Iris: Marcus Peeters-Williams (Open Prize

written by Marcus Peeters-Williams, Year 12

1. Epistulae ad Atticum, et Terentiam et Quintum 56 BC. I lay coiled in a basket as warm as a womb, sitting on the ochre tiles heated by Cicero’s hypocaust system. We had been in Thessaloniki for two years since the statesman had been exiled for his orations against Clodius – Cicero’s defence of the republic, his loud mouth, had got me shoved out of the citadel. I was wrapped up the same as his quill and ink, his furniture, and whatever else he owned under Roman law. When I first slithered into Cicero’s abode in the capitol he had been a groomed man, with hair that only lightly brushed the top tips of his wide ears, and he always wore a brilliantly white toga which was constantly rubbed with chalk to demonstrate his status as a statesman. Before his exile he would religiously don his toga candida but now he only wore torn clothing, the holes in his tunic exposing his white, tired skin. The fat which once sat around his belly had waned away, revealing his exposed ribcage. His hair now tumbled well past his ears now confidently flanking his sallow cheeks, recalcitrant to any stately will left in Cicero. Most significant, however, was the length of his beard which now rested just below his beltline. In Roman custom, this was a symbol of mourning generally reserved for the loss of a loved one – indeed, Cicero had lost his love for politics, and for the Republic. I watched him write his letters to Atticus, his closest friend left in Rome. From the beam I coiled myself around in the thatched roof I peered at his writings, which told of his love Atticus, whom he often talked to me about. He greatly missed his confidante and frequently sat on the steps outside the house which ran down to the Aegean Sea, staring off into the horizon directly towards Rome itself. It’s a shame he could never grasp the true beauty of seclusion, the drum of Roman neuroticism in the far distance.

In his letters he told of the end of his world, without Atticus, and of course his wife Terentia and his brother Quintus, whom he also occasionally wrote to. He begged Atticus to come to meet with him in his palace of exile, to travel south to save his soul from the edge of life itself. A snake can only chortle at his desperation for masculine company, when he was so bountifully surrounded with the daughters of Terra Mater in the form of the roses, narcissus, crocuses which pervaded the rolling hills, and deer and goats frolicking amongst them. Yet, human seeks human, bound by a primitive force quite alien to me as a lone being who would rather anything else than to suffer another snake by my side. His moans and groans had become unbearable to me by 54 BC, at which point I was considering slithering off into the undergrowth, foregoing the warm tiles just to escape the unsound Cicero, who had now become manic and constantly lashed out in fury, one time grabbing me by my tail and

yelling that I was a portent of evil, another time spinning me around and tossing me against the wall, accusing me of being a spy of Clodius. One day a carriage arrived, led by two white horses adorned with heavy metal armour and golden manes. They sneered at me and I sneered back. Cicero was approached by a man who resembled Hermes, and as they conversed Cicero began to hoot wildly, jumping up and down as he did so – he had been recalled to Rome, and would be reunited with Atticus. I, however, was not jumping up and down, and not just because of my lack of legs. Ripping me from Thessaloniki was like ripping a swaddled child from the arms of a new mother, and I was incredibly reluctant to be once again wrapped up with Cicero’s belongings, so much so I struck out at the slave who tried to package me, but it was not use. I was loaded into the carriage, with piles of Roman trash on top of me. We travelled for days, seldom stopping – but when I saw my opportunity, I took it. We had stopped only a couple of Roman miles outside the city which Cicero had pined for so greatly in our isolation, and he ordered the carriage stop atop a hill so that he could survey it in its complete splendour. I slipped out of the wraps which held me, and quietly escaped out the side of the carriage and into the grasses by the side of the road.

For 14 years I was a freed snake, slinking through the Roman forests, without the watchful eye of a master except Terra Mater; I once again, as I did as a younger snake, felt at peace with my surroundings, which lacked the imperial exertion which I had endured with Cicero. I felt that in amongst the iris, gladioli, and amaranth I did not age, as though I were in perfect stasis when living in the natural order. Light, warm breezes lapped at the hills on the first day of spring in 39 BC, the hills shimmered with their swaying grasses, great swathes of choreographed dance along the countryside, and at the top of one hill sat a man, cross-legged with a basket to his side and a yellowed sheet of papyrus in his lap. I swam up the hill through the grasses towards him, and curled myself in his basket. He looked to me and was not shocked but marvelled at my scintillating skin and patted my head, as though I were his lifelong pet. He lifted me in his basket, gently placing his papyrus to my left, and walked me back to his town, Mantua.

2. Of My Mother Once Again, I Sought The Hills

I later learned the man whose basket I had coiled myself into was the poet Virgil, a poet whom Cicero had scorned, with Cicero being of a Homeric style and finding anything non-classical to be distasteful, particularly Virgil’s Eclogues which discussed love outside Cicero’s conceived boundaries. Cicero’s disdain for the young, invigorating writer was more reason to like Virgil, who wrote of pastoral love – a far cry from Cicero’s cherished republic, with its urban cram. I thought I would be enchanted by my new life, with a much younger man, but therein lied the problem. Virgil often took me through the family farm in the same basket he found me in, touring me through the wide expanse of crops, which glowed under the golden rays which Phoebus cast on the empire. But Virgil did not understand my desire to live in the shadows, and repeatedly attempted to pair me with a female snake, who he had named Fulvia. Despite his apparent affinity with nature, he failed to determine my sex. Admittedly to the masculine eye the differences are indistinguishable, but a feminine attention to detail notices the thinner, more elegant tail with its smooth, gradual taper. It occurred to me at this point that Cicero had never called me by any name, partly for his obsession with his own life, partly for his despising of me.

Virgil. however, at the very least had the respect to name me, and he did so with the name Isis, for he told me my reflective scales reminded him of the shimmering moon.

Fulvia and I did not mate, much to the dismay of Virgil, but instead had constant conflicts, with her assertive fangs striking my wayward armour many times as though she was defending her fatherly Virgil from a foreign ophidian threat. Over the course of the coming years I began to hear serpentine whispers behind my back, and I would often turn to see the slippery Fulvia coiled around Virgil’s crook. I saw Virgil’s eyes shift from their glittering soft azure shade to a much darker, stormier look, as though his eyes had been shadowed by thick, ominous rain clouds.

By 37 BC Virgil had been lured into the corrupting stone metropolis, thanks to the success of his poetry. He had now been subsumed by Gaius Maecenas, who had inoculated the impressionable poet with rhetoric against the great soldier Mark Antony. They often talked of his corrupting, by this mysterious female figure, the Regina Meretrix, as they called her. I was rapt by their slanderous stories, that a woman could so brutally reject the masculine world which so often pushed itself outwards across the Roman empire. Maecenas told Virgil of the plan to meet Mark Antony in Brundisium, to attempt to reconcile him and bring him back to Rome. I flicked my tail in excitement at the news, and hatched my plan to board Mark Antony’s ship, to meet the famed Regina Meretrix.

3. In Octaviam

The dark sky loomed above me, such that the paved road only extended a few feet before vanishing into the dark void which surrounded Maecenas’s estate – I was in my element. Alone, I wriggled into the carriage which sat outside the house’s gates and nestled between the crates which sat in the back of the vehicle. The party left at the first crack of Apollo’s whip, the finest white horses selected for the 3 day journey. I dared not move a muscle, fearing I would be thrown out of the carriage, my one chance at a greater freedom lost. And so I endured the journey, scarcely eating except in the dead of the cold autumn night, when I could eat out of the rations carriage without being seen. Finally we arrived at Brundisium, the turquoise waters of the Adriatic Sea reflecting against the white stone of the surrounding town. In the distance, Mark Antony’s fleet stood stoically anchored just off the water’s edge. I watched a lustrously dressed man disembark a barge sent off to shore, and immediately identified the fabled Mark Antony. I made my way down to barge and slipped myself into the empty sword sleeve which Mark Antony had left on the barge. I sailed back to Alexandria with him, and after his initial shock at finding a snake on his ship he quite warmed to the idea of non-human company, being already acquainted with the exoticism of the languid lands of the Ptolemaic dynasty. However, I had no real interest in the man myself, despite how acclaimed he may have been; my interest remained with the Queen.

Arriving at the palace, I watched her from the banks of the Nile as she moseyed down the rich and powerful river on a barge. She sat one a beautiful throne, not worthy for her divine queenly body. Striking purples complemented the golds of her ceremonial dress and the silvers of the oars, which moved to the tune of flutes playing from the shores. Antony put me in a small

reed basket which was cramped and uncomfortable, and I was ported from the shore to her chamber, where I was gifted like some novelty entertainment. The Queen’s presence calmed me, and I became entranced with her very aura, a refreshing feminine existence surrounding me. She did not wrap me like an object as Cicero had done, nor tried to make me mate as Virgil had done, but she took me as is, and she retreated to her chamber with me.

Each time I slithered into her chamber, she welcomed me with enthusiasm and affection, letting me slink across her golden adornments. Oftentimes it would be only me and her in the chamber, and she would speak to me as she did to her two ladies-in-waiting, Iras and Charmian. Together, Cleopatra and I existed on the same plane of existence. I no longer felt like the lowly snake, she had rescued me from the rabbles of Rome. In her presence and her presence alone, I felt truly elated. She gave no thought to my sex, no thought to some chauvinist law of the jungle.

What sincerely intrigued me about Cleopatra was her radical ability to truly choose her seclusion; Cicero was chained to it, Virgil required it, but Cleopatra was entirely free from any psychological bondage. It seemed she was a cat who had the key to her own cage. Now I could see why the Roman men called her the Regina Meretrix – simply because they failed to understand the complexity of her character and attempted to rationalise it with Roman logic. Of course, no Roman logic could impose itself on Egyptian rule. Except that Mark Antony, who was like a stabbing stone against my scaly white belly. When he entered my Queen’s chamber, I quickly slithered to the garden, so I could maintain some form of isolation. He melted my Cleopatra like licking flames melted Troy. I despised the Roman injection, a threat to the serenity maintained by the women of the chamber. Mark Antony failed to appreciate the importance of fitting every soul for independent action, the immeasurable solitude of self.

The time I spent with Cleopatra brought me as close to Terra Mater as I had been in the Roman forests, but all good things (according to humans) must come to an end. Although I didn’t find that to be true in any respect (humans clearly don’t understand the beauty in the infinite cycle of nature) it seemed fitting in this moment, as a fatally wounded Mark Antony was carried into my Queen’s chamber, disrupting our previously undefiled confinement. I sat in the corner and watched the Regina howl in pain, her piercing lupine-like screech reaching the banks of the Nile, from which Octavian and his legion were steadily advancing towards our chamber. Cleo ordered Charmian and Iras to dress her in her most queenly robes, and as they left she turns to me and lifts me until my eyes meet hers. I coil myself around her arm, her porcelain skin, and she strokes me and tells me what must be done. Iras and Charmian dress my queen in a brilliant shimmering gold piece, dazzling to any mortal being. I gaze upon my Queen one last time, before she presses me against her breast, my deadly fangs piercing her nipple. She collapsed, as beautiful in death as in life, her crown still resting gently on her head. I remember slithering off into the garden and then as far as I could go, venomous tears in my eyes.

4. Diverging Lives

I was captured by Octavian’s forces, and brought back to Rome, the place I had tried so hard to flee from. I was paraded around the city streets as some sort of perverse war trophy, the asp that killed my beauty, Cleopatra. Octavian held me in his keep well-fed for many years, but no number of grapes could intoxicate my serpent blood the way Cleopatra had – the luxuries of Rome did not replace my longing for absolute solitude. So often in the company of humans, I had the contradictory desire to never be let go of, always to be left alone. Octavian kept me in a purpose-made glass vase, which had a concave divot for water, and another for food; the vessel was an all-round peculiar and unique device, specifically made for the psychological torture of snakes like me. From my glass palace I saw the comings and goings of many men, eventually many emperors, and many years. Many days I wished for the privilege of death, in its infinite black expanse, that it could fit through the holes at the top of my vase and consume me, transport me to the void. I felt the curse of my lustre, which trapped me under the pellucid ceiling. Maybe now I felt the torment of Cicero – how dearly I missed my Cleo. Day and night blurred, the twinkling night stars superimposed against the ubiquitous Sol. My imagination saw my foremothers dancing in the shadowed sky, dancing with Hatshepsut, Merneith, Nefertiti. I did not know if I wanted to join them, or if I wanted to sink into the ocean, their reflection which danced on the water’s surface.

A hundred years may have passed in that cell, but years didn’t quite matter to me anymore, the Roman republican calendar didn’t hold significance to me. I remember the day a new man raised my vase to his eye level, dark curls and a matching trimmed beard. His gold and purple attire indicated to me that he was the emperor, not that I cared. He handed me to a man with a much longer, much greyer beard, whose cheeks were pallid, his head wrapped in some rouge headdress. I was taken out of the palace, sunlight filling my vase and warming my cold blue blood. At his residence, which was substantial, he released me onto the floor, and I slithered across the tiles which were cool against my belly. I came to know the man as Plutarch, some new writer. I was a gift, from an emperor called Hadrian, who had given me to this stranger as a reward for his writings. I watched him write, and was disgusted by his recounts. He painted my Queen as some erratic harlot, who subjugated the supposed chivalrous Antony. If only Plutarch had seen her in her chamber, her brilliance and her resplendent wears, her soft and gentle touch against my scales. I thought many times of striking his wrinkled neck, but a greater power prohibited me, yet my soul refused to stay in that house.

I saw the Acropolis in the distance, and the Aegean below. It was turning dusk, and the streets were clearing out. I swam down the cobbles, the speed of my movement scraping scales clean off the bottom of my soft white underbelly. The waves rapidly approached, and as I entered the blackened water, once cerulean, a rapid trepidation came over me. Though my exile was voluntary, I feared leaving the forests, as Roman as they may be – will I lose myself as Cicero lost himself? What demon would be waiting for me at the bottom of the ocean? Once I sunk below the fish which swam in lighter waters, this paranoia dissolved. As I sunk into the black, I lost all sense of direction, and the bottom of the ocean opened to the sky. I began to dance, swimming freely through the night. Krill swam around me, each twinkling just like a star. Alone, but not lonely, I sunk into the sky, the krill and I.