by Talbot Mundy
“It is not too late to warn Caesar and perhaps to save him. He can turn back. And yet not many have the courage or the skill to do that. It is not too late for you to break free.”
“S-s-sshah! You have been reading auguries! You have been bitten by the Roman dogs and now you study entrails instead of stars!”
“Egypt! Should you take a dagger and cut Caesar’s throat you would slay him no more surely than you shall if you remain in Rome! For I tell you, you and he have gone too far already and it is his way that you follow, not your own. Neither do you understand the Romans, whose god is Rome, as Caesar’s god is also, though they know it not.”
“They call their god Jupiter Capitolinus,” she objected.
“Romulus would be a better name for him Rome better yet. That force, that influence, that grim intelligence that men call Rome is as resentful as the she-wolf that the Romans took by intuition as their symbol. It will avenge itself on Caesar.”
“Why?” she asked him. “Caesar has done more for Rome than—”
“Nay, nay! More for Caesar! He will slay Rome, he will abolish it if given time, for he despises it! So Rome will slay him, and devour him, and proclaim him in the years to come the greatest Roman. Caesar, who now calls himself a god, knows nothing about gods or devils but believes he deals with men — as in a sense he does. They are as much the masters of their own minds as the fire is master of itself, or water, or the wind. Caesar is too strong for Rome, but he is as easy to kill as any other man.”
“How shall they kill him? He will leave Rome. He will march on Parthia.”
“He will never leave for Parthia. For if he did, he would burst through Parthia as Alexander did and, like Alexander, he would wreck, not strengthen what he leaves behind him. Rome knows, though the Romans do not and are only filled with vague dread. Who are you to question me? You who know that even as the spirit of the Land of Khem is a living spirit, an intelligence, so is the spirit of Rome a living thing and an intelligence. Caesar has lost his way between the two of them, and you have nearly lost your way. Turn ere it be too late!”
“Then did I not do well to match myself with Caesar and make him love me?”
“Aye, well; and well indeed. And had you stayed in Egypt, Caesar would have come to you. For in his heart he despises Rome. And in Egypt he could have been protected. As a king he would have presently defied Rome and destroyed it.”
“Do you mean, you know that Caesar is to die?” she asked him. “Have you read his horoscope?”
“His horoscope is none of my affair. But I warn you that you are in danger.”
“Danger?” she answered. “Do you think to terrify me with the name of danger? And if Caesar is in danger, shall I not stay here and guide and shelter him?”
“Are you for Rome then, or for Egypt?” asked Olympus. “Is it pride that governs you, or duty to the Land of Khem? Get hence! Get hence to your own land, Egypt, ere the Romans deal with you as they will with Caesar!”
“If Caesar is in danger I will warn him. I will stay and warn him,” she retorted. “Caesar is the father of my son.”
“And are you not the mother of your son? I tell you, Caesar is in greater danger if you stay than if you go away,” Olympus answered. “I have done my duty. I have told you. I will say no more.”
“What is this news from Alexandria?” she asked him suddenly. “Is it serious? Is it urgent?”
“I am no judge.”
“Have you spoken to Tros about it?”
“Yes.”
“Is it not a mere rumor that Tros has magnified into a monstrous danger to persuade me?”
“I know not.”
“Have not you and he and Apollodorus taken counsel together to persuade me?”
“We have spoken of it.”
“I will speak of it with Caesar. You may tell Tros that if he ever lies to me again by as much as the width of a hair, and for any reason, that I will marry him to Charmian, whose chastity will give him gray hairs, and that I will set him thereafter to breaking ships, not building them! I am not pleased with you, Olympus. Oh, what a sordid gloom you live in! Oh, what a shroud of fearsome consequence you overlay on fairness! Are the gods deaf, dumb and blind that they should leave me helpless? Are they stupid? And is destiny so fickle? You have let the smoke and the stink of Rome become a veil between you and your good sense!”
Very early in the day she sent for Caesar, who came with Antony. Caesar was not pleased at being summoned, but he was complaisant since it was the first time she had ever taken such a liberty. The two drove slowly in a chariot, preceded by the lictors, followed by Caesar’s almost royal bodyguard, and looking very splendid as they sat behind the charioteer discussing some new plan of Caesar’s for the drainage of the marshes, studying the drawings that they held stretched out between them on their knees. She received them in state and rather distantly, because she was annoyed that Caesar had not come to her alone.
Nevertheless, they spent the whole day talking, lying facing one another on three couches in the little room in which the gods and goddesses were represented as conspiring for and against the fortunes of embattled Troy. From time to time the servants brought in wine for Antony; and once he left them for the dining-room to eat enormously; but Caesar and Cleopatra fasted, and it was while Antony was absent that they actually determined their course, although every detail was discussed between the three of them.
“Caesar,” she said, “they say the auguries are steadfastly against us.”
“They have ever been against me,” he retorted. “I have never won a battle but the augurs of the enemy advised them I must lose it. On the day I crossed the Rubicon a bird fell dead out of a blue sky. Nothing worse than that could happen, unless that the standards should stick in the ground when the order was given to march; and they did! I had to lie about it, or the legions might have mutinied. An augury is an excellent thing with which to paralyze one’s opponents, but a very poor thing to depend on otherwise.”
An Alexandrian tenor in the hall began to sing for them — a man of music, whose voice was an instrument interpreting the unseen glories of the universe. The words of the song were undistinguishable, so not robbing music but leaving it by that much nearer to the realm where limits are unknown and thought, like waves on an endless ocean, rolls in grandeur unconfined.
“Caesar, shall we be satisfied to leave a world the way we found it?” she asked suddenly, after one of the long silences left by the music when thought was feeling its way hack to earth. “Do you suppose I care for this Cleopatra that the Romans think would like to rob your wife Calpurnia of her bondage to a law?”
Caesar chuckled. “Have you heard the latest suggestion of the Senate? They propose a law permitting me to have two wives, so that I may marry you and not divorce the other.”
“Caesar, there is no hope of explaining things to such men. They must be shown, and even then not many will understand, but they will obey, as a dog obeys his master. It must be proved to them that it is not theirs to make laws or to govern themselves, until they pattern themselves on better than a human model and become godlike.”
Caesar rather resented that idea. “How many of them have it in them to be godlike?” he retorted. “I have only found one Caesar in the world.”
She laughed. “And if you found another, you would conquer him or kill him! Caesar, you must conquer Rome, or Rome will kill you!”
“Rome lies at my feet,” he answered. “And as for killing me, I think they will wait for this poor worn body of mine to fill out its remaining years. If otherwise, if what you say of death is true, then death should be something rather to look forward to than to dread.”
“Whoever dreads death is a fool.” she answered. “But it is equally foolish to die too soon, seeing how long is eternity and how short are theca little spans we spend on earth. Will you die, and at the hands of Romans, before you have done your wort? You flatter them too much, Caesar. You have let them think it is their privilege to m
ake you a king, or not to, as they please; so that they hesitate and some of them, swelled by their own importance, enter into mean conspiracies, pretending to themselves that one or two hundred mean men’s minds are greater and more important than one Caesar’s royal spirit. They are like pebbles saying, ‘Lo, we are many and we weigh much; is a single pearl the equal of us all?’ And they can grind the pearl to pieces in the sea of their passion and greed and jealousy. Or they are like dogs that say, ‘Why should a man rule over us, since he is one and we are many?’ And they watch their chance to drag him down and kill him.”
She watched Caesar’s face. He did not answer her, but lay still, chin on elbows, looking very tired but with the cold-gray glitter in his eyes that spoke of an incorrigible craving to be absolute, and then more absolute. For even he had recognized that one limit reached is but the threshold to immeasurable altitudes beyond it.
“Caesar, why argue with dogs? Will you go on your knees to let them use their teeth on you? There is a nobler way. Present them with accomplished fact, as you did when you crossed the Rubicon; and in the meanwhile, give them bones to gnaw on, lest they gnaw yours: bones that will make them think, it may be, they are gnawing yours and mine, while you and I accomplish that which is our destiny.”
“And you suggest?” asked Caesar, staring at her.
“I am the offense. They ascribe to me all kinds of lusts and black arts in order to justify and explain to themselves a hatred of me that they do not understand. It is not their hatred; it is Rome’s. It is like the hatred of the old for the new, or of death for life — the hatred of corruption for the incorruptible. It deceives them and makes them ascribe to me the vileness of their own thoughts. Unless they themselves rebel against, it, it will live on them, devouring them and growing ever greater until the world goes down with them and it into a sleep of cruelty, stupidity and shame — as men who worship wine go down into sottishness, and still crave wine, and still say wine is the friend of man and not a vehicle of dark intelligence but a glorious stuff which man makes for his own profit. How shall they learn that their worship of Rome is a curse and a lie and a trap for themselves unless you prove it to them, and provide them with a better worship, that may lead on to a better yet?”
“I confess to you that Rome is a vortex of all the vile passions of men, that men have deified,” said Caesar. “And Rome holds none of my affection. But I have started to cleanse it. And I have always used your method, that you advise, of giving Romans bones to gnaw on. They have never had such spectacles in the arena as I have provided. Even Pompey, who always dreamed of being king, never dreamed of such feasts of blood and bones as I have fed to them. And I have fed to them no honest men — all criminals and scoundrels—”
“Wherein,” she interrupted, “you have encouraged them to glorify themselves and their own self-righteousness, which in their turn they have attributed to Rome, the ghoul that is their guiding genius! And now you offer to permit them to make you king. But is it possible that two kings should ascend the same throne? Were not even Romulus and Remus enemies at last? Can you and Rome be rulers of the Romans? Romulus slew Remus. Rome will slay Caesar, unless Caesar knows what he is doing and destroys Rome by proving to the Romans that their god whom they ignorantly worship can no longer protect them and that the new, that Caesar shows them, must be better than the old. But if Rome slays you, then Rome will deify you later on, and hide behind your name, and instead of a kingdom of gods upon earth as there used to be will be a time of darkness masquerading as the will of men — vox populi, vox Dei — and of Caesars drawing all their inspiration from the sewers of the underworld, whence in very truth they will derive authority! But they will say they draw their inspiration and their power from the upper realms.”
“What would you have me do?” asked Caesar, wondering at her. There was still the same hard glitter in his eyes, but the deeply chiseled lines of his aging face betrayed affection for her that he had never felt for other women — an affection of the intellect, that gave to him short and sudden glimpses of a feeling higher than emotion, which he could not and did not stay to analyze. She knew she had won Caesar. But to win Rome she must now reverse herself and play her master stroke:
“In the first place, I will leave Rome. I am the offense. They have concentrated rancor against me. And so if I go, as it were I will open a gate in a brimming reservoir, and provide relief, and save you from a danger. And besides: it will do no harm to my Alexandrians to let them know that I am coming There is unrest, that I know the trick of calming And do you make ready to advance on Parthia. Send Brutus out of Rome. Give Cassius and Dolabella their commands as far away as possible — difficult commands that will keep them occupied. Or, if you wish to be rid of them, leave Cassius and Dolabella here in Rome, to put themselves at the head of disaffection, which is sure to rear itself as soon as you start eastward. Encourage them to rise against you, Caesar, in your rear — Rome against Caesar, for the last time! Turn on them! Parthia can wait. Turn back and slay Rome! Let them know that their Caesar is king, and his capital Alexandria, or, if you will, some other place.”
Mark Antony, returning from the feast of wine and wild-boar, pheasants, fish and anchovies, with half a flagon full of wine again to aid digestion, had no argument to offer against leaving Rome for Alexandria.
“For Rome,” he remarked, “is a city of stinking narrow streets and filthy weather, in which for every Roman you find nine or ten of some other breed, too many of whom are citizens — a lot too many, so that it costs a fortune every year to buy their votes. By Heracles, I am a Roman but I would exchange a long life here for a short one in Tarsus, or Athens, or Antioch, or Alexandria!”
But he was stubbornly averse to any sudden change of plan regarding Caesar’s accepting the title of king.
“By Dionysus! Men will say you are afraid of Cicero! Caesar, you owe it to your friends, who have worked so hard for you, to go on and finish the business. We have a crown all ready, made from the gold of finger-rings of your supporters melted down. We have it all worked out: the legions have been told a king of Rome shall lead them to retake the standards Crassus lost. Will you disappoint the legions?”
Antony saw only surfaces, although he had been working in a fashion underground. His jovial face beamed enthusiasm. He nearly broke the onyx table that stood between them when he struck it with his fist for emphasis — then thrust it aside because it prevented him from sitting upright.
“All good men and true are for a kingdom, Caesar! We love and admire you. We are proud of you. And we are ready! Why, even Cassius and Dolabella gave me yesterday their secret promise to be among the first to pledge their loyalty, the moment the crown is accepted. They only hang back because, by Bacchus, they are chicken-livered cowards who fear you will not go through with it. The Lupercalia! The Feast of the Lupercalia! The day is set!”
Caesar assented, though he stared at Antony and it was plain enough that there were reservations in his mind, both as to Antony’s judgment and the chances of success. He might have had his doubts of Antony’s good faith, so coldly and with such reserve did he gaze at him. Antony, conscious of the piercing scrutiny, began to wonder whether he had not omitted something that Caesar waited for him to include in the plan, as a final inducement and a last proof of boisterous loyalty. He turned to Cleopatra — thought of it — and struck his breast. He held his arms toward her:
“Egypt!” he exclaimed. “Should Caesar fail to raise you to a throne beside him, Antony will do it! Jupiter! Be all the gods my witnesses! The loveliest and wisest woman in the world shall share a throne that Caesar’s son shall later on inherit, or else Antony shall die — if necessary by his own hand.”
“So now you know,” said Caesar, smiling at Cleopatra. “Mark Antony is nothing if not a clear and loud exponent of his views!”
CHAPTER XL. “Silence at last? Praise Zeus!”
Momentum and more momentum is a merit while the thread holds. When the thread is broken — ?
> — Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.
NONE knew any longer what the Lupercalia meant except that Rome kept holiday; but there was ritual, and some of it was so ridiculous as to set the keynote for a day of wild absurdities. Lupercus, the deity honored, was vaguely associated in the public mind with Pan and Faunus. There was an aristocratic priestly college of the Luperci, from which two young men were selected, and on the day appointed for the festival these two opened the proceedings by sacrificing a dog and a goat in public. Blood from the sacrifices was then rubbed on their faces, and the ritual prescribed that they should laugh. The mysterious significance of that laughter had been long ago forgotten; it was nowadays accepted as the signal for the merrymaking to begin.
The skins of the dog and the goat were now cut into strips by the two Luperci, and were known as februa. Using these thongs as whips they ran through the streets of the city, striking at every woman within their reach, numbers of women actually offering their buttocks because a blow from the februa was supposed to induce fertility. The ceremony ended in the forum, where the Roman chosen to preside sat ready to receive the runners and to complete the ritual, surrounded by crowds of on-lookers dressed in their best, who were careful to leave ample room for the runners to approach.
Of the runners that day one was Antony — none better suited for the purpose — boisterous, jolly-laughing, horseplay loving, handsome, active, fleet enough of foot and strong-winded in spite of his gluttony. And the Roman who presided was the great Dictator, Caesar, seated on a golden throne, emaciated, pale, but very splendid, with a crowd of his trusted adherents behind him and a number of others carefully distributed amid the throngs under the colonnades on either hand.
There were rumors and an atmosphere of expectation, artfully encouraged. There were men disguised as artisans and tradesmen, ready to insert themselves amid the crowd that would before long pour into the forum in the wake of the whip-wielding runners. But if Caesar, quietly conversing with his intimates, expected anything unusual he gave no sign of it, appearing rather bored than interested.