Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (16 page)

The editor of the university newspaper was from Trinity and had already suggested that I join him, in the first instance,
in the college rugby team and, after that, on the Cherwell ‘feature’ pages. Or would student politics be a better course,
some potent thoughts on miners’ strikes and the prospects of Edward Heath becoming Prime Minister? Possibly. Probably not.

Rue de Musee

Museum Street has one cafe that is open and no museum. Socratis began today by sticking keenly to his role as learned guide.
I asked him if there was anything on show in Alexandria about two of the Ptolemies’ finest public servants, Herophilus and
Erasistratus, doctors who used to cut open living criminals in attempts to find out how the organs of the body fitted together.
He said he did not know – but would find out fast.

He seemed anxious. I told him not to worry. Not much was known by anyone about the opening-up of pregnant women to discover
whether girls took the same time to grow as boys – except that it is said to have happened here. Knowledge of humans, knowledge
of Homer: there were so many things that nature had hidden and that librarians, without distinction between the arts and the
sciences, might be encouraged to discover.

This could never be a discussion for Mahmoud, who dislikes the suggestion that anything morally uncomfortable, unpleasant,
still less evil, has ever happened here. But Mahmoud did not join us today. Maybe we will see him later.

Socratis was not afraid of the awkward question but the answer, he said, would be in the museum of antiquities which was closed
on a Sunday. In fact, for some time it had been closed every day. He knew a man in the next street who might help. He might
even open the back
door. He would return with him soon. Was I happy to wait? My second cup of coffee has just appeared – and a cake with red
eyes.

A few days after Maurice had given me my instructions Geoff the Editor said I should meet him in the back bar of the King’s
Arms before lunch, eleven o’clock. This was an opportunity to escape from classics and Cleopatra for a while. He promised
to introduce me to a great ‘character’. He then wanted me to write about this character. Our university newspaper, he said,
was a mass of grey type about grey institutions. Oxford was a grand hotel of the brilliant and bizarre. He wanted to bring
some of the guests to life.

I was particularly happy to construct a living Oxford character if I could. Geoff did not know it but, by contrast, my theatrical
Cleopatra had suddenly to be deconstructed. She (and he and they) had to be a meta-character, another of Maurice’s mad theatrical
requirements passed on from his mad Marowitzian friend. I did not want to admit that I had increasingly little idea what he
wanted. And he was increasingly away from our rooms, for nights as well as days, and unavailable to ask.

Thus a traditional newspaper project was an attraction in itself. Writing about an Oxford character was something I might
be able to do by myself. Geoff said that he would have a pint of Special and that I should ‘get one in’ for him to save time
when he arrived. It was odd, I thought, to order a drink in advance like that: but Geoff the Editor was fashionable, blond,
famous in his way and surely knew what were the right things to do.

The hour before midday seemed a little early for drinking. The front rooms of the large white pub which looked out onto Broad
Street and the Bodleian Library were empty. Only in the back, a
brown-painted box restricted to men, was there a fresh, flowing fug of Navy Cut and whisky. In 1969 this was a place of refuge,
a room of rest for those who wished that the sixties had never happened, for dons in cream-creased jackets and for students
who wanted to meet them, a place of strict rules of behaviour.

Buying two pints for one person seemed just within these back-bar rules. Talking to the large, lone man in a light brown suit
beside me was probably not. I sat and waited. So did he.

Geoff the Editor’s beer remained untouched. As my own glass emptied, the full glass became cloudily warmed. I felt awkward
and exposed, the more so when my lone companion seemed suddenly to have company of his own. There was a sudden bubbling of
words. I could not see who was speaking or hear precisely what he said.

The big man’s replies were a little clearer but not much. The first distinguishable word was ‘gooseberry’. After that the
speaker’s subject appeared to be some sort of a plague – and what had caused it. This plague, I learnt (for I had nothing
else to do and nowhere else to listen or look), was passed from person to person, produced high fevers, rashes on the skin,
rotting limbs and frequent fatality. Was it typhoid or smallpox or scarlet fever or bubonic plague? How could we tell?

The big man briefly paused, as though waiting for a response that he already knew. Smallpox was a possibility, he said, but
Thucydides mentions no pockmarks among survivors.

Bubonic plague borne by rats? A reasonable idea if Athens during the Peloponnesian War were to have had any rats. But there
was not even a word for rat in Greek, unless a rat and a mouse were judged the same.

Measles? Measles did not exist when Athens was at war with Sparta.
It needed bigger cities than any in the Greek world, bigger than any until the building of Alexandria. Perhaps the identity
of the plague that so weakened Athens in its war was now unknowable, an ancient disease that had itself died. Or maybe Thucydides
was not as good a witness as we think. Or diseases were defined then in totally different ways.

This was a new kind of embarrassment for me. I was in the right place at the right time with the right drinks. But nothing
else was right. These were the weeks when I was relearning everything about how to behave. I was baffled, a bit red-faced.
Maurice would probably be in soon. I did not want to see him. He was driving me mad. But his presence would be better than
no one’s – and he would have quickly disposed of the warming beer. I could wait for him maybe in the front bar where there
were students, women students.

There was a pause and a noise of slurping. The speaker turned around and began to speak to me, his previous companion and
to two other men who were quietly drinking through the time.

If birds eat diseased bodies, he asked, do the birds die too? Thucydides says that birds did die in Athens. But had any birds
ever died from plague? If so, what sort of plague?

Any man, he said in what was now almost a shout, might go mad before he solved this problem – and that was just one problem
of cause and effect in history, even in an area, that of medicine, in which we knew that effects do genuinely have causes.

The speaker took a last sip of his beer, and a shallow breath that an anxious wife might have worried was his last, and went
on smoothly as though all these arguments, like all his actions, were part of a long and practised pattern. Now what were
you about to say?

This was my first introduction to James Holladay, ancient history
teacher extraordinary, the next figure in my history of Cleopatra, without whom it would not have lived this long. He asked
what I was doing. I said I was waiting for Geoff the Editor. That was a coincidence, he said, slightly wincing at the word
as though it were intellectually suspect. He too was waiting for him.

So this was my Oxford character, the one that I would soon be charged with bringing to life. That should not be hard. Even
in fragments he was a very vivid thing. I relaxed. I wondered whether this might even be a good time to mention my troubled
Cleopatra. But once we were silent, the back bar was as quiet as cloud and the moment passed.

Socratis’s driver has arrived at the museum. He is in camouflage fatigues, concentrating hard on the written message from
his boss that there is no museum in Alexandria with exhibits about experiments on criminals. The museum on this street is
closed. The back door is closed as well as the front. He seems sad about this – and promises that his master will be back
himself soon.

James Holladay was a useful man for me to meet. He knew about the wars of Caesar and Cleopatra. He knew as much as there is
to know about how Romans reacted to the assassination of Caesar, how Cleopatra reacted, what seemed immediately most likely
to happen. That was his job. He was Trinity’s ancient history tutor.

His great passion, however, was not for the turmoil of 44
BC
but for an earlier war four centuries before, the Peloponnesian War that had not only cost Athens its supremacy but softened
all Greece for its subjugation by Alexander the Great. His particular interest was the mystery plague, described in detail
by Thucydides, that had killed
thousands of Athenians at the start of that conflict, destroying, inspiring, causing subsequent events. How much it destroyed,
inspired and caused was one of the great questions from the war that Thucydides had made the first war of true history.

James Holladay was much less interested in Cleopatra’s Alexandria. The Egyptian capital, he gestured dismissively with a swipe
of his hand, had suffered briefly from mere bubonic plague. Cleopatra herself, he said, was an even lesser thing to study
than her city, not an epidemic killer, merely a single human being. Her life had lacked the attention of any serious ancient
historian, a significant lack since historians who had lived in the ancient world were the only real subject for an ancient
historian of our own time.

This plague of Athens existed no longer, he concluded, pointing a fleshy finger. He was ever more confident of that. It no
longer plagued anyone. It had gone. That in itself was a useful lesson for us all. It was not the only thing, the only cause,
the only fact from the ancient world that had gone. We were all of us much too keen to connect the past to the present. We
also pretended that we knew too much.

He asked some probing questions. I tried my best to look intelligent even if I could not give him answers. Why did I think
that Caesar and Cleopatra had had a child called Caesarion, or indeed any child? When do we first hear about this boy? Only
after Caesar is dead.

Did Strabo (had I read Strabo?) ever mention him? One of Caesar’s friends wrote a whole book to deny Caesarion’s Roman paternity.
Was he telling the truth or protesting too much? What did I think of ‘the Continuators’? I must have looked inescapably blank.

How did I evaluate the ‘Continuators’ of Caesar’s own books once Caesar had been killed? There is no mention of Caesarion
by them either. The four years before Caesar’s death are some of the best reported in all ancient history. But had Cleopatra
even had an affair with Caesar? No one says so at the time.

I badly wanted Geoff the Editor to arrive now – or Maurice to arrive, or almost anyone. This conversation was not going well.
The idea of turning this man into a newspaper article seemed impossible. The flow of scepticism became a flood. Cleopatra
was once again a dream. Mark Antony’s was the story I should write, the only story that a historian could write about at all.

He pointed a finger past the frosted glass screen towards the front bar which was now beginning to fill.

‘Just think about that young man there. You know nothing about Cleopatra. You know nothing about him either. Many people think
that they know him but they do not. The present and the past are often not so very different in that respect.’

I nodded glumly without seeing precisely whom he meant.

There was a boy on the other side, in front of the window with the view of the library, dressed in velvet like a vole. ‘Homosexual.
No harm in that. There it is. Lots of people seem fascinated by him. Maybe you all are. He works at the theatre and likes
to chop up
Shakespeare.’ The old don took another sip of beer and a longer breath.

There was a stir by the door to the street. Two new arrivals brought champagne which they had purchased elsewhere, most certainly
a breach of King’s Arms’ rules. The velvet hero of this hour – precisely midday on 20 October 1969 I can say, since I have
the note here in my pocket now – said nothing as the wine was poured. Everyone else was already saying more than enough.

Maurice came in last. The theatre boy ignored him in the way that only those do who are lovers, who have recently quarrelled,
or are still quarrelling. Words of shouted abuse came in waves – most of them against the failures of imagination showed by
others, by fellow actors, company managements, stupid students. His admiring audience seemed gradually to have heard enough.
Soon Maurice too joined the bored majority and the boy was alone.

James Holladay also lost interest in the scene. ‘I’ve got a friend who thinks that Caesar and Cleopatra were essentially the
same person,’ I said, thinking that something more original might now be risked and that the next donnish rebuttal could hardly
be more deflating than the ones that had come before.

‘Hang onto him. He might be onto something. They were both great bureaucrats. That is sure. Bureaucratic power was always
essential. Never forget that. Look at the men in the middle ranks. Remember their names: Hirtius, Plancus, Dellius, Canidius.
Study them closely. Don’t give up when the going gets tough.
Nil desperandum
, as Horace says. Read the poem in which he says it.

‘If you have to choose one man, choose Lucius Munatius Plancus. You will soon find out why. Forget the biggest names. Leave
them to those who write for money or for children. Ignore the nameless
masses. Leave those to Marxists. Just watch the office men, the trimmers, the men who were always watching the events most
carefully themselves. Watch Plancus most of all.