Cleopatra Read online

  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].76

  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’.77 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 Cleopatra
s 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 ‘star-crossed’ 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 middle-aged 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 red-gold 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.

  18

  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 Poe78 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’.