A Mist of Prophecies

XX

"What about this?" asked Diana, holding up one of my better garments, a green tunic with a Greek-key border in yellow along the hem.

"Surely I've packed enough clothing already," I said. "The shipmaster charges passengers by the trunk, so we should take only what we need for the journey. It will be cheaper to buy what we need when we get there."

"Mother will like that. A shopping trip!" Diana forced a smile. She was not happy about her mother's trip to Alexandria; she had done all she could to dissuade her. That part of the world was already unsettled and dangerous, she pointed out, and likely to become more so if Pompey had fled there with Caesar chasing after him. Besides that, a sea journey was always dangerous, and autumn was coming; if we stayed in Egypt past the sailing season, we might be stranded there for months, unable to find a ship willing to risk stormy waters. But Bethesda would not relent: to be cured of her malady, she must return to Egypt and bathe in the Nile.

Diana's greatest worry she left unspoken: that she would never see her mother again if the rigors of travel proved too much for her, or if Bethesda's true purpose in returning to Egypt was to die.

"Perhaps-perhaps I should come along," she said.

"Absolutely not, Diana! We've already discussed this."

"But-"

"No! It's unthinkable that a young woman in your condition should take off on such a long and uncertain journey."

"I shouldn't have told you."

"That you're with child? You couldn't have hidden it much longer. You don't know how relieved I was to find out that your morning sickness was due to pregnancy and not something else. No, you will remain in Rome to oversee the household, and Davus will remain by your side. And don't worry-your mother and I will be back in plenty of time to see the birth of our grandchild. Do you think Bethesda would miss that?"

Diana forced another smile and busied herself checking the contents of my trunk. "What's this?" she asked, holding up a sealed bronze urn.

I took it from her and returned it to the trunk. "Ashes," I said.

"Ah. Her ashes."

"You can say her name: Cassandra."

"But why are you taking them to Egypt?"

"It was Rupa's idea. Cassandra lived most of her life in Alexandria. He wants to scatter her ashes in the Nile."

"I don't see why she should go along on Mother's trip."

"Don't forget that it's her legacy that's paying for the trip."

"Ironic, isn't it?" said Diana sharply. "If this trip does cure Mother's condition, it shall have been paid for by the woman who-" She saw the look on my face and left the thought unfinished. "I suppose it is a good thing that you're taking Rupa with you, since Davus isn't going along to protect you. Rupa will know his way around the city."

"You forget that I lived in Alexandria myself for a while."

"But, Papa, that was years and years ago. Surely it's changed since then."

The Alexandria of my youth was fixed in my memory, encircled by nostalgia as a city is encircled by walls to keep it safe. It seemed unthinkable that it could have changed, but why not? Everything else in the world had changed, and seldom for the better.

Diana clicked her tongue. "But I'm not sure about the advisability of taking Mopsus and Androcles."

"I'm an old man, Diana. I'll need quick feet to run my errands."

"So will I, once my belly begins to grow."

"I suppose I could take only one of the boys with me, and leave you the other…"

"No, it would be unthinkable to separate them. But they're likely to get themselves thrown overboard if they behave on the ship the way they behave in this house. They're such a handful, those two little…" Something caught in her throat. She cleared it with a cough and a sniffle and lowered her voice. "A shame you're not taking Hieronymus. He keeps hinting that he'd like to go. Having lived all his life in Massilia, he's eager to see the world."

"At my expense! No, Hieronymus can stay here. Surely he hasn't exhausted all the discoveries that Rome has to offer."

I sat on the bed. Diana sat beside me. She took my hand in hers. "There's something we haven't yet talked about," she said.

"Your mother? I think she truly believes this trip will cure her. You shouldn't worry that-"

"No, not that."

I sighed. "If you wish to finish what you were saying earlier… about Cassandra…"

Diana shook her head. "No. I think it was the Fates who guided your course, and hers, toward an end that neither of you foresaw."

"What, then?"

She hesitated. "We've talked before about the danger in that part of the world…"

"Surely it's no more dangerous than Rome!"

"Isn't it? Ever since old King Ptolemy died, the Egyptians have been as torn apart as we Romans. Young Ptolemy is at war with his sister-what's she called?"

"I believe her name is Cleopatra. Marc Antony once mentioned to me that he had met her. He said the oddest thing…"

"What was that?"

"He said that she reminded him of Caesar. Imagine that! Cleopatra couldn't have been more than fourteen when Antony met her. She must be about twenty-two now-yes, exactly the same age as you, Diana."

"Wonderful! You shall find yourself in Alexandria with Pompey at his most desperate, a royal civil war going on, and a young female Caesar to contend with-if one can imagine such a creature!"

I laughed. "At least it shouldn't be boring."

"But still-this wasn't what I meant to talk about."

"What then?"

She sighed. "Caesar will be there, too, won't he?"

"Very likely."

"And if Caesar is there…"

"Ah, I see where you're going."

"You'll already have so much to deal with-and I don't mean Pompey and Cleopatra and all that. I mean Mother, whether she gets well… or not. And the ashes in that urn, and what you'll feel when you scatter them in the Nile. And I know you'll be worried about me and the child I'm carrying, back here in Rome. And on top of all that, if you should happen to confront Meto again…"

"Daughter, Daughter! Do you imagine that I haven't thought of all this myself? I've been lying awake at night, pondering this journey and all the places it may lead. But looking ahead serves no purpose. It's as you say: the Fates lead us to unseen ends. So far, on balance, the Fates have been kind to me."

There was a noise at the door. Both of us looked up to see Bethesda. She looked pale and delicate, but in her eyes I saw a steady flame that signaled hope. The journey to Egypt had come to mean everything to her.

"Are you done packing, Husband?"

"Yes."

"Good. We leave at dawn. Diana, if you've finished helping your father, come help me sort my things."

"Of course." Diana rose and followed her mother. In the doorway she paused and looked back. Her eyes glittered with tears. "Can it really be tomorrow that you're leaving, Papa? I suddenly feel like Hieronymus; I envy you! You shall see the Nile, and the pyramids, and the giant Sphinx…"

"And the great library," I said, "and the famous lighthouse at Pharos…"

"And perhaps you shall even meet…"

We laughed, knowing we shared the same thought without speaking.

"Cleopatra!" I said, finishing her sentence.

"Cleopatra!" she echoed, as if that odd, foreign-sounding name were a code for all that was understood between us, spoken or unspoken.

After she left the room, I rose from the bed and stepped to the trunk. I reached down and picked up the bronze urn. I held it for a long time, feeling the metal's cold rigidity, sensing the heaviness of its contents. Finally I returned the urn to the trunk and slowly, gently closed the lid.

Author's Note

After two novels recounting political maneuverings and military operations at the outset of the Roman Civil War-Rubicon and Last Seen in Massilia-it was my wish to return to the city of Rome and to see what its beleaguered citizens, especially its women, were up to.

While Caesar and Pompey conducted an overt war in northern Greece, who can doubt that covert operations continued at an equally furious pace back in Rome? We can easily imagine that espionage, bribery, betrayals, profiteering, and all sorts of other skullduggery were rife, but when it comes to eyewitness or even secondhand accounts, our sources for this particular time and place-Rome in the year 48 B.C.-are scattered and obscure.

The challenge to the status quo posed by Marcus Caelius, and its outcome, are recounted in several ancient sources, including Velleius Paterculus, Livy, Cassius Dio, and Caesar's The Civil War. Unfortunately, these authors offer contradictory and fragmentary details and do little to establish even an approximate timetable. But the same chronological uncertainty and paucity of detail that constrain the historian offer a certain elasticity to the novelist, of which I have taken considerable advantage.

In trying to make sense of the political milieu and the mood of Rome in 48 B.C., I found myself returning again and again to a book by Jack Lindsay, Marc Antony: His World and His Contemporaries (London: George Routledge amp; Sons Ltd., 1936). Lindsay offers a far more complex ideological interpretation of the aims of Marcus Caelius than do most historians, who tend to dismiss Caelius as a mere opportunist. For details of the conflict between Pompey and Caesar, T. Rice Holmes's closely argued, exhaustively annotated The Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923) provides a vivid reconstruction. The letters of Cicero also yield much information on the chain of events; I have spent many hours appreciating the labors of Evelyn S. Shuck burgh of Emmannel College, Cambridge, who not only translated but arranged and indexed the entire correspondence in chronological order in The Letters of Cicero (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909).

What of Titus Annius Milo and his fate? Did even his old champion Cicero mourn him? Perhaps not. Consider that Titus Annius may have added the "Milo" to his name because he wished to equate himself with the legendary Olympic athlete Milo of Crotona; consider that Cicero probably felt guilty to the end of his days for botching Milo's defense at his trial for murdering Clodius; consider that, in the dying Republic, Milo must have become the epitome of the has-been who wouldn't stay gone; and then read the following rather catty passage by Cicero in his treatise "On Old Age," written in 44 B.C., four years after Milo's death. This is Michael Grant's translation, from Cicero's Selected Works (Penguin Books, 1960):

A man should use what he has, and in all doings accommodate himself to his strength. There is a story about Milo of Crotona, in his later years, watching the athletes train on the race-course. With tears in his eyes he looked at his own muscles, and said a pitiable thing: "And these are now dead." But you are the one who is now dead, not they, you stupid fellow, because your fame never came from yourself, it came from brute physical force… Milo is said to have walked from end to end of the race-course at Olympia with an ox on his back; well, which would you prefer to be given, Milo's physical vigour, or the intellectual might of [Milo's friend] Pythagoras? In short, enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it, and have no regrets when it has gone… nature has one path only, and you cannot travel along it more than once.

Was this Cicero's way of declaring to the world that his Milo had no one to blame but himself?

What of the women of Rome who populate these pages? Terentia, Tullia, Fabia, Fulvia, Sempronia, Antonia, Cytheris, Fausta, Clodia, and Calpurnia all existed. Gordianus has encountered some of them previously in the Roma Sub Rosa series-Clodia in The Venus Throw and A Murder on the Appian Way; Fulvia, Sempronia, and Fausta in A Murder on the Appian Way; and Fabia in the eponymous short story in The House of the Vestals.

Terentia's marriage to Cicero ended when he divorced her and married a much younger woman, probably late in 46 B.C. At about the same time, Tullia and Dolabella also divorced. Tullia's death the next year caused her father much grief, but according to Pliny, Terentia went on to reach the remarkable age of 103.

Probably Fulvia made the greatest impact on history, especially after her marriage to Marc Antony in 47 B.C., following Antony's divorce from Antonia; Antony even gave up Cytheris for her. But neither Fulvia nor any of these other women speaks to us across the ages in her own voice. We have letters written by Pompey and Antony and Caelius, we have whole books by Caesar and Cicero, but for these women we have only secondhand sources, and mostly hostile sources at that. (Unable to account for Fulvia's ruthlessness and ambition, Velleius Paterculus called her "a woman only on account of her gender.")

As remarkable as these women must have been, no ancient historian saw fit to leave us a biography of any of them; to write the life story of a woman was beyond Plutarch's imagination. The reader who wishes to know more about them will find only scattered crumbs, not the rich banquet afforded to anyone with an appetite for Pompey, Caesar, or any number of other men of antiquity. For the modern historian working from such sources, the task of bringing these women to life is problematic to the point of being insurmountable; so it seems fitting that they should find a prominent place in the Roma Sub Rosa, a secret history of Rome, or a history of Rome's secrets, as seen through the eyes of Gordianus.

Thanks are due to my editor at St. Martin's Press, Keith Kahla, for his attentiveness and patience; to my agent, Alan Nevins, for keeping me too busy to get into any trouble; to Penni Kimmel and Rick Solomon for their comments on the first draft; and to my good neighbors at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, whose splendid production in the spring of 2001 of the complete Oresteia by Aeschylus inspired the creation of Gordianus's Cassandra.