The Horse Changer (31 page)

I expected Antony to send a legate or senior magistrate to Egypt for the summoning of Cleopatra; instead he thought I would make the perfect ambassador. I can see his thinking at this remove; I had nearly burned the queen’s museum. What better message than a summons from the Tuscan barbarian Quintus Dellius? At the time I could only imagine Cleopatra would make me her prisoner if she did not murder me outright. When I protested to Antony that the queen hated me, he scoffed as if dealing with a child.

‘You flatter yourself, Dellius. Cleopatra gains nothing but my enmity by harming you.’

‘There is always a quiet death by poison.’

‘You are my man, Dellius. If the queen forgets it, she is a fool.’

I sailed in the company of a single century of my men, though I had requested two cohorts. I had in addition to these several officers from my Guard. We went in military dress, though no one expected trouble – at least none from the queen. At the port of Alexandria I presented a passport bearing Antony’s signature. I expected delays, perhaps even the news that Cleopatra was travelling and unavailable. To my surprise, she invited me to visit her court on the very day I arrived. Perhaps she feared for her books and thought better than to play games with the likes of Quintus Dellius! More likely she was anxious to know how Antony intended to deal with her.

Whatever her reason, I made my way into the palace with a full escort. The queen received me without remarking our previous encounter. She wore a black wig and dark makeup, Egyptian to the bone, but she could not disguise those pale blue Macedonian eyes. This was the skinny blonde actress I had met: the impertinent slave tossing scrolls into a cauldron and calling me Dominus. Cleopatra’s son, Caesarion, the purported offspring of her liaison with Julius Caesar, sat on a second throne. As the Egyptians require a husband and wife to rule them, Caesarion was also his mother’s husband. Such customs satisfy the Egyptians’ exotic taste, but of course marriages of parent and child leave Romans in a state of physical revulsion. Caesarion was still some years from puberty, so the marriage was, presumably, symbolic. But with that woman who can say? As for his authority, the boy took his orders from his mother, like everyone else.

A great many counsellors and attendants surrounded the two thrones, but I found Nicolas, my former slave, close to Caesarion’s throne. As it happened, soon after Cleopatra had persuaded Nicolas to leave me, she had appointed him Caesarion’s tutor. Nicolas was only a few years older than the boy, but with his command of several languages he proved the perfect teacher. I had no hope of reclaiming my property at that moment, and I did not wish to give Cleopatra the satisfaction of listening to my complaints; so I said nothing about my ownership of the boy.

I announced in the bluntest manner possible that the Imperator Mark Antony required Cleopatra’s presence in Tarsus at once. No flattering titles for the queen, not even Antony’s salutation and warm regards. I spoke to the queen as one addresses men who have dropped their swords.

Her answer was in Greek. Practiced in that language by that point I hoped to understand her, but it was so nuanced with ambiguity I needed my secretary to repeat it to me in Latin. The gist of Cleopatra’s remark was that she would come in late autumn but if not then, surely sometime the following spring or summer. This was about what I expected, and I answered her promptly. ‘Princess Arsinoë will be delighted to learn of your delay.’

This piqued the queen’s curiosity, and she said to me in Latin, ‘And why should my sister rejoice that I cannot immediately travel to Tarsus?’

‘Once you arrive at Tarsus, Antony intends to ask you to decide her fate. As long as you remain in Alexandria the princess may still hope for life and perhaps even a throne.’

Cleopatra’s blue eyes cut to one of her eunuch counsellors. He stepped forward at once, announcing in a high-pitched Latin so mellifluous it was nearly impossible to comprehend, ‘Her majesty may be able to arrange a journey somewhat sooner than the autumn, though of course there is much to do before she can depart.’

Having accomplished my obligations, I turned without farewell and made for the harbour without seeming to be hasty. There I gave orders to set off at once. We were gone by late afternoon and rowed through two nights without stopping until we came to the Judaean harbour of Ashkelon.

A decade after I discovered Nicolas at the court of Cleopatra he joined King Herod’s court as counsellor to the king and tutor of his children. By the time I learned that Nicolas was living in Jerusalem a great many more years had passed. Herod was pleased with the man’s service, and my claims of ownership, though still justified, were by then quite ancient. I also lacked sufficient proof that he was my property. Not a soul still living knew Nicolas had ever been my slave, and of course I had no written evidence of it. I could have appealed to Herod’s belief in my integrity and so have won my property back, but I had enjoyed a great many gifts from Herod and judged that if I insisted he return my slave I risked the loss of his friendship, for Nicolas was one of his favourites. I was not financially harmed, I had paid nothing for him, and I had endured several years in Egypt in the presence of the fellow without ever complaining to Antony that he was my property. So I let it go. At the time, I congratulated myself on my self-restraint, but two decades afterwards I paid dearly for failing to return the scoundrel to slavery.

Nicolas and I were in Rome arguing before Caesar about the fate of Herod’s kingdom – this in the wake of Herod’s death. Nicolas supported Archelaus, Herod’s eldest surviving son, as a successor to the king. I proposed the elevation of Herod’s grandson, Herod Agrippa, the legitimate heir to the throne, though he was then just five years old. There were a great many technical issues to cover in my arguments, including Nicolas’s sabotage of Herod’s government and the likelihood, in my humble opinion, that Herod’s death was in fact an assassination perpetrated by none other than Nicolas and Prince Archelaus. While I was still building the logic of my case and not yet ready to point my finger directly at him, Nicolas apparently guessed my intentions. To neutralise my charges against him, he struck first, declaring he was astonished that a man of my unsavoury character stood in the same room as Caesar.

This unspecified slander against me excited Caesar’s interest, for beneath all his dignity Caesar was a hopeless gossip. Pretending to defend one of his ‘most noble equites’ Caesar asked Nicolas to explain himself or face serious consequences. Nicolas had already written a gushing biography of our revered princeps. To put it plainly, he had no worries about stirring Caesar’s wrath. Still, he proceeded diffidently, as if concerned that he may have overstepped. ‘I only meant to say that it was Quintus Dellius and no other who instructed Cleopatra on how to seduce Mark Antony before the two villains met at Tarsus. I say this as one who witnessed Dellius’s visit to the queen in Alexandria, when he advised her to come in all her splendour to meet Antony, explaining to her in great detail about Antony’s tastes in lovemaking.’

This was an obvious attempt to put the blame of all that followed from that disastrous love affair squarely on my shoulders. By that time, strange as it may sound, no one remembered the true nature of Cleopatra; by some accounts she was an unpleasant mix of a sphinx and that murderous creature of the orient, Medea; by other accounts, Cleopatra was only a quarrelsome girl who got swept up in Antony’s intrigues. It has never been the Roman way to give women too much responsibility, either in accomplishment or disaster. And of course Nicolas and I were the only ones in Caesar’s court that day who knew the truth; so Nicolas’s remarks had the authority of an eyewitness. In his version of the event, I became Cleopatra’s favourite for my cunning advice and remained in that high station until she discovered that I often arranged a suitable bed mate for Antony whenever he did not sleep with the queen. Further, on those occasions when my selection did not entirely please Antony, I happily fulfilled the role of his lover myself.

I made several protests as these lies were being put into the public record, but Caesar would not allow me to stop the fellow. Nicolas was not passing along idle rumour but stating what he had seen. When Nicolas had finished I stood to defend myself against these scurrilous charges, only to be told by a very pleased Caesar that we were quite off topic and had better attend to the fate of Judaea. I complained that I had been ruined by this harangue and was entitled to answer the charges. At this, Nicolas quipped, ‘Perhaps Dellius has some innocent explanation for being so often with Antony in his bed.’

Caesar and his court laughed at this; not one of them doubted that Antony had used me as his girl. I was sixty years of age at that time but still a good hand with a sword. Had I been armed with my gladii, Nicolas would surely have lost his head at a stroke. As it was, I punched him several hard blows before Caesar’s praetorian guard wrestled me to submission. Even as they pulled me away Caesar scolded me: ‘Come, come, Dellius. We were all young once. There’s no reason to be angry because someone has a long memory.’

To his inner circle that evening Caesar quipped, ‘I suppose it is time I admit our friend Quintus Dellius was not the Horse Changer I have always imagined, riding one horse and then another according to the political winds, but the horse so many rode!’ Great fun on the Palatine.

Instructing Cleopatra how to seduce Mark Antony! Yes, and in my spare time I teach crows to caw and cobras how to curl up inside baskets.

When Cleopatra arrived in Tarsus in her royal barge Antony was on business in the city, adjudicating the claims of a couple of landowners, as I recall. All very dull stuff, but of course the city had turned out to watch the imperator. When word came that Cleopatra’s magnificent vessel had docked, the entire city fled the agora and raced to the harbour. Plaintiff and defendant remained before Antony as well as Antony’s Guard; otherwise the Forum was empty. Antony instructed the men to continue their arguments. He was not about to compromise his dignity by running down with the rest of the mob to have a look at the queen’s great ship. The two litigants, however, begged permission to be allowed to settle. They were too eager to see Cleopatra to worry about boundary lines.

So Antony alone snubbed the queen, though I doubt she noticed it. He had me deliver an invitation to her for dinner that night. This gave me the chance for a look at her ship: it was festooned with flowers, trimmed in gold, and propelled by silver-tipped oars. Its size required six hundred oarsmen. At dock the vessel was magnificent; at sea, I expect it sailed as gracefully as a rudderless raft. When I delivered Antony’s invitation, Cleopatra claimed she could not leave her ship. She was utterly exhausted by her long journey. She did, however, suggest that Antony might come to her that evening, if he cared to indulge in her ship’s meagre offerings.

I suppose Antony was actually curious to see the barge, which now everyone in the city but Antony had seen; so he accepted the invitation despite his better judgment. I believe he had become inured to eastern sycophancy and found the queen’s impertinence refreshing. At any rate, he boarded the ship and feasted his way through twenty courses of meagre offerings. Meats, sauces, fish of every variety, exotic fruit from Africa and the orient, and even, I am told, vegetables from Italian farmlands. All delivered by nubile black maidens clad only in diamonds and pearls. These girls were happy to tease the imperator at every service but left the queen to finish her guest off, with her hand and coconut milk, as I learned from the guards I had posted onboard. Antony staggered from the queen’s barge at noon next day. The whole city, gathered at the docks for the occasion, roared with applause, just as fellows will do when a groom leaves his new bride on the morning after their wedding.

Next evening, Antony invited Cleopatra for dinner at his residence. This was supposed to be a banquet to equal the queen’s sumptuous fare, but he had no servants to match her staff. Midway through what he had hoped would be the finest cuisine the queen had ever enjoyed, Antony turned to me with orders to execute the chef. I took this as a joke, but the chef learned of the remark and spent several days in hiding.

Having no hope of impressing the queen either with his dignity or his borrowed staff and palace, Antony surrendered. He ordered me to sail to Ephesus and arrange the execution of Arsinoë on the steps of the Temple of Artemis, for all to see. She was strangled with a piece of knotted silk, this a gift from Cleopatra. I oversaw the affair but let another take the poor girl’s life. This murder broke any number of laws and religious sanctions and exposed me, once again, to the outrage of Artemis, had the goddess actually existed. In the meantime, Antony and Cleopatra sailed away blissfully to Alexandria in the queen’s golden barge.

As my reward for attending to the execution of Arsinoë, Antony did not require me to follow him to Egypt. Instead, he provided me with a thousand Spartans from his Guard and sent me to Galilee. Officially, I was there to liaise between Antony’s legions in Syria and Herod’s army in Galilee. In practice, the job was chiefly administrative. I had to make sure couriers were set up for runs down the Judaean highway as far as Ashkelon. From there, ships took these reports to Alexandria.

As an intelligence officer I thought no one had more current information than I did, but one morning Herod came to me with news that there had been a revolt in northern Italy. Caesar’s problem, I answered. ‘Perhaps it is,’ Herod said, ‘but I suggest you inform Antony of the matter at once.’

I sent Antony what little I knew. Some days later Herod had more information. The revolt turned out to be something more than a local uprising; the leaders were none other than Fulvia, Antony’s wife, and Antony’s brother, Lucius. Joining these two was the freshly retired praetor, Claudius Nero.