Authors: Karen Essex
“He’s devised an ingenious method of avoiding me, has he not, sending me off to see the city?” The king was sweaty and agitated,
his fat jiggling as the royal party arrived at the gates of Rome. The late-morning sun hammered the black top of the enclosed
carriage, but Pompey had insisted that for security reasons the royals must travel in a covered vehicle. “The rabble in Rome
has new power,” Pompey had warned. “They used to fear us, but no more. Now they boldly harass their betters.”
The double gates to the city, one for entering and one for leaving, were three stories tall and guarded by grim-faced, skirted
centurions. With sinewy legs strapped to the knee by the leather laces of their sandals they stood in calcified stillness,
armed with long javelins, their helmets gleaming like new coins in the noontime sun. The city’s walls, the royals were told
by their guide, were made of sandstone, four feet thick and impenetrable. Kleopatra stared at the uniformed men who seemed
to peer back at her from the wall’s many arches on each level.
“How large the men look.” Kleopatra was used to the sizable Romans who visited them at court, Romans made bulky by a lifetime
of feasting and drinking, but had not seen firsthand the formidable height and mass carried by Rome’s military men.
“We are slight in comparison,” she said to her father, who sneaked another look at the soldiers from the tiny window.
“Not all of us are slight,” Hekate retorted, raising an eyebrow toward the robust king, letting out an uncharacteristic giggle,
and causing his daughter and Charmion to laugh.
But when the carriage passed through the towering arch and entered the city, Kleopatra stifled her laughter. Elation settled
like a tickling mist over her body. Her dream of seeing the great city of Rome had come to fruition earlier in her life than
she had ever imagined. It came under unfortunate circumstances, but still, here was Rome, and she had entered its perimeter.
Once inside the city walls, the temperature rose, and the seats of the carriage seemed to get harder and more uncomfortable.
The driver made continual abrupt stops to avoid running into the throngs of pedestrians, or the other carriages, or the merchants’
carts, or the tall litter-bearers carrying fortunate persons of means over the heads of the masses.
“A law has been proposed to abolish all carts and carriages from the streets by day, allowing only transportation by litter
or by foot,” explained the guide Timon, an educated Corinthian slave charged by Pompey to show them the city.
“A few years too late, I would say,” the king replied to this news. He looked out the small portal, and a ghoulish face with
no teeth and one eye looked back at him. “A coin for a poor old man?” The hollow mouth mumbled the request; the single eye
cocked upward, looking to the heavens and not into the carriage at all.
“Zeus!” Auletes screamed. “A giant! Go away, man. Go away.”
The princess ducked under her father and stuck her head out the small window. “He is carried on the shoulder of another,”
she laughed.
“What does the beggar want?” he asked his daughter, fluttering his hands to make the man go away.
“It is just that, Father. He is a beggar asking for coins.”
“Well tell the fellow that I, too, am a beggar, living on Pompey’s hospitality.”
One of the king’s bodyguards who followed them on horseback trotted alongside the carriage, kicking the man away. The carriage
stopped short again, throwing Kleopatra forward and into the lap of her father.
“What now?” asked the king. “How does one endure this city? How does anyone cope with such crowds, such traffic? I am beginning
to see why Pompey does not wish to leave his rural paradise.”
“It is the fault of Julius Caesar’s new law, put into effect by his man, the tribune Clodius,” said Timon, who clearly disapproved.
“The law promises free corn to all who reside in the city. Since its passage earlier this year, the rabble have flocked to
Rome. No one wants to work anymore. They want to come here, live twelve to a room, and bleed the government treasury.”
“An abomination!” said the king. “In my country, the peasants get their daily bread, but they work for it.”
Thus far the judgment of the king upon Rome was that it was loud, hot, crowded, lacking refinement, and not at all hospitable
to royalty. Though Pompey had put them up at the best of Roman townhomes, it was tiny by their own standards and in the middle
of the city, and the royals were simply not accustomed to the noise of a Roman street by day or by night. The king complained
vociferously, but he was assured that Jupiter himself could not quiet the streets of Rome. All night long bands of drunken
marauders roamed the streets yelling, singing, and terrorizing, threatening to light their fellow night-roamers on fire with
their torches if they did not capitulate to their demands for money. The troublemakers made the neighborhood dogs bark, which
always woke the princess. By dawn, schoolteachers had already begun their classes, which took place outdoors, so that as soon
as Kleopatra settled back to sleep, she was startled awake by a resounding lecture given in Greek on the philosopher Herakleitos
or on ethics or Virtue—lectures she might have found intriguing if not for her superior education at the Mouseion. Merchants
began hawking their goods shortly thereafter. Carts creaked incessantly, the drivers yelling at one another to move out of
the way, and then cursing when their cargo collided as they drove in opposite directions down the hazardously narrow streets.
Despite the danger and the intrigue, or perhaps because of it, the city captivated the princess. Saturated with color, in
contrast to the pervasive whiteness of her own Alexandria, houses seemed to be stacked upon houses, with jutting ledges called
gutters to capture the rainfall. Unlike the symmetrical perfection of Alexandria, Rome had tiny narrow streets and great wide
ones. The people everywhere, regardless of class, were loud and crass in speech; neither inscrutable like the native Egyptians
nor intense and argumentative like the Greeks. Everywhere the Romans announced themselves: The exteriors of businesses were
decorated with crude murals of the proprietors at their tasks; family portraits were done on the residences asserting the
identities of the inhabitants, and long political manifestos were scrawled in hurried penmanship on walls and buildings. Rome
and its inhabitants were vulgar, to be sure, but Kleopatra found herself nonetheless infatuated with the display.
Released from the small prison of the carriage now, and strolling down a dank alley at the bottom of Capitoline Hill, she
entertained herself with the obscene epigrams that commemorated the various sex acts witnessed in that corridor. Kleopatra
read in slightly hesitant Latin, for she was not accustomed to slang:
HERE, I, JULIANUS, TAUGHT MY SLAVE-BOY TO PLAY THE
WOMAN. HE PLEASED ME SO WELL I AM PLUCKING HIS THIGHS
CLEAN AND TAKING
HIM INTO MY HOUSE.
“Timon, is it not true that Roman law, contrary to Greek tradition, forbids the defiling of young Roman males?” Kleopatra
asked her guide. “That citizens must confine homosexual relations to foreigners and slaves?”
“It is true, Your Highness,” he answered. He was a young man, intelligent, and relieved to be in the company of Greek-speaking
royals who were happy to share his disdain of the conquering barbarians. “As if one might legislate desire, particularly desire
of that kind. People are people the world over. Even the Romans who consider themselves to be so superior and mighty.”
“I heard someone say once in the Alexandrian marketplace that there is no language as good as the Latin for telling a dirty
joke. Let us walk ahead of my father and the rest so that we may read them,” she whispered to him. “Oh yes,” he said snidely.
“These nasty little ditties are Rome’s finest contribution to literature and poetry to date.”
They strolled on, stopping for the princess to leisurely read of the adventures of “pokers, quim-lickers, and sodomites,”
and one lament of a man unable to practice the latter art for weeks due to loose bowels.
BROTHERS, LISTEN TO MY TALE OF WOE.
MY WIFE HAS LONG, VENGEFULTALONS.
HERE ON THIS SITE SHE CAUGHTME IN A BOY.
SHE SCREAMED, DO I NOT HAVE TWO BUTTOCKS, YOU BASTARD?
I, THE OLD POKER, TRIED TO PROTECT THE BOY-LOVER FROM HER BLOWS.
BUT ALL THE WHILE HE SCREAMED AT HER, TAKE YOUR TWO QUIMS AND GO HOME.
“Very good,” said Timon. “You only mispronounced a few things.”
Kleopatra was not allowed—to her great dismay and despite her good arguments—to enter the public baths, for Auletes said it
was unseemly for a princess to bathe with commoners. She did, however, visit the ruins of the temple of Isis, recently destroyed
by order of the Roman senate because the religion made the Roman women “too excitable.” One senator, grievously worked up
over his wife’s unmatronly devotion to the goddess, had taken a sledgehammer to the pillars of the temple, leaving the delicate
columns in a crumpled heap. Auletes and his entourage were horrified at the treatment of their native deity, the goddess whom
they worshipped, the goddess whom Kleopatra had represented in the Grand Procession. “Roman women appear to be excitable enough
on their own,” commented Auletes. “They don’t seem to require the goddess to incite them.”
The carriage halted in front of their next destination. “The Forum!” Kleopatra said, eager to see the seat of Roman culture.
“We must exit the carriage,” explained Timon. “Vehicles of any kind are not allowed into the square.”
“Then it should be declared a holy place,” huffed the king.
They descended the carriage into the heat of the afternoon, which was enhanced by a strong humidity. Kleopatra had always
envisioned the Forum as a building, or a series of buildings, but it was not. It was a square surrounded by many buildings;
at one end, the massive, eight-columned temple of Saturn, built many centuries ago to honor the god-king of Italy. The temple,
they were told, also housed the Roman treasury. “See, Kleopatra, that is where all our money will be when they get through
with us!” said Auletes.
Roman citizens rested on the edges of three fountains, while others waited for spaces to clear so that they, too, could indulge
their hands, feet, or faces in the cool water. Wide colonnades with long benches lined the square. An old bat-faced woman
stood in front of painted vessels hawking fresh water and other cooling citrus drinks while a slave fanned his master with
a large leaf in the serene shadow of her little booth.
The markets were not in the open air but in two concave hemicycles with arched fronts that faced the squares. Each building
had a gallery where patrons might stroll and look in the window, and the princess looked up, hiding the sun’s glare with her
hand, so that she could see the goods of the merchants displayed behind the open doors.
While the king and Hekate rested in the shade, Kleopatra and Charmion spent hours walking into the shops with Timon, trailed
by an armed guard, and purchasing whatsoever struck the princess’s fancy. She had wanted to procure fabrics for new clothes,
fashionable hair adornments fitting to her new maturity, and shawls for the old ladies who lived on Antirhodos, but she found
that the goods manufactured in Rome were primitive in contrast to those imported from Greece and Egypt. She did manage to
buy a ceramic figure of a Roman
lar
, a spritish creature who protected the Romans at home, and a brocade blanket that she would put upon the back of Persephone
when she saw her pony again.
Thoughts of her horse made her spirits sink. She had had enough of Rome and wanted to go home—to the shimmering sea, to the
wide boulevards, to the exquisite pink granite monuments built by her ancestors, to the palace with its luxuries, to the court
where philosophers and men of science sat with her father and discussed new ideas. It made her sick to the stomach that the
Greek world was usurped, crushed, by these brash Romans, uncouth in so many ways. She decided that she hated this crowded,
fetid city made of ugly brick. She hated the rows of apartments stacked on top of one another to house the rabble from Rome’s
conquered territories. She hated the arrogant men who swept past her in the Forum, followed by armed militias as they left
one building and entered another. She hated every sign of the prosperity and might that Rome had built by pillaging the rest
of the world. All these things discouraged her, and yet in them she saw a certain inevitability. Here was a race of men who
believed that it was their gods-given right to lord over the rest of the world. What fools were her stepmother and sister
and their silly, provincial eunuchs who thought that this sweeping force that cast aside the old and painted the future—their
futures—could be ignored or demolished.
“Timon, why do all the men in the Forum require such protection to walk the short distance from one end of the square to the
next?”
“These men are senators and other men of means. Rome is a terribly dangerous place in these terribly dangerous times.”
“Do we require more protection than we have?” she asked.
“No, the Romans are only concerned with murdering one another at present.”
After the lengthy shopping expedition, Kleopatra and Charmion met up with the others in their party for a final stroll past
the Curia Hostilia, in the northwest corner of the Forum, where the senate often met.
“I cannot go near the place without Pompey!” exclaimed the king, turning away from the direction of the Curia as if he had
been told that a plague had been let loose in the building. But Timon assured him that the senate did not meet on this day.
“If you would like, you may peer into the great room through any one of the open doors in the vestibule,” said Timon.
The long colonnade that led to the Curia was lined with dangling balls hanging from coarse ropes. Pedestrians walked right
past the odd-looking spheres, occasionally stopping to admire one, or to laugh at it, or to read the inscriptions that rested
on podiums below. Curious, the princess quickened her step. She heard the ever-present footsteps of the guards increase their
pace behind her.