Chapter XV #3
Who pauses in the bathhouse or while drinking at a fountain to consider what lies behind it?
A conduit buried three feet beneath the earth, five feet high and three feet wide, built of brick, with a vaulted roof – tall enough for a maintenance man to walk along it – and walls of waterproof cement, applied in layers that take three months to dry and then must be polished to a mirror finish to allow the water to flow freely.
Imagine the labour that is required, the skill needed to maintain a constant gradient across a sixty-mile line.
And this does not take account of the arcades required to cross the valleys, and the thousands of tons of lead and miles of terracotta pipes that are used for the siphons.
People remember battles, but that aqueduct I built in Campania, and the others I shall leave behind me in Rome, Gaul and Germania, I count as victories as great as Actium.
Throughout this time, I kept in touch with Caesar by a regular exchange of dispatches.
He insisted on using a simple cipher, shifting each letter a place further on in the alphabet. It would not have fooled an expert code-breaker for a moment, but I suppose it was effective in baffling any casual busybody who was able to glance at our correspondence.
I keep those letters with my other papers. I consulted them this morning to aid my memory. I have them before me now.
Mine to him are constant pleas for money, to pay the legionaries who were toiling on the aqueduct and to compensate the landowners for the smallholdings I had promised to each man. He must have found them boring, for he hardly bothers to mention them.
His to me recount his leisurely winter and spring in Athens, founding colonies for his veterans and erecting victory monuments, and then his landing outside Alexandria in July, where he laid siege to the city to which Antony and Cleopatra had retreated.
To begin with, his tone is confident – I have brought up ballistae and scorpios close to the walls, and our blockade of the harbour is complete – but then several weeks passed without any report of progress, and I started to become concerned.
Eventually a letter dated the end of the month described a ferocious struggle in the outskirts of the city that ended in a pitched battle around the hippodrome.
He claimed to have killed ten thousand of the enemy but owned up to similar losses on our side.
Although he did not say so, I inferred he had been obliged to break off the attack.
Our forces so greatly outnumbered Antony’s that I knew we could sustain a level of casualties he could not.
Sure enough, a more optimistic message reached me a few days later – Antony has challenged me to settle our dispute by a duel man-to-man to spare our armies further bloodshed!
Can you imagine anything so stupid? He must be worried. I did not even trouble to reply.
And then comes a longer letter.
To: Agrippa
From: Caesar
Antony is dead. I know this for a fact because I have stood over his body.
He even managed to make a mess of his suicide by all accounts, stabbing himself but failing to inflict a fatal wound.
He was carried on his bed to Cleopatra and died in her arms a few hours later.
I had expected to feel exultant, but oddly I felt mostly sadness.
He was a great man, ruined by an excess of passion.
I have given permission for him to be buried in Alexandria with all due honours, as he wished.
The queen herself pleads for mercy, and even tried to seduce me.
But she must be nearly forty and I was not tempted.
I made it clear that Egypt henceforth will be a Roman province, and there was no question of my allowing her to remain on the throne, although I am reluctant to have her killed.
What do you think? I would like to bring her back to Rome and parade her in my triumph.
But then the question arises, what to do with her afterwards?
I send you greetings, my friend. Victory is sweet.
I have all her treasure secured, so you can tell the veterans they will be paid.
A week later, another.
Cleopatra is dead. It is said she put a poisonous snake between her breasts. Her lips were blue, but the doctors could find no puncture marks on her skin, so perhaps that is a myth. At any rate, there is no word on the health of the snake.
And finally:
We caught Caesarion hiding just outside Alexandria.
I had him brought before me. An intelligent, handsome lad aged sixteen.
We had some talk. I could see my great-uncle in his features.
But I fear he could not be allowed to live – he would have been one Caesar too many.
I had him struck from behind when his back was turned so at least he had no warning of the blow, and then gave orders for his body to be thrown to the crocodiles in the Nile to obliterate every trace of him.
I do not recall shedding any tears at the time, but this morning I wept at the cruelty of Caesarion’s fate.
The same blood was in our veins. I ask myself, had I been there, might I have tried to save him?
He was my half-brother, after all. The truth is, I would not.
There was nothing I could have done. My gaze returns repeatedly to that pitiless phrase, he would have been one Caesar too many.
Power makes monsters of us all.