Augustus

by Allan Massie

  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 learn 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 seen 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?

  'Like a right royal bitch,' Agrippa said. 'You never saw the like. I have attended theatres in many cities, but I never saw an actress like the Queen. You'd better be on your guard, lest she seduce you too. It would make a notable haul, wouldn't it? First Himself, then Antony and then you, Octavian. And she's capable of it. Don't fool yourself otherwise.'

  She was simply attired, in mourning white, her hair loose; and she wore no jewels. She looked older than her age, with little crevices of lines running from the corners of her eyes and mouth. Only the eyes themselves contradicted this impression. Almond-coloured and rather large, they sparkled with an unquenchable vivacity. When she spoke her voice was deeper and harsher than I remembered it as being. Her manner was composed and confident.

  She began with compliments. Her dead lord had spoken much of the nobility of my character. The war between us had been unfortunate, the result of a concatenation of circumstance and misunderstanding. She understood of course that I had been angered by Antony's abandonment of my sister, and his preference for her. But where the God Eros struck, mortals were powerless. Egypt had no quarrel with Rome, and indeed Egypt was sensible that its prosperity depended on the strength and vigour of Rome. She had been taught that early, by none other than my father.

  So far, she had spoken as if to persuade me by reason. Though I was of course aware of the depths of her hypocrisy, I still felt the charm of her manner and personality and the strength of her intellect working on my mind and imagination. Now, having introduced Julius' name, she paused.

  'Everything I know I learned from your great and most noble father,' she said. 'He was my teacher and master as well as my lover. His presence was intoxicating. He came on me with the freshness of a spring morning, and I blossomed like a summer flower in his Sun's rays. You, Caesar, are, I see now, his most worthy heir, the inheritor of his genius and his vision. He told me he saw Egypt as the garden and granary of Rome, and I as

  its gardener and farmer. An unromantic role for a young girl, you may say, but he told me that with a laugh, and I found him as convincing as he was irresistible. Caesar, I have erred in opposing you, and my error rested in my willingness to be guided by my dead lord. Antony was a great man, and a noble man, and there is no shame in my memory of him. But there is regret. Regret, because my love for Antony led me to stray from Caesar's precepts, and to follow Antony in his mad ambition which led to war against Caesar's heir. Only now that Antony's splendour can no longer dazzle me, do I see the error of my ways. And so, Caesar, I have come to lay Egypt at your royal and conquering feet, to throw myself on your generous mercy, to remind your father's son of what I meant to your father and to pray that we may together resume the work, the great work of harmony between Rome and Egypt on which we embarked, Caesar and I. For, most noble General, I say this to you: Rome and Egypt are bound together as Egypt is wedded to the Nile and Rome to the Middle Sea; and I am Egypt and you, most puissant General, are Rome'; and, saying this, she threw her head back in proud self-assertion, and sank to her knees before me.

  What a performance.

  I felt her power, her quite remarkable seductiveness. It was like listening to the deepest most desirable temptation; it held promises of bliss and power. I understood how Antony had found himself caught like a beast in a net. I looked away.

  'Great Queen,' I said, 'your words touch me. I too loved Antony and regret the separation of our ways. I too revere the memory of my father, and I recognize that Egypt and Rome are bound together. But this great war has displaced much, and this is not the moment to make any speedy decision on the nature of the future relationship between our countries. I shall ponder all you have said. Rest assured that you will be treated in a manner worthy of your great name and
nature, and that your fate will not be less than your deserts.'

  Her face grew pale. She quivered a moment, then, very slowly and now unwaveringly, rose to her feet. The audience was over.

  I gave orders that she be escorted to the Palace, and kept there with due honour, but under secure guard.

  'She shall appear in my Triumph,' I said to Agrippa, 'in chains, that Rome may be relieved of its long anxiety. And then we shall see what should be done.'

  A letter was brought me from Livia:

  Do not forget that the Queen is a woman and you honour yourself in treating her with honour and moderation. But I should be nervous and unhappy my dear, if you expose yourself to her charms. Her reputation frightens me . . .

  Octavia wrote:

  No woman, and no man either, has done me more bitter wrong than Cleopatra. And yet I find I pity her. To have dared so much and to have lost so completely stops my heart. I rejoice in your victory, brother, but I mourn Antony as the father of my children . . . What do you plan to do with his children by the Queen? I shudder to think of their significance.

  Cleopatra's fate was not of course my only concern, hardly even the chief one. The most urgent was the treatment of Egypt itself. I decided it was too rich and too important to be left in its semi-independent state; Julius had surely blundered in deciding so. Egypt must become a Roman province, for the food supply of Rome itself depended on its harvests. Moreover, I thought it best to keep it, for the time being at least, under my direct control. I therefore appointed Cornelius Gallus, a man in whom I reposed infinite trust, as its governor.