Then you, Antony, sighing and grieving, took a dagger and stabbed yourself twice in the lower stomach. Your words turned to screams as Diomedes, my secretary, entered the room to tell you that Cleopatra was summoning you, that I needed to see you. I have told you, Mark Antony, that I cannot breathe outside your presence. When did I ever fail to call your name? Even today, when your lungs contain no air, I speak to you, I call upon you: “Come, breathe through me. Give me what the water gives to the lotus flower!”
Diomedes, who is both wise and practical but turns pale at the sight of blood, put to good use what little of the Seleucid inheritance he received from his mother. They stripped you naked and carefully loosened the dagger held tight in your frozen fist. With the serene calm of a Syrian, a calm we Lagids find so irritating, he ordered you to be bandaged immediately so that your intestines would not obtrude through your wounds. He had them cover your body with blankets and fasten you to a stretcher.
“And if you’re lying, Diomedes, what then? Without my queen, I will thrust that dagger a thousand times into my body until not one recognizable piece remains.” You had stopped screaming and weeping, but your lips were now babbling.
The industrious Diomedes must now have had to bend over you, to understand the words of a brass-voiced man who so many times had inspired armies to invincibility. Your voice was the first thing that left you as you went to join your ancestors. Alone, it crossed the Lethe, shaking the leaves of the poplars, startling the birds of the riverbanks into flight, and silencing the barking of dogs. Who else but yourself had the power to rob you of your voice on the road to the land of the dead? Your voice, so strong and attractive, should reside today among the living, and he who stole it away would be here to restore me to power. But it has gone. And at this very moment your voice is listening to the words of Nu, the triumphal palace overseer, chancellor in chief of the dead: “I am the deathless inheritor, the exalted one, the powerful one, he who brings rest. I made my name bear fruit, I will set it free, and you will live with me, day after day.”
Inside your body, my king, your destruction stalked its slow and silent way to its end. The great warrior could now enunciate no strategy for his defence. Where the interwoven tissues of your body should have maintained an unseen order, senseless floodgates opened and let out sluices of murderous blood. Partitions cracked asunder. The tense warp and woof was reduced to sheerest linen, spindly and textureless. Over your lungs an assault was gathering to burst them apart. Your inner enemies learned of your speechlessness and abused your frailties, and took your defenses by surprise.
They brought you to me. I am shut up tight in the Temple of Isis. While my defeat was gaining ground, I had them build a mausoleum worthy of Cleopatra. Surrounded by my treasures, I am safe here.
Sooner or later the Romans will be able to capture it and think that in doing so they possess the immortality of Egypt. But they will never exhibit me alive, chained like a slave to the chariot of the man who will delight in parading his victory through the streets of Rome. They will publish a false account of Cleopatra, manipulating her image to disguise the truth about a civil war Octavius waged solely to settle a score with his fellow-triumvir Antony. They will not trap me. The Roman mob will not make me an occasion for mockery and contempt. I know the truth of what I say. Did I not see Arsinoe, my sister and enemy, paraded through Rome in chains of gold in the procession to celebrate the victories of my Caesar?
Here, Mark Antony, let me escape, let me postpone the arrival of your body and journey back to Rome. Let me share in the memory of the five triumphs my Caesar celebrated. Let me step up into the chariot, exulting over my rival Arsinoe, and there let me join the celebratory retinue.
Foreigners had been accommodated in tents in the middle of the roads. All Rome lived the excitement of the triumphs both day and night. There was a gladiatorial combat, and plays were staged in many districts, with actors performing in numerous languages. There were games at the Circus. On chariots drawn by teams of horses, youngsters from noble families performed feats of acrobatics and the so-called Trojan game. There the finest of Rome’s youth, wreaths crowning their hair, some carrying two javelins and others with a quiver on their shoulders, galloped in two even files, split up into two teams, and acted out a chase, lances at the ready. They then performed a second charge before dividing up again into two fighting teams and finally setting up the formation known as the Trojan squadron.
For the sea-battle they had excavated a lake in the lesser Codeta, part of the Campus Martius, and there biremes and quadriremes of the Tyrian and Egyptian fleets confronted each other with vast numbers of combatants. The crowd was so enormous that some people were asphyxiated, while others were crushed to death, two senators among them.
The procession crossed the Campus Martius, passed by the Circus Dominius, attended by massive throngs. It went along the Sacred Way to the Forum and ended up at the Capitol, by the light of torches carried in candelabras attached to the flanks of forty elephants.
As Arsinoe walked along the Sacred Way, secured by chains of gold, the crowds watched in silence, out of respect for Egypt. I made sure they saw that my own gaze, as well as that of my attendants, was turned away from the wretched sight. I had ordered my followers to bribe as many as they could to do likewise, as Arsinoe passed. With so many gazes averted, my Caesar had to free her from her chains, to maintain the tone of celebration, and he withdrew her from the procession. He saved her from the death she had every reason to expect and sent her to live in isolation in the Temple of Diana of the Ephesians. There she stayed till once again she conspired against me and I had no choice but to deal with her as a dangerous enemy.
Although she was hardly a person to reckon with, I arranged the silence that surrounded her as she walked in chains through Rome, to maintain the prestige of the Ptolemies. Her ally was the eunuch named Ganymede; he sported that name as a joke, for he was an ugly brute, never suited to be a prince of Troy or a cupbearer of the gods, and no eagle on the face of this earth could have wanted to snatch him away. Arsinoe died a virgin, never knowing the pleasures of sexuality. She was never a true member of the House of the Lagids. She was a short, skinny thing. Her body was fragile; she had an unprepossessing complexion, like skin stretched tight over a drum. It emphasized her staring, colorless eyes, the only real feature in her nondescript face. Her hair, dark and brittle, seemed to grow out of the skin of a long-buried corpse. In the corridors of my father’s palace, I heard tell that she was not his daughter, that her mother had had a fling, and that the ugly creature was the fruit of this frivolous, lukewarm pastime. A child conceived in passion is born with fire in it, born with color, born full of life, but Arsinoe was like one delivered in the Underworld. I mentioned your eyes, Arsinoe, as your distinctive feature, but your father, whoever he was, must have been half-blind, for he bequeathed you no light, bestowed on you no radiance. You were born gray and hostile. It was as a gray thing they paraded you in chains along the roads of Rome. Like a graceless animal, bred on dusty soils. So what if it did not grieve me to see one who claimed to be my sister walk in chains? It grieved me more when the axle of my Caesar’s chariot snapped, while the procession entered the district of Velabrius, just as he was about to receive their acclamation. I protected you once, Arsinoe, with bribes meant to guarantee you a measure of respect, simply because you bore my father’s name. Yet they had every right to exhibit you, for my Caesar vanquished you and with justice displayed you as a trophy of his wars. Whoever may boast of defeating me will have no chance to exhibit me, for he is not the real conqueror here. My defeat came long before, and it is I who will deliver myself to it. They will not parade me in chains of gold. Our conqueror will get no parade in Rome, no mob to celebrate his multiple triumphs.