Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra

by Peter Stothard

  So, before the age of institutionalised regret, what did it mean to be an Alexandrian? Confidence was important. So was making the best of weakness, finding calm where one could and fun when one wanted it. Alexandrians captivated the Romans with techniques of twisting, reshaping not merely possessing. This city conquered Rome long before Rome conquered this city. Alexandrians might later be seen as dull and dry, products of court life without political freedoms, not properly Greek. But they made magic for export.

  The librarians here were both scholars and entertainers. There was Callimachus, who liked short poems, and Apollonius, who liked long ones. Both squabbled their way to reputations. For centuries poems poured in and out of Alexandria, piling gaiety upon the grim lessons of the past. Ink from everywhere came in on the tides past the Pharos. This was the import that the Ptolemies most prized, red ink from the ochre of earth, black from the burning of insects and wood, waves of words on papyrus rolls which artists could study and make different. The harbour waters were the way into an unprecedented place where the curious and the state-sponsored could pick and prod for pleasure.

  The study of these pickers and prodders was our Oxford study too. Our textbooks were guides to how the greatest poets in Latin had continued and adopted what the Alexandrians had begun. We read closely in those Roman writers, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, whose works have lasted through the centuries – and speculatively in those whose efforts, much lauded in their day, have been lost.

  Virgil had a friend called Cornelius Gallus, an Alexandrian in art who was born in the same year as Cleopatra. He also shared a mistress with Mark Antony. He had many claims to be in Cleopatra the Fifth. But from all his once-famed poems we had just one elegantly balanced pentameter line, rescued from an unreliable book of ‘rivers mentioned by Roman poets’, the kind of list that cataloguers and games-players have always loved.

  Its subject was the Hyspanis, known today as the Southern Bug, a river once deemed to separate Europe from Asia. Uno tellures dividit amne duas: With one stream it divides two lands. There was the ‘one’ at the beginning, the ‘two’ at the end and the word for division dividing the line: it seemed then a magical thing. In the seventies we were told that Gallus, if only we possessed more of his work, would be the link between two ages of art, the learned entertainers and the deepest, most personally passionate poets, between Alexandria and Rome. Hellenistic literature was the hinge on which literature hung. Our teachers always hoped for more of it.

  In Alexandria’s Greek anthologies there was never any direct challenge to the old masters, no equal to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides or to the comedian who mocked them in The Frogs or to the Homeric poets from whom the idea of Greece began. There were instead the men who made Greece for Rome and for everywhere. Alexander’s menacing mermaid sister was right: her brother was still alive and in power over the world.

  Consider, as Mr W used to say, even one of Alexandria’s most mocked of scholars, Didymus Chalcenterus, Cleopatra’s librarian, commentator on Homer, long seen as a figure of fun if seen at all, sometimes called Forget-me-book because he wrote more books than even he could remember. This Didymus explained the choruses of Sophocles and uncertain attributions in Euripides. He listed thousands of Greek words whose meanings, he argued, were not quite what they seemed.

  Didymus made enjoyment happen. Short poems or long ones? Callimachus from Cyrene or Apollonius from Rhodes? Let the readers choose what or whom they liked best. Green marble or red for a bathroom, white or brown for a dining table, polished wood or plain for stairs? He wrote the handbooks and guidebooks. He was at the heart of the project for Alexandria to conquer Rome and beyond.

  This was important, the promotion of Greek not just its existence. No one in the past sixty years who has ever claimed to be a classicist has escaped the jeering charge: why, with so much else from which to choose, do you want to do that? Completing Cleopatra’s lives, in a way that not even I expected, close to where she once lived, is now my own small, best answer.

  There is still no sign of Socratis’s friend at the library. There is a cold rain outside where the seekers of cigarettes and fresh air meet. Each new arrival at the desks has a wetter coat and a better need for her headscarf. Mud streaks the carpets.

  Among Cleopatra’s contemporaries was a man named Crinagoras. His name appears in several of the anthologies of tiny poems that were first made here and are back now on Alexandria’s shelves. He came from Lesbos, the same island as the politician-poet Alcaeus. But Crinagoras did not hymn the death of tyrants. He wrote poetry that pleased his present more than the distant future. He had a ready line for the death of a slave boy, a slave girl or for a lover who bestowed the name ‘Love’s Island’ on the place where he died. When Crinagoras wrote of eagles it was not to praise their soaring flight like a tragedian but to note how their wing feathers, when neatly cut and purpled with lacquer, made quill pens and toothpicks. He had the perfect inscription for a caged parrot whose call echoed the name of Caesar to the woods and hills.

  Alexandrians pioneered the art of wrapping art within art, poems on one subject in the packaging of another, stories of the present inside stories of the past. Crinagoras was good with gifts of all kinds, happy to send roses in winter and copies of lovesick, drunken verses as long as they were from library books dignified by antiquity. He told stories of faraway places, how Alpine bandits fooled watchdogs with kidney fat, how the sheep of Armenia made cries like cattle and bore their young three times a year, how a washerwoman might drown on shores whose waves were monstrous surges of death.

  He hymned obsequiousness and obscurity. He liked words that no one had used before and never would again, the hapax as we call them now. He adopted and adapted Homer. His profession was to be diplomatic, to represent Lesbos to its Roman masters, praising Julius Caesar’s victory over Pompey at the same time as Cleopatra did much the same and more.

  Pharos

  The light is fading over the sea. If I were still a newspaper correspondent or editor, today would not have been a success. If the bombing of the Two Saints church were ever to be seen as ‘the beginning of the end’ for the Mubarak regime (or some other journalistic commonplace), I would have been in the wrong place with the wrong people. Socratis’s friend, when he finally arrived, was cold, polite, keen only to ask questions not to answer them, all of them about what I was doing and why I was here, none of them about the nature of the Alexandrian character. He wore an elegant, dark, four-buttoned suit and dark glasses that lightened as he spoke. He would not give me his name.

  He was mildly disturbing. He hardly registered the name of Socratis or Mahmoud. Maybe he was from some deeper part of the Egyptian state. After he had gone, I felt nauseous again, petulant, perplexed, an unattractive mixture of emotions, a kind of angry embarrassment.

  I did not ‘see red’, the phrase my mother used to use for my childhood anger. I was not sick again. I saw the coloured sky I had seen here before, suddenly full of glass, glowing clouds of blue, a shattered sundial shooting towards the sun. Needles spun through the air. Bright alphabets formed and reformed over the waves. Pages of print fluttered soundlessly like butterflies.

  The dark man did nothing wrong. He said nothing wrong. He was polite, a bit firm at times but calm. I was the one in the wrong. I wondered whether I should go back to the Metropole in order to write about something else, or more likely sleep. Instead I have walked back here to Pharos, quickly, almost running, far along the modern Corniche, fast down to the end of the Ptolemies’ causeway.

  After an hour I am almost alone by the site of Cleopatra’s lighthouse, Alexandria’s lightning conductor, this place with the fort now that changes its marzipan shades in the setting sun. There are no tourists, no shell-sellers, no crocodile-watchers, three taxis and five policemen. The wind has eased, the rain has gone. The Oxford part of this story can end here too.

  There are still some remaining relics of Cleopatra the Fifth, a book that died slowly, somewhere between my leaving T
rinity and beginning to earn a living, between the end of life as a classicist and its recommencement as something else. It might have died at an advertising agency dinner, a trade into which Maurice had briefly introduced me. Its last night might have been when the IRA bombed the teenage drinkers of Birmingham, the first time I saw mass death for myself, when I was working for the BBC and for the first time had a proper job. There was the night that a literary agent suggested that another classical subject, Spartacus, Alicibiades or someone else, anyone else, might produce better progress. I cannot remember.

  Frog died too. There seems no other way of putting it, of rounding off his peculiarly distant part in these memories. He has no lines of his own in this book. There is nothing from him that I can place within quotation marks as a journalist should. I have merely my own schoolboy ill will and Maurice’s reports of some of the things that he later said and did. He is a minor character, and like many minor characters in many histories, barely a character at all but not necessarily less influential for being so.

  I did eventually learn a little more, how much of what Frog said was true, how much Maurice did and did not do in and out of the Red Tents. It was not a simple story. But here by the missing lighthouse both men exist only in the flatness of now, the level present of their existence here in this tense and troubled place.

  Frog died long before Maurice, very soon after the events in this chapter, some forty years ago. He took a train to Amsterdam, found the tallest, most luxurious hotel with the brightest roof-top bar, spent money that he did not have and on the sixth or seventh day (there was some dispute about how long at the time) he threw himself briefly in to the air, spreading his arms as though playing at swans or giving his Classical Society speech on the glory of Roman gladiators, escaping as though by drinking or writing, by being somewhere and someone else, before finding the traffic of the street below. The last of us to see him, on the same Amsterdam train by chance, was one of the older actors who had judged our Cuppers play particularly kindly and who now works in television in Wales.

  The policemen have taken the taxis. There are only gulls and geese now, in and out from behind the walls like thoughts, here and departed like pictures of the past, elegant in the air, gangling on the ground. These are the birds that have always been at Pharos, here when the stones soared into the greying blue, permanent ghosts, their lives surviving in the way they wheel and wail, shrieking and rising. Their circling around a lost wonder of the world is a summons to remember so much that is lost. They trace figures in the air, figures of speech, metaphors moving in and out of sight. A letter in the air is a letter in a line, an O a C or an S, a line from the library, a line in the sky.

  13.1.11

  Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

  In the thirteen days of this year Cleopatra has thus far been a name, a space-traveller’s hostess, a feminist’s missed opportunity, a reason for learning about a city and a subject for Oxford scepticism and fantasy. This is now the middle of the story. The single reason for staying in anxious Alexandria is that I have to finish Cleopatra the Eighth. I have only a few small reminders of what I have done before. There can be no Ninth, a matter of no importance to anyone else but of some importance for me.

  This is the point at which most other books about Cleopatra also divide. Julius Caesar is dead. Mark Antony stands ahead. Behind her is a life that none would have much remembered had it ended after the Ides of March in the terror that followed Caesar’s assassination. Ahead of her is the barge, the pearl and the asp.

  Two years after Caesar’s death Cleopatra received the good news from Philippi in northern Greece that Caesar’s assassins had been defeated by Caesar’s heirs. Brutus and Cassius were dead. Antony and Octavian were triumphant. Of these two victors, Antony was much the more triumphant: Octavian had been hiding in thick marshland, too ill to lead his legions himself and had been mocked for his absence. Antony was the coming man.

  This certainty from Greece contrasted with uncertainty from Rome. It was hard for Cleopatra’s informers to know precisely who was up and who was down. She knew personally at least one of the consuls for 42 BC, Lucius Munatius Plancus. He had been one of Caesar’s army commanders and a visitor to their house. A consul’s power was not what it once had been but Plancus was at least Antony’s consul – on the more promising side.

  There were reports that rich Roman women, by a new decree, were, for the first time, to be taxed. This was both mildly amusing in its immediate effect and disturbing in its novelty. What else new might happen?

  More serious news came from the Greeks of Asia. In Ephesus Cleopatra’s sister, Arsinoe, spared by Caesar after his Alexandrian triumph and transferred to benign imprisonment amongst the priests of Artemis, had suddenly declared herself Queen of Egypt. There were accompanying rumours that their one surviving brother, and her own official husband, Ptolemy XIV, was Arsinoe’s accomplice. There was even the rumour of a pretender claiming to be her dead brother, Ptolemy XIII, the one whose golden armour had been dredged from the bloodied waters of the Nile.

  Nothing on the home front, however, was yet beyond her control. Her brother-husband could be killed without risk. Arsinoe was still far away. The fake Ptolemy could be found and drowned. Meanwhile, Cleopatra was waiting nervously for Quintus Dellius, a Roman whom she did not know, to arrive by ship at her eastern harbour.

  Dellius was the ambassador to Cleopatra from Antony. Even by the pragmatic standards of the time he was a man of flexible allegiance. In the past few years he had supported most sides, Caesar himself, a dissident critic of Caesar and Caesar’s leading killers. He had also taken a variety of intermediate positions from which he hoped to profit, or at least to stay alive. He was now not only the emissary of Antony but his procurer, bringing him girls and boys, keen, it was said, in any way to atone for his previous errors.

  Cleopatra had not been Antony’s enemy. She had kept all of her options open. She had offered only the most cautious support to Brutus and Cassius. Her Egyptian reinforcments never reached the assassins’ side even though Cassius had come close to invading Egypt to claim them. She had sent out ships for Antony and Octavian too, and welcomed them back when the weather turned sour.

  How much these manoeuvres were by design, misinformation, or mere good luck, would be hard for anyone to know. Unfortunately, if anyone were likely to have such damaging knowledge, it would be Quintus Dellius. Antony’s new man was a very knowing pimp with pretensions himself to be a Continuator of a kind, a gatherer and twister of stories, a historian of the campaigns that Caesar had intended to fight against the Persians and which Antony, in his bid to be Caesar’s undisputed successor, was planning to undertake in his place.

  Dellius was not her ideal choice as an escort to the new Roman ruler of the East. But Cleopatra was not in a position to choose. Dellius’s orders were to bring her to Tarsus, a small town on the River Cydnus in what is now southern Turkey. She had little choice but to go. To disregard the call would leave her without a Roman ally and as open to invasion, coups and plots as her father had been. And if she wanted to go to Antony, to explain herself, to offer soothing financial help for his Persian campaign, there was no alternative but to travel with Dellius the pimp.

  Antony seemed a man with whom she could do business. He had proved himself by holding Rome for Caesar during the Alexandrine War. He had rallied the Roman mob after Caesar’s death as soon as it was clear that the assassins intended to kill no one else. Philippi was his solo triumph. For Caesar’s party – and she was herself a famous member of it – he was the senior figure.

  Antony also understood the Greeks and their ways of being ruled. He had been popular in Alexandria even when, as a junior cavalry officer, he had helped to put Cleopatra’s father back on his throne. He was Alexandrian in mind. While not the first Roman to dream of equalling the feats of Alexander the Great, Antony was the first to share his spirit.

  He was in every way more malleable than Caesar, notoriously relaxed, a
successful general even if not a hardened one by the hardest Roman standards. A conflict was coming. Antony was a man of Caesar’s own generation while Octavian was six years younger than Cleopatra. As well as the dog-like Dellius, there were Plancus, Canidius and many more who wished to continue Caesar’s grander causes – and all of them had decided that Antony’s was the cause they should best be backing now.

  So she would go to Tarsus even though this place of meeting was no more ideal than was her escort. Tarsus would give Cleopatra little of the theatrical advantage that she had used on Caesar at home. Its unpaved streets were nothing like her Canopic Way between the Sun’s gates and the Moon’s. The River Cydnus at Tarsus was cold and narrow, as nothing compared to the Nile.

  But the best of Alexandrian artifice was at her command. The Greeks of Egypt had been long adept at turning any water into theatre. They never lived in the heart of their country. They always processed through it by barge, past riverbanks that were the best seats for their shows. She could not choose her Roman escort. But she could keep him waiting while she dressed her stage. She could use the time to prepare a ship that would be a home away from home. She had artists who worked in thick marble, gold and ebony. She had others who created lighter illusions. Impressing war-blasted Tarsus ought not to be hard.

  14.1.11

  Alexandria Courthouse, Route du 26 Juillet

  The meeting between Antony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus became one of the most famous of all meetings. Shakespeare made sure of that. ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, Burn’d on the water. The poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them.’