Cleopatra Read online

  In fact four months of vicious land and sea battles combined with a guerrilla-style urban war brought devastation to Alexandria. Caesar’s own account of the struggles tells us that the city, built from stone and tile with very little wood, seemed virtually immune to fire.4 ‘Seemed’ is the operative word here. When Caesar torched the Egyptian fleet in the harbour, the fire spread to the Palaces and part – maybe all – of the library was lost. Eventually Caesar was able to take control of Pharos, and to keep the harbour open. But things were not going well, and the Alexandrians managed to build a new fleet from scraps of wood recovered in the town. At one low point Caesar almost drowned in the Mediterranean. Forced to swim for his life, he kept his all-important military plans dry by holding them above his head, but lost his cloak to the sea. Retrieved by the enemy, it was displayed as a war trophy.

  Just as Cleopatra had maintained a conspicuous silence during her elder sister’s ill-fated reign and its bloody aftermath, so she remained silent and, as far as we can tell, inactive throughout the Alexandrian Wars. Younger and less experienced, the fourteen-year-old Arsinoë was not content to bide her time. Having escaped from the Palaces, and supported by her influential tutor Ganymede, she joined forces with Ptolemy’s general Achillas. In November 48 the people of Alexandria proclaimed Arsinoë queen of Egypt: a rival to Cleopatra and a future wife for Ptolemy XIII, who was still the crowd’s favourite. Soon after, Pothinos’s treachery was discovered (Plutarch tells us that he was betrayed by Caesar’s barber) and he was executed, while Achillas was killed by the ambitious Ganymede. This left Ptolemy XIII isolated, and Ganymede in command of the army. He was to prove an innovative commander, earning Caesar’s grudging respect by polluting the subterranean water cisterns with saltwater. Caesar was only able to counter this by ordering his men to dig day and night until they struck ground water.

  Next, the people of Alexandria, apparently tiring of life under Arsinoë and Ganymede, made a curious request:

  The Alexandrians, perceiving that success confirmed the Romans, and that adverse fortune only animated them the more, as they knew of no medium between these on which to ground any further hopes, resolved, as far as we can conjecture, either by the advice of the friends of their king who were in Caesar’s quarter, or of their own previous design, intimated to the king by secret emissaries, to send ambassadors to Caesar to request him, ‘To dismiss their king and suffer him to rejoin his subjects; that the people, weary of subjection to a woman, of living under a precarious government, and submitting to the cruel laws of the tyrant Ganymede, were ready to execute the orders of the king: and if by his sanction they should embrace the alliance and protection of Caesar, the multitude would not be deterred from surrendering by the fear of danger.’5

  It is hard to make sense of this development. Caesar’s Alexandrian Wars tells us that Ptolemy, who had developed an intense loyalty to him, begged with tears in his eyes not to be sent from the Palaces. But Ptolemy was bluffing and Caesar, despite his belated recognition that the Alexandrians were ‘false and perfidious, seldom speaking as they thought’, was inexplicably naïve. Believing that Ptolemy’s release might calm the situation, Caesar let him go. As soon as he got clear of the Palaces, Ptolemy wiped his eyes, took up his old command and, ‘like a wild beast escaped out of confinement, carried on the war with much acrimony against Caesar, so that the tears he shed at parting seemed to have been tears of joy’.

  Soon after Ptolemy’s defection, troops commanded by Caesar’s ally Mithridates of Pergamon and supplemented by Nabatean and Jewish forces, captured Pelusium and marched west to Alexandria. Caesar sailed to join them, surprising the Egyptians from the rear. There was a short, sharp battle outside the city. Caesar’s allies won, Alexandria surrendered, Arsinoë was captured and Ptolemy XIII drowned trying to cross the Canopic branch of the Nile in a disastrously overcrowded boat. The heavy golden armour that had made it impossible for him to swim was recovered and displayed to the people of Alexandria as proof of their king’s death, but his body was lost in the river. This was to cause Cleopatra problems years later, when a pseudo-Ptolemy appeared to claim the throne with a dramatic and plausible tale of a desperate swim to safety and many years spent in exile. The Egyptian army surrendered on 15 January 47. Caesar, a deeply unpopular victor, re-entered Alexandria in triumph, and joined the equally unpopular Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemy XIV in the Palaces. To thank them for their help in his campaign, Caesar later granted the freedom of the city to the Alexandrian Jews.

  Caesar could have annexed Egypt, but did not. Instead, the widowed Cleopatra was reinstated on her throne alongside her thirteen-year-old brother, who, Dio tells us, now became her husband:

  … Being afraid that the Egyptians might rebel again, because they were delivered over to a woman to rule, and that the Romans might be angry, both on this account and because he was living with the woman, he commanded her to ‘marry’ her other brother, and gave the kingdom to both of them, at least nominally. For in reality Cleopatra was to hold all the power alone, since her husband was still a boy, and in view of Caesar’s favour there was nothing that she could not do. Hence her living with her brother and sharing the rule with him was a mere pretence which she accepted, whereas in truth she ruled alone and spent her time in Caesar’s company.6

  Together, brother and sister were to rule as the Theoi Philopatores Philadelphoi (the Father-Loving, Brother/Sister-Loving Gods), although Cleopatra, barely subscribing to the fiction of joint rule, would defy convention and always place her name first. Sister and brother were to be ‘supported’ in their rule by three, later four, Roman legions. Egypt was, in all but name, a Roman protectorate.

  Caesar was now free to return to Rome, yet still he dallied in Alexandria. Contemporary observers, reluctant, perhaps, to suggest that the great Caesar was capable of the twin crimes of laziness and irresponsibility, made no mention of this delay. Modern historians are universally agreed that he dallied because of Cleopatra. The pragmatic view is that he wished to see her properly settled on her throne as a secure and useful Roman client-queen. The more romantic view is that he was simply worn out by many years of campaigning and wished to spend some time with his young mistress.

  He often feasted with her to dawn; and they would have sailed together in her state barge nearly to Ethiopia had his soldiers consented to follow him.7

  For many centuries Egypt’s pharaohs had sailed up and down the Nile – Egypt’s highway – in order to confirm their presence to their people. Long, thin Egypt was an awkward country to administer. It could take two weeks for a message to pass from Memphis in the north to Aswan in the south, and there was an ever-present worry that officials living hundreds of miles from the administrative capital might be tempted to forget the king and assume their own quasi-royal prerogatives. A regular royal appearance was a simple and effective way of reinforcing the king’s right to rule, and the Nile was dotted with minor palaces, ‘mooring places of the pharaoh’, where kings could hold temporary court while visiting local governors and making offerings in local temples. The link between large boats and earthly power remains an obvious one today. Only the wealthy can own a large boat; boat ownership brings access to greater wealth and the potential to build more boats. The link between boats and the divine is perhaps less clear to us. But Egypt’s gods regularly processed on the Nile, travelling from temple to temple and crossing from the east bank to the west, while high above the river the sun god Re steered his solar boat across the clear blue sky each and every day.

  Now, if Appian and Suetonius are to be believed, Cleopatra was preparing to sail down the Nile and Caesar had agreed to accompany her. Far from a romantic cruise, this was a triumphal public display; a calculated political move designed to make the new alliance crystal clear to everyone who mattered. The fleet of over 400 ships crewed by Roman soldiers which, Appian tells us, accompanied the royal barge simply reinforced the message.8 We have no description of Cleopatra’s barge. But we do have a descript
ion, penned by Callixeinos of Rhodes and preserved by Athenaeus, of the magnificent barge or navis thalamegos built by Ptolemy IV over one and a half centuries earlier.9 This remarkable vessel was said to be half a stadium long, with a maximum width of thirty cubits and a maximum height of just under forty cubits. It was a multi-roomed, multi-storey floating pleasure palace with five separate restaurants and accommodation for king, queen, courtiers, servants and crew, and it may well have served as the model for Cleopatra’s own barge.

  It is reasonable to assume that Caesar wanted to inspect the land that was, in all but name, his. Lucan suggests that there may have been another motive behind the trip. For many years Caesar – and many others – had been intrigued by the unknown source of the Nile:

  Despite my strong interest in science, said Caesar to Acoreus, Priest of Isis, nothing would satisfy my intellectual curiosity more fully than to be told what makes the Nile rise. If you can enable me to visit the source, which has been a mystery for so many years, I promise to abandon this civil war.10

  If this was the case, he was destined to be disappointed. The origin of the Nile would remain a mystery for another eighteen centuries, while Cleopatra’s barge is unlikely to have passed further south than the notoriously rebellious city of Thebes. It might, indeed, have sailed no further than the ancient capital and traditional coronation city, Memphis.

  At some time between 47 and 44 Cleopatra gave birth to a son whom she named Ptolemy Caesar. Her choice of name was highly suggestive, as was the fact that Caesar made no attempt to veto her use of his name. The people of Alexandria leapt to the obvious conclusion, and instantly renamed the baby Caesarion, or Little Caesar, after his ‘father’. Of course, this is an assumption which is impossible to prove, although many have tried, focusing their attention on Caesarion’s birth date and, by extension, the date of his conception. Plutarch is of little help here as he contradicts himself, telling us both that Caesarion was the son of Caesar, born in 47 – ‘ … leaving Cleopatra on the throne of Egypt (a little later she had a son by him whom the Alexandrians called Caesarion)’ (Life of Caesar) – and that ‘Caesarion was believed to be a son of the former Caesar [Julius Caesar], by whom Cleopatra was left pregnant’ (Life of Antony), a loose statement which implies that Cleopatra was pregnant at the time of Caesar’s death.11

  Contemporaries and near-contemporaries are divided over the baby’s paternity. Dio tells us that Cleopatra pretended that Caesarion was Caesar’s child, while Suetonius tells us that Caius Oppius composed a careful text explaining that he was not. Suetonius himself sits on the fence. He says that Caesar, besotted with Cleopatra, ‘even allowed her to call the son whom she had borne him by his own name. Some Greek historians say the boy closely resembled Caesar in features as well as in gait’, and adds that Mark Antony, who is hardly an unbiased witness, nor one likely to support Octavian’s claim to be Caesar’s true heir, declared before the Senate that Caesar had acknowledged Caesarion as his son.12

  For many years it was believed that a Ptolemaic or Roman stela recovered from the Memphite Serapeum and now housed in the Louvre, Paris, held the key to Caesarion’s birth date. The demotic text on the stela is dated to ‘Year 5, 23 Payni, day of the feast of Isis, birthday of King Caesar’. If we accept that the Year 5 in question is Cleopatra’s Year 5, then, counting from Auletes’s death in 51, this date would be 23 June 47.13 Assuming that she carried her baby for the full nine months, this immediately suggests that Caesarion was conceived during the Alexandrian crisis, at a time when Cleopatra was separated from her brother-husband, Ptolemy XIII, and was living in close proximity to Caesar. But this is Egyptology, and nothing in Egyptology is ever simple. Cleopatra’s co-regent in 47 was her brother Ptolemy XIV, not her son, so why would the stela give Caesarion an incorrect title? Was the stela carved later, when Caesarion had become king? Or does the Year 5 in question belong not to Cleopatra but to Caesarion himself? As his joint rule with Cleopatra started after the death of Ptolemy XIV in 44, this would effectively date the stela to 40. Could the stela refer to a later, Roman, ruler of Egypt who could also be called ‘King Caesar’? Perhaps, as some Egyptologists believe, it is referring to the birthday of Octavian? The fact that Caesarion, as pharaoh, was never known as King Caesar – he was always ‘Ptolemy named Caesar’ – supports this last interpretation. Meanwhile, to add further to the confusion, a recent publication of the stela has suggested that the birth date should be revised to 25 Phaophi, or 28 October 48, and the name of celebrant to ‘King Djoser’, Djoser being the 3rd Dynasty builder of the Sakkara step pyramid who was revered as a god during Ptolemaic and Roman times. This revised reading would suggest that the piece has no relevance to either Cleopatra or Caesarion.14

  Cleopatra refused to rise to the gossip and remained silent over the issue of her son’s paternity. She, of course, had no need to explain herself and everything to gain from the assumption that she was the mother of Caesar’s child. Caesarion offered the strongest of inducements for Caesar to ensure that Egypt remained an independent state for his son to inherit. The death of Ptolemy XIV would make Caesarion king of Egypt, ruling alongside his mother. With Caesarion and Cleopatra on the throne, and Caesar dictator of Rome, Egypt and the Ptolemies would receive Roman protection, Rome would benefit from Egypt’s generosity, and Caesar’s family would effectively rule the civilised world. Caesar, too, retained a dignified silence. Already married to a Roman wife, he was in any case unable to recognise any other woman’s child as his son. His silence has been interpreted many ways. That the liaison was essentially unimportant to him; a fling on a par with his many earlier affairs. That there was no liaison; Caesarion was not his son. Or that Caesar, well aware of the dangers of being perceived as father of the heir to the Roman and Egyptian ‘thrones’, kept silent to protect his son.

  With Caesar seemingly happy enough in his unacknowledged parentage, is there any reason to doubt Caesarion’s paternity? Just a faint, lingering cloud of uncertainty hovers over Caesar’s fertility. After a life of sexual excess, three marriages and countless affairs, he had produced just one acknowledged child. Julia, late wife of Pompey the Great, had been born to Caesar’s first wife Cornelia thirty-six years before Caesarion’s birth. Rumours that Caesar had fathered a string of natural children, including Brutus, son of Servilia, are of course unprovable. One surviving child was, however, by no means unusual: Cornelia, mother of Tiberius Gracchus, bore twelve children but only three survived infancy and childhood. While Egypt’s women were famed for their fertility, something that can perhaps be attributed to their grain-rich diet, Rome was suffering an acute shortage of elite babies caused by a general wifely reluctance to reproduce and made worse by high rates of miscarriage, high rates of mother and baby mortality during pregnancy, labour and early infancy, and, perhaps, the use of lead water pipes.15 Infant deaths and miscarriages frequently go unrecorded, making it difficult to obtain precise statistics, but an estimate that just over half of all babies born in Rome would reach five years of age does not seem unreasonable. Caesar’s daughter Julia had herself died in childbirth, along with her baby.

  In the summer of 47 Caesar left Cleopatra to resume his campaign against the followers of Pompey. He would not see her again for over a year, ill-documented in Egypt, which saw Cleopatra strengthen her hold on her throne through her astute manipulation of the cult of Isis. Caesar’s year, in contrast, is well documented. A quick victory in Asia Minor saw the fall of Pharnaces II, son of Mithridates of Pontus (‘veni, vidi, vici’). This was followed by the quashing of a potentially dangerous mutiny in Rome and a successful North African campaign that wiped out what he hoped would be the last remnants of Pompey’s supporters. Caesar returned to Italy in June or July 46. In late September or early October he celebrated quadruple triumphs: four separate days of festivities honouring his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus and Africa. There were games, plays, banquets, sacrifices and four extensive processions which started in the Field of Mars, entered Rome through the Trium
phal Gate and wound their way through the Forum to the Capitol and the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Included in the processions were displays of war trophies and treasures, paintings and maps illustrating Caesar’s many victories, and tableaux depicting, among other things, the River Nile and the Pharos lighthouse complete with imitation flames. The exhibition of prestigious prisoners included the great Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix, the four-year-old Juba II of Numidia, the Alexandrian eunuch Ganymede and his queen, the teenage Arsinoë IV. This was unusual – the Romans usually avoided displaying female captives in chains, although Pompey had exhibited the widow and daughters of Mithridates in 61 – and it proved very unpopular. Arsinoë gained the sympathy of the watching crowd, and Caesar deemed it wise to spare her life, banishing her to live in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Juba, too, was spared to be raised as a Roman gentleman. Vercingetorix, who had already suffered six years of solitary confinement, was garrotted immediately after his public appearance, while Ganymede simply disappeared, presumably to share Vercingetorix’s fate.

  Some time that same autumn Cleopatra, Ptolemy XIV and (probably) Caesarion arrived in Rome. They settled into Caesar’s private estate, in Trastevere across the Tiber, and there, apparently, they stayed, even during Caesar’s lengthy absence in Spain from December 46 to the summer of 45, until Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March (15 March) 44 prompted a return to Egypt. Whether Cleopatra followed Caesar to Rome of her own free will or was summoned, either as a lover or as a hostage, is unclear. There is certainly no evidence that she made the grand Roman entry beloved of film-makers; it is impossible to imagine Romans turning out to cheer a foreign queen unless they were cheering/jeering at her as a captive. Whatever its purpose, the visit played into the hands of Caesar’s enemies, who were quick to spread malicious gossip: Caesar intended to divorce the barren Calpurnia and marry Cleopatra; Caesar had definitely decided to move his capital city to Alexandria; Caesar was planning to pass legislation that would allow him the right to as many foreign wives as he liked. Dio tells us that Caesar was unconcerned about the growing resentment: