CLEOPATRA

1
LUMEA
ALEXANDRIA AD AEGYPTU, 27

La trei ani după moartea reginei Cleopatra, un călător grec din

Amisea, Pont, pe Marea Neagră, a ajuns în Egipt. Numele lui era
Strabon, cel cu ochii strâmbi, și era acolo în statul major al
prefecturii Greciei, Gaius Cornelius Gallus. Este posibil ca șeful
lui Strabon să fi fost din Frejus, în sudul Galiei (de unde și
numele) și să fie rechemat la Roma pentru a răspunde acuzațiilor,
posibil de trădare. Strabon nu putea să nu observe că peste tot erau
presărate un număr mare de statui ale lui Gallus, unde nu ar fi
trebuit să fie decât statui ale șefului său, Gaius Iulius Cezar,
cunoscut nouă sub numele de Octavian. Era un semn al vremurilor în
care Octavian începuse, în ultimele luni, să se numească Augustus,
cel rânduit de Dumnezeu. Nu este o exagerare să spunem că statutul
lui Augustus ca prim cetățean (împărat în toate, cu excepția
numelui) și chiar titlul său, au apărut ca rezultat direct al
evenimentelor din Egipt din ultimii trei ani.
Strabon a fost geograf, deși, în secolul dinaintea nașterii lui
Hristos, știința a fost rareori separată de istorie și întregul
pachet a fost o artă, dată zborurilor de fantezie și ficțiune de-a
dreptul. Strabon a scris ceea ce a văzut în Egipt, dar a crezut, de
asemenea, tot felul de frânturi pe care i le-au dat romanii,
alexandrinii și egiptenii. Rezultatul, deși lipsit de precizie, ne
oferă o imagine fascinantă a pământului care a fost al Cleopatrei și
care tocmai devenise cea mai nouă provincie a Romei.
Inevitabil, ceea ce l-a impresionat cel mai mult pe Strabon a
fost capitala sa, Alexandria. Atât de uimitor era acest lucru și
atât de diferit de restul țării, încât era cunoscut sub numele de
Alexandria ad Aegyptu – lângă Egipt. Dacă ar fi vizitat Roma recent,
Strabon ar fi observat "Egiptomania" măturând acel oraș – obeliscuri
și statui arhaice apăreau în Forum și la răscruce de drumuri.
În mod ironic, mulți romani s-au îngrijorat că Cleopatra și
iubitul ei, triumvirul Marcus Antonius (Marc Antoniu) doreau să mute
capitala imperiului la Alexandria. Acum, se părea, Alexandria venea
la Roma.
Alexandria Cleopatrei, cea de care Strabon s-a minunat în 27,
avea 300 de ani.
Din punct de vedere tehnic, populația Romei era mai mare, dar
orașul italian de pe cele șapte coline ale sale nu avea spațiul,
ordinea și somptuozitatea orașului fondat de Alexandru cel Mare. Ca
orice alt oraș din lumea antică, a existat o poveste mitică,
supranaturală a fondării sale. Mai prozaic, site-ul a fost perfect.
Un mic sat pescăresc, Rakhotis, grupat pe malul dintre lacul
Mareotis și Marea Mediterană. Alexandru – și generalul său Ptolemeu
care a început construcția efectivă – aveau nevoie de legături cu
Grecia, patria sa Macedonia și restul imperiului pe care îl sculpta
în anii 320; marea a furnizat acest lucru. Lacul, printr-o serie de
canale, ducea la Nil, sângele vieții Egiptului a cărui sursă,
spuneau oamenii, era departe spre sud, în Munții Lunii.
Orașul pe care Strabon l-a văzut a fost așezat pe un model
generos de grilă, care a împărțit locul în cinci districte - Alpha,
Beta, Gamma, Delta și Epsilon - făcând din Alexandria prima așezare
din lume care are adrese poștale clare. A fost întotdeauna un oraș
cosmopolit – Strabon ar fi putut vorbi latină și greacă oriunde în
el – dar dovezile arheologice și alte dovezi sugerează că grupurile
etnice – greci, evrei și egipteni – au păstrat pentru ei înșiși în
camerele lor. În mod inevitabil, într-un oraș fondat de greci, ei
erau elita Alexandriei, cărturari și negustori care trăiau în case
mari de calcar și marmură cele mai apropiate de vasta întindere a
palatelor regale din districtul Beta. Numai ei, la început, puteau
deveni cetățeni cu drepturi depline.
Lui Strabon i s-a spus – și nu există niciun motiv să ne îndoim
de acest lucru – că Ptolemeii, care au condus Egiptul timp de trei
secole, au fost constructori înveterați, fiecare adăugând o altă
extensie a palatului pentru a comemora domnia lor. Până în 27,
aceste clădiri, unde atât Cleopatra, cât și Antoniu muriseră de
propriile mâini, acopereau între un sfert și o treime din oraș. Pe
insula Pharos, primul Ptolemeu a comandat una dintre cele șapte
minuni ale lumii - un far înalt de 328 de metri din piatră albă
strălucitoare. A fost cea mai înaltă clădire pe care grecii au
ridicat-o vreodată, iar Roma nu a depășit-o niciodată. În partea de
sus era o statuie uriașă a lui Zeus Soter (tatăl salvator al zeilor)
și o serie de oglinzi care reflectau o flacără perpetuă care
strălucea în noapte. Strabon spune că farul avea mai multe niveluri
(reprezentările contemporane arată trei) și că fiecare etapă avea o
formă diferită – dreptunghiulară, octogonală și cilindrică –
probabil pentru a arăta abilitățile arhitecturale grecești sau
pentru a da rezistență edificiului colosal.
 De la far, un drum numit Heptastadion mergea spre oraș,
împărțind portul în două. Kitosis (Cutia) a fost șantierul naval al
orașului, unde ar fi fost construite galerele de război și barjele
fluviale ale Cleopatrei. Portul estic era Megas Limen (pe care
romanii îl numeau Portus Magnus), iar cel vestic, destul de mic, era
Eunostos (Întoarcerea fericită). În aceste ape adăpostite, Cleopatra
și-a navigat nava de război Antonia în 31 septembrie, punțile
strălucitoare cu flori și ghirlande, ca și cum s-ar fi întors dintr-
o victorie.
De fapt, tocmai părăsise apele mai turbulente și mai sângeroase
ale Actium, care au marcat începutul sfârșitului ei.
Strabon, savantul grec, ar fi fost cel mai fascinat de Museion,
locul vindecării sufletului, care era cea mai mare bibliotecă din
lume.
Ptolemeu I și succesorii săi au împrumutat lucrări ale culturii
grecești de-a lungul anilor de la Delphi și din alte părți și le-au
copiat – au trimis copiile înapoi și au păstrat originalele. Aceste
cărți (de fapt pergamente) și cărturarii care pluteau în jurul lor,
copiind și cercetând, au fost la dispoziția copilului Cleopatra în
timpul ei și a copiilor ei de către Iulius Cezar și Marc Antoniu.
Niciodată nu va mai fi concentrată atât de multă erudiție într-
un singur loc, deși o secțiune a clădirii și conținutul său fuseseră
distruse cu douăzeci de ani înainte, când Cezar a folosit Teatrul
Mare adiacent ca sediu împotriva armatei fratelui Cleopatrei,
Ptolemeu al XIII-lea.
Strabon ar fi văzut Soma, mormântul orbitor al lui Alexandru, cu
sarcofagul său de aur în stil egiptean într-o cutie de sticlă
translucidă. Oameni au venit din toate colțurile lumii pentru a
aduce un omagiu celui mai mare general din istorie, iar Strabon ar
fi auzit povestea cu trei ani mai devreme, când Octavian venise să
revendice țara ca fiind a lui. El a cerut îndepărtarea capacului
sarcofagului și a presărat eroul îmbălsămat cu flori.
Făcând acest lucru, el a lovit accidental nasul lui Alexandru.
Este posibil ca Strabon să fi văzut, dar nu menționează, mormintele
lui Antoniu și Cleopatra, care zăceau unul lângă altul în moarte,
așa cum au făcut-o în viață. Este posibil să fi știut că Octavian
refuzase să viziteze mormintele primilor Ptolemei și probabil că a
considerat că este mai bine să nu menționeze propria sa vizită, dacă
a făcut una. Noul Augustus, pe jumătate zeificat, nu a tolerat
opoziția, așa cum Gallus era pe cale să afle.
Strabon a văzut imensul templu al lui Poseidon, zeul mării;
Marele Caesarium, încă în construcție, ca memorial al Cleopatrei
pentru Iulius Cezar. În anul 40 [Link]., filozoful evreu Philon din
Alexandria a scris despre acest loc:
 Căci nu există în altă parte nici o incintă ca aceea care se
numește Sebastium, un templu al lui Cezar la bordul navei, situat pe
o eminență orientată spre porturi ... imens și vizibil, prevăzut pe
o scară care nu se găsește în altă parte cu ofrande dedicate, în
jurul său un brâu de picturi și statui din argint și aur, formând o
incintă de o lățime vastă, împodobită cu porticuri, biblioteci,
camere, crânguri, porți și curți larg deschise și tot ceea ce
cheltuielile generoase ar putea produce pentru a-l înfrumuseța.
El ar fi mers prin colonadele de marmură până la Templul lui
Saturn și Gimnaziul, care a servit drept forum public pentru
conducătorii Alexandriei și a fost locul unor măceluri îngrozitoare
de către strămoșii Cleopatrei.
Ar fi văzut și Timonium, o căsuță tristă de vară lângă port, pe
care Marc Antoniu o construise la întoarcerea sa de la Actium,
incapabil pentru o vreme să funcționeze sau să înfrunte lumea. Cel
mai faimos dintre toate, Strabon ar fi vizitat Serapion, un templu
conceput pentru a uni zeii greci și egipteni într-un parteneriat de
lucru de succes care a durat 300 de ani.
Este posibil ca Strabon să fi remarcat marea diferență dintre
liniștea și pacea academică a palatelor regale, acum goale de
Ptolemei și ocupate doar parțial de Gallus și agitația orașului
cosmopolit din afara zidurilor sale.
Aici, în cartiere, trăiau și lucrau multinaționalele ai căror
strămoși răsturnaseră uneori regi și faraoni. Vasele comerciale
gemeau cu grâu, lenjerie, sticlă, parfumuri, mirodenii și papirusuri
din Nil și Africa spre sud.
Orașul în sine a fost renumit pentru sticlă, ceramică, coșuri și
lenjerie. Toată viața umană era acolo, descendenții bărbaților și
femeilor care cunoscuseră conducerea egiptenilor, perșilor, grecilor
și acum romanilor.
Undeva în oraș, Strabon a văzut cimitirele care adăposteau
morții Alexandriei, probabil așezate la est și vest de palate. Aici
se afla Nemesion, templul răzbunării construit de Iulius Cezar
pentru a adăposti capul tăiat al rivalului său Gaius Pompeius
(Pompei cel Mare), care fusese ucis pe țărm nu departe.
Geograful a fost în mod clar impresionat de splendoarea orașului
Cleopatrei, dar puritanul roman din el nu a fost niciodată departe
de suprafață. Rătăcind prin Navalia, șantierele navale, el a
observat că "pe bărci [era] cântând la flaut și dansând fără
reținere, cu cea mai mare obrăznicie".
Tatăl Cleopatrei a fost numit Auletes, flautistul de către
greci, și a fost, de asemenea, numit Neo Dionysos, o reîncarnare a
zeului beat pe care romanii drepți îl disprețuiau ca Bacchus. Era o
reamintire, dacă mai era nevoie, că drumul Egiptului nu era cel al
Romei și că Gallus și succesorii săi aveau datoria de a face ceva în
această privință.
Sailing up the Nile, Strabo was transported back in time. The
story of Cleopatra was essentially the story of Alexandria and of
Rome. Alone of her family, she had learned the Egyptian demotic
language and sailed the river often to worship at the various cult
shrines along the way, but for most of her life she lived in an
alien Greek city and died there, brought to suicide by Roman
politics.
There is a sense in which, whoever ruled from Alexandria, life
for the people along the Nile remained the same. The country was
long and narrow, skirting the river that was its lifeblood. Some
areas were so remote the Romans never reached them and the Egyptians
were a simple, superstitious and inbred people where incest was
perfectly common in the natural order of things. Someone told
Herodotus of Halicarnassus in the fifth century that women here
urinated standing up and the men sitting down.
In a society in which people worshipped crocodiles and bowed to
gods with the heads of jackals, hawks and baboons, why should he
doubt it? At Babylon Fossatum, Strabo came upon a huge army camp,
one of those rectangular bastions of empire, built solidly of
earthworks, ramparts, towers and palisades. Three legions were based
here, the men who had fought first for Antony, then for Octavian in
the miserable, dishonourable war that had just finished. One hundred
and fifty slaves toiled under the murderous Egyptian sun on a giant
treadmill that lifted drinking water for the 2,000 men in the camp.
Strabo would have noticed that the fresh sea breezes of Alexandria
were far away and the towns and villages along the river small,
cramped and dirty.
It was the history of the place, as much as the geography, that
captivated him.
He saw the pyramids, already ancient when Rome was a cluster of
huts; and sphinxes, those strange, crouching animalistic gods half-
buried in the ever shifting sand. He visited the sacred bull of
Apis, which Octavian had refused to see and which Cleopatra had
worshipped, as had all her predecessors. At Arsinoe, he came across
Crocodilopolis, a shrine where the priests lovingly looked after a
sacred crocodile. ‘It is called Petesuchos,’ Strabo recorded, and is
fed on grain and bits of meat and wine, which are always offered to
it by the visiting foreigners.
The animal also wore gold ‘earrings’ and bracelets on his
forefeet.
What Strabo was looking at was a country in decline. The
Ptolemies had ruled this land for 300 years and had amassed a
fortune in doing so. Egypt was rich and the principal supplier of
grain for Rome and its empire, but the general sense that Strabo had
was similar to that of the English poet Shelley eighteen centuries
later. Egypt was an ‘antique land’ in desperate need of renovation.
In Strabo’s day, the Romans had only been there for three years and
it was clearly early days. Even so, he wrote that ‘to the best of
their abilities they have, I might say, set most things right’.
The floor mosaic in a sanctuary at Praenoste near Rome, dating
from around Cleopatra’s time, shows the Nile in full flood as the
Romans imagined it. Exotic animals – lions, giraffes, rhinoceros,
hippopotami, giant centipedes, camels and others clearly invented in
the artist’s imagination – are caught by the rising waters, and
towers and temples stand like islands in the torrent. It is not
accurate (unsurprisingly) and although an astonishing work of art,
does not help us understand Cleopatra’s country very well. One of
the queen’s recent biographers, Stacy Schiff, astutely observes that
Cleopatra is absent when there is no Roman in the room. This has
nothing to do with the queen herself and everything to do with the
Egyptian and Roman methods of recording history.
Rome, in the form of its language and its law, continued to
dominate intellectual Europe for the next 1,500 years. Scholars of
later generations venerated Rome as one of the great civilizations
of the ancient world, so anything a Roman had to say, about
kingship, war, religion, even how to handle slaves and what sort of
hat to wear in the sun, became hugely important and was preserved.
Egypt, by contrast, was a culture of a very different sort and not
‘discovered’ until Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1798.
Egyptian records were curiously parochial, as if there was no world
outside the land along the Nile and the basreliefs and the tomb
paintings reflect a world of men interacting with gods in a half-
understood magic. There are no Egyptian gossips, at least none whose
writings have survived.
One particular blank – which could not be filled in by Strabo
and is difficult to fill at all – is the daily routines of Egypt in
Cleopatra’s time. There is a timeless quality about ancient history.
When we look at the giant bas-reliefs on temples at Karnak, Dendera
and Luxor, we are looking at gods from 3,000 years earlier still
being worshipped in Cleopatra’s reign. The men rowing on the Nile
are doing so in boats that have not changed for two millennia.
They are cutting down reeds and wheat at harvest time exactly as
their forebears had done for centuries. No one comments on this
because it had been a way of life for so long that it was not worthy
of comment. Strabo waxes lyrical about Alexandria’s library because
it was unique. He tells us almost nothing about the fishermen at the
waterside because there were so many of them. The way of life was
agricultural and the success of the harvest – geared entirely to the
Nile’s movements – made the difference between life and death.
Since almost all our records of Cleopatra come from the pens of
her enemies and just occasionally from her own priests, it is almost
impossible to see the real woman. To the Romans, she was fatale
monstrum, an unnatural creature to be destroyed. To the priests of
Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, she was the embodiment of the
goddess Aphrodite whom they called Isis. We are forever doomed to
see her through a distorted glass.
Nevertheless, for all the colour, excitement and ultimate
tragedy of her life, she ruled Egypt for nineteen years, so we must
agree that she was actually extraordinarily good at her job. How did
her government work? Egypt’s population is impossible to determine.
Diodorus Siculus, who visited the country when the future queen was
ten years old, estimated it at about three million, but this was
probably (and unusually for a Roman) a conservative estimate. Most
experts today light on seven million – about the population of
Greater London.
The country was divided into two geographically – Lower Egypt
meant the delta, dominated of course by the artificially created
‘alien’ city of Alexandria, and Upper Egypt, which followed the
tortuous meanderings of the Nile into the swamplands of the Sudan.
Occasionally there had been rebellions from the south against
earlier Ptolemies but in more recent times most of the trouble for
the ruling family came from Alexandria itself. Even here, the
various ethnic groups tended to operate side by side rather than in
unity. The native Egyptians had their own culture, language, priests
and law; so did the Jews, who wrote and spoke Aramaic; and of course
the Greeks who saw themselves as culturally superior to anybody.
At the apex of Egyptian society were the Ptolemies themselves,
personified between 48 and 30 by Cleopatra. They had ruled with
varying degrees of success for 300 years, but as pharaohs (the word
means literally ‘great house’) they tapped into a system that was
1,000 years old. The role of pharaoh was what it remained in all
civilized countries for centuries – he (or in the case of Egypt,
sometimes, she) was head of government, commander-in-chief of army
and navy, law-giver and, crucially, a semi-divine link between man
and the gods. We shall examine the crucial role of religion,
superstition and myth in the next chapter, but we must bear it in
mind throughout this book. Egyptian, Greek and Roman culture did not
exist without this ‘other world’, which paralleled the more humdrum
existence on earth.
Below the Ptolemies came an upper-class elite – aristocrats,
bureaucrats and priests who oiled the wheels of government. These
posts were usually hereditary, so that when Pasherentptah,
Cleopatra’s high priest, died, it was natural that his son
Petubastis should take over, even though the boy was only seven
years old. The priests were administrators, lawyers and doctors.
Their temples were not only shrines but places of refuge and an
important role of the priesthood was to monitor the levels of the
Nile, the Egyptian equivalent of watching the stock exchange today
in terms of national economy.
The Roman republican system, of officials elected for a year and
being unable to stand again for ten, would have made no sense at all
to the Ptolemies or their people. It is unfortunate for us that the
men of their class did not, unlike their Roman counterparts, write
letters or gossip about each other, so we do not have the same sense
of day-to-day realism from the Ptolemaic court. That many of them
were highly unscrupulous, however, cannot be doubted from the events
of Cleopatra’s reign. Her brother’s tutor and her army commander
plotted her overthrow and murder in 49. When we have examples of
Cleopatra intervening personally, it is almost always to deal with a
greedy or over-zealous tax collector.
Unusual in the court were the eunuchs, people the Romans found
repellent.
These men were respected in Alexandria and trusted largely
because sex was not likely to feature in any political machinations
and high-born families’ girls were safe from molestation. Since
Roman law forbade castration, even for slaves (which the eunuchs
usually were), men like Octavian saw them as yet another tragic
example of the way in which Egypt’s women emasculated men.
Under the elite were what we might loosely term the middle
class. As usual in pre-industrial societies, this ambitious,
articulate and educated group were probably relatively few in
number. Included in this category were the merchants and craftsmen
who made and sold the goods that made Egypt (and the Ptolemies
through taxation) rich. At the bottom were the masses – peasants who
lived in mud-brick hovels along the Nile and in the delta and worked
as farm labourers and fishermen.
These were the men who dragged the huge blocks of stone for the
pyramids and sphinxes that Strabo marvelled at. Life was not
completely static for them. The Ptolemies introduced new farming
policies, irrigated fields, dammed the Nile and diverted the river
in places. Iron blades replaced bronze for the sickles and scythes
used at harvest time, but essentially, these people were the
timeless ones, anonymous in their lives, unmarked in their deaths.
Their generic type is shown in carving and in paint on scores of
walls of tombs and temples in ancient Egyptian kingdoms. The Nile
flooded in late summer and the new crop was grown in autumn. After
the spring harvest, the dry season came with a burning wind from the
west. And the whole cycle began again. Even today, standing below
the great pyramid at Giza, it is almost unreal to see the Nile, a
bright strip of living green at the edge of the limitless sand.
In the fifth century, Herodotus visited the country. It was the
Greeks who called the incomprehensible river Neilos; before that the
Egyptians knew it as pa iteru aa, the great river. Sometimes,
according to legend, it flowed with gold.
Ancient Egyptian tombs were called pyramids after Greek cakes of
the same shape. Tall, tapering monoliths became obelisks (kebab
skewers). Long before the Ptolemies replaced the Persians as Egypt’s
rulers, the Greeks were rewriting the country’s culture. Apart from
the peculiar urination habits of men and women, Herodotus commented
on the almost complete reversal of customs in Egypt. Women bartered
in the market-places while men stayed at home and did the weaving.
Even here, the looms operated the other way from the Greeks’.
Men carried loads on their heads; women on their shoulders. Men
did not have to support their parents in their old age; women did.
Men had two sets of clothes; women only one. Women carried their
babies for fewer weeks than anywhere else – twins and triplets were
common. Goats gave birth to five kids rather than the usual two.
Pigeons laid twelve eggs, not the commonplace ten.
The Nile had living in its mudbanks creatures that were half
mice, half sand. The river’s odd behaviour, the people’s odd
behaviour, all seemed strange to a civilized visitor, but the Greek
Herodotus was every bit as much a ‘johnny-come-lately’ as Strabo was
four hundred years later and the Ptolemies had learned to cope with
the strangeness of the place.
By Cleopatra’s time, a top-heavy civil service had been
streamlined and in the rare glimpses we have of the queen at work
running her country, she often intervenes personally, particularly
against corrupt officials. The country was divided into forty nomoi
(local districts), which all had Greek names by the first century
BC. The local governor was the strategos (general) who worked for
Cleopatra under the over-arching epistrategos, who we can regard as
a sort of chief minister. The elite at court were inevitably Greek –
even the Ptolemies’ bodyguards were Macedonians – and this sometimes
caused trouble. If an Egyptian wanted to get on, he would have to
learn Greek and hope for an appointment. Apart from Cleopatra
herself, few Greeks bothered to learn Egyptian.
The government kept a tight control on the economy, which is one
reason why Cleopatra was the richest woman in the world at the time.
Everybody in Egypt paid taxes, whether it was on salt, fields,
drainage ditches or baths. The government also controlled a
rudimentary banking system, which issued gold and silver coinage
(which frequently had to be debased for economic reasons) and had a
monopoly of the textiles, oil and papyrus industries. Cleopatra had
several textile workshops of her own, operated by slave women.
Since virtually all the land belonged to Cleopatra, she kept a
careful watch, via her bureaucratic record-keepers, on how it was
used. Change of usage, perhaps from wheat field to olive grove,
needed royal permission. No one could leave their nome (or province)
and an army of officials checked inventories, looms and breweries
with a thoroughness that makes the Norman Domesday Book in England
1,000 years later look positively amateur.
In one important aspect, the Egypt of the Ptolemies paved the
way for the legend of Cleopatra. Greek women – and even more so
Roman women – lived in a legal and moral straitjacket designed by
men. The Egyptians were more free and easy. So from the century
before Cleopatra we find Graeco-Egyptian marriages taking place, in
which both languages were spoken in the home an children got used to
different names. Women owned property, ran businesses and walked
alone in the streets. Those privately taught at home (there were
still no formal schools for them) could become doctors, artists,
musicians and lawyers. They were rare, but they were there. When the
Romans discovered one of them, Cleopatra VII, behaving in this way,
they were outraged. Two who were not were Julius Caesar and Mark
Antony and, indirectly, they both paid for it with their lives.
 2
THE OTHER WORLD
EGYPT, 332

The story of Cleopatra is so well known to us via Shakespeare

and the silver screen that we tend to believe we understand her. Her
storms and her calms make sense because we are just the same as her.
Only 2,000 years separate us and people are people no matter when
they live. Whether we see Cleopatra as a seductress, a whore or as a
consummate politician and a loving wife and mother, we do so because
the events of her life allow us to make comparisons with our own
emotions and experiences. Most of us have never been queen of Egypt,
nor have we slept with Roman dictators, but we can empathize with
the decisions she made, born of the experiences she faced.
Where we cannot see her, for the choking fog of incense, is in
the religious dimension of her life. And not only hers, but
everyone’s in her story. ‘It is almost impossible,’ writes Guy de la
Bédoyère, one of the best ‘Roman’ experts today, ‘to measure the
quality and nature of symbolism, ritual and belief. One man’s
religious symbol is another man’s decorative motif and yet another’s
nightmare.’
So, three years before Strabo reached Egypt, Octavian caused
grave offence to the hereditary priests of the country by refusing
to have anything to do with the Apis bull, so revered by them and by
Cleopatra. ‘I worship gods, not animals,’ he sneered. In 332, when
Alexander of Macedon came to Egypt on his way to the creation of his
vast and impossible to maintain empire, he had a dream. His hero
Homer came to him and told him to found a great city at that spot on
the coast where King Menelaus of Sparta had found himself stranded
on his way home from the war with Troy.
 Our cynical, modern, western world has no time for any of this.
Of course, Octavian was right to rubbish a bull and we find his
pantheon of gods led by Jupiter to be equally nonsensical. The
Trojan War as Homer told it never happened, so how could he know
where or even if Menelaus came to Egypt? And even if it were true,
what sort of reason is that to found a city? To make these points is
to miss the point. These things were real to the Egyptians, the
Greeks, the Romans, every bit as much as God, Allah, Amida Nyorai
and Vahig¯ur¯u are real to some people today. Unless we understand
that dreams, omens, prophecies and ritual were an essential part of
the lives of the Ptolemies, the Caesars, the Antonys, we shall not
see the real Cleopatra at all.
When Alexander of Macedon marched at the head of his invading
army into Egypt 300 years before Cleopatra was born, he came to Per-
Baster, the shrine of the cat-goddess Bastet. This was the capital
of the eighteenth nome of Lower Egypt and Greek travellers before
Alexander equated the goddess with their own Artemis, the huntress.
This divine equation happened everywhere. Later invaders would
dismiss other gods as superstition and mumbo-jumbo but the Greeks
(and, to a lesser extent, the Romans) assumed they were the familiar
deities but known by different names. The goddess was portrayed by
Alexander’s time as a cat-headed woman, carrying a sacred sistrum
rattle and a basket. She was the goddess of dancing and music, able
to fend off disease and evil spirits.
Herodotus wrote of great pilgrimages to Per-Baster (which the
Greeks called Bubastis), which brought thousands down the Nile in
barges to the melody of flutes and the rhythm of the sistrums.
Alexander’s men would have been astonished by the number of
mummified cats buried in and around the city.
The army’s next port of call was Iunu, the city of the sun that
the Greeks called Heliopolis. This was the cult centre of the sun-
god Ra, who was born each morning, was a man by midday and died
every evening in old age. This god was so all-powerful – he equates
with the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter – that he could assume any
shape and went by a number of aliases. From him sprang many of the
gods of ancient Egypt – Isis and Osiris, Shu and Tefut, Geb and Nut,
Set and Nephthys, all of whom were worshipped at Heliopolis as ‘the
divine company’.
Everywhere that Alexander went he was within sight of giant
stone representations of the Egyptian gods and the men who, as
pharaohs, had lived as living gods, waiting to join the rest in the
afterlife. Alexander was welcomed as a liberator in the towns and
cities he marched through because he was clearing out the hated
Persians and he understood very well that the force with which he
had to reckon were the priests. When all was said and done, the
pharaoh was only one man, albeit divine. The priesthood was
everywhere, the guardians of history, the literate keepers of
records, the go-betweens between the pharaoh-god and his people and
recognizable instantly by their shaved heads. Plato said, ‘In Egypt,
it is not possible for a king to rule without the help of the
priests.’
At Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, Alexander was welcomed
by the high priest Maatranefer, the ‘master-builder’.
Memphis was in many ways the most holy city of Egypt. Ptah was
worshipped here, the creator-god particularly associated with
artisans and artists.
His effigies usually showed an embalmed figure, wrapped in a
winding sheet and head tightly bandaged under the elaborate
mummification process.
Only his hands are free and in them he holds a sceptre
symbolizing omnipotence and stability. Again, he had a number of
aliases and was known to ward off dangerous animals and the
inevitable evil spirits. The name Egypt derives from Ptah, so the
god was very senior in the pantheon of deities. Herodotus, visiting
Memphis 200 years before Alexander, was shown the sites of Ptah’s
miracles and the nearby temple of Imhotep, the first shrine the
Macedonians would have seen that commemorated a man, rather than a
god. Imhotep had been the chief architect of King Zoser in the third
dynasty and had built Egypt’s first pyramid.
The Greeks translated his name as Imuthes, he who comes in
peace, and he was associated with learning and culture of all sorts,
but especially of medicine. In that respect, the later Greeks
equated him with Asclepius, and by Cleopatra’s reign, Imhotep seems
to have replaced Ptah as the central god at Memphis.
It was at Memphis that Alexander came across the bull cult that
continued to dominate Egyptian religion until Cleopatra’s time. The
bull, of course, as a symbol of strength and fertility, was common
to Greek spirituality, too.
Alexander’s own horse was called Bucephalus, the bullheaded. In
Memphis, the Apis bull was venerated. This animal was sacred to Ptah
and his reincarnation.
This was no ordinary beast, and the priests who tended it
lovingly were looking for a very specific hide colouring. Ptah had
inseminated a virgin heifer in his guise of heavenly fire and the
resulting offspring had to have a white triangle on its forehead, a
vulture-shape along its back, a crescent moon on its left flank, a
scarab (beetle) shape on its tongue and a double tail. Our cynical
age can only assume that a lot of painting and/or wishful thinking
went on for priests to continue to find an exact replacement for the
bull when the old one died.
 The Apis bull could tell the future and was consulted much as
the Greeks checked regularly with their Oracle at Delphi. The
Persians, during their occupancy of Egypt, had twice assassinated
the bull and the whole nation had been distraught at the news. At
Sakkara, which Alexander also visited, the mummified corpses of
these sacred bulls were found by archaeologists in AD 1850. The
temple there was called the Serapeum because the dead bull was
equated with Osiris, god of the underworld. The far better known
Serapeum (Osiris-Apis), which Cleopatra would have known, was built
in Alexandria later.
The god Serapis, several carvings of whom have been found
recently in underwater archaeological digs in the old harbour, was a
perfect example of the halfway house between Egyptian and Greek
theology. It would be wrong to think of the Serapia as silent, grim
mausoleums. They were places of regular pilgrimage, with music,
noise and a thriving tourist trade in ‘bull memorabilia’.
Professional female mourners were employed to wail and beat their
breasts in grief.
When Alexander was crowned pharaoh of Egypt on 14 November 332
he was described during the ceremony as ‘Horus, the strong ruler who
takes the lands of the foreigners’ and ‘beloved of Amun and the
chosen one of Ra’. In one sense, these gods were interchangeable,
but whereas Ra was linked with the sun, Amun was associated with
fertility and reproduction. In effigy, he was shown sometimes as a
pharaoh with a crown on his head and a flail in his hand.
Elsewhere he is carved as a ram with curling horns. It is
intriguing that in various coins he had minted, Alexander is shown
with ram’s horns in his hair or as part of his helmet. It is
possible that, by a circuitous route over the centuries, the idea of
the horned god and the devil came from this tradition. Often
referred to as ‘his mother’s husband’, Amun represented the
pharaonic tradition, continued by the Ptolemies, of incestuous
relationships to keep the bloodline pure. Amun-Ra lit the day and
even lent a glow to the night, since his light could never be
completely extinguished. He also won victories over his enemies, so
it was the perfect honorary title to give to Alexander.
As pharaoh, Alexander, like Cleopatra 300 years later, was
Egypt’s highest priest and the role was vitally important. In
January 331, he travelled west from the Nile delta into Cyrenia
(today’s Libya) and got lost in a Saharan sandstorm.
Two black ravens appeared and led the expedition to safety.
Giving thanks at a temple of Amun, Alexander followed the shrine’s
priest into subterranean passageways and emerged later firm in the
belief that he was indeed the son of a god. The transition then from
ancient Egypt with its animal deities to the Ptolemies with their
Greek overlay of religion was assured from the start. It would
continue right through to the reign of Cleopatra, after which the
Romans dismissed the whole thing as superstition. It is difficult to
say when beliefs of this sort disappeared. The arrival of Islam in
the seventh century AD certainly drove them underground and
eventually eclipsed them, but there is some evidence to believe that
Alexander as a living god was still being worshipped 1,000 years
after that.
The Ptolemies continued the linked Graeco-Egyptian cult
tradition. Arsinoe II, whose sole rule was in some ways a blueprint
for Cleopatra’s, was born as ‘Daughter of Ra’ and ‘Daughter of Geb’
(the father of Isis). The pharaonic regalia worn by all the
Ptolemies, including Cleopatra, reflect those centuries-old
traditions. The red crown was Geb’s. The ram’s horns were Amun’s;
the double plumes, cow horns and sun disc belonged to Hathor-Isis.
Hathor was Ra’s daughter, the golden one, known to the Greeks as
Aphrodite.
She is the great heavenly cow, but always shown with a human
body and face. The sistrum, a rattle to frighten away evil, is
always associated with her, and her shrine at Dendera along the Nile
was built to resemble a series of giant rattles. She protected women
especially and became linked with motherhood, beauty and love. She
was the ‘lady of the sycamore’, hiding in those trees on the edge of
the desert and welcoming the dead, who had just climbed her long
ladder to heaven, with bread and water. At Dendera, her ‘day’ marked
the beginning of the new year and was an excuse for parties,
dancing, music and a great deal of drink!
It is with Isis that we most closely associate Cleopatra. The
Greeks knew the goddess by a variety of names because she was so
all-powerful. She is Selene, the moon; Demeter the corn-goddess;
Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sex. In Egyptian belief, Isis was
the wife of Osiris, God of the underworld, and their son was Horus,
the musician, usually shown as a falcon. The fullest description we
have of her story comes from Plutarch, the Romanized Greek who has
left us most details on Cleopatra, too. Out of that emerges the
notion of embalming, which a distraught Isis carried out on her
murdered husband whose body had been dismembered by his brother Set.
So clever was Isis that she became indispensible to Ra, enabling him
to recover from a deadly snake bite and her future was assured.
She was still being worshipped along the Nile long after
Christianity arrived in the fourth century AD and so important was
her cult that shrines to her appear all over the Graeco-Roman world
as far north as the Rhine in what is today Germany. Her festivals
were held in spring and autumn and she is so all- embracing that she
is linked with birth and with death and almost everything in
between. She is the goddess of sailing and even the ‘wet nurse of
the crocodile’.
Not for nothing did Cleopatra work very hard to make herself
regarded as the living Isis.

BOOK TWO: DAUGHTER OF THE GENERAL

THE SUCCESSOR AND THE SAVIOUR
NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S PALACE, BABYLON, 323

On the first day, he drank and partied with Medius before

bathing, sleeping and partying again far into the night. He ate a
little, then went to sleep. The fever was already on him.
On the second day he was carried on a litter to perform out the
usual sacrifices and he rested in the men’s apartments until dusk.
He gave his officers orders about the coming expedition: the army
would march on the fourth day; he would go by ship a day later. They
carried him to his boat and he sailed across to a garden where he
bathed and rested...
...On the eighth day, though very weak, he managed to make the
sacrifices.
He asked the generals to stay in the hall with the brigadiers
and colonels in front of the doors. He was carried back from the
garden to the Royal Apartments. He recognized the officers as they
passed before him, but said nothing.
And on the tenth day, he died. He was Alexander of Macedon,
known as ‘the Great’ and perhaps the greatest general in history. He
was thirty-two. In eleven years, he had destroyed the mighty Persian
Empire and his territory extended from the Danube in the north-west
to the Indus in the east. Such military brilliance would never be
seen again, but the problem with power based on one man is that when
that man is gone, a vast hole is left behind. In an age when rulers
passed on their power to members of their families, Alexander’s son
was still unborn and his brother, Philip Arrhidaios, was a halfwit.
 In the last days of his life, Alexander urged his generals to
divide the empire among themselves. The problem was that he was
dying from what was probably cerebral malaria; his speech was
rambling and his intentions unclear. Did he expect one man to
succeed him? Or was he orchestrating a bloodbath on Darwinian lines
of survival of the fittest? One modern historian refers to the
decision as Alexander’s funeral games. The generals who had been
prepared to follow Alexander to the ends of the earth would not do
that for each other and conflict was inevitable.
The symbolic farewells that Alexander made on 9 June 323 only
added to the divisiveness. Perdiccas, his highest-ranking
lieutenant, was given his signet ring but it was to Ptolemy that
Alexander gave his personal possessions and it was Ptolemy who
mounted a vigil in the temple of Serapis, the Graeco-Egyptian god
whose carved image Alexander carried with him on campaign.
Fighting broke out almost immediately, literally around
Alexander’s corpse before the embalmers had gone to work. On the one
side were officers under Perdiccas who wanted to govern the empire
in the name of Alexander’s unborn son; on the other were those who
backed the adult but highly biddable Arrhidaios. It was a no-win
situation in terms of stability, but at the birth of Alexander IV in
the autumn, he and his uncle were declared joint rulers.
The real power, of course, was the army, a huge fighting force
then unrivalled in the world. Perdiccas was in overall control but
under him Antigonas ruled Asia Minor, Lysimachos held Thrace (modern
Bulgaria), Seleucus had Babylonia, Antipatros claimed Macedonia and
the Greek city states. Ptolemy was, according to the Roman
chronicler Arrian, ‘appointed to govern Egypt and Libya and those
lands of the Arabs that were contiguous to Egypt; and Cleomenes who
had been made governor by Alexander was subordinated to Ptolemy’.
If this was Ptolemy’s idea, it was a shrewd move; if it wasn’t,
he made the most of it. Egypt was the most southerly of Alexander’s
territories. On the map it looks like a geographical afterthought
almost separated from the rest by a narrow land strip at Gaza. Given
the speed of communications in the ancient world, Ptolemy might have
known he could hold this land for ever, even without his former
leader’s affection for it.
As we have seen, Alexander had marched unopposed into Egypt in
October 332 and, backed by the fleet sailing south from the Nile
delta and along the river itself, he came to Memphis, the ancient
Egyptian capital, in triumph.
For years, Egypt had lain under the yoke of Persian domination.
In fact, some of the towns Alexander marched through were rubble as
a result. Unlike the Persians, the Greeks acknowledged, respected
and honoured the lands they conquered. True, they equated the
Egyptian pantheon of gods with their own and the Greek culture that
they imposed never assimilated with the native one, but Alexander
and all his Egyptian successors for 300 years understood the
importance of working with the priesthood and nobility, not against
them. It was a master-class in empire-building.
The Egyptians, recognizing divinity in Alexander or perhaps
realizing he could not be defeated, declared him the successor of
Nectanebo, the last native king of Egypt. He was now pharaoh of
Upper and Lower Egypt, ‘beloved of Amun and the chosen one of Ra’,
and on his deathbed the conqueror whispered that he wanted his body
to lie with Amun, hedging his bets perhaps on the existence of an
afterlife.
He planned a great city on the Mediterranean coast south of the
tiny island of Pharos and in this respect, Alexandrine Egypt would
be very different from the ancient country along the Nile, based on
Memphis, Thebes and Luxor. Here, at the city named after him, would
be built the biggest library in the world and it would be a home to
the finest scholars. It would grow and flourish as Alexandria ad
Aegyptu to the Romans – Alexandria next to Egypt – an apt metaphor
for the cultures that never quite meshed.
So, Ptolemy’s choice of Egypt was a good one and, as if to
underline the fact and his own closeness to Alexander, he took his
master’s embalmed body, in its glittering Egyptian-style
sarcophagus, back to the Nile. Perdiccas saw this as an act of
treachery. He was anxious to preserve his own position as
Alexander’s successor and needed to have the body to prove it.
Claiming that the body should be interred in Macedonian soil, at
Aegae, Perdiccas pursued Ptolemy with a huge force. At Damascus,
Ptolemy cleverly switched corpses and continued into Egypt with the
real body, leaving Perdiccas to find that the great hearse hung with
battle trophies was empty.
This marked the first of many wars among the successors of
Alexander, which may, of course, have been what he intended, but
Perdiccas’ invasion of Egypt in 321 was a disaster. He lost 2,000
men crossing the Nile at Memphis, their blood mingling with the
water as the crocodiles had a field day and Perdiccas himself,
facing a mutiny, was murdered.
With peace at home in Egypt and no immediate rivals on the
horizon, Ptolemy began a settled regime. He didn’t take the title of
king until 305 and like the other successors to Alexander, could
claim that he was still acting as regent on behalf of the infant
Alexander IV. He had the conqueror’s body buried with Graeco-
Egyptian solemnity in Nectanebo’s tomb in the Serapeum at Memphis
until the final resting place could be made ready in Alexandria.
 The murder and mayhem that we associate with Cleopatra’s family
(see Chapter 4) could be found anywhere in the ancient world and by
305, all of Alexander’s immediate family were dead. Ptolemy was
sixty by now and known as ‘Soter’, the saviour, a title given to him
by the inhabitants of the island of Rhodes to whose rescue he came
during his reign. His coins show a strong profile with a prominent
hooked nose, which was a characteristic of later Ptolemies and may
explain his adoption of the eagle as his personal badge. In the
ancient world such symbols were hugely important. In Cleopatra’s
day, the eagle had been adopted by Rome (perhaps because of links
with Egypt) and Gaius Pompeius (Pompey the Great) deliberately
styled his dashing cavalry tactics on those of Alexander, even
copying the conqueror’s hairstyle!
We shall look at the heirs of Ptolemy in the next chapter – and
it is little short of astonishing that the family should hold on to
power in Egypt for three centuries before Cleopatra bit off more
than she could chew against the might of increasingly imperial Rome.
Cleopatra was, according to some historians, thirty-two parts Greek,
twenty-seven parts Macedonian and five parts Persian.
The fact that bas-reliefs from her time and various descriptions
of her in ‘fact’ and fiction ever since often portray her as purely
Egyptian misses the vital starting point of her line. It began with
a rough-and-ready soldier, a capable general and steadfast friend,
who, against all the odds, died in his bed at the age of eighty-
four. Ptolemy I, the successor and saviour, was cremated according
to Macedonian custom and his ashes were placed alongside Alexander’s
embalmed body in the city they both had built.

THE FAMILY FROM HELL

ALEXANDRIA, 287

Cleopatra’s family tree has been described as more like a

cobweb, tangled and, in its own way, deadly. Looking back as we are
from 2,000 years later, two things emerge. First is the sheer
confusion in a bloodline that contains Ptolemies, Arsinoes and
Cleopatras by the dozen. ‘Our’ Cleopatra is the seventh of that name
– and the last.
It is practical to use Roman numerals for them – Ptolemy I,
Ptolemy II and so on – and the ever-cynical Alexandrians usually
gave them unflattering nicknames. So, Ptolemy I Soter (saviour) got
off very lightly, but Ptolemy VIII was Physcon (the Fat-bellied) and
his father, Ptolemy VII was Neos Philopator (the New Father-loving).
The other problem is much more difficult for us to grasp.
Elimination by murder was the stockin-trade of many ruling families
in this period, but it was particularly prevalent among the
Ptolemies.
On the one hand, intermarriage between brothers and sisters,
uncles and nieces – which was a Macedonian as well as an Egyptian
custom – kept the bloodline pure and perhaps ought to have made for
greater harmony. On the other, power politics was clearly more
important than bloodlines or emotions, and assassinations were
orchestrated on a regular basis. This extended to Cleopatra herself
and is another way in which her ‘infinite variety’ is difficult for
a twenty-first-century readership to comprehend.
Ptolemy Soter made his younger son Ptolemy co-regent in 287,
marking a sort of semi-retirement. The younger Ptolemy was married
to a daughter of another of Alexander’s successors, Lysimachos of
Thrace, which might have created a unifying situation and helped
bind Alexander’s empire. The fly in the ointment, however, was
Ptolemy II’s sister, Arsinoe II, who had been married to Lysimachos
herself. In an extraordinarily tangled example of family
realpolitik, Arsinoe attempted to dispose of her own rivals and
those of her children by turning to yet another successor, Seleucus
of Babylonia, for help. By 275 she had married her brother Ptolemy
II and become co-regent.
It was this Macedonian–Egyptian system of giving supreme
political power to women that the Romans could not handle in
Cleopatra’s day. Roman women were supposed to be virtuous,
supportive of their husbands and excellent mothers. Their sole
duties lay in the organization of their households and the ordering
about of slaves. Unless they were Vestal Virgins, with a special
place of sanctity in Roman eyes, they were excluded from any kind of
public position.
Murderous women like the emperor Nero’s mother Agrippina were an
abomination and foreign women with power – like Cleopatra herself or
the Icenian queen Boudicca in Britannia in the far west – were
regarded with horror.
Ptolemy II and Arsinoe established the Ptolemaia, a vast
festival held every four years, which had Olympic connotations and
was both to honour the memory of Alexander and to worship the god
Dionysus. Drinking and feasting were the order of the day and
eyewitnesses tell of processions of 80,000, with elephants and
giraffes laden with exotic imports from Africa and Asia. Huge
statues of gods, Greek and Egyptian, were part of these processions,
with moving fountains of wine and even an 80-foot-high gold phallus
to symbolize the fertility of both the Niles and the Ptolemies.
These were fabulous years for the Ptolemies and their
extraordinary wealth was real. Strict laws created taxes on
everything from grain to papyrus, and the colossal revenue to the
royal family was collected and recorded by a highly efficient and
competent civil service that only Rome would surpass 300 years
later. The economy was, of course, based on agriculture and slavery,
but this was the norm in the ancient world and it would be 2,000
years before anybody seriously thought of an alternative system.
The money was spent on making the Egyptian army and, more
especially, the navy the largest and most impressive in the world.
The Ptolemies also spent a fortune on the shrines of the gods
throughout their lands. At the time, this was seen as essential as
the gods were all-powerful and must be appeased with lavish
presents. In terms of human psychology, it kept the priests happy
and in Ptolemaic Egypt and in many states since, the mood was
essentially theocratic – the Ptolemies themselves were gods and the
priesthood, huge and influential, worshipped them as such.
Trade brought Egypt into contact with the then unimportant city
of Rome on the Tiber and the first embassy sent there in 273 marked
the official start of a symbiotic relationship that would end
fatally for Egypt and for Cleopatra.
Culture for the Ptolemies reached its zenith in the Museion. So
used are we to these buildings as collections of old artefacts that
we have forgotten its original meaning. It was the home of the
muses, where all things cultural were celebrated and the amazing
building in Alexandria had laboratories, lecture halls, gardens and
even a zoo. At its centre was the legendary library, with its
120,000 scrolls (books) on every topic under the sun. In an
extraordinarily ambitious endeavour, successive Ptolemies tried to
amass all the world’s knowledge under their own control, which, had
it worked, would have been the ultimate in ‘Big Brotherdom’.
The combination of Greek and Egyptian scholars working for the
Ptolemies meant that complex histories of both countries were
compiled and stored, including decrees sent out in both languages by
Ptolemy V, which resulted in the survival of the Rosetta Stone, that
enabled scholars of later centuries to decipher ancient hieroglyphs.
Priest-physicians carried out vivisection on humans – usually
criminals from the royal prisons – discovering the function of
arteries, the heart and brain centuries before scientists in the
West. Under Ptolemy III, scholars worked out the circumference of
the earth and even invented a calendar of 365¼ days.
As each Ptolemy and his wife died, a new shrine or temple was
built, each more lavish than the last, enabling the Alexandrians to
claim yet more divinity for their dead rulers. Arsinoe II who died
at the age of forty-six in 270 was declared the counterpart of the
ancient Egyptian gods Osiris, Ra, Ptah and above all Sobek, the
crocodile-god. At Mendes, in rituals where Arsinoe was worshipped,
one eyewitness was the historian Herodotus who calmly observed ‘a
goat tupped a woman in full view of everyone – a most surprising
event’.
It is not clear whether he was referring to the act itself or to
the presence of the audience!
The Ptolemies were polygamous and they took mistresses, too,
although the Romans dismissed the minor wives as concubines by the
time of Caesar’s invasion – again, such practice did not conform to
Roman tradition. Ptolemy II died in 246, so grossly obese for the
last years of his life that he had to be carried everywhere by
litter and spent hours looking enviously out of his window at
everybody else moving about.
Ptolemy III, who succeeded him, married his cousin Berenice,
confirming the fact that Egypt extended as far west as today’s
Tunisia. He also went to war with the Seleucids in Syria and reached
as far as Babylon where Alexander had died over a century earlier.
The couple were popular and successful, given the nickname
Euergetes, the benefactors, and they produced six children. By the
time of his death in 222, Ptolemy presided over a vast empire that
looked unassailable. Then, family issues kicked in. In accordance
with tradition, the widowed Berenice made her son Ptolemy IV co-
regent. It may have given Ptolemy Philopator (Father-loving) ideas
above his station or it may not have been enough for him because he
had his mother and all but one of his siblings murdered. The one
allowed to live was fourteen-year-old Arsinoe III whom Ptolemy later
married.
Behind the scenes, the king’s mistress, Agathoclea, was the real
power in the land, while Ptolemy pursued women and wine in equal
measure. Any opponents to this vicious regime, such as the Spartan
Cleomenes living in exile at Ptolemy’s court, were killed, the man’s
flayed body exhibited to the mob as a warning.
Attempts by the Seleucids to take back parts of their empire
grabbed by the earlier Ptolemies failed at the battle of Raphia in
June 217 and Ptolemy Philopator probably read this as a sign from
the gods. Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, had a massive mixed
force of cavalry and infantry as well as 102 Indian elephants.
Ptolemy used smaller African elephants but they refused to face
their pachyderm opponents and ran.
Antiochus chased after them with his cavalry while Ptolemy’s
infantry held firm and won the day. He now called himself the new
Dionysus and had himself tattooed with the god’s symbolic ivy
leaves. He also, like all the Ptolemies, associated himself with
Alexander and he was responsible for building the astonishing tomb
(Soma) in Alexandria, which was another wonder of the world. It may
have had a pyramid roof in the Egyptian style and the gold
sarcophagus inside was a fitting tribute to the greatest general who
had ever lived. The Ptolemies and their principal wives were laid to
rest alongside him.
But honouring the dead was not enough to hold a bitterly
unpopular regime together. There were few popular risings in Egypt
and nothing to equate with the three generations of slave revolts in
Roman territory that culminated with that of the gladiator Spartacus
in the year of Cleopatra’s birth. From 207, however, the priests of
Karnak had had enough of Ptolemy Philopator’s excesses and put
forward their own home-grown pharaoh as a rival – Herwennefer of
Thebes. At the height of the chaos that followed, Ptolemy died:
whether through natural causes (he was almost certainly an
alcoholic) or murder is unknown. There is no doubt about Arsinoe
III, however – her courtiers killed her, and the couple’s sixyear-
old son became Ptolemy V.
The real power in the land was Agathoclea, but her mother,
Oenanthe, had been Ptolemy III’s mistress in her day and a bloody
coup between followers of these two (neither of whom had any right
to rule) ended with Agathoclea and other family members being
dragged to the Gymnasion and torn apart by the mob. The Greek
historian Polybius wrote ‘some bit them, some stabbed them, others
cut out their eyes ... For a terrible savagery accompanies the angry
passions of the people who live in Egypt.’
It would be interesting to find out exactly what nationality
this mob was; after all, only one-fifth of Alexandria was actually
Egyptian.
Under attack again from the Seleucids, who probably got wind of
the disaster at the court of Ptolemy, the boy king moved south, to
the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis. The rebellion against him
was put down, the ringleaders clubbed to death with stone maces at
the coronation of the new king, who gave himself the title Ptolemy V
Epiphanes, the Revealed. It was the decrees written now, to reveal a
new birth of harmony between Greek and Egyptian gods, that are
written on the Rosetta Stone.
The Seleucid king Antiochus settled for a marriage alliance
rather than the more risky invasion, and at seventeen, Ptolemy was
married to Antiochus’ ten-year-old daughter Cleopatra who became the
first of that name in the family.
This girl, known as the Syrian, was the only example of
‘foreign’ blood to enter the Ptolemy family throughout their 300-
year reign, making a nonsense of those today who claim that
Cleopatra VII (‘our’ Cleopatra) was black.
With invasion averted and internal revolt put down (Herwennefer
was captured but pardoned for the sake of harmony), all should have
been well.
 Ptolemy V lost popularity, however, increasing taxation for
foreign wars. He was murdered by his generals in 180. He was the
first Ptolemy to be mummified in accordance with pharaonic
tradition.
Cleopatra now named her six-year-old son Ptolemy VI Philomater
(Mother-loving) as co-regent and went on to become one of the most
popular queens of Egypt. Her death at twenty-eight was of natural
causes and it is grim testimony to the Ptolemies’ way of doing
things that we have to remark on this. Ptolemy Philomater, now about
ten, was married to his older sister Cleopatra II and war was
resumed with the Seleucids. Their king, Antiochus IV, took Thebes
and declared himself co-regent with Ptolemy and Cleopatra.
On 30 July 168 Rome made the first incursion into Graeco-
Egyptian affairs.
Rome was fighting the third war against Macedonia at the time
and needed peace in Egypt to ensure there would be no support from
that quarter, perhaps in a nostalgic memory of Alexander. A
delegation under Caius Popillius Laenas took a note from the senate
to Antiochus demanding that he pull out of Egypt. In accordance with
diplomatic tradition – and common sense – Antiochus asked for time
to think about it. Laenas drew his sword and scratched a circle in
the sand around the invader-king, telling him he couldn’t leave it
until he had given the Romans an answer. Antiochus backed down. This
gung-ho action seems the stuff of fiction, but it did wonders for
Rome’s military reputation and we have to admire Laenas for his
sangfroid; his tiny delegation must have been outnumbered hundreds
to one. What it meant for the future was that Rome would never be
far away.
To make life even more confusing for historians today, there was
now a three-way rule among the Ptolemies, similar to, but much
cosier than, the triumvirates the Romans would establish in
Cleopatra VII’s time. Ptolemy Philomater continued to rule with his
elder sister but a younger brother, also called Ptolemy, joined them
as Ptolemy VIII. This three-way split was almost bound to fail and
did, Ptolemy VI running to Rome for help to get ‘his’ kingdom back
after being deposed by the other two. The upshot was that Ptolemy VI
and Cleopatra II continued to rule in Egypt while Ptolemy VIII
governed Cyrenia.
So far, so complicated, but it gets worse. Ptolemy VI and
Cleopatra II effectively ignored Ptolemy VIII who had gone so far in
crawling to Rome that he left all he owned to the city of the seven
hills in his will. The royal couple produced Ptolemy VII as their
heir and when his father was killed in a fall from his horse, the
boy was made co-regent with Cleopatra II.
 Re-enter Ptolemy VIII, known as Physcon (the Fat-bellied). All
the Ptolemies were obese, but Physcon must have been extremely large
to merit the Alexandrian nickname. He revelled in the image as a
sign of wealth and opulence and invaded Egypt to claim what he saw
as his rightful heritage. In a scene straight out of a horror movie,
Ptolemy VII was murdered at the wedding feast of Physcon and
Cleopatra II, the boy literally dying in his mother’s arms. A ‘night
of the long knives’ followed, in which any potential opposition to
Physcon was removed by assassination or exile.
The Alexandrians might have ridiculed Physcon behind his huge
back and the Romans laughed at him when they saw him waddle to meet
a delegation in 139, but officially he called himself Euergetes, the
Benefactor. Most of the benefaction went to Egypt as, during his
reign, Physcon promoted native Egyptians into court positions and
officially recognized the power of the priests of Thebes and
Memphis. One of his sons was called Ptolemy Memphites to underline
the Egyptian-ness of the line. Cleopatra was happy to continue this
tradition.
As soon as was expedient, Physcon removed Cleopatra II and
married her daughter, Cleopatra III, who now became, in men’s minds,
the living Isis.
Cleopatra II’s popularity, however, forced Physcon into another
three-way government, the two Cleopatras being officially referred
to as ‘the wife’ and ‘the sister’ to avoid confusion. Cleopatra III
became the mother of Ptolemies IX and X and of the three Cleopatras
Tryphaena, IV and Selene.
Again, the threesome collapsed, Cleopatra II forcing Physcon out
in a palace coup, and this led to open warfare backed by her Jewish
troops. In 132, Physcon wobbled his way to safety in Cyprus where he
had Cleopatra’s son Memphites murdered. The boy’s mutilated remains
were sent back to his mother in a jar.
Once again, Physcon invaded, burning his enemies alive in the
courtyard of the Gymnasion, but internal revolts would not let him
resume rule by himself and the unlikely threesome was back in place.
A psychiatrist would have a field day with the Ptolemies and
would not be remotely surprised by the actions of Cleopatra II’s
eldest daughter Thea. She now ruled in Syria, having been married to
three Seleucid kings who all pre deceased her, and tried to kill her
own son first by firing an arrow at him and then by poisoning his
wine. In a scene that Shakespeare may have stolen for Hamlet, the
boy, Antiochus VIII Grypus (the Hook-nosed) forced his mother to
quaff the goblet instead.
Against all the odds, Physcon died in his bed in June 116,
leaving Cyrenia to his eldest son, Ptolemy Apion. Egypt and Cyprus
went to Cleopatra III and her choice of son – Ptolemy IX – who would
rule with her. So once again two Cleopatras ruled together, joined
by Ptolemy IX Soter Lathyrus (Chickpea the Saviour), who wore his
hair long like Alexander.
On the death of Cleopatra II, Cleopatra III became the Female
Horus and when the historian Pansanius wrote that ‘we know of none
of the kings so hated by his mother’ he was talking about the
relationship between her and Chickpea.
Her eldest daughter Cleopatra Tryphaena was married off to
Grypus and the next, Cleopatra IV, married Antiochus IX. Since
Grypus and Antiochus were half-brothers locked in a deadly war with
each other, it followed that the sisters became bitter enemies too.
The upshot here was that Tryphaena had Cleopatra IV murdered in the
temple of Apollo, her hands hacked off as she clung, screaming, to
the god’s statue.
In Egypt, yet another three-way government resulted – Cleopatra
III, her hated son Chickpea and the remaining daughter/sister
Cleopatra Syrene. Using Chickpea’s absence from Alexandria as an
excuse, Cleopatra III claimed that he had tried to kill her (which
would hardly be surprising) and replaced him with her youngest son,
Ptolemy X, who took the nom du roi of Alexander and even borrowed
the conqueror’s helmet from the Soma to emphasize the point,
complete with elephant skin and ram’s horns. Cleopatra III became
the most despised of the queens of that name. She gave herself five
personal cults and sent hit men after Chickpea, who had fled for his
life to Cyprus. The Alexandrians called her Cocce, the scarlet one,
a euphemism for vagina.
The war between mother and son ended with the death of Cleopatra
III, perhaps murdered by her ‘loyal’ son Ptolemy Alexander, who by
now was far too fat to embody his namesake in any meaningful sense.
Alexandrians called him, with contempt, Cocce’s child, but the
Egyptians loved him after he let his sister marry into the Memphis
priesthood. Ptolemy Alexander himself married his niece Berenice III
who (no doubt to confuse us still further) took the honoured name of
Cleopatra. The legend ran in Egypt that stonemasons left cartouches
on their work blank because of the rapid turnover of rulers.
Rome was now at the gates of Egypt, extending their power with
Ptolemy Appion’s blessing over Cyrenia in 96. Ptolemy Alexander was
overthrown by his army and fled to his sister Selene for safety.
With a mercenary army of Syrians he invaded Egypt and committed the
ultimate sacrilege by melting down Alexander the Great’s gold
sarcophagus and replacing it with glass. The gold was used to pay
his unreliable troops. His death in a naval battle with the
Alexandrians saw the return of Chickpea.
 All Egyptian politics from now on took place under the shadow of
Rome. Not content with stealing Ptolemy’s eagle emblem for their own
and becoming a major buyer of Egyptian corn, the Republic now
claimed that Ptolemy X Alexander had left Egypt to Rome in his will,
as had Physcon before him. Rome had its own problems in the early
first century BC and for now Chickpea ruled with Cleopatra-Berenice
until his death in 81. Now Rome acted, sending Ptolemy XI Alexander
II to rule alongside Berenice. The Alexandrians called him
Pareisactus, the usurper, which seemed to say it all. Within
eighteen days, the usurper had his stepmother-wife murdered and an
appalled citizenry dragged him to the Gymnasion where the mob tore
him to pieces. It was a grim action replay of Berenice II and
Arsinoe III in 203.
Now the direct, legitimate line of Alexander came to an end. The
Alexandrians ignored Rome’s bullying and elected their own Ptolemy
as ruler.
This was Ptolemy XII, the illegitimate son of Ptolemy IX, and he
came to be known as Auletes, the Piper.
He married his sister Cleopatra Tryphaena in January 79 and they
became the ‘father-loving gods’ and the ‘brother-and-sister-loving
gods’, which continued to please the traditionalist Egyptians. He
also called himself the new Dionysus and played his pipe in the
revels held in honour of the drunken god.
The couple’s first child, Berenice IV was born some time between
80 and 75 but after 69 we hear of only one daughter, ‘our’
Cleopatra, the last of the pharaohs.

CLEOPATRA THE WISE

ALEXANDRIA, 69

Bearing in mind how iconic Cleopatra has become over the

centuries and how widely known, we have almost no knowledge of her
birth or early life.
She was probably born in 69 BC, but it may have been 70. She was
probably born in Alexandria, in the royal palaces there, but we
cannot be sure. We have no clear idea who her mother was (which is
where the current controversy over the black Cleopatra comes in –
see Chapters 18 and 19), who attended her birth and what form the
birth actually took.
The problem arises because of our lack of day-to-day knowledge
of Ptolemy Auletes’ court. We know that Alexandria and the Ptolemies
always lay slightly outside Egyptian culture and not part of it.
There had been a sort of intermarriage of the gods’ pantheon and an
elevation of the native priesthood that would reach its height under
Cleopatra, but in important matters like the birth of a princess,
which culture’s wisdom would be followed? It was probably Greek, but
we cannot preclude the Egyptian.
In ancient Egypt, signs of pregnancy included changes to skin
pigmentation and eye colour. A pregnant woman would invariably have
a cold back but a hot neck. Her urine could be used to detect the
sex of the foetus by sprinkling it on wheat and barley grains. If
the wheat germinated first, the child would be female, if vice
versa, a boy. All fertility was, of course, associated with the
gods.
Bes, the dwarf-god, was linked with childbirth, but so were
Taweret and Hathor.
We have met Hathor before. There were seven or nine versions of
this goddess so that she has been likened to fairy godmothers. At
Cleopatra’s birth house at Armant, they are shown as beautiful young
women and they appeared at a child’s birth to foretell its future.
Taweret is universally shown as a pregnant hippopotamus, with huge
breasts and standing on her hind legs. She holds a roll of papyrus
and is linked with suckling as well as vengeance.
Bes, although appearing at birth, was essentially a marriage-
god. He is facially repellent, which is odd for a deity so concerned
with female beauty. In bas-reliefs, where most figures, human and
divine, are shown in profile, Bes is full face, grimacing at us. The
image has been found carved on scent bottles, rouge boxes and mirror
handles; it is likely that Cleopatra owned several of them. He gave
protection against nightmares and brought sweet sleep. Phalluses
made of clay from the Nile were placed in temples as gifts to all
these gods.
Once Cleopatra’s mother, whoever she was, had conceived, if the
pharaonic systems were followed, the gestation would take 271 days.
During this time, prayers were said regularly and mixtures of honey
and wine were taken to prevent miscarriage. Descriptions and
depictions of actual childbirth are rare in Egypt. Midwives rather
than doctors assisted and the mother-to-be usually squatted,
sometimes on special ‘birthing bricks’, which are shown in the
hieroglyph for birth itself. By the time of the Ptolemies, high-born
women gave birth in special delivery rooms next to temples to get
the utmost help from the gods. Cleopatra’s at Armant is a physical
reminder of these, with the shrine of the war-god Montu next door.
Various remedies helped with the pain of childbirth and speeded
up delivery.
 Saffron and beer (probably with the accent on the beer!) was
given to reduce labour pains. Localized trauma to the vagina was
eased by smearing a compound of juniper berries and pine-tree resin
between the legs, and prayers were offered to Isis and her child
Horus and to Hathor – ‘Rejoicing, rejoicing in Heaven!
Birth-giving is accelerated! Come to me, Hathor, my mistress, in
my fine pavilion, in this happy hour.’
Much of this information comes from pharaonic tombs and other
records nearly 2,000 years before Cleopatra was born, but in the
ancient world, scientific change was extremely slow, especially
when, among native Egyptians, the pantheon of gods had not changed
at all and everybody went along with whatever worked.
On the other hand, it may be that Cleopatra’s birth took place
under the Greek tradition of the Ptolemies themselves. Hippocrates,
often called the father of medicine, writing in the century before
Alexander, had ideas just as spurious as those of the ancient
Egyptians. In relation to the sex of a child, a mother expecting a
girl would be pale; if a boy she would be ruddy and healthy. In the
womb, a male child lay to the right, a female to the left. In
ancient Greece, all city states except Sparta tended to ignore their
female babies.
Breast-feeding mothers of boys were given twice as much wine,
beer and grain as those nursing girls. Plato believed that pregnancy
should occur between the ages of sixteen and twenty and Aristotle
(Alexander’s tutor) thought that a law should be passed forcing
pregnant women to walk every day to the temple to pray for a safe
delivery. Artemis (the Roman’s Diana) was the goddess particularly
associated with menstruation and childbirth, as she was linked with
the early deaths of women, hit by her arrow. Deaths of mothers
during pregnancy and of babies themselves were grimly common
throughout the ancient world. The fact that (as far as we know) all
four of Cleopatra’s own children were healthy is in itself something
of a record.
If we know nothing about Cleopatra’s origins, we know at least
who her siblings were. Berenice IV was her elder sister, the
daughter of Auletes and Cleopatra V Tryphaena. The Romans would
claim later that she was Auletes’ only legitimate child. Arsinoe was
the sister born between 69 and 65 and again we have no idea who her
mother was. The boys, both called Ptolemy, were born in 61 and 59
and again, their mother is unknown. It is possible that all four
children – Cleopatra, Arsinoe and the two Ptolemies – had the same
mother, but we cannot know.
‘Don’t hesitate,’ a grandmother wrote to her granddaughter in
the 180s, ‘to name the little one “Kleopatra”, your little
daughter.’
 The name was Macedonian, not Egyptian, and meant ‘renowned in
her ancestry’. She was the seventh Cleopatra of the Ptolemies and
the name appears thirty-three times altogether in ancient sources.
If we know nothing about Cleopatra’s birth, we are almost as
much in the dark about her childhood. Clearly all the children of
the Ptolemies were born with figurative silver spoons in their
mouths, used to luxury and waited on hand and foot by an army of
slaves. But we also know that the Ptolemies made little distinction
between their children in terms of gender and education. Arsinoe and
Cleopatra would have received exactly the same tuition as their
younger brothers and that meant the Museion with the finest library
in the world.
We have no record of who actually taught Cleopatra (it was
probably her brother’s tutor, the eunuch Theodotus) but the Museion
was famous for its Greek and Egyptian philosophers, like
Philostratus and the astronomer Sosigenes.
Ironically, bearing in mind how Cleopatra became the arch-enemy
of Rome, she would have spoken the same literal and metaphorical
language as her later opponents – Greek. Her education would not
have been very different from that of Caesar, Mark Antony or
Octavian. The work was hard, with the alphabet and poetry to master,
lines to be learned. She learned Homer who was as revered by
Cleopatra as he was by Alexander – his works were regarded with the
same awe as later Christians read the New Testament. Above all, of
course, his allegories were vital to an understanding of the world
not just in his time, but for all time.
And (again like the Bible to Christians) every word was the
truth.
She would have read Aesop’s Fables, Herodotus’ account of her
own land, histories of the Ptolemies themselves. All this was hand-
written on long papyri scrolls – which were difficult to handle –
and would have been read aloud to tutors and probably class members
who were her own siblings. There was no punctuation as we know it,
no paragraphs, not even word breaks.
Cleopatra would have mastered the art of rhetoric or public
speaking. Unlike the Romans of her generation who had to win over
their assemblies and even the mob on street corners, Cleopatra’s own
reign had an absoluteness about it that made such speeches
unnecessary. But she had to play the part for her court, her
priesthood, her aristocracy and her people, both of Alexandria and
of Egypt proper. So hung up are we on the woman’s sexual allure that
we sometimes forget she may have won over Caesar and Mark Antony
with her words.
 The Ptolemies were a literary family, Ptolemy Soter I writing
the first biography of Alexander the Great; even the repellent
Physcon wrote tracts about the birds in the royal aviaries. It is
likely that Cleopatra followed this tradition, immersing herself in
medicine and pharmacology. Arab sources from the seventh century AD
claim that she wrote her own books on gynaecology. The Romans, quick
to condemn her in the years ahead, read all kinds of evil into this.
She bewitched Caesar; she bewitched Antony – it was only a
miracle that her wiles didn’t work on Octavian, too. And ancient
Egypt had long had a tradition of poisons, spells and the occult.
Cleopatra was also a linguist of talent. She was the first
Ptolemy to bother to learn Egyptian, which meant that she could not
only read pharaonic missives and reliefs herself, but she could make
meaningful speeches to her people, a huge step forward in the ruler–
ruled relationship. The day-to-day language of Egypt was demotic;
the hieroglyphs only used for architecture. She also spoke Greek,
Syrian, Parthian, Medish, Ethiopian, Troglodyte, Aramaic and Hebrew,
making her a bluestocking of epic proportions.
In later years, dealing with other client kings of Rome in the
helter-skelter of international politics, this skill would prove
highly important. One language ominously missing from her girlhood
repertoire was Latin, in that Plutarch does not mention it. She
would have spoken to cultured Romans in Greek. She was described as
Cleopatra Thea (Augusta in Latin), the Wise, and as Theosebia,
Scribe of the Gods, a reminder that literacy and education were god-
given.
But if Cleopatra lived a sheltered, idyllic life surrounded by
her books and her philosopher-tutors, all that would be shattered in
58 when she was eleven years old. Throughout his reign, Auletes had
been forced to be a ‘friend of Rome’, in effect buying off invasion
with huge outpourings of cash. Seizing any excuse to expand, the
greedy Republic, headed now by Pompey, Caesar and Crassus (see
Chapter 6), accused Auletes’ brother Ptolemy of helping pirates
against Roman shipping in the Mediterranean and grabbed the Cyprus
treasury from him.
Once again, the Alexandrians intervened in what they saw as
their right to oust an unsatisfactory ruler. In a sense, the
Alexandrian mob was as vocal and powerful as that of Rome two
centuries later. Since Auletes had not gone to his brother’s aid,
but stood meekly by while the Romans claimed yet another scalp, they
kicked the Piper out of Alexandria and called the exiled Cleopatra V
Tryphaena to co-rule with Auletes’ eldest daughter, Berenice IV. An
Athenian epitaph says that Auletes sailed to Rhodes with ‘one of his
daughters’.
 This cannot be Berenice, who stayed as joint pharaoh, and
Arsinoe was an infant, so the daughter had to be Cleopatra. It is
always dangerous to trust one historical source, and some historians
like Adrian Goldsworthy don’t really buy what happened next, but if
Cleopatra went on a royal progress with her father on the eve of
womanhood, it would explain a great deal about the ease with which
she entered the world of realpolitik in her own right five years
later. If she stayed behind, continuing her cloistered education,
who was the daughter referred to in the epitaph?
The island of Rhodes was an ally of the Ptolemies and Isis was
worshipped there. Joann Fletcher imagines the young Cleopatra seeing
the Colossus of Rhodes, another wonder of the world now flattened by
an earthquake, and being hugely impressed. This is possible, but
Auletes had a less pleasant encounter.
Marcus Porcinus Cato, on his way to Cyprus to organize the Roman
takeover, insisted that Auletes came to him rather than the other
way round and interviewed him sitting on the toilet. This seems
amazingly high-handed, a mere politician dictating terms to what
today would be called an emperor. It may have made Auletes feel
better had he known that Cato was in disgrace himself. He had fallen
foul of Caesar in Rome and the Cyprus job was a sort of short exile.
He was not a popular man, wallowed in nostalgia for the Rome of
his great-grandfather Cato ‘the Censor’ and hired his second wife
out to the lawyer Quintus Hortensius: hardly an example of the
famous Roman ‘virtue’.
Happier times waited for the royal father and daughter in Athens
where the Ptolemies were regarded as gods, and there would have been
endless speeches and feasting. Then they sailed for Rome. As we
shall see in Chapter 6, by almost all of the old empire in the west
that belonged to Alexander had been taken by the Romans in their
drive to master the world, and in Italy they were met by the general
who most modelled himself on the conqueror – Pompey, who called
himself ‘the Great’ and wore a Macedonian haircut. He lent the
Ptolemies his beautiful villa to the south of Rome during their
stay.
Auletes and Cleopatra spent several months in Rome, wheeling and
dealing with the notoriously difficult senate and sparring with the
‘three pillars of the world’ – Pompey, Crassus and Caesar – each of
whom had an ego and an ambition bigger than Egypt itself. The
wrangling of these months will be described later but they left
Auletes broke and he travelled east to Ephesus, in modern Turkey.
Here was another wonder of the world: the great temple dedicated to
Artemis but linked for ever with Alexander. Auletes had the temple
decorated with a huge pair of doors made from ivory. Broke as he
was, it was important to be seen to be appeasing the gods.
 It was while the royals were at Ephesus that news reached them
of the death of Cleopatra V Tryphaena. Berenice IV, now ruling
alone, panicked. For centuries, the Egyptian pattern of government
had been a co-rulership, but her little brothers were too young and
she felt she could not govern Egypt alone.
Various attempts to find a family member who would do were
blocked by the Roman governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, who was only
too happy to be difficult on Auletes’ behalf as long as the man
continued to line his purse.
An obscure Seleucid claimant was found, whom the Alexandrians
called scornfully Cybiosictes, the Salt-fish Seller, but Berenice
didn’t like him and had him strangled days after their marriage. She
found a replacement in Archelaos, who claimed to be a son of
Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, whose family had been at war with
Rome for generations. By that time, however, all bets were off
because Pompey, angling for control of Egypt for himself, ordered
his subordinate Gabinius to put the Piper back on the throne.
It took a Roman army to do it and the officer commanding the
cavalry was Mark Antony. According to legend, he fell in love with
the fourteen-year-old Cleopatra at first sight; in reality, he
probably never noticed her. Antony took the city of Pelusium on the
eastern tributary of the Nile delta and marched to Alexandria where
Auletes had his own daughter Berenice and her followers slaughtered.
Only Antony stopped him from restaging the ritual dismemberment in
the Gymnasion for which the Ptolemies were infamous.
On 31 May 52 a great ceremony was held in Alexandria. All four
of Auletes’ children were on display; the eldest, Cleopatra, now
sixteen, was officially called Thea Philopator, Father-loving
Goddess, and she sat beside the Piper as his coruler. It was the
thirteenth year of his reign and the first of hers and on the face
of it, it must have looked to witnesses that here was just another
joint government of the Ptolemies, not unlike those that had gone on
for nearly 300 years.
Rome saw it differently.

BOOK THREE: WINGS OF THE EAGLE TIBER, FATHER TIBER

ROME, 753

Cities and institutions like Rome always have a colourful

creation story attributed to them; in the case of Rome there are
two. The first says that the city was founded by the twins Romulus
and Remus, the children of Rhea Silvia and the great god of war,
Mars. Abandoned by their mother, the boys were found, suckled and
raised by a she-wolf. The statue commemorating this stood on the
Capitoline Hill in Rome when Cleopatra was born, and the orator
Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that it was struck by lightning,
probably when Cleopatra was four.
The other story links Rome with the mythical Trojan War and has
the Trojan prince Aeneas founding ‘New Troy’ on the banks of the
Tiber in central Italy after fleeing the flames of his home
somewhere in Asia Minor.
What is interesting is that both stories deal with loss and
violence – constants in the ancient world. Romulus battered Remus to
death with a spade when he jestingly jumped over a ditch of the city
whose foundations he had just dug – the sort of familial slaughter
that was almost de rigueur among the Ptolemies.
Aeneas was a war refugee, escaping from a slaughter that,
according to Homer, saw Trojan women raped and babies carried on the
spear-point of conquering Greek heroes. Similar scenes must have
accompanied the whirlwind eleven-year campaign of Alexander.
The reality, of course, is different. The Latin tribe who became
the Romans were one among many. They settled on the Palatine Hill
above the Tiber about 1000 BC. They were herdsmen; scattered
archaeology has revealed the bones of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs.
The seven hills over which their settlements spread were really a
series of rocky valleys through which the Tiber’s tributaries
splashed, leading to the dismal marshes that were home to teeming
millions of mosquitoes, which continued to keep the death rate high
for centuries. Their houses were wooden structures, circular or
rectangular, filled in with wattle and clay between the uprights.
The Tiber not only provided a water supply, but fish were abundant
and the river was easily wide and deep enough to accommodate even
the largest ships of the ancient world, so trade could develop.
In the cliché of the older history books, Italy was a
‘geographical expression’ before its final unity in 1861. For the
first eight centuries of Rome’s life, its inhabitants were living in
a sort of tribal jungle in which social Darwinism was a reality. To
the south, in Sicilia and Campania, the Greeks dominated with their
scholarship, their democracy and their libertine ways. For
centuries, Capua, one of their major cities, vied with Rome as the
power house of Italy. To the north, the Etruscans held sway as far
as the Alps. They were exotic craftsmen and brilliant traders and
every bit as greedy and expansionist as the Romans became.
Early in the seventh century BC, the Etruscans came south,
forcing the Romans and other former enemies to band together for
survival. The kings of Rome in these years have folkloric names and,
like Romulus himself, almost a god-like figure already, they were
depicted as divine. Tullus Hostilius, for example, c.673–c.641, was
a warmonger on a colossal scale. The historian Titus Livius (Livy),
a contemporary of Cleopatra, summed him up when he wrote:
‘When [Hostilius] fell ill himself, the long sickness changed
his mind...his proud spirit was broken, so that he seemed to have
become another man.’
It didn’t help in the advent of the Etruscans that Rome could
never quite bury the hatchet with all her former enemies. The
Sabines, inland from Rome, were not finally defeated until 290. The
Aequians along the River Anio continued fighting until their
absorption into Rome forty years later. An earlier enemy, whom
Shakespeare was fascinated by in Coriolanus, were the Volscians who
seem to have been completely Romanized by 304. Over time, Roman
resistance to Etruria became offence rather than defence.
In the days of the kings, Roman society was divided by tribe.
There were three, each responsible for providing soldiers in times
of war. Each tribe was divided into ten curia (houses) who advised
the king on day-to-day matters, but had no power themselves.
Alongside this, a class structure was also developing and it was
very polarized by Cleopatra’s time. The patricians were the wealthy,
a military class who came to dominate politics, trade, everything.
Three of the major Roman protagonists in Cleopatra’s story – Caesar,
Pompey and Octavius – all came from this class. Under them came the
plebeians, the ordinary people.
According to the first/second-century AD Greek historian
Plutarch (a very important source for Cleopatra), the plebeians were
organized by the second (and most peaceful) of Rome’s kings, Numa
Pompilius, with a degree of sophistication unknown in the ancient
world. ‘He divided the craftsmen according to their trades – flute-
players, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, shoemakers, leather-
dressers, potters and workers in copper and brass.’
The mud huts on the Palatine became large, solid buildings made
of brick or stone. Tarquinius Priscus (the Old) set up an ambitious
public works scheme.
Stone was quarried, trees felled, plebeians laboured long and
hard, their wagons groaning with building materials. Conduits and
ditches were dug – the stinking malarial ditch into which all the
city’s effluent ran became the Cloaca Maxima (the great arsehole),
which was so high and wide that a hay wagon could pass through it.
As Rome’s size grew and her power became obvious, her armies
proved ever more successful throughout Italy. With that power came
corruption and an ever-greater reliance on slave labour. In
Cleopatra’s day, the slave population of Rome probably outnumbered
freemen four to one. The city was sitting on a potential powder-keg
that could explode any minute and did in the form of Spartacus in
the year of Cleopatra’s birth. More pressing than the slave problem
by the sixth century was the over-reaching arrogance of the kings.
The reign of Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud) tipped Rome’s
patience over the edge.
There was no heredity in kingship but Tarquin took the throne by
force with no popular backing at all. ‘He accepted,’ wrote Livy,
‘that there was no hope of his being accepted into the hearts of his
subjects, so he ruled by fear.’
A successful soldier and great builder, he should have been
exactly what the Romans respected but the actions of his son,
Sextus, provided the spark for revolution.
Spoiled and indulged, the boy was obsessed with a married woman,
Lucretia, who was given a straight choice – submit to Sextus’ lust
or be branded a whore for having sex with a slave. Lucretia chose to
live but then, racked with guilt, committed suicide (that fine,
Roman end). Led by a hardliner, Lucius Junius Brutus, the city’s
population forced Tarquin and his son out and set up a Republic that
was tottering to its own fall at the time of Cleopatra.
The government of the Republic was complicated. It was designed
to prevent a return to the despotism of Tarquin but at the same time
was nothing like a modern democracy nor even the original Athenian
form of that style of government. Service to Rome was essential –
Res Publica meant public matters and everyone, high and low, was
expected to bear responsibility. The only problem was that, anxious
to avoid tyranny, various officials only held office for a year and
could not stand again for a decade. Such novices were expected to
control the mob (always a problem), provide bread and circuses (to
keep the mob happy), feed, clothe and water the city and fight
whichever enemy took the field against Rome.
The role of the Praetor (there were sixteen of them by
Cleopatra’s time) was to administer justice as a magistrate. The
Praetor Urbanus had jurisdiction in the city limits; the Praetor
Peregrinus kept watch on the endless stream of foreigners trickling
to the magnet that was Rome. It was expecting a lot of a man that he
could cope with the finer points of the Twelve Tablets of Roman Laws
as well as taking the field against enemies as dangerous as, say,
Hannibal the Carthaginian (see Chapter 7). Those who did well went
on to become consuls; those who did not often became governors of
provinces as the ‘empire’ spread before it even had an emperor.
The Aedile was responsible for supervising the various markets
throughout the city, as well as maintaining the temples, aqueducts
and baths. The markets, of course, were the city’s lifeblood and it
was here that the grain of Egypt was sold long before the two
peoples recognized each other politically. Aqueducts carried water
supplies from the Tiber and its tributaries and were astonishing
works of engineering, a lasting complement to Roman know-how.
As far as the temples were concerned, the religion of Rome was
complicated and became more so as the ‘empire’ grew. The pantheon of
gods was passed on from that of the Greeks; only the names had
changed to Romanize them – Zeus became Jupiter, Artemis was Diana,
Ares turned into Mars, and so on. Cults came and went depending on
the trend of the time – the Greek god Dionysus, worshipped by the
Ptolemies, never really took off; Dionysus became Bacchus, a
lascivious, useless drunk whose orgies were actively discriminated
against in Cleopatra’s time. Above all, however, the Aedile
organized games that ran for days and commemorated the feast of one
god or another. The gladiatorial contests that were a regular part
of these ceremonies were immensely popular wherever the eagles flew.
The Quaestor was a record-keeper and controller of the treasury.
He had to be at least twenty-five and to have served as an officer
in the army. There were forty of these under Julius Caesar. The
Quaestor worked hand in glove with the Censor, who held a very wide
remit. Cicero described his job:
[The Censors] shall divide citizens into tribes and list them
according to wealth, age and rank. They shall assign young men to
the cavalry and infantry. They shall discourage the unmarried state,
guard public morality and suspend from the senate anyone guilty of
improper conduct.
The Censor checked the suitability of plays (in Shakespeare’s
England Antony and Cleopatra would have been checked by a similar
busybody called the Master of the Revels), supervised public gardens
and had the power to demote the social rank of anyone who broke the
law.
Lastly, the Pontifex Maximus was the bridge builder between gods
and men.
He was not actually a religious leader, but appointed the
sisterhood of the Vestal Virgins (the perfection of chaste Roman
womanhood) and disciplined transgressing priests. The job was for
life (unlike any political posts of the Republic) and the title was
passed centuries later to the Pope.
The best known aspect of the Republic’s government was the
Senate, with its famous initials still found on Roman public
buildings today – SPQR; Senatus Populusque Romanus – the Senate and
the people of Rome. It was composed of about 300 men of the
patrician class (women were accorded no official power under the
Republic) and the image we have from various men who were there is
of toga-clad politicians sitting on their curved marble seats and
hurling abuse at each other. In fact, some of Rome’s finest oratory
came from that platform.
In a clever nod to inclusivity, plebeians were allowed in from
the fourth century, but in practice, only those with administrative
experience could join, so that in effect, only the patricians held
sway. Unlike its modern American counterpart, the senate was not
actually a legislative body, but it controlled finances, tax
collection and foreign policy, so its advice was always taken
seriously.
Four sub-committees operated within the Senate. The Comitia
Curiata (household assembly) represented the twenty wards of the
city set up under the kings. It was a court of appeal and supervised
the election of the Consuls, but by Cleopatra’s day, most of its
work was carried out by the Comitia Centuriata.
This was originally made up of ex-army men but by about 200 had
become largely civilian. It had 193 seats, eighty-eight of them
belonging to the wealthiest patricians. It could approve laws and
peace treaties, declare war and decide issues of exile, life and
death. The Comitia Tributa was open to all citizens and elected
minor officials; its powers were a throwback to the earliest days of
the Republic and very limited. Finally, the Concilium Plebis, the
People’s Council, represented thirty-five outlying districts, but
its decisions covered the whole city.
Like any institution as complex and powerful as Rome, it was a
mass of contradiction. All Romans respected the concept of the wife
and mother, but women had no political voice and prostitution was
rife in every major Roman town. Millions of men, women and children
toiled as slaves in the latifundia, the fields that fed Rome, and
they were bought and sold as cattle. There was no law against
killing a slave. Candidates for election bribed those with the vote
and shamelessly made promises they could not possibly keep. Money
talked – Marcus Licinius Crassus who ran Rome with Pompey and Caesar
when
Cleopatra was a young woman bought up so much derelict property
in the city that he was given the nickname ‘Dives’ – the rich one.
In reality, the story of the Roman Republic was one of powerful
men vying with each other to become more powerful still. And the
best way to do that was to control the army, the most formidable
fighting force of the ancient world.

MARS VICTOR
ROME, 753
 The Roman army could be defeated. In 321 the Samnites won a
famous victory over them in the convoluted valleys of the Caudine
Forks. Livy wrote:
The consuls, half-naked, suffered the ignominious ordeal of
being sent under the yoke. They were followed by their officers, in
descending order of rank; then, one after the other, by the legions
themselves, while the enemy, fully armed, stood around, hurling
insults and cracking jokes.
Between 71 and 69 Spartacus destroyed six different armies that
Rome sent against him. Not only were they beaten at their own game,
they were beaten by an army of slaves, the lowest of the low. The
man who defeated them, Marcus Licinius Crassus, was only awarded an
ovation by Rome, not the full-blown triumph given for victory over a
conventional foreign enemy.
In the Teutoberg Forest in north Germany in AD 9, Publius Varus
was completely outfought in a series of ambushes over several days.
Varus himself committed suicide and his three legions, perhaps
15,000 men, were massacred.
It could happen, but not often. What marked Roman military
conquest was the sheer tenacity of the Roman soldier. The Samnites
were eventually defeated thirty years before Cleopatra’s birth.
Spartacus was killed in battle by Crassus in the year of her birth
and 6,000 of his followers were crucified along the Appian Way into
Rome as a reminder of the fate that awaited anyone who took on the
city of the seven hills. The Teutoberg disaster was a mere glitch in
the conquest of the southern part of Germany, which would not be
wiped out for 400 years.
Rome was at war for an astonishingly long time and was the most
aggressive military force in Italy. We have already seen that her
armies destroyed the Sabines, the Aequians and the Volsci, and in
370 Marcus Camillus defeated the Cisalpine Gauls on the River Arno.
Thirty years later Valerius Corvus destroyed Satricia, the Sabine
capital. Thirty years after that, Lucius Scapula beat the Etruscans.
The army that won these victories was still a citizen army,
composed of farmers who served their city voluntarily, but as the
defensive battles became offensive and the campaigns were fought
ever further afield, the structure of the
Roman war machine had to change. What also changed was the means
by which the army marched.
Think Rome – think roads. They were dug straight as arrows to
cover the miles quickly – the very name miles derives from the Latin
word for soldier – and they had firm surfaces and drainage ditches
to allow the rainwater to run off.
 The Appian Way, which ran south from Rome, was the road that saw
the legions of Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavius march for Egypt. It
was built by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus (the Blind) as early
as 312 and was originally 152 miles long, extending to the port of
Brundisium later. Such roads spread the tentacles from Rome and were
built wherever the legions had permanent camps.
The biggest obstacle that Rome faced outside the Italian
peninsula was Carthage, the North African empire covering modern
Tunisia. Rome fought Carthage three times – the Punic Wars – over a
long period, which cost thousands of lives, destroyed whole tracts
of countryside and almost wiped out some of Rome’s most powerful
families. The geographer Strabo estimated that the Poeni (the Roman
name for Carthaginians – hence Punic) had a population of 700,000
and nearly 300 colonia, cities that made up their empire. The
Carthaginians traded slaves, tin, gold, corn, bronze, iron,
dyestuffs and perfumes, and they saw the islands of the
Mediterranean, especially Sardinia and Corsica, as outposts of their
empire.
The first Punic War focused on the sea. For twenty-three years,
war-galleys grappled together in a bid for supremacy. The army sent
to Sicily in 264 succeeded in taking the island, but the invasion of
North Africa under Marcus Atilius Regulus fell apart when his fleet
was destroyed with huge loss of life.
Hamilcar Barca was unable to follow this up with a swift
counter-attack and two years of sieges on Sicily itself gave the
Romans time to rebuild their fleet and effectively starve the
Carthaginian garrisons out. Barca surrendered, ceding Sicily
permanently to Rome.
It was the second Punic War that terrified Rome because this
time the fighting came to them. It produced one of the finest
generals in the ancient world – Hannibal. Legend says that as a boy
of nine he swore an oath to oppose Rome and spent his adult life
keeping that oath. Ignoring the endless war of manoeuvre and fleets
that had cost his country Sicily, he invaded Italy from the north,
marching into the Po Valley with his war elephants, which terrified
the Romans who had never seen anything like them before. In a
whirlwind series of battles – Trebia, Lake Trasimene and above all
Cannae – he put the legions to the sword.
At Cannae, the consuls Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius
Paullus drew up their battle formations of 80,000 men and attacked
head-on in the usual Roman way, the legions marching in grim
silence, shield to shield through Hannibal’s centre of Spaniards and
Celts. They realized too late that this was a Carthaginian feint and
Hannibal’s Numidian cavalry closed in on their flanks like a giant
crab’s claw. Paullus was killed along with half his command.
 The problem for Hannibal was Rome itself. The city was
inevitably well fortified and Quintus Fabius Maximus and Claudius
Marcellus prevented Carthaginian alliances with local tribes so that
Hannibal had to get his supplies from Carthage itself. Since Rome
once more commanded the sea, this was a major obstacle and by 208
Rome had taken Spain from Carthage.
Four years later Scipio, later named Africanus for his success,
invaded Carthage itself and faced Hannibal at Zama in 202. This time
the Romans were ready for the elephants and the braying of Roman
trumpets seems to have unnerved the animals who were lured into cul-
de-sacs of infantry and slaughtered. The treaty of Scipio brought
the war to a close and Hannibal ended his days as a wandering freak
before finally committing suicide.
The third Punic War was very much a mopping-up operation. It
lasted for only three years and ended with the sacking of Carthage
itself. An estimated 200,000 suits of armour and 3,000 siege engines
found their way to Rome and the survivors of the smouldering city
were sold into slavery. ‘Delenda est Carthago’ Cato told the Senate
in 153 – ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ – it was and everybody
breathed a sigh of relief.
In a speech to his troops before Zama, Scipio Africanus told his
men they were fighting not merely to defeat Carthage, but to
dominate the world. Like peoples before and after them, the Romans
had a divine right, they believed, to conquer. It was a grim
mindset, but it was held universally by a nation that believed
implicitly in its own superiority and was prepared to go to any
lengths to achieve it. Fifty years before Cleopatra’s birth, the
empire with no emperor extended from Iberia (Spain) in the west to
Bithynia and Pontus (Turkey) in the east and included Greece and
Alexander’s own Macedonia.
Much of the aggression of Roman conquest came from the political
system we looked at in the last chapter. Government was dominated by
the elite and ambitious men at the top who followed the cursus
honorum, the path of honour to the consulship if they could. There
were only two consuls at any given time and they only held office
for a year, so there was a need to impress and quickly.
The greatest method of doing this was to be awarded a triumph
for feats of arms, riding in a chariot through Rome’s streets,
thronged with flower-throwing fans who marvelled at the spoils taken
in war and the defeated enemies dragged in chains behind the
legions. Each triumph was accompanied by games and was expected to
be more lavish than the last.
A rational analysis of most of the wars of conquest fought by
the Romans before the birth of Christ shows a recurring pattern.
Early days of each campaign were characterized by embarrassing
losses and some humiliation, especially when charismatic enemies
like Hamilcar, Hannibal, Vercingetorix and Arminius led their men
with brilliance. It is not true to say that Rome fought every year
or that her consuls always went to war. The stop-go military policy
led to quiet periods in which experience was lost and the legions
had to learn to fight all over again.
There was a need, above all, to improve the quality and
consistency of the Roman soldier; to move, in effect, from the
amateur to the professional. The man generally held to be
responsible for this transition is Gaius Marius who died, probably
from a stroke, sixteen years before Cleopatra was born. Hugely
influential though Marius was, the changes were already under way
when he was a boy and were more gradual than historians used to
accept.
The army recruit was increasingly a labourer, without ties to
his own farmland in the latifundia, and was bound to make for an
improvement. A man who is constantly worrying about his wife,
children and the harvest makes a poor soldier unless he is
specifically fighting to defend them. Flavius Vegetius Renatus was
writing nearly 500 years after Cleopatra, but he used earlier Roman
sources, including Julius Caesar, and describes a recruit of the
first century BC:
A young soldier who is chosen for the work of Mars should have
alert eyes and should hold his head upright. [He] should be broad-
chested with powerful shoulders and brawny arms. His fingers should
be long rather than short. He should not be pot-bellied or have a
fat bottom. His calves and feet should not be flabby; instead they
should be made entirely of tough sinew ...smiths, carpenters,
butchers and hunters of deer and wild boar are the most suitable...
Old distinctions of recruitment, based on age and property
ownership, disappeared and the focus of the army became the legion.
In theory 6,000 strong, on campaign the unit usually mustered about
4,800 and even that could be reduced by sickness and secondment. The
old sub-division of the maniple, stolen from the Greek hoplite
armies of Alexander, became the cohort, of 480 men, divided into six
further subunits of eighty, commanded by a centurion. The senior
officers were the tribunes, six per legion, each with a specific
role. The senior centurion was the primus pilus (first spear), a
reminder of the tactical weapons soldiers carried. Each soldier
carried two spears, the javelin (pilum) for throwing and the hasta
for stabbing. By Cleopatra’s time, only the javelin remained. The
legionary carried a short, straight, double-edged sword (gladius)
and a pugio (dagger) and usually wore the overlapping breast and
back plates made famous by Hollywood, the lorica segmentata.
 The head was protected by a helmet with ear flaps and a neck
flange for maximum protection and a large curved angular shield
(scutum) served as both a defence mechanism and a weapon. An
advancing unit would bat the enemy aside with these shields before
stabbing their falling or fallen bodies with the sword.
On the battlefield the cohorts advanced in silence, in the
triplex acies (three-line) formation, which could easily change
direction and deploy in one, two or four lines. Endless training led
to perfection of these tactics and most opponents, especially the
Gauls and Britons, tried to smash the formations with a wild,
headlong charge. This was usually ineffective and led to exhaustion
and a lack of cohesion on which the legions capitalized.
The old emblems of Rome’s citizen armies – the boar, the wolf,
the horse – which could be found in most armies of the ancient world
were replaced in the legion by the silver eagle and carried by the
aquilifer with his distinctive lion or wolf-skin headdress. The
eagle, of course, had been pinched by the Romans from the personal
badge of Ptolemy II.
But if the heart of the new professional army was the legion,
the cavalry (alae) were often recruited from former enemies,
especially the Iberians. They were deployed on the wings of battle
formations to harass the enemy and turn a retreat into a rout. The
auxiliaries served as light infantrymen, in some cases being
virtually indistinguishable from the legions themselves. Specialist
troops were used to build roads and bridges and to fire the highly
effective ballistic weapons used in siege operations. For example,
when Julius Caesar reached the River Thames in the summer of 54, he
had Batavian troops with him who were experts in river crossings.
The irony of the professionalization of the Roman soldier was
that such men lost their sense of identification with Rome itself.
They relied on their pay (and were sometimes mutinous if they didn’t
get it) and became intensely loyal to their unit or their commander.
So popular was Caesar with his troops in Gaul that his men openly
sang songs about his baldness (about which he was very sensitive)
and his homosexual leanings. This might sound negative to the point
of insubordination, but it was the stuff that glued armies together.
The flip side of this development was that by Cleopatra’s day,
rivalries between politicians, like Caesar and Pompey, for example,
or Mark Antony and Octavian, became bloody affairs involving whole
armies of thousands of men.

THE CRACKS IN THE PAVEMENT

ROME, 88
 The Romans may have thrown out their last king, Tarquinius
Superbus, appalled by the man and everything he stood for, but they
did not replace him with anything like a democracy, so that in
reality a handful of Tarquin’s over-mighty subjects took over and
spent the next 500 years jostling each other for power.
The whole system seemed to be held in check by the senate and
the other councils we have met already, but the reality was that
supremely ambitious and egotistical men fought each other for
overall power. The smooth pavement that was the Roman ideal had
cracks in it from the beginning. On the Ides of March 44, Julius
Caesar was stabbed to death on his way into the senate by
republicans who found his ambition too much to stomach; but it could
be argued that the first man to plunge his dagger into the notion of
the Republic was Lucius Cornelius Sulla – ‘Lucky’.
An impoverished young man with skin so sensitive it was
described as ‘mulberries sprinkled with flour’, two legacies in
rapid succession gave him enough money to enter politics. The way to
the top in republican Rome – and it was to remain so throughout
Europe for the next 2,000 years – was to attach oneself to a rising
star. For Sulla, the star was Marius and he impressed against the
Numidian king Jugurtha in Africa before serving against the Germanii
in 104 and 103.
Marius was clearly jealous of his protégé and the young
quaestor gravitated towards Marius’ rival, Quintus Lutatius Catulus.
He made a political mistake in not standing as aedile, because
whoever arranged the games was already a popular figure and Sulla’s
African connections could have brought some weird and wonderful
animals into Rome’s arena. His attempt at the praetorship foundered.
Only by paying huge sums in bribes did he get the Praetor Urbanus
job in 98.
Military successes followed against one of the trickiest of
Rome’s enemies, the Parthians, who had come to dominate the eastern
extent of Alexander the Great’s empire. Consul by 88, Sulla gave
himself the official nickname ‘Felix’, loosely translated as lucky,
but in reality blessed by fortune, a reminder that even the most
hard-bitten soldiers and statesmen of the ancient world
wholeheartedly believed in prophecies and auguries; their lives were
driven by them, in Rome as in Egypt.
A showdown between Sulla and Marius was perhaps inevitable and
the jealous Marius forced Sulla out, amid riotous scenes in the
senate and fighting in the streets. Sulla himself fled but returned
at the head of an army to restore order at sword point. This was a
low point in Roman history – Roman soldiers called out to enforce
discipline on their own people – and virtually all Sulla’s officers
refused to obey him. Promotion from the junior ranks was easily
achieved and when two praetors were sent to Sulla to talk sense into
him, he sent them back to the senate with their togas ripped and
their staffs of office broken in their hands.
Sulla marched on Rome and took it.
The phrase ‘in denial’ still lay two millennia in the future in
Sulla’s day but it fitted his situation perfectly. He was unpopular
with most Romans, who elected a rival, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, as
consul the next year and Sulla was ordered to stand trial for his
crimes against the senate and the people of Rome. He simply refused
to turn up and set off at the head of his army against Mithridates,
the general who had snatched most of Asia Minor back from the
Romans.
The Greeks, in whose lands the campaign began, were uncertain
who to support so Sulla burned the port of Piraeus and seriously
damaged Athens, despite its almost holy reputation as the cradle of
civilization. He was more than holding his own against Mithridates
when news arrived of a revolt in Rome spearheaded by Marius and
Cinna. Sulla’s house had been burned down and his lands declared
forfeit. In 85 the rebel consul made peace with Mithridates (which
outraged the army) and he marched back home.
Other rebels joined him as he reached the port of Brundisium –
Appius Claudius, Metellus Pius and two men who would play tangential
roles in the life of Cleopatra – Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gaius
Pompey. With a mixture of bluff, cunning and appalling savagery, the
outnumbered Sulla fought his way to Rome’s Colline Gate. Here Appius
Claudius was killed and Sulla’s centre driven back but Crassus’
right wing had destroyed the enemy and in a moment that no fiction
writer would dare invent, he sent a messenger to Sulla to ask if his
men could stand down and have their supper!
A terrified senate gave Sulla the title of dictator. The
technical definition was that of a consul with exceptional powers,
granted in times of emergency, including those of life and death,
against whom there was no appeal. On the face of it, looking
backwards, it was difficult to see how different this was from the
role of the Tarquin kings and looking forward, of course, it
foreshadowed the rise of the emperors. In a terrifying purge which
dictators of later centuries have carried out – think Hitler and
Stalin in the twentieth century – Sulla proscribed names of 500 men
he saw as his enemies and therefore the enemies of Rome.
Having decimated the senate he then doubled its size and packed
it with his cronies. The magistracy was increased – there were now
eight praetors and twenty quaestors. The power of the people’s
tribunes was curbed – all ‘junior’ assemblies had to have their
decisions ratified by the senate and the senate belonged to Sulla.
 The jury is still out on the dictator’s next step. Having
amassed unprecedented power over a three-year period, he returned
Rome to the status quo in 80 with Metellus Pius and himself as joint
consuls and retired from politics completely in 79. Should we see
him as a former-day Oliver Cromwell, actually trying to find a
better governmental system than the one he had overthrown? Hardly,
because in 80 everything returned to ‘normal’ and only negativity
had triumphed. He died in 78, having completed his memoirs, now lost
to time, and left behind a nagging doubt in Rome and a yawning chasm
in its pavement. The stock phrase from now on became: ‘Sulla did it;
why can’t I?’
Increasingly the real power of Rome was its army, not its senate
and the man who commanded it could ‘bestride the narrow world like a
colossus’.
The remaining consul was Metellus Pius – the nickname means
devoted, not holy in the modern sense, and the devotion was to his
father who had been exiled in 99 on the order of Marius. He was
praetor in 89 and fought effectively against the neighbouring
Italian tribe, the Marsi, before a less successful campaign in
Africa. His competence as a general endeared him to the army and he
joined the rebel Sulla as a natural opponent of Marius.
As a reward, Sulla made Metellus Pontifex Maximus with its
priestly overtones, and as proconsul and consul fought a bitter war
against the rebel Sertorius in Spain. He retired shortly before
Cleopatra’s birth when her father Auletes was anxious to court Roman
military power and the stage was set for the last titanic struggle
in Roman affairs that would lead to the deaths of Pompey the Great,
Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Cleopatra and the rise of the
emperors under Augustus.
Marcus Licinius Crassus was played with all the hauteur of a
Roman patrician by Laurence Olivier in the film Spartacus. What did
not come out in that portrayal was the man’s avarice, which appalled
his patrician peers. He made a point of buying up property cheaply
all over Rome so that he could sell it at an obscene profit. When
Auletes went to Rome to bribe various officials, it is highly likely
that Crassus was more than interested. He bought people with the
same ease that he bought property and was popular among Romans of
the lower classes, taking on pro bono cases in the law courts.
When Cleopatra was born, the Thracian gladiator slave Spartacus
was looting Italian towns at will. Five armies sent against him were
destroyed and the sixth was commanded by Crassus, by now propraetor.
He took six legions – an unprecedentedly large army, especially
against slaves – and defeated Spartacus somewhere south of Rome. It
was in the mopping-up operations of this campaign that Gaius Pompey
arrived. He magnanimously acknowledged Crassus’ victory, but
overstepped the mark perhaps by suggesting that he had made sure a
similar revolt would never happen again. Pompey’s father was a
highly dubious politician and so prone to changing sides between
Marius and Sulla that when he died of plague, his body was dragged
from its tomb by the mob and torn apart in scenes usually reserved
for the Ptolemies in Alexandria.
Sulla’s arrival at Brundisium brought Pompey with three legions
raised at his own cost to support him. His early military successes
as a dashing cavalry commander went to his head a little, especially
when Sulla hailed him as imperator (conquering general, which later
became synonymous with emperor).
It was now that Pompey began to compare himself with Alexander
the Great, cutting his blond hair in the style of the Macedonian
conqueror.
While Crassus looked on bemused in 82, Pompey demanded a triumph
in Rome for his defeat of the Marian exiles Carbo in Sicily and
Ahenobarbus in Africa. Roman protocol demanded that triumphs were
only given to those who had held public office and Pompey had not.
Even so, he would not be dissuaded and the day went ahead. Somehow
typical of Pompey’s brashness, his elephant-hauled chariot got stuck
on a city gate and he became something of a laughing stock.
Manoeuvring for position as Sulla’s blue-eyed boy, Pompey
divorced his wife Antistia and married the dictator’s stepdaughter,
Aemilia. When she died in childbirth, Pompey married Mucia Tertia,
another member of the same family, and she produced a son, Gnaeus,
in 79. For the next two years, Pompey fought against Sertorius in
Spain, although most of the successful campaigning was done by
Metellus. Returning to Italy for the end of the Spartacus campaign,
Pompey hurried himself through the usual political process and stood
with Crassus as consul in the year of Cleopatra’s birth. The pair
were hardly friends – Crassus the aloof patrician and Pompey the
boy-general (although by now, of course, he was thirty-six) were not
a match made in heaven.
It was now that Pompey officially added the nickname Magnus –
the Great – and he had to earn his sobriquet. Rome’s navy was never
as accomplished as its army, and the pirates of Cilicia (northern
Turkey today) were able to out-row and out-sail the Roman fleets and
raid coastal towns at will. When Cleopatra was three, the senate
unleashed Pompey against the pirates and in a lightning fortyday
campaign, he penned them in, took 90 ships, 20,000 prisoners and
umpteen chests of stolen loot. An ecstatic senate voted to extend
Pompey’s powers and ordered him against Mithridates VI Eupator, the
king of Pontus, who was the greatest obstacle to Rome’s expansion in
the east. Sulla had beaten the man in 84, as had Lucius Lucullus
three years later, but, like a bad denarius, he kept turning up.
 Once again, Pompey was indeed great, defeating Mithridates
before turning on Tigranes of Armenia. This man, an ally of
Mithridates, used the grand Parthian title of ‘king of kings’, but
was captured and obliged to pay Pompey a huge ransom before the
Roman went on to invade Syria and Judaea. Mithridates finally
committed suicide in the Crimea in 63, having fought Rome for thirty
years.
In 62, when the little Cleopatra was probably studying with her
Greek philosophers in the great library at Alexandria, Pompey
celebrated his third triumph in Rome. This one was so spectacular
that the column of troops, captured prisoners of war and booty took
days to march through the streets.
Impressing the rabble was one thing; working for stability in
Roman politics was another, and Pompey clashed with too many
important members of the senate for his own good. He divorced Mucia
Tertia on the unprovable grounds of infidelity, thus alienating her
powerful family, and found himself at odds not only with Lucullus
but with Gaius Porcius Cato, tribune of the plebeians (an important
political post that allowed him to veto anything the senate put
forward). When Ptolemy Auletes came to Rome to ask for support in
getting his kingdom back, Pompey supported him; Cato and many others
did not.
Pompey turned to his supporters, Crassus and the ‘greatest Roman
of them all’, Julius Caesar. This was the first triumvirate, known
to Romans then in the less positive term ‘the three-headed monster’.
Cleopatra was ten; her brother Ptolemy, six. Their father, the
Dionysian Piper, was in exile, forking out huge sums to buy Roman
support for his return to Egypt. In the play of history, the last
act of the Ptolemaic tragedy was about to be played out. And the
Roman Republic would die with Cleopatra.

BOOK FOUR: CAESAR

THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER
ROME, 60

Gaius Julius Caesar was an immensely complex man and we need to

understand him because he is the pivot between the worlds of Rome
and of Cleopatra. Those worlds collided in the summer of 48 when
Caesar was a war-weary veteran of fifty-two, Cleopatra a young – and
exiled – queen of twenty-one. Shakespeare and countless others have
reduced their relationship to a love match – a powerful celebrity
figure with his much younger trophy wife – but that is to ignore
complex politics and does justice to neither of them.
 The Caesarii were a very old Roman family that claimed descent
from the Trojan prince Aeneas who, according to one tradition, had
founded Rome. The meaning of the name is obscure but – and this is a
rich irony bearing in mind Julius Caesar’s obsession with his lack
of hair – is possibly Oscan for ‘curly’.
The man who would write himself into history for the next 1,000
years and beyond was born in 100, making him six years younger than
Pompey, who would become first an ally and finally, a deadly rival.
In the Marius–Sulla civil war, which did so much to weaken the
Republic, Caesar sided with Marius to whom he was related by
marriage. The handsome young dandy, with his huge dark eyes and his
habit of wearing his belt loose, was married to Cornelia, Cinna’s
daughter, and was given the title of flamen dialis, an ancient
priestly order of Jupiter, which was obscure to the point of
meaninglessness. On Sulla’s return in 80, Caesar found himself out
of a post, ordered to divorce his wife and on the run. Caught and
sentenced to death, Caesar was allowed to live because of his
aristocratic connections. Sulla always had his doubts about this
decision – ‘You are going to find many Mariuses in that boy.’
The following year, Caesar began his military career on the
staff of Marcus Minucius Thermus in Asia, winning a civic crown at
Mitylene for saving a man’s life. It was on this campaign that
Caesar may have had a homosexual fling with Nicomedes, the king of
Bithynia, although such charges were later levelled against his
supporter Mark Antony, too. Homosexual relationships were associated
by the Romans with Greek decadence, but in reality, there seems to
have been an ambivalence in Caesar’s day that partially tolerated
it. When Caesar returned to Rome in 78 the great orator and
statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero quipped, ‘We all know what he
[Nicomedes] gave – and what you gave him.’
Certainly, Caesar’s legions in Gaul in the years ahead sang
marching songs that were very open about their commander’s sexuality
and it is impossible to believe he didn’t hear the banter himself:
Gaul was brought to shame by Caesar; by King Nicomedes, he.
Here comes Caesar, wreathed in triumph for his Gallic victory!
Nicomedes wears no laurels – though the greatest of the three.
Here we bring our bald whoremonger; Romans, lock your wives
away!
All the bags of gold you lent him, his Gallic tarts received as
pay.
Even allowing for the ribald over-simplification, there is no
disguising the fact that war, an exaggerated sex-drive and money
were all very important to Caesar.
 The death of Sulla opened the way for the beginnings of a
political career and Caesar attempted to prosecute the governor of
Cilicia, Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella, on charges of corruption. He
failed, but impressed all Rome – even the unimpressible Cicero – by
his rhetoric. It was that which he went to study in Rhodes under one
of the finest rhetoricians of his day, Apollonius Molon, but even
here, adventure and excitement could not leave Caesar alone.
Captured by the ever-menacing Cilician pirates, the future would-be
emperor had to be ransomed for fifty talents. Not one to forgive or
forget, Caesar raised a fleet, tracked his captors down and
crucified them at Pergamon.
From 73 onwards, Caesar’s career accelerated. Soon to be known
for his astonishing speed on campaign, he was no slouch in politics
either. First, he returned to his priestly role, as augur, and used
the death of his wife Cornelia and that of his aunt Julia the
following year to make a public declaration of the glory of Marius’
line, from whom Julia was descended. In an age when political
alliances were cemented by marriage, the widower took Pompeia,
Sulla’s granddaughter, as his new wife.
He was elected military tribune in 70, quaestor in 69 and aedile
in 65. So, when Cleopatra was toddling around the marbled
passageways of the royal palace in Alexandria, the man who would
become her lover, protector and the father of her first child was
already at the top of his political game.
Tom Holland reminds us that Romans hated being dependent on
anyone but in reality no one could go it totally alone in a power
system as complex as republican Rome. Caesar allied himself with
Marcus Licinius Crassus because he was the richest man in Rome and
he almost certainly bank-rolled Caesar’s campaign for the
aedileship. In company with just about every other aedile, Caesar
spent a fortune on building programmes, including restoring Marius’
smashed triumphal arches on the Capitol and, of course, on the
games, a move guaranteed to endear him to Romans of all classes.
Such was the size of Caesar’s ego – it easily matched those of
Crassus and Pompey – that he stood for the post of Pontifex Maximus
in 63. Because this was regarded as the pinnacle of a career, which
was usually given to middle-aged men who had already been censors
and consuls, it was virtually earmarked for Quintus Lutatius Catulus
who had been censor with Crassus two years earlier. It seemed the
height of folly to a traditionalist people like the Romans that this
johnny-come-lately should get the job ahead of wiser and more
experienced men.
It was impossible by now for Caesar to keep out of the tangled
web of Roman power-politics. Some men would have retired to their
country estates, grown vines and disciplined slaves in the
latifundia. But Caesar was not ‘some men’.
He unwisely became involved in the conspiracy of Lucius Sergius
Catalina, a dangerously unstable member of an ancient family in
decline. Unable to afford the massive bribes necessary to become
consul, Catalina drifted ever further into the revolutionary camp,
demanding that laws be passed to wipe out debt (he himself owed a
fortune) and was fought every step of the way by Cicero in the
senate.
The great orator was in his finest hour, but the accusations he
flung at Cataline proved to be an epitaph for the Republic itself.
In [Cataline’s] bands are all the gamblers and adulterers, all
the unclean and shameless citizenry. His witty, delicate boys have
learned not only to love and be loved, but to use a dagger and to
administer poison. If they are not driven out; if they don’t die ...
then I warn you, the school of Cataline will take root in our
republic.
Unfortunately for Rome, the school of Cataline was also the
school of Publius Clodius Pulcher, and of Pompey and Caesar. Where
the last two could and would use their loyal legions to attack each
other, and to cow Rome into submission to them, Clodius used the mob
to the same effect. Throughout the 50s, street fighting between
factions was commonplace, with elections, speeches and even trials
ending in mayhem with blood and cracked heads. Cicero was kicked out
of the senate and of Rome; Clodius supervised first the ransacking
then the physical demolition of his town house. On another occasion,
Pompey had to barricade himself in to avoid an Alexandrian-style
tearing apart by the mob.
Caesar himself escaped the worst of this. Praetor in 62, he was
suspended from office for recommending that Metellus Caecilius
Nepos’ idea be accepted by the senate of giving Pompey a field
command against Cataline who at one point joined his legions outside
Rome and simply declared himself consul, thereby wiping out at a
stroke the whole raison d’être of the Republic.
In this tumultuous period, Caesar divorced Pompeia on the wildly
improbable grounds of suspicion of adultery (but in reality because
her family could help him climb no higher), famously claiming that
she must be ‘above suspicion’.
The propraetor post gave Caesar an army command in Hispania
Ulterior (Western Spain) and he quickly developed the strategies for
which he was famous. He harassed and bullied even friendly tribes
into making war and then beat them, consolidating Rome’s power over
the whole peninsula. He helped himself to large amounts of loot and
wiped out his own debts that way, returning to Rome for a triumph
and every chance of being consul.
Here, however, he was blocked by envious senators spearheaded by
Marcus Porcius Cato (the Younger) who was Tribune of the Plebs that
year and hated everything the brash general stood for. The mob might
see every Caesarean victory as a triumph for Rome and the inevitable
march of civilization and progress, but to at least half the senate
the man was a war criminal. Caesar was denied his triumph (no
general at the head of his army could enter Rome without the
senate’s permission) and he was given instead command of legions in
Italy on the grounds that since the revolt of Spartacus there were
still bands of marauding slaves all over the place.
This was virtually a policeman’s job and Caesar wanted none of
it. Persuading the old rivals Pompey and Crassus to work together
must have taken all his ingenuity, but it worked and the three of
them were, by 59, the ‘three-headed monster’ of the triumvirate.
Crassus was the richest man in Rome; Pompey and Caesar between them
had cornered the market in military prowess. They were unstoppable,
especially by Caesar’s co-consul, Cicero’s stooge Marcus Calpurnius
Bibulus.
Caesar got what he wanted – land reforms for his veterans and a
command in Gaul that would turn him into a legend. Pompey got his
eastern campaign ratified by the senate after years of wrangling.
Crassus lined his purse even more and got command of an army against
the Parthians, which would kill him.
Bibulus, outmanoeuvred at every turn, retired to private life
and took to watching the stars for portents. After that, he always
spoke of the consulship of ‘Julius and Caesar’. Increasingly, Pompey
and Crassus were beginning to think the same thing.
As far as Egypt was concerned, the only Roman of the triumvirate
who truly mattered was Pompey. When the three had joined forces in
60, Ptolemy Auletes appealed to the man’s ego – and his love of cash
– by offering him and Caesar (the Piper was presumably hedging his
bets) 6,000 silver talents, half his annual revenue, to be
recognized as Egypt’s rightful king. Five years earlier Crassus had
proposed in the senate that Rome annex Egypt as she had done with so
many previously independent territories.
That was rejected, as was the suggestion by the tribune Publius
Servilius Rullus that Romans had a right to Egyptian land since the
Republic had been named the heirs of Ptolemy VIII. But the
hieroglyphs were on the wall as far as Egyptian independence was
concerned and Auletes gave Pompey a gold crown for the services he
rendered fighting alongside Egyptian troops in Palestine. Auletes
was now in the hopeless financial ‘catch-22’ of having to borrow
from Roman moneylenders to pay Roman politicians to stay out of
Egypt. Chief among the moneylenders was Gaius Rabirius Postumus and
his work was successful enough in the short term; Auletes became
officially amicus et socinus populi Romani, friend and ally of the
Roman people.
This was not empty rhetoric, but a legal contract in which
Auletes held on to his throne as long as the money rolled in. How he
was supposed to screw yet more money in taxation from his oppressed
people at a time of Nile flooding, poor harvests and strikes was his
problem.
This ignominious grovelling was in stark contrast to Auletes’
brother Ptolemy, whose Cyprus was seized by Rome in 58. The excuse,
which may have been justified, was that Ptolemy was aiding Cilician
pirates against Rome. He was offered the role of high priest but,
unable to bear the demotion from king, committed suicide instead.
Ironically, it was this failure of Auletes to help his brother
that led to the Alexandrian coup against him and his replacement by
his eldest daughter Berenice IV who called her aunt Cleopatra V
(Auletes’ sister and ex-wife) out of exile to rule with her. It was
now that Auletes and his second daughter, our Cleopatra, began the
wanderings we looked at in Chapter 5. In Rhodes, the vagabond king
had his humiliating meeting with Marcus Porcius Cato sitting on the
toilet before faring rather better in Athens and finally arriving in
Italy.
The eleven-year-old Cleopatra’s first visit to Rome took place
in less than auspicious circumstances. Pompey, with his Alexander
the Great hairstyle and pushy swagger, gave the pair and their small
entourage his villa in the Alba Hills, south of Rome, but it hardly
equated with the royal palace in Alexandria.
The royal pair may or may not have been aware that the worship
of foreign gods had been banned only six months before – an example
of the increasing arrogance of the Roman establishment – but popular
outcry had led to something of a U-turn and the new temple of Isis
on Monte Ginesto may have been a familiar place for them to visit.
Knowing that Auletes was sucking up to the Romans, Berenice and
Cleopatra Tryphaena sent a delegation to the senate to lobby against
him. Auletes outmanoeuvred them with a combination of threats and
bribery. It was at this juncture that the over-mighty Julius Caesar
tried to get himself elected as governor of Egypt, undermining both
Auletes and Pompey. He too failed and was, perhaps to keep him quiet
and out of the way, given a command in Gaul, where he started as he
meant to go on by provoking a war with the generally amicable
Helvetii and smashing them in the process.
We have already seen that the death of Cleopatra Tryphaena threw
Berenice into a panic. Her desperate search for a new co-ruler only
produced the salt-fish seller who she had strangled after a week of
marriage. His replacement, in the dog-eat-dog world of the
Ptolemies, was Archelaos, the son of a general of Mithridates VI of
Pontus who bribed the Roman governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, to
keep out of it. But Pompey had other ideas. If Caesar had failed to
get Egypt, he would not. He paid Gabinius 10,000 talents to
reinstate Auletes – the man would then owe him the greatest of
favours.
The triumphal entry of Auletes and the fourteen-year-old
Cleopatra into Alexandria was something of a watershed. The very
presence of Roman troops – Mark Antony commanded Gabinius’ cavalry –
spoke volumes as to who really ruled Egypt. It was now that Auletes,
spiteful to the last, had his own daughter Berenice executed, and
only Antony’s personal intervention prevented a wholesale Ptolemaic
bloodbath. Antony’s troops, mostly Gauls and Germans, stayed on in
the city as a peace-keeping force, although it was not clear who was
in more danger – the Alexandrians from Ptolemy or vice versa.
While Caesar was making a name for himself subduing Gaul and
even invading the land at the very edge of civilization – Britannia
– young Cleopatra continued her education before taking her rightful
place alongside her father as co-ruler. The moneylender Rabirius
accepted Auletes’ offer to make him finance minister as part of the
repayment, but he became so unpopular as a harsh tax collector that
he had to be given a permanent bodyguard of Gauls. He ran back to
Rome along with the increasingly suspect Gabinius and both men were
accused of un-Roman behaviour by wearing Greek clothes! Cicero
witheringly described Gabinius as a ‘thieving effeminate ballet boy
in curlers’.
Caesar’s war in Gaul is seen today as the work of a master
strategist and tactician, which it was. It is also invaluable to
historians as a description of the Roman war machine at work. But
above all it is a piece of propaganda, and his contemporaries saw it
in the simplest of terms – Caesar was lining his purse and turning
himself into a hero, probably to outdo Pompey. A faction in Rome
headed by Gaius Domitius Ahenobarbus planned to recall Caesar and
prosecute him for alleged war crimes. Certainly, the loss of life
among the Gallic population was horrendous and even in an age when
life was cheap there were those who felt he had much to answer for.
Even though the triumvirs met at Lucca in northern Italy and
effectively renewed Caesar’s Gallic contract, the very absence of
the general from the hub of things lost him impetus. Crassus, too,
was losing his grip. Perhaps he always intended to hide in the
shadows as a string-puller, waiting for his moment, but if so, it
never came. Pompey was winning laurels in the east against the
Cilician pirates; Caesar was carving up Gaul. Crassus had only one
clear victory to his name and although Spartacus was possibly more
of a general than anyone Pompey or Caesar faced, his was still an
army of slaves and there was no glory in that. Because of that,
Crassus, having served as co-consul with Pompey for a second time,
insisted on a five-year command in the east.
It was perhaps unfortunate for him that his enemies were the
skilled and resourceful Parthians whose cataphracts (heavy cavalry)
could smash through Roman infantry, even when that infantry were the
formidable legions. At Carrhae (Haran in modern Turkey) in 53
Crassus was stopped in his tracks and his son Publius was killed. In
‘peace talks’ the next day Crassus was struck down as he tried to
mount his horse. His head and hand were hacked off and sent to
Armenia. The head of the richest man in Rome would make one last
appearance. In the celebrations after Carrhae, a Greek play was
staged for the Parthian generals. During it, an actor dressed as a
maenad, a devotee of Dionysus so loved by Auletes and so detested by
Rome, threw the head in the air and it was kicked from player to
player in the sand.
In the previous year, the last family link between the two
remaining triumvirs was broken. Pompey’s fourth wife was Julia
Caesar, the daughter of the conqueror of Gaul. There is little doubt
that Pompey genuinely loved her, but she died in childbirth and an
ambitious, successful Roman was obliged to remarry. His choice was
typically quirky and political. Cornelia was the daughter of
Caecilius Metellus Scipio and the widow of the Publius Crassus
killed at Carrhae. She was sophisticated and beautiful, but more
importantly linked to the family of the Scipio who had defeated
Hannibal and destroyed Carthage.
It was like marrying into the Kennedy family in late-twentieth-
century America. The marriage – Pompey’s fifth – saw him move out of
Caesar’s camp for ever. And Pompey didn’t put a foot wrong. He
staged the most lavish games Rome had ever seen in September 55,
with elephants, tigers, rhinoceros, leopards, wolves and even a
cephos, an Ethiopian animal with the feet of a man that was probably
a baboon, all of them urged to fight each other and end their days
screaming in agony on the spearheads and tridents of the bestiarii,
the animal gladiators.
There is no doubt that Pompey regarded himself as the most
powerful man in Rome. He had served twice as consul and was still
governor of Spain with a formidable military reputation, yet in the
elections that followed the games, his bid to bribe the electorate
with bread and circuses failed. Domitius Ahenobarbus was consul for
54 and Cato was praetor. Increasingly, Cato set himself up as the
man of the Republic, creaking though it obviously was. He had no
armies at his back, unlike both Pompey and Caesar. He had no money,
unlike the recently deceased Crassus, to bribe men to vote for him.
He just stood for honesty and that which was most dear to all
Romans, tradition.
But it all turned to ashes. By 53–52 charges of corruption were
being levelled at Ahenobarbus and his fellow consul Appius Claudius
Pulcher (the Handsome) and street fighting broke out between Cato’s
thug Titus Annius Milo and Clodius, the youngest of Appius Claudius’
sons. Using street gangs and gladiators from the training schools,
both men indulged in open warfare in which nobody’s life was safe.
Things came to a head on the night of 18 January 52 when Milo and
Clodius met face to face. In the scuffle that followed, Clodius was
hit in the shoulder with a javelin and he was carried, bleeding
profusely, to a tavern along the Appian Way, Milo’s men in hot
pursuit. They dragged him outside and hacked him to death.
It was in the nature of things that matters could not rest
there. Clodius was ever a man of the people – even the spelling of
his name reflected the plebs’ pronunciation of Claudius – and the
mob went on the rampage in revenge, almost exactly as they would
with the murder of Caesar twelve years later. They smashed their way
into the senate house the next day and built a pyre for Clodius from
the shattered furniture. The blaze destroyed the entire building and
the law courts next door. The superstitious Romans got the point –
the Republic was a burned-out husk.
In desperation the senate turned to Pompey. They granted him the
consulship as long as he restored law and order. This was halfway to
dictatorship and it had been achieved as far as Pompey was concerned
without bloodshed. Now he unleashed his legions, beating the street
gangs at their own game. Milo was put on trial for the murder of
Clodius and even the renowned orator Cicero, charged with defending
him, was overawed by the unthinkable – a ring of shields around the
Forum. Milo was found guilty and got off lightly by being allowed to
sail into exile in Marseille, in Caesar’s Gaul.
Ptolemy the Piper died on 7 March 51 during a partial solar
eclipse, the gods, as always, marking the coming and the going of a
demi-god. There is debate how old he was, but he was probably sixty,
and after a turbulent life – and unlike most of the Ptolemies – his
death was due to natural causes. His will, which had been ratified
by the Roman senate, when they weren’t screaming at each other,
stipulated that Cleopatra Thea Philopator, the father-loving
goddess, should rule jointly with her ten-year-old brother Ptolemy
XIII. It is at least likely that Cleopatra kept the news of the old
king’s death secret except to her innermost circle for as long as
she could.
It is difficult to be sure but there seems to have been no love
lost between the siblings and when a petulant little boy happens to
be co-ruler of a great country and heir of a great dynasty, the
petty rivalries of the nursery assume gigantic and horrific
proportions. Ptolemy’s advisers might have staged a coup to remove
Cleopatra, even though she was eighteen and had almost certainly
been ruling alongside her father for the last eighteen months. It
was not until 30 June that Rome heard of Auletes’ death, by which
time the king had been embalmed in the Egyptian tradition with its
ten-week ritual of binding, amulet-placing and incense.
The will of Auletes was copied – one version was placed on the
stone shelves of the great library in Alexandria; the other went to
Pompey’s villa near Rome.
Ominously for the last of the Ptolemies, the Roman people were
declared guardians and protectors of the land of Egypt.
Nobody except Cleopatra missed Auletes. Latterly he had given
lavish banquets paid for by taxing the Egyptian people, drank
himself into a stupor and had indiscriminate sex with male and
female teenagers. Even so, Cleopatra and her brother inherited a
throne protected by the greatest military power in the world and the
priesthood backed them both as pharaohs in a tradition that was
centuries old.

CROSSING THE RIVERS

THE RUBICON, 49

One of Cleopatra’s first acts as queen was to honour the Buchis

bull. A funerary stela now in the Carlsberg Glyptotek museum in
Copenhagen reads:
The queen, the lady of the Two Lands, the Goddess Philopator,
rowed [the bull] in the boat of Amun, together with the other boats
of the king, all the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis and
priests being with [them].
This was standard practice; in fact, the exact form of words can
be found in earlier carved records. What it proves is that Egypt
welcomed the new queen with open arms and there is a smooth sense of
continuity from Auletes. The Buchis bull belonged to the complex
religious rites we saw in Book One, an animal chosen because it was
identified with Osiris, the fertility-god and god of the Underworld;
with Montu, the warrior-god, and with the sun-god Ra.
Montu was identified by the Alexandrian Greeks as Apollo because
of his links with the sun. His later effigies, those from
Cleopatra’s reign, show him as a bull-headed man in the Minotaur
tradition, with two tall plumes fixed to his horns. He carried the
khepesh, a curved sword, and in many bas-reliefs from the New
Kingdom is shown offering the weapon to pharaoh to enable the man to
defeat his enemies.
As we have seen, the Egyptians brought offerings to the animal,
its horns bedecked with garlands and it could predict the future and
cure the sick. It even changed colour every hour, and to encourage
fertility, women appeared in front of it, according to a horrified
Herodotus, exposing their genitals. When the bull died it was
mummified and laid to rest in a ceremony called the Bucheion in
Greek at Hermonthis on the Nile, south of Thebes.
It may seem strange that all modern accounts of Cleopatra make
great play of this tradition, but it is a reminder of the huge
importance of religion in the ancient world and of tradition.
Elizabeth II of England was crowned in Westminster Abbey in AD 1952
and went through essentially the same coronation ceremony that her
ancestors had for 1,000 years.
Many historians, too, make great play of the fact that
Cleopatra’s reign marks the end of the Ptolemies and that what we
are looking at is a dynasty in decline.
There is some comparison with the reign of Nicholas II in Russia
in the early twentieth century. His family, the Romanovs, had, like
the Ptolemies, ruled their country for three centuries. There was
also an air of ‘foreignness’ about them – Nicholas was Russian but
his wife was not and the pair wrote letters and diary entries in
English. Nicholas Romanov was the richest man in the world until AD
1917, as was Cleopatra before 31. What destroyed Nicholas was his
inability to cope with demands for change from within. What
destroyed Cleopatra was Rome. But there was nothing inevitable about
either case.
The immediate problem for Cleopatra in 51 was her brother
Ptolemy XIII.
They may have married soon after Auletes’ death, although there
is no record of it and if it happened it could only have been to
prevent any sense of rivalry between ‘her’ court and ‘his’. Then, as
now, one of the first priorities of a monarch was to provide an heir
so that the dynasty can continue. At eighteen, Cleopatra was of
eminently marriageable age; Ptolemy, of course, was still too young.
It may have been simply a matter of his age or it may have been a
conscious ploy on her part, but until 49 Ptolemy is invisible.
In a stela from the Faiyum Delta, she appears as a man, in the
typical straight-legged profile of Egyptian pharaohs, wearing the
crown of the two lands, apparently proclaiming her as sole ruler. It
is only the inscription that makes it clear who this is. Experts are
divided over the importance of this evidence. Is it a deliberate
statement by Cleopatra, doing a man’s job despite her female body
(and in this sense she echoes the female pharaoh Hatsheput in the
New Kingdom) or was this simply a piece of artwork made for Auletes
which had a new inscription added?
Cleopatra intended to impress from day one, whether it be her
own Alexandrians, the people of Upper Egypt, toiling away in the
flood plain of the Nile, or the Romans edging ever nearer to her
mouth-wateringly rich kingdom.
And dress was all important. In Alexandria, she wore her
(possibly auburn) hair in a melon bun with a simple gold diadem and
an expensive but not over-gaudy dress of Greek design. In this
attire she would have found favour even with the Roman matrons
surrounding Pompey and Caesar who were starchy in the extreme. When
she took the title Neos Dionysus (the New Dionysus) from her father,
underlying her closeness to him and her deep religiosity, Cleopatra
wore white under a striking black robe as worn by the priesthood.
For the Egyptians she went completely over the top with the help of
her wardrobe mistress, Charmion. She wore the tight-fitting sheath
dress (which, although sexy and elegant must have been very
difficult to walk in) and a colourful splash of precious stones and
vulture feathers. It was a conscious effort to appear at one with
the gods and the ancient pharaohs. As the goddess Isis (which the
Egyptians still called Aset during Cleopatra’s reign), she appeared
in her full royal regalia with the red and white crowns of Lower and
Upper Egypt with the rearing cobra (uraeus) in gold on her forehead.
In an age before widespread literacy and instant
telecommunication, it was important that Cleopatra show herself to
her people as often as possible. In a sense that was made easy by
the geography of Egypt. It was the Nile and the dedication of the
Buchis bull on 22 March 52 was part of a river journey designed to
impress and reassure Egyptians of all classes.
Built into this river journey – and the later one she made with
Caesar – was the physical existence and symbolic idea of her barge.
There is no clear contemporary description of it. Shakespeare’s
famous image of gold burning on water comes from Plutarch who was
writing two centuries after Cleopatra, but it is entirely in keeping
with the floating palace of the queen. It may have been 300 feet
long with a cypress wood hull decorated with ivory, gold and silver.
It had awnings and carved statues on the deck, shrines to the
gods like Isis and Dionysus, and perhaps even a library, a
gymnasium, a lecture hall and an aquarium. It was the setting for
her seduction of Mark Antony and may even, in modified form, have
taken part in the naval battle of Actium. Smaller boats clustered
around it, bearing priests and local officials, at every step of the
way.
 We know that she attended the ceremony of the Apis bull at
Memphis,
Egypt’s ancient capital, in 49 and paid 412 silver coins, as
well as providing food for the animal’s extensive priesthood. She
may have been overdoing her relationship with her Egyptian subjects
at the expense of the Alexandrians and that could have been a
mistake due to her youth. There had been revolts from time to time
along the Nile, against taxation and bad harvests, but the clear and
present danger came from the multicultural city in Cleopatra’s own
backyard.
Alexandria’s population had a reputation for unrest and thought
little, as we have seen, of dragging unpopular rulers to the
Gymnasion for a good slaughtering. By the autumn of 50, it was clear
that brother Ptolemy felt he had been kept in the shadows long
enough. He was still only twelve but his three principal advisers –
Potheinos, his nurse; Theodotus, his tutor, and Achillas, his
general – were itching to usurp Cleopatra and began by grabbing the
all-important grain supplies to Alexandria.
Decrees were now issued in the joint names of Ptolemy XIII and
Cleopatra and the order of the names was lost on no one. This was
‘Year One’ for him and Cleopatra must have realized that her
resources were far from limitless. Auletes had died broke, having
paid so much blood money to Rome, and the floods along the Nile in
51–50 had led to poor harvests and harsh taxation. This probably
explains Cleopatra’s open and ostentatious wooing of the priests.
Keep the priests happy and, by and large, the people were happy too.
Twelve hundred miles away, things weren’t going too well for
Rome either.
In the summer of 52 news reached Rome that Caesar had won a
crushing victory at Alesia in Gaul. Plutarch estimated that the
general ‘fought pitched battles at various times with three million
men, of whom he destroyed one million in the actual fighting and
took another million prisoners.
The Romans were notorious liars when it came to propaganda
figures, but there is no doubt that Alesia was the high or low point
(depending on our point of view) of slaughter that was both
unnecessary and deliberately provoked by Caesar. His opponents in
the senate (and they were many) mostly saw this as yet another
example of the blood-craze of a warmonger. His supporters, however,
wanted him to return to a triumph (for which the Plebs cheered
heartily) and to become consul again. If that should happen, with
the heaven-storming legions at his back, nothing could stop him.
Cato, as usual, stood firmly behind the increasingly obsolete
standards of republicanism. So did Cicero. Caesar spent some of his
loot money bribing senators back home. ‘By now,’ wrote Petronius
years later under the emperor Nero, ‘the conquering Roman had the
whole world in his hand, the sea, the land, the course of the stars.
But still he wanted more.’
The generic ‘conquering Roman’ could apply equally to Caesar and
to Pompey and at first, when Pompey was called upon to take his
former friend and son-in-law down a peg or two, he took to his bed
with a convenient illness. But the clash was coming – of that there
was no doubt.
In December 50 the consul Gaius Marcellus, with a large crowd of
senators and the usual morbidly curious mob, went to see Pompey in
his villa in the Alban Hills. Gaius Marcellus told him to march
against Caesar, and Pompey accepted. On behalf of Caesar, the
Tribune of the Plebs, Mark Antony, read out the general’s letter to
the senate. It spoke of peace, harmony and the good of Rome but few
people were listening and Metellus Scipio demanded that Caesar give
up his legions or be declared an outlaw. Only two senators opposed
the bill and although Antony vetoed it, the moment had come.
Martial law was declared on 7 January 49 with Pompey’s legions
from Capua patrolling the streets. Antony and the two loyal senators
fled, apparently disguised as slaves, to Ravenna where Caesar was
camped with the 13th Legion.
With the kind of panache that the Duke of Wellington exhibited
at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball shortly before Waterloo in AD
1815, Caesar had a bath and went to a banquet before riding to join
his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, an unimportant little stream
swollen by the winter rains, in the north of Italy.
We do not know exactly when or how Ptolemy XIII’s coup against
his sister took place. It is likely to have been in the spring of 49
and by the summer Ptolemy was regarded as Egypt’s sole ruler. The
eunuch nurse Potheinos gave himself the title of minister of finance
and the fickle Alexandrians seemed happy with that for the time
being.
Cleopatra was on the run, but only from Alexandria. Her
assiduous courtship of Upper Egypt now paid off. She reached Thebes
and crossed the desert to the Red Sea. With her was a sizeable army
under the highly efficient general Callimachos and she established a
rival court to Ptolemy’s at Askalon near Gaza.
Speaking fluent Aramaic and Hebrew as she did, she was able to
talk politics directly to local officials without the services of an
interpreter. Even allowing for the fact that the area had long been
loyal to the Ptolemies, the men who flocked to her now were in
effect being asked to take sides in a civil war in which they had no
direct interest and to choose between siblings of the same house. In
getting an army together at all, Cleopatra was achieving the
impossible and she coolly had coins struck at Askalon. Her portrait
on these shows the twenty-year-old as a younger, only slightly
female version of her father, with large eyes, a hooked nose and
firm, resolute mouth. She would need all her resolution in the
months ahead.
With hindsight, Pompey made a wrong call to abandon Rome. The
Rubicon, minor irritant as it was geographically to an experienced
army used to handling dangerous river-crossings, was the sacred
boundary between Gaul and Roman Italy. It was also a line in the
sand. Technically, Caesar’s advancing legions could have halted at
any time, but the crossing of the Rubicon was a symbolic act, a
declaration of war, and it duly entered the Latin and later the
English language as a point from which there could be no going back.
Caesar trotted south with the 13th at his back, marching in
double time, leaving his remaining four legions to catch up when
they could. His speed wrong-footed Pompey who effectively told Rome
it was on its own and marched his legions south. Tom Holland says,
‘Pompey, of course, could argue that there were sound military
reasons for the surrender of the capital – and so there were’, but
it is difficult to think of any. Rome could be taken militarily by
any army with ballistae (missiles) to smash its walls but the Gauls
and even the great Hannibal had both failed years before and it
would be four centuries before Alaric the Visigoth sacked the place.
Much more importantly, Rome was the symbol of the Republic – leave
it in an enemy’s hands, even a Roman enemy, and there would be no
Republic. And there was a fifty-fifty chance that Caesar’s legions,
loyal to him though they were, might refuse to march on their own
homes.
Terrified citizens, if they were rich enough, fled south. Only a
tiny handful of senators remained, leaving the city defenceless, not
only against Caesar, but against the mob who must have realized that
the rule of law had collapsed.
Domitius Ahenobarbus tried to rally troops against Caesar at
Corfinium, but his inexperienced troops ran at the sight of Caesar’s
grim calligae and Ahenobarbus was brought before Caesar. The rebel
was spared, as was the town; a stroke of genius from Caesar because
all the towns in Italy, including Rome itself, knew there would be
no destruction, no crucifixions, if they surrendered to him.
Pompey reached Brundisium, the port in the south-east, and
commandeered any sailing boat he could to get his men off the
peninsula, bound for Greece. The fast-marching Caesar caught him
there and bombarded his ramparts with slingshots and heavy
artillery. Even so, he could not close the harbour and Pompey and
his entire command slipped away into the night. With various
senators with him and others scattered as far away from Rome as they
felt safe, the defender of the Republic (as he billed himself now)
holed up in Thessalonica to await events. He invited various client
kings to his side. The Galatians arrived under Deiotarus, the
Cappadocians under Ariobarzanes, the Commagenians led by Antiochus.
He couldn’t know it yet, but with these auxiliaries, his army
outnumbered Caesar’s two to one.
Pompey may have had a plan to starve Rome out by cutting off
food supplies from the provinces, but if so, it was not feasible. He
had loyal legions in Spain, so effectively he controlled east and
west but in the days of slow and limited communication, coordinating
those disparate troops to strangle Caesar in the centre was never
likely to work.
When Caesar reached Rome, few people turned up to hear his
public proclamations. He was not greeted as a conquering hero and
the tribune Caecilius Metellus tried to stop him from entering the
treasury in the town’s temple of Saturn. Faced with death, Metellus
backed down, but now there could be no pretence. Caesar had crossed
the Rubicon and the Tiber. He had brought troops into the sacred
city, had occupied the heart of Rome itself and had grabbed its
valuables. He was a dictator in all but name.
Leaving the cavalry commander Marcus Lepidus to govern the city
in his absence, Caesar sailed for Spain in the summer of 49 and
smashed Pompey’s three legions there before Pompey knew what was
happening. With Caesar in Spain, Pompey could have landed in Italy
and probably retaken the city (Lepidus would have been no threat)
but he seems to have been struck by a deadly lethargy and no one in
military history moved as fast as Caesar.
Elsewhere, his supporters fared less well. Gaius Scribonius
Curio, once anti-Caesar but now won over to his side by cash, was
one of the two senators who had voted against both Caesar and Pompey
retaining their commands. He occupied Sicily for Caesar and crossed
to Africa. Here he faced Pompey’s general Publius Attius Varus and
King Juba of Numidia. His legions were wiped out in the Bagrades
Valley and he died with them. Marcus Caelius Rufus was no safer in
Rome itself. He tried to raise the people on behalf of Pompey,
having had his legislative ideas turned down by the senate, and was
killed in the violence that followed.
Early in 48, with storms battering the Adriatic, Caesar eluded
Pompey’s numerically superior fleet and reached Greece. Here, in a
grim winter, his troops were in danger of starving and the calligae
were forced to make bread from grass. There were alarms and
excursions, with the odd head-on clash, but Pompey was not anxious
to meet Caesar in the field and in terms of their reputation, Caesar
probably had the upper hand. ‘This man’, he had come to realize,
‘does not know how to win wars.’
At Dyrrachium (in today’s Albania) in July, a siege stalemate
ended in Caesar getting a bloody nose. Again, we cannot rely on the
numbers involved, but Caesar’s casualties are said to have been
1,000, Pompey’s far fewer. Caesar withdrew into northern Greece and
Pompey should have turned the retreat into a rout or taken this
second opportunity to sail for Rome. He did neither, but faced
Caesar again at Pharsalus on 9 August.
Caesar may have had 22,000 infantry, but Pompey had 45,000 and
his cavalry outnumbered Caesar’s by seven to one. It was this horsed
advantage that Pompey planned to capitalize on, especially as the
field at Pharsalus was broad and flat, excellent cavalry country. We
have to remember that nearly half of Pompey’s troops, perhaps more,
were auxiliaries, not trained in the Roman style and certainly
lacking Caesar’s legions’ recent gruelling experience in Gaul.
Pompey’s second in command, Titus Labienus, attacked with his
cavalry on his left flank, intending to demoralize Caesar’s flimsy
cavalry force and then hit the centre from the flank. Caesar, of
course, had anticipated this and placed six cohorts in the triple-
acies (three-line) formation behind his cavalry. As predicted, the
dictator’s horsemen broke in the face of a headlong charge, but
Caesar’s hidden infantry advanced, using their javelins as spears,
and Pompey’s cavalry broke up, allowing Caesar to hit his centre in
exactly the same way that his enemy had planned.
Quickly stripping a cohort from the rear line of each legion,
Caesar effectively created a fourth line which crashed forward
through the front lines to shatter Pompey’s centre. We have noted
already the dubious casualty figures written for posterity, often by
much later writers; Caesar claimed to have only 200 casualties as
opposed to Pompey’s 15,000.
A further 24,000 were captured and no less than nine legionary
eagles were taken. Even if the figures themselves were exaggerated,
the results were self-evident. Pompey had lost and his army was
destroyed. His wife, Cornelia, may have rallied her husband with a
positive pep talk as various commentators contend, but he had no
army left to renew the war. Or did he?
We do not know whether Pompey had summoned Ptolemy and Cleopatra
to join him at Thessalonica. On balance it seems unlikely because
Egypt was a ‘friend and ally’ of Rome, not technically a client
kingdom, and they owed no such military obligation. At this point,
of course, we have a bizarre situation. Both nations were waging
civil war. Egypt may have been beholden to Rome, but which Rome:
Caesar’s or Pompey’s? And if Pompey was asking for help, to whom did
he turn – Cleopatra or Ptolemy?
 The latter question is easier to answer. In September 48 the
power in Alexandria was unquestionably Ptolemy and his advisers.
Cleopatra was miles to the east, in a desert wilderness at the edge
of the Nile delta that might just as well have been the far side of
the moon. So Pompey waited with a little naval flotilla off the
Pharos while his people talked to Ptolemy’s. On 28 September, a
fishing boat was sent out to bring Pompey to meet the boy king in
person. While Ptolemy watched from a litter-borne throne on the
quayside and Cornelia looked on from the ships at the harbour
entrance, an extraordinary melodrama was played out. When Pompey
struggled ashore in the shallows, the water presumably water-logging
his cloak, one of his attendants, Septimus, who had fought under him
as a centurion, plunged a dagger into the general’s back.
Another ex-comrade, Salvius, rammed his dagger home and the
slave Philippus held his master’s hand as Achillas, Ptolemy’s
general, hacked off the head of the great Pompey. ‘He neither said
nor did anything unworthy of himself,’ Plutarch wrote years later,
‘only groaned a little and so ended his life in the sixtieth year
and only one day after his birthday.’
Philippus, in floods of tears, washed the headless corpse in sea
water and loaded it into a nearby fishing boat. He set fire to it in
a funeral pyre on the beach, which was still burning the next day.
An anonymous ex-comrade of Pompey was there at the time and Plutarch
records him as saying, ‘I find this happiness at last, to touch with
my hands and to prepare for burial the body of the greatest
Imperator that Rome has seen.’
Ptolemy knew, as any cynic did, that ‘dead men don’t bite’ but a
live one was on his way in pursuit of Pompey – Gaius Julius Caesar.
The new dictator arrived three days later with perhaps 4,000
men. Typically, he had not waited until his entire army had licked
their wounds after Pharsalus and knew he could track down Pompey
with far fewer men than he had.
Ptolemy’s army were massed to the east of Alexandria, since that
was the direction Cleopatra would arrive from, but the arrival of
Caesar in the harbour brought Potheinos and Theodotus scurrying to
meet him. They showed him the head of Pompey and his signet ring
with its lion and sword motif. Caesar wept.
Historians cannot decide how crocodile these tears were. Nobody
could wish the man dead more than Caesar, but nostalgia played its
part here – Pompey had, after all, been his son-in-law and former
friend. His tears may have been of shock and disgust, confirming in
Caesar what he had probably always heard, that the Ptolemies were a
pack of ravening wolves. With his lictors carrying their axes and
bundles, the symbol of Rome’s authority, he marched to Ptolemy’s
palace and took it over. The Alexandrians, predictably, rioted and
there were several deaths.
Caesar stayed. He gave the reason that winds kept his ships
penned in the harbour, but he probably intended to milk Alexandria
for all it had. He had never seen the astonishing city before and
was probably genuinely overawed by it. He visited the Pharos
lighthouse, rummaged through the scrolls in the library and paid
homage at the tomb of Alexander. He dictated his memoirs and played
for time. Then, like an old-fashioned headmaster arbitrating between
playground squabbles, he ordered Ptolemy and Cleopatra to disband
their armies and appear before him – two rulers by divine right on
the carpet of a warlord.

THE LADY OF THE TWO LANDS

ALEXANDRIA, 48

Carpets play a significant role in the folklore of the Middle

East and legend has it that this is how Caesar and Cleopatra met.
Like a malevolent spider at the centre of his web, the eunuch
Potheinos tried to manipulate both sides for his own ends. He let it
be known that Caesar’s men were dining off the Ptolemies’ silver
when in fact they were eating from wooden trenchers and the grain
they were fed was rotten. In the desert to the east, Cleopatra now
considered the time was right to get her throne back. Ptolemy
appeared to have all the cards – he was in possession of Alexandria
whose inhabitants by and large backed him as their rightful king. He
also had the Gabinian troops as a formidable bodyguard and perhaps
he could persuade the legendary Caesar to add his 4,000, as well as
his huge military expertise, to his cause. For his part, Caesar was
suspicious of the set-up in Alexandria. Rioting townspeople didn’t
bother him – he was a Roman, after all – but the pharaoh was only
fourteen and it was clear that his strings were being pulled by a
trio of self-serving degenerates – a eunuch, a teacher and a
mercenary. And they had all connived to murder Pompey.
Neither Ptolemy nor his sister had disbanded their armies as
Caesar had ordered, but Cleopatra knew she had to reach the general
somehow and Ptolemy would not give her safe conduct through his
lines. So, she sailed in a fishing boat with her faithful attendant
Apollodorus up the Nile into Alexandria and he carried her ashore.
Historians have argued about this bizarre entrance for centuries.
The queen of Egypt wrapped in a carpet only really fits in a Carry
On film46 and almost certainly is not what happened. She was
probably heavily veiled in the himatia, a Greek hood and cloak
resembling the burka worn by strict Muslim women today.
 There was no problem for Cleopatra to get into the royal palace;
she had probably been born in the place and must have known every
passageway and secret door. Apollodorus spoke fluent Latin so he
could have talked his way out of trouble with either the Gabinian
guards of Ptolemy or Caesar’s men. Even so, it is inconceivable that
Apollodorus and his disguised companion could have gained easy
access to Caesar. If proof were needed, the fate of Pompey proved
that assassination came easily to the Egyptians. Caesar must have
known of Cleopatra’s visit in advance and while he too understood
the need for secrecy, he was not at all alarmed by it.
All modern commentators – and most of them are women – spend a
considerable time wrestling with just how this famous meeting went.
For all the striven-for gender equality of the last hundred years,
they are obsessed with what she wore. Nobody asks what Caesar had
on. The point is that an important weapon in Cleopatra’s armoury was
her sexuality. She was twenty-one, perhaps twenty-two; her sexual
experience is unknown. Caesar was fifty-two, a veteran of the
bedroom as he was of the battlefield. He had been married four times
and was a notorious womanizer. No doubt Cleopatra had done her
homework on this man and if she had heard the rumours concerning
King Nicomedes, she probably assumed that they were exaggerated or
at any rate her charms could win the general over.
Stacy Schiff’s title of the relevant chapter in her book says it
all – ‘Cleopatra Captures the Old Man by Magic’.
She did not simply strip off and offer herself to Caesar; the
seduction was far more complex – and important – than that. And it
is by no means clear who seduced whom. It is easy to turn this into
a Mills & Boon romance or even soft porn, but we have to remember
the realpolitik of the situation. As the most powerful member of the
Mediterranean’s master race, Caesar could offer protection to Egypt
and could win Cleopatra’s throne back for her. On her part, she was
queen of the Mediterranean’s bread basket; if Rome controlled the
Nile, the City of the Seven Hills was unstoppable.
If we deal merely in physical superficialities, we are actually
looking at a living god and goddess. Caesar was leather-hard from
years of campaigning, but nearly bald and a sufferer from petit mal
– the ‘sleeping sickness’ that would sometimes cause fits. In an age
when fertility was everything, he had only fathered one legitimate
child – Julia – and she was dead. He had terrifying nightmares and
was known to be dangerously magnanimous to defeated enemies,
something of a weakness in the ancient world.
Laying aside all the platitudes of commentators then and since
who want to see Cleopatra as a femme fatale, much of her charm was
her bubbling personality and genuinely melodic voice. Various
portraits of her show a nose too hooked, a tight, meanlooking mouth
and a neck with wrinkles, even in her twenties, which suggests
thyroid problems.
Was she a virgin? We have no idea. Given the Ptolemies’ penchant
for incest, any lover is likely to have been a family member and she
did co-rule with Auletes for almost eighteen months. If the only
sexual experience she had had was with her father, it might explain
an instant attraction for Caesar, the classic older man of women’s
literature. What probably excited her was power. Caesar was a hero
in the mould of Alexander himself, and all Rome – and therefore the
civilized world – lay at his feet. He in turn may have been
captivated by her radiance and bowled over by her courage and
impudence.
In smuggling herself into his presence she had carried out
exactly the kind of impulsive action that he had done all his life.
At home was his wife Calpurnia, who has assumed something akin to
sainthood because of the dignified way she handled her husband’s
assassination in 44. In fact, he had already divorced her in 53 to
marry Pompey’s daughter and even the original marriage was merely
one of political convenience. Cleopatra must have seemed an
astonishing breath of fresh, if exotic and spice-laden, air after
that.
Plutarch’s account has Cleopatra having time to make herself
beautiful between rolling out of Apollodorus’ cloak/canvas
sack/carpet and meeting Caesar, but this seems unlikely. Would he
have been more enchanted by a dishevelled, wide-eyed girl on the
run, breathlessly begging his help or a cool seductress in full
make-up? Perhaps it was Plutarch’s inability to explain the
attraction that meant that, in his account, he hedged his bets.
The unlikely couple did not necessarily go to bed together that
night but it is likely to have been soon after because all Caesar’s
actions for the next three months are either with Cleopatra or on
her behalf. The next pressing problem was Ptolemy and his army and
when the boy discovered that his big sister was not only back in his
palace, but had pulled the linen over Caesar’s eyes, he stormed out
in tears, wailing to passers-by that he had been betrayed. Caesar’s
guards brought him back and put him under house arrest.
The victor of Pharsalus and so many other battles now had the
most important of Auletes’ children in his charge, one willingly,
the other not. He knew perfectly well that the scheming Potheinos
had the other two – seventeen-year-old Arsinoe and the boy Ptolemy
XIV – and that sooner or later he would use them as trump cards. It
was in Caesar’s interests – and Rome’s – to effect a reconciliation
between Cleopatra and her nearest brother. But one thing was
abundantly clear: Rome would not take a back seat in Egyptian
affairs again.
 Caesar had almost certainly misread the mood of the Alexandrians
who had swallowed whole the propaganda of Potheinos/Ptolemy that
Cleopatra was evil itself. He made a speech – for the gifted orator,
no problem – from a palace balcony and did the headmasterly thing
with Auletes’ squabbling children in front of him. Rather than the
riot act, he read them their father’s will. They must rule Egypt
together under Roman guardianship. Arsinoe and Ptolemy XIV should
have Cyprus, the island so recently lost to Rome when Auletes’
brother had swallowed poison rather than let Rome in.
Amid rumours that Potheinos was conspiring to poison Caesar (it
was well known that he would eat anything), Caesar realized that
Alexandria was on the point of open rebellion against him and the
Roman presence. The order to assassinate Potheinos made perfect
sense given the man’s ambition and dangerous nature, but to
Alexandrians it was a cause for war.
Rattled, Caesar sent ambassadors to Achillas, commanding
Ptolemy’s army outside the city to open negotiations. The general
had the men hacked down before they reached his tent. In his
account, Caesar plays down the desperate nature of the Egyptian war
he was now obliged to fight. His legions had not yet arrived from
Greece and he was heavily outnumbered. Low on food and fresh water
in the royal palace, he ordered his legionaries to dig until they
found underground streams. For men used to digging trenches and
building marching camps on campaign, this was bread and butter to
them, but they were harried night and day by missile attacks and
attempts to breach the palace walls.
And now Arsinoe escaped. After the removal of Potheinos, Caesar
had all three children holed up in the palace, but Arsinoe was a
Ptolemy through and through. Every bit as resourceful and
calculating as Cleopatra, she was proclaimed queen in Alexandria and
appeared at every opportunity alongside Achillas, now ‘her’ general.
During the street fighting, the Egyptian fleet returned. It
comprised fifty warships lent by Cleopatra to Pompey and both sides
were desperate to get their hands on them. Caesar got there first,
but had no time to do anything but set them alight to prevent them
falling into Achillas’ hands.
The fire, that terrifying night, spread to the town from the
harbour and destroyed part of Alexandria’s fabled library. In the
fierce fluttering of the flames, Caesar’s little garrison fought
hand to hand with Achillas’ Egyptians, determined to drive the
Romans out. Not to be outdone, the Alexandrians rebuilt the fleet in
a matter of days, making it impossible for Caesar to escape.
The one light at the end of the tunnel for the beleaguered
Romans was the in-fighting between their enemies. Arsinoe, with her
tutor Ganymedes, poisoned Achillas in a coup that made no sense at
all. In January 47 a delegation of townspeople came under a flag of
truce to Caesar to ask him to release Ptolemy, their rightful king.
Clearly, Arsinoe had plans to oust Cleopatra and by marrying her
brother and ruling with him, this would have the cloak of legality.
Caesar could see the point of this in his favour, too – he may have
been prepared to jettison Cleopatra at this stage – in order to
achieve a Roman-controlled Egypt.
In a bizarre scene that looks Hollywood-inspired, the crusty old
general sat down with the moody pharaoh and told it like it was.
Ptolemy cried; the rumour was that Caesar did too and in the end
they parted company sadly, rather as father and son. As soon as he
was free, Ptolemy took command of Achillas’ army, complete in golden
armour, and marched to face Caesar’s reinforcements, Anatolian and
Syrian troops under the king of Pergamon. A further 3,000 joined
this band under Antipatros, father of the Herod of Bible infamy.
They took Pelusium and marched towards present-day Cairo where
Ptolemy’s army was caught in a classic pincer movement with Caesar’s
troops. The boy pharaoh went down in the Nile delta, drowning in his
golden armour and his body was never found.
In the victory celebrations that followed, we see Cleopatra
behaving every inch a queen. It could be argued, as the Romans did,
that she only sat on the throne because of Caesar and as long as
Rome let her, but what followed were the years of her greatness,
leading, perhaps, to the ultimate tragedy. The couple visited the
shrine of Alexander the Great and Caesar left his purple robe and
rings there as votive offerings. He buried the embalmed head of
Pompey in the Nemesion, a tomb near the city wall, and erected a
pillar to the Jews of the city who had taken his and Cleopatra’s
side over the previous weeks.
A peculiar piece of politics now took place. Caesar decided,
almost certainly with Cleopatra’s full backing, that she should
become co-ruler, if only in name, with her remaining brother, now
twelve, who became Ptolemy XIV. They were formally Theoi
Philopatores Philadelphia, father-loving, sibling-loving gods.
Cleopatra then married Caesar, although marriage in Ptolemaic
Egypt had little in the way of religious solemnity attached to it.
From Caesar’s point of view, he was committing bigamy, not to
mention adultery, and Roman law would never see Cleopatra as
anything other than his mistress. When Octavian’s propaganda machine
got its claws into her ten years later, she became a whore whose
sexual excesses were made worse by the use of magic. This was the
only way to explain what had happened to Caesar and what would later
happen to Mark Antony.
Celebrations were held in Alexandria, both to mark the peace and
to celebrate the restoration of the rightful rulers of Egypt. From
there, the next step would be to sail and row south, down the Nile
and for the same reasons that Cleopatra had undertaken it when
Auletes died. This was not a honeymoon, with idyllic lovers on the
Nile drinking their nights away under a romantic moon.
This was Cleopatra the hard-headed politician visiting the
shrines and temples of old Egypt, reconfirming her one-ness with
gods and people, reminding them who she was. And if, on her arm, or
a politic half step behind, was the man who bestrode the narrow
world like a colossus, it only added to her power. There were, no
doubt, those who saw it differently; Cleopatra ruled because Rome
let her.
Her gilded barge rippled the Nile because the bald whoremonger
had said it should be so. And for Caesar, it possibly was a welcome
holiday. The couple took to the river with a flotilla of 400 ships,
including a sizeable bodyguard of Caesar’s veterans. Given the
situation, it is unlikely that any of them were Roman war-galleys,
but they were probably the rebuilt ships of Cleopatra’s fleet that
Caesar had burned in the harbour during the hectic weeks of the
siege.
Joann Fletcher highlights the sights that Caesar would have
seen, reminding us always that Cleopatra’s real purpose was to give
thanks and offerings to the various temples we described in Chapter
2. Much of this would have been awe-inspiring to Caesar, a reminder
that his own nation was pitifully new and rather vulgar by
comparison with the antiquity of Egypt.
Aboard their floating palace, the royal couple (in Egypt, though
never Rome, Caesar was viewed as a living god) were entertained by
priests and local officials on both banks of the Nile. This was
ruinously expensive for the host, in that Cleopatra was a guest and
not expected to pick up the tab. One surviving account refers to 200
sheep and 372 suckling pigs as the meat course of a much larger
banquet. Caesar must have been impressed; Egypt’s legendary wealth
and hospitality were living up to their reputation.
The journey began in ‘Cleopatra’s canal’ that ran from the
harbour at Alexandria through the city’s Egyptian quarter,
appropriately enough since the trip would take them from the
cosmopolitan world of their present into a very different – and for
Caesar, eye-popping – world of the past. Sailing across Lake
Mareotis, the flotilla entered the Nile proper at Naukratis, nearly
fifty miles south of the sea the Romans were beginning to see as
theirs.
They travelled across the Delta to Khem, which the Greeks called
Letopolis, and Iunu, the Greek Heliopolis (Sun City) on the opposite
bank. What is fascinating about this journey is how many ancient
temples were already tourist attractions to the Greeks and now the
Romans. Even as far south as the Valley of the Kings, astonished
visitors had chipped graffiti into the mysterious stone blocks – ‘I
saw and was astonished’ was the most common phrase. At Heliopolis,
Cleopatra probably took part in the sacred ceremony of the local
Mnevis bull, reinforcing her role as protector of her country’s
religion.
At Memphis, Cleopatra may have been crowned again in the
Egyptian tradition with the coiled cobra, the sun disc of Ra and the
horns of the sacred cow on her top-heavy crown. She was Nea Isis,
the living goddess, and Isis was the female equivalent of Ptah, God
of creation, from whom the name Egypt was born.
At various points on this royal progress, Caesar must have been
astonished at the ‘magic’ of the decadent east. Cleopatra’s priests
used Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and Greek variants of their gods in
their elaborate rituals and involved the whole panoply of animal
deities – Horus, the hawkhead, whose tears were the most powerful
talisman in the ancient world; Anubis the jackal; Bes, the dwarf god
of birth; Sobek, the crocodile. At Khmun, the Greek Hermopolis,
which was the cult centre of Thoth, god of wisdom, with whom the
intellectual Cleopatra had a particular affinity, sacred ibises with
their odd-shaped beaks were fed a diet of clover. These birds and
the baboons Caesar had probably never seen before were mummified in
the area in their thousands.
So impressed was Cleopatra by the appearance of the Ptolemais
Hermion that she wrote to Theon, her ‘fixer’ in the area on 7 March
46 ‘let the relevant persons be told that the temple of Isis built
on behalf of our wellbeing by Callimachos [her strategos along this
stretch of the Nile] is to be tax free and inviolable together with
the houses built around it as far as the wall of the city’.
At Dendera, special songs were written for Cleopatra’s and
Caesar’s visit.
‘Pharaoh comes to dance and comes to sing. Mistress, see him
dancing, see the skipping!’ We have no clear idea of the sound of
Egyptian music, although we know what instruments it was played on.
This far south, it may have been influenced by the African tribal
rhythms of Nubia with its drums and tambourines. The priests and
‘events organizers’ would have remembered that Cleopatra’s father
was Auletes, the Piper, with his love of music and drink.
At Thebes, Caesar would have seen the 60-foot-high statues that
made their own music, and sang to passers-by. In fact, it was a
trick of the desert winds that echoed through the narrow gaps
between the statues’ legs. Elsewhere, Egyptian priests were not
above helping the ‘magic’ along by chanting from secret recesses in
temple walls. The gullible, and this may even include Caesar,
believed every word.
 We do not know exactly how far south Cleopatra and her lover-god
sailed.
Caesar was fascinated, as were most scholars then and since,
with the source of the Nile, but if finding that was his intention,
he came up woefully short. Not for another nineteen centuries would
that problem be solved.
One account says that Caesar’s soldiers would go no further,
rather as Alexander the Great’s army had,once said ‘enough is
enough’ on his campaign trail 300 years earlier. There was clearly
no mutiny as such, but Caesar must have realized that his
heavenstorming calligae had not seen home for six years, in some
cases more, and he owed them a comfortable retirement on the farms
of the latifundia. More importantly, with Pompey’s sons Sextus and
Magnus on the rampage in their murdered father’s name, he had
unfinished business in Rome.
The couple and their dazzling entourage turned north again and
made for Alexandria. The general left Egypt on 10 June. He had been
away from Rome for six hectic months and he left 12,000 troops
behind for Cleopatra’s – and Rome’s – protection. Some of these men
would never see their homes again. Did the trip down the Nile, with
its heady mix of divinity and adoration, give him ideas above the
station of a mortal Roman, which would lead to his death two years
later?
Two weeks after Caesar left, Cleopatra went into labour with her
first child – Ptolemy Caesar – the offspring of the two most
powerful people in the world; another Alexander.

LITTLE CAESAR
ALEXANDRIA, 47

Ptolemy XV Caesar Theos Philopator kai Philomater, the father-

loving and mother-loving god, was born on 23 June 47.
His birth, though details have not survived, would have followed
the same Graeco-Egyptian ritual mix of common sense, wisdom and
religious mumbo-jumbo that had surrounded Cleopatra’s own birth
twenty-four years earlier. The boy had the golden hair of his
father, although detractors at the time and historians later have
doubted whether Caesarion (little Caesar) was actually Caesar’s
child. The question must be asked whose child could he have been?
Ptolemy XIV was still only thirteen so consummation of his political
marriage to Cleopatra must seriously be doubted.
We could factor in a suitable attendant/slave stud, perhaps
Apollodorus, but the time-scale means that Cleopatra would have to
be sleeping with him at the same time as Caesar. What is important
is that the three men who mattered most in Cleopatra’s life in this
time-frame and slightly later – Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian –
all believed Caesarion to be Caesar’s. Let that be enough.
For a ritual seven days, mother and baby rested hidden from the
world, even from most of the court. Infant mortality was high in the
ancient world, as it would remain for centuries, and only time would
tell if Caesarion would live to become the new Alexander. The period
of greatest danger over, Cleopatra and her son emerged into the
Alexandrian sunshine to begin a round of esoteric celebrations. The
Nile rose, as if by magic, giving a new birth to the people of Egypt
as their queen had to Caesarion. Cleopatra had new coins struck,
showing the boy as Horus, the son of Isis, whose living counterpart
she was. The legend read Kleopatras Basillas, Cleopatra the female
king.
In some ways this was the high water mark of Cleopatra’s reign,
so soon after it had been re-established, and from the pattern of
events – the quiescence of both Alexandria and Upper Egypt – she
must have been coping well with all the minutiae of government we
saw in Chapter 1. Nominally still married to Ptolemy XIV to appease
the supposed traditionalists, both Greek and Egyptian, she may well
have been hatching plans for a fuller official relationship with
Caesar. Depending on how it went for him in Rome, his little son
might inherit the earth.
Caesar was not yet in Rome. Traditionalists there wrung their
hands. The Republic had been shattered by the war between Pompey and
Caesar and was in desperate need of healing. Mark Antony, who had
been left behind with Lepidus to hold things together in Caesar’s
absence, was becoming an embarrassment.
He had been helping himself to Pompey’s various properties,
including the Alban villa where Cleopatra had stayed with her father
as a girl, and doing what Mark Antony did best: drinking. It was
rumoured that he staggered around the tabernae of Rome with an
‘actress’ called Volumnia on his arm and even drove a chariot pulled
by lions through the streets. Where, wailed the traditionalist
republicans, was Caesar?
He was in Anatolia (modern Turkey) in August 47, hunting the
sons of Pompey, both of whom had escaped Pharsalus, and getting
money out of local rulers who had lent cash to Pompey in the civil
war. In terms of payback, nobody was more thorough than Julius
Caesar. At Zela on 2 August, Caesar took on Pharnaces, the king of
Pontus, who had overrun a section of Rome’s rapidly growing empire
in the previous months. Pharnaces’ chariots, with their scythed
wheels, literally sliced through the Roman ranks, but the veteran
6th Legion held the line and drove back Pharnaces’ left flank where
a steep ravine broke their formation. Caesar sent back to Rome his
famous despatch – ‘veni, vidi, vici’ – ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’.
By the end of September Caesar had crossed to Tarentum in the
south of Italy where he met his old enemy Cicero who was there in
his villa under house arrest by Mark Antony. Caesar released him in
exchange for cash, which cannot have done much to heal the breach
between them. Caesar may have been on his way back to Rome at this
point – in fact, the visit to Tarentum makes little sense if this
was not his plan – when word reached him that Pompey’s sons were
rebuilding an army in what today is Tunisia.
Back went Caesar to Africa, sailing on the last day of the mid-
winter solstice, which the Christians would hijack later as the
birthday of Jesus Christ, and reached Hadrumentum three days later.
This was not the sailing season and the Mediterranean could be
notoriously treacherous, especially around Sicily, but men like
Caesar had no patience with such things. By the standards of the
ancient world, he was an old man in a hurry.
Gnaeus and Sextus Pompey had perhaps two legions and the crack
cavalry of Juba of Numidia, who used elephants and camels to instil
terror in the enemy.
Realizing that Caesar was unlikely to be beaten in the field,
Pompey’s sons kept up a guerrilla war until 6 April 46 when Caesar
forced them to fight at Thapsus.
The Pompeys’ army was led by Metellus Scipio who abandoned the
relative safety of his fortified city to confront Caesar head on. As
at Pharsalus, Caesar’s army formed into three lines, but changed
formation at the last minute to panic Juba’s elephants whose
headlong flight caused chaos in Scipio’s ranks. Once again, we have
the laughable propaganda figures of the victors – fifty of Caesar’s
dead compared with 5,000 of Scipio’s. Scipio himself committed
suicide in the Roman tradition, as did Cato (the younger) who had
opposed Caesar for years and had fought against him at Dyrrachium.
The irony was that the patriotic republican would almost certainly
have been spared if he had surrendered because that was Caesar’s
way.
The conqueror of so many lands and winner of so many battles –
302 by his own account – helped himself to Juba’s treasure, absorbed
Juba’s cavalry into the Roman army and made Numidia a Roman
province, rich, as it was, in grain.
 Fifty-four years old and suffering increasingly from the falling
sickness, Julius Caesar went home.
Now the full effect of Caesar’s destruction of Pompey became
apparent and it began to dawn on the senate that, far from restored
in their republican glory, they were being sidelined. It was partly
their fault. They heaped increasingly ludicrous honours on Caesar.
He was Pontifex Maximus again and Dictator, at first for ten years
and then for life. He began to wear scarlet parade boots and to
dress as the ancient kings did, although he pointedly refused the
title of king even when Mark Antony offered it to him. One senator
proposed that Caesar be above the law and that any woman in Rome
should be his for the asking. In his darker moments Caesar probably
realized that if Pompey had been the victor at Pharsalus, he would
be approaching a kind of divinity just as Caesar was.
And nowhere was Caesar’s arrogance more obvious than in the four
triumphs he effectively awarded himself in September and October.
The festivities lasted for forty days, during which Rome itself was
in chaos. Nobody worked and at various times people were trampled to
death in the hysterical crowds. Gold crowns – 2,822 of them: nine
tons of bullion – were paraded in the streets from all parts of the
empire. Each of Caesar’s calligae got 6,000 denarii as a bonus (the
usual pay was one denarius a day). Generous as this was, one
legionary, overheard to grumble that it could have been more if it
were not for the cost of the triumphs, was decapitated for his
insolence and his head displayed in the Temple of Mars.
The Gallic triumph came first, Caesar riding in his chariot with
a slave behind him whispering, ‘Remember you are mortal.’ Caesar
didn’t remember it, not at least until the Ides of March two years
later. His axle broke, but he was above omens like that and revelled
in the adulation of the mob. The procession lasted all day; forty
elephants with flaming torches in their trunks lit the bizarre
finale, in which Vercingetorix, the Gallic leader, was garotted in
full view of the crowd.
Most of them were horrified, not at the spectacle itself, but
because Vercingetorix was a brilliant general and deserved a better
fate.
The second triumph was for Caesar’s victory over the Egyptians.
The Nile was portrayed as a huge male god and there was an enormous
model of the Pharos lighthouse and paintings of the deaths of the
treacherous Potheinos and Achillas. Once again, the crowd were less
pleased with the appearance of Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe, bound in
golden chains. Caesar had taken her with him when he left Egypt and
the crowd probably thought he intended to have her publicly
strangled too.
 The Pharnaces campaign was celebrated in the third triumph and
the last one was for Africa, with grisly pictures of Pompey’s
supporters, like Cato, committing suicide in their abject failure
and misery. The prize here was little Juba, the four-year-old son of
the king of Numidia, who would be kept in Rome and brought up as a
Roman, the most civilizing of all fates. There were chariot races
and gladiatorial combats in which 320 gladiators fought to the death
for the crowd. Four hundred lions died in the arena and for the
first time, Romans saw a giraffe, which they called a cameleopard on
account of its soft muzzle and spotted hide. Pitched battles were
re-enacted, even one involving a naval fight on an artificial lake.
No expense was spared and Rome loved it.
What they did not love was Cleopatra. Caesar sent for his Greek
wife in the late summer of 46, but it is unclear exactly when she
arrived in Rome or exactly why he sent for her. Stacy Schiff
believes that this was Cleopatra’s first visit, indeed her first
sailing across the Mediterranean. If, as I believe, she had
travelled with Auletes as an eleven-year-old, she was not only used
to sailing but knew Rome too. The circumstances were, of course,
very different. Then she had been a child, albeit a precocious one,
effectively exiled from Egypt and going cap in hand to Rome. Now she
was a queen, mature, powerful and sophisticated.
She had survived civil war, as Rome had, and not only had a son
who would continue her line, but her son’s father was the most
powerful man in Rome. Now she would come with all the status that
went with her position and she brought the proverbial kitchen sink.
Effectively the whole court travelled with her.
Arsinoe, of course, was already Caesar’s prisoner in Rome.
Caesarion was brought to show Caesar his son for the first time
(which may well explain why he had invited Cleopatra in the first
place) and, bearing in mind the Ptolemies’ reputation for intrigue,
kid-brother and husband Ptolemy XIV was brought along too. It was
not safe to leave him behind.
All this makes it clear that Egypt – and more especially,
Alexandria – was quiet. Cleopatra would not have dared leave if
there were unrest of any kind. In what was an age of intensely
personal government, she was not only removing the queen, the living
Isis, but her husband-brother and her heir. In fact, if Cleopatra’s
ship had gone down in the Mediterranean it is difficult to know who
would have ruled Egypt, and the Ptolemaic dynasty would have come to
an abrupt halt seventeen years before it did. Undoubtedly, the
Romans would have moved in and turned Cleopatra’s country into a
province.
Experts are divided over the travelling time. Stacy Schiff
claims that Cleopatra was a nervous sailor, and that the entourage
was so huge that the ships could not carry enough provisions to stay
in open water and had to put in to various coastal villages in
Rhodes and Crete to re-victual. This could take weeks.
Joann Fletcher thinks the journey might have been accomplished
in less than a fortnight, depending on the prevailing winds. On the
other hand, Fletcher implies that Cleopatra was not there for
Caesar’s triumphs; Schiff believes she was.
The problem is that we have no Alexandrian evidence for this
visit, only the occasional reference in Roman writings. Surely, if
Cleopatra had been there for the triumphs, Caesar would have paraded
her, not as a prisoner of war, which she was not, but as a ‘friend
and ally of Rome’, and this does not seem to have happened. On the
other hand, wouldn’t the dictator have wanted her there to share his
celebrations as he had shared hers along the Nile? Perhaps she
watched from under one of Caesar’s expensive silk awnings, taking in
the spectacle from a discreet distance.
What the real Cleopatra did not do, unlike Elizabeth Taylor in
1963, was to make her own triumphal entry into Rome. The film
(described in Chapter 18) shows the queen and her five-year-old son
(Caesarion was actually about eighteen months old) sitting
glittering in gold between the paws of a huge basalt sphinx, the
whole float carried by Nubian slaves. Rome would not have stood for
that, as both Caesar and Cleopatra knew.
At Piteoli, Rome’s nearest harbour, Cleopatra would have been
met by Caesar or a delegation. She would have given thanks for her
safe sea-crossing at the temple of Isis in the town before
travelling by carriage or litter along the Appian Way which, when
she was Caesarion’s age, had been dotted with the crucified corpses
of Spartacus’ army.
By Caesar’s edict, no wheeled vehicle could be driven in the
streets of Rome during the hours of daylight, so Cleopatra either
arrived after dark or was carried by her slaves in a litter. She was
housed in Caesar’s villa on the Janiculum Hill on the west bank of
the Tiber, a fashionable spot with cypresses and cedars and well
away from the dictator’s town house near the Forum where he lived
with Calpurnia. Given the likely size of Cleopatra’s entourage, the
villa would have been too small and her staff and hangers-on must
have been housed elsewhere.
What did Cleopatra make of Rome now that she saw it through a
queen’s eyes? Probably not a lot. When the British chieftain
Caratacus was taken in chains to the city as a prisoner of war in
the next generation, he was astonished at the size and splendour of
the place. ‘Why, with all this,’ he is reported to have asked, ‘do
you want our poor mud huts?’ It was a fair question but he never saw
Alexandria. Technically, Rome’s population was probably bigger than
that of Cleopatra’s capital, but it was crammed in between those
annoying seven hills and was frankly a mess.
The only truly impressive buildings in the city centre were
Pompey’s Theatre and Caesar’s Forum, huge physical statements made
by the men who had slogged it out for the victor’s laurel wreath.
Elsewhere, jerrybuilt houses were falling down or being pulled down
by property developers like Crassus, always on the look-out for a
fast denarius. For a nation that prided itself on the rigid
formality of its army camps and its innate sense of order, Rome’s
streets were a shambles. Cleopatra’s palace back home dwarfed
anything that Rome had to offer – and it covered a third of
spacious, grid-patterned Alexandria. She probably stayed away from
the sweating multitude and waited for the world to come to her.
Cleopatra’s presence made life awkward for Romans. Caesar’s
friends, including Mark Antony and the gauche, puny sixteen-year-old
Octavian, who would become Caesar’s Roman heir, may have been
frequent visitors, as of course (presumably without Calpurnia) was
Caesar himself. The historian Cassius Dio noted that Caesar was not
at all concerned by the malicious gossip that flew in every taberna
and on every street corner. Cicero, sixty, bitter, sidelined and
with his beloved Republic sinking into a morass of corruption and
dictatorship, visited Cleopatra more than once because, like most
people, he couldn’t stay away. The Greek woman was fascinating. She
was highly intelligent, could talk literature and politics like any
man and had that dazzling radiance coupled with the magical, musical
voice. In a letter to his friend Atticus on 13 June 44 he wrote:
I hate the queen ... [Her] insolence when she was living in
Caesar’s house in the gardens beyond the Tiber, I cannot recall
without indignation. So, no dealings with that lot. They seem to
think I have not only no spirit, but no feelings at all.
There was some carping about a book. It seems from the letter
that Cleopatra had offered to lend Cicero one and had forgotten
about it. He was, of course, missing the point. She had every right
to be insolent – Cicero’s father was a minor landowner and she owned
the largest library in the world.
But Cleopatra caused upset in a wider and far more important
context. Caesar put up a golden statue to Isis in the temple of
Venus Genetrix in the Forum.
Since Isis was so closely associated with Cleopatra, the image
could have been of the queen herself. The Egyptians might erect such
statues to living rulers; the Romans did not. One or two statues of
Pompey were permitted, but only after the man was dead. Rome was
outraged but only the shrewdest politicians saw the extent to which
Caesar had been bewitched by the Egyptian whore. He embarked on a
series of reforms that autumn, which, far from restoring the
Republic, seemed to be turning Rome into an alien place. He set up
plans for a great library along Alexandrian lines where Greek as
well as Latin texts would be lodged. He set up an official census
along Egyptian lines – the birth of Christ is recorded in the Bible
as taking place at census time in the reign of Augustus Caesar, the
lifted title that Octavian took for himself.
Caesar intended to drain the Pontine marshes around the city,
deadly as they were with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, to create
locks and canals of Alexandrian design. He wanted to turn Ostia into
a huge, modern port with quays and docks like those in the Egyptian
capital. He encouraged the cult worship of the drunken god Dionysus,
with whom Cleopatra’s father had been identified, even though Romans
hated the idea. He rationalized the calendar, instituting the Julian
month and re-ordering the year according to the latest Greek
thinking.
All this was modernization and most of it made sense, but it
went completely against what Romans loved most – tradition. It all
seemed so foreign and it could all be laid at the door of Cleopatra.
It is not likely that she stayed in Caesar’s villa for two
years. Egypt could not spare her for that long. She probably sailed
home for the summer of 45, returning later in the year having
assured herself that all was well in Alexandria.
But on her return, all was far from well in Rome.
Caesar came back from his last campaign in September 45 and
wrote his will.
Placed in the temple of the Vestal Virgins (which not even the
most ferocious rebel was likely to attack), the document stated that
his entire estate should pass to his son or any future sons.
Caesarion is not mentioned by name (it was illegal for Romans to
make bequests to foreigners) but the clause was there because his
father knew perfectly well how fragile life was; the boy might not
live to adulthood (he didn’t) and Cleopatra might yet bear him more
sons. Should that fail, three-quarters of his estate should go to
his great-nephew Octavian (Gaius Octavius) who, in the event of his
own death, would be proclaimed Caesar’s son.
The remaining quarter was to be shared equally between a nephew
and another great-nephew.
As 44 dawned, Caesar may have been starting to think of himself
as a god.
This was routine in Egypt – for centuries the pharaohs had been
revered this way and the Ptolemies had continued the tradition. To
diehard republicans, this was the worst thing that could happen.
Caesar sat on a gold throne. Caesar had his face chiselled on coins.
Caesar was Pontifex Maximus. Caesar was Dictator for life. The old
checks and balances of consulship, praetorship or quaestorship for a
year did not apply to Caesar. Again, on the feast of Lupercalia,
Mark Antony offered Caesar the title of king of Rome. Again, Caesar
refused, but his refusal seemed, to those who heard it, more
hesitant than it had been.
And the last straw was a new campaign that Caesar had been
planning against Parthia. With that state destroyed, the way would
be clear to India where Alexander the Great’s army had gone 300
years earlier. And wasn’t the queen of Egypt descended from one of
Alexander’s generals? And, worse, wasn’t there an oracle that had
foretold that Parthia could only be conquered by a king?
Rome, 15 March 44. It began a day like any other and it was
raining. Later omen-watchers and rumourmongers would claim that
lightning bolts struck down statues and lionesses whelped in the
streets. Caesar had been warned to beware the Ides of March,
essentially a frolicsome drinking festival, and to stay away from
the senate. Calpurnia had had a dream in which Pompey’s statue ran
red with blood. Caesar had already sent sixteen legions marching
east and Rome was waiting to hear who he would appoint consul in his
own absence on campaign.
He had been at dinner on the previous day when the discussion
turned on death and his own answer as to what sort of death was best
was ‘a sudden one’.
The morning of the 15th was business as usual. In the senate,
Caesar sat on his throne and heard petitions. Mark Antony, who might
well have been able to save the man’s life, was delayed in
conversation outside. Tullius Cimber tugged on Caesar’s toga as he
gave him a scroll to read. This was the signal the others were
waiting for. Publius Casca struck the first blow, aiming for
Caesar’s throat but merely grazing his chest. The Dictator threw him
aside but was hit in the ribs, probably by Casca’s brother Gaius,
who later denied all knowledge of it.
The others closed in for the kill, the embittered republican
Gaius Cassius Longinus aiming deliberately for the face. Stumbling
in his toga, bleeding profusely and dying, Caesar staggered at the
base of the statue of his old enemy, Pompey, and recognized his
friend (and perhaps illegitimate son) Marcus Junius Brutus, dagger
in hand. He said, ‘You too, my child?’ And he said it, not in the
famous ‘Et tu, Brute?’ of the Romans, but ‘kai su teknon?’ of the
Greeks. It was the language of cultured Romans, but it was also the
language of Cleopatra.
The honourable men who had murdered Caesar, hysterical and
covered in his blood as well as their own where their knives had
missed the intended target, spread out from Pompey’s Theatre to tell
an appalled Rome what they had done.
The man who would be a god lay with twenty-three stab wounds and
for Cleopatra, any hopes she had of a future with him were
shattered. That part of her life was over.

BOOK FIVE: ANTONY

REBIRTH
ROME, 44

With hindsight, all the murder of Caesar achieved was a

speeding-up of the inevitable. If the honourable men who killed him
hoped for an instant restoration of republican values, they were
mistaken. Amateurs at the killing game, they had effectively bungled
the assassination, had no coherent plan for the future and
ultimately let the moral high ground fall to the two men who most of
Rome saw as Caesar’s successors – Mark Antony and Octavian.
Caesar’s mutilated corpse was delivered to Calpurnia. There was
panic in the streets. Mark Antony, temporarily wrong-footed, got out
of Pompey’s villa, which was now his home, and left Rome, disguised
as a slave. It was the second time he had done that. We do not know
who broke the news to Cleopatra or what her reaction was. Joann
Fletcher has her tearing her hair and clothes in the traditional
lament, but this in itself was only a knee-jerk reaction – all
around the Mediterranean, such ritual was expected. Our problem, for
all the bitchy comments of Romans like Cicero, is that we do not
know the exact relationship of Caesar and the queen.
In Egyptian/Alexandrian eyes, she was his wife; in Roman terms,
his mistress. She was almost certainly the mother of his child (and
was, according to Cicero, pregnant again by the Ides of March). Was
she in love with him? Or he with her? We cannot answer that. What is
obvious is that the death of Caesar represented a catastrophic
political blow to Cleopatra. If she had ambitions to play queen of
Rome to Caesar’s king, as some Romans believed, that would never
happen now. And it was not safe for her to stay in Rome.
She probably did stay in Rome for Caesar’s funeral, but took no
part in it.
While Mark Antony, creeping back after a suitable time, now
launched his ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ to the mob while
displaying Caesar’s wounds, Cleopatra’s people were packing. By the
middle of April she had gone, sailing directly for home past the
Straits of Messina.
 As her flotilla sailed past the Pharos light, to be welcomed
probably by her huge battle fleet, Cleopatra must have realized
that, after the shock of the last weeks, all was well at home.
Whoever had run Egypt in her second absence – it would nominally
have been Ptolemy XIV but backed by a highly competent, if
anonymous, finance minister – had done an excellent job and the
queen could relax.
The next three years of Cleopatra’s life and reign are shrouded
in a certain mystery. If she was indeed pregnant when she left Rome,
she must have miscarried because if there was one thing the
Alexandrian/Egyptian chroniclers would have monitored, it was the
birth of a royal child, especially if it were a boy, a brother to
Caesarion. More likely, this was a piece of malicious gossip, which
Cicero, ready to believe anything of the woman who forgot to lend
him a book, readily accepted. The summer of 44 would have been one
of celebrations.
In July Caesarion was officially designated a pharaoh of Egypt –
‘King Ptolemy, who is as well Caesar, father-loving, mother-loving
god.’ He was three, but in the months ahead, his bas-relief would
appear in front of his mother on the temple wall at Dendera as a
fully grown adult, wearing the crown of both Egypts. In terms of
Egyptian art, he is indistinguishable from Rameses the Great or any
of the pharaohs of the older kingdoms.
Everywhere, art appeared with Cleopatra as Isis. She was
consciously building on the Isis/Horus/Osiris story. Osiris was the
murdered Caesar, dismembered by assassins’ knives in the senate;
Horus, his son Caesarion vowing to avenge his father’s murder.
Others would do that work for him, but as far as Cleopatra’s
propaganda is concerned, it was perfect – history repeating
theology. A cynical world like ours sees all this as hypocrisy and
hype, but that is to misunderstand the woman and her times.
Cleopatra’s people, Alexandrians and Egyptians, believed all this
and so did Cleopatra. It was an integral part of life.
As well as the Dendera temple, Cleopatra began a building
programme on a par with that of her father. A new temple sprang up
at Edfu to the south and she built a shrine in ship form at Coptos.
A birthing-house, which was part chapel, part natal clinic, was
established at Armant (Hermonthis).
The place had an antechamber, a walkway with columns, two
reception rooms and a flat roof for rituals, as well as the birth
room itself. Cleopatra was only twenty-six; there may well be other
royal births. In Alexandria itself she ordered the construction of
the Caesarion, a shrine to her dead husband, with libraries,
colonnades and a brilliant art collection. She also began a huge
temple of Isis, which would have dwarfed everything else in
Alexandria but which was unfinished at her death and was probably
never completed.
The intellectual queen returned to her bluestocking interests.
The library at Alexandria had always attracted scholars, a
university by another name, and Cleopatra encouraged this. Didymus
was the most distinguished of these, churning out 3,500 monographs
on everything under the sun. So supportive of medical science was
the queen that later Arab scholars, who always thought more highly
of her than their narrow, prejudiced Christian contemporaries,
assumed that she herself carried out studies into gynaecology and
obstetrics.
Perhaps she did. A book referred to, but which has not survived,
is called the Gynaecia Cleopatrae and refers to contraceptive
methods that were supposedly used by the queen. The Egyptians of
this period certainly used primitive caps made of a mixture of
crocodile dung and honey, but we cannot link any of this directly to
Cleopatra. It is out of this fascination with burgeoning science
that later generations would fashion the legend of Cleopatra the
sorceress, skilled in the black arts that could emasculate strong
men and unsettle the world.
In the day-to-day running of her country, which is so
infuriatingly vague in terms of the written record, we must assume
that Cleopatra was coping well. Not to do so would invite revolt,
especially in hot-headed Alexandria, which had a reputation for
dismembering its rulers. The usual Nile floods of 43 and 42 did not
happen. What is explicable to us today as banal geography and
weather systems were presumed to be the result of divine displeasure
then. No doubt the priesthood, led by Cleopatra as the living Isis,
would have gone through the ancient rituals to their gods.
But people were starving and on a more practical level, the
queen devalued the currency, reducing the silver content of her
coinage, for the first time giving coins an actual token value. The
bronze drachma she issued was roughly the value of the Roman
denarius. She opened the royal granaries, vast, guarded warehouses
within the royal compound in Alexandria, and distributed free wheat
to her people.
There was a flood of petitions from all over Egypt and
invariably Cleopatra granted concessions, eased tax burdens and
generally made life as comfortable for her people as she could. The
Jewish historian turned Roman sycophant Josephus maintains that the
queen did not extend these privileges to Alexandria’s large Jewish
community. This is unlikely. We know that Jews were involved in all
levels of government, even the surprisingly efficient police force,
and it was a Jewish army that had backed her and Caesar in 48. This
is probably an early example of a Jewish writer heaping misery on
his people as of right, a self-fulfilling prophecy that would echo
down the centuries. But, then, Josephus, like Cicero, ‘hated the
queen’. To cap it all, a disease that sounds suspiciously like
bubonic plague broke out on Egypt’s frontiers, adding to the
country’s woes.
Even so, there was no rebellion, nor even a rumour of one;
Cleopatra was doing something right.
But the curse of the Ptolemies was not fully extinguished. If
Caesarion was the heir, then Ptolemy XIV was very definitely the
spare and as such he may have been in the way. The boy was fifteen
in 44 and while Cleopatra took him with her on her second trip to
Rome she appears to have left him behind on the third. On the
surface all appeared calm when she came back in April, but could
there have been machinations from her kid brother? After all,
exactly the same thing had happened about six years earlier, when
Ptolemy XIII had conspired with Potheinos et al to oust Cleopatra.
Nothing on that scale happened in 44, but she would have been ultra-
sensitive to the possibility, as would her supporters.
Our problem is that we know almost nothing of Ptolemy XIV. His
older brother was petulant, emotional, prone to burst into tears
and, in the circumstances of his death by drowning on campaign,
unlucky. But this Ptolemy is just a cipher, a pharaoh in name only.
Eleven years Cleopatra’s junior, he is unlikely to have had any say
in the politics of her reign. He could, of course, have died of any
one of a hundred natural causes, given the era in which he lived,
but the timing is suspect. His death enabled Cleopatra to declare
Caesarion as co-regent, something she could not have done during the
boy’s lifetime.
Josephus states openly that she murdered her brother and we all
know that Josephus, writing a century after her death, was prepared
to believe anything of Cleopatra. The balance of probabilities is
that she did have the boy dispatched, perhaps by poison, so that the
whole thing could be done quickly, without fuss, behind the palace
walls. And the motive, rather than the queen doing a bit of tidying
up, is that Ptolemy may have been conspiring behind the scenes with
his other sister, Arsinoe.
We last saw the girl as part of Caesar’s Egyptian triumph back
in 46, bound with golden shackles. It is possible that he intended
to have her murdered, as the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix was
murdered, but that would have offended the sensibilities of Rome and
Caesar knew better. Instead, she was sent into exile in Ephesus in
modern Turkey in what was probably a loose and not unpleasant house
arrest. As a schemer and survivor, Arsinoe was a chip off the
Ptolemaic old block. She surrounded herself with a growing group of
supporters at Ephesus who demanded she be queen of Egypt. She almost
certainly had agents working for her (as did Cleopatra) in Rome and
may have been responsible for the appearance of a pretender to the
throne, claiming to be Ptolemy XIII miraculously surviving the
drowning in the Nile delta.
This would be ideal; Arsinoe could supplant Cleopatra and rule
with her ‘brother’, satisfying Ptolemaic and Egyptian tradition and
giving her sole power in reality.
One particular problem area was Cyprus. Auletes’ will had
stipulated that Cyprus should go to Arsinoe and Ptolemy XIV as his
youngest children. The place was important to Egypt because it
provided copper and timber, but Rome had taken it from Auletes’
brother and it is likely that the island never had much affinity
with Cleopatra herself. Rumours reached the queen in 43 that Arsinoe
was in contact with Serapion, the local governor. Both sisters,
however, knew that the only way Arsinoe could make real headway was
by getting the backing of Rome.
Since the murder of Caesar, Rome was a schizophrenic city,
paralysed by its own insecurity. A greyness physically hung over the
seven hills, which may have been the lingering volcanic smoke of
Etna, rumbling away 250 miles to the south. By 42 the many factions
would polarize into Mark Antony and Octavian allying with Marcus
Lepidus as the second triumvirate hunting down Caesar’s murderers,
spearheaded by Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius whose ‘lean and
hungry look’ appalled everybody. In the intervening months, however,
it was almost every man for himself and fortunes fluctuated.
One man who emerged briefly was Publius Cornelius Dolabella. The
ex-sonin-law of Cicero, he had been a supporter, nonetheless, of
Caesar in the Pompey civil war and had fought with him at Pharsalus
and Thapsus. He was prone to push the senate to pass laws that
suited him personally, such as the cancellation of debts. On
Caesar’s death, Dolabella suddenly switched sides, claiming to have
been part of the conspiracy all along. He detested Mark Antony, as
of course did Cicero, but even so, was slippery enough to accept
cash from him and as consul, made sure that there was no martyr cult
to Caesar in the months following the assassination. In October 43
he left to take up his post as governor of Syria and this brought
him indirectly into Cleopatra’s orbit.
The queen must have known that the news of the on-going civil
war in Rome would affect her sooner or later. She still had three of
Caesar’s legions in Alexandria and a fourth had been added recently
so there were some 20,000 Romans in her capital. It remained to be
seen who would approach her first for those troops and in the event
it was Dolabella. Only in his twenties, the man had an awesome
military reputation.
 He was a hot-head and hugely popular, an only slightly watered-
down version of Mark Antony, and Cleopatra probably thought he was
the official face of the new Rome and she had no choice but to
comply. If it came to it, ‘her’ legions were not likely to fight for
her against their own people, so she let them go, leaving her
kingdom dangerously defenceless. Her own army was big enough to put
down internal revolts and in Alexandria she still had the Gabinian
bodyguard, but if a Roman army came against her, it was unlikely she
would survive. But there had to be a deal in her parting with the
legions; Rome must recognize Caesarion as king of Egypt.
Cleopatra’s fleet was hijacked by Cassius to whom it defected
without a murmur and this can only be explained by the fact that the
vast majority of her naval force must have been Roman. Now it was
Cassius’ turn to ask her for help.
Cassius’ reputation was not high and during her time in Rome, it
is likely that Cleopatra learned of it. He was cruel and vicious,
his temper not lessened by the fact that he had been beaten by the
slave army of Spartacus when Cleopatra was a little girl. Such slurs
on a man’s reputation rarely went away. He knew Syria well, crushing
a rebellion in Judaea in 52, and he was marching there now with
twelve legions at his back. A prime mover in the assassination of
Caesar, he had wanted to kill Mark Antony, too, but the genuinely
honourable Brutus had stopped him. Brutus believed he was killing an
idea, not a man.
Cleopatra hedged. There was plague in her country and famine.
This was no doubt true but it would not have precluded her sending
more of her formidable fleet if she had wanted to. In the event,
Serapion on Cyprus sent Cassius the ships he had and the Romans
marched on Laodicia where Dolabella was entrenched. By now it was
July 43 and Dolabella was isolated. Beaten and with his troops
scurrying to Cassius’ standards, Dolabella did what was ‘fine,
what’s Roman’, and ordered a soldier to thrust a sword into his
heart.
It would have taken Cassius days to reach the Egyptian border
and his army was more or less intact. By now he had grown tired of
Cleopatra’s vacillation and probably guessed that his opponents
Antony and Octavian had also asked for her help. Luckily for
Cleopatra Cassius, while on the march south received a messenger
galloping from Brutus in Greece. Antony and Octavian were on the
march. The unlikely comrades had buried their differences and were
on the warpath. Reluctantly, Cassius broke his camp and marched
north again.
The exact sequence of events is unclear at this point but the
fleet earmarked for Cassius was already at sea and Cleopatra was
leading it. In fact, she had no intention of giving him any support
but probably planned to throw in her lot with
Antony and Octavian. Her own personal presence with the fleet
cannot be explained any other way. Does it prove, after all, that
Cleopatra really did love Julius Caesar, that she was sailing to
play her part in the downfall of his murderers? Perhaps not, but it
does add to our concept of the queen. The twentyyear-old who had
once led her armies on campaign in the desert east of Pelusium was
now the twenty-seven-year-old prepared to sail into battle against
the mightiest military power on earth. Those historians who point
out she was no general have overlooked these events.
In his fascinating book The Hinge Factor, Erik Durschmied looks
at the turning points in history, the often insignificant things
that have shaped the past.
It may be that Cleopatra’s fleet would have achieved nothing in
43–42, but we shall never know because storms at sea wrecked her
ships and she had to run to port for safety. She herself was taken
ill and for anti-Cleopatrans this is proof that she was no sailor
and half explains her later actions at Actium in 31.
Her illness was probably seasickness, by the way, and it was the
pounding her ships took that led to her decision to call the whole
thing off. In one way, it was the best of all worlds. She had
promised to help both sides in the civil war and had not lost a man
in battle. On the other hand, she had given away four legions and a
fleet, had a second fleet damaged and had endeared herself to
nobody.
The heirs of Caesar were an ill-assorted pair. Mark Antony was
the gruff soldier, reveller and Jack the lad. He had a cheery
disposition and a notorious reputation with women. Handsome and
powerful, he grew a beard in mourning for Caesar, which only seemed
to make him so much more of a man than Octavian, who was twenty
years younger. The man who would become Rome’s first emperor as
Augustus was only twenty years old in 43 and Cicero at least saw him
as a rising star. In various letters from Cicero, Octavian shape-
shifts from ‘the boy’ to ‘that heavensent young man’.
Antony clearly only ever regarded him as the boy.
What Octavian did have, however, was Caesar’s name and that, in
a Rome prepared to deify the dead dictator, was hugely important.
Octavian may have been young, puny and probably a physical coward,
but Antony needed him. He also needed Marcus Lepidus, who, in an age
when the legions followed a general rather than the abstraction that
was Rome, commanded several thousand men that Antony needed to track
down Caesar’s killers. In November 43, the three men met at Boninia
(near today’s Bologna) and thrashed out an agreement. Over two days
of horse-trading, the second triumvirate was formed. Antony and
Octavian wanted vengeance for Caesar, Lepidus wanted money and
nobody believed that this three-cornered, self-centred alliance
could last much longer than the time it took to defeat Brutus and
Cassius.
The excesses of Caesar had left Rome virtually bankrupt and the
triumvirate needed money. It also needed to make sure that it would
be politically accepted by Rome itself. None of the three had the
stature and gravitas of Caesar and those qualities had got him
killed. The only way to secure support was to remove opposition so
that the senate and the assemblies would rubber-stamp everything the
triumvirs wanted to do.
So, Sulla-style proscription returned to Rome. Each man compiled
a list of men he wanted exiled or dead. Staunch republican virtues,
large estates, slurs real and imagined, all went into the melting
pot of causation. Cassius Dio wrote that the city was full of
corpses, which was an exaggeration but the blood-letting had its
effect. When Antony and Octavian led their armies to Greece, it was
in the sure knowledge that Rome would behave itself under Lepidus
until their return.
The highest-profile casualty in the proscriptions was Cicero,
who had been a thorn in Antony’s side for so long. He was on the
point of leaving his villa to take ship to somewhere safe when a
centurion caught him, dragged him off his litter and cut off the
head of the greatest orator Rome had known. The head and the hand
that had written so many anti-Antony diatribes were taken to
Antony’s house. They arrived while he was at dinner with friends,
and his wife Fulvia spat on it and, removing a hairpin from her
elegant coiffure, rammed it into Cicero’s no longer deadly tongue.
The triumvirs’ army landed near Apollonia and marched along the
Via Egnatia in Macedon. Antony landed first; if Brutus and Cassius
had had the foresight, they could have beaten him before Octavian
arrived. The truth was that Brutus had no military experience at all
and though it is difficult to measure such things, it seemed that
the bulk of Caesar’s veterans were with Antony.
Despite the Romans’ penchant for exaggerating figures, the
armies that clashed twice at Philippi in October were the largest
ever sent out of Italy. The republicans had nineteen legions and
20,000 cavalry to the triumvirs’ nineteen and 13,000 horse. There is
a sense that commanding so many men in the field was a step too far
with relatively primitive communication systems. Clashes and
skirmishes over several days resulted in the first pitched battle in
which Antony smashed Cassius’ legions and captured his camp. The
republican, believing the whole field lost, committed suicide. In
fact, Brutus had done well, driving Octavian’s troops back and
inflicting heavy losses while their commander, ill and probably
terrified, was nowhere to be seen.
Three weeks later, Antony forced Brutus to commit again. While
Octavian’s troops held the centre, Antony’s crossed a marsh and hit
the republicans in the flank. Like Cassius, Brutus took his own life
and Caesar was avenged.
Early in 41, Quintus Dellius, who had changed sides so often in
recent years that a fellow politician called him ‘the bare-back
vaulter of the civil wars’, came to Alexandria. He had been sent to
ask the queen of Egypt for an account of her vacillation for the
last four months and he came on the orders of the triumvir, Mark
Antony.

THE GENTLEST AND KINDEST OF SOLDIERS

ROME, 83

The man who would die with Cleopatra was born fourteen years
before her, the son of Marcus Antonius Creticus and Julia, sister of
Lucius Julius Caesar who was consul in 64. If we only had Cicero’s
opinion of him – ‘In truth, we ought not to think of him as a human
being, but a most outrageous beast’ that would be no truth at all.
The actual date of Antony’s birth is uncertain, but it was
possibly 14 January 83. The Antonii were a distinguished plebeian
family but Julia was patrician, the fifth cousin of Julius Caesar,
and that gave Mark Antony a foot in both political camps as far as a
career was concerned. Since his father, stepfather and grandfather
all held senatorial rank and were quaestors at various times, it was
inevitable that the family should be caught up in the civil war
between Marius and Sulla that in some ways marked the beginning of
the end of the Republic.
When Marius returned to Rome at the head of an army four years
before Antony was born, his grandfather became one of the would-be
dictator’s victims.
Stabbed to death, Marcus Antonius’ head was taken to Marius.
Such appalling precedents are difficult to forget and may explain in
part the fate of Cicero twenty-six years later.
In 72 Marcus Antonius’ son (Antony’s father) was sent to Crete
to control the extremely serious pirate situation there. His fleet
was beaten by the Cilicians whose naval warfare was formidable and
unimpressed Romans called him Creticus in mockery of a failed
campaign. Antony was eight at the time and his disgraced father died
on Crete, leaving huge debts and a miserable reputation.
 Julia married Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura who became consul
in 71 and Antony spent the rest of his childhood years in his house.
As a boy from a well-placed and connected family, Antony would
have been groomed for a public career. Apart from the planning of
actual conspiracies, such as that which toppled Caesar in 44, much
of Roman life was extraordinarily public. Politicians made speeches
in the Forum and outside temples; trials were held in the open air.
Budding orators – and every politician had to be an orator – would
have to prove themselves against large, indifferent or even hostile
audiences. Antony would become part of all this, although, despite
his famous oration burying, not praising Caesar, he never reached
the heights of his grandfather in this respect.
Young Antony would have learned a great deal under a private
tutor – Latin and Greek literature, rhetoric, history – and would
know the role of the pantheon of minor gods that guarded his home
and his life. The lares watched over the hearth; educa and genialis
guided the boy’s mind – there was a long list of them.
He also learned to fight, wrestling on the open plain of the
Campus Martius, handling the short stabbing sword all Roman soldiers
used, throwing the pilum (a lance) and riding without stirrups on
the four-pronged saddle. Politicians in Rome were expected to be
field commanders, too; the Republic expected an awful lot of its
leaders – they had to be generals, financiers, judges and events
managers. Few men could manage it all.
When Antony was thirteen, his uncle and stepfather were both
stripped of their senatorial rank by the censors of 70. It is
unclear precisely why and smacks of hypocrisy. Senators were
supposed to be impeccable in their personal and private lives, but
as we have seen, this was rarely the case. Caius Antonius and
Publius Lentulus seem to have been unlucky – two of sixty-four
senators who were the victims of what Lord Macaulay centuries later
referred to as the ridiculous spectacle of one of society’s fits of
morality. He was talking about nineteenth-century Britain, but it
could equally well have been Rome in the century before Christ.
Despite the existence of his stepfather, technically, on the
death of Marcus Antonius Creticus, Antony was the head of the
household. The coming of age of Roman boys was not fixed and there
is no actual date for Antony’s. At some point in his early teens he
now wore the toga virile of a man rather than the smaller, purple-
edged praetexta of a boy. He also embarked on a career of debauchery
with his friend Caius Scribonius Curio and acquired a taste for wine
and women that never left him. Antony wore a thick, short beard at a
time when most Romans were clean-shaven and wore his tunic short to
show off his powerful legs.
 All the later images of the man, on busts and coins, show a
muscular, thick-set man, completely at odds with the puny Octavian
and even the sinewy Caesar. He and Curio worked their way through a
succession of courtesans, the well-bred and surprisingly
intellectual tarts who were passed around the Roman elite as a
matter of course. In that sense, many Romans realized later,
Antony’s dalliance with Cleopatra was just more of the same.
Just as Antony’s family were caught up in the Marius/Sulla
convulsions, so were they in the attempted revolt by Cataline.
Lentulus backed the man wholeheartedly and in the fallout that
followed, was executed for his pains by garotting. Antony was twenty
by this time and old enough to be involved, but he seems to have
escaped any of the taint and was probably genuinely innocent or
someone would have publicly named him. His uncle Caius Antonius was
put on corruption charges in 59 and exiled.
That Antony should have survived so far was extraordinary and it
may have been his mounting debts that led to his first marriage, to
Fadia, the daughter of Quintus Fabius Gallius. Fabius was a
freedman, so his family had no political clout at all. It may be
that he was rich and that Fadia’s dowry had its own appeal to a
young man who had so far done nothing with his life as his family
crashed and burned around him. It is equally possible that Antony
let his heart rule his head. All his life he was attracted to feisty
women – perhaps Fadia was simply the first of these.
In politics, Antony associated himself with the briefly rising
star that was Publius Clodius Pulcher, who, with his opponent Milo,
was taking Roman elections and realpolitik ever further into the
gutter. The liaison did not last long; the pair quarrelled (exactly
why is unknown) and Antony left for Greece, nominally to study
rhetoric but perhaps because financially he could no longer afford
to live in Rome.
He was still there in 57 when Aulus Gabinius passed through
Greece on his way to take up the proconsulship in Syria. He almost
certainly knew Antony already and took him on. Antony was twenty-six
by now without any real experience of politics or the army and the
exact role that he took on is unclear. A general (which was what, in
effect, Gabinius was as proconsul) needed a staff of officers – the
comites – who were responsible for all the minutiae of logistics for
an army in the field.
Crucial as these men were, the post had little appeal for Antony
who was a ‘dash and fire’ soldier in the mould of Pompey. So, he
became praefectus equitum, prefect of horse, the rough equivalent of
a colonel. As such he would command an ala, a cavalry regiment or
perhaps two or three together in a brigade. Most modern commentators
on Cleopatra claim that Antony commanded Gabinius’ cavalry, but this
is unlikely in a man with little except keenness to recommend him.
The fighting in which Antony took part is at once complicated
and unclear.
The Romans found themselves, inevitably, in a country in which
they had no rights, in the middle of a civil war in Samaria and
Judaea to the south. Near Alexandrion in the Jordan Valley, Mark
Antony erupted onto the military scene, impressing everyone with his
guts and ability in hand-to-hand combat. He handled mopping-up
operations around Alexandrion and was still involved in this when
Gabinius received his offer from Ptolemy Auletes to help him get his
throne back.
Plutarch, always superficial, says that Antony took Pelusium in
the desert east of Alexandria, but the ease with which he did this
probably implied that the city surrendered without a fight. This did
not prevent Antony and other generals from adding it to a list of
battle honours.
Appian, always rather romantically inclined, claims that Antony
met the fourteen-year-old Cleopatra at this point and that he fell
in love with her. Antony was certainly impetuous and impulsive, and
Cleopatra probably already perfectly able to flaunt her considerable
charms, but both of them had other plans for the rest of their
lives.
Gabinius may have been successful in Syria and in putting
Auletes back on his throne, but like far too many over-ambitious
provincial governors, he had overstepped the mark and had to answer
for it in Rome. Sensibly, although it is difficult to see that much
blame could attach to him, Antony stayed in Syria.
Marcus Licinius Crassus now took Gabinius’ place and began his
ill-fated Parthian campaign. It made sense for Antony to join him;
he was already in the east and had recent military experience
whereas Crassus was over sixty and had not led an army in the field
since the Spartacus war in 70. In the event, Antony joined Caesar
instead.
Thanks to Shakespeare and the actual events that followed
Caesar’s assassination, we have the impression that Antony had
always been the future dictator’s right-hand man, as close to him as
a son. This is far from the case. The men were, as we have seen,
distantly related by marriage and they must, in the small circle
that was the Roman republica, have met. We do not know why or
exactly how Antony approached Caesar, but it is likely to have been
that way round. Caesar had temporarily abandoned the cut and thrust
of Roman politics for the cut and thrust of brutal warfare against
the tribes of Gaul where Antony turned up in 53.
 Again, his status and duties are unclear. Given Antony’s earlier
experiences, he may well have commanded cavalry units, but Caesar
does not mention him until the brilliant siege of Alesia in the
summer of 52, during which time Antony had gone back to Rome to
further his political career before rejoining Caesar on the front
line. Adrian Goldsworthy paints a picture of Antony, now thirty and
eligible for a quaestorship for the first time, striding through the
Forum in the dazzling white toga candidus on his way to the sheep
pens in which the open voting took place.
With him would have been slaves – the nomenclatores – who knew
anyone who was anyone by sight and would whisper the relevant name
to Antony so that he could glad-hand with confidence. This summer,
though, it was different. The cracks in the pavement had widened and
the street fighting between the thugs of Clodius and Milo delayed
the elections for some weeks.
Antony was elected but in an atmosphere of martial law. The
murder of Clodius had led a terrified senate to beg Pompey to
restore order and this he did by force. It paved the way for
Antony’s policy later. He watched as a triumvir used his legions to
force through the legality of the senate. The time would come in
Rome, and it would not be long now, when three power brokers would
become one and the senate would not matter at all.
What is telling about Antony’s various military appointments is
how limited they were. Plutarch and subsequently Shakespeare paint a
picture of the middleaged Antony as a veteran. He is ‘the garland of
the war’, a hugely successful general against Octavian’s boyish
callowness. There is almost the temptation to put Antony on the same
footing as Caesar and Pompey, but the facts speak otherwise. He
became Caesar’s quaestor on his return to Gaul but by 50 he was back
in Rome following up his political career.
The first step on this road was to get himself elected, with the
backing of Caesar’s supporters and Caesar’s newly obtained Gallic
money, to the college of augurs. Priests in ancient Rome did not
have the same gravitas as those of Cleopatra’s Egypt. They were
political appointments at the highest level, as they remained in the
Church of England, for example, until very recently. The augurs,
like the Vestal Virgins, had supposed powers of prophecy, reading
signs like the weather, bird flight patterns or interpreting rare,
inexplicable events. There was no actual spiritual element in all
this, but the Romans were superstitious, almost fatalistic people
and such omens were important to them. Antony won against Lucius
Domitius Ahenobarbus and the post was life membership of what was in
effect a very exclusive club of the Roman elite.
Of more importance was the post of Tribune of the Plebs, which
Antony obtained next and he became one of ten appointees for 49.
This gave the man real political power. He could frame bills that
would become law and veto anything he disapproved of in the senate.
He would do that twice on Caesar’s behalf in the months ahead. With
him was Gaius Cassius Longinus, at that stage a Caesar man rather
than an embittered and murderous opponent.
Throughout the year, Antony defended Caesar consistently against
those who thought that the general had overreached himself in Gaul.
Pompey, who had not actually gone to Spain to take up his
appointment there, but had wisely stayed on the spot in Rome, was
scornful of Antony. To Cicero he wrote, ‘What do you think Caesar
will be like if he gets command of the Republic, if his weak and
worthless quaestor acts like this!’
Pompey couldn’t even be bothered to give Antony his official
tribunal rank. He was often drunk or hungover in public and on one
occasion spectacularly vomited while making a speech in the senate.
Both Antony and Cassius were waiting as Caesar crossed the
Rubicon and marched south. They called the senate to a meeting on 1
April while Caesar waited beyond the city walls with his army. There
were few attendees, as we have seen, but the general stayed just
long enough to strip the Treasury before marching to Spain. At his
back, he entrusted Rome itself to Marcus Lepidus and the rest of
Italy to Antony.
Caesar’s campaign against Pompey took its toll on Antony’s
family and friends, even if he was not directly involved. His
brother was captured, his cousin killed and his old friend Curio,
beaten by Juba’s Numidians, was decapitated, his head sent to the
king as part of his own triumph. In Italy Antony seems to have lived
up to Caesar’s expectations. There were no pro-Pompey risings and
much of his time was spent fitting out a fleet at Brundisium that
would take Caesar to Greece to destroy Pompey once and for all.
It was probably now that Antony remarried. The record is silent
on the fate of Fadia. Epidemics were frequent in cities like Rome
and she may have died.
Equally, Antony could have divorced her (this was especially
easy for a man), since the daughter of a freedman was hardly of the
right social class for a Tribune of the Plebs and an augur who was
now assuming praetorian powers by running the Italian province. His
second wife was his cousin Antonia, the daughter of Caius Antonius,
but within a year he had divorced her. It is likely that at this
stage the real love in his life was the actress Cytheris, whose real
name was Volumnia. She was a freed slave with a huge talent for
dance and music. Like many courtesans, she had been passed around
the elite for some years, living for a while with the Marcus Brutus
who would kill Caesar three years later.
 Unlike Cleopatra, whose personal written word is almost non-
existent, we have letters from Mark Antony to Cicero, who was
desperate to leave Rome to rejoin Pompey. Caesar had stipulated that
no one should leave Italy and Antony’s letter is a thinly veiled
threat – ‘However, because I am so very fond of you ... [?] my dear
Cicero, I implore you not to make a mistake ...’
Cicero took the hint and stayed put until Caesar himself came
home and released him from his virtual house arrest.
When Caesar embarked from Brundisium on 4 January 48, Antony was
left behind again. His task was to raise more troops, since Caesar
knew that Pompey outnumbered him. On 10 April, evading Pompey’s
naval blockade, Antony crossed to Lissus on the Greek mainland with
10,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry.
On joining Caesar Antony was given the post of Legate commanding
the 9th Hispana Legion. This unit had already distinguished itself in
Gaul and Britain but its reputation had been tarnished in recent
months by a mutiny in which the Ninth refused to march until they
got their back pay and the definite promise of land on their return.
Caesar had put this insurrection down quickly with executions of the
ringleaders. It is difficult to know why he gave them to
Antony. His own preferred legion was the 10th Gemina, and it may
be he needed a stalwart to make sure the Ninth behaved themselves,
often on the furthest wing from his personal control on the
battlefield. Antony was in the thick of the fighting now. On one
occasion the Ninth held a fort against Pompey’s superior forces for
a whole day before the attack failed and reinforcements arrived.
At Pharsalus on 9 August, Antony commanded the left flank, near
the River Enipeus, and although the fighting was hot here – he was
facing the Cilician legion with Spanish auxiliaries led by Africanus
– the battle was really won, as we have seen, by Caesar on the right
wing detaching the fourth line to create a new formation behind the
dust cloud of his cavalry.
Back in Italy while Caesar chased Pompey to Egypt, Antony was
chosen by Caesar to be magister equitum, Master of the Horse. The
title continued to carry huge weight in Europe down the centuries
and amounted to Caesar’s second-incommand at the time. If Cicero was
appalled by Antony’s behaviour as Tribune, he was outraged now.
Caesar’s right-hand man swaggered around Rome with a bodyguard or an
entourage of pimps and actors and even wore his sword into the
senate where such things were just not done. If Antony’s intention
was to sweeten Caesar’s return he was going the wrong way about it.
If Antony had avoided involvement in the street fighting between
Clodius and Milo, he landed up to his neck in a similar debacle in
47. Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella stood as Tribune of the Plebs in
that year and proposed once again the abolition of all existing
debts. Apart from the obviously self-centred nature of this sort of
legislation, it is difficult to see what it could achieve for the
longterm finances of the Republic. Antony was away from Rome at the
time but on his return he marched into the Forum with soldiers at
his back and drove Dolabella out. While he was dealing with this
potential rising, discontented, unpaid soldiers of Caesar’s pet
legion, the Tenth Gemina, began to make loud noises in the Campania
countryside south of Rome. Like the Ninth, they had not received
their allotted land-plots and felt aggrieved about it. Only Caesar’s
return and his personal intervention calmed them down.
While Antony was busy buying up property abandoned by exiled or
dead supporters of Pompey and giving away priceless furniture from
Pompey’s own villa where Cleopatra had stayed as a girl, he married
for a third time. This was Fulvia, already twice-widowed. Since her
first husband was Clodius and her second Curio, Antony must have
known her for years. Once again he had found a strong woman in the
Cleopatra mould. Fulvia was high born and rich, inheriting fortunes
from both her parents, and was counted as one of Rome’s great
beauties.
We have already traced Antony’s actions after the murder of
Caesar. The weeks and months that followed the Ides of March are
tortuously complicated, with leaders rising and falling, allegiances
shifting and mob violence in the city spreading to open warfare in
the provinces between the Caesarians and Pompeians and every shade
of opinion in between; everybody claimed to be fighting for the
Republic. In this atmosphere of mistrust and fear, Antony moved from
Caesar’s Master of Horse to consul in his own right.
It became clear by the autumn of 44 that Octavian, still only
eighteen and almost unknown in Rome, was fast becoming a threat to
Antony. Both men tried to grab the legions and were only partially
successful. Octavian was untried, but he was a Caesar and he
promised more cash and land in return for services than Antony did.
Such was the state of chaos in this period that Antony went from
consul to public enemy (declared so by Cicero’s repeated insistence
to the senate) and back again. At one point he was defeated in
battle – at Forum Gallorum – by the conspirator Decimus Brutus – but
the creation of the triumvirate restored his power and status.
Philippi sealed it. It was Antony’s greatest victory and it drew
a line in the sand under the whirlwind events since the Ides. Among
the triumvirs, Octavian had the most difficult job, of sorting out
Rome and paying the army; Lepidus, always regarded as inferior and
even slightly unreliable by the other two, had Africa. Antony had
the east. And in 41 the most important area in the east was Egypt.
He sent Quintus Dellius to Egypt’s queen, Cleopatra.
 THE INIMITABLE LOVERS
TARSUS, 41

Antony and Cleopatra’s meeting at Tarsus – the future St Paul’s

‘no mean city’ – has gone down in legend. Plutarch pulls out all the
stops to describe it; even Shakespeare could do no more than copy
him (almost verbatim) and the filmmakers have had a field day.
Cleopatra had done her homework on Antony.
They had first met fourteen years before and although no one
mentions it, it is inconceivable that he wasn’t one of her dinner
guests on more than one occasion in Caesar’s villa on the Janiculum
Hill. The rest she may well have got from Dellius, who seems to have
been enslaved by her as far greater Romans were.
She probably already knew that beautiful, powerful women
captivated Antony; she knew he liked a drink. What she may have
learned from Dellius was that he had recently declared himself to be
another Dionysus, aptly underlined by his drunken revels in Rome.
What could be more perfect for Cleopatra? Her father Auletes had
called himself the new Dionysus and Dionysus was also Osiris in the
Egyptian pantheon. She was the Aphrodite who was also Isis. They
were already a couple in the eyes of the heavens. And it gave her a
clue as to what to wear.
Joann Fletcher waxes lyrical on the range of expensive make-up,
especially for the eyes, that Cleopatra had at her disposal. The
hair, the robes, the eyelids heavy with yellow saffron or lapis
lazuli – all were chosen with great care.
But even before the actual meeting, Cleopatra was playing hard
to get. She ignored Antony’s letters and even took her time when
Dellius turned up. Sailing in state with half her court and the
equivalent of the kitchen sink, she may have approached Tarsus from
Cyprus, the legendary birthplace of Aphrodite. And that was the
message relayed along the coast and up the River Cydnos – Aphrodite
was on her way to revel with Dionysus for the good of Asia.
The barge she travelled in is the one that Shakespeare lifts
entirely from Plutarch (see Chapter 17) and she reclined under a
star-glittering canopy while little boys clothed as cupids scampered
around her and her maidservants dressed as wood and sea nymphs. The
smoking incense from the deck wafted along the river reeds and the
sound of rattles and flute music reached Antony in the market-place.
The exact time of arrivals was impossible to predict with all
the variables of the ancient world, so Antony may have been
genuinely busy hearing petitions in the al fresco Roman style when
the queen’s barge was sighted. Alternatively, he may have been
trying to affect a nonchalant air – after all, he was the most
powerful representative of the greatest power on earth and he had
sent for her. If that was the case, it failed badly because the
crowd, the supplicants, even Antony’s own staff began to melt away
to gawp at the sight – surely one of the most exotic in history and
the imperator was left virtually alone on his dais.
Not to be outdone, he did not join the adulatory throng himself
but sent word to invite Cleopatra to dine with him that evening. She
refused and invited him instead. This was a sticky moment of
protocol; technically, it was Antony, as the resident, who should
have played host. On the other hand, Cleopatra was a queen and, in
her own country at least, semi-divine. Antony could call himself
Dionysus as often as he liked; he was not a god, just a rather pushy
and ambitious man who may have been about to overreach himself.
Every commentator on Cleopatra expresses themselves speechless
at the scale of the banquet. Bearing in mind it happened on her
barge rather than in a palace, it was extraordinary and was eclipsed
only by those she threw in Alexandria weeks later. On the first
night, the company ate off solid-gold plates set with precious
stones. The ‘crockery’, cutlery, goblets, tables, even the couches
they sprawled on were sent home as ‘doggie bags’ with the guests,
Cleopatra’s slaves carrying it all through the streets of Tarsus. On
the second night, it happened all over again. But behind all the
conspicuous consumption, there was a hard kernel of realpolitik on
both sides. Each one wanted something from the other and if sex was
thrown into the mix, so be it.
Cleopatra was twenty-eight by now and Plutarch positively
slavers over her as far as a later-generation Graeco-Roman could
over a foreigner.
She was at the height of her powers, politically and
seductively, and some historians have claimed that she ran rings
around Antony, her inferior in every sense. In some ways it was an
action replay of her bizarre meeting with Caesar, yet in others
totally different. Then, the twenty-one-year-old wanted the
general’s help to restore her to her kingdom and she briefly became
his mistress, later his wife in the process. Now she was an
accomplished queen and politician, some said sorceress, and she
could buy Antony ten times over.
The point was not lost on her, though, that she needed the man’s
support. If he was Rome, at least as far as the East was concerned,
she wanted him to affirm Caesarion as pharaoh of Egypt and perhaps
extract a little more from him. Arsinoe was still at Ephesus, a
stirring and potentially troublesome rival; and a man calling
himself Ptolemy XIII had appeared, miraculously delivered from his
watery grave in the Nile delta marshes.
Antony was forty-two. He had reached the pinnacle of his own
success but wanted more. He knew he had enemies in Rome (everybody
did) and he also knew it was only a matter of time before the boy
Octavian began to muscle in on his domain. What he needed was a
brilliant military victory along the lines of Caesar’s in Gaul and
the obvious way to that was to destroy Parthia.
The warlike people in what is today Iran and Iraq had taken
advantage of the Roman civil war to claw back lost territory. When
Crassus had tried to bring them to heel in 53 they had destroyed him
and his legions; they still had the eagle standards to prove it.
Caesar had once sent sixteen new legions to take them on – only his
assassination had prevented him from leading them. And to make a
Parthian campaign a success, Antony needed money. And who had more
money than any other single individual in the known world?
Cleopatra.
A deal must have been struck during the heady wine mix of the
banquet as the lights bobbed on the decks and the slaves danced and
played music. Serapion, the strategos who had defied Cleopatra and
declared for Cassius from Cyprus, was executed on Antony’s orders.
So was the pretender Ptolemy XIII. It must have been Cleopatra who
effectively put Arsinoe’s neck in the metaphorical noose. She was
worshipping at a temple to Artemis when Antony’s hitmen dragged her
out and killed her. The Roman was all for slaughtering the temple
priests at Ephesus too, since they had willingly proclaimed Arsinoe
queen of Egypt, but Cleopatra seems to have urged mercy and he
complied. It had not been so many years since Antony had played a
similar role to hers in reining in Auletes in Alexandria.
Antony’s and Cleopatra’s critics have seen in all this her
ruthlessness and his weakness. She might just as well have put a
ring in his nose like the Buchis bull and dragged him, garlanded and
perfumed, to slaughter and mummification. But all this is to miss
the point. We have seen already that internecine murder was what the
Ptolemies did – they’d done it for 300 years. We cannot see the
family from Hell in conventional terms. ‘The past’, wrote L. P.
Hartley, ‘is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’
So did the Ptolemies. Both parties seem to have got exactly what
they wanted out of the Tarsus summit meeting.
Cleopatra had no rivals for her throne and her son’s continuing
rule after her death was assured. Antony got his cash for Parthia.
When Cleopatra sailed home, it was business as usual for Antony.
He put down a revolt in Syria before following her to Alexandria.
Again, with hindsight we see a pattern – he would do the same thing,
fatally, at Actium ten years later.
She snapped her fingers and he jumped. In fact, we have no idea
who initiated who, but it is likely that Antony was as captivated by
Cleopatra as Caesar had been, even though he paused on the way to
seduce the wife of the king of Mauretania. It is this sort of high-
class power-bed hopping – he had an affair with the queen of
Cappadocia just before the Tarsus meeting – that has led historians
to doubt whether Cleopatra meant anything to Antony other than
another notch on his bedpost. In Alexandria, however, they seem to
have become a couple.
Caesar had come to the city as a potential conqueror at the head
of three legions. Antony came as a private citizen, wearing Greek
dress, going to the theatre and working out in the gym like other
virile Alexandrians. He was careful to speak their language,
literally and metaphorically. People remembered the handsome
commander of the Gabinian cavalry and how he had prevented wholesale
slaughter in the restoration of Auletes to his throne.
But if Antony knew how to play to the gallery, Cleopatra was
better at it. She indulged him, watching as he wrestled and
practised swordplay in the gymnasion. She hunted with him in the
desert. She attended the theatre with him.
She was there when he talked to the scholars in the great
library – and was no doubt tactful enough not to upstage him in the
conversation.
The couple came to be known as the Inimitable Livers, the
founder-members of an elite drinking club who wined and dined almost
nightly, sometimes disguising themselves as slaves and rolling
around the streets, pulling faces at passers-by and getting into
fist fights. They diced together, they fished on Lake Mareotis and
played practical jokes on each other and their friends. On one
occasion, with most of the Court bobbing about on the lake,
Cleopatra sent a slave underwater to hook a reeking old saltwater
fish onto Antony’s line so that the ‘great angler’ was ridiculed in
the eyes of everyone. Unlike Caesar and certainly unlike Octavian,
Mark Antony had a great sense of humour and took it all in good
part.
 It is difficult to believe that Cleopatra was laughing at Antony
rather than with him. What would be the point? They already had from
each other what they wanted politically. The stay in Alexandria can
only be interpreted as a genuinely romantic interlude and by the
time Antony left for Parthia, Cleopatra was carrying his twins.
Antony’s clash with the Parthians was delayed, however. They had
invaded Syria in 40 under their king Pacorus and, if unchecked,
posed a threat to Cleopatra’s Egypt too. The delay came because of
the arrival in Greece of Antony’s wife, Fulvia and her sons Antyllus
and Iulius. Antony’s mother was with her too. Time and again in the
next five years, Antony would be distracted by other things. Rome
called him or Cleopatra did and he went at their behest away from
the Parthian objective. In this at least he proved himself not to be
another Caesar.
The family had run from Rome because Fulvia had antagonized
Octavian so much that the legions she controlled, on Antony’s
behalf, were now squaring up to each other for a renewal of the
civil war. As Adrian Goldsworthy sums up with classic
understatement, ‘The result was a confusing period of unrest ... in
which allegiances were often unclear.’
In other words, it was basically the same business as usual
since Caesar had crossed the Rubicon. Increasingly in these months,
the third triumvir, Lepidus, was sidelined as governor of Africa and
there was a smouldering build-up of tension between the other two,
which would end in the collapse of an independent Egypt and the
deaths of Antony and Cleopatra.
In the fighting, Octavian sacked Perusia, sacrificing 300 of the
town’s inhabitants to the gods. Sextus Pompey, in the meantime,
still a potential threat on the outskirts of empire, called himself
the ‘king of the seas’ and captured Sicily, blockading the trade
routes that led to Rome.
Most modern commentators agree that Fulvia’s provocation of
Octavian came from her jealousy of Cleopatra; that declaring war was
the one sure way to bring the wayward Antony home. If that was the
case, it didn’t work. When husband and wife met in Athens, Antony
was notoriously cold, left her weeks later without saying goodbye
and did not see her again. She was dead, probably from exhaustion,
by the end of the year.
Joined by Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (Shakespeare’s Enobarbus),
one of those on the periphery of the Caesar assassination, Antony
landed in Brundisium with 200 war-galleys and faced Octavian and his
legions. These men were rather happier now that he had given most of
their veteran comrades farms, which would come their way too in the
fullness of time. Neither side wanted to fight, and an uneasy truce
resulted in the Treaty of Brundisium of September 40. The relief, to
a nation exhausted and terrified by civil war, was palpable and
ironically people were accidentally killed in exuberant street
parties in Rome and Brundisium itself.
The terms of the treaty effectively created a duumvirate to all
intents and purposes. With Lepidus in Africa, Antony and Octavian
divided the rest of the Roman world between them; Octavian had the
west which included Rome and Italy while Antony had the east which
of course included Egypt. Octavian promised him eleven legions to
take on the Parthians and the new rapprochement was sealed with a
wedding. Fulvia’s death freed Antony and his new bride was the
beautiful and sophisticated widow Octavia, Octavian’s sister. She
was about thirty and the fact that Octavian gave her to Antony might
imply a genuine attempt on his part to bury the hatchet. On the
other hand, it could simply have been Octavian’s way to keep a close
watch on his rival.
At more or less the same time, Octavian divorced his wife Clodia
on the grounds that she was a nag and married the much younger
Scribonia, despite the fact that she was already pregnant by her
former husband. Both triumvirs celebrated orations in Rome late in
39 – an oration was less lavish than a triumph and it was given
partly because there was no actual campaign victory to celebrate. It
was just a feel-good exercise in public relations.
Octavian’s reputation fluctuated during this period. Although
ultimately he would emerge as Caesar’s sole heir, billing himself,
not Antony, as the victor of Philippi and emerging, butterfly-like,
as the Emperor Augustus, in 39 he was the man who had still not
found enough farms for his veterans and who had annoyed civilians by
planting ex-soldiers in their back gardens. When, on top of this, he
raised taxation, he was attacked in the Forum and hit by flying
missiles. Only the timely arrival of Antony and his bodyguard saved
his life. The resulting bodies were dumped in the Tiber.
The Peace of Misenum at the end of the summer reconciled the
dangerous Sextus Pompey with the others. He was now officially
governor of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica and became an augur, giving
him a status in Rome he had never held before. The truce may have
continued uneasily (the rumour ran that at every party and banquet,
everybody carried hidden daggers, just in case) but it gave Antony
the chance, at least, to march on Parthia. And he took Octavia with
him. She would only go as far as Athens. Romans did not take their
women to the battle-zone.
They waited for the spring campaigning season to start by
enjoying themselves in Athens. Once again, Antony dropped his
conqueror pose, wore Greek clothes, went to the theatre and became
Dionysus. With Octavia in tow he probably drank less than he had
with Cleopatra, but she joined in the social life and the pair were
hailed officially as ‘the beneficent gods’.
What are we to make of Octavia? Because she was Octavian’s
sister and he was a master of propaganda, an odour of sanctity
clings to the woman. She was probably as capable and pushy as Fulvia
and possibly as Cleopatra, but she hid it well as the dutiful Roman
wife and seems to have supported Antony all the way, an increasingly
difficult job as he and her brother went their separate ways. Was
she, like Fulvia, trying to tie Mark Antony to Rome by supplanting
his Alexandrian love? And were they lovers at all in the real sense?
The ‘Inimitable Livers’ became the ‘Inimitable Lovers’ in some
versions but intimacy is not recorded.
If Antony and Cleopatra exchanged letters (which seems likely)
they have not survived and without them the exact nature of their
love is difficult to measure. Antony seems to have been an
opportunist in love as he was in politics and war. He was not known
to have turned any woman down, especially one with brains and power
to add to their charms. It is likely that when with Cleopatra he was
blissfully happy. And when he was with Octavia he was happy too.
We know that, this time, Cleopatra kept a watchful eye on
Antony. She sent an Alexandrian staff back to Rome with him,
including a soothsayer who prophesied that Octavian’s ‘karma’ would
always outshine Antony’s as long as the men were together. Only in
distance would Antony have a chance. Was this music to Antony’s ears
– the soothsayer knowing he had plans to invade Parthia?
Or was this prophecy on the orders of Cleopatra, to bring her
lover back to the East as quickly as possible? Only one account says
that the links between them were more direct – they exchanged
letters. Either way, because we do not know their exact
relationship, we cannot know how Cleopatra reacted to news of
Antony’s marriage or the birth of Octavia’s two daughters by 37. It
is unlikely that she sulked and stormed as Shakespeare would make
her do sixteen centuries later. She, above all, understood the
nature of political marriages – she may have been married to her
father, was certainly married to both her brothers and was now
‘married’ to her son.
And in October 40, Cleopatra Thea Philopator gave birth to
twins, Anthony’s children. Octavia may have two girls, but they were
single births. Cleopatra had achieved that rarity among the
Ptolemies – a boy and a girl born on the same day. All sorts of
omens and prophecies chimed with this, from Greek and Egyptian
religious tradition. She called the boy Alexander Helios, Alexander
the Sun, in honour of the great half-founder of her dynasty, whose
embalmed body still lay in the Soma in Alexandria. The girl she
named Cleopatra Selene, after an earlier Ptolemy and linked clearly
with the moon.
There were celebrations throughout her lands at the delta and
along the Nile; adoration and sacrifice at Dendera where the twins
were carved on the temple walls; worship of the Apis bull. The vital
religious ingredients of Cleopatra’s political life went on as
before. Not even the death of her high priest at Memphis,
Pasherenptah III, broke her stride. His seven-year-old son
Petubastis took over his duties. He was the same age as Caesarion
and Cleopatra could hold sway over the two boys who represented her
earthly and her divine existences.
She made overtures in this year to Herod of Judaea who had fled
to her court in the oncoming advance of the Parthians. She offered
him, according to one account, command of her army, so highly
renowned was he as a general. In the event he turned her down and
offered his services to Rome where he led Roman legionaries to
victory against the Parthians along with Antony’s grizzled veteran
Publius Ventidius who smashed his opponents in a series of dazzling
victories at the Cilician Gates, Mount Amanus and Gindarus.
But Antony was not there and more importantly, neither were
Octavian’s promised legions. In the autumn of 37 Antony sent for
Cleopatra again. The city of Antioch lay on the River Orontes and
was the Syrian capital. A centre of trade, it was famous for its
olive oil and wine, both locally produced. It was 15 miles from the
sea so Cleopatra and her entourage would have weighed anchor at the
port of Seleucia, named after Alexander the Great’s general, whose
family had ruled this part of the mighty empire 300 years earlier.
Antony and Cleopatra had first met here eighteen years before
when he was a junior cavalry officer and she was a fourteen-year-old
princess-in-waiting. Here, in 37, Antony met his twins for the first
time. The family lived in the palace and it was here that the couple
were married. Technically, both were committing bigamy, but there
was a great deal of precedence for that in the Ptolemy family and in
Roman terms, the now-deified Julius Caesar had done exactly the same
thing – and with the same woman!
Since Roman law did not recognize marriage to a foreigner, it
could be said that Antony had found a loop-hole in legality he could
drive a chariot through. We do not know exactly what form the
marriage ceremony took. Joann Fletcher gives the options, including
the dress, hair preparation and jewellery involved. The simple Roman
version was a choreographed seizure of goods – ‘So, darling, I seize
you.’ The Greek version was more delicate – he was Antonius, she was
Antonia, although she never used the name; it was the equivalent of
today’s Mrs Mark Antony. There would have been an exchange of vows
and rings and a wedding feast on a scale befitting the union of
Aphrodite-Isis and Dionysus-Osiris. They issued coins as joint
rulers, which were struck at Damascus and Askalon as well as
Antioch.
But the greatest wedding present of all was the one that Antony
gave to Cleopatra. He gave her back all the ancient lands of the
Ptolemies before Rome took them, something he did not have the right
to do. Cilicia, Syria, Phoenicia, the Lebanon and Iturea were
restored to her, and Cyprus, Crete and Cyrenia affirmed as Egypt’s.
Antony drew the line at Judaea, probably because Herod, based in
Jerusalem, was a militarily useful ally to Rome. She did, however,
obtain a monopoly in the trade of the legendary Gilead balm, a
perfume rarer than gold and all the bitumen from the Dead Sea
region, which was vital for Egyptian embalming customs.
When Cleopatra went home in the spring of 36, she was carrying
her fourth child. She travelled back to Alexandria overland, on a
royal progress that took in Herod’s Jerusalem. The man was an Arab
and his Jewish people hated him.
Although there is no evidence for the massacre of the innocents
as described in the New Testament, he did kill one of his wives,
three of his own sons, an uncle and a brother-in-law. Cleopatra and
Antony overrode him in a religious controversy with the tribes of
Israel and it turned Herod into a bitter opponent, to add his
invective later to join Octavian’s. According to Josephus, who, as
we know, had his own agenda in the context of Cleopatra, Herod
heroically rebuffed her attempts to seduce him and even toyed with
having her poisoned.
In September the queen gave birth to Ptolemy Philadelphus,
brother-loving, and his eldest brother, Caesarion, now eleven, was
named official co-ruler with Cleopatra to celebrate the new arrival.
Since Cleopatra had been given her throne back by Caesar in 48,
she had had twelve years of relative happiness. The sun shone
literally and metaphorically on her reign in Alexandria. If she had
been the richest woman in the world before 37, she was doubly so now
and she had four healthy, loyal and adoring children to carry on the
Ptolemy line. She also had a dynamic, mercurial lover, but Antony
was tied by an umbilical cord of duty to Rome. And somehow, whenever
Rome was mentioned, storms arose in ‘their sea’ and war-clouds
gathered.
Antony may have had 100,000 men with him as he marched on
Parthia, the largest single Roman army ever seen. Plutarch suggests
sixteen legions as well as 10,000 cavalry from Gaul and Iberia.
Client kings flocked to him as he marched. They had clashed with
Rome before and for most of them, it was an experience they did not
want to repeat. This gave Antony 6,000 Armenian cavalry and 7,000
infantry with a possible 30,000 of both arms from other nations.
From later events we know that he had enough archers and slingers to
keep the Parthians at a respectful distance. At first all went well,
but as he reached Media (today’s Azerbaijan) he was betrayed by the
Armenian king Artavasdes. Antony should have known better than to
trust this man – Crassus’ head was kicked around on stage during his
wedding celebration in 53.
Somewhere in the desert, Antony’s huge supply train was
destroyed by the deadly Parthian horse-archers and he was trapped in
Media itself.
The Parthian army relied heavily on its cavalry and despite
Antony’s alae auxiliary units, the real strength in his army lay
with the Roman legions, the trained veterans. The triumvir may have
faced up to 50,000 horse-archers on this campaign, expert bowmen who
fired their short bows from the saddle and under the animals’ necks
and were particularly dangerous when retreating – the deadly
Parthian shot. The Parthians’ heavy cavalry were extraordinary –
lancers riding heavily armoured horses that would not be seen on
European battlefields until the fifteenth century, by which time
gunpowder could destroy them.
These cataphracts were unstoppable in Antony’s day. In a forced
retreat that foreshadowed the even grimmer one by Napoleon from
Moscow in AD 1812, Antony fought his way back to Antioch in the
middle of winter. His column marched in hollow square formation to
fight off cavalry attacks so the legendary speed of the legions
(perhaps 20 miles a day) was reduced to four or five at best.
His men died from exposure, hunger and dysentery, the universal
enemies of fighting men in every age, and he lost an estimated
20,000, between a quarter and a third of his force.
Cleopatra hurried to him at Leuce Come, near the old Phoenician
city of Sidon. He had almost certainly summoned her for a third
time, but for the first time Antony was in trouble. She sailed in
the teeth of winter with food, clothing and money for his army and
brought her man home to Alexandria. Antony was exhausted. His own
courage and the lengths he went to to rally his men and to care for
them were extraordinary (Octavian could not hope to match that) but
in the end he had failed, almost as badly as Crassus. But Crassus
had died and
Antony had come home – or at least to one of his eastern homes.
It is likely that at some point on the retreat from Media he had
contemplated suicide.
In the spring of 35, Octavian’s promised troops arrived at last,
but a mere 2,000 rather than the 11 legions and only 70 rather than
130 ships (the rest had been lost fighting against Sextus Pompey off
Sicily). And Octavian sent his sister, too. Most historians see this
as the final, disastrous turning point in the always fragile
relationship between Antony and Octavian. Cleopatra’s critics claim
that she went on a hunger strike, threw tantrums, sulked and
screamed to get Antony back, but this does not sound like Cleopatra
Thea, the most powerful woman in the world.
If it was intended to be a straight choice engineered by
Octavian, it can’t have been much of a contest for Antony. He sent
Octavia home from Athens without seeing her in person, keeping her
troops and her ships, and renewed the Parthian campaign from
Antioch. By the summer of 34, Artavasdes was a prisoner, appearing
chained in a later triumph and Armenia had been conquered. To
celebrate all this, Antony and Cleopatra embarked on a series of
celebrations known as the Donations of Alexandria. Antony’s critics
– and by now there were many of them – claimed that he was trying to
emulate a triumph, which could only be held in Rome, but Alexandria
had been holding its own celebrations when Romans still lived in mud
huts along the Tiber.
It is probable that nothing on this scale had been seen before,
even in the triumphs of Roman generals. Antony was dressed as
Dionysus, with his ivy-leaf headgear. Cleopatra, in black and gold,
was Isis, and the whole city dazzled. In the more formal part of the
ceremonies, Antony transformed himself. He appeared now in the
breastplate, helmet and cloak of a Roman imperator, with the eagles
of the legions around him. He made brilliant speeches in Greek to
the politicians and the crowds, and the children were crowned to
honour the occasion. Two-yearold Ptolemy Philadelphus was Lord of
Phoenicia, Cilicia and Syria. He wore Greek boots and a crown like a
little Alexander and no doubt had been coached to walk steadily, as
befitted the occasion. Alexander Helios, six, was given Media,
Parthia and Armenia and was officially called ‘king of kings’. He
was betrothed to the Queen of Media on the same day. His twin,
Cleopatra Selene, became queen of Crete and Cyrenia.
Over all of them, because of their ages, Cleopatra ruled as
regent as Cleopatra Thea Neotera Philopator Philopatris – the new
Thea, father and fatherland loving. The Latin legend on her coins
struck in this year read ‘Cleopatrae reginae regum filium regum’ –
Cleopatra, queen of kings and her sons who are kings.
Yet none of this was actually to happen, at least not for long,
because of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s decision concerning her eldest
son, Caesarion. He was already her co-ruler, Ptolemy Caesar, king of
kings. Now, he was officially declared the heir of Julius Caesar. He
was not a Roman citizen and had no following in the city itself, but
for the first time, Antony’s co-triumvir was made painfully aware of
a rival who might, in time, challenge him.
 Over 1,200 miles away in Rome, Octavian, Julius Caesar’s other
heir, vowed vengeance.

THE SHARERS IN DEATH

Antony and Cleopatra continued to organize the East, live in
splendour and enjoy each other’s company. His eldest son, Antyllus,
joined them and was taught alongside Cleopatra’s children in the
rigorous Alexandrian schooling that she herself had undergone.
Conspicuous consumption was the couple’s trademark. On one occasion
Cleopatra, at a banquet, was said to have taken off a large pearl
earring and dissolved it in a goblet of wine, for a bet.
Scientists of our time have gone to the lengths of trying to
reproduce this vanishing act; it doesn’t work, except by cheating
and crushing the pearl first, which would rather have taken the edge
off the magnificent gesture. The man who stopped her from throwing
in the other earring, Lucius Munatius Plancus, joined in the
nonsense by dressing as Glaucus, the sea-god, complete with blue
body paint and a fish’s tail. The drunkenness went on, the parties
went on. And it rubbed off on the children. Antyllus once gave away
an entire set of gold tableware to a young tutor who had pleased him
at a dinner party.
The family were hugely generous, as they could afford to be. The
only document to have survived that may contain Cleopatra’s
handwriting refers to a massive tax exemption to Antony’s general
Publius Canidius Crassus in 33, allowing him the free importation of
wheat and wine to Alexandria. The single phrase ‘ginestho’ in Greek
reads ‘let it be done’.
But behind the general lifestyle, the daily administration and
the sacrificial duties, a storm was gathering. Although no one had
the stomach for it, the civil war was not actually over, however
Octavian might pretend to the contrary. It could have been possible
to re-order the Republic with a dictator for the West (Octavian) and
a dictator for the East (Antony) but Roman minds did not see it that
way in the first century BC.
Above it all floated the growing shadow of Cleopatra. She was
supposed to be a client king, subservient to Antony; and she was a
woman. The stories drifting west with every merchant ship and
official envoy said the opposite. He was in thrall to her, whether
by magic or his own weakness hardly mattered. And because of this,
Antony was playing precisely into Octavian’s hands.
The two men had never been friends but from 33 onwards, the
mutual sniping got worse. Octavian accused Antony of drunkenness (he
may actually have been an alcoholic by now) to the extent that
Antony wrote a defence of his behaviour – De Sua Ebrietate, On his
drunkenness. He could hardly retaliate; like Julius Caesar, Octavian
drank little. When Octavian began to hurl sexual jibes, however,
Antony could throw the mud back. One of the few letters of his to
have survived (albeit as a paraphrase from Cicero) reads:
Why have you changed? Is it because I’m screwing the queen? Is
she my wife? Have I just started this or has it been going on for
nine years? How about you – is it only [Livia] Drusilla you’re
screwing? Congratulations, if when you read this letter you have not
been up Tertulla or Terentilla, Rufilla or Salvia Titiseniam or all
of them. Does it really matter where or in whom you dip your wick?
It is not clear whether these women were actually Octavian’s
mistresses or merely generic female names, implying that anything in
a peplos would do for Caesar’s heir. Rumours about Octavian’s
rapaciousness needed no additions from Antony. On one occasion, he
is said to have whisked away the wife of his host at a banquet and
returned looking mightily pleased with himself while she was
dishevelled and blushing.
Far more important in this letter is the phrase uxor mea est –
she is my wife.
In the context in which Antony uses it, it is probably a
rhetorical question rather than a statement. But that was part of
what had changed Octavian. Antony was free to take any mistress he
liked, but to marry a foreigner and place her on so high a pedestal
was indefensible. And Antony knew it.
Whatever else he was – manipulator, lecher, coward – Octavian
was a past master at propaganda. Antony made it easy for him, but in
Rome, Caesar’s heir was busy building his image for the future. He
began to build – and Romans were always hugely impressed by the
physical symbols of power – even starting the library Caesar had
wanted to build having seen Cleopatra’s at Alexandria. He did not
talk now of rebuilding the Republic, which most far-seeing men knew
was broken for ever. Now, he styled himself the successor of the
divine Julius – and halfway to a god himself. There was a deep irony
here – all her life, Cleopatra had enjoyed this status, precisely
one which Romans found so noxious.
In February 32 so pushy was Octavian becoming that the two
consuls, Ahenobarbus and Gaius Sosius, ran to Antony while Octavian
figuratively buried his former colleague (Antony had officially
renounced his triumvir title) by reading his will to the senate and
anybody who cared to listen. According to tradition, Antony was
believed to have placed a copy of the will with the Vestal Virgins
in Rome, but since it was only Octavian who had seen it and who was
able to quote chunks from it, it is highly likely that he had
written it himself.
 Caesarion, the will said, was Julius Caesar’s son and heir and
Antony left various bequests to his children with Cleopatra. This
was illegal under Roman law but the most damning indictment against
Antony was that, irrespective of where he died, he wanted to be
buried with Cleopatra in Alexandria.
It was only a short step from that libel to the myth that
Octavian spread that Cleopatra intended to ‘dispense justice on the
Capitol’. In other words, she and Antony would oust Octavian, shelve
for ever the lie of the Republic and preside as lord and lady, king
and queen, over a Roman empire. A second rumour, which rather made
nonsense of the first, was that Alexandria and not Rome would become
their headquarters. If Antony and Cleopatra were happy enough in the
east, why go to such dangerous and unprecedented lengths of taking
the west as well?
Octavian showed his greatest skill in turning a renewed outbreak
of the civil war, a rather sordid power struggle between him and
Antony, into a foreign war, little short of a crusade against the
weak, debauched east where women urinated standing up and people
worshipped gods with animals’ heads. At this stage, the senate was
split. Of the 1,000 members, perhaps 600 sided with Octavian, the
rest unwilling to believe all the invective about Antony. Historians
today argue that if Antony had struck quickly when Octavian’s tax
hikes to pay for the forthcoming campaign made him unpopular in
Rome; or if he had landed without Cleopatra in Italy, he could have
overthrown his rival and perhaps Marcus Antonius would have become
Rome’s first emperor.
But that was precisely the point. Cleopatra was the sticking
place. Antony now officially divorced Octavia and told her to take
herself and her children out of his sumptuous villa in Rome’s
suburbs. She went dutifully, willingly, an excellent propaganda tool
for her brother; she was the perfect, wronged, Roman wife.
From now on, Antony went through the motions of preparing for a
war he clearly did not want to fight. Like a sleepwalker, he went
through the last months of his life in a curious slow motion – and
all of this, both at the time and since, was blamed on Cleopatra.
While she was contributing vast sums to the war and 200 galleys to
bolster Antony’s war-fleet, while troops were being raised as far
north as Thrace (today’s Bulgaria) and the client kings and their
armies were summoned, the lovers dallied on Samnos, watching plays
and throwing parties!
They held court at Athens where Antony had once lived and
Cleopatra was hailed as a goddess as Octavia had been not long
before.
By the end of the summer, Octavian felt he had enough support to
declare war formally on Cleopatra. He snatched up a pilum dripping
with sacrificial blood – he claimed this was an ancient custom, but
had probably invented it as a powerful symbolic act – and hurled it
from the steps of the senate towards the south-east in the direction
of Egypt.
If ever there was a contrived war, this was it. The traditional
method of declaring war was for the senate to demand restitution for
a wrong. It would wait for a few weeks for a response, then send an
emissary to the enemy’s capital to begin proceedings. None of this
happened in the case of Cleopatra and, unlike a number of client
kings who had shifted sides with the blowing of the wind, she had
remained loyal to Rome. Even when given the hopeless choice of which
Rome to support during the post-Ides ferment, she had clearly
dragged her feet so as not to offend either side more than she had
to. For his part, Antony was charged with fighting alongside ‘the
Egyptian [sic] woman against his native country’.
The senate officially took away his consulship.
Still Antony did not hurry but steadily built up his war effort.
Canidius Crassus joined him with sixteen legions, but none of them
was likely to have been up to full strength. According to Plutarch,
he had 100,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry and to his standards
flocked the client kings of the east, from Thrace, Cappadocia,
Mauretania, Armenia and Greece itself. Herod of Judaea was sent to
deal with the Nabatean Arabs who were not paying their allotted
tribute of bitumen, although this decision may have had something to
do with Cleopatra in that she clearly hated the man and he her.
For weeks Antony dithered over what sort of campaign he wanted
to wage.
He had fought in Greece before under Caesar against Brutus and
Cassius and had been successful, but there is always a sense with
Antony that he was a better tactician than strategist and the broad
brushstrokes of war are the ones he was less good at applying.
Despite the Parthian debacle, he was popular, experienced and knew
the country. Octavian, with a similarly sized army, was fighting on
foreign soil (his presence at Philippi had been very nebulous) and
he was strapped for cash to keep his campaign going.
Antony had vast resources from Cleopatra. Not only did she
provide a large proportion of the fleet, but most of the galley
rowers were Greek or Egyptian and she literally spoke most of the
languages of the client kings, keeping them on-side with her well-
known charm offensive. She seems to have been less charming to
Antony’s Roman generals. The gruff Ahenobarbus, once an
antiCaesarian republican, was now one of Antony’s most loyal
supporters, but he clearly found the queen’s presence in Antony’s
tent offensive.
 He called her ‘Cleopatra’ to her face and followed none of the
fawning flattery a queen of her wealth and power was due. Late in
the day, he abandoned them both and went over to Octavian, dying
shortly afterwards, probably of malaria. Dellius deserted too,
although given his track record, this could have been predicted.
More serious was the defection of Lucius Plancus, who had once been
a cringing courtier, dressed as a fish for Cleopatra’s delight. Not
only did he leave the pair in the lurch, he took Antony’s war plans
with him. It is one of the great unanswered questions why Antony did
not see this as a pressing need to change them.
Octavian’s ace-in-the-hole was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a long-
time friend and supporter of the triumvir, whose fleet (actually
Cleopatra’s fleet) had smashed that of Sextus Pompey off Sicily. He
was a gifted military commander and probably the best admiral Rome
produced. He had recently been aedile responsible for Octavian’s
building programme in the city, but his first love was action at sea
and he made the opening moves of the war, striking at the port of
Methone, the most southerly of Antony’s outposts. Antony was wrong-
footed.
He had prepared too slowly and expected an initial attack
further north. His fleet at Methone was captured, reversing the ship
numbers in Octavian’s favour and King Bogud of Mauretania was killed
trying to defend the town. Octavian landed and occupied the town of
Torone, which means ladle. It also means penis in Greek slang and
Cleopatra quipped that it made no difference that Octavian was
sitting on his ladle – he’d been doing that for years. Such ribaldry
only added to Rome’s low opinion of her and disguised the
seriousness of the situation.
Once Octavian had landed on the Greek mainland, the focus of the
campaign became the Gulf of Ambracia and particularly Actium on its
seaward side. When Antony arrived from Patmos he was outnumbered so
refused to be drawn into a land battle straight away. He had already
offered to face Octavian in a personal duel but the result of that
would have been so obvious that the triumvir declined. Within days,
Antony’s cohorts had arrived and he offered battle.
Again, Octavian refused. Conjectural history is always difficult
– the ‘what ifs’ are rarely decisive – but it seems likely that if a
pitched land engagement had been fought at that stage, Antony would
have been victorious and Octavian’s gamble would have failed. As it
was, Antony languished in a malaria-infested swamp for sixteen weeks
before attempting a break-out by sea.
Cleopatra was criticized at the time just for being there and
even modern commentators regard her as being at best in the way and
at worst countermanding Antony’s strategy with ill-informed female
illogicality. Little of this makes sense. She was not a general, say
her detractors, yet she had camped with Achillas in the desert
outside Pelusium before visiting Caesar in Alexandria; she had led
her fleet in action against his murderers. As queen, she must have
felt it was her place to command her troops in person; it was what
the Ptolemies did. Against that we have only the Roman bigotry,
which said that women had no place in an army camp. It was the kind
of thinking that allowed Boudicca of the Iceni to destroy three
Roman towns in Britain before the legions finally stopped her.
At first, Antony had a camp within bow shot of Octavian’s on a
narrow peninsula between the Ionian Sea and the Gulf of Ambracia. As
malaria, low morale and desertions took their toll, he abandoned
that and established himself at a base in Acarnania, across the
narrow gulf entrance from the enemy. There were skirmishes and
clashes in which neither side gained an advantage. Against the
advice of Canidius, who advocated marching inland and drawing
Octavian after them before tackling him on ground of their choosing,
Antony opted for a naval break-out, which would still allow a
rearguard to escape by land. They could all reform in Alexandria,
with fresh troops, high morale and no malaria.
That alone makes sense of what happened on 2 September as the
trumpets announced the emergence of Antony’s fleet.
Naval battles were not the fast, long-range artillery duels of
steel, enginedriven ships. The largest ships in either fleet were
the huge war-galleys with ten banks of oars. Antony’s flagship was
one of these – so, probably was Cleopatra’s Antonia. Most of them
were quinqueremes or triremes, driven by five and three banks of
oars respectively. We have no clear idea of the ethnic make-up of
the rowers, but the vast majority would have been slaves and they
were shackled to their oars with chains. Each ship had a single mast
and one sail, but in battle, the oars did the talking, building up
to ramming speed at which the bronze-tipped beaks at the prow would
smash into the timber mid-ships of the enemy.
Artillery would fire rocks and burning balls of pitch onto enemy
decks as the galleys closed and then grappling irons were thrown to
lash the ships together. Boarding parties of legionaries would jump
from wooden towers and fight as if on land. Most of Antony’s troops
were not used to warfare of this kind and in keeping with most men
at the time were unable to swim. Both sides had their ships in a
three-block formation, but by September Antony had had to destroy at
least eighty of his ships because he had insufficient crew to man
them.
Against him, the centre was commanded by Lucius Arruntius;
Agrippa had the left wing and Caius Lucius the right. Octavian was
with this wing (on land, commanders-in-chief usually occupied this
position) but he was curiously indisposed on 2 September and Agrippa
coordinated the battle. For two hours or more, neither side gained
advantage, but Antony’s manoeuvring meant that large gaps had
appeared in Octavian’s line and through one of them sailed the queen
of Egypt and her lover, heading south under full sail.
The fullest account we have comes from Cassius Dio and he is in
no doubt about what happened:
Cleopatra, whose ship was riding at anchor behind the battle
lines, could not endure the long hours of uncertainty while the
issue hung in the balance: both as a woman and as an Egyptian [sic]
she found herself stretched to breaking point by the agony of the
suspense ... Suddenly, she made her choice – to flee – and made the
signal for the others, her own subjects.
Nothing about the account makes sense yet until recently it was
universally believed. It is simply a piece of propaganda. Dio was
writing years later in praise of Octavian who, as Augustus, could do
no wrong. Cleopatra’s own subjects were Greek as well as Egyptian
and there must have been Romans on board, too.
They were not directly in the firing line, being well behind
Antony’s battle stations, and could have rowed back into the safety
of the gulf or to land at any time. The fact that Cleopatra
signalled to other ships and the fact that she had sails on board
the Antonia at all, implies that this was a planned move. Antony
wanted to fight elsewhere. He would have to clear Agrippa’s ships
out of the way first – hence the battle of Actium – but then
Cleopatra led the way through the gaps he had created and the whole
fleet was to follow. Agrippa, without sails, would not be able to
catch them.
But something seems to have gone wrong and it is probably all
about timing.
This is one of those imponderables. A great general has an
innate sense about these things – exactly when to hold steady,
change formation, fall back, send in the cavalry. Communication from
ship to ship was problematic and engagements difficult, at sea, to
break off. The fact that Antony had to swing across to a quinquereme
from his own flagship implies that Cleopatra had gone too early or
that he was too committed against Agrippa’s wing. Either way, the
result was chaos and Canidius’s land troops could only look on in
horror as Agrippa’s ships closed in on Antony’s fleet and an
appalling hand-to-hand slaughter took place.
Javelins flew at close quarters, grappling hooks smashed into
timbers and held fast. Fire hurtled through the blue of the Ionian
sky to sear Antony’s ships and Antony’s men. ‘Their corpses were
burned,’ wrote Dio, ‘on board the ships as though they were on a
funeral pyre.’
 For the next eleven months Antony and Cleopatra adopted a bunker
mentality in an attempt to salvage what they could of their empire.
There were highs and lows – moments of relief and optimism
occasionally puncturing an over-arching sense of gloom and defeat.
In this respect, Cleopatra emerged the stronger character. As we
have seen already, Antony did not handle defeat well. After Parthia,
his confidence shredded, it took him nearly a year to recover; after
Actium, he never did. Cleopatra, however, planned, organized,
executed. She was the arch-survivor and never more so, ironically,
than in the last months of her life.
On board the Antonia, sailing south, he sulked and sat on deck,
brooding. She won him over, to join her for meals and in bed. In
Alexandria, he had a summerhouse, the Timonium, built on a jetty in
the harbour and lived with a small staff there for weeks before
moving, at her cajoling, back into the palace. Cleopatra returned
from Actium as though from a victory, the band playing, flags flying
and the decks strewn with flowers. What she needed was solidarity
and cash and she carried out Roman-style proscriptions of her own.
Those who would criticize her once the extent of the defeat was
known were executed and their property became hers. No one doubted
that Octavian was on his way, if only because the divine Julius had
done exactly the same thing in 48 – chased his beaten rival Pompey
to Egypt. Cleopatra set about rebuilding her shattered fleet while
Antony, in one of his rare moods of optimism, organized his four
legions from Cyrenaica.
The pair gambled that Octavian, despite his huge numerical
advantage (Canidius’ legions had defected en masse after Actium),
would not risk the sea or a campaign, however one-sided, in
midwinter and that bought them time.
Caesarion was feted at a Greek coming-of-age ceremony in
Alexandria to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. Antony’s son
Antyllus officially put on the toga virile of a man at about the
same time. The message was clear – Caesarion would rule on as the
mother-loving pharaoh after Cleopatra’s death and Antyllus would one
day make speeches in the senate as consul and rule the East as
Antony now did.
Both Antony and Cleopatra sent regular letters to Octavian and
he replied to most of them. Antony usually employed bluff, reminding
his former colleague of their wild youth in Rome. Cleopatra still
played the ‘friend and ally of Rome’ and at one point sent Octavian
her royal throne of gold, her sceptre and crown.
Symbolically, she was surrendering, but it would be surrender on
conditions. She wanted her children to rule Egypt after her. Antony
was finished. He had no cards left to play. Cleopatra, with her
kingdom intact and a vast personal treasure to which she had
recently added, was another matter. It was clearly Octavian’s game
plan to annex Egypt, take the treasure and bring Cleopatra in golden
chains to Rome as part of his triumph, much as Arsinoe had appeared
for Caesar years before. Antony would have no role in this. Beaten
and discredited as he was, the people of Rome were fickle at all
levels of society; the last thing Octavian wanted was a sudden
upsurge of sympathy and perhaps even support for the extriumvir.
In a surreal schizophrenia, Antony celebrated his fifty-third
birthday at the end of January with huge expense, just like the
parties of the good old days. On the other hand, and more or less at
the same time, the Inimitable Livers became the Sharers in Death,
bonded together in a suicide pact that would cheat Octavian of his
ultimate victory at the last moment.
With the summer of 30 came Octavian’s invasion. Caius Cornelius
Gallus marched from Cyrenaica in the west where Antony’s legions
promptly surrendered to him. Octavian approached from Syria in the
east and Pelusium fell without a struggle (although Octavian later
told tall tales of his personal heroism in a pitched battle). Antony
was faced with that nightmare, a war on two fronts and he did not
have enough troops to split his command. He tackled Gallus first and
was beaten back by sheer numbers. Undeterred, he struck east,
clashed with Octavian’s cavalry and forced them back. One
particularly brave soldier was commended to Cleopatra in the palace
that night and she gave him a breastplate and helmet inlaid with
silver as a mark of her appreciation. In the small hours, he
defected to Octavian.
The last stand came on 1 August. Antony’s tiny fleet sailed out
heroically against huge opposition. Within artillery shot of the
enemy, they raised their oars clear of the water, a sign of
surrender. On land, Antony’s cavalry brokeformation and trotted
across to the other camp. Only his infantry stayed steady and they
were quickly defeated.
This whole scene unfolded before Antony and Cleopatra as if in
the ghastly slow motion of a nightmare. She had already begun the
building of a two-storey mausoleum and had it stored with as much of
the royal treasure as it would hold.
She said goodbye to her staff and, with only her handmaidens
Iras and Charmion, locked herself in the still-unfinished building.
She sent word to Antony that she was dead.
From this point on in the narrative, uncertainty mixes with
fiction and we are left with messy scenes and loose ends that remain
untied. With Octavian’s troops pouring into the city, Antony finally
decided to end it. He had contemplated suicide before, perhaps even
tried it. Now he believed his lover/wife was dead, he saw no reason
to stay alive. Caesarion and Antyllus had been sent away for their
own safety and Octavian might yet take pity on the younger children.
Antony asked a bodyguard, Eros, to kill him but the man refused and
rammed Antony’s sword into his own stomach instead. So Antony
followed suit.
Death by stomach wound is rarely instantaneous. In fact, victims
have been known to linger for days. Either Cleopatra was told what
had happened (through a locked door) or it is just possible that she
had actually seen it from an upstairs window and commanded that the
dying Antony be brought to her.
She refused to unlock the mausoleum door so attendants used a
builder’s apparatus to haul him up on wooden planks. With
difficulty, the three women got Antony inside and he died, with all
the delicious possibilities for later novelists and filmmakers, in
her arms. She screamed and wailed, tearing her chest with her nails
so that the wounds became infected in the days ahead. She lost her
appetite and was running a temperature, but she had not shared in
death yet and was still trying to get what she could out of
Octavian.
The new conqueror of Egypt sent first Caius Proculeius, then
Gallus, to talk to the queen. He wanted her country, he wanted her
treasure (before his huge troop members became mutinous) and he
wanted her alive. To that end, while Gallus kept Cleopatra talking
through the locked door, Proculeius scrabbled up a rope and in
through a window, just in time to prevent the queen from stabbing
herself. There seems to have been a lull in the negotiations, during
which Cleopatra had access to her doctor, Olympus, and it was now
that she met Octavian for the first time.
The problem is that we have two differing versions of
Cleopatra’s last days.
Plutarch says one thing; Dio another. Both were writing long
after the event and both presumably embroidered for the sake of a
good story. Dio’s Cleopatra is ill, dishevelled and desperate. She
read Caesar’s faded letters to Octavian and stroked fondly a marble
bust in her chamber. Plutarch has her still the proud queen, haughty
to the end. When she listed the treasures she owned for Octavian’s
benefit, a self-serving attendant butted in to add various items she
had ‘forgotten’.
She grabbed his hair and slapped him across the face several
times; this sounds like the Cleopatra of old, the hard edge showing
in the place of the wide-eyed seductress. Dio’s account is most
interesting – Octavian could not look her in the face and appears
most embarrassed in her company. Plutarch has the nonsense that
Cleopatra tried her ‘magical’ seduction on him, but that Octavian
was far too fine and noble to fall for that. And that doesn’t sound
like Octavian at all.
 On 10 August, Cleopatra visited Antony’s body for the last time.
Romans and Alexandrians usually cremated their dead; Egyptians
embalmed them. It is clear from this that some kind of embalming
process was used on Antony, as it had been on Alexander the Great,
otherwise there would have been nothing to visit.
That night Cleopatra, Iras and Charmion had their last meal
together and she wrote a last letter to Octavian. Then all three
killed themselves.
In what has been described as a classic locked-room mystery,
Octavian’s guards were sent clattering through the palace (he was
probably only rooms away) and found Cleopatra dead, lying in state
in the robes of Isis, all black and gold. Iras lay on the floor
beside her and Charmion, adjusting the queen’s gown for the last
time, was dying.
Furious, Octavian sent for the psylli, Libyan snake charmers
who, it was said, could detect snake venom in a wound by the smell
and were expert at sucking it out. For 2,000 years, the asp has been
blamed for Cleopatra’s death and it is patent nonsense. The only
marks on Cleopatra’s body (apart, presumably, from the still-
infected scratches on her breasts) were found on her arm, implying a
pin prick. We know that Cleopatra knew her potions and she also had
Olympus on hand to provide a range of poisons. There is no mention
of the convulsions and vomiting that cobra bites cause. The poison
was probably an opium derivative, which leads to lethargy, coma and
respiratory collapse. No snake, not even a sixfoot adult, can be
relied upon to kill three people so quickly. Iras and Charmion had
been handling Cleopatra’s combs and hair pins for years – how
difficult would it have been to lace any one of these with a deadly
toxin?
‘Was this well done of your lady, Charmion?’ Octavian’s guard
asked.
‘Very well,’ she answered, ‘becoming a queen descended from so
many kings.’
Did she say it? Perhaps not, but she should have done.
BOOK SIX: THE LEGACY OF CLEOPATRA
‘YON RIBAUDRED NAG OF EGYPT’
LONDON, AD 1607

History, it is said, is written by the winners. And in 30, that

meant Octavian.
Such was the brilliance of his rewriting of history that to
some, Actium is the last battle in the ancient world; Cleopatra was
not only the last Ptolemy and the last pharaoh, she was an
anachronism, a seductress with delusions of grandeur that had no
place in Octavian’s brave new world.
Antony was air-brushed out of history altogether, his eldest
son, Antyllus, was decapitated, his younger children brought up by
his fine Roman ex, Octavia, who cared for them as if they were her
own, not Cleopatra’s. Antony’s statues were destroyed, the Donations
of Alexandria ignored. In Octavian’s official account of Actium,
there is no mention of Antony at all. But two things of the living
Dionysus did survive, both of them beyond Octavian’s reach. His
silver coinage, with the thick neck and bruiser’s nose prominent,
were still currency in Rome’s eastern empire two centuries later.
And, with less felicity, three of his descendants became emperors –
Nero, Caligula and Claudius, a trio of the most flawed individuals
in the history of Rome. Octavian could not possibly match that.
Octavian’s first job in 30 was to secure Egypt. He had coins
struck with a crocodile motif and the legend Aegypta Capta, Egypt
Captured. From now on, it would not be a fabulously wealthy client
kingdom to be wooed and flirted with, but a full part of the Roman
Empire; in fact, Octavian’s personal fief. The huge amount of money
it generated paid his troops and turned Rome from brick to marble;
the inflation rate was said to have dropped from 12 per cent to 4
per cent almost overnight.
Almost everything we see in the city’s ruins today owes more to
Cleopatra’s Alexandria than to any other influence. Octavian left
the country to be governed by Gallus as praefectus. There was little
trouble. Sensibly, Octavian allowed the Alexandrians full mourning
for their queen and permitted her the rites of burial alongside
Antony. Such trouble as there was came briefly and the revolt was
easily crushed by Gallus. When Egypt’s fatal lure affected him too
and he began erecting life-size statues of himself, Octavian had the
senate censure him and the prefect was obliged to follow Antony on
the point of his sword.
Cleopatra’s imagery remained, not because Octavian had any
serious respect for her but because he was aware that in Egypt she
was the living Isis and the statuary and bas-reliefs of queen and
goddess were indistinguishable from each other.
Much more surprising is that her influence spread to Rome where
a certain amount of ‘Egyptomania’ caught on. Whereas Octavian left
Egypt in 29 never to return, denouncing the sacred Apis and Buchis
bulls as mere animals, the mummified Ptolemies as a load of old
bodies and, according to legend, snapping off Alexander the Great’s
nose by accident during his sightseeing, he brought Cleopatra back
to his own city.
 His own triumphs – he milked the occasion, turning what was at
best two campaigns into three – featured Cleopatra’s children and
vast heaps of her treasure. Gold, silver and ivory dazzled in the
sun along the Via Sacra. The tenyear-old twins, labelled as ‘Sun’
and ‘Moon’, were paraded, along with (probably) six-year-old Ptolemy
Philadelphus, although he disappears from the record soon after and
may even have died (of, probably, natural causes) before the
triumph. Cleopatra was there as well – a life-size wax image of her
complete with asps coiling up her arms; the legend of her death was
already established.
In the wake of this, statues of females appeared all over Rome.
The first of these, in Cleopatra’s own lifetime, were of Livia and
Octavia, but they were erected as an antidote to the queen and the
idea took off. I am less happy with Stacy Schiff’s contention that
Roman women received a certain amount of liberation because of
Cleopatra, enjoying a far freer hand in business and even politics.
Roman men still called the shots and would continue to do so for as
long as the Roman Empire lasted.
And these men began to rewrite history before her embalming
process had been completed. Dellius had gone to her as an ambassador
and probably had fallen under her spell. Lucius Plancus certainly
had, dressing up as a sea-god to please her. The tutor Nicolas of
Damascus had taught the queen’s children; yet all three turned on
Cleopatra and added to the corrosive drips from Octavian’s own pen.
The poets jumped on the bandwagon.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) had fought against Antony at
Philippi but he was restored under Octavian and eventually became a
sort of poet laureate. In his Odes, written about seven years after
Cleopatra’s death, he enshrined the snake legend. Cleopatra was:
plotting wild destruction to our Capitol ... a woman mad enough
to nurse the wildest hopes and dark with Fortune’s favours ... Yet
she, seeking to die a nobler death, showed for the dagger’s point no
woman’s fear, nor sought to win with her some swift, fleet secret
shore ... courageous, too, to handle poisonous asps, that she might
draw black venom to her heart ... no craven woman, she!

Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil) was of an age with Cleopatra and

was, like Horace, very influenced by the Greek poets. By the mid
20s, he was working on the Aeneid, recounting the adventures of the
Trojan prince Aeneas after his escape from burning Troy. En route
Aeneas meets Dido, the queen of Carthage, and becomes enslaved by
her. The parallels with Antony and Cleopatra were obvious and
Octavian took a special interest in the poet and his works.
 Sextus Propertius came from Assisi in Umbria and his family lost
land in the proscriptions that followed Philippi. Unlike Horace and
Virgil, however, he had enough cash not to need a patron, so is less
slavishly keen to praise Octavian and damn his enemies. Some experts
have seen in his poetry dedicated to a mistress called Cynthia the
same dilemma that Antony faced, if we accept that his, in the end,
is a love story.
Then the historians took over. We must remember that the writing
of history as we know it is a new discipline. The ancient historians
often had little to go on – suspect stories distorted by time; a
complete lack of understanding of archaeology; often powerful
patrons who paid them to write from a certain perspective; even the
need to make a tale tell a moral story. Above all, they were Roman,
born into a world dominated by Rome and dominated by men. Cleopatra
simply did not fit the bill, so they called her fatale monstrum,
which is almost untranslatable in its horror. She was unnatural.
Lucius Cassius Dio held various minor magisterial offices in
Rome early in the third century AD and his History of Rome ran to a
vast eighty-volume work over twenty-two years. Although Greek, Dio
toes the Roman party line, but his summing-up on Cleopatra has never
been bettered – ‘She captivated the two greatest Romans of her day
and because of the third she destroyed herself.’
Both Appian and Gaius Tranquillis Suetonius wrote of Cleopatra,
but both wrote long after her death (in the case of Appian two
centuries later) and both were content to add uncritical scraps of
gossip to the fuller accounts of Dio and Plutarch. Mestrius
Plutarchus was a Greek philosopher born two generations after
Cleopatra, but at least he travelled to Egypt and knew something of
its culture.
His Parallel Lives, written about AD 100, paired up famous
Romans with Greeks as a moral instruction, a sort of I-told-you-it-
would-end-in-tears about the past. Antony is teamed up with the now
almost forgotten Demetrios Poliorcetes of Macedon and Caesar with
Alexander the Great. Cleopatra appears in those pages of his and has
been paraphrased or quoted in this book. Additional material was
said to have been obtained from accounts of Cleopatra’s doctor,
Olympus, but they have not survived.
The oddest – and most biased – of Cleopatra’s quasi-biographers
is Titus Flavius Josephus, the Jew turned Roman collaborator born
about AD 37.
Notoriously inaccurate in much of what he wrote, he was
convinced that Cleopatra had treated the Jews of Alexandria badly
and painted her accordingly.
In his Against Apion, he wrote:
 She destroyed the gods of her country and the sepulchres of her
progenitors and while she had received her kingdom from the first
Caesar, she had the impudence to rebel against his son [Octavian].
Only a quarter of this sentence is correct – she did indeed
receive her kingdom from Julius Caesar.
In one last respect, Octavian, perhaps unwittingly, paid a back-
handed compliment to Cleopatra. He wanted to begin again. Pretending
to have restored the old Roman Republic, that was the last thing he
wanted. On the other hand, he knew perfectly well how Rome regarded
kingship – the very idea of it had cost Caesar his life.
So, he became known as first citizen – princeps (chief) and
took the name Augustus. It means more than wise, it means venerated,
elevated, spoken of in hushed tones. The idea came from Lucius
Munatius Plancus, who had defected from Antony shortly before
Actium. And he in turn took it from Cleopatra Augusta – the wise,
the venerated, she who is spoken of in hushed tones. Once, the
Romans had stolen Ptolemy’s eagle standard and made it their own.
Now, they stole a Ptolemaic title and pretended it was theirs too.
Cleopatra’s own family probably died out during the first
century AD, although it is not possible to prove it. Her daughter,
the twin Cleopatra Selene, the moon, married King Juba of Mauretania
in 25 and the couple ruled over a watered- down Alexandria at his
capital of Iol, which they renamed Caesaria. As a little boy he had
appeared in Caesar’s triumph to mark the African campaign.
Caesarion was murdered with the connivance of his tutor, Rhodon,
anxious to ingratiate himself with Octavian. And gradually, those
who remembered Cleopatra died and the stories that passed from
fathers to sons lost a great deal in the telling and gained fictions
of their own. The cult of Isis, banned from Rome by Augustus, may
well have lasted in Egypt until the fourth or even fifth century AD
but it was eclipsed by the invasion of Islam in 640.
So it was that Islamic culture resurrected Cleopatra. There had
been no revolts during her reign and she had never threatened to
topple an idea, as the Romans had claimed of her. The Arabic
scholars of the Middle Ages could look at the queen in a more
detached and positive light. They highlighted her scholarship, her
generosity to her people, her extraordinary building programmes. All
around them in Egypt, as in other areas the Muslims conquered, the
ruins of Octavian’s occupation were crumbling into sand.
In Medieval Europe, Cleopatra is largely absent. Until, that is,
she undergoes a remarkable transformation. In 1380, the English poet
and civil servant Geoffrey Chaucer included her in his Legend of
Good Women. This was the third longest poem that Chaucer wrote. Like
many of the officials who ran the Roman Republic, the comptroller of
wines and woollens only did that as his day job; his heart lay with
poetry. ‘Incipit legenda Cleopatrie, Martiris, Egipti regine’,
Chaucer wrote. ‘Here begins the legend of Cleopatra, the martyr
queen of Egypt’.
He apologizes because he does not have the space or time to give
detailed descriptions (the whole poem is unfinished) and he merely
says of Cleopatra’s physical appearance ‘... she was as fair as the
rose in May’. His description of Actium is better, but he could have
had no real notion of ancient naval battles and, perhaps
unconsciously, seems to be describing the English naval victory over
the Franco-Genoese fleet at Sluys off the coast of Flanders a few
years before he was born – ‘shearing hooks and grapnels full of
chains’ fill his pages and the use of quicklime, not to mention
shelled peas being thrown onto decks to make them slippery!
He is in no doubt that Cleopatra ran at Actium, but the soft
soul in him says that that was hardly surprising, given the
terrifying situation she was in. At her death, in Chaucer’s version,
she leaps into a snake pit and dies ‘for love of Antony who was so
dear to her’. Cleopatra died as a martyr to love and in case we are
in any doubt, Chaucer writes, ‘And this is truth of history; it is
no fable.’
The Italian poet Dante, by comparison, perhaps more aware of his
‘Roman’ pedigree, sees her as a villainess, fit only to be included
in his circles of Hell.
Her sin, to Dante, was lust. The Italian’s allegorical poem, the
first part of his Divine Comedy, has Dante guided through Hell by
Virgil, so immediately the bias of the Roman poets is carried on
down the centuries. Cleopatra is one of the ‘carnal malefactors’
whose uncontrollable libido leads to punishment. She and the others
were blown about by fierce storms, never able to rest. Dante clearly
had it in for the Ptolemies, since the ninth circle of Hell
(Cleopatra is in the second) includes the Ptolemy who ordered the
murder of Simon Maccabeus and, according to legend, ordered the
trampling of Alexandrian Jews to death with elephants!
The Renaissance was a conscious attempt by European scholars to
recreate the lost civilizations of Greece and Rome and so Cleopatra
was reintroduced to a whole new generation. Michelangelo Buonarotti
made a pastel sketch of the queen. Her broad nose and thick lips
make her look very African, showing his complete ignorance of the
woman, and her hair coils with asps, like a sultry Medusa. Jacques
Amyot translated Plutarch’s Parallel Lives into French in 1559 and
Thomas North did the honours in English twenty years later.
In her excellent Cleopatra the Great, Joann Fletcher makes one
reference to William Shakespeare – ‘Although many biographies of
Cleopatra begin with the woman, then examine the way she has been
portrayed in later centuries from Plutarch via Shakespeare to
Hollywood, this approach can often reveal more about subsequent
cultures than about hers.’ This is probably true, but all subsequent
biographies do that – the existing climate and culture of the
writer/historian is inevitably daubed all over his/her work and each
generation will have a different take on the past.
Much of what we think we know about Cleopatra comes from
Shakespeare, who in turn lifted it from Plutarch. Allowing for the
passage of fifteen centuries and the inevitable bias of a Romanized
Greek author writing about one of Rome’s enemies, much is lost in
translation. But then again, much is gained.
‘Age cannot wither her’, wrote Shakespeare, which is precisely
why you are reading this book now. ‘Custom cannot stale her infinite
variety’, which explains the various facets of Cleopatra’s character
that this book explores. Shakespeare’s brilliance lies in his
ability to capture the essence of his heroes and heroines while
adding a magic of his own.
In a bizarre link, ‘Egyptians’ were well known on English roads
in Shakespeare’s day. They were ‘wretched, wandering wily vagabonds’
whose swarthy faces were painted red and yellow. They wore turbans
and claimed to be descended from ancient Egyptians, hailing from a
‘country which anciently outvied all the world for skill in magic
and the mysterious black arts of divination’.
Notorious for theft while claiming to tell fortunes, an Act of
Parliament was passed against them in 1530 and others followed. Ben
Jonson, the playwright contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a play
about them in 1621 – Masque of the Gypsies Metamorphosed – which was
presented to James I. ‘Gaze upon them,’ wrote Jonson, ‘as the
offspring of Ptolemy, begotten upon several Cleopatras in their
several centuries.’
Shakespeare had plundered Roman history before, most notably in
Julius Caesar (1599). In a sense, Antony and Cleopatra (1607) is a
sequel, continuing the political story of the Republic that was
about to turn into an Empire. But it is also a love story and in
that sense harks back to Romeo and Juliet (1594–5).
Even their confused suicides are similar. Antony and Cleopatra
are as ‘starcrossed’ as Romeo and Juliet, in that they come from
opposing states, Rome and Egypt, rather as the Italian pair belong
to the rival houses of Montague and Capulet. Both couples, in the
Shakespeare version, die for love, but Antony and Cleopatra are
middle-aged, worldly wise and more cynical.
As with all playwrights in the Elizabethan/Jacobean era,
Shakespeare’s major problem was how to tell a realistic love story
with boy actors in the female roles.
 Presumably contemporary audiences were used to this (females
were not allowed on the stage by law) but passion was a difficult
emotion to portray in the circumstances. Shakespeare himself was
aware of the problem, putting a rather Zen concept into Cleopatra’s
mouth when she says ‘the quick comedians extemporally will stage us
and present our Alexandrian revels. Antony shall be brought drunken
forth and I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness in
the posture of a whore.’ Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is a gypsy and a
temptress, and the theme that runs through the play is that Antony
could have been the greatest Roman who ever lived if he hadn’t let
himself be seduced by her. ‘The beds in the East are soft,’ we are
told, although elite Romans like Antony hardly lived a spartan life.
And Egypt’s softness and decadence is contrasted constantly with
‘what’s fine, what’s Roman’.
In this context, an unflattering portrait of Cleopatra – the
‘ribaudred nag’ (obscene mare) is his line – is maintained by
Antony’s cynical lieutenant Enobarbus (Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus)
who is so disgusted by Antony’s infatuation that he deserts him for
Octavian. Historically, as we have seen, defection was almost
Ahenobarbus’ stock-in-trade but Shakespeare ignores this and gives
Enobarbus’ stand a heroic quality. To fine Romans like him,
Cleopatra is ‘cunning past man’s thought’; ‘we cannot call her winds
and waters, sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests
than almanacs can report’. Some audiences may have been appalled
that Antony could leave the noble and loyal Octavia, every inch a
Roman matron, for a foreign slut.
And it is Cleopatra’s influence on Antony that makes him behave
the way he does. In Julius Caesar he is described as ‘a masker and a
reveller’ – a playboy of the Western world who can quite easily, we
can believe, transfer his interests to the East. He and Cleopatra
wander the streets at night, dressed as peasants, stumbling from pub
to pub. He is consumed by her, neglecting his duty and allowing
power to slip to the cold, calculating Octavian.
Only when the Egyptian fleet is defeated at Actium – and that
because Cleopatra’s war-galley sails away, causing a rout – does
Antony realize the error of his ways. In a particularly petulant
(and again, unRoman) outburst, he screams at her, ‘This foul
Egyptian hath betrayed me ... Triple-turned whore, ’tis thou hast
sold me to this novice [Octavian] and my heart makes only wars on
thee...’
To be fair to Shakespeare’s Antony, he is aware throughout the
play that he is letting the (Roman) side down. ‘A Roman thought hath
struck him’ in Act 1 Scene II, and when Antony receives various
messages from Rome, especially of the death of Fulvia, he
acknowledges that ‘I must from this enchanting queen break off’ and
‘These strong Egyptian fetters I must break or lose myself in
dotage’.
Cleopatra comes across as fickle and wilful, even childishly
awkward when it comes to her relationship with Antony – ‘if you find
him sad,’ she says to her maid, Charmion, ‘say I am dancing; if in
mirth, report that I am sudden sick.’
There is no doubt that theirs is a real love-match – ‘Eternity
was in our lips and eyes, bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts
so poor but was a race of heaven ...’ But the pressure of
international politics forces Antony into a political marriage with
Octavia. Cleopatra is at once broken-hearted and furious at this
news and nearly kills the messenger who brings it.
The contrasting images we have of Cleopatra come from the queen
herself and from Enobarbus, who for most of the play is playing
devil’s advocate on Cleopatra’s behalf. On a personal level, she
describes herself as ‘my old serpent of old Nile’, which she says is
what Antony calls her and describes a middleaged has-been. ‘Think on
me that I am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black and wrinkled deep
in time’; and this is four hundred years before scientists became
aware of the damage caused by over-sunbathing!
Enobarbus, it is true, is more concerned with the outward
appearance and the glittering opulence of the Egyptian court. When
prompted by the gossip-hungry Romans Maecenas and Agrippa from
Octavian’s camp, he tells them of the banquet at which eight wild
boars were eaten by only twelve people and embarks on the famous
description of Cleopatra’s flagship:
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. The oars were silver, which
to the tune of flutes kept stroke ... For her own person, she
beggared all description; she did lie in her pavilion – cloth of
gold tissue – o’er picturing that Venus where we see the fancy
outwork nature.
On each side her stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling
Cupids ... Shakespeare’s own audiences, of course, had no idea what
an ancient Egyptian looked like and found nothing incongruous about
mention of a game of billiards in the play. The boy who played
Cleopatra in 1607 would have worn a stomacher and farthingale as
wealthy ladies of his own day did. Antony would have worn the plate
armour of the Jacobean knight and flourished a cup-hilt rapier in
the warlike bits. This tradition continued, both on the stage and in
art. A painting by Guido Cagnacci in 1658 shows Cleopatra applying
the asp to her arm (Shakespeare seems to have invented the bite on
the breast).
 She has redgold hair (which may be accurate) and the heavy,
pale-skinned body of a Rubens beauty. Her throne is pure Italian
1650s. A drawing of Elizabeth Younge as Cleopatra in 1773 shows her
in the low-cut bodice and high headgear of the fashionable European
courts of the ancien régime – she could easily be Marie Antoinette,
queen of France.
Not until the late Victorian period do we see any real attempt
to get the costumes right. Frederick Leighton, most famous of the
nineteenth-century painters who produced vast canvases on Roman
history, shows her in her barge, smouldering seductively under an
awning beneath the famous purple sails. There is a nod in the
direction of Eastern promise in the photographs of Ellen Wallis as
the queen in the Theatre Royal, London, in 1873, and something
vaguely exotic at the Princess’s Theatre seventeen years later when
Lillie Langtry played her.
By 1906, Constance Collier’s outfit at His Majesty’s is really
very authentic, based on the archaeology that was then being carried
out in the Valley of the Kings. Her Antony, the tragedian H.
Beerbohm Tree, looks magnificent in the cuirasses and lion-masked
cloak that only Hollywood would outdo a few years later.
While Shakespeare’s legendary status grew in the eighteenth
century, one playwright decided rewrites were necessary. Part-time
actor and man-about- town Colley Cibber gave King Lear a happy
ending (!) and even tinkered with Richard III, but in 1724 he wrote
his own Caesar in Egypt, which is best forgotten. It was Antony and
Cleopatra in the First Folio format that stood the test of time and
the legendary Sarah Bernhardt played her in a variant called
Cleopatre in the Theatre Porte St Martin in Paris in 1890.
Enter George Bernard Shaw. It would be difficult to imagine a
greater contrast between him and Shakespeare or the cultures for
which they wrote.
Shakespeare’s England was about to embark on a 300-year imperial
adventure of which Shaw’s was the apogee. Caesar and Cleopatra was
written in 1898 when the British empire was the largest in the world
and included what had once been Cleopatra’s Egypt. The play was
written specifically for the Shakespearean tragedian Johnston
Forbes-Robertson and his wife Gertrude Elliott, but it was first
performed in March 1899 by Mrs Patrick Campbell’s company at the
Theatre Royal, Newcastle.
Shaw was an outspoken critic of the establishment and
unsurprisingly his play is more concerned with politics than love.
Caesar is a far less romantic character than Antony and although
Cleopatra is much younger in this version, she is never the silly
girl and sidekick sister of Ptolemy, but a shrewd operator who plays
the game of realpolitik very well. It was this play, rather than the
better known Shakespeare version, that was translated to the screen
via Hollywood.
On the eve of the First World War, Massenet wrote his opera
Cleopatre. The man specialized in classical themes – he wrote one on
Spartacus too – and Maria Kuznetsova, the darling of St Petersburg
society under the last tsar, played the queen. There was a surreal
echo here, had the Russians only known it. They were celebrating the
end of the Ptolemies at the same time that revolutionaries had plans
to topple the Romanovs.
But there is a sense in which Cleopatra is too big for the
stage. Her ambitions, her contradictions, her sheer variety, dwarf
the confines of theatre. As George Bernard Shaw said in 1945, ‘What
scope! What limitless possibilities! Here you have the whole world
to play with!’
He was talking about the Denham Studios in London, but in
reality he was talking about film.

GODDESS OF THE SILVER SCREEN

HOLLYWOODLAND, AD 1917

The celluloid Cleopatra was huge. Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934

production poster showed the leads in a cinematic clinch and
paraphrased Poe 78 with, ‘The glory that was Egypt! The grandeur
that was Rome!’ It boasted 8,000 extras (long before CGI made all
that humanity unnecessary), it took a year to make – then a very
long haul in film production – and its lavish sets covered 400,000
square feet. Cleopatra’s barge became ‘a love boat’ 500 feet long
and her war-galleys were locked in a holocaust at sea while Antony’s
armies battled on land. This was the backdrop to a ‘love affair that
shook the world set in a spectacle of thrilling magnificence’.
But DeMille’s was not the first film of the queen of Egypt.
Georges Méliès produced the first known version as a ‘short’ in
1899, the same year that Shaw’s play was performed. Shortly after
Beerbohm Tree played Antony on the stage in London and Maria
Kuznetsova wowed them operatically in tsarist Russia, the Fox
company launched Theda Bara down the Hollywood Nile in the silent
version of 1917.
Early film-makers drew heavily on the Bible for their
inspiration and in the days before the puritanical Hayes Commission
began to introduce its rigid censorship, bacchanalian orgies and
decadence were the stuff of ancient courts presided over by cruel
tyrants. Theda Bara was a ‘natural’ for Cleopatra who fitted the
licentious image perfectly. She was the vamp of the silent screen, a
femme fatale with painted lips and large, hypnotic eyes. Her name,
people said, was an apt anagram of ‘Arab Death’ and she hardly had
to change her costume at all the following year for her role as
Salome.
The sets of the 1917 film are astonishing, the painted columns
of her chamber straight out of the Valley of the Kings while black
American extras stand picturesquely as Nubian slaves fanning
Cleopatra with ostrich feathers. She lounges casually on a chaise
longue that Tutankhamun could have owned while an imperious-looking
Caesar (Fritz Leiber) is attempting to control her by wearing
plastic armour and a laurel wreath.
The 1934 version was more lavish and altogether on a different
plane. Warren William played Caesar and heartthrob/hunk Henry
Wilcoxon was Antony. The surprise came with Claudette Colbert as
Cleopatra; she had previously only been known for her light comedy
and romantic roles, but she was excellent as the Egyptian queen. In
keeping with the world’s distorted view of Cleopatra, DeMille asked
Colbert whether she wanted to play one of the wickedest women in
history.
The action spans the involvement of both Caesar and Antony in
Egypt and some film experts regard this Cleopatra as DeMille’s best
film. It was a ‘talkie’, of course, and filmed in black and white.
Much of its set-piece brilliance owes a great deal to Busby
Berkeley’s mass dance routines in which dozens of luscious female
slaves move as one to a huge backdrop of ostrich feathers.
The seduction scene of Antony by Cleopatra is superbly handled.
Antony is furious at being kept waiting by the queen (nobody
glowered quite like Henry Wilcoxon!) and she blasts him when she
finally arrives with her choreographed slaves, lifting virgins in
nets from the sea and scooping up handfuls of jewels.
‘As Antony finally embraces her,’ wrote Baird Searles, ‘she
looks across his shoulder, her face suddenly an icy mask and nods to
her chamberlain. The camera pulls back from their feather-backed
dais across the space of the hall.
Gauzy drapes fall in front of the dais. Rose petals rain down.
Dancing girls writhe...’ and the scene unfolds to reveal Cleopatra’s
giant barge, which becomes the ‘scene of an aphrodisiac rite timed
to the rhythm of the oarsmen’.
White peacocks abound, harpists play and there is even a virgin
straddling a sacrificial ox swathed in garlands of flowers. The Apis
bull had made it to the big screen.
The next venture was Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, released in
1946 and the one in which the playwright was closely involved. It
was then the most expensive British film ever made, produced in an
atmosphere of escapism from the austerity of post-war Britain. The
lighthouse of Pharos, one of the world’s seven wonders, was
recreated and the cast was one to match DeMille’s.
Claude Rains played Caesar like a kind old uncle and the
impossibly handsome Stewart Granger was Apollodorus, Cleopatra’s
faithful servant. So magnetic was Granger, said one critic, that it
makes ‘one wonder about Cleopatra’s taste in men’. Flora Robson was
the slave Ftatateeta and came dangerously close to stealing the film
from Vivien Leigh. Even so, the star of Gone with the Wind put in a
remarkable performance, maturing from impulsive girl to accomplished
stateswoman.
All these versions were swept away by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s
1963 offering, made infamous by the on-and off-set romance between
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and a colossal overspend that
threatened at one point to bankrupt the Fox organization. The cost
was $44 million (about $308 million in today’s figures). Mankiewicz
was a highly literate director and his screenplay acknowledged the
services of men we have met before – Plutarch, Suetonius and Appian.
Some critics believed that it was the attempt to stick to history as
opposed to spectacle that caused Cleopatra to flop. Mankiewicz based
the screenplay on The Life and Times of Cleopatra by Carlo Maria
Franzero, which, while it followed the conventional (Romanized)
facts, could not help seeing Cleopatra as a siren, ‘deflowered, in
the old custom’, on the altar of Amun-Ra.
The film ran for nearly four hours and became, in a sense, the
story of a domestic triangle – Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra – albeit on
a colossal scale. The epics of the 1960s, no less than the SFX
blockbusters of today, received huge hype ahead of the premiere and,
as today, it was usually woefully over the top.
The epic scenes, like Cleopatra’s entry into Rome on a huge,
slave-carried Sphinx, are dazzling in their glitter, but there is
something predictable and laboured about them. Taylor’s make-up was
straight out of the wall-paintings at Luxor, but critics even
complained about that, preferring the chic 1930s fashions of
designer Travis Banton in the DeMille version. The battle of Actium
was surprisingly well done in an age before computer graphics.
What of the actors? As George MacDonald Fraser says in his
Hollywood History of the World, the arrival of the cult of celebrity
adds to the problem of authenticity. ‘They are not Antony and
Caesar, they are Burton and Harrison.’
And even more so, they are Taylor. Rex Harrison is surely too
urbane and ‘modern’ for one of the greatest generals in history and
although we know that Burton could probably have held his own drink
for drink with Antony, he is too petulant and too intelligent at
least for Plutarch’s thug. On the other hand, he handles the ennui
after the Parthian campaign and after Actium very well. He does
nothing and it is precisely that that infuriates us. We want to
shake him and shout, ‘You are Mark Antony, for God’s sake! Pull
yourself together!’ Roddy McDowall is chillingly creepy as the
single-minded Octavian, but could the real man who would become the
Emperor Augustus have been such a psychopath?
Elizabeth Taylor had more costume-changes than anyone in the
cast, to accentuate Cleopatra’s legendary wealth, but she was not
merely a clotheshorse.
She is endearing in the soft interchanges with both Caesar and
Antony, imperious in command and genuinely, it seems, in love. She
dies as nobly as Antony, proving that the Romans did not have a
monopoly on courage.
The truth is that Cleopatra is a very difficult role to
recreate, be it on stage or screen. Her sheer diversity defies
belief and it all comes back to a question we have posed earlier –
how could a woman cope against the male-dominated powers of the
world, especially when that power was the greatest military machine
in history?
As I write, a new Cleopatra is in the offing. Chat rooms have
been abuzz since the summer of 2010 with Hollywood-generated gossip
that Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Shiff’s Cleopatra: A Life has been
bought up by producer Scott Rudin with a view to present yet another
celluloid version. Plans for a 3D rock ’n’ roll musical based on
Cleopatra by Steven Soderbergh appear to have died and in October,
James ‘LA Confidential’ Cameron was in discussions to direct.
By November that was ruled out but controversy has arisen
because of the potential casting of the queen. The likely choice is
Angelina Jolie, whom Sony’s production head Amy Pascal says was
‘born to play this role’.
But there is a problem. Essence magazine wrote in June, ‘Why
does Hollywood think it’s even slightly plausible to cast white
women in roles that would be more sensible to cast a black actress
for? Especially when that role is an African queen.’ Essence has
missed the point spectacularly. We shall discuss this more fully in
the next chapter, but basically, Cleopatra was Greek. Being queen of
Egypt does not remotely make her African in the accepted sense and
the whole thing is a storm in a teacup. If we follow this thing
logically, Spartacus would be played by a Bulgarian, Jesus by an
Israeli and, of course, every Roman would be Italian. Caucasian
American actors could not start to compete for roles before the
sixteenth century!
Stacy Schiff herself has produced an element of sanity by giving
an interview to the Wall Street Journal in November: ‘If you need
someone to project raw charisma and immense authority, I think
[Angelina Jolie] is terrific. The interesting thing about Cleopatra
is that she is such a shape-shifter ... throughout history we’ve
moulded her to our times and our places.’

FATALE MONSTRUM?
‘Moulded her to our times and our places.’ This is the fate of
any great figure from history. However much we try, through
scholarship and careful research, we can never truly get under the
skin of Cleopatra because she is not of our time.
Intellectual as she was, she could not read the words you are
reading now because in her day there was no such language. The last
2,000 years with all its experiences, especially for women, have
changed irrevocably anything Cleopatra knew.
Yet there are some constants. The rampant xenophobia and sexism
of the Romans has not disappeared, however much the Politically
Correct brigade might wish it otherwise and it is still possible to
accept the Roman propaganda view of Cleopatra as fatale monstrum, an
unnatural and deadly harpy whose claws drew the blood of Julius
Caesar and Mark Antony and the thousands of ordinary men who marched
under her banner.
As I write, the people of Alexandria are rioting in the streets,
complaining about their government rather as their forebears snapped
at the rule of the Ptolemies. Images on the television news of the
mob clambering over the statue of Alexander the Great strikes a
chord. The statue is relatively new, but the man and his age and his
royal descendants take us back into the mists of time.
Cleopatra is rarely out of the news. She is the stock-in-trade
of television documentary-makers, either in her own right or as part
of a programme/series on Rome. High-profile archaeology has thrown
its spotlight on her too. Serious underwater research has been going
on since 1994 in the harbour of Alexandria, which Octavian’s Romans
called Portus Magnus, the great port.
A series of earthquakes since Cleopatra’s time, which may or may
not have been accompanied by at least one tsunami in AD 365, have
drowned the palaces of the Ptolemies. Land erosion and the rising of
sea levels have added to the problem. Over the last fifteen years
two parallel underwater projects have been going on led by Dr Zahi
Hawass, secretary general of the supreme council of antiquities of
Egypt, and Franck Goddio, a specialist undersea archaeologist.
Their finds are extraordinary – huge blocks of sculpted stone
that may have come from the Pharos lighthouse, life-size statues of
pharaohs and gods, in Greek and Egyptian style, from the royal
palaces, sheets of gold with Greek texts written on them. Isis and
Osiris have been found lying in the silt, along with the bearded
Serapis.
In May 2008, Zahi Hawass announced that he had found Cleopatra’s
tomb.
Land-based archaeology is being carried out in Alexandria and at
Heraclion and Canopus along the coast, but Hawass’ Cleopatra site is
at Taposiris Magna, 28 miles west of the queen’s capital. The
underground chambers there have yielded many Cleopatra coins and
busts which have her likeness. One 400-foot-long tunnel also has
coins of Mark Antony. The only problem is that no bodies have come
to light and without them the whole claim can be no more than
conjecture.
John Baines, Professor of Egyptology at Oxford University,
warned that looking for royal tombs is a hopeless task and doubted
very much that Octavian would have allowed the queen to be buried
with Antony.
The problem arises because we do not know exactly where the pair
were buried or indeed if they were buried together. Cassius Dio says
they were and from his texts and those of Plutarch it is clear that
Cleopatra’s mausoleum, where she died, was in the palace area,
presumably in Alexandria’s Beta district.
We know that Octavian allowed their burial with full funeral
rites, but this does not give us a site. Taposiris Magna is a full
day’s ride (and two days on foot) from those palaces and the place,
unlike Alexandria, has no particular resonance as a burial site of
the Ptolemies.
Adrian Goldsworthy wrote in his recent book that he secretly
hoped the tombs would never be found. ‘Neither Cleopatra nor Antony
enjoyed much peace in their lives,’ he says, and ‘it would seem a
shame if their remains ended up on display to crowds of tourists, or
even examined, stored and catalogued in a museum basement.’
Three lines earlier, however, the historian in him admits that
any new discoveries would be of interest.
Enter another piece of speculation hyped by the media into
spectacular fact.
Two years ago, the BBC produced a documentary with the lurid
(and woefully incorrect) title Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer and
it focused on the archaeology of a tomb in Ephesus that was claimed
to be that of Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s younger sister. The find itself
was old hat (the tomb having been opened by archaeologists in 1926)
but state-of-the-art research was only carried out in the three
years prior to the programme. The Ephesus body was found in an
octagonal-shaped tomb, which was very unusual, and the skeleton lay
in a sarcophagus.
The skull was measured and examined, but ended up in Nazi
Germany during the Second World War and subsequently disappeared. In
the early 1990s, Hike Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences re-
entered the tomb and carried out extensive work on the remaining
bones. Fabian Kranz worked on the body from 2007 and came to the
following conclusions. The carbon dating process gave a date range
of 200–220 BC, which fits Arsinoe, and the woman in question would
have been between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. There was no
sign of disease or that the girl had ever done hard manual work.
That this could be the body of Arsinoe cannot be doubted, but there
are more cons than pros in the evidence.
First, it was asserted that the octagonal tomb shape bears
reference to the Pharos lighthouse with which Arsinoe was
associated. The octagon was, in fact, the shape of only one tier of
the lighthouse – the others were rectangular and circular – and
there is no written reference linking Arsinoe with the Pharos at
all.
Secondly, all accounts agree that she was executed in or near
the temple of Artemis, probably by Antony’s guards. We obviously do
not know how this was done, but it seems unlikely that
soldiers/hitmen would waste time with poison when they were carrying
swords. There is no sign of violent trauma on the Ephesus body;
sword thrusts or hacks could leave telltale cuts on the bones –
there were none. Ages are notoriously difficult in body
identification and we do not have any exact date of birth for
Arsinoe, but all written records imply that she was four or five
years younger than Cleopatra.
That means that at the time of her death in 41, Arsinoe was
twenty-three or twenty-four, not the teenager the skeletal remains
suggest. Then there is the vexed question of the state of the body.
Ephesus had been under Greek control for 200 years by 41 and the
Greeks practised cremation of their dead. The Ptolemaic Egyptians,
as we know, practised mummification. Why, then, has the body of
Arsinoe undergone neither of these processes?
The most contentious theory, however, comes with the skull. It
has gone, so we are relying on measurements taken in the 1920s, a
time when archaeology was notoriously lacking in intellectual
rigour, and the conclusion reached in the 2009 programme was that
the skull was peculiarly elongated, which was an African practice.
This means that Arsinoe was of mixed race. We know that her father
was Ptolemy Auletes, a Greek, so her mother had to be African.
Because she was Cleopatra’s sister, the theory runs, Cleopatra was
black too. It is difficult to know where to start to unravel these
leaps in logic.
Elongated skulls are found in many cultures, including that of
the Huns of Eastern Europe, the Slavs and Russians, the Incas and in
Greece itself. Allowing that this is not a peculiarity of this
particular body – perhaps hydrocephaly which distorts the skull was
responsible – but a genetic trait, then it could well mean that
‘Arsinoe’s’ mother as well as her father was Greek. Then we have the
further leap that Arsinoe and Cleopatra had the same mother. We do
not know that. It is entirely possible that all Auletes’ children
were by different women. All we can say is that the Ephesus body is
that of a high-status young female, cause of death unknown, who was
buried in the Octagon in the 200 years before the birth of Christ.
Infuriatingly, it is as vague as that.
In 2009 Egyptologist Dr Sally Ashton of Cambridge University
compiled a computerized face of Cleopatra to help us understand what
Chaucer’s ‘rose’ and Shakespeare’s ‘ribaudred nag’ actually looked
like. The result is typical of all computer-generated images – it
could be anybody. Factored into the computer program for this was
every known image of Cleopatra, including Greek busts, Alexandrian
coins and Egyptian bas-reliefs.
Most contentious of all is the skin pigmentation. None of the
artefacts mentioned can help us with that and no contemporary
comments on it. Deep down, we want Cleopatra to be darkskinned and
sultry, because it fits with all our prejudices and preconceptions.
An auburn-haired, poppy-eyed Greek woman with a hooked nose and hard
mouth does not equate with the siren who challenged an empire and
destroyed her own.
It has taken a long time for the world to escape the cultural
shackles of the Roman historians. Shakespeare didn’t even try. Not
until 1838 was there a book about Cleopatra written by a woman.
Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns was written in that year by
Anna Brownell Jameson. The purpose of the book was to ‘present in a
small compass ... an idea of the influence which a female government
has had generally on men and nations and of the influence which the
possession of power has had individually on the female character’,
but the author admits that she sometimes breaks the rules of
biography by going for the moral or picturesque.
In the case of morality, of course, she was doing no more than
Plutarch in his Parallel Lives but the moral high ground had changed
somewhat in 1,800 years. For example, she finds it absurd that
victories are always called ‘glorious’ and is appalled that the
sheer brutality of history is far more horrific than ‘any of the
banished superstitions and goblins of the nursery’.
 Mrs Jameson was fully aware of the 1830s’ limitations of female
power and even rights. As she was writing, the eighteen-year-old
Victoria was struggling through the first year of her reign. She was
arguably the most powerful woman in the world and the same age as
Cleopatra when she assumed that position in 48 BC. But Victoria was
surrounded by male advisers, a male Privy Council, a male parliament
and those few allowed to vote for her political parties were all
men.
So natural is this order of things, says Mrs Jameson, that when
a bizarre collection of circumstances leads to female rule, the
female in question is always in extremis just trying to cope. She
cites Christina of Sweden, ‘the acute Elizabeth’ [the First, of
England], the ‘haughty energetic Catherine’ [the Great, of Russia],
the ‘stupid, heartless Anne’ [of England] and the ‘amiable’
[Austrian Empress] Maria Theresa.
She concludes, rather sadly, that the rules of these queens and
others she includes in this book have been either ‘conspicuously
unhappy or criminal’ and that female government is not ‘properly or
naturally that of the sceptre or the sword’. Did she really believe
this? Why not – she was a woman of her times. Victoria may have been
the most powerful woman in the world, but she deferred constantly to
her male supporters – her uncle Leopold of the Belgians, her husband
Prince Albert, her Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
It was the way of things.
And so Mrs Jameson is scathing of Cleopatra – ‘as a woman, she
can scarcely be said to claim either our sympathy or our respect; as
a sovereign, she neither achieved great exploits nor great
conquests’. But she has to agree that Cleopatra left behind a name
that ‘still acts as a spell upon the fancy’. While acknowledging the
classical authors’ writings on Cleopatra’s lovely voice and
philosophical learning, Mrs Jameson adds that she was ‘dissembling,
ambitious, vain, perverse and utterly unprincipled’. This was 1838
and Mrs Jameson has to be coy about the Cleopatra/Caesar
relationship. No sacrifice was too great for Cleopatra, however,
including ‘her sex’s honour’, and later her enemies ‘could easily
guess at the means by which Cleopatra had seduced her judge’.
She does not believe that Cleopatra had her own brother Ptolemy
XIV murdered to clear the way for Caesarion. There is no direct
evidence for it and it ‘bespeaks a heart more completely hardened
against the natural affections than Cleopatra ever exhibited’. She
was not warlike but ruled by ‘policy and prudence’.
Mrs Jameson is dismissive of Antony, too. He was the ‘arbitrator
of her fate and he ended by becoming the veriest slave that was ever
chained to a woman’s footstool’. He was ‘a magnificent, reckless
libertine, a valiant but a coarse soldier’. True to form, Cleopatra
is the villainess of Actium, losing her nerve and hoisting her sails
with the feckless Antony, made mad by the gods out to destroy him,
following suit. The author does concede, however, that the queen
easily duped Octavian – ‘she had seen through his mean designs and
his deep disguises’.
Anna Jameson follows Plutarch with a grim determination perhaps
to prove that women were just as good historians as men. She was
writing at the end of the antiquarian period when any kind of folk
tale was believed and before history became critical and a matter of
interpretation. Her conclusion, however, is interesting because it
transcends all that – ‘thus perished this celebrated woman [she goes
with the asp poisoning] whose character exhibits such an
extraordinary mixture of grandeur and littleness and whose life and
fate present something so wildly magnificent to the fancy, that we
dare not try her by the usual rules of conduct’. We must leave her
as we find her – ‘a dazzling piece of witchcraft’.
Not until 1914 was there a balanced thesis that put her into the
context of Egyptian history. It was The Life and Times of Cleopatra,
Queen of Egypt, written by the archaeologist Arthur Weigall. This is
a real attempt for the first time to see her as she really was – ‘an
often lonely and sorely tried woman, who fought all her life for the
fulfilment of a patriotic and splendid ambition ...’
Look on the Internet today and you will find over 18,000,000
sites devoted to Cleopatra. You can buy make-up, wigs, necklaces and
even lingerie. You can play slot games and read about various
exhibitions you’ll kick yourself for having missed. Nobody has
tried, as far as I am aware, to turn Cleopatra into a feminist icon
– her story is too wound up with men for that. Only a few scholars
share the view of the Arab traveller Al-Masudi from the seventh
century – ‘She was a sage, a philosopher, who elevated the ranks of
scholars and enjoyed their company.’
Most people believe she was Egyptian and many are still ready to
accept the Roman libel, brilliantly summed up by historian Joyce
Tyldesley – ‘Cleopatra ... was to be remembered as that immoral
foreign woman. Almost overnight she became the most frightening of
Roman stereotypes; an unnatural woman. A woman who worshipped crude
gods, dominated men, slept with her brothers and gave birth to
bastards. A woman foolish enough to think she might one day rule
Rome and devious enough to lure a decent man [Caesar or Antony,
Octavian or Herod, take your pick] away from his hearth and home.’
Stacy Schiff summarizes superbly too – ‘Many people have spoken
for her, including the greatest playwrights and poets; we have been
putting words in her mouth for two thousand years. In one of the
busiest afterlives in history, she has gone on to become an
asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a
strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor. Shakespeare attested to
Cleopatra’s infinite variety. He had no idea.’
And in the end, in a way, Cleopatra has won. She has survived
the scurrilous attacks on her, which called her harlot, witch,
sorceress, fatale monstrum. But she has survived the probing
intrusions of the good guys, too, those of us, historians,
archaeologists and the rest, who have tried to find the truth about
her.
‘So far,’ says the website of the recent Cleopatra Exhibition at
the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, ‘the real last queen of Egypt
has eluded everyone.’