That’s all I have to say. I am going to copy out one more version of these words that you can now read for yourselves.
The Corpse
Your love has buried everything.
“I am dead, my king,” I wrote to you, meaning that defeat had overtaken me, even before the battle at Actium. “I am dead, my king. The word will not scorch your mouth because I have been dead to you for some time now. Follow the steps of Dionysus. Your god has abandoned Alexandria. Attended by an ostentatious procession, he left by the eastern gate late at night, awash with music, bearing our laughter with him.”
I can imagine how lost you must have felt, Mark Antony, on reading in that first sentence, penned by the living hand of Cleopatra: the details of my death. Around you, played your musicians, interpreting your sadness at the undeniable departure of your dear Dionysus. You read only the start of my letter, rashly jumping to erroneous conclusions and delivering yourself into the hands of your evil genius.
“I am a dead woman,” I should have told you in my message. “I have been a corpse from even before the time I bore you twins, while you were celebrating your marriage to the sister of the man who wishes to turn himself into our torturer. From that moment on, I have been a dead woman. From that moment on, I suffocate, and I return to life only in your presence, rolling like a barren sphere toward the grave, or soaring like a golden orange from the Garden of the Hesperides, tossed from the hand of the handsome hero — all as your caprices dictate. My willpower is stolen from me by yours, enslaved by your destiny since the time we conceived a woman and a man, a sun and a moon, when first you lived with me in Alexandria. You, Mark Antony, my guide and my destroyer, once again you have lost me and this time for ever.”
Defeat, Marcus Antonius Dionysus Osiris, befell us long before the events in the Gulf of Ambracia, south of Epirus, facing the promontory of Actium. There we planned to make our move as soon as the enemy fleet gave us an opening. To provoke this, we sent out Publicola, pretending to be a rowdy boor, to attack them. But then I released to the winds the sails of my squadron’s sixty ships and, loaded with the treasures of the Lagids, I fled the Peloponnesus to avoid a pointless sacrifice. With abrupt swiftness you followed me, chasing me in a quinquireme. You ordered the other 180 ships in your fleet to do the same. On board your ship you had Alexander of Syria and Artavasde, king of Armenia, the last of the Arsacids, son and heir of the great Tigranes.
When you and your men came aboard my vessel, the “Antony”—its purple sails aloft, swollen by a favorable wind — Artavasde witnessed your foolish outburst of rage at not having won the victory. You blamed the advice I gave you — to wage war at sea and not on land. It was wrong, I admit, but you could have ignored it, General, and relied on your own strategists.
After your show of fury came silence. For the three days it took us to reach Tenarus, you refused to speak. You broke silence only to answer (and then merely in the form of a question) the shouts of a cocky, strutting youth who wagged his spear at you. His chest bare, his sinews bronzed by the sun, he humiliated you, saved from our rage by our bad luck. In his light Liburnian ship he had overtaken us, his hair and beard unornamented but for sea-salt and sand. Seeing you hunched up and motionless, your face hidden in your hands, elbows on your knees, he plucked up enough courage to shout at you, all bravado, befouling you with ugly epithets.
“Who are you to be pursuing Antony?” was all you said. With a few astute commands you could have captured him and, if your frame of mind had not been so enfeebled, you would have had him strung up for far less an impertinence.
“I’m Eurycles, son of Lacares, blessed with the luck you so badly need. I am here to avenge the death of my father.”
You did not explain to me that Lacares had been convicted of theft and then beheaded on your orders. You were still refusing to speak a word to me. Somebody else had to explain things to me before I understood that outrageous scene.
With these words Eurycles, the son of a thief, turned his ship around and attacked another of our contingent, carrying off its load of silver, more out of greed than a sense of honor. It was typical of a man who dared no more than shout that he wanted to avenge the insult to his family’s name; his squalid inherited character proved how just had been the death sentence passed on his father. On the periphery of the battle, under the pretext of vengeance, the rascal stole from us; he sullied his hands with theft, like the vile devourers of carrion that stalk their prey in cowardly style only after the battle is over.
While the coward behaved this way, you did not stir an inch. You remained seated near the ship’s keel, elbows on knees, your face in the palms of your hands. I could not take the reins and avenge this humiliation because the shame you were inflicting on us had shattered my will to act.
As for those who witnessed your reproaches, your anger, your stony silence, I hereby give the order for their decapitation. I had been planning this ever since we disembarked at Tenerus. There I visited the shrines of Demeter and Aphrodite. Jupiter’s temple I avoided, for they say it contains the entrance to Hell. I want no record to remain of that degrading scene, where you were the acrostolium on the prow of my ship, the “Antony,” exposing us in your weakness to so much humiliation that even a common thief, without brains, honor, or money ventured to attack us.
Those witnesses have been silent for one year, but what guarantee is there that they will be so for two? Hence, I order their execution. From that order I except you, Diomedes, for your eyes are not eyes; you are the hand with which I write these words: Behead the witnesses! I especially want Artavasde dead.
And yes, it’s true, Mark Antony, you didn’t want to take me to the confrontation with Octavius. You wanted me to stay in Alexandria. But I bribed your general, Canidius, to convince you of the advantages of taking me to the battleground. I allowed him to export, tax-free, 10,000 sacks of wheat and to import 5,000 ceramic jars. Hence he found the means to make you see how much you needed to take your Cleopatra to the scene of the battle.
If Diomedes does not know this — and I can see by your eyes you don’t — it’s because it was his own secretary who presented Canidius with the terms I sealed with my own signature. I wasn’t thinking about war; I just couldn’t bear, Antony, for you to be far away from me, to see you stolen again from your Cleopatra by the charms of a Roman wife.
I came back to the “Antony” to make that notorious return crossing. All the while, you, Antony, bent over, almost kneeling, sunk deep inside yourself, you were humiliating us both, all because of that sickly, second-rate weakling who had pursued us. Meanwhile that nobody, Octavius, was crowing over a victory that neither he nor his clever Agrippa deserved credit for. Standing high on the stern, he relished the thought of the praises his poets would lavish on him in the near future.
And you, Antony, did nothing but freeze into a stone. Mark my words, you were committing the worst of disgraces, the foulest of your crimes. There you were, transformed into a stone copy of a thinker, a bad-luck symbol aboard my ship, when you should have been acting the astute strategist, combining intelligence with daring, taking risks, giving the lie to everything your enemy wanted from you: that you had accepted defeat, that you had admitted his triumph, that you had accepted your overthrow and finally your departure from this life.