For a fleeting moment, she thought he would risk an insolent kiss. What better bragging rights to spread among his fellow soldiers than a stolen kiss from the queen of Egypt? But then he seemed to think twice and merely lowered his head with mock respect and stood back, waiting for her to eat.
“Why should Caesar care if I eat?” she muttered.
“You need your strength,” said Charmion. She glared at the Roman soldier. “He cannot march you to your execution in his triumph if you’ve already starved yourself to death.”
“Caesar only has your health and well-being in mind,” the centurion said unconvincingly.
Cleopatra slid off the bed. As she rose, Charmion and Iras instinctively fussed over their mistress’s dress and hair, making sure they were arranged properly. The queen positioned herself in front of the Roman soldier and studied him as he had studied her.
“Tell Caesar I will do all that he asks,” she said. “I am his Egyptian prize, and I will shine as he wishes me to. But first I wish to anoint Antony’s body in the mausoleum.”
“I will inform Caesar,” he said. “I am certain that can be arranged.”
Not caring that his heavy cloak brushed indecorously against the great queen of Egypt, the centurion turned and left Cleopatra’s chambers, slamming the doors behind him.
Iras was the first to speak. “Majesty, it should be the priests and embalmers who anoint Antony’s body,” she said cautiously. “The linseed oil can heat and char the skin if not properly applied, and—”
“I know that, you foolish woman,” snapped Cleopatra. She spoke urgently, under her breath. “Do you not remember what is in the mausoleum? You put it there yourself, Iras.”
The gravity of the queen’s meaning descended upon her. “Of course, Majesty.”
Moments later, the doors to the queen’s chambers opened once again. The centurion stood outside and cocked his head at Cleopatra. “I am to take you to the mausoleum,” he said. “Caesar trusts you will perform as promised afterward.”
Perform. The word struck Cleopatra. I will indeed perform for Caesar, she thought, but I will not be triumphed over. She smiled at the Roman soldier. “The queen will do all that Caesar requires.”
The centurion and what seemed like a full cohort of Roman soldiers escorted Cleopatra and her two advisers out of the palace, where the glaring light of day pierced their eyes.
They walked along a sand-covered limestone path under the searing heat of the Egyptian summer sun until they reached the seven-meter-high door of the mausoleum. The door was built of pure granite, and it took a small army of Roman soldiers to open it. After all, it was meant to be closed once and never reopened.
Rays of light illuminated the interior of the luxurious gilded tomb, and Cleopatra strode inside without waiting for permission from her Roman captors.
She brought her hand to her mouth. The body of Marc Antony lay naked on a wide table. His flesh gleamed with the oil that had already been applied by the embalmers.
Although Cleopatra had known his body would be here, she didn’t know that Caesar had permitted and already arranged for Antony to receive the full Egyptian funerary rites he had dictated in his will. The sight of his body being prepared for the afterlife refreshed the sorrow of his death.
She walked slowly to his body as the door of the tomb closed, sealing the mausoleum from the outside world of sunshine and sound.
The oil on Antony’s bare chest, arms, and legs reflected the flickering light of the oil lamps affixed to the walls of the tomb. She touched his skin. It felt as warm in death as it did in life. But he did not move. He did not rouse and reach for her in the way he always did when she touched him.
She leaned over to kiss his mouth. “I am coming, my love,” she whispered. Cleopatra looked over her shoulder at Charmion and Iras, who stood trembling but dutiful behind her. They would follow their queen into death. “I am ready,” she said to them. “We must move quickly.”
Charmion nodded and moved to open a wardrobe decorated with lapis lazuli, removing a jeweled diadem and a gold-and-green robe. She placed the crown on Cleopatra’s head, while Iras dressed the queen in her royal attire.
Cleopatra sat on a golden couch as Iras retrieved a large pottery bowl within which lay a coiled cobra. The skin on its long body twitched when the perforated lid was removed, but it seemed otherwise unperturbed, even when Iras wrapped her hand around it and gingerly pulled it out. It yawned and moved lazily through her fingers.
“Give it to me,” said Cleopatra. “It must bite me first.”
The queen held the cobra in her hands. The creature was waking up now and becoming more interested in its surroundings. It glided through Cleopatra’s fingers and encircled her left wrist and forearm.
A sound at the door of the tomb. The soldiers were returning. They would not risk leaving the queen—their master’s Egyptian prize—unattended for too long.
Cleopatra pinched the cobra’s face and it bit her on the wrist, its curved fangs sinking into a blue vein so quickly that she didn’t even see it happen. The bite was hot and sharp, but otherwise, she felt nothing. She dropped the cobra onto her lap.
A moment later, it began. A sudden shortness of breath. The queen inhaled deeply, yet her lungs still felt empty. She tried to draw in another breath, hungry for the feeling of full lungs, but she could not. She held out her hands, and Charmion and Iras took them, interlocking their fingers with hers.
Cleopatra lay back on the golden couch as her breaths became shallow and then stopped.
Iras put her face to the queen’s lips.
“It is done,” she said to Charmion. “Isis took her quickly.”
More sounds from the door. Any moment, it would open and the light of day and realization would fill the tomb.
Iras picked up the cobra and pinched its mouth as Cleopatra had done. It struck her in the crook of her elbow.
Wordlessly, she passed the snake to Charmion, who hesitated for a split second before seeing a slant of daylight pierce the darkness. She coaxed the cobra to strike her.
It bit her on the back of her hand, but its fangs lodged in her skin, and she had to pry its head off her. She dropped it onto the floor, and it slithered away, looking for a quiet spot to sleep, indifferent to the drama unfolding around it.
Sunlight blazed into the tomb as more than a dozen Roman soldiers rushed in. The same centurion who had brought Cleopatra and her advisers into the mausoleum was the first to see the sight: Cleopatra lying dead on a golden couch, dressed in royal attire, with her advisers Iras and Charmion lying at her feet.
“Pluto’s withered cock!” he shouted. He took off his helmet and threw it hard against the wall of the tomb and then kicked over a large amphora. It fell, broke, and spilled oil over the floor. Taking an angry step closer, he saw that Charmion still clung to the last of life.
“Are you happy now, Charmion?” he asked bitterly.
“Happier than you, Roman,” she said. “I fulfilled my duty.” She rested her head on Iras’s stomach and joined her friend and her queen.
The centurion ignored the parting gibe, but just when he thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, there was a swell of shouts and marching footsteps behind him. Caesar was coming. He muttered another obscene curse to the gods of the underworld and reluctantly turned toward the approaching Caesar—now the sole and undisputed leader of the Roman world—to explain why he had failed in his duty.
“Caesar,” he began, “we only left her for a matter of minutes, as instructed. We did not—”
Octavian held up his hand for silence. He walked slowly, dreadfully, to Cleopatra’s body and stared at it for a long while. You lying Egyptian bitch, he thought.
General Agrippa appeared at his shoulder. “Ah,” he said, as he assessed the situation. He knew exactly what Caesar was thinking: his triumph just wouldn’t have the sa
me flair to it. “It is a lost opportunity,” he admitted, “but I have news that will lift your spirits, Caesar.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“We found the boy Caesarion. I decapitated him myself.”
“Thank Jupiter and all the gods. What did you do with his body?”
“Buried it in the desert. As much as anything can be buried in sand, that is.”
Octavian gripped Agrippa’s shoulder. “Good work,” he said. And then more seriously. “Tell me, was it true what they say? Did he really look like Caesar?”
“Nothing like,” said Agrippa. Honesty will not serve me here, he thought.
Octavian winked at him. “I thought not.” He smiled to himself, a self-assured smile, and then gestured to the dead queen on the golden couch. “Maecenas advises that our men go through the Royal Library and destroy anything Cleopatra wrote,” he said. “I’m told there’s an entire wing of her books on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and the gods know what else. Burn them. She was no queen and no scholar. She was a sorceress and a whore.”
“Yes, Caesar.” The general summoned a handful of soldiers to follow him and set out for the Royal Library.
Caesar called over his shoulder. “Leave me.” His soldiers quietly filed out of the mausoleum, the disgraced centurion being the last out.
Octavian fixed his eyes on the body of Cleopatra and shook his head in restrained rage.
Thank the gods, he thought, that Roman women are not capable of such trickery.
Chapter XX
Ecce Caesar Nunc Triumphat
Behold Caesar, who now triumphs.
—Suetonius, as sung during the triumph of Julius Caesar
rome, 29 bce
One year later
Pomponia had been thinking about Vercingetorix the Gaul all morning. She had been reflecting on Julius Caesar’s triumph so many years ago, when the King of the Gauls had been paraded around the entire oval of the Circus Maximus and then along the cobblestone streets of the Forum before a jeering Roman mob.
He had been sworn and spat at by men and women, and had food and filth thrown at him by children. He had been dragged to the Rostra and forced to wait for the moment a triumphant Caesar of Rome would give the word. “Kill!”
Now it was the new Caesar’s turn. As the chief Vestal looked around, she imagined that Octavian’s triumph was everything he could have hoped for. Loud, colorful, spectacular, and indulgent in every way. There was just one thing missing—well, two things, actually: Antony and Cleopatra. They were already dead. And even Caesar didn’t have the power to make someone die twice.
Pomponia sat on the Rostra near Livia, Octavia, Julia, and Marcellus. Caesar, dressed in a purple toga and wearing a gilded crown of laurels, stood an arm’s length away. Dressed like the statue of Jupiter on the Capitoline, all he was missing was the lightning bolt. General Agrippa stood behind him. Caesar held up an arm to acknowledge the Roman mob that spilled into every street, colonnade, and portico in the Forum, and that sat perched on top of basilicas and monuments.
Red banners with the gold letters SPQR flapped regally in the wind, and horns sounded, although they were drowned out by the crowd’s victory cheers.
A parade of spoils from the palaces and temples of faraway Egypt rolled through the streets, and people swarmed to catch a glimpse. There were giant painted statues of foreign gods with the heads of animals: a falcon, a jackal, a ram. A particularly strange one—with the head of a black scarab beetle and the body of a man—received more than its share of jeers and finger-pointing.
But then along came a procession of mummies propped up in jeweled sarcophagi and the beetle-headed god was forgotten.
Another round of cheers went up as the mummies gave way to a golden couch upon which reclined an effigy of Cleopatra. It had been outfitted with the queen’s jeweled diadem and gold robe. Its arms were crossed over its chest, showing the Egyptian pharaoh in death.
Following close behind the effigy of the dead queen were her two living children by Marc Antony: Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. They walked slowly with their heads down. What was there for them to see? Ahead of them was the effigy of their dead mother. Around them were the faces of their conquerors.
Yet Caesar had kept his word and allowed them to live. In fact, he had placed them under the care of his sister Octavia, who continued to bear the dictates of the Fates and her powerful brother with regal composure. Pomponia had never known anyone who accepted her duty and fate so willingly.
Octavian raised an arm again, and the crowd roared even louder. Octavian. Then Caesar. Now Augustus.
Following his defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, the Senate had bestowed upon him the lofty name of Augustus. It meant “the great one” and was a step up from the banal princeps, or “first man,” title he tended to use. Pomponia smiled to herself. The man sprouted more names than the Hydra sprouted heads.
The month of Sextilius had also been renamed: it was now known as August in honor of Rome’s savior, and it was only fitting that it followed the month of July which had been named after his divine father. The son follows the father.
“Citizens,” shouted Caesar. “I now give Rome a gift. The death of Antony and Cleopatra!”
At that, the main attraction rolled before the Rostra. It was a massive prison cart decorated to resemble the Royal Palace in Alexandria.
Inside the cart, was a man dressed in the style of an Egyptian male, complete with garish makeup on his face, and a woman dressed as the queen of Egypt, complete with diadem and royal robes: Antony and Cleopatra—or more accurately, two slaves whose greatest misfortune in life had been the striking resemblance they bore to the Egyptian queen and her Roman lover. They sat facing each other, fastened to golden thrones—the very thrones Antony and Cleopatra had ruled from in Alexandria.
Caesar nodded to the executioners, and the performance that everyone had come to see began.
Four men dressed as snake charmers carried heavy baskets to the prison cart. They tipped the baskets through the bars—careful to stand back as far as possible—as hundreds of snakes spilled into the bottom of the cart.
The mob of people moved, weaved, and climbed over whatever or whomever they could to get a better view.
Tied to the thrones inside the cart, the man and woman began to buck in their seats and scream as snakes of every shape, size, and color swarmed around their tethered feet. To add to the drama, the snake charmers used long sticks with hooks on the end to grab snakes from the bottom of the cart and place them on the bodies of the couple—their laps, heads, and shoulders—even shoving them under their clothing.
Pomponia grimaced and looked away. Her thoughts were wandering. They moved from Vercingetorix to the Carcer, from the Carcer to Quintus.
Pomponia turned her head and smiled amiably at Livia. Caesar’s wife wore a green dress with a teal veil, her hair sparkling with gemstones and her teeth bared in a wide smile as she beamed at her powerful husband and basked in her newfound status as first woman of Rome.
The Vestal spoke quietly. “Tell me, Lady Livia, how does your sister like her new villa in Capua?”
“She likes it very well, High Priestess. Perhaps too well, since she has not replied to the last three letters I sent. I think country life has gotten to her.”
“Maybe she ate some bad fish,” said Pomponia.
Livia felt a sudden hot flush in her cheeks but resisted the urge to make eye contact with the Vestal.
“It is such an important day for your great husband,” Pomponia continued. “And for you as well.”
“The gods bless us.”
“Not all the gods.”
“Oh?”
“Vesta does not bless you,” said Pomponia. “Neither does Juno. The divine sisters have not blessed your home by giving you children with Caesar. They have not blessed your bed. I am told
that common slave girls and the wives of other men spend more time in it with your husband than you do, regardless of how energetically you perform when you do get an invitation.”
Livia bristled. “Priestess . . . such matters are private.”
“There is no need for privacy between friends,” said Pomponia. “That is why I have taken it upon myself to know all of your secrets. Although not all are so innocuous. I could have you fed to the lions in the arena for some of them. Your husband could easily find another slave trader to staff his bedchamber.”
“Caesar would never—”
“Oh, hush now, Livia,” Pomponia said. “Caesar would push you off the Tarpeian Rock himself if he learned you had slandered the Vestal order. He reveres the goddess. Our order is a political asset to him. He has made it so. You and your childless belly are becoming a liability.”
“Caesar knows my worth.” The words came out weaker than she would have preferred, and Livia exhaled out her nose. She hadn’t expected this. Her blood quickened with anger. No matter how many stinking beasts she sacrificed to Fortuna, no matter how many backs she managed to clamber over, there was always someone in her way. Unfortunately, the Vestal had the high ground. Yet again, she found herself caught between Scylla and Charybdis with no escape, no option. Not yet. Not with a barren belly. “How might I strengthen our friendship, Priestess?”
“By becoming a friend of the Vestal order,” said Pomponia. “You’ve tried to reduce us because of your own insecurities. Now, I want you to do the opposite. I want you to offer your patronage and elevate us, even more than your husband does.”
“I would be happy to do so.”
“Good.” Pomponia lifted a disapproving eyebrow at Livia’s garishly colored dress. “You may begin by wearing a white stola for all public occasions. And less makeup. You’re pretty enough, nay?”
She reached her hands behind Livia’s neck to secure Medousa’s pendant around it. “You may also wear this, if it pleases you. I have had emeralds set into the Gorgon’s eyes, just for you. The Egyptians believe the gemstones bring fertility, you know.”
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