Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (32 page)

‘
Nil desperandum
’, he told his comrades, the phrase in the poem that James Holladay long ago commended.

The future had to begin with new loyalties and new trust.

‘
Mecum saepe viri, nunc vino pellite curas; Cras ingens iterabimus aequor:
You brave men who have often suffered much worse with me. Drive away your cares with wine. Tomorrow we will set out again
upon the mighty sea.’

‘So what was the point?’

Teucer’s final speech to his friends is not directly about the cast of the Cleopatra story. Nor is it even precisely about
Plancus himself. It is merely an artful reminder of them all.
Nil desperandum
is its most famous phrase.
Despair of nothing
.

Plancus needed to forget his previous employers, how he had raised Greek ships and money for them, how he had solemnly discussed
whether little Selene, the Moon twin, should rule over Libya or which of hundreds of eastern towns her brother, Helios the
Sun, should have as his domains. Together he and Horace should find quieter times, calmer waters, whatever words their politics
and poetry required.

Just as Plancus is a classic Roman, ‘
Laudabunt alii
’ is a classic Latin poem.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, not absolutely sure, no. Nothing is absolutely sure.’

‘How long did you go on writing about Cleopatra?’

‘Off and on for a while. More off than on. And not for a long while.’

V nodded. She was pleased, she said drily, that I made so much progress. There was a pause – and a long procession of teachers,
pupils and other festival-goers who by now had slaked their Sunday morning curiosity among the white tents.

She was also pleased, she said, that she had seen the event announced in the Cheltenham guide and been bothered to come. It
was good to see that I was still alive.

‘Have you been to Alexandria?’

She asked her question in a high monotone, as though we had never met. She said she had been once with her first husband.
She still
sometimes found cheap souvenirs around the house. There was not much ancient to see but I still might do better in the place
where it all had happened.

‘No,’ I said. I had not been and I did not think it would help.

How were her parents?

‘Fine. Still in Essex, still complaining about the clay in the garden (not the same garden but the same clay) and making balsa-wood
models of planes, boats, trains and radar masts.’

She knew that Max Stothard had died (was it about ten years ago?) because her father had mentioned it on one of her rare returns
to Rothmans. But she did not know about Maurice.

‘How is he? It has been quite a few years.’

She did not seem shocked by the answer. She was surprised he had survived so well so long.

This has to be Cleopatra’s very last night. Socratis for the first time leaves a written message. He reports rumblings from
Tunis, the country that had once been Carthage and which the Romans knew simply as Africa. There is lightning over Pharos
and thunder threatening for miles. There is already a scouring storm.

The square is almost empty. The horses and cars have gone. Even the police are under shelter. The trash of the pavements is
bobbing in a river towards the Corniche. The waiters are as troubled as the waters. The concierge is especially agitated.
The Polish drug addict and windscreen-wiper is tonight allowed to shelter in the hotel doorway.

Place Saad Zaghloul

The mirror in Room 114 tells me I should shave. The stubble looks like stitches after a car crash. Long ago I did once wear
a beard. There were pictures in Maurice’s Oxford collection to prove it, him with the chin of a pink-billed bird, me like
a fat, brown nut. But it is not a good look now. I start, stop the blade, stop again until every last stiff hair has gone.

Socratis offers to drive me to Cairo. It will be no trouble, he insists, and a chance for him to check the state of his parked
cars. There have been deep floods and few Egyptians have experience of floods. Even the Dead Sea fountain is filled with water.
The military men are on ‘high alert’, he says, and speed-traps can become road-blocks. Road-blocks are places where the unwary
do not want to be.

This is tempting. But it still seems better to book a driver whose sense of timing is more attuned to the discipline of airlines,
one with less of a record for leaving me with the time to write this story.

In Room 114 the wastepaper basket overflows. The rough-book scraps, the Big Oil letterhead and the reporter’s flip-pads have
finally served their purpose. Keep the Roman map? Mauretania, Africa, Numidia, Cyrenaica, Aegyptus and the names of all the
deserts and tribes between them? Yes, keep the map.

I wish I had bought the Alexandria carpet. Is there time to go back? Without Socratis I would never find the shop.

Mahmoud calls. He has to return urgently to Athens. Can he share my airport car? Yes, he can. We will be leaving the Metropole
at noon. So these will have to be the very last words.

Last words on Canidius: the general whose
ginestho
gave me my new beginning was one of the few who did not change sides after Actium. He was executed in Alexandria on the orders
of Octavian. Neither he nor his heirs in perpetuity could claim on their agreement for tax-free wheat and wine.

Last words on the Big Oil men: Lew died not long after we last met. Mr Antony Brown was a useful fiction, just as the chain-smoking
lobbyist had said. Lew said he had always known. The Ferrari-owning art director works in a garden centre in Wales. His boss,
the book-collector, is a spiritualist on the Essex coast.

Last words on Plancus: Consul, Censor, Twice Victorious General, Builder of the Temple of Saturn, Divider of Lands in Beneventum,
Man of Distinction, Founder of Basle and Lyons. These are just the words he would have liked.

There is no time to buy a souvenir from Alexandria to take home. If there were, I would like a French clock from Lyons, authentic
Louis Farouk from Rue Zaghloul, a flock of blue china birds around golden Roman numbers. Every clock here seems to be from
Lyons.

Last words on Mr W: still alive, I think, and living in Cornwall. We have not spoken since I began to remember our time together.
We would never have remembered the same things. Sir Anthony Browne’s Brentwood School is calm, civilised and successful today,
a credit to his memory. Equally thriving is the Calthorpe Arms, regularly welcoming the
TLS
’s classicists and critics through its doors.

Last words on Horace: Horace’s response to Cleopatra’s defeat
remains one of his most quoted odes, its first words and lofty rhythms often repeated, over two thousand years, at Mermaid
clubs and other clubs when men (mostly men) have gathered for a drink.
Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero, Pulsanda tellus, nunc Saliaribus Ornare pulvinar deorum:
Now is for drinking, now time for freedom’s feet to pound the earth, now for feasts to pile upon the tables of the gods.
The first line is borrowed from Alcaeus, the freedom-fighter of Mytilene. Most of the rest is Horace’s own.

Almost everyone has liked Horace’s poem. It both praises the new regime and its victim.
Nunc est bibendum
is as subtle in its way as
Laudabunt alii
. It is sympathetic as well as triumphal, foreshadowing much of the later portrayal of Cleopatra, as a queen who took her
poison like a true proud Ptolemy and refused to be humiliated by her conqueror.

This became the official version of the Augustan age. She was a worthy adversary: ‘
Saevis Liburnis scilicet invidens Privata deduci superbo Non humilis mulier triumpho:
As though scorning to be led away in her enemy’s ships, no longer a queen, a mere woman in a triumph.’ Cleopatra had been
an evil foe but a worthy one.

Last words on Virgil: in the eighth book of the
Aeneid
, when Aeneas has buried his nurse and is preparing for his battles to found Rome, he is given a shield by his goddess mother,
Venus. Actium is at its centre and Augustus is high on his ship above the foaming waves, light pouring from his eyes. Cleopatra,
blind to the snakes that await her, is attended by a god dog.

Last and strangest words on Cornelius Gallus: after Cleopatra’s death, this poet, persuader and general became the new ruler
of Egypt on Augustus’s behalf. Gallus was a much-venerated Alexandrian in his day. He became equally fascinating to later
scholars even though,
until the end of the 1970s, we possessed only that elegant single line about the river that separated Europe from Asia:
uno tellures dividit amne duas
.

He did not, however, prosper in his Egyptian role. The office workers of the Ptolemies were used to working for a royal autocrat;
and a royal autocrat is what Gallus became, attaching his
ginestho
to the erection of gold-tipped obelisks in his own honour and golden statues of himself. Bureaucracies pass on their rule
books regardless of their ruler. After five tolerant years, the emperor demanded and got a decent suicide.

Rather worse for Gallus’s reputation was the discovery of more of his poetry. In 1978, from a ditch near Aswan, there emerged
nine lines of lumpy love poems and pious praise of Caesar, none of it befitting either what his ancient admirers had claimed
or the more modern had imagined. This was in one way as rare a discovery as the
ginestho
. It was the oldest Latin text in the world, a book that Virgil or Octavian might have held. This was not enough to stem the
decline in its writer’s repute.

Socratis calls. He sounds excited but he is brief. Mahmoud will not be coming with me to the airport. All Egyptians must stay
here now. The Tunisians have set off an explosion. I ought to stay, to study my Roman map, to listen.

Finally, last words on Cleopatra’s children: Caesarion was still on his way to India when he was betrayed and executed. Or,
alternatively, he was brought back to Alexandria on the promise that he would rule Egypt; and then was killed on arrival.
No story about Caesarion is without its ‘either’, its ‘or’ or its ‘alternatively’.

In 1997, the head of a sixteen-foot statue was pulled from the harbour; it is in grey granite and shows an elegant young man,
without a nose, with a worn and down-turned mouth, and hair showing, unconventionally, beneath an Egyptian headdress. This
might have once represented Caesarion. It might even have been planned to stand beside Cleopatra’s Needles outside the Metropole
Hotel.

Whether or not Caesarion was genuinely Julius Caesar’s son was never clear and ceased to matter. Octavian had the advice of
an Alexandrian scholar called Arius Didymus who professed it unwise that there be even the possibility of two Caesars. Following
best local practice Arius cited two lines from Homer’s
Iliad
to support his case for execution.

Little Sun and Moon fared better. They went to Rome where, unlike their mother, they marched in Octavian’s triumph. From there
they were taken not to some underground cell but into the new imperial family where Octavia, Antony’s widow and the new ruler’s
sister, was their guardian.

Of the two, Cleopatra Selene was the preferred. Like her mother, the Moon was a serious student. Of all the Cleopatras she
is the most likely owner of a glowing amethyst inscribed with the advice that a Cleopatra should be ‘sober when drunk’. She
was later permitted to marry another royal North African prisoner, another veteran of a Roman triumph, whom Augustus made
King of Mauretania. This young King Juba became a renowned historian and scholar of his realms. The last Cleopatra to reign
as queen over a great library did so in Morocco.

When Cleopatra Selene died she inspired a poem on the subject of an eclipse, a night when the moon rose and then grew dark,
hiding her sorrow as the beauty who shared her name lost her life and
descended to the world below. ‘With her’, the poet wrote, ‘she had shared her light; and with her death she had shared her
darkness.’ Even in his old age, Crinagoras, pale successor to Alcaeus and elegist of gift-wrapped roses, could put his pen
to a perfect quick Alexandrian poem of departure.