Many things have changed since Egypt fell. Facts have acquired a dizzying speed and I, slow as I am, have been caught up in the rhythm, with nowhere to lodge my recollections. Yes, yes, I know I have boasted of my keen memory, but I have also admitted to the ravages wrought on the records of Cleopatra. Now that I am close to death, it is better for me to die with integrity, not as a scattering of parts in some cheerless corner of the world. I need to recover some wholeness for myself.
That is why I write this. But try as I may, I cannot recapture the voice of Cleopatra. When I attempt it, I simply repeat the errors I have been compounding over the years. I started here with the intention of being utterly faithful, of cleansing my memory of the false trails I was forced to take, in order to promote the lies of Rome. I wanted to find some consolation for my solitude. But there is a wide gap between intention and achievement.
After so many decades of lies and distortions, I can find no way to set the record straight. If I begin imitating the voice of Cleopatra, within no time at all I am sounding like Propertius, who hated her, or like Cicero, who couldn’t even bear to see her portrait, or like Virgil who cheapened her.
Already stiff with the approaching cold of the grave, the voice stumbles. My stylus begins to take me where it wants. The point of my stylus doesn’t give a damn whether I am faithful to a woman it had neither known nor cared to know. All it wanted was to have her speak in a frantic, shrieking tone, in the way you have heard. To have her speak out of an irrational heart. But here I am beginning over. I am escaping the tyranny of my stylus, the implement that writes with fear, even when danger is distant, the fear fed to me and gobbled down from sly Roman spoons. Here I strike back against what I swallowed, here on the bed where I expect to die. And I recall exactly the words she dictated to me when she, too, was expecting to die. I jot them down here, without betrayals, just as she spoke them to me, after she had loosed herself from the rigid embrace of Antony’s corpse.
Even if I could recapture in its entirety my memory of the conflagration that Rome has fanned to fury over the identity of Cleopatra, even if I were to note down word after word of what she said beside Mark Antony’s corpse, I do not, however, have the skill to set before your eyes the mirror in which she might appear — motionless, so that you might contemplate her — in action, so that you might admire her. My undertaking has its necessary limits. Hence I will have no chance to bring her back to life, or of recounting in what her greatness consisted, or of communicating to you what reactions she provoked in those who witnessed her splendor. A poet, I am not. Behind me, I have no Caesar Augustus to spur me on. Before me, I have no palace to reflect the image of the queen in all her majesty. Worse still, with the same zeal employed in destroying the papers of Cleopatra, Augustus has insisted that poets celebrate his Roman self and not omit any opportunity to see to it that his memory defy the assaults of time. Always a crafty man, he set his sights on the future. If we owe Cleopatra the calendar we use today, it was Augustus who left his mark on one of the names of our months. There is no month named for Cleopatra. The Roman populace would have forgotten her long ago, were it not for the cats that invade their premises. When she left Rome on the death of Caesar, she set her cats loose in the streets. But it will not be long before they forget cats came here from Egypt; the presence of a cat in Rome shortly will summon up no more memories of Cleopatra.
Is it a concern that poets put their ink at the service of Augustus’s memory? Horace showed no reluctance to do it, convinced as he was of the vileness of the woman who dared defy Rome. Propertius neither. But Virgil, far wiser — I say it without disrespect for his other virtues, since it isn’t wisdom that makes a poet great — Virgil did feel an enormous regret at the end of his life. Because he gratuitously vilified Cleopatra and overpraised Octavius, he intended to burn his epic. Lying did not trouble him so long as he was blinded by the power radiating from victorious Caesar. Perhaps it was not clear to him that he was lying, for, as I said, he was blinded. But over time the blindness gave way to sight; he grasped the real size of the man, the so-called hero, creature of cunning, but he glimpsed also the man’s disfiguring flaws and his degrading weaknesses. He understood finally that, in piling mud on the memory of Egypt’s queen, he had extinguished a star. Remorse overwhelmed him. Like me, he did not want to go to the grave, laden with regrets, for he well knew the power of the Egyptians in the Land of the Dead. I, too, have no wish to die in regretful silence. I fear, as he did, as anyone would, to encounter in the kingdom of the dead the righteous rage of Cleopatra in all her arrogance. (Horace and Cicero were right about her on that point.)
Nobody is infallible. My queen was not. She erred considerably in not cultivating the poets of Italy. She thought them inferior men, ignorant fellows whose “hands were not fit to wash the clothes of Egyptians,” to quote her words. She offered examples like that clumsy verse from Cicero:
O fortunatam natam me constile Romani
considering it a prime example of dull-witted mediocrity, and held it up as the yardstick by which to measure the poetic endeavors of Rome. She made no effort to woo the poets; in fact, she never disguised her contempt for them, confident that, back in Egypt, there were brilliant poets with scrolls enough to describe her worth, dozens of docile hands eager to eulogize her. Was she justified in her assessment of Roman poetry? Did she hit the mark when she described Julius Montanus, Macrobius, Varius Rufus, and Sulpicius of Carthage as “a bunch of plodding mediocrities”? Probably. But she missed the mark in not trying to win them over to her cause, in the hope that they might reward her by faithfully honoring her memory. Toward Cicero she behaved with unprecedented arrogance. The first time he approached her, he used the pretext of lending her a learned text in order to pursue some pettifogging lawsuit and to ingratiate himself with the wife of Caesar and the queen of Egypt. It was out of sheer disdain for Cicero that she made him a promise she had no intention of keeping. Amonius tells us so.
What was that promise? To take him back to Egypt as her guest so that, in a series of letters, he could describe the country for a Roman audience. The conditions he laid down for his trip were such as to guarantee him enough drachmas to buy himself yet another palace. Of the letters themselves, little could be expected, for he had added a provision to the contract: “Whatever I may write will be at the service of freedom and truth alone, and no one will be permitted to assess it before I have it circulated and placed in the hands of the copyists, for I submit to no censorship. .” The deal he requested was that Cleopatra make him rich twice over and in return he would write whatever he pleased, most probably to satisfy an enemy of Cleopatra, who would reward him by doubling his riches yet again. He had inherited considerable wealth and added to it by marrying well. He further augmented it by his cleverness and his well-chosen friendships. My advice to Cleopatra would have been: “What does it matter? Give him enough to buy a palace. You lose nothing.” But either I would not have dared to say it or it simply did not occur to me to say it back in those palmy days. Neither I nor anyone else of the court spoke up. Sarapion, a member of the royal cabinet since the days of Ptolemy Auletes, only worsened relations between her and Cicero. One afternoon, they say, Serapion was looking for Atticus, who was staying at Cicero’s palace, when he bumped into Cicero himself. Deferentially, Cicero asked if he could be of service. Insolently Sarapion snapped back: “I’m looking for Atticus!” Not one word of greeting. No courteous conversation. It’s no wonder that Cleopatra and her court received such sour commentary in all the writings of Cicero.