Cleopatra and Antony

by Diana Preston

  Caesar moved quickly, reminding the mob of the late king’s will, assuring them with his customary eloquence of his good intentions and declaring that Cleopatra and Ptolemy would rule together. He also decreed that, as stipulated in their father’s will, the two should undergo the traditional brother-sister nuptials for form’s sake. As a further sweetener to the Egyptians, Caesar restored Cyprus—annexed ten years earlier by Rome—to the dynasty, decreeing that it should be an independent kingdom under the joint rule of Cleopatra’s younger half sister, Arsinoe, and her eleven-year-old half brother, yet another Ptolemy.

  The rapprochement was marked by a lavish banquet. Lucan bemoaned how “Cleopatra amid great tumult displayed her luxuries, not as yet transferred to the Roman race. The place itself was equal to a Temple, which hardly a more corrupt age could build; and the roofs adorned with fretted ceilings displayed riches, and solid gold concealed the rafters . . . Ivory covers the halls, and backs of Indian tortoises, fastened by the hand, are placed upon the doors, dotted in their spots with plenteous emeralds. Gems shine upon the couches, and the furniture is yellow with jasper; the coverlets glisten, of which the greater part, steeped long in the Tyrian [purple] dye, have imbibed the drug not in one cauldron only. A part shines, embroidered with gold; a part, fiery with cochineal.” The attendants were as exotic: “this one has dark hair, another has hair so light that Caesar declares that in no regions of the Rhine has he seen locks so bright; some are of scorched complexion with curly hair . . . Unhappy youths as well, rendered effeminate by the iron and deprived of virility.” Their flower-bedecked hair was drenched in costly imported cinnamon “which had not yet diminished its fragrance in foreign air but still carried the scent of its native land, and also with cardamom, freshly and locally harvested.”

  The centerpiece was Cleopatra herself: “Having immoderately painted up her fatal beauty . . . upon her neck and hair Cleopatra wears treasures and breathes deep beneath her ornaments. Her pale breasts glisten through the Sidonian fabric . . . in which the needle of the workman of the Nile has separated and loosened the warp by stretching out the web.”

  But Cleopatra would have been realistic enough to recognize that her wealth, even more than her person, was immensely attractive to Caesar. There was a political point behind the ostentation and extravagance of her banquet as well as the spell of spectacle. She plied her Roman guest with delicacies on golden plates and gem-studded bowls brimful with wine. In the heady, drug-like atmosphere, “Caesar learnt how to waste the wealth of the despoiled world.”

  If Cleopatra had any objections to Caesar’s decision about how Egypt was to be ruled, she was too wise to voice them as she continued her seduction of him, but her feelings must have been ambivalent. After all, she was expected to share the throne she regarded as hers with the half brother who had tried to dispense with her. Also, though Cyprus was a traditional heartland of the Ptolemaic empire and, at the dynastic level, she welcomed its return, on the personal one she loathed Arsinoe, who with their younger brother was to rule the island. Caesar too must have had mixed feelings. As would very soon become apparent, he could have made his own position more secure by siding with the king against Cleopatra. Caesar also knew he would be criticized in Rome over Cyprus—proconsular generals, even ones as all-powerful as he, were supposed to acquire Roman territory, not give it away. Yet, as Plutarch suggested, perhaps he could not help himself: “he damaged his reputation and risked his life needlessly for no real reason, and it was just that he was so passionately in love with Cleopatra.”

  With discontent still simmering in the streets, Caesar kept to the palace, where the four royal siblings, including his new mistress, also bided their time. For a few weeks there was a seeming calm, but in late October 48 Pothinus sent a secret message summoning Ptolemy’s army back to Alexandria from the eastern border with orders to attack and dislodge the uninvited Romans from the palace quarter. This was presumably done with the young king’s knowledge and consent—though such matters were largely in the hands of his powerful council, everything suggests he joined very willingly in their schemes.

  A dismayed Caesar, interrupted in his new love affair, learned that a force of twenty thousand, including two thousand cavalry, was advancing on the city, led by Pompey’s chief assassin, Achillas. Knowing that he was vastly outnumbered, Caesar dispatched messengers to Rhodes, Crete, Syria and Asia Minor demanding ships, corn and troops and especially archers and artillery (in the form of catapults). To buy time, he sent two eminent court physicians, both of whom had carried out sensitive missions for Cleopatra’s father, as emissaries to Achillas, but the latter contemptuously had them murdered out of hand.

  With the Alexandrians eagerly awaiting the arrival of Ptolemy’s army, Caesar took the precaution of placing the king under house arrest. Also, accepting that he could never hold the entire city, he fortified the quarter around the royal palace, the adjacent theater and the great library. Soon after, Achillas’ forces arrived and launched their attack in what Lucan described as a very un-Roman manner: “weapons rain down on the palace and the household gods tremble. There is no battering ram to breach the walls in one blow and break into the palace, there is no siege engine, nor do flames work for them; rather, the young troops, without any strategy, split up and surround the palace.” Caesar’s well-disciplined men relatively easily prevented their disorganized enemy from gaining entry, yet Cleopatra and her Roman lover were effectively as much in prison as her half brother. Thus in 48 the Alexandrian War had begun and, as Suetonius wrote, would prove to be “a most difficult campaign, fought during winter within the city-walls of a well-equipped and cunning enemy.”

  Caesar faced attack by sea as well as by land. In Alexandria’s Great Harbor, ships of the royal Egyptian fleet mustered in readiness to assault Caesar’s ships, anchored in the palace’s private harbor, which they greatly outnumbered. Caesar responded to the apparently hopeless position by ordering his ships to row out to surprise and engage the Egyptian fleet. The shock tactics worked. In fierce hand-to-hand fighting the Romans seized and set fire to many enemy ships. Their pitch-coated wood burned so fiercely that flames whipped up by the wind soon spread to the buildings along the quayside, jumping, in Lucan’s words, “from roof to roof like a meteor as it cuts a furrow across the heavens.” Here the fires were fed by the dry papyrus of thousands of scrolls waiting to be taken to the great library or to be shipped abroad.*

  In the confusion of acrid, choking smoke and searing heat, and with the Alexandrians distracted from the siege of the palace by the need to save their homes, Caesar took a further bold step to secure his safety and that of Cleopatra. Noting that “because of the narrowness of the channel there can be no access by ship to the harbor without the consent of those who hold the Pharos,” he dispatched troops by boat to capture the lighthouse at the eastern tip of the island of Pharos. They soon overran it and installed a garrison. It would now be possible for Caesar’s much hoped-for reinforcements to enter the harbor and land. Caesar also took advantage of the confusion to throw up further barricades around the palace quarter.

  The sudden flight of Cleopatra’s young half sister, Arsinoe, however, took the seasoned commander by surprise. Together with her adviser, an ambitious, bellicose eunuch named Ganymedes, the princess managed to reach Achillas and his army. The anti-Roman Arsinoe was more to their taste than the pro-Roman bed partner of Caesar, and they at once proclaimed her queen of Egypt and joint monarch with Ptolemy. This undermined Caesar’s position only a 84 little less than Cleopatra’s. Up till then, he could claim the rising was a rebellion against Egypt’s rightful king, conveniently, of course, under his protection in the palace, but the proclamation of Arsinoe gave the rising a new legitimacy. However, the infighting so characteristic of the Ptolemaic court came to Caesar’s aid. Ganymedes, Achillas and their respective cliques soon began to spar over control of the army. When Pothinus, confined with his protégé Ptolemy in the palace, learned of the feuding, he sent a message to
Achillas assuring him of his support and promising to escape from the palace with the king.

  This time, thanks to a barber who was, according to Plutarch, “habitually driven by his quite extraordinary cowardice to keep his ear to the ground and poke his nose into everyone’s affairs,” Caesar learned of the plot in time. He ordered Pothinus’ immediate execution, a decision that gave him considerable satisfaction, since he had long suspected the eunuch of plotting his murder. Not long after, Achillas too was dead—murdered on Ganymedes’ orders. Ganymedes now took command of the army, assembled a new fleet, flung a tighter cordon around the royal palace and used mechanical waterwheels to pump seawater into the water system feeding the palace area of Alexandria. When Caesar’s thirsty troops realized that their drinking water had been contaminated, they panicked, but he calmly ordered them to labor through the night to dig new wells and within a few hours the relieved men tapped into “a great quantity of sweet water.”

  The sighting off Alexandria, two days later, of the sails of transport ships bringing a Roman legion and supplies from Asia Minor was timely, even though the stubborn contrary wind prevented them from gaining the harbor. Caesar made a dash with his oared naval vessels to meet the transports and, after foiling an Egyptian counterattack during which over a hundred Egyptian ships were lost, took advantage of the softening winds to tow the new arrivals with their cargoes of food and weaponry safely into the royal harbor.

  Yet Caesar was still not strong enough to break out, and Ganymedes was profiting from the impasse to strengthen and reequip the Egyptian fleet, tearing down the roofs of colonnades, gymnasia and other public buildings to make oars. In February 47, to frustrate the Egyptians’ incessant efforts to set fire to his vessels, Caesar managed to extend his control from the great lighthouse to the entire three-mile-long island of Pharos. However, his attempt the next day to seize the breakwater linking the island to the shore nearly led to his death. He and his men leapt onto the breakwater from their ships and rushed along it to the point where it met the shore. Caesar ordered his troops to construct a barrier here and also to block up the archways beneath the breakwater with stones to prevent Egyptian boats sailing through. They began work but, unseen by them, Egyptian troops had also landed on the breakwater and were advancing swiftly and stealthily behind them. Too late, the sweating Romans realized they were under attack, dropped their spades and grabbed their swords.

  Fearing capture, Caesar’s own ships began shoving off from the breakwater, leaving him and his men trapped. Some legionaries managed to leap across the widening gulf into the departing Roman vessels; others hurled themselves into the water. The anonymous author of The Alexandrian War, probably an officer who was with Caesar, described what happened next: “Caesar yelled words of encouragement, striving to keep his men at their tasks, but when he saw that they were fleeing and that he too was in danger he withdrew to his own vessel.” However, “a large number of men followed him and kept forcing their way aboard it,” making it impossible to steer the ship or push off from the shore.

  At this point, Caesar jumped overboard into the sea. The various accounts of how he saved himself depict him as a superman. Though fifty-two and wearing armor, and despite the fact that he was being attacked by the Egyptians and swamped by the waves, Plutarch reported that he managed to swim with only one arm, in order to save some important papers by holding them above water with the other. Suetonius loyally claimed that, in addition to all his other feats, he “was towing his purple cloak behind him with his teeth, to save this trophy from the Egyptians.” Whatever the reality, he managed to reach a ship, from where he sent small craft back to pick up survivors and so saved a considerable number. His own ship, from which he had wisely leapt, had sunk under sheer weight of numbers and most had drowned. In total, Caesar had lost more than eight hundred legionaries, seamen and rowers. The desperate struggle would have been visible to Cleopatra, watching anxiously from the palace walls and for whom Caesar’s death would have had terrifying repercussions. Had he been killed, she would have lost not only the new protector on whom she had staked everything but doubtless her own life as well. Sleeping with the enemy would not have been forgiven and her younger siblings would have been delighted to be rid of her.

  Ptolemy’s supporters judged that this was a good time to persuade Caesar to release their king. According to the author of The Alexandrian War, they couched their proposal in dulcet terms: “The whole population, they said, being tired and wearied of Arsinoe, of the delegation of the kingship, and of the utterly remorseless tyranny of Ganymedes, were ready to do the king’s bidding; and if, at his insistence, they were to enter into a loyal friendship with Caesar, then no danger would intimidate or prevent the population from submitting.” The writer continued, with lofty Roman disdain, that Caesar was not taken in by the tricks of “a deceitful race, always pretending something different from their real intentions.” Nevertheless, Caesar decided to let Ptolemy go. Perhaps he and Cleopatra hoped that allowing him to join Arsinoe and Ganymedes would trigger rivalries that would only be to their advantage or that Ptolemy might, as he earnestly promised, order Arsinoe and her advisers to cease the attacks. But after shedding copious tears at parting from Caesar, the duplicitous youth rushed from the palace “like a horse released from the starting gate,” no doubt followed equally quickly by members of his entourage.

  Ptolemy pushed Arsinoe and Ganymedes aside and took command of the royal forces besieging the palace quarter. However, by early March 47 the bulk of Caesar’s long and eagerly awaited reinforcements from Syria and Asia Minor were finally approaching overland. At Ascalon they were joined by Jewish troops from Judaea led by Antipater, father of the future King Herod. Under the overall command of Mithridates of Pergamum, the relief force assaulted and swiftly took the Egyptian frontier stronghold of Pelusium before sweeping on toward Alexandria and a rendezvous with Caesar. To reach the city they had first to cross the branches of the Nile delta. Hoping to check their advance, Ptolemy loaded a large force onto his ships and sailed out of Alexandria through the city’s network of waterways to Lake Mareotis and into the Canopic branch of the Nile, along which Mithridates was advancing. Learning of this, Caesar left a small detachment to protect Cleopatra and sailed westward by sea out of Alexandria.

  Landing along the coast, Caesar marched rapidly southeast and rendezvoused with the relief force before the Egyptians could come up. Determined to retain the initiative, he turned his attention to the well-defended camp, over the Canopic branch of the Nile, where young King Ptolemy and his advisers were debating their next step. Caesar’s legionaries plunged into the warm water or felled trees for makeshift bridges, which they swarmed across. After a stiff fight they eventually took the camp, only to find that the king had fled. However, the ship he had hurriedly boarded sank beneath the weight of panicking men trying to follow their king to safety. Ptolemy drowned. On learning of this, Ganymedes, Arsinoe and the Egyptian army surrendered.

  The Alexandrian War was finally over and that night the victorious Caesar hastened back to Alexandria and Cleopatra with his cavalry. He entered through the part of the city formerly held by his enemies, where, as the author of The Alexandrian War recorded, “the entire population of townsfolk threw down their arms, abandoned their fortifications . . . and surrendered themselves to him,” leaving Caesar “master of Egypt and Alexandria.” To prove to the populace that Ptolemy had indeed perished, Caesar ordered the Nile to be dragged until his sodden body was found and then put his golden armor on display.

  The dangerous and costly conflict he had just won gave Caesar ample cause to annex Egypt as a Roman province, but he did not. Instead, he confirmed his mistress as queen with, as her co-ruler, her remaining half brother, the twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIV. Cleopatra must also have been gratified that Caesar made her co-ruler with her brother over Cyprus, conferring the island on them as the rulers of Egypt. Cyprus’ previous and short-lived queen, the disgraced Arsinoe, was to be sent to Rome to pay th
e price for her duplicity by trudging as a captive in the procession celebrating Caesar’s triumph.

  Caesar’s actions perhaps reveal something of his feelings for Cleopatra, who, as the author of The Alexandrian War states with what with hindsight seems dry economy, “had remained loyal.” He is primly silent on the intimate form the Egyptian queen’s “loyalty” had taken. Cleopatra was by now pregnant with a child conceived while the danger to herself and Caesar from the Alexandrian mob and the Egyptian army had been at its height. However, though seemingly still infatuated with the Egyptian queen and no doubt flattered by the signs of his virility, Caesar was not so lost to love and what the poet Lucan called “Cleopatra’s wicked beauty” that he allowed it to dictate his judgment. His decision was guided above all by the perennial “Egyptian problem” that had so often perplexed Rome—the fact that Egypt was too rich and important to become a province lest, in Suetonius’ words, “it might one day be held against his fellow-countrymen by some independent-minded governor-general.”

  Many would later argue, for motives of their own, that Cleopatra’s child was not Caesar’s. After all, during his entire life this great lover of women had sired only one acknowledged child, his beloved daughter, Julia, born many years earlier. In twelve years of marriage, his then wife, Calpurnia, had not once conceived. However, while Caesar may have had a low sperm count, it is equally possible that Calpurnia was infertile. Furthermore, that his many wellborn Roman mistresses do not appear to have borne him children is also no proof of his infertility. Some would have passed his children off as their husband’s; others would have used contraceptive techniques. Though some of these were bizarre—from wearing a cat’s liver in a tube on the left foot to carrying part of a lioness’ womb in an ivory tube—more sensible and effective methods were available, including blocking the passage to the uterus with concoctions of oil, honey and wool. It was also possible to procure abortions, prompting Ovid’s indignant plaint, “Why do you dig out your child with sharp instruments?” Another reason suggested for the relatively low fertility among the Roman elite was the effect of the lead used in the city’s water pipes.