Pharaoh

by Karen Essex

  The parade itself was spectacular. Artisans had worked day and night to paint gigantic scenes of Caesars victories that were carried by slaves. The people cheered wildly at the paintings that made Romes enemies into cowards. A final note: Many plays were staged during the celebrations, but without the finesse of craft so beautifully displayed in Greek theater. And also, Your Majesty, I wish you to hear of this from myself, your servant who loves you. Caesars soldiers invented rather nasty songs about the General, but also about Your Royal Person, and sang them as they marched. The General was called every kind of profligate lover, every mans wife and every woman’s husband, who conquered first the king of Egypt, and then for measure, surmounted the queen. Caesar showed much perturbation at this crudeness, and directly challenged the notion that he was once plaything to the king of Bithynia. How strange these Romans are in their thinking. I discerned that the true insult was the idea that he had once played the passive partner. I suppose that is the result of a mentality in which domination and conquering exceed all other human Virtue. Thank the gods we are not Romans!

  These are the recent doings of Julius Caesar, reported to you herewith on this heated day in the month of August in the violent and chaotic city of Rome, from which, praise the gods, I shall gain some respite next week at the suburban villa of a wealthy and sonless (and therefore unwatched!) widow who enjoys the company of a well-read and affable fat Greek man.

  Your Majesty, I shall remain in your service so long as you wish; otherwise, I would retire to Crete, where I would hire two Greek women to cook for me and five more to furnish me with love.

  Your faithful servant and Kinsman,

  Hammonius

  To: Ptolemy XIV, King of Egypt

  From: Arsinoe IV, Queen of Egypt(delivered by secret messenger)

  My dear brother,

  This will be brief. I am imprisoned in the stinking city of Rome and under surveillance at all times. Fortunately, some Roman matron, appalled that a Royal Female was paraded like a common criminal in Caesars parade, have taken pity on me and send me small gifts of food and grooming articles through their servants. One of these servants is a Macedonian freedwoman who hates the Romans with all her heart. She is smuggling this letter to you through her own brother, a servant to the merchant who supplies wax to our palace candlemakers. Please treat him well He delivers this at great risk to his life, and he is the only person who might deliver to me your response.

  Dear brother, I realize you are but thirteen years old, but you are the only barrier to the great nation our ancestors conquered falling irreparably into the dirty hands of Rome. You must begin to school yourself in the ways of war, for the only way to combat might is with greater might. Say that you wish to study military strategy and go to Greece at once. Kleopatra will be relieved to be rid of you, for you are the only threat to her plan to sell Egypt to the Romans and rule it as their prostitute queen. She is a deluded fool who does not know that she and Julius Caesar are as despised here as they are in Alexandria, and, I am sure, the rest of the world. I have done what I can to fill the ears of influential Roman women with tales of her ambitions and her evil. They hate her already for her alliance with a Roman man married to a Roman woman. They do not speak good Greek, but it is passable enough to convey important ideas, and I believe I was effective in bringing our hated usurper sister one step closer to ruin.

  Thanks to the goodwill of these few women, I am being sent to the city of Ephesus, where I will be given sanctuary at the temple of Artemis, whom the Romans call Diana. I shall still be a Roman captive, but from there I shall surely be able to be in contact with you should you go to Athens. Fear nothing. Simply act. We must keep ourselves nimble and alive for the moment when Kleopatra destroys herself. The Fate of Egypt depends on it. Do not worry. We still have many supporters and we shall prevail.

  Lovingly yours,

  Arsinoe, your rightful Sister and Wife

  From: Julius Caesar, Dictator of RomeTo: Kleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt

  My dear Kleopatra,

  Forgive my silence. I was called away from Rome to fight my enemies in Africa. Again, I was the victor. Upon my return, I face as many enemies as triumphs. As our old friend Clodius used to say, it never ends, darling. Your letters were a comfort to this graying general in his many trials.

  Conditions such as they are, I have put off the campaign to subdue the Parthians for another year, and yet I do not wish to wait another year to see you or Little Caesar. I wish the two of you to make haste for Rome. I have proposed a new piece of legislation to some of my most ardent and influential supporters that would allow me to take an additional wife in order to produce an heir. My supporters believe that with the proper timing, the bill has every chance to pass into law

  Please send word of the approximate day of your arrival. You shall stay in my own home outside the turmoil of the city. It is a lovely villa on Janiculum Hill, which affords the very finest view of the city, though it has not the vast-ness of the quarters to which you are accustomed. I believe it will comfortably house up to ten members of your travel party and no more than twenty-five of your servants. I shall visit you there whenever time permits. I shall also provide you with an amusing Roman entourage for your entertainment. There are those who fear your arrival and those who are dying to meet you. Many feel both sentiments. For myself, I do not care what others think. I miss the presence of the one who understands me.

  I would also like you to include my friend Sosigenes in your travel party. The Roman calendar is completely out of kilter with the solar year to the point of chaos. Only the priests know what day it is and have to announce it to the populace, and I believe that on most days, they, too, are guessing. I intend to lengthen this year in order to set it all straight, but I require Sosigenes’ mind and his calculations to do it properly.

  Until we meet again, I remain,

  Yours, C. Julius Caesar

  To: Gaius Julius Caesar, Dictator of Rome

  From: Kleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt

  My darling,

  I am on my way to you immediately and plan to arrive at the port of Ostia in mid-September. I will happily bypass the more convenient port at Brundisium and sail all the way around the boot of Italy to reach you sooner. Still there is one small matter that troubles me. Would you please lift the ban on the wor-ship of the god and goddess dearest to me? I do not think I should enter a city that forbids the adoration of Isis, as that is the goddess with whom my own people identify me and to whom I pray daily. My late father, whom I loved above all until I met you and gave birth to our son, was called Neos Dionysus. He was not only the gods most avid worshipper; he was the god himself here on earth, or so the Egyptian people believe with all their hearts. And so my darling, you see my dilemma. I trust you will repair these religious matters immediately, and that such issues are within your jurisdiction as Pontifex Maximus.

  Yours always,

  Kleopatra

  To: Hephaestion, Prime Minister of Egypt

  From: Kleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt

  Dear Prime Minister,

  You must complete all our business in the Sinai and return immediately to Alexandria to resume your post in my cabinet. I must leave the city in two weeks for Rome, where Julius Caesar has requested my presence. I shall take my son with me, of course, but I am leaving my brother the king here in Alexandria. You are to act as his Regent in my absence, and you are to keep him under the strictest watch. I intercepted a letter he wrote to his treasonous sister who is presently in Ephesus, where the Romans exiled her. I suppose it would have been unpopular to strangle such a young girl, though if they understood her feral hatred of themselves, they might have risked the good opinion of their citizens and done away with her. I am going to Rome to solidify relations with Caesar and his government, and to seek legitimacy from the Roman senate for my son. Caesar has indicated that this is not an impossible task You are the only adviser in whom I might trust without condition now that Archimedes is out of my
service. As we are allies of Julius Caesar and under the protection of his legions, there is no longer reason to maintain a mercenary army. Please leave the details of disbanding the troops to one of your staff and return to me immediately.

  I will not postpone the date of my departure. As the Romans say, carpe diem. And yet it is not just the day that must be seized now but history itself. I shall not arrive a moment too late.

  Your Sovereign Queen, Kleopatra VII Philopater

  Alexandria: the 20th year of Kleopatra’s reign

  She stares into the mirror in her chamber. Iras the eunuch removes the gold twine holding her curls. It unravels in his hands-a sad reminder of her failure to entice Antony. Iras holds the shredded glittering mess to the light to evaluate its condition. With a pursed look of distaste, he discards it. A diviner spreads the cards upon her table, reading aloud his forecast of gloom. She does not look at him but continues to regard herself as he echoes the words of the miserable astrologer she sent abroad with Antony, that fool who told him that Octavian was born under a more favorable stellar configuration than he. The knowledge surely unmanned him more than the position of the stars at the time of his birth. I should have had the diviner drowned for causing Antony private misery, for infecting a great man with the poison of self-doubt, she thinks. Iras raises an eyebrow. The queen dismisses the enchanter.

  Iras, grave as a goat, brushes her hair in silence. He looks worried, more worried even than Charmion, to whom the queen reveals every desperate thought, and whom the queen does not trouble herself to comfort. But Iras is tender and sentimental, as are many of his castrated brethren. Unlike many of his kind, he is devoid of bitterness. He was, he has confessed to the queen, a lover of men before his manhood was removed; he was never certain that the gods had intended him to be a male in the first place. He believes his mother cursed him in the womb, changing his sex midway through his fetal development.

  “I didn’t mind, Your Royal Grace. They were entirely superfluous,” he said of his missing genitals. “I don’t miss them at all.” He is Antony’s age, fifty-four, though he looks older. Unusual for a Syrian, his skin is lined with an intriguing network of creases. The pasty white lead makeup he uses to make fair his ruddy complexion calls much attention to this convoluted map on his face-a map leading nowhere. Like the queen, he kohls his dark eyes, tints his lashes with inks, and uses the juice of mulberry on his cheeks and eyelids. He does not ochre the palms of his hands and feet as women do, but applies the same for the queen every morning, gingerly working the powder into her skin as if he has never performed the act before. He looks neither male nor female, but has the androgynous features one acquires in later years, and is given to a eunuch’s paunchiness. Sometimes the queen leans her head to rest on his belly as he crochets impossibly small shiny objects and delicate amulets of protection into her hair with the nimble concentration of Arachne weaving her dazzling tapestries. These days, she often tells him that he is the man in her life, which makes him giggle and blush. Exceptional for a eunuch who has access to the powerful, his ambition is confined to shaping and costuming the Royal Hair.

  Iras pinches and unpinches his lips and arches his brows spasmodically, exhaling in annoying little spurts. The queen knows he waits for her reassurance that what the diviner said is by no means Divine Law. He adores Antony, laughs too loudly at his jokes, flirts with him, and believes him to be a great man.

  “No matter, Iras,“she says to him. “Do not tattle on me to the priests, but I place no emphasis on the words of the soothsayers. Yesterday when I went to the temple to preside over the sacrifice, the priest made a great store out of a few maggots swimming in the animal’s organs. But I asked myself, what is the significance of a cankered sheep’s liver, in comparison with one’s own intuition? You must do as I do. Follow not these charlatans, but the inclinations of your mind and the stirrings of your heart. We must endure the rituals, but ignore the prognoses.”

  “Blasphemy, Mother Egypt!”

  “Nonsense. I have not lost any of my fervor for the gods, but I’ve wearied of those who speak for them on earth.”

  Iras holds her hair in his hands. “You are my life, Your Royal Grace.”

  “And you, Iras, are a lovely part of mine.”

  Edified, the eunuch slips into his own internal reveries, dreamily pin-curling her hair for sleep. The queen stares into the mirror, assessing her condition. Despite all the troubles, despite the business at Actium, she is still a young woman. Her eyes are alert, large, almost green, she likes to think, and are green with the proper cosmetic assistance. They are not innocent. She seduces with her eyes-their appeal, her knowingness. What is behind those eyes? men wonder. What accumulated wisdom, what richness lies behind those spice green eyes? And they must- if they are curious, if they respond to challenge, as all great men do-find out. That is her charm and she knows it. She is a mountain of mystery that must be scaled for the secrets within-secrets men wish to possess but do not-to be revealed. It is said that she is ravishing, though she knows she is not. She knows that power and mystique are often mistaken for beauty. She depends on the ancient chemistries of the alluring Egyptian women and on the talents of the eunuch Iras to enhance her natural charms. This evening she wears no cosmetics. Bathed, oiled by the body servants, clothed in a nightgown, the face into which she stares is her own, unpainted, unadorned. She is still young-looking, though she is nine and thirty. Contrary to the warnings of the Greek doctors, the active and demanding life she has led has preserved her vigor and youth, and not robbed her of it. She has borne four children, yet she is as taut as a girl of fourteen. I am like the women of ancient Sparta, she thinks, strong horsewomen, wrestlers, fighters-warrior women who swoon to the smells of war, not the scent of perfume. Such am I and such were my sisters and all my ancestresses. The women of Macedonia, the women of Sparta-the ancient women who rode with, fought with, ruled with, and often ruled, their men. The unconquerable women.

  The poets say that wars are fought for the love of such women. But the Trojan War began as began the war with Octavian-not over a woman, but over money. Spartan money. Helen’s money. For who could have taken a Spartan queen if she did not wish to be taken? The preening Paris? And who could have defeated the man who could have taken a Spartan queen against her will? No, it was a war fought over money and turf, like the war with Octavian, like all wars.

  Always she believed it beneficial to remain dispassionate about one’s enemies. The philosophers, the suffering of her father, and the counsel of Caesar taught her thus. But she does not possess the mental discipline to squelch her fury against the conniving intriguer, who has busied himself serving her to the Roman people as the villain in his dramatic play. He reinvented her: Monster. Seductress. Prostitute. Viper. Enemy of Rome. The most maddening of these was prostitute, as if the queen descended from Alexander the Conqueror was, or could be, for sale. He called her “The Oriental,” though he knew her blood was pure Macedonian Greek. Cunning though he is, he fears me, she thinks. He paints me as Rome’s enemy for an excuse to come here and steal my money. And so it has always been and ever shall be. Money. My money. The treasure of the Ptolemies. The sweet honey that has drawn the flies of Rome to our borders for centuries. Would that I could res urrect Caesar from Hades to make him account for naming Octavian his heir. If I had been then the woman I am today, it never would have happened.

  It is almost daybreak. Iras has fallen asleep on her bed, snoring softly, his painted lashes fluttering as he dreams. As much as she craves sleep, she must wait for the report from Sidonia, the madam of the whores. Surely Antony cannot last much longer. He is no longer young in that way. Or is he, but not for her? The sun forbore to rise. A tightness in her chest chokes the air that reaches for her lungs but never seems to arrive. If I cannot breathe I cannot sleep, she thinks. These days, rest is a rare and precious commodity.

  Rome In the 6th year of Kleopatra’s reign

  They arrived quietly according to Caesar’s wishes, as q
uietly as a queen, a young prince, and a retinue of forty might slip into gossip-dominated Rome. He housed them at the tranquil villa in the southeastern portion of Janiculum Hill, where the ever-curious Kleopatra might look out upon the city without causing the tongues of its inhabitants to wag with her regal presence. Not only did he not wish to incur needless gossip about his mistress. He did not trust his fellow Romans to welcome a son of Caesar born into a monarchy-a son who would be king of a rich and powerful nation-with anything else but the sharp point of a dagger. He hoped Kleopatra would content herself with the lovely view of the olive groves, spiked here and there with cypress trees, and the rolling hills of lavish wildflowers blooming past their usual time. It was the autumn season after all, the most beautiful time to be in Rome, when the light was so lovely it seemed to come to the city filtered through the eyes of a gentle goddess. Even she-the queen of the queen of all cities-who presided over the magnificent Alexandria could hardly complain.

  After all, they were together. That was what she wished, for all her letters insinuated that she would like to bring her son to the city of his father. He knew that he would encounter problems; wicked rumors would spread about the nature of her visit, about the age difference between them, about the plans he was making that included a foreign queen in his grandiose design. But it was all worth it to see her face again, to hear the music of her voice even when she discussed serious matters, and to see that the paternity of his son was not in question, for he carried many of Caesar’s features upon his little face and body.