Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  Her grandmother, for example, was some sort of concubine, a royal mistress, someone else’s wife, sister or mistress, possibly another Macedonian Greek who traced her lineage to one of Alexander’s camp-followers. Or maybe, as hopeful African–American scholars have suggested, she was an Egyptian, even a very black Egyptian from the Nubian parts of the country that are now Sudan.

  If Cleopatra’s parents were brother and sister, she would have had only one set of grandparents, an idea that has attracted psychoanalytic writers as much as genealogical ones. But, from the surviving rough-book evidence here, it seems as though my Cleopatra the Second was on course to avoid such literary perils – either through teenage ignorance or an early developing journalist’s sense of when a topic induces sleep.

  There follow teenaged scribbles on Alexandria as it was when Cleopatra was born. I may have chosen this as some kind of classroom project. I have no surviving best-book evidence or memory. I can now see these pages only as in a direct line from the faces of Essex clay.

  This first description of Alexandria was respectable, certainly no disgrace. Being five thousand miles from the city in the 1960s did not make it impossibly harder than being inside the city now in 2011. Alexandria in the modern age is not like Athens or Rome: almost none of its ancient buildings survive as monuments or memorials for others. There is little easy tourism. The sites are mostly invisible. Its palaces, libraries and lighthouse are wrecked beneath sand and water. Its best known relics, the needles named after Cleopatra, which once stood where the Metropole stands now, have decorated London and New York for more than a century. To be a dissatisfied tourist is easy. To an optimist the neat lines of the ancient street map are not so much a show of what has disappeared but of a city still waiting to be found.

  Alexandria is never far away wherever we are. Useful ideas were its best exports – the universal library, straight streets with addresses and post codes, astronomy and gastronomy, Greek columnar architecture in forms that people could live in rather than merely worship or admire, ‘the pen’ and ‘the wine-press’, new names that still survive for newly identified parts of the brain, and one of the greatest of all human dramas, the story of Ptolemy XII’s second daughter herself. From Alexandria came also poetry as experiment, surprise as a virtue, word pictures of painted pictures, style for style’s sake, so much adaptation from classical Greece which, without this city, would have died. Without the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, there would have been a very different Virgil, Tennyson and Coleridge, to begin only with the restricted contents of my Dorset Avenue library.

  Bibliotheca Alexandrina

  I am back at my polished modern desk, reluctantly for my ambitions but successfully for my health. It is good to be out of Le Metropole. The hotel on the site where ‘the great love of Cleopatra and her Antonio was born’ makes no boast of hygiene. It luxuriates in its old dust and glory. It seemed a nauseous place when I arrived, its staircase lit by a stained-glass French garden, yellows, reds and greens stirred with grey. Last night’s poisoning has passed – but is not quite forgotten. So on this sunless day, the third of the year, I am back in the glassy, grey successor to the first great library of the world.

  This Bibliotheca Alexandrina is clean enough to be a hospital, one of those Middle Eastern hospitals of the rich where there are the finest operating theatres and very few patients. It is tasteful, broad and low. Its roof is a tilted sundial. Its terraces are filled with sculpture. Its rows of desks cascade down towards the sea. It is like an elaborate ornament to a garden. It does not contain many books. It may not be much of a library at all.

  A subversive thought: if the New Year bomb had exploded here instead of in Socratis’s mother’s church, the needles of glass and granite would have been a splendid sight. There would have been fewer deaths and a beach of shining fragments from here to the sea. Letters would litter the pavements. On the walls and windows are imprints from hundreds of different scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Celtic runes, Minoan Greek and Times New Roman, Arabic, Turkish and Chinese. Once the blast had blown, there would have been alphas and abjeds, diphthongs and digammas everywhere. Investigators could have spent their days dividing Linear B from Latvian, Old High German from Apache. Every syllabary would find its semi-vowel.

  There would have been louder international outrage. This library cost $250 million to build. More than a thousand architects competed to design it. Greek ship-owners and Arab sheikhs all paid their part. This wonder of the modern world is especially loved by President Mubarak and his wife. Or so Mahmoud told me. So it might be unwise even to speculate on its transformation into a seaside sky of letters, glittering in the bomb blast of a New Year night.

  Is it even polite to contemplate such destruction? No, it is not. Not even in light-headed revenge for having been so sick. Or I should shroud my contemplation in code. But I do not have a code. Maurice used to have one. He liked to mix letters and numbers for the schoolboy thoughts and hopes that in schooldays needed disguise. And he continued doing so well into his Oxford days, maybe beyond.

  Just before my old friend died last year he tried to explain his code to me. There were a few bits of script left but he was weak by then and we did not make any progress. I read him his account of the Red Tents and he smiled at the memory of Cleopatra’s mermaids. That bit had survived because I had written it down from his dictation. But he could no more understand his juvenile school jottings than can scholars understand so many scratches on old walls, pots and plates.

  This place where Cleopatra once sat would be wonderful as a sky full of glass. No. Stop it. I regret the thought but can no more stop myself thinking it than stop myself vomiting. This would be a new destruction. ‘Destruction’ is always the word that accompanies ‘Alexandrian Library’ in books. The first library here has long been famous for its death even though no one can agree precisely how that death began – or ended. Some blame Cleopatra’s first visit from a careless Julius Caesar, the spread of flames from ship to shore. Others blame the Christians or the Arabs or other vandals. Last night I readily agreed with Mahmoud that excessive nostalgia is an Alexandrian curse, that it is absurd for visitors constantly to compare his city with what once it had been and what it has lost. But this new library is an incitement.

  The first library of the Ptolemies was an extraordinary creation of the human mind, the definer of learning itself. Here was the first collection that aimed to hold all books from everywhere. Other kings had built collections to show that they and their kingdoms were great. Alexandria celebrated the greatness of everything its rulers could borrow, steal or buy. No one knows what the first library looked like or how large it was. But we do know what was done here.

  Yes, I know. I should stop complaining. I need to feel more positive before I write much more. I am merely sick and discontent. What does this library have that no other library has? Nothing very much. There are 500,000 remaindered books from France, some records of how the French made fools of themselves in the Suez crisis. The French, it seems, have been generous in their gifts. There are a few Islamic collections, all of them carefully filleted so as not to incite or offend. Or so it is said.

  I do not know if that is true. A library can certainly be a dangerous thing. When Mr Mubarak keeps Egypt calm and bland, many seem grateful to him. I too should be more grateful. It is warm here. It is clean. It does not make me sick. I am going to start this Cleopatra day with something modest, with her indexes and lists. It may seem wrong to have come so far and to be spending hours at a desk beside electronic catalogues. But since this is the birthplace of the index and the book catalogue, it is not perhaps so very wrong.

  The Greeks of Egypt loved names. They loved lists of names. Their names had meanings as ours once had meanings. Cleopatra meant ‘famed for her father’. There were Cleopatras who had lived and those whom the living had imagined. Fiction on one side, fact on another: that is common enough in a library. Separating those two groups of Cleopatras was one of the first
purposes of a librarian.

  Fiction was defined through lists of names, the names of characters, as we call them. Yes, there was sometimes room to doubt. There were hard cases. That was what scholarship was for. The Greeks knew well that there had been many past confusions, that gods and heroes, different types of beings, had once wandered among humanity on earth. But that was then. In Alexandria’s library truth and the fiction might usefully, and most of the time, be kept apart.

  There was also a substantial history section. And history, like fiction, was also defined by lists of names. The classical Greeks had invented chronology by listing the annual magistrates of Athens by their names, the holders of priestly offices, the winners of the Olympic games. That was how they separated the years for those who saw themselves as Greek.

  Catalogues were the key to existence, to a man or woman having existed and continuing to exist. Inclusion in the first Olympic lists became a key, a kind of membership card, for belonging to the history of the Greeks. When one of Alexander’s ancestors wanted to compete in the games, he was rejected as not Greek enough. As soon as Macedonians were accepted for the running races and their names were on the winners’ list, they became part of measured time. They were members of the club. They were part of civilisation. In Alexandria’s library many membership lists became permanent, a source of reference for ever.

  Dead bodies needed to keep their names. Preserved bodies especially needed names. Otherwise what was the point of the preservation? Many of the biscuit-coloured bundles under the streets here were once called Cleopatra. In life that had been their name.

  After death a corpse might be dried, drenched in scent and wrapped in linen. The coffin might be marked with a thousand messages to the gods, surrounded by water pots lest its occupant needed a drink, and leaves of bronze and berries of clay lest it needed some reminder of other life. None of that was enough. There was nothing as important for survival as a person’s name.

  In an ordered society lists are made to last. Alexandria was the first society ordered in what we can recognise as a modern way, ordered for women as well as men, for small households as well as large ones, for the classes that we can for the first time describe as ‘middle classes’. After a death a permanent label would securely be tied where it could not decay or fall, a red pottery tag on which lines of letters would forever undulate, up and down and up, as though the hard clay were still the soft scrap of cloth by which living men gave names to their ordinary possessions, to their travel trunks, laundry and dogs.

  In a library, as in a graveyard, life is fixed. I should be moving on now to love affairs and banquets, the stuff of history’s romances, most especially for histories of Cleopatra. But all in good time. I have not quite finished with the librarians. For the moment they are making me feel better. I can hardly remember now the colours of last night at the Metropole. The spewings and explosions have almost passed.

  For Alexandria’s ancient cataloguers of the imagination, the greatest subjects were the classical Greek plays. The Ptolemies wanted the best texts of tragedies and comedies more than anything that entered their harbour. They bribed and cheated for them. The dramas of the Athenians, written a century or more before the age of Alexander the Great, were a means of maintaining life itself in upstart Alexandria when Athens was past its prime. In little lidded library boxes, where papyrus scrolls were stored, there were many plays, many more than survive today. In those plays there were many names of mythical heroes and heroines, many mythical Cleopatras.

  Who were they? Before I begin the rest of the day I will choose just one. Among the tens of thousands of boxes that once lined the walls here, there was once only one truly celebrated character called Cleopatra. This was not a living Egyptian queen or even a dead one but an Athenian, a daughter of a human woman and the divine North Wind, a mixed parenthood that rarely did a child any good.

  This Cleopatra lived in Thrace, as far north in the Greek world as Alexandria was south. She was a respectable granddaughter of the founder of Athens, married, a mother, cast out by a barbarian husband and his new wife. Her fate was to watch the blinding of her two sons – and then to die with them, of hunger and thirst, inside a cold, dark cave.

  There were many plays from classical Athens that told of this Cleopatra. If anyone would have known exactly how many it would have been one of the men who ruled the Ptolemies’ catalogues. Only here in the new Greece, on the delta of the Nile, could a studious reader discover all the many ways in which King Phineus of Thrace had married, unmarried and remarried; and how his second wife had blinded the children of the first with the sharp shuttles of her weaving loom.

  Sophocles, the greatest dramatist of Athens, three times told this same tale of the trials faced by his heroine in a distant wilderness, twisting the elements of the plot this way and that way in order to show the whole in all its horror. He also used the story in a fourth play, Antigone, one of the rare plays that still survives, one of the best known of all Greek plays, the tragedy of a Theban princess, the daughter of Oedipus, the noble daughter who defied the law to give her rebel brother a sacred burial banned by the state and is condemned for that to a prison cave and death by starvation.

  So we can still read about the ex-celebrity Cleopatra of Athens and Thrace. But, like so many classical subjects, we have to see her though her likeness to someone else, the now famous Antigone of Thebes. The doomed Cleopatra of the North Wind is one of the examples shown to Oedipus’s own doomed daughter by her chorus of sympathetic attendants. The message is that many other royal women have stood, inevitably briefly, against inescapable fate. Antigone, starving in darkness for giving her brother a decent burial, is supposed to be comforted by that.

  It hardly seems a great deal of comfort. This most ancient Cleopatra, born in a cave of the winds, died under the earth where there was no wind, no air and no children who could see her die. Sophocles’s heroine, facing the same fate, hears of her example and knows that she is not alone – in past or future. That is how drama is deepened and widened – by reference to other names and other stories, some of which we still know, many that we do not, the past that is forever now, the now that never stops.

  Sophocles’s Antigone is incomplete. It is corrupt, as scholars term a text altered by the errors of scribes. But that has never much mattered. The global inheritors of Greece have kept it as much for its argument as its poetry. It has been a good place for a lost Cleopatra story to hide. A matter of chance perhaps, but then survival, even in the best-catalogued library, owes often much to chance.

  Antigone teaches moral argument. It shows the conflict between obedience to man’s laws and the requirement (higher or not?) to obey the laws of the gods. In the classroom the decision of Antigone to die for her beliefs seems a wonderful thing, civics, politics, a whiff of future hopes. Antigone is brave and right. She stands up to state power. She poses questions which are with us still. Whose side are we on, the obstinate woman who sticks by her principles or the legitimate ruler who demands obedience to himself?

  As Brentwood schoolboys we most certainly were on Antigone’s side. Or we said we were. When we read Antigone with our teachers we always knew where we stood. In theory there was no contest. Of course, if a real choice like that been ours, we would probably (no, certainly) have left the body unburied and obeyed the king. Sophocles understood that even if his young readers did not.

  Just occasionally in class, not often but all the more remembered for that, the arguments fell back and the modern parallels disappeared. What was left was the poetry, the Greek in all its alien difference. One dark Brentwood afternoon, revelling in the foolish delight that the language of tragedy, like calculus or a crossword, was so unreasonably difficult, I asked one of our teachers, the most elderly and often the least inspiring, what was the most challenging piece of Greek he knew.

  It was cheek as much as anything. I did not care about this man’s opinion very much. We were not generous to our teachers, certainly not to the occa
sional ones, not to this man who was eccentric, antique, who rarely had his full complement of pipe, teeth and books – and sometimes, it seemed, not even his mind. But I feel generous to him now – for this one lesson that I still remember when so many others have gone.

  It was October. It was ‘last period’. Satchels were packed and piled for boarding house or home. There were wet leaves steaming on hot pipes, a biology experiment. There was the oily smell of paint. Half the classroom, probably half the school, was close to sleep. The old teacher’s response to my question came in a sudden torrent, the fourth choral ode of Antigone, sung in Greek with a whistle as though forced through his false teeth and fetid tobacco. It was a shocking sound, the first time that the Greek language, the language of Cleopatra and her library, sounded to me as though it had ever been used.

  What did it all mean? Eventually I got my answer in English, with stars to mark the absent words, the holes in a text that no one will ever securely fill.

  … are the shores of the Bosphorus **** and Thracian ***** Salmydessus where neighbouring Ares saw with cruel joy the accursed wound blinded against two sons by a wild wife bringing blackness to eyes seeking vengeance smashed by bloody hands and the sliding needle from the loom …

  The Greek lesson had ceased and Greece had taken its place. This was a rare lesson from the classroom, raw cruelty in the language of reason.

  Altar fires die. Fat no longer burns …

  These were words without rules. A home of philosophy and debate becomes a home of maddened birds, whirling, screaming, prophesying the worst of things, pecking at the diseased and dead, shitting back poison from unburied bodies.