Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  ‘… Teucer Salamina patremque Cum fugeret, tamen uda Lyaeao Tempora populea fertur vinxisse corona, Sic tristis affatus amicos: When Teucer was fleeing Salamis and his father, he became drunk with wine, tied a poplar wreath to his brow and spoke to his sad friends.’

  ‘What was the point of that?’ V posed the question as sharply as before and pulled at her cigarette like a teenager.

  Teucer was a minor player in the war. He was like Plancus. He was trying to make a fresh start. Teucer, too, did not have much choice. His father, king of Salamis, was angry at his son’s return from Troy without his beloved elder brother.

  There was no reason in this. The reception was unfair. Everyone in Salamis said so. Teucer had been loyal and devoted to his crazy kinsman. Both of them had served the Greeks loyally until Achilles had been killed and Ajax had lost the battle for his beautiful armour.

  Then there was chaos. Nothing can be done about chaos except wait for it to end. Ajax confused animals with Trojan enemies, slaughtered cattle instead of fellow heroes and finally killed himself, leaving Teucer behind to go home alone, to face their father’s wrath and be forced out of Salamis again in permanent exile.

  None of this was Teucer’s fault. He could not have saved the mad brute, Ajax. Neither he nor his bigger brother could have saved Achilles. So there was no option but that of a new start.

  ‘Nil desperandum’, he told his comrades, the phrase in the poem that James Holladay long ago commended.

  The future had to begin with new loyalties and new trust.

  ‘Mecum saepe viri, nunc vino pellite curas; Cras ingens iterabimus aequor: You brave men who have often suffered much worse with me. Drive away your cares with wine. Tomorrow we will set out again upon the mighty sea.’

  ‘So what was the point?’

  Teucer’s final speech to his friends is not directly about the cast of the Cleopatra story. Nor is it even precisely about Plancus himself. It is merely an artful reminder of them all. Nil desperandum is its most famous phrase. Despair of nothing.

  Plancus needed to forget his previous employers, how he had raised Greek ships and money for them, how he had solemnly discussed whether little Selene, the Moon twin, should rule over Libya or which of hundreds of eastern towns her brother, Helios the Sun, should have as his domains. Together he and Horace should find quieter times, calmer waters, whatever words their politics and poetry required.

  Just as Plancus is a classic Roman, ‘Laudabunt alii’ is a classic Latin poem.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, not absolutely sure, no. Nothing is absolutely sure.’

  ‘How long did you go on writing about Cleopatra?’

  ‘Off and on for a while. More off than on. And not for a long while.’

  V nodded. She was pleased, she said drily, that I made so much progress. There was a pause – and a long procession of teachers, pupils and other festival-goers who by now had slaked their Sunday morning curiosity among the white tents.

  She was also pleased, she said, that she had seen the event announced in the Cheltenham guide and been bothered to come. It was good to see that I was still alive.

  ‘Have you been to Alexandria?’

  She asked her question in a high monotone, as though we had never met. She said she had been once with her first husband. She still sometimes found cheap souvenirs around the house. There was not much ancient to see but I still might do better in the place where it all had happened.

  ‘No,’ I said. I had not been and I did not think it would help.

  How were her parents?

  ‘Fine. Still in Essex, still complaining about the clay in the garden (not the same garden but the same clay) and making balsa-wood models of planes, boats, trains and radar masts.’

  She knew that Max Stothard had died (was it about ten years ago?) because her father had mentioned it on one of her rare returns to Rothmans. But she did not know about Maurice.

  ‘How is he? It has been quite a few years.’

  She did not seem shocked by the answer. She was surprised he had survived so well so long.

  This has to be Cleopatra’s very last night. Socratis for the first time leaves a written message. He reports rumblings from Tunis, the country that had once been Carthage and which the Romans knew simply as Africa. There is lightning over Pharos and thunder threatening for miles. There is already a scouring storm.

  The square is almost empty. The horses and cars have gone. Even the police are under shelter. The trash of the pavements is bobbing in a river towards the Corniche. The waiters are as troubled as the waters. The concierge is especially agitated. The Polish drug addict and windscreen-wiper is tonight allowed to shelter in the hotel doorway.

  22.1.11

  Place Saad Zaghloul

  The mirror in Room 114 tells me I should shave. The stubble looks like stitches after a car crash. Long ago I did once wear a beard. There were pictures in Maurice’s Oxford collection to prove it, him with the chin of a pink-billed bird, me like a fat, brown nut. But it is not a good look now. I start, stop the blade, stop again until every last stiff hair has gone.

  Socratis offers to drive me to Cairo. It will be no trouble, he insists, and a chance for him to check the state of his parked cars. There have been deep floods and few Egyptians have experience of floods. Even the Dead Sea fountain is filled with water. The military men are on ‘high alert’, he says, and speed-traps can become road-blocks. Road-blocks are places where the unwary do not want to be.

  This is tempting. But it still seems better to book a driver whose sense of timing is more attuned to the discipline of airlines, one with less of a record for leaving me with the time to write this story.

  In Room 114 the wastepaper basket overflows. The rough-book scraps, the Big Oil letterhead and the reporter’s flip-pads have finally served their purpose. Keep the Roman map? Mauretania, Africa, Numidia, Cyrenaica, Aegyptus and the names of all the deserts and tribes between them? Yes, keep the map.

  I wish I had bought the Alexandria carpet. Is there time to go back? Without Socratis I would never find the shop.

  Mahmoud calls. He has to return urgently to Athens. Can he share my airport car? Yes, he can. We will be leaving the Metropole at noon. So these will have to be the very last words.

  Last words on Canidius: the general whose ginestho gave me my new beginning was one of the few who did not change sides after Actium. He was executed in Alexandria on the orders of Octavian. Neither he nor his heirs in perpetuity could claim on their agreement for tax-free wheat and wine.

  Last words on the Big Oil men: Lew died not long after we last met. Mr Antony Brown was a useful fiction, just as the chain-smoking lobbyist had said. Lew said he had always known. The Ferrari-owning art director works in a garden centre in Wales. His boss, the book-collector, is a spiritualist on the Essex coast.

  Last words on Plancus: Consul, Censor, Twice Victorious General, Builder of the Temple of Saturn, Divider of Lands in Beneventum, Man of Distinction, Founder of Basle and Lyons. These are just the words he would have liked.

  There is no time to buy a souvenir from Alexandria to take home. If there were, I would like a French clock from Lyons, authentic Louis Farouk from Rue Zaghloul, a flock of blue china birds around golden Roman numbers. Every clock here seems to be from Lyons.

  Last words on Mr W: still alive, I think, and living in Cornwall. We have not spoken since I began to remember our time together. We would never have remembered the same things. Sir Anthony Browne’s Brentwood School is calm, civilised and successful today, a credit to his memory. Equally thriving is the Calthorpe Arms, regularly welcoming the TLS’s classicists and critics through its doors.

  Last words on Horace: Horace’s response to Cleopatra’s defeat remains one of his most quoted odes, its first words and lofty rhythms often repeated, over two thousand years, at Mermaid clubs and other clubs when men (mostly men) have gathered for a drink. Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero, Pulsanda tellus, nunc Saliaribus Or
nare pulvinar deorum: Now is for drinking, now time for freedom’s feet to pound the earth, now for feasts to pile upon the tables of the gods. The first line is borrowed from Alcaeus, the freedom-fighter of Mytilene. Most of the rest is Horace’s own.

  Almost everyone has liked Horace’s poem. It both praises the new regime and its victim. Nunc est bibendum is as subtle in its way as Laudabunt alii. It is sympathetic as well as triumphal, foreshadowing much of the later portrayal of Cleopatra, as a queen who took her poison like a true proud Ptolemy and refused to be humiliated by her conqueror.

  This became the official version of the Augustan age. She was a worthy adversary: ‘Saevis Liburnis scilicet invidens Privata deduci superbo Non humilis mulier triumpho: As though scorning to be led away in her enemy’s ships, no longer a queen, a mere woman in a triumph.’ Cleopatra had been an evil foe but a worthy one.

  Last words on Virgil: in the eighth book of the Aeneid, when Aeneas has buried his nurse and is preparing for his battles to found Rome, he is given a shield by his goddess mother, Venus. Actium is at its centre and Augustus is high on his ship above the foaming waves, light pouring from his eyes. Cleopatra, blind to the snakes that await her, is attended by a god dog.

  Last and strangest words on Cornelius Gallus: after Cleopatra’s death, this poet, persuader and general became the new ruler of Egypt on Augustus’s behalf. Gallus was a much-venerated Alexandrian in his day. He became equally fascinating to later scholars even though, until the end of the 1970s, we possessed only that elegant single line about the river that separated Europe from Asia: uno tellures dividit amne duas.

  He did not, however, prosper in his Egyptian role. The office workers of the Ptolemies were used to working for a royal autocrat; and a royal autocrat is what Gallus became, attaching his ginestho to the erection of gold-tipped obelisks in his own honour and golden statues of himself. Bureaucracies pass on their rule books regardless of their ruler. After five tolerant years, the emperor demanded and got a decent suicide.

  Rather worse for Gallus’s reputation was the discovery of more of his poetry. In 1978, from a ditch near Aswan, there emerged nine lines of lumpy love poems and pious praise of Caesar, none of it befitting either what his ancient admirers had claimed or the more modern had imagined. This was in one way as rare a discovery as the ginestho. It was the oldest Latin text in the world, a book that Virgil or Octavian might have held. This was not enough to stem the decline in its writer’s repute.

  Socratis calls. He sounds excited but he is brief. Mahmoud will not be coming with me to the airport. All Egyptians must stay here now. The Tunisians have set off an explosion. I ought to stay, to study my Roman map, to listen.

  Finally, last words on Cleopatra’s children: Caesarion was still on his way to India when he was betrayed and executed. Or, alternatively, he was brought back to Alexandria on the promise that he would rule Egypt; and then was killed on arrival. No story about Caesarion is without its ‘either’, its ‘or’ or its ‘alternatively’.

  In 1997, the head of a sixteen-foot statue was pulled from the harbour; it is in grey granite and shows an elegant young man, without a nose, with a worn and down-turned mouth, and hair showing, unconventionally, beneath an Egyptian headdress. This might have once represented Caesarion. It might even have been planned to stand beside Cleopatra’s Needles outside the Metropole Hotel.

  Whether or not Caesarion was genuinely Julius Caesar’s son was never clear and ceased to matter. Octavian had the advice of an Alexandrian scholar called Arius Didymus who professed it unwise that there be even the possibility of two Caesars. Following best local practice Arius cited two lines from Homer’s Iliad to support his case for execution.

  Little Sun and Moon fared better. They went to Rome where, unlike their mother, they marched in Octavian’s triumph. From there they were taken not to some underground cell but into the new imperial family where Octavia, Antony’s widow and the new ruler’s sister, was their guardian.

  Of the two, Cleopatra Selene was the preferred. Like her mother, the Moon was a serious student. Of all the Cleopatras she is the most likely owner of a glowing amethyst inscribed with the advice that a Cleopatra should be ‘sober when drunk’. She was later permitted to marry another royal North African prisoner, another veteran of a Roman triumph, whom Augustus made King of Mauretania. This young King Juba became a renowned historian and scholar of his realms. The last Cleopatra to reign as queen over a great library did so in Morocco.

  When Cleopatra Selene died she inspired a poem on the subject of an eclipse, a night when the moon rose and then grew dark, hiding her sorrow as the beauty who shared her name lost her life and descended to the world below. ‘With her’, the poet wrote, ‘she had shared her light; and with her death she had shared her darkness.’ Even in his old age, Crinagoras, pale successor to Alcaeus and elegist of gift-wrapped roses, could put his pen to a perfect quick Alexandrian poem of departure.

  Epilogue

  During those last nights of Cleopatra in January 2011 the ‘Arab Spring’ began. While I was sitting in Khat Rashid and Place Saad Zaghloul, President Ben Ali of Tunisia, a man not well known outside his country despite his dictatorship there for a quarter of a century, was escaping to Saudi Arabia with a jet full of gold. Any military anxiety on the road out of King Farouk’s palace was well justified. A few days later, the streets of Cairo and Alexandria were filled with protesters demanding that Hosni Mubarak too should leave his palaces for the last time, ideally leaving the national treasure behind but, if that were impossible after thirty years in power, he should simply leave.

  Eventually and reluctantly, Mubarak obeyed. His friends told him he had lost. In Libya there were already the first protests against President Gaddafi. Commentators speculated on which of his own closest allies would abandon him first. There were newspaper articles daily from Benghazi, Greek Cyrene as once it was, a place more freedom-loving than the rest, or so it was said.

  The Spring was spreading into Syria and Arabia. Back in London I felt a mild guilt that I had left the story just as it was about to happen. But I was no longer a foreign correspondent or newspaper editor. Any journalist could go to Alexandria and many did. I had been pursuing a different story and, in the peace of ignorance, had completed it.

  For days I watched the Al Jazeera pictures from the Corniche, the banner-wavers who passed by the Metropole and Cecil Hotels, wondering if I would spot Mahmoud or Socratis and, if I did, what side they would be on. There was one time when I thought I saw the yellow-suited driver. If it was the right man he was definitely on the demonstrators’ side, but I could not be sure. It was possible, even likely, that if my two Alexandrians had a choice they would be on different sides.

  There was a news report that the New Year church bombing had been planned by the interior ministry in order to bolster international support against al-Qaeda. This was close to Socratis’s own suggestion although, in those last winter days, he had not expressed himself quite so firmly. Both men would eventually want to be on the winning side, Mahmoud the more so.

  On 23 March Elizabeth Taylor died. For one night only there were news images on television of another Alexandria, the place of silver and ivory, of gold, bright blue sky and the massive application of cosmetics.

  Two days later a battered postcard of Hosni Mubarak arrived at the offices of the Times Literary Supplement. It showed the former Egyptian president in black-haired youth and black-suited severity, just the sort of picture that a rejected dictator in a closely guarded hospital bed would have distributed himself if he had been able to. It carried both an Egyptian and an English stamp. It was hard to read the postmark. It smelt as though it had been pulled from a drawer of mothballs.

  The message read: ‘RIP Cleopatra. All best to you and her for another thirty years, V.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To all those who read the text: to Mary Beard and Paul Webb. To Raphael Cormack for Egyptian research and photographs. To Jo Evans for picture editing. To Si
grid Rausing, publisher and editor, to Ed Victor, my agent, and to Maureen Allen, my assistant at the TLS.

  PETER STOTHARD is Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and author of the books Thirty Days and Spartacus Road. He is a classicist and a political and literary journalist. From 1992 to 2002 he was the Editor of The Times. In 2012 he was chairman of the judges for the Man Booker Prize. He was knighted in 2003.

  Jacket photograph by Raphael Cormack

  Author photo © Teri Pengilley

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