Last Days With Cleopatra

by Jack Lindsay

  He found his emotion outdistancing his thought, lacking symbols to express itself, wasting itself in the very immensity of his detestation. Only the melancholy of the jagged sense of frustration remained. Was it the fear of death?

  Nicias clasped his bony hands and crackled the knuckles.

  “I swear that I’d feel warm here on the coldest day. Here are friends who never deceive, a world that isn’t weighted with regrets and doubts. No men chaffering in the streets. How ugly the world is.”

  Every fraction of the world is beauty, thought Olympos; even the ulcers that I have to probe, the woman in childbirth, the raping soldier; hunger and death; doubt and regret. Everything is beautiful—except perhaps this room of death. But even that must be beautiful too.

  “I’d like to see those books,” he said.

  A slave swarmed up a ladder and brought down the rolls. Olympos knew them at once, out-of-date works on the surgical cure of an ozcena, and on indurated tonsils; but he didn’t like to depress Nicias.

  “They look interesting,” he remarked, and told a slave to carry them to his study.

  In a recess, on cushioned seats, lighted by windows of mica, a group of the state-paid professors were gathered, discussing the latest poem by Parthenios. Rhodon, the tutor of Caesarion, was insisting that the epyllion or little-epic was overdone; he preferred the subjective touch, an epistle-form or a soliloquy. Theodoros his rival, the tutor of Antyllus, was clearly bursting with concealed pride, and engineered the conversation till he was able to mention that he’d had a letter from Parthenios himself, who was at Rome.

  “He declares that the Romans have taken up writing verses most strenuously.”

  There was an outbreak of laughter from the group. Romans as poets, it was richly funny.

  One of the professors, reputed a wag (though a mathematician and author of a work on Unclassified Incommensur-ables) , asked with a bright air: “These Romans, have they an alphabet? I thought their learning stopped at the abacus.” And there was another outbreak of laughter, for the abacus was the calculating-machine.

  Olympos and Nicias had drawn near, and Nicias was glumly silent again, for it was only with Olympos that he had any ease at all in expressing his attitudes.

  Theodoros, determined to make the most of his letter, went on as soon as the laughter had subsided, “ He says that they’ve a poet Catullus, who is, however, as coarse as might be expected, except in his translations which are surprisingly passable. But there’s a coming man, Gallus, who ought to do better things.”

  The wag again commented. “I bet Gallus has a government position.”

  Theodorus admitted that Gallus at the moment commanded in Africa and was in fact a patron well worth flattering. Again the group applauded with laughter; and the wag returned to his discussion with a colleague who was writing a book on the Helicoidal Line. Olympos nodded to acquaintances, and went away. Nicias stayed, not to talk, but to sit among fellow-Greeks who at least hated many of the same things as himself. He despised all the modern poets, Greeks as much as Romans.

  Olympos passed out through the long cedar-panelled hall where meals were served. The professors dined at two long tables of polished wood. Trestle-tables were set up for the resident students at the other end. Everyone sat up to eat, ignoring the general custom for men to eat reclining.

  Olympos went through the further door, and out along a shady myrtle-avenue, to regain the street. He wanted to look at men and women and children, all warm and alive, ignorant of the poisons that contrived queer clottings of disease in their veins. It seemed to him, for a flash of vision, that disease obeyed absolute laws like those sought mathematically by the star-gazers—laws dictated by the relationships of the moment of birth. The individual was stabbed and torn by invisible fates; on the loins or the heart or the eyes the leper-hand of fate was laid, and there, at the appointed moment, collected the venoms of pain, coagulating, growths of deliberate fear. I am afraid of my loins, my heart, my eyes. Then the disease struck.

  Nevertheless the vision was a lie. It was true, and not altogether true. Olympos came out into the street and looked at the people passing. He felt that he loved them all, however worthless they might be, and love could break the laws of fear and pain, the invisible net of memory.

  But he was an old man. Why were these thoughts forced on his old age, because he loved his niece and she was playing the fool? At least I shan’t interfere and say that I only acted for the best, said Olympos to himself; I shall do nothing.

  As soon as he was completely sure of his decision, he was also equally sure that Daphne hadn’t confessed everything, that she was more involved with her lover than she’d admitted.

  *

  The lovers had made many excursion, taking a cheap cab along the Canopic Way or down one of the cross-roads that led to the Lake. They went out to the beaches of Eleusis and bathed, and lay in the sun. They visited the canal that led towards Canopos, and drank on pleasure-barges. They saw a horse-race and the performance of a comedy at the Theatre, sitting on seats that gave them a view of the blue harbour over the roof of the stage. They went westwards, outside the city, where Cleopatra had laid out a garden and where many villas nestled amid olive-plantations and vineyards. They strayed through hollows below the ridges of soft limestone, among brown-purple bushes; and then went further inland still, over the undulating hills, gathering wild flowers, kneeling amid drifts of marigold or blue-budded borage, frail-textured gladioli or white-bunched garlic fighting against nettles and knot-grass, arum-lilies with dark sheens and stock that locked up its fragrance for the night-hours when perhaps other lovers like ghosts of their day-presence, but not themselves, would be there. They loved all the flowers, even the thick coarse asphodel which was the plant of the blessed fields of the dead, not because it was phantasmal like some of the thin-petalled blue flowers, but because it was tough and enduring; it would remain when the feet of the wind had trampled out more delicate companions.

  The lovers lay in the hollows, with no one to see them. For who minded an occasional goat-herd? They were abandoned to one another, amid the flowers, the beautiful genitals of shameless earth; and Daphne eagerly desired the embraces, because they made her forget the burden she bore, and Victor welcomed them because they made him gradually realise that he had begotten on Daphne another life, a life that linked them for evermore. The breeze came fresh with the clean and holy odours of the sea, touched with a strain of mignonette from someone’s garden on the other side of the slope; and the lovers lay on the earth, remembering with distaste the city that had paved and tiled and scraped away the earth from under the feet of its inhabitants. Out of earth and sun came the magnetic forces of growth, tingling in the exposed bodies of the lovers, making their embraces more than a mere contact of over-driven human organisms. The earth shelved under them, and the sunlight roofed them, as close as breathing. The earth was theirs, the living earth that broke into veiling flower and leaf beneath the nuptial sun, and offered her breasts to the hunted animals, among which were men and women, if they could pause to take. Sap of coursing sunlight, nipples of the flowers, juices of the fruits of the earth. Such richness for the nurtured blood. But the hunted animals had no time to pause, crying for blood to drink, killing, disguising dead flesh with the savoury magic of fire, caught in the murderous money-nets of craft, lusting for the burnt sacrifice, for the flesh of the saviour-god.

  The lovers lay in the bosom of the earth, no longer hunting or hunted, at peace in desire.

  But the world was there still, though they forgot it in the cradling hand of nature. They had to return to the world, and there to meet all that threatened them, all that tore away the warm tissues of peace and ravaged them with anxieties, making them again hunter and hunted. The world refused to be denied.

  One day they went to visit the Thalamegos, the huge ship built by Ptolemaios IV with forty banks of oars as a mere gesture of gigantesquerie since it had only once gone on a trip as proof that it could move and
had thenceforth been docked as a pleasure-barge. Cleopatra had given it yet another refitting, and in years past had held parties there, with no pretence that the banks of oars, the longest sixty feet, were meant to dig the waters or that the purple-fringed sail was hoisted on the hundred-foot mast for voyaging. Victor gained admittance with a tip, owing to his palace-dress; and he and Daphne passed through the entrance-colonnade into a covered ante-room, then through another colonnade to an open court fenced with pillars and set with four folding-doors. From the court they went into a large banqueting saloon, built of cedar and cypress with columns of cypress adorned with Corinthian capitals and gold and ivory fittings. The carved cypress-roof was overlaid with gilt, which was again peeling, and the twenty doors were made of citrus-wood with brass nails and fastenings. Twenty couches were laid out, each to hold three guests. Beyond was another room with nine couches, and numerous cabins for sleeping. On the deck above, reached by a broad carved stairway, were more dining-rooms and bedrooms, a drinking-room with paintings of Dionusos, a grotto built of stones and gold, and a dining-room in the Egyptian style. There was also a Chapel of Aphrodite, with a smiling statue; and there Victor took Daphne in his arms.

  But the great ship was damp and chilly with decay, despite all repairs and re-paintings; eerily wind-whispering with the echoes of the voices of the voluptuaries who had drunk or kissed there during vanished hours of summer-moonlight. Cruel voices, sad only because they were impotent, ready to whirl into the vicious screams of winter when the wind hurls itself solidly as a beast against the doors and shutters that hide men and women from the Year gone mad.

  The lovers were dispirited, and longed for the hollows in the hills. They wanted no more sight-seeing; they were afraid—too afraid to go back to the hills. The world was drawing them in.

  *

  There was one matter of sight-seeing that they could scarcely avoid: the Coming-of-Age ceremony. If Victor had been well, he would have ridden behind Antonius, but he was still excused, and with Daphne he went early to find a seat on the Paneion, the artificially constructed hill covered with ledges of flowers and shrubs, and surmounted with Pan’s shrine. From that vantage they could see straight down on that part of the Canopic Way along which the procession was to pass. But the nearness of the crowd, the excitement in the air, gave them a sense of attack; and they were sorry that they had come. Daphne’s face was flushed, her eyes overbright; and soon her manner became rude. When Victor said that he loved her, she asked him how many other girls had heard him say the same thing. He swore that she was the first, blustered, and then admitted that he’d kissed a girl at Antioch.

  “And what about the Palace-girls? You said Charmion was witty and wild.”

  “But I don’t really know anything against her.”

  “Of course not. You wouldn’t count it against her if she let you kiss her.”

  “Well, I haven’t kissed her. She’s never looked at me.”

  “So you confess that you would kiss her if she’d let you.”

  “I didn’t say any such thing. You seem to think that any girl has only to be looked at to come running after a man. Is that your opinion of yourself?”

  “How dare you say such a thing—you of all people! You mean that you think I ran after you.”

  “I don’t. You take up everything wrongly.”

  “Who was the girl at Antioch?”

  “An Arab girl...just before my master was killed.”

  “Did you love her more than me?”

  “I didn’t love her at all.”

  “Yet you’d take her. You confess you’d take any girl. If you’d take one without loving her, you’d take any. You’re saying that you took me only because I threw myself at you.”

  “You know I love you.”

  He was desperately afraid, not about the Arab girl, but about other things: some of the poems that he used to read his master at Antioch, and the dances, and then his friendship with Eros. And beyond all those matters, there was a deeper fear...Daphne would never understand how he’d thought he scorned girls—except for the one attempt with the little Arab girl, and that hadn’t been quite his choosing and hadn’t been very successful.

  “Tell me the truth. No, I won’t let you kiss me. You did more than kiss the Arab girl, I know.”

  “I only kissed her...and...that’s all.”

  “Go on. Tell me.”

  He gulped. His stomach was threatening to turn over, to rise into his throat, and choke him. “Well, I did more. Only once.”

  “Of course it was more than once.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Because it was just after my master was killed. It would have been more than once if it wasn’t for that.”

  She paused, satisfied for the moment with his admissions. He gained courage. “But what does it all matter now?”

  “It doesn’t matter at all. I only want you to tell the truth. But I can’t bear you going back to that Charmion.”

  “You’re quite wrong about her,” he began angrily.

  Daphne interrupted. “See how annoyed you get when I bring her up. I knew you wanted her—even if she has turned you down. I’ll find out yet.”

  “There’s nothing to find out,” he said wretchedly. “Please, Daphne, don’t let’s go on like this.”

  “Then stop it.”

  They had started talking in low fierce whispers; but their tones had grown unconsciously louder, and the people around were staring and nudging. The Paneion was packed, and the gardeners would spend the morrow lamenting over ruined beds and rare shrubs trodden to the ground. The streets below were filled with the crowd, who were kept in place by a line of soldiers. Around the Gymnasion, where the ceremony was to occur, the surge was thickest and it was impossible to keep order for more than a few moments at a time. The shady platform of the pillared Dikasterion, the Court of Justice, was one mass of sight-seers, from which there was no hope of withdrawing those who fainted. Victor and Daphne would have liked to have left their hot position on the Pan-slope but had no choice except to wait till the crowd began to break up. Opposite them the harbour twinkled with foam, in mockery of all sweating mortals.

  At last the procession emerged from the Palace-grounds passed down the street beside the Theatre, and passed through the Brucheion district, then into the Canopic Way, turning to the right. The guards on their white horses, glittering; a maniple of swinging legionaries with curved oblong shields; Cleopatra in a gilded state-carriage with Caesarion; then Antonius in a chariot driven by Eros, with Antyllus at his side; then carriages with the other royal children (but not Iotapa, who, bald, was shut in her room, threatening everyone and swearing to kill herself to make the day ill-omened); then the chief officials, the Exegetes, the head priests; more soldiers. The Alexandrians cheered and threw flowers, and felt that their freedom was assured for ever—though they had no particular freedom under the Ptolemaic Queen. Antonius also they cheered, because he looked tall and noble despite his years; forgetting for the moment that they blamed him for making Alexandria a battle-ground of Roman interests.

  The Queen was unable to smile on her cheering subjects; her face was too stiffly enamelled with cosmetics to hide the unhealed scratch made by Iotapa. But she bowed graciously, dressed as Isis. Only on a state-occasion did she assume even this slight Egyptian effect. She wore a tight silk dress flowing luxuriously over the hips and looped up in the front, her breasts thrust firmly above the cloth by a skilfully-cut breast-band. On her head she wore the urxus, the serpent-crown of Isis, with silken flaps hanging down over her ears.

  Caesarion, pale but controlling his tendency to tremble, sat at her side, gripping his hands together on his lap. Only the sense of his mother, so near, so queenly, kept him upright. His whole life was his pride in her; and as the carriage swung onwards, his shoulder touched hers at moments, and he knew that there could be no greater joy in life than to feel her soft shoulder momentarily touching his, as they drove through the screaming world. He wanted to tell her how much he
loved her, but was sure that she knew, and yet still wanted to tell her. Suddenly her near hand moved across and closed over his hands, soft and possessive and strong for all the smallness of its bones. Without looking at one another, mother and son were happy.

  The crowd cheered, and waved caps or the edges of gowns. At the Gymnasion the Gymnasiarch, the most influential civic official, repeated to himself the address of welcome, and looked back to make sure yet again that the epheboi, the better-class young men admitted to the privileges of the Gymnasion, were keeping their carefully-drawn - up ranks. Games were to be held afterwards. Meanwhile the unprivileged crowd was noisily pushing into the porticoes and walks. The Gymnasiarch frowned at the attendants, and the police and soldiers began to press the crowd back.

  At last. The procession was nearing. The Gymnasiarch cleared his throat; he wished to spit, but, not liking to do so before such an audience, he swallowed the phlegm and repeated to himself the opening of the address of welcome.

  *

  The lovers got away from the crush as soon as the procession had passed and those Alexandrians who couldn’t get into the Gymnasion had scattered for the beach, the lakeside, or the Zoo. But the brightness had clouded away from the sunlit day, and both the lovers feared to trespass again on unkindliness. Solitude, which had been their safety, was now hedged by fears. They bought some cakes from a huckster and lay in the park at the foot of the Paneion. People were passing near them, talking loudly; but there was a small grassy plot under the rhododendron-bush all their own.

  As they lay in silence, they saw two sparrows come fluttering down out of the bush, fighting wildly. The sparrows were so absorbed by their conflict that they had lost all fear of humans; they swooped and beat their wings about the lovers, their tiny beaks tearing at one another; then they fell to the ground at Daphne’s feet, both overcome with weariness, enlocked but harmless. Daphne put out her hand to take and separate them, but drew it back, afraid of rousing them to fresh warfare. A breath of wind frilled the down on their small breasts. So small were their thin feet pushed out against the adversary.