by M. J. Trow
One particular blank – which could not be filled in by Strabo and is difficult to fill at all – is the daily routines of Egypt in Cleopatra’s time. There is a timeless quality about ancient history. When we look at the giant bas-reliefs on temples at Karnak, Dendera and Luxor, we are looking at gods from 3,000 years earlier still being worshipped in Cleopatra’s reign. The men rowing on the Nile are doing so in boats that have not changed for two millennia. They are cutting down reeds and wheat at harvest time exactly as their forebears had done for centuries. No one comments on this because it had been a way of life for so long that it was not worthy of comment. Strabo waxes lyrical about Alexandria’s library because it was unique. He tells us almost nothing about the fishermen at the waterside because there were so many of them. The way of life was agricultural and the success of the harvest – geared entirely to the Nile’s movements – made the difference between life and death. Since almost all our records of Cleopatra come from the pens of her enemies and just occasionally from her own priests, it is almost impossible to see the real woman. To the Romans, she was fatale monstrum, an unnatural creature to be destroyed. To the priests of Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, she was the embodiment of the goddess Aphrodite whom they called Isis. We are forever doomed to see her through a distorted glass.
Nevertheless, for all the colour, excitement and ultimate tragedy of her life, she ruled Egypt for nineteen years, so we must agree that she was actually extraordinarily good at her job. How did her government work? Egypt’s population is impossible to determine. Diodorus Siculus, who visited the country when the future queen was ten years old, estimated it at about three million, but this was probably (and unusually for a Roman) a conservative estimate. Most experts today light on seven million – about the population of Greater London. The country was divided into two geographically – Lower Egypt meant the delta, dominated of course by the artificially created ‘alien’ city of Alexandria, and Upper Egypt, which followed the tortuous meanderings of the Nile into the swamplands of the Sudan. Occasionally there had been rebellions from the south against earlier Ptolemies but in more recent times most of the trouble for the ruling family came from Alexandria itself. Even here, the various ethnic groups tended to operate side by side rather than in unity. The native Egyptians had their own culture, language, priests and law; so did the Jews, who wrote and spoke Aramaic; and of course the Greeks who saw themselves as culturally superior to anybody.
At the apex of Egyptian society were the Ptolemies themselves, personified between 48 and 30 by Cleopatra. They had ruled with varying degrees of success for 300 years, but as pharaohs (the word means literally ‘great house’) they tapped into a system that was 1,000 years old. The role of pharaoh was what it remained in all civilized countries for centuries – he (or in the case of Egypt, sometimes, she) was head of government, commander-in-chief of army and navy, law-giver and, crucially, a semi-divine link between man and the gods. We shall examine the crucial role of religion, superstition and myth in the next chapter, but we must bear it in mind throughout this book. Egyptian, Greek and Roman culture did not exist without this ‘other world’, which paralleled the more humdrum existence on earth.
Below the Ptolemies came an upper-class9 elite – aristocrats, bureaucrats and priests who oiled the wheels of government. These posts were usually hereditary, so that when Pasherentptah, Cleopatra’s high priest, died, it was natural that his son Petubastis should take over, even though the boy was only seven years old. The priests were administrators, lawyers and doctors. Their temples were not only shrines but places of refuge and an important role of the priesthood was to monitor the levels of the Nile, the Egyptian equivalent of watching the stock exchange today in terms of national economy. The Roman republican system, of officials elected for a year and being unable to stand again for ten, would have made no sense at all to the Ptolemies or their people. It is unfortunate for us that the men of their class did not, unlike their Roman counterparts, write letters or gossip about each other, so we do not have the same sense of day-to-day realism from the Ptolemaic court. That many of them were highly unscrupulous, however, cannot be doubted from the events of Cleopatra’s reign. Her brother’s tutor and her army commander plotted her overthrow and murder in 49. When we have examples of Cleopatra intervening personally, it is almost always to deal with a greedy or over-zealous tax collector.
Unusual in the court were the eunuchs, people the Romans found repellent. These men were respected in Alexandria and trusted largely because sex was not likely to feature in any political machinations and high-born families’ girls were safe from molestation. Since Roman law forbade castration, even for slaves (which the eunuchs usually were), men like Octavian saw them as yet another tragic example of the way in which Egypt’s women emasculated men.
Under the elite were what we might loosely term the middle class. As usual in pre-industrial societies, this ambitious, articulate and educated group were probably relatively few in number. Included in this category were the merchants and craftsmen who made and sold the goods that made Egypt (and the Ptolemies through taxation) rich. At the bottom were the masses – peasants who lived in mud-brick hovels along the Nile and in the delta and worked as farm labourers and fishermen. These were the men who dragged the huge blocks of stone for the pyramids and sphinxes that Strabo marvelled at. Life was not completely static for them. The Ptolemies introduced new farming policies, irrigated fields, dammed the Nile and diverted the river in places. Iron blades replaced bronze for the sickles and scythes used at harvest time, but essentially, these people were the timeless ones, anonymous in their lives, unmarked in their deaths. Their generic type is shown in carving and in paint on scores of walls of tombs and temples in ancient Egyptian kingdoms. The Nile flooded in late summer and the new crop was grown in autumn. After the spring harvest, the dry season came with a burning wind from the west. And the whole cycle began again. Even today, standing below the great pyramid at Giza, it is almost unreal to see the Nile, a bright strip of living green at the edge of the limitless sand.
In the fifth century, Herodotus visited the country. It was the Greeks who called the incomprehensible river Neilos; before that the Egyptians knew it as pa iteru aa, the great river. Sometimes, according to legend, it flowed with gold. Ancient Egyptian tombs were called pyramids after Greek cakes of the same shape. Tall, tapering monoliths became obelisks (kebab skewers). Long before the Ptolemies replaced the Persians as Egypt’s rulers, the Greeks were rewriting the country’s culture. Apart from the peculiar urination habits of men and women, Herodotus commented on the almost complete reversal of customs in Egypt. Women bartered in the market-places while men stayed at home and did the weaving. Even here, the looms operated the other way from the Greeks’. Men carried loads on their heads; women on their shoulders. Men did not have to support their parents in their old age; women did. Men had two sets of clothes; women only one. Women carried their babies for fewer weeks than anywhere else – twins and triplets were common. Goats gave birth to five kids rather than the usual two. Pigeons laid twelve eggs, not the commonplace ten. The Nile had living in its mudbanks creatures that were half mice, half sand. The river’s odd behaviour, the people’s odd behaviour, all seemed strange to a civilized visitor, but the Greek Herodotus was every bit as much a ‘johnny-come-lately’ as Strabo was four hundred years later and the Ptolemies had learned to cope with the strangeness of the place.
By Cleopatra’s time, a top-heavy civil service had been streamlined and in the rare glimpses we have of the queen at work running her country, she often intervenes personally, particularly against corrupt officials. The country was divided into forty nomoi (local districts), which all had Greek names by the first century BC. The local governor was the strategos (general) who worked for Cleopatra under the over-arching epistrategos, who we can regard as a sort of chief minister. The elite at court were inevitably Greek – even the Ptolemies’ bodyguards were Macedonians – and this sometimes caused trou
ble. If an Egyptian wanted to get on, he would have to learn Greek and hope for an appointment. Apart from Cleopatra herself, few Greeks bothered to learn Egyptian.
The government kept a tight control on the economy, which is one reason why Cleopatra was the richest woman in the world at the time. Everybody in Egypt paid taxes, whether it was on salt, fields, drainage ditches or baths. The government also controlled a rudimentary banking system, which issued gold and silver coinage (which frequently had to be debased for economic reasons) and had a monopoly of the textiles, oil and papyrus industries. Cleopatra had several textile workshops of her own, operated by slave women.
Since virtually all the land belonged to Cleopatra, she kept a careful watch, via her bureaucratic record-keepers, on how it was used. Change of usage, perhaps from wheat field to olive grove, needed royal permission. No one could leave their nome (or province) and an army of officials checked inventories, looms and breweries with a thoroughness that makes the Norman Domesday Book in England 1,000 years later look positively amateur.
In one important aspect, the Egypt of the Ptolemies paved the way for the legend of Cleopatra. Greek women – and even more so Roman women – lived in a legal and moral straitjacket designed by men. The Egyptians were more free and easy. So from the century before Cleopatra we find Graeco-Egyptian marriages taking place, in which both languages were spoken in the home and children got used to different names. Women owned property, ran businesses and walked alone in the streets. Those privately taught at home (there were still no formal schools for them) could become doctors, artists, musicians and lawyers. They were rare, but they were there. When the Romans discovered one of them, Cleopatra VII, behaving in this way, they were outraged. Two who were not were Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and, indirectly, they both paid for it with their lives.
2
THE OTHER WORLD
EGYPT, 332
The story of Cleopatra is so well known to us via Shakespeare and the silver screen that we tend to believe we understand her. Her storms and her calms make sense because we are just the same as her. Only 2,000 years separate us and people are people no matter when they live. Whether we see Cleopatra as a seductress, a whore or as a consummate politician and a loving wife and mother, we do so because the events of her life allow us to make comparisons with our own emotions and experiences. Most of us have never been queen of Egypt, nor have we slept with Roman dictators, but we can empathize with the decisions she made, born of the experiences she faced.
Where we cannot see her, for the choking fog of incense, is in the religious dimension of her life. And not only hers, but everyone’s in her story. ‘It is almost impossible,’ writes Guy de la Bédoyère, one of the best ‘Roman’ experts today, ‘to measure the quality and nature of symbolism, ritual and belief. One man’s religious symbol is another man’s decorative motif and yet another’s nightmare.’10
So, three years before Strabo reached Egypt, Octavian caused grave offence to the hereditary priests of the country by refusing to have anything to do with the Apis bull, so revered by them and by Cleopatra. ‘I worship gods, not animals,’ he sneered. In 332, when Alexander of Macedon came to Egypt on his way to the creation of his vast and impossible to maintain empire, he had a dream. His hero Homer came to him and told him to found a great city at that spot on the coast where King Menelaus of Sparta had found himself stranded on his way home from the war with Troy. Our cynical, modern, western world has no time for any of this. Of course, Octavian was right to rubbish a bull and we find his pantheon of gods led by Jupiter to be equally nonsensical. The Trojan War as Homer told it never happened, so how could he know where or even if Menelaus came to Egypt? And even if it were true, what sort of reason is that to found a city? To make these points is to miss the point. These things were real to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, every bit as much as God, Allah, Amida Nyorai and Vahig¯ur¯u are real to some people today. Unless we understand that dreams, omens, prophecies and ritual were an essential part of the lives of the Ptolemies, the Caesars, the Antonys, we shall not see the real Cleopatra at all.
When Alexander of Macedon marched at the head of his invading army into Egypt 300 years before Cleopatra was born, he came to Per-Baster, the shrine of the cat-goddess Bastet. This was the capital of the eighteenth nome of Lower Egypt and Greek travellers before Alexander equated the goddess with their own Artemis, the huntress. This divine equation happened everywhere. Later invaders would dismiss other gods as superstition and mumbo-jumbo but the Greeks (and, to a lesser extent, the Romans) assumed they were the familiar deities but known by different names. The goddess was portrayed by Alexander’s time as a cat-headed woman, carrying a sacred sistrum rattle and a basket. She was the goddess of dancing and music, able to fend off disease and evil spirits. Herodotus wrote of great pilgrimages to Per-Baster (which the Greeks called Bubastis), which brought thousands down the Nile in barges to the melody of flutes and the rhythm of the sistrums. Alexander’s men would have been astonished by the number of mummified cats buried in and around the city.
The army’s next port of call was Iunu, the city of the sun that the Greeks called Heliopolis. This was the cult centre of the sun-god Ra, who was born each morning, was a man by midday and died every evening in old age. This god was so all-powerful – he equates with the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter – that he could assume any shape and went by a number of aliases. From him sprang many of the gods of ancient Egypt – Isis and Osiris, Shu and Tefut, Geb and Nut, Set and Nephthys, all of whom were worshipped at Heliopolis as ‘the divine company’.
Everywhere that Alexander went he was within sight of giant stone representations of the Egyptian gods and the men who, as pharaohs, had lived as living gods, waiting to join the rest in the afterlife. Alexander was welcomed as a liberator in the towns and cities he marched through because he was clearing out the hated Persians and he understood very well that the force with which he had to reckon were the priests. When all was said and done, the pharaoh was only one man, albeit divine. The priesthood was everywhere, the guardians of history, the literate keepers of records, the go-betweens between the pharaoh-god and his people and recognizable instantly by their shaved heads. Plato said, ‘In Egypt, it is not possible for a king to rule without the help of the priests.’11 At Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, Alexander was welcomed by the high priest Maatranefer, the ‘master-builder’.
Memphis was in many ways the most holy city of Egypt. Ptah was worshipped here, the creator-god particularly associated with artisans and artists. His effigies usually showed an embalmed figure, wrapped in a winding sheet and head tightly bandaged under the elaborate mummification process. Only his hands are free and in them he holds a sceptre symbolizing omnipotence and stability. Again, he had a number of aliases and was known to ward off dangerous animals and the inevitable evil spirits. The name Egypt derives from Ptah, so the god was very senior in the pantheon of deities. Herodotus, visiting Memphis 200 years before Alexander, was shown the sites of Ptah’s miracles and the nearby temple of Imhotep, the first shrine the Macedonians would have seen that commemorated a man, rather than a god. Imhotep had been the chief architect of King Zoser in the third dynasty and had built Egypt’s first pyramid. The Greeks translated his name as Imuthes, he who comes in peace, and he was associated with learning and culture of all sorts, but especially of medicine. In that respect, the later Greeks equated him with Asclepius, and by Cleopatra’s reign, Imhotep seems to have replaced Ptah as the central god at Memphis.
It was at Memphis that Alexander came across the bull cult that continued to dominate Egyptian religion until Cleopatra’s time. The bull, of course, as a symbol of strength and fertility, was common to Greek spirituality, too. Alexander’s own horse was called Bucephalus, the bullheaded. In Memphis, the Apis bull was venerated. This animal was sacred to Ptah and his reincarnation. This was no ordinary beast, and the priests who tended it lovingly were looking for a very specific hide colouring. Ptah had inseminated
a virgin heifer in his guise of heavenly fire and the resulting offspring had to have a white triangle on its forehead, a vulture-shape along its back, a crescent moon on its left flank, a scarab (beetle) shape on its tongue and a double tail. Our cynical age can only assume that a lot of painting and/or wishful thinking went on for priests to continue to find an exact replacement for the bull when the old one died. The Apis bull could tell the future and was consulted much as the Greeks checked regularly with their Oracle at Delphi. The Persians, during their occupancy of Egypt, had twice assassinated the bull and the whole nation had been distraught at the news. At Sakkara, which Alexander also visited, the mummified corpses of these sacred bulls were found by archaeologists in AD 1850. The temple there was called the Serapeum because the dead bull was equated with Osiris, god of the underworld. The far better known Serapeum (Osiris-Apis), which Cleopatra would have known, was built in Alexandria later. The god Serapis, several carvings of whom have been found recently in underwater archaeological digs in the old harbour, was a perfect example of the halfway house between Egyptian and Greek theology. It would be wrong to think of the Serapia as silent, grim mausoleums. They were places of regular pilgrimage, with music, noise and a thriving tourist trade in ‘bull memorabilia’. Professional female mourners were employed to wail and beat their breasts in grief.