CHAPTER 2
AULETES’ HIGH-FLOWN CLAIMS of divinity did not impress Rome, especially since his murdered predecessor had made yet another will appointing the Roman republic his heir. In any case, the Romans were becoming ever more convinced of the innate superiority of their own nation and culture. Even if they respected the works of Greek antiquity, they despised modern Greeks as decadent and lacking in moral fiber—“the most wretched and unruly race,” as one influential statesman and moralist had dismissed them. The Romans thought other Eastern peoples even worse. The Senate refused to acknowledge Auletes and his sister as rulers in Alexandria or to endorse their brother, yet another Ptolemy, as king of Cyprus. Meanwhile, a succession of other hopeful Ptolemaic claimants to the throne arrived in Rome brandishing expensive gifts to argue their case, but received no encouragement.
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.
Early in 56 BC, a thunderbolt fizzed from the skies to strike the statue of Jupiter on the Capitol Hill in Rome. Officials hurried to consult the Sibylline Books to discover what this might portend. The Sibylline texts had, it was believed, been brought from the East to Rome by one of her early kings and embodied words of wisdom from the last of the prophetic Sibyls, difficult to translate but infallible if decoded correctly. The originals had been destroyed in a fire in 83 but another set had been assembled from diverse and sometimes dubious sources. The city had a whole coterie of priests and augurs skilled in both decoding and linking prophecies to current dilemmas and, unsurprisingly, the new books grew as respected as the old had been.
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.
Unable to repay his chief Roman creditor, Rabirius, Auletes appointed him his minister of finance so that he could extort money directly from the populace. It was a shrewd move and the rapacious Rabirius did not last long. Saved from the mob only by taking refuge in Alexandria’s jail, he fled back to Rome, where the whole Egyptian adventure had come into disrepute. Some serious flooding of the Tiber, which had caused many deaths and much property damage, had occurred at the time of the invasion and been blamed on Gabinius’ disregard of the Sibylline prophecies. Accordingly, both Gabinius and Rabirius were soon put on trial for their freebooting activities in Egypt. Gabinius was exiled but Rabirius acquitted.
In early 51, Auletes, by then well into his fifties and prematurely aged by his troubles and excesses, fell ill. In his will, a copy of which he sent to Rome for safekeeping, he named as his successors the seventeen-year-old Cleopatra, as she must have been anticipating, and the elder of his two sons, the later Ptolemy XIII, who was just ten years old. What actually happened on the king’s death sometime in the spring of 51 is, however, obscure. Papyrus documents from those months refer to “the thirtieth year of Auletes which is the first year of Cleopatra,” suggesting a period of joint rule between them. Perhaps an ailing Ptolemy wished to make clear to his people that Cleopatra was to be Egypt’s next queen. Perhaps Cleopatra kept her father’s death a secret until she had secured her position on the throne. Documents as late as July 51 continue to refer to their joint rulership. However, by early August news of the king’s death had reached Rome and the reign of Egypt’s last queen, Cleopatra VII, had begun.
The new rulers had already been given the titles “Sister- and Brother-Loving” by their father, perhaps more in hope than in expectation. They also took the title Philopater, “Father-Loving.”
According to hieroglyphs on a stele set up after her death, early in her reign Cleopatra traveled four hundred miles from Alexandria to the holy 27 shrine at Hermonthis, fourteen miles south of Thebes (Luxor) in Upper Egypt. The reason for her long journey was to participate in the sacred rites of Buchis, the bull. Bull worship had existed in Egypt from the earliest times as a fertility cult and the rites sometimes had a sexual character. At certain times, women were allowed to visit sacred bulls and expose their genitals to them to make themselves fecund. In Cleopatra’s time, at least four regions worshipped their own sacred bull. The Apis bull of Memphis, always an ebony black beast with white markings, was the most important, leading a luxurious life pampered by priests. However, the bull Cleopatra had come to venerate—the Buchis bull of Hermonthis—was also deeply revered as the living soul of Amon-Ra, the sun god.
The previous Buchis bull had recently died, its mummified body consigned to a stone sarcophagus in a giant necropolis of dead bulls, the “bucheum.” Its replacement, like its predecessor entirely white and with a coat so lustrous it apparently sparkled in the light, was to be ferried in state across the Nile to be installed in its shrine. What more striking way for the living goddess Cleopatra to show herself to her people than to accompany the sacred bull? The inscription records how “the queen, the lady of the two lands, the goddess who loves her father,” led it “on to the ship of Amun surrounded by the king’s boats. All of the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis along with the priests worshipped the divine animal. As for the queen, everyone was able to see her.”*
Cleopatra, it seems, was already aware of the seductive power of spectacle. Like the first Ptolemies, she also appreciated the importance to her people of their ancient religious cults and the explosively emotional nature of their beliefs. When she was ten years old, at a time of tension, a member of a Roman delegation to Alexandria had killed a cat by accident. In Egypt all cats were sacred and, as a writer recorded, “the crowd ran to his house, and neither the king’s representatives who came to ask for clemency for the foreigner nor the fear of Rome were sufficient to save the unfortunate man’s life.”*
In addition, Cleopatra grasped the economic significance of Egypt’s temples. The larger temples were—like the monasteries of medieval Europe—wealthy landowners. They ran industries such as metalworking and linen manufacture. By sponsoring them she was not only aligning herself spiritually with her people but also promoting the nation’s wealth.
Perhaps an awareness of her bloodstained heredity and a determination to protect herself from the violent fate that had befallen so many of her forebears caused Cleopatra to assert her independence early in her reign. Certainly, nothing she had witnessed in her young life so far could have given her any confidence that she was safe. She had not known her mother. Her father had been her protector. Without him she was exposed to the plottings of courtiers and the ambitions of her half siblings. The only person on whom she could rely was herself—a lonely and intimidating scenario, but one with no viable alternative.
Documents dated to the first two years of her rule refer to her and her alone. She also minted coins on which only her head appeared. There are no references to her young brother. He should have governed with his sister and, as a minor, been assisted by a council of regents appointed to help him—a eunuch, Pothinus, for administrative and financial matters; Achillas, a military commander to take charge of the armed forces; and Theodotus, a professor of rhetoric from Samos, as his tutor. This regency council should have taken precedence over Cleopatra since, under the Ptolemaic code, kings took precedence over queens. But for a while Cleopatra, still in her teens, apparently succeeded in brushing the council aside, ruling alone without interference—an achievement that says much not only for her determination but also for her youthful self-confidence and ambition.
That ambition was both for herself and for her country. Cleopatra’s inheritance was a diminished, depleted kingdom, far removed from the muscular empire of the early Ptolemies. Its continued independence was entirely at Rome’s pleasure. Cleopatra had seen her father a supplicant and briber of Rome, despised by his people and kept on his throne only by foreign mercenaries. The circumstances had been humiliating. Yet, however she might resent this, she knew her father had survived for more than two decades only because of the Romans. The question of how best to manage the relationship with Rome and exploit it in her favor would become one of her driving preoccupations as queen.
Her first challenge came uncomfortably early when, later in 51, the Roman governor of Syria sent his two sons to Alexandria to order the soldiers stationed there by Gabinius to return to Syria. He needed them to help defend the province against the Parthians but the disgruntled legionaries, who had grown attached to soft Egyptian life, murdered the young men. Fearing Rome might hold her accountable and despite the risk of the remaining Roman soldiery rising against her, Cleopatra did not hesitate. She arrested the assassins and packed them off to Syria in chains.
Cleopatra’s actions, though diplomatically astute, provoked a crisis at the Alexandrian court, where she was criticized for kowtowing to Rome. Her situation became yet more difficult when droughts and failing harvests in the third year of her reign began to cause unrest in the countryside, provoking a coup against her at court. Documents issued at around this time under the name of “the King and Queen,” and referring to the first year of Ptolemy XIII’s reign, show that Cleopatra was no longer sole sovereign but had been forced to accept her young brother—and his regency council—as co-rulers.
At this increasingly precarious time for Cleopatra, Rome’s affairs again intruded. In 49, Pompey the Great sent his son Gnaeus to Alexandria to seek Egyptian aid in the civil war that had broken out between himself and Julius Caesar. Help was duly granted—fifty ships, grain and soldiers were dispatched—but the grateful thanks sent to Egypt by Pompey’s supporters were addressed only to Ptolemy XIII. Cleopatra had by now been deposed by her brother and fled Alexandria for Upper Egypt.
The details of what actually occurred are sketchy. Caesar wrote that she was expelled by her brother “acting through his relatives and friends.” The term “relatives and friends” had a particular meaning in the complex hierarchy of the Ptolemaic court. At the apex were the “Kinsmen,” allowed to wear a special headband denoting their status; next came “First Friends,” who swept grandly about the court in purple robes, and then “Friends,” who also enjoyed special privileges. These individuals constituted the power base at court. Coaxed and bribed by the regency council—Ptolemy XIII himself was too young to take a direct hand, though he seems throughout to have approved of his council’s actions—a sufficient number of these courtiers must have turned against Cleopatra, eroding her support and leaving her no alternative but flight.
In 48, Cleopatra left Egypt altogether to take refuge in the Philistine city-state of Ascalon, between Egypt and Syria, where, characteristically defiant and determined to regain what she had lost, she began gathering troops for an invasion—Greeks and Egyptians but also Arabs. Achillas, her brother’s commander, also prepared for battle, moving his men into position at Mount Casius, some thirty miles beyond the Egyptian border fortress of Pelusium.
Yet, as would soon become clear to Cleopatra, Rome’s civil war, not Egypt’s, would decide whether she would resume her place as queen. Caesar had defeated Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus and his vanquished rival had set sail for Egypt hoping to find support. A determined Caesar was not far behind.
*The Egyptians had devised a special method to mummify the sacred bulls. First, to dissolve the internal organs, a turpentine enema was pumped into the body cavity and the anus was blocked with a linen tampon. Once the organs had liquefied, the tampon was removed and the fluid drained out. The process then continued in the usual manner: the body was dried using natron, covered with oils and resins and carefully wrapped. The sacred bulls were then given a royal burial. For a description of human mummification.
*Ironically, the Romans popularized the keeping of cats as pets in Europe.