Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  On the back of the Roman map is a message to me from Maurice: ‘V came to see you. I told the porter to say we were out.’

  At the end of our day together, after honking drives through traffic to museums – ethnological, religious or closed – Socratis became suddenly, and surprisingly, the most useful of guides. He took me back to the carpet shop, apologising for having abandoned me last night, claiming that there was much more there that I needed to see.

  The street door, as before, did not invite the uninvited. Behind the barred wooden shutters the rooms of piled cloth were just as silent. A nervous boy brought us tea, his hand trembling as he set down the tiny cups. The panorama of Cleopatra’s city was back on the wall. The shop-owner was nowhere to be seen.

  Socratis spoke at first as though he were filling time before something more important was about to happen. He poked at different parts of the picture and then at the plaster below. His pencil left a soft, dark smudge.

  ‘This is Alexandria,’ he said gratuitously. The boy stood like a stage extra terrified of dropping his spear.

  ‘So think of Cleopatra standing just here three years after the start of her reign, on the highest tower of her palace, looking back at the city that ancestors had built. She is twenty-one years old, a queen whom almost everyone hates.’

  He stressed the last three words, leaving long spaces between them. He moved his pencil higher, off the wall and to the top of the carpet itself, to the repeated lines of background red and brown, the houses of the Egyptian poor that stretched as far as the distant marshes marked by trees.

  ‘These people hated her because she was a Greek, a foreigner who pretended to be Egyptian. She pretended well. She learnt Egyptian. She built schools and temples but, in some ways, that made it worse.’

  Next he swung his arm down to the foreground, to the largest of the houses of the rich where the tapestry-maker had expended the greatest of his efforts, on jewellery, silver bowls and ornaments for hands and hair.

  ‘The rich Greeks of Alexandria were normally allies of the Ptolemies, their fellow city founders. But Cleopatra had abandoned them. She was now an ally of the Romans. Pompey had restored her father to power. Julius Caesar was doing the same for her. She was a superpower puppet.’

  Socratis spun out those last words like a comedian waiting for a laugh. Then he stared hard again at the wall. The boy disappeared behind a curtain into the cavity of rusting iron behind.

  ‘Cleopatra could not rely even on the Roman soldiers who lived in the houses over here.’ He moved his pencil to the right, to the streets where the causeway to the lighthouse begins. ‘These Gabinians, the relics of the army that Pompey had sent after her begging trip to Rome, these mercenaries had gone native long ago. Like almost everyone else here they were now on the side of another Ptolemy, the boy who was Cleopatra’s brother, an ally of the Egyptian priesthood and an enemy of Rome.’

  Here, he pointed, were the prison cells behind the palace walls. ‘She did not have many prisoners. Most convicts were killed. It was cheaper that way. Sometimes librarians were allowed to cut up prisoners while they were still alive, for purposes of science.’

  I knew about that, or about the possibility of it. Vivisection was one of the obsessions of the peculiar Frog at school.

  ‘Library and laboratory, similar words, much the same thing in Alexandria,’ I replied.

  Socratis nodded. ‘So a few prisoners were the least of Cleopatra’s problems. They did not hate her. She was no worse than any other ruler of Egypt. Some things are always the same’.

  He paused to make sure that I was listening. ‘There is a lot happening in this picture that most people do not see. Or rather there is much that they do not yet see.’ Almost as an afterthought, he pushed his pencil deep into the flattest brown-and-red zones of the distant poor. ‘Of course, Cleopatra also had the Jews on her side. But what use were the Jews?’

  We sat staring at each other. It seemed my responsibility, perhaps my best opportunity, to ask him what he meant, to find out what he was doing, what he and I were supposed to be doing together.

  But, at the moment I was about to speak, the shop-owner returned and suggested that surely I must buy the carpet now. Socratis said that it was more useful where it was. I asked if the two men were brothers. Socratis said emphatically that they were not.

  Whatever his coded purpose, Socratis’s description of the background to the Alexandrian War would have been perfectly respectable in Oxford. While his ‘superpower puppet’ message was none too subtle – and Mahmoud, or any supporter of the present regime, might easily have taken offence – his analysis of the events in 48 BC was more or less as the story is best now told.

  Cleopatra was twenty-one years old when the war began. For three years she had been joint ruler of Egypt, joined in that role by the elder of her two young brothers whom, by the custom of both Pharaohs and Ptolemies she had also married. Julius Caesar was fifty-two and had been for barely more than three days the sole ruler of the Roman world. At Pharsalus, in Greece, he had at last defeated his son-in-law, Pompey, the man who had stood vainly for the cause that Rome should not have a sole ruler.

  Caesar’s purpose in coming to Egypt was to kill or capture Pompey who, despite his defeat, had somehow escaped the battlefield. Two pieces of news greeted him when he arrived in Alexandria, the first that the ministers of Cleopatra’s brother, with help from Roman mercenaries, had already captured and killed Pompey, the second that this brother was claiming the throne of Egypt as Ptolemy III, as a sole ruler whose sister had disappeared. Was she dead or in exile? It was hard to be sure.

  The death of Pompey was a convenient good that Caesar could greet with appropriate disapproval, sadness and reflection that there was no enemy worth fighting any more. The exit of Cleopatra, however, was an inconvenience for him, possibly worse than that, concentrating Egyptian power within a Ptolemaic court that was hostile to Rome and keen to avoid financing any more of Rome’s armies.

  While Caesar was taking over Ptolemy’s Palace, Cleopatra proved that she was alive, smuggling herself into the harbour by boat, arriving late in the day and, as has long been portrayed in pictures, books and films, spending the night with the new head of the occupying power. Although Caesar was then married – to his third wife – marital conventions had not even a notional application to infidelities of state. Nor was moral outrage the motivation when Ptolemy discovered his sister’s presence and learnt of her sleeping partner. The boy king stamped his way into the streets before a turbulent Alexandrian crowd, cried betrayal, crashed his crown to the ground and called for armed resistance against his sister and the invader.

  Caesar never intended an Alexandrine war. He did not expect it. He had arrived victorious, more as a diplomatic judge and debt-collector than as a general, with only some thirty ships and three thousand men, nothing like the forces needed for a war. Suddenly, and very visibly, he was an ally of Cleopatra, the Greek queen of Egypt, besieged inside her palace by an army representing almost all her subjects, Greeks and native Egyptians as well as the Gabinian Romans who had once been her protectors. Caesar’s writ ran over the whole Roman world and his protection ought to have been more than sufficient for her needs. But Caesar’s immediate problem was how to exercise any authority beyond the palace itself.

  He had hoped swiftly to set up Cleopatra and her brother-husband in a shared governorship over Egypt in the Roman interest. While the ultimate power would remain with him, he wanted Egyptian propriety and traditions to be upheld. The young Ptolemy and his advisers had not accepted this Roman conceit. They had been horrified to see Cleopatra out of exile and back in Alexandria at all. Fierce fighting broke out, unpredictable urban combat, unusual for the time. One of Caesar’s messengers was killed. So was Ptolemy’s chief minister. Julius Caesar, a man ambitious to match the international legacy of Alexander the Great, was unable even to leave the walls of Alexandria.

  Caesar sent out orders by sea for food and reinforcement bu
t neither could be expected soon. He had only Cleopatra for local help. He had to hope that he could trust her. The unkind would liken him to an unarmed boy or a woman in an occupied city; all his hopes of survival rested on keeping every door closed. He took the young Ptolemy as a hostage but even that was scant protection. The Alexandrians were not sentimental about which Ptolemy they had on their throne as long as they could pretend that he or she was a real one.

  Caesar’s soldiers were struggling in their street fights against Pompey’s killers, helped only by the narrow spaces that prevented the full deployment of the native forces. The fleet that had brought him to Egypt was barely half the size of that controlled by his enemies, a disparity that was clearly visible – to Cleopatra, to her enemy brother Ptolemy himself, her sister Arsinoe and to everyone else weighing the likely course of events from this peculiar family encampment.

  The young queen knew much about Egyptians that Caesar did not know. From the contents of her library she could tell her lover tales from the mysterious book of the Greek historian, Manetho, the man who first described the Egypt of the Pharaohs to the creators of Alexandria. It was Manetho who first set out for foreigners the astonishing chronology of the country, the sweeping millennia between the many men who built the pyramids, the length of the reign of the first king who called himself the Sun and the rules by which women reigned in Egypt before Rome was ever imagined.

  Cleopatra could talk of the pyramids that women rulers had built for themselves. She could argue with Caesar whether these edifices were idle nonsense, worth less than mines and aqueducts and other Roman things. Or were they a potent Egyptian proof that, when a ruler has everything, he or she can build anything? She could read and note, with outrage or not, that carvings of the female sexual organs denoted cowardice and those of the male meant bravery. She could argue, as we do now, about how the Egyptian histories helped or hindered the arguments of the Jews for their own ancient past.

  There are also things we know about her world that she did not. She was unaware how much bigger the great pyramids had been before their lower parts were covered by sand. Nor did she know that there was once a great sphinx with them, the greatest Sphinx, as we know it now. In Cleopatra’s reign it was mostly, maybe wholly, buried.

  During the day Caesar fought and directed his men. At night he dined, conversed in Greek and slept with Cleopatra. Together they were fighting an inventive and resourceful enemy that knew Alexandria well, how its water systems could be polluted and which of its inhabitants could most readily be turned from one side to the other.

  Socratis’s quiet comparison between ancient queen and modern president was surprising but not outrageous. To the Alexandrian bureaucracy, military and priesthood, Cleopatra was a Roman stooge, the daughter of a bigger Roman stooge, and in league with a Roman tax-collector, extortionist and maybe even an occupier. To Caesar she was a necessary ally in his aim of controlling Egypt and using its treasure to pay his legions.

  Cleopatra herself was only a spectator at most events. She played no part in the battle beside the Pharos lighthouse or Caesar’s heroic swim through the harbour, his state papers held one-handed above the waves. She did not join in Caesar’s ruthless burning of ships that he could neither man himself nor risk being manned by Ptolemy. The naval fire spread to some books of the Alexandrian library, a large or small number depending on who came to be the storyteller. But in advising on the volatile peoples of Alexandria, the rich, the poor, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Jews, she would have been a useful agent.

  She may not have warned Caesar how unpopular she was herself with the mob. To do so – or to do so too early – would have been unwise. But she could tell him much about the character and appeal of her siblings and how, when dealing with this royal family, it was wise to keep an open mind about which side each member might be on. A brother might as likely murder his sister as marry her. Often he would do both. There must have been some strange palace meetings before Arsinoe escaped to the Egyptian forces and had their commander murdered, replacing him with her own choice.

  Ptolemy then left too to join his sister. Some said that Caesar deliberately allowed that escape. The result was certainly favourable to him. The Egyptian ranks, divided in loyalty between brother and sister, suddenly had also to face two armies of Egypt’s neighbours, from Judaea and from Pergamon. Caesar’s despatches had produced a prompt response.

  Socratis was right about the Jewish support for Cleopatra’s cause – but wrong to belittle its importance. Jews throughout the region had reason to join the friends of Caesar, the conqueror of Pompey, the Roman whom they hated most for his casual defilement of their temple in Jerusalem fifteen years before and the dismembering of their state. The king of Pergamon was a longer-time ally of Caesar who hoped for territorial gains from the success of his bet on the winning side.

  In March 47, their two forces together marched on Alexandria. The Egyptians prepared – but failed – to counter-attack before Caesar and his allied rescuers combined. In a single battle by the Nile, this Alexandrine War, one of the stranger conflicts of Caesar’s career, came to its end. Away from the twisted streets and houses, his experience in open battle was decisive.

  Ptolemy was drowned and his golden armour dredged from the mud lest any worshipper of kings as gods should have a doubt about his death. His head and body would have been better proof but those were gone to the crocodiles and hippos.

  Arsinoe was taken prisoner and sent to Rome so that she could march in Caesar’s triumph and face whatever plans he might have for her after that. The Gabinians, once heroes for restoring the Fluteplayer, were never heard of again.

  Cleopatra could safely now remarry under Egyptian rites, this time to the younger brother known as Ptolemy XIV on the rare occasions when he has been noted at all. To the surprise of the victorious Roman forces and the disbelief of the politicians at Rome, she then escorted Caesar on a short cruise down the Nile, past pyramids they could not properly see, past a Sphinx they could not see at all, partly for rest and recreation, it was said, but also to show the country who its rulers now were.

  For a few days in Oxford, I made progress with my fourth Cleopatra. It was easy then. My simple idea was that I should write down what I knew, shape it into a neat narrative, improving on Elizabeth Taylor, meeting some of the ambitions of V for a more modern, feminist, sixties style – and have a great success.

  Thus, by that account, in May and June of 47 BC Cleopatra could be pregnant and cruising peacefully down the Nile, or at least as peacefully as any cruise could be within an armed flotilla of river boats, between soldiers marching along the banks and priests waiting to worship their goddess queen at every stop. For Caesar this was a chance to see for the first time what, even 2000 years ago, were tourist sites, the ancient temples made of columns ten times the size of any in Rome or Greece, the towns older than Troy and the new temples and towns built by the Ptolemies in the style of the old. For Cleopatra it was an opportunity to show off the miles of cornfields that stretched out on either side, the food which, whether eaten or merely taxed, was life for foreign armies.

  There was a complete break from Roman politics. There were tame crocodiles to feed and wild ones to avoid but there were no letters, nothing from Caesar’s expectant friends, no reports of the surviving followers of Pompey, unchastened by the death of their leader, who were gathering in Tunisia to continue the war. Caesar had appointed his young friend Mark Antony to be his representative in Rome until he returned. There was no fixed time for that return.

  In a month’s slow river travel the Egyptian barges had reached the edge of their civilisation and were heading deeper into Africa. Either because of Caesar’s sudden impatience for politics, or the impending birth of Cleopatra’s child, or the nervousness of their accompanying troops, the great cedar-and-ivory ships turned and slowly returned to Alexandria. When they arrived, there had been pleasing progress in the construction of the massive temple that would be called the Caesareu
m, the columns and colonnades on what is now the site of the Metropole Hotel.

  8.1.11

  Pharos

  Maurice was at first barely tolerant of my efforts. The project was in every way much too dull. Here we were, far from Rothmans and Brentwood, surrounded by living characters, bearded aristocrats, pallid masters of pin-ball machines, beautiful boys in dresses, glossy women who wanted us to join the Italian Society. And there was I, struggling with the identity of the dead.

  A week later, just as decisively, and just as characteristically, he changed his mind. My Cleopatra was suddenly the key to his future. We sat together at the window end of our high room overlooking the dead lime trees and he set out his plan. In the yellow spotlight of a dim lamp and a sherry decanter, he told me that he had an idea. It was going to be a ‘big idea’. Cleopatra and her Romans were, in every important respect, the same, the same person, the same thing, the same ‘entity’. This was what I had not yet understood.

  We stared at each other. We each tried to outstare the other. It was like a return to the playground, to the schoolboy who had always been there at the edges of running track and rugby field, and whose fate in the dormitories of Brentwood had so worried V. He was still smooth-faced, short-haired and mushroom-cheeked while I (as I liked to think) had moved on to a much hairier, sixties self. On that damp autumn night, he was dressed in velvet, a casual impersonation of a fop, fashionable in the way that was beginning to be possible by careful shopping at Marks & Spencer. My own style was that of suburban protest, a Fair Isle sweater, knitted by my mother from a photograph of Paul McCartney, beneath a pony-skin coat, newly purchased in Chelmsford market, which stood stiffly like an Indian tent when it was not covering my back.