The Search for Cleopatra Read online

  THE SEARCH FOR

  CLEOPATRA

  Votive plaque of Cleopatra as an Egyptian goddess.

  The publishers would like to give particular thanks to Laurence Rees and Ann Cattini of BBC Timewatch, and also Jonathan Lewis, without whom this book would not have been possible.

  THE SEARCH FOR

  CLEOPATRA

  THE TRUE STORY OF HISTORY’S

  MOST INTRIGUING WOMAN

  MICHAEL FOSS

  Arcade Publishing New York

  Copyright © 1997, 2011 by Michael Foss

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-333-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  List of Colour Plates

  The Reigns of the Ptolemies

  1 A Sense of the Past

  2 Preparation of a Queen

  3 The Shadow of Rome

  4 Caesar and Cleopatra

  5 Breathing Space

  6 Antony and Cleopatra

  7 Actium and the Course of History

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  LIST OF MAPS

  Ancient Egypt during the Ptolemies

  Plan of Alexandria during Cleopatra’s time

  The eastern Mediterranean during the first century BC

  Battle of Actium

  LIST OF COLOUR PLATES

  BETWEEN PAGES 64 AND 65

  PLATE 1: A selection of coins from the Ptolemaic period

  PLATE 2: Threshing corn in Ancient Egypt (above); the fertile Nile Valley (below)

  PLATE 3: The Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria

  PLATES 4 and 5: The Palestrina floor mosaic showing Egypt in the first century BC

  PLATES 6 and 7: Images of Cleopatra as a tragic vamp as seen by artists down the ages

  PLATE 8: Julius Caesar

  BETWEEN PAGES 128 AND 129

  PLATE 9: Cleopatra depicted as the goddess Ms

  PLATE 10: The temple of Hathor at Denderah (above); the Sacred Lake at Denderah (below)

  PLATE 11: Cleopatra with her son, Caesarion

  PLATE 12: Mark Antony (above); a Roman sea battle (below)

  PLATE 13: Octavian, later Emperor Augustus

  PLATES 14 and 15: The deaths of Antony and Cleopatra as seen by artists down the ages

  PLATE 16: A boat trip on the river Nile as shown in a Roman mosaic from Tivoli

  THE REIGNS OF THE PTOLEMIES 305–30 BC

  Ptolemy I

  Soter I

  305–282 BC

  Ptolemy II

  Philadelphus

  284–246 BC

  Ptolemy III

  Euergetes I

  246–222 BC

  Ptolemy IV

  Philopator

  222–205 BC

  Ptolemy V

  Epiphanes

  204–180 BC

  Ptolemy VI

  Philometor

  180–145 BC

  Ptolemy VII

  Neos Philopator

  145 BC

  Ptolemy VIII

  Euergetes

  II 145–116 BC

  Ptolemy IX

  Soter II (Lathyrus)

  115–107 BC

  Ptolemy X

  Alexander I

  107–88 BC

  Ptolemy IX

  Soter II (restored)

  88–80 BC

  Ptolemy XI

  Alexander II

  80 BC

  Ptolemy XII

  Neus Dionysus (Aulet

  80–51 BC

  Cleopatra VII

  Philopator

  51–3O BC

  1

  ASENSE OF THE PAST

  LABORIOUS COLLECTIONS OF FACTS, gathered with ingenuity and great effort and judged with difficulty, make up our written histories. Out of this slow accumulation we build our picture of the past. But it is the picture not so much the evidence that we need, for our imagination seems to be primarily visual And in our pictures what we most like – perhaps what we must have – is not some absolute of historical truth founded on a mountain of small certain facts. In any case, that is hardly possible, given the partial and much-erased record of history. Rather, we want a vision for the mind that reveals itself in drama, passion, elemental conflict, emblematic events that become the basis for mythologies.

  Imagine a woman of sufficient interest to throw future ages into a labyrinth of dreams. Imagine her in all the variety and grace and appeal of mature womanhood taken to its utmost possibility, with the mind and a body to captivate a caesar, a world-conqueror, an emperor. Did such a person exist, or was she only a figment of the imagination?

  History has suggested to us that there was such a woman, formed in the flesh and blood of an Egyptian queen of the first century BC. This woman – Cleopatra VII of the house of Ptolemy – has appeared to later generations to contain all the rare elements of a woman of dreams. She captivated not one caesar but two, and made another one – the greatest of the three – tremble so that one of his Romans wrote that Rome, the city of conquerors, had feared only two people: Hannibal and Cleopatra.

  Alexander the Great arrived as the new conqueror of Egypt in 332 BC and so began the period when Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemies from Macedonia on the Greek mainland.

  Who was this woman Cleopatra?

  In June 323 BC, when Alexander the Great died suddenly in Babylon after a short but meteoric life of conquest, his Macedonian generals scrambled for the remains of his empire. The general Ptolemy, a tough and proven soldier who was also, in the manner of so many men of the mountains, shrewd, obstinate and wily, knew that he desired two things: the body of Alexander and the land of Egypt.

  For a man of good judgement these two objects of desire went together; it was at the Egyptian oasis of Siwah that the oracle of Amon had saluted Alexander as the son of the god. Thus there began in Egypt the second and more remarkable career of Alexander the Great, which turned him from a successful conqueror – an ordinary piece of mortality – into a blazing star of mythology a cult-hero and a god whose image became the possession of the world. Even today we see the embers of his fiery trail laid across the mind of humanity. A modern historian, following in the footsteps of Alexander, writes:

  We saw his story retold by Greek and Turkish shadow-players, and by Tadjik bards. We saw one of the last of the travelling one-man shows in Iran, complete with painted backdrop showing the death of the Persian king, Darius, in epic style. We heard about Greek medicine from the doctors of Multan in north-east Pakistan, who claim descent from Alexander’s physicians; we sat in a felt yurt on the Turkmen steppe to hear the story of his devil’s horns and his two-week sex romp with an Amazon queen.

  Ptolemy wanted Egypt, the richest of all Alexander’s conquests, and he knew that the possession of Alexander’s corpse would give him the venerated body of a vivid new god and a tal
isman of extraordinary power in the ancient land. After discussions in Babylon, Ptolemy became satrap of Egypt, though there was doubt whether Alexander should be entombed at Siwah or in the Macedonian homeland at Aegae. Ptolemy hurried to take up his territory. Then while Perdiccas, the foremost of Alexander’s generals, was engaged elsewhere, Ptolemy waylaid the funeral procession and took the hero’s corpse to Memphis. Here, in the old capital of Lower Egypt, the body stayed until a fitting tomb – the Sema – was prepared in Alexander’s own city of Alexandria. Within two years Perdiccas, who saw too late that he had been out-manoeuvred, attacked Egypt, but without success. In 321 BC he was stopped at the Nile. His invaders became the first of many enemies to the rule of the Ptolemies whose corpses were fed to the crocodiles of the river.

  Now Ptolemy was securely confirmed as satrap of Egypt, and he had in his hands the body of the god Alexander and the god’s magnificent new city of Alexandria. A state-cult was founded for Alexander, with its own priesthood. In 305 BC Ptolemy felt strong enough in his new land to transform himself from satrap to king. He took on the customary role of the pharaoh and assumed all the ancient rights and privileges of that great title. He became Ptolemy I Soter. Soter meant Saviour, and in taking that honorific title he claimed to be the man who had rescued Egypt from the hated rule of the Persians, he who had (as it was written in the hieroglyphics of a stele) restored to Horus, the god of Egypt, ‘from this day forth forever, all its villages, all its towns, all its people, all its fields.’

  In a hundred years or so of artful and successful rule, the first three Ptolemies had bound their family into a close-knit dynasty, and had bound that dynasty into the fabric and the being of Egypt. Quite consciously the house of Ptolemy kept the kingship confined within an incestuous family group. In a period of three hundred years two names alone sufficed for the successive kings. The male rulers were called Ptolemy, and sometimes, almost by way of an aside to bring forth great memories, also Alexander. Their co-rulers, the powerful and ruthless queens of the dynasty, were called Berenice or Arsinoe or Cleopatra – nothing else. The kings advertised themselves to their people with such titles as Soter (Saviour) and Euergetes (Benefactor) and Epiphanes (Shown-by-God). They and their queens were called Philadelphus (Brother or Sister-loving) or Philopator (Father-loving) or Philometor (Mother-loving). These titles were too often more than rhetoric, indicating a real marriage between brother and sister or between parent and child. This habit of incest, for which there was perhaps some slight precedent in Egyptian history scandalized the Greeks. But the Ptolemies, those pragmatic ruffians from the highlands of Macedonia, though Greek-speaking and of Greek culture themselves, saw only a dynastic advantage in incest. They were far from their homeland and their regal actions were not subject to review from their Greek peers.

  Founder of the Ptolemy dynasty, Ptolemy I Soter (305-282 BC) had been one of Alexander the Great’s best generals before becoming ruler of Egypt.

  In three centuries of intermittent in-breeding there is no clear evidence that the family degenerated excessively as a result. The Ptolemy men ran to fat. They lost the hardiness and mental toughness of pasturalists from the hills, and the later kings became idle, artistic and a little decadent. But that is a familiar course in realms that have become rich, lazy and somnolent. The Ptolemy queens, on the contrary remained sharp-witted, competent and energetic. However, it is possible that Cleopatra VII, the most brilliant of those queens, gained some of her exceptional qualities from an infusion of new blood. The identity of neither her mother nor her grandmother is known for certain. On the maternal side, she sprang from concubines rather than queens.

  It was a bold step to root the family inheritance on incest. But it was a move of greater wisdom, carefully carried through by the first three Ptolemy kings, to assimilate as much as possible the government by this alien Macedonian Greek ruling house into the long-standing, stable traditions of Egyptian life and practice.

  In the ancient world Greeks and Egyptians were no strangers to each other. Both were seafaring people. Trade and culture had been intermixed between them for a long time. The histories of Herodotus, from the fifth century BC, showed how much was known about Egypt, and with what keen intellectual curiosity (the mark of ancient Greece!) the Greeks investigated all aspects of the civilization of the colossus of the Near East. Among many wonders, two things were easy to note: the longevity and resilience of pharaonic civilization; and the wealth and productive power of the land, owed in large part to the gifts of the Nile. And shrewd minds – there was no shortage of those among Greeks – also saw that the two things were closely connected.

  The wealth of Egypt was obvious. Time and again, when the prodigal Nile had performed its yearly miracle of flood and soil-enrichment, the price of Egyptian wheat in the Athenian market was able to undercut the price of the local produce, despite transportation costs and a middleman’s profit. Wheat and barley were the staples of Egyptian agriculture, which produced in good years a large surplus for export. But the fine silt of the Nile under a warm sun was capable of supporting almost any harvest, and the variety of things grown in Egypt with success was extraordinary. Vines, olives, figs, dates, walnuts, beans, peas, lentils, cabbage, radish, onions and garlic, all did very well. Spices included mustard, cumin and fenugreek. Oil was pressed from linseed, safflower, sesame and croton. There were nuts of many kinds, and the fruits of a warm climate such as apricots, peaches and quinces. From the stock of barley, large amounts of beer were brewed and thankfully drunk on hot harvest days.

  Nor was there a shortage of pasturage for the animals. Draught oxen did the heavy work, ploughing the shallow furrow or turning the waterwheels of the irrigation system on which the success of agriculture depended. On large estates, in the south and at the desert edge, camels were used, as awkward and bad-tempered here as elsewhere. ‘You can hear from your brother’, a letter-writer complains, ‘how everyone here suffered on account of those camels from Coptos.’ Bulls had a special place in a society that held them to be sacred. They, too, were not easy to handle. ‘Those damn bulls of yours’, runs the same letter, ‘are running wild, and they’ve landed me in court several times, thanks to you.’ Ubiquitous donkeys carried the peasants and the lighter loads. The housewife was likely to have her chickens and a dovecote. Pigs snuffled in courtyards (the Greeks were fond of pork and bacon but the animal was unclean to the Egyptians). Sheep and goats in large numbers gave meat and wool and milk and cheese.

  The bulk of the produce, certainly the surplus for export, came from the large estates of the king, the nobles and the temple priesthood, in the Nile delta or in the Fayum where the early Ptolemies drained part of Lake Moeris, to extend the good land on which they could settle their Greek followers or reward mercenary soldiers with landholdings. But the pattern of production and commerce developed in Egypt over several millennia was complex and varied, and the aim of the Ptolemies was not to change it but to refine it and develop it further. Production extended well beyond the dominating great estates whose prime purpose was to enrich the king. The sub-lessee, the smallholder, the cultivator of a domestic plot, the entrepreneur, the official with a sideline in agriculture and business, all played an important part in the accumulation of Egyptian wealth. So long as the main current of labour flowed to the king – to the state – it was permissible that some of the flow should run into the winding channels of individual enterprise.

  Beyond all systems of landholding and production lay the annual problem of the Nile. The success or failure of almost all agriculture depended on the control and distribution of the river-waters – on the rise and fall of the river. In June, the waters began to swell around the First Cataract in the far south. The flood proceeded down the river to the delta, and then began slowly to fall, starting in September. On this simple rhythm the life of the country depended. ‘When two sources of the Nile have been closed up,’ said an ancient inscription, ‘plants will wither and life will retreat from the living.’ Anxiously, the r
iver was watched and measured, with large scales cut into the stone at various points on the bank. The readings were collected and collated, for the balance between dearth and plenty was very fine, as a Roman historian observed:

  Seven metres is an average rise. Less does not irrigate all the available land, and more holds back the sowing by too much wetness; with less the soil is parched, with more it is water-logged. Each district takes a careful note of both extremes. In a rise of five and a half metres one sees the spectre of famine, and even in six metres hunger is felt. But six and a half metres brings good cheer, six and threequarters confidence, and seven metres delight. The largest rise to date was eight metres, and the smallest a little over two metres, in the year of Pharsalus, as if the river by portents was trying to warn of the murder of Pompey.

  The yearly drama of the vast river, stretching some thousand kilometres from the First Cataract to the sea, only unfolded slowly. Different parts of the land v/ere affected at different times. To control the water and make it work for the benefit of the whole land needed a co-ordinated effort to plan and measure and inform, to build and maintain canals, dykes and ditches, to work waterwheels and sluices, to dam or to let flow All this required central direction, a large bureaucracy of administrators, and a large workforce to be deployed at will under the king, who in the theory of the state was the only autocratic authority that the country possessed. Whether the centralized bureaucracy and planned economy of Egypt grew out of the people’s need to control the river, or whether the control of the Nile resulted from the already established forms of pharaonic society, is a question shrouded by its antiquity. But the plain fact was that the system worked. It took no great intelligence to see its success in the long waving green of the cornfields, in vineyards and olive groves, in stands of date palms, in the grape-hung trellises of country houses, in the orchards of ripe fruit. Men saw it even more in the grain warehouses waiting to discharge their surplus into the ships of all the Mediterranean, in the pomp of palaces, and in temples and monuments that dwarfed the scale of all other man-made objects. They knew that this was success.