Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (9 page)

This Alcaeus wrote poems of love and alcohol, seabirds and the sea. He also coined the phrase ‘ship of state’ and worked to
influence the direction in which it sailed. Not much of his work has survived as he wrote it; much more has survived in imitation.
Cleopatra ruled a library where there was very much more Alcaeus, a massive presence from the past, massively influencing
art while making the minimum difference to life.

The political story became one of decline. The Greek Pharaohs paid mercenaries to fight their neighbours’ armies. Ptolemy
VIII, a second self-styled Good-doer, became best known for trying to make elephants drunk enough to trample on Jews, for
killing his sister’s son on his wedding night and for the diaphanous gowns on his famously fat body. Ptolemy X – or maybe
it was Ptolemy XI, the ‘scarlet bastard’ – needed to meet a temporary shortage of cash to pay his creditors and melted down
the golden coffin of Alexander the Great, making the relic just a little less attractive to future looters.

Soon Alexander’s body, the
soma
of the city, even the pretence that it was there, had gone. The founder became merely a
sema
in Greek, the city’s sign, a vowel shift of ‘o’ to ‘e’, a shift of meaning to something merely semantic, a sign that would
survive only in the pages of library books. Few thought that Alexander himself would have disapproved – or done any differently
with so precious a casket. A favourable place in history is not the prime aim of a king when creditors, claimants and killers
loom. This bankrupt Ptolemy was the only
Greek before Cleopatra’s
ginestho
appeared whose handwriting had survived.
Erroso
was his message to posterity; take care, he wrote.

Socratis’s driver emerges from the basement, with his yellow jacket over his arm, sweating nonetheless. The Tourist Police
follow, one shaking out his arms as though after exercise, the other checking the state of his fists. The dog comes last,
unchanged by whatever exertions have taken place down below. I want to ask Socratis what has been going on but he is still
not here. He surely cannot be far away. Having waited so long, I can wait a little longer. Mr W’s tour of ancient Alexandria
is almost complete.

So consider the last Ptolemy. Mr W always wanted matters to be ‘considered’. It was one his favourite words.

After a century and half of decline, Cleopatra’s Fluteplayer father ruled an empire that had lost territory to east and west
but he could pretend that this was not so. Pretence was his reality. When marrying off his daughters, he consigned his eldest
to a man who pretended to be the heir to the Syrian throne and, when that failed, to a chancer who said he was the son of
another king. And yet in the sixties
BC
, through dynastic manipulations and the carefully managed support of Egypt’s ancient priesthoods, he could still gamble the
country’s riches – and its debts – on his staying in command.

Like all rulers of Egypt for the past millennium, he had no great army of his own. Roman power was encroaching on all sides.
But the Romans seemed happy enough to accept payment for protection. To find a way to link the boundless Roman ambition with
the more modest, but still significant, ambition of the Ptolemies was a reasonable way forward. That was the policy of Cleopatra’s
father in the year
of her birth and the twelfth year of his rule – and no one has ever realistically suggested that he had an alternative.

Mr W thought that judgement and realism were two of the greatest gifts that classical study could impart to his pupils. Ptolemy
XII was not a master of government, by any standard then or now, but it did not benefit students to look at beacons of virtue
alone or even, when Mr W was at his most frank, to study them at all.

The two most important words in Greek prose were
men
and
de
, ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’. It was impossible to write the first language of thought without these words.
There were always two sides. Worship of a single purity, he said, produced the purest trouble. Chance governed all. Virtue
was occasionally rewarded, more often not. Religion was risible. Purity was confusing as well as perilous for the young. Fabricated
purity (and was there really any other kind?) was worse. Democracy was a delusion. Showmanship, pragmatism and shallow thought
were the dancing partners of our time.

That was the W doctrine. It was useful for schoolboys to look at figures in ancient landscapes as murky as our own. We might
only then turn our attention to current questions of politics. It was a shame that Harold Macmillan had gone. Sir Alec Douglas-Home
was not perhaps the ideal Conservative Prime Minister for the coming election. Mr Quintin Hogg would have been a better choice.
But a Labour victory would ruin everything. Those local hooligans who had painted ‘Tories Must Go’ on the Queen’s Building’s
bright new brickwork were wholly wrong. The headmaster had been quite right to offer junior boys 6d per letter for scraping
the offensive words away as fast as possible. Mr Harold Wilson was the sort of socialist who might end Greek and Roman history
for ever if the country was foolish enough to give him a chance.

At home, all talk of politics was banned. Politics suggested choices and there were really no choices. On the Rothmans estate
the power of reason would always prevail. I tried the choice between Alexandrians and Athenians but that distinction, to my
father, was especially foolish. Evil bastards would appear anywhere from time to time. He and his new colleagues would make
the missiles and the anti-missiles that, by mathematical certainties, would deter them. That was all the truth that was required.
And that was when, accurately but quite unfairly, I started calling him an arms salesman.

The Roman Theatre, Sharia Yousef

My mother much approved of my father’s advancement from laboratory bench to office desk, from designer of radars to seller
of them. This was promotion. He was making more money. He was distinguishing himself (and therefore her and us) still further
from the technicians and factory workers in the lower reaches of the Rothmans estate. An arms salesman was more like a bank
manager. We were approaching closer to the status of Maurice’s family and leaving behind V and the Noakes Avenue neighbours.

Maurice and I were both at Brentwood. V was at the Chelmsford High School. Even if there had been a free Brentwood School
for girls (which there was not) she would not have been there. That was a disappointment to me but not to my mother, who said
she ‘dressed like a shop girl’. Her mother ‘talked too much’ and her father (she had heard this from a man playing bridge)
had ‘a Ford Popular mind’. A Rover mind was good. A Rolls-Royce mind was the best. It was very common on the Rothman’s estate
to liken minds to cars.

This morning I am alone at the Roman Theatre, one of the main targets on my tourist map, only fifty yards from the Dead Fountain
cafe but hidden from it behind a beehive of bustling security police and soldiers. When he left me here, Socratis said that
it would be a quiet, safe and ‘inspiring’ place for me to write about Cleopatra. I was not in
a mood to argue. His driver, unusually, was nowhere to be seen. I wanted to ask what had happened in the cafe basement yesterday.
But I did not.

Cleopatra herself never saw this theatre, a tight semi-oval of sixteen rows of stone, one of the type known as an ‘odeon’,
more a small concert hall or council chamber than a place for plays. It is the only one if its kind in Egypt and a tiny reminder
of Rome’s architectural legacy to Alexandria, probably a gift to the city in around 200
AD
from Septimius Severus, the first African emperor of Rome. Severus was born in Libya, a permanent traveller and one of the
most assiduous emperors in attempting to understand the British. In his theatre today, in a cheerful kind of homage, two young
sisters from the north of England are making the best of a surreptitious picnic. Perhaps they had been promised a winter beach
holiday by parents who had not asked sufficient questions of the travel agent. One girl kicks a plastic bottle. The other
dips a paper plate in a puddle of rainwater and tears it to pieces with her hands.

This odeon is now a theatre within a theatre, one antiquity within another. The highest seats are where the divers in the
eastern harbour have brought some of the newly discovered statues and ornaments that were once a part of Cleopatra’s city.
These pharaohs and sphinxes, their features worn by so many centuries under the sea, now sit on the edge of the outer theatre,
as though watching the watchers below, all of us in permanent rehearsal. I can sit here between them.

There is an eyeless granite globe, with no definition left beyond what a large bird might leave on soft clay, but shaped unmistakably
as a head. Beside it sits a second mass that might be a man, with deep eye-sockets and the extremities of a lip. On one side
of these is the upper body of a woman, tightly waisted, with full breasts held by
rounded lines of drapery; and on the other a torso, no more than the shape of a giant bone, the knuckle where the legs might
part.

These discoveries are often seen as declining figures, feasts for nostalgia, their faces a flat shadow of their past. But
that is not the only way to see them. They can also be about to come alive, taut as though holding their breath, palpably
present in the furthest rows from the stage. It is as if they have not yet been carved, their eyes still in the mind of the
sculptor, their clearer future still to come. These are images that have not been imagined yet. In our own theatres we might
also say that they were seated in ‘the gods’.

V was once the only person who knew about me and Cleopatra. In the pitted paper of my rough-book pages, there is a picture
of her as some sort of recognition of that fact – or rather interrupted parts of her, black parallel lines representing hair,
belt and patent shoes. She looks respectable, restrained, albeit in slices. Maybe her black skirt was too short for my mother’s
taste, her hair too fringed, her belt and shoes too shiny. She was a year older than I was, an important year older. A search
of old photographs revealed just one of us both together, aged about eight or nine, me behind the ears of a rocking horse
more suited for a much younger child, her on the grass behind. The whole image, framed by a white border like a mosaic tile,
was barely three square inches. My hair stood up like a brush. Hers fell down over her nose.

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 public 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
.