Antony and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  When she had offered eggs and milk to the sacred snake who dwelled in Bona Dea’s shrine at Capua, he had appeared from out of his slit in a glide of glittering scales the sun had turned bright gold, nosed at the milk, swallowed both eggs, then lifted his wedge of a head to gaze at her with still cold eyes. And she had gazed back fearlessly, hearing him talk an alien language inside her, and reached out her hand to stroke him. He had put his chin upon her fingers and flickered his tongue, in and out, in and out, and told her—what had he told her? As if through dense grey fog she fought to remember, and fancied that he had a message for her from the Bona Dea: that if she was prepared to make the sacrifice, the Bona Dea would gift her with the world. It had been the day upon which she was sure of this new pregnancy. No one ever saw the sacred snake. He waited until the night before he came out to drink his milk and eat his eggs. But he had manifested himself to her in brilliant sun, a long golden serpent as thick as her arm. Bona Dea, Bona Dea, gift me with the world and I will restore your worship to what it was before men intruded!

  Nero was reading a sheaf of scrolls. When she entered he looked up, frowning direfully.

  “An overlong walk, Livia Drusilla, for one who tramps the road all day.”

  “I had conversation with a man in the ruins of Fregellae.”

  Nero stiffened. “Wives do not converse with strange men!”

  “He wasn’t a strange man. He was Caesar Divi Filius.”

  That provoked a diatribe that Livia Drusilla had heard many times before, so she felt at liberty to leave her husband with a light word about using the bath water before it grew absolutely cold. Which she did, though it took courage after she had taken in the scum of dead skin and body oils floating on the surface, smelled the stench of sweat. Knowing Nero, he had probably urinated in it; certainly little Tiberius would have. Using a rag, she skimmed as much of the detritus off as she could before sinking into the barely tepid water. Thinking to herself that she would gladly abandon wifely virtue for any man who offered her a fresh, hot, sweetly perfumed bath in a lovely marble tub only she ever used. And after she managed to banish things like urine and scum from her mind, she dreamed that this man was Caesar Octavianus, that he had meant what he said.

  He had meant what he said, though he spent the walk back to the duumvir’s house in Fabrateria castigating himself for the clumsiest overtures of love ever made.

  See what happens when you tempt the gods? he asked, smiling wryly. I despised mawkish sentimentality, deemed men weak who protested that one look had transfixed them with Cupid’s dart. Yet here I am with an arrow protruding from my chest, oceans deep in love with a girl I do not even know. How can that be? How can I, so rational and detached, have succumbed to an emotion that wars with everything I believe in? It was a visitation from some god, it has to have been! Otherwise it makes no sense! I am rational and detached! Therefore, why do I feel this incredible rush of—of—love? Oh, she moved me unbearably! I wanted to take all her troubles on my own shoulders, I wanted to smother her in kisses, I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life! Livia Drusilla. The wife of a pretentious snob like Tiberius Claudius Nero. Out of the same litter basket, another Claudian. The branch of the Claudii cognominated Pulcher produces quirky, independent, unorthodox consuls and censors, whereas the branch cognominated Nero is famous for producing nonentities. And Nero is a nonentity—a proud, stubborn, petty man who will never agree to divorce his wife at the behest of Caesar Octavianus.

  Her face danced before his eyes, maddened him. Stripey eyes, black hair, skin like creamy milk, lush red lips. Could this be a simple sexual drive, then? Could he be suffering from the same ailment that perpetually got Marcus Antonius into hot water? No, that he wouldn’t believe! Whatever this alien emotion was, there had to be a better reason for it than mere penile itch. Perhaps, Octavian wondered as a gig took him back to Rome, each of us has a natural mate, and I have found mine. Like turtledoves. The wife of another man, and pregnant with his child. Which makes no difference. She belongs to me—to me!

  Hugging his secret, he soon found that there was no one to whom he could confide it even had he wanted to. With the grain fleets docking safely in Puteoli and Ostia, and the price of wheat down where it should be for this year at least, Antony had decided to remove himself back to Athens, and was taking Octavia and her brood with him. Octavia might have been the only person he could trust with this awful emotional dilemma, but she was transparently happy with Antony, and immersed in travel preparations. Both put her at risk of letting a confidence slip to her husband, who would crow and tease insufferably. Ha ha ha, Octavianus, you too can be ruled by your prick! Octavian could hear it now. So he waved the Antonian ménage off with his secret undivulged, and turned to wondering if Agrippa might prove to have words of wisdom about it when he reached Narbo, near the Spanish border and a month’s journey from Rome.

  His state of mind tormented him, for passion sat awkwardly upon one whose cerebral habits were coolly logical and emotions resolutely suppressed. Confused, fretting, yearning, Octavian lost his appetite for food and came near to losing his reason. The weight fell off him visibly, as if some furnace of hot air evaporated it, and he couldn’t even begin to think in Greek. To think in Greek was a crotchet, something he did with iron determination because it was so hard. Yet here he was, with half a hundred communications to dictate in Greek, obliged to dictate in Latin with curt instructions to his secretaries to make their own translations.

  Maecenas wasn’t in Rome, perhaps just as well, which meant that it was Scribonia who, on the very eve of Octavian’s departure for Further Gaul, nerved herself to say something.

  She had been very happy throughout a tranquil pregnancy, and bore baby Julia quickly, easily. The little mite was undeniably beautiful, from her flaxen wisps of hair to her big blue eyes, too light ever to go brown as the months went by. Never remembering Cornelia as a joy, Scribonia settled to mothering her babe more in love with her aloof, meticulous husband than ever. That he didn’t love her was not a huge sorrow, for he treated her kindly, with unfailing courtesy and respect, and promised that, as soon as she had fully recovered from her parturition, he would visit her bed again. Next time let it be a son! she prayed, offering to Juno Sospita, Magna Mater, and Spes.

  But something had happened to Octavian on his way back to Rome from a visit to the legion training camps dotted around the old army city of Capua. Scribonia had her own eyes and ears to tell her this, but she also had several servants, including Gaius Julius Burgundinus, who was Octavian’s steward and a grandson of Divus Julius’s beloved German freedman, Burgundus. Though he always stayed in Rome as steward of the domus Hortensia, there were so many of his brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles in Octavian’s clientele that some were always in attendance on their patron whenever he traveled. And, said Burgundinus, big with news, Octavian had gone for a walk in Fregellae and returned in a mood no one had ever seen before. A visitation from a god, was Burgundinus’s own theory, but it was simply one of many.

  Scribonia feared a mental malady, for the calm and collected Octavian was touchy, short-tempered, and critical of things he usually ignored. Had she known him as well as Agrippa did, she would have seen all of it as evidence of self-detestation, and been right. As it was, she attempted to remind him that he needed his strength, therefore had to eat.

  “You need your strength, my dear, so you have to eat,” she said at the specially delicious dinner she had chosen. “You’re off to Narbo tomorrow, and you won’t be served any of your favorite dishes. Please, Caesar, eat!”

  “Tace!” he snapped, and slid off the couch. “Mend your ways, Scribonia! You’re turning into a shrew.” He stopped, one foot off the ground as a servant struggled to buckle his shoe. “Hmm! A good word, that! A true shrew, a grue–some shrew, a new shrew!”

  From that moment until she heard the sounds of his departure the next morning, she didn’t set eyes on him. Running, the tears streaming down her face, she was just in
time to catch sight of his golden head as it disappeared into the gig, hood up against the rain, pouring down. Caesar was leaving Rome, and Rome wept.

  “He went without saying good-bye to me!” she cried to Burgundinus, at her elbow, his face downcast.

  He held out a scroll, looking anywhere but at her. “Domina, Caesar commanded that I give you this.”

  I hereby divorce you.

  My grounds are these: shrewishness, old age, bad manners, incompatibility, and extravagance.

  I have instructed my steward to move you and our child to my old domus at the Ox Heads near the Curiae Veteres, where you will reside and bring up my daughter as befits her exalted station. She is to be highly educated, not set to spin and weave. My bankers will pay you an adequate allowance, and you are to have the full use of your dowry. Bear in mind that I can put a stop to this generous settlement at any time, and will do so if I hear any rumors that your behavior is immoral. In that event, I will return you to your father and take custody of Julia myself, nor will you be let see her.

  It was sealed with the sphinx. Scribonia dropped it from fingers grown suddenly numb, and sank onto a marble bench to sit with her head between her knees, fighting faintness.

  “It is all over,” she said to Burgundinus, standing near.

  “Yes, domina,” he said gently; he had liked her.

  “But I did nothing! I am not a shrew! I am not any of those awful things he lists! Old age! I am not yet thirty-five!”

  “Caesar’s orders are that you be moved today, domina.”

  “But I did nothing! I do not deserve this!”

  Poor lady, you irritated him, thought Burgundinus, bound to dumbness by cliental ties. He will tell the whole world that you are a shrew so that he can save his own face. Poor lady! And poor little baby Julia.

  Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was in Narbo because the Aquitani had been giving trouble, obliging him to teach them that Rome still produced superlative troops and highly competent generals.

  “I sacked Burdigala, but I didn’t burn it,” he said to Octavian when that worthy arrived after a grueling journey that had seen him succumb to the asthma for the first time in two years. “No gold or silver, but a mountain of good strong iron-tired wagon wheels, four thousand excellently cooped barrels, and fifteen thousand able-bodied men to sell as slaves in Massilia. The vendors are rubbing their hands together in glee—it’s been some time since the markets have had such first-class merchandise. I didn’t think it politic to enslave any women or children, but I always can if you wish it.”

  “No, if you wish it. Profits from slaves are yours, Agrippa.”

  “Not during this campaign, Caesar. The males will fetch two thousand talents I have a better use for than to put them in my purse. My needs are simple, and you will always look after me.”

  Octavian sat up straighter, his eyes gleaming. “A scheme! You have a scheme! Enlighten me!”

  In answer, Agrippa rose to fetch a map and spread it out on his homely desk. Leaning over it, Octavian saw that it depicted in considerable detail the area around Puteoli, Campania’s chief port, a hundred miles southeast of Rome.

  “The day will come when you have sufficient warships to put down Sextus Pompeius,” Agrippa said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “Four hundred ships, I estimate. But where is there a harbor big enough to shelter half that many? Brundisium. Tarentum. However, both those ports are separated from the Tuscan coast by the Straits of Messana, where Sextus lies in perpetual wait. So we cannot anchor our fleets in either Brundisium or Tarentum. Take the Tuscan Sea harbors: Puteoli is too congested by commercial shipping, Ostia is beset by mudflats, Surrentum is overcrowded by fishing boats, and Cosa has to be kept for steeling the iron sows from Ilva. Added to which, they are vulnerable to attack from Sextus, even if they could accommodate four hundred big ships.”

  “I am aware of all this,” Octavian said tiredly; the asthma had sapped him. His fist came down on the map. “Useless, useless!”

  “There is an alternative, Caesar. I have been thinking about it ever since I started visiting shipyards.” Agrippa’s big, well-shaped hand hovered over the map, its index finger on two little lakes near Puteoli. “Here is our answer, Caesar. The Lucrine lake and the Avernian lake. The first is very shallow and its water is warmed by the Fields of Fire. The second is bottomless, with water so cold it must lead straight to the Underworld.”

  “Well, it’s very dark and gloomy, at any rate,” said Octavian, something of a religious skeptic. “No farmer will fell the forest around it for fear of angering the lemures.”

  “The forest must go,” Agrippa said briskly. “I intend to join the Lucrine lake to the Avernian by digging several big canals. Then I’ll break down the dyke that keeps the sea from overflowing into the Lucrine lake, and flood it. The seawater will pass down the canals and gradually turn Lake Avernus salty.”

  Octavian’s face was a study in awe and disbelief. “But—but the dyke was built atop the spit that separates Lake Lucrinus from the sea to make sure that the lake waters are exactly the right temperature and salinity to grow oysters,” he said, his mind fixed on the fiscus. “To let in the sea would utterly destroy the oyster beds—Agrippa, you’d have hundreds of oyster farmers howling for your citizenship, your blood, and your head!”

  “They can have their oysters back after we beat Sextus once and for all,” said Agrippa curtly, not a scrap concerned about ruining an industry that had been in existence for generations. “What I pull down they can put up again later. If this is done as I envision it, Caesar, we’ll have a huge expanse of calm, sheltered water in which to anchor all our fleets. Not only that, we’ll be able to train their crews and marines in the art of sea battles without ever needing to worry about Sextus on a raid. The entry will be too narrow to get his ships in more than two at a time. And to make sure he can’t lurk offshore waiting for us to come out two at a time, I’m going to build two big tunnels between Avernus and the beach at Cumae. Our ships can row through those tunnels with impunity and emerge to take Sextus on the flank.”

  The realization broke on Octavian with the shock of immersion in icy water. “You are Caesar’s equal,” he said slowly, so dazed that he forgot to call his adoptive father Divus Julius. “That is a Caesarean plan, a masterpiece of engineering.”

  “I, Divus Julius’s equal?” Agrippa looked astonished. “No, Caesar, the idea is common sense and the execution a matter of hard work, not engineering genius. Going from one shipyard to the next, I’ve had a lot of time to think. And one thing I overlooked is the fact that ships can’t propel themselves. Certainly we’ll have some established, fully crewed fleets, but perhaps two-thirds will be new vessels without crews. Most of the galleys I’ve commissioned are fives, though I’ve taken threes from yards not equipped to build something close to two hundred feet long and twenty-five feet in the beam.”

  “Quinqueremes are very clumsy,” Octavian said, revealing that he was not a complete ignoramus when it came to war galleys.

  “Yes, but fives have a size advantage and can carry two nasty beaks of solid bronze. I’ve gone for the modified five—no more than two men to an oar in three banks—two, two, and one. Ample deck space for a hundred marines as well as catapults and ballistas. At an average of thirty banks to a side, that’s three hundred oarsmen per vessel. Plus thirty sailors.”

  “I begin to see your problem. But of course you have solved it. Three hundred times three hundred oarsmen—a total of ninety thousand. Also forty-five thousand marines and twenty thousand sailors.” Octavian stretched like a contented cat. “I am no general of troops or admiral of fleets, but I am a master of the fine Roman science of logistics.”

  “So you’d rather have a hundred and fifty marines per ship than a hundred?”

  “Oh, I think so. Swarm over the enemy like ants.”

  “Twenty thousand men will do me to start,” said Agrippa. “I mean to start by building the harbor, and for that, someone can press ex-slaves wandering a
round Italia in search of latifundia your land commissioners have not broken up for veterans. I’ll pay them out of my slave sale profits, feed and house them too. If they’re any good, they can train as oarsmen later on.”

  “Incentive employment,” Octavian said with a smile. “That’s clever. The poor wretches haven’t the wherewithal to go home, so why not offer them shelter and full bellies? Sooner or later they drift to Lucania and become bandits. This way is better.” He clicked his tongue. “It’s going to be slow, much slower than I had hoped. How long, Agrippa?”

  “Four years, Caesar, including the one coming but not the one just going.”

  “Sextus will never adhere to the pact for a third of that.” The thick gold lashes fell, hiding the eyes. “Especially now I’ve divorced Scribonia.”

  “Cacat! Why?”

  “She’s such a shrew I can’t bear living with her. Whatever I want, she doesn’t. So she nags. Nag, nag, nag.”

  Agrippa’s shrewd gaze never swerved from Octavian’s face. So the wind’s changed direction, has it? Blowing now from a quarter I can’t recognize. Caesar’s plotting, the signs are unmistakable. Only what’s he plotting that requires the divorce of Scribonia? Shrewish? A nagger? Not in a fit, Caesar. You can’t fool me.

  “I’ll need several men to supervise work on the lakes,” he said. “Do you mind if I choose them? Probably army engineers from my own legions. But they’ll need protecting by someone with clout. A propraetor, if you have one spare.”

  “No, I have a proconsul spare.”

  “A proconsul? Not Calvinus, alas. A pity you sent him to Spain. He’d be ideal.”