10. Cleopatra Stole Antony – Caesar’s BFF – from His Wife
It wasn’t unusual for anyone to have affairs in the ancient world – no weirder than it is now, and probably less so – but Marc Antony was a real womanizer. He was on his fourth marriage when he met and wed Cleopatra bigamously, but he couldn’t just divorce his fourth wife as easily as he had some of the earlier ones. Why? She was Octavia, sister of his arch-rival, the uber-powerful Octavian (later Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, who defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC). This was an important alliance.
But Antony didn’t mind giving up Octavia for an exciting foreign queen. To keep Antony, Plutarch claimed, “she therefore pretended to be passionately in love with Antony herself, and reduced her body by slender diet; she put on a look of rapture when Antony drew near, and one of faintness and melancholy when he went away.”
She basically wheedled him so he’d choose her, his mistress-wife, over his lawful wife, on which the Romans didn’t look fondly. Then Cleopatra traveled with Antony to Athens. He threw Octavia and their kids out of their house there. (Ironically, after Cleopatra’s death, Octavia raised her and Antony’s surviving children in a weird version of The Brady Bunch.)
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