by Karen Essex
Fueled by the memory, he delivered an impassioned finale to his story: how brave Spartacus refused to give up, still swinging his sword at the men, still drawing noble Roman blood; how a Roman centurion of superior size and strength, with a final, mortal blow, spilled the slave’s entrails, slicing him from chest to groin. The Roman made an imaginary slash in the air and then raised his arm as if saluting Kleopatra with a sword. “That, my princess, was the end of your Spartacus.”
Kleopatra released her breath. Silence in the room. Thea signaled for a slave to fan her. Auletes sighed. Berenike squirmed in her seat, unimpressed. No one spoke.
“Say it again!” squealed Kleopatra, jumping out of her throne and knocking her crown askew against the cobra above her.
Charmion, stiff-backed, motioned for Kleopatra to take her seat. It was one thing for a princess to indulge in the grotesque imagery of Homer, but quite another to listen to specious stories told by these unreliable visitors who embellished the slave leader’s capacities. “Sir, I thought that no one knew the identity of the slave, that his men never gave him up, even in death,” Charmion said.
“My dear young woman, of course they denied that he was Spartacus. But we knew better. His powers gave him away,” he said, clearly perturbed to be questioned.
Kleopatra waited impatiently for a turn to talk. “Father, please may our guest tell the story again? Please?” she implored.
With a nod from the king, the Roman reenacted the scene, this time playing all the parts—the centurions, the slain boys, Spartacus—dying dramatically at the princess’s feet, his large body spread over a mosaic of Dionysus entering Thebes disguised as a mortal.
“I should like to have known Spartacus,” Kleopatra said to Auletes while slaves helped the guest to his feet and straightened his garments. He was offered a bowl of wine, which he greedily consumed.
“Is that so, my princess?”
“Yes.” She was serious as only a young child can be, wrinkling her brow with the sincerity of her thought. “I would have taught him to be more sensible. Didn’t he know that he shouldn’t defy Rome?”
Berenike, quiet for so long, suddenly sat up in her chair, snapping at her sister. “Why not? What is wrong with defying Rome?”
“Because he got caught and died. That’s why not,” Kleopatra retorted. “No one may defy Rome. That’s what Father says.”
“Perhaps freedom is a greater condition than life itself,” said Thea. “I know I have always thought as much.” She looked pointedly at the king.
“These are questions for the philosophers, my dears. I shall have to send all of you to the Mouseion to study with the rest of the scholars,” the king said, wishing to change the course of the discussion. “As you are so fond of Spartacus, tell us what would you have done with the slave if he had turned his lion’s courage against this throne?”
“I would have done just as the Romans did,” Kleopatra replied to Auletes’ satisfaction, though privately she was thinking that she and Spartacus might have fallen in love and started their own country. “It would be my duty.”
The king posed the same question to Berenike. “And you, daughter?”
“I should have spared the Greek slave Spartacus and crucified the Romans,” she smirked.
The king’s black eyes shot out like locusts. “You are banished to your chamber, Princess Berenike, for insubordination before the crown and for insulting our exalted Roman guest.” Kleopatra was grateful that the king’s anger was not directed at her. His thick lips were thrust forward as if to entrap invisible food. “You shall not be fed for two days. Now leave.” To Meleager: “Go with her, Tutor, and bid her to mind her foul tongue.”
Berenike marched from the room, leaving the Roman guest unacknowledged, and ignoring the peeved eunuch trailing her steps. Secretly, Kleopatra was full of glee. She made a private prayer to the goddess that Auletes would marry Berenike to a very ugly foreigner, who would force her to put away her weapons, bear his children, and learn one of the many languages she considered beneath her.
“You will excuse the child,” Auletes said apologetically. “She is quite contrary. I fear she suffers from a mental disorder.”
“A spirited girl,” commented the Roman in his best Greek. “Very grand. Very beautiful, if I may be so bold, Your Royal Grace.”
Auletes regarded his guest for an uncomfortably long time. “Are you a man who hears the call of the Muses?”
The Roman stared at him quizzically, as if challenged by a clever teacher in an oral exam. “The Muses, Sire?”
“Like Hesiod, I am haunted by those beguiling ladies. Euterpe in particular. The goddess of the flute stalks me, even in my dreams, beckoning me out of my night reverie and into her spell. She is merciless in her pursuit. I am her slave.” Auletes sighed dramatically, dropping his great head and folding his hands on his lap. His dark curls fell forward. He threw them back with his hand and continued. “Terpsichore, yes, she too has me in the grip of her enchantment. I am a dancer, you know. A king over men by birth, an artist by nature. A constant conundrum. All aspects demand. All must be satiated.”
The Roman had heard the king was a lunatic, a sissy who played songs and danced, but he had no idea that he would have to bear witness to the spectacle.
“I wonder, would you like to hear me play the flute?” Auletes asked the guest coyly, as if introducing the concept of sexual intercourse to a virgin.
“Oh, yes, Father!” Kleopatra interjected, clasping her small hands together. “Please play for us!”
“It is time for your lessons, Kleopatra. Meleager shall be waiting for you,” said Thea, not looking at the princess but shooting a luminous smile in the direction of the guest, blinding him with the white perfection of her twenty-one-year-old teeth and the ripe succulence of her reddened lips.
“Your Excellency is a most gifted musician,” Thea continued, causing her husband to blush. Causing the king, Auletes, to blush, and taking away the attention of the princess’s new Roman friend. She is a menace to my happiness, Kleopatra thought, and I have no power to make her go away.
“My dear, you are too kind,” replied Auletes. They had rehearsed the scene before countless visitors of the past. Modestly, he added, “My family indulges me.”
“Should not Kleopatra join her sister and Meleager?” Thea asked of Charmion. “The children have overstayed their time at court this morning.”
Before Charmion could reply, Kleopatra said, “Madam, is it not equally a lesson to be in the company of a gentleman who is friend and kinsman to the great men of Rome?”
The king smiled at his daughter. “The child has a point,” he said to Thea. “Meleager sings hymns of praise to the dead. Our new friend has active commerce with the living.”
A small victory, the princess thought. Small, but each one significant.
A slave carried in Auletes’ flute, an ebony cylinder with ivory inlays and golden keys, holding it like a sacramental relic. The king addressed his Muse. “Cruel lady, Divine Grace, whimsical One, bless me with your gifts so that I may please my god, the Lord Dionysus, with my song.” Auletes placed a hand tenderly over his heart. He closed his eyes and recited the details of his vision. “Ah, there she is, dancing before my eyes ever so delicately, luring me into her spell. Always she threatens escape! Inconstant lover! Stay, Lady. Do not flee. Linger with me a while so that I may pay tribute to the god and entertain our guest.”
Taking in a copious amount of air, Auletes began to sound a reedy melody, music to entice the god to continue his good fortune. He concentrated fervently, batting his eyelashes when he strained to reach the upper regions of the instrument’s capacity, furrowing his brow and bending his knees until his belly rested on his thighs to hit the low notes.
Kleopatra swayed dreamily. Her love for her father swelled, exceeding even her admiration for his gifts.
THREE
The sounds of the king offering his gift to the Greek god wafted through the palace and into the upp
er chambers. Egyptian, Libyan, Ethiopian, and Nubian servants laid down the tools of their tasks and listened to the music, while in a chamber tucked away at the end of a corridor, it resonated without harmony for an angry Macedonian princess and her besmirched eunuch mentor.
He was insulted—he, the keeper of Ptolemaic tradition. That was how Meleager regarded himself, for it befitted his history as a noble courtier of altered sex. “We have been here as long as the Ptolemies,” he told himself. “We are high priests in the temples and shrines, we are advisers to kings, regents and tutors to the royal children of each generation, keepers of the oral history of the family, and arbiters of court ceremony.”
In each generation, Meleager’s family, longtime aristocrats, selected a special male child to serve the goddess. At seventeen years old, Meleager, the favorite son, entered the mysteries of Kybele. “You are to become the consort of the goddess,” his mother told him. “You shall be the earthly representation of the god Attis, Kybele’s priest, lover, and servant. There is no higher honor. Besides, it is the quickest way to a high position at court.”
All his life Meleager had dreamed of being chosen to represent Attis, son of the virgin Nana, He-who-is-fatherless, the beautiful youth who offered his masculinity so that he could marry no mortal woman but only the goddess. He was the savior god who was sacrificed by the people, castrated, crucified on a pine tree, and whose very blood washed over the earth and purified the land. The god whose flesh, in the form of flatbread, nourished the people. The most holy god who was raised from the dead on the third day, whose resurrection demonstrated the power of the Mother Goddess. The god who was carried to Rome with her after the defeat of Hannibal to give her honor for the victory.
On a sultry summer evening lost to the past, the young Meleager donned a wreath of violets—the flower that sprang from the spilt blood of Attis—and drank the solution given to him by the priest that made him see hallucinations from the life of the god: his sexual love with the goddess; the sacrifice of his body and his blood; his flesh and blood sprinkled over the crops, and the crops shooting up in response. From somewhere he could not see, Meleager heard drums, cymbals, horns, and flutes, making a symphony to the glories of the god. The music seemed to flow from his own heartbeat, from his own veins. The priestesses tossed their heads to the pounding drums, the priests slashed their arms and chests with knives and shards, and Meleager—drugged, inflamed, impervious to pain—took his testicles in his left hand and, with his right, castrated himself with a sacred dagger. He felt an agony too severe to be described as mere pain, passed out, and awoke two days later in the care of a physician. Death and rebirth, he had said to himself upon regaining consciousness, just like the god Attis, Now his genitals rested in the cave of the goddess as an offering, and he served the court of Auletes.
Meleager believed that it was neither his family nor the Royal Family who chose him for service, but the Mother Goddess herself; therefore, he tolerated the disdain of no one. “I took my evening meal with the princesses and the queen,” he would say in response to derision of his kind. “Where did you dine?”
“Alexander himself once took a eunuch as a lover,” he would remind those Greeks who criticized the tradition of altering men, those who considered themselves above him because they retained a few additional ounces of flesh between their legs. They were foolish enough to believe that manhood and pleasure were centered in those small round saggy things. Was it not the great conqueror Cyrus—hero of Alexander—who praised the strength and loyalty of the castrated male? Cyrus observed that castrated horses ceased to bite, but were not deprived of their strength. On the contrary, in times of both war and hunting, they still preserved in their souls a spirit of rivalry. Cyrus found the same qualities in the eunuchs who served him in battle and at court. Unencumbered by the sentimental attachment to either wife or offspring, the eunuch was free to offer unqualified fidelity to his master. So what if the eunuch lacked the ideal manly musculature? As Cyrus said, on the battlefield, steel makes the weak equal to the strong. There were many battlefields in Alexandria, and many different kinds of metal. Meleager had chosen the object of his fierce loyalty. He was armed with knowledge and ready for battle.
Pity the fools who were deceived by the eunuchs’ lack. Meleager lacked nothing. He wore extravagant jewels bestowed upon him by the royals for his service. He lived in lavish apartments adjacent to the Inner Palace. His view of the harbor was dazzling, his cooks second only to the queen’s. Curiosity-seekers of both sexes admired and courted him for his boyish good looks, for his sophistication, and for his access to the Royal Family. Mature ladies of the court came to his apartments at night complaining that they no longer cared for vigorous intercourse but sought more delicate pleasures. Virile and beautiful youths who trained for the Royal Macedonian Household Troops requested audiences to ask his advice on how to behave in the presence of the king and often ended up in his bed. Even members of the king’s Order of the First Kinsmen dined with him, discussing protocol and policy, and then sealed the friendship in an evening of sexual delight. He experienced passion and he could give pleasure, even if he could not impregnate.
Meleager had no legitimate claim upon the elongated, regal young girl who paced his room in anger, yet he knew in his heart that she belonged to him in the same way that he belonged to the Mother Goddess. The goddess had selected him for service to this girl whom she had favored to rule Egypt. He could not attach himself to the girl as a lover, for the female Ptolemies usually remained chaste until marriage. He could not claim her as a husband, for he possessed no royal blood with which he might petition for her hand. But he knew that Berenike was the true queen of Egypt, that her beautiful stepmother had less claim to the throne than she, and that by Thea’s treachery in seducing the king, she had intercepted Berenike’s rightful position as Auletes’ co-regent. These things he knew because the goddess had revealed them to him, her servant. But he could not reveal them to the girl because she had attached herself to Thea in childhood and remained blind to her duplicity. Instead, he pretended the same loyalty to the queen in order to stay intimate with the princess. One day, he would reveal to her the goddess’s will.
“My father is a fool,” said Berenike, pacing. She removed her dagger from its sheath and sliced the air in crisscross motions as she stalked the chamber. “An overblown, Roman-loving fool.” Her long dress, open at the sides, followed her, outlining the burgeoning woman’s form. The eunuch felt a stirring in his bereft lower region. Already she was taller than Thea, though not as beautiful in the feminine way. Her eyes were bright, angry, vigilant. Her teeth and lips were too large on her young face, Meleager observed, but in years to come, when the rest of her caught up with her features, they would serve her handsomely.
“Your father is king,” Meleager replied evenly. It would not do to say disparaging things against the monarch, however impeachable his policies.
“The men in our family are fat and stupid. They say it is because we marry our brothers and that the intermarriage has ruined the men. My father is evidence of this, do you not think?”
It was true; for the last many generations, the Ptolemies had produced idiot men, obese, indulgent, strange. “I shall not speak against the Crown, princess. History may substantiate, however, that in recent years the Ptolemy kings have been rather more stout of body than of heart. Yet incestuous marriage has not diminished the caliber of the female. Without fail, each generation has produced a Ptolemaic queen of extraordinary intelligence.”
The princess stopped pacing, pointing her knife at the tutor. “You sound as if you are speaking of farm animals. You had better remember that the women in my family are queens of an ancient dynasty. Men do not breed us as they breed hunting dogs.”
He might have been angry at the haughty girl, but he was aware that it was he who had instilled in her this pride and arrogance. “Princess Berenike, forgive me for my indelicacy.”
“You do not have to be delicate with me, Tuto
r,” she said, still brandishing the knife at him. “But you do have to remember to whom you speak.”
Berenike whisked the front panel of her dress aside, exposing the leather garter on her thigh. She placed the knife back in its sheath and sat on a divan, ceremoniously smoothing her gown over her legs. Meleager produced a long scroll that seemed to have the weight of a saber.
“Oh, not more family history. Must we incessantly resurrect the dead? Why am I not free to spend the day hunting?” Berenike asked, contrite.
Meleager continued to unroll the large document, struggling without his scribe present to help. It would not do to have an interloper today. He stretched the papyrus lengthwise to reveal an illustrated chart of the Ptolemy dynasty, with small, painstaking portraits of each royal in the family tree. He braced it on a wooden stand, which held taut.
“You will enjoy today’s lesson. We are going to study the female line.”
Berenike settled into her seat. “Then let us pay attention to the interesting ones, and leave out the fools who fell to the poison of courtiers.”
A rap at the door interrupted the tutorial. The small princess entered, trailed by Charmion. “The princess Kleopatra joins her sister for the lesson,” she said formally to the eunuch, escorting the princess to her seat. Charmion and Meleager bowed stiffly to each other.
“Stay with me,” Kleopatra urged her governess. She was never more nervous than in the company of her sister.
“Why must you always be a disagreeable baby?” asked Berenike.
“I am not a baby,” she replied vehemently. “I am merely smaller than you, and I shall speak to Father about this.”
“The world awaits his response to your complaint,” Berenike said dryly.
Charmion exited promptly, and Kleopatra, though still afraid, summoned into her face as much spite as she could. She saw the outline of the sheath under her sister’s dress and wondered if Berenike would dare murder her, and if so, would the eunuch move to prevent it? But presently, Berenike suffered more from ennui than from anger.