'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.')
