Last Days With Cleopatra

by Jack Lindsay

  Then by leaning further over Victor saw the bewildered slaves who were at work pouring the wine; and he heard the voice of Antonius booming, urging them on. One huge amphora, from which the pitch-seals had just been knocked, was too heavy for the two slaves who were striving to lift it half out of the window; and Antonius, lending over-zealous aid, threw the whole amphora out. It hit the water with a great splash, turned over, and sank foamily spouting a red coil, like a cuttlefish stored with grape-juice instead of sepia.

  Antonius thrust out his head to watch the sinking amphora, and called for another, which he ordered to be similarly thrown out.

  Running downstairs, Victor watched Antonius directing the destruction.

  “Every vile drop,” he was saying earnestly, making the slaves work at full speed. A boatman, who had been fishing near, paddled up and sat back in his skiff watching the pouring liquid with perplexed anguish, licking his lips and scowling.

  “Give us some, master,” he ventured to call.

  “It’s poison,” shouted Antonius, and the boatman sat back once more, uncertain and thirsty, while other skiffs came racing up to learn what was happening. The first boatman spread the information he had received, and the boatmen all looked on at the empurpled waves, feeling equally angered whether they witnessed a wanton waste of good wine or whether some dastard had poisoned a whole cellar-stock.

  At last the slaves reported that there wasn’t a drop left, except a flagon in the room of Lucilius, who refused to surrender it. Antonius strode to the room and entered without knocking. On the bed lay Lucilius with a wine-cup in his hand.

  “Where’s the wine?” asked Antonius, in a hectoring anxious voice.

  “What do you want it for?” replied Lucilius. “A mad slave came in here and said you were dumping all our wine in the harbour.”

  “So I am,” said Antonius, moving up and down the room, touching something at one end with his right hand and then something at the other end with his left hand. “Every drop. Every vile drop. Give me all you’ve got, if you love me.”

  “I won’t.” Lucilius swung his fist down on the bed and broke a leather thong. “I’ve let you insult me and trample on my feelings, because I love you more than anyone on earth. Not because you saved my life, but because you saved it in the right way. But you’re going too far when you snatch the wine from my lips.”

  “Please give it up.” Antonius lost all his truculence and clasped his hands. “It’s my only hope. I can’t go on any longer. I’ve been beaten.”

  But Lucilius, who had been drinking for weeks almost as much as Antonius himself, had turned obstinate.

  “I’ll die for you, but I won’t stop drinking.” He tried to argue reasonably. “Think now. You’re not even asking for the wine because you want to drink it, but because you want to make the fishes drunk. What nonsense.”

  Antonius saw the flagon at the foot of the bed, darted at it, and smashed it against the wall.

  “Hell!” shouted Lucilius. “That’s too much!”

  He leaped from the bed and threw himself at Antonius. They fell wrestling to the floor among the fragments of earthenware. Antonius lay weakly for a moment, encumbered by the handle of the flagon which was still in his hand. Recovering, he raised it and seemed looking for a chance to crash its jagged edges into the face of Lucilius. Then he dropped it, gripped Lucilius by the throat, and hurled him back against the plaster wall which was soaked and damaged from the broken flagon.

  “Let me go,” gasped Lucilius.

  But Antonius held on, his lips grimly shut, his eyes narrowed. Victor and Eros had followed him to the room and now stood watching in the door-way. Victor turned away, mumbling something about fetching help; but Eros ran into the room, fell on his knees beside Antonius, and caught his wrists.

  “Let him go,” he pleaded.

  Antonius at once ceased throttling Lucilius and looked up at Eros.

  “How did you get here?”

  Then, without waiting for an answer, he rose and looked round.

  “All the wine’s gone?”

  “Yes, yes,” replied Eros, unable to catch the wandering eye of Antonius. “ There’s none left now.”

  “Good.” Antonius spoke undecidedly, trying to think of something. “Good. It had to be. People will understand some day and bless me. Good.”

  With another vacant glance round he went out.

  Lucilius raised himself with a groan from the floor and shook his head at Victor. Eros had gone after Antonius.

  “He’s getting worse. I’ve a good mind to stab him in his sleep—to save him from disgracing his name—and then to end myself. But the older I get the less I want to die.”

  He looked at the shattered flagon and the pool of wine on the floor.

  “Here, lad, run ashore and buy me some more wine.”

  “I’d be frightened to do it,” said Victor, turning to go.

  “I don’t blame you. I don’t blame anybody.” He whistled. “So this is the end of the world, is it?” He paced up and down the room, and then stopped to look out of the window. “We’ve got a nice view, anyway. I’ll go and get drunk ashore.”

  *

  Antonius dozed fretfully all day. Eros and Victor took turns at watching him. As dusk was drably sifting out of the earth, Victor was at the door, hidden from the view of Antonius on the couch. He didn’t like to stand any closer and prayed that nothing would happen before the turn of Eros came. In the midst of a reverie, in which he dreamed of clasping Daphne all his own in a room of sunlight, he grew aware of furtive movements from the couch. Peeping through the curtains, he saw that Antonius was fumbling about under the couch, lifting the coverlet. He was about to rush forward, thinking that Antonius wanted the bed-pot to urinate or to vomit; but his fear made him hesitate.

  After much clumsy search Antonius found what he was after, and drew it out. A small flagon of wine! He removed the plug with careful movements to and fro, and lifted the flagon-lip to his mouth. Victor heard the wine gurgling, distressed at the cunning leer that he had seen on the face of Antonius. The flagon was one of those known as besa-flasks, made locally after the shape of ancient Egyptian jars commemorating the god Bes. It was pot-bellied, ornamented with a grotesque flattened face with spreading pig-snout, flapping ears, cavernous mouth, and squinting eyes.

  The ugly dwarf-shape out of which Antonius was drinking merged for the gazing Victor with the face and limbs of Antonius himself, producing a twin-monster, a bestial grotesque of deformation. Again the world became confusedly threatening, criss-crossed with madness. Victor tried to think of Daphne, to remember her face as an amulet-protection; but the chaos of general woe and discord broke down the fences of his private emotion, derided him, hid the amulet-face of Daphne behind hag-disguises and treacherous masks. No one was as he or she seemed. Everyone was a decoy, the blinded wild-fowl deceiving its free brethren into the net. Even Daphne.

  Antonius lay back. The room became darker.

  Victor put off the moment when he would call a house-slave to light the lamps. Then he heard Antonius stirring, sitting up.

  “Eros...Victor...”

  Victor entered the room after stepping back a few paces down the corridor, to hide the fact that he had been so near. “The lamps will be ready in a moment.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Victor heard Antonius feeling about—for the flagon, he thought in despair. But it was for his shoes. At length the shoes were found, for Victor in his guilty knowledge of the secret flagon did not join in the search. Then, to cover his remissness, he hurried forward.

  “Let me lace them.”

  Antonius sat stolidly till the shoes were laced. Then he rose.

  “Eros too. No one else.”

  Victor called Eros, and Antonius walked to the outer door, attended by his pages. Down the causeway he went, walking slowly but resolutely. At the foot of the causeway the sentry had taken his place; he challenged the oncomers, but stepped back in surprise when Antoniu
s answered. Then Antonius and his pages went silently on.

  Victor was too terrified to reply to the questioning glances of Eros. In the villa he had seen what Antonius was hugging under his tunic. As Eros lifted the curtain, a drift of light from the end of the corridor had thinned the gloom, and Victor had seen the dagger along the blade of which Antonius was running his finger.

  At the palace-gates Antonius checked the guards and refused to allow them to send ahead to announce him. He did the same in the hall, sternly ordering that no one was to leave it, and signing to the officer in charge. Then on he went, with his pages. Victor knew what he was touching as his hand went every short while to his belt. It was the dagger, hidden against his skin.

  *

  As expected, Nicias refused to dine with an Egyptian. Besides, he had more interesting things to do. He had been engaged in cataloguing part of the Pergamene library of 200,000 book-rolls which Antonius had bestowed on Cleopatra to compensate for books burned in the riots during Caesar’s landing some seventeen years before; and he had found an anonymous and unknown commentary on the geography of Aischulos. At least the Roman had done one good thing in giving Alexandria that library for a library burned by a Roman. The last shipload from Pergamos had arrived only a month ago; and the Library of Alexandria, the biggest in the world with its half-million rolls, had been in a flutter. Most of the parchment-rolls, being duplicates of works already at the Museion, were to be housed at the Sarapeion; but the Museion had first pick.

  What, dine with an Egyptian dilettante when one might die tomorrow with a possibly essential book unread?

  Daphne heard the discussion, and intruded. She said she wanted to go with Olympos since the dinner was to be a family-party; and she was told to go back into the kitchen. But Olympos pleaded for her; and Nicias agreed at last, to settle the matter, which had taken up far too much time already. He was sorry to agree, but it was better to sin against one’s convictions than to waste time. He retired to his anonymous treatise on Aischulean place-names. He’d already found three errors and was sure from internal evidence that the author was a Milesian; a little more deduction would probably unearth his identity.

  “Come back early.”

  Daphne was dressed in her best dress, the one with the most pleats and with the most embroidery on the sleeves. A dress that made her feel grown-up, there were so many inhibitions attached to it. A moment’s forgetfulness would ruin the pleats; and if the top was pulled a fraction too much over the girdle, it looked blousy; and if it was let fall a fraction too much, it was trodden on; and the arm-holes were rather tight, so that they hurt quite a lot, having shrunk through much washing. The tightness was accentuated by the fact that she’d neglected for some time to depilate her armpits (or any other part) like the other girls of her age. What was there wrong with hair? She felt ashamed, hairless, like a little girl of six caught dressing in her mother’s clothes: which was a queer thing to feel, since it was the other way round really—trying to pretend to be a little girl of six, when she was, if not her own mother, at least old enough to be somebody’s mother, somebody very small, the tiniest of tiny babies...The thought was all too complicated and bothersome. She buried it, and didn’t depilate, running her fingers over the hair instead, and prizing its softness. But tonight she was gay.

  The world was filled with people. At least the street was. People who seemed all to be going somewhere, and yet they weren’t going out to dine with—who was it? Manethos.

  As she walked along the street with her arm held by Olympos, she felt very self-assured and wanted to show how much she knew of the world. She wanted to tell Olympos all about Herodes and Antonius, but couldn’t find a way of introducing the subject or of explaining how she knew. At last she found an explanation. She could say that one of the slaves of Antonius talked to Simon at the market. But that explanation somehow robbed her knowledge of its social stamp, its peculiarity. Anyone might have a gossiping slave.

  But it was too late to start the subject; for they reached the house that Manethos had bought and renovated, on the outskirts of the Brucheion area. It was a Greek-built house, but Manethos had decorated it internally and furnished it in Egyptian fashion, not aggressively, but in a kind of collector’s arrangement which lent to his smiling resuscitation of national custom the excuse of an antiquarian’s whim.

  Two native servants met Olympos and Daphne at the door and bowed them in, lowering their hands to touch their knees; then offered them fruit and drinks in an antechamber where they rested and had their shoes removed. Palm-leaf slippers were provided. The guests were then ushered into the room beyond, where the walls showed alternate lines of black and white bricks and slender lotus-columns supported the painted ceiling.

  Here the hosts welcomed them; Manethos, his sister-wife Sheftu-Teta, and their two daughters, one younger and one older than Daphne, with names that no Greek could memorise. Other guests had arrived, an Egyptian named Gebu; a Greek treasury-official who collected antique rings; a jolly-faced Roman Senator who had thrown in his lot with Antonius and now ran one of the state-mills; a wise-eyed old man from Babylon who said nothing; and the Exegetes of the City, the most important civic official, who was also the eponymous Priest of Alexandros the Founder, an exquisitely mannered gross-looking man dressed in purple.

  The hands of the guests were washed in silver bowls with the edges turned-in to obviate splashing. There were some low tables and stools, and against the wall were chairs; but beside the tables were laid daintily-woven grass mats, to which, in a compromise for unused knees and buttocks, Manethos had added linen cushions filled with vegetable down, “a composition softer than feathers and not pleasing to vermin.”

  The guests seated themselves at ease on the cushions, and slave-girls came round to place garlands on their heads and to drop unguent in their hair, while salvers of cakes and salads were set on the tables. Manethos and his family did not eat flesh, but for the more barbarous tastes of his guests he had conceded plates of small roasted birds stuffed with rare herbs, the flesh ready sliced, or fishes boned and served with faint citron sauces.

  While the dishes were taken round by the slaves, the guests conversed. Manethos elucidated a problem of Egyptian history for the ring-collector, and Gebu discussed horse-breeding with the Exegetes. The Senator gave an entertaining account of how elections had been held at Rome in the Republican days and how much ingenuity had been exercised in defining when bribery was or wasn’t bribery; and Manethlis related how some thousands of years previously an attempt at proletarian government in Egypt had failed. He went on to quote some passages from a poet of the period, translating them into Greek:

  Nay but gold and lapis lazuli are hung round the necks of slave-girls, while noble ladies tramp through the land and mistresses of houses cry out: Would that we had something to eat.

  Nay but those who were clad in fine linen are beaten with staves. The ladies that never looked upon the daylight are flung into the streets.

  Nay, but the poor man has attained to the state of the Nine Gods. The poor come in and go out of the Great Houses of the Law.

  Behold, ladies lie on hard mattresses, and the magistrates in the storehouse. He that lay sleepless on walls now owns a bed.

  Behold, the rich man goes to bed thirsting. He that once begged for the rich man’s dregs now has strong beer for himself.

  Behold, she that had no box now has a coffer. She that looked at her face in the water now has a mirror.

  Behold, he that had no shade, now has shade. They that had shade are in the full blast of the storm.

  Olympos said little, and the wise-eyed old man from Babylon said nothing, though he had taken a great fancy to Olympos and pledged him whenever he ate or drank anything. But his silence was understood later when it became apparent that he knew no Greek.

  Daphne, who had heard that Manethos was married to his sister, looked with unabashed interest at the hostess and also studied the daughters, who were both remarkably like their mot
her. Of course she knew how often the natives married when brother and sister, but that wasn’t the same. She didn’t dine in huts, and nothing that the lower classes did was of any moment. (Victor she didn’t consider as lower-class, though he was a slave and most of the natives were “free-born”; he was educated.) But for a couple such as Manethos and Sheftu-Teta to be married—openly!—was an astonishing phenomenon.

  Mother and daughters were alike clad in single-piece dresses tight-fitting at the hips and then flowing loosely down to the ankles. The upper-part was slit deep in front and back, and partially drawn together by a gold cord round the neck. The sleeves were clasped at the wrist with snake-charms. Mother and daughters alike had delicate features with small firm jaws and slightly-sunken cheeks, small heavy mouths and large clear eyes, frail shapely necks. Daphne, who had come to dislike, was enchanted. The hair was cut rather short, to leave it cool and comfortable, though, when occasion demanded, ceremonial wigs were donned. No wigs were now worn, to mark the homeliness of the gathering.

  One of the daughters played a harp, and the other sang an old Egyptian song. Daphne wanted to ask what the song was about, but couldn’t ask, staring at Sheftu-Teta and her girls. She felt that she’d like to marry an Egyptian (Manethos, if he was young, but not the somewhat thick-lipped Gebu) and live calm and contented, with cropt hair and refined manners. Even the few flowers in the vases seemed more elegant than other flowers. Daphne wondered if Sheftu-Teta and the girls trimmed each petal with scissors to make it more perfect before the flowers were arranged in the copper vase.