Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997)

by Margaret George

  Women, too, were joining in--weaving flowers in their hair, climbing over the benches. The heat of the night added to the intensity and fervor. I felt sweat running down my face and back, plastering my gown to my body. The jewelry I wore felt like manacles. It was no night to have metal against the skin.

  When the dinner was over but the revelry was reaching its highest pitch, Caesar suddenly stood up. Trumpets blared, and he seized a torch and leapt up on the table.

  "Friends! I wish to postpone no longer the dedication of my gifts to the Roman people. Why wait for daylight, when we have the light of a thousand torches here? Why wait for another day, when everyone is gathered here already?" he cried.

  At the far end of the Forum, no one even heard him; they were still guzzling, gorging, and dancing. But around us, everyone fell silent and listened.

  "I wish Rome to be the most beautiful city in the world. And to that end, I have constructed new buildings for her." Two of his soldiers stepped up beside him, as well as priests, garbed in their striped togas. "Let me show them to you. Come with me!"

  He took Calpurnia's hand and obediently the rest of his family followed him; he led them to the steps of the almost-finished Basilica Julia. Now a big throng had gathered, following in his footsteps.

  "I give this new covered marketplace and public building to the citizens of Rome," he said. "Our older ones no longer serve our needs; they are neither large nor modern enough. And so I name this the Basilica Julia, in honor of my family line, the Julian clan. It is yours forever!"

  A vast--although somewhat bleary--cheer rose from the populace.

  Then Caesar turned and began to walk northward between the buildings, leading the people to his gleaming white new Forum and the temple within it. He stood at its entrance and brandished a torch.

  "A new Forum for a new day!" he cried. "The city of Rome has need of a new Forum!"

  Everyone had watched it being built, but even so, it seemed a surprise when it was actually presented. A new Forum. But the old one was sacred--it contained so many historic sites, all bound up with the history of Rome. Here it was that Jupiter stopped the assault of the Sabines, here it was that Curtius had vanished into the mysterious Curtin Lake. So many stories, all dear to their hearts. A new Forum? What did it mean? It could not be as simple as Caesar made it sound, simply a new place with more clean space to do business. No, Caesar must have other motives, I could almost hear them thinking. They were always so ready to believe the worst of him.

  "Come, follow me! Tread on the grass, walk in the porticoes, make it yours!" he urged them. But they hung back, like frightened children.

  Caesar walked alone across the grass and mounted the steps of the temple. He stood there for several moments, one foot placed on a higher step than the other, turned sideways. His Triumphator's robe looked darker than any wine, splashed against the white of the marble.

  "And here I solemnly dedicate the temple that I vowed to Venus of my ancestry, my family's origins, Venus Genetrix. I honor the goddess here, in all her manifestations. Come, and see!"

  A company of guards holding torches mounted the steps and took up their stations inside, so that suddenly the interior glowed, and a yellow light shone out through the marble. Slowly the people streamed forward, making their way inside the temple.

  Was I to follow? For I knew what they would see there. If I did not, the people would think it coyness in me. So I forced myself to enter the temple, there to behold the three statues--Venus herself, Caesar, and me.

  People were staring. Calpurnia was still clutching Caesar's hand, but her eyes were downcast. The loud voices had ceased.

  Caesar said nothing, but he had forced them to see--to see that he considered me a part of his family, not in an earthly sense, but in a divine one. I was ashamed now that I had not trusted him, and had forced him into the embarrassing recognition of Caesarion.

  People were awestruck in front of the statues; they stood like statues themselves. Then they turned and filed silently away. I could not read their faces.

  "It is Venus who has favored me as a son, and brought me the victories we celebrated today!" Caesar said. "Venus, I honor you, I give you homage! Bless your descendants, the Julians, each and every one, and let us bring honor and glory to Rome!" The priests bowed and placed offerings before the central statue.

  Caesar was surrounded by the knot of his family, as if they would protect him from any ill wishes. They seemed huddled there before the three glowering statues, who did not seem beneficent at all.

  Outside, the crowd had fragmented into thousands of parties; the food was being cleared away, and stacks of empty wine amphorae--a veritable mountain--were loaded on sturdy carts. The more respectable citizens were returning to their homes, leaving only the drunken, the young, and the disreputable to carry on.

  Calpurnia, Octavian, and Octavia seemed to have vanished; but I was not surprised when Caesar made his way over to Bogud, Bocchus, and me.

  "I regret I was unable to greet you until now," he said. "I trust your dinner was enjoyable?"

  "Never have I seen anything like it!" exclaimed Bocchus. "It will live in history!"

  "I hope so," said Caesar. "Otherwise I have sent a lot of money to vanish into thin air." He laughed. "But I rather think it will live on. The first of a thing always does. Later, others will give bigger feasts, have more extravagant dishes. But the first attempt is what sticks in people's minds." He looked around. "Let us walk the streets, and see how the rest of Rome is celebrating. The air in the Forum was somewhat rarefied."

  Together we left the Forum and immediately entered areas where the hot air was not delicate at all, but gross and heavy. The small streets were packed with celebrants, and I could smell the spilled wine, the precious Falernian, trickling between the pavement stones, running like rainwater. Everyone, so it seemed, was drunk, full-bellied, and shouting. So great was the crush, and so poor the light, that it was not necessary for Caesar to cast off his mantle; no one was paying any attention to us, and we might as well have been invisible.

  It was an eavesdropper's delight. The comments were flying thick and fast, uncensored.

  "He must have robbed the Temple Treasury--again!--to pay for this!"

  "So he's put his whore in the temple, you say? A big statue. I'll bet it doesn't show the part that really charms him!"

  "I suppose he wants a queen because he aims to be king."

  "He sets up all these temples and forums because he saw them in Alexandria. He thinks Rome isn't good enough, that it needs a lot of fancy white marble!"

  I could hardly breathe, the crowds were so thick. The heat was radiating from the tight-packed bodies like fumes from a coal fire, and the heavy hand of the night was pressing down on our heads. The words I was overhearing were so alarming I felt my heart pounding.

  The people seemed determined to interpret everything in the worst possible manner. Why were they turning on Caesar? He cared more for the lot of the common people than did the well-born, well-fed senators they favored.

  One lone voice said plaintively, "I think he's a great man, the greatest general since Alexander."

  But his companion sneered, "They say he's even going to change the calendar! Now he thinks he's a god, to alter the days and seasons!"

  One man stumbled and dropped his wine goblet, and it glanced off Caesar's shoulder. I grabbed Caesar's hand and said, "Let us not go on. I cannot move, and I do not wish to hear any more of this tripe."

  "Tripe?" he said. "So it is. I have heard enough. Now I know well enough what they think."

  He gestured, and our little group swung around and he led us back out through the alleys and side streets. How well Caesar knew his way; I was utterly lost.

  "I have wasted my money after all," he said, with a hard edge to his voice.

  "One man honored you," I reminded him.

  "One man," he said. His voice was tired and tinged with bitterness. "But I served two hundred thousand."

 
Chapter 28.

  The next day the sun shone on an army of men cleaning the Forum and the streets of Rome, sweeping the paving stones free of proof of the Triumphs. They had lasted ten days, had provided an eruption of music, soldiers, animals, trophies, combat, food, and largesse. Never had their like been seen in Rome, and they would always be linked with the name of Gaius Julius Caesar, Imperator, Dictator, Consul. But already they were past; the sun had risen on another day. Now bored people could look around and wonder what would come next to mollify and entertain them.

  Caesar was eager to push through his reforms, and an obedient Senate endorsed them. He aimed many at remedying abuses in the state. He would grant citizenship to the Cisalpine Gauls--residents of that northern part of Italy that had been Romanized for years. He would outlaw all the religious guilds (in reality, political clubs that promoted insurrection and violence against the elected order) with the exception of the Jews, who stayed aloof from political matters. He would halve the number of people receiving a grain dole, and settle the rest in colonies outside Rome. He gave orders to have the civil law codified, as now it existed in hundreds of different documents. There were also a number of other laws regarding Roman matters which were doubtless very important to the Romans but esoteric to everyone else--as all local laws are. And he had in mind more far-reaching schemes for his country.

  "Do you know," he said one evening, when he had come to the villa directly from the Senate, "that I have had my engineers draw up a plan for three projects that will change the world?" Seeing my expression of skepticism, he said, "Well, one of them will change the world."

  He knelt on the floor and made a tracing there with his dagger. "The Peloponnesus in Greece is almost an island." The metal made an ugly scraping noise against the stone. "It's barely attached to the mainland at the Isthmus of Corinth. Now, if a canal could be cut through, severing it completely--think what that would do for shipping! The seas there are so rough that ships are hauled overland, across the isthmus, rather than risk the waters. But if the Aegean and Ionian Seas could be linked--"

  "You cannot cut through that. It is sheer rock, like the rest of Greece," I said.

  "Canals have changed Egypt," he persisted. "If there were no canal linking Alexandria with the Nile, think how crippled you would be."

  "Egypt is made of sand," I said. "Greece is made of stone. Now, what are your other projects?"

  He laughed. "Always your hardheadedness is an astringent to my dreams," he said. "Very well, then, another is that I will have the Pontine Marshes drained to provide more farmland. Now it is a vast, mosquito-ridden swamp."

  "And your engineers say this can be done?"

  "They are hopeful," he said.

  "And the other project?"

  "I will cut a new channel for the Tiber--two new channels, actually. One will link it with the Anio River, so boats can navigate all the way to Tarracina. But in Rome itself I will divert the riverbed westward, make it flow onto the Vatican plain. Then all the activities that now take place on the Field of Mars can be transferred to the Vatican, and the Field of Mars can be built up. I wish to dedicate a gigantic temple there to Mars, the god who has been so gracious to Rome. And I wish to make it the biggest temple in Rome--no, in the world!"

  His eyes were flashing with excitement, in a way I had not seen since Egypt. He had plans, big and impossible, which brought him to life as mucking about in politics in Rome never could.

  Rome was necessary as his home base, the seat of his power, yet, curiously, it drained him of the very energy and strength that made him its master. Whenever he was away from Rome, he flourished; here he seemed to decline.

  "Tell me more of your projects," I encouraged him. "I know you must have more, and you are just leading them out one by one, as the animal wagons were rolled out in the Circus."

  I could see the expression, almost perfectly concealed, that said, Do I dare tell her? But he trusted me, and so he plunged ahead. He was eager to hear himself say the things aloud, to make them more real. He stretched out on the floor and rolled over on his back, putting his head on his arms, as if he were lying out in a meadow somewhere, instead of on the hard stone floor.

  "All things are possible in peacetime," he said. "I think the greatest prize of war is what it allows you to do with the peace afterward."

  "I know there are those who fear your peace and what you plan to do with it," I said, unable to forget the ugly frowns and sarcastic remarks about him.

  "They fear me because they distrust a victorious general," he said. "Always when the battles were past, the victors ripped aside their masks of clemency and went on a rampage of revenge and cruelty. They cannot believe that I will not follow suit. But I will not, and time will prove it."

  "What if you are not given time?" Before I could stop them, the words tumbled out--my fears for the future, his future, anyone's future. My weakness.

  "No one would assassinate me," he answered, saying the dreaded word. "If I were to be killed, chaos would reign, and they know it. There is no one to follow me, to hold back the deluge of more civil war."

  He was right, of course. But are men farsighted? If that were so, everyone would always act wisely, and there would be no ruined men.

  "Tell me of your plans," I began again. "I would hear them all."

  Lying there on the cold floor, he told me of his ideas for making Rome a grand city: he would build a theater like the one in Athens at the foot of the Tarpeian Rock; he would create a state library containing the whole of Greek and Roman literature; he would construct an enclosed election building on the Field of Mars to keep voters protected from the elements; he would create an extension of the harbor at Ostia to give Rome a shipping port like that of Athens; he would have a new road built across the mountains to the Adriatic; he would refound the ruined cities of Corinth and Carthage.

  "Rome's ancient enemies?" I asked. "What about 'Carthage must be destroyed'?"

  He laughed. "Carthage has been destroyed. But the location is a fine one, and it's time to make it over again as a Roman city."

  "Rome in Africa. Rome everywhere," I said.

  "I think it is time we had a nation that is more than a nation; a nation that incorporates all nations. It will not be entirely Roman." He paused. "That, at bottom, is what my fight with the aristocracy of Rome is all about. It is a class I was born into, but they cannot see beyond the city itself. They fear the wider world, even though they now possess it. So they try to pretend things are the same as ever, as if those other lands and other people will vanish. I have brought them the world in a basket and laid it at their feet, and they turn aside in fear." He turned and looked directly at me. "That is what they shrink from in you. To them, you are foreign, and all things foreign are a threat." He sighed. "Rome is like a child to me, a child I love and want to help--but she runs away!"

  "Perhaps they are just confused," I said, trying to make sense of it. All ot this has happened very fast for them. Less than twenty years ago, there was no Gaul for them to have to worry about. It took Rome hundreds of years to grow to one size, and then it suddenly doubled. And their general made a love alliance with a foreign queen. What are they to think? Be gentle with them."

  "I told you, I will be. I am." He began to sound irritated, at me as well as at them. His moods were very changeable these days. He sat up with a grunt. "This floor is too hard. I know what we need here in Rome--a soft place to lie when we wish to relax. We have only beds for sleeping and couches for eating. What about talking and reading?"

  "We have such pleasure seats in the east. I'll make a room like that for us here," I said. "It will be another foreign thing you can introduce to Rome!"

  He stood up and rubbed his back. "One new invention is about to be unveiled," he said. "Summon Sosigenes to meet with us here tomorrow, and I will reveal it to you."

  Sosigenes, my prize astronomer and mathematician from the Museion, had come to Rome at Caesar's insistence. But I had seen little of him during the T
riumphs.

  "That is because he has been working," said Caesar. "I kept him busy."

  "While the rest of the city played? That was schoolmasterish of you." I was suddenly struck with a thought. "These plans you have for Rome--the huge temples, the library, the theater--do you seek to create an Alexandria here on the Tiber?"

  "Perhaps. And I will build a marble palace to put you in, an exact reproduction of the one in Alexandria, so that we will not be able to tell where we are. It will be all the same to us, Rome or Alexandria. There will be no limit in time or place for us."

  I was as good as my word. I made one of the rooms in the villa over into the essence of lounging pleasure, borrowing freely from many cultures. From desert nomads I took the idea of carpets, and laid many on the floor to create a soft, colorful indoor lawn. Some were silk, some wool, but they all caressed the feet and invited you to stretch out on them, confident that no snakes, scorpions, or insects were hidden in the patterns--unlike true lawns. Tapestry cushions from Parthia were strewn all over the carpets, and Arabian silk curtains were spread across the windows to diffuse and color the direct sunlight, while permitting breezes to enter. Small tables made of carved sandalwood from India gave off a sweet smell, and candles were waiting in colored glass lanterns--Alexandrine lanterns. I even managed to find a steward who could procure snow--brought from the mountains in winter--from a rich merchant's storehouse, so that we could have cooled wine whenever we wished. Everything was the exact opposite of the straight lines and hard pallets the Romans favored.