Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (13 page)

If I had bought it, I could be looking at it now, instead of the high bare walls of Room 114 and its low-hung souvenirs of
Venice. Instead, I said I would think about it.

CLEOPATRA THE FOURTH

It was a mild afternoon in the autumn of 1969, at a table on a long lawn beside the stunted remains of what the college guidebook
called ‘the lime tree walk’. In my second week as a student everything seemed peculiarly perfect. The lawn was dotted with
other students reading and writing at tables. We are all warily watching one another, still seeing and being seen. This was
surely the place for Cleopatra. I had already written eighty-five words – and counted each one. The lime trees were like a
line of sphinxes, triumphal in their Oxford way, although less regular and more battered than Alexandrian remains. Doubtless
there would be other inspirations in my new home.

I had not chosen Trinity College with any care. The headmaster of Brentwood had offered me, as he put it, because I had ‘shewn
real gifts as a classic despite being not good at ball games’. Somehow it was all the better for that. I was here by chance,
the best way to be anywhere. I could do whatever I wanted to do. The school had also proposed Maurice as ‘a promising actor’
who was not good at ball games either. That was how things happened then. Trinity had accepted both offers. So had we.

V had preferred to go to Sussex, Essex, Bristol or elsewhere, following the fashionable view that Oxford and Cambridge were
tired
and old. Maurice was not disappointed. To him she was a nag and a nuisance. Neither of us was quite sure which campus she
had chosen. Nor, at this time of abandoning the past as fast as it possibly could be abandoned, did we worry about it.

Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

It is 6.00 a.m. Socratis is coming in three hours’ time. He has a plan that is too complicated to explain. ‘You will like
it,’ his message says. Maybe I will. He will suggest some kind of tour, I think, maybe to meet his mother, more likely to
show off his car.

These are strange days. This time in Alexandria is not what I thought it would be. I never intended to write so much here
about my own life. I came with a promise to write about Cleopatra. Instead I am selecting my own memories of past promises
to write about Cleopatra.

But I do select every memory by how much it connects to those promises. It seems random. But there is a reason, a pattern
and, in the end maybe, a picture too.

When V made her first Oxford visit, she missed me and left only a message at the porter’s lodge. On the back of a college
map of the city’s streets were her exclamation marks, expletives and what, to an optimist, might have been the mark of a kiss.

I had never kissed her at school. We had not been that sort of friends. Did I want to kiss her now that we had both moved
on? Maybe I did. Any prospect of that, however, seemed poor. Her wording was as direct and dismissive as she had ever been:
See you sometime! Who do you stars-and-dashes think you are? Does this place think it is the centre of the world?

Maybe the porters had not been polite. Maybe she had come deliberately to have her prejudices confirmed. A map which, on one
side, showed Oxford at the midpoint of England and, on the other, showed Trinity as the midpoint of Oxford might have fanned
the resentment she had already shown.

This is the first of my two maps on the ill-lit bedspread of Room 114. The four quadrangles of Trinity are certainly prominent
at its centre. Not everyone would have thought this self-aggrandising or odd. In our Brentwood geography rooms an old pink
England had always stood in the central place occupied by Jerusalem in the maps from the school Bible. For map-makers – and
even more so for those commissioning maps – the centre has always been wherever one wants it to be, often where one is standing
oneself.

Outwards and beyond there are the dreaming spires. There is the River Isis, the name of the Thames as it drifts past the city
boundaries, and of Cleopatra’s patron deity too. Traditional? Yes. Offensive? I did not think so. The map shows also what
were then my most useful surroundings, Blackwell’s bookshop, the Bodleian Library, the King’s Arms, the roads from the station
that lead to Trinity, to its ragged line of lime trees and the statues of Theology, Astronomy, Geometry and Medicine that
look down from the college tower.

This map is a memoir of a kind. It is with me because it stimulates a certain sort of memory. It reminds me of the people,
the sherried, the champagned and my more quietly drugged friends, the white-tied, the flower-haired, the cannabis-smokers
who wanted to be hippies, the cannabis-smokers who just wanted to smoke, the tweed-jacketed and the oily-jeaned, the black-bereted
and the twin-setted, the Left, the Right and the merely languid. But forty years ago it was only a map. It was never meant
to mean anything more.

The second map on the hotel bed shows the southern flank of the Roman Mediterranean in the first century
BC
– from Mauretania, where Morocco today stares north to Spain, through Numidia and Africa, shared now by Algeria and Tunisia,
to Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the two halves of Libya, and finally Aegyptus. It is torn from a textbook. It shows abandoned
towns, temples to Isis and other gods, and is designed to help the writers of history essays. Cleopatra would never have seen
such a map, or a street map either, or used one to fight a war or find a city or a way through a city. That was not what maps
then were for. They were political statements, claims of power and ownership, pictures to provoke, just as V had been provoked.

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 but 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.