Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Page 7

  Consider, for a start, he said, King Ptolemy I. That is what we call him now. Ptolemy the Saviour was what he called himself.

  There is a scuffle underneath the broken French street lights by the cafe door. Socratis’s driver has arrived. So has a large brown dog. So have two policemen with the logo ‘Tourist and Antiquities’ on their uniforms, policemen employed to manage foreigners, the least alarming of the many forces that keep law and order around the bus station.

  Rather than coming in to collect me, the driver looks through the windows and walks towards the next door along the street. I am hoping to go to Pompey’s Pillar, one of the biggest ancient sites on my map, one of the sites of Cleopatra’s library, probably the longest-occupied site in the whole of the city. Perhaps he is going to be or bring my guide.

  The driver stops where I can still see him. He waits outside beside a bower of naked cherubs and a poster of two men in sunglasses advertising suits. His dog disappears first. The policemen follow. They could be with or against each other, all on the same side or all on different sides. Finally the driver is gone. There is tinny laughter, the clump, clump, clump of yelping and tumbling down basement stairs; then silence.

  I could go to Pompey’s Pillar on my own. I have the directions. But it seems more polite to wait.

  There was only one occasion when I hit another boy so hard his eyes bled. I never did anything like it again.

  The trouble came when Mr W first lined up every new boy to see who could run the fastest. The result was not supposed to be in doubt. Those who were good at football were also good at cricket and tennis and running. A sportsman was a sportsman. There was no more to be said.

  I did not want to run. Maurice was beside me. He did not want to run either. We were in the centre of the line, the worst place to be unnoticed. On either side stretched a stream of aertex shorts and shirts in varying shades of white.

  To the horror of the football captain, no one else’s progress over the playing field dash was faster than mine. For the last twenty yards I could see and feel that I was in front. Perhaps I appeared triumphant. Certainly a red-headed centre-forward took his defeat badly. He hit me and I, inexperienced in the art of hitting, smashed the bridge of his nose – and the septum too, as I recall the shouted word whose meaning I did not know.

  There ensued a series of unpleasant scenes. I was shocked that I could cause such damage to the division between someone’s nostrils. I was shocked that I could want to. Mr W made a case for self-defence. Maurice said that he was always getting hit, that everyone was always hurting or getting hurt. I have never hit anyone since. I try hard not to raise even my voice. I do not like being in a cafe when something violent is happening in the basement next door. There are yelps from man and dog – and unpleasant laughter.

  In 1963 there was no immediate result of my nose-smashing except that for a few months I was left alone. The running track became a refuge. While running, I could repeat dates and verbs and spellings and all the many things that needed to be repeated.

  In the rough-book, under the sign of the W, is a list of a dozen men called Ptolemy. Theirs is a story that a good teacher makes seem simple even though its truth is not simple at all. This gene pool is swamp. But the misidentifications, missing links and murdered nieces can all come later. At this stage of the Cleopatra story there is nothing wrong with a little simplicity. Just consider, as Mr W used to say, the man who became King Ptolemy I.

  He was a new boy on the block. When Alexander the Great first ordered the building of Alexandria, the man who would be its first king was miles away. While Alexander was defining his city boundaries – making long lines of barley in the ground that marsh birds, to the horror of the soothsayers, as quickly stripped away – there was no Ptolemy in Egypt.

  When Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, after eleven years of founding many Alexandrias throughout the greatest empire then known, the first Ptolemy was just one of the Macedonian generals. He was also the son of Alexander’s father’s mistress. He had a nose like the beak of an eagle.

  He also showed himself to be eagle-eyed. With Alexander dead he saw the main chance and grabbed it. If Egypt was to become his personal inheritance, he needed some proof that this was the will of the gods, the fates, the dead king himself or whatever else had wishes which might help him. Like a master conjuror, he seized what he said was Alexander’s body – and then he brought it to the city that he said was his share of the spoils. It was a spectacular coup.

  Alexander had predicted an Olympic festival of backstabbing after his death. And so it came about. The generals fought among themselves and Ptolemy was one of the biggest winners. Ptolemy saved himself, saved his Alexandria (who now remembers any of the other Alexandrias?) and saved a civilisation too. Did he genuinely save Alexander’s body? Maybe. But whatever the body in the casket, it was a magnificent symbol of power.

  Many came here to see it. Some say that it might now be in St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, Alexandria’s most revered bones being mistaken in 828 for those of St Mark himself, taken away when the Venetians thought that they were getting the relics of their favourite evangelist. Alexander’s tomb has long been sought here as though it were the Holy Grail. It has never been found except by fraudsters of various faiths and none.

  When Ptolemy placed his eagle-standard in Alexandria he won himself an extraordinary prize. Egypt may not have been as wealthy in the fourth century BC as a thousand years before; but it was a miraculously constant generator of wealth. Those who measured the flood waters were the first bureaucrats to be able to predict accurately what tax they could expect the next year. Little was more important than that.

  No conqueror could carry away the power of the Nile to fertilise and feed. None could destroy the faith of the people in the gods they held responsible for their magic river and the Pharaoh who was the living embodiment of those gods. In three thousand years there had been wars and invasion but also a stability exorbitant in length and scale that allowed the building of monuments, unmatched before or since, to prove just how exceptional it had been. Egyptian rulers had sometimes held sway far beyond Egypt’s borders. To be king here meant much more than being a king of Egypt alone. But the Nile was always the spine that supported the whole.

  Ptolemy’s son and successor, Ptolemy II, was obsessive in concentrating the written wisdom of the Greek world alongside that of the Egyptian ancients. He brought books and writers to a library that would in one place, his own place, be there to answer every question that could ever be asked. This Ptolemy Philadelphus, the brotherly lover, developed a long Alexandrian marriage between learning acquired elsewhere and a people who classified that learning. He sought the secrets of medicine and encouraged doctors who dissected the living and the dead.

  Experimental science did not follow as future historians thought it could and should have done. The second Ptolemy did not find as many deep thinkers as he found exploiters and showmen. Perhaps he did not seek them. He did not build pyramids. He did set new standards for the organisation of knowledge and theatrical illusion. When he commanded a street carnival, one of the floats was a wine skin made from thousands of dead leopards, 30,000 gallons of wine, drawn by 600 men, with drinking fountains at the sides for those who walked and watched. Or that was how his sycophantic fantasists wanted it to seem.

  Ptolemy III, Euergetes, the Good-doer, was most famed for his queen, Berenice, whose first husband had been his mother’s lover. When a lock of her hair disappeared from an altar, the librarian and poet Callimachus dutifully found it in the stars, noting in his verse the neatly coiffed shape of the new constellation in the sky and how, down on earth, the sun set over a favourite obelisk.

  Century by century one Ptolemy dissolved into another, marrying and murdering, taxing and exempting from tax, as dynasts do. An emergency tax deal between Ptolemy V, Epiphanes, Man of Light, and the priests of Memphis became the text of what we call the Rosetta Stone, one of many concessions, like Cleopatra’s gines
tho decree, aimed at buying support, maintaining calm, spreading happiness and discouraging insurrection.

  The Ptolemies of Alexandria sponsored poetry but not poetry that changed politics. They preferred revolutionary Greek examples from the past. Fifth-century Athens was famed for tragedy, sixth-century Lesbos for poets. Alcaeus of Lesbos had famously rallied his fellow islanders with ‘nun kre methusthen” (‘now is the time for drinking’) when an especially hated autocrat was ejected from power in the town of Mytilene.

  This Alcaeus wrote poems of love and alcohol, seabirds and the sea. He also coined the phrase ‘ship of state’ and worked to influence the direction in which it sailed. Not much of his work has survived as he wrote it; much more has survived in imitation. Cleopatra ruled a library where there was very much more Alcaeus, a massive presence from the past, massively influencing art while making the minimum difference to life.

  The political story became one of decline. The Greek Pharaohs paid mercenaries to fight their neighbours’ armies. Ptolemy VIII, a second self-styled Good-doer, became best known for trying to make elephants drunk enough to trample on Jews, for killing his sister’s son on his wedding night and for the diaphanous gowns on his famously fat body. Ptolemy X – or maybe it was Ptolemy XI, the ‘scarlet bastard’ – needed to meet a temporary shortage of cash to pay his creditors and melted down the golden coffin of Alexander the Great, making the relic just a little less attractive to future looters.

  Soon Alexander’s body, the soma of the city, even the pretence that it was there, had gone. The founder became merely a sema in Greek, the city’s sign, a vowel shift of ‘o’ to ‘e’, a shift of meaning to something merely semantic, a sign that would survive only in the pages of library books. Few thought that Alexander himself would have disapproved – or done any differently with so precious a casket. A favourable place in history is not the prime aim of a king when creditors, claimants and killers loom. This bankrupt Ptolemy was the only Greek before Cleopatra’s ginestho appeared whose handwriting had survived. Erroso was his message to posterity; take care, he wrote.

  Socratis’s driver emerges from the basement, with his yellow jacket over his arm, sweating nonetheless. The Tourist Police follow, one shaking out his arms as though after exercise, the other checking the state of his fists. The dog comes last, unchanged by whatever exertions have taken place down below. I want to ask Socratis what has been going on but he is still not here. He surely cannot be far away. Having waited so long, I can wait a little longer. Mr W’s tour of ancient Alexandria is almost complete.

  So consider the last Ptolemy. Mr W always wanted matters to be ‘considered’. It was one his favourite words.

  After a century and half of decline, Cleopatra’s Fluteplayer father ruled an empire that had lost territory to east and west but he could pretend that this was not so. Pretence was his reality. When marrying off his daughters, he consigned his eldest to a man who pretended to be the heir to the Syrian throne and, when that failed, to a chancer who said he was the son of another king. And yet in the sixties BC, through dynastic manipulations and the carefully managed support of Egypt’s ancient priesthoods, he could still gamble the country’s riches – and its debts – on his staying in command.

  Like all rulers of Egypt for the past millennium, he had no great army of his own. Roman power was encroaching on all sides. But the Romans seemed happy enough to accept payment for protection. To find a way to link the boundless Roman ambition with the more modest, but still significant, ambition of the Ptolemies was a reasonable way forward. That was the policy of Cleopatra’s father in the year of her birth and the twelfth year of his rule – and no one has ever realistically suggested that he had an alternative.

  Mr W thought that judgement and realism were two of the greatest gifts that classical study could impart to his pupils. Ptolemy XII was not a master of government, by any standard then or now, but it did not benefit students to look at beacons of virtue alone or even, when Mr W was at his most frank, to study them at all.

  The two most important words in Greek prose were men and de, ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’. It was impossible to write the first language of thought without these words. There were always two sides. Worship of a single purity, he said, produced the purest trouble. Chance governed all. Virtue was occasionally rewarded, more often not. Religion was risible. Purity was confusing as well as perilous for the young. Fabricated purity (and was there really any other kind?) was worse. Democracy was a delusion. Showmanship, pragmatism and shallow thought were the dancing partners of our time.

  That was the W doctrine. It was useful for schoolboys to look at figures in ancient landscapes as murky as our own. We might only then turn our attention to current questions of politics. It was a shame that Harold Macmillan had gone. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was not perhaps the ideal Conservative Prime Minister for the coming election. Mr Quintin Hogg would have been a better choice. But a Labour victory would ruin everything. Those local hooligans who had painted ‘Tories Must Go’ on the Queen’s Building’s bright new brickwork were wholly wrong. The headmaster had been quite right to offer junior boys 6d per letter for scraping the offensive words away as fast as possible. Mr Harold Wilson was the sort of socialist who might end Greek and Roman history for ever if the country was foolish enough to give him a chance.

  At home, all talk of politics was banned. Politics suggested choices and there were really no choices. On the Rothmans estate the power of reason would always prevail. I tried the choice between Alexandrians and Athenians but that distinction, to my father, was especially foolish. Evil bastards would appear anywhere from time to time. He and his new colleagues would make the missiles and the anti-missiles that, by mathematical certainties, would deter them. That was all the truth that was required. And that was when, accurately but quite unfairly, I started calling him an arms salesman.

  5.1.11

  The Roman Theatre, Sharia Yousef

  My mother much approved of my father’s advancement from laboratory bench to office desk, from designer of radars to seller of them. This was promotion. He was making more money. He was distinguishing himself (and therefore her and us) still further from the technicians and factory workers in the lower reaches of the Rothmans estate. An arms salesman was more like a bank manager. We were approaching closer to the status of Maurice’s family and leaving behind V and the Noakes Avenue neighbours.

  Maurice and I were both at Brentwood. V was at the Chelmsford High School. Even if there had been a free Brentwood School for girls (which there was not) she would not have been there. That was a disappointment to me but not to my mother, who said she ‘dressed like a shop girl’. Her mother ‘talked too much’ and her father (she had heard this from a man playing bridge) had ‘a Ford Popular mind’. A Rover mind was good. A Rolls-Royce mind was the best. It was very common on the Rothman’s estate to liken minds to cars.

  This morning I am alone at the Roman Theatre, one of the main targets on my tourist map, only fifty yards from the Dead Fountain cafe but hidden from it behind a beehive of bustling security police and soldiers. When he left me here, Socratis said that it would be a quiet, safe and ‘inspiring’ place for me to write about Cleopatra. I was not in a mood to argue. His driver, unusually, was nowhere to be seen. I wanted to ask what had happened in the cafe basement yesterday. But I did not.

  Cleopatra herself never saw this theatre, a tight semi-oval of sixteen rows of stone, one of the type known as an ‘odeon’, more a small concert hall or council chamber than a place for plays. It is the only one if its kind in Egypt and a tiny reminder of Rome’s architectural legacy to Alexandria, probably a gift to the city in around 200 AD from Septimius Severus, the first African emperor of Rome. Severus was born in Libya, a permanent traveller and one of the most assiduous emperors in attempting to understand the British. In his theatre today, in a cheerful kind of homage, two young sisters from the north of England are making the best of a surreptitious picnic. Perhaps they h
ad been promised a winter beach holiday by parents who had not asked sufficient questions of the travel agent. One girl kicks a plastic bottle. The other dips a paper plate in a puddle of rainwater and tears it to pieces with her hands.

  This odeon is now a theatre within a theatre, one antiquity within another. The highest seats are where the divers in the eastern harbour have brought some of the newly discovered statues and ornaments that were once a part of Cleopatra’s city. These pharaohs and sphinxes, their features worn by so many centuries under the sea, now sit on the edge of the outer theatre, as though watching the watchers below, all of us in permanent rehearsal. I can sit here between them.

  There is an eyeless granite globe, with no definition left beyond what a large bird might leave on soft clay, but shaped unmistakably as a head. Beside it sits a second mass that might be a man, with deep eye-sockets and the extremities of a lip. On one side of these is the upper body of a woman, tightly waisted, with full breasts held by rounded lines of drapery; and on the other a torso, no more than the shape of a giant bone, the knuckle where the legs might part.

  These discoveries are often seen as declining figures, feasts for nostalgia, their faces a flat shadow of their past. But that is not the only way to see them. They can also be about to come alive, taut as though holding their breath, palpably present in the furthest rows from the stage. It is as if they have not yet been carved, their eyes still in the mind of the sculptor, their clearer future still to come. These are images that have not been imagined yet. In our own theatres we might also say that they were seated in ‘the gods’.

  V was once the only person who knew about me and Cleopatra. In the pitted paper of my rough-book pages, there is a picture of her as some sort of recognition of that fact – or rather interrupted parts of her, black parallel lines representing hair, belt and patent shoes. She looks respectable, restrained, albeit in slices. Maybe her black skirt was too short for my mother’s taste, her hair too fringed, her belt and shoes too shiny. She was a year older than I was, an important year older. A search of old photographs revealed just one of us both together, aged about eight or nine, me behind the ears of a rocking horse more suited for a much younger child, her on the grass behind. The whole image, framed by a white border like a mosaic tile, was barely three square inches. My hair stood up like a brush. Hers fell down over her nose.