by Talbot Mundy
He tried to coax her to reveal new aspects of herself, but she had learned her lesson. Cleopatra knew that henceforth she and he were lovers, possibly, but only allies as long as Caesar felt that he could gain by the alliance and that she had secrets for him to coax from her. So the secrets went into an inner sanctuary of her soul, that neither he nor any man could open.
“I would be afraid to tell you, Caesar, anything that might upset the balance of your own ideas. For an idea, as I said, is nearer to you than your body; far more sacred to you than your hands and feet, which you might lose and still be shining with a bright idea. My lightning might scorch you, as your iron lightning scorches your opponents.”
“Try me. I am proof against all except love’s rays,” he retorted, “and those warm pleasantly. I have not noticed that they burn.”
“They are fiercer,” she answered, “than the flames that burned the fleet the other night. If I should love you as I could, I might destroy you.”
“Try me,” he insisted.
“Caesar, can you contemplate the loss of treasure or of glory? Yes. You have no fear of losing them, because you know you could win them again. They are an object — something not a part of you. But I tell you, if you should meet with a philosophy that transcends yours, so that you knew your own must yield to it, you would be panic-stricken. You would torture, accuse, kill, and stoop to the most degrading casuistry to justify it. Why? Because your idea is nearer to you and more sacred than the breath you breathe, and they are very few who suffer, without panic, proof that their own ideas lack foundation. It is that panic — that frenzy of ‘I am right and you are wrong’ — that leads to all the wars and cruelties that make this wondrous world a place of torment.”
“Well, we will have those secret books brought forth into the light,” said Caesar, “and then see what panic we can stir in the hearts of Ganymedes’ men!”
She stirred his curiosity, but he could see no bottom to her reasoning, nor any danger lurking for him on the threshold of her mysteries. A warning was a challenge; he accepted it. That minute he made up his mind to discover whither her philosophy would lead him He would give her full rein, subject always to his own predominating will.
CHAPTER XXV. “The Thirty-Seventh Legion at full strength — two-thirds of the men seasick.”
They are few indeed, and fortunate, so circumstanced that when whatever course they take is certain to produce calamity to someone, they themselves can afford to do nothing and leave evil to devour itself. And they are many, and unwise, who in the like predicament adopt the means of utmost violence, identifying fear and selfishness with wisdom, which belongs in an opposite triad. Their true trinity is fear and selfishness and folly. There are some, however, who intuitively choose the least among many evils; such ones are beginners with their feet set fairly in the way of wisdom. But the surest evidence of wisdom, that has entered in and occupied a soul until it governs will and intellect, is SILENCE. If the foolish fear not silence, but embrace it, even they shall find the doors of wisdom open to them.
— Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.
BUT if Caesar had decided to give Cleopatra full rein, partly from curiosity and partly because her unworldly wisdom delighted his aesthetic sense without weakening his reliance on his own grim answers to the riddles of destiny, that was nothing to the looseness of the rein she granted him. Her one mad moment — of delirium of yielding to him — over, she set steadily and consistently to work to strengthen her position, wasting none of her strength whatever on endeavors to restrain his will.
Already she had secret knowledge that the gift of gifts which Caesar could bestow on her was hers. It now remained for her to use her wisdom so that Caesar should preserve her from the wave of Roman conquest and leave her free to lay the foundations of a new old-Egypt.
In those days Cleopatra had not lost her way amid the ebb and flow of counter-currents. The infernal forces had not even disturbed her faith in the omnipotence of Wisdom, and she felt herself in touch with Wisdom’s spiritual stream — sometimes as if she swam in it. She was aware of youth and strength, and of ideals that should crack Rome’s iron foundations if their roots could once creep in and grow unnoticed for a while. She was no more afraid of Caesar than of the nature forces that destroy the dead stalk and prepare the way for new seed.
“Let him plow and break the dry clods. I am the husbandman. I follow after; and I have a son now, who shall follow me.”
She had never a moment’s doubt of the sex of the child she had conceived. The Isis lore, including as it did a mystery of emanation from the Mother of the Universe, and her own high priesthood, that was never more to her than a solemn privilege and obligation, filled her thought with universal themes, until she felt herself a vehicle for light and life, upwelling from within to usher in the dawn of a new era.
Caesar was a strong protector given to her by the gods, to stand, on the gross objective plane, between her and the tide of violence that she felt was more than two-thirds spent. It should begin to recede before long. It should be her task to resist it subtly, from behind the shield of Caesar’s faith in blood and iron, until the day should come when her son should stand in Caesar’s shoes — or sit on Caesar’s throne, it might be — and pursue receding violence with meditative, calm, albeit strong philosophy of the kind that had once made Egypt’s kings as gods on earth and Egypt’s monuments a record of the dignity of spirit to which nations may aspire.
They were bright thoughts and they were far more interesting to Caesar than the sordid politics of Rome that he enjoyed forgetting and deliberately thrust out of his mind. And though Olympus warned her, she had already caught, in some degree, the taint of Caesar’s recklessness. She ceased from urging on him diplomatic courses. She encouraged him to use his own natural talent.
“You have your part to play, and I mine. The Nile bursts many a dike before the flood recedes and lets the laborer on the land.”
His autocratic views and scorn of small-scale politics inspired her in return to grandiose visions of a world at peace and active only in the arts and sciences. Her high spirits and enthusiasm stirred his love of action, which at his age, and after all his strenuous campaigning, had begun to fade a little. He proceeded again to show her how Alexander of Macedon had not been sole possessor of the gift of solving puzzles with the sword.
Tros thrashed his way into the harbor under straining oars against a head wind, bringing news that reenforcements were at anchor off the coast, unable to approach until the wind should change.
“The Thirty-seventh Legion at full strength — two-thirds of the men seasick. But they have with them food, munitions, siege engines and stores — a dozen ships full. Over the desert from Syria comes an army led by Mithridates of Pergamum, Antipater of Jerusalem, and Iamblichus, son of Sempsicaramus of Hemesa — fifteen thousand men.”
Caesar manned his entire fleet with its Rhodian sailors and, leaving all his officers and men behind to guard the Lochias, put out to sea to find and bring in the Thirty-seventh Legion before the Egyptian fleet realized what he intended or had time to weigh anchor to prevent him Foolishly supposing then that he had deserted Cleopatra and was in full flight, the Egyptians moved their ships so as to block the harbor mouth behind him; and, imagining they had Tros safely in their clutches, they were in no particular haste to sail in and precipitate that issue. Time, and the need for reprovisioning his ship, they thought, would force Tros to surrender.
Meanwhile Caesar’s notorious good fortune followed him to sea. Within an hour of his sighting the belated reenforcements the wind changed and blew from the northeast. Taking command, he redistributed the troops so that every ship had its complement of fighting men and set sail for Alexandria in a full gale that brought him boiling down on the Egyptians. Bewildered by his unexpected return, and by the weather that made it difficult to manage their ships in the harbor entrance, they fled after the first exchange of arrow fire and lost a few ships trying to make their way around
the Pharos to the other harbor. Caesar sailed in triumphantly and anchored once again at the royal wharf below the palace windows, after leaving enough of his new troops on Pharos Island to seize and hold its eastern end, thus at last securing the only outlet to the open sea.
And now he proposed to break the Alexandrians’ spirit before the arrival of Mithridates and reenforcements. He did not propose to be too much beholden to dangerous friends. So the following day he put to sea again and, sailing around Pharos, invaded the Harbor of Happy Return, where the Egyptian fleet was anchored, and sunk or burned of their vessels twice as many as his own fleet numbered. It was an easy victory, well calculated to excite his own men and to destroy the Alexandrians’ self-confidence.
But he misjudged them. They were paradoxical, if nothing else. Their city was designed and built to be protected by a navy, and they possessed more ships than any nation known on earth; nevertheless, their army — a comparatively useless and entirely unreliable aggregation of fugitive slaves and criminals — was of far more military importance in their eyes than their profitable shipping, that might have made them masters of the known world if intelligently handled. The army made more noise; it looked more splendid; furthermore, it terrorized themselves and was entirely competent to handle such minor wars with more or less uncivilized peoples as now and then had to be waged on the southern and western frontiers. So while the army remained undefeated the Alexandrians still thought themselves the masters of the situation. They were indignant at the destruction of the ships, because it affected their purses, but they were not otherwise much impressed.
And the wine of Cleopatra’s mystic charm had gone to Caesar’s head. His very abstinence from drinking wine, which he had hardly tasted in the last half-dozen years (perhaps as a consequence of youth’s experience of its effects on him) had had the result of making him incautious of other forms of drunkenness. He felt an impulse, saw his goal, and went at it like any drunken stripling with his first command.
He landed on the western end of Pharos and carried its forts by storm, thus effecting a junction with the men whom he had previously landed at the eastern end. He attempted then to return to the city by marching along the Heptastadium — a fifty-foot-wide causeway. If he had accomplished it, it would have given him the practical command of the harbors on either side of it and would have enabled him to attack the Alexandrians from whichever point he pleased, along the whole length of the waterfront. He would have attributed success to genius and inspiration.
But the city end of the Heptastadium was held in force by Ganymedes’ men, who advanced at once along the causeway to oppose him, and there were forts on Pharos, at his rear, that he had considered it safe to leave untaken for the moment, although there was a strong force of Egyptians holding them. Resplendent in his purple cloak — a marked figure — he led the advance along the Heptastadium in person, his men pouring along after him from Pharos and another thousand men approaching in ships from the eastward side to take part in the triumphal procession — when suddenly the Egyptians on Pharos left their forts and made a spirited attack against his rear. Simultaneously Ganymedes’ men opened a terrific arrow fire from behind a redoubt that they threw up hurriedly across his path. Caesar was caught on the narrow causeway between two forces, either of which outnumbered his, and there was consternation all along the royal section of the water-front, where the Roman reserves and the palace officials were watching.
Slaves ran to warn Cleopatra that Caesar was already slain — made prisoner — wounded; there were as many versions as informers. None could find her. She was on Tros’ ship, and Tros was crowded away from the mole by Caesar’s smaller vessels that were swarming in to rescue him and his already desperately beaten men, who were fighting back to back, with neither room to use their weapons nor a yard of ground to give, and being pushed off into the water to drown in their heavy armor.
Urged by a centurion, Caesar pulled his cloak off to make him a less noticeable target. He was carrying no weapon. In his right hand was a roll of plans of the Pharos fortifications. He struck at the men who tried to throw him into a small boat that had dared the Egyptian arrow fire and was nosing the causeway; then, recognizing the impossibility of even making his voice heard in the din, he leaped into the boat, holding his cloak in one hand and the roll of parchments in the other. Instantly, the men who had stood nearest to him followed, and in a second the boat was swamped and overturned.
The men drowned. Caesar, who wore no armor, swam for his life, holding his cloak in his teeth to save it from being made a trophy by the enemy, keeping the roll of parchments high out of the water in his right hand (for they contained the working drawings of the mechanism of the Pharos lighthouse as well as the plans of the forts) ducking his bald head to avoid the javelins and arrows volleyed at him by the Egyptians, who pranced on the mole and yelled at the top of their lungs in their excitement, everybody advising everybody else what to do and neglecting the opportunity to complete their victory; so that most of the Roman soldiers had time to jump into the boats, and the boats, thrusting themselves alongside the causeway, protected Caesar from the hail of missiles.
He lost his cloak, but he could swim superbly and he reached Tros’ ship so little the worse for the adventure that he was able to climb on board unaided. And from the poop of Tros’ ship he directed the retreat across the harbor to the palace, leaving about four hundred casualties behind him, slain or drowned.
The defeat was ignominious. It brought him to his senses. He became again the coldly zealous, calculating master of strategy. Hating above all things to appear ridiculous, the knowledge that his purple cloak was being paraded through the streets of Alexandria, draped on a man of straw to represent himself, aroused in him that spirit of revenge that he knew how to disguise so well beneath a cloak of specious pretenses.
In that mood he was cruel, calm, resourceful, acidly polite and icily unwilling to confer with anyone before he made his cat-pounce in the quarter least expected.
Cleopatra, meaning to soothe his injured pride by giving him good news to think about, reported the tales that had reached her of Arsinoe’s attempts to have herself proclaimed as queen, and of the repeated failure she had met.
“Ganymedes himself is weary of Arsinoe. The populace will have none of her. He knows his only hope is to rescue Ptolemy from your clutches and to proclaim him king. But how can Ptolemy escape? And there is no Potheinos now to teach him underhanded statecraft.”
“I will teach him — and you also, what is statesmanship,” said Caesar. “Learn this: that a bird in the hand is sometimes worth more if set free to disturb the others.”
He sent for Ptolemy, who greeted Cleopatra almost graciously, having realized at last the strength of her influence with Caesar. And he began by behaving toward Caesar rather skilfully for a boy of his years, as having heard of the sharp reverse on the Heptastadium but being not so foolish as to suppose it had seriously weakened Caesar’s strength. It seemed to him a favorable opportunity to make a bid for friendship.
Caesar, drumming on the table with his fingers, listened to all that the boy had to say before beginning to question him. Then:
“You are aware, of course,” he asked, “that Ganymedes is now calling himself your general?”
“He is my general,” said Ptolemy, boasting himself blindly into Caesar’s net. “But as long as he commands my army he must do what I tell him; and if I tell him to make peace with you, he will come and confer with you at once regarding terms.”
“Well, your army under Ganymedes is a crowd of sweepings of the earth and renegades,” said Caesar, “and they should be prevented from doing further damage to the city.”
“I will send for Ganymedes and he will come and discuss terms.”
“On the contrary,” said Caesar, “you will go to Ganymedes.”
The boy wilted. All his boastfulness left him; educated in treachery by Potheinos and Theodotus, he was shrewd enough to recognize the treachery of Caesar’
s ultimatum. Well he knew that Ganymedes wholly lacked the loyalty that had made Potheinos tolerable in spite of his eunuch spirit; well he realized that Arsinoe was Cleopatra without the breadth of mind and magnanimity. She and Ganymedes, as allies, were a poor exchange for Caesar’s personal protection and the comforts of the Lochias. And well he knew that neither Ganymedes nor Arsinoe would dream of making peace, with himself in their hands as a dynastic symbol around which to rally Alexandria. He understood that Caesar knew no peace was possible on those terms.
“You are seeking to enhance your own dignity,” he objected, with a moment’s flash of spirit. “You would rather tell the world you had a Ptolemy for enemy than let them say you made war on a Ganymedes and a girl!”
But if there was a dangerous course on earth or an unprofitable one, it was to tell the truth to Caesar to his face regarding his own underlying motives.
“Your interpretation of my thought,” said Caesar, “will not alter my decision. Go then and produce the peace, of which you confidently said just now you hold the key in your own hand.”
The last vestige of the boy’s pride left him and he pleaded with Cleopatra.
But Caesar interrupted: “If she should consent to your remaining in the palace, I would not permit it.”
“You are turning me out because you wish to see the end of me,” Ptolemy exploded. “You have taken that she-bastard to be your paramour, and now you crave my crown to wear on your own head!”
“On the contrary,” Caesar answered. “As executor of your father’s will I am affording you the opportunity to make good your boasts; and I will welcome you when you return with peace in one hand and affection for your sister in the other.”
Ptolemy wept, and even offered to acknowledge Cleopatra’s claims as equal with his own. But Caesar was determined to be rid of him. If he should need to save appearances by technical adherence to the terms of Ptolemy Auletes’ will, there was a younger brother, a mere infant, whom he had not troubled himself yet to see, but who he knew was in the palace somewhere, in charge of nurses, and so half-witted and incurably diseased as to be extremely unlikely to be in the way for long.
