A History of the World (25 page)

This Ptolemy had been a close companion and leading general of Alexander’s, and had watched the great king found a new city, Alexandria, in Egypt. He moved quickly to claim control of it, and as part of his claim he managed to grab Alexander’s body as it was being taken back to Greece for burial. In Alexandria, the corpse was encased in a great shrine. Ptolemy had to fight off rivals to keep it there, where it had a totemic power like the relics of later saints would have for Europeans. (Indeed, the bones of St Mark were stolen from Egypt by Venetians to give their young republic a similar legitimacy.) Ptolemy I, as he now was, buttressed Egypt by seizing what are now Israel and Lebanon, and the island of Cyprus.

The Ptolemies would rule Egypt for three hundred years – longer than the Bourbons in France or the Plantagenets in England. They were never a conventional family. Ptolemy II married his sister Arsinoë; incest and the confusing recycling of names would be features of the dynasty. In its first period, much of its energy was taken up successfully repelling rival Greek successors, particularly the Seleucids, whose capital was Syria’s Antioch but whose empire stretched deep into Asia. The Ptolemies also invaded south, into modern Sudan, to acquire elephants of their own to match the Indian war elephants the Mauryas had handed over to the Seleucids. The dispatching of an ambassador to India resulted in Ashoka sending Buddhist missionaries to Alexandria in return.

The victories went on under Ptolemy III, but these Greek rulers of Egypt were a tiny elite, sitting uneasily on top of a much bigger people of traditional and alien views. Like the Normans when they conquered England, the Ptolemies did not bother to learn the local language. This was a wonderful boon for later historians, since it brought with it double- and triple-language proclamations – famously, in the shape of the Rosetta stone – which later allowed Egyptian hieroglyphics to be deciphered. It was less of a boon for the Ptolemies, who had to struggle against local revolts, led by would-be pharaohs who actually were Egyptian.

The kingdom, therefore, was a strange mix of ancient Egyptian
and modern Greek. Most people held to the beliefs and cults of old Egypt, with its priests and temples, its sacred animals and complicated rites. Many hoped for a true Egyptian saviour king to reclaim the throne, rather as the Jews had hoped for a messiah. Over time, new gods were invented, part-Greek and part-Egyptian, as needed. Egyptian deities like Isis became a little Greek, while the Greeks incorporated the Egyptian gods Osiris and Horus into their pantheon. Before the advent of monotheism, a little mingling was no big problem. Still, the Ptolemaic rulers had to tread carefully: Cleopatra bought herself some much needed popular support by accompanying an auspiciously coloured sacred bull on his way to a temple. She was also the first of her dynasty to speak Egyptian as well as Greek.

Her land was still fabulously rich in resources. One of the early Roman plans for annexing Egypt proposed that it would be settled with Roman farmers and used as a new source of cheap food. As under the ancient pharaohs, most land was the property of the state, and the temples had huge estates to support them. Like the British in India, the administration of the country under the Ptolemies used the old system of scribes and village headmen to collect information and taxes. Some titles were changed from Egyptian to Greek, but essentially this was as it had always been. The Ptolemies did, however, try to introduce some Greek rigour into Egypt. They brought in a coin-based economy and a register listing all their subjects. They fixed the price of commodities and turned the temple priests into state officials, helping the dynasty to raise cash to fund its armies and fleets.

But some bad harvests and defeats, followed by the bad luck of a child-king ascending to the throne, caused them to start to lose ground to their rivals. One loss followed another. Like the smaller kingdom of Judah, which also needed allies, they looked for an ally to protect them, and plumped for that far-off but famously warlike city, Rome. This bought time for what had become a struggling dynasty – but at the inevitable price. As Rome grew stronger, pushing aside Carthaginians and Greeks, it slowly became more of a menace and less of a shield. The Roman Senate intervened more in Egyptian life. They began to regard this huge territory with its accumulated wealth, swarming populace and weak rulers as a dependant, not an ally. Ptolemaic Alexandria was being squeezed, very gently, to death.

This may have been inevitable. The kingdom of the Ptolemies had
no effective way of debating policy or elevating good administrators. In practice, modern scholars now believe, the Ptolemaic state was far less efficient than its neat Greek system suggests. Farmworkers, for instance, regularly abandoned their fields as a way of threatening the tax-gatherers; corruption was rife; and many officials were untrained. By Cleopatra’s time, between a seventh and a sixth of the population are thought to have been Greeks or Jews, a huge migration caused by the state’s reliance on ‘reliable’ non-Egyptians to fight, administer and organize. Like the feeling of Anglo-Indians for Hampshire or Wales, the Greeks in Egypt retained a strong sense of their origins in Macedonia or Athens. Unlike Rome, Greek Egypt enjoyed nothing we would recognize as political participation. It remained a royal autocracy. And unlike Rome, or indeed British India, its principal city was not even officially part of its territory.

The story of Cleopatra is incomprehensible without some understanding of that unique and captivating place, Alexandria. The city itself was the dynasty’s greatest achievement. Founded, of course, by Alexander, it was a city-state in its own right – inside Egypt, or ‘by’ Egypt but not quite part of Egypt. Again, later British parallels such as Hong Kong, or today’s Singapore, come to mind. Like them, Alexandria was a melting-pot city of immigrants and merchants, which had soon swollen to half a million people, the same size as the capital of the Chinese empire of the time and, in the West, rivalled only by Rome itself. Even the Chinese had heard of its extraordinary Pharos lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, rising three hundred feet, and with a statue of Zeus and a blazing beacon to guide vessels into port. Alexandria boasted proper town-planning, grand buildings in the Greek style and above all its museum and library.

The word ‘museum’ derives from the worship of the Muses, and has caught on all over. The original museum in Alexandria was, however, less a collection of objects than an academic study centre, with living-quarters, restaurants and full-time researchers. The library, founded by the first Ptolemy and perhaps assembled by one of Aristotle’s pupils, was not open to the public. It was an expression of state cultural pride, intended to contain a copy of every book written in Greek, which in classical times meant almost every book outside
China. It is supposed to have had between half a million and seven hundred thousand carefully filed papyrus rolls, organized in a 120-book catalogue. The librarians’ obsession with their collection prompted them to pay a huge fee to Athens for borrowing the complete works of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles so that they could be copied (rumour had it that the originals were kept and the copies returned), while ships arriving in Alexandria had to hand over any books for copying.

Thus a huge store of the literature, mathematics, philosophy and history of the ancient world, much of it now lost to us, was accumulated in Alexandria. There, the Old Testament was translated into Greek, which would be very important when Christianity began to spread. Much work was done on editing the two great poems we know as ‘Homer’.

It is hardly surprising that with its patronage and its concentration of knowledge, Alexandria also became a centre of literary and scientific progress in its own right. Its poems were less famous than its inventions and practical discoveries. Euclid, who invented modern geometry, doing seminal work on prime numbers, conic sections and perspective, may have studied at Plato’s Academy before he moved to Alexandria. Among his Alexandrian pupils is said to have been Archimedes, the mathematician and engineer who, legend relates, was killed by a Roman soldier after the siege of Syracuse because he would not leave a problem he was studying – ‘Do not disturb my circles,’ he is reported as saying. These are world-famous names today.

But what of Eratosthenes, the first man we know of to have accurately measured the circumference of the earth and produced the first reasonably accurate map of the ancient world? Or Hero, who apparently made a model steam engine? (Sadly, the Alexandrians did not have the skills in metalworking that could have led to Greek or Roman motor-cars.) More immediately useful was the mule-powered waterwheel, still in use, and Herophilos’ discoveries about human anatomy, including the digestive and circulatory systems, which would not be matched until the European Enlightenment. Herophilos could apparently measure the pulse with a water clock. Others worked on quick-firing crossbows, the solar system and the use of compressed air to power engines. The Faiyum mummy portraits, which give us the most realistic and moving ‘real faces’ from classical days, were
executed immediately after Cleopatra’s time, but they most likely derive from a painting tradition which, as the extant sculptures would also suggest, reflects a fabulously skilled people. If this is decadence, the world needs more of it.

Ptolemaic Alexandria was, in short, a cauldron of creativity and invention, matching Enlightenment Scotland and the English Midlands at the beginning of the industrial revolution, or China under the Song empire, or early Muslim Spain. In only one of these cases, the first, did the inventiveness and scientific research lead to a transforming economic revolution. The reason has nothing to do with human intelligence and everything to do with the rare and ‘just right’ coming-together of curiosity, technologies, law, materials and motivation. By Cleopatra’s time Ptolemaic Egypt was in military and economic decline. It may have been in intellectual decline too, for most of the inventions described above came early in the dynasty’s history. On the other hand, it may not have been. We cannot tell where its future might have led.

What must have been clear to Cleopatra, however, was that the prize she was trying to defend against the Romans and other rivals was intellectual and cultural, not merely about territory and power. Why might we think that? There are no records of her early years. But the dynasty used scholars from the museum to tutor its children, and Cleopatra was said not only to speak eight languages but to have written books herself, including on weights and measures; she employed a philosopher as teacher for her own sons.

Her father’s dependence on Rome and his naive attempt to play the competing leaders of the late republic had involved huge bribes, mostly to Pompey. This led him to borrow heavily. Taxation levied to pay for this, and the loss of Cyprus, which became a Roman colony, caused a popular revolt and he fled to Rome. His wife and eldest daughters were made rulers, but when Ptolemy was finally restored, with Roman help, he took a terrible revenge. His wife being dead by then, he had his daughter Berenice beheaded, put the Romans in charge of Egypt’s revenue-gathering, and allowed a reign of terror to rip through the country. He named the Romans the guardians of his eldest surviving children, Cleopatra and her ten-year-old brother, yet another Ptolemy.

In the family tradition, the siblings were married. In the family
tradition, too, they fought like sacred cats in a sack. When Ptolemy XII died the eighteen-year-old Cleopatra had no intention of sharing power with her brother, even though Egypt had no tradition of queens ruling on their own. She moved fast, won allies, declared herself ‘a goddess who loves her father’ – another family tradition was taking notably hypocritical titles – and had her face stamped on coins. For a while she seemed to have won, but a combination of political conservatism and famine allowed her brother and his supporters to oust her. She fled into exile, hoping to raise an army: even as a young woman, she had spunk.

At this point, luckily for her, her brother Ptolemy XIII made a terrible mistake. Pompey, whom we last met having fallen out with Caesar in the never-ending power struggle of these two military tycoons, had finally proved himself the worse commander as well as the lesser politician. Despite having much of the Roman Senate on his side and a considerably larger army, Pompey was finally defeated by Caesar (and his acolyte Mark Antony) at Pharsalus in central Greece, a battle Caesar believed to be his greatest victory. Pompey had few places left to run to, but Egypt was one. He had, after all, accepted the elder Ptolemy’s bribes and been guardian to his children.

But Pompey had not realized that news of his humiliating defeat had travelled even faster than his fleet. To ingratiate himself with the victorious Caesar, the young king and his advisers decided to murder Pompey as soon as he waded ashore. He was stabbed by a former officer of his, then beheaded, while his wife and children looked on. The head was embalmed, placed in a box, and sent as a present to Caesar.

If Pompey had miscalculated, though, so had Ptolemy XIII and his advisers. They simply did not understand the rules of Rome’s civil war, fought among men who respected one another and were connected by family ties. Pompey had been married to Caesar’s only daughter Julia (though she had long since died). As far as Caesar was concerned, he was an honourable and powerful antagonist as well as a son-in-law, deserving of better treatment than beachside decapitation by a foreign child-king. Caesar headed for Alexandria. Ptolemy’s throne was suddenly shaking again.

Much of Cleopatra’s story is semi-legend, retold by Roman and Greek historians after the event. But Plutarch, in his biography of Caesar, is vivid and direct. He says that after Caesar arrived in
Alexandria (with a dangerously small force) he did not think much of Ptolemy’s welcome, and sent for Cleopatra. She would have been stopped in her tracks, even perhaps assassinated, if her brother’s men had seen her. Over to Plutarch: