Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra

by Peter Stothard

  While both sides weighed their choices Cleopatra made a last visit to Antony’s tomb. Afterwards she sat on a straw bed and tried to persuade Octavian that she had acted against him only from fear of Antony. Octavian did not believe her. She replied with prayers and fists and arguments over the inventory of personal trinkets missing from her treasure trove.

  Four months later, when the summer was over, Maurice and I were back in the same Blue Lion seats. He had some points that he hoped I might say at his funeral. But the listing of his achievements in advertising, finance and charities did not detain him beyond the first glass of Evian.

  We sat after that as though with those blue plastic boxes of Agfa colour slides, the ones that were fashionable for our parents in our schooldays. In the 1950s most photographs were of happy scenes, or scenes made happy, scenes that the photographer wanted to remember. So too were these colour-slide memories, memories of mud and rugby, sports days and concerts even though neither of us had succeeded with ball or recorder except in our own minds. We remembered how both of us had been ‘groaners’ at Rothmans Primary, and we remembered the Brentwood book-burning.

  Did I remember Miss Leake and the children’s parties at his house in front of the chicken farm? Yes, I remembered most of all the parquet floor and the find-your-partner games and the time Maurice almost smashed the china cabinet. How did I know that I was not imagining the parquet floor – or that he was not imagining the cabinet? We did not absolutely know. But there were magic cushions and wooden lakes. I was sure about that.

  If Maurice were still in touch with V, perhaps he could ask her whether we were right? He was not in touch, he said firmly. It had been years since her last attack on us for betraying political beliefs that neither of us thought we had ever possessed. There had been no more complaints that I was failing to make a difference, failing to make things happen, always preferring to name things than change them. Once this had been a refrain, Maurice said. Now it had long ago stopped. And anyway, V had not been at his fifth birthday party.

  Did I remember his performance from the Trinity bell tower? He reminded me eloquently of this lest I had forgotten, adding details, like the names of the loudly listed underground stations that I had indeed forgotten. His voice was fixed back in the past. Even the ravages on his skin could not destroy the images of how he had been long ago, slightly reddened cheeks, slightly slackened vowels, a glass in his hand so differently filled.

  We talked of how acts of memory are useful for the dying. There were Greek and Roman philosophers who warned against the fear of death and taught the power of shared recollections to keep fear at bay. In that lost pub of The Times we pictured the winter of 1963, our shiverings as useless wing three-quarters on a rugby ground that was the coldest since the restoration of Charles II. We watched again Maurice’s Duncan in the Brentwood School Macbeth. He thought that the doomed Scottish king lacked any good lines and wanted most to have been Banquo.

  Then how did she die? Maurice’s question was suddenly almost urgent. Beneath the tight skin of his jaw, tiny muscles were still moving after his words had ceased. He was like a singer listening to one of his own records, knowing what he had heard before, what he wanted to hear.

  Painlessly.

  Painlessly is good, he replied.

  Cleopatra discovered that Octavian was about to send her to Rome by ship. She had little remaining time to decide.

  So how does she die?

  By the quietest poison, I said. Ignore the stories of asps or cobras or any other kind of snakes hiding in fig baskets. With the knowledge from human experiments that the Ptolemies possessed, no queen would leave her suicide to the whim of a reptile. Cleopatra was an aficionado of painlessness and pain. She had seen the agony caused by the snakes of Egypt, signed many a ginestho for the experiments and executions that proved why no one would want to die that way if other ways were available.

  Painless is good, Maurice repeated and ordered coffee. It was good that she had deceived her tormentor and died as she intended to die. That seemed much the best version of events.

  We moved away again to the times we had spent by the cold North Sea watching birds on the waves, the wheeling, wailing and gangling that were the same when we were five and fifteen as when we were fifty-five. We recalled grey gulls massing on the beaches as the mud dried. He seemed suddenly tired. It was hard to hold these thoughts. He pouted – as he had used to do when his cheeks were fatter. It was still a very recognisable pout.

  We spoke of E.M. Forster. Maurice particularly liked the scandalous late novel that bore his name. The author of Maurice had shown little interest in his Alexandrian books, Pharos and Pharillon, after he had written them. But he had given his only speech about Cleopatra’s city in the east-coast town of Aldeburgh, where for a while Maurice had owned a house.

  I brought with me a copy of this speech. The novelist had drawn desperate comparisons between Aldeburgh and Alexandria, between different scapes of sea and sky, nuanced brown and unbelievable blue. He had tried hard but had found nothing in common to mark the two places ‘beyond the first two letters of their name and the occasional visitations of fish’.

  Maurice smiled and recalled the Aldeburgh seals that looked so human when they stared. Were seals man’s first inspiration for mermaids? He wanted to know how what we imagined intersected with our memories. He already knew how cancer can trigger the imagination, the desire to be somewhere else being so strong as the disease takes its grip.

  And James Holladay? Was it true that he had died of a heart attack in a plane flying over the Bermuda Triangle, a most unlikely end for a man who must so much more likely have collapsed in the back bar of the King’s Arms? Yes, it was true. He died twenty-two years ago, New Year’s Day 1989, and was buried under a marble slab in a forest of mahogany and coconut.

  The coffee arrived, and then a cab, and the evening was over. Maurice died a month later. A part of me departed too.

  21.1.11

  Rue Nebi Danial

  While Cleopatra was beginning her immortality in Alexandria, Plancus was in Rome taking smaller steps along the road to being remembered. He was being practical, helpful, ingratiating to the victor who was now undisputed leader of the Roman world. Gradually the great survivor became cautiously optimistic. He began to see a new future for himself.

  He saw some of the letters he would eventually want on his tomb, the ancient pillbox that Duke was to contemplate on his way to Anzio. There would be the COS for his consulship back in 42 BC. To have taken that post had been his decent duty after the death of Julius Caesar – to hold the fort, to stabilise, to do good if he could. There would be a word or two on his foundation of the Roman colonies ‘Lugdunum et Rauricam’, places that would become Lyons and Basle. There would be room left on the lintel for other offices he might hold, temples he might build, but none for any references to his services for Antony and Cleopatra. There would be no more mention, except by his enemies, of his slitherings on palace floors in a sea-creature outfit or his judicial role while Cleopatra turned pearls into the world’s most expensive wine.

  Plancus wanted to be a player again. Dutiful constitutional service was to be his epitaph. Beyond the record of his virtuous offices there would also be space for his heirs and for any honours that they might gain from his example. Caieta, close to his family home, was his chosen burial site by the sea. This had also been the burial place of Aeneas’s nurse, a minor but significant character in the myth of Rome’s foundation. Perhaps Plancus was pleased by that coincidence. Perhaps it was no coincidence at all.

  Words would last longer even than tombs. That was what civilised people were beginning to think. If a tomb were somehow linked to art, the chance of survival might be higher still. His marble memorial might, with appropriate encouragement to Virgil, take its place discreetly (but not too discreetly) in the epic of the great new order. It would match the first lines of the second half of Rome’s greatest poem. To any young reader who had only the second
half in his hand it might be the very beginning of the Aeneid.

  Poets were useful. That much Plancus knew. But poets were not always as clear as marble and concrete. Virgil was maybe the most reliable, a public poet who knew his place. But there was Horace too, a younger genius of the new age, equally revered by the new regime, a master of the more personal style. Horace was Plancus’s friend. But he was tricky. He was Alexandrian in his way although he did not always like to admit it. No one who received a poem as a gift from Horace ever knew quite what it meant, still less what others later might think it meant.

  In the four weeks between Maurice’s last visit to the Blue Lion and his last breath, we met and spoke whenever we could. Much of our shared memories in this book are his own memories, retained by him, released by his dying and merely reinforced by my own. His present then presupposed his death. His present revived his past. I wish I had been with him even more.

  I had other appointments to keep, the kind of appointments that come to an Editor of the TLS with interests in the ancient world. One of these, and of all the chances in this story it seems still the strangest, required a Sunday morning reading in Gloucestershire of that most peculiar and subtle poem which Horace addressed to Plancus. This was the one known by its first words Laudabunt alii, the beginning of thirty-two lines which, while Maurice was dying, and thus so very eerily as it seemed to me, my task was to explain, word by word, on stage, to an audience in the West of England countryside.

  Plancus’s long afterlife arrived in Cheltenham on the occasion of a literary festival, a temporary village of tented bookshops, libraries and halls, a virtually unknown event in the calendars of the 1970s and 1980s but in 2010 as common as a game of cricket. The aim of the event was to help readers who had never read a Latin poem before to read one for the first time.

  I had agreed to chair the meeting. The choice of poem was not mine. Plancus followed me by purest chance. ‘Laudabunt alii’ we all began at 10.00 a.m. A light-pointer identified each word: ‘will praise’ was followed by ‘other men’. Laudabunt alii claram Rhodon aut Mytilenen Aut Ephesum bimarisve Corinthi moenia: Others will praise bright Rhodes, or Mytilene, or Ephesus or the walls of Corinth on its two seas. The audience had come to read it in Latin – and it was my task to help them do just that.

  V was sitting in the second row from the front, between two blocks of schoolchildren and their teachers. She had a boyish face, not much older than I remembered but larger, her pale cheeks framed by dark, shoulder-length hair, a tattoo on her left shoulder and what I would once have called an Alice-band to keep her forehead clear. I knew immediately who she was. She smiled up while another member of our panel was explaining Laudabunt alii, how the second word is the plural subject of the verb in the future tense that precedes it, and what comes next, what precisely it was that ‘other men will praise’.

  V was taking notes. My colleagues were beginning to explain what the words might mean. I remembered the problems. Is Horace about to praise Plancus? Or is Horace not as straightforward as that? Are the words already a warning to Plancus? If ‘other people’ are handing out the bouquets, this may suggest that Horace is not going to give any himself. Perhaps Plancus will not like his ode.

  Perhaps no one will be praised. The subjects are not, it turns out, even people. They are places, Greek places, tourist sites that were also controversial places, names which any educated soldier of the past decade would know well, in Plancus’s case much too well. The light-pointer moved jerkily over the words.

  Laudabunt alii claram Rhodon aut Mytilenen

  Aut Ephesum bimarisve Corinthi moenia.

  Why did Horace choose Rhodes? Was it as beauty spot or naval dockyard island? Why Mytilene? As a peaceful town of poets, protected by Crinagoras, gentle poet and diplomat? Or as a ruin pillaged by Roman armies? Ephesus was the city where Arsinoe was strangled, where Antony and Cleopatra danced on their way to Actium. Corinth was the port with a mouth on two strategic seas. Both welcomed wealthy tourists all the time. Sometimes desperate generals came instead.

  My colleagues posed their questions. I concentrated on the answers. In one sense this is a simple drinking song, a request to Plancus to cheer up and enjoy some wine while he can. But little in Horace means what it seems to mean. We must look at what is omitted as well as what is there. The stresses are within the lines and within the names. Even readers finding this poem for the first time have to take a view of the distant unknown.

  V did not seem to have any young charges of her own. While the other adults in the row checked whether their pupils were taking down the translation correctly, she alternated careful note-taking with looking straight ahead. When she caught my eye, she did not smile but held up the back of the exercise book on her lap. On it was a V, in Quink-blue ink, lest I might not have recognised her face.

  I was doing my best but I was drifting. My eyes scanned around and around the circular hall. There were polite questions and from my colleagues beside me came answers equally polite.

  Sunt quibus unum opus est … celebrare: There are some people who do nothing but celebrate …

  In the following lines, we learn, Horace does hand out a little praise of his own, not to Plancus but to another place, to Tibur, Rome’s summer suburb of tinkling water gardens, temples and facades – a bit like Cheltenham perhaps – where Plancus and Horace both have pleasant houses.

  This was not a helpful direction for Plancus. He may have felt a little guilty about Tibur. The means by which homes there had gained their owners were rarely as pleasant as the houses themselves. Horace’s own retreat had been a reward for loyalty from the new regime. Plancus’s place had been gained a little earlier and in much nastier circumstances, it was said. It had belonged to his brother whom he had betrayed to Mark Antony after Caesar’s death. The pursuers had caught him because they knew in advance the perfume he was wearing. Perfume was as great a slur on a Roman man as any betrayal.

  There was much here in Tibur that would ideally be forgotten – by Horace, by Plancus, by everyone. But Horace has simultaneously both a message for Plancus and a description of him. Have a few drinks, adapt and survive, subtly, not by changing sides any more but by changing the past. Many of their friends were dead. Cleopatra and Antony were dead. Crimes were still crimes. Let them fade rather than be erased. To continue was the key and to be a Continuator was to be a king.

  Others will say the good things.

  Come to sunny Rhodes, to Ephesus by the sea.

  Come to magical Mytilene, to Corinth beside two seas, to drink-drenched Thebes and Thessaly and Delphi too!

  The holiday list goes on and on.

  Some will always like to praise.

  In Athens every olive tree is a garland-in-waiting.

  Some go for Argos (so good for horses) or Mycenae.

  Every one of them a delight.

  But not I, Plancus. There is too much else to say.

  Rhodes, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, all those names.

  A bit like a map of your war, don’t you think?

  OK, my war, our war.

  If I must say good things about somewhere, let me praise little Tibur instead, where the streams tumble by the orchards, where our beautiful homes, ours at least for now, are calmed by whispering caves. Perhaps you prefer that, Plancus. Perhaps you do not.

  Enough, enough. Remember just three thoughts that are true.

  There will always be darkness behind the sun.

  A good glass of wine clears any darkness away.

  And your wars are not quite over yet.

  So time for a Trojan War story. Teucer. Remember him?

  Smarter brother of the mad, drunk Ajax who died of failure.

  Teucer was a realist. He could never have saved Ajax. But when he sailed home alone, was his father pleased to see him? Was he hell!

  Teucer had to turn right around. He made a speech to his followers. ‘Nil desperandum. Trust me.

  There is a new home for us in a new world. Have a dri
nk. Have another drink. Tomorrow we will set off once again upon the sea.’

  Ninety minutes later, when ‘How to Read a Latin Poem’ was over, V was sitting on a wall outside, smoking a grey cigarette and rolling a second between her fingers. She had not stayed to the end. The book with her initial on the back was on top of a canvas briefcase.

  She apologised for walking out. Our first words after more than twenty years were about how she needed a nicotine injection. Otherwise it was as though we were still circling warily around the evils of private schools and the inadequacies of Elizabeth Taylor’s director. She was never one for pleasantries.

  ‘So what did I miss?’

  ‘A story, an Odyssey story, an Aeneid story. Horace wants to tell Plancus a story.’

  ‘It is the weirdest ending. I don’t get it.’

  She snapped at me like Mr W at a student of German.

  ‘Teucer’s is not a famous story now. It is one of the lesser known odysseys that began with the fall of Troy. There were hundreds of them.’

  She screwed up her face into an ancient scowl. ‘Remember that your thinking about Plancus was my idea.’

  Alexandria’s librarians kept a careful catalogue of all the odysseys they knew. There was the long journey of Odysseus himself who took a decade to reach home from Troy, kill his rivals and reclaim his wife. There was the shorter trip by Agamemnon who came home quickly to be killed quickly too. Helen, whose abduction had caused the war, was delayed with her husband Menelaus on Pharos, and escaped their captors only by wrestling with a god of the sea. Aeneas, a minor Trojan prince, copied the best adventures of Odysseus and rose to be the founder of the Roman race. Those were just the best-known stories.

  Horace rarely chose the obvious when the obscure was available. He preferred the oblique, the tangential. That was what the Alexandrians had taught him.

  ‘Horace tells Plancus the story of a man called Teucer, the brother of the giant Ajax, one small hero of the Greeks at Troy and another much greater one.