Free Antony and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough Page A

Octavianus to feed Italia, and the less taxes the businessmen pay, the less money Octavianus has to buy land to settle the veterans. With the landowners stirring the pot, Octavianus will cook.”
    “Rome has built an empire on the people of Italia from north of the Padus River all the way to the tip of Bruttium. Hasn’t it occurred to you that in insisting that you be able to recruit troops in Italia, you’re actually saying that no other place can produce such excellent soldiers? But if the country starves, they too will starve.”
    “No, they won’t,” Antony said instantly. “The famine only drives them to re-enlist. It’s a help.”
    “Not to the women who bear the boys who will grow up into those excellent soldiers.”
    “They get paid, they send money home. The ones who starve are useless—Greek freedmen and old women.”
    Mentally exhausted, Cleopatra lay back and closed her eyes. Of the emotions that lead to murder she had intimate knowledge; her father had strangled his own eldest daughter to shore up his throne, and would have killed her had not Cha’em and Tach’a hidden her in Memphis as a growing child. But the very idea of deliberately drawing down famine and disease upon her people was utterly foreign to her. These feuding, passionate men possessed a ruthlessness that seemed to have no bounds—no wonder Caesar had died at their hands. Their own personal and familial prestige was more important than whole nations, and in that, they were closer to Mithridates the Great than they would have cared to hear. If it meant that an enemy of the family would perish, they would walk over a sea of dead. They still practiced the politics of a tiny city-state, having no concept, it seemed to her, that the tiny city-state had turned into the most powerful military and commercial machine in history. Alexander the Great had conquered more, but on his death it vanished as smoke does into a wide sky; the Romans conquered a bit here and a bit there, but gave what they had conquered to an idea named Rome, for the greater glory of that idea. And yet they could not see that Italia mattered more than personal feuds. Caesar used to say it to her all the time: that Italia and Rome were the same entity. But Marcus Antonius would not have agreed.
    However, she was a little closer to understanding what kind of man Marcus Antonius was. Ah, but too tired to prolong this evening! There would have to be more dinners, and if her cooks went insane dreaming up new dishes, then so be it.
    “Pray excuse me, Antonius. I am for bed. Stay as long as you like. Philo will look after you.”
    Next moment, she was gone. Frowning, Antony debated whether to go or stay, and decided to go. Tomorrow evening he would give a banquet for her. Odd little thing! Like one of those girls who starved themselves just at the age when they should be eating. Though they were anemic, weakly creatures, and Cleopatra was very tough. I wonder, he thought in sudden amusement, how Octavianus is coping with Fulvia’s daughter by Clodius? Now there’s a starved girl! No more meat on her than a gnat.
     
     
    Cleopatra’s invitation to a second dinner that evening came as Antony was setting out on the following day for the courts, where he knew the Queen would not present herself again. His friends were so full of the wonders of that banquet that he cut his breakfast of bread and honey short, arriving at the agora before any of the litigants had expected him. Part of him was still fulminating at the direction in which she had led the more serious conversation, and they had not broached the subject of whether she had sided with Cassius. That would keep a day or two, he supposed, but it did not augur well that clearly she was not intimidated.
    When he returned to the governor’s palace to bathe and shave in preparation for the evening’s festivities aboard Philopator , he found Glaphyra lying in wait for him.
    “Was I not asked last night?” she demanded in a