Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Meanwhile, the dungeons of Alexandria were emptied at his command to supply victims for the Roman games, and his agents were set to work procuring wild animals to be sent to Rome by shiploads, some to await his own arrival, others to be used at once in the arenas as the great dictator’s gift, to keep the populace in a state of fevered expectation. Though he ignored the Senate, and not even Cicero could persuade him to answer indignant correspondence, he was careful to make the Roman mob remember him, and in addition to the lions and elephants, the hippopotami, giraffes, enormous apes, the crocodiles and savage bulls, he began to send shiploads of weapons as trophies to use in his triumph.

  It was on those ships that Cleopatra sent her emissaries to reside in Rome and keep her privately informed of whatever political changes might be taking place behind the scenes. With Caesar’s knowledge, and without it, she sent missionaries to revive the Roman’s interest in Isis, knowing that what nearly every Roman craved was knowledge of an after-life, which his own religion barely hinted at. She knew that much of the Romans’ ruthlessness was due to ignorance of any reason why they should not plunder and enslave the world; if after-life was no more than a lingering around neglected tombs, then it was logical to make the most of this life at the cost of other people. She proposed to change the Roman consciousness. Familiar herself, as all the educated Alexandrians had long been, with Buddhist teachings, that were the subject of almost daily lectures in the Bruchium colonnades, she hoped by imitating Caesar’s propaganda methods to sow peace where he stirred excitement.

  What she overlooked was that the advent of a new idea usually raises public restlessness to fever heat, until the passion now and then boils off in bloodshed. Sending quietist philosophy to Rome was rather like pouring oil on a furnace in driblets. And she did not foresee that the Romans would prefer the long-notorious Egyptian sorcery to any pure philosophy that she could send them, though Olympus warned her. She became increasingly impatient when Olympus hinted that there might be deadly danger in her plans.

  Meanwhile, Caesar’s troops insisted on their customary privilege of holding gladiatorial games, and an arena was constructed on the outskirts of the city, where a few score pairs of felons were compelled to slay each other, or were torn by lions. It was a shabby spectacle, the victims being untrained, and the Alexandrians resented it all the more in that Caesar absented himself They would have liked him to observe their furious contempt for such uncivilized amusement. Stones began to be thrown at Roman soldiers in the streets, and all the pacifying work of weeks might have been undone, had not Cleopatra thought of rescuing Apollodorus from the depths of his depression.

  She sent for him. She commanded him. When he had left her presence she announced: “We will never see the old Apollodorus back, but he will be as amusing and as undependable as ever.”

  CHAPTER XXIX. “Who hath regarded a horse, and the soul of the song that resides in him?”

  The essence of a true philosophy is ease. It may, it usually does, take effort to acquire it, and yet effortlessness is its nature, since it recognizes WHAT Is rather than what might be. This is why the true philosopher has dignity without demanding it, but he who struggles to obtain dignity appears ridiculous, and he who fears its loss is like a madman nailing shadows to a wall.

  — Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

  FESTIVALS were the breath of the life of Alexandria. The climate lent itself to merry-making, and the beauty of the marble city was the inspiration. Caesar, who loved splendor and movement and life, seriously pondered the idea of making Alexandria his capital. It could be easily defended. It was close to the sources of enormous wealth and limitless supplies of corn. It would serve well as a starting-point for conquest of the East. The climate of Rome was dreary in comparison, and deadly with malaria; he foresaw that it might take generations to transform that brick-built, squalid, ancient city on the Tiber into the splendid empire-plexus of his dreams.

  With his customary mastery of detail, he devoted intricate attention to the parks, the zoological gardens, the open-air public dining-places where the holiday-keeping crowd was liberally fed with good food and indifferent wine from the royal cellars. Wishing to see Alexandria at its gayest, he requested Cleopatra to decree a sort of saturnalia to celebrate the resumption of the city’s normal life, and most of the ideas that he incorporated afterward into his method of corrupting and controlling Rome were suggested to his inquiring mind during those extravagant weeks while he and Cleopatra watched the festivals together.

  He made extravagant contributions, in his own name but with Alexandrian money, to all the important temples with a request that the money be spent on celebrating peace and the dawn of prosperity; so that day after day the principal streets became, as it were, rivers of flowing crowds, all gaily dressed, all laughing, singing — led in religious procession by sacred black bulls and by the companies of priests surrounding their aged heirophant veiled in heliotrope and robed in priceless splendor — before they threw off all restraint and solemn thought to live life madly for the moment.

  But the gaiety, the reveling and drunkenness, the dancing in the streets and torch-lit boating on Lake Mareotis were preliminary — merely the producers of the proper mood from which to rise to that crowning arch-delight of Alexandria — the chariot races. Tickets for the stadium were free, but they were numbered and the thirty thousand seats were allotted in strict proportion to residents of the several city wards; several days before the races upper seats were changing ownership at prices more than the equivalent of one year’s income of some of the purchasers, and the price of a box would have bought two racing chariots, their horses, grooms and experienced charioteers. There was tremendous excitement because the Jews, already exercising privileges granted them by Caesar, were allotted a percentage of the seats; but most of the Jews compromised by selling out at stupendous prices, thus avoiding a riot, and in the end only Esias and five friends occupied the one box that had been allotted to them as a mark of distinction, next to the seats reserved beside the royal box for distinguished strangers, in which Tros sat so near to Cleopatra that he could talk to her across the gilded rail and could feel the flutter of the peacock-feather fans.

  Caesar was in the royal box, wearing his purple cloak and golden chaplet, grimly disregarding the indecent songs the Alexandrian humorists sang about him (they were the most impudent lampoonists in the world, and to have whipped them would have stirred the city’s indignation even more than granting civic liberties to Jews had done). There was a parade of Roman legionaries to begin with that gave no offense worth mentioning because it came as a glamourous climax to the marvelous and wholly unexpected, good-tempered and yet rigidly enforced efficiency with which the public had been herded by Caesar’s veterans, every man and woman to the proper seat. Even Esias and his friends were not hooted; and for a while Caesar and Cleopatra were accorded generous ovations, that were repeated and repeated until pandemonium broke loose at last with the appearance of the first competitors.

  There were six events for professional charioteers, all slaves or freedmen, commencing with a race for two-horse teams, and men comparatively unknown, each succeeding race presenting better- and yet better-known men and horses; so that the excitement grew and gathered until the climax when, in the seventh race, the amateurs of Alexandria competed in person with famous four-horse teams on which they had spent fortunes, and on which they and the public wagered such incredible amounts that bankruptcy and even personal slavery were not uncommonly the outcome. Many an Alexandrian had never visited his distant Nile-bank, revenue-producing corn-land, or his mines, until enormous losses on the race-course compelled him to rebuild a fortune in retirement.

  From the moment when the golden trumpets blew the fanfare and the first four chariots, with their drivers dressed in red, white, green and yellow opened the proceedings with a trial canter once around the stadium, there was a rising wave of passionate suspense that burst in a storm of exultation when the starter gave the sign
al and the race began.

  There were rules, but no mercy for the man whose skill could not protect him from the fouling of an adversary. Whoever pinned a rival against the barrier and crushed him, or who stole the inside course at a turn and made his gain good by bumping the rival team and leaving charioteer and horses wrecked and struggling in a broken heap, received the plaudits of the crowd and no official would have dared to disqualify such a skilful victor. There was betting as to how many contestants in each race would bite the dirt, and only once, that whole day, did the wagerers on zero win the odds.

  The frenzy became inhuman. There were fights among the spectators, for no reason except that excitement had to find relief; the Roman legionaries were kept busy with their spear-butts prodding rose-wreathed Alexandrians who were pulling hair and punching noses simply because they had betted on different teams and could not watch the outcome without venting their hysteria on one another.

  In between the races the arena swarmed with acrobats and clowns who helped to relieve the emotional strain and to occupy the long intervals provided for the professional gamblers who paid highly for their privilege. That was the recognized opportunity for new troupes of performers to advertise themselves for employment by the nobility at their profligate evening entertainments, and the competition to amuse was consequently brilliant and bitter, but the gales of laughter seldom came until the trumpets sounded to clear the course and a cohort of cavalry, armed with whips, pursued them tumbling over one another out of the arena with the clowns making the most of the chance to appear ridiculous.

  The only quiet spectators in the stadium, outside the royal box, were the officers of Caesar’s Arab cavalry who occupied the seats of honor in a line with Tros. They sat like graven images, contemptuous alike of charioteers and horses, of the noisy Alexandrians and of everything except the women, whose unveiled beauty set their eyes aglow and whose vivacious gestures made them wary of movement lest they should betray their own lawless lust. They had desert manners, those Arab chieftains, and a bone-dry estimate of the essentials, that made them respectful of Caesar and intolerantly disrespectful of the city people’s judgment of a horse. Tros and Caesar were the only two men in all that multitude who gained their admiration, by restraining whatever excitement and almost entirely disguising whatever interest they might feel. Tros now and then leaned across the gilded rail to talk to Cleopatra about his friend, Caswallon, the King, who, according to Tros, preferred unbroken horses and a roadless countryside. His memories of Britain had grown glamourous during the years since he had helped Caswallon to defeat the Roman legions led by Caesar.

  Caesar’s secretaries brought baskets full of books, which he studied with knitted brows and one leg crossed over the other. He ignored the racing, now and then reading aloud to Cleopatra passages that he considered noteworthy and enjoying her brilliant comments; for she was as familiar as he was with the works of the philosophers and he had not yet found one subject on which she could not converse with him with original intelligence.

  Caesar, preferring not to risk defeat, was not competing in the seventh race, in which it was usual for the court to be represented and for which almost any prominent Alexandrian would have been delighted to enter his own best team and charioteer in Caesar’s name. However, it was known — and known particularly to the Arabs, who accepted it as a tactful and auspicious compliment — that Cleopatra had entered those four priceless stallions that had been sent her by Sampsicaramus. The horses, being unknown to the Alexandrians, found very little favor in the betting, but it had been rumored for days, from end to end of Alexandria, that Apollodorus was to take the reins. It was considered likely that Apollodorus’ almost endless run of luck had spent itself. The fortune-tellers, shrewdly studying the law of averages, were unanimous about it. And it was also known that Apollodorus’ three most noted rivals had leaped at the chance to replace him in the popular esteem.

  Two of them, Phidias and Cleisthenes, had been political supporters of Prince Ptolemy. Included in Caesar’s general amnesty they had, nevertheless, been mulcted mercilessly by the officials whose duty it was to collect the money payable to Rome; so they had wagered heavily to recoup themselves, and they were bidding, too, for popularity to save them from political extinction. Both young, they had all the attributes that mobs approve in aristocracies, including good looks, arrogance and courage. Politically they were jealous of Apollodorus; personally they hated him, having felt his sarcasm; and they knew that in spite of his favor at court he was under a present cloud of melancholy that was likely to obscure his spirit and his almost superhuman skill. Furthermore, they were aware that his team was only partly trained; so that each regarded the other as the real opponent and they had thought it safe to lay long odds against Apollodorus’ chance, as well as wise to agree on convenient means of making the race a duel between themselves.

  The third competitor, named Gelo, nearly forty years of age, had been one of Arsinoe’s chief adherents and had taken part in her betrayal into Caesar’s hands. He, too, was in the race for popularity, which he direly needed. But he hated Apollodorus with a virulence more bitter than that of the other two contestants. They were, after all, young noblemen as capable of like as dislike. Gelo was a no man’s friend who thought that popularity depended solely on success and that success entailed somebody’s ruin. An approach that he had once made to Apollodorus, with a view to buying his social and political friendship had been rejected with light-hearted indifference that stung and drove him into Arsinoe’s party, only to find himself again mistrusted and unpopular. He justified the mistrust by being among the first to seek credit for her surrender into Caesar’s hands; and now he proposed at last to win the plaudits of the crowd as well as Caesar’s gratitude by humbling in the dust the brilliant horseman who had worn the victor’s golden laurel wreath too long.

  Gelo had observed that Caesar disliked men in his environment who distracted attention from his own preeminence. The safest way, it seemed to him, to establish claims on Caesar was to render unasked but important services and then to be unobtrusive but expectant of recognition. He had noticed, and he had heard it said, that Caesar now and then showed irritation at the ease with which Apollodorus made himself the center of attraction; he proposed to earn Caesar’s gratitude and simultaneously to make a strong impression on the public by contriving the handsome favorite’s defeat. The more spectacular and ignominious that defeat the better; and as for the personal risk, it was no more than proportionate to the boundless social and political opportunities that were contingent on success.

  It had not been difficult for Gelo to produce in the public mind anticipation of some calamity to Apollodorus. He had revived, and his agents had busily spread, the half-forgotten rumor that Apollodorus had been Cleopatra’s lover until Caesar replaced him in her affections. All the world knew what the fate of a discarded lover ought to be; the fellow should have killed himself to prevent one calamity from following another. To drive the Queen’s own horses in a desperate effort to restore himself into her favor was too great a temptation to offer the inscrutable dealers of evil luck. Caesar had probably hired someone to weaken the chariot axle or to tamper with the horses’ food. The odds against Apollodorus, who hitherto had almost always been an odds-on favorite, were at ten to one. There was even money being laid on Phidias and Cleisthenes, and Gelo scarcely figured in the betting.

  The odds against Apollodorus went to twenty to one the moment the teams came through the entrance gate beneath the royal box. Apollodorus had drawn the outside station and should have come last, but he shot under the archway out of turn, avoiding Phidias by a miracle, and wheeling to the left the wrong way of the course — unable to control the four flame-colored stallions that fought the bits and one another and appeared to revert to savagery at the sight of the arena and its thirty thousand yelling occupants. The gate attendants, who should have tried to seize the horses’ heads and turn them, jumped clear in a panic to avoid heels and wheels. Apollodor
us had to let the war-trained, chariot-shy stallions take him almost half around the course before he turned them at last and began to follow the other three chariots that, in accordance with long established custom, were parading prior to the race.

  The odds went now to a hundred to one against him. Twice his stallions crashed into the barrier set down the midst of the stadium to divide the course and once they nearly jumped the six-foot wooden wall into the crowded lower seats; they would have jumped it, had they all been of the same mind, but they were fighting one another at the same time that they rebelled against the guidance of reins and whip.

  Caesar rolled up a parchment manuscript and watched them. There was something in that fight between a reckless man and four yoked passions incarnated in the “wind-bred” desert stallions that appealed to his sense of domination. He smiled and spoke to Cleopatra; and because his smile was naturally sardonic when seen in profile vanishing in deep lines at the corners of his mouth, there were many who remarked that he was sneering at her favorite. She nodded back confidently, but that was to be expected; nobody had ever seen her look less than confident in public.

  Caesar was seen to send a secretary to the box in which the Jews were seated. It was noticed that Esias left the box in a great hurry and did not return until the race was about to start, when he nodded to Caesar, who raised his left hand in acknowledgment. There were many who rightly deduced from that that Caesar had placed a substantial bet, but only some professional gamblers knew he had wagered almost enough on Apollodorus to ruin the losers, if, by accident or some amazing stroke of luck, Apollodorus should snatch the victory. Caesar was not a man who believed much in the soothsayers or who overlooked the long odds when recklessness and courage coupled with experience were at war with frenzied strength against over-confident opponents. He had won one or two such victories himself. What he had said to Cleopatra was: