“Cleopatra has returned from the dead to kill the emperor.”

The scrolls said as much. A newly published set of oracular texts informed the public that the fall of Rome was imminent, that Despoina had risen from her imprisonment, and that her anger at Augustus would destroy everything in the world.

A centurion read from the text, sitting beside a campfire on the shores of the Black Sea. “And thou shalt be no more a widow,” he said, and one of his young legionaries laughed.

“They only mean Cleopatra was a whore who went to our leader’s bed after her husband killed himself,” he said. “Trying to buy freedom for Egypt. Augustus likes a conquered woman, too, just like Caesar did before him. I was in Alexandria. I guarded the queen in her private chambers.”

“How did you guard her?” another legionary snorted. “From your knees?”

“She was the one kneeling,” the first legionary boasted.

The centurion looked sharply at them.

“These are ancient prophecies, god-given. Have some respect. Listen. ‘But thy soul shalt cohabit with a man-eating lion, terrible, a furious warrior. And then shalt thou be happy, and among all men known; for thou shalt leave possessed of shameless soul.’”

“What do you make of that?” another legionary asked, a feeling of unease creeping through his belly.

“Cleopatra is not a mortal woman, if she ever was. Some say she was a witch and that was how she got Mark Antony to do her bidding.”

The company made a sign against witchcraft. Antony had been their idol, and then he had betrayed them. It would be a comfort if that had not been his fault. It would be a comfort if, in fact, Augustus, who was known to be no warrior, who had fled several battlefields, turned out to be a liar. Stranger things had happened in the history of Rome.

The commander read the rest of the prophecy.

He put the scroll down, his face grim.

“In Alexandria, I was with the emperor when we went into the mausoleum. The queen’s body was not there, though we had carried it to the pyre and chained it in place three days earlier. We thought it had been stolen, but the emperor went pale. This prophecy says she lives, and I believe it. The prophecy says that Augustus has inflamed her wrath—”

“It doesn’t say Augustus,” one of the men interrupted.

“Destroy the cities of the Roman king,” the commander said. “There is a plague, or haven’t you heard? Everywhere but Rome. She is saving Rome for last.”

The men stared into their campfire, sobered.

“Perhaps she saves Rome for something worse than plague,” said the young legionary who had guarded Cleopatra.

Elsewhere in the new texts, the oracles implied that a return to the republic would save Rome. Messages began to be exchanged, from end to end of the country, from legion to legion, from commander to commander. Soon, the senators and their emissaries traveled to these distant legions, soliciting their support, working their way through country villages and ports, where the rumor of the emperor’s misdeeds had already spread.

The new Sibylline prophecies did as the senators hoped they would.

An army constructed of legions that had once been loyal to Antony, and of legions that were commanded by allies of the seceding senators, began to rise.