Cleopatra and Antony Read online

  Unable to repay his chief Roman creditor, Rabirius, Auletes appointed him his minister of finance so that he could extort money directly from the populace. It was a shrewd move and the rapacious Rabirius did not last long. Saved from the mob only by taking refuge in Alexandria’s jail, he fled back to Rome, where the whole Egyptian adventure had come into disrepute. Some serious flooding of the Tiber, which had caused many deaths and much property damage, had occurred at the time of the invasion and been blamed on Gabinius’ disregard of the Sibylline prophecies. Accordingly, both Gabinius and Rabirius were soon put on trial for their freebooting activities in Egypt. Gabinius was exiled but Rabirius acquitted.

  In early 51, Auletes, by then well into his fifties and prematurely aged by his troubles and excesses, fell ill. In his will, a copy of which he sent to Rome for safekeeping, he named as his successors the seventeen-year-old Cleopatra, as she must have been anticipating, and the elder of his two sons, the later Ptolemy XIII, who was just ten years old. What actually happened on the king’s death sometime in the spring of 51 is, however, obscure. Papyrus documents from those months refer to “the thirtieth year of Auletes which is the first year of Cleopatra,” suggesting a period of joint rule between them. Perhaps an ailing Ptolemy wished to make clear to his people that Cleopatra was to be Egypt’s next queen. Perhaps Cleopatra kept her father’s death a secret until she had secured her position on the throne. Documents as late as July 51 continue to refer to their joint rulership. However, by early August news of the king’s death had reached Rome and the reign of Egypt’s last queen, Cleopatra VII, had begun.

  The new rulers had already been given the titles “Sister- and Brother-Loving” by their father, perhaps more in hope than in expectation. They also took the title Philopater, “Father-Loving.”

  According to hieroglyphs on a stele set up after her death, early in her reign Cleopatra traveled four hundred miles from Alexandria to the holy 27 shrine at Hermonthis, fourteen miles south of Thebes (Luxor) in Upper Egypt. The reason for her long journey was to participate in the sacred rites of Buchis, the bull. Bull worship had existed in Egypt from the earliest times as a fertility cult and the rites sometimes had a sexual character. At certain times, women were allowed to visit sacred bulls and expose their genitals to them to make themselves fecund. In Cleopatra’s time, at least four regions worshipped their own sacred bull. The Apis bull of Memphis, always an ebony black beast with white markings, was the most important, leading a luxurious life pampered by priests. However, the bull Cleopatra had come to venerate—the Buchis bull of Hermonthis—was also deeply revered as the living soul of Amon-Ra, the sun god.

  The previous Buchis bull had recently died, its mummified body consigned to a stone sarcophagus in a giant necropolis of dead bulls, the “bucheum.” Its replacement, like its predecessor entirely white and with a coat so lustrous it apparently sparkled in the light, was to be ferried in state across the Nile to be installed in its shrine. What more striking way for the living goddess Cleopatra to show herself to her people than to accompany the sacred bull? The inscription records how “the queen, the lady of the two lands, the goddess who loves her father,” led it “on to the ship of Amun surrounded by the king’s boats. All of the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis along with the priests worshipped the divine animal. As for the queen, everyone was able to see her.”*

  Cleopatra, it seems, was already aware of the seductive power of spectacle. Like the first Ptolemies, she also appreciated the importance to her people of their ancient religious cults and the explosively emotional nature of their beliefs. When she was ten years old, at a time of tension, a member of a Roman delegation to Alexandria had killed a cat by accident. In Egypt all cats were sacred and, as a writer recorded, “the crowd ran to his house, and neither the king’s representatives who came to ask for clemency for the foreigner nor the fear of Rome were sufficient to save the unfortunate man’s life.”*

  In addition, Cleopatra grasped the economic significance of Egypt’s temples. The larger temples were—like the monasteries of medieval Europe—wealthy landowners. They ran industries such as metalworking and linen manufacture. By sponsoring them she was not only aligning herself spiritually with her people but also promoting the nation’s wealth.

  Perhaps an awareness of her bloodstained heredity and a determination to protect herself from the violent fate that had befallen so many of her forebears caused Cleopatra to assert her independence early in her reign. Certainly, nothing she had witnessed in her young life so far could have given her any confidence that she was safe. She had not known her mother. Her father had been her protector. Without him she was exposed to the plottings of courtiers and the ambitions of her half siblings. The only person on whom she could rely was herself—a lonely and intimidating scenario, but one with no viable alternative.

  Documents dated to the first two years of her rule refer to her and her alone. She also minted coins on which only her head appeared. There are no references to her young brother. He should have governed with his sister and, as a minor, been assisted by a council of regents appointed to help him—a eunuch, Pothinus, for administrative and financial matters; Achillas, a military commander to take charge of the armed forces; and Theodotus, a professor of rhetoric from Samos, as his tutor. This regency council should have taken precedence over Cleopatra since, under the Ptolemaic code, kings took precedence over queens. But for a while Cleopatra, still in her teens, apparently succeeded in brushing the council aside, ruling alone without interference—an achievement that says much not only for her determination but also for her youthful self-confidence and ambition.

  That ambition was both for herself and for her country. Cleopatra’s inheritance was a diminished, depleted kingdom, far removed from the muscular empire of the early Ptolemies. Its continued independence was entirely at Rome’s pleasure. Cleopatra had seen her father a supplicant and briber of Rome, despised by his people and kept on his throne only by foreign mercenaries. The circumstances had been humiliating. Yet, however she might resent this, she knew her father had survived for more than two decades only because of the Romans. The question of how best to manage the relationship with Rome and exploit it in her favor would become one of her driving preoccupations as queen.

  Her first challenge came uncomfortably early when, later in 51, the Roman governor of Syria sent his two sons to Alexandria to order the soldiers stationed there by Gabinius to return to Syria. He needed them to help defend the province against the Parthians but the disgruntled legionaries, who had grown attached to soft Egyptian life, murdered the young men. Fearing Rome might hold her accountable and despite the risk of the remaining Roman soldiery rising against her, Cleopatra did not hesitate. She arrested the assassins and packed them off to Syria in chains.

  Cleopatra’s actions, though diplomatically astute, provoked a crisis at the Alexandrian court, where she was criticized for kowtowing to Rome. Her situation became yet more difficult when droughts and failing harvests in the third year of her reign began to cause unrest in the countryside, provoking a coup against her at court. Documents issued at around this time under the name of “the King and Queen,” and referring to the first year of Ptolemy XIII’s reign, show that Cleopatra was no longer sole sovereign but had been forced to accept her young brother—and his regency council—as co-rulers.

  At this increasingly precarious time for Cleopatra, Rome’s affairs again intruded. In 49, Pompey the Great sent his son Gnaeus to Alexandria to seek Egyptian aid in the civil war that had broken out between himself and Julius Caesar. Help was duly granted—fifty ships, grain and soldiers were dispatched—but the grateful thanks sent to Egypt by Pompey’s supporters were addressed only to Ptolemy XIII. Cleopatra had by now been deposed by her brother and fled Alexandria for Upper Egypt.

  The details of what actually occurred are sketchy. Caesar wrote that she was expelled by her brother “acting through his relatives and friends.” The term “relatives and friends” had a particular mea
ning in the complex hierarchy of the Ptolemaic court. At the apex were the “Kinsmen,” allowed to wear a special headband denoting their status; next came “First Friends,” who swept grandly about the court in purple robes, and then “Friends,” who also enjoyed special privileges. These individuals constituted the power base at court. Coaxed and bribed by the regency council—Ptolemy XIII himself was too young to take a direct hand, though he seems throughout to have approved of his council’s actions—a sufficient number of these courtiers must have turned against Cleopatra, eroding her support and leaving her no alternative but flight.

  In 48, Cleopatra left Egypt altogether to take refuge in the Philistine city-state of Ascalon, between Egypt and Syria, where, characteristically defiant and determined to regain what she had lost, she began gathering troops for an invasion—Greeks and Egyptians but also Arabs. Achillas, her brother’s commander, also prepared for battle, moving his men into position at Mount Casius, some thirty miles beyond the Egyptian border fortress of Pelusium.

  Yet, as would soon become clear to Cleopatra, Rome’s civil war, not Egypt’s, would decide whether she would resume her place as queen. Caesar had defeated Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus and his vanquished rival had set sail for Egypt hoping to find support. A determined Caesar was not far behind.

  *The Egyptians had devised a special method to mummify the sacred bulls. First, to dissolve the internal organs, a turpentine enema was pumped into the body cavity and the anus was blocked with a linen tampon. Once the organs had liquefied, the tampon was removed and the fluid drained out. The process then continued in the usual manner: the body was dried using natron, covered with oils and resins and carefully wrapped. The sacred bulls were then given a royal burial. For a description of human mummification.

  *Ironically, the Romans popularized the keeping of cats as pets in Europe.

  PART II

  Romulus’ Cesspit

  CHAPTER 3

  The Race for Glory

  GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR HAD by his victory at Pharsalus amid the golden cornfields of Thessaly made himself master of the Roman world. In the previous decades he and his equally ambitious rivals such as Pompey and their predecessors had blatantly and successfully twisted the laws of the Roman republic and subverted its constitution to their own ends.

  They owed that success to the organic way in which the republic had evolved. The patrician plotters who, in 509 BC, had ejected Rome’s last king had substituted a form of government in which each year the male citizens of Rome elected two magistrates, soon to become known as consuls, to run the affairs of the state. Two consuls were appointed not only to share the burden but also so that each could restrain the ambitions of the other. The stipulation of annual elections was designed as another protection against any rising autocrat.

  The republic’s founders never formulated these new arrangements in a written constitution or any coherent suite of legal documents. Caesar was by no means the first to exploit the flexibility the lack of a written constitution afforded to claim legitimacy for his acts. The city’s aristocracy had long felt free to mold and modify the system of government in line with their wishes and best interests while reassuring citizens that they could reconcile any changes with mos maiorum, “the tradition of the elders,”—a relatively amorphous but sacrosanct concept.

  Over time, the Romans had approved the creation of a number of extra positions, again to be filled by elected officials. Early in the life of the republic, in response to pressure from the common people—the plebs—tribunes had been elected to represent their wishes. The extent and nature of their powers were the subject of heated debate and frequent change. As Rome had grown, other offices had been added, not only to spread the growing workload but also to preserve the checks and balances crucial to the republic’s health. Some of these, in particular the position of quaestor, the official responsible for tax collection, and praetor, assistant consul, formed a hierarchy that any aspirant consul had to ascend before he could stand for the top job. The Romans knew the climb as the “race for glory.” Both Pompey and Caesar had made the climb but found the glory it afforded insufficient to satiate their ambition. Antony too would struggle to fulfill his aspirations within the limitations imposed by the traditions of the elders.

  Rome’s power and the extent of the lands she controlled had grown dramatically in the period of the republic’s life up to Caesar’s birth in July 100.* Within 250 years of the republic’s foundation in 509, she had conquered the whole of the Italian peninsula. Her next stride was across the straits of Messina on to the island of Sicily. Here she first came into conflict with Carthaginians. From their capital on the North African coast in what is now Tunisia, the Carthaginians dominated western Mediterranean trade while establishing colonies throughout Sicily. By 227, the Romans had expelled the Carthaginians from Sicily and also from Sardinia and Corsica. But the titanic struggle between the two had just begun. The Carthagians occupied Spain and the silver they mined there soon refilled their war chests for another round in the conflict that became the most complex, in terms of alliances and tactics, in antiquity and probably the most costly in lives and resources.

  In 218, Hannibal brought his Carthaginian army, which included thirty-seven war elephants and many thousands of cavalrymen, over the snowy Alpine passes into Italy. Fighting as he went, by August 216 he had reached Apulia, where by a daring, encircling movement on the plains of Cannae he defeated a Roman army of eighty thousand men, killing forty-eight thousand of them in a battle so fierce that the rate of killing is estimated at five hundred men a minute. Carthage also invaded Sicily. Rome was at her lowest ebb, releasing debtors and other prisoners to serve in the army, devaluing her currency, desperately seeking allies anywhere she could find them, including in Ptolemaic Egypt, and even sacrificing two Gauls and two Greeks in the middle of the city because the omens seemed to demand it.

  Rome slowly fought back. In the critical year of 211, Syracuse, a major Greek city in Sicily allied to the Carthaginians, fell after a long siege in which one of the Alexandria Museon’s most famous scholars played a major role. Archimedes was not only a mathematician but also a resident of Syracuse and an excellent engineer. He devised a number of weapons for the city’s defense, including a crane with a claw designed to grab the bow of invading ships and a large array of mirrors, probably highly polished brass shields, to channel sunlight into a beam of rays to blind attackers and perhaps even set fire to sails or wooden superstructures. On entering the city the Romans killed Archimedes as he sat at his desk.

  The Romans quickly thereafter recovered the rest of Sicily and over the next five years completely vanquished the Carthaginians. Under the harsh terms of the peace treaty Carthage lost her empire and fleet and paid a large indemnity. At the end of one of the most decisive wars in history and one with the most far-reaching implications, the Mediterranean world lay at the feet of Rome. Her victory against the odds owed much to her by now large supplies of manpower, her willingness to adapt to sea warfare and above all Rome’s coherence as a society, of which all citizens felt proud and in which all held a stake. The challenge now was to preserve that coherence while embracing and enhancing Rome’s superpower status.

  Rome’s next expansion—at the time when in Egypt Cleopatra’s great-grandfather Potbelly was giving rein to his bizarre excesses—took her legions, with Potbelly’s formal acquiescence, across the Ionian Sea to Macedonia, homeland of Alexander and the Ptolemies. In a series of wars, Macedonia was defeated, divided and ultimately in 147 absorbed as a Roman province. Meanwhile, other Greek cities had been cajoled and coerced under Roman hegemony, although retaining a veneer of autonomy for a time. In North Africa, the Romans picked a new quarrel with the Carthaginians and after a long siege, followed by a week of hand-to-hand street fighting, in 146 occupied Carthage and leveled it. In the same year, the Romans razed Corinth and removed even the illusion of freedom in Greece. Rome’s dominions now spread from Spain in to parts of southern France in t
he north.

  Roman society had obviously changed over the years as her possessions grew. The Senate—its name deriving from the Latin word senex, meaning “old man” or “elder”—had become the most important political body. With three hundred members appointed for life, the Senate was so arranged that effective control lay in the hands of some twenty patrician families or clans, most of whom traced their descent back to legendary times. One such clan, though not among the most powerful in 100, were the Julians, whose members included Caesar. They claimed descent from Venus via Aeneas, the Trojan hero and the putative ancestor of Romulus.*

  Families such as the Julians built power bases through the cultivation of a group of clients whose interests they protected and advanced, in return for their votes and those of a host of subsidiary clients, to secure the election of preferred candidates for the consulate and other posts. (The word for “patron,” patronus, gave rise to the Italian padrino, the term for a Mafia godfather.)

  In the latter part of the second century BC, the patrician families slowly divided into two broad groupings. Both proclaimed liberty as their watchword, though they were differentiated as much by their views of how Rome should be ruled, and by whom, as by other differences of policy. The struggle between them would dominate the next century. One grouping, the optimates (conservatives or republicans), preferred to retain the status quo whereby the oligarchy ruled collectively more or less in conformity with the amorphous tradition of the elders. The other grouping was the populares, or people’s party. The people’s theoretically broad powers in electing officials and adopting laws in popular assemblies were much reduced by a bloc voting system that rendered patricians more equal than others. Often, therefore, the cultivation of the people by members of the popular party was merely a ploy to break the influence of the oligarchy and concentrate power in their own hands, rather than a true effort to empower the masses. Others of the popular party were, however, genuine reformers.