CLEOPATRA

by GARDNER F FOX

Illustrated by Kurt Brugel in scratchboard after a photo of Elizabeth Taylor.

Originally printed in Man's Magazine, July 1962

“MY BODY is my sword!” Cleopatra stood with up-raised chin, anger darkening her hazel eyes. The breezes off the Red Sea desert, where she was camped with her tiny army, molded a thin linen tunic to her full young breasts and slender legs as she stood looking north toward Alexandria-the capital city of all Egypt-and toward Rome and its mighty empire. To the west lay Egypt, land of lotus and papyrus, for which she was engaged in a bitter life-and-death struggle.

Against her was arrayed not only her brother Ptolemy and his army but the legions of Rome as well, mightiest war machine in history, commanded by the most powerful man in the world, Julius Caesar. She had no allies, for no one else dared stand against the Roman eagles. She had only herself-and her lush body..

Cleopatra, just 20 years old that summer of the year 48 B.C., had at her disposal only a small force of Egyptian mercenaries, a few thousand men lured by the gold and jewels she promised in the event of victory. Hers had been an idle promise, actually. In her heart she knew her soldiers would never stand against the disciplined might of the Roman legions. Yet she was determined to keep the Atef crown of Egypt on her shapely head.

If she could not do it as a woman, she would do it as a goddess. A goddess of love such as Ishtar of Babylon had been, carnal and voluptuous. Or Iris of Egypt, Aphrodite of Greece, Venus of Rome. She would be all of them if it would save her throne. If her body was her only weapon, she would use it as such. It would be sword and shield at the same time, before which even Caesar himself would fall a victim.

The blood felt molten in her veins. She was a young girl, but boasted the body of a mature woman. Her breasts were firm and full, her thighs soft yet strong. Nor was she any stranger to the love rites. In the Nympheae-a pleasure house filled with the most erotic women of Alexandria-she had been an apt pupil of the courtesans of her day. From illumined scrolls in the Museion, the vast library where records of all human knowledge were stored, she had learned the amorous secrets of the lands of Ind, of far Cathay, of Persia and Lydia.

She had taken her first lover at 12, a handsome young slave from Illyria whom she kept in a locked room, away from palace gossip. From him she learned the mysteries of a male body and the raptures with which it could delight her own. Under her palla she smuggled out choice erotic manuscripts from the Museion, and with her captive slave brought the illumined pages to vivid life.

When she tired of him, she sent a strangler into the room, then had the slave's body buried in the Necropolis. She was older now, more sophisticated. As a royal princess, she was free to pick and choose her lovers. Mostly she chose young slaves, for they were vigorous of body and could be disposed of easily without embarrassing questions.

From time to time she dabbled in the more exotic love arts, discovering that cruelty had its own special flavor as did masochism; but what she did with these youths, the words she said and made them say, the manner in which she made them perform, and what she herself did to them, she wanted kept secret.

Above all else, she was a queen. The less the common people knew of her peccadillos, the more in awe they would regard her. The people of ancient Egypt had looked upon their Pharaohs as gods. This was how they must regard Cleopatra, despite the fact that she was of Grecian blood.

Her ancestor, Ptolemy, had been a general of Alexander the Great. It had been Ptolemy who had built Alexandria, where Alexander himself lay buried in an alabaster sarcophagus in the Sema. Cleopatra was descended from that first Ptolemy, a Macedonian Greek. Her skin was white, not the dusky red of the true Egyptian. A large number of her female ancestors had been named Cleopatra (Greek for "glory of the gods"). She herself, when and if she became undisputed queen of Egypt, would be Cleopatra VII.

When and if...

It had not been so very long ago that she had been a terrified child watching her father flee for his life during the palace revolution which dethroned him and put her older sister Berenice on the throne. Ptolemy XII had had five children, including Berenice, the oldest, and a brother, Ptolemy XIII.

Both Berenice and Ptolemy XIII had ruled Egypt until Cleopatra's father bought his way back to power in Rome and, with the help of the legions, established himself once again as king.

Cleopatra had sat in the great Stadium on the day her sister Berenice had been stripped naked and dragged across the arena sands to lose her head beneath the ax of the executioner. Ptolemy XIII had died that day, also. There was another brother, Ptolemy XIV, eight years younger than Cleopatra, and a baby sister, Arsinoe. They, too, like Cleopatra, were not harmed by the victorious Ptolemy XII, who now held supreme power once again.

CLEOPATRA had learned a lesson in world politics that day. In the years of her girlhood, before her father died and left her the throne, she had come to realize that only Rome could guarantee the safety of any ruler. It was a lesson she was always to remember.

When her father died, Cleopatra married her brother Ptolemy XIV, as was the custom. She looked on him with contempt, however, and would not abandon to his arms the body that had known so many lovers. Not for him the frenzied convulsions of her passion; it is recorded that she never consummated their marriage. It was not morality that restrained her, but her undying need for power-sole power, not a throne shared with a boy eight years her junior.

Ptolemy resented her arrogance and became arrogant in turn. With the general of his armies, Achillas, he drove Cleopatra from Alexandria, caused her to flee to the Red Sea deserts with the few thousand mercenaries in her pay. She was here now, a love goddess in exile, hungry for the luxuries of the Lochias Palace and the weight of the golden uraeus on her thick black hair.

Rome alone could place her back in the Alexandrine palace, and Rome did as Julius Caesar ordered. Her first task-then was to win over this aging, balding man whose body was addicted to cataleptic fits and who had made himself master of the world.

Caesar was no frightened schoolboy where it came to women. He had been married to Cornelia, daughter of Cinna, whom he later divorced and married off to Pompey the Great. His second wife was Pompeia, his third Calpurnia. Between wives he had many mistresses, and even, some said, pretty Greek boys. The Alexandrine taverns rang with the laughter of those who made jokes about his lechery. Such a man should be a formidable victim for this young Egyptian queen who had made herself as expert in venery as any dockside trollop.

Caesar was in Alexandria now. He had come with his legions to battle fellow Roman Pompey in the struggle for mastery of their world. Now Pompey lay dead, his headless corpse awash in the shoals before the Pharaohs lighthouse, his head having been cut off and brought to Caesar in his tent by Pothinus, a eunuch, and Theodotus of Chois.

Caesar had thus won Rome, By doing so, he would also win Royal Egypt, as Cleopatra liked to call herself.

AH, but how would she go to him? In a golden chariot drawn by the great white horses sacred to Isis? In a sedan chair of solid silver, so heavy that 20 Nubians were needed to lift and walk with it? In a pleasure barge on the Nile river waters? ... No, it should be none of these.

She would travel to Caesar' wrapped in a rug.

Apollodorus, her chamberlain, went with her, carrying the rug upon his shoulder. Admitted into the room where Caesar was writing his memoirs, Apollodorus knelt and unrolled the rug. From its folds sprang the naked Cleopatra, flushed, lovely, triumphant. She stood before him proudly, shoulders drawn back and pale breasts jutting firmly, her ivory skin smooth and flawless as Pentelician marble. Venus, indeed! She was a living statue, a goddess come to mingle with her worshipers.

Caesar was enthralled. He kissed the hands she held out to him. She laughed happily, like a schoolgirl in delight at seeing the balding head of this mightiest of men bow low before her beauty. What need had she of an army when she had her body? Hers was the wisdom of eternal womankind, of the Magna Mater.

"I came to invite you to a feast, noble Caesar," she whispered.

It was a banquet at which she was to be the dessert, she told herself as he nodded assent. Perfumed with the essences of Punt, with the aromatic oils of Sheba, her nudity revealed by a few blazing torches, she would become Isis offering herself to the love of a mortal man.

Caesar had never met a woman like her. History has drawn a veil over their first night together in the Lochias Palace, but the mere fact that this young Grecian girl, who was Egyptian by assimilation, could cast such a spell on aging roué Julius Caesar is proof enough that she was an enchantress of the flesh. No mere woman could have so seduced the senses of a man who could boast three enviable wives and the love of any matron in Rome to whom he stretched his hand.

In his travels, Caesar had bedded the blonde women of Germania, the darker girls of Gaul and Britain. The Roman matron Servilia, old enough to be his mother, had borne him a child. The plump women of Thessaly, the thin and wanton priestesses of Cybele, all had yielded him their bodies. To none of them had he surrendered himself, however.

Cleopatra alone was to make him lose his heart.

No pen has written down the words she whispered in his ear even as he lay shuddering with pleasure in her arms. All the world knows, however, that in the days that followed, Caesar waged war against young Ptolemy, the brother of Cleopatra, and his Egyptian general, Achillas.

Rome's legions smashed the Egyptian soldiery. Young Ptolemy fled from the battlefield on the banks of the Nile into utter oblivion. Achillas was beheaded. There was no one left to stand beside Cleopatra on the throne. The Atef crown was set securely on the glossy black hair of her pretty head; at last, she and she alone was queen in Egypt.

Much as he would have liked to, Julius Caesar could not linger in Cleopatra's arms. However, he did leave something of himself with her: for she was swollen with his child, the future Caesarion, when she waved a scarf to the big trireme moving slowly past the Pharaohs lighthouse, carrying her lover toward Zela where he was to meet and defeat Pharnaces, son of Mithridates.

Alone in her city, Cleopatra proved herself a wise ruler. Her throne had been made secure. The contracts with Rome for corn and grain were renewed at a sizable profit. The linens of Egypt were world famous, as were its fine papyrus scrolls; for these also, she bargained with the wealthy Roman merchants who, possibly because they were not fools and knew that this woman was a favorite of their leader, dealt lavishly and generously with her in the matter of payment.

A little news seeped through to Cleopatra occasionally. Caesar had annihilated the army of Pharnaces at Zela. He had sent back to Rome a masterpiece of understatement in his report, saying simply: Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered. How this delighted Cleopatra. Then, from Zela, Caesar went back to Rome where he was again elected Consul and Dictator.

He was in Africa when Cleopatra gave birth to his only son, Caesarion. She sent a swift galley to bring him the news where he lay camped at Thapsus. Nothing would do but that Cleopatra and his son travel at once to Rome, to be on hand for the victory feast which would follow his African campaign against Scipio and Juba,

Cleopatra welcomed this news with joyful laughter. She had been a lonely girl during her pregnancy; sometimes too, she had been afraid; for men die in battle and Caesar, despite the fact that men called him a god, was merely mortal flesh. Should Julius Caesar die, what would be. come of his queen-mistress? This was an eventuality on which Cleopatra did not like to think. She must dissuade him from the battlefield, at all costs.

And so she would go to him, let Rome and its greatest man see her, not only as Queen Cleopatra, but as the living incarnation of their own love goddess, Venus.

On the stern-castle of the great trireme which carried her to Rome she set up images of the gods. When she rose in the morning, she dropped a glowing coal into a bowl of incense before the bronze figure of Isis and before the marble likeness of Aphrodite. Every evening as the sun set, she did the same to the solid gold statue of Ishtar that had been a gift from the king of Lycaeonia, and to the silver Venus which Caesar had shipped to her from Puteoli. In this manner and by praying to these goddesses, she hoped to share in their wisdom and in their power over men.

All Rome gathered to watch her retinue march from the river-mouth port of Ostia along the Ostian Way into Rome. She herself was borne aloft on a silver throne by 50 Nubians in leopard loincloths, wearing the Atef crown and a thin tunic of Egyptian linen girdled with emeralds, A jeweled pectoral covering her bared shoulders rose and fell to the lift of her breasts. Behind her came the images of the four goddesses. It was as if she brought love itself in her train.

Her lover landed some days later and entered Rome in the triumphal procession due a conqueror. He rode in a golden chariot that had belonged to Juba. Captives in chains walked for miles in his wake. Great wagons trundled over the cobbles with the treasures of a continent strapped to their floorboards. His cheeks were flushed, not only from pleasure of this triumph, but with the knowledge that he was to see the woman he loved.

Publicly, Julius Caesar gave a feast which was attended by more than 20,000 persons. Privately, he dined with Cleopatra in the magnificent mansion which was her palace away from home. He had been separated from his queen for two long years. He was older, a little balder, and his flesh had known the softness of her own; yet he came like a schoolboy eager for her embrace.

She met him in a garment created for her in Alexandria by its finest craftsmen, modeled after the solid gold statue of Ishtar of Babylon. A gold diadem rested on her thick black hair, jeweled pendants dangling from it. Her earrings were fashioned in the shape of golden urns, each one set with a titanic ruby. A gauze skirt hid and yet revealed her soft hips and shapely legs. Her heavy breasts were bared in the manner of the goddess, and her upper arms were clasped by golden bracelets.

No mere woman this, but a live goddess. Caesar was in raptures as they sipped Falernian wine chilled by Alpine snows and watched Gadean dancing girls perform the forbidden fescinne dances. Slave-women dressed as Amazon gladiators did battle with whips and slender sticks, clad only in helmets to protect their faces from the marks of battle, Mimes acted out the more indecent of the stage performances that had taken the citizens of Alexandria by storm in the months Caesar had been in Asia Minor and in Africa. It was as if the great Roman were attending a banquet tendered him by Ishtar herself.

As she had in Alexandria, so Cleopatra did in Rome. She came, saw and conquered Caesar. He was her slave. In the weeks which followed, she kept him in this fleshly thralldom with her love arts, with the erotic displays her slaves put on for his enjoyment, with her soft body. And the kingdom of Egypt prospered across the Mediterranean.

One thing, however, Caesar would not do for Cleopatra. He would not give up his seemingly endless wars. Just one more campaign, he promised, then he would be done with fighting.

He must go into Spain to meet the sons of Pompey. They were a threat to the Roman peace, for the remnants of Pompey's legions were gathered under their banners. Any day now they might march on Rome to kill Caesar and take the empire for their own.

"It isn't that I am afraid,” he murmured as he lay one night in her soft white arms as a slave girl poured wine into the blue faience goblets Cleopatra had brought from Alexandria. “For myself, I don't care. It's for our son, for Caesarion. The people of Rome press the laurel wreath of empire on me. They crown my statues. I've put them off, so far. When the Pompeys are no more, when Rome is one in spirit-I can ascend a throne. Then I can bequeath that throne to our son."

Cleopatra thrilled. To do that, Caesar would first have to legalize their union. To be mistress no longer, but empress of the Roman Empire! Ah, this would be to - know a destiny which would live through the ages. Calpurnia he would put aside as he had Pompeia and Cornelia. Octavian—his adopted son -- would rank below his natural child, Caesarion, Caesar and she would found a dynasty which would endure forever.

Bemused by her vision, Cleopatra donned the armor and weapons of Artemis and spent a last night with her lover in the mansion just off the Forum. She made him fight a mock duel with her, defeat her with sword and shield, then take her as he might a conquered Amazon general.

With her kisses 'on his mouth, Caesar went to Spain. While Cleopatra planned festivities to rival the Saturnalia and the Bacchanalia to celebrate his victory, he caught up with the Pompeys at Munda and utterly crushed them. The sons of Pompey surrendered. Rome was now secure. It belonged to Julius Caesar.

There was still a faction in the Senate which looked with repugnance on the idea of Julius Caesar as an emperor, however. When he returned from Spain to the tumult of still another triumph, the conspirators gathered against him. Led by Brutus and Cassius, on the Ides of March -March 15-in the year 44 B.C., their daggers took the life of the greatest man of their time.

Cleopatra was forced to flee for her life from Rome. Everything she had fought for so valiantly had been stripped from her fingers by a dozen bloody daggers. No longer would there be a world throne from which she would rule and which would be handed down in turn to Caesarion.

She had lost her godhood. While Julius Caesar had lived, Cleopatra remained faithful to him. Now that he lay dead, she indulged herself in those excesses of the flesh which she had formerly held in check. Clad as Isis, she permitted herself to be worshiped by handsome young men in a small temple she had erected for this purpose. She ordered them fed rare drugs which increased not only their lust but also the amorous power of their bodies.

She took them to her as 'she might a narcotic. They helped her forget those dreams of becoming ruler of the world. In their frenzies, they brought appeasement not only of the senses but of the mind. To them she was Aphrodite, Isis, Venus. Her smooth flesh was an altar upon which they lavished kisses and caresses.

“Worship me," she commanded. “Cover me with love, wrap me in ecstasy. Let me know I am not merely a woman but a goddess."

And gradually over the next two years, these lovers made Cleopatra understand that she was desirable, that she was still young and filled with energy, vitality. The love goddess had not died when the daggers plunged into Caesar; she only slept.

Cleopatra took a renewed interest in the world around her...

Two years after the death of Julius Caesar, his murderers died on the battlefield of Philippi before the legions of Octavius Caesar and Mark Antony. As Julius Caesar had done before them, these two most powerful men in the Roman world now began a struggle for sole dominion over the lands which stretched from the verdant islands of Britain to the desert lands of Parthia. Octavian was the adopted son of the murdered man; Mark Antony was his general, beloved of the common people. Octavian was cold, reserved, haughty; Antony was a bull who fought with laughter on his lips and bedded any woman who came within hand's grasp of him.

Cleopatra ruled Egypt with her eyes directed across the Mare Internum toward Philippi, and these two men who were to mold her world. Octavian? Or Antony? Which would she back? One of them alone must triumph in this coming struggle for power. If she were wise, she would pick the right man and perhaps, with him, win the empire that Caesar had been unable to give her.

She chose Mark Antony. He was a famous general, used to battles and the strategies of military campaigns. He was beloved of the Roman people who were suspicious of the thin, studious Octavian, Antony frequented the wine-ships where men of every sort could rub elbows with him, even vie with him for the favors of a Suburra streetwalker. Octavian spent his days with his illumined scrolls.

When they divided the empire which Julius Caesar had won, Antony chose the East, Octavian the West.

“Antony knows the West belongs to him as well," Cleopatra told her prime minister, Amenabarbus. "Rome loves him. It would never side with Octavian against him. All he need do is cement the East to his eagles, reinforce his legions with armies from Lydia and Thrace, Syria and Egypt, then turn on Octavian. It would be a slaughter."

Amenabarbus counseled caution but he had never been a goddess at whose hennaed feet mighty Caesar had groveled in passion. Pride held Cleopatra-the pride of her beauty, of her erotic wisdom, of her royalty. She would go to Antony as the love goddess she was, and employ the same fleshly chains that had bound Caesar.

For Antony, she chose a pleasure barge instead of a rug, a great gilded vessel fitted with a hundred silver oars and shaped like a seashell at high prow and curving stern. Decked with golden chains, silken ropes, flowers--and with the fairest women in her kingdom--the barge went by way of the River Cydnus to Antony at Tarsus in Cilicia.

The sails of Cleopatra's barge were stained deep purple, the color of royalty. Naked cupids disported themselves all around Cleopatra, who lay stretched on a golden dais clad as Venus. Her women were gowned as the Graces or in transparent scales that they might pass for sea nymphs. She sent word ahead of her that Venus had come to meet with Bacchus for the greater glory of the world.

Antony had seen Cleopatra in Rome and was familiar with her as a woman. He was perhaps all the more unprepared when he found himself saluted as a fellow god, as Bacchus and as Mars. When night threatened to overtake them before they were done with the spiced wines that naked nymphets served, a thousand candles in square or round circlets were lowered from overhanging tree branches. They turned night into day again. Antony took it, as Cleopatra intended he should, as an omen that their meeting was destined to set the world ablaze.

Royal Egypt soon discovered that Antony was no Julius Caesar. He was brutal and gross, where Caesar had been suave and sophisticated. What had appealed to the one man would only bore the other, and so in her wisdom she became that which would most please Mark Antony. Foregoing Venus, she became a bacchante.

She drank with him, measure for measure, and only the slave who was her wine-maiden knew that the golden goblet she held in her ringed hand contained a false bottom. The wine she appeared to drink went into that receptacle. After every cup she insisted on a new one so as to maintain her deception. In such manner only could she retain a clear head.

Deliberately she let herself descend to his level. True, she was still Ishtar, but she was a drunken Ishtar who gloried in the human couplings which were a form of her worship. She was Isis with her hair down, with the lees of wine staining the ivory fullnesses of her heavy breasts. Her laughter grew coarse, her mood abandoned. She yielded her body to his caresses even while they watched slaves chosen for their beauty make love before them.

Antony had no taste for the sophisticated comedies the Alexandrines enjoyed; instead, she gave him lascivious entertainments, geared to please only the baser appetites of man. Her slave-women ignored the more stately steps in favor of the Gadean and Syrian dances where the belly rotates, the hips quiver, the dancers sink to the ground in frank sensuality.

He forgot everything for Cleopatra. In Rome his wife, Fulvia, carried on his struggle against Octavian without him, as did his legions in the war with Parthia. Antony gave them both carte blanche to handle his affairs while he went off with Cleopatra to Alexandria.

The love goddess came home with her new worshiper.

In Alexandria, many noblemen and noblewomen of the city were banded together in a hedonistic group pledged to spend their every waking hour in the pursuit of pleasure. They called themselves the Inimitables. They saw in Mark Antony a kindred spirit and welcomed him with open arms.

Orgy followed orgy. Nothing was left unsaid, nothing left undone, which might entrap the Roman general in sensual chains. They resurrected the Aphrodisia, those ancient festivals in honor of the goddess Aphrodite, where Cleopatra played the part of the beautiful Phryne and disported herself naked before every eye, that all should marvel at her beauty. The Aphrodisia of Corinth and its particular ceremony, known as the pannychis, was most popular of all, probably because it was the most drunken, the most lecherous.

During this winter of 41 B.C., Antony sealed his fate.

Cleopatra opened his eyes to the decadence and vices of the East, and tapped the broad vein of sensuality that ran so deep in the great Roman general. Rome itself was only 500 years old, and had not yet the time nor the inclination to decay as Egypt had; that was to come in later years when Rome, like Antony, would absorb the evils of the world they conquered.

She taught him the arts of the hetairae of the temples of Byblos and Ephesus.

She built a replica of the temple of Aphrodite Porne at Corinth and herself posed as the goddess in her role of harlot. She celebrated the Lenea, the feast of the wine-pressers, attended as it was by public parades in the indecent costumes of nymphs, satyrs, nereids and bacchantes. At the Lenea, it was a good thing to stagger about in a drunken frenzy as this was sacred to Dionysus

Antony was never happier. Forgotten was the role he had set out to play in world politics, and that he was engaged in a power struggle with Octavius Caesar. Forgotten, too, was his wife, Fulvia, and his war with Parthia. The only things that mattered now were the gratification of his senses and his love for the goddess Cleopatra, whose beauty was a net of flesh wrapping tighter and tighter about him.

Only when spring was at its full flower did he tear himself away from Alexandria and set sail for Syria to gather his legions against Labienus who, in command of the troops of Parthia, was overrunning Asia and posing a threat to the Roman frontier. When word came that his wife and his brother Lucius had met defeat at the hands of Octavian and had fled Rome, Antony turned his armada of over 200 triremes to the west.

The fumes of Alexandrine incense were still muddling his head. All he could think about was Cleopatra. Fulvia took sick and died on her way to meet him; so Antony, forgetting that Octavian was his enemy, consented to marry his sister, Octavia. He allowed the clever Octavian to gain the time needed in which to destroy the image of Mark Antony as a hero in the minds of the Roman people. He thought only of Royal Egypt; she was invariably on his tongue; thus Antony himself gave his enemy the sword he needed. Later, Octavian was to tell the Roman people that Antony had abandoned them for Egypt, that he had become a foreigner.

For a little while, Mark Antony-perhaps the air of Rome, which he returned to reluctantly, cleared his mind of Alexandrine perfume-attended to his affairs. He sent his finest general, Ventidius, against Parthia, where he won such great success that the fame of Antony mushroomed throughout the East. He lived for a while with Octavia but his heart was with Cleopatra; even from a distance she kept a grip on him-as if she were in truth a goddess.

For her part, Cleopatra sat and waited. She was busy rearing her son Caesarion; to him she played the mother goddess, the Magna Mater of the lands of Asia Minor. The love she bore him was maternal. She never gave up her dream that she was rearing the future emperor of the world, The throne he had narrowly missed inheriting from Caesar, he would take from Mark Antony. It may be that Cleopatra began to have her doubts, for Antony was meeting bitter military reverses in Parthia, where the Parthian light cavalry fought guerrilla tactics so successfully against the heavily armored legionaries. In a sense this was occasioned by the desertion of 16,000 Median light cavalry at the orders of their king, Artavasdes. Antony did not forget this; at the conclusion of the Parthian war he took the legions into Medea and made Artavasdes his prisoner.

Always a Roman general had celebrated his triumph in Rome. Antony broke with that tradition. Too long a time had elapsed since he had held Cleopatra in his arms. He sailed with his eagles and his war prisoners to Alexandria and there, with Artavasdes stumbling along in golden chains behind his chariot, he paraded his military might before the eyes of the woman he loved.

Two massy thrones of solid gold were set up on a platform of solid silver, and here Antony and Cleopatra sat while Cleopatra, together with her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion, was invested with the kingdoms of Cyprus, Libya and Coele Syria.

By Mark Antony, Cleopatra had two illegitimate sons and a daughter. Their oldest son, Alexander Helios, was named king of Armenia and Media. The younger son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, was crowned king of Phoenicia, Syria and Cilicia. (For their daughter, Cleopatra Selene, there was no kingdom as yet. In time, she would marry Juba, and with him would rule Mauritania; but this was long after her mother and her father were dead.)

Thus did a mere mortal pay tribute to his goddess.

Cleopatra called herself the New Isis, and wore the robes traditional to the Egyptian Venus. She had played the goddess role so long that she had almost begun to believe in it. Alexandria became too small a stage for her triumphs, however; she and Antony must make a triumphant tour of their possessions, that all men might see and worship her.

They traveled to Ephesus, Samos, Illyria and Athens. Festivals attended them at every stopping point, Only those in the highest positions, however, realized that Cleopatra and Antony were using their display of power to gather military strength for the coming fight with Octavian.

In Rome, Octavian took alarm. Formerly held back by love of his sister Octavia, wife of Antony, he now abandoned all pretense. The world was too small for both Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar—one of them must die.

The two contenders for world dominion met at Actium.

The battle was fought at sea, a tactical mistake on the part of Antony. Octavian had demonstrated his ability as an admiral during the Sicilian wars; Antony was a land general. The defeat was crushing, though it might have been avoided had Cleopatra not withdrawn her Egyptian navy just when, by boldly attacking, she conceivably could have turned the tide to victory.

Did she fear risking her 60 ships, which were her only defense in case Octavian won the day? Her main concern was Egypt and Caesarion. All else meant nothing in her eyes. Historians, pondering her strange retreat, have never solved its riddle.

Seeing her go, Antony took a small galley and went after her, abandoning his men, his ships, his future, to be with this goddess he loved. When he went aboard her flagship, he sat for three days not speaking, not moving, with his face buried in his hands. He must have understood that he was finished as a man, as a claimant to a world throne. He may even have wept bitter tears because the goddess he thought so magnificent, he discovered to have feet of clay.

Vet, he was so much in need of Cleopatra that he permitted himself to be led to her like a small child, to go to bed with her, to cast himself on her mature breasts as he might upon those of his own mother. Then he bathed her flesh with his tears.

Perhaps his mind had become deranged with the shock of his defeat; he had been so confident. Did not a living Venus side with him? Did not an entire world send its fighting men to confront their common enemy? His ships had been bigger, more heavily armed than those Octavian boasted. Nineteen Roman legions and 12,000 cavalry waited on the Greek shore to do battle where he said, not being involved in the sea fight. How could Octavian have wrested the victory laurel from him? It was as if the gods themselves had turned away their faces.

All he had left was Cleopatra.

She built a stone summerhouse called the Timonium when they came back to Alexandria that he might be alone, away from the crowds, the faces, the jeering voices. At the same time, Cleopatra built a massive tomb for herself in which she stored her treasures of gold, silver, emerald, pearl and ebony. She had seen many kings and queens dragged in chains behind the chariots of their conquerors. She would never be taken in chains through the streets of Rome. This was her main, perhaps her only, fear in life.

Octavian came to Alexandria one year after Actium. Mark Antony ran a sword into his own belly at the news. He was carried, dying, into the great mausoleum which was to be Cleopatra's final resting place. Antony had done all that any goddess could ask. He had given her his life as a final sacrifice.

Aware that Octavian regarded her as the enemy of Rome, cognizant also that the Roman people blamed her for the collapse of their former idol, Antony, Cleopatra determined to take her own life. No Roman should see Cleopatra of Egypt in chains like an animal, being dragged along the cobbled streets of Rome. Better death as a queen and goddess than life as a prisoner and a slave!

So she ordered a bowl of fruit to be brought to her-a bowl in which was to be placed a deadly asp. The fruit she brought to her mouth, the asp to her full white breast, even while she sat erect upon the throne that had been set up inside her marble tomb. She bit of the fruit-the asp of her.

By her death she triumphed over Octavian; he was especially anxious to ride a chariot behind which this woman must stumble through the streets of the Rome she had hoped to rule. This joy was denied him.

The manner of her death was especially appropriate: the snake that had bitten Cleopatra was sacred to the goddess Venus.

END