Cleopatra E-Book

Emil Ludwig

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Emil Ludwig’s account of Cleopatra’s life is a brilliant psychological study of the Queen and those two men with whom her name remains forever: Caesar and Antonius. Instead of the eccentric amorous, the idiosyncratic author shows us a real and deep lover, a mother, and a fighter.

Leseprobe

Emil Ludwig

CLEOPATRA

The Story of a Queen

Translated from German by Bernard Miall

Copyright

First published in 1937

Copyright © 2020 Classica Libris

Original title

Kleopatra: Geschichte einer Königin

Dedication

“Exceptional people exist beyond the confines of morality; in the final analysis their impact is that of a physical cause, of fire or water.”

—Goethe

Preface

The last time I met her was on the Nile; yet her mind was fixed upon the North; to her, Egypt was almost a foreign country. Her home was the Mediterranean, and the sea-breeze sighs through her story.

Of all the biographies that I have written, this is distinguished by an all but total absence of quotations. The personal documents—letters, speeches, memoirs—which I have accumulated in other cases in order to elucidate the character of my subject by his own words, or those of his friends and foes, are here completely lacking. Such documents as the love-letters of Cleopatra, and most of the private papers of Antony and Caesar, are lost to us; there survive only three sentences of a single letter of Antony’s. But the public life of the queen, apart from one brief unknown period, has been reliably recorded for posterity, though only because the three Romans with whose lives her own was intertwined have their places in the history of the world.

Yet such characteristics of hers as are recorded by the half-dozen authors of antiquity who wrote in the years following closely upon her reign present us with a living portrait, and this is confirmed by at least one authentic bust. Plutarch, my master, above all, I am able to follow closely, and for the first time; for although by virtue of my race, my life, and my education I belong to the Mediterranean, I have hitherto described Greek characters only as dramatis personae, never historically.

In view of the naively subtle records of the ancients all the modern historians have seemed to me superfluous; but I have read and profited by Ferrero’s great history of Rome, and also Stahr’s and Weigall’s fine studies of Cleopatra (1864 and 1927). For even if Plutarch were not more modern than all the analytical writers of our time, he would still be closer to his subjects; and when he writes that his grandfather learned the secret of his roast meats from Antony’s head cook in Alexandria, this statement has for me more actuality than any discussion between two scholars of today, of whom one accuses the other of giving too much credit to Suetonius and too little to Appian.

The absence of psychological documents leaves me free to dwell more insistently on states of mind and soliloquies than would have been possible had my sources been more abundant. When in 1919, with my Goethe, I began to write a new kind of biography, I permitted myself an occasional soliloquy, and also in my Napoleon, but I did not follow this practice in my later books. Here, however, in the complete absence of psychological sources, the monologue was compulsory. For the action there is everywhere sufficient warrant, but even Plutarch could only deduce the actors’ feelings. Yet no battle of those days, no clash of parties, no Roman province has any significance for us; only the feelings are eternal, they are of the same nature as our own, and only by their light are we able to perceive a human being like ourselves in this or that historical personage.

Though here the limit of the historical novel is reached, it has nowhere been overstepped; here, as elsewhere, I have dispensed entirely with the hundreds of dialogues which historical figures are wont to exchange in the hearing of the attentive observer; and even in the setting of the scene I have faithfully followed the ancient writers, as far as they go. The few sentences which are actually spoken may be found in my sources.

Thus this unquiet history is dedicated almost entirely to the psychological life of the heroine and her three Romans. Not here will the reader find the soul of the grande amoureuse which the legendary Cleopatra has become, in defiance of all the sources, but a lover, mother, warrior, and queen. All problems of form apart, I hope my readers will accept this representation as a contribution to the history of the human heart on which I have been working these thirty years.

—Emil Ludwig

Moscia, January 1937

APHRODITE

“When a woman takes on some of man’s attributes, she must triumph; for if she intensifies her other advantages by an access of energy, the result is a woman as perfect as can be imagined.”

—Goethe

Chapter I

APHRODITE

1

Perched in the open window-niche, in the shadow cast by the pillars, a little princess is gazing out to sea. She is eleven years old. Her hands are half folded between the brown curly head and the marble wall; her feet are drawn up in childish fashion, so that she is sitting on her sandals. There she crouches, in her yellow silk shift—for she wears little more—and the light wind puffs it out a little around the small pointed breasts. She is already a woman. In the North she would pass for fifteen, but here we are on the Mediterranean, and the palace is in Alexandria, on the African coast.

She is not tall, but incredibly light on her feet, and now, if she were to leap from her post, the eunuch squatting on the ground would be too late to help her; she would be already at the door, so swift and supple is the little princess. From his shadowy corner he can watch her, imagining that she does not notice him. But she is aware of everything that goes on around her, and while her golden-brown glance follows the great sail that is just passing the lighthouse, she is conscious of the humid eyes of the cowering slave in the corner, and the rustling of the silken smock as he softly rubs his brown back against it. As for what he may be feeling, that is nothing to her; he is only a slave, an animal; he is not even a man. And at the same time she is aware of a tarry smell, from which she concludes that the wet hawsers with which her little yacht was yesterday hauled up the slipway have been hung in the arcade under her window to dry.

Like a silent complaint, the humid gaze of the unmanned slave rests on the princess. She is white, he thinks; Berenice, her sister, is yellow-skinned, and her father, the king, is really almost brown. But she will not always be so white; a little while now and she will be flushed with love and wine. Why are her nostrils fluttering? No doubt she is still considering how her sister can most readily be poisoned. If she would trust me with the business I would do it without delay; her voice alone is enough to drive one crazy. It was my father who killed her great-uncle. In the end he was beheaded for it. But we all have to die some day. And he stares at the princess.

She sits there motionless, gazing across the sea, her hands half folded behind her curly head, her little feet drawn up. When she sees the sail of her father’s ship, her imprisonment will be at an end! But perhaps they have killed him long ago, in Rome, or else at sea. And tomorrow, it may be, a lateen-rigged ship will bring a Roman into port, with his short jerkin and his short sword, and his keen, austere features, to depose that devil of a sister and free her in her father’s name.

From Rome, she muses, comes all good fortune, and all calamity. Why from Rome? Does not half the harvest leave the port every spring, in the long ships bound for Italian harbours? The finest fabrics, the splendid amethysts that hold the secret of Dionysos, golden-yellow amber and musk and incense, all that enters the port here, and is dearly bought, is brought ashore almost as soon as it arrives, only to be sent in the long ships to Rome. What do they pay for it? Every few years her father has to bring up the great bars of gold from the vaults and send them on board the ships, and again a thousand talents cross the sea to Rome. The more they buy of us, the more we have to pay them. Why?

For two years now her father has been in Italy, in Pompey’s country villa, haggling as to how much he must pay them if he is to keep his crown. Who are they, after all, these Romans, always demanding, always threatening? He looks plebeian enough on the coins, the “great” Pompey! They say the other one, Caesar, is better to look at, but there are no coins as yet with his head upon them. They are all a lot of self-made tradesmen and warriors! And we, who are descended from Alexander, who for three hundred years have been of kingly blood, we, the offspring of the gods, and their representatives on earth, must we go begging to Rome before they condescend to leave us in our palaces? There, even now, another grain-ship is sailing past the mole—and again they won’t pay for it.

Suddenly the princess is aware of the reason. She recalls her father’s puffy face; his unkingly behaviour in his own capital; how he used to join the musicians and play the flute in the streets and make his slaves dance to his piping. Is there a child in the great city who does not call his king Auletes, the Fluteplayer? Is there a nobleman who has not seen his king reeling drunken through the streets? How many women have struck his fingers as he fumbled at their breasts? No wonder they suddenly deposed him and proclaimed Berenice queen—Berenice, the eldest of his children, whom he, himself a bastard, had begotten upon some dark-skinned slave!

To poison her! thinks the princess. As another Ptolemy poisoned his mother! As the fourth Ptolemy strangled his brother and sister! Always, when her tutor speaks of the sudden death of some member of her house, history should record a conspiracy. She knows—she has other sources of information.

To have a juggler for a father, for a king! she thinks. A mother who vanished; no one knows who she was! A harlot for sister and queen! Could the slaves, could the people still believe that the king was the living image of the god Amon, the chosen of Ptah, when he drove in purple to the temple, the royal asp upon his brow? Could the scholars still do homage to him in their writings, after he had threatened the famous sage Demetrius with death if he would not get drunk in the public street?

There comes Demetrius. How deep he bows his handsome head, almost to the ground! He speaks the most beautiful Greek to be heard in the city; he knows so much about the gods and the elements; and when he lectures his pupil in his gentle voice she asks herself whether—as the Jewish philosopher taught her—the intellect may not really be more precious than the crown; but then she smiles to herself, and does not believe him.

Yet one must learn; one must learn all that the Greeks know, so that one day one may be able to deal with the Romans, who know nothing, and can only fight! All wisdom and all beauty come from Athens; they will tell her that again today, the three scholars who come to the palace, for she is insatiable in her thirst for knowledge; she is learning more than her father ever learnt, and far more than her elder sister and the three younger children are learning. The whole Museion knows that now, after a hundred years, there is once more a princess in the palace who wants to know everything, who instantly grasps and retains all that the drawings and apparatus in the great hall teach her: mechanical diagrams, the plans of the shipbuilders, skeletons and the human body, and coins, many coins, from which she learns to read faces, as well as half a dozen Mediterranean languages. Best of all, she likes to stand in front of the great maps, and when her firm hand, which never trembles, draws with a fingernail a line from the Nile Delta eastward (and this she does often, compressing her lips the while), it journeys through Syria, Cappadocia, Epirus, even Brundusium; but then the nail scratches its slanting way across Italy and hastens southward, making straight for home, as though she would annex the whole of the eastern Mediterranean; as though all the coasts were to be subjected to Egypt. But the line drawn by her finger never encloses Rome.

And yet for her Egypt is only a name. She knows as little as her fathers knew of the country up-Nile. Its faith is not hers; its gods are not her gods. The Nile is a foreign river, no longer to be seen from the lagoon here, beyond the wide expanse of Lake Moeris. For Alexandria does not lie on the banks of the Nile, like Memphis, but on the Grecian Sea. All that she feels, the language of her dreams, all that she learns, and all that she makes of her learning—her ancestors, the houses of Alexandria, the hubbub of the port with its hundred tongues and races—all has a Greek colouring, and when she runs through the echoing halls of the palace with her light, pattering steps, the busts of the Ptolemies look down upon her. True, they no longer have the classic nose, but they are still Athenian in form, aping in style and bearing the great Alexander, who one day landed on the desert shore, gazed about him, and resolved to found on this spot the capital of the world. And is it not still the capital of the world?

In the evening, the princess goes up to the flat roof of the palace. There one can see almost as far as from the lighthouse; perhaps as far as Cyprus, as far as Greece, even as far as Rome! Now the ships lie dreaming at anchor. They are dreaming of their cargoes—papyrus and glass, perhaps—of their voyage across the blue sea, of the next harbour, and the rough hands that will seize their hawsers and unload them amidst the din and bustle of the wharves, of their hazardous future, and the great problem of the storms that are lying in wait to destroy them. Messengers from race to race, bearers of commerce, and war, and power, they are always heading for danger, since if they lie long in harbour they are doomed to rot and perish.

From the roof of the palace the princess follows their watery track, but her dreams are not theirs. One day—so says her passionate heart—one day—so her keen understanding tells her—I will set out on one of these swift-sailing ships for the shores of Syria and Cappadocia, followed by six hundred triremes, for Ephesus, Corinth, and Athens! All the isles in the great gulf shall be mine! Berenice will be among the shades, and I shall wear the crown with the royal asp, Aphrodite and Isis, and the seal on my ring will say: Cleopatra the Seventh, Queen of Egypt. Then there will be only Rome and myself in the world—and then we shall see whether Egypt’s grain will still go to these Italians, and if it does go to them, whether they will not send gold to Alexandria in payment, instead of taking it from us! Gold and homage from inland Rome to the brimming capital of the world!

2

At night, such visions of the future of the East sank with the sun into the western sea.

What she heard of Rome—now from the philosophers, now from a captain, now from a eunuch—was dark and confused; and so was what she heard of the past life of her father, and the present state of the Roman Republic, which was on the point of foundering.

She knew what had happened during the eleven years of her young life; twenty-seven years before her birth a Ptolemy had bequeathed Egypt to the Roman people, but the Senate had been unwilling to enter upon its inheritance, so great was the jealousy of those who might be called upon to administer this wealthiest of countries. Was not a feeble kingdom on the Nile Delta less dangerous than a powerful Roman proconsul? It had preferred to give Egypt and Cyprus to two illegitimate sons of the royal testator, confident that they would prove to be drunken and dissolute rulers. The more one squeezed out of them, the weaker would they become. Each of the three or four potentates of Rome waited secretly for the day which would find him powerful enough to seize and hold the wonderful country, concerning which Rome had more appetite for fables than for sober reports.

Every few years the great Roman lords had got hold of the flute-playing king, and then, as a cat plays with a mouse, had let him go again, to bring more gold from the legendary, inexhaustible treasury of the Ptolemies, making him pay again and again, until at last, in return, the Roman people and the Roman Senate recognized him as King of Egypt.

In the year 59 B.C.—but the Roman year was reckoned from the foundation of the city—Gaius Julius Caesar was Consul. But he was far from being powerful enough to prevent another potentate, his enemy and rival, Clodius, who was discontented with the bribe he had received, from deposing the King of Cyprus, the brother and vassal of the King of Egypt. His treasury was confiscated, and Cyprus became a Roman province; but the flute-playing king behaved as though Cyprus had meant nothing to him. What was more, he even attempted to wring such an enormous sum of money from the country that he could pay Caesar’s party in Rome without breaking into the private treasury of his house.

But at this rebellion broke out in Alexandria. Now the dignitaries of the palace and the city, the priests and nobles, the landowners and court officials, found it easy to convince the unstable, faithless population of the capital, ever eager for change, that their king was beneath contempt. He fled to Rome; Berenice, his eldest daughter, was declared queen by her party. But his brother, the King of Cyprus, drank poison and died.

Eleven-year-old Cleopatra had heard the news with amazement. There were many bloodstained pages in the history of her house. In the course of two hundred and fifty years, thirteen Ptolemies had succeeded one another, governed or persecuted by their wives and children, like the Pharaohs, their predecessors on the Nile. She had seen how poison and the dagger had worked havoc in the lives of her forebears; how brothers had slain sisters, princes their fathers, and queens their consorts, who were also their brothers. All these things had been done for the sake of power, for the sake of an intenser life; often merely because he who did not strike quickly would himself be struck down. But hitherto none had fallen by his own hand. Yet now a late heir of this race that was sinking into dishonour had for once raised the standard of pride. There had emerged from this decaying dynasty a virile successor of those Greeks whom legend had glorified and whose verse the island king had echoed as he lifted the poisoned cup. The princess was deeply moved. If she had learned to despise her father, haggling for power in Rome as the years went by, she must now revere his brother. So it was true, what the philosophers of the Museion had taught her: even today there was something that stood higher than the crown, and gold. The ten-year-old Cleopatra realized that the pride of a king may be a finer thing than power; and the knowledge that such bondage as her father’s was unworthy, and poison a swift release, impressed itself deeply upon her youthful mind, never to be effaced.

But she, in her young vitality, was resolved to overcome the bondage in which her sister was keeping her. Was Berenice happy? The first husband who had slept with her—a cousin of sorts, chosen so that he could be called a king and beget her children—was so degenerate that the officers of the palace had soon put him to death. The second husband they had forced upon her was better. But was it not possible that this reputed son of the Persian king was a mere adventurer? And, after all, who were these Persians, who always went about in tight-fitting trousers, and who certainly knew how to ride, but had no understanding of the Greek spirit, of the subtleties and refinements of life? Was he a free man, independent of the eunuchs who ruled the palace? Did he love or despise his wife? Were they ever for a day free of the dread of Rome? Exacting or insolent, Rome lay invisible in the North, and any day it might come and kill, stealing everything, destroying everything.

Her father was treading the path of shame; yet since it was impossible to rule against the will of Rome, one must come to an understanding with the Romans; the princess knew that. So did the people of Alexandria; so did the royal pair. This was why they had sent after the deposed king a hundred noble citizens, who would seek to persuade Rome to form an alliance with their party. Month after month went by; nothing was heard of the embassy; but the lonely princess was almost the only person in Alexandria who hoped that the envoys would be turned away. For only if her despised father was victorious in Rome could she herself hope for the crown.

But when the winter was over and the first ships again came gliding past the Pharos, she learned, with the whole city, that Auletes had had the envoys killed one by one. But the impatient princess had, of course, her own spies, so that she heard many things that were unknown to others; knew that her father had offered six thousand talents from his treasury if the Romans would restore him to power; that Rome was now impoverished as the result of the unsuccessful Persian wars; that Caesar and Crassus, Crassus and Pompey, were conspiring against one another, to determine which of them should take Egypt and the treasure of the Ptolemies, in order to win the mastery over his rivals. Everything depended on her father’s ability to pay such a price that he would leave Rome not as a subject, but as an ally.

And already there was news from oversea. Now, it was reported, the struggle was nearing its political culmination; Caesar, back from Gaul, had proclaimed the Fluteplayer, by his “Julian law,” the “ally and friend of the Roman people.” At the same time, the crafty rulers had involved their new friend and ally in millions of debt to the Roman usurers; a debt that he could never pay, so that in the end he would have to knuckle down to them.

Already a circle of men with grievances, eager for a new revolution, was forming about the little discarded princess. Auletes had issued secret instructions: they must give their support to the little Cleopatra; and while in Rome the cunning and cowardly Ptolemy was a mendicant for his throne, here in the palace the silent sister was laying her plans, considering how she could best make use of the Romans, how rise to power by their aid.

And then, one day, they really came. A Roman general in Syria, already head-over-ears in debt, and unable any longer to pay his cohorts, set forth to get hold of twelve thousand talents, the very price which the Fluteplayer was asked to pay for his throne. Pushing through the desert with a few thousand men, from Gaza to Pelusium, in the Eastern Delta, he marched upon the Nile by the route which had been followed by Alexander, three centuries earlier, and thousands of years ago by many a Persian, Hebrew, and Assyrian commander.

At last liberation was at hand, even though it came through the detested Romans. Cleopatra’s heart beat high; now she hid from her powerful sister, now showed herself, claiming her rights, in the ranks of the new party. Now Alexandria heard the din of battle as the foreign horsemen pushed onward to the city; heard how they thundered at the gates, and how the gates burst open; saw how the fugitives went to ground or surrendered. And now Cleopatra saw once again the ravaged face of her father, returning to his house and his throne, guarded by the foreign legions; saw the disfigured corpse of the young king, watched the submission of the priests and nobles, noted the defenceless attitude of the ever-inquisitive Alexandrians—and observed how they promptly swore loyalty to their old king, whom they had once driven from the throne. And at last she saw the head of her hated sister, condemned by her father, roll in the sand; the condition of her future power! Now no one stood between her and power but an elderly, effeminate criminal, whom she must call her father. It was a day of speechless triumph when her sister died.

Higher yet beat the proud heart of the young princess when she saw the foreign soldiers face to face. Were these the Romans? Was this the Roman army? Here were fair-haired men with wild Germanic faces; men who could not answer her in any common tongue; little, wild-looking Asiatics, large-eyed Jews, low-browed Byzantines: The Roman army, it seemed, had been shattered in Africa. She, who so distrusted Rome, saw the worst Romans, not the best—and her old fear of them began to abate.

At the same time, her amazement grew. A captain of horse—the captain who had taken Pelusium and led the assault on the capital—sat feasting with her father in the palace. He was honoured equally with the general, but he seemed to outshine the latter in every way. If this was a Roman—well, he was a man! With his loose tunic girt very low, and his great sword still at his side, he was half sitting, half reclining, at the table. He had the head of a Hercules, a short beard, and a great aquiline nose. The princess, gazing, silently revised her prejudice against the Romans.

The captain of horse did not notice the pretty, nervous child. Cleopatra was fourteen and he twenty-eight when they first met at this solemn royal banquet. Mountains and rivers, seas and cities, would hear the din of battle, and the destiny of a hero would move to its fulfilment, before these two would meet again after thirteen years. Perhaps that meeting would never have taken place had they now exchanged more than a word and a glance; perhaps the desire to blossom and bear fruit in that later period of her summer might never have drawn them together, if now, during this brief sojourn, the spring breezes had wafted them nearer. There they sat at table, an Aphrodite bright as the crescent moon, a merry Hercules with youthful features, both far enough from the mature divinities whom they would one day mime and represent; a tender Greek virgin, a Roman officer, Antony and Cleopatra.

3

Three years later she was queen.

Cleopatra came to the throne of an Egypt in a state of dissolution. The royal Fluteplayer had passed these last years of his reign in a series of shifts and manoeuvres. A Roman minister of finance had de facto distrained upon all that he possessed, and when the king was forced to drive him away Rome came to the conclusion that now at last the realm of Egypt, like the greater part of the Mediterranean littoral, must be annexed. Then and there it would have become a Roman province but for the fact that in that same year Crassus, in the midst of his Persian campaign, had perished with all his army. This chance it was that saved the country from subjection, but it was shaken in every respect when the inglorious king died.

In a solemn invocation he had appointed the Roman people the executors of his last will and testament, for on placing the seventeen-year-old Cleopatra and the ten-year-old Ptolemy together on the throne of Egypt—stipulating, in accordance with the ancient custom of the Pharaohs, that the brother and sister should marry—he, knowing the ways of the palace, could but dread the intrigues which would centre round the two younger children: Arsinoë, then thirteen, and a second little Ptolemy. Which of these four would suppress, banish, or murder the others? Which party would pave the way for such deeds? As though he were addressing a god, even so this Greek Egyptian conjured the Roman Senate to preserve peace and order. Even from the grave his voice called upon Rome for help—Rome, the dispenser of destiny; Rome, which sooner or later must either conquer Egypt or surrender world-power to that country.

Cleopatra never consummated her marriage with her younger brother. What she did between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one is unknown; it is the only lacuna in the story of her life. Yet in these years something of importance happened, no less than this: that she was driven from the throne; and, being dethroned, she withdrew herself, only to retrieve her position. From a single order which an ancient writer has preserved for us we know something of her feelings as a sovereign.

At the very beginning of her reign a Roman proconsul of Syria sent his son to Alexandria in order to fetch the troops which had remained, from the time of Antony’s visit, as a sort of Roman garrison. In the place of disciplined bodies of troops he found demoralized hordes, mainly Celts and Germans, who preferred to be left there with their Egyptian wives and had no inclination to get killed in the next Persian war. On the contrary, they slew the officer and drove off his escort. What did the queen do? Did she not rejoice in her pride to see the arrogant command of the distant Roman thwarted by these half-subjects of hers? Cleopatra was not one of those rulers who give way to their emotions. She had the murderers taken prisoner, and sent them in chains to Syria, to the Roman proconsul, the father of the murdered man.

But she was yet to learn! The Roman potentate also was above giving way to his emotions. Instead of avenging himself cruelly upon the murderers of his son, he sent the prisoners back, with a message for the queen: Only the Roman Senate or its officers had the right to arrest Romans! A significant lesson for the proud Cleopatra. What would she learn from it?

It was not long before a Roman ship again put into Alexandria. Gnaeus Pompeius stepped ashore, the son of the great Pompey, commissioned by his father to fetch these very troops. Now the barbarian hordes were ready to go; this time they were to fight under the greatest general of the age, and against Caesar himself! In this great, final battle for power one must hasten to side with Pompey! Cleopatra heard of the matter; she not only released the troops, but she gave the Romans fifty ships to use as transports. True, Pompey had sent a son of his as messenger, younger and far more elegant than Antony! If his father was victorious, she would have rendered a service to an old friend of her house.

Of Pompey’s rival, of Caesar, the Fluteplayer had spoken only in ambiguous terms. Such tales of Caesar as had crossed the seas were more fascinating than anything related of Pompey. But as yet Cleopatra had seen no coin bearing his effigy, while the other had sent her the finest of portraits, a rejuvenated Pompey. This, if it was not clever calculation, was a lucky chance, for at first, as a spectator of the great contest, she had thought of the two generals merely as two elderly gentlemen.

For the inmates of the palace, the strange errand of this young Roman was a welcome pretext for blackening the young queen. She was in league with the Romans, then, and she had surrendered the Egyptian fleet to them! A handsome pair of legs, the property of an elegant young officer, had been enough to bewitch her! What might not such a sovereign do? The young woman’s camarilla was too powerful, too intelligent, and much too independent, but the boy, who ruled jointly with her—one could influence him; he was rather backward for his twelve years. What could be easier than to show him how his sister despised him? Did she not obstinately refuse to consummate their marriage? Did she not let her angry young husband wait in vain at the bolted door of her bedroom? The inmates of the palace knew everything. Before long, his three mentors—a eunuch, a philosopher, and a general—had successfully incited the palace and the army, the nobles and the people, to rebel against a queen who had sold her country to the Romans.

Just how it happened no one can say, but one day the twenty-year-old queen had to flee the city. Should she go to Rome? The Senate and the people of Rome had been invoked as trustees of the will that had made her joint sovereign. But the young Cleopatra, who was not led by her emotions when her interests were at stake, was not the person to consider her interests when she felt that she had been insulted. Appeal to the Romans to bring her home, as they had brought her father, whom she despised for that very reason? Rather die by poison, like his brother, if all was lost!

Cleopatra, with a few troops, fled to the Red Sea. There were Arabs there, and other tribes, whose language and sympathies and idiosyncrasies she had studied. There she recruited an army by her own efforts, having resolved to match herself against the forces of her brother and his prompters. Did she not know the weakness of his troops? Achillas, the general who was now supreme in the capital, she knew to be irresolute. So, a new Amazon, she advanced upon Pelusium with her own forces, partly along the hills, partly through the desert. From the west Achillas came to meet her. There, at the eastward edge of Egypt, a battle would be fought for the throne of the oldest realm on earth.

Yet at this moment the eyes of the world were not turned toward the Nile. They were fixed upon Greece, where for some weeks two far mightier armies were facing each other; like hers, prepared for battle, but for a far greater prize! No Amazon was there, with her rabble of adventurers, but the two greatest generals of their age, and the stake for which they would fight was the empire of the world; for as yet no third power was at hand, or, at least, was not visible. While the Ptolemies, brother and sister, armed themselves in the Delta and spied upon each other’s doings, Caesar, at Pharsalus, defeated Pompey. The defeat was absolute, and the news flew along the shores of the Mediterranean, and all men trembled, for until yesterday Pompey had been thought unconquerable. The news reached the Nile. The two royal enemies were startled; they listened and waited. Close on the first report followed another, even more astonishing. It reached the legitimate government first. The mighty Roman, who a few years ago had the power to make or unmake a king of Egypt, was now a fugitive. Approaching Alexandria with two thousand men, the poor remnant of his splendid army, he was about to seek asylum there and to ask help of the Fluteplayer’s son! A month after the decisive battle Pompey put in at Pelusium.

He had intended to go ashore, but in the war-council of gods and men it was otherwise decided. Pothinus, the eunuch, the virtual head of the government, which was opposing Cleopatra, promptly made up his mind to murder the defeated Roman. They would thus be obliging Caesar, the new master of the world, and they would not have to look on while two foreign armies fought upon Egyptian soil. When Pompey was close inshore the Egyptian general went to meet him in a swift rowing-boat, and with him were the hireling murderers.

The sea was shallow there, they said; the galley could not come closer inshore. Cornelia, in a premonition of evil, took fright and warned her husband. But Pompey, seeing the shore thronged with Roman soldiers, got into the boat; with some difficulty, for the sea was running high, the boat was small, and he was a man of sixty. In the act of disembarking he was stabbed in the back. His wife saw the blow from the deck of the galley; saw, too, how his head was struck off; whereupon she shrieked aloud and fled. The head and the dead man’s ring were kept; the body was thrown into the sea.

Three days later Caesar, Pompey’s enemy and conqueror, landed in Alexandria. He immediately sent out messengers, requiring the royal pair to retire to their hostile camps: he had come to restore order in Egypt.

4

Order? thought Cleopatra, in her tent. She threw herself on the few remaining cushions, which lay on the ground in warlike confusion, unadorned, and not even soft. As her habit was when she had to come to a decision, she lay for a long while motionless, flat upon her stomach, propping her breast and head on her hands, so that she might breathe freely, and think. It was only a temporary camp; for weeks, her scanty force had had to follow the movements of her brother’s army, always on the edge of the desert; but the soldier’s life had only steeled the Amazon within her.

Did a lover enter her tent in the nights that followed those hot, perilous days? We do not know; the ancient historians and authors, almost all of her adversaries’ party, and therefore full of malice, do not record a single love-affair up to the time of these hostilities. Yet here they can hardly be doing her justice; what with her lonely position, the climate, the adventurous life, her ripeness, and her mouth, it seems improbable that this Aphrodite was a virgin at the age of twenty-one. But in her youth the young warrior that was one side of her nature thrust all voluptuousness aside; swiftly she grasped at what her blood craved for, only to shake it off again; her heart and her head were cool.

There she lay in her tent, resolute to fathom the great event: her capital was besieged by a Roman, whose first movements her spies had reported a few days ago; her fellow-sovereign, brother and husband, lay only a few thousand paces away, in his fortified camp on the hill, with water and a fertile countryside behind him, and greatly her superior in strength. She herself was surrounded by a few thousand savages, whose spears and arrows would protect her only so long as no wealthier general offered them money to slay or surrender the fugitive queen in their midst. Her brother would obey the Roman’s summons, for how could his counsellors dare to confront the greatest of generals, now without a rival, the representative of a world-wide empire, with a host of adventurers of whom half were Roman soldiers! He would hurry off to the capital, do homage as his father had done, and pay tribute; and his troops, under the Roman’s command, would capture the disobedient queen by a sudden onslaught.

But what if the excitable Alexandrians were to rebel against the foreigner? They say he came here with thirty-four ships; that means that he cannot have four thousand men with him, and my brother has twenty thousand! If one could hold the Roman in check for a time one could delay the reinforcements from Roman Syria. If they had only prevented him from landing, these scoundrels whom their king had left behind him as a guard! But he had landed—so ran the report—and with true Roman arrogance had paraded his lictors, with axe and fasces, and had entered through the main streets of the capital; all marching, with surly faces, to the sound of a harsh music, just behind the hurrying general with his golden helmet. And then—tumult.

How did the rioting begin? thought Cleopatra; and she remembered what she had seen long ago in Alexandria. Some Roman emigrant would whistle; two or three others would shout a term of abuse; then twenty or thirty would cut off a handful of the invaders, and one of these insolent Romans would be slain. Then, of course, the arrows began to fly; the mob replied with stones; the tumult increased, and the mighty Roman was thankful to reach the palace. Once there, it would not be too difficult to crush the townsfolk with regular troops, and at the same time to conciliate them—Peace be with you! We are the allies of great Egypt! Oh, she knew all the tricks of a conqueror taken by surprise! After all, it was a sore disgrace to the great man that only three days after his grim entry he should be forced to humiliate himself!

Were she in the palace now, reigning alone, how long could she hold Egypt? Why, even if she could assassinate the general and drive his fleet out to sea, would not Rome sail eastward with all her forces and degrade the land of her fathers to the status of a province, as the Senate had already twice resolved?

Then, as though to tempt her further, her imagination pictures the arrival of another messenger. He enters her tent; she springs to her feet, dragging the news from his unwilling lips. The little king has hastened to obey the summons of the Roman; with him are his general, his eunuch, his philosophers—the pitiful triumvirate; with much bending of the back they have greeted the invader, who plays the host, and courteously invites them to live in their own palace, so far as he himself is not occupying the apartments. Order! The great man is always preaching order! The testament of the deceased king must be fulfilled. The armies, of course, will be disbanded; on the other hand, he must remind them of the debts of the late monarch, which were to be paid to the Dictator of Rome in ready money. When all this has been done peace shall reign between the two peoples, for no one has any thought of infringing upon Egypt’s liberty.

Kill him! Poison him! thinks the fugitive queen. She waves the messenger away and begins to pace to and fro in the narrow circle of her tent, her hands clasped behind her back, her head now drooping, now tossed upwards, as befits her train of thought. Is there no way out? Oh, if only she had the twenty thousand who now stand under the orders of those rascals yonder! Pothinus? That criminal? And cannot he contrive the murder of this Roman too? Has he not just had Pompey slain? Then why not Caesar? Surely, he bows so deeply only to hide his cunning gaze from the foreigner! Surely, they are plotting together to deceive him! A first battle; for a few weeks, at least, Achillas could easily keep the upper hand; the Romans are too few in number, and one could cut off their water.

But then she herself would be lost. Then all Alexandria would rise and help the valiant conqueror to drag the cowardly queen from her hiding-place; then all would be over. She knows that there is only one means of salvation: to side with the Roman! Who is this Roman? Who is this Caesar?

She steps out of the tent as though seeking light and air; but outside it has suddenly grown dark, and the north-west wind that blows oversea in autumn is cold. She shivers; she is almost afraid of this wind. Growling softly like watchdogs before their master’s house, the guards lie resting in a circle about the fire. What a dog’s life, she thinks, have they had to lead all these months! There, in the west of the Delta, is her palace, and the northern barbarians are tumbling the delicately coloured silken beds. But she, the queen, feels the grit of the desert in her sandals, and for all she knows some conspirator may be lying by the fire yonder, to win a few pieces of gold by plunging his knife into her throat. She cannot see the beacon of the Pharos; the palms and the dunes limit her view, and the capital, of course, is too far away. She shivers and returns to her tent. There she lies, her head supported on her left arm, her knees drawn up in childish wise, considering what she shall do on the morrow.

If she did as the Roman requires—if she returned with her troops to the capital—what a pitiful figure she would cut! What a rain of epigrams there would be among the cynical Alexandrians, if her mythical Red Sea army were considered in the light of modern walls and catapults! The Roman would laugh. Caesar? They say he only smiles.

Once more her thoughts begin to centre upon the stranger. A few months ago he was still regarded as an adventurer, but today he seems the master of the world, before whom Egypt trembles, though she has not yet seen his face. From what her father told her in his sober moments, and the reports of her agents, she has long ago created an image for herself, but she still lacks the key to it; the portrait, were it only stamped on a poor drachma, which would serve as a guide to her woman’s instincts. For all her musings this night are concerned with the degree, the form, the nature, and suggestive power of a virility which she must understand and play upon if she is to save her life.

But what friends and women, what legend and faction and calumny, report of Caesar yields nothing but contradictions. A great connoisseur of women, yet half-way through the fifties; three or four times married, yet still without a son; his love-affairs have always been carefully veiled, yet he was the first Roman to deliver a public funeral oration on the death of his wife; wholly masculine, yet an old scandal is always recurring in new epigrams, to the effect that in his youth he slept with King Nicomedes. Once, it was said, he himself was betrayed; at the feast of Dionysos his wife had prostituted herself to an impudent youth in women’s garments, who had concealed himself among the priestesses. When she was accused of this offence, Caesar had solemnly declared that he did not believe in the truth of the accusation; nevertheless, he divorced her, for Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.