Colleen McCullough - Antony and Cleopatra

‘Aren’t you pleased?’ Dellius asked. ‘You won without even needing to argue your case, Herod.’

‘Why did Antonius have to elevate my brother too?’ Herod demanded harshly, though he spoke to someone who wasn’t there. ‘He has put us on an equal footing! How can I wed Mariamne when Phasael is not only my equal in rank, but also my older brother? It’s Phasael will wed her!’

‘Come, come,’ said Dellius gently. ‘That’s all in the future, Herod. For the moment, accept Antonius’s judgement as more than you had hoped to gain. He’s come down on your side – the five sparrows have just had their wings clipped.’

‘Yes, yes, I see all that, Dellius, but this Marcus Antonius is clever! He wants what the far-sighted Romans all want – balance. And to put me alone on an equal footing with Hyrcanus is not a Roman enough answer. Phasael and I in one pan, Hyrcanus in the other. Oh, Marcus Antonius, you are clever! Caesar was a genius, but you are supposed to be a dolt. Now I find another Caesar.’

Dellius watched Herod plod off, his mind whirling. Between that brief conversation over dinner and this audience today, Mark Antony had done some research. That was why he’d hollered for Lucilius! And what frauds they were, he and Octavian! Burned all Brutus’s and Cassius’s papers, indeed! But like Herod, I deemed Antonius an educated dolt. He is not, he is not! thought Dellius, gasping. He’s crafty and clever. He will put his hands on everything in the East, raising this man, lowering that man, until the client-kingdoms and satrapies are absolutely his. Not Rome’s. His . He has sent Octavian back to Italia and a task so big it will break so weak and sickly a youth; but, just in case Octavian doesn’t break, Antonius will be ready.

TWO

When Antony left the capital of Bithynia, all of the potentates save Herod and the five members of the Sanhedrin accompanied him, still declaring their loyalty to the new rulers of Rome, still maintaining that Brutus and Cassius had duped them, lied to them, coerced them – ai, ai, ai, forced them! Having scant patience for Eastern weeping and wailing, Antony didn’t do what Pompey the Great, Caesar and the rest had done – invite the most important among them to join him for dinner, travel in his party. No, all the way from Nicomedia to Ancyra, the only town of any size in Galatia, Mark Antony pretended that his regal camp followers didn’t exist.

Here, amid the rolling grassy expanses of the best grazing country east of Gaul, he had perforce to move into Deiotarus’s palace and strive to be amiable. Four days of that were three too many, but during that time Antony informed Deiotarus that he was to keep his kingdom – for the moment. His second most favored son, Deiotarus Philadelphus, was gifted with the wild, mountainous fief of Paphlagonia (it was of no use to anybody), whereas his most favored son, Castor, got nothing, and what the old King should have made of that was now beyond his dwindling mental faculties. To all the Romans with Antony, it meant that eventually drastic changes would be made to Galatia, and not for the benefit of any Deiotarid. For information about Galatia, Antony talked to the old King’s secretary, a noble Galatian named Amyntas who was young, well-educated, efficient and clear-sighted.

‘At least,’ said Antony jovially as the Roman column set off for Cappadocia, ‘we’ve lost a decent percentage of our hangers-on! That gushing idiot Castor even brought the fellow who clips his toenails. Amazing, that a warrior like Deiotarus should produce such a perfect pansy.’

He was speaking to Dellius, who now rode an easy-gaited roan mare and had passed the grumpy pony to Icarus, previously doomed to walk. ‘You’ve lost Pharnaces and his court too,’ said Dellius.

‘Pah! He ought never to have come.’ Antony’s lips curled in contempt. ‘His father was a better man, and his grandfather much better still.’

‘You mean the great Mithridates?’

‘Is there any other? Now there was a man, Dellius, who almost beat Rome. Formidable.’

‘Pompeius Magnus defeated him easily.’

‘Rubbish! Lucullus defeated him. Pompeius Magnus just cashed in on the fruits of Lucullus’s labors. He had a habit of doing that, did Magnus. But his vaingloriousness got him in the end. He began to believe his own publicity. Fancy anyone, Roman or otherwise, thinking he could beat Caesar!’

‘You would have beaten Caesar with no trouble, Antonius,’ said Dellius without a trace of sycophancy in his tone.

‘ I ? Not if every god there is fought on my side! Caesar was in a class all his own, and there’s no disgrace in saying that. Over fifty battles he generaled, and never lost a one. Oh, I’d beat Magnus if he still lived – or Lucullus, or even Gaius Marius. But Caesar? Alexander the Great would have gone down to him.’

The voice, a light tenor surprising in such a big man, held no resentment. Nor even, reflected Dellius, guilt. Antonius fully subscribes to the Roman way of looking at things: because he had lifted no finger against Caesar, he can sleep at night. To plot and scheme is no crime, even when a crime is committed thanks to the plotting and scheming.

Singing their marching songs lustily, the two legions and mass of cavalry Antony had with him entered the gorge country of the great red river, Halys, beautiful beyond Roman imagination, so rich and ruddy were the rocks, so tortured the planes of cliffs and shelves. There was ample flat ground on either bank of the broad stream, flowing sluggishly because the snows of the high peaks had not yet melted. Which was why Antony was marching overland to Syria; winter seas were too dangerous for sailing, and Antony preferred to stay with his men until he could be sure they liked him better than they had Cassius, to whom they had belonged. The weather was chilly, but bitter only when the wind got up, and down in the bottom of the gorge country there was little wind. Despite its color, the water was potable for men as well as horses; central Anatolia was not a populous place.

The settlement of Eusebeia Mazaca sat at the foot of the vast volcano Argaeus, white with snow, for no one in history remembered its erupting. A blue city, small and impoverished; everyone had looted it time out of mind, for its kings were weak and too parsimonious to keep an army.

It was here that Antony began to realize how difficult it was going to be to squeeze yet more gold and treasure out of the East; Brutus and Cassius had plundered whatever King Mithridates the Great had overlooked. A realization that put him severely out of sorts and sent him with Poplicola, the brothers Decidius Saxa and Dellius to inspect the priest-kingdom of Ma at Comana, not far distant from Eusebeia Mazaca. Let the senile King of Cappadocia and his ludicrously incompetent son stew in their denuded palace! Perhaps at Comana he would find a hoard of gold beneath an innocent-looking flagstone – priests left kings for dead when it came to protecting their money.

Ma was an incarnation of Kubaba Cybele, the Great Earth Mother who had ruled all the gods, male and female, when humanity first learned to tell its history around the campfires. Over the aeons she had lost her power, save in places like the two Comanas, one here in Cappadocia, the other north in Pontus, and in Pessinus, not far from where Alexander the Great had cut the Gordian knot with his sword. Each of these three precincts was governed as an independent realm, its king also serving as high priest, and each lay within natural boundaries like Pontic cherries in a bowl.

Scorning an escort of troops, Antony, his four friends and plenty of servants rode into the beguiling little village of Cappadocian Comana, noting with approval its costly dwellings, the gardens promising a profusion of flowers in the coming spring, the imposing temple of Ma rising atop a slight hill surrounded by a grove of birches, with poplars down either side of a paved avenue that led straight to Ma’s earthly house. Off to one side was the palace: like the temple, its Doric columns were blue with scarlet bases and capitals; the walls behind were a much darker blue, and the shingled roof edged in gilt.