The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
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When Cleopatra had arrived in Alexandria that June three months after the death of Caesar, she had found Caesarion safe and well in the custody of Mithridates of Pergamum, wept on her uncle’s bosom, thanked him lovingly for his care of her realm, and sent him home to Pergamum laden down with a thousand talents of gold. Gold that Mithridates was to find very handy when Brutus demanded tribute; he paid the specified amount and said nothing about the large surplus of bullion still in his secret coffers.
Now three years of age, Cleopatra’s son was tall, golden-haired, blue of eye and growing more like Caesar every day. He could read and write, discuss affairs of state a little, and was fascinated by the work his birth had made his lot. A happy chance. Time then to say goodbye to Ptolemy XIV Philadelphus, Cleopatra’s half brother and husband. The fourteen-year-old boy was handed over to Apollodorus, who had him strangled and gave out to the citizens of Alexandria that their king had died of a familial trouble. True enough. Caesarion was elevated to the throne as Ptolemy XV Caesar Philopator Philomator—Ptolemy Caesar, father-loving and mother-loving. He was anointed Pharaoh by Cha’em, high priest of Ptah, and became Lord of the Two Ladies, He of the Sedge and Bee; he was also given his own physician, Hapd’efan’e.
But Caesarion could not marry Cleopatra. Father-daughter or mother-son incest was religiously unacceptable. Oh, for the daughter Caesar had never given her! A mystery and clearly the will of the Gods, but why? Why, why? She, the personification of Nilus, had not quickened, even during those last months when she and Caesar were together in Rome for many nights of love. When her menses began to flow as her ship had put out from Ostia, she had fallen to the deck and howled, screeched, torn her hair, lacerated her breasts. She had been late, been sure she was with child! Now there would never be a full sister—or brother—for Caesarion.
In about the time that it would have taken for news that Egypt had a new king to travel from Alexandria to Cilicia and back again, Cleopatra received a letter from her sister Arsinoë. Despite Caesar’s plans that she would spend the rest of her days in service to Artemis of Ephesus, Arsinoë had escaped as soon as she learned of Caesar’s assassination. She had gone to earth in the temple kingdom of Olba, where, it was said, the descendants of Ajax’s archer brother, Teucer, still ruled. It was described in some of the Alexandrian texts, which Cleopatra had consulted the moment she learned Arsinoë’s whereabouts, hoping to find a clue as to how she could eliminate her sister. Hauntingly beautiful, said the texts, with its gorges, white and racing rivers, jagged peaks of many colors; its people lived in roomy houses cut inside the cliffs, warm in winter, cool in summer, and made exquisite lace that procured an income for Olba. What she read discouraged Cleopatra. Arsinoë was safe enough there to think herself inviolate, untouchable.
Her letter asked that she be allowed to return to Egypt and take up her rightful place as a princess of the House of Ptolemy. Not, swore Arsinoë on the paper, to attempt to usurp the throne! There was no need for that. Let her come home, she begged, to marry her nephew, Caesarion. That would mean children of the true blood for Egypt’s throne within little more than a decade.
Cleopatra wrote one word back: NO!
She then issued an edict to all her subjects that forbade the Princess Arsinoë to enter Egypt. If she did, she was to be put to death at once and her head sent to the Pharaohs. This edict found favor with her subjects of Nilus, but not with her Macedonian and Greek subjects in Alexandria, whom Caesar had tamed beyond any thought of insurrection, but who still thought it a good idea for Caesarion to have a suitably Ptolemaic bride. After all, he couldn’t marry someone without a drop of the same blood in her veins!
On the Ides of Julius, the priests read the first Nilometer, at Elephantine on the Nubian border. The news was sent down the length of the mighty river to Memphis in a sealed packet that Cleopatra opened with a leaden heart. She knew what it would say: that Nilus was not going to inundate, that this year of Caesar’s death would see the river in the Cubits of Death. Her foreboding was confirmed. Nilus measured twelve feet, well and truly down in the Cubits of Death.
Caesar was dead, and Nilus had failed. Osiris was returned to the West and the Realm of the Dead, carved up in twenty-three chunks, and Isis searched for the pieces in vain. Though she saw the wonderful comet not long after on the far northern horizon, she did not know that it had coincided with Caesar’s funeral games in Rome, nor was she to learn that for two more months, by which time its spiritual significance had faded.
Well, business must go on, and a ruler’s business was to rule, but Cleopatra had no heart for it as the year wore down. Her sole joy was Caesarion, who shared her life more and more. She needed a new husband and more children desperately, but whom could she marry? Someone of either Ptolemaic or Julian blood. For a while she toyed with the idea of her cousin Asander in Cimmeria, but abandoned him with little regret; none of her people, Egyptian or Alexandrian, would take kindly to a grandson of Mithridates the Great as the husband of a granddaughter of Mithridates the Great. Too Pontic, too Aryan. The line of the Ptolemies was finished. Therefore her husband would have to be of Julian blood—quite impossible! They were Romans, laws unto themselves.
All she could do was send agents to winkle Arsinoë out of Olba, which finally happened after a gift of gold. Shipped first to Cyprus, she was then shipped back to the precinct of Artemis in Ephesus, where Cleopatra had her watched closely. Killing her was out of the question, but while ever Arsinoë lived, there were Alexandrians who saw her as preferable to Cleopatra. Arsinoë could marry the King, Cleopatra could not. Some might have asked why Cleopatra was so opposed to the idea of a marriage between Arsinoë and her son: the answer was simple. Once Arsinoë was the wife of Pharaoh, it would be so easy for her to eliminate her older sister. A potion, a knife in the dark, a royal cobra, even a coup. The moment that Caesarion had a wife acceptable to Alexandria and Egypt, his mother was expendable.
No one in the Royal Enclosure expected that the famine when it came would be so terrible, for the usual recourse was to buy in grain from elsewhere than Egypt. This year, however, every land around Our Sea had seen its crops fail, so there was no grain to buy in to feed that massive parasite, Alexandria. A desperate Cleopatra sent ships into the Euxine Sea and managed to buy some wheat from Asander of Cimmeria, but an unknown person—Arsinoë?—then whispered to him that his cousin Cleopatra didn’t think him good enough to share her throne. The Cimmerian supply dried up. Where else, where else? Ships sent to Cyrenaica, usually capable of producing grain when other places couldn’t, returned empty to say that Brutus had taken the Cyrenaican grain to feed his gigantic army, and that his partner in crime, Cassius, had afterward taken by force what the Cyrenaicans had kept to feed themselves.
In March, when the harvest ought to have been filling the granaries to overflowing, the field rats and field mice of the Nilus valley had no gleanings to pick through, no precious little hoards of wheat and barley and pulses to tide them over. So they quit the fields and moved into the villages of Upper Egypt between Nubia and the beginning of the anabranch that enclosed the land of Ta-she. Every dwelling was mud brick with an earthen floor, be it the meanest hovel or the mansion of the nomarch. Into all these premises came the field rodents and their cargo of fleas, which hopped off their bony, anemic hosts and hopped into bedding, mats, clothes, there to feast upon human blood.
The rural workers of Upper Egypt sickened first, came down with chills and high fevers, splitting headaches, aching bones, tenderly painful bellies. Some died within three days spitting copious, putrid phlegm. Others did not spit, but rather developed hard, fist-sized lumps in groins and armpits, hot and empurpled. Most who had this form of the disease died at the lump stage, but some survived long enough for the lumps to burst and produce cupfuls of foul pus. They were the lucky ones, who mostly got better. But no one, even the temple physician-priests of Sekhmet, had any idea how the frightful epidemic was transmitted.
The people of
The tiny harvest that had been gathered stayed inside piles of jars on the river’s wharves; the local people were too sick and too few to load it on to barges and send it to Alexandria and the Delta. When word of the plague reached Alexandria and the Delta, no one volunteered to venture down the river and do the loading either.
Cleopatra faced a hideous dilemma. There were three million people in and around Alexandria, and another million in the Delta. Disease had closed the river to both these hungry hordes, and all the gold in the treasure vaults could not buy grain from abroad. Word went to the Arabs of southern Syria that there would be huge rewards for those men willing to go down Nilus and load grain, but the rumors of a terrible plague kept the Arabs away too. The desert was their shield against whatever was going on in Egypt; travel between southern Syria and Egypt dwindled and then ceased, even by sea. Cleopatra could feed her urban millions for many months to come on what the granaries still contained from last year’s harvest, but if the next Nilus inundation were also in the Cubits of Death, Alexandria would starve, even if the more rural Delta people survived.
One of the few consolations was the appearance of Dolabella’s legate Aulus Allienus, to remove those four legions from garrison duty in Alexandria. Expecting to meet opposition, Allienus was baffled when he found the Queen eager to oblige him—yes, yes, take them! Take them tomorrow! Without them, there would be thirty thousand fewer mouths to feed.
She had to make some decisions. Caesar had nagged her to think ahead, but she wasn’t by nature that kind of person. Nor did anyone, least of all a cosseted monarch, know the mechanics of plague. Cha’em had told her that the priests would contain the disease, that it would not spread north of Ptolemais, where all river and road traffic had been stopped. Except of course that traffic among field rodents proceeded, albeit at a slower rate. Understandably, Cha’em was too busy marshaling his priest army to go to Alexandria and see Pharaoh, who didn’t travel south to see him either. She had no one to advise her, and absolutely no idea what she ought to do.
Plunged into gloom anyway by Caesar’s passing, Cleopatra couldn’t summon the necessary detachment for decision making. Assuming from the usual pattern that next year’s Inundation would also be in the Cubits of Death, she issued an edict that inside the city only those with the Alexandrian citizenship would be allowed to buy grain. The Delta people would be allowed to buy grain only if they were engaged in agricultural pursuits or the production of paper, a royal monopoly that had to be continued.
There were a million Jews and Metics in Alexandria. Caesar had gifted them with the Roman citizenship, and Cleopatra had matched his generosity by granting them the Alexandrian citizenship. But, after Caesar sailed away, the million Greeks of the city had insisted that if the Jews and Metics had the citizenship, they ought to have it too. In the end the only residents of the city who didn’t have the citizenship, once confined to just three hundred thousand Macedonians, were the hybrid Egyptians. If the citizenship were to exist as it did at the moment, then the granaries would have to provide something over two million medimni of wheat or barley every month. Could that be cut to something over one million medimni every month, the prospect was brighter.
So Cleopatra reneged on her promise and stripped the Jews and Metics of the Alexandrian citizenship while allowing the Greeks to keep it. Her wisdom as a ruler was running backward: she had never taken Caesar’s advice and issued free grain to the poor, and now she removed the franchise from a third of the city’s populace in order, as she saw it, to save the lives of those most entitled to dwell in Alexandria by right of bloodline. No one in the Royal Enclosure said a word against the edict; autocracy bred its own disadvantages, one of which was that autocrats preferred to associate with people who agreed with them, didn’t like people who disagreed with them unless they were on a level with Caesar—and who in Alexandria was, to Cleopatra?
The edict fell upon the Jews and Metics like a thunderbolt. Their sovereign, in whose service they had toiled, for whom they had given up much, including precious lives, was going to let them starve. Even if they sold everything they owned, they would still not be allowed to buy grain, the staple of existence. It was reserved for the Macedonian and Greek Alexandrians. And what else was there for an urban populace to eat in time of famine? Meat? There were no animals in drought. Fruit? Vegetables? The markets had none in drought, and despite the presence of Lake Mareotis, nothing grew in that sandy soil. Alexandria, the artificial graft on the Egyptian tree, just could not feed itself. Those in the Delta would eat something, those in Alexandria would not.
People began to leave, especially out of Delta and Epsilon Districts, but even that was not easy. The moment rumors of plague ran around the ports of Our Sea, Alexandria and Pelusium ceased to see foreign ships dock, and Alexandrian merchantmen voyaging abroad found that they were not allowed to dock in foreign ports. In its little corner of the world, Egypt was quarantined by no edict save the ages-old fear and horror of plague.
The riots began when the Alexandrians of Macedonian and Greek extraction barricaded the granaries and mounted huge numbers of guards wherever food was stockpiled. Delta and Epsilon Districts boiled, and the Royal Enclosure became a fortress.
To compound her woes, Cleopatra also had Syria to worry about. When Cassius sent asking for warships and transports, she had to decline because she still hoped to find a source of grain somewhere in the world, would need every ship to bring it back including war galleys—how else was she going to ensure that her transports would be allowed to dock and load?
As summer began, she learned that Cassius intended to invade. On the heels of that, word came from the first Nilometer that, as she had expected, the Inundation was down in the Cubits of Death again. There would be no harvest, even if sufficient people along Nilus were alive to plant the seed, which was debatable. Cha’em sent her figures that said sixty percent of the population of Upper Egypt was dead. He also told her that he thought the plague had crossed the frontier the priests had erected athwart the valley at Ptolemais, though now he hoped to arrest it below Memphis. What to do, what to do?
Around the end of September things suddenly improved a little. Limp with relief, Cleopatra learned that Cassius and his army had gone north to Anatolia; there would be no invasion. Unaware of Brutus’s letter, she assumed that Cassius had heard how bad the plague was, and had decided not to risk exposure to it. At almost the same moment, an envoy from the King of the Parthians arrived and offered to sell Egypt a large amount of barley.
So distraught was she that at first she could only babble to the envoys about the difficulties she would have importing it; with Syria, Pelusium and Alexandria closed, the barley would have to be barged down the Euphrates to the Persian Sea, brought around Arabia and into the Red Sea, then all the way up to the very top of the gulf that separated Sinai from Egypt. With plague all along Nilus, she babbled to the expressionless envoys, it could not be unloaded at Myos Hormos or the usual Red Sea ports because it couldn’t go overland to the river. Babble, babble, babble.
“Divine Pharaoh,” the leader of the Parthian delegation said when she let him get a word in, “that isn’t necessary. The acting governor of Syria is a man called Fabius, who can be bought. Buy him! Then we can send the barley overland to Nilus Delta.”
A large amount of gold changed hands, but gold Cleopatra had in enormous quantities; Fabius graciously accepted his share of it, and the barley came overland to the Delta.
Alexandria would eat a little longer.
News from Rome was scanty, thanks to the general ban on Pelusium and Alexandria, but not long after the Parthian envoys departed (to tell their royal master that the Queen of Egypt was an incompetent fool), Cleopatra received a letter from Ammonius, her agent in Rome.
Gasping, she discovered that Rome hovered on the brink of at least two separate civil wars: one between Octavianus and
Gaius Octavius! No, Caesar Octavianus. Atwenty-year-old? Senior consul of Rome? It beggared description! She remembered him well—a very pretty boy with a faint hint of Caesar about him. Grey eyed, very calm and quiet, yet she had sensed a latent power in him. Caesar’s great-nephew, and therefore a cousin of Caesarion’s.
A cousin of Caesarion’s!
Mind whirling, Cleopatra walked to her desk, sat down, drew paper forward and picked up a reed pen.
I congratulate you, Caesar, on your election as Rome’s senior consul. How wonderful to think that Caesar’s blood lives on in such a peerless individual as yourself. I remember you well, when you came with your parents to my receptions. Your mother and stepfather are well, I trust? How proud they must be!
What news can I give you that might assist you? We are in famine in Egypt, but so, it seems, is the whole world. However, I have just received the happy news that I can buy barley from the King of the Parthians. There is also a frightful plague in Upper Egypt, but Isis has spared Lower Egypt of the Delta and Alexandria, from which city I write this on a beautiful day of sun and balmy air. I pray that the autumnal air of Rome is equally salubrious.
You will, of course, have heard that Gaius Cassius has left Syria in the direction of Anatolia, probably, we think, to conjoin with his fellow criminal, Marcus Brutus. Whatever we can do to help you bring the assassins to justice, we will.