CHAPTER SEVEN

CLEOPATRA

"THE SERPENT OF OLD NILE"

Some thirty-five years ago, in the north Jersey village of Pompton, the township undertaker's barn burned down. It was a spectacular midnight fire. All the natives turned out to view it. Dominie Jansen even hinted, I remember, that it was a visitation on the community for some of his neighbors' sins. Whereat, Lem Saulsbury took the pledge--for the eighth time that year.

Well, the next week, when the Pompton ~Clarion~ appeared, no mention was made of the fire--the only event of intense human interest, by the way, since Joel Binswanger, the official local sot, six months earlier had, at the village tavern, swallowed a half-pint flask of carbolic acid--set aside for cleaning the brasses--under the conviction that it was applejack. Joel had complained of a rough throat and an unwonted taste in his mouth for days afterward. The Clarion editor, taken to task for printing nothing about the fire, excused the omission by saying;

"What'd 'a been the use of writing the story? Everybody knows about it."

That's all there is to the anecdote. Yes, I've heard better, myself. I've even heard the same one better told. It serves, though, as a fitting preamble to my story about Cleopatra.

"Everybody knows about it."

Who can say anything about her that you have not heard? Perhaps I can. Probably not. Will you be patient with me, and, even as tourists visit European shrines to verify their Baedekers, read this story to verify what you have always known? Cleopatra cannot be omitted from any super-woman series. And I will make her as interesting as I know how.

Personally, I believe the Pomptonians would far rather have read about that barn blaze, which they had seen, than about the conflagration of a whole foreign metropolis.

At sixteen--in 52 B.C.--Cleopatra's known career as a heartbreaker began; although there are rumors of more than one still earlier affair, with Egyptian nobles as their heroes.

She was the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes--Ptolemy the Piper--cordially hated ruler of Egypt. Cleopatra and her baby brother, young Ptolemy, nominally shared the throne for a time. They were both children. They ruled much as the baby "drives" when he holds the reins of the horse at whose head is the hostler's guiding hand. All manner of adventurers--both native and Greek--were the real rulers.

One of these factions drove Cleopatra from the throne and from her capital at Alexandria, leaving the "triple Uræus crown," with its mystic lotus adornments, on the head of baby Ptolemy alone.

The crown was the only fragment of actual kingship the child possessed. The power and the graft lay in the hands of a trio of industriously grasping Greek adventurers.

Cleopatra, meantime, out in the cold, schemed to regain her place on the double throne, and, even at that early age, amused herself in the interim by planning the tortures she would wreak on little Ptolemy when her turn should come.

While she was casting about for means to outwit the Greeks, and seeking means to buy up a mercenary army of invasion, she learned that Julius Cæsar, an elderly Roman of vast repute as a conqueror, had come to Alexandria at the head of a few legions, on a mission of diplomacy.

Cleopatra may have known little of men's strength, but already she was a profound student of their weaknesses.

She began to ask questions about Cæsar. Brushing away (as immaterial if true), her scared native attendants' statements that he had the body of an elephant, the head of a tiger, and the claws of a dragon, and that he fed on prisoners served raw, she pumped one or two exiled Romans and gleaned an inkling of the conqueror's history.

With the details of Cæsar's Gallic invasion, his crushing of Pompey, and his bullying of semihostile fellow Romans, she did not in the least concern herself. What most interested Cleopatra were the following domestic revelations:

He had been married at least four times, and three of his wives were still living. Cossutia, the wife of his youth, he had divorced by law because he had been captivated by the charms of one Cornelia, whom he had forthwith married, and who had died before he had had time to name her successor.

Next in order he had wed Pompeia; and, on the barest rumor of indiscretion on her part, had announced dramatically: "Cæsar's wife must be above suspicion!" and had divorced her to marry his present spouse, Calpurnia.

The interstices between these unions had been garnished with many a love episode. Adamant as he was toward men, Cæsar was far from being an anchorite where women were concerned; and he had the repute of being unswervingly loyal to the woman whom he, at the time, chanced to love.

This scurrilous information was quite enough for Cleopatra. She had her plans accordingly. She would see Cæsar. More to the point, she would be seen by Cæsar. But how? Cæsar was in Alexandria, the stronghold of her enemies. It would mean capture and subsequent death for Cleopatra to be found in the city. Yet she planned not only to enter Alexandria, but to make her first appearance before Cæsar in a way designed to catch his attention and more than friendly interest from the very start.

Julius Cæsar sat in the great audience hall of the Alexandria palace, whose use he had commandeered as his temporary headquarters. Behind him stood his guards; heavy armored, tanned of face; short, thick swords at hip. Before his dais trailed a procession of folk who hated him as starkly as they feared him.

They were Egyptians with favors to ask, and they bore gifts to indorse their pleas. They were Greeks who sought to outwit the barbarian victor, or to trick him into the granting of concessions. One by one the suppliants crawled past, each crying out an appeal or a grievance. Nearly every one made a peace offering, until the mass of gifts was stacked high on the stone floor of the audience hall.

Presently entered two black porters, (strapping Nubian giants), who bore lightly between them a roll of rare Persian carpet. They halted, laid down their burden on the floor at Cæsar's feet, fell on their knees in obeisance, and--waited. On the floor lay the roll of priceless weave, no one coming forward to make the rich gift an excuse for the urging of some boon.

Cæsar grew inquisitive. He leaned forward to examine the tight-folded, shimmering rug more carefully. As he did so, the folds were suddenly flung aside, and a girl leaped to her feet from among them. Thus had Cleopatra entered Alexandria. Thus had she penetrated to Cæsar's presence. Thus, too, by her craft and daring, had she won the attention of the man whose daring and craft had conquered the world.

Cæsar stared in delighted interest. He saw, standing gracefully--and wholly undraped--before him, a slender, red-haired girl, snub-nosed and of no special beauty. But, at a glance, this man who saw everything, saw, too, that she possessed an unnameable fascination--a magnetism--that was greater by far than that of any other woman he had known in all his fifty-eight years.

It was Julius Cæsar's first introduction to a super-woman; to the super-woman of super-women; to a woman beside whose snub-nosed, plain face, under its shock of red hair, the memory of the Roman beauties who had so often charmed his idle hours grew dim and confused.

Cleopatra, on her part, saw nothing so impressive as an elephant-tiger-dragon monster. She beheld a thin, undersized man, nearly sixty years old, hawk-nosed, inscrutable of eye, on whose thin gray locks, to mask his fast-growing baldness, rested a chaplet of laurel leaves.

This was the hero whose cunning and whose war genius had caused sceptered men to grovel at his feet, and had made stubborn republican Rome his cringing servant. But he was also the man whose weakness was an attractive woman. And on this weakness Cleopatra at once proceeded to play.

Yet she speedily found that Cæsar's was but a surface weakness, and that beneath it lay iron. Gladly he consented to save her from her foes, and even in a measure to let her punish such of those foes as were of no use to him. But as for making her the undisputed Queen of Egypt and setting her triumphantly and independently on the throne of her ancestors, at Rome's expense--he had not the remotest idea of doing that.

Nor could all her most bewildering blandishments wring such a foolish concession from him. He made love to her--ardent love; but he did not let love interfere in any way with politics.

Instead of carrying her to the throne, through seas of her enemies' blood, he carried Cleopatra back to Rome with him and, to the scandal of the whole city, installed her in a huge marble villa there.

And there, no secret being made of Cæsar's infatuation for her, Cleopatra remained for the next few years; indeed, until Cæsar's death. There, too, Cæsar's son, Cæsarion, was born; and with the boy's birth came to Cleopatra the hope that Cæsar would will to him all his vast estates and other wealth; which would have been some slight compensation for the nonrestoring of her throne.

While Cleopatra abode in Rome, more than one man of world-fame bowed in homage before her. For example, Lepidus--fat, stupid, inordinately rich, fit dupe for cleverer politicians. Marcus Antonius, too, --Cæsar's protege, and at this time a swaggering, lovable, dissolute soldier-demagogue, whose fortunes were so undissolubly fastened to Cæsar's that he, the winner of a horde of women, dared not lift his eyes to the woman Cæsar loved.

Among the rest--Marcus Brutus, snarling Casca, and the others--came one more guest to the villa--a hard-faced, cold-eyed youth whom Cleopatra hated. For he was Caius Octavius, Cæsar's nephew and presumptive heir; the man who was, years hence, to be the Emperor Augustus.

At length, one day, Rome's streets surged with hysterical mobs and factions. And news came to the villa that Cæsar had been assassinated at the Forum. Speedily an angry crowd besieged Cleopatra's house.

Now that the all-feared Cæsar no longer lived to protect her, the people were keen to wreak punishment on this foreign sorceress who had enmeshed the murdered man's brain, and had made him squander upon her so much of the public wealth that might better have gone into Roman pockets. Rome's new government, too, at once ordered her expulsion from the city.

Cleopatra, avoiding the mob and dodging arrest, fled from Rome with her son, her fortune, and her few faithful serfs. One more hope was gone. For, instead of leaving his money to Cæsarion, Cæsar, in his will, had made the cold-eyed youth, Caius Octavius, his heir.

Back to the East went Cleopatra, her sun of success temporarily in shadow. In semi-empty, if regal, state, she queened it for a time, her title barren, her real power in Egypt practically confined to her brain and to her charm. Nominal Queen of Egypt, she was still merely holding the reins, while iron-handed Rome strode at the horse's head.

From afar, she heard from time to time the tidings from Rome. The men who had slain Cæsar had themselves been overthrown. In their place Rome--and all the world--was ruled by a triumvirate made up of three men she well remembered--Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus.

The next news was that Antony and Octavius had painlessly extracted Lepidus from the combination, and were about to divide the government of the whole known world between themselves. Antony, to whom first choice was given, selected the eastern half for his share, leaving the west to Octavius.

Then came word that Antony was on his way toward Egypt; thither bound in order to investigate certain grave charges made by her subjects against Cleopatra herself.

Once more were the queen's throne and her life itself in peril. And once more she called upon her matchless power over men to meet and overcome the new menace. When Antony drew near to the capital, Cleopatra set forth to meet him; not with such an army as she might perchance have scraped together to oppose the invader, but relying solely on her own charms.

Antony by this time was well past his first youth. Here is Plutarch's word picture of him:

He was of a noble presence. He had a goodly, thick beard, a broad forehead, and a crooked nose. And there appeared such a manly look in his countenance as is seen in the statues of Hercules.... And it is incredible what marvelous love he won.

Yes, and it is incredible into what messes that same "marvelous love," first and last, dragged him. He had a wondrous genius for war and for statesmanship; but ever, just as those qualities lifted him to eminence, some woman would drag him down. For instance, as a young man, his budding political hopes were wrecked by Flavia, a charmer who enslaved him. Later, Rome turned a deaf ear to the tales of his military glory because he chose to escort openly along the Appian Way a frail beauty named Cytheria, in a chariot drawn by four lions. In rapid succession he--like his idol, Cæsar--married four wives.

Flavia was the first--she who blasted his early statesmanship ambitions; next Antonia, from whom he soon separated; third, Fulvia, a shrew who made his home life a burden, and whose temper drove him far from her--not that he really needed such incentive.

But Fulvia loved him, as did all women. For when Cicero lay dead, she went to the orator's bier and thrust a bodkin through the once magic tongue; thus punishing the tongue, she explained, for its calumnies against her beloved husband.

Fulvia was not exactly a cozy-corner wife, as you, perhaps, have observed; yet, when she died, Antony was heartily sorry. He said so. At the time, he was far away from Rome and home--he had not taken Fulvia to Egypt with him--and was basking in Cleopatra's wiles. On a visit to Rome he next married Octavia, sister of Octavius. It was a state match. He speedily deserted her and hurried back to Egypt.

Antony--true lover and false husband, hero and fool, rake and statesman--had fifty sides to his character--and a woman was on every side. In times of peace he wallowed in the wildest dissipation, and spent vast fortunes without a second thought. In war, he was the idol of his men, carousing with them, sharing their hard fare and harder life, never losing their adoring respect, always the hero for whom they would blithely die.

And so back to the story.

Up the River Cydnus sailed Antony, bent on restoring order to Egypt and punishing the cruel Cleopatra. And down the River Cydnus to meet him came Cleopatra.

The barge, wherein lay the queen, had sails of purple and gold. It was propelled by oars of pure silver. Around the recumbent Cleopatra were beautiful attendants, clad--or unclad--as Nymphs, Graces, Cupids. She herself wore, on her left ankle, a jeweled band in which was set a sacred scarab. That was the full extent of her costume.

At a single look, Antony forgot forever the punitive object of his journey to Egypt; forgot that he was ruler of half the world, and that he had the cleverness and power to oust Octavius from the other half, and to rule it all. He forgot everything, except that he loved her, and was content to be her helpless and happy slave; that she was the supreme love of his thousand loves; that the world was well lost for such love as hers.

From that moment the old-time magnetic statesman and general, Marcus Antonius--with his shrewd plans for world conquest--was dead. In his place lived Mark Antony, prince of lovers; a man whose sole thought and aim in life consisted in worshipping at the bare feet of a red-haired, snub-nosed Egyptian woman.

Cæsar had loved Cleopatra--and won. Mark Antony loved her--and lost; lost everything--except perfect happiness. But for her, Antony might have striven night and day, with brain, will, and body, using his friends as sacrifices, employing a statesmanship that was black treachery, drenching all Europe in blood. But for Cleopatra, he might have done all this. He might, as a result, have ousted Octavius and made himself, for the minute, master of all the world--as a price for his years of racking toil--before some patriotic assassin got a chance to kill him.

Thanks to Cleopatra's malign influence, the old warrior spent his last years, instead, in a golden Fool's Paradise, whose joys have become historic. Wherefore, the schoolbooks hold up Antony as a horrible example of what a man may throw away, through folly.

I have tried, in the preceding few paragraphs, to reenforce the school-books' teachings; to show that it is better to toil than to trifle, to sweat and suffer than to saunter through Arcady, to die dead-tired than to die divinely happy. I am sure I make the point clear. If I do not, the fault is not mine; and the sad, sad example of Antony has gone for naught.

They had a wonderful time there, in the Lotus Land, these two super-lovers. Each had had a host of earlier "affairs." But these now served merely as do the many rough "detail sketches" that work up at last into the perfected picture.

It was no heavy-tragedy romance. The two mature lovers had a saving sense of fun that sent them on larks worthy of high-school revelers. By night, they would go in disguise through the city, to revel unrecognized at some peasant wedding or orgy.

Once, the incognito Antony, on such an expedition, got a sound thrashing and a broken head from taking too prominent a part on a slum festivity. And Cleopatra never let him hear the last of it. That the all-conquering Marcus Antonius should have been beaten up by a crowd of Egyptian ~fellaheen~, who trembled at the very mention of his name, struck her as the joke of the century.

She had a right lively sense of humor, had this "Serpent of Old Nile," as Antony playfully nicknamed her. And probably this sense of humor was one of the strongest fetters that bound to her the love veteran, who was sick of a succession of statelily humorless Roman beauties.

Cleopatra was forever playing practical jokes on her lover. Once, for example, as she and Antony sat fishing off their anchored barge in the Alexandria harbor, Antony wagered that he would make the first catch. Cleopatra took the bet. A moment afterward Antony felt a mighty tug at his line. With the zest of a born fisherman, he "drew in."

He brought to the surface, suspended from his hook, an enormous fish--dried, boned, and salted! Cleopatra had privily sent one of her divers over the far side of the barge to swim down and fasten the salted fish to her sweetheart's line.

Again, the talk ran to the unbelievable cost of some of the feasts the ancient Persian monarchs had been wont to give, and the wholesale quantity of priceless wines drunk at those banquets. Whereat, Cleopatra offered to wager that she could drink ten million sesterces ($450,000) worth of wine at a single sitting.

Antony loudly assured her that the thing was impossible. Even so redoubtable a tankard man as himself could not hope to drink one-hundredth that value of wine in the most protracted debauch. She insisted. The wager was made.

Calling for a goblet of "slaves' wine"--a species of vinegar--the queen dropped into it the largest pearl of Egypt's royal treasury, a gem appraised at four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The treasure dissolved under the vinegar's sharp acid; and Cleopatra--to a gasp of horror from the more frugal onlookers--drained the goblet.

Such banquets staggered Egypt's resources. So did other jolly extravagances. Rumors of Antony's strange infatuation reached Rome. Rome was used to Antony's love affairs, and Rome knew Cleopatra of old.

So Rome merely grinned and shrugged its shoulders. But when the big revenues that Antony had promised to wring from the conquered country failed to arrive, Rome--sorely wounded in the pocketbook--began to protest.

Antony's friends at home pointed out to him what capital the crafty Octavius would try to make of this new-born dissatisfaction against his colleague. In a momentary gleam of sanity, Antony left the weeping Cleopatra and hastened back to Rome to face his enemies.

There, all too briefly, the man's old genius flamed up. He appeased the populace, won his former ascendency over the disapproving Senate, blocked Octavius' plot to hurl him from power, and sealed his campaign of inspired diplomacy by marrying his rival's sister, Octavia.

At a stroke, Antony had won back all he had lost Octavius was checkmated, the people were enthusiastic, and once more Antony had world rulership within his easy reach.

But in busy, iron-hard Rome, he fell to remembering the lazy sunshine of Egypt. The primly gentle Octavia was hopelessly insipid by contrast with the glowing super-woman. Memory tugged, ever harder and harder.

Even if this story were fiction, instead of prosy fact, you would foresee just what was bound to happen. Back to Egypt, on some flimsy pretext, fled Antony. He turned his back on Rome, on his wife, on Octavius, on friend, on foe, on future. He was to see none of them again. Nor was there to be a second outflash of his old genius. The rest was--Cleopatra.

The reunited lovers flew from bliss to bliss, from one mad extravagance to another. Statecraft, regal dignity--common sense--all went by the board.

At Rome, the effect of Antony's whirlwind reinstatement campaign gradually wore off. Revenues did not flow in from Egypt. But all sorts of wild stories did. And the wilder they were, the truer they were. Rome at large did not bother its brutal head over Antony's morals. But all Rome stormed and howled over the fact that the boundlessly rich kingdom of Egypt was bringing in practically no more money to the coffers of Rome. It was as if men who had invested a fortune in a thirty-story office building should find that the superintendent was holding back all the rents and losing tenants every day.

Octavius was quick to take advantage of all this. Personally, he hated Antony, and he was bitterly resentful of his sister's desertion. Politically, he wanted to be lord of the world--as later he was--under the title of "Emperor Augustus;" and poor, enfeebled Antony alone stood in his way.

On the plea that a new money-getter was needed for Rome in Antony's place, Octavius easily roused public feeling into a clamor that Egypt be invaded, Antony overthrown, and Cleopatra put to death. Octavius, as master of Rome, headed the punitive army of invasion.

Again, on news of his foes' approach, Antony's spirit--but this time not his genius--flickered back to a ghost of its old flame. By messenger, he sent Octavius a very sporting offer: namely, that waste of lives be avoided by Octavius and Antony meeting in single combat, to the death; "winner take all."

But Octavius was a politician, not a d'Artagnan; which is why he at last became Emperor of Rome and ruler of the known earth. He had not those cold, light eyes and thin lips for nothing. He was a strategist rather than a gladiator. Back to the challenger came this terse reply:

"Can Antony find no readier mode of death than at the sword of Octavius?"

On moved the invaders. And Antony took enough time from Cleopatra's side to make halfhearted preparations to resist. The first clash of any importance was the sea fight off Actium. There Fortune was inclined for the time to smile once again on her old prime favorite. All along the line, Antony's warships were driving back and breaking the formation of Octavius'. Then, at the crucial moment of the fight, Cleopatra, who, in a royal galley, was watching the conflict, ordered her galley put about and headed for the distant shore. To this day no one knows whether her fatal order was the result of a whim or of sudden cowardice or of both.

Her galley swept away from the battle. Antony, seeing it depart, feared Cleopatra might have been wounded by a stray arrow. At once he forgot that the issue of the day depended solely on him. He realized only that the woman he worshipped might be injured. And he ordered his own galley to put off in pursuit of Cleopatra's.

The captains of Antony's other ships, seeing their leader apparently running away, were seized with panic terror, and followed. The fight became a rout. Antony's fleet was annihilated.

With that strangely won battle, the last real obstacle between Octavius and complete victory was down. Steadily the conqueror advanced on Alexandria. Cleopatra saw how things were going. She knew that Antony was forever broken, and that, as a protector against the oncoming Romans, he was helpless. So she thriftily shifted her allegiance to Octavius; sending him word that she was his admiring slave, and that she craved a personal interview.

It was the same old siren trick. At sight, when she was sixteen, she had won Cæsar's heart; at sight, when she was twenty-eight, she had won Antony's heart and soul. On sight, now, at thirty-eight, she hoped to make of Octavius a second Antony. But Cæsar had had black eyes, and Antony's eyes were a soft brown; whereas the eyes of Octavius were pale gray and fire-less. Had Cleopatra bothered to study physiognomy, she might have sought some more hopeful plan than to enslave such a man as this new invader.

Octavius, cold and heartless as he was, would not trust himself to meet the super-woman; which was, perhaps, the highest of the billion tributes that were, soon or late, paid to Cleopatra's charms.

Instead, Octavius sent her a courteous message, assuring her of his respect and infinite admiration, and saying that he would see that she was treated with every consideration due her rank. To his friends, however, he loudly boasted that she should walk barefoot through Rome, bound by gold chains to his chariot axle. And word of this boast came to Cleopatra. The game was up.

She walled herself into the huge Royal Mausoleum and had word sent forth that she was dead. Antony, himself in hiding from the advancing Romans, heard and believed. Nothing was left. He had blithely thrown away the world for love. And now, after ten years of glorious happiness, the woman for whom he had been so glad to sacrifice everything, was dead.

His foes were hastening to seize him. There was but one course for a true Roman in such a plight to follow. The example of Brutus, of Cato, of a hundred other iron patriots, rose before him. And their example Antony followed.

He drove his sword through his body and fell dying, just as news came to him that Cleopatra lived. With almost his last breath, Antony ordered his slaves to carry him to the queen. The doors and lower windows of the mausoleum were bricked up. There was no time to send for masons to break an opening in them, if the dying man would reach Cleopatra alive. So he was lifted by ropes to an upper window of the tomb, and was then swung into the room where Cleopatra awaited him.

And in the arms of the woman who had wrecked him, and who at the last--though, mercifully, he never knew it--had sought to betray him, Mark Antony died. Perhaps it was an ignoble death, and an anticlimax. Perhaps it was a fit end for the life of this man, who had ever been the adored of women; and the death he himself would have chosen. Fate seldom makes a blunder in setting her scenes.

So perished Mark Antony; to whose life and death, before you judge him, I beg you to apply the words of a country preacher I once heard. The preacher was discanting on the Biblical personage "out of whom were cast seven devils."

"Brethren," said the exhorter, "a man must be far above the ordinary, to contain seven devils. In the average man's petty nature there isn't room even for a single half-size devil, to say nothing of seven full-grown ones."

Cleopatra had long since made up her mind to die sooner than walk in chains through the streets where once she had swept as Cæsar's peerless sweetheart. But she was part Greek and part Egyptian--both soft nations, lacking in the stern qualities of Rome. She had no taste for naked steel. She was content to die, but she wanted to die without pain.

On certain of her slaves she practiced the effects of various Oriental poisons. Some of these slaves died in agony, some in mere discomfort. One of them died with a smile on his lips--a slave on whom had been inflicted the bite of the tiny gray Nile-mud asp.

Cleopatra's question was answered. She put an asp to her breast. The serpent fixed its fangs in her white flesh.

And Cleopatra--model and synonym for a worldful of super-women--was very comfortably spared the shame of walking chained and barefoot in a Roman Triumph.