CHAPTER TWO
Cleopatra was an Egyptian woman who became an object of gossip for the whole world … She came to rule through crime. She gained glory for almost nothing else than her beauty while on the other hand she became known throughout the world for her greed, cruelty and lustfulness …
Boccaccio, On the Lives of Famous Women1
For many hundreds of years the sacred Bakhu or Buchis bull had been worshipped as a living god in the Theban region. During his lifetime the bull was associated with the warrior god Montu and, to a lesser extent, with the fertility god Osiris and the sun god Re. He received offerings, delivered oracles and cured the sick (specialising in eye diseases), and he occasionally fought with other bulls in a dedicated bullring. In death he was mummified and buried, with all the pomp and ceremony due to a deceased god, in a vast bull cemetery known as the Bucheion, at Armant (ancient Iuni-Montu; Greek Hermonthis), on the west bank of the Nile to the south-west of Thebes. A funerary stela recovered from this cemetery details the enthronement of a Buchis bull on Phamenoth 19 (22 March 51):
… He reached Thebes, his place of installation, which came into existence aforetime, beside his father, Nun the Old. He was installed by the King himself in year 1, Phamenoth 19. The Queen, the Lady of the Two Lands, the Goddess Philopator, rowed him in the boat of Amen, together with the boats of the king, all the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis and priests being with him. He reached Hermonthis, his dwelling place on Mechir 22 …2
The precise date of Auletes’s demise is unknown: all we can say for certain is that some time during 51 Auletes’s Year 30 became ‘Year 30 which is become Year I’ (i.e. the first year of the new regime), and by August of that same year news of his death had reached Rome. But the Bucheion stela tells us that the installation ceremony occurred at a time when Egypt was ruled by a king and a queen, the ‘Lady of the Two Lands, the Goddess Philopator’. The names within the text are left blank – something that frequently happens in later Ptolemaic inscriptions – and therefore both king and queen are unnamed. However, given the date of the stela, it seems that they are more than likely to be Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra VII. The stela therefore offers a terminus ante quem for Auletes’s death, which is likely to have occurred in late February or early March 51. The only alternative is that the unnamed king is Auletes rather than Ptolemy XIII. If this is the case, it may be that Auletes did not die until as late as June or July 51, and the wording of the stela may be read as an indication that Cleopatra was indeed her father’s co-regent.
The image is a standard view of a king making an offering to the Buchis bull, and the text is a version of a standard Bucheion text found on three other late Ptolemaic stelae:
He was installed by the King himself. Going on the boat of Amen, together with the boats of the king, all the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis, prophets and priests being with him. He reached Hermonthis, his dwelling place.
The fact that the priests felt the need to adapt a standard text to include the queen confirms Cleopatra’s political importance immediately after her father’s death. The Ptolemies observed the rites of the native religion, and developed a strong interest in the cult of the Apis bull (celebrated at Memphis, cult centre of the creator god Ptah, where the Apis was worshipped as the physical manifestation of Ptah) and the cult of the Mnevis bull (celebrated at Heliopolis, cult centre of the sun god Re, where the Mnevis was considered to be the physical manifestation of the sun god). However, given the Egyptian fondness for formulaic texts, and given that the Bucheion text was inscribed in 29, after Cleopatra’s death, the stela does not prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Cleopatra actually attended the ceremony in person.
Although Ptolemaic tradition suggests that Cleopatra is likely to have married her brother soon after their father’s death, their marriage is nowhere recorded. An inscription on the barque or boat shrine of the earth god Geb in the Koptos temple, dedicated by Cleopatra, shows the queen offering to the divine triad of Min, Isis and Horus, and describes her as ‘Mistress of the Two Lands, Cleopatra Philopator, Beloved of Min-Re of Koptos, King’s Wife, King’s Daughter’, but the husband-king is unnamed, and could be either Ptolemy XIII or Ptolemy XIV.3 If it did occur, and a marriage between his eldest surviving daughter and son may well have been a condition of Auletes’s will, it is likely to have been, in 51, a marriage in name only. The age gap between sister and brother was unfortunate. The eighteen-year-old Cleopatra was rather too old to remain unwed, while Ptolemy, at just ten years old, was a little too young to consummate a marriage. There are no known legal age limits for marriage in Ptolemaic Egypt, but archaeological evidence indicates that most women married in their mid- or late teens, acquiring husbands older rather than younger than themselves. Tayimhotep, wife of the high priest of Ptah Pasherenptah III, whom we last met at Auletes’s coronation, would not have been unusual in marrying, aged fourteen, a husband eighteen years older than herself.4 This left Cleopatra in an awkward position. As a queen of marriageable age she needed to start producing the children who would continue her dynastic line.
Husband or brother, Ptolemy, as king, should have been the dominant partner in the relationship. But he was a minor, ruling via a regency council, and for the first year and a half of their joint reign Cleopatra became the effective monarch, while her brother was pushed into the background. The earliest documents from this period suggest that Cleopatra ruled alone, although it is important to view documents dated to the first year of the solo queen ‘Cleopatra Philopator’ with a degree of caution, as Berenice III had also been a Cleopatra Philopator. The most intriguing of these documents is a unique limestone stela, of unknown provenance but probably from the Faiyum, which is now housed in the Louvre, Paris. The piece is a fusion of Egyptian and Greek traditions, with a conventional Egyptian religious image topping a text written in Greek. It shows a slightly damaged ‘Cleopatra’, dressed in the kilt and double crown of a traditional pharaoh, making an offering to the goddess Isis, who is sitting on a throne and suckling her infant son. The somewhat confusing inscription, which details the dedication of a ‘seat’ (topos) by the priest Omnophris, president of the association of the devotees of Isis, reads:
For Queen Cleopatra Thea Philopator [is dedicated] the seat of the association [of Isis] Snonais, the president of which is the chief priest Omnophris. July 2 51.
Cleopatra, on this stela, appears entirely male; the inscription, which makes it clear that she is in fact a woman, implies that she is the sole ruler of Egypt. This, the only surviving image of Cleopatra as a female king, recalls the Theban artwork of the early New Kingdom female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut (reigned 1473–1458) struggled with the convention decreeing that a king of Egypt should be a young and healthy male. Soon after her coronation she abandoned the customary woman’s sheath dress and queen’s crowns, and started to appear in the traditional king’s regalia of short kilt, bare chest, crown or head-cloth, broad collar and false beard. Very occasionally, towards the beginning of her reign, Hatshepsut was depicted as a woman dressed in this male clothing, but more usually she was shown performing male actions with a man’s body.5 It would be easy to suggest that Cleopatra is here deliberately emulating Egypt’s most successful female monarch, as in many ways Hatshepsut, who effectively usurped the throne from a weaker and much younger male co-regent, makes an appropriate role model for Cleopatra.6 But Hatshepsut was forced to battle against a system which could not cope with the idea of female rule, while Cleopatra, living in an age which had already experienced the vigorous rule of Cleopatras I, II and III, encountered no such problem. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Cleopatra would have known much about Hatshepsut’s history, art or propaganda, as the majority of Hatshepsut’s images were defaced within thirty years of her death, and her name was omitted from Egypt’s official King List. Today Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel, decorated with multiple images of the female king performing traditionally male actions, is the highlight of any tour of Karnak temple, but the chapel is a modern reconstruction, painstakingly compiled from the demolished remains of the original building, which would have been invisible to Cleopatra.
A re-reading of the text on Cleopatra’s stela indicates that, although it features Cleopatra, she did not commission it. The image of the female king cannot therefore be taken as official propaganda. The text is not all it seems. The Greek letters are uncomfortably squashed into the space available, and it seems likely that it is a later addition, cut over an earlier text. This suggests that the stela was first cut for Cleopatra’s father and then changed, rather ineptly, when he died. Nevertheless, the important fact remains that Cleopatra is featured as a sole ruler, while Ptolemy’s name is excluded from the stela.
When, over two centuries earlier, the intelligent and experienced Arsinoë II married her younger, weaker brother Ptolemy II, she determined to work with him. In so doing, she strengthened the Ptolemaic hold on the Egyptian throne. Cleopatra, intelligent and ambitious and not one to suffer fools gladly, would have done well to heed this precedent. Her sidelining of her brother was to prove a tactical mistake, as it left Ptolemy vulnerable to a group of manipulative and ambitious Alexandrian courtiers, including his tutor Theodotos, the soldier Achillas and the eunuch Pothinos, who was soon to become Egypt’s chief minister. All three were to use the young king to further their own political ambitions. By the time Ptolemy was old enough to embark on a full married life, his relationship with his sister had irretrievably broken down and Egypt was teetering on the brink of civil war.
On 27 October 50 we find the first decree to be issued with Ptolemy’s name preceding Cleopatra’s. Egypt, usually so fertile, was suffering the effects of years of unreliable Nile floods. The decree, issued after a second disappointing inundation, directed that all surplus grain and legumes grown in Upper and Middle Egypt should be sent straight to Alexandria – and nowhere else. The penalty for contravening the decree ‘by order of the king and queen’ was death, those who informed on rogue traders were to receive a specified reward dependent on their social status.7 The crisis was severe enough to unite the royal couple, who recognised that, at a time of national shortage, the volatile citizens of Alexandria must be their primary concern. But, as the Alexandrians ate their grain supplies, the people outside Alexandria suffered from shortages, high inflation and high taxation. And, as the Nile continued to under-perform, the workers began to desert their hamlets, taxes went unpaid and the cities started to fill with hungry peasants. As wheat prices reached an all-time high, the priests of the Faiyum village of Hiera Nesos grew worried; their hungry villagers had mysteriously vanished, leaving them unable to complete the temple rituals.8
Rome was temporarily distracted from Egyptian affairs. In 54 Julia, the only acknowledged child of Julius Caesar and the beloved wife of Pompey, had died, severing the personal link between the two men. The following year Crassus perished in a disastrous campaign fighting the Parthians at Carrhae (modern Harran, Turkey). A wave of unease rippled through the Mediterranean world; it was assumed, quite rightly, that the Parthians would now attempt to take Syria. In late 51 Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, the new Roman governor of Syria, sent his two sons to Egypt to plead with the Gabinians, Gabinius’s now Egyptianised army, to return home and protect his land against Parthian attack. The Gabinians, however, had grown comfortable serving as a mercenary Ptolemaic army and were reluctant to uproot themselves to fight. Rather than negotiate, they killed the two sons of Bibulus. This left the king and queen of Egypt in a difficult situation. Risking the anger of the Gabinians, Cleopatra and Ptolemy had the murderers arrested and sent in chains to Syria.
In January 49 Caesar and his army of veterans crossed the Rubicon, the official boundary between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. As Roman law forbade any general from crossing the river with an army, this was treason. The die was cast: Caesar had effectively declared war on Pompey and Rome. Soon after, Gnaeus Pompey, Pompey’s son, arrived in Alexandria to beg for military aid on his father’s behalf. His request could not be honourably refused. Pompey had been Auletes’s host and patron in Rome, and he was entitled to call upon the Ptolemies for support. Egypt supplied Gnaeus with a large quantity of wheat, 500 Gabinians and sixty warships that were to play a key role in his father’s subsequent campaigns. The decision to grant this aid was taken by Ptolemy (or, more likely, his ministers), with Cleopatra’s name recorded second. It was a decision that angered the people of Alexandria, who blamed Cleopatra for the whole affair. Her apparent eagerness to please the Romans, first in the matter of the Bibulus murderers and then by giving arms to Pompey, reminded them too much of her father’s reign. Later there would come a rumour, preserved for us by Plutarch, that the sexually voracious Cleopatra had seduced Gnaeus during his Egyptian sojourn. Much later still, due to a misreading of his sources by William Shakespeare, would come the fiction that Cleopatra had had an affair with Gnaeus’s father.
Cleopatra’s obvious and growing unpopularity in Alexandria may in part explain why Ptolemy’s advisers chose this time to act against his co-regent. In 49 we find the development of a new regnal-year numbering system. ‘Year 1 which is also Year 3’ equates the third year of nominally joint rule following the death of Auletes with a new Year 1; presumably Ptolemy’s first year as a solo king. In the summer of 49 Cleopatra’s name disappears from all official documents and the new ‘Year 1’ dating system is dropped. Ptolemy is backdating his reign, erasing the memory of his sister and retrospectively claiming sole rule from the time of his father’s death. Cleopatra and her supporters had been forced to flee Alexandria, travelling first perhaps south to Thebes – a city notoriously prone to rebellion, but one that may have been inclined to support Auletes’s daughter against the Alexandrians – then eastwards to Syria.9 Here she set to work raising the mercenary army that would allow her to reclaim her throne. Quite how Cleopatra managed to raise an effective army at a time when the Roman civil war was causing massive disruption across the Mediterranean world is nowhere explained; the fact that she was able to achieve this in a very short space of time confirms that, outside Alexandria, she was considered a viable candidate for the Egyptian throne. It is likely that the majority of her troops came from the Philistine coastal city of Ashkelon (near the modern Israeli city of the same name), which owed a long-standing debt of loyalty to the Ptolemies and which issued coins bearing Cleopatra’s image in 50/49 and, perhaps, 49/8. Meanwhile, in Thessalonica (Salonica), the Roman counter-senate recognised Pompey as high commander and, in direct contravention of Auletes’s will, Ptolemy XIII as sole king of Egypt with Pompey as his legal guardian. Ptolemy, like his father before him, had become a ‘friend and ally’ of Rome.
On 9 August, 48 armies loyal to Pompey and Caesar met at Pharsalus in Thessaly, central mainland Greece. Pompey had the advantage of numbers – his 47,000 men outnumbered Caesar’s by two to one – but he was the weaker general, his advisers were inexperienced, and Caesar had Mars, god of war, and Venus, his divine ancestress, on his side. Caesar won the battle and, magnanimous in victory, pardoned his enemies, including Marcus Junius Brutus, the son of his long-term mistress Servilia. Defeated but by no means inclined to give up the fight, Pompey fled with the remnants of his army to the island of Lesbos, where he was reunited with his younger son, Sextus, and his fifth wife, Cornelia, the widowed daughter-in-law of Crassus. From Lesbos Pompey sailed to Cilicia, thence to Cyprus and finally, after some hesitation, to his old ally, Egypt. Confident of a warm welcome from Auletes’s son, he sailed to Pelusium and dropped anchor in sight of the beach. The ‘eyewitness’ accounts of what happened next are provided by Plutarch and Dio; neither, of course, a true witness, but both capable of telling a moving story calculated to touch even the most stony of hearts.10
Having established camp outside Pelusium, in the foothills of Mount Casius (Ras Baron), Ptolemy and his army of Gabinians were nervously awaiting Cleopatra’s army, which was known to be marching from the east. Messengers came to announce Pompey’s arrival and to ask for an audience with the king. Panicking, Pothinos called a meeting of Ptolemy’s most trusted advisers so that each could suggest a course of action. Some argued that Pompey should be welcomed as an honoured guest; others that he was a troublemaker who should be driven away from the shore. But Theodotos could see flaws in both arguments, and he argued his case with all the skills of an experienced teacher. If Pompey was welcomed as a friend, Caesar would automatically become Egypt’s enemy. But if Pompey was driven away, he would become Egypt’s enemy and Caesar would blame Ptolemy for allowing him to escape. Furthermore, Pompey already had links with Cleopatra through his son Gnaeus; it was more than likely that he would support the queen in her battle for the throne. It seemed to Theodotos, perhaps correctly, that Pompey’s cause was already irretrievably lost. Wishing to ingratiate his king with Caesar, and worried that Egypt might become Rome’s battleground, he argued that the vulnerable Pompey should be killed before he landed. After all, as everyone knew, ‘A dead man does not bite.’
It was agreed. Ptolemy’s army marched to the beach and formed themselves in ranks facing the sea. Commandeering a fishing boat, Achillas rowed out to Pompey’s flagship with two of the Gabinians, the tribune Lucius Septimus and the centurion Salvius. Pompey’s followers, worried that a lone, undignified fishing boat was an inappropriate vessel for their master, urged him not to leave the safety of his ship. Indeed, they argued, it might be prudent to row away from the shore, at least until they were out of missile range. But Septimus, speaking in Latin, gave Pompey a courteous welcome: ‘Hail, Imperator [commander]’. And Achillas, speaking in Greek, explained that the undignified transport was an unfortunate necessity, the harbour at Pelusium being too shallow to accommodate Pompey’s fine ship. Reassured, Pompey embraced his wife and transferred to the fishing boat with two bodyguards, his freedman Philip and a slave. Once on board he busied himself reading through the speech he meant to make to King Ptolemy.
As the boat bumped on the beach Pompey held out his hand so that Philip might help him to rise with dignity. Then, far too late, he realised his danger. ‘He uttered not a word and made no complaint, but as soon as he perceived their plot and recognised that he would not be able to ward them off or escape, he veiled his face.’ Cornelia, watching from the ship, screamed as the treacherous Septimus ran her husband through with a sword, and Salvius and Achillas stabbed him in the back with their daggers. Pompey’s head was hacked from his body, his corpse thrown into the sea. It was the day before his fifty-eighth birthday. Ptolemy, sitting on his throne on the shore, turned a blind eye to the murder of his father’s friend. For this callousness Dante would consign him to circle nine, the circle reserved for those who betray their guests, in his Inferno.11
The loyal Philip retrieved Pompey’s body from the sea and cremated him on a pyre of discarded ship’s timbers on the beach. His ashes were eventually returned to the grieving Cornelia, who buried him in Italy. A few weeks later Egypt experienced the lowest Nile flooding ever recorded and the already depleted food supplies became perilously low. Divine retribution, some said, for the murder of Pompey.
Four days later Caesar, chasing Pompey with a small fleet of ten warships and some 4,000 men, arrived in the great harbour of Alexandria. Pothinos and Theodotos hurried from Pelusium to meet him, eager to tell their tale before Caesar heard it from others less sympathetic to their cause. They took with them, as macabre greeting gifts, Pompey’s severed (and in some accounts pickled) head and his signet ring. Caesar must have had mixed feelings when viewing these grizzly trophies. In many ways Ptolemy and his advisers had done him a huge favour: it was far better that the disruptive Pompey be killed by foreigners than by a fellow Roman. But the manner of his death was appalling, and Caesar could not be seen to condone the murder of a Roman citizen conducted so blatantly before so many witnesses. He therefore averted his eyes from Pompey’s head and wept ostentatious tears over his ring. Then he donned his purple-edged toga and left his ship to process with his twelve lictors carrying the fasces – the bundle of rods and an axe bound with red tape and laurel, which signified his office – through the city. The people of Alexandria watched this miniature Roman invasion with incredulity and a well-vocalised resentment that soon turned to rioting. By nightfall Caesar had commandeered the royal palace, and there had been several deaths.
Although Pompey was dead, the Roman civil war was far from over and Caesar’s own position was far from secure. The bulk of his army was still stationed in Greece. Nevertheless, he chose to make an extended stay in hostile Alexandria, where, or so he tells us, he soon found himself stranded by adverse northerly winds. This curious decision is nowhere explained. Authors of a romantic disposition have suggested that Caesar lingered in Egypt because of his deep love for Cleopatra, but he had not yet met the queen, who was still camped with her army to the east of Pelusium. It seems instead that Caesar stayed for the most practical of reasons: he wished to tax the wealthy Alexandrians in order to recover some of the money lent by Rabirius to Auletes. Settling in for a long visit, and turning a blind eye to the local resentment, Caesar sent for reinforcements and spent his days writing his memoirs and sightseeing. He was particularly impressed by a visit to the tomb of his great hero Alexander the Great.
Egypt was a land trembling on the brink of civil war. Perhaps Caesar calculated that increased stability would bring increased wealth, and that increased wealth would allow increased taxation. Perhaps he understood that a grateful Egyptian king and/or queen might be of some use to him in the future. Maybe he was simply bored. Whatever his reasoning, Caesar took it upon himself to settle the dispute between Cleopatra and Ptolemy, and he ordered both to appear before him at Alexandria. Ptolemy did as he was bidden, leaving his troops at Pelusium under the command of Achillas. In Alexandria he moved into the palace district with Pothinos, who, acting as a negotiator between the Romans and the Alexandrians, did all he could to foster bad feeling between the two sides. Thanks to Pothinos, the Romans were fed rotten grain while Ptolemy’s supporters were misfed information, and dined off crude pottery under the mistaken impression that the Romans had confiscated the valuable royal plate. No one was happy and the city was fast approaching boiling point.
Superficially, Ptolemy held all the cards. He had the military support of the Gabinians and the vocal support of the people of Alexandria. He was here, on the spot, in Alexandria. Caesar’s easiest, most obvious option was surely to award him the crown, with Arsinoë replacing her sister as queen. But Cleopatra, too, had something to offer. That she was older and more experienced was obvious: Ptolemy, still only thirteen years old, was controlled by a clique of advisers and had, as yet, made no independent decisions. That she had the support of the native Egyptians was perhaps an irrelevance; far more important was the fact that she could display an impressive track record of loyalty to Rome. If Caesar was hoping to recover Rabirius’s debt, Cleopatra might be inclined to help him. But this was not necessarily an argument that Cleopatra wanted to plead in a public meeting in Alexandria. A preliminary, private meeting with Caesar would better suit her needs.
Cleopatra too set off for Alexandria. With Achillas and his army blocking her route through Pelusium, and Pothinos guarding the harbour at Alexandria, hers was a secret, undignified journey. Abandoning her troops, she was able to slip past Achillas and make her way in a small boat along the coast. She landed in the Palaces district at nightfall. The story of how Cleopatra had herself smuggled into the palace by the Sicilian merchant Apollodorus, who hid her in a bedroll or a bundle of linen sheets, has grown in the telling so that in modern versions of her tale we find Cleopatra being unrolled from an exotic, anachronistic Persian rug to tumble, alluringly dishevelled and breathless, at Caesar’s feet. This is a romantic story that really does not hold up to detailed scrutiny, and it stems in its entirety from the fluent pen of Plutarch. Was this truly the only means by which Cleopatra could make her way into Caesar’s presence? Having gained the security of the palace, could she not have abandoned her bedroll to make a more conventional entry? It is hard to imagine that Caesar would allow an unknown Sicilian to bring a potentially dangerous package into his suite without having it searched. Was Caesar then expecting Cleopatra’s arrival? Dio tells us that they had already been in correspondence; had Caesar been warned to turn a blind eye to strangers bearing bundles? Or did Cleopatra deliberately plan to arrive as the ultimate gift-wrapped package? Was this in fact a carefully stage-managed production designed to appeal to Caesar’s notoriously susceptible nature? It would certainly be naïve to assume that Cleopatra – whose later history confirms that she shared the Ptolemaic love of elaborate spectacle – was unaware of the impact of her unorthodox arrival. Plutarch for one believed that her entry was well planned:
It was by this device of Cleopatra’s, it is said, that Caesar was first captivated, for she showed herself to be a bold coquette, and succumbing to the charm of further intercourse with her, he reconciled her to her brother …12
What did Caesar see when Apollodorus dropped his bundle and revealed his queen? If we are imagining the scene as described by Plutarch we should probably indulge our wildest fantasies and picture a dark room, flickering torchlight, high stone walls, gilded furniture, a mosaic floor and a dark-haired, olive-skinned young woman dressed in Greek rather than Egyptian garments. Cleopatra is likely to have been short by modern standards and she probably, like almost everyone of her time, suffered from bad teeth. Her coins, unflattering to modern eyes, suggest a prominent nose and chin and a rather thick neck. It is hard for us to be more precise in our imaginings, as we have no real idea what Cleopatra looked like. No contemporary descriptions and few contemporary illustrations have survived.
So much for Cleopatra’s appearance. What did she see when she tumbled from her bedding roll to lie at Caesar’s feet? A man thirty years older than herself. Well built, tall by Roman standards, with dark eyes, a pale, rounded face, receding fair hair and a bad ‘comb-over’: Caesar was notoriously self-conscious about his baldness and insisted that his statues be topped with youthful mops of curly hair. He liked to be well groomed; his biographer, Suetonius, gives us perhaps more information than we would like, telling us:
he was something of a dandy, always keeping his head carefully trimmed and shaved; and has been accused of having certain other hairy parts of his body depilated by tweezers.13
His clothes were the height of fashion: Suetonius mentions wrist-length sleeves with fringes on his striped senatorial robe and a daringly loose belt. Clearly Caesar appreciated luxury. But he was no hedonist. Unusually for a Roman, he drank sparingly, and he ate anything that was put in front of him, seemingly unable to distinguish good food from bad.
Caesar was the supreme celebrity of his age, known by reputation throughout the civilised world. Cleopatra would have understood that she was facing a man with exceptional drive and ambition. An excellent politician, orator and author, a superb horseman, and an extremely successful though by no means infallible general, Caesar was known to be both good-humoured and amusing. And he had a reputation for sexual excess that his legionaries repeated with awe and pride: he was ‘every woman’s man and every man’s woman’.14 Stories of his same-sex alliances are likely to have been greatly exaggerated, although there was a persistent rumour, potentially politically damaging but impossible to quash, that he had enjoyed a youthful fling with King Nicomedes of Bithynia. Cicero certainly believed that there was no smoke without fire:
Caesar was led by Nicomedes’s attendants to the royal bedchamber, where he lay on a golden couch, dressed in a purple shift … So this descendant of Venus lost his virginity in Bithynia.15
In classical Greece, where men and ‘decent’ women lived very separate lives, and where men of all ages routinely spent many hours naked at the gymnasium, it was expected that an older man might feel a tenderness, or more, for a young boy. The Romans, who were on the whole tolerant of homosexuality, took the view, as did the Egyptians, that to be sodomised was to betray weakness. Roman masters might bugger their slaves and Egyptian soldiers might rape a defeated enemy, but no one would willingly submit to this perceived humiliation. If Caesar had really been Nicomedes’s lover, he had been devalued by the experience. His enemies never let the matter drop.
Perhaps to compensate, Caesar’s heterosexual alliances were many, varied and well documented. He had been married three times, to Cornelia the mother of Julia (dead), Pompeia (divorced after an allegation of adultery) and Calpurnia (current wife). He had a long-term mistress, Servilia, who was widely acknowledged to be the most beautiful woman in Rome, and an impressive list of casual conquests, including the wives of Gabinius, Crassus and Pompey, and Servilia’s own daughter Tertia. After leaving Cleopatra he was to have a torrid affair with Eunoe, wife of King Bogudes of Mauretania. We could reasonably expect that he also had insignificant, unrecorded liaisons with prostitutes and slaves. No wonder his marching soldiers sang with pride:
Home we bring our bald whoremonger; Romans, lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him, went his Gallic tarts to pay.
And, far more provocatively:
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.16
Caesar was older and more experienced in all aspects of life than Cleopatra, but the two nevertheless had much in common. Both were ruthlessly ambitious and both were prepared to take prodigious risks to achieve their ambitions. Both had a vested interest in ensuring that Egypt did not succumb to civil war. Both had the knack of persuading the ordinary people to love them, yet both were to a certain extent lonely and insecure. Caesar had lost his only daughter and suffered from terrible nightmares; Cleopatra, estranged from her younger siblings, had lost her mother, two sisters and the father who had taught her his politics. From her uncle Ptolemy she had learned that defiance of Rome meant certain death. From Auletes she had learned that Rome, and Rome alone, could protect the Ptolemaic dynasty, and that Romans could be bought. Caesar needed Egypt’s wealth, while Cleopatra needed Rome’s protection. So who seduced whom? If we accept that Cleopatra planned her unorthodox entrance to entice Caesar, we should probably also accept that she planned to seduce him. For a queen in need of both an ally and a son, this would have been a sensible diplomatic move. But, as most cultures believe that ‘nice girls’ don’t plan to sleep with a blind date at their first meeting, this seemingly wanton behaviour has stigmatised Cleopatra as little more than a high-class whore.
Ptolemy XIII had gone to bed that night a happy lad, secure in the knowledge that his sister, trapped at Pelusium, would be unable to plead her case before Caesar. With the Gabinians and the people of Alexandria on his side, it could only be a matter of time before he, a recognised friend and ally of the Roman people, was confirmed sole ruler of Egypt. He woke up the next morning to find that his sister had somehow arrived at the palace. She was already on the most intimate of terms with Caesar and had managed to persuade him to support her cause. It was all too much for a thirteen-year-old boy to bear. Rushing from the palace, he ripped off his diadem and, in a well-orchestrated public display of anger, the crowd surged forward, intent on mobbing the palace. But Caesar would not be intimidated. Before a formal assembly he read out Auletes’s will, making it clear that he expected the elder brother and sister to rule Egypt together. Meanwhile, and most unexpectedly, the younger siblings, Arsinoë and Ptolemy XIV, were to become king and queen of Cyprus, which, after ten years as Roman property, Caesar was now returning to Egypt.
Soon after Cleopatra’s death her victorious rival Octavian ordered that all images of Cleopatra be destroyed. As Cleopatra was, at the time, perceived as public enemy number one, his Roman subjects were happy to comply: it is, in any case, unlikely that there were many Roman Cleopatras to be destroyed. But in Egypt, where Cleopatra’s images were cult images connected with the worship of the goddess Isis and with Cleopatra’s own personal cult, this order caused great offence. Plutarch tells us that some of her Egyptian statues were saved by the priest Archibios, who, acting either as Cleopatra’s friend or as a representative of the native priesthood, offered Octavian an irresistible 2,000 talents to preserve them. Her two-dimensional images carved high on the temple walls were difficult to destroy and so remained untouched, but the majority of her statues were indeed lost.
Those images that do survive may be divided into two very different groups which can, if considered out of context, give Cleopatra the semblance of a severely split personality. There are images composed in the classical or Hellenistic style (but not necessarily by non-Egyptian artists) which show Cleopatra dressed as an elite Hellenistic woman, and images composed in the Egyptian style which present her as a traditional Egyptian queen bearing the time-honoured regalia designed to express political and religious power. When viewed side by side, the two styles convey a strikingly mixed message. To modern, western eyes the Hellenistic Cleopatra looks relaxed and natural, while the Egyptian Cleopatra seems stiff and artificial; there is therefore a great temptation to interpret the Hellenistic Cleopatras as true-to-life representations. This is wishful thinking. Classical portraiture was intended to convey an idealised, recognisable, often heroic representation of its subject rather than a warts-and-all snapshot. In the case of the Ptolemies, artists often included attributes intended to hint at the subject’s divinity, so that it can be difficult to distinguish a fragmentary queen from a fragmentary goddess. Hellenistic images of Cleopatra might therefore be expected to look alike because they are the official image of Cleopatra; it does not necessarily follow that they look particularly like the flesh-and-blood queen. It is highly unlikely that Cleopatra sat for each and every formal portrait, so we must assume that the majority of her images were carved from artists’ models and sketches. The standard practice of creating statue heads and bodies separately, maybe even in different workshops (the head of marble finished, perhaps, with plaster, then painted; the body of stone, wood or metal), makes accuracy of the composite whole even less certain, and accounts for the disproportionate number of recovered Ptolemaic heads.
For over 2,000 years non-experts have habitually identified any and every classical-style statue of a woman holding a snake, or standing next to a snake, or wearing a snake bracelet, as ‘Cleopatra’. This has gone hand in hand with a predictable tendency for enterprising masons to reach for their chisels and add snakes to classical statues, instantly turning bland Aphrodites into exciting and far more valuable Cleopatras. It is only in the past century that art historians have been able to discard the fake and, or so they hope, identify genuine contemporary or near-contemporary Hellenistic Cleopatra statuary on the grounds of date and style. The identification of genuine Cleopatras is, of course, a matter of personal conviction as well as scientific proof, and a room full of expert art historians would undoubtedly produce different opinions on different pieces. Today just one Hellenistic head is more or less universally accepted as an authentic Cleopatra, with a further three heads being championed by various experts.17
The one undisputed Cleopatra was recovered from the Villa of the Quintilii, on the Via Appia, Rome, in the late eighteenth century. Today it is housed in the Vatican Museum. Originally the head was displayed on the body of a statue of a priestess of the Roman goddess Ceres recovered from the same villa; it was not until 1933 that art historian Ludwig Curtius recognised that the head and body were not a true pair. The head has a broken nose (an over-delicate late eighteenth-century ‘restoration’ has recently been removed). It was designed to be inserted into a now-lost body, and a rough patch on one cheek and a curious stone knob on the head suggest that it was originally part of a larger statue group. Cleopatra appears as a mature woman whose hair is dressed in the ‘melon coiffure’ (sectioned and braided hair drawn back into a low bun; the name reflects the supposed resemblance to a melon segmented lengthways) worn by many upper-class Hellenistic women. Royal women topped this hairstyle with a broad diadem whose ribbons tied beneath or underneath the bun. Cleopatra has large heavy-lidded eyes, a small mouth, badly made ears, a long face, a broad forehead and a curled fringe. This fringe of kiss curls, often described as snail curls, is a defining characteristic of Cleopatra’s Hellenistic portraits and appears in a more exaggerated form on her coins.
All of Cleopatra’s coin portraits are in the Hellenistic style. These are generally taken to be her most lifelike portraits, purely because they are the least obviously flattering. Almost sixty silver and bronze coin types have been identified, issued in Egypt, Cyprus, the cities of Syrio-Palestine, and perhaps in parts of Italy and Greece. The coins may be divided into two broad types.18 The vast majority, minted in Egypt and Cyprus throughout her reign, show Cleopatra as a typical Ptolemaic queen, although a bronze coin minted in Cyprus that shows her nursing her infant son Caesarion, apparently represents Cleopatra as the mother goddess Isis. The reverse of these coins show Egyptian symbols. Her Romanised coins, minted late in her reign outside Egypt, show Cleopatra with Mark Antony. Here the queen appears in a slightly diminished light, not as an independent ruler, but as a client-queen of Rome and, perhaps, as part of a married couple.
Silver tetradrachm of Cleopatra VII from Askalon, dating to 50–49 when Cleopatra was feuding with her brother Ptolemy XIII.
All the coins reveal the same woman in profile: a woman whose prominent nose and pronounced chin do not suggest, to modern western eyes, a great beauty. These features tend to become more pronounced with age, so that Cleopatra appears ‘softer’ or more conventionally attractive in the earliest coins issued in Alexandria when she was nineteen years old, while the later coins, shared with Mark Antony, show a more defined, slightly hooked aquiline nose, a strong chin and mouth and enough fat folds (politely known as Venus rings) on the neck to allow some observers to suggest that she suffered from a goitre. This older Cleopatra looks like a slightly feminised version of Mark Antony, and both resemble Auletes. Comparing statues and coins, we can see that Cleopatra inherited more than her nose from her father. Both share deep-set eyes and a firm, slightly bulbous chin; both, in fact, bear a passing and presumably deliberate resemblance to Ptolemy I. The strong nose can be traced back to Ptolemy VIII, suggesting that Cleopatra may have deliberately chosen to emphasise the one trait that unequivocally identified her as a genuine Ptolemy.
Cleopatra’s coins reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, the skills and traditions of their makers. Allowing for this, it seems entirely understandable that Cleopatra might not have wanted to appear soft and feminine on the tokens that represented her sovereignty both within Egypt and in the wider Mediterranean world. Both Cleopatra Thea (queen of Syria, and great-great-aunt to our Cleopatra) and Cleopatra III (great-grandmother to Cleopatra VII) issued coins that gave them strong, almost masculine faces and, in the absence of an accepted Hellenistic iconography representative of politically powerful femininity, Cleopatra VII might have chosen to follow their example. This tendency to an increasingly masculine appearance is obvious in the statuary of Cleopatras I–III; as the queens grow more powerful their images become less feminine, climaxing in a basalt Egyptian-style statue of Cleopatra III now housed in Vienna Museum which gives the elderly queen the appearance of an old man in an incongruously frivolous curly wig.
Modern observers have not been slow to comment on Cleopatra’s perceived lack of beauty and, in particular, on her nose, which has been the subject of learned discussion and many jokes, culminating in Lord Berners’s 1941 novel The Romance of the Nose.19The kindest comment is perhaps that she was ‘a belle laide with a rather large mouth and, on some specimens, a long hooked nose which she had inherited from her father’.20 The unspoken question hovers – how did Cleopatra manage to captivate two of Rome’s greatest men if it was not by her looks? Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and standards of beauty vary from time to time, culture to culture and person to person. Most would in any case agree that beauty, pure and stark, is far removed from sexual allure. There is general agreement that another of Egypt’s queens, the 18th Dynasty Nefertiti, possessed a beauty that appeals to every age, race and gender, but although many have marvelled before Nefertiti’s world-famous Berlin bust, few have found her in any way sexy.21 The real question here is not whether we find Cleopatra beautiful, but whether Caesar found her attractive enough to sleep with. And the answer is that clearly he did. Plutarch, who of course never met her, tells us that Cleopatra’s charm lay in her demeanour, and in particular in her voice:
… Her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her; but converse with her had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behaviour towards others, had something stimulating about it. There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased …22
Dio, writing a century after Plutarch, begs to differ. His Cleopatra is beautiful, and all too well aware of the effects of her beauty. The whole private meeting has therefore been planned so that she might seduce the susceptible Caesar:
Cleopatra, it seems, had at first urged with Caesar her claim against her brother by means of agents, but as soon as she discovered his disposition (which was very susceptible, to such an extent that he had his intrigues with ever so many other women – with all, doubtless, who chanced to come in his way) she sent word to him that she was being betrayed by her friends and asked that she be allowed to plead her case in person. For she was a woman of surpassing beauty, and at that time, when she was in the prime of her youth, she was most striking; she also possessed a most charming voice and a knowledge of how to make herself agreeable to every one. Being brilliant to look upon and to listen to, with the power to subjugate every one, even a love-sated man already past his prime, she thought that it would be in keeping with her rôle to meet Caesar, and she reposed in her beauty all her claims to the throne. She asked therefore for admission to his presence, and on obtaining permission adorned and beautified herself so as to appear before him in the most majestic and at the same time pity-inspiring guise.23
Presumably the fact that Cleopatra was queen of Egypt, the last of an ancient and semi-divine line, precociously intelligent, politically powerful and extraordinarily rich, simply added to her charms.
If the Hellenistic Cleopatra is a woman of doubtful physical appeal, the Egyptian Cleopatra has all the beauty and serenity of a goddess. This is exactly what we would expect. Like their Greek and Roman contemporaries, Egypt’s official artists never set out to create true-to-life portraits. Nor did they manufacture ‘art for art’s sake’. Invariably, they created symbolic or idealised representations of an individual at a particular stage of his or her life, usually for a specific religious purpose. In this respect, royal art may be considered as the ultimate extension of the hieroglyphic writing system, where every word is a picture and every picture can be read as a word. A statue or a two-dimensional image can be read, just as a papyrus scroll can be read.
A quick glance through any illustrated book of Egyptian art will reveal ranks of near-identical kings smiting foreigners, near-identical scribes sitting with a papyrus roll across their lap, and near-identical sons and daughters standing naked with fingers in their mouths beside their much larger parents. This tradition continued for over 3,000 years, so that the 1st Dynasty King Den, who wields a mace to smite an enemy on an ivory label in c. 3000 appears scarcely different from Auletes smiting an enemy on the pylon of the Edfu temple of Horus in 57. As the office of the king continued unchanging from reign to reign, irrespective of the office holder, this similarity was a good and desirable thing; a reinforcement of the cyclical continuity of Egyptian life. And, in case anyone really wanted to know which king was being shown, the artists invariably added a name.24The Egyptian-style art of the Ptolemies was essentially propaganda, designed to allow the Ptolemies to appeal to their Egyptian people and their Egyptian gods by reflecting and fuelling their political and religious beliefs.25 With pose, material, scale and placement all predetermined, it seems impossible that these images can tell us anything of Cleopatra’s appearance. They do, however, tell us quite a lot about her perceived role. Egypt had a long tradition of highlighting powerful women using a combination of religious and political symbols, and Cleopatra exploited this tradition to the full. The two-dimensional Cleopatra standing larger than life at each end of the rear wall of the Hathor temple at Dendera is an uncompromisingly traditional Egyptian queen. The bewigged, crowned, beautiful and eternally young Cleopatra can barely be differentiated from the queens who lived thousands of years before her, and she can barely be differentiated from the goddesses Isis and Hathor. The confusion is deliberate and convincing.
Again, however, we have to be careful when approaching Cleopatra’s Egyptian art. Cleopatra has long been recognised as a brand name, with strong selling power, and canny antiquities dealers have found it all too easy to add a cartouche to an insignificant ancient statue, instantly tripling its value. As a result, many of the ‘Cleopatras’ that made their way into western collections during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now recognised (recognised, often, by their ill-written and badly copied hieroglyphs) as forgeries. Cleopatra’s genuine Egyptian-style three-dimensional images are all relatively small; we do not have any colossal Cleopatras, although the ongoing reclamation of Ptolemaic statuary from the sea at Alexandria offers a glimmer of hope that one day this situation might change. In the meantime, it seems likely that all her surviving statues are cult images, manufactured for the temples and shrines dedicated to her personal cult. They show Cleopatra as a healthy woman in the prime of life; again, this to be expected. Women rarely grow old in Egyptian art.26 Although conforming to the same general pattern, the statues show a degree of flexibility and individuality; the overall appearance is typically Egyptian, with traditional postures, wigs and clothing, but Hellenistic accessories occasionally appear, there are classical noses and eyes, and we can sometimes glimpse Hellenistic curls beneath the formal Egyptian wigs.
The best example of this art style is a black basalt statue of unknown provenance, now housed in the Hermitage, St Petersburg. It shows a young queen standing tall and slender against a back pillar, her left foot slightly advanced. Her tight linen sheath dress – impossible to walk in without the benefit of Lycra – clings to the curves of her breasts, stomach, hips and thighs. Her navel is a dimple beneath the fine cloth. In her right hand she holds the ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life; on her head she wears a heavy tripartite wig (a wig which divides into three parts; one falling on each side of the face and one falling behind). She wears the triple uraeus (triple snake) on her brow. Her oval face has the prominent ears and exaggerated almond-shaped eyes seen in earlier Ptolemaic statuary. Her mouth turns downwards and her chin is square. The only dissonant note is the double cornucopia that she carries in the left hand. For the cornucopia, or horn of plenty, is a Greek symbol. Firmly associated with queens, it first appears in Egyptian royal art during the reign of Ptolemy II, when it is added to images of the deified Arsinoë II. This statue is unlabelled and, on the basis of the double cornucopia, was for a long time identified as Arsinoë II. But Cleopatra, too, favours the cornucopia, and the presence of the unusual triple uraeus strongly suggests that this is a representation of Cleopatra VII.
The uraeus is the rearing cobra worn on the forehead by kings and queens from the Old Kingdom onwards. Wadjyt, ‘The Green One’, the snake goddess of Lower Egypt and the Nile Delta, decorates and protects the royal crown and its wearer. To understand the symbolism of the uraeus, we need to understand the ancient creation myth told by the priests of the sun god Re at Heliopolis. This explains how the first god, Atum, lived on the island of creation with his twin children, Shu and Tefnut. One terrible day Atum’s children fell into the sea of chaos surrounding the island. Devastated, Atum sent his Eye (a form of the goddess Hathor) to search for his missing children. But when the Eye returned with the children she found that the sun had replaced her. Enraged by this betrayal, she transformed herself into a cobra, and Atum, first king of Egypt, placed her on his brow.
Most of Egypt’s dynastic queens wore a single or a double uraeus on the brow. Many also wore the short modius or platform crown, surrounded by multiple uraei and often topped by a more elaborate crown. But the triple uraeus – three cobras worn on the brow – is rare and has, in recent years, come to be associated with Cleopatra VII.27 The symbolism of the three snakes is difficult to assess. It may be that the triple uraeus is to be read as a rebus – a visual pun – that translates from Ptolemaic Egyptian as either ‘queen of kings’ or ‘goddess of goddesses’. Alternatively, it could represent three individuals: Isis, Osiris and Horus perhaps, or a queen’s triple title of king’s daughter, king’s sister and king’s wife.28 It may even be a simple misunderstanding of dynastic symbolism, with the more traditional double uraeus plus central vulture head worn on the brow by earlier queens being transformed into three snakes by the Ptolemaic artists.
The use of the triple uraeus as a diagnostic tool to identify otherwise unidentifiable Cleopatra images remains contentious. A limestone crown, part of a broken statue recovered from the temple of Geb at Koptos and now in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London, is a good example of this type of reasoning. The inscription recorded on the crown refers to a ‘hereditary noble, great of praise, mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt, contented … king’s daughter, king’s sister, great royal wife who satisfies the heart of Horus’, but omits to name names. The crown, which is made up of double plumes (two tall feathers associated with the cult of the Theban god Amen), a sun disc (associated with solar cults), cow horns (associated with the goddesses Hathor and Isis) and triple uraeus, was originally identified as belonging to a statue of Arsinoë II, who is known to have been active in this region; the Koptos Isis temple was associated with the Iseion at the central northern Delta site of Behbeit el-Haga, which was patronised by her husband Ptolemy II. But Arsinoë tends to wear her own, specific crown and, as Cleopatra is now strongly associated with the triple uraeus, historians have started to wonder whether the anonymous husband could be either Ptolemy XIII or his brother Ptolemy XIV. Similarly, a pale blue glass intaglio with a portrait of a Ptolemaic woman of unknown provenance (now in the British Museum) is identified as Cleopatra on the basis of the hairstyle, broad diadem and a peculiarly prominent triple uraeus, which virtually sits on top of the queen’s head.
Just one sculpted ‘Cleopatra’ appears to straddle the gulf between the Hellenistic and Egyptian art styles. A Parian marble head, recovered from the wall of the Church of San Pietro e Marcellino in the Via Labicana, not far from the sanctuary of Isis in Rome, is today housed in the Capitoline Museum. The head was originally part of a composite statue. It has no Egyptian-style back pillar, yet the face is unmistakably Egyptian in appearance. The head wears a tripartite wig and a vulture crown or headdress. This headdress, as its name suggests, has the appearance of a limp bird draped over the head, with the wings falling either side of the face, the tail hanging down the back and the vulture’s head and neck rising from the wearer’s forehead. In this case the vulture’s delicate head has been lost, as have the queen’s inlaid eyes and the tall crown that she originally wore on top of her headdress. The vulture headdress was originally worn by Nekhbet, goddess of southern Egypt and, in some tales, mother of the king. Other goddesses subsequently adopted it, as did dynastic queens; the earliest example of a vulture headdress, worn by a now-anonymous queen, comes from Giza and dates to the 4th Dynasty. Nekhbet’s northern counterpart, the snake goddess Wadjyt, introduced a variant by replacing the bird’s head with a snake; as vultures and snakes were regarded as good mothers, this modified vulture headdress emphasised the link between queens and motherhood. By the Ptolemaic age the headdress had become closely associated with goddesses and divine or dead queens. Experts are divided over the subject of this head: it has been variously identified as Cleopatra VII, Berenice II and the goddess Isis.