Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  So her borders were safe. Her treasury was overflowing. She could take with her to Rome, where silver and gold were at a premium, enormous sums of money that might relieve Caesar’s necessity as well as, if adroitly used, insure for herself that good-will of the Roman mob, notoriously fickle, used to being bought and flattered, contemptible, and yet as essential to herself as to Caesar.

  She could afford to go to Rome as one who brought gifts, not as a seeker of favors: as a valuable ally, rather than a source of potential danger to the Roman imperium. And it was not in Cleopatra’s nature to act less than splendidly when she had opportunity. The chance to dazzle Rome, to bewilder it, to show the Romans what real dignity and wealth and splendor were, challenged her audacity and made her deaf to remonstrance.

  Olympus was solemnly critical: “Pause,” he advised, “and consider! Fish swim. Birds fly. Each to his own element. A jewel in its setting is a thing men crave, but fling it in the mud and what becomes of it? Where is its value? And how suddenly departed!”

  Tros tried other methods of dissuasion. “Whoever sticks a head into Caesar’s net is Caesar’s victim,” he assured her. “Caesar needs you more than ever again you will need him Send him money and encourage him to fight the Parthians, who will give him an even bigger beating than the Britons did!”

  But her personal loyalty rebelled at the mere suggestion of contributing to Caesar’s possible defeat by any enemy.

  “I go to Rome,” she insisted, “because Caesar is the friend, and Rome the enemy. I have heard you say that wars are won in the heart of an enemy’s country. Is it not a war that I am waging? Is it less a war because I only risk myself and wage it without slaying men? Make ready, Tros, for I will sail to Ostia on your ship.”

  There was nothing for Tros to do but to obey her. As the fountainhead of discipline in the Egyptian fleet he could not permit himself to set an example of disobedience.

  Charmian consulted with Olympus before voicing her own intuitive dread, seldom trusting her own judgment when she felt it opposed to Cleopatra’s. Olympus hinted to her what he had not dared to say to Cleopatra lest she should accuse him of casting secret horoscopes and should insist on being shown them in full detail. He understood the danger of his lore — how people, guided by a forecast of events, are paralyzed by fatalism and refuse to use judgment or will. But he could depend on Charmian not to betray the source of her dark forebodings, and on Cleopatra not to suspect it since she knew that Charmian was very often jealous of him. So Charmian came primed into the dressing-room at night, and they two talked alone on the balcony under the stars, huddled in shawls on a couch with their feet tucked under them.

  “What would happen,” Charmian asked, “if Caesar should die or be murdered while you visit him in Rome? He has the falling sickness and a host of enemies. His wife will hardly love you. She would surely try to blame you for his death if he should die.”

  “They are more likely to kill me than Caesar,” Cleopatra answered, “and I feel that my time has not yet come. I feel an urge in me to do things, not to hesitate and weigh and analyze.”

  “I smell death,” said Charmian.

  “You can smell the sea, too,” Cleopatra answered, “You can see it; there, under the moon, all cold and merciless. But need it drown us?”

  She had plenty of encouragement to offset Tros, Olympus, Charmian and one or two others who dared to advise her against going. The librarian officials were as eager as herself to spread in Rome the culture that they counted on to change the face of history. There was no pride greater than theirs or less amenable to political arguments, which they regarded as beneath contempt.

  “Flood Rome with learning and with art,” they urged her. “Take with you philosophers, sculptors, painters, poets and historians. Bestow that priceless gift on Rome and Rome will forever after worship you as the source of her civilization!”

  And the Jews insisted, They sent Esias to present their views, accompanied by scores of slaves all loaded down with gifts for Roman ladies whom Cleopatra might see fit to patronize.

  “Trade,” said Esias, “is as blood in the veins of nations. Take with you some of my people, and the trade of Egypt, I can promise you, will multiply like kine and camels in a fat year. Use your influence in Rome to give the Jews advantages, and the wealth of Alexandria shall become a proverb.”

  Probably Apollodorus did more to confirm her own determination than all other influences combined. He hated Rome. He did not want to go to Rome, where members of the aristocracy did not compete in chariot races and his own peculiar personal advantages were more likely than not to arouse antagonism Shrewd in his own way, and aware that Roman vice and virtue were as different from the Alexandrian as iron is from copper, he was daring enough to be insolent because he knew that Cleopatra liked him personally too well to take serious offense.

  “The trouble with you, Royal Egypt,” he assured her, “is that you are much too innocent. You think that because you are an altruist the world will recognize the fact and turn to altruism to oblige you. You are like a rose — by which I mean that you are not without thorns — and you remind me of a rose set in a pig-pen, trying to please the pigs by blooming marvelously. We have a rather reasonable breed of pigs in Egypt, and as long as you bloom we will lie in the sun and enjoy you. But the Romans will regard you as an insult to their sty and as an altogether tasty morsel, viewed as fodder. Your thorns which we are far too careful of our comfort to care to tamper with, will merely serve as a condiment to sharpen the Roman appetite. Stay in Egypt. Bloom where blossom is allowed to blow at its appointed time.”

  “You shall live in Rome,” she said, “as my permanent legate unless you rise to this occasion and make our entry into Rome as splendid as the rising sun!”

  He took her at her word. Tros utterly refused to let his ship be made into a plaything, as he called it, so she had to be contented with the purple sails and gilded serpent at the bow that were his own idea of dignity. But the fleet, that was loaded with gifts and priests, librarians, astronomers, traders, slaves of every known nation and craftsmen of every known art, was a purple and golden dream — a mystery of opulence, in the van of which Tros’ great war-ship plunged like a leviathan, the more majestic since the others were so gaily feminine.

  Her brother — the child of Ptolemy Auletes’ drunken old age and half-witted at best — was ailing, so she ran no risk of leaving him behind to die, with the inevitable consequence of rumors that she had caused him to be poisoned in her absence. She brought him to Rome with her, with well-known doctors in attendance and accompanied by individuals who might, if left behind with him, have started a conspiracy; men and women whose obvious interest it was to keep the boy alive as long as possible and on whom, in the event of his death, disgrace would fall if there were any hint of murder.

  “Another symptom of her innocence. She would better have drowned him publicly like a kitten too many,” Apollodorus remarked. “He will die soon. He is rickety, anemic, rotten with scrofula, and ought to die to save himself from misery. But the more precautions she takes, the more doctors she employs, the more surely the gossips will swear she killed him She might as well have the satisfaction of deserving the credit. It would show her common sense. Caesar would do it without hesitating. So would I. But she lacks common sense. She has only genius. She is amusing but not practical.”

  But common sense was more than half her genius. She was far too wise to enter Rome by land, for instance, and steal any of Caesar’s thunder by anticipating his coming triumph. She proposed to be indispensable to Caesar, not a nuisance to him She had brought a fleet of corn-ships in her wake to enable him to feed the Roman mob at her cost and to his own advantage. It was at her request that Caesar did not come to Ostia to meet her; he could not have done it without all Rome’s knowledge, and she even asked that the senatorial committee of reception should be no larger or more important than that usually accorded to a visiting potentate.

  She combined, in fact, splend
or with tactful self-suppression, choosing to travel by boat and by night up the Tiber, increasing her prestige by the atmosphere of secrecy that started countless rumors spreading without offering the slightest competition to Caesar’s all-dominant fame — adding to it rather than detracting from it and affording Caesar opportunity to greet her in the privacy of his villa on the Tiber-side that he had placed at her disposal.

  He had aged perceptibly since she had seen him last. Standing between torches, on the marble landing at the foot of steps that led to terraced gardens surrounding the villa, he looked drawn and pale. More dignified than ever, he had lost a little of his former charm of manner, and his cordiality, though genuine, was strained, as if he no longer possessed the ability to throw off official cares and be personal and human. Everything was studied. He had posted himself to appear statuesque. With a gesture he included all Rome in his person as receiving her with honor. But the darkness and the night-roar of the city, the apparent loneliness of Tiber-bank (only apparent: there were troops within hail), the torches, and the water gurgling at the piles, the sheen of light on shields where, like a row of statues in the dark, his bodyguard and lictors watched him motionless, all emphasized the deathly whiteness of his figure and a feel of tragedy impending that made Cleopatra shudder. Tros, emerging from the barge behind her, nudged Apollodorus.

  “Is this the bank of Tiber or of Styx?” he whispered.

  But Caesar’s spoken greeting was delivered with vigor and a little laughter, as if suddenly he realized how deeply he had loved and how empty his life had been since leaving Alexandria — a mere series of things and deeds, no spiritual fulness such as he experienced with her beneath a gentler sky. Holding out his arms toward her, for a moment he forgot everything except that he was glad to see her.

  “This destiny,” he said, “that flatters and then frenzies us, that joins and separates us, is a poor thing, Egypt! Let us challenge it and have our will of it! These eyes have not seen anything so welcome as yourself since they last looked on the Lochias.”

  But she avoided his embrace until he had taken their child in his arms, she receiving it sleeping from the nurse and drawing aside the shawl that he might see by torchlight how the tiny thing resembled him.

  “An omen!” he said. “He is a Caesar. He weeps not!”

  But at the word the child awoke and vented riotous displeasure, yelling for his wet-nurse.

  Other incidents occurred to spoil the concord of the night. Caesar, normally so graceful and sure on his feet, stumbled as he turned to mount the steps beside the litter he had provided for Cleopatra. He caught hold of the litter and saved himself, but not without cutting his knee on the edge of the stone. He made nothing of it, but his lictors and the men-at-arms grew solemn, one of them advising him to send an offering to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.

  “For the moment I forgot I am a god,” he answered irritably.

  It annoyed him that he had forgotten to greet Tros and Apollodorus. He turned on the steps and waited for them, speaking then less courteously than he probably intended, stroking his brow with his hand because his brain was crowded with a host of contradictory thoughts that blurred memory and prevented the dignified condescension he would normally have shown.

  But he had regained suavity, at least of manner, by the time he reached the villa, and by the time he had led Cleopatra into the vast reception hall and she had praised it, he was almost the Caesar of earlier days, considerate and gently courteous, his eyes regaining their old cold brilliance and his voice assured, amused, a trifle highly pitched but dignified.

  They found a room together where the slaves had set food and wine, and only Charmian came in with them to play the servant and protect them from intrusion with her calm, discreet, all-watchful and unnoticeable hovering; and in the two hours while the house was being filled with mounds of luggage and the fretful eunuchs wondered who should find accommodation for them all, Caesar and Cleopatra found a basis for new mutual regard, the stronger since she made no challenge to his outworn physical emotions. Sensuously he was a dying flame that might be fanned up for a moment but would then cease. Intellectually he was weary but as vigorous as ever and as capable of new enthusiasm. They had been comrades as much as lovers; she resumed the comradeship, directing her assault against his one weak point, his loneliness, reminding him that she was the only woman he had ever trusted with his inmost thoughts, and how she had opened to him realms of imagination where no common minds could reach to criticize and carp and sting.

  “Confess,” she said, laughing, “that I showed you how and why you are immortal, and that you now seek to rival the gods! Isn’t that why you neglected me?”

  “I am told,” he answered kindly, “that you have converted what you are pleased to call neglect into an opportunity. Are you not absolute in Egypt?”

  “Absolute?” she asked. “With Caesar shining in the firmament and Caesar’s son each day a full day nearer manhood? Twenty years and he will be older than I was when you and I met. I should be a poor pupil, or else Caesar a poor instructor, if I could not use those twenty years to some advantage. I am not ungrateful. You will find me a faithful friend and not inclined to strain the friendship.”

  He accepted the new status with relief that he betrayed by an immediate invitation to discuss his own plans and the future, and to link her own with his if she could find a way to do it.

  “The Senate talks,” he said, “of voting me the dictatorship for life. There is some talk, too, of making the office hereditary.”

  That was a plain enough hint. But she knew as well as he did where the danger ahead of them lay.

  “Caesar’s son,” she answered shrewdly, “if a Roman, might inherit the dictatorship. The Romans are ready for that. They will bow to a Roman. But Caesar must be a king before the Romans will accept Caesarion.”

  “Romans are not fond of the thought of being ruled by kings,” he answered rather wearily. It appeared he had been giving thought to that of late.

  “That is because they are ignorant. They can be taught, however.”

  “Try — just try to teach, for instance, Cicero!” he answered, smiling

  “Numa leges dedit!” she retorted. “Numa was a king, a high priest and a god. Can Cicero deny it? Are you not Numa’s equal? And is Cicero? Make wise laws, and Cicero, who can only talk about them, will appear ridiculous. And is there not an ancient prophecy that Rome shall never conquer Parthia until the Romans fight under a Roman king?”

  “I had forgotten that,” said Caesar.

  “You have too much to remember. Offer the crown to Cicero and bid him fight the Parthians!”

  Caesar smiled. “I am afraid he might accept!” he said ironically. “He is one of those men who are friendly when in need of money but whose indignation leads them to take strange courses. However, that ancient prophecy is worth considering.”

  CHAPTER XXXVI. “Who is the ruler of Rome?”

  They who take thought may observe, and will be wise if they remember, that the celebration of a victory is on the one hand silly gloating over other men’s misfortune, and on the other a false semblance of finality, beneath which treason among the victors bides its time.

  — Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

  DAILY during weeks and months that followed it became more clear to every thoughtful man in Rome that Caesar was planning to make himself king. But as to how much Cleopatra had to do with it opinions differed. Some thought that she restrained his insolence, which cost him countless friendships to offset the popularity he won by extravagant bribes to the mob in the form of free food and entertainment. Others blamed the whole of his extravagance and demagogic strategy on her, knowing that he was drawing freely on her treasury and forgetting that he had never used any other than corrupt methods of controlling Roman politics, the only difference being that he now accepted gifts from her instead of borrowing from money-lenders and repaying them by letting them plunder helpless provinces.

  Accusat
ion was the breath of life to Rome. Without a scandal to discuss, the city life fell foul and flat, the very forum seemed a place of dreariness. The scandal of Cleopatra’s residence in Caesar’s villa, while the dictator himself lived in a smaller house within the city with his legal wife Calpurnia, provided a surging undercurrent to the excitement of his four-day triumph, the splendor of which exceeded anything the world had ever seen, but the effect of which was hardly what Caesar had anticipated.

  On the first day he rode through the streets as the conqueror of Gaul, with Vercingetorix in chains and so many Gaulish prisoners and so much plunder that to the reeking, yelling mob it almost seemed as if the whole of Gaul had been transported into Rome for their profit and amusement. Brave Vercingetorix, neglected in a dungeon for six miserable years, was hooted through the streets unpitied, few remembering the terms on which he had surrendered himself to Caesar in order to save his nation from further bloodshed. Tros tried to speak to him but the crowd and the soldiers prevented, until at last, as the procession neared the capitol, he saw them lead the unhappy chief away to the place of execution. Then he fought his way back to where Cleopatra looked on from a balcony. It was dark before he reached her.

  Caesar was ascending the capitol now by torchlight with forty elephants to right and left of his chariot, passing between serried ranks of veterans who hailed him as Caesar — victor — imperator. For a while the roar upswelling deafened Cleopatra’s ears. It was Apollodorus, scornfully surveying Rome’s artless histrionics and enthusiasm over plundered peoples’ misery, who at last drew her attention.

  “The Lord Tros is irritated,” he remarked. “Soothe him before he dies of apoplexy, or we will have no admiral to take us home when this orgy is over!”

  Tros wasted few words: “Caesar has murdered Vercingetorix,” he growled. “Caesar, who they tell me wept at the news of Pompey’s later end, now breaks his word to a nobler enemy and butchers him to please the mob. I go from here. I will return to the fleet at Ostia. I beg your leave of absence.”