Cleopatra Read online

  Various remedies helped with the pain of childbirth and speeded up delivery. Saffron and beer (probably with the accent on the beer!) was given to reduce labour pains. Localized trauma to the vagina was eased by smearing a compound of juniper berries and pine-tree resin between the legs, and prayers were offered to Isis and her child Horus and to Hathor – ‘Rejoicing, rejoicing in Heaven! Birth-giving is accelerated! Come to me, Hathor, my mistress, in my fine pavilion, in this happy hour.’

  Much of this information comes from pharaonic tombs and other records nearly 2,000 years before Cleopatra was born, but in the ancient world, scientific change was extremely slow, especially when, among native Egyptians, the pantheon of gods had not changed at all and everybody went along with whatever worked.

  On the other hand, it may be that Cleopatra’s birth took place under the Greek tradition of the Ptolemies themselves. Hippocrates, often called the father of medicine, writing in the century before Alexander, had ideas just as spurious as those of the ancient Egyptians. In relation to the sex of a child, a mother expecting a girl would be pale; if a boy she would be ruddy and healthy. In the womb, a male child lay to the right, a female to the left. In ancient Greece, all city states except Sparta tended to ignore their female babies. Breast-feeding mothers of boys were given twice as much wine, beer and grain as those nursing girls. Plato believed that pregnancy should occur between the ages of sixteen and twenty and Aristotle (Alexander’s tutor) thought that a law should be passed forcing pregnant women to walk every day to the temple to pray for a safe delivery. Artemis (the Roman’s Diana) was the goddess particularly associated with menstruation and childbirth, as she was linked with the early deaths of women, hit by her arrow. Deaths of mothers during pregnancy and of babies themselves were grimly common throughout the ancient world. The fact that (as far as we know) all four of Cleopatra’s own children were healthy is in itself something of a record.

  If we know nothing about Cleopatra’s origins, we know at least who her siblings were. Berenice IV was her elder sister, the daughter of Auletes and Cleopatra V Tryphaena. The Romans would claim later that she was Auletes’ only legitimate child. Arsinoe was the sister born between 69 and 65 and again we have no idea who her mother was. The boys, both called Ptolemy, were born in 61 and 59 and again, their mother is unknown. It is possible that all four children – Cleopatra, Arsinoe and the two Ptolemies – had the same mother, but we cannot know.

  ‘Don’t hesitate,’ a grandmother wrote to her granddaughter in the 180s, ‘to name the little one “Kleopatra”, your little daughter.’21 The name was Macedonian, not Egyptian, and meant ‘renowned in her ancestry’. She was the seventh Cleopatra of the Ptolemies and the name appears thirty-three times altogether in ancient sources.

  If we know nothing about Cleopatra’s birth, we are almost as much in the dark about her childhood. Clearly all the children of the Ptolemies were born with figurative silver spoons in their mouths, used to luxury and waited on hand and foot by an army of slaves. But we also know that the Ptolemies made little distinction between their children in terms of gender and education. Arsinoe and Cleopatra would have received exactly the same tuition as their younger brothers and that meant the Museion with the finest library in the world.

  We have no record of who actually taught Cleopatra (it was probably her brother’s tutor, the eunuch Theodotus) but the Museion was famous for its Greek and Egyptian philosophers, like Philostratus and the astronomer Sosigenes. Ironically, bearing in mind how Cleopatra became the arch-enemy of Rome, she would have spoken the same literal and metaphorical language as her later opponents – Greek. Her education would not have been very different from that of Caesar, Mark Antony or Octavian. The work was hard, with the alphabet and poetry to master, lines to be learned. She learned Homer who was as revered by Cleopatra as he was by Alexander – his works were regarded with the same awe as later Christians read the New Testament. Above all, of course, his allegories were vital to an understanding of the world not just in his time, but for all time. And (again like the Bible to Christians) every word was the truth.

  She would have read Aesop’s Fables, Herodotus’ account of her own land, histories of the Ptolemies themselves. All this was hand-written on long papyri scrolls – which were difficult to handle – and would have been read aloud to tutors and probably class members who were her own siblings. There was no punctuation as we know it, no paragraphs, not even word breaks.

  Cleopatra would have mastered the art of rhetoric or public speaking. Unlike the Romans of her generation who had to win over their assemblies and even the mob on street corners, Cleopatra’s own reign had an absoluteness about it that made such speeches unnecessary. But she had to play the part for her court, her priesthood, her aristocracy and her people, both of Alexandria and of Egypt proper. So hung up are we on the woman’s sexual allure that we sometimes forget she may have won over Caesar and Mark Antony with her words.

  The Ptolemies were a literary family, Ptolemy Soter I writing the first biography of Alexander the Great; even the repellent Physcon wrote tracts about the birds in the royal aviaries. It is likely that Cleopatra followed this tradition, immersing herself in medicine and pharmacology. Arab sources from the seventh century AD claim that she wrote her own books on gynaecology. The Romans, quick to condemn her in the years ahead, read all kinds of evil into this. She bewitched Caesar; she bewitched Antony – it was only a miracle that her wiles didn’t work on Octavian, too. And ancient Egypt had long had a tradition of poisons, spells and the occult.

  Cleopatra was also a linguist of talent. She was the first Ptolemy to bother to learn Egyptian, which meant that she could not only read pharaonic missives and reliefs herself, but she could make meaningful speeches to her people, a huge step forward in the ruler–ruled relationship. The day-to-day language of Egypt was demotic; the hieroglyphs only used for architecture. She also spoke Greek, Syrian, Parthian, Medish, Ethiopian, Troglodyte, Aramaic and Hebrew, making her a bluestocking of epic proportions. In later years, dealing with other client kings of Rome in the helter-skelter of international politics, this skill would prove highly important. One language ominously missing from her girlhood repertoire was Latin, in that Plutarch does not mention it. She would have spoken to cultured Romans in Greek. She was described as Cleopatra Thea (Augusta in Latin), the Wise, and as Theosebia, Scribe of the Gods, a reminder that literacy and education were god-given.

  But if Cleopatra lived a sheltered, idyllic life surrounded by her books and her philosopher-tutors, all that would be shattered in 58 when she was eleven years old. Throughout his reign, Auletes had been forced to be a ‘friend of Rome’, in effect buying off invasion with huge outpourings of cash. Seizing any excuse to expand, the greedy Republic, headed now by Pompey, Caesar and Crassus (see Chapter 6), accused Auletes’ brother Ptolemy of helping pirates against Roman shipping in the Mediterranean and grabbed the Cyprus treasury from him.

  Once again the Alexandrians intervened in what they saw as their right to oust an unsatisfactory ruler. In a sense, the Alexandrian mob was as vocal and powerful as that of Rome two centuries later. Since Auletes had not gone to his brother’s aid, but stood meekly by while the Romans claimed yet another scalp, they kicked the Piper out of Alexandria and called the exiled Cleopatra V Tryphaena to co-rule with Auletes’ eldest daughter, Berenice IV. An Athenian epitaph says that Auletes sailed to Rhodes with ‘one of his daughters’. This cannot be Berenice, who stayed as joint pharaoh, and Arsinoe was an infant, so the daughter had to be Cleopatra. It is always dangerous to trust one historical source, and some historians like Adrian Goldsworthy don’t really buy what happened next, but if Cleopatra went on a royal progress with her father on the eve of womanhood, it would explain a great deal about the ease with which she entered the world of realpolitik in her own right five years later. If she stayed behind, continuing her cloistered education, who was the daughter referred to in the epitaph?

  The island of Rhodes was an ally of the Pto
lemies and Isis was worshipped there. Joann Fletcher imagines the young Cleopatra seeing the Colossus of Rhodes, another wonder of the world now flattened by an earthquake, and being hugely impressed. This is possible, but Auletes had a less pleasant encounter. Marcus Porcinus Cato, on his way to Cyprus to organize the Roman takeover, insisted that Auletes came to him rather than the other way round and interviewed him sitting on the toilet. This seems amazingly high-handed, a mere politician dictating terms to what today would be called an emperor. It may have made Auletes feel better had he known that Cato was in disgrace himself. He had fallen foul of Caesar in Rome and the Cyprus job was a sort of short exile. He was not a popular man, wallowed in nostalgia for the Rome of his great-grandfather Cato ‘the Censor’ and hired his second wife out to the lawyer Quintus Hortensius: hardly an example of the famous Roman ‘virtue’.

  Happier times waited for the royal father and daughter in Athens where the Ptolemies were regarded as gods, and there would have been endless speeches and feasting. Then they sailed for Rome. As we shall see in Chapter 6, by 58 almost all of the old empire in the west that belonged to Alexander had been taken by the Romans in their drive to master the world, and in Italy they were met by the general who most modelled himself on the conqueror – Pompey, who called himself ‘the Great’ and wore a Macedonian haircut. He lent the Ptolemies his beautiful villa to the south of Rome during their stay.

  Auletes and Cleopatra spent several months in Rome, wheeling and dealing with the notoriously difficult senate and sparring with the ‘three pillars of the world’ – Pompey, Crassus and Caesar – each of whom had an ego and an ambition bigger than Egypt itself. The wrangling of these months will be described later but they left Auletes broke and he travelled east to Ephesus, in modern Turkey. Here was another wonder of the world: the great temple dedicated to Artemis but linked for ever with Alexander. Auletes had the temple decorated with a huge pair of doors made from ivory. Broke as he was, it was important to be seen to be appeasing the gods.

  It was while the royals were at Ephesus that news reached them of the death of Cleopatra V Tryphaena. Berenice IV, now ruling alone, panicked. For centuries, the Egyptian pattern of government had been a co-rulership, but her little brothers were too young and she felt she could not govern Egypt alone. Various attempts to find a family member who would do were blocked by the Roman governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, who was only too happy to be difficult on Auletes’ behalf as long as the man continued to line his purse.

  An obscure Seleucid claimant was found, whom the Alexandrians called scornfully Cybiosictes, the Salt-fish Seller, but Berenice didn’t like him and had him strangled days after their marriage. She found a replacement in Archelaos, who claimed to be a son of Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, whose family had been at war with Rome for generations. By that time, however, all bets were off because Pompey, angling for control of Egypt for himself, ordered his subordinate Gabinius to put the Piper back on the throne.

  It took a Roman army to do it and the officer commanding the cavalry was Mark Antony. According to legend, he fell in love with the fourteen-year-old Cleopatra at first sight; in reality, he probably never noticed her. Antony took the city of Pelusium on the eastern tributary of the Nile delta and marched to Alexandria where Auletes had his own daughter Berenice and her followers slaughtered. Only Antony stopped him from restaging the ritual dismemberment in the Gymnasion for which the Ptolemies were infamous.

  On 31 May 52 a great ceremony was held in Alexandria. All four of Auletes’ children were on display; the eldest, Cleopatra, now sixteen, was officially called Thea Philopator, Father-loving Goddess, and she sat beside the Piper as his co-ruler. It was the thirteenth year of his reign and the first of hers and on the face of it, it must have looked to witnesses that here was just another joint government of the Ptolemies, not unlike those that had gone on for nearly 300 years.

  Rome saw it differently.

  BOOK THREE: WINGS OF THE EAGLE

  6

  TIBER, FATHER TIBER

  ROME, 753

  Cities and institutions like Rome always have a colourful creation story attributed to them; in the case of Rome there are two. The first says that the city was founded by the twins Romulus and Remus, the children of Rhea Silvia and the great god of war, Mars. Abandoned by their mother, the boys were found, suckled and raised by a she-wolf. The statue commemorating this stood on the Capitoline Hill in Rome when Cleopatra was born, and the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that it was struck by lightning, probably when Cleopatra was four. The other story links Rome with the mythical Trojan War and has the Trojan prince Aeneas founding ‘New Troy’ on the banks of the Tiber in central Italy after fleeing the flames of his home somewhere in Asia Minor.

  What is interesting is that both stories deal with loss and violence – constants in the ancient world. Romulus battered Remus to death with a spade when he jestingly jumped over a ditch of the city whose foundations he had just dug – the sort of familial slaughter that was almost de rigueur among the Ptolemies. Aeneas was a war refugee, escaping from a slaughter that, according to Homer, saw Trojan women raped and babies carried on the spear-point of conquering Greek heroes. Similar scenes must have accompanied the whirlwind eleven-year campaign of Alexander.

  The reality, of course, is different. The Latin tribe who became the Romans were one among many. They settled on the Palatine Hill above the Tiber about 1000 BC. They were herdsmen; scattered archaeology has revealed the bones of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. The seven hills over which their settlements spread were really a series of rocky valleys through which the Tiber’s tributaries splashed, leading to the dismal marshes that were home to teeming millions of mosquitoes, which continued to keep the death rate high for centuries. Their houses were wooden structures, circular or rectangular, filled in with wattle and clay between the uprights. The Tiber not only provided a water supply, but fish were abundant and the river was easily wide and deep enough to accommodate even the largest ships of the ancient world, so trade could develop.

  In the cliché of the older history books, Italy was a ‘geographical expression’ before its final unity in 1861. For the first eight centuries of Rome’s life, its inhabitants were living in a sort of tribal jungle in which social Darwinism was a reality. To the south, in Sicilia and Campania, the Greeks dominated with their scholarship, their democracy and their libertine ways. For centuries, Capua, one of their major cities, vied with Rome as the power house of Italy. To the north, the Etruscans held sway as far as the Alps. They were exotic craftsmen and brilliant traders and every bit as greedy and expansionist as the Romans became.

  Early in the seventh century BC, the Etruscans came south, forcing the Romans and other former enemies to band together for survival. The kings of Rome in these years have folkloric names and, like Romulus himself, almost a god-like figure already, they were depicted as divine. Tullus Hostilius, for example, c.673–c.641, was a warmonger on a colossal scale. The historian Titus Livius (Livy), a contemporary of Cleopatra, summed him up when he wrote: ‘When [Hostilius] fell ill himself, the long sickness changed his mind...his proud spirit was broken, so that he seemed to have become another man.’22

  It didn’t help in the advent of the Etruscans that Rome could never quite bury the hatchet with all her former enemies. The Sabines, inland from Rome, were not finally defeated until 290. The Aequians along the River Anio continued fighting until their absorption into Rome forty years later. An earlier enemy, whom Shakespeare was fascinated by in Coriolanus, were the Volscians who seem to have been completely Romanized by 304. Over time, Roman resistance to Etruria became offence rather than defence.

  In the days of the kings, Roman society was divided by tribe. There were three, each responsible for providing soldiers in times of war. Each tribe was divided into ten curia (houses) who advised the king on day-to-day matters, but had no power themselves. Alongside this, a class structure was also developing and it was very polarized by Cleopatra’s time.
The patricians were the wealthy, a military class who came to dominate politics, trade, everything. Three of the major Roman protagonists in Cleopatra’s story – Caesar, Pompey and Octavius – all came from this class. Under them came the plebeians, the ordinary people. According to the first/second-century AD Greek historian Plutarch (a very important source for Cleopatra), the plebeians were organized by the second (and most peaceful) of Rome’s kings, Numa Pompilius, with a degree of sophistication unknown in the ancient world. ‘He divided the craftsmen according to their trades – flute-players, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, shoemakers, leather-dressers, potters and workers in copper and brass.’23

  The mud huts on the Palatine became large, solid buildings made of brick or stone. Tarquinius Priscus (the Old) set up an ambitious public works scheme. Stone was quarried, trees felled, plebeians laboured long and hard, their wagons groaning with building materials. Conduits and ditches were dug – the stinking malarial ditch into which all the city’s effluent ran became the Cloaca Maxima (the great arsehole), which was so high and wide that a hay wagon could pass through it.

  As Rome’s size grew and her power became obvious, her armies proved ever more successful throughout Italy. With that power came corruption and an ever greater reliance on slave labour. In Cleopatra’s day, the slave population of Rome probably outnumbered freemen four to one. The city was sitting on a potential powder-keg that could explode any minute and did in the form of Spartacus in the year of Cleopatra’s birth. More pressing than the slave problem by the sixth century was the over-reaching arrogance of the kings. The reign of Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud) tipped Rome’s patience over the edge. There was no heredity in kingship but Tarquin took the throne by force with no popular backing at all. ‘He accepted,’ wrote Livy, ‘that there was no hope of his being accepted into the hearts of his subjects, so he ruled by fear.’24 A successful soldier and great builder, he should have been exactly what the Romans respected but the actions of his son, Sextus, provided the spark for revolution.