Antony and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  “Unanswerable,” said Cha’em, mouth twitching at the look of horror on Apollodorus’s face; he was a eunuch.

  “And since when did universal suffrage cost more than select suffrage?” Caesarion demanded. “Setting up an electoral apparatus will cost, yes. A free grain dole will cost. A subsidized grain ration will cost. Fountains and baths will cost. But if the nest-featherers are hauled down from their perches at the top of the roost and every citizen pays all his taxes instead of some people’s taxes being winked at, I think the money can be found.”

  “Oh, stop being a child, Caesarion!” Cleopatra said in weary tones. “Just because you have a huge allowance to squander doesn’t mean you understand high finance! Find money, piffle! You’re a child with a child’s idea of how the world works.”

  All the glee vanished; Caesarion’s face took on a pinched, rigid hauteur. “I am no child!” he said through his teeth, voice as cold as Rome in winter. “Do you know how I spend my huge allowance, Pharaoh? I pay the wages of a dozen accountants and clerks! Nine months ago I commissioned them to investigate Alexandria’s revenues and expenditures. Our Macedonian magistrates from the Interpreter to their bureaucracy of nephews and cousins are corrupt! Rotten!” One hand, a ruby ring flashing crimson fire, brushed the scrolls. “It is all here, every last peculation, embezzlement, fraud, petty theft! Once the data were all in, I felt ashamed to call myself King of Alexandria!”

  If silence could boom, this silence did. One part of Cleopatra exulted in her son’s amazing precocity, but another part was so angry that her right palm itched to strike the little monster’s face. How dared he! Yet how wonderful that he dared! And what could she answer? How was she going to get out of this with her dignity intact, her pride unhumbled?

  Sosigenes postponed that evil moment. “What I want to know, is who gave you these ideas, Pharaoh? You certainly didn’t get them from me, and I refuse to believe that they sprang fully armed from your own brow. So where did they come from?”

  Even as he asked, Sosigenes was conscious of a twisting in his chest, a pang of pure sorrow for the lost boyhood of Caesarion. It has always been awesome to witness the evolution of this true prodigy, he thought, for, like his father, he is a true prodigy.

  But it has meant no boyhood. As a tiny babe in arms he had talked in polished sentences; no one could fail to see what a mighty mind dwelled inside the infant Caesarion. Though his father had never once remarked on it, or indeed seemed to see it; perhaps the memories of his own early years closed his eyes. How had Julius Caesar been when he was twelve years old? How, for instance, had his mother treated him? Not the way Cleopatra treated Caesarion, Sosigenes decided in that minute slice of time waiting for Caesarion to answer. Cleopatra regarded her son as a god, so the depth of his intellect only served to increase her foolishness. Oh, if only Caesarion had been more…ordinary!

  Well did Sosigenes remember persuading Cleopatra to let the five-year-old boy play with some of the children belonging to high-born Macedonians like the Recorder and the Accountant. Those boys had drawn back from Caesarion in fear, or punched and kicked him, or mocked him cruelly. All of which he had borne without complaint, as determined to conquer them as he was to conquer the woes of Alexandria today. But seeing their behavior, Cleopatra had banished all children, girls as well as boys, from contact with her son. In future, she had ordained, Caesarion must be content with his own company. Whereupon Sosigenes had produced a mongrel puppy. Horrified, Cleopatra would have had the creature drowned. But Caesarion had walked in at that opportune moment, seen the dog, and become a little boy of five. Face wreathed in smiles, his hands went out to hold the squirming scrap: thus had Fido entered Caesarion’s life. Yet the boy knew Fido displeased his mother, and had been obliged to conceal from her the dog’s importance to him. Again, that wasn’t normal. Again, Caesarion was forced into adult behavior. A careworn old man lives within him, while the boy he has never been allowed to be withers save in secret moments spent far from his mother and the thrones he occupies as her equal. Equal? No, not that, never that! Caesarion is his mother’s superior in every way, and that is a tragedy.

  The lad’s answer to the question came, and suddenly he was a little boy, face alight.

  “Fido and I go ratting in the palace attics—terrific rats up there, Sosigenes! Some are nearly as big as Fido, I swear! They must like paper, because they’ve eaten through piles and piles of old records—some go back as far as the second Ptolemy! Anyway, a few months ago Fido found a box they hadn’t managed to chew—malachite inlaid with lapis. Beautiful! When I opened it, I found it held all the documents my father wrote while he was in Egypt. Stuff for you, Mama! Advice, not love letters. Did you never read them?”

  Face burning, Cleopatra remembered a donkey ride Caesar had made her take through the ruins of Alexandria, forcing her to see what had to be done, and in what order. Housing for the ordinary people first—only after that, temples and public buildings. Oh, and the seemingly endless lectures! How they had irritated her, when what she hungered for was love! Remorseless instructions as to what must be done, from citizenship for everyone to a free grain dole for the poor. She had ignored all of them save giving citizenship to the Jews and Metics for helping Caesar hold the Alexandrians at bay until his legions arrived. Meaning to get to all of them sometime. But her god-head had intervened, and his murder. After his death, she had deemed his reforms pointless. He had tried reforms in Rome, and they killed him for his hubris. So she had put his lists and orders and explanations into that malachite box inlaid with lapis, and given it to a palace steward to store somewhere out of sight, out of mind.

  What she hadn’t counted on was a busy boy with a ratting dog. Oh, the damage his discovery had created! Caesarion was now infected with his father’s disease; he wanted to change things so hallowed by the centuries that even those who would benefit didn’t want change. Why hadn’t she put those sheaves of paper in the fire? Then her son could have found nothing except rats.

  “Yes, I read them,” she said.

  “Then why didn’t you act on them?”

  “Because Alexandria has its own mos maiorum, Caesarion. Its own customs and traditions. The rulers of a place, be it a city or a nation, are not obligated to succor the poor, who are an affliction only starvation can cure. The Romans call their poor proletarii, meaning that they have absolutely nothing to give the state save children—not taxes, not prosperity. But the Romans also have a tradition of philanthropy, which is why they feed their poor at the state’s expense. Alexandria has no such tradition, nor do other places. And yes, I agree that our magistrates are corrupt, but the Macedonians are the original settlers, and feel entitled to the perquisites of office. Try to strip them of office, and you’ll be torn to pieces in the agora—not by the Macedonians, but by the poor. The citizenship of Alexandria is precious, not to be given to the undeserving. As for elections—they are a farce.”

  “I wish you could hear yourself. It’s all hippo shit.”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Pharaoh.”

  The expressions crossed his face like shivers over a horse’s hide, childish at first—angry, frustrated, resisting—but slowly became adult—flintily determined, icily resolute. “I will have my way,” he said. “Later if not sooner, I will have my way. You can block me for a while because you can appeal to enough of Alexandria’s citizens to block me. I am not a fool, Pharaoh, I do know the magnitude of the resistance there will be to my changes. But they will come! And when they do, they will not be confined to Alexandria. We are Pharaoh of a country a thousand miles long but only ten miles wide at most except for Ta-She, a country that has no free citizens at all. They belong to us, as does the land they till and the crops they harvest. As for money! We have so much we can never spend it, sitting beneath the ground outside Memphis. I will use it to improve the lot of Egypt’s people.”

  “They will not thank you,” she said, tight-lipped.

  “Why should they? By rights it’s their money, not our
s.”

  “We,” she said, biting off each word, “are Nilus. We are son and daughter of Amun-Ra, Isis and Horus reincarnated, Lords of the Two Ladies Upper and Lower Egypt, of the Sedge and Bee. Our purpose is to be fruitful, to bring prosperity to high and low alike. Pharaoh is God on earth, destined never to die. Your father had to die to assume his godhead, whereas you have been a god since your conception. You must believe!”

  He gathered up his scrolls and rose to his feet. “Thank you for listening to me, Pharaoh.”

  “Give me your papers! I want to read them.”

  That provoked a laugh. “I think not,” he said, and left.

  “Well, at least we know where we stand,” Cleopatra said to the others. “On the edge of a precipice.”

  “He will change as he matures,” Sosigenes comforted.

  “Yes, he will,” said Apollodorus.

  Cha’em said nothing.

  “And do you agree, Cha’em?” she asked. “Or did your vision tell you he won’t change?”

  “My vision made no sense,” Cha’em whispered. “It was muddled, confused—truly, Pharaoh, it signified nothing.”

  “I’m sure it did to you, but you won’t tell me, will you?”

  “I say again, there is nothing to tell.”

  But he crept away showing his age, and as soon as he was far enough away not to be caught, he began to weep.

  Cleopatra took supper in her rooms, but did not call for her two handmaidens; the day had been a long one that must have tired Charmian and Iras out. A junior girl—Macedonian, of course—waited on her while she picked without appetite at the food, then assisted her to shed her robes for sleep. Among those who were well off and owned many servants, it wasn’t customary to wear clothes to bed. Those who did sleep clothed were either prudish, like the late Cicero’s wife, Terentia, or those who didn’t have sufficient servants to launder the sheets regularly. That she actually spent time thinking about this was Antony’s fault; he despised women who wore a shift to bed, and had told her why, even who. Octavia, a modest rather than a prudish woman, was not averse to making love naked, he had said, but once the lovemaking was over, she donned a shift. Her excuse (for so it seemed to him) was that one of the children might need her urgently during the night, and she would not permit the servant who came to wake her to see her unclothed body. Though, according to Antony, her body was lovely.

  That subject exhausted, Cleopatra’s mind passed to the odder aspects of Antony’s relationship with Octavia: anything, not to have to think about today!

  He had refused to divorce Octavia, stubbornly dug his heels in when Cleopatra tried to persuade him that divorce was the best alternative. He was her husband now; the Roman marriage had no purpose. But it had emerged during the course of her exhortations that Antony was still fond of Octavia, and not merely because she was the mother of two of his Roman children. Both girls, therefore—to Cleopatra, at any rate—unimportant. Not to Antony, it seemed; he was already planning their marriages, though Antonia was about five at most, and Tonilla not yet two. Ahenobarbus’s son, Lucius, was destined to wed Antonia, but Antony hadn’t yet made up his mind about Tonilla’s husband. As if any of that mattered! How could she prise him loose from his Roman connections? What use were they to Pharaoh’s consort, Pharaoh’s stepfather? What use was a Roman wife, even the sister of Octavian?

  To Cleopatra, Antony’s clinging to Octavia was a sign that he still hoped for an arrangement with Octavian that would permit each of them to have his share of empire. As if that boundary on the river Drina dividing West from East were a permanent fence, on either side of which dog Antony and dog Octavian could snarl and bare their teeth at each other without ever needing to fight. Oh, why couldn’t Antony see that such an accommodation would never last? She knew it and Octavian knew it. Her agents in Rome were full of Octavian’s ploys to discredit her in Roman and Italian eyes. He called her the Queen of Beasts, embroidered the tales of her bath, her private life, and alleged that she was corrupting Antony with drugs and wine. Turning him into her creature. Her agents reported that, thus far, Octavian’s efforts to besmirch Antony fell on barren ground; no one really believed them—yet. His seven hundred senators remained faithful, their fondness for Antony fueled by their hatred for Octavian. A tiny crack had appeared in the solid wall of their devotion after the real story of the Parthian campaign became known, but only a handful of them had deserted him. Most had decided that the eastern disaster was not Antony’s fault; to admit that it was, was to admit Octavian was right, and that they could not do.

  Antony…By now, starting his campaign against Artavasdes of Armenia, whom he must be allowed to conquer. But before he could contemplate marching against Artavasdes of Media Atropatene, Quintus Dellius must have succeeded in forging an alliance that no Roman general, including Antony, could possibly refuse. Though some aspects of the pact could not be written down, even imparted to Antony: they were between Egypt and Media, to the effect that, when Rome was conquered and absorbed into the new Egyptian empire, Median Artavasdes could strike at the King of the Parthians with all the might of forty or fifty Roman legions and assume the throne he hungered for above all else. Cleopatra’s price was peace, a peace that must last until Caesarion was grown enough to step into his father’s boots.

  There. The name had intruded at last, could not be avoided. If the events of this, her first day back in Alexandria, were taken as evidence of Caesarion’s remarkable character, then he was going to grow into the same kind of military genius his father had been. His father’s wishes drove him, and his father had been murdered three days before he was to set off for a five-year campaign against the Parthians. Caesarion would want to conquer east of the Euphrates, and once he had succeeded, he would rule from Oceanus Atlanticus to the River of Ocean beyond India. A kingdom far bigger than Alexander the Great’s at its peak. Nor would his army refuse to keep going east, nor would the structure of his satrapies be imperiled by rebellious marshals intent upon pulling his empire down, carving it up among themselves. For his marshals would be his brothers and his cousins from Antony’s marriage to Fulvia. Welded into blood loyalty, united, not divided.

  She saw none of this as impossible. All it required to bear fruit was iron determination on her part, and that she had. If her advisers were less hers, one of them at least might have asked her what would happen to this gauzy edifice of ambitions if her son turned out not to have his father’s military genius. A question she would have brushed aside anyway. The boy was as precocious as his father, as gifted, as like him as a proverbial pea in a pod. He was a Julian, half of his blood Caesar’s. And look at what Octavian, with far less Julian in him, had done at eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Assumed his inheritance, twice marched on Rome, forced the Senate to make him senior consul. A mere youth. But beside Caesarion, Octavian paled into insignificance.

  Only how was she to deflect Caesarion from a kind of idealism that she knew Caesar’s pragmatism would have tempered? Caesar’s plans for Alexandria and Egypt were experimental, things he felt he could enforce in Egypt through his domination of its ruler, Cleopatra. Thinking to point to the success of his programs in her kingdom when he tried the same reforms in Rome more consistently than time had permitted. His loneliness had been his downfall; he had not been able to find colleagues who believed in his ideas. Nor, she knew, would Caesarion. Therefore Caesarion had to be talked out of trying to implement his program.

  She rose from her bed and went to the exquisite little room attached to her quarters wherein stood statues of Ptah, Horus, Isis, Osiris, Sekhmet, Hathor, Sobek, Anubis, Montu, Tawaret, Thoth, a dozen more. Some had the heads of beasts, that was true, but many did not. All of them were aspects of life along the river, not so different from Roman numina and elemental forces. More like them, in fact, than like Greek gods, who were humans on a giant scale. And hadn’t the Romans needed to give some of their gods faces as the centuries wore on?

  Sheathed in gold, the room was lined with these stat
ues, painted in lifelike colors that glowed even in the weak lamp flames of night. In its center lay a rug from Persepolis; Cleopatra knelt on it, arms stretched in front of her.

  “My father, Amun-Ra, my brothers and sisters in godhead, I humbly ask that you give your son and brother Ptolemy Caesar who is Pharaoh enlightenment. I humbly ask that you give me, his earthly mother, the ten years more that I need to bring him into the full glory that you intend. I offer you my life as security against his, and beseech your help in my difficult task.”

  Her praying done, she continued to abase herself, and so fell asleep, only waking with the dawn and the coming of the disc of the sun. Cramped, bewildered, stiff.

  On her way back to bed, hurrying before the servants came on duty, she passed her huge mirror of polished silver, and paused, startled, to stare at the woman reflected in it. As thin as ever, as small, as unlovely. Of body hair she had none; it was plucked with scrupulous care. She looked more child than woman, save for her face. Its shape had changed, lengthened, hardened, though it betrayed no lines or wrinkles. The face of a woman fully thirty-four, whose large golden-yellow eyes were shadowed with sadness. The light grew; she continued to stand looking at herself. No, not the body of a child! Three pregnancies, one with twins, had turned the skin of her belly to sloppy parchment, loose, crinkled, dully brown.

  Why does Antonius love me? she asked her image, shocked. And why can’t I love him?

  Halfway through the morning she found Caesarion, resolved to have it out with him. As was his habit, he had gone down to the cove behind his palace to swim, and sat now on a rock looking like an ideal subject for Phidias or Praxiteles. All he wore was a loincloth, still wet enough to show his mother that he was indeed a man. The realization terrified her, but she was not one to give in to her feelings, and so sat on another rock where she could see his face. Caesar’s face, more and more.