The Search for Cleopatra

by Michael Foss

  BREATHING SPACE

  THE MOMENT WAS PERILOUS. Caesar’s death cancelled expectations and made guesswork of certainty. Should the Egyptian queen stay or run? Cleopatra had never lacked nerve. She drew on her store of courage and waited a little. The reading of Caesar’s will gave her no comfort. After bequeathing his gardens on the Tiber to the people and giving each Roman 300 sestercii, gifts that wrung tears from the populace, Caesar did not mention Caesarion, his bastard son, but made his great-nephew Octavius the adopted successor and spiritual heir to whom he gave three-quarters of his estates.

  In the chaos of the time, when the consul Antony played on the senate and the conspirators with such skill and diplomacy, the name of Cleopatra flickered through the pages of Cicero’s correspondence. Cicero was implicated by his sympathies and his meddling and he was desperate to catch the drift of events. A month after the murder he wrote, ‘I see nothing to object to in the flight of the queen.’ But in the second week in May she was still in Rome, the subject of farther rumours to which Cicero obscurely referred: Tm hoping it is true about the queen and that Caesar.’ Later writers, in particular the loose-mouthed poet Lucan commenting a century afterwards, suggested that Cleopatra was kept in Rome by a miscarriage of another baby whose father was also Caesar. But on 17 May Cicero noted that ‘the rumour about the queen is dying down’, and a week later added, ‘I am hoping it is true about the queen.’ Without doubt Cicero was hoping for bad news about Cleopatra. He did not like Greeks and he did not like women, and most of all he hated the Greek woman Cleopatra, as he admitted to his friend Atticus on 17 June. The misogynist Cicero is a poor witness against Cleopatra, but his political judgement was still keenly attuned to the Roman turmoil.

  Now I see it was folly [he wrote on 24 May] to be consoled by the Ides of March. Our courage was that of men but, believe me, we had no more sense than children. We have only chopped down the tree, not rooted it up.

  Nothing was settled by Caesar’s murder. The Roman contest began again, a new struggle in which Cleopatra for the moment had no place. The sensible road for her led back to the homeland. She had been preparing for it before Caesar’s death, and now she went.

  In trying to protect herself and the Egyptian monarchy by going to Rome, Cleopatra had been neglecting Egypt itself. When she returned, there was much work to do. Once again, for two consecutive years, the Nile flood had fallen below the measures known as ‘the cubits of death’ and hardship and some famine followed, as they always did from these periodic disasters. And once again calamity laid bare the latent tensions within the state, the tug-of-war between the productive native countryside and the huge consuming metropolis, between the lean forgotten south and the pampered sybarites of Alexandria. A stele put up at about this time by the priests of Amon-Ra at Thebes, in honour of the chief magistrate of their district, lamented the state of their region ‘ruined by a variety of grievous circumstances’. The people of Thebes praised their magistrate, Callimachus, for his heartfelt care in the recent times of famine and pestilence, and commended his attachment to old ways and old faith. No credit was given to the reigning monarchs, who were not mentioned in the inscription, except in the dating by the years of the reign.

  Cleopatra’s cartouche showing the queen’s name spelt in hieroglyphic signs.

  Disease followed famine. With the impartial curiosity of Alexandrian science, Dioscurides Phacas, a man known as Freckles, tracked the spread of the pestilence. He noted the distended black blotches and the suppurations from lymphatic glands, and in doing so described for the first time the symptoms and the course of the bubonic plague.

  To address the troubles of the kingdom required from the queen a most delicate balance. To some degree, the rights and duties of the regions in such a large diverse land were irreconcilable. But agriculture was of the first importance, and Cleopatra was forced to make some hard decisions in the apportionment of labour and produce. In the emergency she made a distribution from the royal granaries from which the large Jewish community in the Delta quarter of Alexandria was excluded. The law placed the Jews, as foreigners, outside the largesse of the state, even though the community had been established for generations. Cleopatra can hardly have hesitated between her own people and foreigners, but her decision won her an enduring Jewish enmity. Much more difficult were the judgements that had to be made between the groups of her own subjects, as a decree from Heracleopolis, dated April 41 BC, showed. In the face of shortages local administrators in the countryside were placing extra burdens and dues on Alexandrians who did agricultural work outside the city. The queen declared herself to be ‘exceedingly indignant’ and ordered that no excessive demands should be made on these workers.

  Nor shall their goods be destrained for such contributions, nor shall any new tax be required of them, but when they have once paid the essential dues, in kind or in money, for corn-land and for vine-land, which have regularly in the past been assigned to the royal treasury, they shall not be molested for anything further, on any pretext whatsoever.

  Slowly, some of the neglect of agriculture was put right and production began to increase. As a promise of a new age of plenty Cleopatra, as ever the adept propagandist, placed on the reverse of her coins the double cornucopia and the fillet of the royal diadem formerly used by her predecessor Arsinoe II, the queen remembered as the Lady of Abundance.

  The plight of agriculture had called for emergency measures. The other business to which Cleopatra gave immediate attention was in fact the enduring preoccupation of her reign: to secure her own position, and even more the future of her dynasty, by all the means that intrigue, politics and religion allowed. Very soon after her return to Egypt her brother-husband Ptolemy XIV was heard of no more. Later writers, in particular the unfriendly Jewish historian Josephus, stated the young king had been poisoned. It would be no surprise if Cleopatra killed the youth. Murder within the family was a hazard of Ptolemaic rule. Cleopatra had fought her other brother-husband Ptolemy XIII to a bitter end, seeing without grief his drowned body brought to Alexandria by Caesar’s soldiers. She did not forgive her sister Arsinoe for her flight from the palace, when the young girl had gone over to Pothinus and Achillas. When the chance came, a few years later, for Cleopatra to rid herself of Arsinoe, she demanded her sister’s execution without hesitation. Ptolemy XIV was an impediment, for he held a position that she had daringly marked for another. The practice of the Egyptian monarchy, which required a co-ruler for a queen, had raised Ptolemy XIV to the kingship. But he was a mere cipher, as easily cast down as raised up. The plan she had now formed swept her brother away and replaced him with three-year-old Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar.

  To Egyptians, the marriage within the crown of a mother and her infant son was a formal trifle, easily swallowed. More difficult to take was the illegitimacy of the child, though he was at least clearly within the Ptolemaic line through his mother. The sticking-point, the offence that caught in the throats of Alexandrians especially was the Roman father of this newly crowned Ptolemy Caesar. But for Cleopatra, the decision, though boldly provocative, was logical enough. She thought that Caesar’s child was the best counter she had to defend herself against any further Roman designs on Egypt. She gambled that the elevation of a half-Roman to be co-ruler of Egypt already brought the kingdom within the orbit of the Roman imperium. With Ptolemy Caesar – Caesarion – in place, Rome would need no greater presence in Egypt. Cleopatra had always understood that she needed Romans to save her country from Rome. What better, then, than a half-Roman co-ruler who was also her little son?

  Alexandrians would choke on this offering, as Cleopatra very well knew. With them, she was prepared to brazen it out. She had defied them before and would do so again. It was of much more importance to her to have the new arrangement confirmed and accepted within the wide boundaries of her realm. For the future of her dynasty Ptolemy Caesar had to be seen as a king in the Egyptian tradition, a true successor in the long line of the pharaohs.


  The shrewd propaganda of the queen had already proclaimed the divine provenance of her child. In the ancient Egyptian practice, stories in pictures were put on temple walls to illustrate the descent of a new-born royal child from Amon-Pharaoh through his Isis-Queen. ‘These pictures’, writes one sympathetic scholar, ‘reproduced not merely a dogma, namely the teaching about the divine birth of Pharaoh, but also a sacred ritual drama.’ This was the tradition that Cleopatra deliberately followed. In the celebratory inscription for the birth of Caesarion at Hermonthis in Upper Egypt, the meaning of the event is bluntly underscored by doing away with the usual symbols of queen-as-goddess and child-as-god and plainly showing these deities in their human figures.

  Cleopatra is shown kneeling, attended by goddesses, and above her is her new name Mother of Ra in hieroglyphs. Over the new-born child stands the device of the scarab, marking out the young Ptolemy Caesar as God of the Rising Sun.

  In another scene two babies – Horus and Caesarion – are suckled on a couch by goddesses with the heads of cows, while Amon and Mut and Cleopatra herself lend a divine lustre to the nursing of the babe.

  This tale of divine birth was the fable that she also propagated when she had placed on her coins the figure of herself as Isis suckling Caesarion in the guise of Horus. But now, with her son assimilated into the divine kingship, she needed to give her people further instruction, although they had shown that they were already familiar with her insistent message. A stele inscribed in the Fayum soon after her return from Rome made a dedication to the crocodile-god on behalf of Queen Cleopatra and King Ptolemy Caesar, who were declared jointly to be the great-grandchildren of the god. But some more resplendent gesture was needed, some star-burst of affirmation of the co-rulers’ divine role, and this was provided at about this time on the wall of the temple of Denderah in Upper Egypt (see Plate 11).

  The symbolic representation, in huge figures, was both grand and subtle. Here, in colossal relief, stand Queen Cleopatra and in front of her a full-scale male named as Ptolemy Caesar. They bear gifts of musical instruments and gold which they are offering to Hathor, one of the goddesses of the temple and the goddess of music and love. She was the Egyptian equivalent of Aphrodite and therefore the appropriate deity to receive gifts from love’s servant Cleopatra and her love-child Caesarion.

  But that was not the whole story, as the skill of Egyptologists has revealed. The noble figure standing in front of Ptolemy Caesar is Isis, the goddess who is the sister-wife of Osiris, and one already identified with the queen in the mythology of the royal birth. Isis is the consort and saviour of Osiris, who brings the slaughtered god back to life and is then delivered of his divine child. The son born to them is the god Horus, the Sun God of Egypt, the God who united the Two Lands, and thus the archetype of each new-born pharaoh who would also rule in Upper and Lower Egypt. The holy message, therefore, to be read on the wall of Denderah was as follows: Isis-Cleopatra had conceived out of the dead god Osiris-Caesar (for had not the Romans in a fit of guilt deified Julius Caesar also?), and the child of their union was Horus-Caesarion, now properly called Ptolemy Caesar, the divinely appointed co-ruler of the Two Lands of Egypt. And this was the king destined in the future (if he realized his mother’s magnificent dream) to reconcile under one crown the two empires of Egypt and Rome.

  To those untrained in the arcana of Egyptian religious symbolism the message on the wall of Denderah might seem grotesque and far-fetched. But the Egyptian priesthood had studied the interpretation of pictures and hieroglyphs for millennia, and they read the symbolic meaning quite easily. Then the priests remembered the commitment of the queen to themselves, their temples and the traditions of their faith. They were able to see on the stele at the Bucheum at Hermonthis that Cleopatra, for the glory of the sacred bull, had given 412 silver pieces for a table of offerings, a daily allowance of bread, wine and milk for the priestly staff, and 27 measures of oil for the performance of the daily rites. And for the general support of the shrine and its workers she also paid for meat, beans and oil They saw also that under her administration the grants made to the temples for the exercise of religious functions – the syntaxis – were kept up. They noted that her dangerous intimacy with Rome seemed, at least for the time being, to keep the land safe from Roman invasion. Forgiving her those very failings for which the Alexandrians held her in contempt, the priests recognized her as their native goddess-queen. They understood the message she had so gigantically engraved at Denderah, and they passed it on to their vast, illiterate, faithful flock among the Egyptian peasantry.

  For a bright moment it looked as if Cleopatra might have succeeded in her plans to secure both her own present and her son’s future. Conditions in Egypt were slowly improving, though they were still dire enough in places to force free men and women to sell themselves into servitude. Despite the economic troubles, the queen was building a new fleet and restocking the royal granaries. The Roman legions left behind by Caesar had subdued the hostile Alexandrians into a surly obedience. But she could not divorce herself and her kingdom from the course of history that was being shaped in Rome.

  On the death of Caesar, his heir designate Octavius, a pale, slight, sickly youth of eighteen, returned from military training in Apollonia and after a time took on the name of his adoptive father, though in this period of his life he became known to history as Octavian. The firmness of his decision and the steady determination to avenge his great-uncle’s murder belied his youth and his weak constitution and showed something of the qualities that Caesar had noted in him when they were together in Spain in the previous year. Despite early lack of support and many setbacks Octavian clung to his conviction. In July in the depressed and muddled months after the murder, when he insisted on celebrating the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris – the triumph for Caesar’s victory at Thapsus – despite opposition, a comet appeared in the sky, which was taken by both Octavian and the populace as the welcome of the gods for the divine Caesar. Octavian knew then that his path was marked out and he never wavered.

  In the days after the murder the consul Antony averted worse disaster with fair speech and the skill of his diplomacy He set himself as the standard-bearer of Caesar’s following, but the forces for disorder pulled too strongly for him to control for long. He formed an uneasy alliance with Octavian to whom he referred with condescension as ‘the boy who owed everything to a name’. The two were as far apart in character as mountain and sea. But the name Octavian had assumed was the great name of the dead man, and this was the most potent rallying-call to all those, particularly the soldiers of the legions, who had reason to remember Caesar’s extraordinary accomplishments.

  In the summer of 44 BC the leaders of the assassins, Brutus and Cassius, abandoned Italy for Asia Minor where they hoped to raise men and money for the inevitable contest. In Rome, relations between Antony and Octavian were wearing thin. Cicero began to attack Antony in the senate in the famous series of speeches known as Philippics, while Antony, to weaken Octavian’s position, declared before the senate that Caesar had recognized Caesarion as his son. Caesar’s party split. Amid accusations and plots and much deceitful jostling, the split widened into open warfare. The senate ordered Octavian to join the consuls for the new year 43 BC in an attack on Antony The opponents met at the battle of Mutina in April 43 BC. Antony was defeated and driven into Gaul, both consuls fell on the field of battle, and Octavian was left in sole command of Rome. As the victorious general he swept into the city and took the vacant consulship by intimidation. From this position of vantage he began to stitch together the torn fabric of Caesar’s party, for he knew that the immediate contest was not with Antony but with the murderers gathering their forces in the East.

  In October, Octavian went to Bononia to meet Antony and Lepidus, the soldier who had succeeded Antony as Caesar’s master of horse. In formal harmony that hid their inner feelings these three men joined together in the Second Triumvirate for ‘the re-organization of the Roman State’. They issued a proscrip
tion list of those they deemed to be implicated in the death of Caesar. Three hundred senators and no less than 3000 men of the rank of equites forfeited life and property to the state, and now the triumvirs had the money to pursue an eastern war against Brutus and Cassius.

  From the safety of Egypt, Cleopatra watched these events with cautious concern. She was naturally of Caesar’s party, but her instinct warned her very strongly not to get involved with the internal struggles of the Roman state. In Syria, the republican Cassius was being opposed by Caesar’s loyal general Dolabella. Cleopatra permitted or connived at the departure of the legions still in Egypt to go to the help of Dolabella. But in July 43 BC, when Dolabella was surrounded and committed suicide at Laodicea, these legions went over to Cassius. At this time also, the Egyptian governor of Cyprus supported Cassius, with the implicit approval of Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s unlucky sister who had walked in Caesar’s triumph and then been banished to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus. Cypriot ships defected to Cassius and the Ephesians saluted Arsinoe as queen of Egypt.

  It seemed that Cassius had carried all before him along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and his army was dangerously close to Egypt. All the princes of the region had submitted to the republican general, except in Egypt where Cleopatra was still studiously non-committal. Cassius, as eager as all others for Egyptian wealth, was on the point of changing her mind by invasion when an urgent call from Brutus summoned him to Smyrna to prepare to meet the advance of the triumvirs.

  If Cleopatra was not ready to support Cassius, she was also in some doubt about Octavian. He, merely a great-nephew, had stolen the birthright that might have gone to her son Cae-sarion. But she saw that some resolution was approaching and it was time for her to indicate some preference. Despite her suspicion of him, Octavian had shown no predatory interest in Egypt and he was still far away. She knew Antony as Caesar’s friend and admirer, and her sympathies lay with his faction. When Cassius had asked Cleopatra for aid, she had fended him off with a plea of poverty, owing to disease and famine in the kingdom. But suddenly she put to sea with her own fleet, commanding it herself with an imperial grandeur unprecedented in a queen, heading for the Adriatic with help and supplies for the triumvirs. But after a short passage, the display of armed might turned to farce as gales tore the fleet apart and a bedraggled queen, green with sea-sickness, limped back to the Great Harbour in Alexandria. She was getting together another fleet when news came, in the autumn of 42 BC, that Brutus and Cassius had been defeated and killed at Philippi, and with them perished also the republican cause in Rome.