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....
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....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.
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.
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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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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
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