by M. J. Trow
The latter question is easier to answer. In September 48 the power in Alexandria was unquestionably Ptolemy and his advisers. Cleopatra was miles to the east, in a desert wilderness at the edge of the Nile delta that might just as well have been the far side of the moon. So Pompey waited with a little naval flotilla off the Pharos while his people talked to Ptolemy’s. On 28 September, a fishing boat was sent out to bring Pompey to meet the boy king in person. While Ptolemy watched from a litter-borne throne on the quayside and Cornelia looked on from the ships at the harbour entrance, an extraordinary melodrama was played out. When Pompey struggled ashore in the shallows, the water presumably water-logging his cloak, one of his attendants, Septimus, who had fought under him as a centurion, plunged a dagger into the general’s back. Another ex-comrade, Salvius, rammed his dagger home and the slave Philippus held his master’s hand as Achillas, Ptolemy’s general, hacked off the head of the great Pompey. ‘He neither said nor did anything unworthy of himself,’ Plutarch wrote years later, ‘only groaned a little and so ended his life in the sixtieth year and only one day after his birthday.’44
Philippus, in floods of tears, washed the headless corpse in sea water and loaded it into a nearby fishing boat. He set fire to it in a funeral pyre on the beach, which was still burning the next day. An anonymous ex-comrade of Pompey was there at the time and Plutarch records him as saying, ‘I find this happiness at last, to touch with my hands and to prepare for burial the body of the greatest Imperator that Rome has seen.’45
Ptolemy knew, as any cynic did, that ‘dead men don’t bite’ but a live one was on his way in pursuit of Pompey – Gaius Julius Caesar.
The new dictator arrived three days later with perhaps 4,000 men. Typically he had not waited until his entire army had licked their wounds after Pharsalus and knew he could track down Pompey with far fewer men than he had. Ptolemy’s army were massed to the east of Alexandria, since that was the direction Cleopatra would arrive from, but the arrival of Caesar in the harbour brought Potheinos and Theodotus scurrying to meet him. They showed him the head of Pompey and his signet ring with its lion and sword motif. Caesar wept. Historians cannot decide how crocodile these tears were. Nobody could wish the man dead more than Caesar, but nostalgia played its part here – Pompey had, after all, been his son-in-law and former friend. His tears may have been of shock and disgust, confirming in Caesar what he had probably always heard, that the Ptolemies were a pack of ravening wolves. With his lictors carrying their axes and bundles, the symbol of Rome’s authority, he marched to Ptolemy’s palace and took it over. The Alexandrians, predictably, rioted and there were several deaths.
Caesar stayed. He gave the reason that winds kept his ships penned in the harbour, but he probably intended to milk Alexandria for all it had. He had never seen the astonishing city before and was probably genuinely overawed by it. He visited the Pharos lighthouse, rummaged through the scrolls in the library and paid homage at the tomb of Alexander. He dictated his memoirs and played for time. Then, like an old-fashioned headmaster arbitrating between playground squabbles, he ordered Ptolemy and Cleopatra to disband their armies and appear before him – two rulers by divine right on the carpet of a warlord.
11
THE LADY OF THE TWO LANDS
ALEXANDRIA, 48
Carpets play a significant role in the folklore of the Middle East and legend has it that this is how Caesar and Cleopatra met. Like a malevolent spider at the centre of his web, the eunuch Potheinos tried to manipulate both sides for his own ends. He let it be known that Caesar’s men were dining off the Ptolemies’ silver when in fact they were eating from wooden trenchers and the grain they were fed was rotten. In the desert to the east, Cleopatra now considered the time was right to get her throne back. Ptolemy appeared to have all the cards – he was in possession of Alexandria whose inhabitants by and large backed him as their rightful king. He also had the Gabinian troops as a formidable bodyguard and perhaps he could persuade the legendary Caesar to add his 4,000, as well as his huge military expertise, to his cause. For his part, Caesar was suspicious of the set-up in Alexandria. Rioting townspeople didn’t bother him – he was a Roman, after all – but the pharaoh was only fourteen and it was clear that his strings were being pulled by a trio of self-serving degenerates – a eunuch, a teacher and a mercenary. And they had all connived to murder Pompey.
Neither Ptolemy nor his sister had disbanded their armies as Caesar had ordered, but Cleopatra knew she had to reach the general somehow and Ptolemy would not give her safe conduct through his lines. So she sailed in a fishing boat with her faithful attendant Apollodorus up the Nile into Alexandria and he carried her ashore. Historians have argued about this bizarre entrance for centuries. The queen of Egypt wrapped in a carpet only really fits in a Carry On film46 and almost certainly is not what happened. She was probably heavily veiled in the himatia, a Greek hood and cloak resembling the burka worn by strict Muslim women today.
There was no problem for Cleopatra to get into the royal palace; she had probably been born in the place and must have known every passageway and secret door. Apollodorus spoke fluent Latin so he could have talked his way out of trouble with either the Gabinian guards of Ptolemy or Caesar’s men. Even so, it is inconceivable that Apollodorus and his disguised companion could have gained easy access to Caesar. If proof were needed, the fate of Pompey proved that assassination came easily to the Egyptians. Caesar must have known of Cleopatra’s visit in advance and while he too understood the need for secrecy, he was not at all alarmed by it.
All modern commentators – and most of them are women – spend a considerable time wrestling with just how this famous meeting went. For all the striven-for gender equality of the last hundred years, they are obsessed with what she wore. Nobody asks what Caesar had on. The point is that an important weapon in Cleopatra’s armoury was her sexuality. She was twenty-one, perhaps twenty-two; her sexual experience is unknown. Caesar was fifty-two, a veteran of the bedroom as he was of the battlefield. He had been married four times and was a notorious womanizer. No doubt Cleopatra had done her homework on this man and if she had heard the rumours concerning King Nicomedes, she probably assumed that they were exaggerated or at any rate her charms could win the general over.
Stacy Schiff’s title of the relevant chapter in her book says it all – ‘Cleopatra Captures the Old Man by Magic’.47 She did not simply strip off and offer herself to Caesar; the seduction was far more complex – and important – than that. And it is by no means clear who seduced whom. It is easy to turn this into a Mills & Boon romance or even soft porn, but we have to remember the realpolitik of the situation. As the most powerful member of the Mediterranean’s master race, Caesar could offer protection to Egypt and could win Cleopatra’s throne back for her. On her part, she was queen of the Mediterranean’s bread basket; if Rome controlled the Nile, the City of the Seven Hills was unstoppable.
If we deal merely in physical superficialities, we are actually looking at a living god and goddess. Caesar was leather-hard from years of campaigning, but nearly bald and a sufferer from petit mal – the ‘sleeping sickness’ that would sometimes cause fits. In an age when fertility was everything, he had only fathered one legitimate child – Julia – and she was dead. He had terrifying nightmares and was known to be dangerously magnanimous to defeated enemies, something of a weakness in the ancient world. Laying aside all the platitudes of commentators then and since who want to see Cleopatra as a femme fatale, much of her charm was her bubbling personality and genuinely melodic voice. Various portraits of her show a nose too hooked, a tight, mean-looking mouth and a neck with wrinkles, even in her twenties, which suggests thyroid problems.
Was she a virgin? We have no idea. Given the Ptolemies’ penchant for incest, any lover is likely to have been a family member and she did co-rule with Auletes for almost eighteen months. If the only sexual experience she had had was with her father, it might explain an instant attraction for Caesar, the classic olde
r man of women’s literature. What probably excited her was power. Caesar was a hero in the mould of Alexander himself, and all Rome – and therefore the civilized world – lay at his feet. He in turn may have been captivated by her radiance and bowled over by her courage and impudence. In smuggling herself into his presence she had carried out exactly the kind of impulsive action that he had done all his life. At home was his wife Calpurnia, who has assumed something akin to sainthood because of the dignified way she handled her husband’s assassination in 44. In fact, he had already divorced her in 53 to marry Pompey’s daughter and even the original marriage was merely one of political convenience. Cleopatra must have seemed an astonishing breath of fresh, if exotic and spice-laden, air after that.
Plutarch’s account has Cleopatra having time to make herself beautiful between rolling out of Apollodorus’ cloak/canvas sack/carpet and meeting Caesar, but this seems unlikely. Would he have been more enchanted by a dishevelled, wide-eyed girl on the run, breathlessly begging his help or a cool seductress in full make-up? Perhaps it was Plutarch’s inability to explain the attraction that meant that, in his account, he hedged his bets.
The unlikely couple did not necessarily go to bed together that night but it is likely to have been soon after because all Caesar’s actions for the next three months are either with Cleopatra or on her behalf. The next pressing problem was Ptolemy and his army and when the boy discovered that his big sister was not only back in his palace, but had pulled the linen over Caesar’s eyes, he stormed out in tears, wailing to passers-by that he had been betrayed. Caesar’s guards brought him back and put him under house arrest.
The victor of Pharsalus and so many other battles now had the most important of Auletes’ children in his charge, one willingly, the other not. He knew perfectly well that the scheming Potheinos had the other two – seventeen-year-old Arsinoe and the boy Ptolemy XIV – and that sooner or later he would use them as trump cards. It was in Caesar’s interests – and Rome’s – to effect a reconciliation between Cleopatra and her nearest brother. But one thing was abundantly clear: Rome would not take a back seat in Egyptian affairs again.
Caesar had almost certainly misread the mood of the Alexandrians who had swallowed whole the propaganda of Potheinos/Ptolemy that Cleopatra was evil itself. He made a speech – for the gifted orator, no problem – from a palace balcony and did the headmasterly thing with Auletes’ squabbling children in front of him. Rather than the riot act, he read them their father’s will. They must rule Egypt together under Roman guardianship. Arsinoe and Ptolemy XIV should have Cyprus, the island so recently lost to Rome when Auletes’ brother had swallowed poison rather than let Rome in.
Amid rumours that Potheinos was conspiring to poison Caesar (it was well known that he would eat anything), Caesar realized that Alexandria was on the point of open rebellion against him and the Roman presence. The order to assassinate Potheinos made perfect sense given the man’s ambition and dangerous nature, but to Alexandrians it was a cause for war.
Rattled, Caesar sent ambassadors to Achillas, commanding Ptolemy’s army outside the city to open negotiations. The general had the men hacked down before they reached his tent. In his account, Caesar plays down the desperate nature of the Egyptian war he was now obliged to fight. His legions had not yet arrived from Greece and he was heavily outnumbered. Low on food and fresh water in the royal palace, he ordered his legionaries to dig until they found underground streams. For men used to digging trenches and building marching camps on campaign, this was bread and butter to them, but they were harried night and day by missile attacks and attempts to breach the palace walls.
And now Arsinoe escaped. After the removal of Potheinos, Caesar had all three children holed up in the palace, but Arsinoe was a Ptolemy through and through. Every bit as resourceful and calculating as Cleopatra, she was proclaimed queen in Alexandria and appeared at every opportunity alongside Achillas, now ‘her’ general. During the street fighting, the Egyptian fleet returned. It comprised fifty warships lent by Cleopatra to Pompey and both sides were desperate to get their hands on them. Caesar got there first, but had no time to do anything but set them alight to prevent them falling into Achillas’ hands. The fire, that terrifying night, spread to the town from the harbour and destroyed part of Alexandria’s fabled library. In the fierce fluttering of the flames, Caesar’s little garrison fought hand to hand with Achillas’ Egyptians, determined to drive the Romans out. Not to be outdone, the Alexandrians rebuilt the fleet in a matter of days, making it impossible for Caesar to escape.
The one light at the end of the tunnel for the beleaguered Romans was the in-fighting between their enemies. Arsinoe, with her tutor Ganymedes, poisoned Achillas in a coup that made no sense at all. In January 47 a delegation of townspeople came under a flag of truce to Caesar to ask him to release Ptolemy, their rightful king. Clearly, Arsinoe had plans to oust Cleopatra and by marrying her brother and ruling with him, this would have the cloak of legality. Caesar could see the point of this in his favour, too – he may have been prepared to jettison Cleopatra at this stage – in order to achieve a Roman-controlled Egypt. In a bizarre scene that looks Hollywood-inspired, the crusty old general sat down with the moody pharaoh and told it like it was. Ptolemy cried; the rumour was that Caesar did too and in the end they parted company sadly, rather as father and son. As soon as he was free, Ptolemy took command of Achillas’ army, complete in golden armour, and marched to face Caesar’s reinforcements, Anatolian and Syrian troops under the king of Pergamon. A further 3,000 joined this band under Antipatros, father of the Herod of Bible infamy. They took Pelusium and marched towards present-day Cairo where Ptolemy’s army was caught in a classic pincer movement with Caesar’s troops. The boy pharaoh went down in the Nile delta, drowning in his golden armour and his body was never found.
In the victory celebrations that followed, we see Cleopatra behaving every inch a queen. It could be argued, as the Romans did, that she only sat on the throne because of Caesar and as long as Rome let her, but what followed were the years of her greatness, leading, perhaps, to the ultimate tragedy. The couple visited the shrine of Alexander the Great and Caesar left his purple robe and rings there as votive offerings. He buried the embalmed head of Pompey in the Nemesion, a tomb near the city wall, and erected a pillar to the Jews of the city who had taken his and Cleopatra’s side over the previous weeks.
A peculiar piece of politics now took place. Caesar decided, almost certainly with Cleopatra’s full backing, that she should become co-ruler, if only in name, with her remaining brother, now twelve, who became Ptolemy XIV. They were formally Theoi Philopatores Philadelphia, father-loving, sibling-loving gods. Cleopatra then married Caesar, although marriage in Ptolemaic Egypt had little in the way of religious solemnity attached to it. From Caesar’s point of view, he was committing bigamy, not to mention adultery, and Roman law would never see Cleopatra as anything other than his mistress. When Octavian’s propaganda machine got its claws into her ten years later, she became a whore whose sexual excesses were made worse by the use of magic. This was the only way to explain what had happened to Caesar and what would later happen to Mark Antony.
Celebrations were held in Alexandria, both to mark the peace and to celebrate the restoration of the rightful rulers of Egypt. From there, the next step would be to sail and row south, down the Nile and for the same reasons that Cleopatra had undertaken it when Auletes died. This was not a honeymoon, with idyllic lovers on the Nile drinking their nights away under a romantic moon. This was Cleopatra the hard-headed politician visiting the shrines and temples of old Egypt, reconfirming her one-ness with gods and people, reminding them who she was. And if, on her arm, or a politic half step behind, was the man who bestrode the narrow world like a colossus, it only added to her power. There were, no doubt, those who saw it differently; Cleopatra ruled because Rome let her. Her gilded barge rippled the Nile because the bald whoremonger had said it should be so. And for Caesar, it possibly was a welco
me holiday. The couple took to the river with a flotilla of 400 ships, including a sizeable bodyguard of Caesar’s veterans. Given the situation, it is unlikely that any of them were Roman war-galleys, but they were probably the rebuilt ships of Cleopatra’s fleet that Caesar had burned in the harbour during the hectic weeks of the siege.
Joann Fletcher highlights the sights that Caesar would have seen, reminding us always that Cleopatra’s real purpose was to give thanks and offerings to the various temples we described in Chapter 2. Much of this would have been awe-inspiring to Caesar, a reminder that his own nation was pitifully new and rather vulgar by comparison with the antiquity of Egypt.
Aboard their floating palace, the royal couple (in Egypt, though never Rome, Caesar was viewed as a living god) were entertained by priests and local officials on both banks of the Nile. This was ruinously expensive for the host, in that Cleopatra was a guest and not expected to pick up the tab. One surviving account refers to 200 sheep and 372 suckling pigs as the meat course of a much larger banquet. Caesar must have been impressed; Egypt’s legendary wealth and hospitality were living up to their reputation.
The journey began in ‘Cleopatra’s canal’ that ran from the harbour at Alexandria through the city’s Egyptian quarter, appropriately enough since the trip would take them from the cosmopolitan world of their present into a very different – and for Caesar, eye-popping – world of the past. Sailing across Lake Mareotis, the flotilla entered the Nile proper at Naukratis, nearly fifty miles south of the sea the Romans were beginning to see as theirs.48 They travelled across the Delta to Khem, which the Greeks called Letopolis, and Iunu, the Greek Heliopolis (Sun City) on the opposite bank. What is fascinating about this journey is how many ancient temples were already tourist attractions to the Greeks and now the Romans. Even as far south as the Valley of the Kings, astonished visitors had chipped graffiti into the mysterious stone blocks – ‘I saw and was astonished’ was the most common phrase. At Heliopolis, Cleopatra probably took part in the sacred ceremony of the local Mnevis bull, reinforcing her role as protector of her country’s religion.