Antony and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough

several things Caesar had said that the Treasure of the Ptolemies was indeed secreted away so cunningly that no one could find it who didn’t know how. No doubt the items on Dellius’s list would fetch ten thousand talents, but he needed far more than that. And to march or sail his army to Alexandria would cost some thousands of talents of itself. Oh, curse the woman! I cannot bully or bludgeon her into yielding. Therefore I must find a different way. Cleopatra is no Glaphyra.
     
     
    Accordingly a note was delivered to Philopator early the next morning to say that the banquet Antony was giving tonight would be a costume party.
    “But I offer you a hint,” the note said. “If you come as Aphrodite, I will greet you as the New Dionysus, your natural partner in the celebration of life.”
    So Cleopatra draped herself in Greek guise, floating layers of pink and carmine. Her thin mouse-brown hair was done in its habitual style, parted into many strips from brow to nape of neck, where a small knot of it was bunched. People joked that it resembled the rind of a cantaloupe melon, not far from the truth. A woman like Glaphyra would have been able to tell him (had she ever seen Cleopatra in her pharaonic regalia) that this uninspiring style enabled her to wear Egypt’s red and white double crown with ease. Tonight, however, she wore a spangled short veil of interwoven flowers, and had chosen to adorn her person with flowers at neck, at bodice, at waist. In one hand she carried a golden apple. The outfit was not particularly attractive, which didn’t worry Mark Antony, not a connoisseur of women’s wear. The whole object of the “costume” dinner party was so that he could show himself to best advantage.
    As the New Dionysus, he was bare from the waist up, and bare from mid-thigh down. His nether regions were draped in a flimsy piece of purple gauze, under which a carefully tailored loincloth revealed the mighty pouch that contained the fabled Antonian genitalia. At forty-three, he was still in his prime, that Herculean physique unmarred by more excesses than most men fitted into twice his tally of years. Calves and thighs were massive, but the ankles slender, and the pectorals of his chest bulged above a flat, muscled belly. Only his head looked odd, for his neck was as thick as a bull’s, and dwarfed it. The tribe of girls the Queen had brought with her looked at him and gasped, near died inside for want of him.
    “My, you don’t have much in your wardrobe,” Cleopatra said, unimpressed.
    “Dionysus didn’t need much. Here, have a grape,” he said, extending the bunch he held in one hand.
    “Here, have an apple,” she said, extending a hand.
    “I’m Dionysus, not Paris. ‘Paris, you pretty boy, you woman-struck seducer,’” he quoted. “See? I know my Homer.”
    “I am consumed with admiration.” She arranged herself on the couch; he had given her the locus consularis , not a gesture the sticklers in his entourage appreciated. Women were women.
    Antony tried, but the stripped-for-action look didn’t affect Cleopatra at all. Whatever she lived for, it wasn’t the physical side of love, so much was certain. In fact, she spent most of the evening playing with her golden apple, which she put into a glass goblet of pink wine and marveled at how the blue of the glass turned the gold a subtle shade of purple, especially when she stirred it with one manicured finger.
    Finally, desperate, Antony gambled all on one roll of the dice: Venus, they must come up Venus! “I’m falling in love with you,” he said, hand caressing her arm.
    She moved it as if to brush off the attentions of an insect. “ Gerrae ,” she growled.
    “It is not rubbish!” he said indignantly, sitting up straight. “You’ve bewitched me, Cleopatra.”
    “My wealth has bewitched you.”
    “No, no! I wouldn’t care if you were a beggar woman!”
    “ Gerrae! You’d step over me as if I didn’t exist.”
    “I’ll prove that I love