Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (31 page)

Rue Nebi Danial

While Cleopatra was beginning her immortality in Alexandria, Plancus was in Rome taking smaller steps along the road to being
remembered. He was being practical, helpful, ingratiating to the victor who was now undisputed leader of the Roman world.
Gradually the great survivor became cautiously optimistic. He began to see a new future for himself.

He saw some of the letters he would eventually want on his tomb, the ancient pillbox that Duke was to contemplate on his way
to Anzio. There would be the COS for his consulship back in 42
BC
. To have taken that post had been his decent duty after the death of Julius Caesar – to hold the fort, to stabilise, to do
good if he could. There would be a word or two on his foundation of the Roman colonies ‘Lugdunum et Rauricam’, places that
would become Lyons and Basle. There would be room left on the lintel for other offices he might hold, temples he might build,
but none for any references to his services for Antony and Cleopatra. There would be no more mention, except by his enemies,
of his slitherings on palace floors in a sea-creature outfit or his judicial role while Cleopatra turned pearls into the world’s
most expensive wine.

Plancus wanted to be a player again. Dutiful constitutional service was to be his epitaph. Beyond the record of his virtuous
offices there would also be space for his heirs and for any honours that they might
gain from his example. Caieta, close to his family home, was his chosen burial site by the sea. This had also been the burial
place of Aeneas’s nurse, a minor but significant character in the myth of Rome’s foundation. Perhaps Plancus was pleased by
that coincidence. Perhaps it was no coincidence at all.

Words would last longer even than tombs. That was what civilised people were beginning to think. If a tomb were somehow linked
to art, the chance of survival might be higher still. His marble memorial might, with appropriate encouragement to Virgil,
take its place discreetly (but not too discreetly) in the epic of the great new order. It would match the first lines of the
second half of Rome’s greatest poem. To any young reader who had only the second half in his hand it might be the very beginning
of the
Aeneid
.

Poets were useful. That much Plancus knew. But poets were not always as clear as marble and concrete. Virgil was maybe the
most reliable, a public poet who knew his place. But there was Horace too, a younger genius of the new age, equally revered
by the new regime, a master of the more personal style. Horace was Plancus’s friend. But he was tricky. He was Alexandrian
in his way although he did not always like to admit it. No one who received a poem as a gift from Horace ever knew quite what
it meant, still less what others later might think it meant.

In the four weeks between Maurice’s last visit to the Blue Lion and his last breath, we met and spoke whenever we could. Much
of our shared memories in this book are his own memories, retained by him, released by his dying and merely reinforced by
my own. His present then presupposed his death. His present revived his past. I wish I had been with him even more.

I had other appointments to keep, the kind of appointments that come to an Editor of the
TLS
with interests in the ancient world. One of these, and of all the chances in this story it seems still the strangest, required
a Sunday morning reading in Gloucestershire of that most peculiar and subtle poem which Horace addressed to Plancus. This
was the one known by its first words
Laudabunt alii
, the beginning of thirty-two lines which, while Maurice was dying, and thus so very eerily as it seemed to me, my task was
to explain, word by word, on stage, to an audience in the West of England countryside.

Plancus’s long afterlife arrived in Cheltenham on the occasion of a literary festival, a temporary village of tented bookshops,
libraries and halls, a virtually unknown event in the calendars of the 1970s and 1980s but in 2010 as common as a game of
cricket. The aim of the event was to help readers who had never read a Latin poem before to read one for the first time.

I had agreed to chair the meeting. The choice of poem was not mine. Plancus followed me by purest chance. ‘
Laudabunt alii
’ we all began at 10.00 a.m. A light-pointer identified each word: ‘will praise’ was followed by ‘other men’.
Laudabunt alii claram Rhodon aut Mytilenen Aut Ephesum bimarisve Corinthi moenia:
Others will praise bright Rhodes, or Mytilene, or Ephesus or the walls of Corinth on its two seas. The audience had come
to read it in Latin – and it was my task to help them do just that.

V was sitting in the second row from the front, between two blocks of schoolchildren and their teachers. She had a boyish
face, not much older than I remembered but larger, her pale cheeks framed by dark, shoulder-length hair, a tattoo on her left
shoulder and what I would once have called an Alice-band to keep her forehead clear. I knew
immediately who she was. She smiled up while another member of our panel was explaining
Laudabunt alii
, how the second word is the plural subject of the verb in the future tense that precedes it, and what comes next, what precisely
it was that ‘other men will praise’.

V was taking notes. My colleagues were beginning to explain what the words might mean. I remembered the problems. Is Horace
about to praise Plancus? Or is Horace not as straightforward as that? Are the words already a warning to Plancus? If ‘other
people’ are handing out the bouquets, this may suggest that Horace is not going to give any himself. Perhaps Plancus will
not like his ode.

Perhaps no one will be praised. The subjects are not, it turns out, even people. They are places, Greek places, tourist sites
that were also controversial places, names which any educated soldier of the past decade would know well, in Plancus’s case
much too well. The light-pointer moved jerkily over the words.

Why did Horace choose Rhodes? Was it as beauty spot or naval dockyard island? Why Mytilene? As a peaceful town of poets, protected
by Crinagoras, gentle poet and diplomat? Or as a ruin pillaged by Roman armies? Ephesus was the city where Arsinoe was strangled,
where Antony and Cleopatra danced on their way to Actium. Corinth was the port with a mouth on two strategic seas. Both welcomed
wealthy tourists all the time. Sometimes desperate generals came instead.

My colleagues posed their questions. I concentrated on the answers. In one sense this is a simple drinking song, a request
to
Plancus to cheer up and enjoy some wine while he can. But little in Horace means what it seems to mean. We must look at what
is omitted as well as what is there. The stresses are within the lines and within the names. Even readers finding this poem
for the first time have to take a view of the distant unknown.

V did not seem to have any young charges of her own. While the other adults in the row checked whether their pupils were taking
down the translation correctly, she alternated careful note-taking with looking straight ahead. When she caught my eye, she
did not smile but held up the back of the exercise book on her lap. On it was a V, in Quink-blue ink, lest I might not have
recognised her face.

I was doing my best but I was drifting. My eyes scanned around and around the circular hall. There were polite questions and
from my colleagues beside me came answers equally polite.

Sunt quibus unum opus est … celebrare:
There are some people who do nothing but celebrate …

In the following lines, we learn, Horace does hand out a little praise of his own, not to Plancus but to another place, to
Tibur, Rome’s summer suburb of tinkling water gardens, temples and facades – a bit like Cheltenham perhaps – where Plancus
and Horace both have pleasant houses.

This was not a helpful direction for Plancus. He may have felt a little guilty about Tibur. The means by which homes there
had gained their owners were rarely as pleasant as the houses themselves. Horace’s own retreat had been a reward for loyalty
from the new regime. Plancus’s place had been gained a little earlier and in much nastier circumstances, it was said. It had
belonged to his brother whom he had betrayed to Mark Antony after Caesar’s death. The pursuers had
caught him because they knew in advance the perfume he was wearing. Perfume was as great a slur on a Roman man as any betrayal.

There was much here in Tibur that would ideally be forgotten – by Horace, by Plancus, by everyone. But Horace has simultaneously
both a message for Plancus and a description of him. Have a few drinks, adapt and survive, subtly, not by changing sides any
more but by changing the past. Many of their friends were dead. Cleopatra and Antony were dead. Crimes were still crimes.
Let them fade rather than be erased. To continue was the key and to be a Continuator was to be a king.

Ninety minutes later, when ‘How to Read a Latin Poem’ was over, V was sitting on a wall outside, smoking a grey cigarette
and rolling a second between her fingers. She had not stayed to the end. The book with her initial on the back was on top
of a canvas briefcase.

She apologised for walking out. Our first words after more than twenty years were about how she needed a nicotine injection.
Otherwise it was as though we were still circling warily around the evils of private schools and the inadequacies of Elizabeth
Taylor’s director. She was never one for pleasantries.

‘So what did I miss?’

‘A story, an
Odyssey
story, an
Aeneid
story. Horace wants to tell Plancus a story.’

‘It is the weirdest ending. I don’t get it.’

She snapped at me like Mr W at a student of German.

‘Teucer’s is not a famous story now. It is one of the lesser known odysseys that began with the fall of Troy. There were hundreds
of them.’

She screwed up her face into an ancient scowl. ‘Remember that your thinking about Plancus was my idea.’

Alexandria’s librarians kept a careful catalogue of all the odysseys they knew. There was the long journey of Odysseus himself
who took a decade to reach home from Troy, kill his rivals and reclaim his wife. There was the shorter trip by Agamemnon who
came home quickly to be killed quickly too. Helen, whose abduction had caused the war, was delayed with her husband Menelaus
on Pharos, and escaped their captors only by wrestling with a god of the sea. Aeneas, a minor Trojan prince, copied the best
adventures of Odysseus and rose to be the founder of the Roman race. Those were just the best-known stories.

Horace rarely chose the obvious when the obscure was available. He preferred the oblique, the tangential. That was what the
Alexandrians had taught him.

‘Horace tells Plancus the story of a man called Teucer, the brother of the giant Ajax, one small hero of the Greeks at Troy
and another much greater one.

‘…
Teucer Salamina patremque Cum fugeret, tamen uda Lyaeao Tempora populea fertur vinxisse corona, Sic tristis affatus amicos
: When Teucer was fleeing Salamis and his father, he became drunk with wine, tied a poplar wreath to his brow and spoke to
his sad friends.’

‘What was the point of that?’ V posed the question as sharply as before and pulled at her cigarette like a teenager.

Teucer was a minor player in the war. He was like Plancus. He was trying to make a fresh start. Teucer, too, did not have
much choice. His father, king of Salamis, was angry at his son’s return from Troy without his beloved elder brother.

There was no reason in this. The reception was unfair. Everyone in Salamis said so. Teucer had been loyal and devoted to his
crazy kinsman. Both of them had served the Greeks loyally until Achilles had been killed and Ajax had lost the battle for
his beautiful armour.

Then there was chaos. Nothing can be done about chaos except wait for it to end. Ajax confused animals with Trojan enemies,
slaughtered cattle instead of fellow heroes and finally killed himself, leaving Teucer behind to go home alone, to face their
father’s wrath and be forced out of Salamis again in permanent exile.

None of this was Teucer’s fault. He could not have saved the mad brute, Ajax. Neither he nor his bigger brother could have
saved Achilles. So there was no option but that of a new start.