Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (8 page)

For Queen Cleopatra Thea Philopator [is dedicated] the seat of the association [of Isis] Snonais, the president of which is the chief priest Omnophris. July 2 51
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Cleopatra, on this stela, appears entirely male; the inscription, which
makes it clear that she is in fact a woman, implies that she is the sole ruler of Egypt. This, the only surviving image of Cleopatra as a female king, recalls the Theban artwork of the early New Kingdom female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut (reigned 1473–1458) struggled with the convention decreeing that a king of Egypt should be a young and healthy male. Soon after her coronation she abandoned the customary woman’s sheath dress and queen’s crowns, and started to appear in the traditional king’s regalia of short kilt, bare chest, crown or head-cloth, broad collar and false beard. Very occasionally, towards the beginning of her reign, Hatshepsut was depicted as a woman dressed in this male clothing, but more usually she was shown performing male actions with a man’s body.
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It would be easy to suggest that Cleopatra is here deliberately emulating Egypt’s most successful female monarch, as in many ways Hatshepsut, who effectively usurped the throne from a weaker and much younger male co-regent, makes an appropriate role model for Cleopatra.
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But Hatshepsut was forced to battle against a system which could not cope with the idea of female rule, while Cleopatra, living in an age which had already experienced the vigorous rule of Cleopatras I, II and III, encountered no such problem. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Cleopatra would have known much about Hatshepsut’s history, art or propaganda, as the majority of Hatshepsut’s images were defaced within thirty years of her death, and her name was omitted from Egypt’s official King List. Today Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel, decorated with multiple images of the female king performing traditionally male actions, is the highlight of any tour of Karnak temple, but the chapel is a modern reconstruction, painstakingly compiled from the demolished remains of the original building, which would have been invisible to Cleopatra.

A re-reading of the text on Cleopatra’s stela indicates that, although it features Cleopatra, she did not commission it. The image of the female king cannot therefore be taken as official propaganda. The text is not all it seems. The Greek letters are uncomfortably squashed into
the space available, and it seems likely that it is a later addition, cut over an earlier text. This suggests that the stela was first cut for Cleopatra’s father and then changed, rather ineptly, when he died. Nevertheless, the important fact remains that Cleopatra is featured as a sole ruler, while Ptolemy’s name is excluded from the stela.

When, over two centuries earlier, the intelligent and experienced Arsinoë II married her younger, weaker brother Ptolemy II, she determined to work with him. In so doing, she strengthened the Ptolemaic hold on the Egyptian throne. Cleopatra, intelligent and ambitious and not one to suffer fools gladly, would have done well to heed this precedent. Her sidelining of her brother was to prove a tactical mistake, as it left Ptolemy vulnerable to a group of manipulative and ambitious Alexandrian courtiers, including his tutor Theodotos, the soldier Achillas and the eunuch Pothinos, who was soon to become Egypt’s chief minister. All three were to use the young king to further their own political ambitions. By the time Ptolemy was old enough to embark on a full married life, his relationship with his sister had irretrievably broken down and Egypt was teetering on the brink of civil war.

On 27 October 50 we find the first decree to be issued with Ptolemy’s name preceding Cleopatra’s. Egypt, usually so fertile, was suffering the effects of years of unreliable Nile floods. The decree, issued after a second disappointing inundation, directed that all surplus grain and legumes grown in Upper and Middle Egypt should be sent straight to Alexandria – and nowhere else. The penalty for contravening the decree ‘by order of the king and queen’ was death, those who informed on rogue traders were to receive a specified reward dependent on their social status.
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The crisis was severe enough to unite the royal couple, who recognised that, at a time of national shortage, the volatile citizens of Alexandria must be their primary concern. But, as the Alexandrians ate their grain supplies, the people outside Alexandria suffered from shortages, high inflation and high taxation. And, as the Nile continued to under-perform, the workers began to desert their
hamlets, taxes went unpaid and the cities started to fill with hungry peasants. As wheat prices reached an all-time high, the priests of the Faiyum village of Hiera Nesos grew worried; their hungry villagers had mysteriously vanished, leaving them unable to complete the temple rituals.
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Rome was temporarily distracted from Egyptian affairs. In 54 Julia, the only acknowledged child of Julius Caesar and the beloved wife of Pompey, had died, severing the personal link between the two men. The following year Crassus perished in a disastrous campaign fighting the Parthians at Carrhae (modern Harran, Turkey). A wave of unease rippled through the Mediterranean world; it was assumed, quite rightly, that the Parthians would now attempt to take Syria. In late 51 Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, the new Roman governor of Syria, sent his two sons to Egypt to plead with the Gabinians, Gabinius’s now Egyptianised army, to return home and protect his land against Parthian attack. The Gabinians, however, had grown comfortable serving as a mercenary Ptolemaic army and were reluctant to uproot themselves to fight. Rather than negotiate, they killed the two sons of Bibulus. This left the king and queen of Egypt in a difficult situation. Risking the anger of the Gabinians, Cleopatra and Ptolemy had the murderers arrested and sent in chains to Syria.

In January 49 Caesar and his army of veterans crossed the Rubicon, the official boundary between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. As Roman law forbade any general from crossing the river with an army, this was treason. The die was cast: Caesar had effectively declared war on Pompey and Rome. Soon after, Gnaeus Pompey, Pompey’s son, arrived in Alexandria to beg for military aid on his father’s behalf. His request could not be honourably refused. Pompey had been Auletes’s host and patron in Rome, and he was entitled to call upon the Ptolemies for support. Egypt supplied Gnaeus with a large quantity of wheat, 500 Gabinians and sixty warships that were to play a key role in his father’s subsequent campaigns. The decision to grant this aid was taken by
Ptolemy (or, more likely, his ministers), with Cleopatra’s name recorded second. It was a decision that angered the people of Alexandria, who blamed Cleopatra for the whole affair. Her apparent eagerness to please the Romans, first in the matter of the Bibulus murderers and then by giving arms to Pompey, reminded them too much of her father’s reign. Later there would come a rumour, preserved for us by Plutarch, that the sexually voracious Cleopatra had seduced Gnaeus during his Egyptian sojourn. Much later still, due to a misreading of his sources by William Shakespeare, would come the fiction that Cleopatra had had an affair with Gnaeus’s father.

Cleopatra’s obvious and growing unpopularity in Alexandria may in part explain why Ptolemy’s advisers chose this time to act against his co-regent. In 49 we find the development of a new regnal-year numbering system. ‘Year 1 which is also Year 3’ equates the third year of nominally joint rule following the death of Auletes with a new Year 1; presumably Ptolemy’s first year as a solo king. In the summer of 49 Cleopatra’s name disappears from all official documents and the new ‘Year 1’ dating system is dropped. Ptolemy is backdating his reign, erasing the memory of his sister and retrospectively claiming sole rule from the time of his father’s death. Cleopatra and her supporters had been forced to flee Alexandria, travelling first perhaps south to Thebes – a city notoriously prone to rebellion, but one that may have been inclined to support Auletes’s daughter against the Alexandrians – then eastwards to Syria.
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Here she set to work raising the mercenary army that would allow her to reclaim her throne. Quite how Cleopatra managed to raise an effective army at a time when the Roman civil war was causing massive disruption across the Mediterranean world is nowhere explained; the fact that she was able to achieve this in a very short space of time confirms that, outside Alexandria, she was considered a viable candidate for the Egyptian throne. It is likely that the majority of her troops came from the Philistine coastal city of Ashkelon (near the modern Israeli city of the same name), which owed a long-standing
debt of loyalty to the Ptolemies and which issued coins bearing Cleopatra’s image in 50/49 and, perhaps, 49/8. Meanwhile, in Thessalonica (Salonica), the Roman counter-senate recognised Pompey as high commander and, in direct contravention of Auletes’s will, Ptolemy XIII as sole king of Egypt with Pompey as his legal guardian. Ptolemy, like his father before him, had become a ‘friend and ally’ of Rome.

On 9 August, 48 armies loyal to Pompey and Caesar met at Pharsalus in Thessaly, central mainland Greece. Pompey had the advantage of numbers – his 47,000 men outnumbered Caesar’s by two to one – but he was the weaker general, his advisers were inexperienced, and Caesar had Mars, god of war, and Venus, his divine ancestress, on his side. Caesar won the battle and, magnanimous in victory, pardoned his enemies, including Marcus Junius Brutus, the son of his long-term mistress Servilia. Defeated but by no means inclined to give up the fight, Pompey fled with the remnants of his army to the island of Lesbos, where he was reunited with his younger son, Sextus, and his fifth wife, Cornelia, the widowed daughter-in-law of Crassus. From Lesbos Pompey sailed to Cilicia, thence to Cyprus and finally, after some hesitation, to his old ally, Egypt. Confident of a warm welcome from Auletes’s son, he sailed to Pelusium and dropped anchor in sight of the beach. The ‘eyewitness’ accounts of what happened next are provided by Plutarch and Dio; neither, of course, a true witness, but both capable of telling a moving story calculated to touch even the most stony of hearts.
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Having established camp outside Pelusium, in the foothills of Mount Casius (Ras Baron), Ptolemy and his army of Gabinians were nervously awaiting Cleopatra’s army, which was known to be marching from the east. Messengers came to announce Pompey’s arrival and to ask for an audience with the king. Panicking, Pothinos called a meeting of Ptolemy’s most trusted advisers so that each could suggest a course of action. Some argued that Pompey should be welcomed
as an honoured guest; others that he was a troublemaker who should be driven away from the shore. But Theodotos could see flaws in both arguments, and he argued his case with all the skills of an experienced teacher. If Pompey was welcomed as a friend, Caesar would automatically become Egypt’s enemy. But if Pompey was driven away, he would become Egypt’s enemy and Caesar would blame Ptolemy for allowing him to escape. Furthermore, Pompey already had links with Cleopatra through his son Gnaeus; it was more than likely that he would support the queen in her battle for the throne. It seemed to Theodotos, perhaps correctly, that Pompey’s cause was already irretrievably lost. Wishing to ingratiate his king with Caesar, and worried that Egypt might become Rome’s battleground, he argued that the vulnerable Pompey should be killed before he landed. After all, as everyone knew, ‘A dead man does not bite.’

It was agreed. Ptolemy’s army marched to the beach and formed themselves in ranks facing the sea. Commandeering a fishing boat, Achillas rowed out to Pompey’s flagship with two of the Gabinians, the tribune Lucius Septimus and the centurion Salvius. Pompey’s followers, worried that a lone, undignified fishing boat was an inappropriate vessel for their master, urged him not to leave the safety of his ship. Indeed, they argued, it might be prudent to row away from the shore, at least until they were out of missile range. But Septimus, speaking in Latin, gave Pompey a courteous welcome: ‘Hail, Imperator [commander]’. And Achillas, speaking in Greek, explained that the undignified transport was an unfortunate necessity, the harbour at Pelusium being too shallow to accommodate Pompey’s fine ship. Reassured, Pompey embraced his wife and transferred to the fishing boat with two bodyguards, his freedman Philip and a slave. Once on board he busied himself reading through the speech he meant to make to King Ptolemy.

As the boat bumped on the beach Pompey held out his hand so that Philip might help him to rise with dignity. Then, far too late, he
realised his danger. ‘He uttered not a word and made no complaint, but as soon as he perceived their plot and recognised that he would not be able to ward them off or escape, he veiled his face.’ Cornelia, watching from the ship, screamed as the treacherous Septimus ran her husband through with a sword, and Salvius and Achillas stabbed him in the back with their daggers. Pompey’s head was hacked from his body, his corpse thrown into the sea. It was the day before his fifty-eighth birthday. Ptolemy, sitting on his throne on the shore, turned a blind eye to the murder of his father’s friend. For this callousness Dante would consign him to circle nine, the circle reserved for those who betray their guests, in his
Inferno
.
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The loyal Philip retrieved Pompey’s body from the sea and cremated him on a pyre of discarded ship’s timbers on the beach. His ashes were eventually returned to the grieving Cornelia, who buried him in Italy. A few weeks later Egypt experienced the lowest Nile flooding ever recorded and the already depleted food supplies became perilously low. Divine retribution, some said, for the murder of Pompey.

Four days later Caesar, chasing Pompey with a small fleet of ten warships and some 4,000 men, arrived in the great harbour of Alexandria. Pothinos and Theodotos hurried from Pelusium to meet him, eager to tell their tale before Caesar heard it from others less sympathetic to their cause. They took with them, as macabre greeting gifts, Pompey’s severed (and in some accounts pickled) head and his signet ring. Caesar must have had mixed feelings when viewing these grizzly trophies. In many ways Ptolemy and his advisers had done him a huge favour: it was far better that the disruptive Pompey be killed by foreigners than by a fellow Roman. But the manner of his death was appalling, and Caesar could not be seen to condone the murder of a Roman citizen conducted so blatantly before so many witnesses. He therefore averted his eyes from Pompey’s head and wept ostentatious tears over his ring. Then he donned his purple-edged toga and left his
ship to process with his twelve lictors carrying the
fasces
– the bundle of rods and an axe bound with red tape and laurel, which signified his office – through the city. The people of Alexandria watched this miniature Roman invasion with incredulity and a well-vocalised resentment that soon turned to rioting. By nightfall Caesar had commandeered the royal palace, and there had been several deaths.