Cleopatra and Antony by Diana Preston Read Free Book Online Page B

reclined on ebony couches, the men in two circles and the women in a third. * The diners leaned on their left hand with a cup of wine near their right alongside perfumed oil, perhaps of roses, to anoint their brows. Just as in Egypt, achieving the right ambient aroma was thought essential to conviviality. Dining room floors were often spread with aromatic foliage such as ferns and verbena and scented oils burned.
    The dinner menu survives. Among the hors d’oeuvres were sea urchins, raw oysters, mussels, thrushes baked under a thatch of asparagus, clams, loins of wild boar and roe deer and force-fed fowl. The main course included sows’ udders, boars’ heads, boiled teals, ducks, hares, fish quiches and more. *
    The account of the feast does not tell what wines were served but, though relatively abstemious himself, Caesar was a connoisseur who knew the value of wine to draw others into injudicious promises or confessions. At another feast, he astonished his guests because, as Pliny records, “he gave Falerian, Chian, Lesbian and Marmartine—the first time apparently that four types of wine were served [at such an event].”
    Pompey’s next military command was in 67 against pirates in the Mediterranean, who were becoming a major hazard to Roman trade. Within three months Pompey and his five hundred ships and 120,000 men had swept the pirates from the seas. Unsurprisingly, the next appointment he sought from and was granted by the Senate was in the east against Mithridates, who had followed up the limited incursions, made while Caesar was in Rhodes, with a full-scale invasion of Roman territory.
    In his previous campaigns Mithridates had ordered the massacre of some eighty thousand Roman men, women and children and had murdered a captured Roman governor by having his mouth wrenched open and molten gold from a crucible poured down his throat to show that the Roman desire for gold could only be slaked by killing Romans. Despite his setback at the hands of Sulla, Mithridates’ forces were strong once more. Nevertheless, Pompey defeated Mithridates in 66 and forced him into exile, where he died three years later. Ever the showman, Pompey appropriated from among Mithridates’ possessions a red cloak once said to have been worn by Alexander and in Pompey’s view an ideal garment to wear in his own Triumph.
    Pompey certainly did much to earn his sobriquet “the Great” during his time in the east, adding Syria and its great capital of Antioch, as well as Pontus, to the Roman provinces. He occupied Jerusalem, where he horrified the temple priests by entering the inner sanctum. Although he eventually withdrew from Jerusalem and Judaea, Roman rule, already establshed on Egypt’s western border, was surging ever closer to her eastern one. Of the three great successor states to Alexander’s empire—Macedonian, Seleucid and Egyptian—Egypt was now the only one remaining independent. Cleopatra’s father, Auletes, though no doubt congratulating himself for the aid he had sent Pompey and sycophantically and publicly toasting his success in Alexandria, must have wondered how much longer that would last.
    In Rome, Crassus had continued to finance any emerging leaders who might bolster his faction. Among these was Caesar. Both men gave some initial support to a near-destitute patrician called Catiline. However, in an attempt to win popular support over the heads of the Senate, Catiline began to proclaim wild programs for debt cancellation—an anathema to Crassus as Rome’s richest man, though perhaps less so to Caesar, himself heavily in debt. Senators became sufficiently worried that even the most patrician of them supported the new man Cicero against Catiline as one of the two consuls for 63. The gangling, stringy Cicero received the most votes, while the second consular post went to an ally of Crassus, not Catiline.
    Also in 63, Crassus backed Caesar for the post of high priest, or pontifex maximus—the top religious office