Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (9 page)

Although Pompey was dead, the Roman civil war was far from over and Caesar’s own position was far from secure. The bulk of his army was still stationed in Greece. Nevertheless, he chose to make an extended stay in hostile Alexandria, where, or so he tells us, he soon found himself stranded by adverse northerly winds. This curious decision is nowhere explained. Authors of a romantic disposition have suggested that Caesar lingered in Egypt because of his deep love for Cleopatra, but he had not yet met the queen, who was still camped with her army to the east of Pelusium. It seems instead that Caesar stayed for the most practical of reasons: he wished to tax the wealthy Alexandrians in order to recover some of the money lent by Rabirius to Auletes. Settling in for a long visit, and turning a blind eye to the local resentment, Caesar sent for reinforcements and spent his days writing his memoirs and sightseeing. He was particularly impressed by a visit to the tomb of his great hero Alexander the Great.

Egypt was a land trembling on the brink of civil war. Perhaps Caesar calculated that increased stability would bring increased wealth, and that increased wealth would allow increased taxation. Perhaps he understood that a grateful Egyptian king and/or queen might be of some use to him in the future. Maybe he was simply bored. Whatever his reasoning, Caesar took it upon himself to settle the dispute between Cleopatra and Ptolemy, and he ordered both to appear before him at Alexandria. Ptolemy did as he was bidden, leaving his troops at Pelusium under the command of Achillas. In Alexandria he moved into the palace district with Pothinos, who, acting as a negotiator between the Romans and the Alexandrians, did all he could to foster bad feeling
between the two sides. Thanks to Pothinos, the Romans were fed rotten grain while Ptolemy’s supporters were misfed information, and dined off crude pottery under the mistaken impression that the Romans had confiscated the valuable royal plate. No one was happy and the city was fast approaching boiling point.

Superficially, Ptolemy held all the cards. He had the military support of the Gabinians and the vocal support of the people of Alexandria. He was here, on the spot, in Alexandria. Caesar’s easiest, most obvious option was surely to award him the crown, with Arsinoë replacing her sister as queen. But Cleopatra, too, had something to offer. That she was older and more experienced was obvious: Ptolemy, still only thirteen years old, was controlled by a clique of advisers and had, as yet, made no independent decisions. That she had the support of the native Egyptians was perhaps an irrelevance; far more important was the fact that she could display an impressive track record of loyalty to Rome. If Caesar was hoping to recover Rabirius’s debt, Cleopatra might be inclined to help him. But this was not necessarily an argument that Cleopatra wanted to plead in a public meeting in Alexandria. A preliminary, private meeting with Caesar would better suit her needs.

Cleopatra too set off for Alexandria. With Achillas and his army blocking her route through Pelusium, and Pothinos guarding the harbour at Alexandria, hers was a secret, undignified journey. Abandoning her troops, she was able to slip past Achillas and make her way in a small boat along the coast. She landed in the Palaces district at nightfall. The story of how Cleopatra had herself smuggled into the palace by the Sicilian merchant Apollodorus, who hid her in a bedroll or a bundle of linen sheets, has grown in the telling so that in modern versions of her tale we find Cleopatra being unrolled from an exotic, anachronistic Persian rug to tumble, alluringly dishevelled and breathless, at Caesar’s feet. This is a romantic story that really does not hold up to detailed scrutiny, and it stems in its entirety from the fluent pen of Plutarch. Was this truly the only means by which Cleopatra could
make her way into Caesar’s presence? Having gained the security of the palace, could she not have abandoned her bedroll to make a more conventional entry? It is hard to imagine that Caesar would allow an unknown Sicilian to bring a potentially dangerous package into his suite without having it searched. Was Caesar then expecting Cleopatra’s arrival? Dio tells us that they had already been in correspondence; had Caesar been warned to turn a blind eye to strangers bearing bundles? Or did Cleopatra deliberately plan to arrive as the ultimate gift-wrapped package? Was this in fact a carefully stage-managed production designed to appeal to Caesar’s notoriously susceptible nature? It would certainly be naïve to assume that Cleopatra – whose later history confirms that she shared the Ptolemaic love of elaborate spectacle – was unaware of the impact of her unorthodox arrival. Plutarch for one believed that her entry was well planned:

It was by this device of Cleopatra’s, it is said, that Caesar was first captivated, for she showed herself to be a bold coquette, and succumbing to the charm of further intercourse with her, he reconciled her to her brother …
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What did Caesar see when Apollodorus dropped his bundle and revealed his queen? If we are imagining the scene as described by Plutarch we should probably indulge our wildest fantasies and picture a dark room, flickering torchlight, high stone walls, gilded furniture, a mosaic floor and a dark-haired, olive-skinned young woman dressed in Greek rather than Egyptian garments. Cleopatra is likely to have been short by modern standards and she probably, like almost everyone of her time, suffered from bad teeth. Her coins, unflattering to modern eyes, suggest a prominent nose and chin and a rather thick neck. It is hard for us to be more precise in our imaginings, as we have no real idea what Cleopatra looked like. No contemporary descriptions and few contemporary illustrations have survived.

So much for Cleopatra’s appearance. What did she see when she tumbled from her bedding roll to lie at Caesar’s feet? A man thirty years older than herself. Well built, tall by Roman standards, with dark eyes, a pale, rounded face, receding fair hair and a bad ‘comb-over’: Caesar was notoriously self-conscious about his baldness and insisted that his statues be topped with youthful mops of curly hair. He liked to be well groomed; his biographer, Suetonius, gives us perhaps more information than we would like, telling us:

he was something of a dandy, always keeping his head carefully trimmed and shaved; and has been accused of having certain other hairy parts of his body depilated by tweezers.
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His clothes were the height of fashion: Suetonius mentions wrist-length sleeves with fringes on his striped senatorial robe and a daringly loose belt. Clearly Caesar appreciated luxury. But he was no hedonist. Unusually for a Roman, he drank sparingly, and he ate anything that was put in front of him, seemingly unable to distinguish good food from bad.

Caesar was the supreme celebrity of his age, known by reputation throughout the civilised world. Cleopatra would have understood that she was facing a man with exceptional drive and ambition. An excellent politician, orator and author, a superb horseman, and an extremely successful though by no means infallible general, Caesar was known to be both good-humoured and amusing. And he had a reputation for sexual excess that his legionaries repeated with awe and pride: he was ‘every woman’s man and every man’s woman’.
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Stories of his same-sex alliances are likely to have been greatly exaggerated, although there was a persistent rumour, potentially politically damaging but impossible to quash, that he had enjoyed a youthful fling with King Nicomedes of Bithynia. Cicero certainly believed that there was no smoke without fire:

Caesar was led by Nicomedes’s attendants to the royal bedchamber, where he lay on a golden couch, dressed in a purple shift … So this descendant of Venus lost his virginity in Bithynia
.
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In classical Greece, where men and ‘decent’ women lived very separate lives, and where men of all ages routinely spent many hours naked at the gymnasium, it was expected that an older man might feel a tenderness, or more, for a young boy. The Romans, who were on the whole tolerant of homosexuality, took the view, as did the Egyptians, that to be sodomised was to betray weakness. Roman masters might bugger their slaves and Egyptian soldiers might rape a defeated enemy, but no one would willingly submit to this perceived humiliation. If Caesar had really been Nicomedes’s lover, he had been devalued by the experience. His enemies never let the matter drop.

Perhaps to compensate, Caesar’s heterosexual alliances were many, varied and well documented. He had been married three times, to Cornelia the mother of Julia (dead), Pompeia (divorced after an allegation of adultery) and Calpurnia (current wife). He had a long-term mistress, Servilia, who was widely acknowledged to be the most beautiful woman in Rome, and an impressive list of casual conquests, including the wives of Gabinius, Crassus and Pompey, and Servilia’s own daughter Tertia. After leaving Cleopatra he was to have a torrid affair with Eunoe, wife of King Bogudes of Mauretania. We could reasonably expect that he also had insignificant, unrecorded liaisons with prostitutes and slaves. No wonder his marching soldiers sang with pride:

Home we bring our bald whoremonger; Romans, lock your wives away!

All the bags of gold you lent him, went his Gallic tarts to pay
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And, far more provocatively:

Gaul was brought to shame by Caesar;
By King Nicomedes, he.
Here comes Caesar, wreathed in triumph
For his Gallic victory!
Nicomedes wears no laurels
Though the greatest of the three.
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Caesar was older and more experienced in all aspects of life than Cleopatra, but the two nevertheless had much in common. Both were ruthlessly ambitious and both were prepared to take prodigious risks to achieve their ambitions. Both had a vested interest in ensuring that Egypt did not succumb to civil war. Both had the knack of persuading the ordinary people to love them, yet both were to a certain extent lonely and insecure. Caesar had lost his only daughter and suffered from terrible nightmares; Cleopatra, estranged from her younger siblings, had lost her mother, two sisters and the father who had taught her his politics. From her uncle Ptolemy she had learned that defiance of Rome meant certain death. From Auletes she had learned that Rome, and Rome alone, could protect the Ptolemaic dynasty, and that Romans could be bought. Caesar needed Egypt’s wealth, while Cleopatra needed Rome’s protection. So who seduced whom? If we accept that Cleopatra planned her unorthodox entrance to entice Caesar, we should probably also accept that she planned to seduce him. For a queen in need of both an ally and a son, this would have been a sensible diplomatic move. But, as most cultures believe that ‘nice girls’ don’t plan to sleep with a blind date at their first meeting, this seemingly wanton behaviour has stigmatised Cleopatra as little more than a high-class whore.

Ptolemy XIII had gone to bed that night a happy lad, secure in the knowledge that his sister, trapped at Pelusium, would be unable to plead her case before Caesar. With the Gabinians and the people of Alexandria on his side, it could only be a matter of time before he, a
recognised friend and ally of the Roman people, was confirmed sole ruler of Egypt. He woke up the next morning to find that his sister had somehow arrived at the palace. She was already on the most intimate of terms with Caesar and had managed to persuade him to support her cause. It was all too much for a thirteen-year-old boy to bear. Rushing from the palace, he ripped off his diadem and, in a well-orchestrated public display of anger, the crowd surged forward, intent on mobbing the palace. But Caesar would not be intimidated. Before a formal assembly he read out Auletes’s will, making it clear that he expected the elder brother and sister to rule Egypt together. Meanwhile, and most unexpectedly, the younger siblings, Arsinoë and Ptolemy XIV, were to become king and queen of Cyprus, which, after ten years as Roman property, Caesar was now returning to Egypt.

Soon after Cleopatra’s death her victorious rival Octavian ordered that all images of Cleopatra be destroyed. As Cleopatra was, at the time, perceived as public enemy number one, his Roman subjects were happy to comply: it is, in any case, unlikely that there were many Roman Cleopatras to be destroyed. But in Egypt, where Cleopatra’s images were cult images connected with the worship of the goddess Isis and with Cleopatra’s own personal cult, this order caused great offence. Plutarch tells us that some of her Egyptian statues were saved by the priest Archibios, who, acting either as Cleopatra’s friend or as a representative of the native priesthood, offered Octavian an irresistible 2,000 talents to preserve them. Her two-dimensional images carved high on the temple walls were difficult to destroy and so remained untouched, but the majority of her statues were indeed lost.