The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (28 page)

Then there were the love tokens. He gave Egypt back its foreign territories in Asia Minor, and in return she directed the vast wealth of Egypt to his ambition. The following summer, as if to seal the deal, she bore him twins: Alexander Helios (the sun) and Cleopatra Selene (the moon). In return he gave her the one present every Ptolemy coveted.

The wealthy kingdom of Pergamum (in what is today Turkey) had recently been acquired by the Roman state, having, rather unusually, been left to Rome in the will of its last king. For the Romans it was a rich trading nation and a welcome source of revenue. But for any Alexandrian it held something worth more than gold—a library of some two hundred thousand volumes, the second largest collection of books on earth. This was Antony’s gift to Cleopatra, a suitable recompense for Caesar’s damage to the great library and an investment in its future. It was the greatest gift an Alexandrian could receive.

But the heirs of Julius Caesar had no desire to see another Alexander arise in Egypt, and what was more, their leader, Octavian, had personal reasons to distrust Mark Antony, who was still, at least in name, married to his sister. Now Antony was, in Octavian’s view, under the control of that evil Eastern temptress who had ruined Julius Caesar. She was everything Rome stood against—a foreigner, a competitor, a political player, and, perhaps worst of all, a woman in an era when Rome viewed women as simply their fathers’ or husbands’ possessions. Despite several reconciliations, it was clear that Octavian’s desire to rule Rome and Mark Antony’s dreams of an empire in the East were set to clash head-on. In the end, driven on by Cleopatra, Antony abandoned his wife—in the process snubbing Octavian—and returned to Alexandria to plan one final bid for glory. Together they fueled a propaganda campaign to have themselves associated with Dionysus and Aphrodite—or for their Egyptian subjects, Osiris and Isis. They were to be living gods destined to rule over a new Alexandrian empire. He would provide the military might, she the money, and together they would achieve Alexander’s dream and rule an Eastern empire from the city he had founded for that purpose. So enchanted with the prospect was Cleopatra that she instigated a new system for counting dates. This would now be the year 1.

In 36 BC, however, that dream began to crumble. An overconfident Antony suffered a crushing defeat on his expedition against Parthia, leading many of his senior military commanders to doubt both his judgment and his motives. These were Roman troops, after all, and though they had followed Antony across the Middle East, they had done so in the name of Rome, not Alexandria. Many were also aware that his rivalry with Octavian was now beyond reconciliation. Caesar’s adopted heir was no fool and clearly saw in Mark Antony’s expeditions a personal ambition that far outstripped the orders he received from Rome. He also saw behind him a son of Cleopatra’s, Caesarion, a true heir to Julius Caesar.

The excuse for a final war came when Antony made his plans public, in a lavish ceremony in the gymnasium at Alexandria. Here a silver dais was set up with two golden thrones upon it, one for himself and one for Cleopatra, and other seats for Cleopatra’s children. Then he declared his lover, who was dressed as Isis, queen of Egypt, Cyprus, Libya, and Coele-Syria, to share that throne with Caesarion, her son by Caesar. He then proclaimed his own son by Cleopatra “king of kings” and allotted to him further territories, including the vast expanses of Armenia, Parthia, Media, Syria, and Phoenicia. In short, he had claimed half the known world.

The resolution of the Roman senate against him and his Egyptian queen (who was now, thanks to Octavian’s brilliant propaganda, known in Rome as “the ruinous monster”) made war inevitable. The Alexandrian dream had seduced Rome’s greatest general, and now he would have to fight for it.

Octavian finally met these would-be Eastern emperors not on land but off the coast of Actium in Greece. The sea battle was brief and bloody, and within a few short hours Antony and Cleopatra were fleeing for the distant safety of Alexandria’s walls. Her ships entered the great harbor as tradition dictated, to the strains of victory songs and garlanded with flowers, but not even she could hide this defeat. She had come home for the last time, to the city that had made her, but not in triumph as she had hoped, and she would never leave its walls again. There was to be no sanctuary.

Many of the Roman generals who had supported Antony now began to defect—some no doubt just gauging the way the political wind was blowing, others now overtly opposed to this “un-Roman” dalliance with a woman they considered no more than an unreliable Eastern princess. In their eyes Cleopatra had brought Rome nothing but trouble—trouble for Pompey, trouble for Julius Caesar, trouble for Mark Antony, and now trouble for them.

In the spring of 30 BC Octavian’s armies began to march on Alexandria. Antony managed one final victory in the outskirts of the city by the hippodrome, but when he returned to the battlefield the following day, his fleet and cavalry went over to the enemy. On August 1, when Octavian walked into Alexandria, the Ptolemaic kingdom came to an end.

With Octavian on his way to the palace, Cleopatra retired to her mausoleum, sending a note to Antony to say she was already dead. Hearing this, he fell on his sword in despair. The blow was not immediately fatal, however, and he was still writhing in agony when word came that Cleopatra was not dead. In his last moments he asked to be carried into her presence so he might die in her arms. Tied to a cord and hauled up through a high window (for Cleopatra would not open the door for fear of betrayal), he finally gained admittance to the tomb, and that last wish was granted.

Cleopatra did not immediately follow him to the grave. She was flushed out of her mausoleum after Octavian managed to get one of his guards in through the same window as the dying Antony. She immediately tried to stab herself, but Octavian’s orders were that she be taken alive, and she was overpowered and brought to him only wounded. Perhaps Cleopatra at least thanked him for being granted the chance to bury Antony with royal honors, but she can have held out little hope that more kindness awaited her than being paraded through the streets of Rome in Octavian’s triumph to the jeers and scorn of a crowd he had taught to hate her.

Seeing death as the only noble way out, she then tried to starve herself but was persuaded against this after threats were made against her children. Finally, after a meeting with Octavian on August 10, she persuaded him that she now wished to live, and he dropped his guard. She had bent one last great Roman to her will. Two days later she was dead. Plutarch describes her last moments:

 
As soon as Octavian opened the tablet he must have known that it was too late, for in it she begged the Roman to bury her alongside her beloved Antony. He quickly dispatched messengers to her, but they arrived to find her lying dead upon a couch, her body carefully arrayed in state by her two female servants Iras and Charmion. Iras was herself in the last moments of life as they burst in, while Charmion, also in the throes of death, was trying to arrange a diadem on her mistress’s head. One of the messengers turned on her: “ ‘A fine deed, this, Charmion!’ ‘It is indeed most fine,’ she said, ‘and befitting the descendant of so many kings.’ Not a word more did she speak, but fell there by the side of the couch” (Plutarch,
Life of Antony,
in
Parallel Lives,
85).

No one can be sure if Cleopatra died from the bite of an Egyptian asp in that basket of figs, as was reported at the time, or from some other poison which, like many rulers of her day, she must have carried about with her. But the story of the asp provides an appropriate death for a queen of Egypt and the only Ptolemy ever to have learned Egyptian.

She had been perhaps the most Egyptian ruler of all her dynasty, using her inquisitive Greek mind to look deep into the past of her adoptive home for clues to a future free from Roman domination. She had even beguiled a Roman general into joining her on that journey—an Osiris to play alongside her tragic Isis. But the great days of Egypt she looked wistfully back to had been little more than a memory when Alexandria was founded, and the Egyptian temples she built along the Nile were more an homage to the stories of long-dead pharaohs she had read of in the library than the signs of a resurgent Egypt.

Now at thirty-nine years old she was dead and finally resting next to her beloved Antony. As for her children, Caesarion, in many ways the only true heir of Egypt and Rome, was hunted down by Octavian’s men and killed. He was about fourteen years old. Her children with Antony did survive, although they were forced to walk alongside her picture, in which she was portrayed with the asp still clinging to her arm, in Octavian’s triumph in Rome. Only Cleopatra Selene appears again in the history books after that, married to King Juba II of Mauritania, where she transformed his minor capital of Caesarea into a little Alexandria, complete with sculptures of her illustrious ancestors and even its own small library.

Back in the real Alexandria that library and the city that held it were now Roman possessions. The Ptolemaic dream was dead, but Alexandria’s story was still far from over.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE CLOCKWORK CITY

Gordon Bottomley, “To Ironfounders and Others”

 
 
T
he Alexandria that awoke the day after Cleopatra’s death was changed but not destroyed. Having been defeated in war, the city might have expected to be erased entirely from the face of the ancient world, as Carthage was in 146 BC, as an example to others who might dare to defy Rome.

But this was not to be Alexandria’s fate. Octavian limited his revenge to stripping the city of its governing body or senate and founding his own city of Nicopolis (named after a city in Epirus opposite the site of the battle of Actium) in what was then the suburb of Ar Rama. Further humiliation would be unnecessary and, far more important, entirely counterproductive. Egypt was potentially too wealthy, Alexandria was too much of a prize, and what was more, Rome itself was also changing. The Roman province of Egypt—as it now was—had been conquered by a republic, but the general at its head had no intention of maintaining the political traditions of Cicero. He was the first of a new breed of Roman ruler, one who professed republicanism in the name of Octavian, but practiced power as the first emperor—Augustus. Egypt had been where his stepfather, Julius Caesar, and his erstwhile friend, Mark Antony, had looked for the money to conquer the world, and it would be where he would consolidate his rule, taking the Ptolemies’ inheritance as his personal fiefdom.

Alexandria fascinated the new emperors of Rome in two ways. Economically, it was the port through which 20 million bushels of wheat were annually exported from the Nile Valley—enough to feed the unemployed and restive city mob back in Rome. More important, it was the center of the intellectual world, an Egyptian city founded on Greek thinking and now ruled by Rome. In its library lay the practical works by men such as Archimedes that had helped Rome build an empire, as well as many others, perhaps yet unread and untapped. And whereas the republic may have had less time for the higher arts, emperors, like pharaohs, could be seduced by their association with the great literary names from history and legend whose works filled the colonnades of the library. That was indeed a prize.

Alexandria was the most extraordinary city on earth, as Julius Caesar and Mark Antony had learned, and as Augustus was now finding out. Around the roads and gates laid out so long ago by Dinocrates, extraordinary buildings now stood. From just south of the Canopic Way the Paneium gave a stunning view across the city. This was itself an astonishing structure, a man-made hill in the shape of a fir cone around which a path spiraled up to a temple dedicated to Pan on the summit. From here the city lay spread out before a visitor. Across the wide granite-paved street lay the Soma, the tomb of Alexander, where the embalmed Conqueror of the World still lay in a crystal coffin (though not the original gold casket, which had been melted down) surrounded by the tombs of the Ptolemies. Through the hazy sides of the sarcophagus one might just have made out the scar where the great man’s nose had been recently reattached after Augustus had accidentally broken it off when he demanded to touch this sacred relic. Away to the west, beyond the porticoes of the gymnasium, stood the great temple of the Serapeum, with its own library and stadium where annual games celebrated the power of Ptolemy’s invented god.

Off in the distance to the north lay some of the city’s most famous buildings, laid out in stately fashion around the harbor. Most impressive of all, after the palaces themselves, were the enormous grounds and buildings of the Sebasteum (or Caesarium), begun by Cleopatra in honor of Mark Antony but finished by Augustus as a celebration of his victory.

Here stood “Cleopatra’s Needles”—the three ancient obelisks Augustus had brought there from Heliopolis, which now stand one on London’s Embankment, one in New York’s Central Park, and one in Paris’s Place de la Concorde. Their setting in the Sebasteum is described by Philo, a Jewish scholar living in the city in the first century AD, as