Kleopatra
Kleopatra fought against the blackout that was coming from drinking so much barely diluted wine. Unsatisfied with his daughter’s response to his troubles, Auletes turned on his belly and began to tell his tale of woe to the woman next to him. When Kleopatra regained consciousness, she heard her father say, “And my despicable wife took the opportunity to turn the Regency Council against me. I do not know the fate of my trusted adviser Demetrius, nor of my four other children.”
The king spoke loudly to make certain that he was heard by his host, but Pompey remained attentive to his wife and the treats she inserted into his mouth.
“I am certain that the senate will soon hear of my plight and come to my aid, just as I came to the aid of Rome in her plight with Judaea,” the king said pointedly in a voice that was too loud.
“Would you like to hear me play the flute?” she heard her father ask the woman sitting languidly on the couch next to him. “Oh yes,” she replied. “But not now.”
Kleopatra groaned at the rebuff to her father and lowered her head into her elbows. How banal were these Roman dinners. The food she found foreign and not to her liking, nor to the liking of her stomach. The conversation was limited to cheap gossip, recipes for the food served, and the seemingly eternal Roman problems with their lazy slaves. She noticed that the Romans both envied and disdained refinement, calling their upper-class boys who admired the arts and letters of the Hellenes “greeklings,” and regarding them as “unmanly.” These slights upon her nationality she bore with disdainful dignity, much to Charmion’s approval. There was no use in defending Greek achievement to the barbarians.
All throughout dinner the Romans talked incessantly with no mind to concealing the food they chewed, kissed one another on the lips while their mouths were still full, belched loudly, expelled gas, spilled food over themselves and their servers, and laughed out loud at the loquacious poet who sang to them while they ate. Their dining habits were similar to their grasp of most of the world’s money and resources—insatiable.
Auletes had now struck up a conversation with the woman who had slapped the Spanish slave. Her husband, waving a goblet in his hand, interrupted them. “Will we have another display of your dinner before us as we did the last time?” he asked his wife. The woman glared at him through her painted eyes as the other guests laughed. “It looks so nice going in but so terribly ugly coming out,” he continued.
“It’s not as if you haven’t treated everyone here to the same spectacle,” she said. “I had gotten a bad piece of fish. That is all.”
Kleopatra closed her eyes and prayed to the goddess that the woman would not do what her husband had intimated, but the goddess apparently was not listening. As Auletes continued to tell the woman his troubles, she put her hands over her mouth and ran from the room, leaving behind a trail of vomit. Servers scurried to the floor to clean up her mess. When she returned, a slave wiped her mouth while another poured her more wine and still another fussed about her clothing, swabbing away her filth. For these services she said not a word of thanks. All the while Auletes continued his discourse to anyone who would listen, no matter how halfheartedly.
Hekate got up to leave the banquet, stopping by the couch of the princess to wish her good night. “Have you ever seen such a disgraceful display of crudeness?” the elegant Greek woman asked in a whisper.
Since the death of Mohama, Hekate had become a companion and friend. Kleopatra admired Hekate’s preternaturally long neck, which she held high above her collarbone. She leaned against Hekate’s full bosom, closing her eyes, wishing that she might miraculously disappear. How meager the princess felt in the company of women like Hekate who burst with the essential female charms. Kleopatra noticed her father’s easy vulnerability to Hekate’s low, soothing voice, her high, full, creamy breasts, and the way her breathing quickened and her eyes upturned when she approached the king with one of her wishes. Kleopatra possessed none of these qualities. She was still small and straight up and down, and devoid of any hope that she would one day be as round and desirable as Mohama, or as slender and desirable as Hekate.
Hekate stroked Kleopatra’s hair gently and rhythmically just like Kleopatra petted her dogs. “Would you like to go to bed?” she asked. “I will tell the king to excuse you.”
“No, I will wait up with my father.”
They looked at the king, who was now trying to plead his case to the oblivious, intoxicated Julia. Pompey had fallen asleep on the couch face up and was making sounds like water being sucked from a cistern.
“He’s devised an ingenious method of avoiding me, has he not, sending me off to see the city?” The king was sweaty and agitated, his fat jiggling as the royal party arrived at the gates of Rome. The late-morning sun hammered the black top of the enclosed carriage, but Pompey had insisted that for security reasons the royals must travel in a covered vehicle. “The rabble in Rome has new power,” Pompey had warned. “They used to fear us, but no more. Now they boldly harass their betters.”
The double gates to the city, one for entering and one for leaving, were three stories tall and guarded by grim-faced, skirted centurions. With sinewy legs strapped to the knee by the leather laces of their sandals they stood in calcified stillness, armed with long javelins, their helmets gleaming like new coins in the noontime sun. The city’s walls, the royals were told by their guide, were made of sandstone, four feet thick and impenetrable. Kleopatra stared at the uniformed men who seemed to peer back at her from the wall’s many arches on each level.
“How large the men look.” Kleopatra was used to the sizable Romans who visited them at court, Romans made bulky by a lifetime of feasting and drinking, but had not seen firsthand the formidable height and mass carried by Rome’s military men.
“We are slight in comparison,” she said to her father, who sneaked another look at the soldiers from the tiny window.
“Not all of us are slight,” Hekate retorted, raising an eyebrow toward the robust king, letting out an uncharacteristic giggle, and causing his daughter and Charmion to laugh.
But when the carriage passed through the towering arch and entered the city, Kleopatra stifled her laughter. Elation settled like a tickling mist over her body. Her dream of seeing the great city of Rome had come to fruition earlier in her life than she had ever imagined. It came under unfortunate circumstances, but still, here was Rome, and she had entered its perimeter.
Once inside the city walls, the temperature rose, and the seats of the carriage seemed to get harder and more uncomfortable. The driver made continual abrupt stops to avoid running into the throngs of pedestrians, or the other carriages, or the merchants’ carts, or the tall litter-bearers carrying fortunate persons of means over the heads of the masses.
“A law has been proposed to abolish all carts and carriages from the streets by day, allowing only transportation by litter or by foot,” explained the guide Timon, an educated Corinthian slave charged by Pompey to show them the city.
“A few years too late, I would say,” the king replied to this news. He looked out the small portal, and a ghoulish face with no teeth and one eye looked back at him. “A coin for a poor old man?” The hollow mouth mumbled the request; the single eye cocked upward, looking to the heavens and not into the carriage at all.
“Zeus!” Auletes screamed. “A giant! Go away, man. Go away.”
The princess ducked under her father and stuck her head out the small window. “He is carried on the shoulder of another,” she laughed.
“What does the beggar want?” he asked his daughter, fluttering his hands to make the man go away.
“It is just that, Father. He is a beggar asking for coins.”
“Well tell the fellow that I, too, am a beggar, living on Pompey’s hospitality.”
One of the king’s bodyguards who followed them on horseback trotted alongside the carriage, kicking the man away. The carriage stopped short again, throwing Kleopatra forward and into the lap of her father.
“What now??
?? asked the king. “How does one endure this city? How does anyone cope with such crowds, such traffic? I am beginning to see why Pompey does not wish to leave his rural paradise.”
“It is the fault of Julius Caesar’s new law, put into effect by his man, the tribune Clodius,” said Timon, who clearly disapproved. “The law promises free corn to all who reside in the city. Since its passage earlier this year, the rabble have flocked to Rome. No one wants to work anymore. They want to come here, live twelve to a room, and bleed the government treasury.”
“An abomination!” said the king. “In my country, the peasants get their daily bread, but they work for it.”
Thus far the judgment of the king upon Rome was that it was loud, hot, crowded, lacking refinement, and not at all hospitable to royalty. Though Pompey had put them up at the best of Roman townhomes, it was tiny by their own standards and in the middle of the city, and the royals were simply not accustomed to the noise of a Roman street by day or by night. The king complained vociferously, but he was assured that Jupiter himself could not quiet the streets of Rome. All night long bands of drunken marauders roamed the streets yelling, singing, and terrorizing, threatening to light their fellow night-roamers on fire with their torches if they did not capitulate to their demands for money. The troublemakers made the neighborhood dogs bark, which always woke the princess. By dawn, schoolteachers had already begun their classes, which took place outdoors, so that as soon as Kleopatra settled back to sleep, she was startled awake by a resounding lecture given in Greek on the philosopher Herakleitos or on ethics or Virtue—lectures she might have found intriguing if not for her superior education at the Mouseion. Merchants began hawking their goods shortly thereafter. Carts creaked incessantly, the drivers yelling at one another to move out of the way, and then cursing when their cargo collided as they drove in opposite directions down the hazardously narrow streets.
Despite the danger and the intrigue, or perhaps because of it, the city captivated the princess. Saturated with color, in contrast to the pervasive whiteness of her own Alexandria, houses seemed to be stacked upon houses, with jutting ledges called gutters to capture the rainfall. Unlike the symmetrical perfection of Alexandria, Rome had tiny narrow streets and great wide ones. The people everywhere, regardless of class, were loud and crass in speech; neither inscrutable like the native Egyptians nor intense and argumentative like the Greeks. Everywhere the Romans announced themselves: The exteriors of businesses were decorated with crude murals of the proprietors at their tasks; family portraits were done on the residences asserting the identities of the inhabitants, and long political manifestos were scrawled in hurried penmanship on walls and buildings. Rome and its inhabitants were vulgar, to be sure, but Kleopatra found herself nonetheless infatuated with the display.
Released from the small prison of the carriage now, and strolling down a dank alley at the bottom of Capitoline Hill, she entertained herself with the obscene epigrams that commemorated the various sex acts witnessed in that corridor. Kleopatra read in slightly hesitant Latin, for she was not accustomed to slang:
HERE, I, JULIANUS, TAUGHT MY SLAVE-BOY TO PLAY THE
WOMAN. HE PLEASED ME SO WELL I AM PLUCKING HIS THIGHS
CLEAN AND TAKING HIM INTO MY HOUSE.
“Timon, is it not true that Roman law, contrary to Greek tradition, forbids the defiling of young Roman males?” Kleopatra asked her guide. “That citizens must confine homosexual relations to foreigners and slaves?”
“It is true, Your Highness,” he answered. He was a young man, intelligent, and relieved to be in the company of Greek-speaking royals who were happy to share his disdain of the conquering barbarians. “As if one might legislate desire, particularly desire of that kind. People are people the world over. Even the Romans who consider themselves to be so superior and mighty.”
“I heard someone say once in the Alexandrian marketplace that there is no language as good as the Latin for telling a dirty joke. Let us walk ahead of my father and the rest so that we may read them,” she whispered to him. “Oh yes,” he said snidely. “These nasty little ditties are Rome’s finest contribution to literature and poetry to date.”
They strolled on, stopping for the princess to leisurely read of the adventures of “pokers, quim-lickers, and sodomites,” and one lament of a man unable to practice the latter art for weeks due to loose bowels.
BROTHERS, LISTEN TO MY TALE OF WOE.
MY WIFE HAS LONG, VENGEFULTALONS.
HERE ON THIS SITE SHE CAUGHTME IN A BOY.
SHE SCREAMED, DO I NOT HAVE TWO BUTTOCKS, YOU BASTARD?
I, THE OLD POKER, TRIED TO PROTECT THE BOY-LOVER FROM HER BLOWS.
BUT ALL THE WHILE HE SCREAMED AT HER, TAKE YOUR TWO QUIMS AND GO HOME.
“Very good,” said Timon. “You only mispronounced a few things.”
Kleopatra was not allowed—to her great dismay and despite her good arguments—to enter the public baths, for Auletes said it was unseemly for a princess to bathe with commoners. She did, however, visit the ruins of the temple of Isis, recently destroyed by order of the Roman senate because the religion made the Roman women “too excitable.” One senator, grievously worked up over his wife’s unmatronly devotion to the goddess, had taken a sledgehammer to the pillars of the temple, leaving the delicate columns in a crumpled heap. Auletes and his entourage were horrified at the treatment of their native deity, the goddess whom they worshipped, the goddess whom Kleopatra had represented in the Grand Procession. “Roman women appear to be excitable enough on their own,” commented Auletes. “They don’t seem to require the goddess to incite them.”
The carriage halted in front of their next destination. “The Forum!” Kleopatra said, eager to see the seat of Roman culture.
“We must exit the carriage,” explained Timon. “Vehicles of any kind are not allowed into the square.”
“Then it should be declared a holy place,” huffed the king.
They descended the carriage into the heat of the afternoon, which was enhanced by a strong humidity. Kleopatra had always envisioned the Forum as a building, or a series of buildings, but it was not. It was a square surrounded by many buildings; at one end, the massive, eight-columned temple of Saturn, built many centuries ago to honor the god-king of Italy. The temple, they were told, also housed the Roman treasury. “See, Kleopatra, that is where all our money will be when they get through with us!” said Auletes.
Roman citizens rested on the edges of three fountains, while others waited for spaces to clear so that they, too, could indulge their hands, feet, or faces in the cool water. Wide colonnades with long benches lined the square. An old bat-faced woman stood in front of painted vessels hawking fresh water and other cooling citrus drinks while a slave fanned his master with a large leaf in the serene shadow of her little booth.
The markets were not in the open air but in two concave hemicycles with arched fronts that faced the squares. Each building had a gallery where patrons might stroll and look in the window, and the princess looked up, hiding the sun’s glare with her hand, so that she could see the goods of the merchants displayed behind the open doors.
While the king and Hekate rested in the shade, Kleopatra and Charmion spent hours walking into the shops with Timon, trailed by an armed guard, and purchasing whatsoever struck the princess’s fancy. She had wanted to procure fabrics for new clothes, fashionable hair adornments fitting to her new maturity, and shawls for the old ladies who lived on Antirhodos, but she found that the goods manufactured in Rome were primitive in contrast to those imported from Greece and Egypt. She did manage to buy a ceramic figure of a Roman lar, a spritish creature who protected the Romans at home, and a brocade blanket that she would put upon the back of Persephone when she saw her pony again.
Thoughts of her horse made her spirits sink. She had had enough of Rome and wanted to go home—to the shimmering sea, to the wide boulevards, to the exquisite pink granite monuments built by her ancestors, to the palace with its luxuries, to the court
where philosophers and men of science sat with her father and discussed new ideas. It made her sick to the stomach that the Greek world was usurped, crushed, by these brash Romans, uncouth in so many ways. She decided that she hated this crowded, fetid city made of ugly brick. She hated the rows of apartments stacked on top of one another to house the rabble from Rome’s conquered territories. She hated the arrogant men who swept past her in the Forum, followed by armed militias as they left one building and entered another. She hated every sign of the prosperity and might that Rome had built by pillaging the rest of the world. All these things discouraged her, and yet in them she saw a certain inevitability. Here was a race of men who believed that it was their gods-given right to lord over the rest of the world. What fools were her stepmother and sister and their silly, provincial eunuchs who thought that this sweeping force that cast aside the old and painted the future—their futures—could be ignored or demolished.
“Timon, why do all the men in the Forum require such protection to walk the short distance from one end of the square to the next?”
“These men are senators and other men of means. Rome is a terribly dangerous place in these terribly dangerous times.”
“Do we require more protection than we have?” she asked.
“No, the Romans are only concerned with murdering one another at present.”
After the lengthy shopping expedition, Kleopatra and Charmion met up with the others in their party for a final stroll past the Curia Hostilia, in the northwest corner of the Forum, where the senate often met.
“I cannot go near the place without Pompey!” exclaimed the king, turning away from the direction of the Curia as if he had been told that a plague had been let loose in the building. But Timon assured him that the senate did not meet on this day. “If you would like, you may peer into the great room through any one of the open doors in the vestibule,” said Timon.