Four days after giving me his instructions, Maurice was anxious about how his play was ‘coming on’. He gave the words a menacing twist. He was no easier to please than V had been. Both of my school friends knew what they wanted from a Cleopatra story that neither of them wanted to write. I did not know what I wanted from the story even though I wanted to write it. Thanks to Professor Rame, Mr G, Mr W, V and now Maurice, I was strongly committed. I was bound fast by separate links from the past that had formed a chain.
I took a sip of sherry from a glass by our window seat and described to him how, soon after the end of her cruise with Caesar, Cleopatra was in sole charge of Egypt – and a mother for the first time, of a son she called Ptolemy Caesarion. Maurice took a gulp from his own larger glass and heard how Caesar himself had not played the devoted father for long, if at all. He had immediately left to fight unfinished wars against other Eastern kings and other supporters of Pompey. Cleopatra’s next decision, or his, would be whether, where and when the two might meet again.
Caesar’s priority was in the furthest western territory in Mediterranean Africa, Mauretania, modern Morocco, whose king was enthusiastically welcoming the survivors of Pharsalus. Cleopatra’s main concern was domestic diplomacy, revenue-raising, river-management, the survival of her child, the normal duties of a ruling Ptolemy.
‘Fine’, said Maurice, puffing himself somewhat haughtily in our window seat as though he were already playing all his chosen characters, all of them already combined, none of them lacking in haughtiness. So Cleopatra and Caesar are separated. That is a good start. Then they are going to come together. That will be perfect.
And then he sighed. He wanted to get back to the texts, his texts, his parts. When would we start picking lines from Shakespeare? We had been talking too much about Elizabeth Taylor. The Cuppers judges were not going to be impressed, or find anything very Marowitzian, in a one-man version of a movie. We had somehow to get beyond that. There were the two big plays, Antony and Cleopatra itself and Julius Caesar. How should we start? He had them both already. He pulled out two white paperbacks and a page of scribbled notes.
In a sense, he said portentously, these were Parts One and Two of the same play; Cleopatra is a living presence but not a character in Julius Caesar; Julius Caesar is a dead presence but not a character in Antony and Cleopatra. He slumped slightly after this. The clock in the tower struck seven. Dinner was in fifteen minutes. Could we just get ahead a bit?
I was irritated. But that was nothing new. Ours was a story of two people who had long irritated each other. I also liked the idea of writing this play, of being a playwright. I was in a hurry. We were both in a hurry. An idea of a play made from words already written by someone else appealed to me even more than to him, nothing to be proud of but true. So yes, I said. We could get ahead. But he would have to concentrate – and keep away from the decanter till we had finished.
Two years after the Nile cruise and the birth of her son, Cleopatra was back in Rome. As a child she and her father had been Pompey’s guests, reliant upon him for their royalty and their lives. As an adult, she was now the royal mistress of Pompey’s conqueror, installed in Caesar’s garden palace in the area known as ‘the other side of the Tiber’. Her new husband and one surviving brother, Ptolemy XIV, was with her too, a safer as well as more respectable option than leaving any senior family member at home.
In February of 44 BC Caesar accepted the office of dictator for the fourth time. On the first occasion, five years earlier, he had taken the honour for eleven days, the second time for a year, the third for ten years and now his one-man rule was to last the rest of his life. He had already celebrated four of the greatest triumphs that Romans had ever seen, one of them over Egypt, a parade graced by a model of the Pharos, a statue of the Nile and by Arsinoe in chains. Afterwards, because of the sympathy shown to Cleopatra’s sister by the Roman crowd, she was handed to the priests of Ephesus for a decorous exile instead of being strangled.
Soon afterwards Caesar began marshalling forces for the campaign that he hoped would earn him the greatest triumph of all, a new eastern assault on the Persians that would open the way to India and finally match the achievements of Alexander the Great. Cleopatra was with him while he did so, observing the military costs that her wealth would help to bear. She may have made a brief return trip to Alexandria to ensure that all was well. She was close by, but not immediately beside him, when he went to the senate for the last time on the Ides of March.
An hour later, after Trinity dinner, Maurice stretched again for the decanter, the only object that offered any link between the minor-middle-class life we had abandoned and the decadence to which we were beginning to aspire. He was suddenly renewed, not quite shouting as he had among the stone college statues but almost as rhythmic and insistent.
He strode around the room as though it were more cage than stage. The truth would come from a random rearrangement of words, a ‘mobile metaphor’. First, I should forget the facts. Secondly, I should forget the factual story. Thirdly, there was no need for any story. We needed to take elements from both the plays over the whole span of time, but we should be surprising, novel, avoiding purple-sailed barges and ‘et tu Brute’ and asps and all the bits that anyone might recognise.
We should reconfigure the truth from all the parts that no one usually noticed, that the audience would hardly know, beginning early in the story, yes, when she was a presence not a character (that was perfect: I should not forget that point) and then we would reconnect the hidden nerves and tissues to make a being that was instantly recognisable and wholly new. Fine, I said nervously and for the third time. I would think about what he had said.
It seemed best that we come back to the subject a few days later. Oxford study was already proving harder than I had hoped. I had a guilty secret, an ability in my last years at school to see a text when it was no longer there, not just a good memory but a photographic memory, a skill I barely recognised as unusual until I lost it. Neither the ability to memorise nor my previously remembered texts survived my eighteenth birthday – and when they faded there was the awkward task of maintaining such intellectual reputation as they had earned me.
There were also other problems. I wanted other women than Cleopatra, ideally a girlfriend, living women. There were different opportunities for writing too. Despite missing the Daily Telegraph prize for film criticism (or for my similarly V-inspired rock review of Jimi Hendrix), I had won in the less competitive jazz category. It had brought me an expensive lunch at the top of the newly opened Post Office Tower and as many records as I could play. There was much to be said for journalism. I was wondering whether I could do more.
The editor of the university newspaper was from Trinity and had already suggested that I join him, in the first instance, in the college rugby team and, after that, on the Cherwell ‘feature’ pages. Or would student politics be a better course, some potent thoughts on miners’ strikes and the prospects of Edward Heath becoming Prime Minister? Possibly. Probably not.
9.1.11
Rue de Musee
Museum Street has one cafe that is open and no museum. Socratis began today by sticking keenly to his role as learned guide. I asked him if there was anything on show in Alexandria about two of the Ptolemies’ finest public servants, Herophilus and Erasistratus, doctors who used to cut open living criminals in attempts to find out how the organs of the body fitted together. He said he did not know – but would find out fast.
He seemed anxious. I told him not to worry. Not much was known by anyone about the opening-up of pregnant women to discover whether girls took the same time to grow as boys – except that it is said to have happened here. Knowledge of humans, knowledge of Homer: there were so many things that nature had hidden and that librarians, without distinction between the arts and the sciences, might be encouraged to discover.
This could never be a discussion for Mahmoud, who dislikes the suggestion that anything morally uncomfortable, unple
asant, still less evil, has ever happened here. But Mahmoud did not join us today. Maybe we will see him later.
Socratis was not afraid of the awkward question but the answer, he said, would be in the museum of antiquities which was closed on a Sunday. In fact, for some time it had been closed every day. He knew a man in the next street who might help. He might even open the back door. He would return with him soon. Was I happy to wait? My second cup of coffee has just appeared – and a cake with red eyes.
A few days after Maurice had given me my instructions Geoff the Editor said I should meet him in the back bar of the King’s Arms before lunch, eleven o’clock. This was an opportunity to escape from classics and Cleopatra for a while. He promised to introduce me to a great ‘character’. He then wanted me to write about this character. Our university newspaper, he said, was a mass of grey type about grey institutions. Oxford was a grand hotel of the brilliant and bizarre. He wanted to bring some of the guests to life.
I was particularly happy to construct a living Oxford character if I could. Geoff did not know it but, by contrast, my theatrical Cleopatra had suddenly to be deconstructed. She (and he and they) had to be a meta-character, another of Maurice’s mad theatrical requirements passed on from his mad Marowitzian friend. I did not want to admit that I had increasingly little idea what he wanted. And he was increasingly away from our rooms, for nights as well as days, and unavailable to ask.
Thus a traditional newspaper project was an attraction in itself. Writing about an Oxford character was something I might be able to do by myself. Geoff said that he would have a pint of Special and that I should ‘get one in’ for him to save time when he arrived. It was odd, I thought, to order a drink in advance like that: but Geoff the Editor was fashionable, blond, famous in his way and surely knew what were the right things to do.
The hour before midday seemed a little early for drinking. The front rooms of the large white pub which looked out onto Broad Street and the Bodleian Library were empty. Only in the back, a brown-painted box restricted to men, was there a fresh, flowing fug of Navy Cut and whisky. In 1969 this was a place of refuge, a room of rest for those who wished that the sixties had never happened, for dons in cream-creased jackets and for students who wanted to meet them, a place of strict rules of behaviour.
Buying two pints for one person seemed just within these back-bar rules. Talking to the large, lone man in a light brown suit beside me was probably not. I sat and waited. So did he.
Geoff the Editor’s beer remained untouched. As my own glass emptied, the full glass became cloudily warmed. I felt awkward and exposed, the more so when my lone companion seemed suddenly to have company of his own. There was a sudden bubbling of words. I could not see who was speaking or hear precisely what he said.
The big man’s replies were a little clearer but not much. The first distinguishable word was ‘gooseberry’. After that the speaker’s subject appeared to be some sort of a plague – and what had caused it. This plague, I learnt (for I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to listen or look), was passed from person to person, produced high fevers, rashes on the skin, rotting limbs and frequent fatality. Was it typhoid or smallpox or scarlet fever or bubonic plague? How could we tell?
The big man briefly paused, as though waiting for a response that he already knew. Smallpox was a possibility, he said, but Thucydides mentions no pockmarks among survivors.
Bubonic plague borne by rats? A reasonable idea if Athens during the Peloponnesian War were to have had any rats. But there was not even a word for rat in Greek, unless a rat and a mouse were judged the same.
Measles? Measles did not exist when Athens was at war with Sparta. It needed bigger cities than any in the Greek world, bigger than any until the building of Alexandria. Perhaps the identity of the plague that so weakened Athens in its war was now unknowable, an ancient disease that had itself died. Or maybe Thucydides was not as good a witness as we think. Or diseases were defined then in totally different ways.
This was a new kind of embarrassment for me. I was in the right place at the right time with the right drinks. But nothing else was right. These were the weeks when I was relearning everything about how to behave. I was baffled, a bit red-faced. Maurice would probably be in soon. I did not want to see him. He was driving me mad. But his presence would be better than no one’s – and he would have quickly disposed of the warming beer. I could wait for him maybe in the front bar where there were students, women students.
There was a pause and a noise of slurping. The speaker turned around and began to speak to me, his previous companion and to two other men who were quietly drinking through the time.
If birds eat diseased bodies, he asked, do the birds die too? Thucydides says that birds did die in Athens. But had any birds ever died from plague? If so, what sort of plague?
Any man, he said in what was now almost a shout, might go mad before he solved this problem – and that was just one problem of cause and effect in history, even in an area, that of medicine, in which we knew that effects do genuinely have causes.
The speaker took a last sip of his beer, and a shallow breath that an anxious wife might have worried was his last, and went on smoothly as though all these arguments, like all his actions, were part of a long and practised pattern. Now what were you about to say?
This was my first introduction to James Holladay, ancient history teacher extraordinary, the next figure in my history of Cleopatra, without whom it would not have lived this long. He asked what I was doing. I said I was waiting for Geoff the Editor. That was a coincidence, he said, slightly wincing at the word as though it were intellectually suspect. He too was waiting for him.
So this was my Oxford character, the one that I would soon be charged with bringing to life. That should not be hard. Even in fragments he was a very vivid thing. I relaxed. I wondered whether this might even be a good time to mention my troubled Cleopatra. But once we were silent, the back bar was as quiet as cloud and the moment passed.
Socratis’s driver has arrived at the museum. He is in camouflage fatigues, concentrating hard on the written message from his boss that there is no museum in Alexandria with exhibits about experiments on criminals. The museum on this street is closed. The back door is closed as well as the front. He seems sad about this – and promises that his master will be back himself soon.
James Holladay was a useful man for me to meet. He knew about the wars of Caesar and Cleopatra. He knew as much as there is to know about how Romans reacted to the assassination of Caesar, how Cleopatra reacted, what seemed immediately most likely to happen. That was his job. He was Trinity’s ancient history tutor.
His great passion, however, was not for the turmoil of 44 BC but for an earlier war four centuries before, the Peloponnesian War that had not only cost Athens its supremacy but softened all Greece for its subjugation by Alexander the Great. His particular interest was the mystery plague, described in detail by Thucydides, that had killed thousands of Athenians at the start of that conflict, destroying, inspiring, causing subsequent events. How much it destroyed, inspired and caused was one of the great questions from the war that Thucydides had made the first war of true history.
James Holladay was much less interested in Cleopatra’s Alexandria. The Egyptian capital, he gestured dismissively with a swipe of his hand, had suffered briefly from mere bubonic plague. Cleopatra herself, he said, was an even lesser thing to study than her city, not an epidemic killer, merely a single human being. Her life had lacked the attention of any serious ancient historian, a significant lack since historians who had lived in the ancient world were the only real subject for an ancient historian of our own time.
This plague of Athens existed no longer, he concluded, pointing a fleshy finger. He was ever more confident of that. It no longer plagued anyone. It had gone. That in itself was a useful lesson for us all. It was not the only thing, the only cause, the only fact from the ancient world that had gone. We were all of us much too keen to conn
ect the past to the present. We also pretended that we knew too much.
He asked some probing questions. I tried my best to look intelligent even if I could not give him answers. Why did I think that Caesar and Cleopatra had had a child called Caesarion, or indeed any child? When do we first hear about this boy? Only after Caesar is dead.
Did Strabo (had I read Strabo?) ever mention him? One of Caesar’s friends wrote a whole book to deny Caesarion’s Roman paternity. Was he telling the truth or protesting too much? What did I think of ‘the Continuators’? I must have looked inescapably blank.
How did I evaluate the ‘Continuators’ of Caesar’s own books once Caesar had been killed? There is no mention of Caesarion by them either. The four years before Caesar’s death are some of the best reported in all ancient history. But had Cleopatra even had an affair with Caesar? No one says so at the time.
I badly wanted Geoff the Editor to arrive now – or Maurice to arrive, or almost anyone. This conversation was not going well. The idea of turning this man into a newspaper article seemed impossible. The flow of scepticism became a flood. Cleopatra was once again a dream. Mark Antony’s was the story I should write, the only story that a historian could write about at all.
He pointed a finger past the frosted glass screen towards the front bar which was now beginning to fill.
‘Just think about that young man there. You know nothing about Cleopatra. You know nothing about him either. Many people think that they know him but they do not. The present and the past are often not so very different in that respect.’
I nodded glumly without seeing precisely whom he meant.
There was a boy on the other side, in front of the window with the view of the library, dressed in velvet like a vole. ‘Homosexual. No harm in that. There it is. Lots of people seem fascinated by him. Maybe you all are. He works at the theatre and likes to chop up Shakespeare.’ The old don took another sip of beer and a longer breath.
Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Page 13