Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Yet serious unrest would continue across much of southern Egypt, and later, in 24-23 BC, Octavian would suffer a serious defeat at in 24-23 BC at the hands of ‘Queen Candace’, the Meroitic Kandake or female ruler Amanirenas. As the forces of this ‘second Cleopatra’ marched over the border from Sudan into Egypt and overwhelmed three Roman cohorts to seize Aswan, they took many prisoners and ‘even wrenched from their bases the statues of Caesar’, explaining how the head of Octavian’s large bronze statue with inlaid eyes ended up 470 miles south in Meroe, buried beneath temple steps to be symbolically trampled underfoot Egyptian-style by all those entering the sacred precincts.

  Having already taken his leave of Egypt which he never visited again, on 13 August 29 BC Octavian had finally entered Rome. There he celebrated three lavish Triumphs to mark his victories in Illyria, Aktion and Egypt — it was said that ‘all the processions presented a striking appearance on account of the spoils of Egypt’. Cleopatra’s vast wealth and funerary equipment were displayed in a parade which culminated in the appearance of her eleven-year-old twins, beneath a sign naming them simply ‘Sol et Luna’, Sun and Moon. Any suggestion that Octavian had been relieved to be rid of Cleopatra in case he offended public opinion by displaying her in the Triumph was surely offset by his use of her children, forced to march through Rome beside a great wax image of their dead mother. This ‘effigy of the dead Cleopatra lying on a couch, so that in a sense she too, together with the live captives, who included her children . . . formed a part of the pageant’ even included the theatrical portrayal of asps winding bracelet-style up her arms toward her chest, revealing to the illiterate crowds her death by snake venom.

  Amongst those lining the route to celebrate Cleopatra’s death, the poet Propertius and his girlfriend secured such a good vantage point of the effigy he could claim ‘I’ve seen the sacred adders’ fang upon her bosom close and hang, and her whole body slowly creep on the dark road to endless sleep’. Fellow poet Horace also marked the occasion by rewriting the rather sombre poem he had written soon after Aktion, any reservations that Cleopatra still lived now replaced by joy and relief at her death. For now Rome was finally able to crack open the vintage wine and celebrate in full, his ‘Cleopatra Ode’ beginning ‘Nunc est bibendum’, ‘Now is the time to drain the flowing bowl, now with unfettered foot to beat the ground with dancing, now with feasting to deck the couches of the gods, my comrades!’.

  The culmination of the Triumph was the execution of prisoners in the Forum, after which the conquering hero Octavian then ascended the Capitoline Hill to offer sacrifice in the temple of Jupiter at the summit. Since this was the religious heart of Rome, from which Cleopatra had supposedly wished to rule, Octavian distributed largesse around the Capitol’s most important shrines of Jupiter (Zeus), Juno (Hera) and Minerva (Athena), each one stripped of all previous dedications and embellished with the rich spoils of Cleopatra’s Egypt. He admitted that his gifts to Rome’s temples ‘cost me about 100,000,000 sesterces’, and it is surely more than coincidence that ‘the largest mass of rock crystal ever seen’ weighing around 1501b (68 kg), was dedicated in the Capitol’s temple complex by his wife Livia. It was just possibly the crystal that Cleopatra had intended for her Alexander-style coffin, although its astronomical value meant that this was something she would never have been permitted to keep, even after death.

  Octavian built a total often new temples, repairing more than eighty others all ‘at great expense, without any inscription of my name’. Having commissioned the great temple known as the Pantheon, he adorned it with a new statue of Venus. Keen to reclaim the goddess for Rome and to symbolise Cleopatra’s defeat, he adorned his new statue with her remaining huge pearl ‘cut in two pieces, so that half a helping of the jewel might be in each of the ears.’ He even took for his new statue the pearl necklace she herself had placed on Caesar’s statue of Venus in his family temple in the Forum.

  Although mindful of his pledge to leave this, like all statues of Cleopatra, intact, Octavian nevertheless changed its immediate surroundings by creating a much larger Forum with a somewhat phallic layout. Two semi-circular galleries or exedrae appear to form testicles and a long projecting forecourt extended into the area of Caesar’s Venus temple so that ‘the buildings could be imagined as having sexual intercourse’ in a very subtle, albeit disturbing, use of architectural domination.

  Certainly Octavian had learned much from his time in Alexandria, and keeping to the plans Caesar himself had drawn up with Cleopatra’s advice, Octavian inaugurated the new Senate House which Caesar had initiated. He could also claim that ‘I found Rome built of sun dried bricks — I leave her clothed in marble’, when marble was used for the first time in the city to cover Apollo’s temple on the Palatine Hill. Behind doors of imported ivory, panels of North African marble and glazed relief figures of Apollo-Octavian battling Antonius-Herakles gave way to an Alexandrian-style library where ‘all that men of old and new times thought, with learned minds, is open to inspection by the reader.’

  In the grand tradition of Roman generals who had for centuries carted off antiquities from Greece and the East to enhance their more modest city, Octavian ordered a succession of statues and obelisks to be brought back from Egypt, initiating a trend which led to more obelisks ending up in Rome than remained in Egypt. Of two brought from the great temple of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis to symbolise his victory over Egypt, that of Seti I was set up in the centre of the Circus Maximus (now in the Piazza del Popolo) while the second, originally commissioned by the Saite king Psammetichus II, was reinscribed with Octavian’s name and set up in the Campus Martius (now in Monte Citorio) in the centre of a marble and bronze pavement. Marked out in lines and an Egyptian-inspired Zodiac to create a giant sundial 100 yards across called the Solarium Augusti, ‘the biggest clock of all time’ was obviously influenced by the Egyptian method of using sunlight and shadow to mark time and key events. The 100-foot-high obelisk at its centre was erected in such a way that twice a year, at sunset on Octavian’s birthday, 23 September (the autumn equinox), and again on 21 March (the spring equinox), its shadow fell straight across the dial and up the steps to touch the altar of the ‘Peace of Augustus’, inscribed with the legend that ‘Augustus gave this gift to the Sun, having brought Egypt into the power of the Roman People’.

  Eventually two more granite obelisks (now in the Piazza dell’Es-quilino and the Piazza del Quirinale) were imported from Egypt to flank the entrance to the ambitious mausoleum that Octavian had begun to build on the Campus Martius as early as 28 BC. Quite possibly inspired by that of Cleopatra, his dynastic sepulchre, complete with gardens and trees, featured a facade as found on great royal tombs across the East. Beneath the domed top, the tomb was essentially a step pyramid in cross-section, and as Egyptomania took hold of Rome wealthy men such as Gaius Cestius even built their own pyramid-shaped tombs in the middle of the eternal city.

  Although Octavian would always maintain he had restored the Republic in the face of threatened monarchy from the East, he became Rome’s princeps or ‘leading citizen’, effectively its first emperor, in January 28 BC, after which his totalitarian regime determined virtually every aspect of life from legislating on public morals to suppressing such undesirable cults as Isis worship. He even pronounced on dress, ordering all male citizens to wear the toga and married women the all-concealing long dress and mantle.

  Such policies were simply rubber-stamped by the compliant Senate, who wished to mark his elevation to power with a new name connecting him directly with Rome. Some favoured Romulus, the founder of the city and its first king, until his advisers pointed out connotations with monarchy and tyranny. So, as a more honourable alternative, Munatius Plancus suggested the name ‘Augustus’, quoting an epigram which stated ‘when glorious Rome had founded been, by augury august’. Although ground consecrated by the augurs was indeed known as ‘august’, it seems more than coincidental that Plancus, who had once danced before Cleopatra, the New Isis, would h
ave known that another of her divine titles was ‘Isis Augusta’, meaning majestic and sacred. So it was that the banker’s son Gaius Octavianus became Augustus Caesar in 27 BC after lifting a name from the goddess persona of Cleopatra.

  It was also decided that a month should be named to celebrate Octavian’s new name in the same way that the fifth month, Quinctilis, had been renamed July in honour of Julius Caesar’s birth month. Yet instead of selecting his own birth month, September, the newly named Augustus claimed Sextilis as the month of Augustus, ordering ‘that the month renamed in his honour should be the one in which he brought down Cleopatra’ and the first day of August, the day Alexandria had surrendered, was declared a public holiday.

  From that time onwards avoiding any reference to Cleopatra, Antonius or the civil war, Octavian simply stated ‘Aegyptum imperio populi Romani adieci’, ‘I added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people’, even though he had made Egypt his personal possession. After first isolating its people from the rest of the ancient world by forbidding any Roman to visit Egypt or any Egyptian to visit Rome, he made sure that his version of events was never contradicted by implementing a policy of mass censorship. Thousands of contradictory or incriminating texts, from the Sibylline books to the writings of Julius Caesar, were burnt. A brief missive to his Surveyor of Libraries ordered the removal of any works deemed ‘unsuitable’ for public consumption, replacing them with his own rewriting of history, greatly enhanced by the pens of his eloquent poets.

  Yet despite such drastic measures, some sources did survive. When the royal archives in Alexandria were taken over and countless official documents binned as waste paper, some were recycled as mummy cartonnage and only discovered two thousand years later when Cleopatra’s handwriting came to light. The funerary inscriptions of the high priests of Memphis, concealed beneath Sakkara’s drifting sands, were only rediscovered and translated in modern times, while the complexities of Ptolemaic hieroglyphs on temple walls ‘were enough to safeguard embarrassing facts and dangerous sentiments’ from the eyes of Octavian’s agents.

  The names and images of Cleopatra and Antonius also survived on their coinage, the silver currency of Antonius remaining in circulation for some 250 years, far longer than the softer gold coins of Octavian which lasted a century at most. And, like his coinage, Antonius’ genes too proved the more durable. Fathering only a single child, Julia, Octavian repeatedly used her for his own political ends, first betrothing her to Antonius’ son Antyllus and then, after his execution, to the distinctly non-Roman king of the Getae in contradiction of Roman law. She was finally married off to her cousin, Octavia’s son Marcellus, in 25 BC, and on his premature death she was passed on to the elderly Agrippa in belated thanks for winning Octavian his many battles. Despite the twenty-five-year age gap they had two sons, Gaius and Lucius, who became Octavian’s heirs. At Agrippa’s death Julia was forced to marry Livia’s son Tiberius to provide a father figure for the boys, yet, with neither party keen on the marriage, Julia had a number of affairs. Following her relationship with Antonius’ youngest son, Iullus, he was forced to commit suicide by Octavian while Julia was charged with promiscuity under her father’s strict moral laws, exiled to the small island of Pandateria and even denied burial in the family tomb. Since her sons also mysteriously died young, Octavian was left with little choice but to adopt his adult stepson Tiberius as his successor when he himself finally passed away in AD 14 aged seventy-five, some say poisoned by Livia who wanted her ageing son as emperor.

  Yet, in contrast to Octavian’s distinct lack of success as a dynast, Antonius’ descendants were prolific and widespread. In the East, his half-Asiatic granddaughter Pythodoris was married off to his former client kings, first Polemon of Pontus and then Archelaus of Cappadocia. In the West, his grandson Claudius and great-grandsons Caligula and Nero were the three emperors who succeeded Octavian and Tiberius.

  Under their successive reigns so much Eastern splendour was revived that there were once again rumours that Alexandria would replace Rome as the capital of the empire. Antonius’ memory was rehabilitated by his great-grandson Caligula, who ordered the obelisk that Cleopatra had set up in Antonius’ honour to be brought from Alexandria and set up close to Rome’s centre of Isis worship (now in the Piazza di San Pietro outside the Vatican). Caligula gave Isis’ cult state recognition after its violent suppression under the previous regime, fostered his own divinity based on mysteries related to Isis’ cult and even pursued a Ptolemaic-style marriage to his sister. As an admirer of Alexander the Great, he also had suitable offerings presented to Alexander’s mummy, taking its golden breastplate for himself and very nearly adopting the Ptolemic-style royal diadem when dining with foreign kings.

  After his distinctly un-Roman behaviour hastened his assassination Caligula was succeeded by Antonius’ grandson Claudius, who continued to support the Isis cult by commissioning the elaborate altar known as ‘the mensa Isiaca’, decorated with images of Isis and the sacred bulls. Claudius’ military tribune Gaius Stertimius Xenophon was also a priest of Isis and Serapis, and though Octavian and his immediate family had all been cremated according to Roman custom and their ashes placed within the family mausoleum, their urns gave way to sarcophagi when at least one member of the imperial family chose to be embalmed Egyptian-style.

  As Egypt’s influence continued to spread through Rome, helped by such courtiers as Chaeremon, a former librarian at Alexandria and expert on Egyptian civilisation, the writing of ‘Aigyptiaka’, books about Egypt, became a popular literary pastime. As a noted historian and author of works on Etruscan and Carthaginian history, Claudius himself began a modern history of Rome beginning with Caesar’s murder in 44 BC, until his grandmother Livia strongly advised him to leave out events before 30 BC and any mention of Cleopatra, for even he as emperor ‘would not be allowed to publish a free and unvarnished report on the intervening period’. With the censorship supported by Claudius’ mother Antonia, Antonius’ daughter by Octavia, Antonius’ daughter by Cleopatra conversely did all she could to keep her parents’ legacy very much alive, for Cleopatra Selene was ‘totally her mother’s daughter’.

  Although many historians like to believe that all three of the couple’s children had been spared, based on the claim that Octavian ‘brought them up no less tenderly than if they had been members of his own family, and gave them the education their rank deserved’, seven-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphos was not mentioned as part of the Triumph of 29 BC and may well have succumbed to his first cold winter in Rome. The Triumph was also, ominously, the last official sighting of Alexander Helios, who died ‘before military and marriageable age’. His bride-to-be, Iotape, now surplus to requirements, was sent back to her father Artavasdes, who was pardoned by Octavian and made client king of Armenia. Iotape herself was married off to a fellow client king in Commagene.

  As the only surviving child of Cleopatra, eleven-year-old Cleopatra Selene was sent to live with the saintly Octavia whose household consisted of her own teenage sons by her first marriage, her two daughters by Antonius, the two Antonias, aged nine and six, and thirteen-year-old Iullus, Antonius and Fulvia’s remaining son after Octavian had beheaded his older brother Antyllus. The children were raised and educated to become the means of creating political alliances, and Selene was part of Octavian’s plan for North Africa. She was now betrothed to Prince Juba, who had lived in Rome ever since Caesar had brought him back from North Africa as a four-year-old, been granted Roman citizenship, taken the name Gaius Julius Juba and remained with Caesar, presumably meeting Cleopatra VII during her time in Rome. Then, taking up residence in Octavia’s household, the bookish prince was made client king of Mauritania and Numidia in 25 BC and married to Selene.

  Although officially only queen of Mauritania and Numidia, Selene had been awarded Cyrene by her parents in the Donations ceremony, while her status as sole remaining child of Cleopatra VII meant she must surely have regarded herself as ruler of Egypt by birth. As heirs to the whole of North
Africa, in theory if not in practice, Juba and Selene ruled their kingdom from their coastal capital, Iol. They renamed it Caesarea (modern Cherchel), which may have applied as much to Julius Caesar as to Octavian, and re-created Cleopatra’s court within a luxurious palace complex embellished with superb mosaics, marble walls and swathes of rich purple fabrics produced at Juba’s dye factories at Mogador. The palace was filled with relief carvings of sphinxes, bronze figures of Dionysos and lamps of Alexandrian design, and large quantities of statuary were imported from Egypt. There were 1500-year-old statues of the pharaohs Tuthmosis I, and Tuthmosis III, a giant uraeus snake and a head of Amun, perhaps sourced from Thebes to perpetuate the dynastic link with Alexander and his divine father.

  Within a veritable ‘gallery of ancestors’, stunning marble busts of the very handsome, curly-haired Juba stood alongside images of the equally attractive Selene, whose sculpted portraits carried all ‘the marks of her devotion and love for her mother country’. Inheriting her mother’s love of pearls and lush fabrics, she honoured her memory by adopting her trademark melon hairstyle, albeit adorned with more defined snaillike curls to frame her somewhat fuller face.