Cleopatra

by M. J. Trow

  Cleopatra’s presence made life awkward for Romans. Caesar’s friends, including Mark Antony and the gauche, puny sixteen-year-old Octavian, who would become Caesar’s Roman heir, may have been frequent visitors, as of course (presumably without Calpurnia) was Caesar himself. The historian Cassius Dio noted that Caesar was not at all concerned by the malicious gossip that flew in every taberna and on every street corner. Cicero, sixty, bitter, sidelined and with his beloved Republic sinking into a morass of corruption and dictatorship, visited Cleopatra more than once because, like most people, he couldn’t stay away. The Greek woman was fascinating. She was highly intelligent, could talk literature and politics like any man and had that dazzling radiance coupled with the magical, musical voice. In a letter to his friend Atticus on 13 June 44 he wrote:

  I hate the queen ... [Her] insolence when she was living in Caesar’s house in the gardens beyond the Tiber, I cannot recall without indignation. So, no dealings with that lot. They seem to think I have not only no spirit, but no feelings at all.54

  There was some carping about a book. It seems from the letter that Cleopatra had offered to lend Cicero one and had forgotten about it. He was, of course, missing the point. She had every right to be insolent – Cicero’s father was a minor landowner and she owned the largest library in the world.

  But Cleopatra caused upset in a wider and far more important context. Caesar put up a golden statue to Isis in the temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum. Since Isis was so closely associated with Cleopatra, the image could have been of the queen herself. The Egyptians might erect such statues to living rulers; the Romans did not. One or two statues of Pompey were permitted, but only after the man was dead. Rome was outraged but only the shrewdest politicians saw the extent to which Caesar had been bewitched by the Egyptian whore. He embarked on a series of reforms that autumn, which, far from restoring the Republic, seemed to be turning Rome into an alien place. He set up plans for a great library along Alexandrian lines where Greek as well as Latin texts would be lodged. He set up an official census along Egyptian lines – the birth of Christ is recorded in the Bible as taking place at census time in the reign of Augustus Caesar, the lifted title that Octavian took for himself. Caesar intended to drain the Pontine marshes around the city, deadly as they were with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, to create locks and canals of Alexandrian design. He wanted to turn Ostia into a huge, modern port with quays and docks like those in the Egyptian capital. He encouraged the cult worship of the drunken god Dionysus, with whom Cleopatra’s father had been identified, even though Romans hated the idea. He rationalized the calendar, instituting the Julian month and re-ordering the year according to the latest Greek thinking.

  All this was modernization and most of it made sense, but it went completely against what Romans loved most – tradition. It all seemed so foreign and it could all be laid at the door of Cleopatra.

  It is not likely that she stayed in Caesar’s villa for two years. Egypt could not spare her for that long. She probably sailed home for the summer of 45, returning later in the year having assured herself that all was well in Alexandria. But on her return, all was far from well in Rome.

  Caesar came back from his last campaign in September 45 and wrote his will. Placed in the temple of the Vestal Virgins (which not even the most ferocious rebel was likely to attack), the document stated that his entire estate should pass to his son or any future sons. Caesarion is not mentioned by name (it was illegal for Romans to make bequests to foreigners) but the clause was there because his father knew perfectly well how fragile life was; the boy might not live to adulthood (he didn’t) and Cleopatra might yet bear him more sons. Should that fail, three-quarters of his estate should go to his great-nephew Octavian (Gaius Octavius) who, in the event of his own death, would be proclaimed Caesar’s son. The remaining quarter was to be shared equally between a nephew and another great-nephew.

  As 44 dawned, Caesar may have been starting to think of himself as a god. This was routine in Egypt – for centuries the pharaohs had been revered this way and the Ptolemies had continued the tradition. To diehard republicans, this was the worst thing that could happen. Caesar sat on a gold throne. Caesar had his face chiselled on coins. Caesar was Pontifex Maximus. Caesar was Dictator for life. The old checks and balances of consulship, praetorship or quaestorship for a year did not apply to Caesar. Again, on the feast of Lupercalia, Mark Antony offered Caesar the title of king of Rome. Again, Caesar refused, but his refusal seemed, to those who heard it, more hesitant than it had been.

  And the last straw was a new campaign that Caesar had been planning against Parthia. With that state destroyed, the way would be clear to India where Alexander the Great’s army had gone 300 years earlier. And wasn’t the queen of Egypt descended from one of Alexander’s generals? And, worse, wasn’t there an oracle that had foretold that Parthia could only be conquered by a king?

  Rome, 15 March 44. It began a day like any other and it was raining. Later omen-watchers and rumourmongers would claim that lightning bolts struck down statues and lionesses whelped in the streets. Caesar had been warned to beware the Ides of March,55 essentially a frolicsome drinking festival, and to stay away from the senate. Calpurnia had had a dream in which Pompey’s statue ran red with blood. Caesar had already sent sixteen legions marching east and Rome was waiting to hear who he would appoint consul in his own absence on campaign.

  He had been at dinner on the previous day when the discussion turned on death and his own answer as to what sort of death was best was ‘a sudden one’.

  The morning of the 15th was business as usual. In the senate, Caesar sat on his throne and heard petitions. Mark Antony, who might well have been able to save the man’s life, was delayed in conversation outside. Tullius Cimber tugged on Caesar’s toga as he gave him a scroll to read. This was the signal the others were waiting for. Publius Casca struck the first blow, aiming for Caesar’s throat but merely grazing his chest. The Dictator threw him aside but was hit in the ribs, probably by Casca’s brother Gaius, who later denied all knowledge of it. The others closed in for the kill, the embittered republican Gaius Cassius Longinus aiming deliberately for the face. Stumbling in his toga, bleeding profusely and dying, Caesar staggered at the base of the statue of his old enemy, Pompey, and recognized his friend (and perhaps illegitimate son) Marcus Junius Brutus, dagger in hand. He said, ‘You too, my child?’ And he said it, not in the famous ‘Et tu, Brute?’ of the Romans, but ‘kai su teknon?’ of the Greeks. It was the language of cultured Romans, but it was also the language of Cleopatra.

  The honourable men who had murdered Caesar, hysterical and covered in his blood as well as their own where their knives had missed the intended target, spread out from Pompey’s Theatre to tell an appalled Rome what they had done. The man who would be a god lay with twenty-three stab wounds and for Cleopatra, any hopes she had of a future with him were shattered. That part of her life was over.

  BOOK FIVE: ANTONY

  13

  REBIRTH

  ROME, 44

  With hindsight, all the murder of Caesar achieved was a speeding-up of the inevitable. If the honourable men who killed him hoped for an instant restoration of republican values, they were mistaken. Amateurs at the killing game, they had effectively bungled the assassination, had no coherent plan for the future and ultimately let the moral high ground fall to the two men who most of Rome saw as Caesar’s successors – Mark Antony and Octavian.

  Caesar’s mutilated corpse was delivered to Calpurnia. There was panic in the streets. Mark Antony, temporarily wrong-footed, got out of Pompey’s villa, which was now his home, and left Rome, disguised as a slave. It was the second time he had done that. We do not know who broke the news to Cleopatra or what her reaction was. Joann Fletcher has her tearing her hair and clothes in the traditional lament, but this in itself was only a knee-jerk reaction – all around the Mediterranean, such ritual was expected. Our problem, for all the bitchy comments of Romans like Cicero, is
that we do not know the exact relationship of Caesar and the queen. In Egyptian/Alexandrian eyes, she was his wife; in Roman terms, his mistress. She was almost certainly the mother of his child (and was, according to Cicero, pregnant again by the Ides of March). Was she in love with him? Or he with her? We cannot answer that. What is obvious is that the death of Caesar represented a catastrophic political blow to Cleopatra. If she had ambitions to play queen of Rome to Caesar’s king, as some Romans believed, that would never happen now. And it was not safe for her to stay in Rome.

  She probably did stay in Rome for Caesar’s funeral, but took no part in it. While Mark Antony, creeping back after a suitable time, now launched his ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ to the mob while displaying Caesar’s wounds, Cleopatra’s people were packing. By the middle of April she had gone, sailing directly for home past the Straits of Messina.

  As her flotilla sailed past the Pharos light, to be welcomed probably by her huge battle fleet, Cleopatra must have realized that, after the shock of the last weeks, all was well at home. Whoever had run Egypt in her second absence – it would nominally have been Ptolemy XIV but backed by a highly competent, if anonymous, finance minister – had done an excellent job and the queen could relax.

  The next three years of Cleopatra’s life and reign are shrouded in a certain mystery. If she was indeed pregnant when she left Rome, she must have miscarried because if there was one thing the Alexandrian/Egyptian chroniclers would have monitored, it was the birth of a royal child, especially if it were a boy, a brother to Caesarion. More likely, this was a piece of malicious gossip, which Cicero, ready to believe anything of the woman who forgot to lend him a book, readily accepted. The summer of 44 would have been one of celebrations. In July Caesarion was officially designated a pharaoh of Egypt – ‘King Ptolemy, who is as well Caesar, father-loving, mother-loving god.’ He was three, but in the months ahead, his bas-relief would appear in front of his mother on the temple wall at Dendera as a fully grown adult, wearing the crown of both Egypts. In terms of Egyptian art, he is indistinguishable from Rameses the Great or any of the pharaohs of the older kingdoms.

  Everywhere, art appeared with Cleopatra as Isis. She was consciously building on the Isis/Horus/Osiris story. Osiris was the murdered Caesar, dismembered by assassins’ knives in the senate; Horus, his son Caesarion vowing to avenge his father’s murder. Others would do that work for him, but as far as Cleopatra’s propaganda is concerned, it was perfect – history repeating theology. A cynical world like ours sees all this as hypocrisy and hype, but that is to misunderstand the woman and her times. Cleopatra’s people, Alexandrians and Egyptians, believed all this and so did Cleopatra. It was an integral part of life.

  As well as the Dendera temple, Cleopatra began a building programme on a par with that of her father. A new temple sprang up at Edfu to the south and she built a shrine in ship form at Coptos. A birthing-house, which was part chapel, part natal clinic, was established at Armant (Hermonthis). The place had an antechamber, a walkway with columns, two reception rooms and a flat roof for rituals, as well as the birth room itself. Cleopatra was only twenty-six; there may well be other royal births. In Alexandria itself she ordered the construction of the Caesarion, a shrine to her dead husband, with libraries, colonnades and a brilliant art collection. She also began a huge temple of Isis, which would have dwarfed everything else in Alexandria but which was unfinished at her death and was probably never completed.

  The intellectual queen returned to her bluestocking interests. The library at Alexandria had always attracted scholars, a university by another name, and Cleopatra encouraged this. Didymus was the most distinguished of these, churning out 3,500 monographs on everything under the sun. So supportive of medical science was the queen that later Arab scholars, who always thought more highly of her than their narrow, prejudiced Christian contemporaries, assumed that she herself carried out studies into gynaecology and obstetrics. Perhaps she did. A book referred to, but which has not survived, is called the Gynaecia Cleopatrae and refers to contraceptive methods that were supposedly used by the queen. The Egyptians of this period certainly used primitive caps made of a mixture of crocodile dung and honey, but we cannot link any of this directly to Cleopatra. It is out of this fascination with burgeoning science that later generations would fashion the legend of Cleopatra the sorceress, skilled in the black arts that could emasculate strong men and unsettle the world.

  In the day-to-day running of her country, which is so infuriatingly vague in terms of the written record, we must assume that Cleopatra was coping well. Not to do so would invite revolt, especially in hot-headed Alexandria, which had a reputation for dismembering its rulers. The usual Nile floods of 43 and 42 did not happen. What is explicable to us today as banal geography and weather systems were presumed to be the result of divine displeasure then. No doubt the priesthood, led by Cleopatra as the living Isis, would have gone through the ancient rituals to their gods. But people were starving and on a more practical level, the queen devalued the currency, reducing the silver content of her coinage, for the first time giving coins an actual token value. The bronze drachma she issued was roughly the value of the Roman denarius. She opened the royal granaries, vast, guarded warehouses within the royal compound in Alexandria, and distributed free wheat to her people.

  There was a flood of petitions from all over Egypt and invariably Cleopatra granted concessions, eased tax burdens and generally made life as comfortable for her people as she could. The Jewish historian turned Roman sycophant Josephus maintains that the queen did not extend these privileges to Alexandria’s large Jewish community. This is unlikely. We know that Jews were involved in all levels of government, even the surprisingly efficient police force, and it was a Jewish army that had backed her and Caesar in 48. This is probably an early example of a Jewish writer heaping misery on his people as of right, a self-fulfilling prophecy that would echo down the centuries. But, then, Josephus, like Cicero, ‘hated the queen’. To cap it all, a disease that sounds suspiciously like bubonic plague broke out on Egypt’s frontiers, adding to the country’s woes. Even so, there was no rebellion, nor even a rumour of one; Cleopatra was doing something right.

  But the curse of the Ptolemies was not fully extinguished. If Caesarion was the heir, then Ptolemy XIV was very definitely the spare and as such he may have been in the way. The boy was fifteen in 44 and while Cleopatra took him with her on her second trip to Rome she appears to have left him behind on the third. On the surface all appeared calm when she came back in April, but could there have been machinations from her kid brother? After all, exactly the same thing had happened about six years earlier, when Ptolemy XIII had conspired with Potheinos et al to oust Cleopatra. Nothing on that scale happened in 44, but she would have been ultra-sensitive to the possibility, as would her supporters.

  Our problem is that we know almost nothing of Ptolemy XIV. His older brother was petulant, emotional, prone to burst into tears and, in the circumstances of his death by drowning on campaign, unlucky. But this Ptolemy is just a cipher, a pharaoh in name only. Eleven years Cleopatra’s junior, he is unlikely to have had any say in the politics of her reign. He could, of course, have died of any one of a hundred natural causes, given the era in which he lived, but the timing is suspect. His death enabled Cleopatra to declare Caesarion as co-regent, something she could not have done during the boy’s lifetime. Josephus states openly that she murdered her brother and we all know that Josephus, writing a century after her death, was prepared to believe anything of Cleopatra. The balance of probabilities is that she did have the boy dispatched, perhaps by poison, so that the whole thing could be done quickly, without fuss, behind the palace walls. And the motive, rather than the queen doing a bit of tidying up, is that Ptolemy may have been conspiring behind the scenes with his other sister, Arsinoe.

  We last saw the girl as part of Caesar’s Egyptian triumph back in 46, bound with golden shackles. It is possible that he intended to have her murdered, as
the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix was murdered, but that would have offended the sensibilities of Rome and Caesar knew better. Instead, she was sent into exile in Ephesus in modern Turkey in what was probably a loose and not unpleasant house arrest. As a schemer and survivor, Arsinoe was a chip off the Ptolemaic old block. She surrounded herself with a growing group of supporters at Ephesus who demanded she be queen of Egypt. She almost certainly had agents working for her (as did Cleopatra) in Rome and may have been responsible for the appearance of a pretender to the throne, claiming to be Ptolemy XIII miraculously surviving the drowning in the Nile delta.56 This would be ideal; Arsinoe could supplant Cleopatra and rule with her ‘brother’, satisfying Ptolemaic and Egyptian tradition and giving her sole power in reality.

  One particular problem area was Cyprus. Auletes’ will had stipulated that Cyprus should go to Arsinoe and Ptolemy XIV as his youngest children. The place was important to Egypt because it provided copper and timber, but Rome had taken it from Auletes’ brother and it is likely that the island never had much affinity with Cleopatra herself. Rumours reached the queen in 43 that Arsinoe was in contact with Serapion, the local governor. Both sisters, however, knew that the only way Arsinoe could make real headway was by getting the backing of Rome.

  Since the murder of Caesar, Rome was a schizophrenic city, paralysed by its own insecurity. A greyness physically hung over the seven hills, which may have been the lingering volcanic smoke of Etna, rumbling away 250 miles to the south. By 42 the many factions would polarize into Mark Antony and Octavian allying with Marcus Lepidus as the second triumvirate hunting down Caesar’s murderers, spearheaded by Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius whose ‘lean and hungry look’ appalled everybody. In the intervening months, however, it was almost every man for himself and fortunes fluctuated.