Cleopatra

by M. J. Trow

  At Memphis, Cleopatra may have been crowned again in the Egyptian tradition with the coiled cobra, the sun disc of Ra and the horns of the sacred cow on her top-heavy crown. She was Nea Isis, the living goddess, and Isis was the female equivalent of Ptah, god of creation, from whom the name Egypt was born.

  At various points on this royal progress, Caesar must have been astonished at the ‘magic’ of the decadent east. Cleopatra’s priests used Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and Greek variants of their gods in their elaborate rituals and involved the whole panoply of animal deities – Horus, the hawkhead, whose tears were the most powerful talisman in the ancient world; Anubis the jackal; Bes, the dwarf god of birth; Sobek, the crocodile. At Khmun, the Greek Hermopolis, which was the cult centre of Thoth, god of wisdom, with whom the intellectual Cleopatra had a particular affinity, sacred ibises with their odd-shaped beaks were fed a diet of clover. These birds and the baboons Caesar had probably never seen before were mummified in the area in their thousands.

  So impressed was Cleopatra by the appearance of the Ptolemais Hermion that she wrote to Theon, her ‘fixer’ in the area on 7 March 46 ‘let the relevant persons be told that the temple of Isis built on behalf of our wellbeing by Callimachos [her strategos along this stretch of the Nile] is to be tax free and inviolable together with the houses built around it as far as the wall of the city’.

  At Dendera, special songs were written for Cleopatra’s and Caesar’s visit. ‘Pharaoh comes to dance and comes to sing. Mistress, see him dancing, see the skipping!’ We have no clear idea of the sound of Egyptian music, although we know what instruments it was played on. This far south, it may have been influenced by the African tribal rhythms of Nubia with its drums and tambourines. The priests and ‘events organizers’ would have remembered that Cleopatra’s father was Auletes, the Piper, with his love of music and drink.

  At Thebes, Caesar would have seen the 60-foot-high statues that made their own music, and sang to passers-by. In fact, it was a trick of the desert winds that echoed through the narrow gaps between the statues’ legs. Elsewhere, Egyptian priests were not above helping the ‘magic’ along by chanting from secret recesses in temple walls. The gullible, and this may even include Caesar, believed every word.

  We do not know exactly how far south Cleopatra and her lover-god sailed. Caesar was fascinated, as were most scholars then and since, with the source of the Nile, but if finding that was his intention, he came up woefully short. Not for another nineteen centuries would that problem be solved.49 One account says that Caesar’s soldiers would go no further, rather as Alexander the Great’s army had once said ‘enough is enough’ on his campaign trail 300 years earlier. There was clearly no mutiny as such, but Caesar must have realized that his heaven-storming calligae had not seen home for six years, in some cases more, and he owed them a comfortable retirement on the farms of the latifundia. More importantly, with Pompey’s sons Sextus and Magnus on the rampage in their murdered father’s name, he had unfinished business in Rome.

  The couple and their dazzling entourage turned north again and made for Alexandria. The general left Egypt on 10 June. He had been away from Rome for six hectic months and he left 12,000 troops behind for Cleopatra’s – and Rome’s – protection. Some of these men would never see their homes again. Did the trip down the Nile, with its heady mix of divinity and adoration, give him ideas above the station of a mortal Roman, which would lead to his death two years later?

  Two weeks after Caesar left, Cleopatra went into labour with her first child – Ptolemy Caesar – the offspring of the two most powerful people in the world; another Alexander.

  12

  LITTLE CAESAR

  ALEXANDRIA, 47

  Ptolemy XV Caesar Theos Philopator kai Philomater, the father-loving and mother-loving god, was born on 23 June 47.50 His birth, though details have not survived, would have followed the same Graeco-Egyptian ritual mix of common sense, wisdom and religious mumbo-jumbo that had surrounded Cleopatra’s own birth twenty-four years earlier. The boy had the golden hair of his father, although detractors at the time and historians later have doubted whether Caesarion (little Caesar) was actually Caesar’s child. The question must be asked whose child could he have been? Ptolemy XIV was still only thirteen so consummation of his political marriage to Cleopatra must seriously be doubted. We could factor in a suitable attendant/slave stud, perhaps Apollodorus, but the time-scale means that Cleopatra would have to be sleeping with him at the same time as Caesar. What is important is that the three men who mattered most in Cleopatra’s life in this time-frame and slightly later – Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian – all believed Caesarion to be Caesar’s. Let that be enough.

  For a ritual seven days, mother and baby rested hidden from the world, even from most of the court. Infant mortality was high in the ancient world, as it would remain for centuries, and only time would tell if Caesarion would live to become the new Alexander. The period of greatest danger over, Cleopatra and her son emerged into the Alexandrian sunshine to begin a round of esoteric celebrations. The Nile rose, as if by magic, giving a new birth to the people of Egypt as their queen had to Caesarion. Cleopatra had new coins struck, showing the boy as Horus, the son of Isis, whose living counterpart she was. The legend read Kleopatras Basillas, Cleopatra the female king.

  In some ways this was the high water mark of Cleopatra’s reign, so soon after it had been re-established, and from the pattern of events – the quiescence of both Alexandria and Upper Egypt – she must have been coping well with all the minutiae of government we saw in Chapter 1. Nominally still married to Ptolemy XIV to appease the supposed traditionalists, both Greek and Egyptian, she may well have been hatching plans for a fuller official relationship with Caesar. Depending on how it went for him in Rome, his little son might inherit the earth.

  Caesar was not yet in Rome. Traditionalists there wrung their hands. The Republic had been shattered by the war between Pompey and Caesar and was in desperate need of healing. Mark Antony, who had been left behind with Lepidus to hold things together in Caesar’s absence, was becoming an embarrassment. He had been helping himself to Pompey’s various properties, including the Alban villa where Cleopatra had stayed with her father as a girl, and doing what Mark Antony did best: drinking. It was rumoured that he staggered around the tabernae of Rome with an ‘actress’ called Volumnia on his arm and even drove a chariot pulled by lions through the streets. Where, wailed the traditionalist republicans, was Caesar?

  He was in Anatolia (modern Turkey) in August 47, hunting the sons of Pompey, both of whom had escaped Pharsalus, and getting money out of local rulers who had lent cash to Pompey in the civil war. In terms of payback, nobody was more thorough than Julius Caesar. At Zela on 2 August, Caesar took on Pharnaces, the king of Pontus, who had overrun a section of Rome’s rapidly growing empire in the previous months. Pharnaces’ chariots, with their scythed wheels, literally sliced through the Roman ranks, but the veteran 6th Legion held the line and drove back Pharnaces’ left flank where a steep ravine broke their formation. Caesar sent back to Rome his famous despatch – ‘veni, vidi, vici’ – ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’.51

  By the end of September Caesar had crossed to Tarentum in the south of Italy where he met his old enemy Cicero who was there in his villa under house arrest by Mark Antony. Caesar released him in exchange for cash, which cannot have done much to heal the breach between them. Caesar may have been on his way back to Rome at this point – in fact, the visit to Tarentum makes little sense if this was not his plan – when word reached him that Pompey’s sons were rebuilding an army in what today is Tunisia.

  Back went Caesar to Africa, sailing on the last day of the mid-winter solstice, which the Christians would hijack later as the birthday of Jesus Christ, and reached Hadrumentum three days later. This was not the sailing season and the Mediterranean could be notoriously treacherous, especially around Sicily, but men like Caesar had no patience with such things. By the standards of the anc
ient world, he was an old man in a hurry.

  Gnaeus and Sextus Pompey had perhaps two legions and the crack cavalry of Juba of Numidia, who used elephants and camels to instil terror in the enemy. Realizing that Caesar was unlikely to be beaten in the field, Pompey’s sons kept up a guerrilla war until 6 April 46 when Caesar forced them to fight at Thapsus. The Pompeys’ army was led by Metellus Scipio who abandoned the relative safety of his fortified city to confront Caesar head on. As at Pharsalus, Caesar’s army formed into three lines, but changed formation at the last minute to panic Juba’s elephants whose headlong flight caused chaos in Scipio’s ranks. Once again, we have the laughable propaganda figures of the victors – fifty of Caesar’s dead compared with 5,000 of Scipio’s. Scipio himself committed suicide in the Roman tradition, as did Cato (the younger) who had opposed Caesar for years and had fought against him at Dyrrachium. The irony was that the patriotic republican would almost certainly have been spared if he had surrendered because that was Caesar’s way.

  The conqueror of so many lands and winner of so many battles – 302 by his own account – helped himself to Juba’s treasure, absorbed Juba’s cavalry into the Roman army and made Numidia a Roman province, rich, as it was, in grain. Fifty-four years old and suffering increasingly from the falling sickness, Julius Caesar went home.

  Now the full effect of Caesar’s destruction of Pompey became apparent and it began to dawn on the senate that, far from restored in their republican glory, they were being sidelined. It was partly their fault. They heaped increasingly ludicrous honours on Caesar. He was Pontifex Maximus again and Dictator, at first for ten years and then for life. He began to wear scarlet parade boots and to dress as the ancient kings did, although he pointedly refused the title of king even when Mark Antony offered it to him. One senator proposed that Caesar be above the law and that any woman in Rome should be his for the asking. In his darker moments Caesar probably realized that if Pompey had been the victor at Pharsalus, he would be approaching a kind of divinity just as Caesar was.

  And nowhere was Caesar’s arrogance more obvious than in the four triumphs he effectively awarded himself in September and October. The festivities lasted for forty days, during which Rome itself was in chaos. Nobody worked and at various times people were trampled to death in the hysterical crowds. Gold crowns – 2,822 of them: nine tons of bullion – were paraded in the streets from all parts of the empire. Each of Caesar’s calligae got 6,000 denarii as a bonus (the usual pay was one denarius a day). Generous as this was, one legionary, overheard to grumble that it could have been more if it were not for the cost of the triumphs, was decapitated for his insolence and his head displayed in the Temple of Mars.

  The Gallic triumph came first, Caesar riding in his chariot with a slave behind him whispering, ‘Remember you are mortal.’ Caesar didn’t remember it, not at least until the Ides of March two years later. His axle broke, but he was above omens like that and revelled in the adulation of the mob. The procession lasted all day; forty elephants with flaming torches in their trunks lit the bizarre finale, in which Vercingetorix, the Gallic leader, was garotted in full view of the crowd. Most of them were horrified, not at the spectacle itself, but because Vercingetorix was a brilliant general and deserved a better fate.

  The second triumph was for Caesar’s victory over the Egyptians. The Nile was portrayed as a huge male god and there was an enormous model of the Pharos lighthouse and paintings of the deaths of the treacherous Potheinos and Achillas. Once again, the crowd were less pleased with the appearance of Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe, bound in golden chains. Caesar had taken her with him when he left Egypt and the crowd probably thought he intended to have her publicly strangled too.

  The Pharnaces campaign was celebrated in the third triumph and the last one was for Africa, with grisly pictures of Pompey’s supporters, like Cato, committing suicide in their abject failure and misery. The prize here was little Juba, the four-year-old son of the king of Numidia, who would be kept in Rome and brought up as a Roman, the most civilizing of all fates. There were chariot races and gladiatorial combats in which 320 gladiators fought to the death for the crowd. Four hundred lions died in the arena52 and for the first time, Romans saw a giraffe, which they called a cameleopard on account of its soft muzzle and spotted hide. Pitched battles were re-enacted, even one involving a naval fight on an artificial lake.53 No expense was spared and Rome loved it.

  What they did not love was Cleopatra. Caesar sent for his Greek wife in the late summer of 46, but it is unclear exactly when she arrived in Rome or exactly why he sent for her. Stacy Schiff believes that this was Cleopatra’s first visit, indeed her first sailing across the Mediterranean. If, as I believe, she had travelled with Auletes as an eleven-year-old, she was not only used to sailing but knew Rome too. The circumstances were, of course, very different. Then she had been a child, albeit a precocious one, effectively exiled from Egypt and going cap in hand to Rome. Now she was a queen, mature, powerful and sophisticated. She had survived civil war, as Rome had, and not only had a son who would continue her line, but her son’s father was the most powerful man in Rome. Now she would come with all the status that went with her position and she brought the proverbial kitchen sink. Effectively the whole court travelled with her. Arsinoe, of course, was already Caesar’s prisoner in Rome. Caesarion was brought to show Caesar his son for the first time (which may well explain why he had invited Cleopatra in the first place) and, bearing in mind the Ptolemies’ reputation for intrigue, kid-brother and husband Ptolemy XIV was brought along too. It was not safe to leave him behind.

  All this makes it clear that Egypt – and more especially, Alexandria – was quiet. Cleopatra would not have dared leave if there were unrest of any kind. In what was an age of intensely personal government, she was not only removing the queen, the living Isis, but her husband-brother and her heir. In fact, if Cleopatra’s ship had gone down in the Mediterranean it is difficult to know who would have ruled Egypt, and the Ptolemaic dynasty would have come to an abrupt halt seventeen years before it did. Undoubtedly, the Romans would have moved in and turned Cleopatra’s country into a province.

  Experts are divided over the travelling time. Stacy Schiff claims that Cleopatra was a nervous sailor, and that the entourage was so huge that the ships could not carry enough provisions to stay in open water and had to put in to various coastal villages in Rhodes and Crete to re-victual. This could take weeks. Joann Fletcher thinks the journey might have been accomplished in less than a fortnight, depending on the prevailing winds. On the other hand, Fletcher implies that Cleopatra was not there for Caesar’s triumphs; Schiff believes she was.

  The problem is that we have no Alexandrian evidence for this visit, only the occasional reference in Roman writings. Surely, if Cleopatra had been there for the triumphs, Caesar would have paraded her, not as a prisoner of war, which she was not, but as a ‘friend and ally of Rome’, and this does not seem to have happened. On the other hand, wouldn’t the dictator have wanted her there to share his celebrations as he had shared hers along the Nile? Perhaps she watched from under one of Caesar’s expensive silk awnings, taking in the spectacle from a discreet distance.

  What the real Cleopatra did not do, unlike Elizabeth Taylor in 1963, was to make her own triumphal entry into Rome. The film (described in Chapter 18) shows the queen and her five-year-old son (Caesarion was actually about eighteen months old) sitting glittering in gold between the paws of a huge basalt sphinx, the whole float carried by Nubian slaves. Rome would not have stood for that, as both Caesar and Cleopatra knew.

  At Piteoli, Rome’s nearest harbour, Cleopatra would have been met by Caesar or a delegation. She would have given thanks for her safe sea-crossing at the temple of Isis in the town before travelling by carriage or litter along the Appian Way which, when she was Caesarion’s age, had been dotted with the crucified corpses of Spartacus’ army.

  By Caesar’s edict, no wheeled vehicle could be driven in the streets of Rome during
the hours of daylight, so Cleopatra either arrived after dark or was carried by her slaves in a litter. She was housed in Caesar’s villa on the Janiculum Hill on the west bank of the Tiber, a fashionable spot with cypresses and cedars and well away from the dictator’s town house near the Forum where he lived with Calpurnia. Given the likely size of Cleopatra’s entourage, the villa would have been too small and her staff and hangers-on must have been housed elsewhere.

  What did Cleopatra make of Rome now that she saw it through a queen’s eyes? Probably not a lot. When the British chieftain Caratacus was taken in chains to the city as a prisoner of war in the next generation, he was astonished at the size and splendour of the place. ‘Why, with all this,’ he is reported to have asked, ‘do you want our poor mud huts?’ It was a fair question but he never saw Alexandria. Technically, Rome’s population was probably bigger than that of Cleopatra’s capital, but it was crammed in between those annoying seven hills and was frankly a mess. The only truly impressive buildings in the city centre were Pompey’s Theatre and Caesar’s Forum, huge physical statements made by the men who had slogged it out for the victor’s laurel wreath. Elsewhere, jerry-built houses were falling down or being pulled down by property developers like Crassus, always on the look-out for a fast denarius. For a nation that prided itself on the rigid formality of its army camps and its innate sense of order, Rome’s streets were a shambles. Cleopatra’s palace back home dwarfed anything that Rome had to offer – and it covered a third of spacious, grid-patterned Alexandria. She probably stayed away from the sweating multitude and waited for the world to come to her.