She did not even realize that she was crying until she felt the coarse skin of Antony’s finger wipe away a tear.
Finally, after all her efforts and all her struggles, she had fulfilled the promise she had made more than twenty years ago at the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, the city she would soon return to as Queen of Kings and of her Sons who are Kings, and the exulted partner of Rome’s greatest general. Just as she had promised the goddess on that day, she had not stooped to the humiliation and subjugation of her ancestors before the monster that was Rome. Instead, she had put herself and her kingdom in a position of equality with the Romans. The Declaration of the Empire of the East was the moment that represented the culmination of her entire life’s efforts. It was all she had ever wanted, and now she had it.
Weeks later Kleopatra found out how little Rome welcomed equal partners. Octavian distorted every one of Antony’s actions, making it appear that everything he did was a signal that he was stealing the Roman empire to slake Kleopatra’s thirst for conquest.
“But you have done nothing for me that you have not done in one form or another for any of your monarchical allies,” she had protested to Antony.
“That is correct. If I have given you more, it is because you have given me more.”
Much more, she thought. More money. More troops. More ships. More grain. She had lain her country’s resources at his feet. More to the point, after the failure in Parthia of so many Roman generals past, Antony, like Caesar, figured that he could not win that war without her. Was she not supposed to enhance her own prestige for her continued efforts to help Rome subdue its most menacing foe?
But that was not the story circulated by Octavian. He used Kleopatra’s assistance in building up the eastern forces as evidence that she was planning her own full-scale war against Rome. He put this idea into circulation so successfully that Kleopatra began to think that she no longer had any choice but to do it. Antony had made dozens of attempts to make peace with Octavian, but it was clear that Octavian did not desire peace, at least not peace between himself and Antony. Antony had sent numerous letters to Rome explaining the logic of his alliance with Kleopatra, and listing her many efforts on behalf of the empire. Somehow, those missives were never read before the senate as intended.
On Antony’s fiftieth birthday, he decided that he must make a will. He named his Roman children his heirs in Rome-for legally, he could do nothing else-and made separate provisions in Alexandria for his children with Kleopatra. He had the will drawn up in Rome by a Roman solicitor and filed, according to custom, with the Vestal Virgins in Rome, the holy temple considered a sacred depository for private documents. But Octavian, who now went everywhere with a bodyguard, burst into the temple and took Antony’s will by force from the High Priestess. He made a great show of reading it to the senate, although what he read bore no resemblance to what Antony had written. He declared that Antony had disinherited his Roman children in favor of Kleopatra’s children, and that his fondest wish was to be buried in Alexandria so that he never again would have to leave the queen’s company.
Octavian began to send letters to Antony “accusing him” of sharing Kleopatra’s bed. In letters and pamphlets and speeches, he asked the question over and over-did Antony not realize that this sexual liaison was against the Roman moral code? Antony was furious and wrote to Octavian asking why he had waited nine years before he decided that it was morally wrong to sleep with the queen, and then listed Octavian’s many mistresses by name.
“The man’s staff goes about Rome tearing girls away from their families for his sexual delight,” Antony told Kleopatra. “He is remorseless in this, as if he’s a brothel master! This, after breaking up a perfectly good and legal Roman marriage that had produced two male heirs and forcing the man to give up his wife! Serves him well that she remains barren.”
“After producing two sons with another man?” Kleopatra asked. “Livia is not barren. She despises Octavian, and takes secret herbs to prevent conceiving his child.”
“Interesting,” Antony said. “Do such potions exist?”
“If one is schooled in the old ways of medicine,” Kleopatra said. “Greek doctors know nothing of these remedies. The old women keep the ingredients secret and pass them down to their young apprentices only by word. They also say that sometimes a woman remains barren if she is unhappy.”
“Then I take it Your Majesty is fiercely happy,” Antony said, and they both laughed. “But if you were forced to divorce your husband and leave your sons, would you not be unhappy?”
“Yes, but there is not a man on earth who is able to make me do that,” she replied, taking his face into her hands and kissing him. He had let his beard grow again for the winter, and she ran her fingers through its fuzz. “Either his wife is punishing him, or the gods are punishing him. I cannot decide which. But whichever the case, it is not punishment enough for his evil.”
To:Kleopatra VII, Queen of Kings
From: Hammonius in the city of Rome
Dear Your Majesty,
I am writing to inform you that I will sail with this letter away from the city of Rome for good. I have been here for many years now serving the needs of your kingdom and those of your father before you. While I have successfully operated as an importer of goods, many here know my true purpose. It is no longer safe for one who serves the queen of Egypt so closely to rest on Roman soil.
And so with Your Majesty’s permission-for I am so certain it is coming that I am leaving Rome today-I will sail to the port of Piraeus, make a short pilgrimage to Eleusis where I shall be reinitiated in the Mysteries, and then I shall make for the place of my retirement, an olive plantation outside the city of Athens. I will not be lonely there, for it is the home of Archimedes’ father-in-law. Archimedes has married at last, a lovely young Greek girl who cannot yet be twenty. When he enters the room, she regards him each time as if he is a hero returned from the Trojan War. I am certain they will have an enormous brood of very fine children who will sit on my lap in my old age as you used to do when you were but a girl.
Your Majesty, I am seventy years old and still fat, healthy, and enjoying the pleasures of love whenever I may, but soon I shall be old and blind and bent over a cane. I hope that I have served you well. Archimedes and I are bound by oath to protect and serve you until we breathe our last. But now, you are under the protection of the great Marcus Antonius. With such a man as your husband and ally, and with an army of one hundred thousand at his command, what more might two poor Greeks-one elderly, the other now middle-aged and in search of peace in his life-do in your service? And yet if there is such a mission you wish us to undertake, we are at your command.
After all the many covert means by which we have corresponded over the years, I must now ask you to reach me by more mundane methods. I may be found at the plantation of Demosthenes of Brauron, that sacred town founded by the children of Orestes. There I shall eat olives and drink wine in the sun while young maid-ens-they are all named Iphegenia there-worry over my health, or so Archimedes has promised.
I hope to see you again before you find yourself staring at the flames of my funeral pyre. I will offer a sacrifice in Eleusis in your name.
Your eternal and humble Kinsman and servant,
Hammonius
Ephesus: the 18th year of Kleopatra’s reign
Neos Dionysus!” shouted the Ephesians gathered at the harbor, chanting Antony’s divine moniker as soon as he appeared at the bow of the Antonia. “Queen of Kings! Queen of Kings!” Kleopatra heard the people shouting for her as she hurried to Antony’s side.
Antony and Kleopatra had sailed into the Great Harbor of the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor with their entire navy Eight hundred ships from all over the world had come to join them in their cause, two hundred built by Kleopatra and flying the Ptolemaic standards with the red and white colors of Egypt. The Antonia, their flagship, led the aquatic parade, a pageant of power that took one’s breath away. Kleopatra knew that on thi
s day, every spectator would rush from the docks, spreading the word of this mighty force that had landed on their shores.
She and Antony alighted from their vessel and walked together up broad Harbor Street under a prescient blue sky unmarred by clouds while the citizens of Ephesus threw rose petals in their path. She had once walked this street at night, when its fifty lanterns cast gigantic columnar shadows from the colonnades across its big square stones. Ephesus was one of the region’s holiest spots, the location of the temple of Artemis, and therefore a good place to secure the absolute favor of the gods before going to war. Blinding white columns along the route both welcomed foreigners into the city and warned them to wash before entering its gates. Strangers were welcome; their diseases were not. Ephesus was a marble city, and it shimmered now in the noontime sunlight like some divine desert mirage. Only the barren fig trees and the tapered cypresses stuck like spears into the ground made the city seem earthbound.
The royal procession continued through town. Looking up, Kleopatra could see the theater built by Lysimachus into the slopes of the mountain. Straight ahead, at the end of the street, a huge statue of a boar, the mascot of the city, opened his chasm of a jaw. The porticos along the streets were jammed with people spilling into the avenue to catch a glimpse of the divine queen and her Roman consort. A little boy with two goats trailing him had become the unofficial leader of the procession. He scampered ahead of Kleopatra’s party, swatting the bottoms of his animals to keep a few steps ahead of her guard. The crowd stayed with them until they reached a great corridor of pines that were taller than the temple. There they boarded the carriage that would take them to their winter quarters, a Greek-style palace in the slopes above the city with a view of the sea so that they might look out upon their navy.
It seemed to Kleopatra at this moment that all the world was with them, and today even the heavens showed approval for their cause. They had sailed in perfect weather with the most favorable winds and landed gently on the white sands of the ancient city. Not only the populace had been there to greet them. Many Roman senators, outraged by Octavian’s actions, had fled their own country to join with Antony and Kleopatra and were now headquartered in Ephesus.
“If it’s war Octavian wants, it’s war we shall give him.” Kleopatra was resolute, standing on tiptoes to whisper these words in Antony’s ear, though she was smiling and waving at the throng.
Without the courage to declare war on the great Antony, Octavian had been waging a war of slander, propaganda, and sabotage, inventing wild stories and poisoning minds that lacked the discretion or the knowledge to think for themselves. Through some loudmouth poets, Octavian had spread the word that Kleopatra had taken to ending every sentence with the oath, As surely as I shall dispense justice on the Capitol! She had laughed to Antony when she heard that. “Firstly, it is a cumbersome phrase with which to end a sentence,” she said.
“And secondly,” Antony added, “Even if you were so inclined to make that your ambition, you would never be foolish enough to say it.” How low was the level of the Roman intellect that they would believe such ridiculous tales? Not only accept such strange fantasies as truth, but react with such enormous outrage? The latest stories invented were the most foolish, and yet they were accepted and circulated by Antony’s Roman enemies with the ferocity of a hurricane. It was now said that Antony’s appetite for Egyptian luxury had grown so great that even Kleopatra chastised his extravagances. It was said that he only pissed into golden chamberpots-the least serious charge leveled by Octavian, but interestingly, the one that solicited the most ill-will among the Romans. Rumors had also spread that at banquets, Kleopatra melted priceless pearls in vinegar and drank the potion to Antony’s health; that Antony anointed Kleopatra’s feet as if he were her body slave; that he had robbed the library at Pergamum to appease her unquenchable thirst for stolen manuscripts; and that the two wrote one another love letters on priceless tablets of onyx and silver. Kleopatra wondered if the most ignorant and superstitious servants in her palace would have believed the kinds of ridiculous things propagated by Roman aristocrats. The stories had all the elements of cautionary fables written to frighten little children into obedience. She supposed that made sense; intellectually- with rare exception-the Romans were less sophisticated than little Greek schoolboys.
But the rumor and innuendo secretly disturbed Kleopatra’s peace of mind. Had she and Antony made tactical errors? She had asked herself that question as they sailed toward Ephesus. She did not share her concerns with Antony because he allowed what were mere questions in her mind to shadow his moods and humor. He preferred utter optimism, and so that is what she presented to him. But privately, she reviewed the choices they had made. Nothing was irreversible as far as she was concerned. What had been said today might be taken back tomorrow. Or at least that seemed the Roman way. Antony planned to proceed from Ephesus to Rome to set the record straight on Octavian’s lies. Kleopatra was to wait in Ephesus with the army and the navy, for surely her presence in Rome, after Octavian’s propaganda against her, would pose too much of a threat. That was the plan, until Octavian took the final step in breaching with Antony forever. He declared Kleopatra Enemy of Rome. Now there was no question of Antony going there peaceably.
“Of course he could not say such a thing of the Imperator, who still has the support of at least half the senate, the eastern forces of the army, and a good number of the country’s monied classes,” said the senator Ahenobarbus, one of the many who had fled Rome and joined Antony and Kleopatra in Ephesus.
Kleopatra sat with Antony and his War Council as Ahenobarbus reported Octavian’s recent exploits. “With no constitutional authority, he has denied the Imperator the consulship-an elected office-and he has declared that the great Marcus Antonius is no longer a Roman officer, but a mercenary in the service of a foreign queen!”
“The insult to Your Majesty will not go unpunished,” Canidius added.
Kleopatra wondered how much of Ahenobarbus’s fury was genuine and how much had been called up to make a show of his loyalty to Antony, who did not join in the fray but sat calmly listening to the reprehensible actions of his enemy. He had a look of incredulity on his face, as if he did not quite believe he had to take these bizarre actions of Octavian seriously. Kleopatra, too, wondered how Octavian managed to get away with his actions in a country that supposedly had slavish love of its constitution. The Romans had murdered Caesar over what they considered violations of that sacrosanct document. Now they allowed his pale nephew open interpretation of five hundred years of inalienable law. Octavian was cagey, however, and while he played fast and loose with the constitution itself, he adhered publicly to the strictest Roman forms. Very clever, the queen noted.
Calling upon all the Roman traditions he could summon up, Octavian staged a drama in which he cast Kleopatra as the evil predator and magician who had bewitched Antony and many of his supporters. Himself he portrayed as the upholder of the constitution and the Roman Republic who would vanquish the Egyptian menace in the names of the gods.
“He put on his priest’s robes and marched into the Field of Mars, where he dipped a sword in blood and threw it toward the east,” Ahenobarbus said. “There were those who remarked that he could not throw very far, so frail is he. But he declared the war against you a holy war, Kleopatra.”
Kleopatra did not like the way Ahenobarbus made use of her given name, which was reserved for intimates of the queen. It made her suspicious of him. If he could not address her by her formal titles, what was his true opinion of her partnership with Antony? But she said nothing, encouraging him to supply more details.
“Then he set about Italy with a large army, making the population swear an oath to him.”
“What sort of oath?” Kleopatra asked.
“The typical sort of thing a Roman is made to swear to a general. ’I will hold my loyalty to the Son of the Divine Julius Caesar above my loyalty to family, children, and friends. I declare the enemies of the
Son of the Divine Julius Caesar to be my enemies and I swear to fight to vanquish them.’ Oh, it goes on and on, but that is the gist of it.”
Kleopatra had no control over the way her body cringed when she heard that Octavian referred to himself as the Son of the Divine Julius Caesar. Perhaps because her son was the only true son of Caesar. Maybe it was motherly protection, but every time she heard the phrase, she shuddered.
“He frightened people into signing it by saying that the Imperator and the queen wished to destroy the city of Rome and to make Alexandria the new capital of the world.”
Antony still had said little. He looked at Kleopatra. “Perhaps that’s what we should do.”
She laughed. “Destroy the city of Rome?”
“No, set up a new Rome in Alexandria. We’ve got enough of the Roman senate with us to make a case for having Rome itself. What is Rome? A piece of geography? Is it not the families who have made it great? The scions of those families are here with me. The ones who are not are with the shopkeeper’s son-a boy who is elevated only by adoption. And I am convinced that Caesar named him his heir while in one of his dizzy spells.”