins and then began to consolidate his own power base. He formed an alliance with Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt and subsequently became her lover, spending the winter of 41-40 BC with her in Alexandria. The Greek historian, Plutarch, describes Marc Antony's stay in Egypt as a time of play and folly. Cleopatra tried to entertain her lover and keep him happy: 'Were [he] serious or disposed to mirth, she had at any moment some new delight or charm to meet his wishes.' (The translation is Dryden's.)

They played dice. They drank. They hunted. When he exercised, she went along to watch. They would go out at night disguised as servants 'to disturb and torment people at their doors and windows'. (Plutarch tells us that 'from these expeditions he often came home very scurvily answered, and sometimes beaten severely, though most people guessed who it was.') But one of the most striking of these 'follies' took place in the context of a fishing trip:

He went out one day to angle with Cleopatra, and, being so unfortunate as to catch nothing in the presence of his mistress, he gave secret orders to the fishermen to dive under water, and put fishes that had already been taken upon his hooks, and these he drew so fast that the Egyptian perceived it.

This tale is reminiscent of others in which the rich and powerful demand continuous flattery, their delusions of competence - and even brilliance - perpetually reinforced. Clever advisers must lose to them at chess and athletic bodyguards at tennis. Terrible paintings must be admired and dire poetry wondered at. The entourage must slouch so that the tiny man looks bigger. Reality must be reshaped so that the leader seems wiser, stronger, taller, wittier, better-looking, more discerning, more noble, and more astute than could ever in fact be the case.

There are two sides to this dynamic. Presented in serious mode, the vanity of the leader is the sign of an unstable and frightening world in which there is no real justice, where talent goes unrewarded, and where experience unfolds in a capricious, cruel, and arbitrary fashion.  Seen in comic mode, however, the trope communicates a much more reassuring message concerning the equality of persons, the hollowness of power, and the fragile condition of the dictator's authority. Perhaps there is a dialectical relationship between these moments or a characteristic alternation, the horror of capricious power interacting with the absurdity of pretension.

In Plutarch's account of the fishing trip, the trick is - in fact - revealed:

[F]eigning great admiration, [Cleopatra] told everybody how dexterous Antony was, and invited them next day to come and see him again. So, when a number of them had come on board the fishing-boats, as soon as he had let down his hook, one of her servants was beforehand with his divers and fixed upon his hook a salted fish from Pontus. Antony, feeling his line give, drew up the prey, and [...], as may be imagined, great laughter ensued.

But Cleopatra turns her trick once again toward the flattery of Antony, suggesting that his lack of skill in fishing is almost a sign of his strength in other areas of life:

'Leave,' said Cleopatra, 'the fishing rod, general, to us poor sovereigns of Pharos and Canopus; your game is cities, provinces, and kingdoms.'

And, in fact, Plutarch also tells us that the population of Alexandria in general regarded Antony's 'follies' in this way: '[They said] they were much obliged to Antony for acting his tragic parts at Rome, and keeping comedy for them.'

So this is a story about the interaction of the trivial and the weighty - the question of whether the 'greatness' of the 'great' is visible in every area of life or in their very neglect of the ordinary for that which is worthy of their attention. And it raises the question of whether fishing itself is a metonymic image of life as a whole or rather an interlude in the relentless march of days - a moment of respite when something different can happen and the the balance of life might be restored.

A packet of salted fish. [Image by David [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.]