Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Riding down the great central highway of Alexandria in a splendid gold chariot, Antonius may well have replicated the route of the previous ‘Neos Dionysos’, Auletes. He was described as ‘coming forth in procession around the temple of Isis by his war chariot ... to alight at the temple of Isis, lady of the Mound-of-Egypt’, presumably referring to the Serapeum complex which was built on high ground, its walls sheathed in gleaming metal atop a great sweep of one hundred white stone steps. The black-robed Cleopatra sat enthroned above the proceedings to receive the conquering hero. As he formally presented her with all the spoils of war, including the Armenian king and his fellow prisoners secured in chains of silver as befitted their regal status, the entire city would have bowed down before her in thanksgiving in rites overseen by the youthful high priest Petubastis, who may also have led further celebrations to confirm the marriage of a couple who were now portrayed by artists as Isis and Dionysos. Yet the great triumphal procession was only a preliminary to the main event known to history as the ‘Donations of Alexandria’.

  It was the culmination of everything that Cleopatra and Antonius had so far achieved. Surviving details suggest a spectacle initiated by Antonius but almost certainly stage-managed by Cleopatra. Taking place in Alexandria’s huge Gymnasion stadium, traditional stage of the Ptolemaia festival, it featured displays of lavish wealth that demonstrated to all the power of this ultimate celebrity couple and their growing dynasty, and repeated the same ceremony of 52 BC when Auletes presented his own four children to the Alexandrians.

  At the centre of the proceedings a two-tiered platform of gleaming silver held six gold thrones, the two largest, on the higher tier, occupied by the glittering couple themselves. The royal consort Antonius, in full Roman military dress as Triumvir, Imperator and commander of the eastern provinces, was flanked by Roman legionary standards and a Roman bodyguard beneath a fine linen canopy topped by the twin Ptolemaic eagles; his wife Cleopatra ‘was then, as at other times when she appeared in public, dressed in the habit of the goddess Isis and gave audience to the people under the name of the New Isis’. With her black robes sharply defined against the Gymnasion’s brilliant white marble walls and the colourful costumes of those around her, she was accompanied by her four children each enthroned on the second tier: the thirteen-year-old pharaoh Caesarion, the six-year-old twins Helios and Selene, and two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus.

  Rising to address the massed ranks of Alexandrians, calling on oratorial skills so effectively employed at Caesar’s funeral ten years earlier, Antonius addressed them in his capacity as Caesar’s high priest, telling them in their shared Greek tongue that he spoke in honour of the deified Julius. Reiterating that ‘the greatness of the Roman empire consisted more in giving than in taking’, he named each of his three children by Cleopatra and proceeded to list the territories he now bestowed on each of them in the name of Rome.

  Stating that ‘his own sons by Cleopatra were to have the style of “kings of kings”’, he presented the eldest, Alexander Helios, with Armenia, Media and Parthia to give him all the lands east of the Euphrates as far as India, the furthest extent of Alexander the Great’s own empire. With the boy’s betrothal to the king of Media’s only daughter Iotape confirming his status, six-year-old ‘Alexander was brought out before the people in Median costume, the tiara and upright peak’. A superb bronze figurine of a chubby young boy from late first-century BC Alexandria, dressed in the same Median dress, is highly likely to depict this child: he is standing on tiptoes, stretching out his hand to take his newly awarded territories.

  Antonius then presented his younger son, two-year-old Ptolemy, with Phoenicia, Syria and Cilicia. The toddler was brought out like his older brother but dressed in the purple mantle, Macedonian boots and distinctive Macedonian cap known as the kausia, ‘done about with the diadem; for this was the habit of the successors of Alexander’. As the two boys then turned to acknowledge their parents formally, no doubt after a considerable amount of practice, ‘one was received by a guard of Macedonians, the other one by one of Armenians’ as a mark of their status.

  Then came Cleopatra’s only daughter, six-year-old Cleopatra Selene, who received the huge territory of Cyrene (eastern Libya) combined with Crete. The girl herself is perhaps represented on a bronze plaque showing twins Selene-Isis and Helios-Horus holding long sceptres alongside a double cornucopia, quite possibly the moment when the young twins were presented with their own sceptres at the great event.

  Yet in light of the childrens’ young age, Cleopatra was made regent for them all. She was now proclaimed ‘Cleopatra Thea Neotera Philopator Philopatris’, ‘the New Thea, Father Loving and Fatherland Loving,’ Ruler of Egypt, Cyprus, Libya and Coele-Syria, while the Latin inscription on the couple’s Roman-style coins announced, ‘Cleopatrae reginae regum filiorum regum’, ‘Cleopatra, Queen of Kings, and her sons who are kings’.

  Finally came her eldest child and co-ruler Caesarion, bearing the pharaonic regalia of crook and flail and dressed in robes of finest linen. Hailing him as ‘Ptolemy Caesar, King of Kings’, to share senior rank with his mother over her three youngest children, Antonius declared the thirteen-year-old pharaoh sole legitimate heir of Julius Caesar. It was political dynamite.

  It was certainly too much for Octavian, who, on becoming consul for a second time in January 33 BC, finally went public with his attacks on Antonius. In a brilliant PR campaign targeting the couple whose coherent policy of ruling the East would surely soon move westwards, Octavian’s allegations became all the more plausible the longer Antonius stayed away from Rome. He seized on rumours of his rival’s marriage to Cleopatra, and it was later said that Antonius ‘by marrying two wives at once, did a thing which no Roman had ever allowed himself, even though Caesar had begun to change the laws of Rome to accommodate his own polygamy.

  So, in contrast to the saintly Octavia, Cleopatra became ‘Aegyptia coniunx’, ‘the Egyptian wife’, following her ‘filthy marriage’, and the lands that Antonius had awarded his faithful ally two years earlier were reduced to the gifts of a besotted lover. With the Donations dismissed as ‘a theatrical piece of insolence and contempt of his country’, the Ptolemaic procession preceding them was misrepresented as a Roman Triumph held outside Rome, scandalising many Romans ‘because they felt he had made a present to the Egyptians of the honourable and sacred traditions of his fatherland for the sake of Cleopatra’, even though pharaohs had processed in golden chariots to celebrate military victories centuries before Rome was even founded. And despite the fact that Cleopatra had funded this particular ‘Roman’ conquest, Octavian claimed that the spoils of the war had been dedicated to Egypt’s Isis rather than Rome’s Capitoline Zeus, conjuring up images of the corrupt Eastern monarch enjoying her ill-gotten gains while his virtuous sister sat at home on a par with the Vestal Virgins and did her weaving.

  Giving Agrippa the powers to banish anyone who might voice an alternative opinion or hold pro-Egyptian sympathies, Octavian decided to compete with Alexandria by rebuilding Rome. Funded by spoils from the Illyrian war and using some of the plans Caesar had drawn up with Cleopatra’s help, Agrippa was appointed ‘Commissioners for public works,’ and under his direction old temples were restored, roads repaired and public halls and colonnades constructed along with new aqueducts, drains and bath-houses. And as grand games and financial incentives won over the people, Octavian kept up his attacks on Antonius in the Senate, accusing him of needless cruelty in the death of Sextus Pompeius, even though he himself had crucified many of Sextus’ troops, and highlighting the captivity of the Armenian king, despite the fact that his life had been spared in contrast to the several hundred Perugians whom Octavian had dispatched as human sacrifices.

  Understandably riled by such hypocrisy, Antonius robustly defended himself by letter, and although Octavian mocked his opponent’s literary style, his use of ‘antique diction’ and ‘nonsensicalities of those garrulous Asiatic orators’, which his own limited knowledge of Gree
k failed to grasp, Antonius continued to fire his vivid missives north. Pointing out that Octavian had unlawfully seized Lepidus’ territories, given land out to only his veteran troops, retained almost half the ships loaned to him and sent a mere tenth of the troops promised in return, Antonius’ most fascinating defence tackled the main issue, his relationship with Cleopatra.

  In a startlingly frank letter, Antonius asked Octavian, ‘What’s come over you? Do you object to my sleeping with Cleopatra? She is my wife! And it isn’t as if this were anything new — the affair started nine years ago! And what about you? Are you faithful to Livia Drusilla? My congratulations if, when this letter arrives, you have not already been to bed with Tertullia or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisiena — or all of them. Does it really matter so much where, or with whom, you get your erections?’ For behind his carefully honed public image, Octavian kept at least one mistress and had numerous affairs with his colleagues’ wives and daughters, albeit claiming that they were undertaken purely ‘for reasons of state, not simple passion’ to find out what his enemies were up to. Yet his methods were unsubtle even by the standards of Antonius, who accused Octavian of ‘hauling an ex-consul’s wife from her husband’s dining room into the bedroom — before his eyes, too! He brought the woman back, says Antonius, blushing to the ears and with her hair in disorder.’

  Yet the real reason for Octavian’s attacks was Antonius’ public declaration of Caesarion’s paternity, both at the Donations and in a report to the Senate announcing that Caesar had acknowledged Caesarion as his son to several colleagues, including Gaius Oppius. Clearly this undermined Octavian’s adopted status, and Oppius was persuaded to publish a retraction. Antonius’ supporters then accused Octavian of homosexuality, sacrilege and cowardice. As the two factions became increasingly hostile, Octavian’s propaganda machine was forced to work flat out to counter a couple who had the support of most of the Greek-speaking nations and a considerable number of Romans. For Alexandria was already home to Plancus, one of the couple’s regular dinner guests, and Dellius the one-time envoy, the senator Quintus Ovinius who managed Cleopatra’s woollen mills and the Greek-born Roman officer Gaius Julius Papeios, who led a party of Roman and Greek troops down to Philae in spring 32 BC to pay homage to Isis and their monarch.

  With Rome’s legionary standards flanking Cleopatra’s great throne room and her royal insignia emblazoned on the shields of the Roman guard ordered to obey her commands, her court was also home to increasing numbers of artists, scholars and craftsmen appointed by Antonius. They also ‘collected for Cleopatra the masterpieces of the East’, from antique bronze statue groups to ancient paintings and Pergamon’s great royal library, which must have delighted Cleopatra above all else for she was said to have derived ‘a positively sensuous pleasure from literature’. The gesture had tremendous political significance, for not only did it enable Antonius to fulfil his duties as Caesar’s successor by replacing works lost during the Alexandrian War, it allowed Cleopatra to fulfil yet another of the Ptolemies’ long-held dreams, acquiring the vast library of former rivals to acknowledge her control of their former kingdom. The vast cargo of two hundred thousand books was transferred from Pergamon’s temple of Athena-Isis to Alexandria’s Serapeum close to the Isis temple, and the new library initiated another wave of cultural growth as Cleopatra’s scholars began to register and collate the avalanche of new information.

  Ever mindful of the need for a thorough education for her children as future monarchs, Cleopatra appointed the Damascus-born philosopher and historian Nikolaus as tutor to the twins Alexander and Cleopatra and young Ptolemy Philadelphus, who were also cared for by a tutor named Euphronios. Their older half-brother Caesarion was taught by the scholar Rhodon, while Theodorus was tutor to Antonius’ eldest son Antyllus — Antonius’ legal heir, according to Roman law. Although he had not been direct part of the Donations ceremony, the ten-year-old appeared with his father on coinage, and he enjoyed the same luxurious lifestyle as his half-siblings. His personal physician, Philotas, recalled how young Antyllus had once rewarded him for a witty comment by giving him all the plate on the sideboard until advised he might be better accepting its value in money, ‘for there may be amongst the rest some antique or famous piece of workmanship which Antony would be sorry to part with’. The number of children in the royal household was increased in 33 BC by the arrival of the infant Princess Iotape of Media, future bride of six-year-old Alexander Helios. The royal children also seem to have been close to their twelve-year-old cousin Petubastis, a familiar figure at court, whose statuary was set up at the Serapeum.

  Such statuary was also part of the Caesareum temple, where Antonius as Caesar’s high priest would have led the sacred rites. Cleopatra commissioned a further shrine in honour of Antonius as Dionysos-Osiris, and in keeping with the Ptolemies’ re-erection of ancient obelisks in honour of their partners she set up a red granite one in the square adjoining Antonius’ monument. There were also bronze statues of Antonius set on basalt bases, one erected on 28 December 34 BC to mark the Donations and inscribed in Greek ‘Antonius the great, lover without peer, Parasitos set this up to his own god and benefactor, 29th day of Khoiak, year 19 which is also year 4.’

  As Cleopatra continued to use this system of double dating in her administration, assisted by those capable of maintaining government during her regular absence abroad — her Syrian adviser Alexas, her secretary Diomedes, her finance minister Seleucus, the eunuch Mardion and a second Potheinos who may have been her prime minister — she had also begun to prepare for the inevitable conflict with Octavian which she realised was fast approaching. Still sixty ships short following Antonius’ loan to the man who was now her enemy, she had imported great quantities of timber from Syria and Lebanon to build new warships, maybe redeploying some of her trading vessels which normally operated in the Red Sea to create an impressive fleet of over two hundred. Drawing on revenue generated through long-term trade with India and the recent acquisition of the balm and bitumen trade, she brought together the huge sums needed to pay the army and foreign supporters, but required another way of maintaining support from those within Egypt. So, instead of doling out money as her father had done, she set up a system of tax breaks such as the one which Antonius’ general Canidius received in February 33 BC, informing him that

  We have granted to Publius Canidius and his heirs the annual exportation of 10,000 artabas of wheat and the annual importation of 5,000 Coan amphoras of wine without anyone exacting anything in taxes from him or any other expense whatsoever. We have also granted tax exemption on all the land he owns in Egypt on the understanding that he shall not pay any taxes, either to the state account or to the special account of us and others, in any way in perpetuity. . . . Let it be written to whom it may concern, so that knowing it they can act accordingly. Let it be done!

  This is a fascinating insight into Cleopatra’s financially astute mind, but what really makes this document come to life is the addition of the Greek phrase , meaning let it be done’, personally added at the end of the document in the hand of Cleopatra herself and thus representing the closest tangible link to the woman yet found.

  Meanwhile Antonius had once more travelled north and, after meeting with their ally the Median king, wrote to the Senate to explain the true nature of the Donations in order to counter Octavian’s accusations. He then arrived in Ephesus, where he sent for Cleopatra and prepared for New Year’s Eve. This was the date when the second Triumvirate came to an end: at midnight on 31 December 33 BC.

  As East and West held their breath, waiting for the two ex-triumvirs to make their next move following the bitter war of words which had raged throughout 33 BC, Antonius gained the upper hand when his powerful colleagues Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Gaius Sosius were both appointed consul for 32 BC. Having received Antonius’ report regarding his command of the East and the Donations, Ahenobarbus was unwilling to divulge its potentially inflammatory contents. But Sosius took the initiative, fin
ally reading it out in February before a packed Senate who learned that the Donations were simply the confirmation of territories already awarded in Antonius policy of governing the East. Antonius then played his trump card by offering to lay down his powers if Octavian would do the same. Left with little room to manoeuvre, Octavian and his supporters began to insult the consuls, intimidating them with an armed guard whose presence in the Senate was illegal. The meeting broke up amid volatile scenes recalling those which had followed the murder of Caesar.

  But then an extraordinary thing happened. Both consuls and almost half the Senate publicly aligned themselves with Antonius, and some three to four hundred men left Rome to set up a new Senate in Ephesus. The harbour there was suddenly swamped by ships ‘coming in from all quarters to form the navy’. Cleopatra herself arrived in her royal flagship Antonias at the head of a personal squadron of sixty ships followed by 140 warships, to be hailed as monarch by the Ephesian people.

  When Canidius Crassus appeared with his legions from Armenia the commanders reassembled their mighty force of 75,000 legionaries, the vast majority drawn from the Greek-speaking nations, together with 25,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, 500 warships and 300 smaller vessels, all largely funded by Cleopatra who had brought with her the royal war chest containing 20,000 talents in bullion. The couple’s mint in Lebanon was now able to produce the coins needed to pay their troops; each legion was to be paid in coinage featuring their own legionary standard backed by the image of a war galley. Such resources far outweighed those of Octavian, who was forced to levy a deeply unpopular 25 per cent income tax across Italy where Antonius and Cleopatra had already begun distributing well-placed funds to their remaining supporters. If they had marched into Italy during the spring of 32 BC they would surely have been victorious, but they did not yet make their move.