by Michael Foss
Dating from the 1ST century BC, the Palestrina floor mosaic was found in the Roman town of Praeneste (Palestrina) in southern Italy and shows how from an early age Egypt was a popular theme in Roman works of art. It provides a rare view of an idealized landscape of the Upper Nile. The southern part of the Nile Valley is represented by the exotic animals in the upper section of the mosaic while the foreground depicts the Nile delta. Various Egyptian papyrus boats are shown sailing up and down the river while Egyptian and Greek temples line the banks.
FACING PAGE: Study of a nude woman as Cleopatra, a drawing by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669).
ABOVE: Cleopatra by Pietro Dandini (1646-1712).
LEFT: Engraving of Cleopatra by Chapman 1804.
The image of Cleopatra as a tragic vamp which persists today was aided by imaginative artists through the centuries.
Marble bust of Julius Caesar showing him as a figure of authority. Dictator from 48-44 BC, his affair with Cleopatra helped to hasten his downfall.
If I should suffer the inevitable lot of man before leaving a heir to the throne, I bequeath the royal power that belongs to me to the Romans, always my faithful partners in friendship and treaty.
It was a tactic to buy support and time, and it was used by others in the East with reason to fear Rome, for example Nicomedes of Bithynia and Attalus of Pergamon.
Physkon’s will was hedged with a reservation. But his illegitimate son, Ptolemy Apion, who ruled in the North African realm of Cyrene, when he died in 96 BC left his kingdom to Rome without qualification. For the first time, a piece of the Ptolemaic inheritance had been deliberately alienated. With usual stealthy footwork, Rome at first stood back a little from this stroke of fortune. For a while, the Greek cities of the kingdom were permitted the luxury of self-government, though Rome took over the royal estates and raised a tax on the medicinal resin known as silphium, the most valuable export product of the land. Then in 74 BC, when all the likely consequences had been argued and judged, and each faction in Rome had considered its own advantage, the decision was made. A quaestor was appointed and the new Roman province of Cyrenaica was brought into being, dangerously poised on the western flank of Egypt.
In 80 BC, with the irony of history, another illegitimate Ptolemy came to the throne, but this time in Egypt itself. Nothos the Bastard, generally known as Ptolemy Auletes, like other weak Ptolemies tossed about by the blows of the Alexandrian mob, placed his faith and his comfort in Rome and clung to the leaders of the Roman factions for support to see him safe amid the savage rivalries of his own homeland. Bribing Romans, he looked as if he would impoverish Alexandrians. He gained the venal friendship of Julius Caesar, but lost Cyprus and his own brother to Marcus Cato without turning a hair. Driven out by corrupt Alexandrians, he was restored by corrupted Romans, Egyptians saw their hateful king contemptuously thrown back to them, and a people that had reason to fear Rome in the past, now had reason for hatred and anger as well.
But what could they do at this late stage? The learned men of the Alexandrian philosophical schools, warned by history and their own timidity, tried hard for a peaceful accommodation with Rome. But the mob and the house of Ptolemy, the one as wilful and foolish as the other, danced together down a riotous, indulgent path to ruin. Their conduct was a lesson in useless depravity, and when much later Dio Chrysostom thought it necessary to lecture the citizens of Alexandria on their many sins, he took the events of Auletes’ reign as an example:
When you managed your own affairs, did not your king play the flute and do little else, while you were his enemies, and made him flee your country to which he was only restored under Roman protection? Then piping and dancing together you destroyed your city.
It was a just accusation.
By then, in 51 BC when Cleopatra came to the throne, the Romans were at the gate, even with a firm foot in the door, and were waiting with their usual patience. Carthage had fallen, Corinth was gone. Macedonia, Armenia, Pontus, Syria and Cyrene were dust under the Roman sandal Was there any reason why Egypt should not follow?
Coin depicting Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII. During his reign Egypt became a client state of Rome.
In one respect, Egypt had been fortunate. For nearly a hundred years, since the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC, Romans had been so convulsed with the internal strife of their own state that their foreign affairs had not been a matter of settled policy but more an adjunct to the ambitions and rivalries of the great antagonists in Rome. Ever since the Italian tribes had been overwhelmed and incorporated into the confederacy of the republic, Rome crept outwards from Italy, putting faith in conquest. The cohesion of the state at home almost demanded military adventure abroad. The territory consumed fed the one overriding political concept of the state, which even in their bitter quarrels gave Romans an unspoken sense of purpose: Rome was born to rule.
But the question had become, in the years after 133 BC, who should rule in Rome itself? The state, which had begun with monarchy and progressed through the free institutions of the republic, went through great circles of contention and grief back to the dictatorship of triumvirs and finally to the imperial despotism of Augustus. Though this was apparently a war of ideals, of democratic forms against patrician autocracy, pitting the people against the senate, the populares against the optimates, the contest was in fact played out among the coteries of a small number of noble families fighting like rats in a sewer for authority and the spoil that accrued from Roman glory.
As they trod the brutal path to domination, the great faction leaders constantly looked back to Rome, the city of their hopes. They could not afford to do otherwise amid plot and treachery. But to arm themselves for the struggle the participants needed reputation, money and troops, and these were best made and retained abroad. In the reign of Ptolemy Auletes, the triumvirs Crassus, Caesar and Pompey marched tirelessly through the borderlands of the Mediterranean, battering hard Roman roads into Spain, Gaul, Macedonia, Parthia, Syria and other places. But their campaigns were determined by the stresses of the moment, by challenges to Roman authority, and beyond that by individual ambition. The great men carried their conquests to Rome, to claim their triumphs which they waved like flags before their factions, and there was neither time nor agreement for a comprehensive, well-considered policy of conquest in the East.
In these circumstances a country such as Egypt was, with luck, safe from Roman invasion. Egypt had the power and the resources (if not the political will) to make invasion long, arduous and expensive, with no certainty of success. Had not the wild Parthians, barbarians fuelled by raw energy and courage, as recently as 53 BC defeated Crassus at Carrhae with the shameful loss of the legions’ eagles?
The land of the Ptolemies was careful not to threaten Roman interests by contentious alliances or ill-advised forays in the East. It paid its dues to Rome in money and deference. Until the internal struggle for power in Rome was resolved, and barring unfortunate entanglements and the quirks of history, Egypt seemed likely to rest in a nervous state of peace.
But with the coming of Cleopatra, feared eventualities began to fall into place. The Roman struggle was entering its last phase, as cunning and treachery picked off the competing champions one by one. That was one blow for Egypt. The other fatal stroke was indeed an entanglement, a fateful meeting of minds and wills and bodies between masters of the Roman world and a young Egyptian queen.
4
CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA
SHE BORE THE NAME of Alexander’s sister: Cleopatra, ‘glory of the father’. According to the custom of her family she and her co-ruler, her little brother Ptolemy, were the Brother-and-Sister-loving Gods. They were also Theoi Philopatores, the Father-loving Gods. Cleopatra knew her place in the successions of her house, her great inheritance stemming from Alexander himself. Her blood was descended from the incest of god-kings with god-queens, and in this mixture who was to say which was the most potent part? The line of Ptolemy was also the line of Arsinoe, a fierce implac
able queen, director of her brother-husband’s policy, murderer of rivals within and without her family. Yet when she died, older than the king and a tired woman who had left him no children, her husband Ptolemy II Philadelphus mourned her tenderly; she had been the hand in his hand, the consoler of his health, the foundation and brace of his kingdom. Arsinoe was the type of the Ptolemaic queen, and others of the same kind followed after her. Later, in courts of weak men, they knew the art of ruling. They were strong and fearless and without mercy.
Cleopatra VII had it in her bones to be such a queen, and she intended to rule. From her first regnal year, when she was only 18, contrary to Ptolemaic custom the coins of her reign carried her portrait only. It was as if her co-ruler and little brother Ptolemy XIII did not exist. Her coins were clearly stamped Kleopatras Basilisses with no other acknowledgement. She wished it to be known that Queen Cleopatra was the ruling monarch of Egypt.
Within a few months of her accession, the sacred bull of Buchis died at the temple of Hermonthis, a few miles from Thebes in Upper Egypt. This white bull, with its coat that seemed to catch and sparkle in the light, contained the terrestrial spirit of the great god Amon-Ra, and the inauguration of a new bull was a deep moment in the religious life of Egypt. The event took place in March 51 BC, and the inscription at the Bucheum recorded that ‘the Queen, the Lady of the Two Lands, the Father-loving Goddess, rowed the bull in the barge of Amon to Hermonthis’. Never before, in the meticulous religious records of Egypt, had it been noted that a Ptolemy performed this reverent act in person. It was an astute political statement by the young queen, announcing her identification with the spirit and the life of an older Egypt. She was not just a Macedonian Greek from Alexandria who farmed an alien land for her own benefit from the distant Mediterranean shore. She was an Egyptian whose heart beat in time with the pharaonic tradition, a queen of all her people.
Cleopatra needed whatever help she could get from the body of Egypt, for the scheming at the head, in Alexandria, was as busy as usual. The 10-year-old king, Ptolemy XIII, had been provided with a council of guardians made up of the dioiketes Pothinus, a eunuch in charge of finance and administration, the tropheus Theodotus, the king’s tutor, and the army commander Achillas. Ptolemaic law, regarding co-rulers, had always given kings precedence over queens. If the guardians wished to advance their own ambitions through the manipulation of a child-king, they had a keen interest in limiting and controlling this determined queen. She must be made to see her inferior place.
So her position in the Brucheion palace was full of danger, nor was there any safety in the city beyond. To the habitual wildness of the Alexandrian mob, there was now an added peril from the Roman legionaries, mainly from Gaul and Germany, abandoned in Egypt by Gabinius in 55 BC. Barbarian soldiers trained in the brutal schools of camp and campaign, they were unhinged by the diversions and indulgence of Alexandria. A few years later Julius Caesar found these Gabinians a cause of violent disorder.
The men of Gabinius [Caesar wrote in the Civil War] had grown used to the lax life in Alexandria. Ceasing to think of themselves as Roman and forgetting Roman discipline, they had married and begot children by local wives. And many brigands, pirates, condemned criminals and exiles had joined them. If any were arrested by his master, his comrades would unite to rescue him. A threat to one was a threat to all. So insolent did they become, they demanded the execution of royal favourites, plundered the property of the rich, and besieged the palace for more pay. They dared to try to raise up or pull down kings, as was the ancient Alexandrian tradition.
The Gabinians were a rabble to be feared, but Cleopatra was bold enough to try to limit their destructive influence. When a new Roman proconsul in Syria, Marcus Bibulus, ordered the Gabinians to return to his command for the war against Parthia, the rebel troops killed the envoys, who were Bibulus’ own two sons. Cleopatra had the murderers arrested immediately and sent to Bibulus in chains. She wished to keep Roman friendship almost at any cost, but it was a brave act for one so insecure to antagonize these riotous brawlers.
Votive plaque of Cleopatra as an Egyptian goddess.
For she had other troubles within her realm. In 50 BC the seasonal flood of the Nile had been too low for a good harvest. Drought followed and with it famine. Villages were abandoned and temples grew anxious for their safety. So great was the dearth that Cleopatra was forced to divert resources from the countryside to the vast, consuming metropolis of Alexandria. The decree that ordered this transfer of grain, written in peremptory terms with severe penalties for disobedience, was jointly signed with her brother-king. No doubt she needed to invoke the fullest authority of the Ptolemaic crown and so had to rely on the support of the king’s council. Even then, there were signs that she acted reluctantly or under pressure, for the decree was dated ‘in the first year which is also the third year’ of the reign. The third year for Cleopatra, but only the first for Ptolemy XIIL Once acknowledged, the king and his council grew in opposition to her sole authority.
Egypt was uneasy for the queen, but there was little comfort either in the world outside. Of the three men, the triumvirs, contending for power in Rome, Crassus was killed at Carrhae in 53 BC. The survivors, Pompey and Caesar, both saw the ultimate prize now within reach. In 49 BC Julius Caesar marched into Italy from Gaul and precipitated civil war. Within a few months Pompey was forced out of Italy. Asia Minor had been Pompey’s favourite stamping ground, where his triumphs had been won, and he set out in that direction, pausing first in the Balkans and sending messengers to the East to gather men and money. He sent his most important envoy – his son – to Alexandria, for Egypt was the richest of the eastern lands, and he already possessed there, at least nominally, a formidable if troublesome body of soldiers. The Gabinians, when they were under Roman discipline, had been part of Pompey’s faction.
Cleopatra knew that Pompey was not a man to trifle with, and his voice in Rome in the past had been friendly to Egypt. The country still seemed within reach of his powerful arm. So Egypt, whether it was through Cleopatra or the king’s council, sent off sixty ships and a large quantity of grain to Pompey’s base in Albania. And 500 Gabinians were either bribed or intimidated into rejoining the legions. The rump of the Roman senate that followed Pompey out of Italy passed a resolution of thanks to Egypt and placed Ptolemy XIII under the direct guardianship of Pompey, an equivocal honour for a young Egyptian king, fraught with dangerous consequences for the future.
In Alexandria, the strains of joint rule, made worse by the impending Roman civil war, had destroyed the already fragile harmony within the royal family. Alexandrians had always detested signs of subservience to Rome; the Gabinians resisted the break-up of their lawless community. Pothinus and the council, acting (as Caesar wrote) through the king’s ‘friends and relatives’, fastened the blame on Cleopatra as the senior of the co-rulers and the dominating figure in government. By the end of 49 BC the sentiment of the people of Alexandria had turned against her and she was driven from the capital. Decrees began to be issued in the name of Ptolemy XIII alone.
To drive a Ptolemaic queen from Alexandria was one matter. An angry mob could do that. But to prevent her from plotting a return was much harden Former Cleopatras, queens of courage and spirit, had proved their ability to foment trouble, to raise armies, and to march back to the city in triumph. Cleopatra IV, in particular, in 113 BC had shown how a queen’s revolt might be managed, and Cleopatra VII needed no further encouragement. We read of Cleopatra in Upper Egypt, in the Thebaid, raising an army where the old pharaonic traditions were still strong. Cleopatra well understood her subjects in these lands, as she had shown at the inauguration of the bull of Buchis. Within a year she was ready to move against her brother, and Achillas of the king’s council was forced to lead an army to confront her at the north-eastern border near Pelusium.
At this moment, the shadow of Rome suddenly fell dark again on the history of Egypt. In the summer of 48 BC Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus in Thessaly. Af
ter this shattering blow Pompey cast around for a means to restore his fortune. He decided to run for Egypt, the land that had helped him before and where the most wealth lay. He was, after all, the self-appointed guardian of the 13-year-old king, who would be unlikely to deny aid to the great Pompey.
In September 48 BC his small fleet approached the Egyptian shore near Mount Casius where the king’s forces were drawn up against Cleopatra. A single boat pulled from the beach containing three men of rank – the Egyptian general Achillas, a Roman centurion, and another Roman named Septimius, one of the Gabinian officers. Pompey entered the boat to be rowed ashore. As they closed on the beach Septimius suddenly stabbed Pompey and killed him, and then the Egyptian navy attacked the small number of Roman ships, sinking some and scattering the rest.
It was certain that the murder was planned. Formerly, in the East, Pompey had been the all-conquering general, but now he was merely a fallen hero and a cause for further trouble. In all dealings with Rome, the Ptolemies had always tried to back the winner. Failed men were no longer worth honour or fear. As the king’s tutor Theodotus said, ‘Dead men don’t bite.’ Dante, a scathing moralist and keeper of the human conscience, for this act of treachery placed Ptolemy XIII in the same circle of hell as Cain and Judus, since the boy-king had watched the murder from the shore, dressed in the purple chlamys of royalty. But the politician and orator Cicero was nearer to the mark when he stated flatly that sooner or later, after Pharsalus, some such end was inevitable for Pompey.