The Memoirs of Cleopatra

by Margaret George

  More messages. The Senate had met, and the senators had expressed a wide range of reactions. The most extreme had proposed that the conspirators be given special honors as public benefactors. So much were the “honors” of the Senate worth! The less extreme merely said that amnesty should be granted to all, and Cicero proposed an “act of oblivion.”

  An act of oblivion—like the one they had dealt Caesar?

  Someone else had said Caesar should formally be declared a tyrant and all his acts illegal. Antony had reminded them that if that were done, then every one of them who owed his appointment to Caesar would have to resign it. There would be no praetorships for Brutus and Cassius, no Bithynia for Tillius Cimber, no Asia for Trebonius, no Cisalpine Gaul for Decimus.

  There should be torture and hell for Decimus at the hands of his own gladiators!

  The conspirators had tried to prevent the reading of Caesar’s will, but Calpurnia’s father had refused to be bullied by them, had ordered the Vestals to release it, and had announced that Antony would read it from his house. Next they tried to block a public funeral for Caesar, but Antony pointed out that any Consul who had died in office was permitted a public funeral, and Caesar was Consul.

  The whole world would pay homage to him. His enemies who had killed him—now let them see how they would be hated.

  It grew dark again, and this time I felt sleep coming over me. I knew I would, at last, rest, or what from now on must serve as rest. But at midnight a messenger arrived, with a vehement note from Antony.

  The will—I read it out to Caesar’s friends and family. It is not what I expected. He has named Octavian his principal heir, and requests him to be adopted as his son! He is to assume the name of Gains Julius Caesar! And Caesar named Decimus as one of his secondary heirs, should his other great-nephews die early. Oh, the perfidy of Decimus is now made more hideous than ever!

  He has given the gardens of the villa—your villa—to the people of Rome, along with three gold pieces a person. Generous indeed. And when the people hear of it, I cannot vouch for the safety of any of the conspirators—or the Liberators, as they now call themselves.

  I was forced to have Cassius as my houseguest tonight, in exchange for my own son as a hostage on the Capitol! The food tasted like poison. I asked Cassius if he had a dagger, and he said, “Yes, and a big one, should you try to play the tyrant, too!”

  We shall see what awaits him at the hands of the mob!

  The funeral tomorrow night. I speak the eulogy, as his nearest male relative here. There will be a funeral pyre in the Campus Martius, but the bier and ceremony will be in the Forum. Should you wish to attend, you and Calpurnia will be safe on the steps of the Temple of Vesta, where Lepidus will station soldiers.

  My head whirled. Octavian to be his—son? To take his name? But there was already another who bore the name Caesar—Ptolemy Caesar.

  How could there be more than one Caesar?

  As if Octavian could ever be Caesar! He was only distantly related, a mere great-nephew. And there was nothing of Caesar about him. His slight frame, his utter lack of athleticism or soldiership or oratory—no, nothing!

  Whatever had possessed Caesar to name him? And why had he not warned me?

  Perhaps I had known him very little. How much more there would have been to learn, had the gods just granted us time!

  Drawn as if by a strong wind, I went to the Forum on the night of Caesar’s funeral. I arrived well before dark; my litter had taken me past the enormous waiting funeral pyre in the Campus Martius beside his daughter Julia’s tomb. The logs were neatly arranged and decorated. I shuddered. I hated the whole idea of burning someone, but then the Romans hated our custom of embalming. It was all ugly; there was no redeeming death, no matter which method we chose to consume the body.

  Calpurnia was already there, on the curving steps of the round Temple of Vesta. She looked almost pleased to see me, her sister in this strange way, her companion in loss.

  “They are on their way here,” she said. “They took his—they took him away this morning. Look! See where they will lay him!” She pointed to a huge bier, made to look like the Temple of Venus Genetrix. Under its columns an ivory couch, covered with purple and cloth of gold, waited to receive him.

  A low sound filled the air, as musicians began to play dirges and solemnly beat their drums around the bier. The people joined in, moaning and swaying.

  Torches were lit all around the Forum, ringing it with golden light. I could see the procession now, making its way toward us. A sigh went up from the people.

  The decorated litter, borne by ten magistrates, wound its way to the waiting bier. Then it was placed reverently on the ivory couch, and the men stepped back. Antony appeared and mounted the bier, resplendent in his consular robes.

  First a herald recited in ringing tones all the decrees passed in Caesar’s name by the Senate and people of Rome, including the oath of loyalty they had all sworn. At this the people gave a groan. Then he recited Caesar’s wars and battles, the enemies defeated and the treasures sent home, the territories added to Rome, the thanksgivings voted to him.

  Antony then stood beside the bier, and began intoning the sonorous funeral chant. The people took it up, moaning and moving back and forth.

  The chant finished, Antony then began to speak, with the loud, resonant voice and oratory for which he was famed.

  “Caesar, Caesar!” he cried. “Will there ever come another like you to Rome—you who so tenderly loved it like a son, cherished it like a wife, and honored it like a mother? No, no, never, never, never!”

  He looked around at the entire crowd, his head held high. “For the gods, Caesar was appointed high priest; for us, Consul; for the soldiers, Imperator; and for the enemy, Dictator, But why do I enumerate these details, when in one phrase you called him father of his country, not to mention the rest of his titles?”

  He turned and gestured toward Caesar, lying on the ivory couch. “Yet this father, this high priest, this inviolable being, this hero and god, is dead, alas! dead not by the violence of some disease, nor wasted by old age, nor wounded abroad somewhere in some war, nor caught up inexplicably by some super’ natural force, but no! he who led an army into Britain died right here within the walls of the city as a result of a plot!”

  His voice rising, he swept his right arm in an arc, indicting everyone before him. “The man who enlarged its boundaries—ambushed in the city itself! The man who built Rome a new Senate house—murdered in it! The brave warrior—unarmed! The promoter of peace—defenseless! The judge—beside the court of justice! The magistrate—beside the seat of judgment! He whom none of the enemy was able to kill even when he fell into the sea—at the hands of the citizens! He who so often took pity on his comrades—at their hands!”

  He turned back to Caesar again and cried out to him, “Of what avail, Caesar, was your humanity, of what avail your inviolability, of what avail the laws? Now, though you enacted many laws that men might not be killed by their personal foes, yet how mercilessly you yourself were slain by your friends! And now, the victim of assassination, you lie dead in the Forum through which you often led the Triumph crowned. Wounded to death, you have been cast down upon the Rostra from which you often addressed the people. Woe for your blood-bespattered head, alas for the rent robe, which you assumed, it seems, only that you might be slain in it!”

  His voice broke and tears streamed down his face.

  Just then someone near the bier shouted the line from a well-known play by Pacuvius: “ ‘What, did I save these men that they might slay me?’ ” And it sounded as if the voice were coming from Caesar himself.

  Suddenly, Antony snatched up Caesar’s bloody toga and held it aloft on his spear, twirling it around. The torchlight showed the stains—turned black now—and the gaping holes in the garment. “Look there! See! See! See how he was brutally slain—he who loved Rome so that he has left his gardens to you, as well as bequests of money. This was his reward for loving you,
the people of Rome!” He waved the toga like a battle flag, and a great cry arose from the crowd.

  They rushed forward in a shouting mass, yelling about Caesar. Suddenly, as if by magic, they were hauling furniture toward the bier—benches, stalls, chairs, staves—and turning it into a funeral pyre.

  “Here! Here in the Forum!” they screamed, piling up the furniture. Antony hastily jumped down off the platform just as the first torch cartwheeled through the air and landed on the pile. It flickered and caught, and then a rain of other torches followed.

  People rushed toward the roaring fire as it reached upward to Caesar. Caesar! My heart stood still as I saw the flames licking up around his couch, and he lying motionless on it. They tore off their clothing and heaved it into the flames. The official mourners, who had worn his four Triumphal robes, tore them to pieces and cast them into the fire. Soldiers ripped off their valuable breastplates and threw them in, and women flung their jewelry, as if they were all sacrificing at some primitive bonfire to the god Caesar.

  Thus the people proclaimed him a god long before Octavian did.

  People fell on the ground, sobbing, beating their breasts, wailing. The smoke rolled in billowing clouds, blocking out the stars; sparks flew upward in the darkness, each a new star, flaming and dying.

  A group of people differently dressed stood by the flames, swaying and chanting. I learned later that these were Jews, who knew Caesar as their partisan and friend. He had obtained many privileges for them, and they were to mourn by the ashes of the funeral pyre for days afterward.

  We watched, transfixed, as the great sacrifice was consumed in the night. The gods accepted it. And I relinquished Caesar into their pitiless hands.

  HERE ENDS THE THIRD SCROLL.

  The Fourth Scroll

  35

  In the fetid, close cabin of the heaving ship that plowed its way through the high seas, I was torturously reborn. Weak and sick, I lay on the bed that bucked and jumped and afforded no rest day or night. But I did not care; it was impossible to be more miserable than I was, no matter where I lay or what surrounded me. I felt that I could lie forever on that foul bed, entombed in the dark. I was dead, as dead as Caesar.

  The tight cabin, the lack of light, the smell and sound of water, all were a hideous repetition of my journey in the carpet to meet Caesar four years—a lifetime—ago. Now I was being borne away from him, knowing that no journey on earth could ever bring me to him again. Then my heart had raced with the gamble of it; now it beat feebly with the blow of defeat it had been dealt. And as day followed day, and the water-seeping, moving cabin held me prisoner, I felt I was enfolded in a birth canal, moving back toward a womb, toward oblivion and nothingness.

  I did not eat. I did not wake—or perhaps I never really slept. And I did not think. Above all, I did not think. But the dreams! Oh, the pursuing dreams that curled around me. I kept seeing Caesar, seeing him first as alive and strong, then seeing him engulfed in flames as he had lain on his bier. Then I would scream, or mumble, and Charmian would be beside me, taking my hands, quieting me. And I would turn away, close my eyes again, and be taken back by the dream-demons.

  I had not collapsed in Rome. Somehow I had got through those days that now seemed more like a nightmare than the real nightmares besetting me. But I had little memory of them. After the funeral, nothing has a clear edge to it. I left, that is all. I left as soon as I could, without actually running from the Forum directly to a departing ship. Only when I was safely aboard and saw the shoreline of Italy receding in the distance did I go to the cabin, lie down, and die.

  Charmian would sit by me, enduring the dreadful cabin day after day, reading to me, trying to interest me in something besides the all-absorbing world in my dreams. She and the cooks prepared dishes to be as tempting as possible under the circumstances—fresh-caught fish stew, boiled peas and lentils, honeyed cakes. They all looked, and smelled, revolting to me, and would make me sick. I would hang my head over the side of the bed and retch, even though I had not tasted them.

  “You will waste away,” Charmian would chide me, taking one of my wrists and circling it with her own hand. “Is this a royal arm? You could not even lift it if you were wearing the bracelet of the Kandake.” She would attempt to joke. “I know your ancestor Ptolemy the Eighth and several others were obese, but must you do penance for it this way? To turn yourself into a skeleton?” She appealed to my pride. “What if Caesar could see you now?”

  But that was to no avail. Sometimes I felt that Caesar was nearby, was watching me, and I knew that he—he who had had the weakness of the falling sickness—would understand my state and sympathize with it. Other times I felt that he had vanished entirely, leaving me naked and abandoned in the universe much more thoroughly than if I had never been held close to him at all. Then I knew it did not matter what I looked like. He was gone, and would never behold me anymore.

  Days passed; and because I was not dead but alive, and because life—if it is life—eventually stirs, I was gradually reborn, emerging from the weightless, timeless darkness that had held me.

  On the deck again, the light seemed too intense, and stung my eyes; the winds too sharp and raking against my skin; the blues of the sea and sky artificially bright and stabbing. I had to shade my eyes and narrow them in order even to endure the sight of the horizon where the two blues met. There was nothing else to be seen—no land, no clouds.

  “Where are we?” I asked Charmian, that first day when I leaned against her as she guided me up on deck. My voice sounded shaky and faint.

  “In the very middle of the sea—halfway home.”

  “Oh.” On the way to Rome I had followed our route so eagerly, willing the winds to fill the sails and blow us there as fast as possible. Now I had no idea how long we had been at sea, or when we would arrive, nor did I care.

  “We have been gone from Rome almost thirty days,” she said, trying to spark some interest and sense of time in me.

  Thirty days. That meant Caesar had been dead for almost forty-five. That was all any date meant to me—did it come before or after Caesar’s death? And how long before or after?

  “It is already the beginning of May,” said Charmian gently, trying to orient me.

  May. This time last year, Caesar had still been away from Rome. He had already fought what turned out to be his last battle, at Munda, in Spain—and almost a year to the day afterward he had fallen to the daggers of the assassins. This time last year, I had been waiting for him in Rome.

  But he had not returned to Rome for a long time. Instead, he had gone to his estate at Lavicum and written his will—the will that named Octavian his heir, and failed to mention Caesarion at all.

  At the memory of it, I felt an emotion stirring, like the head of a fern breaking the ground after a winter’s sleep. It was spindly and pale, but it was alive, and uncurling.

  It was grief, regret, and anger all mixed together. It would have taken so little for him to have formally named Caesarion as his son, even if he left absolutely nothing to him; even if he had reminded the executors that under Roman law he could inherit nothing. It was Caesar’s name that his son needed, his paternal recognition, not his property. Now, forever after, his enemies had the opportunity to claim that Caesarion was not Caesar’s own—after all, the Dictator had not mentioned him in his will! Eyewitnesses to the occasion in Rome when he picked him up and acknowledged him as his own would forget, would grow old, die, while the historical document of the will remained, and lived on and on.

  Oh, Caesar, I cried inside, Why did you abandon us, even before you abandoned us?

  I remembered how joyous I had been to welcome him back, all the while unknowing of his actions at Lavicum. He had been so sensible, so rational, in giving all his reasons for why he could not formally acknowledge Caesarion. But just a word in the will—a few precious words, that would have cost Caesar nothing, but the lack of them would cost us dear!

  Weak and shaky, I returned to the cabin. Enough
daylight for one day.

  My mind became nimble and restless long before my body. It did not want to be forced to return to the dream world, the nightmare world, but began to feed on more substantial things: wondering what had happened in Rome since I had left, wondering what news had been received in Alexandria. Perhaps, in Egypt, they did not yet even know about the Ides of March.

  When I left Italy, messengers were still en route, overland, to notify Octavian. What he would do was anyone’s guess. But what could he do, really? He was still a schoolboy in Apollonia, and Caesar’s offices were not hereditary. Lawyers could see to the estate. There would be little purpose in his returning to Rome. There was no place for him there. He was too young to assume a seat in the Senate, and he had no military skills, so could not take command of troops. Poor Octavian, I thought. His political future looked bleak.

  At least he would be rich. Caesar had left him a fortune. There are worse fates than being a wealthy private citizen, I thought. But I knew he had loved Caesar and would grieve for him.

  And Antony—what had happened to Antony? He was attempting to step into Caesar’s shoes and take command of the state, steady it, and then unseat the assassins from their cozy perch, so that he could exact revenge. But what had actually happened?

  What difference does it make to you now? I told myself. You are finished with Rome. It died for you with Caesar. Had Caesarion been named in his will, then we would still be a part of it. But he did not, and we are not. No more Senate, no more Cicero, no more Forum, no more Antony, no more Octavian. It is gone, over, done with.