The Memoirs of Cleopatra

by Margaret George

  Yes, the mighty Roman Senate—or part of it—came as fugitives to Ephesus, cast out of Rome by Octavian.

  Ahead of them, just in time to warn us, Ahenobarbus and Sosius put in with their swift Liburnian, and came rushing to our house, where we were sitting in the atrium enjoying the fine spring weather. The sun, straight overhead, was sparkling in the little square pool with its mosaic bottom.

  “Imperator,” called Ahenobarbus from the doorway. “We have been driven out of Rome!”

  Right behind him was Sosius, panting from the run from the harbor.

  We stared at them as if they were apparitions. They were supposed to be a thousand miles away, leading the Senate—defending our interests.

  “What?” Antony leapt up, dropping the letters he was reading off his lap. One of them rolled into the pool and sank with a gurgle.

  “Most noble…most noble…I can no longer say ‘Triumvir.’…” Sosius looked stricken.

  Yes, the Triumvirate had officially expired with the new year, and was hardly to be renewed! Now Octavian was a private citizen, technically at least. But Antony still held his military command and his eastern title of Autocrator.

  “Pray, be seated.” Antony was ever the considerate host. “Refresh yourselves.” He dragged over a bench himself, and bade them take the good chairs, as if this were a courtesy call.

  They sank down, arranging their togas around their knees. Ahenobarbus looked fierce, his eyes flashing above his wiry beard.

  “You have had no word of this?” he asked. “You did not receive my messages?”

  Antony shook his head. “Tell me now.”

  Ahenobarbus gave a grunt. “The long version or the short?”

  “First the short,” I said. Now he glared at me, then turned back to Antony. But if he expected Antony to disagree, he was disappointed.

  “In the first month of the new year, I was to preside over the Senate,” he said. “I judged the climate completely wrong to read your dispatch.”

  “But how else could Rome know?” I burst out. It seemed to me he had exceeded his commission in deciding to withhold the information. That was for us to decide, not him.

  Now he looked poisonously at me, then continued stiffly. “There was such hostility toward your eastern policy that I felt that to mention the Donations was to inflame them further. Octavian was absent from Rome. I hoped to fathom the feelings and then devise a strategy. But he”—he shot a look at Sosius—“when he took the chair the next month, decided to attack Octavian directly and call for a vote of censure against him. Then a tribune vetoed it. And before we knew what had happened, Octavian appeared in the Senate house, surrounded by armed men, and threatened us. He refused to let us read your dispatch at all, even the part about the Armenian conquest. He said he would return the next day and present all his grievances against you, with written proof, and exact punishment on Antony’s ‘creatures.’ We didn’t return on his appointed day, but left. At the same time, three hundred senators decided to come with us. ‘Any other traitors who feel the call should depart now!’ Octavian warned. And so they are following—about half the Senate.”

  Antony looked stunned. He was speechless.

  “So where does the true government of Rome reside?” I asked. “In legal terms, which half of the Senate counts?”

  “They can both claim legitimacy,” said Sosius. “There is a tradition that if the Senate must flee elsewhere, the government resides with them. But in this case, large numbers have stayed behind. Now Rome has no government at all! The Triumvirate has expired, the Senate split—” He looked as if he were going to burst into tears. “We are adrift on a perilous sea.”

  “Get hold of yourself!” barked Ahenobarbus.

  “I can’t bear another civil war,” Sosius lamented. “It has gone on and on for so long—will Rome never be at rest? Caesar, Pompey, Sextus, now you and Octavian—no, no!” He moaned. “We cannot stand another one.”

  “We will have to,” I said briskly.

  “What do you mean, ‘we’?” growled Ahenobarbus. “You are not Roman.”

  “I am intimately involved in all these movements,” I said. “Since I bore Caesar’s child fifteen years ago, I am part of Roman politics, like it or not.”

  “I don’t like it!” he returned.

  I was taken aback—not at his sentiments, but at his honesty. “There are days I don’t like it, either,” I said.

  Still Antony’s speech had not returned. Both Consuls turned to him, waiting.

  “Imperator,” said Sosius, “tell us…what shall we do?”

  “I don’t know,” Antony finally said. He looked perplexed. “Wherever shall we put all these senators?”

  “You revered the Senate so,” I reminded him. “Now you shall have them on your hands!” Perhaps it was cruel of me, but I was upset as well. Everything was so messy—and Octavian so full of surprises.

  They arrived within a few days, spilling off the boats, making their way up the harbor road and into the main part of town, clutching their belongings.

  How odd they looked, away from Rome! Transported to another setting, they lost all their formidable qualities and just seemed like any other foreigners.

  We found lodging for them only by straining the hospitality of the Ephesians to the limit.

  Octavian had promptly appointed two of his men—Valerius Messalla and Cornelius Cinna—to fill the vacant posts of Consul. The ranks had closed behind us. Our Consuls were deposed. Our entire party was in exile. There was only one way to get back—fight, defeat Octavian, and return to Rome in triumph. At last it had come to this. I had been waiting twelve years since Caesar’s death to see his true heir recognized, his false one driven from the throne. For throne it was: the Roman throne, created by Caesar, destined for his son.

  The forces gathered in Ephesus. Antony now had eight squadrons of sixty ships each, with forty support ships and five scouts per squadron—almost five hundred ships. He also counted another three hundred transport and supply vessels. Altogether our fleet numbered eight hundred—a staggering size. For the first time since Alexander, all the sea power in the east lay at one man’s command.

  Canidius had brought the sixteen legions from Armenia, and seven more were drawn from Macedonia. The client kings all over the east had pledged their troops: Archelaus of Cappadocia, Amyntas of Galatia, Tarcondimotus of the Amanus, Mithridates of Commagene, Deiotarus of Paphlagonia, Rhoemetalces and Sadalas of Thrace, Bocchus of Mauretania, Herod of Judaea, Malchus of Nabataea, and the King of Media. These totaled some twenty-five thousand men, in addition to the seventy-five thousand legionaries.

  Did I neglect to mention that I was supporting all this? Yes, the treasury of Egypt was covering all the expenses of maintaining this army, as well as the navy—some twenty thousand talents in all. A great deal, considering that it cost about fifty talents to maintain a legion in the field for a year. It was also more than my father’s entire original debt to Rome. So much had Egypt prospered in the years of my reign that what had been an enormous and impossible debt to him was lying at my fingertips, ready for disposal.

  I was underwriting all the expense—carrying this army on my back—or, rather, on my treasury’s back. And yet the Romans dared to order me to depart! The insolence of Romans never failed to stun me. Without me, there would be no army, no provisions, no housing for them, no bread and wine….

  Yet they tried to persuade Antony to dismiss me!

  Ahenobarbus started it, muttering that “all would be well if Cleopatra would depart to Egypt.” Others took up the chorus, saying that my presence was damaging Antony’s cause. Just how, they did not specify! All this, while eating my bread!

  Antony ignored the murmurs. Later they got louder, but during that spring they were still soft enough to be passed over.

  We decided to do something Alexander had done: hold a festival of music, drama, and poetry prior to going to war. It was a very Greek thing to do; no Roman would think of it. Yet were we
not fighting to preserve our different way of life?

  We gave orders for everyone to assemble on the island of Samos, which lies just off the wide Bay of Ephesus.

  70

  The marble seats of the theater glowed violet in the twilight, like other night creatures that give off light at dawn or dusk: fireflies, will-o’-the-wisps, glow-worms, the shining wake of a ship in moonlight. They climbed up the hill—a gentle slope, this, at Samos—empty of patrons, patiently waiting for the audience they knew must come.

  The flat stones of the stage, empty as well, invited me to walk upon them. I did so, in slow, measured footsteps, undergoing transformations of character every few paces. I was Medea, my hands red with blood, I was Antigone, guiding her blind father, I was the virgin prophetess Cassandra. In the moments when I pretended, I could feel something change inside me. Had there been rows of faces looking at me, I could have convinced them, too, that I was someone else.

  What an odd power and freedom, I thought—to pretend to be someone else, someone who may not have ever existed at all, or is long dead. In some godlike way, it makes me—briefly, oh, so briefly—the bestower of life on the lifeless. The infuser of warm breath and blood to the shades.

  And why limit myself only to other womanly incarnations? Why not be Oedipus himself, or Achilles—or anyone I fancied? The imagination in full force can know no bounds, and the biggest difference between me and these people was not in being a man or a woman but in existing at all.

  Silence. No audience, and therefore no rebirth for the dead heroes. At least not tonight. I would have willed them to appear, but the only mortal disguise they could use was the body of an actor, with an audience to see him.

  Acting is the only art that one cannot do alone, I realized, and still call oneself an artist. There can be secret poets, secret painters, secret musicians, but no secret, solitary actors. An actor without an audience is lacking an essential element.

  “Alone?” Antony asked in a loud whisper.

  I felt embarrassed. How long had he been watching? Had he guessed what I was doing? I had to smile at my own conceit: that my enactments were so good he would have immediately known which character I mimicked. And in the fading light, too.

  I whirled around. I did not see him anywhere, and the seats looked as empty as ever. Now even the purple glow was fading out, ebbing away, as the night robbed everything of color.

  “Rehearsing?” Now the voice seemed to come from a different place. But I was surrounded by emptiness.

  “Where are you?” I whispered, and the perfect setting magnified it so it could be heard all around.

  “Everywhere,” came back the answer. “You cannot escape me.”

  “Then come and show yourself.” I waited, sure a rustle or a movement would point him out to me. But in the gloom I saw nothing.

  A light, warm wind was flowing down the hillside, bringing the scent of new meadow grass and thyme with it. Spring on an eastern Greek island was the nearest we could come while alive to actually wandering in the Elysian fields.

  A slender crescent moon hung low in the sky, hovering over the fields. Where was Antony? We needed to walk hand-in-hand across the warm, scented expanses.

  “Who would you most like to be?” Now the teasing voice seemed to come from a different place. “Answer me that, and I shall grant it, in person.”

  “There is no one else I would rather be all the time,” I said, realizing the rare pleasure of that. “But I suppose, just for tonight, I would like to be one of the goddesses of the gentle breeze, so I could fly and stream over the island, wherever I wished.”

  There, now I had played the game. He must now fulfill the promise.

  He emerged from behind the altar of Dionysus, which stood near the middle of the stage, peeking up over its top like a schoolboy. I was astonished—how had he hidden there without my seeing him? “Sometimes what you seek is very near to hand,” he said, stepping out.

  “If one cannot see it, it does little good,” I said. “Now, can you teach me to fly?”

  “Dionysus could, in the guise of wine,” he said. “And we have invited all the members of the Dionysian actors guild to come to Samos and perform—so we shall all fly.”

  I laughed. “A tricky answer.” The wind whispered in my ears. “Oh, Antony—this festival is most solemn and portentous. The ancient Greek way of going out to war—when war was a ritual and a contest rather than a science—holding games, drama, music, all to placate the gods…perhaps we shouldn’t have done it.” The sacred character of it—had that been lost, forgotten, so that all the world would see was revelry? We were too much associated with that as it was. Yet to forsake the old ways entirely seemed insulting to the very gods we wished to aid us. As if we cared more about what Octavian and Horace thought than Zeus himself…. “They will ridicule us in Rome,” I said.

  He shrugged. “We won’t hear them.” Now he walked around the stage. “Here is where our thoughts will be—with this reenactment of the mighty deeds done by gods and heroes. May we be worthy of them.” Suddenly his voice took on that oratorical tone meant for more than just me. He was addressing an invisible audience—a past one, and one yet to come. “These deeds must not be forgotten. We are re-creating our ancestors in our own lives—they dream the state we are in. When we live, they live too. They dance in the sunlight once more, feel the radiance that makes life sweet.”

  His voice made me shiver. To call back the dead, grant them life through us…yes, drama was perhaps the most frightening act we could perform, and the most generous.

  “Will the senators understand this?” I asked. “And the client kings, who have no part in Greek thought?”

  “You concern yourself overmuch with that. At the least, they will be entertained. And they will doubtless find it more pleasant than the Roman way of opening a war—which always seems to start not with a play, but with taxes!”

  I laughed. Yes, the Romans labored under that burden—money troubles. Octavian was about to launch a tax drive that was bound to make him odious. He was going to demand a quarter of a person’s income to finance the army. Romans, who were used to receiving tribute from provinces to pay their government rather than doing it themselves, were in for a shock.

  From somewhere in the night I heard music—drums, flutes, lyres—and voices singing a refrain.

  “They are practicing,” said Antony. “The Dionysian songs will fill the island.”

  The sweet and haunting melodies hung over us in the warm air.

  “It is ghosts singing,” I said.

  “Ghosts sighing,” he said.

  We stood together listening.

  Finally I took his hand. “Let us walk. There is a path here in the field….”

  It wound its way toward a ruin, whose roof had long since vanished and whose weathered pillars were missing their capitals. Tall weeds and shrubs bordered the path, and reached out to clutch at our clothes. But from the rise we could see the flat sea and the small distance separating Samos from the mainland. It was called the Seven Stadia Channel, which meant it was no bigger than the expanse of water between the Pharos and the mainland of Alexandria proper. Yet an island had a special feel to it, if it was properly an island.

  I wondered, idly, when an island stopped feeling like an island…when you could walk to it in low tide? When a mole was built connecting it to the mainland? The Pharos didn’t feel like an island any longer, and neither did Tyre. Once-invincible Tyre…joined to the mainland by Alexander in his siege.

  Alexander…yes, he would understand what we did here on Samos. He would be present tomorrow.

  For more than twenty days the island rang with celebrations, as the leaders of our forces all gathered for the blessing, drenched in wine, food, song, and drama. The client kings had brought oxen from each of their cities to be sacrificed, and in a special ceremony just for them—for the rulers of Cappadocia, Cilicia, Mauretania, Paphlagonia, Commagene, Thrace, Galatia—Antony reminded them, in his ring
ing voice, of the prophecy of the east’s rising against Rome, shearing her hair and lowering her. “The woman who shears the hair, the Widow, stands here beside me, the Queen of Egypt. And we fight together in the name of her son’s inheritance. It is not your lands or territory that will be lessened, but Rome will fall to his lot.”

  There was a deep murmur of approval and desire. This was their moment, the moment the east had been seeking for over a hundred years. What Mithridates had failed to do, we would: deliver the east from its stooped humiliation.

  Day after day the hills resounded with our celebrations. “What will they do to celebrate the victory, when they went to such expense of festivity for its opening?” people were asking—the question we meant them to ask. Let our friends and foes know we would hold nothing back: that here we dedicated our entire beings, our treasury, our army, our navy, our creative forces to the supreme test.

  In May we went to Athens, after ferrying the army over to southern Greece.

  Greece. A Roman civil war was to be decided in Greece, for the third time in only seventeen years. For the third time the thin, hard Greek soil would soak up the blood of Romans fighting for dominance in their homeland.

  I had been profoundly affected by each of these battles. The first had brought Caesar into my life, the second, Antony. Now it was the fate of my children that would be decided by the forthcoming clash. Would they receive their inheritance, secured by Antony’s victory, or lose everything, be banished into the nameless void outside history?

  There could be no mistakes in this campaign. Pompey had lost against Caesar because he had not pursued his initial rout, and his strategy was not flexible enough; Brutus and Cassius killed themselves after misreading signals from their own camp. It was not lost on me that the losers in both previous clashes had been the Romans who stood their ground in Greece; the winners had been the Romans who invaded from the west. Yes, there must be no mistakes.

  We had nineteen Roman legions dedicated to the war effort. Another eleven were standing guard in Egypt, Syria, Cyrenaica, Bithynia, and Macedonia.