Cleopatra by M.J. Trow

Author:M.J. Trow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472100023
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2016-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

BOOK FIVE: ANTONY

13

REBIRTH

ROME, 44

With hindsight, all the murder of Caesar achieved was a speeding-up of the inevitable. If the honourable men who killed him hoped for an instant restoration of republican values, they were mistaken. Amateurs at the killing game, they had effectively bungled the assassination, had no coherent plan for the future and ultimately let the moral high ground fall to the two men who most of Rome saw as Caesar’s successors – Mark Antony and Octavian.

Caesar’s mutilated corpse was delivered to Calpurnia. There was panic in the streets. Mark Antony, temporarily wrong-footed, got out of Pompey’s villa, which was now his home, and left Rome, disguised as a slave. It was the second time he had done that. We do not know who broke the news to Cleopatra or what her reaction was. Joann Fletcher has her tearing her hair and clothes in the traditional lament, but this in itself was only a knee-jerk reaction – all around the Mediterranean, such ritual was expected. Our problem, for all the bitchy comments of Romans like Cicero, is that we do not know the exact relationship of Caesar and the queen. In Egyptian/Alexandrian eyes, she was his wife; in Roman terms, his mistress. She was almost certainly the mother of his child (and was, according to Cicero, pregnant again by the Ides of March). Was she in love with him? Or he with her? We cannot answer that. What is obvious is that the death of Caesar represented a catastrophic political blow to Cleopatra. If she had ambitions to play queen of Rome to Caesar’s king, as some Romans believed, that would never happen now. And it was not safe for her to stay in Rome.

She probably did stay in Rome for Caesar’s funeral, but took no part in it. While Mark Antony, creeping back after a suitable time, now launched his ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ to the mob while displaying Caesar’s wounds, Cleopatra’s people were packing. By the middle of April she had gone, sailing directly for home past the Straits of Messina.

As her flotilla sailed past the Pharos light, to be welcomed probably by her huge battle fleet, Cleopatra must have realized that, after the shock of the last weeks, all was well at home. Whoever had run Egypt in her second absence – it would nominally have been Ptolemy XIV but backed by a highly competent, if anonymous, finance minister – had done an excellent job and the queen could relax.

The next three years of Cleopatra’s life and reign are shrouded in a certain mystery. If she was indeed pregnant when she left Rome, she must have miscarried because if there was one thing the Alexandrian/Egyptian chroniclers would have monitored, it was the birth of a royal child, especially if it were a boy, a brother to Caesarion. More likely, this was a piece of malicious gossip, which Cicero, ready to believe anything of the woman who forgot to lend him a book, readily accepted. The summer of 44 would have been one of celebrations.

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