Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (33 page)

On the other side, with the wealth of the barbarian world and warriors in all kinds of different armour, came Antony … With him sailed Egypt and the power of the East from as far as distant Bactria, and there bringing up the rear was the greatest outrage of all, his Egyptian wife! … The queen summoned her warships by rattling her Egyptian timbrels – she was not yet seeing the two snakes there at her back – while Anubis barked and all manner of monstrous gods levelled their weapons at Neptune and Venus and Minerva.
³

Faced with such a glorious image, Virgil’s readers might perhaps forget just how weak Octavian’s military record actually was.

The subversive Augustan poet Sextus Propertius writes longingly of his feisty mistress Cynthia. He, like Mark Antony, has been ensnared and to a certain extent emasculated by a powerful woman, and he is not afraid of admitting it. Answering the question, ‘Why do you wonder if a woman controls my life?’ he lists examples of famous, unnaturally dominating women, including the Amazon Penthesilea, Omphale, queen of Lydia, Semiramis and, of course, Cleopatra, ‘the whore queen of Canopus’. Later he provides a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tribute to Octavian and the battle of Actium. Clearly Propertius is aware of the irony of a Roman man celebrating a great victory over a mere woman, but, like Virgil before him, he sensibly sees no need to labour this delicate point.
⁴
In this he is joined by his contemporary Horace, who is happy to reduce Cleopatra to the status of a madwoman drunk on power, yet who also gives a surprisingly sympathetic account of her death: ‘fiercer she was in the death she chose, as though she did not wish to cease being queen’.
⁵
By restoring some of Cleopatra’s dignity, Horace actually makes her a more credible and worthy foe for Octavian.

Rome’s historians, writing later than the poets, preserve a more rounded impression of Cleopatra. She is seductive and unnatural, yes, but we also catch glimpses of an educated, even intelligent woman. But history, in Rome, was not the strict discipline that it is (or should be) today. Sparse historical ‘facts’ were woven into a coherent narrative with large helpings of personal opinion and guesswork. Stories were selected in order to make a moral or political point. And, of course, the Roman historians concentrated on Cleopatra’s interaction with the Roman world while ignoring her life in Egypt. The two most influential of Cleopatra’s ‘biographers’ are Plutarch and Dio; from their works come the Cleopatras described by later classical authors. The Roman writer Suetonius (
The Divine Julius
and
The Divine Augustus
) and the somewhat unreliable Alexandrian Greek Appian (
The Civil Wars
) add further to Cleopatra’s tale.

Maestrius Plutarchus (Plutarch), a Greek from Chaironeia in Boeotia, wrote his
Parallel Lives
in
c
.
AD
100, using the not always successful device of ‘parallels’ to allow a comparison between the moral strengths and weaknesses of his Greek and Roman subjects. Among those he studied were Pompey the Great (paired with the Spartan king Agesilaus), Julius Caesar (paired with Alexander the Great) and Mark Antony (paired with Demetrios Poliorcetes of Macedon, son of Antigonos ‘the One-Eyed’). Cleopatra’s story was, of necessity, interwoven with theirs. Although it is claimed that Plutarch had access to the memoirs (now lost) of Cleopatra’s physician Olympus, and that his grandfather had a friend who knew Cleopatra’s cook, his sources remain hidden. His methodology, however, is made clear from the outset:

… it is not histories that I am writing, but lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities. Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.
⁶

The
Lives
were popular with Plutarch’s fellow Romans, and popular again in medieval times and the Renaissance, when they inspired a whole host of authors and artists. Plutarch’s Cleopatra is a confusing creature; he seems unable to make up his mind whether she is essentially good or essentially bad, although he is certain that she is manipulative, and that she has been the ruin of at least one good Roman.

The Greek historian and Roman senator Cassius Dio Cocceianus wrote his highly readable, action-packed eighty-volume
Roman History
in the years between
AD
200 and 222. He tells us that he spent a decade researching his magnum opus, and that he consulted all the important references. These, most unfortunately, go unnamed, but almost certainly included the works of the historians Livy and Polybius. Cleopatra’s story stretches from Book 42 – Julius Caesar in Egypt – to her suicide in Book 51. Dio’s Cleopatra is an erotically powerful, manipulative woman with a fatal allure. Naturally, Antony is unable to resist her. The two deaths are followed by a brief but damning character assessment. Antony is a contradiction: brave yet foolish, both generous and harsh, ‘characterised equally by greatness of soul and by servility of mind’, while Cleopatra:

… was of insatiable passion and insatiable avarice; she was swayed often by laudable ambition, but overweening effrontery. By love she gained the title Queen of the Egyptians, and when she hoped by the same means to win also that of Queen of the Romans, she failed of this, and lost the other besides. She captivated the two greatest Romans of her day, and because of the third she destroyed herself.
⁷

Plutarch and Dio were non-Roman by birth, yet they were happy to transmit the official Roman worldview. The historian Josephus, or Joseph son of Matthias (
c
.
AD
37–100), had a Jewish education and saw things from a slightly different perspective. Josephus had stood against the Romans in the Jewish–Roman war of
AD
66–73. Having failed to commit suicide with his fellow soldiers, he was captured by Vespasian’s forces and changed his allegiance. Now a loyal Roman citizen, Titus Flavius Josephus settled in Rome, where, in receipt of generous public funds, he published a series of works, each intent on proving that he was both a good Roman and a good Jew. His two-volume
Against Apion
was published in response to an anti-Jewish outburst by the Greek grammarian Apion of Alexandria. Book 2 includes a highly idiosyncratic outline of Ptolemaic history that, of course, includes an unflattering portrait of Cleopatra, who, in Josephus’s eyes, commits the double offence of being both anti-Roman and anti-Jewish:

… This man [Apion] also makes mention of Cleopatra, the last queen of Alexandria, and abuses us, [the Jews], because she was ungrateful to us; whereas he ought to have reproved her, who indulged herself with all kinds of injustices and wicked practices, both with regard to her nearest relations and husbands who had loved her, and, indeed, in general with regard to all the Romans and those emperors that were her benefactor … she destroyed the gods of her country and the sepulchres of her progenitors, and while she had received her kingdom from the first Caesar, she had the impudence to rebel against his son [Octavian]
…
⁸

In
AD
640 Egypt fell to the Islamic forces led by the Arab general Amr Ibn-al-As. Almost immediately, Muslim Egypt became isolated from
the Christian world. For over a thousand years, until the sixteenth-century Ottoman conquest, western scholars continued to study ancient Egypt second-hand via the only sources available to them: the classical authors and the Bible. Meanwhile, in Egypt, a separate and very different historical tradition was evolving. Medieval Arabic scholars had access to Coptic (Christian), classical, Jewish and Arabic texts, including the Egyptian history written by the seventh-century Coptic Bishop John of Nikiou, which includes a sympathetic account of the good Queen Cleopatra, wife of Julius Caesar.
⁹
Most importantly, they also had first-hand access to the ancient monuments, and to the scholars and storytellers who preserved Egypt’s oral heritage. From this invaluable information the Arab historians were able to develop a parallel understanding of Egypt’s past which included a very different version of Cleopatra from that recognised in the West. The traveller and historian Al-Masudi (died c. 956) introduces us to the eastern Cleopatra, who variously appears as Qilopatra, Kilapatra or Aklaupatr:

… She was a sage, a philosopher, who elevated the ranks of scholars and enjoyed their company. She also wrote books on medicine, charms and cosmetics in addition to many other books ascribed to her which are known to those who practice medicine.
¹⁰

This Cleopatra is the ‘virtuous scholar’ mentioned in
Chapter 1
(pages 32–3): a public benefactor who protects her people and presides over academic seminars, where she displays an impressive knowledge of mathematics, science and philosophy. She is credited with the authorship of a series of books ranging from cosmetics (an important and by no means female-orientated science in Egypt) through gynaecology to coins, weights and measures.

As a detailed account of Cleopatra’s reign, the Arab history is in many ways flawed: Bishop John believed, for example, that Cleopatra built both the Heptastadion linking Pharos to the mainland and the
canal which brought fresh water to Alexandria; others believed that she built the Pharos lighthouse. But looking beneath these specifics, and allowing for the fact that the historians may well have confused the lives of several Ptolemaic queens, plus other scholarly women, it does confirm that the lingering memory of Cleopatra within Egypt was a positive and appreciative one – a memory which focused on her political and administrative achievements rather than her love life. Unfortunately, the works of the Arabic historians, written in Arabic and until recently not widely available in translation, have been to a large extent overlooked by western Egyptologists.

Meanwhile, in the West, the Roman version of Cleopatra continued to evolve, reflecting contemporary images and ideals of womanhood. She became a beauty rather than a monster and, as beauty was unthinkingly equated with goodness, her story became that of an unconventional life redeemed by loyalty to a man. At the same time, her firm association with a snake led to a hazy identification with the Biblical Eve. The Christian Church, of course, forbade suicide. But in a world accustomed to stories of Christian martyrs finding redemption through suffering and death, Cleopatra’s story was an acceptable variant. In 1380 Geoffrey Chaucer included the
legend
of Cleopatra the martyr in his
Legend of Good Women
, and her transformation into a virtuous queen who lived only for the love of a man was complete.

Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
, translated into French by Jacques Amyot (1559), then from the French into English by Sir Thomas North (1579, 1595, 1603), served as the inspiration behind William Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
(
c
. 1600),
Antony and Cleopatra
(c. 1606) and
Coriolanus (c
. 1607). The parallels between Plutarch and
Antony and Cleopatra
are obvious. Plutarch says

…she disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus; the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her self, she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture: and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her …

Shakespeare’s Domitius Enobarbus says

I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that
The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
¹¹

Placing drama and popular appeal above loyalty to his source, Shakespeare dropped some of Plutarch’s disapproval, borrowed slightly from Horace, and allowed his queen to become a genuine heroine ruined by uncontrollable passion. Female rule, in Shakespeare’s day, was seen as neither unnatural nor undesirable, and Shakespeare’s play, written when memory of the reign of Elizabeth I was still vivid, reflects this.
His was by no means the first of the modern Cleopatras, nor would it be the last, but his Cleopatra has had the greatest effect on the public imagination, inspiring a wealth of Cleopatra-themed art: novels, plays, poetry, paintings, sculptures, operas, ballets, songs, tragedies, comedies and epic films. These in turn have inspired a wealth of Egypt-themed marketing, with an anachronistic Cleopatra being used to sell everything from cigarettes to sandals.
¹²