Antony and Cleopatra (38 page)

“Oh, Antonius, how delightful!” Octavia cried when he told her. “I can see Mama, and visit little Julia for myself—Livia Drusilla is indifferent to her plight, won’t exert herself to persuade Little—Caesar Octavianus, I mean—to keep in touch with his daughter. I fear for the mite.”

“You’re pregnant again,” said Antony, light dawning.

“You guessed! How amazing! It’s barely a fact yet, and I was waiting until I was sure before I told you. I hope it’s a son.”

“Son, daughter, what does it matter? I have plenty of both.”

“Indeed you do,” said Octavia. “More than any other man of distinction, especially if you include Cleopatra’s twins.”

A smile flashed. “Irked, my dear?”

“
Ecastor
, no! Just rather proud of your virility, I think,” she said with an answering smile. “I confess that sometimes I find myself wondering about her—Cleopatra. Is she well? Is life pleasant for her? She’s faded out of consciousness to most of Rome, including my brother. A pity in a way, since she has a son by Divus Julius as well as your twins. Perhaps one day she will return to Rome. I would like to see her again.”

He reached for her hand, kissed it. “One thing I’ll say for you, Octavia—you don’t have a jealous bone in your body.”

In Rome, Antony found two letters waiting for him, one from Herod and one from Cleopatra. Considering Cleopatra’s of less moment, he snapped the wax seal on Herod’s letter first.

 

My dear Antonius, I am King of the Jews at last! It wasn’t easy, given the military ineptitude of Gaius Sosius—no Silo, he! A good peacetime governor, but not up to the task of disciplining the Jews. However, he paid me a signal honor by giving me two very good legions of Roman troops and letting
me
lead them south to Judaea. Antigonus came out of Jerusalem to meet me at Jericho, and I utterly routed him.

He then fled to Jerusalem, which underwent siege. It fell when Sosius sent me two more good legions. He came with them himself. When the city fell he wanted to sack it, but I talked him out of it. What I wanted and Rome needed, I said to him, was a prosperous Judaea, not a pillaged desert. Eventually he agreed. We have put Antigonus in chains and sent him to Antioch. Once you are in Antioch, you can decide what to do with him, but I strongly urge execution.

I have freed my family and the family of Hyrcanus from Masada, and married Mariamne. She is pregnant with our first child. Since I am not a Jew, I did not appoint myself High Priest. That honor went to a Zadokite, Ananeel, who will do exactly as I tell him. Of course I have opposition, and there are some who conspire to take up arms against me, but nothing will come of it. My foot is now firmly on the Jewish neck, and will never be lifted while there is life in my body.

Please, I beg you, Marcus Antonius, give me back a whole and contiguous Judaea instead of these five separate places! I need a seaport, and would be happy with Joppa. Gaza is a little too far south. The best news is that I have wrested the bitumen fisheries off Malchus of Nabataea, who sided with the Parthians and refused me, his own nephew, succor.

I close thanking you most profusely for your support. Rest assured that Rome will never regret making me King of the Jews.

 

Antony let the scroll curl up and sat for a moment with his hands behind his head, smiling at his thoughts of the Semitic toad. Maecenas in eastern guise, but owning a ruthlessness and savagery that Maecenas completely lacked. The thing was, what would benefit Rome’s interests in southern Syria most? A reunited Judaic kingdom, or a fragmented one? Without expanding his geographical borders by one mile, Herod had enriched himself mightily by acquiring the balsam gardens of Jericho and the bitumen fisheries of the Palus Asphaltites. The Jews were warlike and made excellent soldiers—did Rome need a wealthy Judaea ruled by a highly intelligent man? What would happen if Judaea engulfed all of Syria south of the Orontes River? Where would its king look next? To Nabataea, which would give him one of the two great fleets engaged in trade with India and Taprobane. More wealth. After that, he’d look to Egypt, less of a hazard than any attempted expansion north into Rome’s provinces. Hmmm…

He picked up Cleopatra’s letter, broke the seal, and read it more quickly by far than he had Herod’s. Not that they were so very different, Herod and Cleopatra: not an ounce of sentimentality in either of them. As always, she had written a litany of praise for Caesarion, but that wasn’t sentimentality, that was the lioness and her cub. Caesarion apart, it was the letter of a sovereign rather than an ex-mistress. Glaphyra would do well to emulate her Egyptian counterpart.

Cleopatra’s beaky little face swam before his inner gaze, the golden eyes shining as they did when she was happy—was she happy? Such a businesslike letter, softened only by love for her older son. Well, she was a ruler first, a woman second. But at least she had more to talk about than Octavia, immersed in her pregnancy and loving being in Rome again. Though she didn’t see a great deal of Livia Drusilla, whom she considered cold and calculating. Not that she’d said so—when did his present wife ever commit a social solecism, even in private to her husband? But Antony knew because he shared Octavia’s dislike; the girl was so absolutely Octavian’s creature. What did Octavian have, that he could grab and hold certain chosen people with talons of steel? Agrippa. Maecenas. And now Livia Drusilla.

Suddenly he was filled with loathing of Rome, of Rome’s tight little ruling class, Rome’s greed, Rome’s inexorable goals, Rome’s divine right to rule the world. Even the Sullas and the Caesars abnegated their own desires before Rome, offered everything they did on Rome’s altars, fed Rome with their strength, their deeds, the
animus
that drove them. Was that what was wrong with him? Was he incapable of that kind of dedication to an abstraction, an idea? Alexander the Great didn’t think of Macedon the way Caesar had Rome; he thought of himself first, he dreamed of his own godhead, not his country’s might. Of course that was why his empire fell apart as soon as he died. Rome’s empire would never fall apart because of one man’s death, or even the deaths of many men. A Roman man had his place in a temporary sun, he never thought of himself as
the
sun. Alexander the Great had. And perhaps Marcus Antonius did too. Yes, Marcus Antonius wanted a sun of his own, and his sun was not Rome’s. No, it was
not
Rome’s!

Why had he let that lot in Tarentum whittle his percentage down? All he had to do was sail away with his fleet, but he hadn’t. Thinking he was staying in order to ensure the safety and welfare of his troops when he invaded the Kingdom of the Parthians. Being fobbed off with mere promises! Yes, I promise that I’ll give you twenty thousand well-trained legionaries, said Octavianus, lying through his teeth. I promise I’ll send your forty percent the moment we open Sextus’s vault door. I promise you’ll be consul. I promise you’ll be the senior Triumvir. I promise to care for your interests in the West. I promise this, I promise that. Lies, lies, all lies!

Consider, Antonius.
Think!
You have more than seven hundred out of the thousand senators. You can rally voters in the upper Classes and control laws, elections. But somehow you can never get to him, Caesar Octavianus. That’s because he’s here in Rome, and you’re not. Even this interminable summer, while you are physically here, you can’t marshal your forces to destroy him. The senators are waiting to see how much they’ll get out of Sextus Pompeius’s coffers—those among them, that is, who haven’t disappeared to their seaside villas for a summer out of stinking, sweltering Rome. And the People are losing sight of you. Now you’re back, a lot of them don’t recognize you at a glance anymore, though it’s only two years since you were last here. They may hate Octavianus, but he’s a familiar and much-loved hate—the kind of man whom every man thinks he has to love to hate. Whereas I am not even seen as Rome’s savior these days. They have waited too long for me to assert myself. Five years since Philippi, and I haven’t managed to do what I said I’d do in the East. The knights loathe me more than they do Octavianus—he owes them millions upon millions, which makes him theirs. I don’t owe them anything, but I haven’t succeeded in making the East a safe place to conduct business, and that they can’t forgive.

The month of Julius has come and gone, Sextilis is fast disappearing into that maw I don’t understand. Why does time fly so quickly? Next year—it
must
be next year! If it isn’t, I will be a has-been, an also-ran. While that little turd wins.

Octavia came into the room, hesitated with a tentative smile, then continued when he beckoned her.

“Don’t look afraid,” he said, voice deep. “I won’t eat you.”

“I didn’t think you would, my dear. I just wondered when we were leaving for Athens.”

“On the Kalends of September.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be taking you, but not the children. By the end of the year I’ll be in Antioch, which means an exile for you in Athens. The children would be better off in Rome, under your brother’s protection.”

Her face fell, her eyes filled with unshed tears. “Oh, that will be hard!” she said, voice breaking. “They need me.”

“You can stay here if you want,” he said curtly.

“No, Antonius, I can’t. My place is with you, even if you are not in Athens very often.”

“Whatever you like.”

There was a new Quintus Dellius in Antony’s life, a tall and extremely elegant senator of a fairly old family that had, for instance, produced a Vestal Virgin close to a hundred years ago. The Fonteii Capitones were genuine Roman plebeian aristocrats. His name was Gaius Fonteius Capito, and he was as handsome as any Memmius, as well educated as any Mucius Scaevola. Nor was Fonteius a sycophant; he enjoyed Antony’s company, brought out the best in Antony, and, as a loyal client, was pleased to do Antony a service, but he owned himself.

When Antony quit Rome and Italia at the beginning of September, embarking himself and Octavia on his flagship at Tarentum, he took Fonteius with him. The hundred and twenty ships of his fleet had been joined by twenty more quinqueremes Octavia had donated to her brother out of her private fortune; all hundred and forty were still at anchor in Tarentum, busy building ship sheds so the vessels could be drawn up out of the water before winter.

It was still a little early for equinoctial gales, thus Antony was anxious to be gone, hoping to sail before a following wind and a following sea all the way around Cape Taenarum at the foot of the Peloponnese, and thus up to Athens and anchor in the Piraeus.

But three days out, they encountered a terrible storm that forced them to seek shelter on Corcyra, a beautiful isle off the Greek shore just below Epirus. The tossing sea hadn’t been kind to Octavia, nearing the end of her seventh month, so she greeted
terra firma
with gratitude.

“I hate to see you delayed,” she said to Antony, “but I confess I hope we have several days here. My baby must be a soldier, not a sailor.”

He didn’t smile at her little joke, too impatient to be on his way to be moved by his wife’s suffering, or her gallant attempts not to be a nuisance. “As soon as the captain says we can put out, we sail again,” he said brusquely.

“Of course. I’ll be ready.”

That evening she didn’t appear for supper, pleading a stomach still churning from its maritime ordeal, and Antony was tired of the usual group who surrounded him, jockeying for his attention, forcing him to assume a bonhomie he didn’t feel. In fact, the only one he was drawn to was Fonteius, whom he bade join him for supper, just the two of them.

Shrewd in the manner of a natural diplomat and fonder of Antony than he was of himself, Fonteius accepted gracefully. He had long divined that Antony wasn’t happy, and maybe tonight was his chance to probe Antony’s wound, see if he could find the poisoned dart.

It was an ideal evening for intimate talk; the lamp flames flickered crazily in tendrils of the wind roaring outside, rain hissed against the shutters, a small torrent gurgled as it rushed down the hill. Coals glowed red in several braziers to take the chill out of the room, and the servants moved like
lemures
in and out of the shadows.

Perhaps because of the atmosphere, or perhaps because Fonteius knew exactly how to trigger the right responses, Antony found himself pouring out his fears, horrors, dilemmas, anxieties, with little logic or order.

“Where is my place?” he asked Fonteius. “What do I want? Am I a true Roman, or has something happened to make me less a Roman than I used to be? Everything at my fingertips, great power—and yet—and yet—I seem to have no place to call my own. Or is place the wrong word? I don’t
know
!”

“It might be that when you said place, you meant function,” said Fonteius, picking his way delicately. “You love to revel, to be with the men you deem your friends and the women you desire. The face you show to the world is bold, brazen, uncomplicated. But I see many complications beneath that exterior. One of them led you to a peripheral participation in the murder of Caesar—no, don’t deny it! I do not blame you, I blame Caesar. He killed you too, by making Octavianus his heir. I can only imagine how deeply that cut you! You had spent your life to that time in Caesar’s service, and a man of your temperament couldn’t see why Caesar condemned some of your actions. Then he left a will that didn’t even mention you. A cruel blow that utterly destroyed your
dignitas
. For men wondered why Caesar left his name, his legions, his money, and his power to a pretty-boy youth rather than to you, his cousin and a man in his prime. They interpreted Caesar’s will as a sign of his colossal displeasure at your conduct. That wouldn’t have mattered were it not that he was Caesar, the idol of the People—they have made him a god, and gods do not make wrong decisions. Therefore—you were not worthy to be Caesar’s heir. You could never become another Caesar.
Caesar
made that impossible, not Octavianus. He stripped you of your
dignitas
.”

“Yes, I see,” said Antony slowly, hands clenching. “The old boy spat on me.”

“You are not naturally inward-turning, Antonius. You like to deal with concrete facts, and you have Alexander the Great’s propensity to use a sword on knotty problems. You don’t have Octavianus’s ability to burrow beneath society’s skin, to whisper defamations as truths in a way people come to believe. The source of your dilemma is the stain upon your reputation that Caesar put there. Why, for instance, did you choose the East as your part of the Triumvirate? You probably think you did because of the riches and the wars you could fight there. But I don’t think that’s why at all. I think it was an honorable way out of being in Rome and Italia, where you would have had to display yourself before people who know Caesar despised you. Dig down inside yourself, Antonius! Find your injury, identify it for what it is!”

“Luck!” said Antony, shocking Fonteius. Then, louder, “
Luck!

Caesar’s luck was proverbial, it was a part of his legend. But when he cut me out of his will, he passed his luck to Octavianus. How else has the little worm survived? He has Caesar’s luck, that’s how! While I lost mine. Lost it! And that’s the crux of it, Fonteius. Whatever I do is unlucky—how does anyone deal with that? I know I can’t.”

“But you can, Antonius!” Fonteius cried, recovering from this extraordinary development. “If you choose to regard your present melancholy as loss of luck, then make your own luck in the East! It’s not a task beyond you. Retrieve your reputation with the knights by creating an East perfect for business opportunities! And take yourself an eastern adviser, someone of the East and for the East.” He paused, thinking of Pythodorus of Tralles, bound to Antony by marital ties. “An adviser with power, influence, wealth. You have five more years as Triumvir thanks to the Pact of Tarentum—use them! Create a bottomless well of luck!”

Prickles of exhilarations sparkled through Antony, banishing his megrims. Suddenly he saw his way clear, how to regain his luck.

“Would you undertake a long voyage for me on winter seas?” he asked Fonteius.

“Anything, Antonius. I’m genuinely concerned for your future, which isn’t in harmony with Octavianus’s Rome. That’s another factor causing melancholy—that the Rome Octavianus is intent upon making is alien to the Roman men who prize Rome as she used to be. Caesar started tampering with the rights and prerogatives of the First Class, and Octavianus is determined to continue that work. I think that, when you find your luck, you should aim at bringing Rome back to what she used to be.” Fonteius lifted his head, listened to the sounds of wind and rain, smiled. “The gale is blowing itself out. Where do you want me to go?” It was a rhetorical question: Tralles and Pythodorus, he knew.

“To Egypt. I want you to see Cleopatra and persuade her to join me in Antioch before winter is over. Will you do that?”

“It is my pleasure, Antonius,” Fonteius said, concealing his dismay. “If there’s a ship in harbor here in Corcyra seaworthy enough to sail the Libyan Ocean, I’ll go at once.” A rueful look appeared. “However, my purse isn’t deep. I’ll need money.”

“Money you shall have, Fonteius!” Antony huffed, his face transfigured with happiness. “Oh, Fonteius, thank you for showing me what to do! I must use the East to force Rome to reject the machinations of Caesar and Caesar’s heir!”

When Antony passed by the door of Octavia’s room on his way to his own, he was still fizzing with excitement, and full of a new urgency to reach Antioch. No, he wouldn’t stop in Athens! He would sail directly to Antioch. The decision made, he opened Octavia’s door and entered to find her snuggled up in bed. He sat on the edge of it and pushed a wisp of hair off her brow, smiling.

“My poor girl!” he said tenderly. “I should have left you in Rome, not subjected you to the Ionian Sea near the equinox.”

“I’ll be better in the morning, Antonius.”

“And so you may be, but here you stay until you can obtain passage to Italia,” he said. “No, don’t protest! I’ll have no arguments, Octavia. Go back to Rome and have our baby there. You miss the children, who are in Rome. I’m not going to Athens, I’m going straight to Antioch, no place for you.”

Sadness washed over her; she gazed into those reddish eyes with pain in her own. How she knew it, she had no idea, but this was going to be the last time she ever saw Marcus Antonius, her beloved husband. Good-bye on the island of Corcyra—who could ever have predicted that?

“I will do whatever you think best,” she said, swallowing.

“Good!” He got up, leaned to kiss her.

“But I will see you in the morning, won’t I?”

“You will, definitely you will.”

When he was gone she rolled over, pushed her face into the pillow. Not to weep; the agony was too great for tears. What she looked at was the loneliness.

Fonteius got away first. A Syrian merchantman had also put in to wait out the tempest, and since its captain had to brave the Libyan Ocean anyway, he said, he wasn’t averse to an extra stop in Alexandria for a nice fat fee. His holds were loaded with Gallic iron-tired wagon wheels, copper pots from Nearer Spain, some firkins of
garum
flavoring, and, to fill up the spaces, linen canvas from the lands of the Petrocorii. This meant his vessel sat low but well in the water, and he was willing to give up his cabin under the poop for this foppish senator with his seven servants.

Fonteius waved Antony good-bye, still stunned. How horribly it had all gone wrong! And how presumptuous he had been, to think that he could read the mind of Antonius, let alone manipulate it! Why had the man fixed on luck, of all things? A phantasm, a figment of the imagination. Fonteius didn’t believe luck existed as an entity of itself, no matter what people said about Caesar’s luck. Yet Antony had soared over the top of the truth he ought to have seen, to fix on luck.
Luck!
As for Cleopatra! Ye gods, what was he thinking about, to choose her as his eastern adviser? She’d tweak and twist, compounding his confusion. The blood of King Mithridates the Great flowed in her veins, along with a bevy of murdering, amoral Ptolemies, and a few Parthians to boot. To Fonteius, she was a distillation of all that was worst about the East.

Fonteius wanted civil war, if civil war was what it took to get rid of Octavian. And the only man who could successfully beat Octavian was Mark Antony. Not the Antony whom Fonteius had seen emerging over the past years; it needed the Antony of Philippi. Cleopatra? Oh, Antonius, a bad choice! Fonteius had been friendly with Caesar’s widow, Calpurnia, before she took her life, and Calpurnia had given him a fairly comprehensive sketch of the Cleopatra she and other women had known in Rome. A sketch that didn’t inspire hope in Antony’s ambassador.

Who arrived in Alexandria after a month’s passage due to a storm that forced them to spend six days in Paraetonium—what a place! But the captain had found
laserpicium
there, and tossed enough canvas overboard to make room for twenty amphorae of it.

“My fortune is made!” he told Fonteius jubilantly. “With Marcus Antonius coming to live in Antioch, there will be so much over-indulgence that I’ll be able to ask a fortune for one dose! At several thousand spoonfuls per amphora—ah, bliss!”

Though he hadn’t been to Alexandria before, Fonteius wasn’t very impressed by the city’s undeniable beauty, its layout of wide streets. Maecenas, he reflected, would have called it a desert of right angles. However, thanks to each succeeding Ptolemy’s passion for erecting a new palace, the Royal Enclosure had charm. Two dozen palaces at least, plus an audience chamber.

There, amid a blaze of gold that had awed every Roman who had seen it, he met two marionettes. That was the only word he could attribute to them, they were so stiff, wooden, and painted. A pair of dolls made in Saturnia or Florentia, their strings manipulated by an invisible master. The audience was brief; he was not asked to state his business, simply to convey greetings from the Triumvir Marcus Antonius.

“You may go, Gaius Fonteius Capito,” said the white-faced doll on the higher throne.

“We thank you for coming,” said the red-faced doll on the lower throne.

“A servant will conduct you to dinner with us this afternoon.”

Removal of the maquillage and paraphernalia revealed two small people, though the boy wasn’t going to be a small man. Fonteius knew his age—ten—and thought he looked more like thirteen or fourteen, save that puberty had not yet started. Caesar’s image! Another player on the stage of the future, and an unexpected but immensely urgent reason why Antony should not be associating with this woman. Caesarion was the sole object of her affections, it shone out of her magnificent golden eyes every time they rested on him. For the rest, she was skinny, tiny, almost ugly. The eyes and a beautiful skin saved her; she also had a low, melodious, and cleverly used voice. Both mother and son spoke to him in Latin he could not fault.

“Did Marcus Antonius send you to warn us he is coming here?” the son asked eagerly. “Oh, I have missed him!”

“No, Your Majesty, he isn’t coming here.”

The bright face fell, its vivid blue eyes looked away. “Oh.”

“A disappointment,” the mother observed. “Why are you here, then?”