Antony and Cleopatra (63 page)

“Yes, I do. Your only experience was when you sat on Mount Casius waiting for Achillas and his army. It was my father who dragged you out of that mess, not your own nonexistent military ability. If you accompany Marcus Antonius, his Roman colleagues will think he’s under your control, and hate you. Romans are not used to foreigners in the command tent. I am not a fool, Mama. I know what they say in Rome about you and Antonius.”

She stiffened. “And what do they say in Rome about us?”

“That you’re a sorceress, that you’ve bewitched Antonius, that he’s your plaything, your puppet. That it’s you pushing him to clash with the Senate and People. That if he was not your husband, none of what has happened would have happened,” Caesarion said valiantly. “They call you the Queen of Beasts, and deem you the prime mover in this, not Antonius.”

“You go too far,” Cleopatra said, sounding dangerous.

“No, I don’t go far enough, if I haven’t succeeded in talking you out of this! Especially out of personally participating. My dearest, loveliest Mama, you act as if Rome were King Mithridates the Great. Rome is not—and never will be!—eastern-minded. Rome is of the West. She seeks only to control the East for her own survival.”

She had watched him closely, eyes going back and forth as she tried to decide what was her best tack. Having arrived at it, she said, voice soothing, “Caesarion, you’re not yet fifteen. Yes, I admit you are a man. Still and all, a very young and inexperienced man. Rule Egypt wisely, and I’ll give you additional powers when Antonius and I return wearing the laurels of victory.”

He ceased the struggle. Eyes full of tears, he stared at her, shook his head, and left the room.

“Silly boy,” she said fondly to Iras and Charmian.

“Beautiful boy” from Charmian, sighing.

“Not a boy, and not silly” from Iras, grimly. “Haven’t you realized, Cleopatra, that he’s prophetic? You should take notice of what he says, not dismiss it.”

So she left on
Philopator
with Iras’s words still ringing in her ears; it was those, rather than what Caesarion had actually said, that caused her unhappiness, a mood the attitude of Antony’s colleagues in Ephesus only enhanced. But, autocrat that she was, all of it only served to make her haughtier, ruder, more overbearing.

Antony wasn’t to blame for his ship’s putting in to Samos; it developed a leak that couldn’t wait for Athens to be attended to, and Samos was the closest island.

The League of Dionysiac Entertainers had made Samos its headquarters; while he waited, Antony thought he might as well see what was going on among the magicians, dancers, acrobats, freaks, musicians, and others who lingered in their delightful cottages until some festival called them away. None at the moment, Callimachus the league president informed him, after showing him a wonderful trick that turned landbound beetles into twinkling butterflies.

“However, we’ve decided to put on a feast tonight in your honor. You will attend?”

Of course he would! Resisting the urge to drink wine was as nothing compared to his compulsion to seek merriment in the company of an assortment of entertainers. The only problem was, he soon learned, that sobriety severely curtailed his enjoyment; he took a cup of wine and proceeded to get drunk.

What happened during the days that followed this decision he didn’t remember; it was true that wine affected his memory more and more as he grew older. Only his secretary, Lucilius, forced him back into the dismal world of sobriety—and that, by a single, simple sentence:

“The Queen is bound to find out.”

“Oh, Jupiter!” Antony groaned. “
Cacat!
”

The leak had been repaired
nundinae
ago, he discovered when Lucilius and his body servants half carried him aboard, shaking and stumbling. Had he really drunk that much? Or was it more quickly destructive? Under the hangover he was conscious of a new terror, that finally the years of dissipation were catching up with him. The days of lifting anvils were over. He had turned fifty-one, and his biceps when he flexed them felt a little soft, wouldn’t pop up. Fifty-one! A venerable consular’s age. And Octavian was a mere thirty, wouldn’t be thirty-one until toward the end of September. Worse, all Octavian’s best generals were young men, whereas his were like himself, becoming grizzled. Canidius was over sixty! Oh, where did the time go? He felt sick, had to rush to the rail and vomit.

His valet brought him water to drink, sponged his lips and chin. “Are you coming down with something,
domine
?”

“Yes,” said Antony, shivering. “Old age.”

But by the time his ship tied up in the Piraeus, Antony had regained a little of last year’s physical well-being, even if his mood was unpleasant.

“Where is my wife, Octavia?” he demanded of his steward in the governor’s palace.

The man looked blank—no, astonished. “It is some years since the lady Octavia was in residence, Marcus Antonius.”

“What do you mean, some years? She’s supposed to be here, along with twenty thousand soldiers from her brother!”

“I can only repeat,
domine,
that she isn’t. Nor are there any soldiers billeted anywhere near Athens. If the lord Octavianus sent soldiers, they must have gone to Macedonia, or overland to Asia Province.”

Memory was coming back; yes, it was five years since Octavia had come with four cohorts of troops, not four legions. And he had commanded her to send the military gifts from Octavian to him in Antioch, and return home herself.
Five years!
Was it really so long? No, perhaps it was only four years ago. Or three? Oh, did it matter?

“I’ve been away from Rome too long,” he said to Lucilius as he settled behind his desk.

“The last time was Tarentum, six years ago,” said Lucilius from his own desk.

“Then it was four years ago that Octavia came to Athens.”

“Yes.”

“Take a letter, Lucilius…. To Octavia, from Marcus Antonius. I hereby divorce you. Remove yourself from my house in Rome and cease tenancy of any of my villas in Italia. I do not return your dowry and I decline to continue to support you or my Roman children. Accept this as binding and final.”

Keeping his eyes firmly on the sheet of paper, Lucilius wrote. Oh, dear lady! With this act, all hope of rescue for Antonius is lost…. He lifted his head, got up, put the paper down in front of Antony. One of his superlative talents was handwriting so good it didn’t need to be copied by a professional scribe.

Antony read it swiftly, then folded it. “Wax, Lucilius.”

Red was the customary color for formal documents. Lucilius held the stick in the flame of a lamp so expertly that it wasn’t discolored from the smoke, twisted it away the moment a blob the size of a denarius lay athwart the outer fold. Antony put his seal ring in it and pressed down hard. Hercules, surrounded by IMP. M. ANT. TRI.

“Get it onto the next ship for Rome,” Antony said curtly, “and find me a ship bound for Ephesus. My business in Athens is quite finished.” He smiled wryly. “It never existed.”

There didn’t seem to be an exact moment he could pinpoint as the actual burning of his Roman boats, Antony decided as he sailed from the Piraeus; just that it dated from his learning that he had sworn to dedicate himself and his booty to Cleopatra and Alexandria. His love for Octavia and things Roman had not prospered, whereas his love for Cleopatra had become all-encompassing. Why that was he didn’t really know, except that she lay at the core of his being, that he couldn’t gainsay her even when her demands were preposterous. Some of it was due to his lapses of memory, yes, but they couldn’t be blamed for it either. Maybe the great Queen had moved herself holus-bolus into his heart because she at least could find merit in him; she at least thought him powerful and worth cultivating. Rome belonged to Octavian, so why not let Rome go entirely? That was what it boiled down to, when all was said and done. If he wanted to be the First Man in Rome, he would have to conquer Octavian on a battlefield. And Cleopatra saw that clearly, always had. His dangerous binge on Samos and its awful aftermath of illness and fresh lapses of memory had taught him that his best years were past, even though he knew it was no more than a binge. An irresistible binge, when his real reason for sailing from Ephesus to Athens had been to escape his love, his bane, his vows to Cleopatra.

So, he had thought, arriving in Athens more or less healed, why not burn his Roman boats? Everyone from Cleopatra to Octavian wanted it, expected it, would have nothing less from him. Now he must get back to Ephesus before Cleopatra created fresh problems.

But before he could reach Ephesus the presence of Cleopatra was having severe repercussions. First Saturninus and Arruntius departed for Rome, declaring that they would rather serve a man they hated than any kind of woman; at least Octavian was a
Roman
! Then Atratinus followed, together with a group of junior legates who were infuriated by the way Cleopatra toured their camps finding fault, even had scathing words to say about sloppy gear or major centurions who didn’t snap to attention when she addressed them.

When Atratinus reached Rome, Ahenobarbus and Sosius listened to his complaints with dismay.

Things were not good in Rome either. The Treasury was almost empty, thanks to the cost of finding good land for so many thousands of veterans. The multimillions of sesterces Sextus Pompeius’s vaults had yielded were spent, incredible as that seemed. Land came expensive, and very few legionaries agreed to retire in foreign locations like the Spains, the Gauls, and Africa. They too were Roman, welded to Italian soil. Yes, the retirees were content—but at huge cost to the nation.

However, there could be no denying that Octavian was slowly gaining the ascendancy in the Senate and among the plutocrats and knight-businessmen; opportunities in Antony’s East were dwindling, and those men and firms that had been prospering two years ago were now disintegrating. Polemon, Archelaus Sisenes, Amyntas, and the smaller Antonian-appointed dynasts had grown confident enough to legislate to make it impossible for Roman commerce to flourish. Egged on, as everybody knew, by Cleopatra, the spider at the center of the web.

“What are we going to do?” Sosius asked Ahenobarbus after the angry Atratinus had gone.

“I’ve been thinking about that ever since Antonius’s letter, Gaius, and I believe there’s only one thing left to do.”

“Well, go on!” Sosius cried eagerly.

“We have to reinforce the Romanness of Antonius’s rule in the East, that’s the first prong of this two-tined fork,” Ahenobarbus said. “The second is to make Octavianus look illegal.”

“
Illegal?
How on earth can you do that?”

“By removing the government from Rome to Ephesus. You and I are the consuls of the year. Most of the praetors are also Antonian. I doubt we’ll prise any tribunes of the plebs off their bench, but if half the Senate goes with us, we’ll be an undisputed government-in-exile. Yes, Sosius, we leave Rome for Ephesus! Thus making Ephesus the center of government, and infusing Antonius’s circle with, say, five hundred trusty Romans. More than enough to force Cleopatra to return to Egypt, where she belongs.”

“That was what Pompeius Magnus did after Caesar—oops, Divus Julius!—crossed the Rubicon into Italia proper. He took the consuls, the praetors, and four hundred senators to Greece.” Sosius frowned. “But in those days the Senate was smaller, nor did it contain so many
novi homines
. Today’s Senate is a thousand strong, and two-thirds New Men. Many of them Octavianus’s men. If we are to look like a government-in-exile, we’ll have to persuade at least five hundred senators to go with us, and I don’t think we will.”

“Nor do I, actually. I’m aiming for the four hundred do-or-die Antonians. Not a majority, but impressive enough to convince most people that Octavianus is operating illegally if he tries to form a government to replace us,” said Ahenobarbus, looking smug.

“Once you do that, Gnaeus, you’re starting a civil war.”

“I know. But civil war is inevitable anyway. Why else has Antonius moved his entire army and navy to Ephesus? Do you think Octavianus hasn’t interpreted the move correctly? I loathe the man, but I’m well aware of his brilliance. A warped counterpart of Caesar’s mind lives inside Octavianus’s head, believe me.”

“How do you know it’s in the head?”

“What?” Ahenobarbus asked blankly.

“The mind.”

“Anyone knows that who’s ever been on a battlefield, Sosius. Ask any army surgeon. The mind is inside the head, in the brain.” Ahenobarbus waved his hands around, exasperated. “Sosius, we’re not discussing anatomy and the location of the
animus
! We’re discussing how best we can help Antonius out of his Egyptian mire and back inside Rome!”

“Yes, yes, of course. Pardon me. We’d better act in a hurry, then. If we don’t, Octavianus will prevent our leaving Italia.”

But Octavianus didn’t. His agents reported the sudden convulsion of activity by certain senators—bank withdrawals, the salting away of assets to prevent their being garnished, packing up of houses, wives, children, pedagogues, tutors, nurserymaids, valets, maids, hairdressers, cosmeticians, seamstresses, skivvies, bodyguards, and cooks. But he made no move of any kind, didn’t even mention it in the House or on the rostra of the Forum Romanum. He had gone out of Rome early in spring, but he was back, alert as a bird dog, yet absolutely inactive.

So Ahenobarbus, Sosius, ten praetors, and three hundred members of the Senate hastened down the Via Appia to Tarentum on horseback or in gigs, leaving their dependents to travel in litters together with hundreds of ox-drawn wagons of servants, furniture, fabrics, fans, follies, and foodstuffs. Everything eventually sailed from Tarentum, Tarentum being the nearer port for voyages heading for Athens around Cape Taenarum or for Patrae on the Gulf of Corinth.