The Memoirs of Cleopatra

by Margaret George

  “I know you have fought winter campaigns before,” I said, “but this time, will you not be at a disadvantage? The enemy is already encamped there, and has his supplies. What will you do?”

  “I must trust to myself to find the solution,” he said.

  “Would not a little planning be more prudent?”

  “I have done all the planning I can, given the circumstances. I must trust that the rest will follow once I am there,” he said. He seemed different to me; he was already far away.

  “May all the gods protect you,” I suddenly said. “May Isis have you in her keeping.”

  “You know I do not believe in such things,” he said gently. “But if I believe you have me in your keeping, then—”

  I flung my arms around him. “In my keeping, in my remembrance, in all my thoughts!” I kissed him, hard, as if to remember later that he was real, to notice how his lips and teeth felt, how his jaw fitted against mine.

  He stepped back and looked at me for what seemed a long time. Then he said, “Farewell, and farewell.”

  30

  The rains continued; the days stretched out, while the city held its breath and waited to hear what would happen in Spain. Would they have a new master, the young Gnaeus Pompey?

  Doubtless they would cheer him just as they had cheered Caesar, I thought. O sweet Isis—do not let Caesar lose his life on a bare battlefield far from home. It is not even distinguished as a far frontier, nor is the foe distinguished as a fighter. Grant to him anything but an ignoble end! I prayed.

  And waited, like everyone else.

  The great winter solstice festival of Saturnalia came, and with it, Rome exploded into celebration. At its close, when the final celebration would be held, Charmian and I took Ptolemy for an outing. I knew whatever detrimental effect the cold would have on him would be offset by the novelty of seeing this most Roman of festivals.

  The area around the Forum was jammed with celebrants, all behaving in strange ways—some were masked, others ran about in costumes. I was at a loss to understand what it all meant. It seemed to be an unbridled party, but I could see from the dolls and wrapped food everyone clutched that it had its own rules.

  I should have brought someone with me to explain all this! I thought, pulling my cloak up over my head against the chill.

  Just then I caught sight of a most disrespectful disguise—someone had a mask on like Octavian’s face. Then, as the person came closer, battling his way resolutely through the crowds, I saw that it was Octavian.

  I motioned to him and drew him over to us. He had to shove and push his way past a boiling surge of people, looking irritated the whole time.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, bowing. “But no, you cannot be Cleopatra during Saturnalia. You must be someone else—take another name.”

  “Oh, very well,” I said. “I shall be…Queen Hatshepshut.”

  “No, not a queen. Queens cannot be queens. You must become something else altogether.”

  “Then I shall become—Charmian!” I squeezed her arm. “And she must become me! And Ptolemy—choose someone.”

  He sighed. “I would choose Socrates.”

  Octavian made a face. “Oh, not him! You don’t want to take hemlock, do you?”

  “No. Well, then, Plato.”

  “What staid longings you have!” said Octavian. “I wish to be Achilles!”

  “Why, are you consumed with rage?” I asked him. That Octavian, who was so self-contained, should want to be the ferocious Achilles!

  “No, but I wonder what it is to be the greatest warrior in the world.”

  “Why are you here?” I had thought my eyes mistaken when I had seen him. “Caesar said you were to accompany him to the war.”

  He looked apologetic. “I got a fever, and could not leave with him. I will join him later. After I am fully recovered.” He gave a mournful, hacking cough.

  “Have you had any word?” I hated myself for having to ask—for admitting that I had not.

  “Yes,” said Octavian proudly. “He has reached Spain safely. All is well.”

  It had taken a month to hear only that he had arrived. Battles had already been fought since then—might be fought even as we stood there, unknowing.

  “Thanks be to all the gods!” I paused. “What is the situation there? What did he find?”

  A raft of celebrants swept past us, stumbling and laughing. An unintelligible chorus of words tumbled off their lips.

  Octavian moved closer to me. “This is a bad place to talk,” he said. “I can hardly hear you.” Another knot of people, coming like the current of a river, bumped into him, almost knocking him down.

  “Come and see us tonight!” one of them said, grabbing his arm. “And wear a costume!”

  “Yes! We want a big audience!” said a woman with ivy vines twined in her hair.

  “Perhaps,” said Octavian. “Thank you.”

  “Who was that?” asked Ptolemy.

  “A bunch of actors,” said Octavian sternly. “Ignore them.”

  “Is there a play tonight?” asked Ptolemy. “Can we go?” He turned to me. “It’s so boring just to lie in bed at home!”

  “I hardly think their fare would be suitable for you,” said Octavian. “Anything Cytheris is in is filthy.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, and I saw the expression on his face, I knew that he remembered, acutely, what I had seen at the Regia.

  “Cytheris,” I said, trying to smooth out the awkward moment. I had no wish to cause him embarrassment, or to have him associate me with humiliation. “I think I have met her—but where?”

  “I saw her at the Egyptian entertainment that you gave,” he said.

  “That Caesar gave,” I corrected him. “But why should I remember her?”

  “In the first place, because she is beautiful. In the second, because she is scandalous. In the third, because she made a spectacle of herself, hanging on Marc Antony, her lover at the time.”

  “At the time?”

  “Yes, Fulvia has won the battle for him. Some prize! They were married a few weeks ago. Now supposedly Antony has reformed himself. But I suspect he’s out in the crowd somewhere with his Hercules costume. People never really change.” He sniffed. “It looks as though Cytheris has consoled herself well enough for her broken heart.”

  “Can we go?” Ptolemy kept asking me.

  “Let us see what they are performing first,” I said. “Now—about Spain.” I was desperate for any news of the situation. I needed to know what Caesar had found there.

  Octavian knitted his brows. “It seems that most of southern Spain has gone over to the enemy. As I understand it, the rebels have thirteen legions. Two of those are veteran ones, left over from the original Pompey’s forces. Those two prize ones are guarding Corduba, and the rest are spread out over the countryside. Caesar has eight legions—four veteran—and they are better trained than the enemy’s. So they may be evenly matched—the superior numbers of one side canceled out by the better training of the other’s. One bright spot—Caesar has eight thousand cavalry, supplied by Bogud, against the other’s six thousand.”

  I felt a coldness take hold of me, as if the December temperature could penetrate under my skin. “Evenly matched,” I said. “I suppose Labienus will duplicate his tactics in Africa and do everything possible to prolong the war and avoid a pitched battle. They are already situated there, after all, under roofs, while Caesar must live in the open field!” I hated Labienus as I despised all disloyal people—in my sight, disloyalty is the most heinous of all crimes.

  “Then it will be Caesar’s task to duplicate his victory in Africa by drawing them out onto a battlefield,” said Octavian. “He may have to trick them.”

  Southern Spain. The ingrates—the very area where Caesar had served as governor, and was their patron! No ground was safe, nothing permanently secured, then.

  “Oh, Cleopatra, dearest sister—can we please go to the play?” Ptolemy was smiling at me.

  W
e went. I took the entire household with me, so that we Egyptians could be seen as partaking of Roman drama, rather than as a sister indulging her brother’s prurient interests. Actually I was pleased that something had stirred Ptolemy’s interest, for the truly sick are not interested in plays. Nor in scandalous actresses.

  The Romans had a very divided opinion on drama. They were not an aesthetic people, and the subtleties of Greek tragedies did not appeal to them—did they not understand them? Perhaps not. They preferred the simple butchery of the wild beast hunts and the paired gladiators to the agonizing of Oedipus. The mixed-up bedrooms, the cuckolded husband, the conniving slave—those they understood. So their plays revolved around such themes and characters.

  And, yes, the play was filthy. Most likely Ptolemy did not understand the worst parts, but some dirty jokes brought a red blush to his cheeks.

  Cytheris was indeed beautiful, and I understood how she was received—or semi-received—in the highest circles of Rome. Beauty seems to confer its own imperium, although we like to deny this.

  When we left the theater, fluffy white specks were descending from the night sky. They swirled into the torches, making little hissing noises as they did so. The paving stones were covered in what looked like a thick frost.

  “Snow!” I said. “This must be snow.”

  We stood out in the open, just looking at it. The flakes that fell all over us were like chopped feathers—light and floating. They caught in folds of our garments and landed, stinging, on our lips.

  “Snow,” said Ptolemy, in wonder. “I thought never to see it for myself!”

  It stuck on our shoes, melted and seeped in with a paralyzing coldness. When our litter bearers took us home, I could see the path their feet made in the white blanket.

  Snow. There would be a great deal of snow in Spain, where Caesar had to live under leather tents outdoors.

  To occupy my time, I taught myself much about Rome. I saw most of her for myself—I visited her sacred shrines, the tombs of her greatest men, the gardens of Lucullus laid out on the Esquiline, and, most interesting to me, the temple of Asclepius on Tiber Island, along with its hospital. The Greek god of healing had found a home for himself in the midst of the rushing, muddy Tiber.

  I never reached a conclusion about Rome. She was so mighty in some ways, so venal in others. Yet I had a premonition that this combination was calculated to appeal most strongly to human nature.

  They will crush everything beneath their chariot wheels, the Kandake had warned me. And here, when I saw the chariots clattering past, and witnessed the Roman pragmatism—that most manifested itself in callousness—I knew she was right. They would. Unless, somehow, they could be tempered by association with our older sensibilities.

  Octavian left, belatedly, to follow Caesar. He came to bid me farewell one January morning, and to ask if there was any message I wished him to convey.

  I thought it polite of him to come, but I had no private message for Caesar I wished to entrust to him.

  “Nothing has happened yet,” Octavian said. “We have received no news of any battle.”

  So Caesar had had to endure an idle month in the freezing field.

  “I wish you great success,” I said.

  My wishes evidently counted for little, as Octavian encountered every setback on a nightmarish journey, ending in a shipwreck. He dragged himself onward to reach Caesar nonetheless, long after the crucial engagement of the war.

  And thus he recommended himself to Caesar. His very doggedness—his ability, like a mastiff, to sink his teeth into something and not let go—must have impressed Caesar as the very highest virtue. The teeth were thin and precariously anchored, but the courage in hanging on determined Octavian’s whole fortune—I know that now. If only he had remained too sickly to follow—as he turned out to be on every major battle afterward. The battle of Philippi, the battle of Naulochus, and finally the battle of Actium, found Octavian lying sick in his tent. Would that he had never gone to Spain—then the others would not have followed. And I—

  But quiet, my heart. It is over. And I speak of then, not of now.

  Spring came in March. The yellow wildflowers all along the Tiber burst into bloom, and in our own gardens the trees unfurled their tentative green leaves. Ptolemy’s cough melted away once the weather became warmer, and as if to make up for it, he grew taller quickly.

  But there was still no word of the outcome in Spain. It seemed a mockery to luxuriate in the warm spring breezes and stroll in the twilights when the future of Rome hung in the balance. The Roman festivals of Lupercalia, Anna Perenna, and Liberalia passed, and it was not until the twentieth day of April that the word reached Rome, causing an explosion of celebration in the streets.

  Caesar had won. On March seventeenth, he had at last succeeded in drawing the rebel forces into one decisive battle at Munda.

  It was a desperate fight, one of the bloodiest in Roman history. When it was over, thirty thousand erstwhile followers of Pompey lay dead on the battlefield, against only a thousand Caesarians. Labienus was dead; so was Gnaeus Pompey. Sextus, the younger Pompey brother, had escaped.

  “The thing that turned the battle”—this was recounted in wonder on the streets, and I heard it told many times, ten times for every ten city blocks—“since the sides were almost evenly matched, and it was growing dark, and the Caesarians began to grow disheartened and fall back—was Caesar himself forcing his way into the front lines where the breach was. He ripped off his helmet and shouted, ‘Do you mean to deliver your commander into the hands of these boys?’ And he began fighting desperately, hand to hand, and at the sight of that his men rallied, and the battle turned.”

  I must trust to myself to find the solution, he had said. And he had done so, with a foolhardy, wild gamble that had his name, and his alone, written all over it.

  I was weak in hearing about it. His courage was something unhuman. And so was his luck.

  It was immediately declared that April twenty-first—the day after the news was received in Rome—would be celebrated forever after with chariot races in the Circus. Then the Senate outdid itself in an effort to confer honors on Caesar. Caesar should have the title of Imperator for life, and the title should be made hereditary. He must be Consul for ten years. All the anniversaries of his previous victories should henceforth be celebrated with annual sacrifices. He could wear the laurel wreath at all times and the garb of the Triumphator at all official occasions. His statue must be set in the temple of Quirinus, with the inscription “To the Invincible God.” At public games an ivory statue of him must be carried in a litter, and a chariot follow with its trappings, in company with the statues of other gods. Another statue of him must be set up beside the statues of the former kings of Rome. A temple dedicated to the liberty Caesar had brought must be built at public expense.

  And at his return, a thanksgiving of fifty days should be ordered.

  I was hungry to see him. In spite of my earlier contention that I must return to Egypt as soon as the seas opened, good reports from Alexandria now permitted me to stay longer in Rome. How could all the crowds see him return and crown him victor of the world, and Caesarion and I not welcome him home—to his city and to us?

  But when was he to return? No one seemed to know. He lingered in Spain, settling administrative problems there, and making appointments. Octavian had joined him in his headquarters. Others rushed to meet him in nearer Gaul, which he would pass through on his way home: Brutus, Antony, Decimus.

  At last it came: a personal letter to me. It had been written from Hispalis. I thanked the messenger and gave him some token (doubtless too much), and then waited until I could shut the door of my room and read it in private.

  It is over, and I am victorious. I know; you have heard this already. But what you have not heard I now tell you: I have often fought for victory, but at the battle of Munda I fought for my life.

  I was spared. I return to you, and to Rome, alive and restored.

&nb
sp; My love to you and our son.

  I fought for my life. What had I been doing that day? Why had I not felt it? It seemed impossible that it could have been an ordinary day for me. Without meaning to, I crumpled the precious letter by holding it too tightly.

  It took him a very long time to return. He was not back at the anniversary of his first Triumph, when the Romans duly paraded out his statue in company with that of Victory, at the Victory games. He did not set foot in the city until the heat had begun to wane; he even retired to his private estate at Lavicum for a week or so beforehand. There he rewrote his will. But no one knew that until long afterward.

  There were murmurs that Caesar would celebrate a Triumph. But it seemed unlikely that he would allow this to take place, since his enemies had been other Romans. Triumphs were only to be celebrated over foreign foes.

  And then he swept into Rome, bringing the speculation to an end. He had returned. He was victorious. He would order all things anew. The suspension of events would end.

  He did not send any messages to me, or invite me to attend any of the private events welcoming him. Yet I knew he was waiting, as was I. All things in time.

  The night he came to the villa was a rainy, chilly one—yes, the year was turning again. I heard the crunch of the gravel under his horse’s hooves and knew someone was approaching outside. I did not think it was he; I had no specific day I was awaiting him. It was enough that I knew he would come.

  I heard his voice, heard him dismissing the servants. Then I heard him taking the stairs two at a time, bounding up them to my door. I flung it open and found myself staring into his face in the dim light.

  It seemed forever; it seemed only an instant ago that I had seen him. I was overcome with the impact of it, and buried my face in his shoulder. I had no words for the joy I felt in having him with me.