Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  The whole death scene is the final act of a melodrama. Or is it? Cleopatra would do anything to save Egypt. Two thousand years later and you see something similar in that modern Egyptian pharaoh, President Anwar Sadat. Someone who so completely identifies with their nation that they see no separation between it and themselves. And in that state of identification these people employ the personal as well as the political to achieve their own ends. This doesn’t mean they subjugate their personal wishes to the needs of the country. It just means the personal desires have the imperative of political decisions that affect thousands, and that the repertoire of techniques to ‘save the country’ includes the intensely personal such as having an affair or prostrating yourself before another leader (as Sadat effectively did when he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to solve the Sinai problem for Egypt).

  Cleopatra used her obvious attractions to get what she wanted. But that didn’t mean she was someone who did not also fall in love and have some semblance of loyalty. She knew, though, that she was doomed in her alliance with Mark Antony: she could not simply desert him. However, he had to go. He’d become an encumbrance. She loved him, but that love would not diminish if he died. This is to strip it of the sentimental vein developed by Plutarch in his account of their romance, and brought to a fine conclusion by Shakespeare; yet, given all her actions, one is forced to conclude that Cleopatra would rather live to fight another day than die in the arms of her lover. And yet she loved him enough not to murder him. She wasn’t a female Herod. She needed a way to force him to kill himself. At the same time, she dreaded being paraded through the streets of Rome as war booty if she were defeated. But would Octavian have done this? Surely he would have cut her a deal of some kind – this would have been her line of thinking, and yet his would have been – Do I need this troublesome woman?

  Cleopatra was not yet forty, and perhaps still fantasised about charming Octavian. But for that to happen the first part of her plan needed to come off.

  She had always made a great deal about poisons, her mastery of poisons, her ability to detect them. She had experimented on men condemned to death, and some who were not condemned who also died. Poison is the weapon of choice for those who have not the power to face down opponents openly. It is the weapon of court intrigues par excellence.

  Though Plutarch, in his telling of the tale, makes much of her experiments with poison, it was a way of holding her own in the company of men. Mark Antony might challenge Octavian to man-to-man combat with any favourite warrior of his choice, while Cleopatra would lovingly finger her cobra or a phial of belladonna or wolfsbane extract. She knew precisely her bargaining chips: she had amassed great wealth in Egypt – indeed, as Egypt’s Pharaoh, one can see that her rule was the turning point of Egypt’s fortunes. It was the wealthiest country in the world at the time. Alexandria was a more impressive city than Rome. Octavian desired to mulct the Egyptians of all their wealth, their grain for sure but also their gold, their jewels, amassed over countless centuries of mining and trading with Africa and the East. That treasure hoard was the goal, and Octavian, being in debt in Rome, needed it. Did he need a queen? He did not, but he needed what she had. Cleopatra knew that this game would be played to the hilt – hence her mausoleum, which was, in effect, a bunker. It was built so strongly and cleverly that once someone was inside it was impossible for anyone to break down the doors. But there was a window high up, restricting entry to a manageable scramble of one, allowing some communication, but not much.

  In the final scene, we have Antony, deserted by Cleopatra’s navy and devastated, beaten by Octavian because he had tried to fight both on land and at sea. Octavian’s navy was the better, and Cleopatra’s sixty triremes soon turned tail and fled when the fighting went against them. As they had in previous battles. Cleo was a lover not a fighter. Antony knew this, and yet vanity led him to fight on Octavian’s terms rather than his own. If he had kept to a land battle alone, if he had resisted Cleo’s urge to help, history might have been very different: Egypt might have kept its wealth, largely as India and China did. There is every reason to believe that the Roman rule of Egypt, from 45 BC until the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century, was an effective pillaging of the country from which it never really recovered. One might compare it to the delicate irrigation systems of Balkh, in northern Afghanistan, that supported a rich urban culture, destroyed by Genghis Khan and forever after condemning that land to a hand-to-mouth nomadic existence. Long waves in history, cause and effect, echoing down the centuries to the present day.

  So, the treasure. And balance against that the children. Cleopatra’s children, half Roman, half of the esteemed blood of Caesar himself, great-uncle of Octavian, these children she naturally wanted to protect. The eldest, Caesarion, was the most at risk. She sent him with a great fortune to India, to establish some sort of trading nation in its own right, a sort of government in exile. Her other children she would bargain for, using the treasure, the main chip, but also – and this was the eastern part of her, understanding how to realise its worth – showing just how much trouble she might be, both dead and alive. If she could play both those chips her children, and Egypt, might survive. Was she concerned for herself? It seems apparent that Cleopatra had the kind of monstrous ego that would not tolerate the insult and degradation of being treated as a slave and captive in Rome. Why, she had been celebrated there as a queen; to be dragged through those streets in chains was more shame than she could bear. But here the cunning began to show. The people of Rome were fickle. They appreciated courage in their enemies, and they had a fickle but real sense of justice. Cleopatra wanted to buy time so that Octavian would realise the dangers of parading her through the streets in a degraded state. She needed time for some kind of deal to be worked out. A better deal than him simply killing her.

  Meanwhile he was bribing everyone, and Cleopatra did not excite complete loyalty. Antony’s son Antyllus had a tutor who knew that the boy wore under his tunic a gigantic gem worth – well, worth more than his life. Betrayed, the boy was executed, but not before the tutor had made off with the gem. He was caught and Octavian saw that he was crucified. A double betrayal deserved such treatment: that was the message he wanted to send.

  Now Antony had decided to throw his tunic over his head and kill himself. The Roman way. His exquisitely worked sword, his gladius, from which we get the word ‘gladiator’, was quite up to the job if he had done the deed correctly. Instead he missed his heart, which was the aim of the Roman method of falling on one’s sword, and performed what the Japanese call seppuku, rupturing his belly in what must have been a ghastly and painful experience.

  But, finding himself not dead, he forced his men to cart him over to Cleopatra’s mausoleum where, initially, he believed she was incarcerated and dead herself. Except she wasn’t. Hiding perhaps until she knew what to do next. Poor lovestruck Antony was unable to get Cleopatra to open the mausoleum from the inside. She claimed it was impossible. That it would be shut to the outside world as well as barred on the inside is not very plausible. To have constructed the tomb as a last resting place with no escape doesn’t fit with the rest of the story. Anyway, in a moment of tragic comedy Antony used the last of his strength to manhandle himself through the high window only to crash to the floor inside. He asked for some wine, told Cleopatra she should trust Proculeius, the servant of Octavian, and died.

  Next, Proculeius tried to get into the mausoleum. He too had to take the undignified window route. There is an unavoidable element of farce in all this, this extended death at the very end of the Nile. And yet this endgame is also the endgame of Egypt as a power in its own right. Finally Cleopatra was persuaded to meet Octavian, perhaps her plan all along (and certainly giving the lie to the supposedly escape-proof tomb, unless she crawled out of the window herself). In the version I prefer she put on a last-ditch attempt to seduce him. When this failed she knew that she would be paraded as a captured queen through Rome, which would be utterly shaming. Remembe
r, this is a woman who played for the highest stakes all her life. She had already decided it would be utter triumph in life or death. Given that she could not succeed in winning over Octavian, she knew she would have to die in a way that would send a message through the ages. Some have argued that the asp that killed her, which would have been a cobra from the detailed description of her death, and was a snake used in state executions, would have been too big to smuggle in in a basket of figs. There are perfectly deadly green cobras three feet long. Cooled in an amphora of water to make it sluggish, such a snake could easily be coiled in the base of a basket of figs.

  The symbol, one symbol, of Egypt is the cobra or asp. It adorned the headpiece of the Pharaoh. Like a snake the river coils through the country. Even today those who suffer a cobra bite are thought to have some sort of special blessing – if they survive. As recently as the 1940s peasants in the Fayoum would inflict a cobra bite on the earlobe of a twelve-year-old boy (after forcing the snake to bite on the carcass of a chicken). The lack of blood vessels in the region and the limited quantity of venom meant the boy would survive and almost gain a measure of immunity. In ancient times a bite was thought to confer immortality.

  Yet, in Roman Egypt, the cobra was used for state executions. Prisoners were bitten on a raised vein on the trunk or leg. Or poison was collected and smeared as ointment into an open cut. We know that the asp was a cobra from the simple descriptions of death by an asp bite. Primarily neurotoxic, the venom causes the victim to suffer numbness of the mouth, tingling and paralysis of the limbs, a heavy weight upon the chest that grows into an asphyxiating torment, tendon spasms, coma and death. Unlike that of the other poisonous Egyptian snake, the horned viper, cobra venom can take effect in as little as six minutes. The viper’s venom affects the blood vessels, causing internal haemorrhaging, and takes longer – sometimes up to twenty hours.

  Cleopatra, as has been said, knew her poisons. In the final scene she smuggled a cobra into her chamber. All her entreaties to win over the victorious Octavian had failed. He wanted the Nile, he wanted the wealth of Egypt. After he was rid of Cleopatra, who had hung on to her possessions through her manipulation of Mark Antony, Egypt would have no more rulers. Rome wanted the Nile and would keep it.

  The asp bit. Plutarch tells us that Cleopatra had two bites or incisions in her arm. We know that she tested her poisons on condemned prisoners, so she would have known that the asp was her best bet. Fast acting, the venom would do for her and both her maids too – a cobra carries up to one grain (sixty milligrams) of venom and only 0.18 of a grain is needed to kill a human. The venom is forty times more powerful than the man-made substitute tubocurarine. Hemlock and other plant poisons have nothing on cobra venom, yet Cleopatra chose it for another reason. Mindful of the way a symbol will travel through history without distortion, she showed that her death was at the hands of the one true god of Egypt: the twisting immortal River Nile.

  Cleopatra was accorded a burial of some magnificence. She was laid to rest by the side of her beloved Antony, as much the cause of his undoing as he was of hers. They would certainly have been mummified, it being the tradition until well into Christian times some five centuries hence. Plutarch implies that the tomb was in the centre of Alexandria; it has never been found. There have been searches as far afield as Siwa. A current favourite is Tposiris Magna, a desert outpost some twenty miles from Alexandria.

  Cleopatra dead, after twenty-two years of rule – ten years more than Alexander the Great, who had started the Ptolemaic dynasty 300 years earlier – and now the dynasty was at an end, Egypt swallowed at last by the Roman Empire. Is there a modern comparison to bring home the enormity of this? America swallowing the formerly independent islands of Hawaii? No comparison. The British Empire swallowing India – closer. In any case there were still loose ends. Octavian was a cold-hearted and efficient emperor. He dispensed with the triumvirate, the tripartite rulership of Rome, as effectively as Napoleon disposed of the three-man Consulate, and was more successful in his Egyptian ventures than that later invader. Octavian knew the ways of Eastern kingship: kill all the contenders, especially those related to you. Double that if they have an auspicious name. Poor seventeen-year-old Caesarion, son of Caesar and Cleopatra – what a combination: if only his tutor, entrusted with the boy’s life, had not sold him out somewhere on the Red Sea coast of Egypt on his way to Ethiopia or India. He persuaded the lad to return to Alexandria. Probably the pair had been scared and fleeced of their wealth, and the prospect of starting a new empire in India didn’t look nearly as promising as a fat sinecure from the Emperor. Being no one is always hard when you have been someone since birth; maybe even being someone at risk is better than being no one living free. The boy obviously lacked the sense of self-preservation his parents had in spades. Whatever happened, Rhodon his tutor persuaded the boy he would be given Egypt to rule once Octavian had spent a little time there. On the way back to Alexandria Caesarion met the men Octavian had set to capture him. Far from getting to rule Egypt, Octavian’s young cousin was tortured and then murdered. It is not recorded why or how he was tortured, but illegitimate murders are often dressed up as righteous and justifiable and perhaps the torture proved it, proved the lad was guilty of fomenting an imaginary revolt.

  Cleopatra’s other kids, the ones by Antony, were no threat as they were not fully grown and didn’t have the Caesarian blood. They were taken to Rome and brought up as Octavian’s by his sister. Cleopatra’s daughter, also Cleopatra, was eventually married to the ruler of ancient Mauretania (located somewhat confusingly in modern Algeria). She had coins minted in her likeness, looking just like her mother, the Last Pharaoh of Egypt; but these coins were inscribed in Greek, not hieroglyphics.

  16 • Herod on river duty

  When his life is almost over the lazy person starts to be prosperous.

  Egyptian proverb

  The Nile connects everything to everything. Sooner rather than later. From Cleopatra we move, smoothly in fact, to the infant Jesus. The Nile is part of both their lives, but what links them initially is Herod, bad old King Herod, who had sided, in his youth, with Antony and Cleopatra against Octavian (who became, as we have seen, the mighty Caesar Augustus). Herod was friends with Antony, good friends it seems, and remained loyal to him even in the latter’s defeat. Politically, though, he was a Roman. In all his quarrels, despite his Arab background, he sided with Rome (his mother was a Nabataean from Petra, his father was an Idumean – an Arab tribe that were forced to become Jewish on pain of death around 135 BC; this made Herod a Jew, though culturally he was Greek and had a Greek name and spoke Greek). When he had to face Caesar Augustus he removed his crown and openly admitted his previous support and continuing friendship, even after death, for Antony. Caesar admired loyalty and told him to put his crown back on again.

  As a young man Herod was good looking, strong and decisive, but he aged badly. He married ten women and grew increasingly unstable and paranoid. His favourite wife, Mariamne, he had put to death because he doubted her political loyalty. After that he took to wandering through the palace calling her name and asking his servants to bring her when she didn’t come. When they failed to return with her he had them beaten mercilessly.

  He suffered from continual pains in his colon, intolerable itching all over the surface of his body, gout, swollen testes and ‘putrefaction of his privy member that produced worms’. He also had a problem breathing and had to sleep, as best he could, sitting upright. Diviners said these diseases were a punishment both for what he had done and for what he would do in the future. Modern physicians have concluded that he had chronic kidney disease complicated by genital gangrene. Nasty. Certainly the great physical pain he was in did not help his delusions. He had his eldest son, the Crown Prince, locked up for treason. In ever greater pain, Herod tried to commit suicide but a local (and foolish, it must be said) retainer stopped him. In all the confusion the Crown Prince cried out from his gaol cell to be released so that he could take
over the country. When Herod heard this he had him executed for treason . . . and then died himself five days later, writhing with regret that he had killed his own son.

  At what point Herod decided to have all the baby boys born in Bethlehem murdered we do not know – only that it was entirely in keeping with his deranged character.

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph fled through the Sinai, or perhaps took a ship, to Egypt, a Roman-ruled country where Jews were also living. It was here they made their journey up the Nile, so legend holds. The Coptic Church has made much of the Holy Family’s visit over the years; close to where I live in Maadi is a Coptic monastery which lies right between the Nile and the notoriously busy Corniche road. There is a kind of slipway down to the Nile and a few steps to the side mark one place where the Holy Family alighted. They only stopped for a rest break, so to speak, rather as if Keele services on the M6 had become honoured because Prince William stopped there on his way home from university one year. There are numerous other rest stops all the way to Asyut in the south. At some places the Virgin Mary has been seen. In a country that is around 10 per cent Christian it is by no means only that religion that is invigorated by reports of these sightings. Many Muslims too claim to have seen her themselves. But this is in a country where religious words are frequently discovered written in the seed patterns inside watermelons and eggplants. There is not much solid evidence of Jesus’ journey through Egypt – he was still, after all, a tiny unknown baby at the time, and there was certainly no reason for Joseph and Mary to broadcast the fact that they had a prophet for a son, given that they had only just escaped his death in Israel.

  However, there is a solid body of non-canonical gospel evidence and oral legend that supports the idea that Jesus visited Egypt at some point during his life. It’s certainly possible – and Egypt was a centre of mystical teaching at that time.