Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Page 8

  That rocking horse park was where we most often met. Occasionally I visited her house. It was full of model roundabouts that her father made from balsa wood, low tables filled with soft, smooth cars and windmills twirling from meat skewers. I was not invited in far. Though scholarly in spirit, she preferred a solidarity with those she perceived as her fellows, fifteen-year-olds in general, fifteen-year-old girls in particular, those whose parents were more political than mine, were aligned a little with the Left, and could never be described as arms sellers.

  Cleopatra was a piece of common ground. V’s heroines were Virginia Woolf and the Pankhursts. She admired female struggle. This was 1964. My Egyptian queen could have been a good example, she said, if her storytellers had not been obsessed by sex and fashion shows. The custom of inbreeding brothers and sisters, whatever its social and genetic drawbacks, was excellent for gender equality. What did I think about that?

  And how had Cleopatra spent her teenage years? Did I not know? I should find out. If I did not want to know how she had spent the years that we ourselves were living through, what was the point of studying a life at all?

  There was no kind of answer in the new film, she said suddenly and coldly one day. Elizabeth Taylor was much too old. V knew about films when I knew only the stories for films. At Chelmsford County High School she already belonged to a more social set than that to which a young Brentwoodian might belong, citing from time to time the opinions of university students, boys who had jobs, men who rode in cars and paid for drinks in pubs.

  She had seen Cleopatra in London quite a few months ago, she said, but would be happy to see it again with me in tow, making her point as though this were a rare generosity. In the meantime I could trust her that it did not include the queen’s teenage years. There the conversation, like so many of the ones we had, abruptly ended.

  When Cleopatra was ten, her father lost his job. Even kings could lose their jobs, particularly kings who had a family like the Ptolemies. In 59 BC there was a palace coup and her elder sister, Berenice, was suddenly the Queen of Egypt. Ptolemy XII was suddenly no more than a former monarch, one whose only hope of restoration was help from Rome, from foreign generals, Pompey, Julius Caesar and their various surrogates and rivals.

  So late in 58 BC, when Cleopatra was eleven, the ex-king travelled to Rome, via Rhodes and Athens, to plead his case. There is a commemorative inscription from Athens that mentions a daughter travelling with him, imperfect evidence that Cleopatra accompanied her father on his trip but enough for me now.

  Berenice’s rival Alexandrians swarmed on Rome at the same time. Their task was to profess the superior loyalty and generosity of the new monarch, poisoning the reputation of the old and promising stability, the word which in Greco–Egyptian meant commonly the liquidation of junior alternatives. The fate of Cleopatra herself was at high risk – but less so in Rome perhaps than in the basements back home.

  Cleopatra did not speak Latin but she had already proved herself a student. She was an asset for her father, a healthy young heir for presentation to bankers and other sceptics. Neither of the Alexandrian factions had an easy case to make in Rome. How Egypt should best be ruled was a topic on which many Romans held a view, not merely a matter of how much wealth could be stolen for the Republic but which of the Republican leaders should steal it. The treasure was colossal. But for ambitious generals such as Pompey and Caesar, themselves nearing the brink of civil war, it was much worse that their rival scoop the prize than that the prize stay in Ptolemaic hands.

  There was little sentimentality at Rome over any particular Egyptian monarch, merely a preference that, if the king were to be replaced by a queen, the switch should be made with Roman consent. At first Ptolemy struggled. He had less money. His Egyptian enemies dined and bribed on a massive scale. It took almost a year – of incurring debts and making promises, of troublesome oracles and other inducements unknown – for Ptolemy to win his argument and be promised a Roman army that would put him back in power.

  What would Rome have looked like to an Egyptian princess? Familiar? Yes. Unfamiliar? Also yes. A foreign city then was like a past city now. To travel is to see what is the same and what is different. The study of ancient history is a never-ending negotiation between what has never changed and what has changed utterly. We are not looking at parallels between old and new, always deceptive, always false. We are looking into the space between the lines.

  In 58 BC Rome was larger than Alexandria, but it was not as grand. Romans paid much less tax than Alexandrians and were much less governed. Rome had no army of bureaucrats, merely armies that rifled the treasuries of others. The Roman constitution allowed dictators but not permanent dictators.

  Rome was also becoming much more like Alexandria than later Romans liked to think. Egypt was becoming fashionable around the Roman Forum. The fastest-growing city in the Mediterranean, whose ground plan was already being ripped apart by the competitive instincts of Pompey and Caesar, was at the beginning of a cultural thrall to the power that was in decline.

  Fewer Roman houses displayed marble or the most obvious luxury of Alexandria. But the piles of varyingly veined and coloured stones awaiting erection suggested that this would soon change. There were new statues of gods in gold and ivory, making the older ones look their age. Some of Rome’s finest houses were decorated with scenes of the Nile. Crocodiles and hippos gaped alongside crested cranes and cobra.

  Isis, Cleopatra’s personal goddess within the pantheon of Egypt, was so fashionable that she was a political issue. Should she or should she not be banned? There was a new Senate order to dismantle the shrine of Isis on the Capitol. Amid the clatter of masons constructing and reconstructing memorials to military triumph, there was also some serious damage to Egyptian religious rites. But the bar on Isis worship, like most senatorial attempts to change personal behaviour, was inconsistent. From Cleopatra’s personal perspective Egypt was, at least, what everyone was talking about.

  Some of Rome’s religion was wholly alien to an Alexandrian. Worshippers were allowed in the most intimate parts of the temples, places where only the Egyptian elite ever entered. There was a peculiar reverence for Vestal Virgins and no one seemed to believe in the afterlife. But her Isis cult was ubiquitous. Cleopatra’s goddess was twinned here with Fate and Fortune. She had a sanctuary at the foot of Rome’s most south-easterly hill, protected there by present aristocrats, patronised by dead dictators, threatened by ranting demagogues who would come to regret their prejudice.

  Egyptian wheat was the source of Roman bread. Egypt’s doctors cured Roman ills. They had the benefit of Alexandrian curiosity and a readiness to cut up the living as well as the dead. Gynaecology was great among their arts. They knew how the womb worked and where its blood vessels lay. The library at Alexandria was a storehouse of medical facts observed by eye, written on papyrus and passed on to succeeding generations and the doctors of successor powers.

  Some of these things V and I knew in 1967. Most of them we did not know. Human vivisection was a fascination only for a fellow Brentwoodian whom Maurice called Frog. There were so many things waiting in books. Some were facts about facts, facts from the history of scholarship, things that could be learnt about learning. Both for Rome and for Egypt the ‘teenage years’ were a momentous time. V loved the idea that Cleopatra had a front-row seat at so extraordinary a show. She wanted to know how this Roman holiday affected the rest of her life. With the blissful solipsism of youth, there was no more important part of the story for my friend. This, she said boldly, was the early sight of politics that made a politician of a queen.

  V had heard terrible stories of things that went on at Brentwood, brutality on a heroic scale that in her mind amounted almost to vivisection itself, things that among her girlfriends were mentioned only in whispers. She disapproved of schools with a hundred football pitches and ponds. Why were they allowed to seek out suitable boys for miles around and have them educated into the service of a decaying empire at pub
lic expense? Prime Minister Wilson would soon put a stop to this ‘direct grant’ system, she said, just as Mr Nasser had done his own bit to bring Britain to reality. Almost a decade after Suez, or so her mother told me, the British were still asking what minor power meant when the Americans held all the power. It was that same Cleopatra question from Rome 58 BC.

  V occasionally came to Brentwood on a Saturday afternoon. This was permitted on designated dates. I have notes of a few of them still in my 1967 diary. Each time she seemed surprised that I was still alive. Was I keeping an eye on other old Rothmans friends? How was that witty boy with thick round glasses, Maurice, the one whose insults made her laugh?

  She routinely listed names and, when I could not give a positive reply, pursed her lips as though to say that they had surely disappeared into hell. Her girlfriends knew of boys who had gone there (there was a resounding stress on the word ‘gone’) who spent their nights in boxes, boys who had to clean lavatories with toothbrushes and play all the roles of girls since there were no girls there.

  Those were boarders, I said, members of a wholly different world from that of the boys bussed in only for the days. Well, Maurice is a boarder, she said. How was he? I was not always sure. I was surprised that she cared. V was an older girl from Noakes Avenue. We were younger boys, Maurice from the big houses in the fields and I from the middle ground. We had been in the same junior school. That was all.

  She was impressed, however, by Brentwood’s Bean Library. This was the one reason, she thought, why a sixteen-year-old boy might reasonably spend three hours each day on a trunk road instead of going to the best school nearby like everyone else. We met there from time to time, normally on the occasion of a football match when sisterly support was approved.

  The Bean, she said, was like a perfumery that she had once visited with her mother in London. It smelt of spice and leather and beneath a polished-wood barrel roof stood rectangular tables and open shelves through which we could see who was selecting books on the other side. It was this arrangement of shining surfaces that explains my peculiar picture of her in the rough-book, a drawing of black feet on tiptoes, a space and then a pale knee below a dark hem, another space and then a belt of black leather, more books and then a necklace with a single stone.

  The Bean Library was home to a society where we discussed the 1964 general election and the appearance in Brentwood of Mr W’s lost Tory saviour, Quintin Hogg himself, ringing his hand-bell to warn us that if we elected Mr Wilson we would soon all be wringing our hands. When voting time came, Brentwood heeded this warning and returned a Conservative to Westminster as was its wont. But the country at large did not. Sir Alec returned to his Scottish coalmines and grouse moors and the only Douglas-Home of which anyone in the Bean Library needed to take note was his brother William whose comedy, The Chiltern Hundreds, about a butler who campaigns to be a Tory MP when his master has defected to Labour, had been selected as our school play. V preferred the election result to the play. I did not care much for either.

  One night I brought home one of Mr W’s red Latin Loeb editions to set alongside my grandfather’s Aeneid, books 7–12. My father commented that one advantage of the classics was how little of it had survived. He meant that there was so little of the ancient world to study, compared, for example, with the infinite possibilities of his shooting range over the sea and skies. Just one look at the Bean Library Loeb shelf showed how wrong that was. The classical landscape was vast. There were Latin texts in red and Greek in green, hundreds and hundreds of books. There was poetry, history and drama but also the Elements of Euclid, Ptolemy I’s prized mathematician, my father’s only good Greek.

  Sometimes in the Latin books there were short passages, sometimes long passages, suddenly rendered into Greek. To read the forbidden parts of Latin poems it was essential to know Greek. To read about sodomy or cock-sucking or how Greek queens excited themselves with geese, a boy needed to know Greek well, or to know another boy who knew Greek well. Even among these school books there was an intimidating infinity of Greek and Latin as boundless as the deserts and fields of Egypt and Essex.

  The Bean Library was where the rough-book was written, where Cleopatra the Second began. Without it there would not be an eighth attempt now in the theatre of Septimius Severus under the flat gaze of unfinished gods.

  The tourist site is almost empty now. It is close to closing time in the rain. There are only two places in which to stay dry, a postcard hut by the entrance selling Tutankhamuns and, a hundred yards to the east, a glass-covered Roman house called the Villa of the Birds.

  The choice of postcards is peculiar. All of them celebrate a child pharaoh from the desert south who never came to the Mediterranean, whose name not even Cleopatra knew, the heir to a father who preached the heresy that there was only one god and whose memory had already, in the first century BC, been expunged from history for more than a thousand years. There is nothing Alexandrian about Tutankhamun.

  The second shelter is for vivid mosaics of peacocks, ducks and doves made by Alexandrians for Romans, portraits in coloured stone of birds that still fly and swim here. There are no postcards of the birds. The archaeological authorities – and their political masters – do not like their Greek and Roman past. They much prefer to be the heirs to pharaohs.

  Now that the clouds have cleared, it is an hour till closing time on Sharia Yousef, the time that Socratis promised that Mahmoud would come, the time to discuss plans for tomorrow. The picnickers have gone. The shadows from the grey-green columns are sweeping like second hands across the sunset face of the stage.

  What most amazed V was the competition at Brentwood to know things, the ancient and the modern, or to know some of them, or to seem to know some of them. There were weekly ‘form-orders’ for every form, league tables of individual performance in every task on every day. Competition was considered character-forming, competition in Latin and Greek especially so. There were rankings for rugby and cricket and running, but also for the collection of cold-weather data and the sale of tickets for raffles and The Chiltern Hundreds. There were contests in writing accounts of the death of kings for Greenwood, the school magazine. My Cleopatra was unplaced but my Mary Queen of Scots was a winner, the first words of mine ever put on view beyond the box room overlooking the Essex clay.

  Everyone had a position in an order and, while in theory this could change with every test and examination, in practice it was noticeable how little it changed. The top seemed always to be on top. The best footballers were the best cricketers too – and the best runners once full athletics training was under way. When the lowest were raised to the highest, and the highest returned to the bottom of the pile, as happened once a year in the dining rooms on ‘Saturnalia day’, the result was felt more deeply than any act of religion. The sight of the headmaster carrying warm carrots and the second-formers being served by the sixth was our most self-conscious borrowing from ancient Rome. Borrowing seems too weak a word for what it was like for the orders to be briefly subverted, the lowest divisions elevated to the school heights.

  Division was the daily business of life. There were boundaries between the aesthetes and the Combined Cadet Force, between the boys who mocked Mr G for mispronouncing Himalayas and those who feared his hosepipe, between those who fenced for England and those who fenced pornography, between those to whom the headmaster might read Achilles Tatius and those to whom he never would. And there was always our classical divide between the Greeks and the Germans.

  When Mr W shouted ‘Get out, you Huns’ at the half of a class who had chosen to study German rather than Greek, it was just an ordinary day. He used this command before every lesson, sitting up on his stool behind his high desk and waving a white-chalked duster at the retreating modern linguists as though it were a talisman against their evil spirits. The regularity of the words brought equally regular results. When the master had spoken from his perch, it was as though a new queen bee had come of age within a swarm. The thirty-strong th
ird-form class divided into two equal clouds. The Huns clattered and clanged over their bags and books to reach safety. The Hellenes, as we remainders were known, poked them on their way with pencils and rulers.

  The noise of wood and flesh and metal was immense. There was more clanging than would be heard today because polio was still a potent scourge and iron leg-callipers an all too audible reminder of it. The mere clattering was the sound of boy-meets-desk at all ages and times. The peace, when the clouds had parted, was W-heaven. Once the Huns had given up their ground, we could shuffle to the front of the room, fill up the empty spaces and open our slim, brown-cloth-backed copies of Euripides’ Rhesus, a Trojan War play about spies and horse-thieves which may not have been by Euripides at all.

  This was an introduction to scepticism as well as to tragedy. The high-spending librarians of the Ptolemies attracted fakes as well as treasures. Our Rhesus was of dubious authenticity, we were told. But, for reasons that were never clear, availability in school stocks, perversity in the character of Mr W, simplicity in much of its language, we seemed always to be reading it. The drama was set at night outside Troy. A matching murky blackness filled our minds but at least we effete scholastics were safe for a while from the Huns.

  Mr W had no genuine prejudice against those who chose German. He did have an ill-concealed contempt for the Combined Cadet Force, whose business was rerunning the last war and in whose ranks every pupil, even his own, had to march on Thursday afternoons. But a jocular anti-German approach was fine.