by Jack Lindsay
Last Days With Cleopatra
Jack Lindsay
© Jack Lindsay 1935
Jack Lindsay has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1935 by The Edinburgh Press
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
A YEAR ENDS - OCTOBER – DECEMBER 31 B.C.
1 LOVERS MEETING LOVERS PARTING
2 ALONE
3 TELL ME THE TRUTH
4 THIS IS MY BODY
5 TEMPTATION
6 A CHILD IS BORN
ANOTHER YEAR COMES - MARCH-OCTOBER 30 B.C.
7 ON A HEIGHT
8 COMING OF AGE
9 FORLORN HOPE
10 BETRAYAL
11 A WORLD DIES
12 A CHILD IS BORN
FOREWORD
A foreword to a novel always seems rather portentous; but as there are a few things I wish to say on the three books which I have written about the period of Roman history 63-30 B.C., I am taking the risk, though well aware that the books cannot be made better (and I hope cannot be made worse) by anything I say about them.
I began the closer scrutiny of this period when working on the poems of Catullus; and being led to consider the general political background at a time when I was essaying novel-form, I felt certain narrative themes demand my attention. First, the revolutionary movement and the part played by Catilina; secondly, the religious impulse which resulted in Caesar-worship; thirdly, the balance of forces which out of the conflict produced the Roman Empire and (consequently) modern Europe. I felt the general drama of the period, its tangle of forces, its spiritual mass, long before any themes emerged; for I always, to use the pictorial analogy, work from mass towards outline, from character-impact towards structure or plot. But I had no particular intention. I felt all kinds of correspondences with the present day and, beyond any details, the abiding significance of a great revolutionary epoch. Since this epoch created Europe (for the Roman State and Christianity were alike its products), it seemed to me the most important epoch in history and some understanding of it to be essential to any understanding of the modern world.
From that general attitude I began on Catilina. The more I looked at the movement which he headed, the clearer did it seem to me that there lay the clue, the human dynamic. I could defend this thesis in detail, but there is no space for such argument here. I felt in Catilina the Roman race reasserting itself, striving incoherently for a reversal of values in order to rediscover the core of the old values. (For it seems to me that all history records the clash of two impulses—that of brotherhood and that of individual rights—and that each impulse has its peculiar righteousness and tyranny, because the need for individual self-perfection and purification has never yet been able to harmonise with the racial need for solidarity and social interdependence. Therefore history reveals a perpetual oscillation, since when one impulse develops its tyranny the other impulse gathers power and promises redemption. Thus, when “liberty” develops into commercialism, there is necessarily generated a need for “justice” which calls out for the totalitarian state; and so on.)
The devotion of “brotherhood” came to a head in Catilina, and left an irresistible revolutionary force at the disposal of Caesar, upon whom the loosened emotions and needs torrentially poured. Such a loosening must be short-lived by its very nature, and the man who attracts to himself the pouring must be a powerful individual who can dictate the terms on which the revulsion, the inevitable contraction and reconstruction, is to proceed.
Caesar became the “race-hero,” dictated his terms to the future, and then was torn to pieces by the storm of forces.
It is here that there intrudes the specifically religious emotion which needs a “divine king dying” to satisfy its terrors and to give life significance. And it is here that we see the relation between Christianity and the Caesar-cult; for the murder and deification of Caesar quickened and gave an immediacy of appeal to the passion-dramas of the Mysteries, turning the race-brotherhood emotion (which is simple in Catilina) into a recoil of individualism and the need of a Saviour historical in existence but more closely related to the moral problems of the suffering individual than the deified Caesar could ever be.
For, beyond the destructive terror-of-the-dead (still as potent an element in religion and the “psychopathology of everyday life” as under the Pharaohs), there is the positive side of religion which is clearer, I think, in these earlier days than now when art, sport, and politics usurp so much of the deeper elements of what would once have been “religious emotion.” The positive side of this old religion sought to give ritualistic expression to the great crises of life, birth and puberty, marriage and death; it thus still included, to a great extent, drama; it sought to be a mirror of experience. to reflect things, in Spinoza’s phrase, sub specie aternitatis: that is, in the fullness of their organic changes.
As I have said, I had no theses to work out in these books, I merely strove to find out what I really thought about the period by realising it, to the best of my ability, as human action, as symbolic action, as a story.
I find, however, as I review what I have written, that beside the various political threads, there is certainly the thesis of individual and race. In Catilina the race-call grows overpowering, smashing up all who come within its area of action; in Caesar the race-hero is finalised; but in the process a new stimulation to the individual is given (which is why, unconsciously, I gave the stress to Gallus and Cytheris, Amos and Karni, in Cesar is Dead).
The hero-image, achieved, splits into rivalry: Antonius and Octavianus. The mad side (unleashed energy) of Guar diverges into Antonius, for a moment serving its race-purpose; then the saner side (the wish to construct with a minimum of waste, to give the individual the chance to develop) asserts itself in Octavianus.
(It will be seen, by the way I use “mad” and “saner,” that I cannot but take, in the last resort, the side of the individual; yet sub specie eternitatis such terms allot no variation of praise or blame.)
The third book, this book, is the expression of the cleavage and its aftermath. The figure of unleashed energy, Antonius, after carrying all before him in glorious power, suddenly finds himself lost, for all his resistances have been dissipated. He fails, because he has no longer a fulcrum with which to shift the earth that he has apparently mastered; and his antagonist, embodying the revulsion, effortlessly triumphs.
That is why, I see, I have built this novel on the young lovers. They are the individuals struggling to realise their small lives as the universe, and they are. as important as any protagonists of the history which, after all, exists only in order to give them a foothold. In them life is beginning anew. Absorbed in their personal affairs, they are the counter-balance to Catilina absorbed in the outgoing brotherhood-call; yet the race is getting at them through Isis and the child.
But, I must repeat, this is all analysis after the event, and I make it as I might of somebody else’s work. I didn’t write to prove anything, since I can’t see how anything can be abstractly proved about life or needs to be so proved.
The trilogy might, it follows from what I have said, be named, A Prelude to Christianity, since it shows the stage of things from which Christianity necessarily resulted.
It might also be called Prelude to the Future written 1933-1934 a sketch of the forces at work at this moment when the human species is undergoing the shock and instability of another great “interbreeding”; for with the developed human organism the interbreeding of ideas is almost as violent in effects as the interbreeding of bodies which it precedes a
nd accompanies: as witness the present changes taking place in the “unchanging East.”
I should like to say that I have spared no effort to make every historical and social detail as exact and correct as possible. Thus, it is not through a whim of mine that Antonius gives no speech at Caesar’s funeral in Caesar is Dead. I do not know how anyone who reads Cicero’s letters and speeches carefully can fail to see that Suetonius gives the true account of the funeral: which is the one I offer. In inventing domestic backgrounds for the historically known characters I have tried to build on the evidence. Thus, the character of Brutus and his relations with his wife and mother (Caesar is Dead) are based on the picture given in Cicero’s letters: written, we must remember, in the heat of the events and therefore doubly valuable as evidence.
JACK LINDSAY.
A YEAR ENDS - OCTOBER – DECEMBER 31 B.C.
1 LOVERS MEETING LOVERS PARTING
The fashionably dressed women were peering round to see if Queen Cleopatra would arrive after all. They whispered and nudged one another, smoothing down their embroidered blouse-fronts and settling the pleats of their skirts. The men, who accompanied them, tried to keep them quiet, and frowned at the eager whisperings which every now and then became audible, stimulated by a particular piece of malicious comment. What would the Queen wear? would the ladies in violet be able to sneer at the ladies in green, or would the ladies in scarlet be the lucky ones? and was it true that side-curls were to be worn?
The Chapel of Adonis was stuffy with heat and sweat discreetly sweetened with toilet-perfumes. Everyone had discussed to the verge of boredom the decorations and the works of art. There was hardly anything new or notable, except a statuette of Aphrodite with gilt hair, eyes of emerald, and mouth and nipples of ruby. That was worth seeing; perhaps it would set a new mode in evening-wear; the price of gilt wigs would increase, and the toilet-manufacturers would be busy experimenting for the right ruby dye. Every woman in the Chapel had asked her husband how he thought the colour-scheme would suit her; and most of the husbands .had stupidly replied that as yet, thank Zeus, beauty specialists hadn’t found a way of dyeing women’s eyes green, or any other colour. When that day came, it would be a clever man who knew his wife anywhere except in the dark.
The same old things. The tapestries depicting the passion of Adonis: the wooing by Aphrodite, the onslaught by the boar, Aphrodite’s lamentations, the resurrection of the son-beloved. Statues in fresh gowns, and votive tablets, and paintings. On two elaborately carved couches, piled with purple cushions, lay the images of the lovers, two wooden statues realistically tinted and dressed in fine clothes. Their gaudy eyes stared at the select gathering in the Chapel, over the heaps of apples and figs, cakes, roses and lilies in pots. Above the couches was twined a bower of myrtle and anise, and among the leaves were perched tame birds, one of which, a pigeon, had discoloured with a dropping the brown hair of Adonis.
The ladies, who had obtained all the front positions, whispered together, wondering (wide-eyed, loose-lipped) how it was that so-and-so dared to appear in public (in a new dress) when it was notorious that two nights ago she’d been discovered in adultery (without a dress at all, certainly not this dress hand-painted with a boar-pattern). But even the question of so-and-so’s impudence was trivial before the question whether the Queen would arrive, Marcus Antonius at her side.
Victor, a page, standing a few paces inside the door could have answered that question. He knew that the Queen would not be coming; and was sorry that he’d come himself. Let off duty, he’d been passing out of the palace-area and noticed the crowd pushing into the Chapel; joined out of curiosity and now wanted to get out again. Around the door were some poorer women, mostly Greeks, though with a sprinkling of inquisitive Egyptians and Syrians; but the attendants were roughly keeping this section of the worshippers in their place, while finding room for any better-dressed Greeks. The Adonia was a Greek rite, and the upper classes must be given the first chance of paying respects to the couched deities and of gushing over the prettiness of the decor.
What a waste of time. But then everything was waste of time. Victor wanted to waste his time elsewhere. The crush, the close heat, the quantity of women (so many and so much of them), irritated him.
Then he saw nearby a poorly clad woman with an earthen pot clasped to her bosom. The pot held some tiny flower, and the woman was clasping it with an agonised care as the attendant jostled her. With a start Victor realised that the ceremony was serious, or had been once. What did it mean to the woman with the flower-pot? He wanted to ask her, but had no intention of asking. One couldn’t ask such questions. Besides, she probably wouldn’t know. But certainly she hadn’t come for the same reasons as the women who were waiting for the highly paid singer who was to sing the Dirge.
The thought was somehow discomforting; the woman with the pot was worse than the others. Victor found the moral courage to start shoving his way out. He felt ashamed of what was going on, though he didn’t know why. The people shouldn’t be waiting for a trained virtuoso to sing for them; they ought to be singing themselves if they cared. What was Adonis to them? But the poor woman cared. She’d be ready to sing, in a cracked voice. Victor’s ears burned. He disliked sleek women chattering and bony women with religious eyes. However, the hymn of worship shouldn’t have become a concert performance.
As he struggled to get out, he saw that a singer had appeared beside the bower in which lay the lovers of painted wood. She was bowing before the rustling audience, clearing her throat. The two harpers were gravely testing their strings. Like the twittering women. A priest was fidgeting and blinking; trying to rebuke the talkative women in the front row. Then came the clear voice, beautiful indeed, though Victor hated it because everything seemed all wrong:
O pity the Mother, who cries in her loss.
O my child, she cries, my lover, my priest,
she cries for the herb that fails to grow in the earth,
she cries for the fields of the earth where no corn is growing,
she cries for the pool of fish, where no fish are found,
a weary woman, a weary child, undelivered.
Victor, struggling out, felt a sudden sweetness in his blood; the beautiful voice wrenched at his heart-strings; but it was a bought voice, and nobody cared, and those who did care were unpleasant. He refused to listen, and listened. He disliked the smell of the crowd; the veil of perfumes staling and wearing thin, stripping the pretence of difference from the lady; and the incense. No wonder the birds had ceased to hop about in the bower, and perched as if drugged. Why didn’t they cry out in scorn, all together?
As he passed the woman with the flower-pot, he saw again her rapt face. She at least was satisfied. (For her the death and resurrection of Adonis gave the meaning of life, penetrating her drab existence and sanctifying it. On the bed of marriage, conceiving or bearing, she was the stricken earth-woman; and she died with the gored lover, the child who was part of her body. And she came back to the light of warmth with the seasonal earth, and knew nothing about it at all except that she was made blessed by the wedding and the dying and the rebirth of the divine ones.) She beat her breast with the disengaged hand in time to the music; her heart pulsing in time with the heart of life.
“Old fool,” muttered Victor; and wrenched himself into the open, among the late-comers and the beggars, the children and the sellers of Aphrodite-plaques, a girl offering wreaths and two drunken soldiers arguing with an attendant. The world was still the same. Well-kept gravel-paths and noisy people; and nowhere to go. But not quite the same world.
*
Sometimes one hears a remark meant for the ears of another, and takes no heed of it; and then later it returns with abrupt insistence, as if it had been significantly aimed at oneself. That was how Victor felt. Marcus Antonius had been talking with his philosopher-friend Aristocrates, who had said: “Religion is the attempt to make the pattern of natural process self-conscious. It hasn’t anything to do with a belief.”
Somehow the words seemed to explain things; to explain why Victor had been so uncomfortable and discontented in the Chapel. The words bothered Victor, repeated themselves in his mind, though he couldn’t understand them. They insisted on being understood; challenged him; had a meaning which told why he’d entered the Chapel and why he’d gone out again. Why he was wretched.
He’d never questioned his emotions in this way before, and now life had grown full of doubts. He was wretched. For he was a slave, and he loved his master Marcus Antonius, Autocrator. Today had been a bad day for Antonius. He had been so boisterously good-natured at rising, unexpectedly gay with hope after days of depression; he had wrestled and played with Victor and Eros, his favourite pages. Then had come news of a galley’s arrival from Greece. Antonius had tried not to show interest; he had talked of what he meant to do with the legions left behind in Greece at Actium. He’d garrison Asia with them; he’d create a great Eastern Empire. What was Rome, a malarious country-town? The West was barbarous. But perhaps he’d sail later on for Spain, where the tribes were still ready to rebel, and there he’d establish a branch of his empire.
“Halfway-house to the Blessed Isles of the West, my lads!”
Then had come the messenger with the tidings that the seven legions deserted at Actium had surrendered. For a week they’d refused to believe that Antonius had sailed away to Egypt after the sea-fight. Then in bewildered despair they had thrown down their arms.
Antonius said nothing when he heard. He opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing. He sat down heavily in a chair and gripped the arm-rests, and Victor had seen two big tears well out from under his eyelids. He waved the pages away, said nothing, refused to see anyone. He seemed to be dazed. There was a blank suffering in his eyes. Several times he tried to speak, but failed.