Cleopatra Read online

  The irony of the professionalization of the Roman soldier was that such men lost their sense of identification with Rome itself. They relied on their pay (and were sometimes mutinous if they didn’t get it) and became intensely loyal to their unit or their commander. So popular was Caesar with his troops in Gaul that his men openly sang songs about his baldness (about which he was very sensitive) and his homosexual leanings. This might sound negative to the point of insubordination, but it was the stuff that glued armies together. The flip side of this development was that by Cleopatra’s day, rivalries between politicians, like Caesar and Pompey, for example, or Mark Antony and Octavian, became bloody affairs involving whole armies of thousands of men.

  8

  THE CRACKS IN THE PAVEMENT

  ROME, 88

  The Romans may have thrown out their last king, Tarquinius Superbus, appalled by the man and everything he stood for, but they did not replace him with anything like a democracy, so that in reality a handful of Tarquin’s over-mighty subjects took over and spent the next 500 years jostling each other for power. The whole system seemed to be held in check by the senate and the other councils we have met already, but the reality was that supremely ambitious and egotistical men fought each other for overall power. The smooth pavement that was the Roman ideal had cracks in it from the beginning. On the Ides of March 44, Julius Caesar was stabbed to death on his way into the senate by republicans who found his ambition too much to stomach; but it could be argued that the first man to plunge his dagger into the notion of the Republic was Lucius Cornelius Sulla – ‘Lucky’.

  An impoverished young man with skin so sensitive it was described as ‘mulberries sprinkled with flour’,29 two legacies in rapid succession gave him enough money to enter politics. The way to the top in republican Rome – and it was to remain so throughout Europe for the next 2,000 years – was to attach oneself to a rising star. For Sulla, the star was Marius and he impressed against the Numidian king Jugurtha in Africa before serving against the Germanii in 104 and 103. Marius was clearly jealous of his protégé and the young quaestor gravitated towards Marius’ rival, Quintus Lutatius Catulus. He made a political mistake in not standing as aedile, because whoever arranged the games was already a popular figure and Sulla’s African connections could have brought some weird and wonderful animals into Rome’s arena. His attempt at the praetorship foundered. Only by paying huge sums in bribes did he get the Praetor Urbanus job in 98.

  Military successes followed against one of the trickiest of Rome’s enemies, the Parthians, who had come to dominate the eastern extent of Alexander the Great’s empire. Consul by 88, Sulla gave himself the official nickname ‘Felix’, loosely translated as lucky, but in reality blessed by fortune, a reminder that even the most hard-bitten soldiers and statesmen of the ancient world wholeheartedly believed in prophecies and auguries; their lives were driven by them, in Rome as in Egypt.

  A showdown between Sulla and Marius was perhaps inevitable and the jealous Marius forced Sulla out, amid riotous scenes in the senate and fighting in the streets. Sulla himself fled but returned at the head of an army to restore order at sword point. This was a low point in Roman history – Roman soldiers called out to enforce discipline on their own people – and virtually all Sulla’s officers refused to obey him. Promotion from the junior ranks was easily achieved and when two praetors were sent to Sulla to talk sense into him, he sent them back to the senate with their togas ripped and their staffs of office broken in their hands. Sulla marched on Rome and took it.

  The phrase ‘in denial’ still lay two millennia in the future in Sulla’s day but it fitted his situation perfectly. He was unpopular with most Romans, who elected a rival, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, as consul the next year and Sulla was ordered to stand trial for his crimes against the senate and the people of Rome. He simply refused to turn up and set off at the head of his army against Mithridates, the general who had snatched most of Asia Minor back from the Romans. The Greeks, in whose lands the campaign began, were uncertain who to support so Sulla burned the port of Piraeus and seriously damaged Athens, despite its almost holy reputation as the cradle of civilization. He was more than holding his own against Mithridates when news arrived of a revolt in Rome spearheaded by Marius and Cinna. Sulla’s house had been burned down and his lands declared forfeit. In 85 the rebel consul made peace with Mithridates (which outraged the army) and he marched back home.

  Other rebels joined him as he reached the port of Brundisium – Appius Claudius, Metellus Pius and two men who would play tangential roles in the life of Cleopatra – Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gaius Pompey. With a mixture of bluff, cunning and appalling savagery, the outnumbered Sulla fought his way to Rome’s Colline Gate. Here Appius Claudius was killed and Sulla’s centre driven back but Crassus’ right wing had destroyed the enemy and in a moment that no fiction writer would dare invent, he sent a messenger to Sulla to ask if his men could stand down and have their supper!

  A terrified senate gave Sulla the title of dictator. The technical definition was that of a consul with exceptional powers, granted in times of emergency, including those of life and death, against whom there was no appeal. On the face of it, looking backwards, it was difficult to see how different this was from the role of the Tarquin kings and looking forward, of course, it foreshadowed the rise of the emperors. In a terrifying purge which dictators of later centuries have carried out – think Hitler and Stalin in the twentieth century – Sulla proscribed names of 500 men he saw as his enemies and therefore the enemies of Rome. Having decimated the senate he then doubled its size and packed it with his cronies. The magistracy was increased – there were now eight praetors and twenty quaestors. The power of the people’s tribunes was curbed – all ‘junior’ assemblies had to have their decisions ratified by the senate and the senate belonged to Sulla.

  The jury is still out on the dictator’s next step. Having amassed unprecedented power over a three-year period, he returned Rome to the status quo in 80 with Metellus Pius and himself as joint consuls and retired from politics completely in 79. Should we see him as a former-day Oliver Cromwell, actually trying to find a better governmental system than the one he had overthrown? Hardly, because in 80 everything returned to ‘normal’ and only negativity had triumphed. He died in 78, having completed his memoirs, now lost to time, and left behind a nagging doubt in Rome and a yawning chasm in its pavement. The stock phrase from now on became: ‘Sulla did it; why can’t I?’ Increasingly the real power of Rome was its army, not its senate and the man who commanded it could ‘bestride the narrow world like a colossus’.

  The remaining consul was Metellus Pius – the nickname means devoted, not holy in the modern sense, and the devotion was to his father who had been exiled in 99 on the order of Marius. He was praetor in 89 and fought effectively against the neighbouring Italian tribe, the Marsi, before a less successful campaign in Africa. His competence as a general endeared him to the army and he joined the rebel Sulla as a natural opponent of Marius. As a reward, Sulla made Metellus Pontifex Maximus with its priestly overtones, and as proconsul and consul fought a bitter war against the rebel Sertorius in Spain. He retired shortly before Cleopatra’s birth when her father Auletes was anxious to court Roman military power and the stage was set for the last titanic struggle in Roman affairs that would lead to the deaths of Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Cleopatra and the rise of the emperors under Augustus.

  Marcus Licinius Crassus was played with all the hauteur of a Roman patrician by Laurence Olivier in the film Spartacus. What did not come out in that portrayal was the man’s avarice, which appalled his patrician peers. He made a point of buying up property cheaply all over Rome so that he could sell it at an obscene profit. When Auletes went to Rome to bribe various officials, it is highly likely that Crassus was more than interested. He bought people with the same ease that he bought property and was popular among Romans of the lower classes, taking on pro bono cases in the law courts.
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br />   When Cleopatra was born, the Thracian gladiator slave Spartacus was looting Italian towns at will. Five armies sent against him were destroyed and the sixth was commanded by Crassus, by now propraetor. He took six legions – an unprecedentedly large army, especially against slaves – and defeated Spartacus somewhere south of Rome. It was in the mopping-up operations of this campaign that Gaius Pompey arrived. He magnanimously acknowledged Crassus’ victory, but overstepped the mark perhaps by suggesting that he had made sure a similar revolt would never happen again. Pompey’s father was a highly dubious politician and so prone to changing sides between Marius and Sulla that when he died of plague, his body was dragged from its tomb by the mob and torn apart in scenes usually reserved for the Ptolemies in Alexandria. Sulla’s arrival at Brundisium brought Pompey with three legions raised at his own cost to support him. His early military successes as a dashing cavalry commander went to his head a little, especially when Sulla hailed him as imperator (conquering general, which later became synonymous with emperor). It was now that Pompey began to compare himself with Alexander the Great, cutting his blond hair in the style of the Macedonian conqueror.

  While Crassus looked on bemused in 82, Pompey demanded a triumph in Rome for his defeat of the Marian exiles Carbo in Sicily and Ahenobarbus30 in Africa. Roman protocol demanded that triumphs were only given to those who had held public office and Pompey had not. Even so, he would not be dissuaded and the day went ahead. Somehow typical of Pompey’s brashness, his elephant-hauled chariot got stuck on a city gate and he became something of a laughing stock.

  Manoeuvring for position as Sulla’s blue-eyed boy, Pompey divorced his wife Antistia and married the dictator’s stepdaughter, Aemilia. When she died in childbirth, Pompey married Mucia Tertia, another member of the same family, and she produced a son, Gnaeus, in 79. For the next two years, Pompey fought against Sertorius in Spain, although most of the successful campaigning was done by Metellus. Returning to Italy for the end of the Spartacus campaign, Pompey hurried himself through the usual political process and stood with Crassus as consul in the year of Cleopatra’s birth. The pair were hardly friends – Crassus the aloof patrician and Pompey the boy-general (although by now, of course, he was thirty-six) were not a match made in heaven.

  It was now that Pompey officially added the nickname Magnus – the Great – and he had to earn his sobriquet. Rome’s navy was never as accomplished as its army, and the pirates of Cilicia (northern Turkey today) were able to out-row and out-sail the Roman fleets and raid coastal towns at will. When Cleopatra was three, the senate unleashed Pompey against the pirates and in a lightning forty-day campaign, he penned them in, took 90 ships, 20,000 prisoners and umpteen chests of stolen loot. An ecstatic senate voted to extend Pompey’s powers and ordered him against Mithridates VI Eupator, the king of Pontus, who was the greatest obstacle to Rome’s expansion in the east. Sulla had beaten the man in 84, as had Lucius Lucullus three years later, but, like a bad denarius, he kept turning up.

  Once again, Pompey was indeed great, defeating Mithridates before turning on Tigranes of Armenia. This man, an ally of Mithridates, used the grand Parthian title of ‘king of kings’, but was captured and obliged to pay Pompey a huge ransom before the Roman went on to invade Syria and Judaea. Mithridates finally committed suicide in the Crimea in 63, having fought Rome for thirty years.

  In 62, when the little Cleopatra was probably studying with her Greek philosophers in the great library at Alexandria, Pompey celebrated his third triumph in Rome. This one was so spectacular that the column of troops, captured prisoners of war and booty took days to march through the streets. Impressing the rabble was one thing; working for stability in Roman politics was another, and Pompey clashed with too many important members of the senate for his own good. He divorced Mucia Tertia on the unprovable grounds of infidelity, thus alienating her powerful family, and found himself at odds not only with Lucullus but with Gaius Porcius Cato, tribune of the plebeians (an important political post that allowed him to veto anything the senate put forward). When Ptolemy Auletes came to Rome to ask for support in getting his kingdom back, Pompey supported him; Cato and many others did not.

  Pompey turned to his supporters, Crassus and the ‘greatest Roman of them all’, Julius Caesar. This was the first triumvirate, known to Romans then in the less positive term ‘the three-headed monster’.

  Cleopatra was ten; her brother Ptolemy, six. Their father, the Dionysian Piper, was in exile, forking out huge sums to buy Roman support for his return to Egypt. In the play of history, the last act of the Ptolemaic tragedy was about to be played out. And the Roman Republic would die with Cleopatra.

  BOOK FOUR: CAESAR

  9

  THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER

  ROME, 60

  Gaius Julius Caesar was an immensely complex man and we need to understand him because he is the pivot between the worlds of Rome and of Cleopatra. Those worlds collided in the summer of 48 when Caesar was a war-weary veteran of fifty-two, Cleopatra a young – and exiled – queen of twenty-one. Shakespeare and countless others have reduced their relationship to a love match – a powerful celebrity figure with his much younger trophy wife – but that is to ignore complex politics and does justice to neither of them.

  The Caesarii were a very old Roman family that claimed descent from the Trojan prince Aeneas who, according to one tradition, had founded Rome. The meaning of the name is obscure but – and this is a rich irony bearing in mind Julius Caesar’s obsession with his lack of hair – is possibly Oscan31 for ‘curly’. The man who would write himself into history for the next 1,000 years and beyond was born in 100, making him six years younger than Pompey, who would become first an ally and finally, a deadly rival.

  In the Marius–Sulla civil war, which did so much to weaken the Republic, Caesar sided with Marius to whom he was related by marriage. The handsome young dandy, with his huge dark eyes and his habit of wearing his belt loose, was married to Cornelia, Cinna’s daughter, and was given the title of flamen dialis, an ancient priestly order of Jupiter, which was obscure to the point of meaninglessness. On Sulla’s return in 80, Caesar found himself out of a post, ordered to divorce his wife and on the run. Caught and sentenced to death, Caesar was allowed to live because of his aristocratic connections. Sulla always had his doubts about this decision – ‘You are going to find many Mariuses in that boy.’32

  The following year, Caesar began his military career on the staff of Marcus Minucius Thermus in Asia, winning a civic crown at Mitylene for saving a man’s life. It was on this campaign that Caesar may have had a homosexual fling with Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, although such charges were later levelled against his supporter Mark Antony, too. Homosexual relationships were associated by the Romans with Greek decadence, but in reality there seems to have been an ambivalence in Caesar’s day that partially tolerated it. When Caesar returned to Rome in 78 the great orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero quipped, ‘We all know what he [Nicomedes] gave – and what you gave him.’33 Certainly, Caesar’s legions in Gaul in the years ahead sang marching songs that were very open about their commander’s sexuality and it is impossible to believe he didn’t hear the banter himself:

  Gaul was brought to shame by Caesar; by King Nicomedes, he.

  Here comes Caesar, wreathed in triumph for his Gallic victory!

  Nicomedes wears no laurels – though the greatest of the three.

  Here we bring our bald whoremonger; Romans, lock your wives away!

  All the bags of gold you lent him, his Gallic tarts received as pay.34

  Even allowing for the ribald over-simplification, there is no disguising the fact that war, an exaggerated sex-drive and money were all very important to Caesar.

  The death of Sulla opened the way for the beginnings of a political career and Caesar attempted to prosecute the governor of Cilicia, Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella, on charges of corruption. He failed, but impressed all Rome – even the unimpressible Cicero – by his
rhetoric. It was that which he went to study in Rhodes under one of the finest rhetoricians of his day, Apollonius Molon, but even here, adventure and excitement could not leave Caesar alone. Captured by the ever-menacing Cilician pirates, the future would-be emperor had to be ransomed for fifty talents. Not one to forgive or forget, Caesar raised a fleet, tracked his captors down and crucified them at Pergamon.

  From 73 onwards, Caesar’s career accelerated. Soon to be known for his astonishing speed on campaign, he was no slouch in politics either. First he returned to his priestly role, as augur, and used the death of his wife Cornelia and that of his aunt Julia the following year to make a public declaration of the glory of Marius’ line, from whom Julia was descended. In an age when political alliances were cemented by marriage, the widower took Pompeia, Sulla’s granddaughter, as his new wife. He was elected military tribune in 70, quaestor in 69 and aedile in 65. So when Cleopatra was toddling around the marbled passageways of the royal palace in Alexandria, the man who would become her lover, protector and the father of her first child was already at the top of his political game.

  Tom Holland reminds us that Romans hated being dependent on anyone35 but in reality no one could go it totally alone in a power system as complex as republican Rome. Caesar allied himself with Marcus Licinius Crassus because he was the richest man in Rome and he almost certainly bank-rolled Caesar’s campaign for the aedileship. In company with just about every other aedile, Caesar spent a fortune on building programmes, including restoring Marius’ smashed triumphal arches on the Capitol and, of course, on the games, a move guaranteed to endear him to Romans of all classes.