Cleopatra Read online

  One character does stand out. Alexandria-next-to-Egypt, a Greek enclave in an Egyptian landscape, simultaneously home to a library full of dreaming scholars, a marketplace full of astute merchants, a court of almost unimaginable luxury and an aggressive king-making mob, played a vital role in Cleopatra’s story. I make no apology for dedicating an entire chapter to this sparkling, vital city.

  Every good story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. But Cleopatra’s story has continued to grow with the years, and still lacks a definite ending. My final chapter is therefore a metabiography – an exploration of the development of a cultural afterlife that, over 2,000 years since Cleopatra’s own death, shows no sign of dying. Although this chapter briefly considers the many versions of Cleopatra preserved in ancient histories and modern fiction, it is an introduction to, rather than the definitive treatment of, a fascinating topic which is a subject, and one or more books, in its own right.6 The intention here is to equip the reader with an understanding of the sources which historians have used to piece together Cleopatra’s life and, of course, of the biases lurking within those sources.

  That the world is still fascinated by Cleopatra – the achingly beautiful Cleopatra of popular culture rather than the real queen – is easily demonstrated. As I finished writing the paragraph above I switched on my radio. On Wednesday 14 February 2007 – appropriately enough St Valentine’s Day – Cleopatra was in the news. A silver coin had been ‘discovered’ in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries at Newcastle. The coin showed a face that would have been instantly recognisable to anyone who had made even the most cursory study of Cleopatra’s relatively plentiful currency. It was by no stretch of the imagination an exciting archaeological find. But the discovery made the newspapers, and then the radio and television, and the reporters, steeped in Cleopatra mythology, were all discussing Cleopatra’s beauty (or rather her shocking lack of beauty) as if she were a modern celebrity. More than 2,000 years after her death, Cleopatra was still effortlessly making the headlines, even if most of the ‘facts’ being reported were wrong.7

  CHAPTER ONE

  Princess of Egypt

  When everything seemed lost, the heirs of the house of Ptolemy would suddenly have almost put within their grasp a (dominion stretching not only over the lost ancestral lands, but over wider territories than Ptolemy I or Ptolemy II or Ptolemy III had ever dreamed of. Those kings, being men, had based their dominion on the power of their arms; but now, when the military power of Egypt had become contemptible beside that of Rome, the sovereign of Egypt would bring to the contest power of a wholly different kind – the power of a fascinating woman.

  E. R. Bevan, The House of Ptolemy1

  In 81 the death of Ptolemy IX, king of Egypt, plunged the Ptolemaic dynasty into crisis. Years of vicious family feuds had caused a shortage of legitimate male Ptolemies. With no more obvious heir to the throne, Berenice III, daughter of Ptolemy IX and widow of his brother Ptolemy X, inherited her father’s crown and restyled herself Cleopatra Berenice. Soon after, to comply with Ptolemaic tradition, she agreed to marry her young stepson-nephew, Ptolemy XI.

  The Romans watched the unfolding royal saga with a proprietorial interest. They believed that they had a valid legal claim to Egypt, which had been gifted to them seven years earlier in a vexatious will drawn up by Ptolemy X. As yet, they had resisted the temptation to annex Egypt, but many believed that it could only be a question of time. Meanwhile, the Roman dictator Sulla gave his gracious approval to the marriage of Berenice and Ptolemy, but the pair were ill-suited and Ptolemy, as the natural son of Ptolemy X, believed that he should rule in his own right. Within three weeks of the wedding the over-eager Ptolemy had murdered his bride and seized her throne. The next day he was snatched by an angry Alexandrian mob, dragged off to the gymnasium, and killed. Egypt was once again in need of a king or queen.

  The double murder threw Egypt into crisis. The Alexandrians had dared to kill the king that the Romans had chosen for them; would this provoke the Romans into claiming their property? A new Ptolemy was needed, and quickly. But this was no easy matter. Berenice had been the only surviving child of Ptolemy IX and his consort Cleopatra IV, and she had died childless. Just one legitimate Ptolemy remained. Berenice’s aunt, Cleopatra Selene, was the daughter of Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra III and the ex-wife of Ptolemy IX, but she was also the widow of three kings of Syria2 and, as the mother of ambitious Syrian sons, she made an unsuitable guardian of Egypt’s interests. Bypassing Cleopatra Selene, the crown was offered to the two illegitimate sons of Ptolemy IX: sons born to an unrecorded mother and currently living in Syria. The elder son returned to Egypt and took the throne as Ptolemy Theos Philopator Philadelphos (the Father-Loving, Brother/Sister-Loving God). From 64/3 he was to add Neos Dionysos (the New Dionysos) to his name. In 76 Ptolemy XII was crowned by Pasherenptah III, the newly appointed high priest of the god Ptah, in a traditional Egyptian ceremony held at Memphis. His regnal years were to be counted from the death of his father, Ptolemy IX, a move which stressed continuity in the immediate royal family, but which effectively erased the reign of the ill-fated Berenice III from the official record. As a consolation prize the younger son, also named Ptolemy, was offered the crown of Cyprus. The Romans, irritated by this rapid turn of events, refused to recognise the new kings.

  The identification of Ptolemy XII with Dionysos was an astute political move. ‘Twice born’, once when ripped from his stricken mortal mother, Semele, and again when delivered from the thigh of his divine father, Zeus, the mystical Greek god Dionysos had long been associated with the resurrected Egyptian fertility god-king Osiris. But while the bandaged Osiris promised a calm and ordered afterlife to anyone living a correct earthly existence, Dionysos offered his most enthusiastic followers a lifetime of secret rituals and ecstatic experiences, culminating in the twin promises of union with the god and eternal salvation beyond death. As the austere cult of Osiris retained its popularity with the native Egyptians, the more flamboyant cult of Dionysos flourished both within Egypt and without. In Alexandria, a city where the Greek concept of tryphe (endless undisciplined luxury and ostentatious display) underpinned many aspects of official life, Dionysos was considered both a protective deity and a royal ancestor: genealogists had helpfully determined that Arsinoë, mother of Ptolemy I, was a descendant of Heracles and Deianeira, the daughter of Dionysos. So, by identifying himself with Dionysos, Ptolemy was effectively allying himself both with his legitimate Ptolemaic ancestors and with Alexander the Great, who had revered Dionysos as the conqueror of much of the eastern world. At the same time he was distancing himself from the more restrained and conservative Romans who favoured the Olympian gods, and who tended to look upon Ptolemaic excess – indeed, any form of excess – with horror. The stoic philosopher, geographer and historian Strabo, writing some sixty years after Ptolemy’s death, was not at all impressed with the Dionysiac royal lifestyle:

  Now all the kings after the third Ptolemy, being corrupted by luxurious living, administered the affairs of government badly, but worst of all the fourth, seventh, and the last, Auletes [Ptolemy XII], who, apart from his general licentiousness, practised the accompaniment of choruses with the flute, and upon this he prided himself so much that he would not hesitate to celebrate contests in the royal palace, and at these contests would come forward to vie with the opposing contestants.3

  Devotees of Dionysos came from all walks of life; they were male and female, rich and poor, free and enslaved, old and young. They drank copious amounts of wine and, in defiance of the taboo against transvestism, challenged the natural order of things by donning diaphanous womanly clothing to perform their mysterious, sex-based rituals. Lucian preserves the story of the staid philosopher Demetrios, who angered Ptolemy XII by drinking only water and refusing to cross-dress during the Dionysiac revels; as punishment he was forced to don a gown, dance and play the cymbals.4 They also serenaded their god on the aulos, or double flute, and from this last association
came Ptolemy’s irreverent nickname Auletes or ‘Flute Player’. Whether this less than flattering sobriquet referred to the king’s musical ability, or to his plump cheeks, permanently puffed out like the cheeks of a flautist, or whether it was a snide reference to the well-understood link between male and female aulos players and prostitution, is not now clear. More straightforward was Ptolemy’s alternative nickname, Nothos or ‘Bastard’.

  Auletes had inherited the most densely populated land in the Mediterranean world. It is impossible to give precise statistics, but historians have estimated a population of somewhere between two and a half and seven million, while Diodorus Siculus, visiting Egypt in 60, when Cleopatra was about ten years old, suggests a total Egyptian population of about three million. It was a tenuously unified and culturally segregated land. The vast majority of Auletes’s subjects were indigenous Egyptians, but over 10 per cent of the population were of Greek extraction, and there was also a sizeable and vociferous Jewish minority. Traditionally, the Egyptians had always made a firm distinction between those who lived in Upper, or southern, Egypt (the Nile Valley) and those who lived in Lower Egypt (the Delta). The southern Egyptians tended to regard themselves as the true guardians of Egypt’s heritage, while the northerners tended to regard themselves as superior to the unsophisticated valley dwellers. To further complicate matters, the people of Alexandria, a temperamental, cosmopolitan and racially well-mixed bunch, considered themselves a distinct cultural group, superior in every way to those unfortunate enough to live outside the city.

  Tensions between the various factions could run high, and any group was liable to turn against their king at any time. The reigns of Ptolemies III, IV and V had been blighted by southern uprisings, while the reigns of the later Ptolemies had been heavily influenced by the Alexandrians, who considered that they had the right to chose and depose their own king. Ptolemy XII was to suffer rebellions, politically inspired strikes and blatant interference by the Alexandrians. But open warfare was the exception rather than the rule. For most of the time the various cultural groups coexisted in an uneasy truce, leading parallel lives, speaking their own languages, worshipping their own gods and making use of their own, entirely separate, legal systems whereby contracts written in the demotic script used by Egypt’s scribes were classified as Egyptian, contracts in Aramaic were considered Jewish and contracts written in Greek fell under the stricter Greek law.5 Two things unified the various groups: they were all prepared (albeit temporarily) to acknowledge Auletes as king, accepting his edicts as superior to all laws, and they all bitterly resented any form of Roman interference in their land.

  The vast majority of Auletes’s Egyptian subjects led lives that would have been instantly recognisable to their earliest dynastic forebears. The bottom tier of their inflexible social pyramid was made up of the manual workers and peasants, the millions who lived in insignificant mud-brick villages and hamlets dotted along the Nile and the tributaries of the Delta, and who worked the land owned by the king, the temples and the elite. Illiterate and poor, these peasants have left many simple desert graves but few material remains and no writings, so, in consequence, we can say little about their lives and ambitions. We can, however, understand something of their work. Egypt’s phenomenal wealth derived from her abundant natural resources: the gold in the deserts, the papyrus in the marshes and, above all, the rich agricultural land. The Ptolemies had made some improvements – there were new iron tools, new crops, new harvesting policies, new methods of irrigation and vast tracts of newly reclaimed land in the Faiyum – but farming life continued much as it had for centuries. The late summer inundation was followed by an autumn sowing. The late spring/early summer harvest was followed by a dry season, when the hot sun baked the fields and sterilised the soil. Then the river burst her banks, the fields flooded and the cycle started all over again. We can get a flavour of this time-honoured, uniquely Egyptian rhythm by looking at the vivid agricultural scenes engraved on the private tomb walls of the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms.

  Higher up the social pyramid came the skilled artisans and the educated scribes who lived in the towns and cities, and who made up what can loosely be defined as the middle class. Higher still came the elite: the high-ranking bureaucrats and the hereditary priests who worked closely with the new regime and who, having benefited from Ptolemaic generosity, used their private wealth to maintain Egypt’s religious and funerary traditions. Included among this group was the extended family of Egypt’s last native king, Nectanebo II, who had fled Egypt in 343.

  The royal family occupied the final tier of the social pyramid, with the king standing alone and untouchable at the peak. For 3,000 years the king of Egypt had been recognised as the chief priest of all cults, the head of the civil service and the commander of the army. Only the king could offer to the gods; only the king, through his offerings, could prevent Egypt from being overwhelmed by the sea of chaos that surrounded and constantly threatened his tightly controlled world. Unique and irreplaceable, he was a demigod in his lifetime and a full god at death; Egypt simply could not manage without him. Any king – an infant, a woman, even a foreigner – was considered better than no king at all, and it was understood that the official coronation ceremony could instantly convert a mere mortal into a powerful monarch. Recognising that this belief in the semi-divine kingship did much to keep them in power, and appreciating the need to please the still-powerful and deeply conservative Egyptian priesthood, the Ptolemies were always happy to be seen to be conforming to the royal tradition that distinguished Egypt from the rest of the world. However they dressed, spoke and thought at home, however much they ran Egypt as a profitable business, in public they appeared more traditionally Egyptian – building and restoring temples and reviving long-forgotten rituals – than the Egyptians themselves.

  Egypt’s most venerable tourist supplies a lively account of this traditional Egyptian way of life. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Turkey) visited northern Egypt some time after 450, at a time when Egypt, temporarily reconciled to Persian rule, was both peaceful and prosperous. An experienced traveller, he could not hide his astonishment at finding himself in a land where everything appeared contrary to the natural order of things:

  Not only is the Egyptian climate peculiar to that country, and the Nile different in its behaviour from other rivers elsewhere, but the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind. For instance, women attend markets and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving. In weaving the normal way is to work the threads of the weft upwards, but the Egyptians work them downwards. Men in Egypt carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders; women urinate standing up, men sitting down. To ease themselves they go indoors, but eat outside in the streets, on the theory that what is unseemly but necessary should be done in private, and what is not unseemly should be done openly. No woman holds priestly office, either in the service of goddess or god; only men are priests in both cases. Sons are under no compulsion to support their parents if they do not wish to do so, but daughters must, whether they wish it or not … Men in Egypt have two garments each, women only one.6

  Herodotus is by no means an infallible source. Culturally, he is unashamedly anti-Persian, pro-Greek and, up to a point, pro-Egyptian. He is prone to believing what he is told, no matter how unlikely, and he is attracted to tales of the strange and unexpected. Far from keeping an open mind, he contrasts all his experiences with the proper (i.e. Greek) way of doing things. Yet there is clearly more than a grain of truth in his writing. Egypt’s rainless climate was peculiar, and the river was undeniably strange; it flooded in summer, whereas normal rivers, as everyone knew, flooded in winter. And Egypt’s women, however they might choose to urinate, were definitely unusual when compared to the women in Herodotus’s own family. Egyptian women were free to live alone, and to own, inherit, buy and sell property. They could choose their own husbands, initiate a divorce and raise chi
ldren without male interference. In marked contrast, Greek custom decreed that women should play a non-conspicuous role in society, living permanently under the protection of a male guardian. As Greek women never formally came of age they could never become legally competent; they had no independent political or social rights, no right to choose a husband and no rights over their own children. Family circumstances permitting, Greek women were expected to remain indoors, providing for the family, guarding their chastity and weaving wool.