The Judgment of Caesar: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Steven Saylor

  The day was a disaster for Caesar. The Alexandrians reclaimed the archway and removed the stones that blocked it; more than eight hundred of Caesar’s men were killed by the enemy or drowned, including all those aboard his lost ship; and the triumphant Alexandrians managed to fish his new purple cape out of the water. On the causeway, they danced and shouted and waved the cape like a flag of triumph as Caesar dragged himself sputtering and half-drowned aboard the ship and made an ignominious retreat. Later the Alexandrians attached the tattered, filthy cape to a pole, like a captured banner, and for the rest of the war, they flaunted it on every possible occasion as an insult to Caesar’s dignity.

  The war continued for months. As in all wars, there were lulls in the fighting as each side regrouped. Caesar used such occasions to consult the many scholars and philosophers who found themselves confined to the precincts of the city under his control, which included the famous Library and the adjacent Museum, the repository of so much of the world’s mathematical and astronomical learning. It was during one such lull that Caesar set about devising a new, more reliable calendar, for the venerable Roman calendar had in recent years grown out of step with the actual seasons, so that harvest festivals were taking place long before the actual harvests, and spring holidays occurred while Romans shivered. The world’s most esteemed scholars were consulted when Caesar devised the new calendar, and if they did their job well, it may be that the calendar, like the movements of the stars and planets, will outlast Rome itself.

  At last the balance between the warring sides was altered by the approach of Caesar’s ally, King Mithridates of Pergamum, who arrived at the Egyptian frontier at the head of an army composed of Jewish, Arabian, and Syrian levies. Mithridates took Pelusium, then marched south, toward the apex of the Nile Delta. Hearing of Mithridates’s advance, King Ptolemy dispatched a force to intercept him; when this Egyptian force was annihilated, Ptolemy set out himself to do battle with the new invaders. Meanwhile, Caesar, in regular communication with Mithri-dates, assembled his best troops, left a contingent to hold his position in the city, and sailed out of the harbor. He landed at a point west of Alexandria and circled around Ptolemy’s army, marching at such a quick pace that he passed the king and joined Mithridates at the Nile before Ptolemy arrived. Thus the stage was set for the decisive battle of the Alexandrian War, which would not take place in Alexandria, but in the very heart of Egypt on the banks of the great river.

  I was not there, but Meto was. Through his eyes I witnessed the end of King Ptolemy.

  Ptolemy’s army occupied a small village near the river, situated on a hill with a canal on one side to act as a moat; the Egyptians also built earthen ramparts and dug trenches lined with sharp pickets. The position appeared unassailable; but Caesar’s men forded the canal by cutting down trees and filling the channel until a makeshift bridge was created, while others of his men swam downstream and emerged on the far side of the village, so that Ptolemy’s stronghold was encircled. Still, the fortifications appeared impenetrable until Caesar’s scouts noticed a poorly guarded area where the hill upon which the village stood was steepest; apparently the Egyptians assumed the sheerness of the cliff was itself adequate defense. Against that point Caesar launched a sudden and powerful assault, and when the high point was taken, his men went streaming down through the village, driving the Egyptians before them in a panic. The Egyptians were trapped by their own fortifications, falling from the walls, piling atop one another in the trenches, and impaling themselves on the pickets. Those who managed to escape the village faced the Roman soldiers who encircled them, and the army of Ptolemy was slaughtered from within and without.

  King Ptolemy, apprised of the disaster as it unfolded, managed to flee by a small boat to take refuge on a royal barge in the Nile. The captain lifted anchor, dipped oars, and began to flee the scene of battle. Meanwhile, hundreds of desperate Egyptian soldiers threw down their weapons, stripped off their armor, and dove into the river. In a great, churning mass they converged on the royal barge and attempted to clamber aboard. Those already on the boat welcomed the first newcomers, then saw that they would quickly be overwhelmed and began to try to fight off their comrades, slashing at them with swords, jabbing them with spears, and firing arrows at those farther off.

  The scene was horrific. The banks of the Nile echoed with the screams of the dying and the pleas of the living. The water around the barge grew thick with corpses. But those in the water greatly outnumbered those on the barge, and despite the slaughter, more and more of them managed to climb aboard, until at last the vessel was overloaded. The starboard side was submerged; the opposite side rose into the air. As if tipped by the hand of a Titan, the great barge capsized, emptying its occupants into the water and falling upside down onto the horde of swimmers who had attempted to board her. For a brief moment, the underside of the barge remained visible above the water, and a few dazed, desperate Egyptians managed to climb aboard; then the vessel vanished completely, swallowed by the river.

  The army of Ptolemy was annihilated. Caesar’s victory was complete.

  Or almost complete, for the body of the king was never found. Caesar’s troops examined every corpse along the shore, waded through every patch of reeds, pulled nets through the shallows, and dragged poles across every accessible bit of river bottom for miles downstream. Caesar’s best swimmers—among them Meto, who led the search—dove repeatedly at the spot where the barge sank, retrieving every corpse mired in the mud or trapped in the debris. It was exhausting, filthy, dangerous work, and it yielded nothing.

  Or rather, almost nothing. One diver located the flute that had been played by the king’s piper. Another retrieved Ptolemy’s cobra-headed uraeus crown and delivered it into Caesar’s hands. Meto himself found an even more curious souvenir: a tattered cape, so mud stained that at first it was difficult to discern its purple hue. It was the cape that Caesar had lost at the battle of the Pharos causeway, when he himself might have perished on a foundering ship. Apparently King Ptolemy had kept it close at hand, intending to use it to rally his troops at some critical juncture or to celebrate his ultimate triumph over the Roman invader. When Meto returned the cape to Caesar, the imperator smiled ruefully but said nothing. He spread the cape on a rock on the riverbank, and when it was sufficiently dry, he laid it upon one of the many pyres that had been lit to dispose of the Roman dead. The purple cape was consumed, and Caesar never spoke of it again.

  Hearing the tale of Ptolemy’s end, I remembered what Cleopatra had told me regarding those who died in the Nile, and the special blessing they received from Osiris. But it was not the king’s existence in the life hereafter that worried Caesar, but the continuation of his existence, real or rumored, in this world. So long as Ptolemy’s body was not found, the enemies of the queen might persist in believing that their champion survived, and the peace of Egypt might yet be disturbed by pretenders. There was even the slightest possibility that Ptolemy had indeed survived, and had gone into hiding, disguising himself as a commoner or fleeing to some place beyond the reach of Rome, perhaps to the court of the Parthian king. Caesar would have preferred to return to Alexandria with the lifeless body of the king, so that it could be displayed to Cleopatra as the head of Pompey had been displayed to him—irrefutable proof of the enemy’s demise. But in this regard, despite all his efforts, Caesar was to be thwarted.

  I shed no tears for young Ptolemy. I had seen him murder men in cold blood; he was anything but innocent. But a victim he was, of those even more ruthless than himself, and the horror of his end filled me with a kind of awe, as had the death of Pompey. History and legend conspire to convince us that there are men who rise above the common lot of hu-mankind, who are set apart from the rest of us by birth or achievement or the favor of the gods; but no man, regardless of his pretensions to greatness, is immune from death, and the death of the so-called great is often more squalid and terrifying than the deaths of their most humble subjects. I thought of the young king and the strange
, short life he had led, so full of violence and betrayal and thwarted dreams, and I felt a twinge of pity.

  When Caesar returned to Alexandria, news of the king’s demise preceded him. Abandoning all resistance, the Alexandrians threw down their weapons and opened the Canopic Gate to Caesar and his retinue. The people put on the tattered clothing of suppliants. Their priests made sacrifices in the temples to appease the wrath of the gods. But Caesar was not wrathful. He forbade his men to make any show of hostility and turned his march through the city into a joyous procession. When he arrived at the royal precinct, the men he had left to garrison the palace received him with ecstatic cheering. Cleopatra strode out to greet him. She had not been seen in public for quite some time, and it appeared to me, despite the loose gown she wore, that she had grown considerably larger around the middle. In lieu of her brother’s head, Caesar presented her wibroke the seal, unrolled theth the captured crown. Leaving her own diadem in place, she also fitted the crown of her brother on her brow, so that the vulture’s head and the rearing cobra were side-by-side. The Alexandrians, even those who previously had cursed and spat at the mention of her name, erupted in a thunderous cheer and hailed her as their goddess-queen.

  The battle at the Nile took place late in the month of Martius, five days before the kalends of Aprilis (by the old calendar); it was on that very day that I finally received a letter from my daughter Diana in Rome.

  Throughout the war, I had been trapped along with the Roman forces inside the palace precinct. I had Rupa and the boys for company, and Meto, when he could take time from attending Caesar. But I had grown increasingly homesick for Rome.

  To assuage that homesickness, I had regularly written long letters to Diana, apprising her of all that had happened since her mother and I left Rome, except for the one detail that I could not bear to commit to a letter: the loss of Bethesda. I told her of my reconciliation with Meto, of my meetings with the king and queen of Egypt, and of Rupa and the boys and our curious visit to the Tomb of Alexander. Trade in the harbor had come to a standstill, but Caesar did occasionally dispatch a ship to carry messages, and Meto inserted my letters in the consul’s official packets. Whether they ever reached Diana, I had no way of knowing, since no letters had yet arrived from her—until the day of the battle on the Nile, when a ship from Rome sailed into the harbor and a little later a messenger knocked upon my door and pressed a sealed roll of parchment into my hand.

  I broke the seal, unrolled the scrap of parchment, and read:

  Dearest Father and Mother,

  I’ve written many letters to you, but your own letters give no sign that you’ve received them, so I never know quite what to say. At the risk of repeating myself, know that all is well here in Rome. Eco and his family seem to be thriving; I think Eco is working in some capacity for Marc Antony, who is in charge of the city in Caesar’s absence, but Eco is so secretive about his work (taking after his father!) that I cannot really tell what he does, though it must be lucrative. Davus and I are looking after the house in your absence. Little Aulus is happy but misses having his grandpapa to tell him stories and his grandmama to tuck him in at night.

  But now the real news: The new baby has come! She was delivered on the nones of March—an easy birth—and we have decided to call her Little Bethesda, perhaps simply Beth for short, which I hope will please her grandmother. She is happy, healthy, and very loud! She looks like you, Papa. (I can hear you muttering, “Poor child!,” but don’t, for she is very pretty.)

  We long for you to return home. Your letters say nothing of Mother’s search for a cure in the Nile, so we are very anxious to learn about that.

  Write soon and let me know that you received this letter. All love to you both, and to Meto, and to Rupa and Androcles and Mopsus. All good fortune to Caesar, that the fighting may soon be over and you can all return to Rome! Neptune bless the ship that brings you this letter, and the ship that brings you back to us!

  When I finished reading the letter, Mopsus asked me if I wept for joy or sadness. I could not tell him which.

  Diana’s new motherhood was very much on my mind when, a few days after Caesar’s triumphant return, an official announcement went forth that Queen Cleopatra was expecting a baby. According to Meto, Caesar had no doubt that the child was his. In mid-Aprilis, having settled affairs in Alexandria, the prospective parents set out on a leisurely tour up the Nile, aglow with the triumph of their union and attended by every luxury. I recalled that Ptolemy had proposed just such a journey to Caesar. Instead, Ptolemy had died in the Nile, and it was Ptolemy’s sister who showed Caesar the splendid temples and shrines along the river and the source of Egypt’s greatness.

  CHAPTER XXX

  With the end of the war came peace. Alexandria opened its gates and its harbors. Rupa and the boys and I were free to move about as we wished.

  For a few days I wandered about the city, thinking I should see the sights and revisit familiar places before I left, for at my time of life it seemed very unlikely that I would ever return. But the sights and sounds of Alexandria gave me no joy. I asked Meto to arrange a place for me and my charges at the first opportunity on one of Caesar’s transport ships sailing to Rome.

  Meto did as I asked. On the day before we were set to leave Alexandria, I took Rupa with me and strolled down the Canopic Way, determined at least to have a look inside the temple of Serapis before I left. As we passed by market stalls and public squares and splashing fountains, I fell to musing on the compromises forced upon us by the struggle for survival. In the end, Caesar had chosen Cleopatra, but more because of her brother’s default than because of her own virtues. Cleopatra had deceived Caesar, and would have seen Meto executed without experiencing the least qualm of guilt. Caesar had been less than honest with the queen; and what of his relationship with Meto, whom he had imprisoned and threatened with death? I pictured the three of them locked in a circle of deceit, each confronted by the others’ betrayals, yet determined, for the sake of expediency, to look the other way. Something about their hardheaded pragmatism left me thoroughly dissatisfied, but who was I to judge them? My rejection of Meto, when I felt betrayed and deceived by him, had brought me only misery, and in the end I recanted, as if I had been the one at fault. As long as things went relatively smoothly, was it wiser to overlook petty treacheries and deceits and disappointments and simply get on with the business of living? What good ever came of issuing ultimatums and passing judgment on others? Thus do we learn to compromise with each other and with our own expectations in an imperfect world.

  Such were the thoughts spinning in my head when I saw, across a marketplace, the old priestess who had counseled Bethesda at the temple of Osiris on the Nile.

  The market was vast and crowded with people; goods were beginning to flow back into Alexandria, and the populace, in the giddy mood that follows a war, were eager to spend their money. Amid the teeming throng, at a considerable distance, I caught only a fleeting glimpse of the woman; it was only after she moved out of sight that I realized who she was.

  I gripped Rupa’s arm. “Did you see her?”

  He signed with his hands. Who?

  The old priestess, I began to say—then remembered that Rupa had had been off scattering Cassandra’s ashes in the river when Bethesda sought the counsel of the wisewoman. Rupa had never seen her.

  I frowned and squinted, trying to catch another glimpse of her face amid all the others. “Only someone . . . I thought I recognized. But perhaps I was only—no, wait! There she is! Do you see her?” I stood on tiptoes and pointed. “It must be her; she looks exactly the same! The white hair pulled into a knot; the skin like weathered wood; that ragged woolen mantle . . .”

  Rupa shook his head, then drew a sharp breath.

  “You see her, then?”

  He signed: Look at the younger woman with her. Look!

  “Younger woman? Where? I don’t see anyone—unless you mean the woman wearing the cloth headdress and—”

  Like Rupa
, I drew a sharp breath. The two of us stood stock-still, staring in disbelief.

  “It can’t be,” I whispered, “and yet . . .”

  Rupa nodded vigorously, even as he furrowed his brow, as if to say: It is her. And yet it can’t be her. . . .

  “It’s a trick of the light,” I said, squinting at the apparition—for surely the woman in the yellow linen gown, her hair concealed in the folds of a nemes head-cloth, was only a phantom. And yet, the old crone could see her, for the two of them exchanged a few words, apparently about the relative merits of two combs offered by a vendor. They were too far away, I told myself; the Egyptian sun was too bright, making a dazzlement of their distant faces. I was seeing what I wanted to see, not something that was actually there. Yet Rupa seemed to see the same thing. Or did he?

  Dissatisfied with both combs, the woman and the crone were moving away. Other, nearer faces intervened. I rose on tiptoes and pitched from side to side, trying to keep her in sight.

  “It is her, isn’t it?” I said. “It’s . . .” I pressed my lips together, summoning the strength to speak her name aloud.

  Rupa interrupted. He hooked his forefingers together to make the sign that signified his sister, and made the word an exclamation by the look on his face: Cassandra!