Caesar (80 page)

“Brutus, you're the best!” The level of wine in Pompey's goblet went down considerably; he smacked his lips and leaned back contentedly. “Which leads me,” he said casually, “to another, more important subject. You're the richest man in Rome, and I haven't enough money to fight this war. I'm selling up my own interests in Italia, so are the others. Oh, I don't expect you to go so far as to sell your house in the city, or all your country estates. But I need a loan of four thousand talents. Once we've won the war, we'll have Rome and Italia to carve up between us. You won't lose.” The eyes so earnestly and kindly fixed on Pompey's widened, filled with tears. “Pompeius, I daren't!” he gasped.“ You daren't?”

“Truly, I daren't! My mother! She'd kill me!”

Mouth open, Pompey stared back, stunned. “Brutus, you're a man of thirty-four! Your fortune belongs to you, not to Servilia!”

“You tell her that,” said Brutus, shivering.“ But—but—Brutus, it's easy! Just do it!”

“I can't, Pompeius. She'd kill me.” And from that stand Brutus would not be budged. He blundered out of Pompey's comfortable house in tears, colliding with Labienus.“ What's wrong with him?” Pompey was gasping. “I don't believe it! I can't believe it! Labienus, that spineless little worm just refused to lend us one sestertius! He's the richest man in Italia! But no, he daren't open his purse! His mother would kill him!”

The sound of Labienus's laughter filled the room. “Oh, well done, Brutus!” he said when he was able, wiping his eyes. “Magnus, you have just been defeated by an expert. What a perfect excuse! There's nothing in the world will ever part Brutus from his money.”

By the beginning of June, Pompey had put his army into camp near the town of Beroea, some forty miles from Thessalonica, the capital of Macedonia, and moved into the governor's palace in that great and heavily fortified city—together with his entourage of consulars and senators. Things were going better. Apart from the five legions he had brought with him from Brundisium, he now had one legion of Roman veterans settled in Crete and Macedonia, the Cilician legion (very under-strength), and two legions the chastened Lentulus Crus had managed to raise in Asia Province. Forces were beginning to dribble in from King Deiotarus of Galatia, some infantry and several thousand cavalry; the debt-crippled King Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia (who owed Pompey even more than he owed Brutus) sent a legion of foot and a thousand horse; the petty kingdoms of Commagene, Sophene, Osrhoene and Gordyene contributed light-armed troops; Aulus Plautius the governor of Bithynia-Pontus had found several thousand volunteers; and various other tetrarchies and confederations were also sending soldiers. Even money was beginning to appear in sufficient quantity to ensure that Pompey could feed what promised to be an army containing thirty-eight thousand Roman foot, fifteen thousand other foot soldiers, three thousand archers, a thousand slingers, and seven thousand horse troopers. Metellus Scipio had written to say that he had two full-strength legions of surprisingly excellent troops ready to move, though he would have to march them overland due to a shortage of transport vessels. Then in Quinctilis came a delightful surprise. Bibulus's admirals Marcus Octavius and Scribonius Libo had captured fifteen cohorts of troops on the island of Curicta—together with Gaius Antonius, their commander. Since the troops were all prepared to swear allegiance to Pompey, his army was even bigger. That sea battle in which Octavius and Libo destroyed Dolabella's forty ships was the first of many victories for Pompey's navy, swelling rapidly. And very ably commanded, as it turned out, by the inexperienced Bibulus, who learned ruthlessly and developed a talent for his job. Bibulus divided his navy into five large flotillas, only one of which was still theoretical by the time that September came. One flotilla, commanded by Laelius and Valerius Triarius, consisted of the one hundred very good ships levied from Asia Province; Gaius Cassius came back from Syria with seventy ships to inherit command of them; Marcus Octavius and Libo controlled fifty ships from Greece and Liburnia; and Gaius Marcellus Major and Gaius Coponius took charge of the twenty superb triremes Rhodes had donated to the distressingly persistent Cato, who refused to leave without them. Anything to get rid of Cato! cried the Rhodians. The fifth flotilla was to consist of whatever ships young Gnaeus Pompey managed to extract from Egypt.

Full of himself because his father had given him this hugely important job, Gnaeus Pompey set out by sea for Alexandria, determined that he would excel. Twenty-nine this year, had Caesar not intruded he would have entered the Senate as quaestor next year. A fact which didn't worry him. Gnaeus Pompey never for one moment doubted that his father had the ability and the strength to squash that presumptuous Julian beetle to pulp. Unfortunately he had not been quite old enough to serve in the East during Pompey's campaigns there; his cadetship had been spent in Spain during a disappointingly peaceful time. He had, of course, done the obligatory tour of Greece and Asia Province after he finished his military service, but he had never managed to reach either Syria or Egypt. He disliked Metellus Scipio only one degree less than he disliked his stepmother, Cornelia Metella, thus his decision to sail to Egypt along the African coast rather than go overland through Syria. An insufferable pair of snobs was Gnaeus Pompey's verdict about Metellus Scipio and his daughter. Luckily his little brother Sextus, born thirteen years later, got on very well with his stepmother, though, like all Pompey the Great's three children, he had mourned the passing of Julia bitterly. She had made everyone in the family so happy. Whereas Cornelia Metella, Gnaeus Pompey suspected, didn't even manage to make his status-conscious father happy. Why he was thinking these things as he leaned on his ship's poop rail watching the dreary desert of Catabathmos slide by, he didn't know, save that time dragged and thoughts winged their own airy passage. He missed his young wife, Scribonia, dreamed of her by day as well as night. Oh, that ghastly marriage to Claudilla! Yet one more evidence of his father's insecurity, his determination to obtain none but the highest wives and husbands for all his family. A drab, sat-upon girl too young for marriage, so utterly devoid of the kind of stimulus Gnaeus Pompey had needed. And what ructions when he had set eyes on Libo's daughter, announced that he was divorcing Claudilla and marrying this exquisite little Latin partridge with the glossy feathers and plump contours his mind and body craved! Pompey had thrown one of his best tantrums. In vain. His oldest son stuck to his resolve with true Pompeian tenacity, and had his way. With the result that Appius Claudius Censor had to be given the sinecure of governing Greece for the government in exile. Where, if rumor was right, he had gone even more peculiar, spent his time probing the geometry of pylons and muttering about fields of force, invisible fingers of power, and similar claptrap. Alexandria burst on Gnaeus Pompey like Aphrodite upon the world. More numerous even than Antioch or Rome, its three million people inhabited what was arguably Alexander the Great's most perfect gift to posterity. His empire had perished within a single generation, but Alexandria went on forever. Though so flat that its biggest hill, the dreamy garden of the Panaeum, was a man-made mound two hundred feet high, it seemed to Gnaeus Pompey's dazzled eyes more something constructed by the Gods than by clumsy, mortal men. Part blinding white, part a rainbow of colors, liberally dewed with trees carefully chosen for slenderness or roundness, Alexandria upon the farthest shore of Our Sea was magnificent. And the Pharos, the great lighthouse of Pharos Island! Far taller than any other building Gnaeus Pompey had ever seen, a three-tiered hexagon faced with shimmering white marble, the Pharos was a wonder of the world. The sea around it was the color of an aquamarine, sandy-bottomed and crystal clear, for the great sewers which underlay Alexandria emptied into the waters west of the city, ensuring that their contents were carried away. What air! Balmy, caressing. See the Heptastadion, the causeway connecting Pharos Island with the mainland, marching for almost a mile in white majesty! Two arches pierced its center, each arch spacious enough to permit the passage of a big ship between the Eunostus and the Great Harbors. There directly before him reared the great palace complex, joined at its far end to a crag climbing out of the sea that used to be a fortress and now cupped a shell-like amphitheater within its hollow. This, Gnaeus Pompey realized, was a real palace. The only one in the world. So vast that it paled the heights of Pergamum into insignificance. At first glance its many hundreds of pillars looked severely Doric, save that they owned a more ponderous girth, were far taller and were vividly painted with tiers of pictures, each one the height of a column drum; yet proper pediments sat atop them, with proper metopes, everything a truly Greek building of importance should have. Except that the Greeks built on the ground. Like the Romans, the Alexandrians had elevated their palace complex upon a stone plateau thirty steps high. Oh, and the palms! Some graceful fans, some horny and stumpy, some with fronds like feathers. In an ecstatic daze, Gnaeus Pompey saw his ship tied up at the royal wharf, supervised the disposition of his other ships, donned the purple-bordered toga his propraetor's imperium entitled him to wear, and set off behind six crimson-clad lictors bearing the axes in their fasces to seek palace accommodation and an audience with the seventh Queen Cleopatra of Egypt.

Having ascended the throne at seventeen years of age, she was now nearing twenty. The two years of her reign had been fraught with triumphs and perils: first the glory of skimming down Nilus in her huge gilded barge with its purple sail embroidered in gold, the native Egyptians abasing themselves before her as she stood with her nine-year-old brother/husband by her side (but one step down); in Hermonthis the bringing home of the Buchis Bull, found because the curls in his flawless long black coat grew the wrong way round, her vessel afloat in a sea of flower-decked barges, herself clad in the solemn regalia of Pharaoh but wearing only the tall white crown of Upper Egypt; the journey past ruined Thebes to the First Cataract and the island of Elephantine, to be at the first, most important Milometer on the very day when the rising waters would predict the final height of the Inundation. Every year at the beginning of summer, Nilus mysteriously rose, broke its banks and spread a coat of thick, black mud replete with nutrition over the fields of that strange kingdom, seven hundred miles long but only four or five miles wide except for the anabranch valley of Ta-she and Lake Moeris, and the Delta. There were three kinds of Inundation: the Cubits of Surfeit, the Cubits of Plenty and the Cubits of Death. Measured in the Nilometers, a series of graduated wells dug to one side of the mighty river. It took a month for the Inundation to travel from the First Cataract to the Delta, which was why the reading of the Nilometer at Elephantine was so important: it gave warning to the rest of the kingdom what kind of Inundation it would experience that summer. By autumn Nilus was receding back within its banks, the soil deeply watered and enriched. That first year of her reign had seen the reading low in the Cubits of Plenty, a good omen for a new monarch. Any level above thirty-three Roman feet was in the Cubits of Surfeit, which meant disastrous flooding. Any level between seventeen and thirty-two feet was in the Cubits of Plenty, which meant a good Inundation; the ideal Inundation level was twenty-seven feet. Below seventeen feet lay the Cubits of Death, when Nilus didn't rise high enough to break its banks and famine was the inevitable result. That first year saw the real Egypt—Egypt of the river, not the Delta— seem to revive under the rule of its new Queen, who was also Pharaoh— the God on Earth who her father, King Ptolemy Auletes, had never been. The immensely powerful faction of the priests, who were native Egyptians, controlled much of the destiny of Egypt's Ptolemaic rulers, descendants of one of Alexander the Great's marshals, the first Ptolemy. Only by fulfilling the true religious criteria and earning the blessing of the priests could the King and Queen be crowned Pharaoh. For the titles of King and Queen were Macedonian, whereas the title of Pharaoh belonged to the awesome agelessness of Egypt itself. The ankh of Pharaoh was the key to more than religious sanction; it was also the key to the vast treasure vaults beneath the ground of Memphis, as they were in the custody of the priests and bore no relation to Alexandria, wherein the King and Queen lived their Macedonian-oriented lives. But the seventh Cleopatra belonged to the priests. She had spent three years of her childhood in their custody at Memphis, spoke both formal and demotic Egyptian, and came to the throne as Pharaoh. She was the first Ptolemy of the dynasty to speak Egyptian. Being Pharaoh meant that she had complete, godlike authority from one end of Egypt to the other; it also meant that she had access, should she ever need it, to the treasure vaults. Whereas in un-Egyptian Alexandria being Pharaoh could not enhance her standing. Nor did the economy of Egypt and Alexandria depend upon the contents of the treasure vaults; the public income of the monarch was six thousand talents per year, the private income as much again. Egypt contained nothing in private ownership; it all went to the monarch and the priests. Thus the triumphs of Cleopatra's first two years were more related to Egypt than to Alexandria, isolated to the west of the Canopic Nilus, the westernmost arm of the Delta. They also related to a mystical enclave of people who occupied the eastern Delta, the Land of Onias, separate and complete in itself and owning no allegiance to the religious beliefs of either Macedonia or Egypt. The Land of Onias was the home of the Jews who had fled from Hellenized Judaea after refusing to acknowledge a schismatic high priest, and it kept its fervent Jewishness still. It also supplied Egypt with the bulk of its army and controlled Pelusium, the other important seaport Egypt possessed upon the shores of Our Sea. And Cleopatra, who spoke both Hebrew and Aramaic fluently, was the darling of the Land of Onias. The first peril she had handled well, the murder of the two sons of Bibulus. But her present peril was much graver. When the time came for the second Inundation of her reign, it fell in the Cubits of Death. The Nilus didn't break its banks, the muddy water did not flow across the fields, and the crops failed to poke their bright green blades above the parched ground. For the sun blazed down upon the Kingdom of Egypt every day of every year; life-giving water was the gift of Nilus, not the skies, and Pharaoh was the deified personification of the river.

When Gnaeus Pompey sailed into the Royal Harbor of Alexandria, that city was stirring ominously. It took two or three famines in a row to deprive the native Egyptians along the river of all food sources, but that was not so in Alexandria, which produced little save bureaucrats, businessmen and bonded servants. Alexandria was the quintessential middleman, unproductive of itself yet making most of the money. It manufactured fancies like astonishing glass made up of thin, multicolored strands; it turned out the world's finest scholars; it controlled the world's paper. Without being able to feed itself. That, it expected Egypt of the Nilus to do. The people were of several kinds: the pure Macedonian stock composing the aristocracy and jealously guarding all the highest positions in the bureaucracy; the merchants, manufacturers and other commercial persons who were a hybrid mixture of Macedonian and Egyptian; a very considerable Jewish ghetto at the eastern end of the city in Delta District, mostly artisans, craftsmen, skilled laborers and scholars; the Greek rather than Macedonian scribes and clerks who filled the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, worked as masons and sculptors, teachers and tutors—and plied the oars of both naval and merchant vessels; and even a few Roman knights. The language was Greek, the citizenship not Egyptian but Alexandrian. Only the three hundred thousand Macedonian noblemen owned the full Alexandrian citizenship, a source of complaint and bitter resentment among the other groups in the population. Save for the Romans, who sniffed at such an inferior kind of suffrage. To be Roman was to be better than anyone, including an Alexandrian. Food was still to be had in plenty; the Queen was buying in grain and other stuffs from Cyprus, Syria and Judaea. What caused that ominous stirring was the rise in prices. Unfortunately the Alexandrians of all walks except the peaceful and inwardly turned Jews were aggressive, extremely independent and absolutely uncowed by monarchs. Time and time again they had risen and ejected this Ptolemy from the throne, replaced him or her by a different Ptolemy, then done it all over again the moment prosperity trembled or the cost of living soared. All of which Queen Cleopatra knew as she readied herself to receive Gnaeus Pompey in audience. Complicated by the fact that her brother/husband was now almost twelve years old, and could no longer be dismissed as a mere child. Not yet pubertal beyond those first physical tremors which preceded the massive changes still to come, the thirteenth Ptolemy was nonetheless becoming increasingly difficult to control. Mostly due to the malign influence of the two men who dominated his life, his tutor, Theodotus, and the Lord High Chamberlain, Potheinus. They were already waiting in the audience chamber when the Queen strode in, and she did stride; to do so, she had discovered, spoke of confidence and authority, neither of which her meager bodily endowments reinforced. The little King was seated on his throne, a smaller edifice one step lower than the great ebony and gilt chair which was her own seat. Until he had proven his manhood by quickening his sister/ wife, he would not be elevated any higher. Clad in the purple tunic and cape of the Macedonian kings, he was an attractive boy in a very Macedonian way, blond, blue-eyed, more Thracian than Greek. His mother had been his father's half sister, her mother a princess of Arabian Nabataea. But the Semite didn't show at all in the thirteenth Ptolemy, whereas in Cleopatra, his half sister, it did. Her mother had been the daughter of the awesome King Mithridates of Pontus, a big, tall woman with the dark yellow hair and dark yellow eyes peculiar to the Mithridatidae. Therefore the thirteenth Ptolemy had more Semitic blood than his half sister; yet she looked the Semite. A Tyrian purple cushion encrusted with gold and pearls enabled the Queen of Alexandria and Egypt to sit on that too-big chair and place her feet on something solid; without it, her toes could not touch the dais of purple marble.“ Is Gnaeus Pompey on his way?” she asked. Potheinus answered. “Yes, lady.” She could never make up her mind which of the two she disliked more, Potheinus or Theodotus. The Lord High Chamberlain was the more imposing, and bore witness to the fact that eunuchs were not necessarily short, plump and effeminate. His testicles had been enucleated in his fourteenth year, a little late perhaps, and at the direction of his father, a Macedonian aristocrat with huge ambitions for his very bright son. Lord High Chamberlain was the greatest position at court and could be held only by a eunuch, a peculiar result of the crisscrossed Egyptian and Macedonian cultures; it was inflicted upon one of pure Macedonian blood because the ancient Egyptian traditions dictated it. A subtle, cruel and very dangerous man, Potheinus. Mouse-colored curls, narrow grey eyes, handsome features. He was, of course, plotting to spill her from the throne and replace her with her half sister Arsinoe, the full sister of the thirteenth Ptolemy. Theodotus was the effeminate one, despite his intact testicles. Willowy, pale, deceptively weary. Neither a good scholar nor a true teacher, he had been a great intimate of her father, Auletes, and owed his position to that happy chance. Whatever he taught the thirteenth Ptolemy had nothing to do with history, geography, rhetoric or mathematics. He liked boys, and one of the most galling facts of Cleopatra's life was the knowledge that Theodotus would have sexually initiated her brother well before her brother was deemed old enough to consummate their marriage. I will have to take, she thought, Theodotus's leavings. If I live that long. Theodotus too wants to replace me with Arsinoe. He and Potheinus know that they cannot manipulate me. What fools they are! Don't they understand that Arsinoe is as unmanageable as I am? Yes, the war to own Egypt has begun. Will they kill me, or will I kill them? But one thing I have vowed. The day Potheinus and Theodotus die, my brother will die too. Little viper!