Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Such pins would have been a key part of her trademark melon coiffure, tucked away within the hair mass, their portrayal in sculpted images or in the hair of female mummies of the time revealing how such a lethal object could be secreted innocuously about the person. And since female hair was in many ways regarded as inviolable in Roman culture, the Roman soldiers who searched her for concealed weapons and even shook her robes for poisons seem never to have considered investigating her hairstyle. Given that Cleopatra chose to die in the company of her hairdresser Eiras, a woman whom Octavian himself had ridiculed as ‘Cleopatra’s hair-dressing girl’ alongside other courtiers and eunuchs deemed to be incapable of any significant deeds, it must have been with a tremendous sense of satisfaction that Eiras now provided the very means by which Octavian was deprived of his greatest triumph.

  In a final flourish, Cleopatra had even directed the layout of this final tableau which would be played out for greatest effect to an audience who would throw open the doors at any time once Octavian had read the letter. Perhaps pausing for a last look out at the sea, the domain of Isis Pharia which stretched out far beyond her window, Cleopatra lay down upon her golden bed and ‘with majestic grace, took in her hands all the emblems of royalty’. After neatly arranging Cleopatra’s robes about her, Charmion took her place at the head of the bed as Eiras took hers at the foot — specific positions at either end of the body which were the traditional places of Isis and Nephthys as chief guardians of the deceased. With Charmion the royal dresser taking the place of Nephthys, the goddess responsible for the linen which decked out the dead, Isis’ close association with the hairdresser’s art meant that Eiras was equally well placed to perform this sacred duty as she handed over the hollow hairpin with its lethal contents.

  Cleopatra ‘made a slight scratch on her arm and had dipped the pin in the blood’. Since the skin was slightly broken, the venomous contents were rapidly absorbed intravenously. As the poison began to take effect, Cleopatra closed her eyes and a gradual numbness crept across her body. The last sounds she heard would have been the low voices of her two women preparing to follow, and the steady lapping of the waves, growing increasingly distant until vanishing completely.

  The silence would only have been broken by the sound of hobnailed soles against the palace’s marble floors as Octavian’s men hurried through the ante-rooms and flung open the doors, to find Cleopatra dead, ‘lying upon a bed of gold, set out in all her royal ornaments. Eiras, one of her women, lay dying at her feet, and Charmion, just ready to fall, scarce able to hold up her head, was adjusting her mistress’s diadem’ inherited from Alexander as her symbol of power. Clearly stunned by the calculated effect of the stage-managed sight before them, one of the men asked angrily, ‘Was this well done of your lady, Charmion?’ ‘Extremely well done,’ she answered defiantly with her final breath, ‘and as befitting the descendant of so many kings.’

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue: the Aftermath

  As soon as Octavian received Cleopatra’s letter requesting burial with Antonius, he rushed to her quarters since ‘he was so anxious to save Cleopatra as an ornament for his triumph’. Ordering specialist physicians to try to revive her, the men were unable to find any obvious cause of death, and no signs of violence: ‘the only marks that were found on her body were tiny pricks on the arm’.

  Paying little attention to any hairpins scattered around or indeed reinserted into the hair, they assumed that such marks must have been made by a snake. Yet of the three large cobras which would have been needed to kill all three women, not a single snake was found, ‘only something like the trail of it was said to have been noticed on the sand by the sea, on the part towards which the building faced and where the windows were’. Nevertheless, it was said that Octavian ‘actually summoned Psylfian snake-charmers to suck the poison from her self-inflicted wound, supposedly from the bite of an asp’. Renowned for their ability ‘if sent for immediately, to suck out the venom of any reptile before the victim dies’, some of these Libyan Psylfi presumably practised in Alexandria.

  Their Egyptian equivalents were priests of the scorpion goddess Selket, experts in the treatment of scorpion stings and snakebites, who employed complex rites set down in the medical texts. A Ptolemaic treatment specifically for snakebite listed twenty-one types of snake and the different gods associated with them, followed by a prognostic test to find out ‘Will the patient live or die?’ Treatment then involved cutting out the bite and applying natron salt to reduce swelling, in the way that magnesium sulphate might be used today; alternatively the wound might be treated with various combinations of onion, beer, carob, terebinth, kyphi, mustard or a decoction of mandrake root.

  Certainly some form of emergency treatment was administered to Cleopatra, since Octavian ‘not only came to see her body, but called in the aid of drugs and of the Psylli in an attempt to revive her’, their reciting of the correct incantation an equally vital part of such treatment. For, as one Ptolemaic spell stated, ‘the poison does not enter the heart here, nor burn the breast here . . . Osiris’ sword destroys the poison, it cools the burn, when the snakes — merbu, wartet, ketet — come out!’ Such spells also listed the traditional gods Selket, Ra and Horus, although the deity most often invoked was Isis, consummate physician and the expert healer in cases of snakebite.

  Yet despite every medical and magical attempt to revive her, it was too late. Cleopatra had escaped. She had defiantly predicted, ‘I will not be shown in a Triumph’, and it is said that Octavian ‘was bitterly chagrined on his own account, as if all the glory of his victory had been taken away from him’.

  But he also realised that, to be seen as her legal successor by the Egyptians, some of whom rose up in revolt at news of her death, he must give his predecessor proper burial. So, honouring her last wishes, he ordered her tomb to be completed and her body to be buried alongside that of Antonius, presumably handing her body over to the embalmers since the sources maintain that the couple ‘were both embalmed in the same manner and buried in the same tomb’.

  The timing of Cleopatra’s funerary rites was certainly significant from a ritual point of view, for, only two days after her death on 10 August, the Egyptians celebrated the Birthday of Isis, the Lychnapsia or ‘Festival of Lights’ to commemorate the time when Isis searched the darkness by torchlight for the body of Osiris. So, as every Isis temple across Egypt and beyond blazed with light, the body of Living Isis was laid out in her tomb beside the goddess’ temple on Alexandria’s Lochias peninsula, her devotees taking comfort in the legend that the goddess could never die. For, unlike her husband Osiris, Isis herself had never suffered death but was perceived as a human queen who had simply passed into another dimension in order to resurrect the dead. A later literary work, based on the pharaonic Ancestor Ritual, had Cleopatra describing how the dead await the waters of rebirth to be reborn, and the idea that Isis’ temples allowed the souls of the dead to be revived was reflected in the belief that at least one of her shrines was ‘full of ghosts’.

  Accompanying their mistress into the beyond were Charmion and Eiras, whose loyalty became proverbial in Alexandria. Octavian ordered that ‘her women also received honorable burial by his directions’, presumably within Cleopatra’s mausoleum following the age-old practice of burying servants with those they had served in life during Egypt’s earliest periods. Statues of the two serving women were also set up at the burial site. However, claims that Octavian gave orders for Cleopatra to receive a burial ‘with royal splendour and magnificence’ failed to mention that she was nevertheless deprived of her vital, albeit precious funerary equipment. It is said that ‘great quantities of treasure were found in the palace’, and in his rampant asset-stripping, Octavian melted down the royal plate and all the precious metals he could find, sending back to Rome all Cleopatra’s other treasures including her personal jewellery and her remaining great pearl worth around 10 million sesterces. And although his biographer was keen to point out that he only kep
t for himself’a single agate cup’, he somehow found sufficient funds to purchase the ultimate status symbol, his own island, when he bought himself Capri the following year.

  The Egyptian wealth sent back to Rome ended thirteen years of economic depression overnight as ‘the rate of interest fell from 12 to 4%’. Octavian could also now guarantee huge supplies of Egyptian grain each year, and was finally able to give his troops their long overdue back pay. One later Roman source claimed that he ‘seduced the army with bonuses, and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians. Indeed, he attracted everybody’s goodwill by the enjoyable gift of peace’, eliminating all possible opposition as ‘war or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit’ and clearly one woman.

  Following Cleopatra’s death on the 17th day of Mesore, to 10 August, Egypt was apparently ruled by her children for a period of some three weeks until Octavian’s regime began on the first day of the following month, 1st Thoth, 31 August 30 BC, when Egypt was formally annexed by Rome. Having made himself Cleopatra’s legitimate heir by ordering her burial and completing her tomb, Octavian ordered the execution of her eldest son and co-regent Caesarion, the fifteenth and final Ptolemy whose dynasty had ruled Egypt for almost three hundred years.

  Agreeing with Arius’ opinion that ‘it is bad to have too many Caesars’, paraphrasing a line from the Iliad, Octavian had finally made himself sole heir of Julius Caesar, ordering work to be carried out on the Caesarium which Cleopatra had created in Caesar’s honour and which he rede-dicated in honour of himself. He nevertheless continued with Cleopatra’s plans by ordering the pair of granite obelisks she had selected from Heliopolis to be set up at either side of the huge entrance way. Each stood on the back of four giant bronze crabs whose claws, inscribed in Greek and Latin, announced that they had been set up on the orders of Octavian; the obelisks, however, eventually taken to London and New York, are still quite rightly known as ‘Cleopatra’s Needles’.

  The Caesarium’s interior was home to numerous statues in keeping with Egypt’s long tradition of ancestor worship, but Octavian now set up marble statues of himself to replace those of the previous regime. Female images were required to compete with those of Cleopatra, so statues of his wife Livia were set up together with those of other female relatives. The bust of a young woman recently found in Alexandria’s harbour had been identified on the basis of her hairstyle as Octavia’s youngest daughter, Antonia Minor.

  Yet there were no such favours for her father Antonius, whose statues were pulled down and smashed wherever they were found. The obelisk that Cleopatra had erected in his honour was rededicated to Rome’s conquest of Egypt, and, with his name chiselled out of every official inscription, Octavian declared 14 January, the day of Antonius’ birth, to be ‘nefastus’ or unholy.

  The destruction of Cleopatra’s own statues was only prevented when ‘Archibius, one of her friends, gave [Octavian] two thousand talents to save them’. Such a sum would support the Roman army for a whole year, and it was an offer that even Octavian could not refuse. Although Archibius is generally assumed to have been a courtier with more money than sense, only the temples would have been capable of finding such an extraordinary sum, particularly since they would have needed Cleopatra’s statuary to remain intact as a vital part of Egypt’s divine ancestor cult. And given that Archibius’ Egyptian name was Horemakhbyt, it has been plausibly suggested that he was spokesman for the Egyptian clergy following the death of the teenage high priest Petubastis.

  Not only had the high priest’s death seriously affected national administration, it had deeply changed matters within the ancient Egyptian capital, Memphis, where new rulers of Egypt were traditionally confirmed and crowned by the hereditary high priest. This was now no longer possible since ‘the Memphite dynasty was extinguished at the same moment as the House of the Ptolemies’. The Egyptian records even suggest that Octavian’s forces had ransacked the tomb of the previous high priest, Pasherenptah III, for although he had died ten years before and been buried alongside his wife Taimhotep, his body had to be remummified and reburied in 30 BC, presumably following its desecration. So, to prevent the body of his unfortunate son and heir Petubastis sharing the same fate, it was kept in the embalmers’ workshop for a staggering seven years before it was felt sufficiently safe to bury his mummy with its ‘gold and silver ornaments with protective amulets of all sorts of genuine precious stones’.

  Having secured Alexandria, Octavian moved on to Memphis where the high priest’s nearest living relative, Psenamun of Letopolis, had to be drafted in to become Octavian’s high priest, designated ‘divus films’, ‘divine son’ of Julius Caesar, or ‘god and son of a god’ in Egyptian. Although he was worshipped as such within the great temple complex of Memphis, it is perhaps telling that Psenamun was the first and last high priest of Octavian. After the unfortunate Petubastis was finally buried seven years after his death, priestly records ceased in 23 BC.

  Refusing to follow his female predecessor’s enthusiasm for native religion, Octavian ‘would not go out of his way, however slightly, to honour the divine Apis bull’. He claimed ‘to worship gods, not cattle’, and his feelings were echoed by his spin doctor poets who ridiculed the ‘demented’, ‘deranged’ Egyptians and their absurd devotion to such sacred creatures. In a complete break with Ptolemaic practices, the new regime were reluctant to pay for the animals’ costly burials, and they were increasingly wrapped in recycled papyri rather than best-quality linen. A similar situation was reflected in burials of the Buchis bulls at Hermonthis. When the twenty-four-year-old bull which Cleopatra had once rowed along the Nile at the very start of her reign died soon after she did, the sandstone stela marking its burial named Octavian but lacked any accompanying titles or even a cartouche.

  The Hermonthis clergy, ‘the angry priests’, were apparently unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of a successor by using his official titles, even though they had already been devised. Anti-Roman feelings are also suggested by the requirement that all temple personnel, from the highest priest to the lowliest worker, had to swear an oath that they would not abandon their posts and take part in rebellion. A surviving document from the Fayum refers to two men,

  both lamplighters in the temple of Serapis, most great god, and of the Isis shrine there, and Paapis son of Thonis and Petorisris son of Patoiphos, both lamp-lighters in the temple of Taweret, most great goddess, at Oxyrynchos. All four swear by Caesar, god and son of a god, to the overseers of the temples in the Oxyrynchos and Kynopolitye nomes, that we will superintend the lamps of the above named temples in the Oxyrynchos and Kynopolitye nomes, that we will superintend the lamps of the above named temples and will supply proper oil for the daily lamps burning in the temples signified from Thoth 1 to Mesore 5 of the present year 1 of Caesar in accordance with what was supplied up to the 22nd which was year 7 of Cleopatra; and we the aforesaid are mutually sureties and all our property is security for the performance of the duties herein written.

  Yet clearly such oaths proved ineffective, so in reaction to ongoing native unrest which, as always, focused on the temples, Octavian confiscated all temple lands and placed the clergy under the ‘high priest of Alexandria and all Egypt’, a new appointee responsible for enforcing strict rules concerning everything from priestly dress to their behaviour. He also gave orders for his statuary to be set up throughout the country, a giant bronze image erected in the far south at Aswan embellished with large, inlaid eyes to reflect his own which gleamed ‘like those of horses, the whites being larger than usual’; it was also a means of keeping a symbolic watch over the border with Nubia, home of the nomadic Blemmyes and Nobatae.

  These volatile peoples were devotees of Isis too, which perhaps explains why, regardless of his true feelings towards Egypt and its gods, Octavian was keen to have himself portrayed at Philae in full pharaonic garb, bringing myrrh, wine and all good things to Isis and her fellow gods. He was even named ‘beloved of Ptah and Isis’. Further south at Kala
bsha in Nubia, he ordered towering figures of Cleopatra and Caesarion offering to Isis on a 23-foot-high gateway to be recarved as himself, accompanied by cartouches naming him ‘the Roman’ and ‘Caesar the god, son of the god’.

  Although Octavian was portrayed as a traditional pharaoh on Egypt’s monuments in order to conform to a culture built entirely around the central figure of a king, the country was soon ruled in absentia when he left Egypt for Syria, finally returning to Italy in the summer of 29 BC. Although he and his Roman successors would continue to use the traditional pharaonic titles ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, son of Ra’, they added the additional phrase ‘he whose power is incomparable in the City par excellence that he loves, Rome’, making clear that Egypt’s pharaoh no longer resided in Egypt.

  Having reduced Cleopatra’s fiercely independent kingdom to little more than his personal domain, he treated the Egyptians themselves differently from other subject peoples. Allowed neither to enter the Roman Senate, as they had been in Ptolemaic times, nor even to serve in the army, they were reduced to little more than serfs producing grain for Rome. And, with Egypt’s borders closed to foreigners, travel was only possible by means of a special visa. Any Roman of senatorial class was forbidden to visit Egypt without his express permission, and he ‘took a leaf from Alexander’s book when [he] decided to keep Egypt under strict surveillance’. Fully aware of the risks associated with handing Egypt over to anyone in the Senate, Octavian appointed the lesser-ranking general Cornelius Gallus, one of the men who had arrested Cleopatra, as his ‘Prefect of Egypt and Alexandria’ — ‘praefectus Aegypti et Alexandreae’. Having successfully dealt with rebellions in the south, Gallus commissioned celebratory inscriptions at temples such as Philae, ‘caused a list of his achievements to be inscribed upon the pyramids’ and even set up his own statuary throughout Egypt. Yet it is also reported Gallus ‘circulated much disparaging gossip’ about Octavian who prosecuted him for treason and killed himself.