Antony and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online

Dellius, that didn’t mean simple sightseeing; with him he took a scribe who jotted down notes using a broad stylus on wax tablets.
    At the Sema Dellius chuckled with glee. “Write, Lasthenes! ‘The tomb of Alexander the Great plus thirty-odd Ptolemies in a precinct dry-paved with collector’s-quality marble in blue with dark green swirls…. Twenty-eight gold statues, man-sized…. An Apollo by Praxiteles, painted marble…. Four painted marble works by some unidentified master, man-sized…. A painting by Zeuxis of Alexander the Great at Issus…. A painting of Ptolemy Soter by Nicias…. ’ Cease writing. The rest are not so fine.”
    At the Serapeum Dellius whinnied with delight. “Write, Lasthenes! ‘A statue of Serapis approximately thirty feet tall, by Bryaxis and painted by Nicias…. An ivory group of the nine Muses by Phidias…. Forty-two gold statues, man-sized….’” He paused to scrape a gold Aphrodite, grimaced. “‘Some, if not all, skinned rather than—ah—solid…. A charioteer and horses in bronze by Myron….’ Cease writing! No, simply add, ‘et cetera, et cetera….’ There are too many more mediocre works to catalogue.”
    In the agora Dellius paused before an enormous sculpture of four rearing horses drawing a racing chariot whose driver was a woman—and what a woman! “Write, Lasthenes! ‘ Quadriga in bronze purported to be of a female charioteer named Bilistiche…. ’ Cease! There’s nothing else here but modern stuff, excellent of its kind but having no appeal for collectors. Oh, Lasthenes, on!”
    And so it went as he cruised through the city, his scribe leaving rolls of wax behind like a moth its droppings. Splendid, splendid! Egypt is rich beyond telling, if what I see in Alexandria is anything to go by. But how do I persuade Marcus Antonius that we’ll get more from selling them as works of art than from melting them down? Think of the tomb of Alexander the Great! he mused—a single block of rock crystal almost as clear as water—how fine it would look inside the temple of Diana in Rome! What a funny little fellow Alexander was! Hands and feet no bigger than a child’s, and what looked like yellow wool atop his head. A wax figure, surely, not the real thing—but you would think that, as he’s a god, they would have made the effigy at least as big as Antonius! There must be enough paving in the Sema to cover the floor of a magnate’s domus in Rome—a hundred talents’ worth, maybe more. The ivory by Phidias—a thousand talents, easily.
    The Royal Enclosure was such a maze of palaces that he gave up trying to distinguish one from another, and the gardens seemed to go on forever. Exquisite little coves pocked the shore beyond the harbor, and in the far distance the white marble causeway of the Heptastadion linked Pharos Isle to the mainland. And oh, the lighthouse! The tallest building in the world, taller by far than the Colossus at Rhodes had been. I thought Rome was lovely, burbled Dellius to himself, then I saw Pergamum and deemed it lovelier, but now that I have seen Alexandria, I am stunned, just stunned. Antonius was here about twenty years ago, but I’ve never heard him speak of the place. Too busy sowing wild oats to remember it, I suppose.
     
     
    The summons to see Queen Cleopatra came the next day, which was just as well; he had concluded his assessment of the city’s value, and Lasthenes had written it out on good paper, two copies.
    The first thing he was conscious of was the perfumed air, thick with heady incenses of a kind he had never smelled before; then his visual apparatus took over from his olfactory, and he gaped at walls of gold, a floor of gold, statues of gold, chairs and tables of gold. A second glance informed him that the gold was a tissue-thin overlay, but the room blazed like the sun. Two walls were covered in paintings of peculiar two-dimensional people and plants, rich in colors of every description. Except Tyrian purple. Of that,