Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (17 page)

If this was the case, he was destined to be disappointed. The origin of the Nile would remain a mystery for another eighteen centuries, while Cleopatra’s barge is unlikely to have passed further south than the notoriously rebellious city of Thebes. It might, indeed, have sailed no further than the ancient capital and traditional coronation city, Memphis.

At some time between 47 and 44 Cleopatra gave birth to a son whom she named Ptolemy Caesar. Her choice of name was highly suggestive, as was the fact that Caesar made no attempt to veto her use of his name. The people of Alexandria leapt to the obvious conclusion, and instantly renamed the baby Caesarion, or Little Caesar, after his ‘father’. Of course, this is an assumption which is impossible to prove, although many have tried, focusing their attention on Caesarion’s birth date and, by extension, the date of his conception. Plutarch is of little help here as he contradicts himself, telling us both that Caesarion was the son of Caesar, born in 47 – ‘ … leaving Cleopatra on the throne of Egypt (a little later she had a son by him whom the Alexandrians called Caesarion)’ (
Life of Caesar
) – and that ‘Caesarion was believed to be a son of the former Caesar [Julius Caesar], by whom
Cleopatra was left pregnant’ (
Life of Antony
), a loose statement which implies that Cleopatra was pregnant at the time of Caesar’s death.
¹¹

Contemporaries and near-contemporaries are divided over the baby’s paternity. Dio tells us that Cleopatra pretended that Caesarion was Caesar’s child, while Suetonius tells us that Caius Oppius composed a careful text explaining that he was not. Suetonius himself sits on the fence. He says that Caesar, besotted with Cleopatra, ‘even allowed her to call the son whom she had borne him by his own name. Some Greek historians say the boy closely resembled Caesar in features as well as in gait’, and adds that Mark Antony, who is hardly an unbiased witness, nor one likely to support Octavian’s claim to be Caesar’s true heir, declared before the Senate that Caesar had acknowledged Caesarion as his son.
¹²

For many years it was believed that a Ptolemaic or Roman stela recovered from the Memphite Serapeum and now housed in the Louvre, Paris, held the key to Caesarion’s birth date. The demotic text on the stela is dated to ‘Year 5, 23 Payni, day of the feast of Isis, birthday of King Caesar’. If we accept that the Year 5 in question is Cleopatra’s Year 5, then, counting from Auletes’s death in 51, this date would be 23 June 47.
¹³
Assuming that she carried her baby for the full nine months, this immediately suggests that Caesarion was conceived during the Alexandrian crisis, at a time when Cleopatra was separated from her brother-husband, Ptolemy XIII, and was living in close proximity to Caesar. But this is Egyptology, and nothing in Egyptology is ever simple. Cleopatra’s co-regent in 47 was her brother Ptolemy XIV, not her son, so why would the stela give Caesarion an incorrect title? Was the stela carved later, when Caesarion had become king? Or does the Year 5 in question belong not to Cleopatra but to Caesarion himself? As his joint rule with Cleopatra started after the death of Ptolemy XIV in 44, this would effectively date the stela to 40. Could the stela refer to a later, Roman, ruler of Egypt who could also be called ‘King Caesar’? Perhaps, as some Egyptologists believe, it is
referring to the birthday of Octavian? The fact that Caesarion, as pharaoh, was never known as King Caesar – he was always ‘Ptolemy named Caesar’ – supports this last interpretation. Meanwhile, to add further to the confusion, a recent publication of the stela has suggested that the birth date should be revised to 25 Phaophi, or 28 October 48, and the name of celebrant to ‘King Djoser’, Djoser being the 3rd Dynasty builder of the Sakkara step pyramid who was revered as a god during Ptolemaic and Roman times. This revised reading would suggest that the piece has no relevance to either Cleopatra or Caesarion.
¹⁴

Cleopatra refused to rise to the gossip and remained silent over the issue of her son’s paternity. She, of course, had no need to explain herself and everything to gain from the assumption that she was the mother of Caesar’s child. Caesarion offered the strongest of inducements for Caesar to ensure that Egypt remained an independent state for his son to inherit. The death of Ptolemy XIV would make Caesarion king of Egypt, ruling alongside his mother. With Caesarion and Cleopatra on the throne, and Caesar dictator of Rome, Egypt and the Ptolemies would receive Roman protection, Rome would benefit from Egypt’s generosity, and Caesar’s family would effectively rule the civilised world. Caesar, too, retained a dignified silence. Already married to a Roman wife, he was in any case unable to recognise any other woman’s child as his son. His silence has been interpreted many ways. That the liaison was essentially unimportant to him; a fling on a par with his many earlier affairs. That there was no liaison; Caesarion was not his son. Or that Caesar, well aware of the dangers of being perceived as father of the heir to the Roman and Egyptian ‘thrones’, kept silent to protect his son.

With Caesar seemingly happy enough in his unacknowledged parentage, is there any reason to doubt Caesarion’s paternity? Just a faint, lingering cloud of uncertainty hovers over Caesar’s fertility. After a life of sexual excess, three marriages and countless affairs, he had
produced just one acknowledged child. Julia, late wife of Pompey the Great, had been born to Caesar’s first wife Cornelia thirty-six years before Caesarion’s birth. Rumours that Caesar had fathered a string of natural children, including Brutus, son of Servilia, are of course unprovable. One surviving child was, however, by no means unusual: Cornelia, mother of Tiberius Gracchus, bore twelve children but only three survived infancy and childhood. While Egypt’s women were famed for their fertility, something that can perhaps be attributed to their grain-rich diet, Rome was suffering an acute shortage of elite babies caused by a general wifely reluctance to reproduce and made worse by high rates of miscarriage, high rates of mother and baby mortality during pregnancy, labour and early infancy, and, perhaps, the use of lead water pipes.
¹⁵
Infant deaths and miscarriages frequently go unrecorded, making it difficult to obtain precise statistics, but an estimate that just over half of all babies born in Rome would reach five years of age does not seem unreasonable. Caesar’s daughter Julia had herself died in childbirth, along with her baby.

In the summer of 47 Caesar left Cleopatra to resume his campaign against the followers of Pompey. He would not see her again for over a year, ill-documented in Egypt, which saw Cleopatra strengthen her hold on her throne through her astute manipulation of the cult of Isis. Caesar’s year, in contrast, is well documented. A quick victory in Asia Minor saw the fall of Pharnaces II, son of Mithridates of Pontus (‘
veni, vidi, vici’
). This was followed by the quashing of a potentially dangerous mutiny in Rome and a successful North African campaign that wiped out what he hoped would be the last remnants of Pompey’s supporters. Caesar returned to Italy in June or July 46. In late September or early October he celebrated quadruple triumphs: four separate days of festivities honouring his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus and Africa. There were games, plays, banquets, sacrifices and four extensive processions which started in the Field of Mars, entered Rome through the Triumphal Gate and wound their way through the Forum
to the Capitol and the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Included in the processions were displays of war trophies and treasures, paintings and maps illustrating Caesar’s many victories, and tableaux depicting, among other things, the River Nile and the Pharos lighthouse complete with imitation flames. The exhibition of prestigious prisoners included the great Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix, the four-year-old Juba II of Numidia, the Alexandrian eunuch Ganymede and his queen, the teenage Arsinoë IV. This was unusual – the Romans usually avoided displaying female captives in chains, although Pompey had exhibited the widow and daughters of Mithridates in 61 – and it proved very unpopular. Arsinoë gained the sympathy of the watching crowd, and Caesar deemed it wise to spare her life, banishing her to live in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Juba, too, was spared to be raised as a Roman gentleman. Vercingetorix, who had already suffered six years of solitary confinement, was garrotted immediately after his public appearance, while Ganymede simply disappeared, presumably to share Vercingetorix’s fate.

Some time that same autumn Cleopatra, Ptolemy XIV and (probably) Caesarion arrived in Rome. They settled into Caesar’s private estate, in Trastevere across the Tiber, and there, apparently, they stayed, even during Caesar’s lengthy absence in Spain from December 46 to the summer of 45, until Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March (15 March) 44 prompted a return to Egypt. Whether Cleopatra followed Caesar to Rome of her own free will or was summoned, either as a lover or as a hostage, is unclear. There is certainly no evidence that she made the grand Roman entry beloved of film-makers; it is impossible to imagine Romans turning out to cheer a foreign queen unless they were cheering/jeering at her as a captive. Whatever its purpose, the visit played into the hands of Caesar’s enemies, who were quick to spread malicious gossip: Caesar intended to divorce the barren Calpurnia and marry Cleopatra; Caesar had definitely decided to move his capital city to Alexandria; Caesar was planning to pass legislation that
would allow him the right to as many foreign wives as he liked. Dio tells us that Caesar was unconcerned about the growing resentment:

… he incurred the greatest censure from all because of his passion for Cleopatra – not now the passion he had displayed in Egypt (for that was a matter of hearsay), but that which was displayed in Rome itself. For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar’s own house, so that he too derived an ill repute on account of both of them. He was not at all concerned, however, about this, but actually enrolled them among the friends and allies of the Roman people.
¹⁶

Cicero, a dedicated republican, met Cleopatra at this time and despised her for her arrogance (
superbia
). In a letter written to his great friend Atticus on 13 June 44, he made his feelings clear:

I hate the queen! And the man who vouches for her promises, Ammonius, knows I have good reason to do so; although the gifts she promised me were of a literary nature and not beneath my dignity – the sort I should not have minded proclaiming in public …. The queen’s insolence, when she was living in Caesar’s house in the gardens beyond the Tiber, I cannot recall without indignation. So no dealings with that lot. They seem to think I have not only no spirit, but no feelings at all.
¹⁷

This extended Roman visit is yet another hazy period in Cleopatra’s life. We can confirm from contemporary records that a visit did take place, but cannot be certain that an entire unbroken eighteen months were spent in Rome. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Caesar, having only just restored stability to Egypt, would wish to risk Cleopatra’s precarious hold on her throne, while Cleopatra’s own family history showed that neglecting Alexandria to holiday in Rome was a very bad
idea indeed. It may therefore be that there were two entirely separate visits to Rome: an initial diplomatic mission with Ptolemy XIV to gain official recognition as a ‘friend and ally’, and a second visit a year later, with or without Ptolemy, to discuss the future of Egypt and Cyprus.
¹⁸

The Egyptian royal party may well have been present to witness Caesar’s dedication of a golden statue of Cleopatra in the Forum temple of Venus Genetrix (Venus the Mother). The story of this statue is recorded by Appian, who adds that it still stands in the temple as he writes in the second century
AD
. This superficially unlikely tale makes far more sense if we imagine Caesar dedicating a statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis to stand beside Venus. Within Egypt Cleopatra was strongly linked with Isis, who was in turn equated with the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, and she regularly dressed as the goddess. The dedication of a statue of Isis modelled on Cleopatra may not have been considered offensive to the people of Rome. The dedication of a statue of a living foreigner, on the other hand, would have caused huge public resentment. While it was acceptable, and even encouraged, for foreigners to recognise living Romans as divine beings, the Romans themselves did not worship living gods. Or did they? Caesar had always claimed descent from Venus, the divine mother of Aeneas. In 46 he had been publicly acknowledged as a demigod. In 45 his image was allowed to process with the images of the gods, and a temple statue was inscribed ‘to the Invincible God’. There were sacrifices on his birthday, annual vows for his continuing good health, a new temple-style pediment fronting his house and a new title, ‘Jupiter Julius’. It is quite clear that towards the end of his life Caesar, like Alexander the Great before him, was starting to investigate the intriguing question of his own divinity. At the same time, he was experimenting with the idea of kingship: his coy double refusal of a royal diadem tied with a laurel wreath, offered by Mark Antony during the February 44 Lupercalia (an ancient festival celebrated to purify the city of
Rome), had fooled no one. Diadems continued to appear on Caesar’s statues, and Caesar himself continued to sit on a golden throne. Both aberrations were to be blamed fairly and squarely on the corrupting influence of the divine queen Cleopatra. Cicero’s private letters suggest that Cleopatra was unpopular in Rome, although as he self-avowedly disliked the queen he cannot be considered a disinterested witness. Any unpopularity is unlikely to have arisen because Cleopatra tempted Caesar with sexual favours as, to a certain extent, it was expected that a great man would keep a suitably prestigious mistress. Cleopatra was unpopular because she was perceived as leading Caesar into dangerous Hellenistic ways. It was far easier to blame Cleopatra for Caesar’s flirting with the trappings of royalty and divinity than it was to blame Caesar himself.