Cleopatra Read online

  M. J. Trow studied history at university, after which he has spent years teaching. He is also an established crime writer and a biographer, with a reputation as a scholar who peels away legend to reveal the truth. Originally from Rhondda, South Wales, he lives in the Isle of Wight.

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  CLEOPATRA

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

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  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2013

  Copyright ©M. J. Trow, 2013

  The right of M. J. Trow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  UK ISBN 978-184901-978-1

  eISBN 978-147210-002-3

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  First published in the United States in 2011 by Running Press Book Publishers, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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  US ISBN 978-0-7624-4801-2

  US Library of Congress Control Number: 2012942465

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

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  Cover design and illustration by JoeRoberts.co.uk

  AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  All dates are BC unless otherwise stated. I have also used modern spellings, which are now almost universal. So Kleopatra is Cleopatra, Marcus Antonius is Mark Antony, Gaius Pompeius is Pompey the Great, and so on. I have used Roman or Greek place names with their modern counterparts where necessary and have left currency as it was in the first century BC without any attempts to convert it into today’s prices.

  CONTENTS

  Book One Isis Burning

  1 The World

  2 The Other World

  Book Two Daughter of the General

  3 The Successor and the Saviour

  4 The Family from Hell

  5 Cleopatra the Wise

  Book Three Wings of the Eagle

  6 Tiber, Father Tiber

  7 Mars Victor

  8 The Cracks in the Pavement

  Book Four Caesar

  9 The Three-headed Monster

  10 Crossing the Rivers

  11 The Lady of the Two Lands

  12 Little Caesar

  Book Five Antony

  13 Rebirth

  14 The Gentlest and Kindest of Soldiers

  15 The Inimitable Lovers

  16 The Sharers in Death

  Book Six The Legacy of Cleopatra

  17 ‘Yon Ribaudred Nag of Egypt’

  18 Goddess of the Silver Screen

  19 Fatale Monstrum?

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  BOOK ONE: ISIS BURNING

  1

  THE WORLD

  ALEXANDRIA AD AEGYPTU, 27

  Three years after the death of Queen Cleopatra, a Greek traveller from Amisea in Pontus on the Black Sea arrived in Egypt. His name was Strabo, the Squint-eyed, and he was there on the staff of Greece’s praefectus (governor), Gaius Cornelius Gallus. It is likely that Strabo’s boss was from Frejus in southern Gaul (hence the name) and he was about to be recalled to Rome to answer charges, possibly of treason. Strabo could not fail to notice that there were a large number of statues of Gallus dotted all over the place, where there should have been nothing but statues of his boss, Gaius Julius Caesar, known to us as Octavian. It was a sign of the times that Octavian had begun, in the last months, to call himself Augustus, the divinely ordained. It is no exaggeration to say that Augustus’ status as first citizen (emperor in all but name), and even his title, came about as a direct result of events in Egypt over the previous three years.

  Strabo was a geographer, although, in the century before the birth of Christ, the science was rarely divorced from history and the whole package was an art, given to flights of fancy and downright fiction. Strabo wrote down what he saw in Egypt but he also believed all sorts of tittle-tattle fed to him by Romans, Alexandrians and Egyptians. The result, while short on accuracy, gives us a fascinating picture of the land that was Cleopatra’s and which had just become Rome’s newest province.

  Inevitably, what impressed Strabo most was its capital, Alexandria. So astonishing was this and so different from the rest of the country that it was known as Alexandria ad Aegyptu – next to Egypt. If he had visited Rome recently, Strabo would have noticed the ‘Egyptomania’ sweeping that city – obelisks and archaic statuary were appearing in the Forum and at crossroads. Ironically, many Romans had worried that Cleopatra and her lover, the triumvir Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) wanted to shift the capital of the empire to Alexandria. Now, it seemed, Alexandria was coming to Rome.

  Cleopatra’s Alexandria, the one Strabo marvelled at in 27, was 300 years old. Technically, Rome’s population was larger, but the Italian city on its seven hills lacked the space, order and sumptuousness of the city founded by Alexander the Great. Like every other city in the ancient world, there was a mythical, supernatural story of its founding. More prosaically, the site was perfect. A small fishing village, Rakhotis, clustered on the shore between Lake Mareotis and the Mediterranean Sea. Ale
xander – and his general Ptolemy who began the actual building – needed links to Greece, his homeland of Macedonia and the rest of the empire he was carving out in the 320s; the sea provided that. The lake, via a series of canals, led to the Nile, the lifeblood of Egypt whose source, men said, was far to the south in the Mountains of the Moon. The city that Strabo saw was laid out on a lavish grid pattern, which divided the place into five districts – Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon – making Alexandria the first settlement in the world to have clear postal addresses. It was always a cosmopolitan city – Strabo could have talked Latin and Greek anywhere throughout it – but archaeological and other evidence implies that the ethnic groupings – Greek, Jew and Egyptian – kept to themselves in their quarters. Inevitably, in a city founded by the Greeks, it was they who were Alexandria’s elite, scholars and merchants living in grand limestone and marble houses nearest to the vast sprawl of the royal palaces in the Beta district. Only they, at first, could become full citizens.

  Strabo had been told – and there is no reason to doubt this – that the Ptolemies who had ruled Egypt for three centuries had been inveterate builders, each one adding another palace extension to commemorate their reign. By 27 these buildings, where both Cleopatra and Antony had died by their own hands, covered between a quarter and a third of the city. On the island of Pharos, the first Ptolemy commissioned one of the seven wonders of the world – a 328-foot-tall lighthouse made of gleaming white stone. It was the tallest building the Greeks ever erected, and Rome never surpassed it. On top was a huge statue of Zeus Soter (the saviour father of the gods) and a series of mirrors that reflected a perpetual flame that shone into the night. Strabo says the lighthouse had many tiers (contemporary depictions show three) and that each stage had a different shape – rectangular, octagonal and cylindrical – probably to show off Greek architectural skill or to give the colossal edifice strength.1

  From the lighthouse, a causeway called the Heptastadion2 ran to the city, dividing the harbour into two. Kitosis (the Box) was the city’s dockyard where Cleopatra’s war-galleys and river barges would have been built. The eastern harbour was Megas Limen (which the Romans called Portus Magnus) and the western, rather smaller, was Eunostos (the Happy Return). It was into these sheltered waters that Cleopatra sailed her warship the Antonia in September 31, the decks bright with flowers and garlands, as though returning from a victory. In fact, she had just left the more turbulent and bloody waters of Actium, which marked the beginning of her end.

  Strabo, the Greek scholar, would have been most fascinated by the Museion, the place of the cure of the soul, which was the largest library in the world. Ptolemy I and his successors borrowed works of Greek culture over the years from Delphi and elsewhere and copied them – they sent the copies back and kept the originals themselves. These books (actually scrolls) and the scholars who floated around them, copying and researching, were at the disposal of the child Cleopatra in her time, and of her children by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Never again would so much scholarship be concentrated in one place, although a section of the building and its contents had been destroyed twenty years before when Caesar used the adjacent Great Theatre as his headquarters against the army of Cleopatra’s brother, Ptolemy XIII.

  Strabo would have seen the Soma, the dazzling tomb of Alexander with its Egyptian-style gold sarcophagus in a translucent glass case. People came from all over the world to pay homage to the greatest general in history and Strabo would have heard the story of three years earlier, when Octavian had come calling to claim the country as his own. He had demanded the removal of the sarcophagus lid and had strewn the embalmed hero with flowers. In doing so, he accidentally knocked off Alexander’s nose. Strabo may have seen, but does not mention, the tombs of Antony and Cleopatra, lying side by side in death as they did in life. He may have known that Octavian had refused to visit the tombs of the earlier Ptolemies and probably thought it best not to mention his own visit, if he made one. The newly half-deified Augustus did not tolerate opposition, as Gallus was about to find out.

  Strabo saw the huge temple of Poseidon, the sea-god; the Great Caesarium, still under construction, as Cleopatra’s own memorial to Julius Caesar. In AD 40, Alexandria’s home-grown Jewish philosopher Philo wrote of this place:

  For there is elsewhere no precinct like that which is called the Sebastium, a temple to Caesar on the shipboard, situated on an eminence facing the harbours ... huge and conspicuous, fitted on a scale not found elsewhere with dedicated offerings, around it a girdle of pictures and statues in silver and gold, forming a precinct of vast breadth, embellished with porticoes, libraries, chambers, groves, gateways and wide open courts and everything which lavish expenditure could produce to beautify it.3

  He would have walked through the marble colonnades to the Temple of Saturn and the Gymnasion, which served as a public forum for the rulers of Alexandria and had been the site of ghastly wholesale slaughters by Cleopatra’s ancestors. He would also have seen the Timonium, a sad little summer house near the harbour that Mark Antony had built on his return from Actium, unable for a while to function or to face the world. Most famous of all, Strabo would have visited the Serapion, a temple designed to unite the Greek and Egyptian gods in a successful working partnership that lasted for 300 years.

  It may be that Strabo noted the vast difference between the hush and academic peace of the royal palaces, now empty of the Ptolemies and only partly occupied by Gallus4 and the bustle of the cosmopolitan city outside its walls. Here, in the quarters, lived and worked the multi-nationals whose ancestors had sometimes toppled kings and pharaohs. The trading vessels groaned with wheat, linen, glass, perfumes, spices and papyri from the Nile and Africa to the south. The city itself was famed for its glass, pottery, baskets and linen. All human life was there, the descendants of men and women who had known rule by Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and now Romans.

  Somewhere in the city, Strabo saw the cemeteries that housed Alexandria’s dead, probably laid out to the east and west of the palaces. Here was the Nemesion, the temple of retribution built by Julius Caesar to house the severed head of his rival Gaius Pompeius (Pompey the Great) who had been murdered on the shore not far away.

  The geographer was clearly impressed by the splendour of Cleopatra’s city but the Roman puritan in him was never far below the surface. Wandering around the Navalia, the dockyards, he noted ‘on boats [there was] flute-playing and dancing without restraint, with the utmost lewdness’.5 Cleopatra’s father had been called Auletes, the flute-player, by the Greeks, and was also called Neo Dionysus, a reincarnation of the drunken god whom the upright Romans despised as Bacchus. It was a reminder, if one was needed, that Egypt’s way was not Rome’s way and that Gallus and his successors had a duty to do something about this.

  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 fin
ished. 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,6 ‘and is fed on grain and bits of meat and wine, which are always offered to it by the visiting foreigners.’7 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’.8

  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 bas-reliefs 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.