by Talbot Mundy
There was a long wait, during which the roars of boisterous laughter could be heard approaching up the narrow streets. The runners, it appeared, had separated. Antony came first, hard-breathing and hot from buffoonery, roaring his gibes at the women and now and then raising a howl of amusement by striking a man.
But when he came in sight of Caesar he stood still, as if suddenly almost overwhelmed by the importance of a duty. He bowed long and low, to recover his breath. He raised his right hand and advanced with dignity toward the golden throne, waiting for silence to fall that his bold voice might be heard as far away as possible. Amid a hush he greeted Caesar as the God Lupercus, begging him to accept a throne on earth since he already had a throne above the heavens.
Caesar smiled but made no answer. He sat pondering, apparently surprised and then absorbed in thought, his faculties in fact alert for any sign the crowd might give of its approval. Antony, more confident of the result of preparation, knelt and suddenly produced, as if by magic, a crown of golden laurel leaves.
Instantly Caesar’s supporters began to cheer, endeavoring to start a demonstration. But none responded and the cheers fell flat and hollow. The crowd even groaned a little, and Cassius was seen to make off from a corner of the forum, where he had been watching; as he went he hid his face in a fold of his toga. Caesar noticed him, however, and remarked about it; there was not much that Caesar’s eyes missed. He was perfectly aware, for instance, that his own supporters were looking crestfallen and that Antony was at his wits’ end, although putting a bold face on it.
He rose to the occasion, never in his whole life having failed to act a part with dignity. He smiled. He waved the crown aside. He showed disdain for it.
The crowd applauded then, and Antony, forever sanguine as he was, and flushed that moment with excitement, thought the demonstration, though a little late in coming, was now genuine. He repeated the offer, pressing the crown on Caesar with repeated praises and imploring gesture, using all the histrionic skill in which he so excelled. And again the friends of Caesar tried to start the cheering. But the crowd again grew ominously silent: now no groaning, but a stillness that was worse — more unmistakable.
So Caesar made the best of it. He did not touch the crown. He ordered an attendant to accept it, making his own refusal of it obvious with a gesture that suggested gratitude and yet a consciousness of incongruity. And in the stillness his autocratic voice could be heard from one end of the forum to the other, speaking presumably to his intimates but actually to the crowd:
“Take that toy to the capitol and let the entry be made in the official calendar that on this day the people offered Caesar the crown of Rome and that Caesar refused it.”
Genuine cheering burst out then and Antony, recovering his presence of mind, resumed the day’s buffoonery, laying about him with the whip and drawing the crowd out of the forum in the hope of seeing him play a few more practical jokes on Roman matrons, or perhaps on virgins not yet anxious for the touch of Lupercalian fertility.
Apollodorus brought the news to Cleopatra, who had avoided appearing in public that day.
“Send for Tros!” she commanded.
“Greetings,” she said, “man of restless keels and fretting anchors! How long will it take you to convey my baggage to the fleet?”
“A day and a night,” he answered. “I will do it with a great good will.”
But that was too swift for her purpose. The appearance of a flight from Rome was something that she wanted to avoid; departure, made in haste, so swiftly on the heels of Antony’s abortive offer of the crown to Caesar, might stir ridicule. And ridicule, she knew, endangers causes in the way the sea sucks out the groundwork of a granite wall.
“Secretly and slowly. Take a month,” she answered. “Gradually get my servants and effects on shipboard and be ready with a fleet of boats to take the rest of us down-river when I give the word. Dispatch a ship to Alexandria with word that I am coming, but let them not know when they may expect me. Silence!”
“Silence at last? Praise Zeus! There has been too much talking!” was the only comment Tros made. But he knew that silence was impossible. To load on to the fleet at Ostia, under the eyes of polyglot and countless slaves and merchants, to say nothing of the Roman harbormaster and his crew, the enormous quantities of purchases and all the slaves that Cleopatra had accumulated, without attracting notice would be a feat without parallel. But he would do his best.
When Caesar came to her that evening, sarcastic about Antony, and moody, irritated by the tactless sympathy of friends and the intentionally obvious amusement of his enemies, he found her in a royal mood. She alone knew what the disappointment meant to him. She only knew which strings to touch ‘of the harp of his ambition, how to tune it and to re-evoke its splendor. He was capable that night of breaking, and of yielding to the weariness of too much strain and rapidly encroaching age, if she had not been there to squander on him understanding and a love he had not known in other women’s arms.
She took him to the nursery to see Caesarion. They stood together watching the child asleep, and then returned to the little room with Trojan destiny depicted in weaving on the wall, where they had held so many confidences.
“Caesar, are you not glad now that you did not divorce Calpurnia? Imagine what the Romans would have said, and how they would have grinned with malice’: And now you can see for yourself how destitute of wisdom it would be, and how inevitably sterile, to allow the Romans to invite you to be king. Did you invite them to build you a temple and to deify you? No! You did it. You announced it. You yourself imposed it on them. Don’t you see that you deny your own divinity by letting them imagine they have right or power to appoint you or remove you or to change your destiny in any way whatever? Kings are born, not elected, Caesar. They impose themselves, as the sunlight imposes itself and causes growth to flourish. But if kings forget that, or if they lose the royal touch with their divinity, they cease to be kings; they identify themselves with littleness and darkness, until littleness and darkness swallow them and they become one with the mob that thinks itself incarnate power. You derive your power from above, or you are nothing.”
Caesar felt entirely confident that he was more than nothing. Cleopatra was the only being in the world whom he regarded as his equal or as able to match minds with him. Excepting her, he knew he was superior to anyone on earth. All other people bored him He had no patience nowadays with the inanities and pawky meannesses, even of men like Cicero. Nobody but Cleopatra understood his craving to re-outline all earth’s boundaries and weld a thousand nations into one beneath one despotism. Even she mistook his motive — did not realize how personal it was. She underestimated his monopolizing vanity.
“If you are not my guiding genius, what else are you?”
“Caesar,” she answered, “I have come too near to being your evil genius! And I would rather die than be that. I would rather die a thousand times. Unknowingly I have set these Romans’ teeth on edge against you. And I have encouraged you to think in half-terms and in compromises. I have stayed in Rome too long and let you realize too well my love for you, that will endure through all adversities and stand (which is a test more trying) in the hour of my own fortune. So that you have dallied. You have taken me for granted. I have let you rob your destiny because you think that whatever happens you can turn to me for comfort and amusement. And that is true, but it is a companionship and not a journey’s end. And so I leave Rome. I return to Egypt.”
“When?” he asked her. He appeared to have forgotten it was not the first time they had broached that subject.
Suddenly it dawned on him what Rome would be without her. It was like a stab. He tasted the stark loneliness again, that nowadays he dreaded, and that only she knew how to alchemize into a wonderland of living dreams.
“You shall not!” he asserted.
But her low laugh undermined the rampart of his will and took in flank his sortie. She interpreted his meaning before words could coin it
into shape:
“You would rather rob me of my Land of Khem and keep me captive? Caesar, you are too great — too wise! Do you love me, Caesar? I will stay a month then — not another hour. I have already given Tros his orders. Make you ready for the march on Parthia. Make haste. No, Caesar! No more dallying! And no half-measures! March on Parthia, and when the Romans rise behind you, turn on them and smite them! Be the king you truly are, and not by their leave, not of their choice, but because the gods have chosen you to be their comrade!”
“Very well,” he answered, rather wearily again. He dreaded her departure. “A month? That is rather soon — a little early in the year. There will be snow up in the mountains. But it will give you time to send the corn ships to the coasts of Asia. And afterward—”
“You love me, Caesar? There will be no afterward when you are king. There will be you and I, Caesarion, and who else? Nobody who matters!”
CHAPTER XLI. “Caesar, beware the Ides of March!”
And so the long day’s task is done, and we may sleep...
— Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.
A MONTH went by amid a fuss of military midwives — Rome in travail of her only output, armament. The hammers of the swordsmiths and the armorers, by day a din above the city roar, by night were a cicada chorus, swallowing all other sound, pulsing in clattering fits and starts until the pause at midnight, when the gangs relieved each other and the agony of din began again. The forge-glow over narrow streets became a blood-red smear on clouds that slowly rolled along the Tiber Valley. Dawn saw narrow entries chock-a-block with spears in bundles, arrow-heads and javelins in baskets, helmets swinging by the chin-strap two score to the pole, and swords by hundreds waiting for the veteran inspectors — with the great oak log ready for the testing blow in mid-street, boxes for the broken blades and hilts, and the accountant, shivering in the raw cold, waiting to attest the reckoning.
No wagon traffic. Horses and asses and men all laden with weapons, threading the maze of mean streets, up- and down-hill, zigzag — crazy alleys where the overhanging upper stories let a slit of light through to the rubbish underfoot. Thunder of oaths and shouting by the city gates where wains were loaded and the legion gallopers came thrashing through mud and dust to demand why in the name of Pollux and his brother seven centuries of the Eight-and-twentieth were lacking even spears to drill with. Fights — incessant quarreling, at least the half of it begun by veterans who stole such armor or well-handled weapons as appealed to expert eyes — and on the camping-grounds from end to end of Italy the shouting and the steady tramping of the men at drill.
And Caesar in his element, attending to a thousand interests at once, but far more irritable than he used to be, with furrows lining an emaciated face and sharp sarcastic comments for the members of his staff, who knew no longer whether to assume responsibility and risk rebuke or to incur indignity by asking. Caesar’s vanity had grown intolerable. He was centralizing in himself all power, all executive authority, and blaming his subordinates for the inevitable, nigh-impenetrable jam of the machinery of war and state all crowding at one inner room.
The Senate was becoming used to stinging scorn and curt peremptory commands Some senators were absent, choosing the monotony of country villa life in preference to supine and contemptuously watched obedience to Caesar’s orders. Others wondered, watching Cassius and Dolabella, Antony and Brutus, Decimus Brutus Albinus, Trebonius, Tullius Cimber, Casca and Bucolianus — men who were indubitably plotting something and appearing day by day to gather new adherents, keeping their secret, however, whatever it might be, too well for its purport to be definitely guessed. Antony and Brutus, it was evident, were not yet of the inner circle — Brutus evidently worried and unwilling to be drawn in; Antony endeavoring to worm his way in, and not trusted. Caesar appeared totally indifferent, though it was said on every hand that Antony had learned enough to warn him, and all Rome felt restless with the undertow of a conspiracy afoot.
And in spite of military fever-heat of furious preparation, Caesar with his usual unscrupulous audacity accumulating money and a sort of false prosperity ensuing on the scarcity of marketable stores, a gloom had settled over Rome, more shuddersome and ominous than anything that any man remembered since the days of Sulla. It was like the chill before a hail-storm. Gladiators felt it and the best men dreaded the arena. Even in the dungeons criminals were restless.
Rumor crosscut rumor. It was known that Caesar meditated leaving Rome about the seventeenth of March, and that on the Ides of March (the fifteenth) he would appear before the Senate to deliver his final speech before departure on his great campaign. There was a story that the offer of the crown would be repeated on the first; but that was Cleopatra’s doing. She persuaded Antony to give the rumor currency in order to uncover a conspiracy if it had reached a head; her Alexandrians were combing Rome for information, and many a slave told half-heard secrets. But the law forbade the testimony of a slave against his master, and nothing definite was learned or done, except that Antony refused to run the risk of offering the crown a second time.
The Ides (the fifteenth) was the day that had been set for Cleopatra’s going, but not many knew it. They were few who came to bid her farewell, and to most of those she pleaded some excuse or other through Apollodorus; for the gloom had penetrated her thought, too, until she lacked, or felt she could not spare the spirit necessary for an interview with people who, she knew, were only enemies in masks. And she saw almost nothing of Caesar, though there was not a thing he did that she did not know within the hour, nor a word he said outside the secret conferences with his staff that did not reach her ears by messenger. Her confidant in those last days was Antony, who came and went much oftener than Caesar knew.
It was only an hour that Caesar snatched to say good-by to her — the fourteenth, in the afternoon. They walked alone together in the gardens overlooking the Tiber, near where he had met her on the night of her arrival. She had mastered herself. She had bitted and ridden her fear until not even she was aware of it. Caesar, full of admiration for her, praised her royal courage:
“For I know,” he said, “that you have heard these rumors. Rome is full of them. And you must be acutely aware of how difficult your own position would be if some murderer should end my life. However, you are better off than if I had done what I at first intended, that is, changed my will. If I should die too soon, and they should find that you and Caesarion were my chief beneficiaries, I fear that my nephew Octavian, and even Antony perhaps, would turn on you and rend you. All Rome would applaud them. But it will be otherwise when I return from Parthiaor if they rise against me, as we half expect, and I should teach them the lesson they need.”
His own courage was phenomenal; for he, too, felt the gloom that overrode the city. He confessed it; but he had almost none of the Roman dread of auguries and portents. Danger acted on him like a tonic.
“And I never could see,” he said, smiling, “how if there is anything in portents, what is ominous for one side should not be propitious for the other. I am willing to believe that Rome is possibly fore-conscious of the drastic purging I may be obliged to administer before my goal is finally accomplished. But if that is so, then Rome’s anxiety is my encouragement! But I think it is mainly the weather; and I feel the temporary loss of your companionship far more keenly than I do this brooding gloom that they are making such a fuss about.”
She tried to make him promise to protect himself with a double bodyguard. She offered him Apollodorus, and even Olympus, “who is quicker to perceive a danger than a mouse is, since he reads men’s minds before the thought can turn into a deed.” She offered Tros: “He has come from Ostia. He waits to take me down the river. He is a man of peace, who fights more fiercely than—”
“I know him,” Caesar interrupted, smiling. “I am hardly likely to forget Tros! He is the bravest and least self-seeking enemy I ever fought — my enemy this moment if the truth were told! Both of which facts are an excellent reason for co
ntentment that your life is in Tros’ keeping. For myself, I much prefer a sudden death to any other; but I think my time is not yet.”
He insisted on her promise to go down the river without making another attempt to say good-by to him:
“Both because I shall be occupied, and also because if there is any truth in all this premonition and this talk of a conspiracy, your presence in the city might start rioting; and that might lead to unanticipated and unnecessary damage.”
He was eager to be gone and she did not cling to him or add a feather’s weight of anguish to the burden of responsibility beneath which he had aged a dozen years in fewer months. They said their farewell by the river-bank, each throwing golden coins into the Tiber:
“Not that I believe in superstitious practices, but — Egypt, if we never again see each other, you may know this and remember it: that Caesar loved you, and that he never knew whether his greatest victory was yours or his — Caesar or Cleopatra! Name it for me. What shall be the name of that field?”
“Let it be Caesarion!” she answered. And then Charmian came, bringing the child with her; and Caesarion was the last who touched him, clinging to his outstretched finger, crying because Caesar would not stay and be a horse or something sensible.
It was a gray dawn. She, Apollodorus, Tros and Charmian sat listening to Olympus as he spoke of destiny and what a man might do to make himself a mocker of the waves of life that swallow one and cast another on the beach. For Cleopatra had refused to sleep in fear of dreams that might undo her courage and, by flooding her with evil from the world between the outer and the inner planes, might make a gate of her for floods of negative, destructive forces.
“I am using all my will, and if I break down — tell me, Olympus: if I break down, do the gods know what will happen?”
