Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (1935)

This is the third historical novel by Lindsay set in the Roman world. The other two have had essentially the same modus operandi: that of setting many strands of surrounding story alongside the great events which are being recounted. This one is a little different in that it has a core storyline which the great events themselves surround. Thus the background is Antonius and Cleopatra and those final months in Alexandria waiting and wondering what Octavianus will do, with Antonius depressed and drinking too much and Cleopatra despising him, failed attempts to patch up personally and make good political moves tripping them both up. The foreground is owned though by one of Antonius' young slaves, Victor, and by a middle-class Greek girl he meets, Daphne. Daphne's father is a classics-obsessed semi-ascetic, working at the Museion, for whom Daphne figures as an appendage only. She's lonely, quickly growing up, and falls for Victor, not minding when he reveals that he's a slave. Victor is locked into all the intrigues of the court, suffers wholesale decampments in Antonius' restlessness, endures tests of his loyalty and strength, manipulates to get free time in which to meet Daphne, survives the lunge downward into depression and confusion of his master. There's another 'character' in all this which is to my mind critical - it is the ancient city of Alexandria. Victor and Daphne move around its shaded lakes with their clumps of wild trees and thickets and their twinkling sun-bathed water, its busy ochre-coloured streets with the sun baking overhead, its harbour and the rough-edged quay districts tightly packed around it, even out to the Pharos, lovingly described in its stony mystery of many levels, the big bright blue sky over all. Eventually the defeat comes, Antonius and Cleopatra are dead, as is Daphne's father, and Victor and the now heavily pregnant Daphne must set off south along the Nile, in search of a former friend of Antonius who has promised Victor a place with him on his farm, Lucilius. Along the way their boat is attacked and they escape up onto the bare desert hills, to an unfinished tomb where Daphne gives birth. And in coping with that on their own, they find the strength and inspiration to begin their new life. Every now and then Lindsay indulges himself a little too much in what I would call impressionistic riffing - short stabs of sentence, all pulled together into one paragraph, like thought-shards drifting back and forth through an idea or construction. Conversely, a lot of the time that works well and helps to make for the most emotionally satisfying and distinctly coloured of the three novels in this sequence.