The Search for Cleopatra Read online

  Many people [a high official wrote to an underling] are still writing against you, your subordinates, and especially the tax-farmers, for abuse of power and fraudulent exactions and even blackmail

  The state system so successfully established by the first three Ptolemies was slowly disintegrating, and events seemed to bear out old pharaonic prophecies: ‘Everywhere there will be harm. The seasons will remain in darkness. Even by day, what is light and what is shadow?’

  The world of the eastern Mediterranean was in turmoil. Old kingdoms struggled against the baleful ambition of Rome. Constant wars, large and small, cut off the export markets on which the prosperity of Egypt depended so much. Social unrest harmed agricultural production. Peasant cultivators refused to work. They took sanctuary in the old temples, particularly in the Thebaid. Canals were not dredged, dykes not maintained, and water-wheels unrepaired. The delicate balance of land and water in the Nile valley was disturbed, with serious consequences. The coinage was debased again and again, copper coins replacing silver or gold, and inflation increased. In Upper Egypt whole regions asserted an autonomy against the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria. For a time, a certain Pharaoh Harmachis declared an independent state in the territory between the Nile cataracts.

  To support them in this sea of troubles the later Ptolemies had little beyond an effete confidence in the god-given right to rule, and an increasing resort to violence. They came down harshly on their own subjects. ‘Again and again’, it was said of Ptolemy Physkon, ‘he turned his troops on the people of Alexandria and massacred them.’ Their own people they might destroy but in the face of the Roman threat the Ptolemies were so weak they could only watch aghast. They tried to combine cringing submission with futile stratagems. Neither worked. In 164 BC Ptolemy VI was seen trudging up the Capitol hill in Rome, pitifully dressed, no more impressive than the meanest petitioner. The will of his brother Ptolemy VIII offered Egypt to Rome, if the king should die without issue. To explain this astonishing gift to the disbelieving Roman senators, he displayed on his fat body scars supposedly made by his own ungrateful subjects. For this demonstration Physkon got nothing but contempt. When Scipio Aemilianus visited Alexandria and saw the puffed-up king waddling anxiously forward, he commented to his companion: ‘The citizens of Alexandria owe me one thing. At last they have seen their king walk!’

  In the squalor of their lives, one fat king followed another. Ptolemy XI, who dared to call himself Alexander, was so gross he needed an attendant on each side to support him. Yet it was said that when he was drunk he was agile enough in lewd dances. Indecency, in body and mind, became the measure of rule. It was rumoured that Physkon had chopped up his son and sent the body in a box to the child’s mother as a present. The rumour was believed, for had not this king who called himself the Benefactor been retitled Kakergetes (Malefactor) by his people? In the Ptolemaic family warfare went on, kings against queens, children against parents, brothers against sisters. Incestuous marriages were made and broken for a momentary advantage. When the great Ptolemy II Philadelphus had begun the fashion of incest by marrying his sister Arsinoe II, he had so shocked the ancient world that the Thracian poet Sotades had rudely commented: ‘Now you’ve thrust your prick into an unholy opening.’ For this the poet was caught, bound in a wooden box and drowned at sea. But when Ptolemy IX Lath-yrus, the king known as Chick-Pea, set his sights on his own granddaughter, there was hardly a murmur of surprise.

  Suddenly, despite the variety of the royal couplings, the direct male line in the Ptolemies was at an end. In 80 BC, when the Alexandrian mob murdered Ptolemy XI Alexander, the only remaining males of royal blood were two illegitimate sons of Ptolemy IX Soter by a concubine. To forestall any Roman intervention, the people of Alexandria quickly acclaimed one of these young men as king of Egypt, and the other as king of Cyprus. Unusually, Ptolemy XII was crowned in Alexandria not Memphis, perhaps because haste and safety required it, and he was given a queen, Cleopatra V, who according to custom was probably his sister. He took the resounding title of New Dionysus, but the Alexandrians in their blunt way called him Nothos the Bastard, while in the world at large he was known as Auletes the Flute Player.

  A king who assumed the name Dionysus and earned the nickname Flute Player gave notice of an artistic temperament. The cult of Dionysus, enthusiastically taken up by many eastern kings, meant several different things. At the most serious level, it indicated an identification with a mystery-god, one who beneath the conventions of day-to-day religion reconciled beliefs in a deep, unspoken faith. In this faith the attributes of true divinity, obscurely manifest in Dionysus or Isis or Osiris, were immanent in the new god-king. Ptolemy Auletes was the ‘new Osiris’ in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, and as such he was likely to have taken a serious interest in the meaning and symbolism of his coronation.

  I went to the house of the Greek kings [the high priest of Ptah recorded] which is on the shore of the Great Sea by Rhakotis. There I crowned in his royal palace the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Master of two worlds, the Father-and-Sister-loving God, the New Osiris. He went to the temple of the Lady Isis. He offered her many and costly sacrifices.

  There is no need to doubt that these were authentic acts of worship by the young king.

  But there was another disreputable side to the cult of Dionysus that Auletes was glad to acknowledge. In honour of this god of excess, who goaded his followers to the wildest dances, the heaviest drinking and the boldest sexuality, Auletes was ready to play his flute the night through, to dance and drink with the most fervent of them. He changed into female clothes, as Dionysus had done, and flaunted himself recklessly, and he was offended in his cups when others refused the indulgence of his orgies. The philosopher Demetrius, a man of stiff sobriety who tried to avoid the court frolics, only managed to appease the pleasure-loving king (a man known for casual cruelty) by dancing before him each day in a wanton, transparent gown. Though Auletes fathered several children, he took his sexual experiments far enough to gain a reputation for homosexuality. On a stele at Philae certain Egyptian men claimed that they had slept with the king.

  Egypt needed something more in these hard days than a Dionysian monarch. Rome was laying claim to the kingdom on the basis of some dubious documents and refused to recognize Auletes. Two young princes from the East, the sons of Cleopatra Selene who was the only legitimate Ptolemy left alive, were in Rome pressing their own claims by bribery on the greedy senators. But Rome had no wish to unite the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms. The senators pocketed the bribes and packed the youths off on a homeward journey through Sicily, where they were thoroughly robbed. Uneasily, Auletes matched his rivals in Rome, bribe for bribe. The great men in Rome grew rich on Egyptian money while the treasury at Alexandria, made lean by the deteriorating Egyptian economy, was drained to no purpose. The Roman nobles were pleased to despise the softness and oriental luxury of the king whose bribes they so gladly accepted.

  At any moment the Roman thunder might break over Egypt. The storm was held off, not by Auletes’ guile, but by jealousy and indecision within Rome. A great internal strife was underway there, concerning the very nature of the republic itself, and there was a feeling that other matters could wait. Egypt would have its turn. In the meantime Ptolemy Auletes dabbled in waters whose troubled currents he could not control. He sent 8000 cavalry to help the general Pompey in Palestine, since Pompey was the Roman in the ascendant in the lands nearest to Egypt. Already Pompey had crushed Tigranes and Mithridates, troublesome enemies to Rome in Armenia, Pontus and Syria. In 64 BC Pompey extinguished the Seleucid line and brought Syria to Rome as a province. The old Queen Cleopatra Selene was dead, captured and killed by Tigranes on the Euphrates in 69 BC. Illegitimate Auletes, only shakily a Ptolemy, hated or despised at home and abroad, under the displeasure of Rome and watching that military giant flex dangerous muscles nearby, knew then the impotence and loneliness of his position.

  In 69 BC Ptolemy Auletes fathered a baby girl, his third c
hild, who was called Cleopatra according to the custom of the family. At about the same time the king’s wife, also Cleopatra, disappeared from the Egyptian records. Perhaps she died, perhaps she was put away, a fate not unknown to the co-rulers of the Ptolemies. Was this queen, Cleopatra V, the mother of the baby Cleopatra? It is not known. The father had a reputation for sexual looseness. At the very beginning of her life there is an unanswered question about Cleopatra. We can only see her as her father’s daughter, with all that entails, for we are in doubt about her mother.

  In the search for Cleopatra, her father Ptolemy Auletes will certainly take us some of the way, though the historical sources are silent on her childhood and upbringing. She was a Ptolemy, raised in the Ptolemaic court, in the city of Alexandria. She had within reach every luxury, every refinement known to the ancient world. Egypt was still wealthy, though it had been richer, and it is the habit of decadent courts in declining economies to let a painted face try to hide bodily decay.

  What, then, were some of the antecedents to her character, the grounds for the formation of her mature being? Her father was a man of artistic sensibility and talent. His nickname, Flute Player, though a contemptuous comment on the king, was in its way a compliment to the man. In music, in dance, in the theatre of his decorative, indulgent life, Auletes showed real ability. He understood the part of statecraft that uses the propaganda of public entertainment, and he knew how much of entertainment was glitter and subterfuge. He had the weakness of his vices but also the intelligence to judge events; and though he did not have the force of character to stand up to them, he had the slipperiness to avoid the worst consequences. The world boiled dangerously around him; he was disliked at home in Alexandria and despised abroad; yet despite many setbacks, amid court plots and Roman intimidation, he clung to the throne for 29 years.

  It is easy to see what counted against Auletes – his debauchery, his frivolity, his extravagance, his self-absorption, his cruelty. To find threads of virtue in the dismal cloth of his life is much harder. Yet in an aesthetic sensibility, vice and virtue are often only two sides of the same coin. For men of this kind religion and theatre are not far apart. Both deal with shadowlands beyond the worst materialism of the senses. Auletes seemed by instinct to tap into the springs of Egyptian religion, both the ancestral practices of the pharaonic state and the mystery-faith of a Dionysian god-king.

  The crypts of the great temple of Denderah, which Lathyrus and Ptolemy Alexander had not finished, were completed by Auletes; he set up an altar at Coptos to Khem, Ms and Heh; put his name more than once on the temples at Karnak [Thebes]; set up bronze-bound gates at the great pylon of Edfu; enlarged Ptolemy Philometor’s temple at Kom Ombo.

  This was the work of a man deeply imbued with the spirit of Egypt, and it is no surprise to find at Philae, on the island in the Nile, a mighty statue of Auletes as pharaoh, the lord and governor of the ancient land. No doubt this understanding of the symbols and forms of Egyptian religion, so important to the native people to whom Alexandria meant almost nothing, helped Auletes to keep his precarious hold on the throne for so long. It was appropriate, too, that there should be at Philae an inscription from a certain Tryphon, ‘catamite of the Young Dionysus’.

  The character of her father Auletes, his vices and virtues, entered into the character of Cleopatra. And growing up in the court, she took the things that the court had to offer. Her health and physical well-being would have been in the hands of the best Alexandrian doctors. There were no better doctors in the West or the Near East. Her tutors would have come from the community of scholars living almost in the shade of the palace, in the halls of the Museum and the Library. There, the pursuit of knowledge went quietly on, despite the depravity of the court. A Ptolemy attack on artists and scholars, such as Physkon had made, seemed an offence against nature. Had not the house of Ptolemy perjured itself, and effected a swindle for which it forfeited a large amount of gold, to bring to the Museum from Athens the best and oldest manuscripts of the Greek genius? That Greek hunger for learning did not die just because the kings lost political and moral sense.

  The events of her later life gave good evidence that Cleopatra had the quick wits and the guile of the Ptolemies. From the historian Plutarch we know, too, that she was well-educated, even learned:

  There were few of the barbarian nations that she had to answer through an interpreter. To most of them she spoke direcdy, as for example to the Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, Parthians, and many others whose language she had learnt. And all this was the more surprising in that most of her predecessors, the Ptolemies, scarcely gave themselves the trouble of acquiring the tongue of Egypt.

  To the natural talents of a Ptolemy she had added something else, a resolution, a staying-power, an extra hardness and purpose that echoed the great queens of the past. She had in her the fire of Arsinoe II, of the second and third Cleopatras.

  To the formal schooling gained by a young girl within the palace walls, the city of Alexandria added an education of another kind. But the huge city spoke in different voices and the whole message was not easy to grasp. On the one hand, Alexandria seemed to represent the highest point of contemporary civilization, a place of grandeur and intellect unrivalled in all lands of the West and the Near East. In the majesty of its public buildings and palaces, in the convenient order of its streets, in the ingenuity of its harbours, canals and waterways, in its free associations, universal trade and enquiring spirit it stood as a monument to what could be done when Macedonian energy and Greek talent were married to Egyptian life and money. The daily prospect of the city that opened before the eyes of each Ptolemy must have seemed to a young member of the ruling house a complete justification for so many years of Ptolemaic government. Seeing all this, which one of them would not have desired and worked for the continuation of their dynasty?

  On the other hand, Alexandria had for a long time shown the symptoms of urban disease. It was superficial and restless, fall of empty spectacle and expense, seeking diversion at all costs. Within its many districts were little wars, shifting violence swirling in and out of ethnic enclaves, places that were almost ghettos. The dangerous mob was easily stirred by demagogues and faction leaders into cruelty and bloodletting. Among the people cynicism and moral laxity mirrored the vices of the kings. Alexandria was a place of distorting mirrors throwing back at the citizens caricatures of humanity. In late days, too, a smell of fear seeped through the city, coming out of the royal quarter of Brucheion, and induced by the vicious distractions of a divided royal family. In this suffocating atmosphere an intelligent girl could see the meaning of failure, how easily greatness of spirit degenerated into mere criminal aptitude.

  As Cleopatra grew into her teenage years there was truly much to fear in the state of king and country. In 59 BC, when Julius Caesar was one of the Roman consuls, Ptolemy Auletes bought his support with a payment of 6000 talents, a sum of money so gigantic it was said to equal about half the yearly revenue of Egypt. At last, Auletes was recognized as Egyptian monarch and declared to be ‘ally and friend of the Roman people’. Caesar, Pompey and Crassus were now joined together in the First Triumvirate, a dictatorial conjunction that cut across all the traditions of republican Rome. Auletes was recognized in Egypt, but his brother who ruled in Cyprus, and who had neglected to pay bribes, was not so lucky. The tribune Clodius, one of Caesar’s men, moved a law to annex Cyprus, and Marcus Cato was sent to take over the island. In exchange for his throne, the Cypriot Ptolemy was offered the high priesthood of the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos. The king preferred to commit suicide.

  With his empire diminished by the loss of Cyprus, and by the surrender of Cyrene on the North African coast, Auletes faced the anger of the Alexandrian mob. The people had already seen the treasury ravaged for Roman bribes, and now could hardly believe the indifference of the king to the death of his brother and the loss of his territory. Auletes thought it wise to leave the country. In 58 BC he set out for Rome
, hoping to raise money against the surety of the Egyptian economy, and seeking further assurances of support. On the way to Italy, Auletes met Cato at Rhodes and was received by the famous Stoic sitting on a commode and emptying his Roman bowels. Auletes knew then, from close quarters, the class of people he was forced to deal with.

  For two years, until 57 BC, Auletes was in Rome, or at a villa belonging to Pompey in the Alban hills, caught in the labyrinth of Roman politics. Without the resources of his treasury in Alexandria, in any case seriously depleted, Auletes had to borrow heavily to cover his schemes. In a short time he was deeply in debt to the financier Rabirius Postumus.

  The populace in Alexandria had no wish to see the return of the king. In his absence they recognized the queens, first the shadowy figure of Cleopatra VI, who was either Auletes’ wife or eldest daughter, and then when she died they brought forward his second daughter Berenice IV A deputation under the philosopher Dio was sent to Rome to plead for the dynastic change in Alexandria. But Auletes hired thugs to attack the party at the landing in the bay of Naples. Several were killed, and though Dio escaped he was too frightened to deliver the message in Rome. He was caught and murdered soon after. Having expended his bribes and done what murder could do, Auletes discreetly retired from Rome to the sacred precinct of Artemis at Ephesus. Here, he was close to the Roman legions in the East, ready to take the advantage of any wind.

  In Rome, the triumvirs were divided on the question of Egypt. Early in 56 BC lightning struck the statue of Jupiter on Mount Alban, and when the Sibylline Books were opened to see what this portent meant, a message cautiously sympathetic to Auletes was revealed. It was decided that Ptolemy Auletes should be helped to recover his throne, but by whom and under what conditions were matters still subject to jealous rivalry. At last, one of Pompey’s followers, Aulus Gabinius, proconsul of the newly formed Roman province of Syria, was chosen to see Auletes home. The chief condition of this help was that the Egyptian king should pay the truly fantastic sum of 10,000 talents, part of which was ear-marked for both Caesar and Pompey. The moneylender Rabirius, anxious for the security of his loans, put aside Roman business and decided to accompany Gabinius into Egypt.