Now I must speak to you again. Listen, Mark Antony, to what I have always wanted to tell you. No, my maidens, do not wash from my naked chest the blood in which I am dressed. Do not comb my hair or try to perfume me. There is no costume more fitting to my words than Antony’s blood. These words will sit well with my disheveled hair, with my blood-stained skin, hands clad in dry, crackling blood. Diomedes, turn your face away if I disgust you; but do not move far from Egypt’s pharoah, for you must hear the words she speaks. You must note down everything I now say. Our time is short. Let them bring you water. If you need to eat, make sure your assistants write down everything, without omitting a single word. These are the last words that your queen, Isis Cleopatra, will speak. Write! Time is flying. No, do not touch me! Do not put fresh clothes on me. So what, if my face is stained, my tangled locks matted with dried blood? I realize it is improper to let myself be seen in this state. There is no need to repeat it. I am dyed with the wine of the great Mark Antony. Let no one say again I am defeated. The truth is, I am not! Let me be just as I am, drenched in him, in what he kept deep within himself, unseen by the world, in what forced him to return to me. You must understand that I am dressed in what once gave him life, draped with the hidden currents of his flesh, his secret knowledge, the source of his desire for me, the spell that made me beautiful for him, the thing that made him mine. Out of it we two formed our invincible unity as well as our mutual betrayal.
Let’s begin, Diomedes. Otherwise my history will serve as material for Roman lies. All of you, who met me, who knew who I was and what my deeds were, the glory that I added to my ancestors and to Egypt, you will either die with me or keep silence about me. If anyone lives and dares to speak for me, may his tongue wither! But nothing will remain of my true story unless we make haste. My treasures will be reduced to crude ingots to be sent to Rome. Likewise they will treat my work, my achievements, and my family. They will mint coins with the legend “Egypt in captivity.” They will consign to oblivion the woman I once was. Ready, Diomedes? Let your ink be of a quality that defies the centuries. Only a few hours remain. Begin!
I, Cleopatra, the last of the Lagids, Pharoah of Egypt, descendant of Alexander the Great, of the goddesses Philadelphia, Arsinoe, and Berenice, of the gods Soters, Adelphos, and Euergetos, preserve here my authentic history. The Romans will shatter to fragments all my achievements and my virtues. They will disfigure me and no one will remain to contradict them. With me, my world collapses. Everyone who knew who I truly was will depart. With me, the Egypt of a thousand years crumbles to dust. Alexandria will cease to be a city of land and sea. My children, my counselors, ministers, administrators, the priests of Egypt and of the Greek pantheon — all will be converted at one stroke into foreigners, refugees, pariahs. We have been outmaneuvered by a lesser rival. Rome cannot bear comparison with Alexandria. The usurper who commands Rome’s army is a ridiculous child whose veins run with the sticky liquid of his envy.
Foul Envy touched his bosom with a hand
Besmirched with urine, stuffed his heart
With crooked thorns, breathed in it gall
And through his bones and round his sour lungs
Dispersed a venom dark as any pitch.
It was not, I repeat, the Romans who defeated me. We, the Egypt of Cleopatra, the triumvir Mark Antony, we were their superior by far. Our defeat came not from Rome. They will boast that they conquered the Nile. They will write that they triumphed in battles. It is not true! No! A nightmare has been the real source of our defeat. Merely saying that for five years I have been a corpse, does not do it justice. No phrase can precisely define the meaning of our warring and our decline, for never was I so alive as then, never so possessed of fire and light. Mark Antony, you dragged me along the channels of a delta where Destiny never intended me to go. You quenched more than one of the goddesses’ stars in the uncontrollable torrents of your whims. And I? I wove myself into you in a web both rare and bizarre, on which there came to be traced what I will now attempt to decipher. I pluck at that web’s corners, the one nearest, facing the sun. On it appears a saying of Io:
O youth, you found a cruel suitor there.
What you have heard is scarcely a beginning.
I do not wish to drown myself in tears or reach my end without first telling of our hours of greatness, of our triumphs and glories. I will begin at the beginning, before we became those tireless lovers of life, before the world lay at our feet, before I restored Egypt’s glory and ruled it as the greatest of the Lagids, before my dream of seeing East and West united under one crown twice became a possibility. I will not mention the chariot drawn by lions that you drove in Rome, while Caesar was visiting me in Egypt, though I am sorely tempted to linger on its description, and along with it, your character and the road we trod together. I will begin, as I said, at the beginning.
With my children, I am the last of my line. They will be dragged to Rome and married to freedmen or treated as slaves. I wish them an early death. But I myself must escape oblivion. The Cleopatra that Roman propaganda changed me into is a vacillating substitute for the real, decisive Cleopatra; the false image that Octavius constantly fashions of me, he makes in order to give himself the courage to war on me. I must elude the death brought on by history’s forgetfulness. No fate is worse than oblivion; it is the completest form of death that can befall a queen.
I never kept a record of public events, the way my Caesar did. I did not jot down phrases to jog the memories of others. I let the poets and historians be responsible for that, without an Aulus Hirtius at my elbow, to eavesdrop on my words and deeds. But I now know that when Egypt falls and the Ptolemies are no more, all those rolls of papyrus will end up under water or in the fire. The papers of Mark Antony, including those that Caesar left in his keeping, will be burned. My own story, told by its protagonist, artlessly, without the skill I have admired in those touched by the Muses — may some god deign to protect it. Then one day, when the hatred of the man who wants to represent himself as my conqueror — though he never has been or will be — when his hatred has passed away, then others in a far-off time will testify to my glory and my fall. My account will be faithful to the facts.
Urgent need will help me where literary skill may fail. On stone, hard stone, I should carve what I want to say, but time forbids. Ink will record what I tell to you, Antony, you who touched me and tasted the saliva of my mouth, and to those yet unborn. Your ears still hear me, Antony, still are nearby, and cannot leave till I accompany them. I am their missing part, their key component. Without me, they will never rest, will remain a mere shadow of themselves, cannot depart. Here they stay. I should not speak in a loud voice as if declaiming to you, like that other queen who in defeat wailed her woes to Darius: “Can he listen to my voice from the underworld?” A murmur will suffice for your understanding, for Cleopatra is flesh fitted to the labyrinth of your two ears, the one thing your body lacked since birth. Without me, you cannot leave, for your condition is defective. When my story ends, we two shall go together.
It’s you to whom I speak: you who shared my linen bed, and those who may not dwell in Africa or Asia or Rome, who may listen to me beyond the regions of Gaul and the wild, turbulent Atlantic. Listen! This is what I was. These were my deeds. The last hours of my life I will spend in relating my history. Can a better death be imagined?