Cleopatra and Antony (3 page)

Potbelly dispatched the will to Rome and hastened after it to display the livid scars in his plump rippling flesh inflicted, he claimed, by would-be assassins. A doubtless amused Senate awarded him Cyprus for his trouble but took no further action after his brother failed to relinquish the island. Neither was Rome particularly perturbed by the ensuing chaos when, in 145, Ptolemy VI died. Potbelly rushed to Alexandria, took the title Ptolemy VIII and forced his brother’s wife, their sister Cleopatra II, to marry him. As soon as he was sure he had impregnated her, he had her young son—his nephew—murdered before her eyes. The unfortunate Cleopatra II in due course bore Potbelly a son. However, in a psychotic outburst he later had the child dismembered and the pieces sent in a box to Cleopatra as a “birthday present” in revenge for his sister-wife’s plotting against him.

Within three years of his marriage to Cleopatra II, Potbelly had also raped, then married, her daughter—his niece and stepdaughter—whom he made Cleopatra III and co-regent with her mother. Such incestuous bigamy was unprecedented. Furthermore, the two wives, though mother and daughter, hated each other, each determined that her own children and not her rival’s should succeed to the throne. The rivalry only ended with the death of Cleopatra II, quite likely murdered by her daughter.

When revolts broke out, Potbelly massacred the inhabitants of the town of Hermonthis, purged the Alexandrian court of dissidents and banished most of the scholars studying in Alexandria. However, he did succeed in reuniting the old core Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, Cyrenaica and Cyprus without Roman interference. Rome, at the time still busy converting Macedonia into a province, was relatively unconcerned about the chaotic antics in Egypt. Nevertheless, around 140 the Senate dispatched a fact-finding mission to the Alexandrian court. Potbelly, whose girth had grown, according to one of the visitors, to “a size and dimension which meant that people could not get their arms around him,” gave them a guided tour, waddling around wearing the ivy garland of Dionysus and clothed in an embarrassingly diaphanous purple robe that revealed far too much, “as though he wanted to make a display of what any decent man would try to hide.” The Romans congratulated themselves that they had given the Alexandrians a rare experience—“the sight of their king taking a walk.” They were lucky to have been spared another sight. Despite his bulk, the king was an active and able performer of a species of obscene dance that, from his reign, would become a tradition at the Ptolemaic court. More pertinently, the Romans reported their astonishment at “the number of inhabitants of Egypt and the natural advantages of the countryside,” concluding that “a mighty power could be sustained there if this kingdom ever found capable leaders.” There would, however, be no capable leader until the last Cleopatra.

On Potbelly’s death in 116, the kingdom descended once more into bloody confusion. He had bequeathed Cyrenaica to his illegitimate son, Ptolemy Apion, and Egypt and Cyprus to Ptolemy IX, his elder son by his niece and second wife, Cleopatra III. She, however, favored their younger son, who did not reciprocate her affection. Instead he used his mother to help him exile his brother to Cyprus and then, after mounting the Egyptian throne as Ptolemy X, had her murdered. In turn, in 89 the garrison of Alexandria ejected him from his kingdom. Rome lent him money for a fleet but he was killed during a sea battle trying to retake Cyprus.

Rome allowed Ptolemy IX to return to Egypt, reuniting it with Cyprus once more, but Cyrenaica soon was gone. Ptolemy Apion had died in 96, leaving his kingdom to the Roman people, though twenty-two years would pass before Rome finally took possession of it. Rome, however, soon resumed her role in determining who should sit on the throne in Alexandria. In 80, the death of Ptolemy IX triggered the familiar pattern of court intriguing, maneuvering and murder. For six months his sister Cleopatra Berenike III, widow of Ptolemy X—and, unlike him, popular with the citizens of Alexandria—ruled the kingdom alone.

However, the arrival in Alexandria of her late husband’s son by another woman, Ptolemy XI, who was a protégé of Rome, left her little choice but to do Rome’s bidding and marry him. The new king showed his gratitude by murdering his wife and former stepmother after reigning with her for just nineteen days. The Alexandrians had been watching these events with anger and concern. The city’s volatile and cosmopolitan population was not opposed to the dynasty in principle but could react violently to events of which it disapproved. A mob surged into the palace, dragged the young king off to the Gymnasium and dismembered him.

After this bloodletting, the Alexandrian court chose two of the three remaining illegitimate children of Ptolemy IX to rule in his place. They married, becoming Ptolemy XII and Cleopatra V, with the title “Divine Lovers of Their Father and One Another.” Although his early ancestors had proclaimed the dynasty’s divinity, Ptolemy XII became the first king to claim the title of a specific god, calling himself the “New Dionysus.” This was somewhat ambitious. His subjects took a less lofty view of their new ruler. Some called him simply “Nothos” (the bastard), others “Auletes” (the piper) because of his love of the soft, velvet notes of the
aulos
, or pipes. Like other Ptolemies, he seems to have been a keen participant in the traditional obscene royal dances and also bisexual. On a stele set up at Philae on the Upper Nile some Egyptian men claimed to have slept with Auletes. However, his greatest distinction would be to father Ptolemaic Egypt’s last and most remarkable queen.

*Believing body hair to be impure, they even plucked out their eyelashes.

*The oldest surviving papyrus in Greek is a plea to Serapis from a woman of Greek descent called Artemisia to take vengeance on her behalf against “the brute who got her pregnant.”

*Another dynasty of god-kings, the Incas, also practiced incest. Their last ruler, Atahualpa, was the result of fourteen generations of it.

*The first Cleopatra known to history was the wife of the king of Macedonia, Perdiccas, in the fifth century BC. A little later, Alexander the Great had a sister of that name. In 1821,
Cleopatra
became the first Egyptian word to be transcribed from hieroglyphics, a year before the Rosetta Stone, with its identical text in Greek, Egyptian demotic and hieroglyphs, yielded many more secrets of hieroglyphs.

CHAPTER 2

The power struggles that would shortly lead to civil war in Rome meant that every Roman of ambition and influence was determined to keep such a rich prize as Egypt out of the hands of a rival. The result was much scheming and many proposals and counterproposals for what should happen to Egypt—wilder plans even included a scheme to use the country as a place to house the Roman poor—but no action to take advantage of the latest Ptolemaic bequest to seize Egypt. Nevertheless, the precariousness of Egypt’s continued independence was brutally demonstrated to Cleopatra’s father when, in 64 BC, Pompey the Great conquered the kingdom of the Ptolemies’ Seleucid rivals and converted it into the Roman province of Syria. Auletes astutely sent Pompey a 21 token force of cavalry to assist in his “peacekeeping” in neighboring Judaea and threw a feast in Pompey’s honor, even if the Roman was not present in person, where a thousand guests quaffed from gold cups changed after every course.

Finally, though, in 59, Auletes obtained a result from all his entreating and bribing of Roman officials. Julius Caesar, who had recently joined Pompey and Crassus in the First Triumvirate, agreed to speak out for Auletes in the Senate in return for six thousand talents—estimated at Egypt’s entire revenue for six months. As consul that year, Caesar, helped by Pompey, who no doubt shared in the largesse, pushed through a resolution recognizing the indigent Egyptian king as a “friend and ally” of the Roman people.

Auletes’ relief at this legitimization of his rule after twenty years of trying was swiftly extinguished. Just a year later, the Roman tribune Clodius, an aristocrat notorious both for his excesses and for his manipulation of the mob, proposed the formal annexation of Cyprus. The excuse was that its king, Auletes’ brother, had aided pirates, and the Senate agreed. The king of Cyprus was offered the position of high priest of Aphrodite at Paphos but chose poison instead. His treasure was shipped back to Rome and paraded through the Forum to the cheers of the crowd. Rage at the loss of the Ptolemies’ last overseas possession, contempt for Auletes’ flaccid response, and resentment of tax increases to repay the money he had borrowed in Rome to bribe Caesar sparked the Alexandrians to another of their periodic demonstrations of people power and they ejected Auletes from his kingdom.

He fled to the island of Rhodes hoping for an audience with its influential Roman governor, Cato the Younger, to ask assistance in reclaiming his throne. His hopes must have been high as he was ushered into Cato’s presence. Had he not just been awarded a “special relationship” with Rome, for which he had paid handsomely? However, the Roman, far from rising to receive him, was squatting. Cato had recently taken a laxative and was, as a consequence, busily evacuating his bowels. The defecating governor dismissively told the flustered Ptolemy to seek a reconciliation with his people. Rome could, or rather would, do little for him. Cato’s reception of the Egyptian king, informal to say the least, reflected not only the disdain of this hard-drinking moralist and self-appointed guardian of old Roman values toward foreigners of all sorts and effete foreign kings in particular, but also Rome’s indifference to Egypt’s problems.

Seemingly impervious to insult, Auletes traveled on to Rome, where, from his lodgings in Pompey’s villa in the Alban hills, he embarked on another frantic and undignified round of fawning and bribery. Cut off from Egyptian revenues, he again had to use money he did not possess and borrowed from Roman moneylenders at exorbitant rates of interest. The eleven-year-old Cleopatra may have been with him, observing her father’s humiliation at firsthand. An inscription found on a stone epitaph in Athens—and written by command of a “Libyan princess” to honor a lady-in-waiting who had died there—may have been commissioned by Cleopatra when she and her father paused there on their way to Rome. The description “Libyan” was often used to describe the Greek population of North Africa. If Auletes had chosen Cleopatra to accompany him, it suggests a particular closeness to her father, and she would have been a good companion despite her young age—intelligent, inquiring and sharply observant.

Cleopatra was the third of Auletes’ six children. The identity of her mother is uncertain but she was probably Auletes’ sister and first wife, Cleopatra V, who records suggest died in the year of Cleopatra’s birth—perhaps even at her birth—and who had given Auletes two other daughters. Just possibly, Cleopatra’s mother was his second wife, about whom nothing, not even her name, is known, who bore him yet another girl, Arsinoe, and then two sons, both named Ptolemy. However, Cleopatra’s later and thoroughly reciprocated animosity to this trio suggests that they were not full brothers and sisters. Cleopatra was soon to get her first direct experience of intradynastic rivalry. In Alexandria, Auletes’ eldest daughter, her sister, had seized the throne as Cleopatra VI. On her death, his next eldest daughter claimed it as Berenike IV and sought a husband to help her hold it. She found three candidates—two were Seleucid princes, the first of whom died while the marriage negotiations were under way and the second of whom was vetoed by Rome. The third candidate was supposedly related to the Seleucid house but so coarse that the Alexandrians quickly nicknamed him “the salt fishmonger,” and within a few days of marrying him Berenike ordered him to be strangled. She subsequently wed a Greek noble named Archelaus.

Meanwhile, the Alexandrians had dispatched an embassy of a hundred men to Italy, led by the philosopher Dio, to defend their action in deposing their pipe-playing monarch. Learning of this, Auletes had some of them murdered as they came ashore in the Bay of Naples. Dio escaped and managed to reach Rome, only to be assassinated soon afterward. The resulting scandal did not help Auletes’ case and the despondent king wisely removed himself to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, for 23 which, despite his bankrupt condition, he ordered magnificent doors of carved ivory. Here he waited to see what, if anything, Rome might do to help him.

Within the volumes’ pages was found a pronouncement pinpointing Egypt as the cause of the current divine intervention. It stated that if the king of Egypt sought help, Rome could give him her friendship, but to “succor him with a multitude” would bring terrible misfortune on the city. The message was clear—no armed intervention in Egypt. However, this prompted angry debate in the Senate over who might lead a peaceful embassy to Egypt.

Cicero, a man of modest pedigree who had made himself into Rome’s leading lawyer and orator by dint of his justly celebrated talents both for speaking and for self-publicity, applied his finely honed legal mind to break the stalemate. He wrote to his ally and friend Lentulus, the governor of the Roman province of Cilicia in southern Asia Minor, suggesting that he take his army and fleet to Alexandria and install a garrison. Auletes could then safely and independently return to his capital and resume his reign. Such action, Cicero argued, would be entirely consistent with the Sibylline Books. Rome would have given the Egyptian king friendship without supplying “a multitude” literally to accompany him home. (Cicero hoped that he might even be given an official position in Alexandria—a city he was curious to see.)

Aware that Cicero lacked the backing of the Senate in his hairsplitting, Lentulus prevaricated. However, Aulus Gabinius, governor of Syria, was less scrupulous. (Cicero once dismissed him as “a thieving dancing boy in paint and hair curlers.”) Ambitious and in sore need of money, Gabinius agreed to restore Auletes in return for ten thousand talents. To raise this enormous sum, the king turned once again to Roman financiers, and to the banker Rabirius in particular, who provided the necessary funds at extortionate rates of interest. In 55, Gabinius marched his men across the desert from Gaza and into Egypt, claiming as his pretext that the Egyptians were encouraging pirates who were damaging Roman trade. His commander of cavalry was the twenty-seven-year-old Mark Antony.

Antony came from an aristocratic and distinguished, albeit impoverished, family. His paternal grandfather had been a noted orator murdered during Rome’s civil strife. His father, who had died fighting against pirates when Antony was about eleven, had been a feckless man, according to Sallust “devoid of all cares but those of the moment,” and recklessly generous. His strong-minded mother, Julia, was a distant relation of Julius Caesar. Even Antony’s enemies admitted that she was a dignified and virtuous woman and it was she who provided the stability in Antony’s youth as well as being prominent later amongst his political advisers.

In advance of the main army and at the head of his troopers, Antony rode through the thick, dry drifting sand of the desert and along the edge of sulfurous marshes called by the Egyptians “the Outbreaths of Typhon”—Typho being a monster associated with volcanoes—to storm the Egyptian outpost at Pelusium and open the way to Alexandria. Archelaus resisted bravely until he was killed but his troops put up little fight.

Back on his throne, Auletes settled some scores. One of his first acts was to order the slaying of his daughter Berenike for taking his crown. She was probably strangled in the royal palace, possibly before the eyes of her teenage younger sister Cleopatra. Waves of arrests and executions followed, with anyone suspected of complicity with Berenike killed out of hand. Though obviously traumatic, her sister’s death was to Cleopatra’s advantage. As the king’s eldest surviving daughter, under Ptolemaic tradition she was now in line for the throne—a prospect that with two elder sisters might previously have seemed remote.

Though Antony’s stay in Egypt was brief, some claim that during it he first saw and even fell in love with Cleopatra, then fourteen. The second-century historian Appian later wrote, “It is said that he was always very susceptible . . . and that he had been enamored of her long ago when she was still a girl and he was serving as master of horse under Gabinius at Alexandria.” This may well be an embroidery of the facts. Appian himself acknowledged his taste for the sensational and for writing about those events “which are most calculated to 25 astonish by their extraordinary nature.” But even if Antony did not fall in love with Cleopatra, she must have seen the good-looking young man and heard of his courage at Pelusium. She may also have been struck by his humanity—he successfully interceded with the king for the lives of Egyptians captured at Pelusium and the Alexandrian population would remember him for it when, many years later, he returned to their city as the lover and ally of their queen.

As Cleopatra grew into young adulthood in the royal palace, experiencing a more settled period in her life than she had yet known, she could resume her disrupted education and develop the intellectual powers that even her later detractors would not deny. She was more fortunate than the majority of Egyptian and Macedonian women, most of whom received no formal education. Cleopatra could also hardly have been in a better place than Alexandria. Her ancestor Ptolemy I had founded the great Library of Alexandria and the adjacent Museon, where scholars from across the “civilized world” could live and study for free.
Museon
means “shrine of the Muses” and it had rapidly become the main center of Hellenic learning, supplanting even Athens. In the library scholars edited the first texts of Homer, produced commentaries and divided works up into volumes. The length of the latter was regulated by the optimum length of the papyrus roll—the only writing paper.

The Museon itself was particularly strong in astronomy, mathematics (Euclid worked there) and medicine. Because the Egyptians mummified their dead, they already had a better knowledge of human anatomy than many others. The Greek professors had built on this, probably with the help of condemned criminals supplied by the Ptolemies for vivisection, to understand the nature of the nervous, digestive and vascular systems. They had established that the brain rather than the heart was the seat of intelligence and undertook pioneering surgery including operations to remove bladder stones, cleanse internal abscesses and repair wounds. They had also developed a detailed knowledge of pharmacology and toxicology.

The young Cleopatra could take her pick of tutors from the Museon to pursue her interests, which seem to have been wide-ranging. The tenth-century Arab historian al-Masudi described her as “a princess well versed in the sciences, disposed to the study of philosophy.” But as well as her studies she had much else to reflect upon. In particular she could observe at close quarters the conflicting pressures on her father. In fact, Auletes had only four more years to live and they were difficult ones. There was rebellion in the south and his safety in Alexandria was guaranteed only by the Gallic and German legionaries that Gabinius stationed there. With the economy in a desperate state, Auletes debased the country’s silver coinage, introduced by Ptolemy I as the country’s first currency—under the pharaohs payment had been in kind and coins had been viewed with suspicion. Ptolemy had also established a network of state-controlled banks to manage the flow of funds. Now Auletes reduced the precious metal content in the silver stater, the most common coin, to around a third.