And the Rest Is History (3 page)

In 1142, on his way to Rome to plead a theological question, Peter fell ill and collapsed at the Abbey of Cluny, where he lingered for several months. From there he was taken to the priory of St. Marcel, where he passed from this world to the one with which he was always absorbed. His last words were, “I don't know.”

Héloise survived Abelard for more than twenty years, without even the comfort of his written words. Her last words were of her first love: “In death, at last, let me rest with Abelard.”

The treatises of the scholar Abelard have been consigned to the dustbin of history; what survives is the tale of two martyrs to romance who, although they were the playthings of fate, managed to transcend physical love for an immortal one.

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41 BC

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he romance between the Roman general Antony and Cleopatra, his Egyptian queen, has captured the imagination of artists, poets, and playwrights since antiquity. The reason for their timeless appeal most likely lies in their last desperate acts, history's most famous suicides—undertaken because they preferred death to life without each other.

Controlling the land of the Nile since the reign of Alexander the Great, the Ptolemy family and their royal line of succession decreed that a brother and a sister marry and jointly share the throne. With the death of Pharaoh Ptolemy XII, power passed to his eighteen-year-old daughter Cleopatra and his twelve-year-old son Ptolemy XIII. Although the dynasty is to be commended for not favoring male heirs over female ones, the brother-sister/husband-wife rulers often engaged in more than mere sibling rivalry. Driven by a desire to be the sole ruler, Cleopatra embarked in a civil war against her brother; as a result she was driven from her palace in Alexandria by an army loyal to Ptolemy.

In the thick of the royal family feud Julius Caesar arrived from Rome in pursuit of his enemy Pompey; however, with the discovery that the Egyptians had assassinated his rival, he turned his attention to arbitrating the bloodbath that was tearing apart the land of the Nile. In one of the great iconic meetings in world history, Cleopatra, barred entry to her palace, had her servants roll her up in a Persian carpet and smuggle her into the palace, where the rug was laid at Caesar's feet. When the seductively clad Egyptian queen tumbled out, Julius was charmed both by her gesture and her allure, so much so that they soon became intimate.

The following morning Caesar let it be known that Cleopatra's enemies were now his enemies. The ruler who was to proclaim
“Veni, vidi, vici”
(“I came, I saw, I conquered”) was himself conquered by the femme fatale with the kohl-rimmed eyes, and nine months later she bore his baby, Ptolemy Caesar, nicknamed Caesarion. Ptolemy XIII (conveniently for his sister) ended up drowned in the Nile, thanks to Julius's machinations.

When Caesar returned to Rome, he did so with his paramour and their son in tow. To the disgust of his wife, Calpurnia, and his people, in the Temple of Venus he erected a golden statue of Cleopatra, depicted as Isis. Although Hollywood portrayed the queen as a great beauty, coins bearing her likeness prove the contrary. Plutarch writes of her, “For her beauty was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her.” In other words, she was plain. What made Cleopatra attractive were her wit, charm, and intelligence. The only claim she had to looks was a large nose, which was considered a mark of beauty in her epoch.

In 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated on the steps of the Forum on the ides of March. His death would change the course of history as well as Cleopatra's own life.

After Caesar's death, the general Marcus Antonius (Marc Antony), became, along with Octavian, one of the three leaders of Rome. Fearing an eventual power struggle with Octavian, Marc arranged for a meeting with the Egyptian queen, hoping to gain a powerful political ally. He was to gain far more.

When Cleopatra received Antony's summons for an interview, she vowed to seduce him in the same fashion as she had done her former Roman general. She needed the protection of the ruler of the most powerful nation in the world to safeguard her throne and secure the succession of Caesarion. She staged the entrance of the millennium.

Cleopatra sailed down the river in a gilded barge, adorned with swelling sails of Tyrian purple. The ship was filled with such a quantity of rose petals that the Romans knew of her arrival before she appeared on their horizon. The oars were silver, drawn by servant girls clad as nymphs. The boat drew near the shore to the accompaniment of the music of flutes and harps. Against this frame, Cleopatra lay on a divan beneath a canopy of gold, dressed in the garb of Venus, fanned by boys clad as Cupid.

The first time Cleopatra met Antony was when he came to dine on her palace barge. He was immediately enraptured by the seductress. The queen, who had most likely given herself to Caesar only for political expediency, became the paramour of Antony—but this time, it was for love. The couple spent all their time together, which led to Antony's neglect of his legions.

When Cleopatra returned to Alexandria, she did so with Antony, who abandoned his military campaign to follow her. According to Plutarch, Cleopatra “played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him. At night she would go rambling with him to disturb and torment people at their windows, dressed like a servant-woman, for Antony also went in servant's disguise ... However, the Alexandrians in general liked it all well enough, and joined good-humoredly and kindly in his frolic and play.”

Not so the Romans. They viewed her as a lustful seductress who employed sex and sorcery to seduce their two greatest generals. Marc Antony had fallen far from the magnificent orator whose eulogy for Caesar had made him the most celebrated of his countrymen.

Finally, after a year Antony pulled himself away from Cleopatra to rejoin his legions in Rome. When he arrived, to help make amends, he agreed to wed Octavian's sister, Octavia, though his heart lay in Egypt. The messengers who conveyed this information to Cleopatra probably did so with the greatest of trepidation, as she was known to kill those who brought disturbing news (giving birth to the expression “Don't kill the messenger”). She was particularly unhappy with the timing of her lover's nuptials, as she was pregnant with his twins, Alexander Helios (“The Sun”), and Cleopatra Selene (“The Moon”).

In his own country, Antony was caught in an emotional tug-of-war, endlessly torn between his two mistresses: Rome and Cleopatra. Unable to deny the latter, he headed to Asia Minor and sent for Cleopatra to join him. There he married her under Egyptian law, which allowed polygamy, and announced the paternity of his son and daughter. As a wedding present he presented her with the Roman dominions of Syria, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Crete. She was delighted with the gifts; Octavian, however, did not share the sentiment.

The couple began presenting themselves as divine and bedecked themselves as Osiris and Isis. Disgusted with these actions, Rome, as much as it once idolized Antony, now vilified him. Antony, by falling into Cleopatra's arms, had placed his neck in Octavian's hands. The latter decided to destroy Antony to advance his own means. By obliterating his enemy he would avenge his slighted sister ; moreover, he could set himself up as Augustus Caesar and become his country's first emperor. He asked the Senate to declare war against Egypt.

In 31 BC, Antony's forces faced Octavian's in a high-stakes naval battle off the coast of Actium in Greece. The victor would become the undisputed leader of the most powerful country in the world. Cleopatra, in a ship with a gold sail, anxiously awaited its outcome. At a crucial stage in the battle, Cleopatra suddenly gave a signal that signified retreat. At this point Antony had a choice: follow his heart and Cleopatra, or follow his duties as a Roman general. He immediately set off after her, proving that to him power was nothing; his queen was everything. When his legions saw that their leader had abandoned the battle, they did likewise and joined forces with Octavian. Shakespeare, in his play
Antony and Cleopatra
, wrote of Antony's action, “The triple pillar of the world transform'd into a strumpet's fool.” The legions of Rome marched to Alexandria.

During the ensuing land battle, Cleopatra took refuge in a mausoleum. When Antony heard this news, he assumed his queen was dead. He had made his love the world; without her, there was nothing. No longer willing to go on, in the Roman fashion of suicide, he fell on his own sword. As he lay dying, he was informed that she was merely in hiding. His last order as a general was for his soldiers to carry him to Cleopatra; he died in her arms. The Queen of the Nile had but one course of action: to show how a descendant of kings could die. Ten years earlier she had made a grand entrance to meet Antony; now it was the occasion to make a grand departure.

She wrote a letter for Octavian, with a plea that she be buried alongside Antony. Cleopatra also ordered her servants to bring her a basket of figs, inside which was concealed a poisonous asp. Dressed in full royal regalia, replete with the pharaoh's Uraeus headdress, she put the cobra to her breast. She then lay down on a couch of gold to join her ancestors, to join Antony.

Antony and Cleopatra flung away the two greatest empires of the world and committed suicide for one another, ensuring that their tale would pass from an individual story to an iconic one.