13.
Rome.
The meandering Tiber, glassy in the moonlight, attracted his attention through its serenity and nocturnal beauty. Caesar stood on the balcony of his Janiculum villa - the ‘Mons Aureas’ (the golden hill of sand). Situated west of Rome, Caesar had given the extensive and luxurious property to his mistress, Cleopatra.
Cleopatra. He still recalled their first meeting, as if it was burned within his memory. The smell of Egyptian oil of roses still lingered in his nostrils. A similar balcony adjoined a similar reception room, but the eastern sky was ruby red, oozing heat. Various official papers, like now, littered the chamber. Confusion and faction-fighting reigned supreme in Egypt back then. Caesar was close to returning to Rome. He was fatigued, bored perhaps of the east - and he had his own civil war to attend to. His epilepsy had also returned. Balbus, ever loyal and quick-witted, had explained away a fainting fit as heat exhaustion.
An exotic looking slave, Apollodorus, appeared before him. Oil or sweat glistened across his bare, muscular torso. Over his shoulder the Nubian carried a finely decorated carpet, a gift no doubt.
“Yes?” Caesar rudely demanded, unusually curt from tiredness or tedium, after a pregnant pause between the two men.
Without a word said the slave bowed to Caesar, smiling slightly and awkwardly like one unpractised in the art - and then rolled out the carpet.
Cleopatra. Caesar could not remember the last time that he had been so astonished, or aroused - perhaps the one fed off the other. The Conqueror of the World was rendered temporarily speechless.
Her eyes, oriental-like, were rimmed with ash - and would prove both engaging and unreadable, shaped either in perpetual satisfaction or desire. A satin tyrian purple skirt, worn low upon her hips to display a bejeweled navel, clung to her thighs and reached down to her feet - where pretty toes, painted gold, peeped out. A V-shaped split ran down the satin skirt, revealing tantalising glimpses of silken thighs. A low-necked sable cloak adorned her shoulders and breasts, leaving most of her arms bare - and shone as glossily in the candle light as her long jet hair.
“I come to you both as a queen and supplicant,” the girl issued, her voice strong yet feminine. She bowed before him, yet her eyes - equal in pride, ambition and charm to the Roman’s - met his. An alluring face, more Greek than Egyptian, gazed up at him. Her full, sensual lips, which would prove as amorous as they could be eloquent, were slightly parted. The tawny skin of the nubile girl, barely out of her teens, glowed like the burnished gold decorating her ears and long-nailed, tapering fingers. Her perfume was as intoxicating as her singular beauty. Only mistresses could entice and enthral Caesar so - never wives.
Apollodorus silently excused himself, his task completed.
Cleopatra, Queen and the Goddess Isis incarnate, rose and unclasped the scarab brooch which fastened her cloak. The garment slid from her shoulders and onto the floor, revealing her young, succulent flesh and breasts.
“I am your slave,” she issued playfully, ardently.
Caesar was tempted to reply “No, I am yours”, but refrained from doing so. He merely drew the beautiful, sensuous girl towards him and kissed her.
“My father was known as Ptolemy the Flute-Player. I too will show you how I can use my mouth and fingers.”
The evening was memorable, to say the least, Caesar judged, half-smiling.
Pillow talk was of politics, the grain supply and the strength and tactics of armies. He was impressed by her intellect and ambition. The woman batted not an eyelid when plotting the usurpation of her brother-husband’s throne. She was both a goddess and a whore - and as manipulative as both Caesar fancied. Yet she had seduced him. He remembered again making love to the exotic queen on her imperial barge, soaring up and down upon the rhythmic waves - the eastern sun kissing and massaging his skin, along with the woman he was with. She complained not when he took another mistress (which he rarely did for once, satisfied and excited as he was by his semi-divine lover) yet Cleopatra was wise enough to remain faithful to Caesar. The dictator told himself that he had still not been swayed by the woman into doing anything that Caesar didn’t want to do - but then Julius smiled, knowing it to be untrue. He had fought and won half a country for her. Mark Antony had joked that, in terms of the young queen, Caesar could also declare, “I came, I saw, I conquered” - but rather could not the Egyptian say that in reference to the Roman?
Was it their advice, or the veiled threat of his legions to abandon him, which convinced Caesar to finally free himself from the seductions of the east and return to Rome - to attend to his own civil war, rather than those of his paramour? Caesar had returned though, bringing his trophy mistress with him and establishing her in his Janiculum villa. And she had given him that which he most craved, a son.
The dictator yawned and rubbed his brow - being careful not to disturb the laurel wreath which rested on his head and half-disguised his balding pate - as he gazed out over the undulating, turquoise river. A voice, doused in wine and amours, breezed out from the bedroom.
“Come back to bed.”
Her appetites could rival Mark Antony’s, Caesar mused.
“Give me a moment or so,” he replied.
After this evening he would return and stay with Calpurnia, his wife, for a while. He missed her uncomplicated devotion and friendship. Her love had become unconditional, like his mother’s and Julia’s had once been. He still missed his daughter. For a while Cleopatra had filled the void, but not anymore. Caesar recalled the incident, argument, of yester night between him and his mistress.
“But Caesarion is your son!” she had posited, her eyes ablaze with the heat of a passion far removed from love.
“But he is not my heir. Octavius is,” Caesar had firmly replied.
The young queen and mother responded with a tantrum. Curses, in a language Caesar was unfamiliar with, emanated from the woman, as well as cat-like hisses and wild protestations. Her arguments seemed scripted though to Caesar - and he had already made his judgement. He intended to adopt Octavius. Eventually he silenced the politic queen, either through his rhetoric or the threats implicit behind his words.
“Julius,” she called from inside, now demanding, yearning.
An increasingly familiar mournfulness, or atrophy, overcame the dictator again - darkening his mood and eyes, as if a veil had been placed over him. Even Caesar could not conquer time, old age. He tried to muster his spirits. The Parthian campaign would be his last, but greatest, triumph. He looked forward to seeing Octavius again, imparting his memories and wisdom to him. More than his mistress, his nephew made him feel enthused and purposeful again.
“Julius,” she exclaimed once more, her musical voice a little less harmonious - harder and flatter. The queen was not used to being ignored, or defied.
Would he even return from the campaign? He honestly didn’t know he conceded - and occasionally of late a world-weary Caesar thought to himself how he didn’t care.
*
Spain.
Ribbons of cloud, like deft white brush strokes across a light blue canvas, striped the sky. Lowing cattle could be heard in the background, perhaps moaning about the oppressive heat. Caesar fanned himself with some papers that he had just finished reading and signing. He sat with his nephew in a carriage, cantering along - but still tarrying too much for the dictator. Finally they were on their way home.
Caesar closed his eyes in a vain effort to suppress an oncoming migraine. Finally he had earned a moment or two of peace - and private time with his beloved nephew. Since dawn, since their party had set off, Caesar had been hard at work - replying to urgent matters of state that Antony had ignored and re-writing chapters of his book with Hirtius, which would recount the history of the recent civil war. Julius also caught up with his personal correspondence. Among which Cassius Longinus had composed a servile and long-winded petition to be considered for the Praetorship of Rome. Cleopatra had written to him, stressing how she loved and desired Caesar - and that
she had remained chaste in his absence. Aemilius Lepidus was memorably forgettable in a routine, fawning letter. Atticus still wouldn’t sell his life-size bronze statue of Aeneas, yet Caesar perhaps admired the art-collector more for prizing beauty over money. Added to a clear and insightful review of the mood in the Senate, Brutus had also written a critical but fair appraisal of “The Journey”, a poem that Caesar had recently composed.
Whilst Caesar closed his eyes Octavius, sitting opposite and half-reading a play by Terence, surveyed his uncle. Although the youth had been impressed by his general’s infectious energy and dynamism in front of his legions and staff, Octavius had spent many evenings of late with the dictator - and Caesar could not sustain his public face in private. His tanned skin could not quite conceal the small clusters of liver spots dotting his head, which would have been discernible to all if not for the civic crown or bronze helmet which the dictator wore. Wrinkles increasingly carved themselves, as deep as scars, around his neck and brow. Caesar joked to his nephew that they were just ‘laughter lines’. He slept more, often dozing off in the middle of reading, or during his evening meal. Octavius would often take the book or plate away from his uncle on such occasions, not wishing for anyone else to see him so vulnerable looking. When he would wake, Julius would smile to himself, appreciating his nephew’s consideration. His head seemed to weigh heavier in his hands when deep in thought. His joints ached during cold nights. So too Caesar secretly asked his quartermaster to forge a new, lighter cavalry sword. He could no longer leap up and mount his horse from behind, yet the keen rider derived the utmost pleasure one afternoon from teaching his surrogate son to perform the trick. “Not even Caesar can conquer old age,” Julius confessed to Octavius one evening, his wistful smile eventually faltering. He confessed to bouts of falling sickness also to his nephew. Although saddened by his slight demise Octavius felt privileged that his great uncle should allow him to see him at his most human and fallible.
The wheels of the carriage, along with four hundred hooves and numberless hob-nailed infantry boots, spewed up dust along the corrugated track, enveloping the entire army almost in a sandy mist. The curtains were closed over the windows of the regal carriage, but still gusts of dust infiltrated the compartment and made the two passengers cough.
A scroll and a pair of ewers upon a tray, containing the dregs of some watered-down Falernian, fell to the floor as the carriage suddenly jolted, having passed over another large rut in the track. Caesar scrunched his face up in frustration and condemnation. The dictator thought to himself how he could have worked through his correspondence in half the time if they had been travelling along a Roman road. Roman roads were valuable as things in themselves - as arteries for both trade and the military - but equally so they embodied Roman superiority and progressiveness. Their flagstones marked out and extended the Empire.
After a pause - during which Caesar gazed through a crack in the window and up at the sapphire sky as if he were an augur searching for or receiving inspiration - he spoke in confidence to his nephew in an attempt to justify himself to the boy, or perhaps himself.
“People will doubtless scoff and claim that I fought this war for myself. I would be lying Octavius if I said that that was not partly true. But know that I have sacrificed part of myself for this triumph. I have been cruel as well as clement. I have lost many friends and comrades. But I fought for them - and for peace. I freely admit to you that I, in part, acted in pride in defying the Senate. Caesar could not have those self-serving parasites and honourless politicians sit in judgement on him. But didn’t Caesar merit such pride? But if I was proud, they were envious. Aye, their envy condemned me. They dusted off ancient laws for convenience - but remember that they served not their own precious laws and traditions when they overturned the rightful petitions of the tribunes and proclaimed me an enemy of the state - a state which I had enriched and served for over a decade.
I honestly believed that my rightful cause would not instigate such a terrible war. I was not the only one to be prompted by pride. I did not force Pompey to abandon Rome. He was flattered and manipulated into challenging me. If we could have only talked face to face, imbued in each other that same spirit of trust and equanimity that we shared when Julia was alive; we could have ruled and bettered Rome together, perhaps.
But the past is dead. Pompey is dead - and I have mourned him enough. More than perhaps his conceited and ambitious sons did.
If they could not see that the old order was dying, how could they have possibly imagined anything different, more enlightened? - A Rome re-born. The Senate is but a cartel run by a few ancient clans, who have become so in-bred as to be retarded. Merchants lobby the Senate and direct Rome. The people are taxed to fund the Empire but their interests are not represented or respected. Only their taxes, not their rights, reach the Senate House.
But I will change things when I return Octavius - that I can promise you. Caesar has to be Caesar,” the eloquent and forceful dictator expressed, yet this final statement was conveyed with perhaps a tinge of sadness - as if “Caesar” was its own animal, too powerful and proud for even its own creator to control.
The carriage bumped over another rut in the track, causing Octavius’ book to fall to the floor.
“And I promise you also that this Spanish road, or poor excuse for such a thing, will become a Roman one by the end of the year.”
*
The surface of the Tiber shimmered, like the jade-coloured silk gown Cleopatra was wearing over her soft tawny skin - if she had not already disrobed by now. The wind soughed through the stone vents of the balcony. The sky grew leaden, dampening out the stars. Caesar continued to glare down upon the hypnotic swirls and currents of the mournful river. “The Tiber was full of citizens’ corpses, the public sewers were choked with them and the blood that streamed from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges,” Cicero had written, in response to the violence and civil disorder during the years when Clodius and Milo fought for political supremacy on the streets of Rome. Caesar recalled the lines again, briefly and morbidly imagining a corpse-strewn Tiber - but then the dictator permitted himself a self-satisfied smile, for no longer would his beloved capital suffer such scenes. Caesar had brought peace, reconciliation to Rome. His life - and the sometimes compromising means he had adopted to achieve his ends - proved justified. He had fulfilled his self-appointed destiny.
“Julius,” the voice issued again, this time purring - sultrily rather than sulking. Caesar finally ventured back inside.
“I’m tired,” the dictator exclaimed, before even entering the chamber. Before seeing her Caesar encountered her scent. The queen’s musky perfume reached almost as far as her voice, albeit the Roman turned his nose up at the overly potent fragrance. His villa smelt like a brothel, Caesar disdainfully thought to himself.
“I have enough love for the both of us.” The purring was now somewhat slurred. She had been drinking again.
“I haven’t any for either of us,” Caesar was tempted to reply, but refrained from doing so.
14.
Time passes.
The wind seemed to shush itself as the skeletal branches of the willow trees, swaying in the breeze, swiped over the three youths like giant hands. On more than one occasion Octavius nearly had his sun hat knocked off and Agrippa had to nimbly dodge left and right to avoid the top of his bow - which was slung over his shoulder - from being caught up in the trees. The scent of pine and salt mingled in the air.
The three adolescents finally came to the end of the disused woodland trail. They stood on top of a cliff looking out across an ocean glowing purple beneath the embers of dusk. Beneath them was ‘Monster Bay’, named as such because of the steep jagged cliff walls and semi-circular shape to the bay, as if a titan had reared up from the ocean and taken a bite out of the coastline. Winged clouds scudded the crimson horizon. Agrippa rubbed his face - routinely checking to see if his stubble was duly transforming itself into a beard - and grinned, appr
eciating the sumptuous view. Salvidienus however, surveying the same seascape, still wore a look of disgruntlement on his haughty countenance. The Roman aristocrat was still cursing the fact, beneath his breath, that he had to carry his own provisions and fishing equipment, having been out-voted by his two friends on the subject of whether they wanted slaves to accompany them on their expedition or not.
The companions had spent the afternoon fishing. Agrippa had won the unspoken competition between the three as to who had caught the most fish. They had then cooked and eaten their catch, washed down by some Arvisium wine which Salvidienus had borrowed from his father’s cellar. The friends had laughed, argued, and then slept on the riverbank. Realising that the light was falling they decided to venture to the coast. Their plan was to shoot fire arrows out into the ocean - again in unspoken competition with each other to see who could shoot the furthest.
Octavius took in the memorable seascape, but yet he was still absorbed by the contents of Octavia’s most recent letter. Rome was thriving again. Caesar’s reforms were working. By enfranchising a number of colonies in Gaul and Spain - and investing in the regions - Caesar had encouraged emigration from Rome. Overcrowding and crime were also down due to the dictator having cut the number of recipients of the free corn dole - thus those who had once over-relied on the state had to emigrate or find employment. Public amenities were again being built and maintained. To pay for these state projects Caesar had confiscated the estates of eminent Pompeians who had refused to surrender after Pharsalus. So too he had levied fines and taxes upon the Spanish and African towns who had opposed him during the Civil War.
Augustus- Son of Rome Page 11