Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Tales of Classical Perversion: Cleopatra's Needle 80%? CW: It...

Narrator: We begin with a gargle amid that bed where has been entertained so many of the great men of history. 

(Anthony empties his bladder into Cleopatra's mouth, who delightedly gargles Anthony's micturation and then swallows.)

C: I do wish you would use the other end.

A: I.... need to grow bigger balls before I do that.

C: You need to grow bigger balls? I'm the one who's begging you to shit in my mouth!

A: How can you have a taste for that?

C: There's a lot you didn't know about Julie.

A: He? Liked to, farcockt in you?

C: No! He liked me doing it to him.

A: He liked... Fuck... If that ever got out?...

C: He didn't care... 

A: And you did it too?

C: I was curious! 

A: And you liked it??

C: It's not the most disgusting thing that's ever been in me. 

A: Alright, you need to be quiet.

(Anthony puts his phallus in Cleopatra's mouth and fucks it while Cleopatra makes noises in her throat 'GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW!) 

A: I'm telling you, the Briton girls don't make noises like that.

C: (talking while phallus still in mouth) "What noises do they make? 

A: Who? 

C: The Britons. 

A: I don't they even had sex before Rome got there. 

C: What about the Gauls?

A: What about who?

C: The Gauls.

A: Oh... they make even dirtier noises. 

C: The Germans?

A: They do dirtier things than you've ever done.

C: The Slavs?

A: They're too drunk to do much of anything...

C: The Israelites?

A: Depends on if it's before or after they're married...

C: What happens after they're married?

A: Apparently you never have sex again.

C: Why is that?

A: Jews seem to have a very love/hate relationship with sex.

C: Well they do punish sodomy.

A: What? (takes phallus out of mouth) 

C: The Jews, they punish sodomy.

A: Oh... yeah I heard something about that... So... now that I can hear what you're saying you fancy a bit of that right now?

C: What?

A: Sodomy!

C: Oh! I'd love it, you first though... (Cleopatra stands up to reveal she's wearing a wooden dildus) ... (speaking to the servant in the corner of the room) "Menefer where's the shaving cream?

M: The tub's on the bed right next to your other dildii." 

(Cleopatra starts stroking the dildus up and down with shaving cream) 

C: Octavia never did this for you right?

A: Never, but she never loved me. 

C: I'm playing the world's smallest lute for you." 

(Cleopatra sticks it in) 

A: Ah... ah... AHHHHHHHH THAT'S NO LUTE!...

C: You said the other one was too small!

(Cleopatra begins premensing his anus) 

A: THIS one's perfect!

C: HOW many ROman WHORES are THIS GIVing?

A: There's... buggery... in the love... that... can't be reckoned." 

C: (Cleopatra increases the speed) The BREAking OF so GREAT a THING should MAKE a GREATer CRACK!

A: AAAAAAAAAHHH AHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHH!" 

(Cleopatra pulls out) 

A: Not so quick my love or I very well may shit in your mouth. 

C: (Cleopatra unfastens the dildo) Why don't you take a taste of what I want you to do.

A: Does my lady so order it?

(Cleopatra shoves the dildo in Anthony's mouth and he throws up.) 

C: How was it?

A: Do it again.(Anthony begins to suck Cleopatra's dildus)

C: I needed protection against the Parthians, and you were never the diplomat in this relationship. 

A: (with dildus still in mouth) "And you liked it?

C: Marcus Antonius,... what's the worst thing you've ever tasted?" 

A: (Anthony raises his head away from the dildus) Probably this dish in Palestina, it's calves feet in jelly.

C: Oh! P'tcha. 

A: Yeah! That's right! Pitcha! Our accountant says the Israelites call it that because that's the noise they make after they taste it.

C: Tony, come on, seriously, is this the first time you ever vomited? 

A: After half my meals.

C: Have you ever bit into rotten food?

A: When my food taster sucks...

C: Have you ever tasted mud? Dried blood? 

A: Every battle drill.

C: When you were on your vineyard, did you ever get fertilizer in you mouth?

A: Pretty disgusting, sure.

C: Have you ever bit your tongue?

A: Oh that hurts more than a sword to the stomach.

C: Have you torn your Achilles?

A: No but I've torn plenty of others'.

C: Have you passed a kidney stone?

A: No but some senators pass them all the time. The vomitorium isn't fun those days.

C: You've clearly been burned.

A: Three times in the field.

C: Have you ever had a tooth ache?

A: Thank the gods, no. I hear that's the most painful thing on earth.

C: Alright, well I've experienced things far more painful than a toothache, and after a tooth ache, excramentum in your mouth is thrilling.

A: What does it taste like?

C: It tastes like shit. That's not the point.

A: What's the point?

C: The point is that you've just eaten the most disgusting thing known to man, you live to tell about it, and even if you smell awful, you're not in pain, and that's the best feeling on earth.

A: I don't know why, but I'm turned on right now... how about something more traditional? 

(Anthony puts his phallus into Cleopatra's vaginae while putting fingers in her anus, a hand clasped with all his might over her mouth against the pillow, and biting down hard on her nipples, she screams with what seems to be pleasure). 

(It would once again seem that the fragments we have are that of a greater metanarrative. In the first fragment, it would seem that Cleopatra is written as a kind of Egyptian whore, perhaps for a satyr within a Greek bawdy house, whereas the rest is a narrative of much more lofty sentiment. One might suppose this the narrative of an extremely ambitious epician in 5th Century Byzantium, and yet, while the original text prints this fragment in Greek letters, the words they spell are the common tongue of Ancient Egypt in thoroughly idiomatic 1st Century BC grammar. This circumstance is further complicated by the fact that the Egyptian court in principle spoke Greek. It is highly to be so doubted, particularly because it contravenes so much of the historical record, but however infinitesimal, there is a possibility that the rest of this tale may be none other than the authentic last testament Cleopatra herself before suicide in a letter to her children.

Dr. Richard Westenbach - Free University Berlin, 1952)

....I had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as no singing requirement. What I really loved was drawing, and even at eight was so passionate for theater that I drew elaborate stage sets and recited Antigone's monologue for the manager of the Royal Alexandrine Theater. I knew I was good, but actors at court would train for eighteen years, yet there was the company manager telling my father the Pharaoh that I displayed once-in-a-generation's talent. I have no idea if it was an artist's eye or an actor's lie, but I can't possibly have been that good, could I? Irregardless, the company affected such faith that I acted in a production of Euripides for my father's pleasure. It was onstage that General Pompey first saw me. 

The play was The Bacchae. Queen Agave was played by a man, but in the throne room of my father, I was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women. Pompey was in Egypt to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, to maintain ruse he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy the Pharaoh was paying not to attack. My father, Ptolemy XII, had been made extraordinarily rich by the investments of his court minister, Enoch-bar-Joseph, but our Egypt suffered dysfunction for a thousand years, and by the grace of Juno we are still a kingdom; but whether kingdom or fifedom, Egypt had neither the army nor the arms to fight Rome. My father, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey no less than half our fortune to refrain from attack, but after seeing The Bacchae, Pompey refused the offer. He had seen me onstage and what he really wanted was a weekend in my company. I was 9. 

My older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare my father shame at court, it was announced that Egypt's next co-sovereign died of a chill. I was thereupon forced to be wife to my older brother at 10. Eleven months later, my father died of that same chill... While my brother-husband was stupid, I'd always displayed all manner of scholastic aptitude, so it was decided that while he went off to sport and whor every day, I would be ferried down the Nile to be educated every day amid the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls, with the understanding that I would be the one true Pharaoh in all but name when I turned eighteen. To this day, the library and its glories are my truest husband. 

For six years I studied seventeen hours every day. Any assignment incomplete in allotted time would result in beating. I learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. I spoke Greek with family and court and by servants was fluent in Coptic from first speech. I was fluent in Latin by eleven, Nubian by twelve, Aramaic by thirteen, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. I was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12, and the entire last third of the Iliad. I must have read three hundred critical commentaries on them end to end.

And along with useless literary merit, I learned all of the mythology of our pagan world, both the Grecian and Egyptian. My tutor instructed me: "Think of the Gods not as beings apart from us but your ancestors and friends whose daily company you keep. They are your only true peers who may understand the divine burdens of thronely life." He also gave me the literature of other countries: their philosophies, their sacred texts, their theologies, theogmonies, and theophanies.  

My tutor, Philostratus, was a eunuch. Yet when I was sixteen he cornered me in a library stack: "My crownest princess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." I was married already for six years, deflowered for seven, briefly a mother at twelve. Never had I known happiness either connubial or conjugal. What other option had I more attractive? Philostratus was far more husband to me than my brother. "But you're a eunuch, how can you possibly instruct me?" "All the more way I can." 

My education effectively ended at sixteen when, rather than learn history, we embarked upon adventures which, unburdened by the need for ejaculate or care for pregnancy, engaged sexual congress for those seventeen hours a day.  This ugly, fat, sweaty man, twice and a half my size, finished my education, but had I learned history rather than sex, we might have outfoxed the Roman burden. I was not for a moment attracted to Philostratus,  I will not deny that the sensations he imparted made me hungrily curious, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.' He was, as always, the most thorough tutor; knowledgeable and authoritative. He taught from a rare Indian textbook and approached every act as a further lesson in Archemedean mechanics and Euclidean geometry. 

It was not until eighteen when Philostartus was caught in flagrante delicto with me. My brother, for my tutor's lustful presumption, impaled Philostratus upon a spike from his anus to his mouth. In the fight that followed between me and my husband, I came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and he developed a gangrenous infection that spread around his body for nine months. Across the palace I could hear my brother's screams, and it gave me more pleasure than two years in Philostratus's chambers ever could. 

Ancient custom required me to marry to marry my second brother, then the ten year old I was when I was first married. I refused custom, and my refusal launched a civil war.  Many Egyptians at court considered my refusal to marry my brother the worst kind of dishonor. Those tongues in opposition to me wagged that never would a Pharaohess issue such a brazen demand had not been Egyptian women so spoiled by equality and education. 

Egyptian women were first in the world in liberation, and the first to be slaughtered and raped in the civil war which followed. It is said th...

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....e I mounted the Pharaohship as sole ruler, my brother's friends at court never ceased in their toximaic comments that 'our new Pharaoh looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. It was at this moment I realized that as a woman in a man's world, I had to cultivate that which women have, and as I had innately less than others, must make more of less. 

I went to the official Pharaonic tailor, Joseph-bar-David. He and his assistant, Jonathan-bar-Joseph, lived together above their office, and day and night they slaved to find outfits worthy of a monarch. They importuned me to let them see me naked so that they could accent all my best features. I had always worn the traditional androgyne clothing of an Egyptian heir, even after becoming queen in all but office. When gazing at me nude, they affected great gasps and temeritously told me I was hiding Babylonic features behind such a baggy dump of an outfit. 

They began by design for a headdress of gold. I will not deny I danced naked in the gold head dress at night in view of my obsidian mirror. It was also in view of the servants, and I made it a point of seeing if I could arouse the manservants keeping watch in my room. Those servants I found pleasing I bestowed with remunerative favor. And yet the headdress was so heavy that my upper back and neck aches as though I'm Atlas with the world on my shoulders. 

Joseph proceeded to design me a series of broad necklaces, broad so each could be bedecked with some of the largest jewels in the Pharaonic palace, each jewel worn by a different previous Pharaoh. Each of them cut into my skin like lacerations, and every night a servant had to apply spirit of camphor on my collar. Thereon were the sashes around the waste of finest raiment, deliberately long and phallic, reminding my subjects that this was no mere woman, each embroidered by a different geometric pattern to represent my educative years in the Library of Alexandria. I'd get them caught and trip, and every subject had to pretend not to laugh, and every week I had to resist the urge to bury them in sand. Afterward a series of capes, each in the color of a different noble house. Every day I would enter with the colored cape of whatever house currently held my greatest favor. So many noblemen sacrificed their lives in attempt to gain it. Some deaths were irritants I welcomed, some were of friends I loved. And finally, the dresses, the gowns, the robes, the frocks. Some revealing legs up to the pelvis, some revealing cleavage up to the areola; all of them hugging my form like skin. I would come home every night and the material would inevitably chafe, leaving skinmarks, peeling skin, and rashes that would itch every minute of the day. And the shoes: oh Isis those shoes; I'm thirty-nine now, I'd be lucky still to walk before I'm forty five. 

And finally, the makeup: the cake of foundation, the eyeliner that stretched halfway to my hair, the lengthened eyelashes,  the earings that literally so stretched my ears that I always have to wear my hair long and never can braid it, the eyelids weighed down by led dye. My eyes have burned every day for more than twenty years and in recent years, I've lost ability to clearly see. 

Through the beginning of that redressing process, Philostratus admonished me for 'lewd ostentation', claiming that a woman sovereign particularly must be modest lest she attract envy; yet no tongue thereafter called me a witch. Yes, I was proud of how I looked. It a cynical ploy of strumpery, but it was also a manner of reminding subjects at court that indeed, their Pharaoh was woman, but she was also a goddess. No mortal could endure this regimen of beau....

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...was Caesar who arrived when I was 20 and brokered peace between brother and sister. Caesar, having heard of Pompey's exploit, guessed from my refusal to marry the one act that would give me more pleasure than any: in an immediate private audience he requested after disembarkation, he presented me with the most splendid gift; beneath the present an engraved silver platter from Brittania, above the bounty an immaculately preserved Egyptian embroidery from the 18th dynasty; the gift was Pompey's head.

Caesar looked like a phallus. He was 51, tall and so thin he could walk through a lyre; completely bald on top with half his hair ring combed forward in a manner more absurd than British stone henges he'd recount; yet legends of female conquests were so manifold that I doubted a homely, witchy girl like me merited romantic affection; yet immediately I felt the heave of his eros - not from loins but from heart, and within fifteen seconds understood why women more beautiful than I thought him tantalizing.

The appeal was that Caesar is every woman's dream of a husband. Caesar was largely raised by women, whom by his fifties were all dead and he yearned to resurrect their company and acceptance. What enticed us was that women felt his absolute equal. He spoke openly of his many ailments, had no fear to cry or panic in front of women, and no reservation for bequeathing all those sexual services men of high station considered degrading, and most importantly, he listened to women as complete conversational partner. He considered our insights, and while never hesitating to refute them did so with such nuance that we understood he apprehended every word we said. Upon men he imposed his full might's authority, with women he shared his vulnerability's full burden. 

He'd surely in mind to bed me from moment of Nile embarkation, but with Caesar, women did not seduce nor he them, he simply knew his ability to converse as peer would receive reward. In his company, women learned what he'd tell no man. He'd inevitably explain he thought ambition the worst of all burdens; one pursued as joyless compulsion. Even as he chased the unsat throne atop the Roman world, he knew he simultaneously chased death and martyrdom. To Caesar, empire and imperial rule were the only ways to save Rome from its Senate's corruption and stupidity, and dying the horrible collapse of all world powers. He loved Rome truly but believed it declining to barbaric demise. To save Rome, so said Caesar, he had to destroy it. Putting his name into glory and history simply was his reward for the gratitude he felt himself owed, like a doctor to a patient he saves. 

Yet even as he loved women, he played them like a pan pipe. Everything he said was true, yet none of it was. Was he ever truly attracted to me, or was I allure to him simply because of my descent from the true love of Caesar's life: Alexander the Great? Woman's wisdom was Caesar's greatest weapon, his greatest resource, his greatest teacher. We watched powerlessly as man after man fell to Caesar. Caesar would enter land after land the conqueror, take the defeated king's wife into confidence, and she'd divulge every secret of what made her husband a mediocre king.  

 Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw the gorgeous ways kings lived; the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only could a man formed by Rome's censure of luxury. He was, like all Romans, born into austerity and wanted to die drowning in raiment. He wished to be king because he knew himself the smartest of Romans, and therefore best fit to know what Rome needed. Cicero also thought himself the smartest who knew best, but the liberal hypocrite inveighed against Caesar and me all the gorgeous corruption which his manner demonstrated more loudly than Caesar ever could. 

Cicero was that type who always flourishes amid power's corruption: the higher the ideals, the lower the reality. Even as he inveighed against Caesar's 'rich young slut' he combed Rome's drawing room nurseries for the youngest heiress he could find, and when he quickly discovered the girl inadequate to appreciate his magnificence, he separated from her with no more regret than the hundreds of wh....

.....Cicero determined to hate me because I would upset the balance of a world he mastered. In his mind, Caesar and Cicero was a truer partnership than Caesar and Pompey: Cicero master of the spirit; Caesar master of the corpse - but a woman who shows herself a capable writer and politician? She might as well be declared a master greater than he for how greatly it upset the knowledge of a man alleged to know all. Cicero extolled virtue as though he was virtue herself, but he was everything the Rome hated; even those who loved him hated him. 

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...Caesar clearly decided from beginning that I'd rule and my brother a mere figurehead, and the advisors knew it; for by the time I came to court the next morning, Roman soldiers subdued and arrested my older brother-husband's advisors, all of whom fought on my younger brother's pliable side. They all had shown up to greet Caesar that morning with knives in their tunics. 

Upon my entrance, Caesar related all that had happened, and left their fates to me. I remembered the story Philostratus imparted to me of how King David pardoned enemies like Shimei, I decided to pardon them. But remembering how King Saul took it upon himself so many times to murder David, I decided to find out who lead this conspiracy. I had each of them bound, took each into a private room where as Caesar and my brother watched, thrashed them all on the back with 60 lashes, blood everywhere upon my white dress until it was a smock. Within ten lashes they each confessed the names of the organizers: Omari and Chisisi. Caesar smiled the whole time, my brother cried. I told the Romans to dispose of them with their worst death, Omari and Chisisi were nailed by the extremities on planks of perpendicular wood in the desert, where the sun baked them and the vultures ate the....


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...Was it all a play? The father of my tutor, Philostratus, was, in fact, a Judean from Yavneh named Philo. a philosopher himself who taught all his children and grandchildren. Philo was of no school nor party; he believed that all ideas were true, the truth is without end, and all ideas emanated from a totalizing celestial source stretching from the heavens to the earth, and therefore one can neither ascertain people's complete motives, either by formal ideas as Plato would have it, or substance as Aristotle would. To assume one knows the truth in its whole is the presumption to assume the role of the gods. Caesar is now a god, and I therefore I know as little of Caesar's motives as my mortal self knows of my own....

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For, you see, my dearest children, then as now, we'd birthed the new age of feminism. Women were educated for school, women could work, women could fight, women could sue at court, women could judge, and women could lead. Our empire was always the vanguard of women's progress, but the progress was accelarated by one development above all others: the re-arrival of the Judean peoples. 

We may be Greek, but we feel pain as Egyptians, and Egypt traces her decline to the Hebrew exodus, after which we no longer had our underclass doing all that work for which Egyptians demand such exorbitant pay. Yet who in their right mind prefers the Egypt of Amenhotep and Tuthenkamen to the Egypt of the Ptolemys and Cleopatras? Rome has the soldiers but we have the books. Greece produces the scholars but we produce the art that decorates their offices. Antioch runs the trade but we Egyptians buy all when Rome saves. Modern life is run by Rome, studied by Greece, administered by Antioch, but life pays tribute to Egypt; its capital Alexandria the world's chiefest joy. 

And how? Because the Jews never really left. From earliest establishment of a Judean kingdom in Palestine, Kings David and Solomon re-established good relations with neighbors with whom so much history shared. Hundreds of years thereafter, the closest of allies: our soldiers fought the same wars, traded the same goods; heard the same musicians, watched the same theater companies; the same artists drew our courts, the same tutors taught our scholars. Egypt's had many allies, but the relationship to the Jewish people was built by stone that never moved. 

And every time there was new instability in Judea, more Jews arrived on our shores. Six centuries ago with the assassination of Governor Gedalia, ten thousand Jews arrived in Alexandria by single caravan. Ten thousand became the tens of thousands, tens of thousands a hundred thousand, then two hundred, three hundred, and finally seven-hundred fifty thousand in Alexandria alone. In Egypt they once were slaves, now they became masters, often beloved by their servants; overlords who ran the country for ten generations of predecessors and ancestors, chamberlains who ran our courts; landowners who administered our land more competently than any Egyptian taskmaster, farmers who worked twice as hard, generals willing to lead our armies' charge in combat and soldiers on our borders willing to die for Egypt twice. Where Luxor once accorded them slavery, Alexandria made Jews free, and Jews loved Egypt more than any Egyptian. If Egypt stood while Assyria and Babylon and Persia fell, it's because we welcomed Jews to an extent no ancient empire did, and they repaid our welcome with prosperity so unlike that of Ancient Egypt; not the totalitarian prosperity of an overlord worshipped in cult, but equalizing, egalitarian prosperity. And from this prosperity we created new justice, where which Egyptian women claimed all these rights we take for granted. 

We still have so much further to go. We can be all those things, but so many of us are not. We are such a marginalized minority in every facet of life but Pharaohdom. Women are just 7% of landowners, farmers, soldiers, shepherds, local councilmen and judges, and all women but me have inferior positions at court and half my enoblements of women are met with court veto. And of course, whatever the job of women, they are paid a fraction of men doing the same. Gaia herself a goddess, and not even she is honored enough that progeny in her image are allowed a fraction of men's dignitas. And still men's prosperity against women is as bounteous as the Nile banks against the desert.  

I too am a god but not even a god can raise the position of women if she is a woman herself. I am Pharaoh and daughter of Pharaoh, yet I could not shield myself from forced marriage and rape. We are so far from equality yet so very close. Who cannot believe that a limitless future for women would not be on the horizon if we do what must be done? 

Every horoscope says the same: a new era dawns now. You feel it as surely as I. Rome shall rule then decline as every empire does; but other Empires rule their corners, Rome will rule the whole sphere. Its might will unite us all: by government, by language, roads, culture, and fashion. Rome's beliefs will be the world's beliefs, Rome's dogma the world's, Rome's edicts unbreakable law; and when Rome declines, what then? 

There is another side to these Jews, one that continually manifests itself in its history's long turbulence. One that for decades after their liberation from us, conquered and killed its neighbors down to the last man, woman and child. One that, having attained enlightened prosperity, threw off their Solomonic wisdom for the sake of the very god who inspired their achievements. One that threw out our Greeks when they came in peace to improve Jewish life just as Jews improved ours. One that believes women a mere helpmeet to men and husbands created to rule over us. One that believes an excellent wife rarer than jewels. One that believes it better to live in the desert than a house with a quarrelsome woman. Jews are quick to vengeance as to mercy, they are as turbulent as the mind of the jealous god to whom they bow. 

When chaos reigns, we all turn to gods, but when Rome dissolves in chaos, we all will turn to the same gods and when order is restored, it will be the same gods throughout the world, and for all time; but no god can ensure order as the Jewish god can: one god; eternal, omniscient, all powerful, as judgemental as the empire who imposes it, as searing in his anger as men are to quarrelsome women. 

The higher the ideals, the lower the reality. Whomever comes after Rome will adapt the Jewish god as the god for the world, for all places at all times, a god who knows all actions and all thoughts, who can control people even within their minds. For all their contributions to Egypt and the world, the world will be better off without these people. Whatever Rome does in response, it is imperative that you annihilate every Jewish person in Egypt down to the youngest infant, then march on Israel to do the same. It is worth the deaths on your conscience, it is worth the death of Egypt, it is worth the death of all humankind to prevent this future, where 99 out of every hundred men shall be lower than dirt, and therefore 99 out of every hundred women still lower. All the progress of women, just a mirage in time's sand; all our rights stripped, all our dignity violated. 

My great-uncle, Ptolemy Lazarus, tried to re-enslave the Hebrews, but that very dysfunctional great-grandmother Cleopatra III stopped him. Everywhere Lazarus is thought a villain of Egyptian history, but he did not go far enough. He thought Egypt could be restored to former glory, but Egypt is not the world's future. Slavery is the world's future, and worldwide slavery the Jews' revenge upon the world. 

I was weak. Jews were our friends, mentors, allies, they only seemed to mean well at court and in business.  Whether Jews will be the rulers or ruled like the rest of us is irrelevant. Their ideas must be stopped before they take hold, and it can only be stopped by their immediate deaths. Whether any of you knows it, whether any Roman knows it, whether any Jew knows it, I know it, and the Jewish god knows it. Whether Jews are the rulers or ruled like the rest of us, the world will be at eternal war with all that Judea represents. 

I have raised you all to value women, to respect them always, to fear them when appropriate, and to advocate for all their dignity, rights, and futures. To honor our futures, you must annihilate the Jewish people. 

May you live forever,

Your Mother, Queen Cleopatra, The Goddess, The Younger, Father Loving, and Fatherland Loving

Sunday, February 12, 2023

Tales of Classical Perversion - Cleopatra's Needle - Much More - CW: That Beginning....

  We begin with a gargle amid that bed where has been entertained so many of the great men of history. 

(Anthony empties his bladder into Cleopatra's mouth, who delightedly gargles Anthony's micturation and then swallows.)

"I do wish you would use the other end." "I.... need to grow bigger balls before I do that." "You need to grow bigger balls? I'm the one who's begging you to shit in my mouth!" "How can you have a taste for that?" "There's a lot you didn't know about Julie." "He? Liked to, farcockt in you?" " No! He liked me doing it to him." "He liked... Fuck... If that ever got out?..." "He didn't care..." "How could you let him do that???" "It's not the most disgusting thing that's ever been in me." "Alright, you need to be quiet." 

(Anthony puts his phallus in Cleopatra's mouth and fucks it while Cleopatra makes noises in her throat 'GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW!) 

"I'm telling you, the Briton girls don't make noises like that." (talking while phallus still in mouth) "What noises do they make?" "Who?" "The Britons." "I don't they even had sex before Rome got there." "What about the Gauls?" "What about who?" "The Gauls." "Oh... they make even dirtier noises." "The Germans?" "They do dirtier things than you've ever done." "The Slavs?" "They're too drunk to do much of anything..." "The Israelites?" "Depends on if it's before or after they're married..." "What happens after they're married?" "Apparently you never have sex again." "Why is that?" "Jews seem to have a very love/hate relationship with sex." "Well they do punish sodomy." "What?" (takes phallus out of mouth) "The Jews, they punish sodomy." "Oh... yeah I heard something about that... So... now that I can hear what you're saying you fancy a bit of that right now?" "What?" "Sodomy!" "Oh! I'd love it, you first though... (Cleopatra stands up to reveal she's wearing a wooden dildus) ... (speaking to the servant in the corner of the room) "Menefer where's the shaving cream?"  "The tub's on the bed right next to your other dildii." (Cleopatra starts stroking the dildus up and down with shaving cream) "Octavia never did this for you right?" "Never, but she never loved me" "I'm playing the world's smallest lute for you." (Cleopatra sticks it in) "Ah... ah... AHHHHHHHH THAT'S NO LUTE!..." "You said the other one was too small!" "THIS one's perfect!" "HOW many ROman WHORES are THIS GIVing?" "There's... buggery... in the love... that... can't be reckoned." (Cleopatra increases the speed) "The BREAking OF so GREAT a THING should MAKE a GREATer CRACK!" "AAAAAAAAAHHH AHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHH!" (Cleopatra pulls out) "Not so quick my love or I very well may shit in your mouth." (Cleopatra unfastens the dildo) "Why don't you take a taste of what I want you to do." "Does my lady so order it?" (Cleopatra shoves the dildo in Anthony's mouth and he throws up.) 

"How was it?"

"Do it again." 

(Anthony begins to suck Cleopatra's dildus)

"I needed protection against the Parthians, and you were never the diplomat in this relationship." 

(with dildus still in mouth) "And you liked it?" "Marcus Antonius,... what's the worst thing you've ever tasted?" (Anthony raises his head away from the dildus) "Probably this dish in Palestina, it's calves feet in jelly." "Oh! P'tcha. Yeah" "That's right! Pitcha! Our accountant says the Israelites call it that because that's the noise they make after they taste it." "Tony, come on, seriously, have you ever vomited?" "After half my meals." "Have you ever bit into rotten food?" "When my food taster sucks..." "Have you ever tasted mud? Dried blood?" "Every battle drill." "When you were on your vineyard, did you ever get fertilizer in you rmouth?" "Pretty disgusting, sure." "Have you ever bit your tongue?" "Oh that hurts more than a sword to the stomach." "Have you torn your Achilles?" "No but I've torn plenty of others'." "Have you passed a kidney stone?" "No but some senators pass them all the time. The vomitorium doesn't sound fun those days." "You've clearly been burned." "Three times in the field." "Have you ever had a tooth ache?" "Thank the gods, no. I hear that's the most painful thing on earth." "Alright, well I've experienced things far more painful than a toothache, and after a tooth ache, excramentum in your mouth is thrilling." "What does it taste like?" "It tastes like shit. That's not the point." "What's the point?" "The point is that you've just eaten the most disgusting thing known to man, you live to tell about it, and even if you smell awful, you're not in pain, and that's the best feeling on earth." "I don't know why, but I'm turned on right now... how about something more traditional?" 

(Anthony puts his phallus into Cleopatra's vaginae while putting fingers in her anus, a hand clasped with all his might over her mouth against the pillow, and biting down hard on her nipples, she screams with what seems to be pleasure). 

(It would once again seem that the fragments we have are that of a greater metanarrative. In the first fragment, it would seem that Cleopatra is written as a kind of Egyptian whore, perhaps for a satyr within a Greek bawdy house, whereas the rest is a narrative of much more lofty sentiment. One might suppose this the narrative of an extremely ambitious epician in 5th Century Byzantium, and yet, the original text prints this fragment within the common tongue of Ancient Egypt in thoroughly idiomatic 1st Century BC grammar. This circumstance is further complicated by the fact that the Egyptian court in principle spoke Greek. It is highly to be so doubted, particularly because it contravenes so much of the historical record, but however infinitesimal, there is a possibility that the rest of this tale may be none other than the authentic last testament Cleopatra herself before suicide in a letter to her children.

Dr. Richard Westenbach - Free University Berlin, 1952)

....I had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as I wasn't required to sing. What I really loved was drawing, and even at eight was so passionate for theater that I drew elaborate stage sets and recited Antigone's monologue for the manager of the Royal Alexandrine Theater. I knew I was a good actress, but actors at court would train for eighteen years, and there was the company manager telling my father, the Pharaoh, that I displayed a once-in-a-generation actor's talent. I have no idea if it was an artist's eye or an actor's lie, but I cannot possibly have been that good an actress, could I?

Irregardless, the company affected such faith that I acted in a production of Euripides for my father's pleasure. It was onstage that General Pompey first saw me. 

The play was The Bacchae. Queen Agave was played by a man, but in the throne room of my father, I was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women. 

Pompey was in Egypt to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, to maintain the ruse that he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy the Pharaoh was paying not to attack him. My father, Ptolemy XII, had been made extraordinarily rich by the investments of his court minister, Enoch-bar-Joseph, but our Egypt suffered dysfunction for a thousand years, and by the grace of Juno we are still a kingdom; but whether kingdom or fifedom, Egypt had neither the army nor the arms to fight Rome. My father, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey no less than half our fortune to refrain from attack, but after seeing The Bacchae, Pompey refused the offer. He had seen me onstage and what he really wanted was a weekend in my company.... I was 9. 

My older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare my father shame at court, it was announced that Egypt's next co-sovereign died of a chill. I was thereupon forced to be wife to my older brother at 10. Eleven months later, my father died of that same chill... While my brother-husband was stupid, I'd always displayed all manner of scholastic aptitude, so it was decided that while he went off to sport and whor every day, I would be ferried down the Nile to be educated every day amid the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls, with the understanding that I would be the one true Pharaoh in all but name when I turned eighteen. To this day, the library and its glories are my truest husband. 

For six years I studied seventeen hours every day. Any assignment incomplete in allotted time would result in beating. I learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. I spoke Greek with family and court and by servants was fluent in Coptic from first speech. I was fluent in Latin by eleven, Nubian by twelve, Aramaic by thirteen, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. I was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12, and the entire last third of the Iliad. I must have read three hundred critical commentaries on them end to end.

And along with useless literary merit, I learned all of the mythology of our pagan world, both the Grecian and Egyptian. My tutor instructed me: "Think of the Gods not as beings apart from us but your ancestors and friends whose daily company you keep. They are your only true peers who may understand the divine burdens of thronely life." He also gave me the literature of other countries: their philosophies, their sacred texts, their theologies, theogmonies, and theophanies.  

My tutor, Philostratus, was a eunuch. Yet when I was sixteen he cornered me in a library stack: "My crownest princess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." I was married already for six years, deflowered for seven, briefly a mother at twelve. Never had I known happiness either connubial or conjugal. What other option had I more attractive? Philostratus was far more husband to me than my brother. "But you're a eunuch, how can you possibly instruct me?" "All the more way I can." 

My education effectively ended at sixteen when, rather than learn history, we embarked upon adventures which, unburdened by the need for ejaculate or care for pregnancy, engaged sexual congress for those seventeen hours a day.  This ugly, fat, sweaty man, twice and a half my size, finished my education, but had I learned history rather than sex, we might have outfoxed the Roman burden. I was not for a moment attracted to Philostratus,  I will not deny that the sensations he imparted made me hungrily curious, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.' He was, as always, the most thorough tutor; knowledgeable and authoritative. He taught from a rare Indian textbook and approached every act as a further lesson in Archemedean mechanics and Euclidean geometry. 

It was not until eighteen when Philostartus was caught in flagrante delicto with me. My brother, for my tutor's lustful presumption, impaled Philostratus upon a spike from his anus to his mouth. In the fight that followed between me and my husband, I came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and he developed a gangrenous infection that spread around his body for nine months. Across the palace I could hear my brother's screams, and it gave me more pleasure than two years in Philostratus's chambers ever could. 

Ancient custom required me to marry to marry my second brother, then the ten year old I was when I was first married. I refused custom, and my refusal launched a civil war.  Many Egyptians at court considered my refusal to marry my brother the worst kind of dishonor. Those tongues in opposition to me wagged that never would a Pharaohess issue such a brazen demand had not been Egyptian women so spoiled by equality and education. 

Egyptian women were first in the world in liberation, and the first to be slaughtered and raped in the civil war which followed. It is said that....

-------------------------------------------

....Before I mounted the Pharaohship as sole ruler, my brother's friends at court never ceased in their toximaic comments that 'our new Pharaoh looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. It was at this moment I realized that as a woman in a man's world, I had to cultivate that which women have, and as I had innately less than other women, I had to make more of less. 

I went to the official Pharaonic tailor, Joseph-bar-David. He and his assistant, Jonathan-bar-Joseph, lived together above their office, and day and night they slaved to find outfits worthy of a monarch. They importuned me to let them see me naked so that they could accent all my best features. I had always worn the traditional androgene clothing of an Egyptian heir, even after becoming queen in all but office. When gazing at me nude, they affected great gasps and temeritously told me I was hiding Babylonic features behind such a baggy dump of an outfit. 

They began by design for a headdress of gold. I will not deny I danced naked in the gold head dress at night in view of my obsidian mirror. It was also in view of the servants, and I made it a point of seeing if I could arouse the manservants keeping watch in my room. Those servants I found pleasing I bestowed with remunerative favor. And yet the headdress was so heavy that my upper back and neck aches as though I'm Atlas with the world on my shoulders. 

Joseph proceeded to design me a series of broad necklaces, broad so each could be bedecked with some of the largest jewels in the Pharaonic palace, each jewel worn by a different previous Pharaoh. Each of them cut into my skin like lacerations, and every night a servant had to apply spirit of camphor on my collar. Thereon were the sashes around the waste of finest raiment, deliberately long and phallic, reminding my subjects that this was no mere woman, each embroidered by a different geometric pattern to represent my educative years in the Library of Alexandria. I'd get them caught and trip, and every subject had to pretend not to laugh, and every week I had to resist the urge to bury them in sand. Afterward a series of capes, each in the color of a different noble house. Every day I would enter with the colored cape of whatever house currently held my greatest favor. So many noblemen sacrificed their lives in attempt to gain it. Some deaths were irritants I welcomed, some were of friends I loved. And finally, the dresses, the gowns, the robes, the frocks. Some revealing legs up to the pelvis, some revealing cleavage up to the areola; all of them hugging my form like skin. I would come home every night and the material would inevitably chafe, leaving skinmarks, peeling skin, and rashes that would itch every minute of the day. And the shoes: oh Isis those shoes; I'm thirty-nine now, I'd be lucky still to walk before I'm forty five. 

And finally, the makeup: the cake of foundation, the eyeliner that stretched halfway to my hair, the lengthened eyelashes,  the earings that literally so stretched my ears that I always have to wear my hair long and never can braid it, the eyelids weighed down by led dye. My eyes have burned every day for more than twenty years and in recent years, I've lost ability to clearly see. 

Through the beginning of that redressing process, Philostratus admonished me for 'lewd ostentation', claiming that a woman sovereign particularly must be modest lest she attract envy; yet no tongue thereafter called me a witch. Yes, I was proud of how I looked. It a cynical ploy of strumpery, but it was also a manner of reminding subjects at court that indeed, their Pharaoh was woman, but she was also a goddess. No mortal could endure this regimen of beauty. 

---------------------------

It was Caesar who arrived when I was 20, and brokered the peace between my brother and me. Caesar, having heard of all Pompey's exploits, guessed from my refusal to marry the one thing that would give me more pleasure than any other: and in an immediate private audience he requested after disembarking from his ship, he presented me with the most splendid gift; beneath the present an engraved silver platter from Brittania, above the present an immaculately preserved Egyptian embroidery from the 18th dynasty; the gift was Pompey's head.

Caesar looked like a phallus. He was 51, tall and so thin he could walk through a lyre; completely bald on top with half his ring of hair combed forward in a manner more absurd than the British stone henges he would recount. Yet legends of his female conquests were so manifold that I doubted a homely, witchy girl like me would merit romantic affection. Yet I immediately felt the heave of his eros; not from the loins but from the heart, and within fifteen seconds I understood why women far more beautiful than I thought him tantalizing.

The appeal was that Caesar was every woman's dream of a husband. What enticed us was that amid his company, he made us his absolute equals. He had no fear to cry or panic in front of women, no reservation for bequeathing all those sexual services men of high station considered degrading, and most importantly, he listened to women as a complete conversational partner. He considered our insights, and while never hesitating to refute them did so with such nuance that we understood he apprehended every word of which we said. Upon men he imposed his authority's full might, with women he shared the full burdens of his vulnerability. 

Women's wisdom was Caesar's greatest weapon, his greatest resource, his greatest teacher. We watched powerlessly as man after man fell to Caesar's defeat. Caesar would enter land after land the conqueror, take the fallen king's wife into confidence, and she would divulge every secret of what made her husband a bad king.  

He'd surely had in mind to bed me from the moment he embarked from the Nile, but with Caesar, women did not seduce and he did not seduce them, he simply knew his ability to converse and listen as a peer would be rewarded. In his company, women learned what he would tell no man. He'd inevitably explain he thought ambition the worst of all burdens; one he pursued as joyless compulsion. Even as he chased the unsat throne atop the Roman world, he knew he simultaneously chased death and martyrdom. To Caesar, empire and imperial rule were the only ways to keep Rome from dying the horrible collapse of all empires. To save Rome, so said Caesar, he had to destroy it. He loved Rome truly but believed it declining to barbaric demise. If he put his name into glory and history amid the process, it was simply his reward of gratitude he felt himself owed, like a doctor to a patient he saves. Yet even as he loved women, he played them like a pan pipe. Everything he said was true, yet none of it was. Was he ever truly attracted to me, or was I allure to him simply because of my descent from the true love of Caesar's life: Alexander the Great? 

Caesar had clearly decided from the beginning that I would be rule and my brother a mere figurehead, and the advisors knew it; because when I came to court the next morning, Roman soldiers had subdued and arrested my older brother-husband's advisors, all of whom fought on my younger brother's pliable side. They had all shown up that morning to greet Caesar with knives in their tunics. 

Upon my entrance, Caesar related all that had happened, and left their fates to me. I remembered the story Philostratus imparted to me of how King David pardoned enemies like Shimei, I decided to pardon them. But remembering how King Saul took it upon himself so many times to murder David, I decided to find out who lead this conspiracy. I had each of them bound, took each into a private room where as Caesar and my brother watched, thrashed them all on the back with 60 lashes, blood everywhere upon my white dress until it was a smock. Within ten lashes they each confessed the names of the organizers: Omari and Chisisi. Caesar smiled the whole time, my brother cried. I told the Romans to dispose of them with their worst death, Omari and Chisisi were nailed upon two planks of perpendicular wood in the desert, where the sun baked them and the vultures could eat them even as they lived. 


-----------------------------------------

...Was it all a play? The father of my tutor, Philostratus, was, in fact, a Judean from Yavneh named Philo. a philosopher himself who taught all his children and grandchildren. Philo was of no school nor party; he believed that all ideas were true, the truth is without end, and all ideas emanated from a totalizing celestial source stretching from the heavens to the earth, and therefore one can neither ascertain people's complete motives, either by formal ideas as Plato would have it, or substance as Aristotle would. To assume one knows the truth in its whole is the presumption to assume the role of the gods. Caesar is now a god, and I therefore I know as little of Caesar's motives as my mortal self knows of my own....

-----------------------------------

 Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw the gorgeous ways kings lived; the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only could a man formed by Rome's censure of luxury. 


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For, you see, my dearest children, then as now, we'd birthed the new age of feminism. Women were educated for school, women could work, women could fight, women could sue at court, women could judge, and women could lead. Our empire was always the vanguard of women's progress, but the progress was accelarated by one development above all others: the re-arrival of the Judean peoples. 

We may be Greek, but we feel pain as Egyptians, and Egypt traces her decline to the Hebrew exodus, after which we no longer had our underclass doing all that work for which Egyptians demand such exorbitant pay. 

And yet the Jews never really left. From the earliest establishment of a Kingdom in Judea, the Kings David and Solomon re-established good relations with neighbors for whom so much history was shared. For hundreds of years thereafter, the closest of allies: our soldiers fought the same wars and traded the same goods. We heard the same musicians, watched the same theater companies, and the same artists drew our courts. Egypt's had many allies, but the relationship to the Jewish people was built by stone that never moved. 

And every time there was new instability in Judea, more Jews arrived on our shores. Six centuries ago with the assassination of Governor Gedalia, ten thousand Jews arrived in Alexandria by single caravan. Ten thousand became the tens of thousands, tens of thousands a hundred thousand, then two hundred, three hundred; and where they once were slaves, they became masters, often beloved by their servants; overlords who ran the country for our predecessors and ancestors, chamberlains who ran our courts; landowners who administered our land more competently than any Egyptian taskmaster, farmers who worked twice as hard, generals willing to lead their armies' charge in combat and soldiers on our borders willing to die for Egypt twice. Where Ancient Egypt once accorded them slavery, modern Egypt made Jews free, and Jews loved Egypt more than any Egyptian. If Egypt stood while Assyria and Babylon and Persia fell, it's because we welcomed Jews to an extent no ancient empire did, and they repaid our welcome with prosperity so unlike that of Ancient Egypt; not the totalitarian prosperity of an overlord worshipped in cult, but equalizing, egalitarian prosperity. And from this prosperity we created new justice, where which Egyptian women claimed all these rights we take for granted. 

We still have so much further to go. We can be all those things, but so many of us are not. We are such a marginalized minority in every facet of life but Pharaohdom. Women are just 7% of landowners, farmers, soldiers, shepherds, local councilmen and judges, and all women but me have inferior positions at court and half my enoblements of women are met with court veto. And of course, whatever the job of women, they are paid a fraction of men doing the same. Gaia herself a goddess, and not even she is honored enough that progeny in her image are allowed a fraction of men's dignitas. And still men's prosperity against women is as bounteous as the Nile banks against the desert.  

I too am a god but not even a god can raise the position of women if she is a woman herself. I am Pharaoh and daughter of Pharaoh, yet I could not shield myself from forced marriage and rape. We are so far from equality yet so very close. Who cannot believe that a limitless future for women would not be on the horizon if we do what must be done? 

Every horoscope says the same: a new era dawns now. You feel it as surely as I. Rome shall rule then decline as every empire does; but other Empires rule their corners, Rome will rule the whole sphere. Its might will unite us all: by government, by language, roads, culture, and fashion. Rome's beliefs will be the world's beliefs, Rome's dogma the world's, Rome's edicts unbreakable law; and when Rome declines, what then? 

There is another side to these Jews, one that continually manifests itself in its history's long turbulence. One that for decades after their liberation from us, conquered and killed its neighbors down to the last man, woman and child. One that, having attained enlightened prosperity, threw off their Solomonic wisdom for the sake of the very god who inspired their achievements. One that threw out our Greeks when they came in peace to improve Jewish life just as Jews improved ours. One that believes women a mere helpmeet to men and husbands created to rule over us. One that believes an excellent wife rarer than jewels. One that believes it better to live in the desert than a house with a quarrelsome woman. Jews are quick to vengeance as to mercy, they are as turbulent as the mind of the jealous god to whom they bow. 

When chaos reigns, we all turn to gods, but when Rome dissolves in chaos, we all will turn to the same gods and when order is restored, it will be the same gods throughout the world, and for all time; but no god can ensure order as the Jewish god can: one god; eternal, omniscient, all powerful, as judgemental as the empire who imposes it, as searing in his anger as men are to quarrelsome women. 

Whomever comes after Rome will adapt the Jewish god as the god for the world, for all places at all times, a god who knows all actions and all thoughts, who can control people even within their minds. For all their contributions to Egypt and the world, the world will be better off without these people. Whatever Rome does in response, it is imperative that you annihilate every Jewish person in Egypt down to the youngest infant, then march on Israel to do the same. It is worth the deaths on your conscience, it is worth the death of Egypt, it is worth the death of all humankind to prevent this future, where 99 out of every hundred men shall be lower than dirt, and therefore 99 out of every hundred women still lower. All the progress of women, just a mirage in time's sand; all our rights stripped, all our dignity violated. 

My great-uncle, Ptolemy Lazarus, tried to re-enslave the Hebrews, but that very dysfunctional great-grandmother Cleopatra III stopped him. Everywhere Lazarus is thought a villain of Egyptian history, but he did not go far enough. He thought Egypt could be restored to former glory, but Egypt is not the world's future. Slavery is the world's future, and worldwide slavery the Jews' revenge upon the world. 

I was weak. Jews were our friends, mentors, allies, they only seemed to mean well at court and in business.  Whether Jews will be the rulers or ruled like the rest of us is irrelevant. Their ideas must be stopped before they take hold, and it can only be stopped by their immediate deaths. Whether any of you knows it, whether any Roman knows it, whether any Jew knows it, I know it, and the Jewish god knows it. Whether Jews are the rulers or ruled like the rest of us, the world will be at eternal war with all that Judea represents. 

I have raised you all to value women, to respect them always, to fear them when appropriate, and to advocate for all their dignity, rights, and futures. To honor our futures, you must annihilate the Jewish people. 

May you live forever,

Your Mother

Friday, February 10, 2023

Tales of Classical Perversion: Cleopatra's Needle - A Lot More - CW: Prologue Restored

 We begin with a gargle amid that bed where has been entertained so many of the great men of history. 

(Anthony empties his bladder into Cleopatra's mouth, who delightedly gargles Anthony's micturation and then swallows.)

"I do wish you would use the other end." "I.... need to grow bigger balls before I do that." "You need to grow bigger balls? I'm the one who's begging you to shit in my mouth!" "How can you have a taste for that?" "There's a lot you didn't know about Julie." "He? Liked to, farcockt in you?" " No! He liked me doing it to him." "He liked... Fuck... If that ever got out?..." "He didn't care..." "How could you let him do that???" "It's not the most disgusting thing that's ever been in me." "Alright, you need to be quiet." 

(Anthony puts his phallus in Cleopatra's mouth and fucks it while Cleopatra makes noises in her throat 'GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW!) 

"I'm telling you, the Briton girls don't make noises like that." (talking while phallus still in mouth) "What noises do they make?" "Who?" "The Britons." "I don't they even had sex before Rome got there." "What about the Gauls?" "What about who?" "The Gauls." "Oh... they make even dirtier noises." "The Germans?" "They do dirtier things than you've ever done." "The Slavs?" "They're too drunk to do much of anything..." "The Israelites?" "Depends on if it's before or after they're married..." "What happens after they're married?" "Apparently you never have sex again." "Why is that?" "Jews seem to have a very love/hate relationship with sex." "Well they do punish sodomy." "What?" (takes phallus out of mouth) "The Jews, they punish sodomy." "Oh... yeah I heard something about that... So... now that I can hear what you're saying you fancy a bit of that right now?" "What?" Sodomy!" "Oh! I'd love it, you first though... (Cleopatra stands up to reveal she's wearing a wooden dildus) ... (speaking to the servant in the corner of the room) "Menefer where's the shaving cream?"  "The tub's on the bed right next to your other dildii." (Cleopatra starts stroking the dildus up and down with shaving cream) "Octavia never did this for you right?" "Never, but she never loved me" "I'm playing the world's smallest lute for you." (Cleopatra sticks it in) "Ah... ah... AHHHHHHHH That's no lute!..." "You said the other one was too small!" "THIS one's perfect!" "HOW many ROman WHORES are THIS GIVing?" "There's... buggery... in the love... that... can't be reckoned." (Cleopatra increases the speed) "The BREAking OF so GREAT a THING should MAKE a GREATer CRACK!" "AAAAAAAAAHHH AHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHH!" (Cleopatra pulls out) "Not so quick my love or I very well may shit in your mouth." (Cleopatra unfastens the dildo) "Why don't you take a taste of what I want you to do." "Does my lady so order it?" (Cleopatra shoves the dildo in Anthony's mouth and he throws up.) 

"How was it?"

"Do it again." 

(Anthony begins to suck Cleopatra's dildus)

"I needed protection against the Parthians, and you were never the diplomat in this relationship." 

(with dildus still in mouth) "And you liked it?" "Marcus Antonius,... what's the worst thing you've ever tasted?" (Anthony raises his head away from the dildus) "Probably this dish in Palestina, it's calves feet in jelly." "Oh! P'tcha. Yeah" "That's right! Pitcha! Our accountant says the Israelites call it that because that's the noise they make after they taste it." "Tony, come on, seriously, have you ever vomited?" "After half my meals." "Have you ever bit into rotten food?" "When my food taster sucks..." "Have you ever tasted mud? Dried blood?" "Every battle drill." "When you were on your vineyard, did you ever get fertilizer in you rmouth?" "Pretty disgusting, sure." "Have you ever bit your tongue?" "Oh that hurts more than a sword to the stomach." "Have you torn your Achilles?" "No but I've torn plenty of others'." "Have you passed a kidney stone?" "No but some senators pass them all the time. The vomitorium doesn't sound fun those days." "You've clearly been burned." "Three times in the field." "Have you ever had a tooth ache?" "Thank the gods, no. I hear that's the most painful thing on earth." "Alright, well I've experienced things far more painful than a toothache, and after a tooth ache, excramentum in your mouth is thrilling." "What does it taste like?" "It tastes like shit. That's not the point." "What's the point?" "The point is that you've just eaten the most disgusting thing known to man, you live to tell about it, and even if you smell awful, you're not in pain, and that's the best feeling on earth." "I don't know why, but I'm turned on right now... how about something more traditional?" 

(Anthony puts his phallus into Cleopatra's vaginae while putting fingers in her anus, a hand clasped with all his might over her mouth against the pillow, and biting down hard on her nipples, she screams with what seems to be pleasure). 


-----------------------------------


- The Pharaohs are Greek for ten generations and as the product of incest, have no Egyptian blood - supposedly... Talking about Cleopatra III/Ptolemy VIII as zenith of family dysfunction. Cleopatra is determined to spare her children the same fate. Cleopatra is a tenth-generation Greek ruler of Egypt, and incestually bred, she is completely un-Egyptian, or so it is said... 


I had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as I wasn't required to sing. What I really loved was drawing, and even at eight was so passionate for theater that I drew elaborate stage sets and recited Antigone's monologue for the manager of the Royal Alexandrine Theater. I knew I was a good actress, but actors at court would train for eighteen years, and there was the company manager telling my father, the Pharaoh, that I displayed a once-in-a-generation actor's talent. I have no idea if it was an artist's eye or an actor's lie, but I cannot possibly have been that good an actress, could I?

Irregardless, the company affected such faith that I acted in a production of Euripides for my father's pleasure. It was onstage that General Pompey first saw me. 

The play was The Bacchae. Queen Agave was played by a man, but in the throne room of my father, I was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women. 

Pompey was in Egypt to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, to maintain the ruse that he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy the Pharaoh was paying not to attack him. My father, Ptolemy XII, had been made extraordinarily rich by the investments of his court minister, Enoch-bar-Joseph, but our Egypt has suffered dysfunction for a thousand years, we had neither army nor arms to fight Rome. My father, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey literally half Egypt's fortune to refrain from attack, but after seeing The Bacchae, Pompey refused the offer. He had seen me onstage and what he really wanted was a weekend in my company.... I was 9. 

My older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare my father shame at court, it was announced that Egypt's next co-sovereign died of a chill. I was thereupon forced to be wife to my older brother at 10. Eleven months later, my father died of that same chill... While my brother-husband was slow-witted, I'd always displayed all manner of scholastic aptitude. It was decided that while my brother-husband went off every day to sport and whore, I would be the true Pharaoh in all but name when I turned eighteen, and until then ferried down the Nile to be educated every day amid the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls. To this day, the library and its glories are the truest husband I've ever had. 

For six years I studied seventeen hours every day. Any assignment incomplete in the allotted time would result in a beating. I learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. I grew up speaking Greek at court and by my servants was fluent in Coptic from first speech. I was fluent in Latin by eleven, Nubian by twelve, Aramaic by thirteen, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. I was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12, and the entire last third of the Iliad. I must have read three hundred critical commentaries on them end to end.

And along with all this useless literary merit, I learned all of the mythology of our pagan world, both the Grecian and Egyptian. My tutor instructed me: "Think of the Gods not as beings apart from us but your ancestors and friends whose daily company you keep. They are your only true peers who may understand the divine burdens of thronely life." 

My tutor, Philostratus, was a eunuch. Yet when I was sixteen he cornered me in a library stack: "My crownest princess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." I was married already for six years, deflowered for seven, and a mother at twelve years old. Never had I known happiness either connubial or conjugal. What other option had I more attractive? Philostratus was far more a husband to me than my brother. "But you're a eunuch, how can you possibly instruct me?" "All the more way I can." 

My education effectively ended at sixteen when, rather than learn history, we embarked upon adventures which, unburdened by the need for ejaculate or care for pregnancy, engaged sexual congress for those seventeen hours a day.  This ugly, fat, sweaty man, twice and a half my size, finished my education, but had I learned history rather than sex, we might have outfoxed the Roman burden. I was not for a moment attracted to Philostratus,  I will not deny that the sensations he imparted made me hungrily curious, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.' He was, as always, the most thorough tutor; knowledgeable and authoritative. He taught from a rare Indian textbook and approached every act as a further lesson in Archemedean mechanics and Euclidean geometry. 

It was not until eighteen when Philostartus was caught in flagrante delicto with me. My brother, for my tutor's lustful presumption, impaled Philostratus upon a spike from his anus to his mouth. In the fight that followed between me and my husband, I came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and he developed a gangrenous infection that spread around his body for nine months. Across the palace I could hear my brother's screams, and it gave me more pleasure than a night with Philostratus ever could. 

Ancient custom required me to marry to marry my second brother, then the sixteen year old I was when Philastratus cornered and educated me, but I refused custom, and my refusal launched a civil war.  Many Egyptians at court considered my refusal the worst kind of dishonor. Those tongues in opposition to me wagged that never would a Pharaohess demand this had Egyptian women not been so spoiled by equality and education. 

Before I mounted the Pharaohship as sole ruler, my brother's friends at court never ceased in their toximaic comments that 'our new Pharaoh looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. It was at this moment I realized that as a woman in a man's world, I had to cultivate that which women have, and as I had innately less than other women, I had to make more of less. 

(describe Cleopatra's metamorphosis here) 

It was Caesar who arrived when I was 20, and brokered the peace between my brother and me. Caesar, having heard of all Pompey's exploits, guessed from my refusal to marry the one thing that would give me more pleasure than any other: and in an immediate private audience he requested after disembarking from his ship, he presented me with the most splendid gift; beneath the present an engraved silver platter from Brittania, above the present an immaculately preserved Egyptian embroidery from the 18th dynasty; the gift was Pompey's head. 

Caesar looked like a phallus. He was 51, tall and so thin he could walk through a lyre; completely bald on top with half his ring of hair combed forward in a manner more absurd than the British stone henges he would recount. Yet legends of his female conquests were so manifold that I doubted a homely, witchy girl like me would merit romantic affection. Yet I immediately felt the heave of his eros; not from the loins but from the heart, and within fifteen seconds I understood why women far more beautiful than I thought him tantalizing.

The appeal was that Caesar was every woman's dream of a husband. What enticed us was that amid his company, he made us his absolute equals. He had no fear to cry or panic in front of women, no reservation for bequeathing all those sexual services men of high station considered degrading, and most importantly, he listened to women as a complete conversational partner. He considered our insights, and while never hesitating to refute them did so with such nuance that we understood he apprehended every word of which we said. Upon men he imposed his authority's full might, with women he shared the full burdens of his vulnerability. 

Women's wisdom was Caesar's greatest weapon, his greatest resource, his greatest teacher. We watched powerlessly as man after man fell to Caesar's defeat. Caesar would enter land after land the conqueror, take the fallen king's wife into confidence, and she would divulge every secret of what made her husband a bad king.  

With Caesar, women did not seduce and he did not seduce them, he simply knew that his ability to converse and listen as a peer would be rewarded. In his company, we women learned what he would tell no man. He'd inevitably explain he thought ambition the worst of all burdens; one he pursued as joyless compulsion. Even as he chased the unsat throne atop the Roman world, he knew he simultaneously chased death and martyrdom. To Caesar, empire and imperial rule were the only ways to keep Rome from dying the horrible collapse of all empires. To save Rome, so said Caesar, he had to destroy it. He truly loved Rome but he believed it declining to barbaric demise. If he put his name into glory and history amid the process, it was simply his reward of gratitude he felt himself owed, like a doctor to a patient he saves. Yet in retrospect, he played women like a pan pipe. None of it was true. Was he ever truly attracted to me, or was I allure to him simply because of my descent from the true love of Caesar's life: Alexander the Great?

Caesar had clearly decided from the beginning that I would be rule and my brother a mere figurehead, and the advisors knew it; because when I came to court the next morning, Roman soldiers had subdued and arrested our advisors, 

-----------------------------------

 Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw the gorgeous ways kings lived; the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only could a man formed by Rome's censure of luxury. 


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


For, you see, my dearest Cleopatra Selene, then as now, we'd birthed the new age of feminism. Women were educated for school, women could work, women could fight, women could sue at court, women could judge, and women could lead. Our empire was always the vanguard of women's progress, but the progress was accelarated by one development above all others: the re-arrival of the Judean peoples. 

We may be Greek, but we feel pain as Egyptians, and Egypt traces her decline to the Hebrew exodus, after which we no longer had our underclass doing all that work for which Egyptians demand such exorbitant pay. 

And yet the Jews never really left. From the earliest establishment of a Kingdom in Judea, the Kings David and Solomon re-established good relations with neighbors for whom so much history was shared. For hundreds of years thereafter, the closest of allies: our soldiers fought the same wars and traded the same goods. We heard the same musicians, watched the same theater companies, and the same artists drew our courts. Egypt's had many allies, but the relationship to the Jewish people was a special one that never seemed to waver. 

And every time there was new instability in Judea, more Jews would arrive on our shores. Six hundred years ago, with the assassination of Governor Gedalia, ten thousand Jews arrived in Alexandria by a single caravan. Ten thousand became the tens of thousands, tens of thousands became a hundred thousand, then two hundred, then three hundred; and where they once were slaves, they became masters; not just masters, but beloved masters: overlords who ran the country for our predecessors and ancestors, chamberlains who ran our courts; landowners who administered our land more competently than any Egyptian taskmaster, farmers who worked twice as hard, generals willing to lead their armies' charge in combat and soldiers on our borders willing to die for Egypt twice. Where Ancient Egypt once accorded them slavery, modern Egypt made Jews free, and Jews wanted to be more Egyptian than any Egyptian. If Egypt has not fallen as did Assyria and Babylon and Persia, it's because we welcomed Jews as no other empire did, and they repaid our welcome with prosperity so unlike that of Ancient Egypt. Not the totalitarian prosperity of an overlord worshipped in cult, but equalizing, egalitarian prosperity. And from this prosperity we created a new justice, where which Egyptian women claimed all the rights we take for granted. 

We still have so much further to go. We can be all those things, but so many of us are not. We are such a marginalized minority in every facet of life but Pharaohdom. Women are just 7% of landowners, farmers, soldiers, shepherds, local councilmen and judges, and all women but me have inferior positions at court and half my enoblements of women are met with court veto. And of course, whatever the job of women, they are paid a fraction of men doing the same. I am a god but not even a god can raise the position of women if she is a woman herself. We are so far from equality and yet we've come so very close, who cannot believe that  a limitless future would not be for women might be the horizon? 

Every horoscope says the same: a new era dawns now. You feel it as surely as I. Rome shall rule then decline as every empire does; but other Empires rule their corners, Rome will rule the whole sphere. Its might will unite us all: by government, by language, by roads, by culture, by fashions. Rome's beliefs will be the world's beliefs, Rome's dogma the world's, Rome's edicts, unbreakable law; and when Rome declines, what then? 

There is another side to these Jews, one that continually manifests itself in its history's long turbulence. One that in the years after their liberation, conquered and killed its neighbors without mercy to a man. One that overthrew its own Solomonic wisdom and prosperity for the sake of the very god who inspired it. One that threw out our Greeks when they came in peace to improve Jewish life just as Jews improved ours. One that believes women a mere helpmeet to men and husbands created to rule over us. One that believes an excellent wife rarer than jewels. One that believes it better to live in the desert than a house with a quarrelsome woman. Jews are quick to vengeance as to mercy, they are as turbulent as the mind of the jealous god to whom they bow. 

When chaos reigns, we all turn to gods, but when Rome dissolves in chaos, we all will turn to the same gods and when order is restored, it will be the same gods throughout the world, and for all time; but no god can ensure order as the Jewish god can: one god; eternal, omniscient, all powerful, as judgemental as the empire who imposes it, as searing in his anger as men are to quarrelsome women. 

Whomever comes after Rome will adapt the Jewish god as the god for the world, for all places at all times, a god who knows all actions and all thoughts, who can control people even within their minds. For all their contributions to Egypt and the world, the world will be better off without these people. Whatever Rome does in response, it is imperative that you annihilate every Jewish person in Egypt, man woman and child, and then march on Israel to do the same. It is worth all that death on your conscience, it is worth the death of Egypt, it is worth the death of all humankind to prevent this future, where 99 out of every hundred men shall be lower than dirt, and therefore 99 out of every hundred women still lower. All the progress of women, just a mirage in time's sand; all our rights stripped, all our dignity violated. 

My great-uncle, Ptolemy Lazarus, tried to re-enslave the Hebrews, but my great-grandmother Cleopatra III stopped him. Everywhere he's thought a villain of Egyptian history, but he did not go far enough. He thought Egypt could be restored to former glory, but Egypt is not the world's future. Slavery is the world's future, and worldwide slavery the Jews' revenge upon the world. 

I was weak. Jews were our friends, mentors, allies, they only seemed to mean well at court and in business.  Whether Jews will be the rulers or ruled like the rest of us is irrelevant. Their ideas must be stopped before they take hold, and it can only be stopped by their deaths, and soon. Whether any of you knows it, whether any Rome knows it, whether any Jew at all knows it, I know it, and the Jewish god knows it. Whether Jews are the rulers or ruled like the rest of us, the world will be at eternal war with the Jewish people. 

I have raised you all to value women, to respect them always, to fear them when appropriate, and to advocate for all their dignity, rights, and futures. To honor our futures, you must annihilate the Jewish people. 

May you live forever,

Your Mother

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Tales of Classical Perversion: Cleopatra's Needle - Beginning rewritten

 Cleopatra letter to her children before her suicide,


- The Pharaohs are Greek for ten generations and as the product of incest, have no Egyptian blood - supposedly... Talking about Cleopatra III/Ptolemy VIII as zenith of family dysfunction. Cleopatra is determined to spare her children the same fate. Cleopatra is a tenth-generation Greek ruler of Egypt, and incestually bred, she is completely un-Egyptian, or so it is said... 


I had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as I wasn't required to sing. What I really loved was drawing, and even at eight was so passionate for theater that I drew elaborate stage sets and recited Antigone's monologue for the manager of the Royal Alexandrine Theater. I knew I was a good actress, but actors at court would train for eighteen years, and there was the company manager telling my father, the Pharaoh, that I displayed a once-in-a-generation actor's talent. I have no idea if it was an artist's eye or an actor's lie, but I cannot possibly have been that good an actress, could I?

Irregardless, the company affected such faith that I acted in a production of Euripides for my father's pleasure. It was onstage that General Pompey first saw me. 

The play was The Bacchae. Queen Agave was played by a man, but in the throne room of my father, I was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women. 

Pompey was in Egypt to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, to maintain the ruse that he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy the Pharaoh was paying not to attack him. My father, Ptolemy XII, had been made extraordinarily rich by the investments of his court minister, Enoch-bar-Joseph, but our Egypt has suffered dysfunction for a thousand years, we had neither army nor arms to fight Rome. My father, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey literally half Egypt's fortune to refrain from attack, but after seeing The Bacchae, Pompey refused the offer. He had seen me onstage and what he really wanted was a weekend in my company.... I was 9. 

My older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare my father shame at court, it was announced that Egypt's next sovereign died of a chill. I was thereupon forced to be wife to my older brother at 10. While my brother-husband was slow-witted, I'd always displayed all manner of scholastic aptitude. It was decided that while my brother-husband, the crown prince, went off every day to sport and whore, I would be the true Pharaoh in all but name, and ferried down the Nile every day to be educated amid the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls. To this day, library and its glories are the truest husband I've ever had. 

For six years I studied seventeen hours every day. Any assignment incomplete in the allotted time would result in a beating. I learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. I grew up speaking Greek at court and by my servants attained fluency in Coptic from first speech. I was fluent in Latin by elevent, Nubian by twelve, Aramaic by thirteen, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. I was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12, and the entire last third of the Iliad. I must have read three hundred critical commentaries on them end to end.

And along with all this useless literary merit, I learned all of the mythology of our pagan world, both the Grecian and Egyptian. My tutor instructed me: "Think of the Gods not as beings apart from us but your ancestors and friends whose daily company you keep. They are your only true peers who may understand the divine burdens of thronely life." 

My tutor, Philostratus, was a eunuch. Yet when I was sixteen he cornered me in a library stack: "My crownest princess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." I was married already for six years, deflowered for seven, and a mother at twelve years old. Never had I known happiness either connubial or conjugal. What other option had I more attractive? He had already been a far more a husband to me than my brother. "But you're a eunuch, how can you possibly instruct me?" "All the more way I can." 

My education effectively ended at sixteen when, rather than learn history, we embarked upon adventures which, unburdened by the need for ejaculate or care for pregnancy, engaged sexual congress for those seventeen hours a day.  This ugly, fat, sweaty man, twice and a half my size, finished my education, but had I learned history rather than sex, we might have outfoxed the Roman burden. I was not for a moment attracted to Philostratus,  I will not deny that the sensations he imparted made me hungrily curious, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.' He was, as always, the most thorough tutor; knowledgeable and authoritative. He taught from a rare Indian textbook and approached every act as a further lesson in Archemedean mechanics and Euclidean geometry. 

It was not until eighteen when Philostartus was caught in flagrante delicto with me. My brother, for my tutor's lustful presumption, impaled Philostratus upon a spike from his anus to his mouth. In the fight that followed between me and my husband, I came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and he developed a gangrenous infection that spread around his body for nine months. Across the palace I could hear him scream, and it gave me more pleasure than a night with him ever could. 

Ancient custom required me to marry to marry my second brother, then ten years old himself, but I refused custom, and my refusal launched a civil war because many Egyptians at court considered my refusal the worst kind of dishonor. Those in opposition to me said that I would never have demanded this had Egyptian women not been so spoiled by equality and education.

(this needs elaboration)

Before I mounted the Pharaohship as sole ruler, my brother's friends at court never ceased in their toxic comments that 'our new Pharaoh looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. It was at this moment I realized that as a woman in a man's world, I had to cultivate that which women have, and as I had innately less than other women, I had to make more of less.

It was Caesar who arrived when I was 20, and brokered the peace between my brother and me. Caesar, having heard of all Pompey's exploits, guessed from my refusal to marry the one thing that would give me more pleasure than any other: and in an immediate private audience he requested after disembarking from his ship, he presented me with the most splendid gift; beneath the present an engraved silver platter from Brittania, above the present an immaculately preserved Egyptian embroidery from the 18th dynasty. The gift was Pompey's head. 

Caesar looked like a phallus. He was 51, tall and so thin he could walk through a lyre; completely bald on top with half his ring of hair combed forward in a manner more absurd than the British stone henges he would describe. Yet legends of his female conquests were so manifold that I doubted a homely, witchy girl like me would merit romantic affection. Yet I immediately felt the heave of his eros; not from the loins but from the heart, and within fifteen seconds I understood why women far more beautiful than I thought him tantalizing.

The appeal was that Caesar was every woman's dream of a husband. What enticed us was that amid his company, he made us his absolute equals. He had no fear to cry or panic in front of women, no reservation for bequeathing all those sexual services men of high station considered degrading, and most importantly, he listened to women as a complete conversational partner. He considered our insights, and while never hesitating to refute them did so with such nuance that we understood he apprehended every word of which we said. Upon men he imposed his authority's full might, with women he shared the full burdens of his vulnerability. 

The wisdom of women was Caesar's greatest weapon, his greatest resource, his greatest teacher. We watched powerlessly as man after man fell to Caesar's defeat. Caesar would enter land after land the conquerer, take the wife of the fallen king into confidence, and she would divulge every secret of what made her husband a bad king.  

With Caesar, women did not seduce and he did not seduce them, he simply knew that his ability to converse and listen as a peer would be rewarded. In his company, we women learned what he would tell no man. He'd inevitably explain he thought ambition the worst of all burdens; one he pursued as joyless compulsion. Even as he chased the unsat throne atop the Roman world, he knew he simultaneously chased death and martyrdom. To Caesar, empire and imperial rule were the only ways to keep Rome from dying the horrible collapse of all empires. To save Rome, so said Caesar, he had to destroy it. He truly loved Rome but he believed it declining to barbaric demise. If he put his name into glory and history amid the process, it was simply his reward of gratitude he felt himself owed, like a doctor to a patient he saves. Yet in retrospect, he played women like a pan pipe. None of it was true. Was he ever truly attracted to me, or was I allure to him simply because of my descent from the true love of Caesar's life: Alexander the Great?

 Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw the gorgeous ways kings lived; the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only could a man formed by Rome's censure of luxury. 

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Tales of Classical Perversion: Cleopatra's Needle - Long Beginning - Prelude Removed for Now

Cleopatra letter to her children before her suicide,


- The Pharaohs are Greek for ten generations and as the product of incest, have no Egyptian blood - supposedly... Talking about Cleopatra III/Ptolemy VIII as zenith of family dysfunction. Cleopatra is determined to spare her children the same fate. Cleopatra is a tenth-generation Greek ruler of Egypt, and incestually bred, she is completely un-Egyptian, or so it is said... 


Cleopatra had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as she was not required to sing.  She was a great visual artist and stage manager, and from the age of eight was directing the royal theater company in Euripides for her father's pleasure. It was at a production of The Bacchae that General Pompey first saw her. Queen Agave was, as always, played by a man, but in the throne room of her father she was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women. Pompey was at Egyptian court so as to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, with the ruse that he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy. The Pharaoh, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey literally half Egypt's fortune (this part should be a dialogue scene), Pompey refused the offer and said that what he really wanted was a weekend in Cleopatra's company.... She was 9. 

Cleopatra's older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare the family the shame, it was announced that Egypt's next Pharaohness died of a chill. Cleopatra was thereupon forced to be wife to her older brother at 10. Displaying all manner of intellectual ability while her husband/brother was slow-witted, she was educated every day at the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls, "my truest husband," with the understanding that she would eventually run the country while her brother went off to sport and whore.

Cleopatra studied seventeen hours every day and her tutor beat her when she did not complete her lessons. She learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. She grew up speaking Greek at court but by her servants attained fluency in Coptic from first speech. She was fluent in Latin by eight, Nubian by ten, Aramaic by twelve, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. She was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12, and the entire last third of the Iliad. and must have read literally a thousand critical commentaries on them.

And along with her interest in theater she learned all of the mythology of the Greco-pagan world. "We learned of the Gods not as beings apart from us but our ancestors and friends whose daily company we keep. Our only true peers who could understand the divine burdens of a thronely life." 

Her first true lover was, in fact, her tutor, who was a eunuch. She was sixteen, already married for six years, deflowered for seven, and a mother at twelve, but she never knew connubial happiness until finding it with her longtime tutor, Philostratus, who at sixteen cornered her in a library stack to proposition her. "What other option was there? He was a far more interested husband to me than my brother." "My dearest Pharaohess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." "You're a eunuch, how can you possibly instruct me?" "All the more way I can." My education effectively ended at sixteen when, rather than learn history, we embarked upon adventures which, unburdened by the need for ejaculate or care for pregnancy, engaged sexual congress a day at a time. This ugly, fat, sweaty man, twice and a half my size, finished my education, but had I learned history rather than sex, we might have outfoxed the Roman burden. I was not for a moment attracted to Philostratus, but he was, as always, the most thorough tutor, knowledgeable and authoritative. He approached every act as a further lesson in mechanics and geometry.  I was curious about the sensations he imparted, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.'"

3. Cleopatra was caught in flagrante delicto with Philostratus, who, for his lustful presumption, was impaled  upon a spike from his anus to his mouth. In the fight between her and her husband, she came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and he developed a gangrenous infection that only killed him after spread around his body for nine months. She was required by custom to marry to her second brother, then ten years old himself. She refused, and her refusal launched a civil war because many Egyptians at court considered her refusal the worst kind of dishonor. Those in opposition to her said that she would never have demanded this had Egyptian women not been so spoiled by equality and education.

3. Caesar arrived when she was 20. When Caesar disembarked, having heard of all Pompey's exploited, he guessed from her refusal to marry the one thing that would give her more pleasure than any other: the head of Pompey, which he presented to her upon an embroidered silver platter. 

What made Caesar attractive to women? He was 51 with an absurd combover (completely bald on top with half his ring of hair combed forward.) What made him attractive was that he treated women as his complete equals, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually. He was not afraid to cry or panic in front of women, he was not afraid to bequeath all those sexual services other men of high station considered degrading; and most importantly, he listened to them as a complete conversational partner. He considered their points of view, and while he did not hesitate to refute them, always did so with maximum politesse.  From Philostratus I learned even moreso that looks were secondary to charisma. Before I ascended the throne, my brothers friends at court never ceased to comment 'the Pharaohess looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. I realized that as a woman in a man's world, I had to cultivate that which women have, and had I less of it innately than other women, I had to make more of less." 

Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw gorgeous ways with which kings lived, the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only a man could formed by Rome's spartan censure of luxury. Cleopatra was of particular allure to him because of her descent from Alexander the Great, whom Cleopatra joked was 'the true love of Caesar's life.' 

Friday, February 3, 2023

Tales of Classical Perversion: Palestine's Colossus - Rough Draft

 (this story happens in the month following the debate of Hillel and Shammai) 

Herod sails Rhodes to meet with Octavian, the newly coronated Caesar Augustus, ready to supplicate himself to Augustus's feet and, having collaborated with Augustus's Enemy, Anthony, beg for Octavian's clemency to spare the lives of Herod and his court.

As the ship approaches the ruins of Rhodes's famous Colossus, two sailors talk, one Roman the other Judean: 

"When sailors sailed under it, they must have peered up. Did they... ,,, get a view of anything underneath?" "There's no phallus among the ruins if that's what you're implying." "How could there not be?!" "Well it's just not there." "It just seems unlikely to go to all that trouble to scare the bejeesus out of visitors by sailing under a statue a hundred meters tall and not give it a sch.." "..I don't know what to tell you." "Maybe you Romans should... y'know... look harder." "Are you saying the fucking Colossus of Rhodes had a small..." "I'm not saying it was small, though it had to be small enough that somebody could make it disappear without noticing." "You're fucking pazzo." "Look, all I'm saying is that something must have happened, and I bet I know what did even..." "Whatdya' think?" "I think some Jewish bronze merchant a hundred years ago said getta load'a that schvantz, and sold it to a Roman senator." "...Get the fuck outa here!" "I really do!" "You think some Yid had the balls to steal a gigantic bronze phallus from the most watched site in the world?" "I think Rome helped!" "You think the penis of the Colossus of Rhodes is in Rome?!" "I think it's standing straight up on top of the fucking Pantheon is what I think." 

 Only to find when he pulls into the harbor that there are carved statues in the likeness of Herod and Antipater right next to the feet of the old Colossus.

Captain: "What does this mean your majesty?" "It means either that I will be feted as a hero, or I will be killed, my family killed, and all Judea will fall to slavery just as every Roman province does." 

Herod embarks from the ship. His welcome? A dozen naked slave girls, who paint his face red, strip him of his clothes so that they can place purple toga on him, then place a laurel wreath atop his head. Herod is put on a chariot and pulled into a Roman-style triumph through the streets of Rhodes. The charioteer continually calls out 'Hail Herod! Rome's protector in the East! Hail Herod! Vanquisher of the Hasmoneans! Hail Herod! Ensnarer of Cleopatra! Hail Herod! Rebuilder of Jerusalem!" Behind him comes an open caravan showcasing an armory's worth of weapons - the short gladius, the long spatha, the tiny pugio, the enormous hasta, the aerodynamic pilum, the flying plumbata - a hundred of them each at least, and a dozen each at least in all matter of catapult: the onager, the ballista, the scorpio; and a thousand dolabras - the tool which every Roman soldier used for digging, along with a thousand helmets and shields. Then came open chests of gold and silver in currency coin and bullion: Aureus, Quinarius Aureus, Denarius, Quinarius, Sesterius, Dupondius, As, Semis, and Quadrans. Then further chests containing giant jewels of pearl, jade, malachite, amethyst, carnelian, topaz, chalcedony, obsidian, olivine, and  lapis lazulli. Behind the jewels are further statues and paintings and tapestries: of Herod, Antipater, Mairiam, and all the Hasmonean protectors, and of all the prophets of the Bible. 

Six hours later, at the end of the parade, stood Flavius Jacobus, at the foot of Rhodes's Temple of Jupiter, there to bid his old friend into the temple. 

"Well, the Temple of Jupiter here is not much of a temple but it'll do for now. Rome and Rhodes bids welcome to its Protector in the East. I hope this trip is turning out as eventfully as you hoped?" 

And on the center wall of the Temple, sitting upon Divine Jupiter's lap was Caesar Augustus. 

"Well, I don't know if I hoped for such events but..."

"...Such events you now have. We have named you Rome's Protector in the East, and we trust that you will act to Rome's benefit just as you've acted to Judea's. Do you notice all the finery behind you in your triumph?" 

"I couldn't help but.."

"..It's yours of course." 

"Isn't some slave supposed to shout in my ear to remember that I'm mortal?" 

"You're from Judea, nobody forgets there." 

"So this is a triumph?" 

"It's very much a triumph. Yours and mine." 

"Didn't you have a triumph of your own in Rome?"

"Come with me King, let's talk among the ruins." 

(Caesar and Herod go to beach of Rhodes and talk among the Colossus's many bronze ruins)

"What ruler who wants to die of natural causes ever throws himself a triumph?" 

"So this is..."

"This is my celebration as much as yours. When Divine Julius wanted to celebrate, it was to places like Rhodes he came. 'My boy, when Romans go north you work, when you go east and south, you play.'"

"Your father went to Rhodes?"

"He tried to go to Rhodes, then he was abducted by pirates, just like you were." 

"I wasn't abducted by pirates." 

"You weren't?" 

"I was shipwrecked after Cleopatra sent me to Italy to pitch something straight to you and Anthony. I honestly thought I'd be dead - either Cleopatra wanted me thrown overboard, or have Anthony kill me, and if they didn't, I figured you would. But instead I was shipwrecked and fell into the belly of whale where I stayed for three days."

"You mean like your prophet Jonah?..."

"How do you know about Jonah?"

"A good leader reads..."

"I swear it happened." 

"If you say it happened it did. You're a king and kings write their own histories. There are all sorts of things that happened to me which no one would believe." 

"If you say so." 

Augustus begins to croak and ribbit like a frog. Within forty seconds, three hundred and some frogs appear noisily atop the ruins of Rhodes's Colossus and bow to two of them, within thirty seconds the frogs leave. 

"The Gods allow some people to do some very strange things. We great men, we're not made of the same stuff." 

"In my country, I'm told there is only one god who grants such permissions." 

"But I've heard you believe in two."

"How did you discover that?" 

"A good leader also listens." 

"I don't necessarily believe in two gods. I've only heard one."

"What god is that?"

"The 'other' God."

"The other god?"

"The God who appeared to me after the destruction of my true home country, Idumea, and told me to avenge my homeland against the Jewish people and Yahweh." 

"So it's true!" 

"What?"

"You hate your people!" 

"And you love Romans?"

"I'm ambivalent about them." 

"You fear them!" 

"Yes, very much so." 

"How much more reason have I to fear mine? They killed my family, they killed the family that birthed my family, they've been killing my family since the time of Lot and Ishmael." 

"Well, the Romans did just kill my father, but no, we don't have your prodigal patrimony. Rome is a city of immigrants, and immigrants come to new places to forget their old hatreds." 

"Hatred is history's oldest motivator. Let Roman history go on long enough there will be enough hatred to power the rest of Judea's history."

"Don't forget yourself Protector, you're still in the company of the only man in the world you can't rule." 

"My apologies your majesty."

"Don't you dare call me that. I'm no king and no emperor, my title is 'Mr. Princeps', Rome's First Citizen." 

"You really want me to call you that?"

"It's just ridiculous enough that people won't be in awe of me." 

"Whatever you say Mr. Princeps." 

"I must say, I'm more impressed than I expected to be." 

"What did you expect?" 

"The whole world knows of Herod's Odyssian cunning, but I worried I'd find a spoiled killer." 

"Well, guilty as charged, that's exactly what you got." 

"We have spoiled killers everywhere in Rome, the spoiled killers kill each other and assume they can take their spoils without another spoiled killer coming to take theirs; but you're different Herod son of Antipater. I can't tell whether you're just a little spoiled or just a lot a killer, but men like you either build nations or destroy them."

"What charm of mine gave it away?" 

"Don't you know? You, king of a people supposed so skilled in the arts of duplicity?"

"I'm not a Jew." 

"Of course you are, all semites are partially Jews, and you rule over them! Were you not the most gifted among a very gifted people you'd just be another Judean prince strangled in a prison."

"I still don't understand."

"Of course you do. You're gifted enough that I'm scared just talking to you." 

"Mr. Princeps can't be scared of a vassal king." 

"I'm scared of every vassal king who knows to speak less than I do."

"Have I spoken less?"

"I don't know, but had you spoken more, it would have been impossible not to read your mind, and you'd be stunned how many vassal kings speak over me in conversation."

"Ignorance is bold. Knowledge is reserved." 

"Indeed, yet amid all this tact and polish, I hear that there is no German horde who can do to people all it's said Herod does, and it's for that reason I trust you Herod-ben-Antipater to pilot a project I hope to institute through the whole empire." 

"What project?" 

"Jew, how long took it your people to advance from Abraham to such learning as you now have that neither the might of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Syria, nor Greece could destroy you, and you've arrived at such eminence and might that the banks of men like Flavius Jacobus, uncannily scrupulous and unscrupulous whenever appropriate, is the coin of the largest Empire the world has ever seen? Two thousand years?" 

"Yes, it would seem that or thereabout."

"It was roughly the same time that Egypt and Sumeria learned to read, yes?" 

"I suppose." 

"Now look at this bronze Jew. Two and half centuries ago, the might of the ancient world looked upon its work and despaired, and after fifty years, a mere earthquake took it down for all time. I understand there was an earthquake none to far ago in Jerusalem?" 

"One of a few. I'm afraid I don't understand." 

"Two thousand years it took from Jews to go from a desert people to work at the side of the most powerful empire the world. Prosperity never abides long in the same place, and so this, now, is a once every two millennia opportunity. The most educated nations in the world are also the most powerful." 

"I suppose I see that, but I don't understand what to do with it." 

"It will not be again unless we educate the world to our standard." 

"You think you can do that?"

"I think YOU can do that. Rome may think it wants glory for its senate and its people, but Rome must not be allowed to become a permanent empire of bread and circus! Your people are commanded to be a light unto nations? Well, be that light!" 

"I... Mr. Princeps, I think your ambition exceeds even your own power. Who am I that I should be the one to bring the world out of slavery? Does the world even wish to be brought freedom?" 

"The world does not know what it wishes, it does not know what it needs. But what the world needs is for all her vassal nations to be as strong as Rome herself."

"Wouldn't that cause permanent war?" 

"Not if nations were united in alliance!" 

"Mr. Princeps, you surely realize this is madness." 

"It is only the mad who seek leadership!" 

"And it is surely only the mad who seek the world's improvement."

"Then be mad with me Jew. Surely you've seen the augers. Jupiter is in retrograde for the next fifty years, every horoscope in the world predicts that we are on the cusp of a new age with a new way of looking at the world. Surely you see the evidence all around you." 

"The evidence is Rome." 

"No, the evidence is change." 

"Rome is change."

"No. Change is Rome. Pericles built a republic in Athens, but it was a mere city-state, it became an empire for two minutes, once the Delian League became the Athenian empire it declined within in a generation. Rome's republic has lasted seven-hundred years. For its Republic to survive it must have its own league of nations!" 

"How does one affect that?" 

"This is my imperial project. This is my imperial legacy.... A religion."

"You want to export the Jewish religion throughout the empire?"

"No, though I could think of worse religions. I want a religion of liberalism." 

"Surely you know my people would not accept any god but Yahweh." 

"No, but religions can coexist with the religion I have in mind to export. All the local gods can still be worshipped, but we compel their gods to embody toleration, practical logic, knowledge and open exchange."" 

"I don't think my people are as intelligent as you think we are." 

"But they can be if you educate them! Doesn't your bible encourage charity and indulgence to the poor?" 

"You can't interpret everything in the Bible literally." 

"Just remember this, King, of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing." 

"In what?" 

"So many of them already read, so many of them handle money; teach them our higher maths and physic!" '

"Hardly any of them read! Two in every hundred perhaps!"

"Two in every hundred is more than the one in every hundred in Rome."  

"I don't even know your higher maths and physic!" 

"It only need begin with a couple dozen. You're Herod the builder, teach your people to build so that there are a hundred Herod the builders! We'll send the engineers!" 

".... Mr. Princeps, I worry that by saying that I believe in your vision, you'll realize that I'm indulging you. So I would like to tell you a lesson my father imparted to me about his idea of the perfect government." 

"Your father was an able man." 

"The ablest. If I may speak freely?"

"Always." 

"Were he Roman he could have outfoxed your father." 

"My father said as much every time Antipater was mentioned. Nothing would delight me more than to hear your father's lesson." 

"My father said the perfect government is a government were all its subjects were slaves, but thought themselves free." 

"Don't you see Jew, that is precisely the government I seek." 

"I'm afraid I don't understand." 

"Once the world is educated, they are slaves to their reason, and they will be forever compelled to make the wise choice." 

"Sire, I will tell you what I am thinking right now. My father gave me a Greek tutor, as I'm sure your father did."

"Of course." 

"So you know your Herodotus." 

"Indeed." 

"Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this.." 

"'..to know so much and to have control over nothing.' Yes Jew, of course I know my Herodotus, I read it once every year and that is precisely the point. So long as Rome is me, Rome knows enough to surrender its hoard of knowledge to the world, and once the world has knowledge, the world's storehouse of knowledge will forever increase and we all will be forever ignorant of its full contents." 

"And you know your Thucydides." 

"He's a little drier. The limits of my intelligence. I expect you're smart enough to remember every passage."

"Only because the tutor would flay me alive if I didn't. The quote is 'Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in discovering the truth,'"

"'but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.' Yes, my father's favorite maxim. So let's make sure the first story they hear from birth is the truth. But you've also read The Republic." 

"Oh god that fucking Greek tyrant. Still worse would happen every time I didn't sufficiently commit it to memory." 

"So then you know these quote Jew: Either we shall find what it is we're seeking.."

(both) "..or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know." 

"Let's free these men from their caves Jew. I doubt you believe in the augers any more than I do, but the astrologers surely see the new era we all live in and predict accordingly. Let's head off this new era's ignorance and blood by creating an era of our own. You know exactly what I'm going to quote now." 

"Pericles?"

"Indeed. Recite it Jew." 

“For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples...

"Splendidus Iudaeus. Come, let's embrace on this." 

(Herod comes over, Augustus pulls him into a hug, kisses him directly on the lips, then Augustus takes Herod's hand in his gently. The gentle stroke becomes an iron grip, and Augustus severs the artery in Herod's arm with his dagger and it seems as though Augustus is about to cut Herod's arm completley off. Herod's arm spurts blood in volumes and he screams so loud the entire beach hears him. The scream turns into whimpers and Herod cannot help but cry.)

(Augustus whispers a millmeter away from Herod's ear) 

"We've documented every manner in which you've ordered a subject executed. Cross me on this project Philistine and you'll watch as we use all those techniques on your children, then save a technique never yet seen in Judea for you."

(Herod continues to whimper. Augustus reaches behind one of the ruins and produces a woolen coat." 

"Come, put this coat on. Rhodes gets cold at night and it absorbs the blood like a bandage. No one will will even know you bleed. As Rome's protector in the East you have to sacrifice to Jupiter like us all tonight, and then you'll be paraded in triumph again tomorrow back to your ship. We'll give you golden armor to cover the wound. (Augustus hugs Herod again) Come, they're waiting for us at the temple." 









Thursday, February 2, 2023

Tales of Classical Perversion - Palestine's Colossus - Large Beginning

(this story happens in the month following the debate of Hillel and Shammai) 

Herod sails Rhodes to meet with Octavian, the newly coronated Caesar Augustus, ready to supplicate himself to Augustus's feet and, having collaborated with Augustus's Enemy, Anthony, beg for Octavian's clemency to spare the lives of Herod and his court.

As the ship approaches the ruins of Rhodes's famous Colossus, two sailors talk, one Roman the other Judean: 

"When sailors sailed under it, they must have peered up. Did they... ,,, get a view of anything underneath?" "There's no phallus among the ruins if that's what you're implying." "How could there not be?!" "Well it's just not there." "It just seems unlikely to go to all that trouble to scare the bejeesus out of visitors by sailing under a statue a hundred meters tall and not give it a sch.." "..I don't know what to tell you." "Maybe you Romans should... y'know... look harder." "Are you saying the fucking Colossus of Rhodes had a small..." "I'm not saying it was small, though it had to be small enough that somebody could make it disappear without noticing." "You're fucking pazzo." "Look, all I'm saying is that something must have happened, and I bet I know what did even..." "Whatdya' think?" "I think some Jewish bronze merchant a hundred years ago said getta load'a that schvantz, and sold it to a Roman senator." "...Get the fuck outa here!" "I really do!" "You think some Yid had the balls to steal a gigantic bronze phallus from the most watched site in the world?" "I think Rome helped!" "You think the penis of the Colossus of Rhodes is in Rome?!" "I think it's standing straight up on top of the fucking Pantheon is what I think." 

 Only to find when he pulls into the harbor that there are carved statues in the likeness of Herod and Antipater right next to the feet of the old Colossus. Herod has no idea what this means. 

Herod embarks from the ship. His only welcome? A dozen naked slave girls, who paint his face red, strip him of his clothes so that they can place purple toga on him, then place a laurel wreath atop his head. Herod is put on a chariot and pulled into a Roman-style triumph through the streets of Rhodes. The charioteer continually calls out 'Hail Herod! Rome's protector in the East! Hail Herod! Vanquisher of the Hasmoneans! Hail Herod! Ensnarer of Cleopatra! Hail Herod! Rebuilder of Jerusalem!" Behind him comes an open caravan showcasing an armory's worth of weapons - the short gladius, the long spatha, the tiny pugio, the enormous hasta, the aerodynamic pilum, the flying plumbata - a hundred of them each at least, and a dozen each at least in all matter of catapult: the onager, the ballista, the scorpio; and a thousand dolabras - the tool which every Roman soldier used for digging, along with a thousand helmets and shields. Then came open chests of gold and silver in currency coin and bullion: Aureus, Quinarius Aureus, Denarius, Quinarius, Sesterius, Dupondius, As, Semis, and Quadrans. Then further chests containing giant jewels of pearl, jade, malachite, amethyst, carnelian, topaz, chalcedony, obsidian, olivine, and  lapis lazulli. Behind the jewels are further statues and paintings and tapestries: of Herod, Antipater, Mairiam, and all the Hasmonean protectors, and of all the prophets of the Bible. 

Six hours later, at the end of the parade, stood Flavius Jacobus, at the foot of Rhodes's Temple of Jupiter, there to bid his old friend into the temple. 

"Well, the Temple of Jupiter here is not much of a temple but it'll do for now. Rome and Rhodes bids welcome to its Protector in the East. I hope this trip is turning out as eventfully as you hoped?" 

And on the center wall of the Temple, sitting upon Divine Jupiter's lap was Caesar Augustus. 

"Well, I don't know if I hoped for such events but..."

"...Such events you now have. We have named you Rome's Protector in the East, and we trust that you will act to Rome's benefit just as you've acted to Judea's. Do you notice all the finery behind you in your triumph?" 

"I couldn't help but.."

"..It's yours of course." 

"Isn't some slave supposed to shout in my ear to remember that I'm mortal?" 

"You're from Judea, nobody forgets there." 

"So this is a triumph?" 

"It's very much a triumph. Yours and mine." 

"Didn't you have a triumph of your own in Rome?"

"Come with me King, let's talk among the ruins." 

(Caesar and Herod go to beach of Rhodes and talk among the Colossus's many bronze ruins)

"What ruler who wants to die of natural causes ever throws himself a triumph?" 

"So this is..."

"This is my celebration as much as yours. When Divine Julius wanted to celebrate, it was to places like Rhodes he came. 'My boy, when Romans go north you work, when you go east and south, you play.'"

"Your father went to Rhodes?"

"He tried to go to Rhodes, then he was abducted by pirates, just like you were." 

"I wasn't abducted by pirates." 

"You weren't?" 

"I was shipwrecked after Cleopatra sent me to Italy to pitch something straight to you and Anthony. I honestly thought I'd be dead - either Cleopatra wanted me thrown overboard, or have Anthony kill me, and if they didn't, I figured you would. But instead I was shipwrecked and fell into the belly of whale where I stayed for three days."

"You mean like your prophet Jonah?..."

"How do you know about Jonah?"

"A good leader reads..."

"I swear it happened." 

"If you say it happened it did. You're a king and kings write their own histories. There are all sorts of things that happened to me which no one would believe." 

"If you say so." 

Augustus begins to croak and ribbit like a frog. Within forty seconds, three hundred and some frogs appear noisily atop the ruins of Rhodes's Colossus and bow to two of them, within thirty seconds the frogs leave. 

"The Gods allow some people to do some very strange things. We great men, we're not made of the same stuff." 

"In my country, I'm told there is only one god who grants such permissions." 

"But I've heard you believe in two."

"How did you discover that?" 

"A good leader also listens." 

"I don't necessarily believe in two gods. I've only heard one."

"What god is that?"

"The 'other' God."

"The other god?"

"The God who appeared to me after the destruction of my true home country, Idumea, and told me to avenge my homeland against the Jewish people and Yahweh." 

"So it's true!" 

"What?"

"You hate your people!" 

"And you love Romans?"

"I'm ambivalent about them." 

"You fear them!" 

"Yes, very much so." 

"How much more reason have I to fear mine? They killed my family, they killed the family that birthed my family, they've been killing my family since the time of Lot and Ishmael." 

"Well, the Romans did just kill my father, but no, we don't have your prodigal patrimony. Rome is a city of immigrants, and immigrants come to new places to forget their old hatreds." 

"Hatred is history's oldest motivator. Let Roman history go on long enough there will be enough hatred to power the rest of Judea's history."

"Don't forget yourself Protector, you're still in the company of the only man in the world you can't rule." 

"My apologies your majesty."

"Don't you dare call me that. I'm no king and no emperor, my title is 'Mr. Princeps', Rome's First Citizen." 

"You really want me to call you that?"

"It's just ridiculous enough that people won't be in awe of me." 

"Whatever you say Mr. Princeps." 

"I must say, I'm more impressed than I expected to be." 

"What did you expect?" 

"A spoiled killer." 

"Well, guilty as charged, that's what you got." 

"We have spoiled killers everywhere in Rome, the spoiled killers kill each other and assume they can take their spoils without another spoiled killer coming to take theirs; but you're different Herod son of Antipater. I can't tell whether you're just a little spoiled or just a lot a killer, but men like you either build nations or destroy them."

"What charm of mine gave it away?" 

"Don't you know? You among the people who are supposed to be so skilled in the arts of duplicity?"

"I'm not a Jew." 

"Of course you are, all semites are partially Jews, and you rule over them all! If you were not the most gifted among a very gifted people you'd just be another Judean prince strangled in a prison."

"I still don't understand."

"Of course you do. You're gifted enough that I'm getting scared just talking to you." 

"Oh?"