Cleopatra and Caesar

The messenger knelt before Cleopatra with a letter sealed in Caesar's name. It ordered her treasury opened before sunrise. Caesar read it once and set it beneath the lamp. He had sent no such command. In the corridor, sandals struck the stone in the rhythm of an armed escort. Cleopatra watched his face instead of the wax. A denial could be as useful as a forged order. She asked him which detail proved it false. He pointed to the date. The writer had used the Roman reckoning correctly, but placed a festival on a day when the palace scribes knew the treasury would be closed. Whoever forged the letter understood one court better than the other. She summoned her chief scribe and requested a fresh copy, changing only the hour of delivery. Caesar objected until she asked who would know to protest a correction to a letter that had never existed. The escort entered carrying an empty chest. Its officer glanced at the new date and immediately said that the arrangement had been for dawn. Cleopatra dismissed the guards around him before he understood what he had admitted. The treasury remained sealed. Caesar offered to destroy the forged letter, but she kept it beside the genuine one. An alliance, she told him, needed records of the moments when trust had required evidence. Outside, the messenger was given water and a seat. He would leave with a reply dictated by both rulers and a seal neither allowed out of sight.