by Talbot Mundy
“Vale, Caesar!” said Apollodorus. “And may I, too, die as swiftly when the day comes, in an hour of dignity and fame! And may T be as great an artist! But may I not leave such a riddle for my friends! For what Tros and I shall say to Royal Egypt is beyond my wit to imagine!”
“Say to her?” Tros spoke at last. “I will say to her that mice and rats have bitten her lion’s veins and bled him! I will tell her that mean men slew a hero! I will say to her that, though the cruelty and crime of Caesar was a foul blot on a fair earth, they who slew him are no better than the worms that writhe on battle-fields! A man lies dead, Apollodorus. A rogue and a liar — a slayer — a thief — a vain, intolerant, ambitious tyrant, but not a coward — a man, upstanding! They who slew him are the rats of Rome — faugh! — sewer rats! — too cowardly and too incapable and mean to win a shred of liberty by being worth it!”
“Tros,” said Apollodorus, “do you realize that we are standing here with naked weapons, and that anyone who enters—”
“Come!” Tros answered. “Let us go and do our duty. Caesar’s task is finished. Egypt’s and ours lies all ahead of us.”
CHAPTER XLII. “ROW — Row, you lubbers, and take Egypt home again!”
This little life we lead on earth is but a school for courage. If we learn more courage when the game is losing, or is lost, should we then envy the apparent winner?
— Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.
IT WAS five days before Cleopatra left Rome. There were not five minutes of them wasted. Dry-eyed, unflinching, she received the news from Tros’ lips, Apollodous looking on in silence and she lifting her chin as Tros faced her in the garden where she and Caesar had so recently said their farewell.
“Courage, Royal Egypt! I bring—”
“There is no need, Tros, to warn me what you bring, for I can read it in your eyes before your lips speak. Caesar is dead. Is it not so?”
“He is dead,” Tros answered.
“Did he die of epilepsy?”
“They have slain him Miserable men — a Brutus, seeking coward comfort for his own soul, blubbing about honor, stabbing his own father for the sake of a sneak’s theory of statecraft! Cassius, Casca, Dolabella — swine and servile flatterers! — a dozen cowards hacking at a man unarmed!”
“Caesar will be glad,” she said, “that he did not die of epilepsy. I, too, am grateful for that; for he was very proud. And where was Antony?”
“They fooled him. There was a senator named Trebonius, who was presently joined by others, who held Antony in conversation outside the curia.”
“Antony, I think, might not be very difficult to fool,” she answered. “Where is he now? And who rules Rome? Is there a man who can do it?”
Tros told her how he and Apollodorus, leaving Caesar where he lay, had gone in search of Antony and found him hiding in his house — that great house he had bought from the estate of Pompey with the money Cleopatra lent him. And how Antony begged them to keep Cleopatra for a while in Rome until it was certain what the mob would do and how the legions would receive the news of Caesar’s death.
“By Bacchus, I am surprised they did not kill me,” Antony had said. “And they will kill her if she calls the least attention to herself before the mob is got under control! If she should run now they would raise a hue and cry. By Bacchus, what an opportunity! Do you see what Cassius and Brutus will attempt? They will blame poor Egypt for all Caesar’s sins, and justify themselves by inflaming the people against her. Bid her stay until I feel my way a little. She must not be taken fleeing on her way to Ostia.”
Cleopatra, however, was not in a mood for flight, though Tros was all in favor of it.
“Make haste!” he advised her. “I will take you down the river before Rome even starts to think We will be in Egypt before the mob has found a leader.”
“Think you Antony will fight?” she asked him.
“Fight whom? Whom shall he fight, and for what? Mark Antony is thinking of his own skin — thinking himself lucky that he was not slain along with Caesar — likely enough to run for it — probably wanting you to stay here so that he may bolt along with you if necessary! Study your own best interest.”
“Tros, if I think of myself,” she answered, “I shall break down and the gods will go away from me in scorn. I think of Egypt. Where is Antony? You say in Pompey’s mansion? I will go to him.”
Disguise was easy — an Arab burnous and a golden-hilted scimiter. It was easy to imagine her one of those young scions of a patriarchal clan, followed by a veiled wife, Charmian, bearing the child — not so easy to imagine Tros a tribal servitor; Olympus and Apollodorus looked the part far better. Tros, though, had the advantage that he looked too powerful and savage to be interfered with; he wore his own long sword beneath an Arab cloak, for practical considerations, and an Arab scimiter on view to save appearances, which were almost comical, because he strode as no Arab ever did, and the white cloth, bound with a golden cord across his forehead and descending to his shoulders, made his head look twice even its normal size. There was no time to get horses, litters, anything — nor anything to gain by letting slaves into the secret. They went on foot.
All Rome was in a ferment, men and women surging through the streets, their flow on the whole toward the forum but broken and interrupted by the backwash of gathering factions in quest of a leader — and no leaders anywhere to find. Five — ten — twenty thousand different accounts of Caesar’s death, none even near approximate; and several reports that legions were on the march already, either to wreak vengeance on the city or to make Brutus — Cassius — somebody, perhaps Octavian, dictator. Stories that half the Senate had been butchered.
Nobody seemed to think of Antony. His great white marble house was guarded, but with the guards so carefully hidden that the place seemed vacant. There was a porter’s lodge, but no porter, and the outer gate was locked and fastened with an iron chain. It was not until Tros looked up into a cypress tree that overhung the wall and saw a leg protruding from a shadow that they obtained any response to efforts to attract attention. Apollodorus climbed on Tros’ shoulders, seized the leg and dragged down a slave, who was frantic with terror but amenable to threat, persuasion, bribery and violence all blended into one. When he had cried out half a dozen sentences two lictors came and undid the lock on the gate, but they were without their red cloaks and fasces.
Antony received his mysterious visitors in a darkened room, to which Pompey’s splendid furniture gave an atmosphere of dimly suggested eastern luxury. He was wearing chain mail under his outer clothing and his face was a picture of doubt, fear, worry, indecision, anger and a sort of Heraclean energy seeking an outlet. Nobody in Rome could look, or be more boyishly perplexed than Antony whenever the props of optimism had been knocked away from under him Normally more boisterous and merry than a gale in spring-time, he was now a beaten bull, as dangerous, but not more dangerous, inclined to hide and sulk and pity himself.
But Cleopatra knew exactly how to manage him. It was not for nothing that she and Caesar had discussed Mark Antony or that Caesar, never knowing when his end might be, had told her secrets that no other person in the world knew, unless possibly Calpurnia, and except the Vestal Virgins — the custodians of all such documents as men wished to be kept inviolable and not even discoverable until the proper time. Her whole thought was for her Land of Khem, as Caesar’s had been to avoid such rivalries, in the event of his sudden death, as sundered Alexander’s empire.
“Antony, Caesar is dead, and there is nothing to be gained by any such unmanly or unwomanly yielding to desolation as would only stir his spirit to contempt. It is an hour for deeds, not meditations. Sorrow is ill-served by idleness. Those ingrate murderers will not be idle.”
“They are likelier to send and murder me,” said Antony. His fear was not physical. He was afraid of losing, not of dying; whereas Caesar had never feared either possibility. “I am wondering whether or not to offer myself to the legions as their leader.”
“I despise Octavian!” said Antony.
“Then understand this; I never met Octavian, but from what Caesar has told me he is no fool. He is a better man to count on than those murderers, and he is likely to be much too wise to try to ingratiate himself with the public by blaming dead Caesar. But that is what those murderers will do. They must. How otherwise are they to justify their miserable deed? They must accuse him of all imaginable treasons. And Octavian, unless you forestall him, will come hurrying to Rome to appear as Caesar’s champion and to defend his memory. He will come — he will come in any case, and he is likely enough to march with several legions from the north of Italy. So when he does come, let him find you a far stouter advocate of Caesar than he himself could ever hope to be; so that he must befriend you, and take your side of any argument.”
“It will take Octavian days and days to get here,’” answered Antony. “And what about those others meanwhile?”
“Shivering for their coward skins, mistrusting one another, and waiting to see what the soldiers and the mob will do about it!” she retorted. “Stand up, Antony! Get Caesar’s will and read it — read it to the people! Send a messenger to those caitiffs — is it true that they are hiding in the capitol? — then send them a messenger and suggest they should proclaim a general amnesty: something they can hardly do without including your name in it. That will give you the advantage of initiative, and it will make them think you hold a stronger hand than at the moment is perhaps true. Strength, Antony, is decision — swiftness — will, to leap at opportunity!”
“And you?” he asked. “You are not safe now in Caesar’s villa.”
“I will stay here,” she retorted.
Sudden, new emotions changed the entire expression of his face. It had not dawned on his bewildered mind until that moment that she would need a new ally to provide the force, so necessary to protect her wealth until Egypt could stand on its own feet. Fortunately, Fulvia was absent. He stood up. He extended his hands toward her.
“Egypt! Royal Egypt!” he began. But she interrupted him
“Octavian,” she said, “may covet Egypt.”
“If I defend you from Octavian?”
“Defend me, and then discover whether I lack gratitude.”
“I will need money,” he suggested.
She had thought of that before she came to visit him. Apollodorus had a bill of exchange in her favor, drawn by Esias the Jew on a Roman firm of corn contractors. It was already endorsed. She bade Apollodorus hand it over, and even Antony’s eyes opened wide at the amount.
“That is a royal present, Egypt,” he said, stressing the noun with noticeable emphasis. Repayment, unless of grudges, was not a permanent obsession with him.
Nevertheless, he was a man of deeds when sober, and aroused, with somebody to put ideas in his head and to inspire him with funds and a view of the future. He had brains — ability — a splendid presence — energy; and if his gratitude was mere emotional reaction and as evanescent as the money in his coffers, it was as heroic as his appetite and muscles while it lasted.
He began that minute. He became a titan of directed energy, his guiding spirit Cleopatra and his field of action all the purlieus of the city. He tired out men and horses and his own throat — slaked the latter with a gallon of the choicest wine from Pompey’s cellar, and, when night fell, staged a masterpiece of melodrama. He had ordered Caesar’s body carried out into the forum, where it lay in state on woven gold and purple, with a cohort guarding it, all standing with their arms reversed.
There, by moonlight, and with flickering torches adding smoky mystery, he stood — a figure of heroic grief — and gazed in silence at the stern face of the dead dictator. Thousands watched him. They were even on the roofs of the forum buildings. There in solemn melancholy, by appointment, he received Calpurnia, Caesar’s widow, and received from her authority as sole executor of Caesar’s will. He held her hand and led her toward two Vestal Virgins, who had come in state, with their lictors and their company of guards, to offer their commiseration and the protection of their own inviolable sanctuary. By midnight Antony was much the most important man in Rome.
Dawn found him in the saddle, showing himself here, there, everywhere, allaying the excitement, and yet stirring the suspense, announcing the suggested amnesty and thus obliging the conspirators to approve it, with their thunder stolen, and authority and influence by inches slipping into Antony’s sole hands.
That afternoon he opened Caesar’s will and read it to an astonished audience, who had never dreamed Caesar would make such thoughtful and ironic preparation for sure and condign vengeance on whoever might succeed in killing him before his time: for every Roman citizen three hundred sesterces, and to the Roman people his estates and gardens; not a hint that he expected to be king; no mention of Caesarion or Cleopatra. The last will of a man who loved the Roman people. An indictment of his murderers, that might have been the reason for that grim ironic smile whenever intimates had warned him of the danger of assassination.
Promptly the conspirators began to try to change their tactics. But it was too late. Cinna and some others had been making hot-head speeches against Caesar’s memory and it was already known all over Rome that they had sought to justify themselves by blackening the great man’s name. They were at Antony’s mercy, and he forbearing with them for the moment solely because he might need their support against Octavian, who had no other possible course than that of follower in Caesar’s footsteps, and whose jealousy might make him openly the enemy of Antony unless Antony took care to have alternative alliances available.
The ferment in the city raged until the fifth day after Caesar’s death, when all the preparations for the funeral were ready — mainly preparation of the public mind by Antony’s adherents, who had worked up a fever of expectation. None knew what would happen. All knew that the occasion would be seized by Antony to make his bid for popular approval. Every street in every direction near the forum was thronged with men and women, through whose ranks the lictors conducting Antony had the utmost difficulty in forcing a way.
He was not alone. Cleopatra had insisted on her own eyes witnessing what happened; she had sent Caesarion under escort in Charmian’s care, to the riverside, where the long barge waited, manned by forty of Tros’ best rowers. So there followed Antony four hooded mourners in long drab-colored robes — all males, apparently, and one enormous, one so small as possibly to be the big man’s son. But they might have been slaves, or almost anything; they were nondescripts — quite unimportant-looking people, who attracted no attention. All eyes were on Antony.
The forum was smoky and red from the flare of the torches. The shadowy shapes of the buildings vaguely framed a throng that moved in unison. A coppery sheen flashed from the soldiers’ shields, that clashed and clashed together, punctuating — rhythmically pulsing to a dirge of women’s voices: a dirge as old as Rome, that had a litany of lamentations running through it, borne by the murmuring voices of men, like rumbling underground. The wild clouds, curtaining the moon, took gruesome and fantastic shapes as if the whole of nature were in league to signalize that night. The very soul of Rome seemed riven by the grief that — swaying, wailing, ululating — dreed its dirge in final salutation of the mighty dead.
The lictors made a place for Antony’s four drab attendants, deep in the shadowy corner of an office portico, where they could stand on upturned boxes with their backs against the wall. There were steps within two paces of
them leading to the alley between that building and the next; and thence there was a maze of back-streets, leading anywhither — unsafe, but affording easy passage, since the crowd was in the wider thoroughfares.
“Now by the brow of Pallas, you shall keep your word!” Tros growled in Cleopatra’s ear. “No dallying! We go hence in the instant of my decision!”
“I will go when I have seen that fatal arrow I have shot at Rome!” she answered. She was watching Antony. He had mounted the heavy scaffolding on which the bier was laid and for a moment he gazed at Caesar’s dead face.
Then he burst into a flood of tears and, turning toward the crowd, began to lead their dirge, monotonously chanting and repeating lines from Accius that every Roman knew.
“I saved them. I have given life. They slew me. They have given death!”
Every few moments Antony would pause, amid the clashing of the shields and shrilling lamentations of the women, to turn toward Caesar’s corpse and break into loud weeping. He was making magic — the old magic of the forum — concentrating in himself in person all the passionate emotion of a city, gathering its impulse, leading it until it should uplift him to a feat of oratory that the very roots of Rome should recognize as Rome’s own heart made manifest in golden words.
“Friends! Romans! Countrymen!”
He burst into his speech at last, and there fell, like the hush of the forest when night waits for a rising moon, a silence filled with breathing.
“Come,” said Cleopatra. “Come now. Antony has won them. Rome shall pay a price for slaying Caesar such as even Caesar might have hesitated to enforce!”
She had to tug at Tros’ long hood; he would have waited to hear that oratory. And Apollodorus would have lingered, only Tros took hold of him and thrust him forward down the steps into abysmal darkness, where their feet went splashing into pools of filth and unseen mutilated beggars scrambled out of reach of hurrying feet. Tros picked up Cleopatra — carried her — and ran to where horses waited for them in a stable up a back-street.