Read Online Antony and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online

current, was whiter than white, embroidered to display two entwined beast heads—a hooded serpent and a vulture—and a strange eye dripping a long black tear.
    Peacock feathers had been clustered everywhere, but nowhere more lushly than about a tall gold dais in front of the mast. On a throne sat a woman clad in a dress of peacock feathers, her head burdened with the same red and white crown as the figurehead man wore. Her shoulders sparkled with the jewels in a wide gold collar, and a broad girdle of the same kind was cinched about her waist. Crossed on her breast she carried a shepherd’s crook and a flail in gold worked with lapis blue. Her face was made up so heavily that it was quite impossible to see what she looked like; its expression was perfect impassivity.
    The ship passed him by closely enough to see how wide it was, and how wonderfully made; the deck was paved in green and blue faience tiles to match the roofs. A peacock ship, a peacock queen. Well, thought Antony, inexplicably angered, she will see who is cock of the walk in Tarsus!
    He took the bridge to the city at a gallop, tumbled off the horse at the door to the governor’s palace, and strode in shouting for his servants.
    “Toga and lictors, now !”
    So when the Queen sent her chamberlain, the eunuch Philo, to inform Marcus Antonius that she had arrived, Philo was told that Marcus Antonius was in the agora hearing cases on behalf of the fiscus, and could not see Her Majesty until the morrow.
     
     
    Such had actually been Antony’s intention for days; it had been formally posted on the tribunal in the agora, so when he took his place on the tribunal he saw what he had expected—a hundred litigants, at least that many advocates, several hundred spectators, and several dozen vendors of drinks, snacks, nibbles, parasols, and fans. Even in May, Tarsus was hot. For that reason his court was shaded by a crimson awning that read SPQR on fringed flaps every few feet around its margins. Atop the stone tribunal sat Antony himself on his ivory curule chair, with twelve crimson-clad lictors to either side of him and Lucilius at a table stacked with scrolls. The most novel actor in this drama was a hoary centurion who stood in one corner of the tribunal; he wore a shirt of gold scales, golden greaves, a chest loaded with phalerae, armillae, and torcs, and a gold helmet whose scarlet horsehair ruff spread sideways like a fan. But the chest loaded with decorations for valorous deeds wasn’t what cowed this audience. That lay in the Gallic longsword the centurion held between his hands, its tip resting on the ground. It reminded the citizens of Tarsus that Marcus Antonius owned imperium maius, and could execute anyone for anything. If he took it into his head to issue an execution order, then this centurion would carry it out on the spot. Not that Antony had any intention of executing a fly or a spider; easterners were used to being ruled by people who executed as capriciously as regularly, so why disillusion them?
    Some of the cases were interesting, some entertaining as well. Antony waded through them with the efficiency and detachment that all Romans seemed to possess, be they members of the proletariat or the aristocracy. A people who understood law, method, routine, discipline, though Antony was less dowered with these essentially Roman qualities than most. Even so, he attacked his task with vigor, and sometimes venom. A sudden stir in the crowd threw a litigant off balance just as he reached the point whereat he would pass his case over to the highly paid advocate at his side; Mark Antony turned his head, frowning.
    The crowd had parted, sighing in awe, to permit the passage of a small procession led by a nut-brown, shaven-headed man in a white dress, a fortune in gold chains around his neck. Behind him walked Philo the chamberlain in linen of blues and greens, face painted delicately, body glittering with jewels. But they were as nothing compared to the