The Search for Cleopatra

by Michael Foss

  Caesar’s Egyptian interlude has been a puzzle. How did it come about that a general of his experience, a master of stratagems and swift action, allowed himself to be caught in the Alexandrian web of deceit and violence? His inferior force, blockaded in a hostile city, was always in danger. With luck and good management Caesar kept the enemy at bay, but he could not defeat it until reinforcements arrived. At any moment, he might have been swept away. Caesar’s own explanation for this state of misery lacked conviction. He said he had been detained against his will ‘by the Etesian winds which blow into the harbour and make exit difficult’. The judgement of others was that infatuation, not contrary winds, held him back. Who can doubt that Cleopatra had much to do with it, but she was only part of the pattern not the whole picture.

  Caesar had permitted himself a moment of relaxation. After years of upward struggle he saw the summit ahead, clearly lit and accessible. He paused for breath, and his grip slipped a little. Some lack of attention, a judgement of men and places that was less keen than usual had jammed him into a corner of Alexandria under siege. But for a man used to extremities of danger, his position was not really serious. He had a body of well-trained veterans solidly established behind good fortifications. He had access to the Great Harbour and from there, with difficulty, to the sea. He was faced by a large number of angry but ill-disciplined opponents, poorly led and themselves hampered by the tight constraints of street warfare. His admiral Euphranor had brought supplies and extra troops. His loyal general Mithridates would be bringing an army from Syria as soon as possible. And in the meantime, as he sat out this awkward impasse, there were compensations.

  He had met a young woman of a kind he had never seen before. He had kissed and left many a girl in many places. Powerful Roman ladies, talented women who pursued dynastic ambition with all the deadly strength of men, had won his respect and even his affection. But when he gave Servilia, that brooding mistress of Roman politics, jewels said to be worth a million denarii, had he ever such a return as from this slip of an Egyptian queen? Such conversation, such a delightful clash of ideas, so much learning and sparks of wit, flirtations, the tricks of love, profound moments and then the retreat into each other’s arms. And where else but in this court in the shade of the Museum and Library could he recover the memory of Alexander the Great, the exemplar of his hopes? Here, too, he could talk of Thales and Plato, of Euripedes and Aristophanes. He could see the manuscripts of Theocritus and other great poets, and best of all of mighty Homer himself whose extant writings lay on the shelves of this very Library. And when the scholarly talk was done, there were still feasts and entertainments and drolleries and music and dance to put to shame staid Rome with its vulgar triumphs and blundering excesses. ‘His greatest favourite was Cleopatra’, wrote Suetonius, ‘with whom he would often revel all night till the dawn of day.’

  He knew these times must end. After the victory over Ptolemy and the settling of Egyptian affairs, Caesar was anxious to get away But before he went, Cleopatra arranged for him one last elegaic celebration to remind of all that he had gained, and all that he stood to lose, now that he was about to take up the interrupted business of his life. She took him sailing far up the Nile in the Egyptian royal barge, a vessel nearly 100-metres long of unexampled luxury, with audience chambers to catch the breath and private withdrawing-rooms to make the senses reel, with viewing platforms and canopied sun-decks, and even a temple or two. They would have gone as far south as the Ethiopian border had not Caesar’s army refused to follow. The soldiers were desperate for home and Caesar went with them.

  He left at the beginning of the summer. Egypt was nominally in the hands of the co-rulers Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIV, the brother ten years her junior. But three legions under the freedman Rufinus remained in Egypt with orders to keep a careful watch, ‘to support the monarchs’, said the Alexandrine War ‘who had neither the affection of their own people, because they had been loyal to Caesar, nor the authority of long usage, because they had ruled jointly for only a few days’. Then the writer added ominously that ‘if the rulers of Egypt remained loyal, they would have our protection, but if ungrateful, then these same soldiers would punish them’.

  Rufinus and his legions were warning enough to the Egyptian people. But in case the message was still not clear, Caesar also took with his departing army Cleopatra’s disgraced sister Arsinoe, to walk in chains in his Roman triumph. He left behind the queen pregnant with his child.

  Cleopatra’s baby was born on Payni 23 (23 June) 47 BC. The little boy was declared to be the son of the Roman general and named Caesar, though he was always known by the diminutive Caesarion. It was a provocative act in Rome-hating Alexandria to proclaim openly this bastard child. But Alexandria was for the moment lost to Cleopatra and was only kept peaceful by Rufinus and the legions. Cleopatra’s strength, and the mark of her intelligent reading of Egyptian history, lay not in her own Greek-speaking capital but in her appeal to the great mass of the native people beyond. The first formal act of her reign had been a solemn visit to Upper Egypt on an occasion of religious importance. The recent pleasure-journey with Caesar up the Nile, though light-hearted in almost all respects, was still a visitation by a monarch to her subjects, to show the nature of majesty and the bond between queen and people.

  So the event that enraged Alexandria was celebrated near Thebes. An inscription at Hermonthis welcomed the baby as the child of Amon-Ra created through the human agency of Julius Caesar. The day of birth was declared a feast of Isis, and a coin struck in Cyprus (ceded back to Egypt’s queen by her Roman lover) showed Cleopatra as Isis-Aphrodite suckling Caesarion as the infant god Horus-Eros.

  Once Caesar was free of Egypt he seemed determined to make up for the indulgence of his days in Alexandria. He swept across Asia Minor, brushing aside Pharnaces of Pontus with such ease that he recalled an old Greek tag and boasted, Tcame, I saw, I conquered.’ In September he was back in Italy but was drawn away again to face one of the last despairing uprisings of Pompey’s followers in North Africa. In April 46 BC he defeated them at Thapsus and had returned to Rome by the end of July Now he could attend to the propaganda of his great achievements and delight the fickle Roman population with no less than four triumphs celebrating his conquests in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus and North Africa.

  Here was heaven-sent opportunity for political show and Caesar made the most of it, particularly in the triumph over Egypt. The colossus of the ancient world was brought low, and as a sign of subjugation – amid the statue of the Nile-god, the giant model of light-flashing Pharos, and lurid representations of the deaths of Pothinus and Achillas – the dejected figure of Arsinoe walked in chains, the greatest princess ever to face the humiliation of a Roman triumph. The usual brutal custom had been to kill the captives after the show, but Caesar, out of humanity or some other compunction, spared her life.

  At one moment, in the triumphal processions, coarse soldiers and the underlings of Rome had been bawling ribald songs of the general’s amours, of fumblings in oriental courts with a queen of exotic splendour. Then suddenly that queen herself was in Rome, with her brother-husband and all her strange retinue. Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIV, so uneasy in Alexandria, had come to tie even closer the bond with Rome and to solicit official confirmation of amicitia from the senate and the people. Caesar was now so completely in control of the Roman state that the recognition of the Egyptian co-rulers as Rome’s ‘friends and allies’ was easily granted.

  But beyond any business of state, Cleopatra had come to Rome for the sake of Caesar. They were no longer constant lovers. Malicious mouths in the town reported that he had passed on to Eunoe, wife of King Bogud of Mauretania. But the intimacy of sex had sealed a political and human affiliation between Caesar and Cleopatra. Caesar did not repudiate the past, nor did he deny the paternity of the baby who bore his name. Rather, he paid Cleopatra as great an honour as was within his power. In the new Forum Julium, constructed by Caesar at huge expense as an annex to the Forum Romanum, b
eside the cult-statue of Venus Genetrix, the goddess celebrated as Mother and Founder of the Julian clan, he placed a gilded statue of Cleopatra.

  No compulsion forced him to do this. His legions already controlled Lower Egypt. A place in his bed was now given to another, and he had no wish to marry Cleopatra for dynastic or political purposes. Calpurnia was Caesar’s wife, and Roman law did not permit either bigamy or a marriage between a patrician and a foreigner. It was thought possible that Caesar had been so infected by the humours of the Ptolemaic court during this -close days with Cleopatra that he was no longer content to be just the dictator of the Roman state. Perhaps he aspired to the deification of his person, to become god-king as the Ptolemies claimed to be? The introduction of the goddess-queen Cleopatra into the shrine of Caesar’s clan seemed an ominous sign to republican opponents. When would the dictator follow the queen into the temple? In May 45 BC the senate was persuaded to erect in the temple of Quirinus a statue of Julius Caesar bearing the inscription ‘To the Unconquered God’. Quirinus was the deified Romulus, the founder of Rome who later became its tyrant, and for this, so it was said, he was torn in pieces. ‘I had rather’, Cicero wrote with bitter irony, ‘he were a companion in the temple of Quirinus than of Salus.’ Better that he show his true colours as a tyrant than masquerade as the friend of Safety. The daggers of assassination were beginning to be sharpened.

  Some time late in 46 BC Cleopatra and her court settled into a large villa on Caesar’s estate just across the Tiber, under the slope of the Janiculum hill. In these peaceful surroundings, amid gardens and country breezes but within easy reach of the political heart of Rome, she began to test Rome society. Her notoriety, both as Egypt’s queen and as Caesar’s mistress and mother of his son, guaranteed the attendance of the curious and the fashionable. The force of her personality, her strong sense of politics and her ability still to influence Caesar pulled sober senators again and again to her door, some with respect and some in horrified fascination.

  Under her influence, leaning on the tradition of scholarship, culture and invention that she brought from Alexandria, Caesar set afoot several ambitious plans for improvement and reform. In imitation of the Alexandrian Library, Terentius Varro, a man of many bright talents who had fought against but been pardoned by Caesar, began the task of bringing together a collection of all Greek and Roman literature. In Alexandria, too, Caesar had seen the Egyptian-Greek skill in hydraulic engineering, and he now proposed a scheme for a canal that would drain the malarial swamp of the Pontine marshes and link the Tiber to Terracina. Even more important was the work on the reform of the calender undertaken on Caesar’s orders by the mathematician Sosigenes from the Museum in Alexandria. The lunar year used in Rome had grown seriously out of step with the astronomical year and required a large correction. A new solar year, based on calculations that Sosigenes had drawn from Ptolemaic astronomy, was successfully introduced on 1 January 45 BC. This reform was called the Julian calendar in honour of Caesar; with more justice it might have been called after Cleopatra and her Alexandrian scientist.

  These were virtuous plans for the benefit of society. Much more doubtful and dangerous in Roman eyes was the introduction of the cult of Dionysus, formerly banned in Rome. The eastern god of mystery and excess, so attractive to the Alexandrians, concentrated all the vague fears and nameless horrors that Romans identified with Egyptian life. Surely Cleopatra had brought this monstrous god with her. Now Rome began to see deceit, frenzy, riot, irrational violence slowly darken habitual Roman clarity.

  But no Ptolemaic court could exist for long without its pleasures, and even in Rome, where crudity vied with prudery, Cleopatra would not forego the delights of art and entertainment. Tigellius Hermogenes, famously delicate and demanding, sang for her. The philosopher Philostratus laid out his rhetorical flourishes for a select company. Aristocrats of the beau monde flocked to her bold feasts and discreet dinners. She met the large cast of idealists and opportunists gathered for the acting out the Roman drama. Was it tragedy or comedy? Mark Antony was there, and though Cleopatra had seen him when she was a girl in Alexandria she might not have met him now, for he was temporarily out of favour with Caesar. But Cicero, the shrewd observer, the distressed republican who admired Caesar but loved Rome more, could not keep away. He was drawn not just by curiosity but also by the easy assembly of cultured minds whose learning matched his own. For the queen herself, he could hardly suppress a shudder. Her divinity and the ruthless autocracy of the Ptolemaic state went against all his beliefs. But a little exchange of manuscripts or beautiful objects between discriminating scholars was not something to reject. Nor should such pleasantries be considered a bribe, rife though bribery was in this sorry world. ‘They are quite consistent with my position’, he wrote indignantly; ‘I would not hesitate to declare them in the public assembly.’ Yet when Cicero came to a final judgement, after Caesar’s death, his stoic and republican heart could not approve of Cleopatra.

  I hate the queen [he wrote in a letter to a friend]. When she lived in the gardens across the Tiber, I cannot speak of her arrogance without pain. I will have nothing to do with these people. They give me no credit for spirit nor even for a capacity of resentment.

  Resentment he certainly had, and so too did a large part of the Roman populace.

  For Cleopatra had become fully identified with Caesar’s own aims, for which she was partly blamed. These aims were feared by very many If not a goddess to the Romans, Cleopatra was at least a sorceress, a weaver of strange, self-deluding spells that ensnared a simple Roman virtue. Caesar was now well-launched on the slope to imperial, even god-like, authority. His best intentions were misconstrued in the poisoned atmosphere. After the reform of the calendar, when someone mentioned to Cicero the expected rise of a certain constellation, he replied tartly, ‘Yes, by edict!’ Caesar’s radical changes in the senate were seen as skulduggery and factional packing. ‘Here’s a good idea’, cried graffiti on a wall. ‘Don’t show the new senators the way to the senate-building!’ Caesar was no longer open to argument, and dictatorial pride had made him remote and haughty. When a group from the senate came humbly to offer him his own temple, dedicated to Divus Julius, he did not even rise to greet the delegation.

  The pressure of ambition and a vast burden of work prevented Caesar from spending much time with Cleopatra. He was not much seen in the gardens of the Janiculum. His health, uncertain for some time, was growing worse – crushing headaches, faints, epileptic fits. At the end of 46 BC a revolt using Pompey’s well-remembered name dragged him to Spain, He returned victorious in the summer of 45 BC, but badly in need of rest and convalescence. He retired to his estates south of Rome, and there he made his will which he deposited, as was customary, with the Vestal Virgins.

  In his absence the rumourmongers had been silent about Cleopatra. Perhaps she also had been away, even to Egypt to foster and protect the source of her power,. By the time Caesar was ready to return to Rome, in October 45 BC, she was back there too, and once more she was the subject of malicious tongues. It was said that Caesar planned to move his capital from Rome to Alexandria. And he would marry the oriental witch skulking across the Tiber. The tribune Cinna, according to a tale reported later by the historian Suetonius, had drawn up a decree on Caesar’s instruction ‘making it lawful for Caesar to marry as many wives as he wished’.

  Julius Caesar, it seemed to Rome, had the world in his hand, to deal with it as insolently as he saw fit. In February 44 BC, at the feast of Lupercalia, he sat in the Capitol on a golden throne and received from Antony the title and the diadem of a king. Despite the acclamation of his claque, the crowd watched in silence and only broke into a thunder of applause when he took off the diadem and handed it back. He should have been warned, and especially so when the Sibylline Books were opened and declared that the projected war against Parthia could only be won by a king. There were some things that a true Roman, even a partisan of Caesar, could not stomach, and one of these was a blatant, open
assumption of a king’s name.

  The plans for the campaign against Parthia were well advanced. This war would avenge the defeat and death of Crassus, and the loss of the Roman eagles, nine years before. It would also be the last step in Caesar’s regal progress, and confirm him in his imperium, his mastery of the world.

  Caesar was set to leave on 17 March 44 BC. Since the departing general, who was no longer her lover but her soul-mate and confidant, was likely to be away for some time, Cleopatra also made preparation to go. Egypt needed her, and she needed her own country. She and Caesar had given one another what each desired. Their fateful meeting, though leading her to full, passionate womanhood, had enmeshed her in the destiny of Rome. And for him, the self-contained Roman schemer, what did he see beyond the joys of an ardent woman? Perhaps she made him dream on delusions of divinity and authority such as he had seen obscurely in the Greek world-hero Alexander and practically in the long rule of that great man’s Ptolemaic successors. In any case, the Egyptian queen and the Roman dictator were done with each other now, and they could depart in peace.

  On the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BC, the swords of the conspirators brought Caesar’s dream to an abrupt end.

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