Augustus i-1

by Allan Massie

  'This is it, Caesar,' he called out. 'This is the hour to which all the campaign has tended. Or rather,' he corrected himself, dropping the rhetorical tone which he had adopted for the benefit of the soldiers who stood around, 'we have a few hours to go.'

  'How can you be sure?' I asked. (I have always hated the sea and naval warfare, and found its principles mysterious.)

  'Haven't you noticed?' he said. 'Or have you forgotten? The wind is likely to shift in the afternoon, and move round to the north-west. That will enable Antony to run before it. He hopes it will cut us off from our land base, and aid him to break our line… but if he fails, then the wind will aid his flight. He will be able to run fast before it…' 'It sounds,' I said, 'a desperate gamble.' 'What else is left for him?' Agrippa said.

  We had had the conversation before. At staff meetings we had analysed the options open to Antony, and concluded that what would be attempted to-day offered him the only chance of avoiding the slow and humiliating surrender which the crumbling and demoralization of his army, pinned in our blockade, otherwise threatened. I could have wished that his nerve had failed him and he had desisted from this last attempt. For one thing I have always found it uncanny when your adversary does just what you have predicted. I am ever inclined to fear that it will lead to a change of fortune. But Agrippa was buoyed up and excited by the success of his forecast.

  A little later, when we had checked all dispositions and wished each other luck (for however well-laid your plans, chance is the arbiter of war), and taken the auspices and sacrificed to the lords of destiny, Agrippa climbed back to his little boat, and was rowed away. I watched till the boat became a speck on the ocean and then disappeared behind the line of galleys on our left.

  Towards noon the proud high sails of Antony's fleet could be seen rounding the point and, then, like a dream unfolding, they deployed, and stood off in battle array some half a mile distant. The world held its breath while the soft breeze still rippled landward.

  I dunked a piece of bread in the resin-flavoured wine of Greece (which survives better on shipboard than our more delicate Italian wines) and so broke my fast.

  For the hundredth time and more I rehearsed the arguments we had held. My own wish had been to avoid this encounter. I would have let Antony clear the straits unchallenged and make a dash for Egypt. I was sure such precipitate flight would dishearten the Romans and Italians in his force. They would, I said, feel that Antony had finally thrown in his lot with Egypt, that he had abandoned all hope of winning the West and resigned himself to being Cleopatra's lapdog. When they felt this, I suggested, many would desert their general; and we would achieve success without a battle. Agrippa heard my argument out, then banged his fist on the table.

  'No, no, and again, no,' he cried, and I could see that our officers were impressed by the vehemence of his tone. 'No,' he said again, quietly, to emphasize his sincerity. 'That is no more than conjecture. What is fact is this. Antony's ships are bigger than ours and much faster under full sail. If we shirk the contest and let him run, the chances are he will escape without suffering any damage to his fleet. Then our whole summer campaign will have been wasted. It will all be to begin again. And do you imagine, Caesar, we can tax Italy another year as we have this one? I tell you, on both military and political grounds, we must bring the matter to issue.'

  I heard him and assented. I have always been ready to be impressed by solid argument. Indeed, one reason for my success has been that I have never obstinately maintained my own point of view from pride. I have always been willing to concede that in certain areas others know more than I.

  So I had assented, and now watched Antony's fleet rock on the water. Sea-gulls screamed overhead. The men shifted their feet and kept their eyes fixed on the enemy, all but a few old sweats who had lain down on deck and were chatting among themselves. They were men who had been in so many battles that they had long ceased to anticipate what might happen. They had seen enough death to know that they might not see the moon rise that night; they would therefore take their ease and conserve their strength. I envied their fatalism.

  The sun passed the zenith and still the wind neither rose nor shifted. The light shimmered in noonday heat. Sweat ran down the backs of my legs. My mouth felt dry and sour. The whole world rocked in a pregnant and awful silence.

  Then, very gently at first, my nostrils were pricked with the tang of smoke. The black fumes which had been rising almost straight from the burning ships before drifting thinly away over the camp could now be seen shifting towards the open sea.

  Melas shouted orders to his sailors, and my centurions called their men to stand to. With sails set and oars flailing, Antony's fleet moved against us in battle order. When they were still some hundred paces distant, I could hear the cry of battle from our left where Agrippa was already engaged.

  Literary art such as Caesar's can make sense and order of battles. All those I have taken part in have left me with a confused welter of impressions: I see a young boy by my side fall with an arrow in this throat, his hands closing on the shaft and locking there; he fell, half-turnng so that the point was driven deeper in his neck before the shaft split and he was left holding the upper part, broken and useless, and his face turned towards me, as he lay on one cheek, his innocent eye glazing over, and indignant surprise fading from it… I see a burning brand tossed in a wide arc through the air to land among the sheets of an enemy ship, and I hear the screams of terrified and burning sailors. I hear the thud of grappling irons joining our ships to theirs, the hoarse execrations and the clash of swords. And, high up on our bridge, I see the whole ocean turned into a mimic and ghastly theatre, the water running purple with blood, and hear the splash of bodies and everywhere the cries of death.

  Caesar could have made sense of it, or have pretended to do so. I cannot, and, while it happened, horror drove out all thought of triumph.

  Then, for a moment, came a lull. Some ships had surrendered, others floundered broadside on. On our wings, ships manoeuvred to outflank the enemy. There was suddenly one of those mysterious halts which take place in battles when the first fury and first charge are spent and the Gods weigh fortune in their balance. Someone cried, They've had enough, they're going to break,' and in their centre a little galley put out from the great flagship, hurrying with urgent oars to where another ship with purple sails lay off at the head of the Egyptian contingent. How it happened I do not know, but the cry went up, 'Antony flees.' The galley approached the purple-sailed vessel, men were seen to board, and, with a speed that surprised me, it began to run before the wind, with the whole Egyptian fleet streaming behind it. I have a picture in my mind of a grey ravaged face in the stern of the fleeing flagship, a face eloquent of vain ambition, burnt nights and lost powers. I do not think I saw it, except in my mind's eye; but that is Antony, fixed for eternity, the great bull emasculated, his face set against the ruin he had brought upon himself, tears coursing his cheeks, his back to Egypt, the months remaining, and the shame he must endure. We lay at sea all night, amidst the cries and groans of the wounded and dying. The aftermath of a sea battle is more terrible even than of a land one, for the elements themselves are hostile. The black water laps cruelly against the ships, threatening even the victor lest the wind, which was strong that night, should blow up a storm. All through the hours of the dark, men struggled to rescue others from the burning hulls, to fish men from the hostile water, to comfort the dying and tend the wounded. The cruelty of war can only be fully appreciated by those who have seen the tenderness of soldiers after a battle.

  In the morning we returned to land. Antony had left part of his army under Canidius to hold his camp. It was a pointless gesture. They all knew there was nothing to fight for, no hope of breaking out. For some days Canidius obstructed negotiations and declined to answer my emissaries. Then, on the fifth night, he slipped from the camp himself, and rode hard through the hills making for Corinth, from where he too took ship for Egypt. His men were relieved to le
arn of his departure. They surrendered at once. True to my promise of clemency, I disbanded some of the legions and despatched the men to Italy to await resettlement, while I incorporated others in my own army. The play was finished. There remained only the epilogue.

  FOURTEEN

  Egypt stank. The Nile, drawn back from its bounds in the dry season, leaves spread over the land a coating of grey mud. The peasants cover it with dung from their cattle, sheep and camels, and from its rich soil produce two crops of wheat a year. Yet it stinks.

  And the stink of Egypt is moral too. Alexandria is a noble city, of Greek origin, as was of course the house of Ptolemy to which Cleopatra belonged, descended from one of Alexander's generals. Its harbours, guarded by the Pharos, an astonishing construction four hundred feet high, built in three diminishing tiers of limestone, pink marble and a purple granite from upper Egypt, are truly among the wonders of the world. The city has been laid out, in its public quarter, with elaborate care. Who can fail to be impressed by the great hundred-foot-wide street that runs right across it? Who likewise can fail to wonder at its university and libraries, the tombs of Alexander and the Ptolemies, or at its innumerable workshops where goldsmiths, scent-confectors, ivory-carvers, glass-makers abound, or the factories where papyrus is prepared. The wealth and variety of Egypt's economy must stagger every observer. And yet, as I say, the place stinks.

  It is not merely the vulgar reek of humanity, in this city where half a million swelter in the late summer heat, a heterogeneous and excitable mass compounded of Greeks, Jews, and native Egyptians, quick to riot, cowardly and treacherous. Nevertheless their organization is merely a matter of efficient administration, such as we were soon able to provide. What disquiets in Egypt however is the undercurrent of malevolent magic, the strange and repellent cults of animal gods, the underlying assumption that truth is to be found in dark and secret places and not in the light. Beyond the city, in the desert, stand the vast and mysterious tombs of the ancient Pharaohs, monstrous reminders of a vile religion, the cult of the dead. Ancient Egypt is a land of buggery. It is said that the source of power is to be found in the penetration of the anus, achieved to the accompaniment of magical incantations. One Pharaoh reputedly described Egypt as 'looking like the crack between the globes of the buttock'. The fertility of the Nile mud resembles excrement, and one of their most potent Gods, Khepera, is a dung beetle; he is Lord of the Land of the Dead.

  How can any Roman fail to be disgusted by this antique superstition; how can he fail to despise the land that bred it?

  Had Antony been subdued and subverted by Egypt's ancient magic? In a sense. Of course Cleopatra was not Egyptian but Greek, and since the Ptolemies practised marriage only within the family, she was free of any inherited Egyptian taint; yet, since few doubt that she employed sorcery on Antony, which destroyed his Roman virtue and rendered him her contemptible slave, it is reasonable to believe that Antony fell victim to the greedy and rapacious gods of Egypt.

  He had withdrawn his army to the fringe of the desert. One day he resolved to make a last stand, the next to submit and throw himself on my mercy. His plight was indeed desperate. His legions in Cyrene had deserted him and attached themselves to my general Cornelius Gallus. It was reported that Cleopatra tried to rally him; she proposed wild chimerical plans: they would sail to Spain and seize the silver mines; they would turn their backs on Egypt and the Roman World, and head, like Alexander, for India, to carve out a new empire there. Antony heard her in silence. His eye dropped. His hand sought the wine-flask. He looked at Cleopatra with the bitter hatred of a man who gazes on the instrument of his destruction. He wrote to me: You have played the game and won. Antony is hardly Antony any more. The God Hercules who loved me now curls his lip in scorn to see how low I have fallen. Yet we have achieved much together, you and I; for the sake of our old love and friendship, for the sake of your sister Octavia, my one true wife, I crave clemency. You will understand how I am humbled to bring myself to ask this. Why, Caesar, should the Roman world still be split by turmoil? I still have legions devoted to my cause. I can still strike a fierce blow, and, rendered desperate by my condition, can promise you that such a blow will hurt. But I am weary of struggle. I am ready to desist. Grant me, Caesar, safe passage to my estates, and I shall drag out my last days in tranquillity, tending my vines and olive groves in the fertile plain and gentle hillsides of my beloved Bononia. Is this too much to ask? Should you grant me my request, I shall deliver the cursed Queen who has bewitched me to your hands. How could I answer so miserable a letter? It made me quiver with shame to read it, for I could not fail to read the bitter self-hatred and abandonment of virtue that informed it. I could not reply. I could not even show the letter to Agrippa. I publish it now merely for the record, that historians be not deceived.

  I knew how low was the morale of Antony's legions, and sent my cavalry against them. Antony's heroes of so many encounters threw down their arms. 'Why die for nothing?' one centurion cried. 'Die for the General,' a staff-officer, bloodshot and distraught, cried out. The centurion looked him in the eye. 'The General is nothing', he said, and planted his sword-point deep in the sand.

  Learning of this, Antony's last resolution failed him. He withdrew to his tent. What passed before his eyes at that moment? Did he see that morning when he stood with Caesar's bloodied toga in his hand, and harangued the people? Did he recall that morning on the island shrouded by river-mists when we met to re-order the world? Did he, I wonder, even envy Lepidus, whose insignificance had saved his life? But Antony could not be pictured living in dishonoured retirement. I could not have treated him as I treated Lepidus.

  News was brought to him that Cleopatra had killed herself. At once he broke into a wail of lamentation in which mourning and reproach, love and hatred, were strangely mixed. When he had finished, and wept a little, he called for a cup of wine, drank it and composed himself to sleep. Towards evening he woke. The sun lay low across the desert. Antony stood in the doorway of his tent and looked at the world turning purple in the twilight. He called again for wine, but this time merely touched the rim of the cup with his lips. In the distance he could still hear the cries and moans of wounded men, but his camp, so diminished in size, so silent, with the silence of men waiting for fate, must have seemed a long way from the battlefields of Gaul, Spain or Armenia. The sands stretched out in all directions till they lost themselves in the evening mists.

  He threw his head up, they say, called for his sword, told his bearers to hold it steady and launched himself against it.

  Perhaps the man shrank from the task, or perhaps a last instinct held Antony back, for the sword did not pierce any vital organ, and, though he fell to the ground bleeding freely, he was not yet dead. He moaned with pain or disappointment, and begged his servant to deliver the final blow. But the man shrank again from doing so, and night closed about the bleeding general. In a little, when he had lost consciousness, they wrapped him in a blanket and carried him into his tent. Meanwhile, hearing the news, his soldiers drifted away, falling from the camp like autumn leaves.

  Towards dawn Antony woke; his fearful servants approached and told him that the report received yesterday had been false. Cleopatra was not dead. She had instead taken refuge in the Royal Mausoleum, known sometimes simply as the Monument. He begged them to carry him there, and, very gently, with a devotion it touches me to recall, they lifted him on to a litter, and obeyed his last instructions.

  They raised him to the Mausoleum. He was by now very weak and it is not known if he regained consciousness. He probably died in Cleopatra's arms, but it is not certain and the accounts are conflicting. One version has it that Cleopatra reviled him as the author of her ruin, and that the last words Antony heard were full of hatred and reproach; but this I do not believe. In her own way Cleopatra loved him and besides she had too fine a sense of the dramatic to let him die in such a manner.

  Of course I mourned Antony when I heard of his death. How could I fail to? I have see
n gladiators bedew the arena with their tears as they gazed on the comrade they had slain, and no gladiators have been joined as Antony and I were joined.

  So died this most remarkable of men. Agrippa, with his characteristic generosity, observed that a rarer spirit never steered humanity. It is said Cleopatra swooned at the moment of his death, and I myself almost did so, having to seize Agrippa's arm to support myself against a moment of dizziness when the news was broken.

  'I am both glad and sorry,' I managed to say. 'Glad for Antony's sake for life could have offered him nothing but sad decline, and glad too for Rome, since Antony's death brings this old barren division of the world to an end. I did not choose this war; he forced it on me, and has paid the price. How did he die?' 'Nobly, on his own sword, a Roman death…'

  I nodded. 'It ought to make more noise,' I said. 'You would think the death of such a man would shake lions into the streets of Alexandria and send the citizens cowering to their hovels.' 'What did Cleopatra say?' I do not know, why, after a pause, I had asked the question.

  'She said, sir, that there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.'

  'Do you remember, Agrippa, how he spoke of Brutus? "This was the noblest Roman of them all." Those were his words. They angered me then, for I could not share his opinion of Brutus. But now? Why do I feel like that? Why do I feel like a man who has shot a splendid bird, an eagle, or brought down a noble stag? I had no choice, yet half my heart is torn. He was my brother and my rival, my separated love, my friend and companion in countless fields; and now, a body for crows to pick at. Was it destiny tore us apart, were our stars irreconcilable? Where's the Queen of Egypt?'

  'She takes refuge still in the Mausoleum, but has sent to know your will.'

  'Agrippa,' I said, 'fetch her to me. You at least will be proof against her charms.' How would she come?