To weep, to moan our lot, when needs require
We stir the hearts of friends, is time well spent.
Even more so in my case, for my time cannot be weighed in the common balance, for in itself it forms part of the booty that belongs to him who, in his arrogance, stupidity, and error, believes he is my master. My time is more precious now than ever, it gives me joy to start upon these memories. Something akin to life itself gathers to my heart and touches me and warms this chilly flesh. Suddenly I am alive, and I recall. .
Diomedes the Informer
“When they collected excrement from the sacred crocodile to annul the generative power of semen, they offended our guardian and brought death to Egypt. When the Queen cuckolded her brother and frolicked with a string of Roman generals, she offended Eros and brought death to Egypt. When she made a present of Alexandria’s youth for the Romans to use as shields in their military campaigns, she offended Osiris and brought death to Egypt. When, instead of governing, she braided her hair in unnatural styles, fixing it in place with fruit juices, she offended Isis with her vanity and brought death to Egypt.”
The obscene prophet who spouted this endless succession of nonsense had been rushed to Alexandria by Romans intent on lowering respect for the Queen. His outlandish cries halted the Queen’s dictation. She had described herself as dead but had been firing out words like arrows. She had just described herself as alive, but her description coincided with the prophet’s outcry.
Now she fell silent. Her tense, arrowlike words dropped to earth and she burst into tears. Without tension to support her, her body changed from a flourishing tree to a flower ripped up by the roots, from the stone in a sling to a pebble lying on the road, from the hurtling wheel of a chariot to the tile shaken from the rooftop by its passing.
Reversing the direction of her words, her declaration of life, and bursting energy, she turned listless and tearful. Why? What could it matter to her what a longhaired prophet was bellowing, a man who misread the past and was blind to the present and future? Like the boastful son of Lacares, he had come to plunder the fallen, like a vulture, a foul hyena.
Cleopatra leaned back on the soft cushions and the mattress of her gilded bed and there she stifled her sobs. Charmian and Eira were sobbing and howling. Down below, at the foot of the mausoleum dedicated to Isis, the official mourners, dressed in black, their hair down, had been waiting for the queen to stop dictating. They had not dared to open their mouths but now they, too, joined in the chorus of grief. They wept for Mark Antony, for Dionysus, for Osiris, the father of the gods. They wept for the pain of the queen. I myself went over to the window and saw among the women the figure of the lean prophet, his shouts drowned out by the lamentations. In a trance, he did not hear them. He believed his lies from beginning to end. He had forgotten he was proclaiming falsehoods.
Right at the foot of the tower, a dense ring of Roman soldiers used their sharp lances to hold at bay the crowd of Alexandrians. The soldiers were unsettled by the behavior of the mourners, who were swaying back and forth, tearing their hair in the extremes of grief. The points of the lances almost touched their chests. Between the backs of the soldiers and our own white walls was only a narrow passage cluttered with their weapons and baggage.
“If only we had with us a platoon of brave men,” I thought. “Right now they could slip silently down ropes and plant in the backs of the Romans their own daggers, lying there idly on the ground.”
Surrounding the tower and the ring of legionnaires, the people thronged in their grief, echoing the cries of the mourners at a lesser volume. There were children, women, elderly men, and the usually restless youngsters — all now stunned to inactivity by the appalling turn of events. Sellers were carrying empty baskets. Dogs snuffled around. It was as busy as market day, but without any of the customary piles of merchandise. Alexandria was starting to feel hunger pangs. Carts, loaded with grain, vegetables, and animals, were being waylaid on lawless roads, most frequently by Roman garrisons, who seized them violently, eager to add to their stores of war booty.
From the window I managed to see on the central balcony of the royal palace the commanding officers of the Roman army, as they surveyed the scene. They were staring at me with curiosity. I half-turned away to look at Cleopatra. I don’t know if it was my gesture that woke her, or what else it was, because her tears lasted no longer than the time it took me to see what I have described. She got up, almost leaping off the bed, and resumed speaking in a voice now hoarsened by rage. She forgot Mark Antony was dead. She forgot that Octavius, today known as Augustus Caesar, was in Alexandria. She forgot her time was running out implacably and she returned to the topic of what, in her opinion, had caused her downfall. She began on a furious note, spitting out incoherent phrases that I will not bother you with. Then she sat back and lowered her voice to a murmur broken by sobs. The tears that flooded her cheeks could have been from pleasure, because her words carried us away to her happiest days in Alexandria, as she sank her arm into the plump cushions and put the full weight of her upper body against it.
Cleopatra
“O Antony!” she cried, it wasn’t you who brought us, you and me, to this grievous end. One kiss from you, the mere taste of your lips, was enough to intoxicate me. When you put your mouth on mine, delirium seized me before I could close my eyes. From you, I drank an unknown substance that made me stumble. But instead of falling, I turned my face to the sky. My chin jarred against the sharp edges of well-rounded spheres, my forehead banged against them, and then my chest. Every kiss brought to my skin a need for more kisses. At every kiss, Antony, I opened up to you, my shoulder, my hand, my thigh. My skin was cut to ribbons, my veins chopped small, simply because I was returning your kiss. I was kissing you, Antony, and unfolding. The stars transformed me into part of the racing air through which they fly. Antony, Mark Antony, just to kiss you! In your kiss, I flew, I opened out, I came apart, ignorant of pain. I wanted more kissing, more flying, more ranks of stars to beat against. Free from earth, weightless, indifferent to every form of grief and all the humiliations flesh is heir to. The things that each of us, when separated, would describe as obligations, needs or acts of drudgery, became, when we two shared the work, a joyous celebration.
We never, never lost the thing that bound us two together — that sense of power! If you, Antony, and I had been destined to die at the same moment, then death would have lost its sting. Together, you and I could overcome any obstacle. You were my life and death.
Life itself was a smiling game of delirious excitement. We played games because happiness overflowed in us; we laughed because life after life was there for us to live! How many ways we found to be happy! So happy that at times we became children again. Nothing in my whole life gave me the glory you gave — if the meaning of glory is to be elevated above the ranks of ordinary humanity. Antony, I loved you because you created me, because in you I was born a second time, and because whatever you drew from me was sublime and ripe with laughter.
Because I loved you, I had to return to the world, infused with the power you bestowed on me. Out of the two of us, I decided to produce a sun that would radiate well-being on our peoples, even as it expanded our glory. My strength increased with my love, my ambitions fed full on their own appetites, the perfection of our loving bodies had both the power and the duty to touch our peoples with the same perfection.
But you shared neither my needs nor the will to satisfy them. The effect of our soaring flight — the word “flight” contains all my meaning, even my skin opening like a flower — it had different results for you. I was so happy. Joy let me play like a child. As I burst open and tore apart and soared high, I was growing; my will was gathering strength. One aspect of my being was brought low by your love, but the other, the one visible to worldly eyes, grew ever more perfect, more complete, more lived-in, solider. It shone, like a blue-green moon over trees and rivers. I was growing; my will was gathering strength. My happiness was like the tiny fibers of those eager roots that drink with zest all the forces of the earth. My stem, leaves, flowers, fruit responded to that zest, as if it were their source of life.