Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997)

by Margaret George

  I still had it, and realized he was asking for it back. "It is safe. Charmian, bring it to me." I took it and handed it back to Antony. "Keep wearing it with honor," I said.

  When they returned at dusk, Caesarion was flushed and excited. He was wearing a little set of body armor and a helmet, and he flashed his sword up and down and made stabbing motions. He rushed at the curtains and poked a hole in them.

  Antony said, "We'll do this often. He takes to it, and I think he needs it. Too much time indoors in the palace won't make a man of him. When he's older, he can come with me on campaigns--oh, not to fight, but just to see what it's like to be out in the field."

  I felt hot tears pushing to spill out of my eyes. All the things Caesar would have done for him! Thank the gods that Antony had come, a man who understood boys and could do for him what I could not. Growing up among women and eunuchs was not enough for a son of Caesar, who would be called upon to do great things, as a man among men.

  "Thank you," I said, unable to say more.

  The days spun on. Looking back, they seem a multicolored blend, like the scarves of a whirling dancer. With the idleness of winter, there was no guilt in pausing from the business of the world. The Amimetobioi--the Incomparables--met often and outdid one another in dicing, drinking, banqueting. At the palace there were always several oxen roasting, in different stages of doneness, so that no matter what the hour or the number of guests, we could be fed on a moment's notice. Another member kept geese always turning on the spit, another a continual profusion of honey cakes, each flavored with different honey--precious ones like Attic and Rhodian and Carian and Hymettan, and obscure ones from Spain and Cappadocia. Wines gushed, from the sticky-sweet, precious Pramnian, to the apple-scented wine of the island of Thasos, to that of Byblos, and the Chian, poured from its sphinx-stamped amphorae. There were hunting and elephant rides and chariot races with tame panthers trotting alongside, down the wide streets of the city and out beyond the walls to the sandy ridges.

  Alone, at night Antony and I would roam the streets of Alexandria, disguised, as he liked to do, wandering past the monumental buildings and private homes, listening to conversations, overhearing the songs and quarrels of common people; in our chambers we traded clothes and I became a man while he was a richly appareled courtesan. It was all a dizzy round of pretending, of playacting; we were playing as surely as Caesarion with his sword and shield. In this way I had at last the childhood I had skipped--mine had been too serious and dangerous to have afforded such lighthearted silliness, such lack of concern for safety.

  Late at night, together in our darkened room, it felt as if the entire world were concentrated in that one chamber; the rest had vanished, had receded into the night, and would not encroach upon us.

  "I wonder what I did before I loved you," he said once, idly, his fingers tracing patterns on my back.

  "I don't think you were lonely," I said. But for some reason I was not jealous of who had come before. It could not have been like this.

  "No, not lonely." He laughed softly. "But it was all just a rehearsal. Everyone now seems only an early dream of you."

  I sighed, and turned my head. It was resting on his shoulder, happy in its home there. "Dreams," I said. "This seems like a dream. This room, this bed, seems a magic kingdom."

  "Where we are both King and Queen and the only citizens," he said, tracing the line of my nose, my lips. "An unusual kingdom."

  "Oh, Antony, I love you," I said, the words tumbling out. "You have freed me."

  "How can a queen be freed?" he asked.

  "You have set me free in a garden--a garden of earthly delights, which bloom without any effort." Yes, since he had come I felt I was walking through such a garden--filled with exotic, many-petaled flowers that opened their perfumed throats just for my pleasure whenever I passed by. The shade was always waiting, and there were cool mists and hidden bowers around every corner.

  "I would call them unearthly delights," he said. "For nothing happens on earth without our efforts, my love." He turned his head to mine and kissed me, a long, lingering kiss. "Even this." And it did take an effort for me to raise my head.

  * * *

  Gradually the winter relaxed its grip on the sea, and our isolation ended. I could feel it ebbing in the increased warmth of the sun and the steady decline in the ferocity of the waves and storms. Always before I had longed for the end of winter; now I dreaded it. I did not want my magic kingdom breached. I wanted to live in it forever, or until I was so sated with love and pleasure that I finally cried, "Hold! Enough!"

  I was not at that stage when the first ships arrived, plying the path between Italy and Egypt, Syria and Egypt. Messengers rushed ashore, official ones with the insignia of the Roman army, and sought Antony out. Their news was grim.

  "It's all gone to hell," he said, shaking his head, when I found him. At his feet were the curled letters from Tyre and Rome, lying forlornly.

  "What is it?" I bent down to pick them up, but waited for him to tell me.

  "War in Italy," he said. "My wife . . ." he paused.

  Yes, the magic kingdom had been breached. The world was back with us.

  "My wife, Fulvia, and my brother, Lucius, seem to have gone to war against Octavian."

  "What?" I started to read the letter, but it was very long.

  "It's complicated. But it seems they felt that Octavian was taking advantage of his position to settle his own veterans, giving them all the best land, and taking credit even for what he gave mine. So they have launched a campaign against him--and are even now being besieged in the mountain city of Perusia." He ran his hands through his hair. "All my legions are hovering, but without a signal from me, they have not moved. And a good thing, too."

  "Why is that a good thing?" I asked. It was never good to be beaten.

  "Why, because it would violate my compact with Octavian." He looked surprised that I would even ask. "We are partners, remember? The civil wars are over."

  "It would seem they are not." I paused. "Not if he is trying to discredit you."

  Antony frowned. "He's not trying to discredit me, he just--he just--"

  "Then why have Fulvia and Lucius gone to war against him?"

  "It seems they are too anxious for my rights."

  It seemed that the anxiety was on Antony's part--to protect Octavian. "Is it not possible that Octavian acted wrongly?"

  "Well, he--" Antony paused. "I need more information before coming to a conclusion." He leaned down and picked up the other letter. "Nothing ambiguous about this." He handed it to me.

  I skimmed it. It was terrible. The Parthians had overrun Syria, killed Saxa, Antony's governor there, and even taken Jerusalem. Everything was gone but Tyre. The two legions in Syria, along with their eagles, now belonged to Parthia. They had got more for their collection, to add to those of Crassus.

  "Oh, the legions!" cried Antony. "The shame of it!"

  His client kings, the ones who had so obsequiously paid court to him last autumn, had not proved very stalwart. Perhaps it was time they were replaced.

  "Only Herod showed any initiative," said Antony. "He got away, and held out at Masada."

  "Good for him," I said. At least someone had.

  "A war on two fronts," he said, shaking his head. "I am involved in a war on two fronts."

  The war in Italy was a nasty little war. Octavian even descended to having his slingers fire stones engraved with such sentiments as "Give it to Fulvia!" into the enemy camp. He also let loose with an obscene epigram to the effect that:

  .

  Glaphyra s fucked by Antony. Fulvia claims

  A balancing fuck from me. I hate such games.

  Manius begs me: must I bugger him?

  No, if I'm tvise, no humoring his whim.

  Fuck or else fight! she cries. But still I've found

  Dearer than life my prick. Let trumpets sound.

  .

  He must be desperate--to reveal his true colors. Antony seemed to
find the verses amusing.

  "Octavian has divorced Claudia," said Antony, out of nowhere. "He must have truly turned against me."

  "What are you talking about?" I asked. This was several days after the first letter. More had come in in the meantime. Once the seas opened, we were pelted with them.

  "He likes to cement treaties with personal ties. He asked to marry into my family, when we became Triumvirs together. The best I could come up with was Claudia, Fulvia's daughter, since all we had was sons--young ones at that. And so he married her."

  Octavian, married. How odd that seemed! "I didn't know," I said.

  "But he's divorced her, sent her back to Fulvia. He said she was 'intact'-- still a virgin. Married three years, and he didn't touch her!"

  "He must have planned this all along," I said. His self-control and long-range planning were almost unhuman. "He always thinks ahead."

  Antony shook his head. "It is so--coldblooded."

  "Yes. He is a formidable enemy." My measures of him, no matter how extreme they seemed at the time, always fell short. He was beyond anything I had ever encountered--resolute, implacable, unshakable in the pursuit of his goal. I remembered his struggle to reach Caesar in Spain after his shipwreck. Always there was Octavian, crawling out of some wreckage or other, wet, weak, injured--and still coming. I shivered.

  "He isn't my enemy," said Antony firmly. "I wish you would stop saying thatr"

  More news poured in. A slave insurrection had started in Campania, but Octavian had stamped it out, and scores of people of all ranks fled to the protection of the rebel pirate-king Sextus Pompey, who all but ruled Sardinia and Sicily. Even Antony's own mother had joined them.

  "My mother, forced to flee for her safety!" he lamented. "A disgrace upon me!" "Oh, stop it!" I said. "Punish Octavian, and set things right!"

  "But it isn't Octavian who's at fault--it's Fulvia. She has even raised legions against him, and issued her own coins!"

  Yes, I could imagine the fiery Fulvia doing that. "She is only doing it on your behalf."

  "That's what you think!" He turned on me. "The real reason she has done this is to lure me from Egypt. She's angry about you."

  "So she will raise an army and jeopardize your interests to pry you away from me? Strange sort of loyalty."

  "You don't know her."

  "I think I do." I remembered the stories of her bloodthirstiness, her vengeance.

  "Better that you never learn more, or come closer to her."

  "Divorce her," I said suddenly.

  He stared at me, shocked. "What?" he finally said.

  "She is harming you," I said. I was thinking out loud now. "She is ambitious for you, and has her eyes set on the highest prize. She understands--as you do not seem to--the danger in Octavian. But she is a liability. She cannot really help you to achieve what should be yours. I can."

  He tried to joke. "Is this a proposal?"

  "Join your forces with mine," I said. "Let me show you what I can offer you. Not a legion here or there, hastily raised, but enough to buy fifty legions, a whole fleet of ships, an army as big as you wish." I grasped his arm, his thick-muscled arm. "Soar as high as you are meant to."

  "I repeat my question: Is this a proposal?" He smiled, treating it as mere love-play.

  "Yes," I said. "Marry me, join our forces, and I shall never betray or desert you. All you want, I can deliver into your hands."

  "All I want?" he said. "I have no desire for more than I already have."

  "Which you seem in peril of losing," I said. "To retain what you have, you will have to reach for more."

  "I am no Caesar," he finally said. "What made his heart leap up does not tempt me. If you "think to have found a second Caesar, I must disappoint you."

  "It isn't a second Caesar I want, but an Antony who attains the stature that he deserves. Do not settle for less than your destiny."

  "Ah, you make it sound so grand. Destiny. Stature. Very noble. Makes the blood sing. But I must look at what it really means."

  "Is an alliance with me so repugnant?"

  He laughed. "How can you say that?"

  "Because you seem to shrink from it. But I know that you are actually drawn to it." I paused. "Be careful, or I may take up with Octavian! He would not hesitate--he's greedy for glory, no matter what path he must tread to get it."

  "I hope you are joking." Antony looked alarmed.

  "I could never make a marriage with Octavian," I assured him. "Unless I was guaranteed he would treat me as he did Claudia."

  "No chance of that. I know he has a lust for you."

  That was unexpected. "How do you know that?"

  "I could feel it," said Antony. "And I would rather slay you than let him satisfy his curiosity."

  His outburst took me by surprise--both his assertion about Octavian and his possessiveness.

  "Then take me for yourself. Legally," I added.

  "But such a marriage would not be recognized in Rome," he said.

  Yes, I had heard that before. But if he only had one wife, it would have to be honored.

  "So I have offered, and you have refused." I stood up and made ready to leave the room. "I must say, the rejection stings." I tried to make it sound light.

  "I am not rejecting you, but politically--"

  "I know. Our magic kingdom ends where politics begins."

  I paced my room that night, until Charmian inquired anxiously if I wished a sleep potion. But I wanted the opposite: something to sharpen my wits, to unlock ideas. I needed to think, think more clearly than I ever had before.

  Antony was being offered an opportunity that comes only once in the lifetime of a man, and not to all men, but only to a very few. For all the talk about the Fortune of Caesar, had he not been bold enough to snatch at it as it passed, he would have remained sitting by the side of the road. But he did grab it, wrestled with it, and a new world order was born. We could not turn back.

  Rome had taken over the west, and part of the east. It was easier to take over such primitive and virgin lands as Gaul than to take realms that were old past imagining: Babylon, and Syria, and Arabia. And Egypt, oldest and strongest of all. What was Rome to do with them? They could never be Roman, speak Latin, think like Romans. Yet that is what Rome would try to make them do, I knew it. In would come the administrators, the census takers, the tax farmers, the road and aqueduct builders, running roughshod over all the ways that had stood since the beginning of time, obliterating all the wisdom they sorely needed for the new age.

  Alexander had known better; he had tried to forge a new race from the old, losing nothing, keeping all intact. Caesar had known better, and his wider views had been part of what killed him. Octavian was parochial, local, entirely focused on the country of Rome and Italy. Should his vision prevail, the east would wither and die, ground under the hobnail boots of the Roman soldiers occupying it.

  And Antony? In many ways he had Caesar's wider outlook. He was not prejudiced against something merely because it was not Roman. His Dionysus guise was treated with contempt in Rome, but appreciated by his eastern subjects. He was sensitive to their outlook and beliefs; he was the one Roman willing to shed his toga. Even Caesar had not gone that far.

  Outside, I could see the beacon of the Lighthouse winking. There was so much here, so much glorious history--the collective intellect and spirit of the Greek world. Surely its star could not be setting already. Should Octavian prevail, that was what would happen.

  No empire can be ruled by two men. One must always, ultimately, make a bid for supreme power. That Octavian would do so, I had no doubt. But he would need time, time to grow in strength. If the contest were held today, he would lose.

  Antony was better suited to follow Caesar, with me as his partner. What I said about two people did not apply to husband and wife. They could rule jointly: I would speak for the eastern peoples, and Antony for the western. And our children would inherit all, heralding a new race of international citizens.

 
Our children ... for there was to be a child, I had just realized. A child that should wear the mantle of both worlds, but be bound by neither.

  Antony stood highest in all the civilized world now--the avenger of Caesar, the victor of Philippi, the senior partner of Octavian. It was all his for the taking. It was necessary, for the well-being of all the realms under his protection, that he take over. I would be his faithful partner, the balance to the Roman weight on the other side of the scales. Why could I not make him understand that?

  I sank down on my bed, rocking back and forth. He was too modest a man, too fixed on his obligations to Octavian, to the Triumvirate, which was due to expire in only three years. Three years in which Octavian would consolidate his gains, grow stronger. Then what? Strength is always obtained at someone else's expense. Octavian could not grow greater unless Antony grew less.

  Oh, Antony, I thought, awake! Take what fortune is offering you. She never offers twice.

  Chapter 47.

  "Come with me,"' I told Antony two mornings later. He had come at my summons, and now stood looking at me expectantly. I hoped to convince him of what he must do by showing him the secret workings of my country.

  "I don't understand," he said, as we rode in a chariot to the docks and dismounted before the large warehouse owned by Epaphroditus and his company. They were expecting us.

  "I want you to suspend all judgment until this morning is over," I told him. "Then, tonight, you must think about it--think of all it entails. Of all it can mean."