[Illustration]
The Life and Times of
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt
“Histories make men wise.”--BACON.
“I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks
that what was done in a remote age ... has any deeper sense than what
he is doing to-day.”--EMERSON.
“To philosophise on mankind exact observation is not sufficient....
Knowledge of the present must be supplemented from the history of the
past.”--TAINE.
“Only the dead men know the tunes the live world dances to.”--LE
GALLIENNE.
“Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for ... the earth shall cast
out the dead.”--ISAIAH.
[Illustration:
_British Museum._] [_Photograph by Macbeth._
CLEOPATRA.
]
The Life and Times of
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt
A Study in the Origin
of the Roman Empire
BY
ARTHUR E. P. BROME WEIGALL
INSPECTOR-GENERAL OF ANTIQUITIES, GOVERNMENT OF EGYPT
AUTHOR OF ‘THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AKHNATON, PHARAOH OF EGYPT,’
‘THE TREASURE OF ANCIENT EGYPT,’ ‘TRAVELS IN THE UPPER EGYPTIAN
DESERTS,’ ‘A GUIDE TO THE ANTIQUITIES OF UPPER EGYPT,’ ETC., ETC.
_WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS_
William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
1914
_ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_
_I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
TO MY FRIEND OF MANY YEARS,
RONALD STORRS,
ORIENTAL SECRETARY TO THE BRITISH AGENCY IN EGYPT,
SCHOLAR, POET, AND MUSICIAN._
PREFACE.
I have to thank most heartily the Honourable Mrs Julian Byng, Mrs
Gerald Lascelles, Mr Ronald Storrs, and my wife, for reading the proofs
of this volume, and for giving me the benefit of their invaluable
advice.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION xiii
PART I.--CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR.
CHAP.
I. AN INTRODUCTORY STUDY OF THE CHARACTER OF CLEOPATRA 3
II. THE CITY OF ALEXANDRIA 18
III. THE BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF CLEOPATRA 41
IV. THE DEATH OF POMPEY AND THE ARRIVAL OF CÆSAR IN EGYPT 65
V. CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR 82
VI. CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR IN THE BESIEGED PALACE AT ALEXANDRIA 95
VII. THE BIRTH OF CÆSARION AND CÆSAR’S DEPARTURE FROM EGYPT 114
VIII. CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR IN ROME 133
IX. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EGYPTO-ROMAN MONARCHY 153
X. THE DEATH OF CÆSAR AND THE RETURN OF CLEOPATRA TO EGYPT 178
PART II.--CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY.
XI. THE CHARACTER OF ANTONY AND HIS RISE TO POWER 203
XII. THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY 224
XIII. CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY IN ALEXANDRIA 238
XIV. THE ALLIANCE RENEWED BETWEEN CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY 254
XV. THE PREPARATIONS OF CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY FOR THE
OVERTHROW OF OCTAVIAN 279
XVI. THE DECLINE OF ANTONY’S POWER 303
XVII. THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM AND THE FLIGHT TO EGYPT 324
XVIII. CLEOPATRA’S ATTEMPT TO BEGIN AGAIN 349
XIX. OCTAVIAN’S INVASION OF EGYPT AND THE DEATH OF ANTONY 368
XX. THE DEATH OF CLEOPATRA AND THE TRIUMPH OF OCTAVIAN 386
GENEALOGY OF THE PTOLEMIES _At end._
ILLUSTRATIONS.
CLEOPATRA _Frontispiece_
British Museum. Photograph by Macbeth.
_To face p._
PORTRAIT OF A GREEK LADY 32
_The painting dates from a generation later than that of
Cleopatra, but it is an example of the work of the
Alexandrian artists._
Cairo Museum. Photograph by Brugsch.
SERAPIS: THE CHIEF GOD OF ALEXANDRIA 48
Alexandria Museum.
POMPEY THE GREAT 66
Rome. Photograph by Anderson.
JULIUS CÆSAR 88
British Museum.
CLEOPATRA 128
British Museum. Photograph by Macbeth.
JULIUS CÆSAR 160
Vatican. Photograph by Anderson.
ANTONY 208
Vatican. Photograph by Anderson.
OCTAVIAN 240
Vatican. Photograph by Anderson.
ANTONIA, THE DAUGHTER OF ANTONY 290
British Museum. Photograph by Macbeth.
CLEOPATRA AND HER SON CÆSARION 304
_Represented conventionally upon a wall of the Temple of
Dendera._
CLEOPATRA. 352
British Museum. Photograph by Macbeth.
OCTAVIAN 376
Glyptothek, Munich. Photograph by Bruckmann.
THE NILE 400
_An example of Alexandrian art._
Vatican. Photograph by Anderson.
MAPS AND PLAN.
THE KNOWN WORLD IN THE TIME OF CLEOPATRA xx
APPROXIMATE PLAN OF ALEXANDRIA IN THE TIME OF CLEOPATRA 24
ÆGYPTUS 66
CLEOPATRA’S POSSESSIONS IN RELATION TO THE ROMAN WORLD 268
A MAP ILLUSTRATING THE WAR BETWEEN CLEOPATRA AND OCTAVIAN 308
INTRODUCTION.
In the following pages it will be observed that, in order not to
distract the reader, I have refrained from adding large numbers of
notes, references, and discussions, such as are customary in works
of this kind. I am aware that by telling a straightforward story in
this manner I lay myself open to the suspicions of my fellow-workers,
for there is always some tendency to take not absolutely seriously a
book which neither prints chapter and verse for its every statement,
nor often interrupts the text with erudite arguments. In the case
of the subject which is here treated, however, it has seemed to me
unnecessary to encumber the pages in this manner, since the sources
of my information are all so well known; and I have thus been able to
present the book to the reader in a style consonant with a principle of
archæological and historical study to which I have always endeavoured
to adhere--namely, the avoidance of as many of those attestations of
learning as may be discarded without real loss. A friend of mine, an
eminent scholar, in discussing with me the scheme of this volume,
earnestly exhorted me on the present occasion not to abide by this
principle. Remarking that the trouble with my interpretation of
history was that I attempted to make the characters live, he urged
me at least to justify the manner of their resuscitation in the eyes
of the doctors of science by cramming my pages with extracts from my
working notes, relevant or otherwise, and by smattering my text with
Latin and Greek quotations. I trust, however, that he was speaking in
behalf of a very small company, for the sooner this kind of jargon
of scholarship is swept into the world’s dust-bin, the better will
it be for public education. To my mind a knowledge of the past is so
necessary to a happy mental poise that it seems absolutely essential
for historical studies to be placed before the general reader in a
manner sympathetic to him. “History,” said Emerson, “no longer shall be
a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You
shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes
you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.”
Such has been my attempt in the following pages; and, though I am so
conscious of my literary limitations that I doubt my ability to place
the reader in touch with past events, I must confess to a sense of
gladness that I, at any rate, with almost my whole mind, have lived for
a time in the company of the men and women of long ago of whom these
pages tell.
Any of my readers who think that my interpretation of the known
incidents here recorded is faulty may easily check my statements
by reference to the classical authors. The sources of information
are available at any big library. They consist of Plutarch, Cicero,
Suetonius, Dion Cassius, Appian, ‘De Bello Alexandrino,’ Strabo,
Diodorus Siculus, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Seneca, Lucan, Josephus,
Pliny, Dion Chrysostom, Tacitus, Florus, Lucian, Athenæus, Porphyry,
and Orosius. Of modern writers reference should be made to Ferrero’s
‘Greatness and Decline of Rome,’ Bouché-Leclercq’s ‘Histoire des
Lagides,’ Mahaffy’s ‘Empire of the Ptolemies,’ Mommsen’s ‘History of
Rome,’ Strack’s ‘Dynastie der Ptolemäer,’ and Sergeant’s ‘Cleopatra
of Egypt.’ There are also, of course, a very large number of works on
special branches of the subject, which the reader will, without much
difficulty, discover for himself.
I do not think that my statements of fact will be found to be in
error; but the general interpretation of the events will be seen to be
almost entirely new throughout the story, and therefore plainly open
to discussion. I would only plead for my views that a residence in
Egypt of many years, a close association with Alexandria, Cleopatra’s
capital, and a daily familiarity with Greek and Egyptian antiquities,
have caused me almost unconsciously to form opinions which may not be
at once acceptable to the scholar at home.
To some extent it is the business of the biographer to make the best
of the characters with which he deals, but the accusation of having
made use of this prerogative in the following pages will not be able
to be substantiated. There is no high purpose served by the historian
who sets down this man or that woman as an unmitigated blackguard,
unless it be palpably impossible to discover any good motive for his
or her actions. And even then it is a pleasant thing to avert, where
possible, the indignation of posterity. An undefined sense of anger is
left upon the mind of many of those who have read pages of condemnatory
history of this kind, written by scholars who themselves are seated
comfortably in the artificial atmosphere of modern righteousness. The
story of the Plantagenet kings of England, for example, as recorded
by Charles Dickens in his ‘Child’s History of England,’ causes the
reader to direct his anger more often to Dickens than to those weary,
battle-stained, old monarchs whose blood many Englishmen are still
proud to acknowledge. An historian who deals with a black period
must not be fastidious. Nor must he detach his characters from their
natural surroundings, and judge them according to a code of morals of
which they themselves knew nothing. The modern, and not infrequently
degenerate, humanitarian may utter his indignant complaint against
the Norman barons who extracted the teeth of the Jewish financiers
to induce them to deliver up their gold; but has he set himself to
feel that pressing need of money which the barons felt, and has he
endeavoured to experience their exasperation at the obstinacy of these
foreigners? Let him do this and his attitude will be more tolerant: one
might even live to see him hastening to the City with a pair of pincers
in his pocket. Of course it is not the historian’s affair to condone,
or become a party to, a crime; but it certainly is his business to
consider carefully the meaning of the term “crime,” and to question its
significance, as Pilate did that of truth.
In studying the characters of persons who lived in past ages, the
biographer must tell us frankly whether he considers his subjects
good or bad, liberal or mean, pious or impious; but at this late hour
he should not often be wholly condemnatory, nor, indeed, need he be
expected to have so firm a belief in man’s capacity for consistent
action as to admit that any person was so invariably villainous as he
may be said to have been. A natural and inherent love of right-doing
will sometimes lead the historian to err somewhat on the side of
magnanimity; and I dare say he will serve the purpose of history best
when he can honestly find a devil not so black as he is painted. Being
acquainted with the morals of 1509, I would almost prefer to think of
Henry the Eighth as “bluff King Hal,” than as “the most detestable
villain that ever drew breath.”[1] I believe that an historian, in
sympathy with his period, can at one and the same moment absolve Mary
Queen of Scots from the charge of treachery, and defend Elizabeth’s
actions against her on that charge.
In the case of Cleopatra the biographer may approach his subject from
one of several directions. He may, for example, regard the Queen of
Egypt as a thoroughly bad woman, or as an irresponsible sinner, or as
a moderately good woman in a difficult situation. In this book it is
my object to point out the difficulty of the situation, and to realise
the adverse circumstances against which the Queen had to contend; and
by so doing a fairer complexion will be given to certain actions which
otherwise must inevitably be regarded as darkly sinful. The biographer
need not, for the sake of his principles, turn his back on the sinner
and refuse to consider the possibility of extenuating circumstances.
He need not, as we so often must in regard to our contemporaries, make
a clear distinction between good and bad, shunning the sinner that
our intimates may not be contaminated. The past, to some extent, is
gone beyond the eventuality of Hell; and Time, the great Redeemer,
has taken from the world the sharpness of its sin. The historian
thus may put himself in touch with distant crime, and may attempt
to apologise for it, without the charge being brought against him
that in so doing he deviates from the stern path of moral rectitude.
Intolerance is the simple expedient of contemporaneous society: the
historian must show his distaste for wrong-doing by other means. We
dare not excuse the sins of our fellows; but the wreck of times past,
the need of reconstruction and rebuilding, gives the writer of history
and biography a certain option in the selection of the materials which
he uses in the resuscitation of his characters. He holds a warrant
from the Lord of the Ages to give them the benefit of the doubt; and
if it be his whim to ignore this licence and to condemn wholesale a
character or a family, he sometimes loses, by a sort of perversion, the
prerogative of his calling. The historian must examine from all sides
the events which he is studying; and in regard to the subject with
which this volume deals he must be particularly careful not to direct
his gaze upon it only from the point of view of the Imperial Court of
Rome, which regarded Cleopatra as the ancestral enemy of the dynasty.
In dealing with history, says Emerson, “we, as we read, must become
Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner.” Even
so, as we study the life of Cleopatra, we must set behind us that view
of the case that was held by one section of humanity. In like manner we
must rid ourselves of the influence of the thought of any one period,
and must ignore that aspect of morality which has been developed in us
by contact with the age in which we have the fortune to live. Good and
evil are relative qualities, defined very largely by public opinion;
and it must always be remembered that certain things which are
considered to be correct to-day may have the denunciation of yesterday
and to-morrow. We, as we read of the deeds of the Queen of Egypt,
must doff our modern conception of right and wrong together with our
top-hats and frock-coats; and, as we pace the courts of the Ptolemies,
and breathe the atmosphere of the first century before Christ, we must
not commit the anachronism of criticising our surroundings from the
standard of twenty centuries after Christ. It is, of course, apparent
that to a great extent we must be influenced by the thought of to-day;
but the true student of history will make the effort to cast from him
the shackles of his contemporaneous opinions, and to parade the bygone
ages in the boundless freedom of a citizen of all time and a dweller in
every land.
[Illustration:
THE KNOWN WORLD
IN THE TIME OF
CLEOPATRA
]
PART I.
CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR
CHAPTER I.
AN INTRODUCTORY STUDY OF THE CHARACTER OF CLEOPATRA.
To those who make a close inquiry into the life of Cleopatra it will
speedily become apparent that the generally accepted estimate of her
character was placed before the public by those who sided against her
in regard to the quarrel between Antony and Octavian. During the last
years of her life the great Queen of Egypt became the mortal enemy
of the first of the Roman Emperors, and the memory of her historic
hostility was perpetuated by the supporters of every Cæsar of that
dynasty. Thus the beliefs now current as to Cleopatra’s nefarious
influence upon Julius Cæsar and Marc Antony are, in essence, the simple
abuse of her opponents; nor has History preserved to us any record of
her life set down by one who was her partisan in the great struggle in
which she so bravely engaged herself. It is a noteworthy fact, however,
that the writer who is most fair to her memory, namely, the inimitable
Plutarch, appears to have obtained much of his information from the
diary kept by Cleopatra’s doctor, Olympus. I do not presume in this
volume to offer any kind of apology for the much-maligned Queen, but it
will be my object to describe the events of her troubled life in such
a manner that her aims, as I understand them, may be fairly placed
before the reader; and there can be little doubt that, if I succeed in
giving plausibility to the speculations here advanced, the actions of
Cleopatra will, without any particular advocacy, assume a character
which, at any rate, is no uglier than that of every other actor in this
strange drama.
The injustice, the adverse partiality, of the attitude assumed by
classical authors will speedily become apparent to all unbiassed
students; and a single instance of this obliquity of judgment is all
that need be mentioned here to illustrate my contention. I refer to
the original intimacy between Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar. According
to the accepted view of historians, both ancient and modern, the
great Dictator is supposed to have been led astray by the voluptuous
Egyptian, and to have been detained in Alexandria, against his better
judgment, by the wiles of this Siren of the East. At this time,
however, as will be seen in due course, Cleopatra, “the stranger for
whom the Roman half-brick was never wanting,”[2] was actually an
unmarried girl of some twenty-one years of age, against whose moral
character not one shred of trustworthy evidence can be advanced;
while, on the other hand, Cæsar was an elderly man who had ruined
the wives and daughters of an astounding number of his friends, and
whose reputation for such seductions was of a character almost past
belief. How anybody, therefore, who has the known facts before him,
can attribute the blame to Cleopatra in this instance, must become
altogether incomprehensible to any student of the events of that time.
I do not intend to represent the Queen of Egypt as a particularly
exalted type of her sex, but an attempt will be made to deal justly
with her, and by giving her on occasion, as in a court of law, the
benefit of the doubt, I feel assured that the reader will be able
to see in her a very good average type of womanhood. Nor need I, in
so doing, be accused of using on her behalf the privilege of the
biographer, which is to make excuses. I will not simply set forth the
case for Cleopatra as it were in her defence: I will tell the whole
story of her life as it appears to me, admitting always the possible
correctness of the estimate of her character held by other historians,
but, at the same time, offering to public consideration a view of her
deeds and devices which, if accepted, will clear her memory of much
of that unpleasant stigma so long attached to it, and will place her
reputation upon a level with those of the many famous persons of her
time, not one of whom can be called either thoroughly bad or wholly
good.
So little is known with any certainty as to Cleopatra’s appearance,
that the biographer must feel considerable reluctance in presenting her
to his readers in definite guise; yet the duties of an historian do not
permit him to deal with ghosts and shadows, or to invoke from the past
only the misty semblance of those who once were puissant realities.
For him the dead must rise not as phantoms hovering uncertainly at the
mouth of their tombs, but as substantial entities observable in every
detail to the mental eye; and he must endeavour to convey to others the
impression, however faulty, which he himself has received. In the case
of Cleopatra the materials necessary for her resuscitation are meagre,
and one is forced to call in the partial assistance of the imagination
in the effort to rebuild once more that body which has been so long
dissolved into Egyptian dust.
A few coins upon which the Queen’s profile is stamped, and a bust of
poor workmanship in the British Museum, are the sole[3] sources of
information as to her features. The colour of her eyes and of her
hair is not known; nor can it be said whether her skin was white as
alabaster, like that of many of her Macedonian fellow-countrywomen, or
whether it had that olive tone so often observed amongst the Greeks.
Even her beauty, or rather the degree of her beauty, is not clearly
defined. It must be remembered that, so far as we know, not one drop of
Oriental blood flowed in Cleopatra’s veins, and that therefore her type
must be considered as Macedonian Greek. The slightly brown skin of the
Egyptian, the heavy dark eyes of the East, full, as it were, of sleep,
the black hair of silken texture, are not features which are to be
assigned to her. On the contrary, many Macedonian women are fair-haired
and blue-eyed, and that colouring is frequently to be seen amongst the
various peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless, it seems
most probable, all things considered, that she was a brunette; but in
describing her as such it must be borne in mind that there is nothing
more than a calculated likelihood to guide us.
The features of her face seem to have been strongly moulded, although
the general effect given is that of smallness and delicacy. Her nose
was aquiline and prominent, the nostrils being sensitive and having an
appearance of good breeding. Her mouth was beautifully formed, the lips
appearing to be finely chiselled. Her eyes were large and well placed,
her eyebrows delicately pencilled. The contour of her cheek and chin
was charmingly rounded, softening, thus, the lines of her clear-cut
features. “Her beauty,” says Plutarch, “was not in itself altogether
incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her”; and he adds
that Octavia, afterwards Antony’s wife, was the more beautiful of the
two women. But he admits, and no other man denies, that her personal
charm and magnetism were very great. “She was splendid to hear and to
see,” says Dion Cassius, “and was capable of conquering the hearts
which had resisted most obstinately the influence of love and those
which had been frozen by age.”
It is probable that she was very small in build. In order to obtain
admittance to her palace upon an occasion of which we shall presently
read, it is related that she was rolled up in some bedding and carried
over the shoulders of an attendant, a fact which indicates that
her weight was not considerable. The British Museum bust seems to
portray the head of a small woman; and, moreover, Plutarch refers to
her in terms which suggest that her charm lay to some extent in her
daintiness. One imagines her thus to have been in appearance a small,
graceful woman; prettily rounded rather than slight; white-skinned;
dark-haired and dark-eyed; beautiful, and yet by no means a perfect
type of beauty.
Her voice is said to have been her most powerful weapon, for by
the perfection of its modulations it was at all times wonderfully
persuasive and seductive.
“The Devil hath not, in all his quiver’s choice,
An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice,”
says Byron; and in the case of Cleopatra this poignant gift of Nature
must have served her well throughout her life. “Familiarity with her,”
writes Plutarch, “had an irresistible charm; and her form, combined
with her persuasive speech, and with the peculiar character which in a
manner was diffused about her behaviour, produced a certain piquancy.
There was a sweetness in the sound of her voice when she spoke.” “Her
charm of speech,” Dion Cassius tells us, “was such that she won all who
listened.”
Her grace of manner was as irresistible as her voice; for, as Plutarch
remarks, there seems to have been this peculiar, undefined charm in
her behaviour. It may have been largely due to a kind of elusiveness
and subtilty; but it would seem also to have been accentuated by a
somewhat naïve and childish manner, a waywardness, an audacity, a
capriciousness, which enchanted those around her. Though often wild
and inclined to romp, she possessed considerable dignity and at times
was haughty and proud. Pliny speaks of her as being disdainful and
vain, and indeed so Cicero found her when he met her in Rome; but this
was an attitude perhaps assumed by the Queen as a defence against the
light criticisms of those Roman nobles of the Pompeian faction who
may have found her position not so honourable as she herself believed
it to be. There is, indeed, little to indicate that her manner was by
nature overbearing; and one is inclined to picture her as a natural,
impulsive woman who passed readily from haughtiness to simplicity.
Her actions were spontaneous, and one may suppose her to have been in
her early years as often artless as cunning. Her character was always
youthful, her temperament vivacious, and her manner frequently what may
be called harum-scarum. She enjoyed life, and with candour took from
it whatever pleasures it held out to her. Her untutored heart leapt
from mirth to sorrow, from comedy to tragedy, with unexpected ease; and
with her small hands she tossed about her the fabric of her complex
circumstances like a mantle of light and darkness.
She was a gifted woman, endowed by nature with ready words and a
happy wit. “She could easily turn her tongue,” says Plutarch, “like
a many-stringed instrument, to any language that she pleased. She
had very seldom need of an interpreter for her communication with
foreigners, but she answered most men by herself, namely Ethiopians,
Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes, and Parthians. She is
said to have learned the language of many other peoples, though the
kings, her predecessors, had not even taken the pains to learn the
Egyptian tongue, and some of them had not so much as given up the
Macedonian dialect.” Statecraft made a strong appeal to her, and as
Queen of Egypt she served the cause of her dynasty’s independence and
aggrandisement with passionate energy. Dion Cassius tells us that she
was intensely ambitious, and most careful that due honour should be
paid to her throne. Her actions go to confirm this estimate, and one
may see her consumed at times with a legitimate desire for world-power.
Though clever and bold she was not highly skilled, so far as one can
see, in the diplomatic art; but she seems to have plotted and schemed
in the manner common to her house, not so much with great acuteness or
profound depth as with sustained intensity and a sort of conviction.
Tenacity of purpose is seen to have been her prevailing characteristic;
and her unwavering struggle for her rights and those of her son
Cæsarion will surely be followed by the interested reader through the
long story before him with real admiration.
It is unanimously supposed that Cleopatra was, as Josephus words it, a
slave to her lusts. The vicious sensuality of the East, the voluptuous
degeneracy of an Oriental court, are thought to have found their most
apparent expression in the person of this unfortunate Queen. Yet
what was there, beyond the ignorant and prejudiced talk of her Roman
enemies, to give a foundation to such an estimate of her character? She
lived practically as Cæsar’s _wife_ for some years, it being said, I
believe with absolute truth, that he intended to make her Empress of
Rome and his legal consort. After his assassination she married Antony,
and cohabited with him until the last days of her life. At an age when
the legal rights of marriage were violated on every side, when all
Rome and all Alexandria were deeply involved in domestic intrigues,
Cleopatra, so far as I can see, confined her attentions to the two men
who in sequence each acted towards her in the manner of a legitimate
husband, each being recognised in Egypt as her divinely-sanctioned
consort. The words of Dion Cassius, which tell us that “no wealth could
satisfy her, and her passions were insatiable,” do not suggest a more
significant foundation than that her life was lived on extravagant and
prodigal lines. There is no doubt that she was open to the accusations
of her enemies, who described her habits as dissipated and intemperate;
but there seems to be little to indicate that she was in any way a
Delilah or a Jezebel. For all we know, she may have been a very
moral woman: certainly she was the fond mother of four children, a
fact which, even at that day, may be said to indicate, to a certain
extent, a voluntary assumption of the duties of motherhood. After due
consideration of all the evidence, I am of opinion that though her
nature may have been somewhat voluptuous, and though her passions were
not always under control, the best instincts of her sex were by no
means absent; and indeed, in her maternal aspect, she may be described
as a really good woman.
The state of society at the time must be remembered. In Rome, as
well as in Alexandria, love intrigues were continuously in progress.
Mommsen, in writing of the moral corruption of the age, speaks of the
extraordinary degeneracy of the dancing girl of the period, whose
record “pollutes even the pages of history.” “But,” he adds, “their,
as it were, licensed trade was materially injured by the free act of
the ladies of aristocratic circles. Liaisons in the first houses had
become so frequent that only a scandal altogether exceptional could
make them the subject of special talk, and judicial interference seemed
now almost ridiculous.” Against such a background Cleopatra’s domestic
life with Cæsar, and afterwards with Antony, assumes, by contrast, a
fair character which is not without its refreshing aspect. We see her
intense and lifelong devotion to her eldest son Cæsarion, we picture
her busy nursery in the royal palace, which at one time resounded to
the cries of a pair of lusty twins, and the vision of the Oriental
voluptuary fades from our eyes. Can this dainty little woman, we ask,
who soothes at her breast the cries of her fat baby, while three sturdy
youngsters play around her, be the sensuous Queen of the East? Can this
tender, ingenuous, smiling mother of Cæsar’s beloved son be the Siren
of Egypt? There is not a particle of trustworthy evidence to show that
Cleopatra carried on a single love affair in her life other than the
two recorded so dramatically by history, nor is there any evidence to
show that in those two affairs she conducted herself in a licentious
manner.
Cleopatra was in many ways a refined and cultured woman. Her linguistic
powers indicate a certain studiousness; and at the same time she seems
to have been a patron of the arts. It is recorded that she made Antony
present to the city of Alexandria the library which once belonged to
Pergamum, consisting of 200,000 volumes; and Cicero seems to record the
fact that she interested herself in obtaining certain books for him
from Alexandria. She inherited from her family a temperament naturally
artistic; and there is no reason to suppose that she failed to carry
on the high tradition of her house in this regard. She was a patron
also of the sciences, and Photinus, the mathematician, who wrote both
on arithmetic and geometry, published a book actually under her name,
called the ‘Canon of Cleopatra.’ The famous physician Dioscorides
was, it would seem, the friend and attendant of the Queen; and the
books which he wrote at her court have been read throughout the ages.
Sosigenes, the astronomer, was also, perhaps, a friend of Cleopatra,
and it may have been through her good offices that he was introduced to
Cæsar, with whom he collaborated in the reformation of the calendar.
The evidence is very inconsiderable in regard to the Queen’s personal
attitude towards the arts and sciences, but sufficient may be gleaned
to give some support to the suggestion that she did not fall below the
standard set by her forefathers. One feels that her interest in such
matters is assured by the fact that she held for so long the devotion
of such a man of letters as Julius Cæsar. There is little doubt that
she was capable of showing great seriousness of mind when occasion
demanded, and that her demeanour, so frequently tumultuous, was often
thoughtful and quiet.
At the same time, however, one must suppose that she viewed her life
with a light heart, having, save towards the end, a greater familiarity
with laughter than with tears. She was at all times ready to make merry
or jest, and a humorous adventure seems to have made a special appeal
to her. With Antony, as we shall see, she was wont to wander around
the city at night-time, knocking at people’s doors in the darkness and
running away when they were opened. It is related how once when Antony
was fishing in the sea, she made a diver descend into the water to
attach to his line a salted fish, which he drew to the surface amidst
the greatest merriment. One gathers from the early writers that her
conversation was usually sparkling and gay; and it would seem that
there was often an infectious frivolity in her manner which made her
society most exhilarating.
She was eminently a woman whom men might love, for she was active,
high-spirited, plucky, and dashing. To use a popular phrase, she was
always “game” for an adventure. Her courageous return to Egypt after
she had been driven into exile by her brother, is an indication of her
brave spirit; and the daring manner in which she first obtained her
introduction to Cæsar, causing herself to be carried into the palace on
a man’s back, is a convincing instance of that audacious courage which
makes so strong an appeal on her behalf to the imagination. Florus, who
was no friend of the Queen’s, speaks of her as being “free from all
womanly fear.”
We now come to the question as to whether she was cruel by nature.
It must be admitted that she caused the assassination of her sister
Arsinoe, and ordered the execution of others who were, at that time,
plotting against her. But it must be remembered that political murders
of this kind were a custom--nay, a habit--of the period; and, moreover,
the fact that the Queen of Egypt used her rough soldiers for the
purpose does not differentiate the act from that of Good Queen Bess who
employed a Lord Chief Justice and an axe. The early demise of Ptolemy
XV., her brother, is attributable as much to Cæsar as to Cleopatra,
if, indeed, he did not die a natural death. The execution of King
Artavasdes of Armenia was a political act of no great significance. And
the single remaining charge of cruelty which may be brought against
the Queen, namely, that she tested the efficacy of various poisons on
the persons of condemned criminals, need not be regarded as indicating
callousness on her part; for it mattered little to the condemned
prisoner what manner of sudden death he should die, but, on the other
hand, the discovery of a pleasant solution to the quandary of her own
life was a point of capital importance to herself. When we recall
the painful record of callous murders which were perpetrated during
the reigns of her predecessors, we cannot attribute to Cleopatra any
extraordinary degree of heartlessness, nor can we say that she showed
herself to be as cruel as were other members of her family. She lived
in a ruthless age; and, on the whole, her behaviour was tolerant and
good-natured.
In religious matters she was not, like so many persons of that period,
a disbeliever in the power of the gods. She had a strong pagan belief
in the close association of divinity and royalty, and she seems to have
accepted without question the hereditary assurance of her own celestial
affiliation. She was wont to dress herself on gala occasions in the
robes of Isis or Aphrodite, and to act the part of a goddess incarnate
upon earth, assuming not divine powers but divine rights. She regarded
herself as being closely in communion with the virile gods of Egypt
and Greece; and when signs and wonders were pointed out to her by her
astrologers, or when she noted good or ill omens in the occurrences
around her, she was particularly prone to giving them full recognition
as being communications from her heavenly kin. Her behaviour at the
battle of Actium is often said to have been due to her consciousness of
the warnings which she had received by means of such portents; and on
other occasions in her life her actions were ordered by these means.
It is related by Josephus that she violated the temples of Egypt in
order to obtain money to carry on the war against Rome, and that no
place was so holy or so infamous that she would not attempt to strip
it of its treasures when she was pressed for gold. If this be true,
it may be argued in the Queen’s defence that the possessions of the
gods were considered by her to be, as it were, her own property, as
the representative of heaven upon earth, and in this case they were
the more especially at her disposal since they were to be converted
into money for the glory of Egypt. As a matter of fact, it is probable
that in the last emergencies of her reign, the Queen’s agents obtained
supplies wherever they found them, and, if Cleopatra was consulted at
all, she was far too distracted to give the matter very serious thought.
It is not necessary here to inquire further into the character of
the Queen. Her personality, as I see it, will become apparent in the
following record of her tragic life. It is essential to remember
that, though her faults were many, she was not what is usually called
_bad_. She was a brilliant, charming, and beautiful woman; perhaps
not over-scrupulous and yet not altogether unprincipled; ready, no
doubt, to make use of her charms, but not an immoral character. As
the historian pictures her figure moving lightly through the mazes of
her life, now surrounded by her armies in the thick of battle; now
sailing up the moonlit Nile in her royal barge with Cæsar beside her;
now tenderly playing in the nursery with her babies; now presiding
brilliantly at the gorgeous feasts in the Alexandrian palace; now
racing in disguise down the side-streets of her capital, choking
with suppressed laughter; now speeding across the Mediterranean to
her doom; and now, all haggard and forlorn, holding the deadly asp
to her body,--he cannot fail to fall himself under the spell of that
enchantment by which the face of the world was changed. He finds that
he is dealing not with a daughter of Satan, who, from her lair in the
East, stretches out her hand to entrap Rome’s heroes, but with mighty
Cæsar’s wife and widow, fighting for Cæsar’s child; with Antony’s
faithful consort, striving, as will be shown, to unite Egypt and Rome
in one vast empire. He sees her not as the crowned courtesan of the
Orient, but as the excellent royal lady, who by her wits and graces
held captive the two greatest men of her time in the bonds of a union
which in Egypt was equivalent to a legal marriage. He sees before him
once more the small, graceful figure, whose beauty compels, whose voice
entices, and in whose face (it may be by the kindly obliterations of
time) there is no apparent evil; and the unprejudiced historian must
find himself hard put to it to say whether his sympathies are ranged
on the side of Cleopatra or on that of her Roman rival in the great
struggle for the mastery of the whole earth which is recorded in the
following pages.
CHAPTER II.
THE CITY OF ALEXANDRIA.
No study of the life of Cleopatra can be of true value unless the
position of the city of Alexandria, her capital, in relationship
to Egypt on the one hand and to Greece and Rome on the other, is
fully understood and appreciated. The reader must remember, and bear
continually in mind, that Alexandria was at that time, and still is,
more closely connected in many ways with the Mediterranean kingdoms
than with Egypt proper. It bore, geographically, no closer relation to
the Nile valley than Carthage bore to the interior of North Africa.
Indeed, to some extent it is legitimate in considering Alexandria
to allow the thoughts to find a parallel in the relationship of
Philadelphia to the interior of America in the seventeenth century or
of Bombay to India in the eighteenth century, for in these cases we see
a foreign settlement, representative of a progressive civilisation,
largely dependent on transmarine shipping for its prosperity, set down
on the coast of a country whose habits are obsolete. It is almost as
incorrect to class the Alexandrian Queen Cleopatra as a native Egyptian
as it would be to imagine William Penn as a Red Indian or Warren
Hastings as a Hindoo. Cleopatra in Alexandria was cut off from Egypt.
There is no evidence that she ever even saw the Sphinx, and it would
seem that the single journey up the Nile of which the history of her
reign gives us any record was undertaken by her solely at the desire of
Cæsar. Bearing this fact in mind, I do not think it is desirable for me
to refer at any length to the affairs, or to the manners and customs,
of Egypt proper in this volume; and it will be observed that, in order
to avoid giving to events here recorded an Egyptian character which
in reality they did not possess in any very noticeable degree, I have
refrained from introducing any account of the people who lived in the
great country behind Alexandria over which Cleopatra reigned.
The topographical position of Alexandria, selected by its illustrious
founder, seems to have been chosen on account of its detachment from
Egypt proper. The city was erected upon a strip of land having the
Mediterranean on the one side and the Mareotic lake on the other. It
was thus cut off from the hinterland far more effectively even than
was Carthage by its semicircle of hills. Alexander had intended to
make the city a purely Greek settlement, the port at which the Greeks
should land their goods for distribution throughout Egypt, and whence
the produce of the abundant Nile should be shipped to the north and
west. He selected a remote corner of the Delta for his site, with the
plain intention of holding his city at once free of, and in dominion
over, Egypt; and so precisely was the location suited to his purpose
that until this day Alexandria is in little more than name a city of
the Egyptians. Even at the present time, when an excellent system of
express railway trains connects Alexandria with Cairo and Upper Egypt,
there are many well-to-do inhabitants who have not seen more that
ten miles of Egyptian landscape; and the vast majority have never
been within sight of the Pyramids. The wealthy foreigners settled in
Alexandria often know nothing whatsoever about Egypt, and Cairo itself
is beyond their ken. The Greeks, Levantines, and Jews, who now, as in
ancient days, form a very large part of the population of Alexandria,
would shed bitter tears of gloomy foreboding were they called upon to
penetrate into the Egypt which the tourists and the officials know and
love. The middle-class Egyptians of Alexandria are rarely tempted to
enter Egypt proper, and even those who have inherited a few acres of
land in the interior are often unwilling to visit their property.
Egypt as we know it is a _terra incognita_ to the Alexandrian. The
towering cliffs of the desert, the wide Nile, the rainless skies,
the amazing brilliance of the stars, the ruins of ancient temples,
the great pyramids, the decorated tombs, the clustered mud-huts of
the villages in the shade of the dom-palms and the sycamores, the
creaking _sakkiehs_ or water-wheels, the gracefully worked _shadufs_ or
water-hoists,--all these are unknown to the inhabitants of Alexandria.
They have never seen the hot deserts and the white camel-tracks over
the hills, they have not looked upon the Nile tumbling over the granite
rocks of the cataracts, nor have they watched the broad expanse of
the inundation. That peculiar, undefined aspect and feeling which is
associated with the thought of Egypt in the minds of visitors and
residents does not tincture the impression of the Alexandrians. They
have not felt the subtle influence of the land of the Pharaohs: they
are sons of the Mediterranean, not children of the Nile.
The climate of Alexandria is very different from that of the interior
of the Delta, and bears no similarity to that of Upper Egypt. At
Thebes the winter days are warm and brilliantly sunny, the nights
often extremely cold. The summer climate is intensely hot, and there
are times when the resident might there believe himself an inhabitant
of the infernal regions. The temperature in and around Cairo is more
moderate, and the summer is tolerable, though by no means pleasant. In
Alexandria, however, the summer is cool and temperate. There is perhaps
no climate in the entire world so perfect as that of Alexandria in the
early summer. The days are cloudless, breezy, and brilliant; the nights
cool and even cold. In August and September it is somewhat damp, and
therefore unpleasant; but it is never very hot, and the conditions of
life are almost precisely those of southern Europe.
The winter days on the sea-coast are often cold and rainy, the climate
being not unlike that of Italy at the same time of year. People must
needs wear thick clothing, and must study the barometer before taking
their promenades. While Thebes, and even the Pyramids, bask in more
or less continual sunshine, the city of Alexandria is lashed by
intermittent rainstorms, and the salt sea-wind buffets the pedestrians
as it screams down the paved streets. The peculiar texture of the true
Egyptian atmosphere is not felt in Alexandria: the air is that of
Marseilles, of Naples, or of the Piræus.
In summer-time the sweating official of the south makes his way seaward
in the spirit of one who leaves the tropics for northern shores. He
enters the northbound express on some stifling evening in June, the
amazing heat still radiating from the frowning cliffs of the desert,
and striking up into his eyes from the parched earth around the
station. He lies tossing and panting in his berth while the electric
fans beat down the hot air upon him, until the more temperate midnight
permits him to fall into a restless sleep. In the morning he arrives
at Cairo, where the moisture runs more freely from his face by reason
of the greater humidity, though now the startling intensity of the
heat is not felt. Anon he travels through the Delta towards the north,
still mopping his brow as the morning sun bursts into the carriage. But
suddenly, a few miles from the coast, a change is felt. For the first
time, perhaps for many weeks, he feels cool: he wishes his clothes were
not so thin. He packs up his helmet and dons a straw hat. Arriving at
Alexandria, he is amused to find that he actually feels chilly. He no
longer dreads to move abroad in the sun at high noon, but, waving aside
the importunate carriage-drivers, he walks briskly to his hotel. He
does not sit in a darkened room with windows tightly shut against the
heat, but pulls the chair out on to the verandah to take the air; and
at night he does not lie stark naked on his bed in the garden, cursing
the imagined heat of the stars and the moon, and praying for the mercy
of sleep; but, like a white man in his own land, he tucks himself up
under a blanket in the cool bedroom, and awakes lively and refreshed.
A European may live the year round at Alexandria, and may express a
preference for the summer. The wives and children of English officials
not infrequently remain there throughout the warmer months, not from
necessity but from choice; and there are many persons of northern
blood who are happy to call it their home. In Cairo such families
rarely remain during the summer, unless under compulsion, while in
Upper Egypt there is hardly a white woman in the land between May and
October. Egypt is considered by them to be solely a winter residence,
and the official is of opinion that he pays toll to fortune for the
pleasures of the winter season by the perils and torments of the
summer months. Even the middle and upper class Egyptians themselves,
recruited, as they generally are in official circles, from Cairo,
suffer terribly from the heat in the south--often more so, indeed, than
the English; and I myself on more than one occasion have had to abandon
a summer day’s ride owing to the prostration of one of the native staff.
The Egyptian of Alexandria and the north looks with scorn upon the
inhabitants of the upper country. The southerner, on the other hand,
has no epithet of contempt more biting than that of “Alexandrian.” To
the hardy peasant of the Thebaid the term means all that “scalliwag”
denotes to us. The northern Egyptian, unmindful of the relationship
of a kettle to a saucepan, calls the southerner “black” in disdainful
tones. A certain Alexandrian Egyptian of undiluted native stock, who
was an official in a southern district, told me that he found life
very dull in his provincial capital, surrounded as he was by “all
these confounded niggers.” And if the _Egyptians_ of Alexandria are
thus estranged from those who constitute the backbone of the Egyptian
nation, it will be understood how great is the gulf between the Greeks
or other foreign residents in that city and the bulk of the people of
the Nile.
I am quite sure that Cleopatra spoke of the Egyptians of the interior
as “confounded niggers.” Her interests and sympathies, like those of
her city, were directed across the Mediterranean. She held no more
intimate relationship to Egypt than does the London millionaire to
the African gold-mines which he owns. Alexandria at the present day
still preserves the European character with which it was endowed by
Alexander and the Ptolemies; or perhaps it were more correct to say
that it has once more assumed that character. There are large quarters
of the city, of course, which are native in style and appearance,
but, viewed as a whole, it suggests to the eye rather an Italian
than an Egyptian seaport. It has extremely little in common with the
Egyptian metropolis and other cities of the Nile; and we are aware that
there was no greater similarity in ancient times. The very flowers
and trees are different. In Upper Egypt the gardens have a somewhat
artificial beauty, for the grace of the land is more dependent upon the
composition of cliffs, river, and fields. There are few wild-flowers,
and little natural grass. In the gardens the flowers are evident
importations, while the lawns have to be sown every autumn, and do
not survive the summer. But in Alexandria there is always a blaze of
flowers, and one notes with surprise the English hollyhocks, foxgloves,
and stocks growing side by side with the plants of southern Europe. In
the fields of Mariout, over against Alexandria, the wild-flowers in
spring are those of the hills of Greece. Touched by the cool breeze
from the sea, one walks over ground scarlet and gold with poppies and
daisies; there bloom asphodel and iris; and the ranunculus grows to
the size of a tulip. There is a daintiness in these fields and gardens
wholly un-Egyptian, completely different from the more permanent grace
of the south. One feels that Pharaoh walked not in fields of asphodel,
that Amon had no dominion here amidst the poppies by the sea. One is
transplanted in imagination to Greece and to Italy, and the knowledge
becomes the more apparent that Cleopatra and her city were an integral
part of European life, only slightly touched by the very finger-tips of
the Orient.
[Illustration:
Approximate plan of
ALEXANDRIA
in the time of Cleopatra.
]
The coast of Egypt rises so little above the level of the Mediterranean
that the land cannot be seen by those approaching it from across the
sea, until but a few miles separate them from the surf which breaks
upon the sand and rocks of that barren shore. The mountains of other
East-Mediterranean countries--Greece, Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus,
and Syria--rising out of the blue waters, served as landmarks for
the mariners of ancient days, and were discernible upon the horizon
for many long hours before wind or oars carried the vessels in under
their lee. But the Egyptian coast offered no such assistance to the
captains of sea-going galleys, and they were often obliged to approach
closely to the treacherous shore before their exact whereabouts became
apparent to them. The city of Alexandria was largely hidden from
view by the long, low island of Pharos, which lay in front of it and
which was little dissimilar in appearance from the mainland.[4] Two
promontories of land projected from the coast opposite either end of
the island; and, these being lengthened by the building of breakwaters,
the straits between Pharos Island and the mainland were converted into
an excellent harbour, both it and the main part of the city being
screened from the open sea. There was one tremendous landmark, however,
which served to direct all vessels to their destination, namely, the
far-famed Pharos lighthouse, standing upon the east end of the island,
and overshadowing the main entrance to the port.[5] It had been built
during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus by Sostratus of Cnidus two
hundred years and more before the days of Cleopatra, and it ranked as
one of the wonders of the world. It was constructed of white marble,
and rose to a height of 400 ells, or 590 feet. By day it stood like
a pillar of alabaster, gleaming against the leaden haze of the sky;
and from nightfall until dawn there shone from its summit a powerful
beacon-light which could be seen, it is said[6], for 300 stadia, _i.e._
34 miles, across the waters.
The harbour was divided into two almost equal parts by a great
embankment, known as the Heptastadium, which joined the city to the
island. This was cut at either end by a passage or waterway leading
from one harbour to the other, but these two passages were bridged
over, and thus a clear causeway was formed, seven stadia, or 1400
yards, in length. To the west of this embankment lay the Harbour of
Eunostos, or the Happy Return, which was entered from behind the
western extremity of Pharos Island; while to the east of the embankment
lay the Great Harbour, the entrance to which passed between the
enormous lighthouse and the Diabathra, or breakwater, built out from
the promontory known as Lochias. This entrance was dangerous, owing to
the narrowness of the fairway and to the presence of rocks, against
which the rolling waves of the Mediterranean, driven by the prevalent
winds of the north, beat with almost continuous violence.
A vessel entering the port of Alexandria from this side was steered
towards the great lighthouse, around the foot of which the waves leapt
and broke in showers of white foam. Skirting the dark rocks at the base
of this marble wonder, the vessel slipped through the passage into
the still entrance of the harbour, leaving the breakwater on the left
hand. Here, on a windless day, one might look down to the sand and the
rocks at the bottom of the sea, so clear and transparent was the water
and so able to be penetrated by the strong light of the sun. Seaweed
of unaccustomed hues covered the sunken rocks over which the vessels
floated; and anemones, like great flowers, could be seen swaying in the
gentle motion of the undercurrents. Passing on into the deeper water of
the harbour, in which the sleek dolphins arose and dived in rhythmic
succession, the traveller saw before him such an array of palaces and
public buildings as could be found nowhere else in the world. There
stood, on his left hand, the Royal Palace, which was spread over the
Lochias Promontory and extended round towards the west. Here, beside
a little island known as Antirrhodos, itself the site of a royal
pavilion, lay the Royal Harbour, where flights of broad steps descended
into the azure water, which at this point was so deep that the largest
galleys might moor against the quays. Along the edge of the mainland,
overlooking the Great Harbour, stood a series of magnificent buildings
which must have deeply impressed all those who were approaching the
city across the water. Here stood the imposing Museum, which was
actually a part of another palace, and which formed a kind of institute
for the study of the sciences, presided over by a priest appointed by
the sovereign. The buildings seem to have consisted of a large hall
wherein the professors took their meals; a series of arcades in which
these men of learning walked and talked; a hall, or assembly rooms,
in which their lectures were held; and, at the north end, close to
the sea, the famous library, at this time containing more than half a
million scrolls. On rising ground between the Museum and the Lochias
Promontory stood the Theatre, wherein those who occupied the higher
seats might look beyond the stage to the island of Antirrhodos, behind
which the incoming galleys rode upon the blue waters in the shadow of
Pharos. At the back of the Theatre, on still higher ground, the Paneum,
or Temple of Pan, had been erected. This is described by Strabo as “an
artificial mound of the shape of a fir-cone, resembling a pile of rock,
to the top of which there is an ascent by a spiral path, from whose
summit may be seen the whole city lying all around and beneath it.”
To the west of this mound stood the Gymnasium, a superb building, the
porticos of which alone exceeded a stadium, or 200 yards, in length.
The Courts of Justice, surrounded by groves and gardens, adjoined the
Gymnasium. Close to the harbour, to the west of the Theatre, was the
Forum; and in front of it, on the quay, stood a temple of Neptune. To
the west of this, near the Museum, there was an enclosure called Sema,
in which stood the tombs of the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt, built around
the famous Mausoleum wherein the bones of Alexander the Great rested in
a sarcophagus of alabaster.[7]
These buildings, all able to be seen from the harbour, formed the
quarter of the city known as the Regia, Brucheion, or Royal Area. Here
the white stone structures reflected in the mirror of the harbour, the
statues and monuments, the trees and brilliant flower-gardens, the
flights of marble steps passing down to the sea, the broad streets and
public places, must have formed a scene of magnificence not surpassed
at that time in the whole world. Nor would the traveller, upon stepping
ashore from his vessel, be disappointed in his expectations as he
roamed the streets of the town. Passing through the Forum he would come
out upon the great thoroughfare, more than three miles long, which
cut right through the length of the city in a straight line, from the
Gate of the Necropolis, at the western end, behind the Harbour of the
Happy Return, to the Gate of Canopus, at the eastern extremity, some
distance behind the Lochias Promontory. This magnificent boulevard,
known as the Street of Canopus, or the Meson Pedion, was flanked on
either side by colonnades, and was 100 feet in breadth.[8] On its
north side would be seen the Museum, the Sema, the palaces, and the
gardens; on the south side the Gymnasium with its long porticos, the
Paneum towering up against the sky, and numerous temples and public
places. Were the traveller to walk eastwards along this street he
would pass through the Jewish quarter, adorned by many synagogues and
national buildings, through the Gate of Canopus, built in the city
walls, and so out on to open ground, where stood the Hippodromos or
Racecourse, and several public buildings. Here the sun-baked soil was
sandy, the rocks glaring white, and but little turf was to be seen. A
few palms, bent southward by the sea wind, and here and there a cluster
of acacias, gave shade to pedestrians; while between the road and the
sea the Grove of Nemesis offered a pleasant foreground to the sandy
beach and the blue expanse of the Mediterranean beyond. Near by stood
the little settlement of Eleusis, which was given over to festivities
and merry-making. Here there were several restaurants and houses of
entertainment which are said to have commanded beautiful views; but so
noisy was the fun supplied, and so dissolute the manners of those who
frequented the place, that better-class Alexandrians were inclined to
avoid it. At a distance of some three miles from Alexandria stood the
suburb of Nicopolis, where numerous villas, themselves “not less than
a city,” says Strabo,[9] had been erected along the sea-front, and the
sands in summer-time were crowded with bathers. Farther eastwards the
continuation of the Street of Canopus passed on to the town of that
name and Egypt proper.
Returning within the city walls and walking westwards along the Street
of Canopus, the visitor would pass once more through the Regia and
thence through the Egyptian quarter known as Rhakotis, to the western
boundary. This quarter, being immediately behind the commercial
harbour, was partly occupied by warehouses and ships’ offices, and
was always a very busy district of the town. Here there was an inner
harbour called Cibotos, or the Ark, where there were extensive docks;
and from this a canal passed, under the Street of Canopus, to the
lake at the back of the city. On a rocky hill behind the Rhakotis
quarter stood the magnificent Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, which
was approached by a broad street running at right angles to the Street
of Canopus, which it bisected at a point not far west of the Museum,
being a continuation of the Heptastadium. The temple is said to have
been surpassed in grandeur by no other building in the world except the
Capitol at Rome; and, standing as it did at a considerable elevation,
it must have towered above the hubbub and the denser atmosphere of the
streets and houses at its foot, as though to receive the purification
of the untainted wind of the sea. Behind the temple, on the open rocky
ground outside the city walls, stood the Stadium; and away towards
the west the Necropolis was spread out, with its numerous gardens and
mausoleums. Still farther westward there were numerous villas and
gardens; and it may be that the wonderful flowers which at the present
day grow wild upon this ground are actually the descendants of those
introduced and cultivated by the Greeks of the days of Cleopatra.
Along the entire length of the back walls of the city lay the Lake of
Mareotis, which cut off Alexandria from the Egyptian Delta, and across
this stretch of water vast numbers of vessels brought the produce of
Egypt to the capital. The lake harbour and docks were built around
an inlet which penetrated some considerable distance into the heart
of the city not far to the east of the Paneum, and from them a great
colonnaded thoroughfare, as wide as the Street of Canopus, which it
crossed at right angles, passed through the city to the Great Harbour,
being terminated at the south end by the Gate of the Sun, and at the
north end by the Gate of the Moon. These lake docks are said to have
been richer and more important even than the maritime docks on the
opposite side of the town; for over the lake the traffic of vessels
coming by river and canal from all parts of Egypt was always greater
than the shipping across the Mediterranean. The shores of this inland
sea were exuberantly fertile. A certain amount of papyrus grew at the
edges of the lake, considerable stretches of water being covered
by the densely-growing reeds. The Alexandrians were wont to use the
plantations for their picnics, penetrating in small boats into the
thickest part of the reeds, where they were overshadowed by the leaves,
which, also, they used as dishes and drinking-vessels. Extensive
vineyards and fruit gardens flourished at the edge of the water; and
there are said to have been eight islands which rose from the placid
surface of the lake and were covered by luxuriant gardens.
[Illustration:
_Cairo Museum._] [_Photograph by Brugsch._
PORTRAIT OF A GREEK LADY
THE PAINTING DATES FROM A GENERATION LATER THAN THAT OF CLEOPATRA, BUT
IT IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE WORK OF THE ALEXANDRIAN ARTISTS.]
Strabo tells us that Alexandria contained extremely beautiful public
parks and grounds, and abounded with magnificent buildings of all
kinds. The whole city was intersected by roads wide enough for the
passage of chariots; and, as has been said, the three main streets,
those leading to the Gate of Canopus, to the Serapeum, and to the
Lake Harbour, were particularly noteworthy both for their breadth
and length. Indeed, in the Fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, one of the
characters complains most bitterly of the excessive length of the
Alexandrian streets. The kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, for nearly
three centuries, had expended vast sums in the beautification of
their capital, and at the period with which we are now dealing it had
become the rival of Rome in magnificence and luxury. The novelist,
Achilles Tatius, writing some centuries later, when many of the
Ptolemaic edifices had been replaced by Roman constructions perhaps
of less merit, cried, as he beheld the city, “We are vanquished, mine
eyes”; and there is every reason to suppose that his words were no
unlicensed exaggeration. In the brilliant sunshine of the majority
of Egyptian days, the stately palaces, temples, and public buildings
which reflected themselves in the waters of the harbour, or cast their
shadows across the magnificent Street of Canopus, must have dazzled
the eyes of the spectator and brought wonder into his heart.
The inhabitants of the city were not altogether worthy of their
splendid home. In modern times the people of Alexandria exhibit much
the same conglomeration of nationalities as they did in ancient days;
but the distinguishing line between Egyptians and Europeans is now more
sharply defined than it was in the reign of Cleopatra, owing to the
fact that the former are mostly Mohammedans and the latter Christians,
no marriage being permitted between them. In Ptolemaic times only
the Jews of Alexandria stood outside the circle of international
marriages which was gradually forming the people of the city into a
single type; for they alone practised that conventional exclusiveness
which indicated a strong religious conviction. The Greek element,
always predominant in the city, was mainly Macedonian; but in the
period we are now studying so many intermarriages with Egyptians had
taken place that in the case of a large number of families the stock
was much mixed. There must have been, of course, a certain number
of aristocratic houses, descended from the Macedonian soldiers and
officials who had come to Egypt with Alexander the Great and the first
Ptolemy, whose blood had been kept pure; and we hear of such persons
boasting of their nationality, though the ruin of their fatherland and
its subservience to Rome had left them little of which to be proud. In
like manner there must have been many pure Egyptian families, no less
proud of their nationality than were the Macedonians. The majority of
educated people could now speak both the Greek and Egyptian tongues,
and all official decrees and proclamations were published in both
languages. Many Greeks assumed Egyptian names in addition to their own;
and it is probable that there were at this date Egyptians who, in like
manner, adopted Greek names.
Besides Greeks and Egyptians, there were numerous Italians, Cretans,
Phœnicians, Cilicians, Cypriots, Persians, Syrians, Armenians,
Arabs, and persons of other nationalities, who had, to some extent,
intermarried with Alexandrian families, thus producing a stock which
must have been much like that to be found in the city at the present
day and now termed Levantine. Some of these had come to Alexandria
originally as respectable merchants and traders; others were sailors,
and, indeed, pirates; yet others were escaped slaves, outlaws,
criminals, and debtors who were allowed to enter Alexandria on
condition that they served in the army; while not a few were soldiers
of fortune who had been enrolled in the forces of Egypt. There was a
standing army of these mercenaries in Alexandria, and Polybius, writing
of the days of Cleopatra’s great-grandfather, Ptolemy IX., speaks of
them as being oppressive and dissolute, desiring to rule rather than to
obey. A further introduction of foreign blood was due to the presence
of the Gabinian Army of Occupation, the members of which had settled
down in Alexandria and had married Alexandrian women. These soldiers
were largely drawn from Germany and Gaul; and though there had not yet
been time for them to do more than add a horde of half-cast children
to the medley, their own presence in the city contributed strikingly
to the cosmopolitan character of the streets. This barbaric force,
with its Roman officers, must have been in constant rivalry with the
so-called Macedonian Household Troops which guarded the palace; but
when Cleopatra came to the throne the latter force had already been
freely recruited from all the riff-raff of the world, and was in no way
a match for the northerners.
The aristocracy of Alexandria probably consisted of the cosmopolitan
officers of the mercenaries and Household Troops, the Roman officers
of the Gabinian army, the Macedonian courtiers, the Greek and Egyptian
officials, and numerous families of wealthy Europeans, Syrians, Jews,
and Egyptians. The professors and scholars of the Museum constituted
a class of their own, much patronised by the court, but probably not
often accepted by the aristocracy of the city for any other reason than
that of their learning. The mob was mainly composed of Greeks of mixed
breed, together with a large number of Egyptians of somewhat impure
stock; and a more noisy, turbulent, and excitable crowd could not be
found in all the world, not even in riotous Rome. The Greeks and Jews
were constantly annoying one another, but the Greeks and Egyptians
seem to have fraternised to a very considerable extent, for there was
not so wide a gulf between them as might be imagined. The Egyptians of
Alexandria, and, indeed, of all the Delta, were often no darker-skinned
than the Greeks. Both peoples were noisy and excitable, vain and
ostentatious, smart and clever. They did not quarrel upon religious
matters, for the Egyptian gods were easily able to be identified with
those of Greece, and the chief deity of Alexandria, Serapis, was here
worshipped by both nations in common. In the domain of art they had no
cause for dissensions, for the individual art of Egypt was practically
dead, and that of Greece had been accepted by cultivated Egyptians as
the correct expression of the refinement in which they desired to live.
Both peoples were industrious, and eager in the pursuit of wealth, and
both were able to set their labours aside with ease, and to turn their
whole attention to the amusements which the luxurious city provided.
Polybius speaks of the Egyptians as being smart and civilised; and of
the Alexandrian Greeks he writes that they were a poor lot, though he
seems to have preferred them to the Egyptians.
The people of Alexandria were passionately fond of the theatre. In the
words of Dion Chrysostom, who, however, speaks of the citizens of a
century later than Cleopatra, “the whole town lived for excitement,
and when the manifestation of Apis (the sacred bull) took place, all
Alexandria went fairly mad with musical entertainments and horse-races.
When doing their ordinary work they were apparently sane, but the
instant they entered the theatre or the racecourse they appeared as if
possessed by some intoxicating drug, so that they no longer knew nor
cared what they said or did. And this was the case even with women and
children, so that when the show was over, and the first madness past,
all the streets and byways were seething with excitement for days, like
the swell after a storm.” The Emperor Hadrian says of them: “I have
found them wholly light, wavering, and flying after every breath of a
report.... They are seditious, vain, and spiteful, though as a body
wealthy and prosperous.” The impudent wit of the young Græco-Egyptian
dandy was proverbial, and must always have constituted a cause of
offence to those whose public positions laid them open to attack. No
sooner did a statesman assume office, or a king come to the throne,
than he was given some scurrilous nickname by the wags of the city,
which stuck to him throughout the remainder of his life. Thus, to quote
a few examples, Ptolemy IX. was called “Bloated,” Ptolemy X. “Vetch,”
Ptolemy XIII. “Piper”; Seleucus they named “Pickled-fish Pedlar,” and
in later times Vespasian was named “Scullion.” All forms of ridicule
appealed to them, and many are the tales told in this regard. Thus,
when King Agrippa passed through the city on his way to his insecure
throne, these young Alexandrians dressed up an unfortunate madman
whom they had found in the streets, put a paper crown upon his head
and a reed in his hand, and led him through the town, hailing him as
King of the Jews: and this in spite of the fact that Agrippa was the
friend of Caligula, their Emperor. Against Vespasian they told with
delight the story of how he had bothered one of his friends for the
payment of a trifling loan of six obols, and somebody made up a song
in which the fact was recorded. They ridiculed Caracalla in the same
manner, laughing at him for dressing himself like Alexander the Great,
although his stature was below the average; but in this case they had
not reckoned with their man, whose revenge upon them was an act no less
frightful than the total extermination of all the well-to-do young
men of the city, they being collected together under a false pretence
and butchered in cold blood. These Alexandrians were famous for the
witty and scathing verses which they composed upon topical subjects;
and a later historian speaks of this proficiency of theirs “in making
songs and epigrams against their rulers.” Such ditties were carried
from Egypt to Rome, and were sung in the Italian capital, just as
nowadays the latest American air is hummed and whistled in the streets
of London. Indeed, in Rome the wit of Alexandria was very generally
appreciated; and, a few years later, one hears of Alexandrian comedians
causing Roman audiences to rock with laughter.
The Emperor Hadrian, as we have seen, speaks of the Alexandrians as
being spiteful; and, no doubt, a great deal of their vaunted wit had
that character. The young Græco-Egyptian was inordinately vain and
self-satisfied; and no critic so soon adopts a spiteful tone as he
who has thought himself above criticism. The conceit of these smart
young men was very noticeable, and is frequently referred to by
early writers. They appear to have been much devoted to the study of
their personal appearance; and if one may judge by the habits of the
upper-class Egyptians and Levantines of present-day Alexandria, many of
them must have been intolerable fops. The luxury of their houses was
probably far greater than that in Roman life at this date, and they had
studied the culinary arts in an objectionably thorough manner. Dion
Chrysostom says the Alexandrians of his day thought of little else but
food and horse-racing. Both Greeks and Egyptians in Alexandria had
the reputation of being fickle and easily influenced by the moment’s
emotion. “I should be wasting many words in vain,” says the author of
‘De Bello Alexandrino,’ “if I were to defend the Alexandrians from the
charges of deceit and levity of mind.... There can be no doubt that the
race is most prone to treachery.” They had few traditions, no feelings
of patriotism, and not much political interest. They did not make any
study of themselves, nor write histories of their city: they lived for
the moment, and if the Government of the hour were distasteful to
them they revolted against it with startling rapidity. The city was
constantly being disturbed by street rioting, and there was no great
regard for human life.
The population of Alexandria is said to have been about 300,000 during
the later years of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which was not much less
than that of Rome before the Civil War, and twice the Roman number
after that sanguinary struggle.[10] In spite of its reputation for
frivolity it was very largely a business city, and a goodly portion
of its citizens were animated by a lively commercial spirit which
quite outclassed that of the Italian capital in enterprise and bustle.
This, of course, was a Greek and not an Egyptian characteristic, for
the latter are notoriously unenterprising and conservative in their
methods, while the Greeks, to this day, are admirable merchants and
business men. Alexandria was the most important corn-market of the
world, and for this reason was always envied by Rome. Incidentally
I may remark that proportionally far more corn was consumed in
Cleopatra’s time than in our own; and Cæsar once speaks of the
_endurance_ of his soldiers in submitting to eat meat owing to the
scarcity of corn.[11] The city was also engaged in many other forms
of commerce, and in the reign of Cleopatra it was recognised as the
greatest trading centre in the world. Here East and West met in the
busy market-places; and at the time with which we are dealing the
eyes of all men were beginning to be turned to this city as being
the terminus of the new trade-route to India, along which such rich
merchandise was already being conveyed.
It was at the same time the chief seat of Greek learning, and regarded
itself also as the leading authority on matters of art--a point which
must have been open to dispute. The great figure of Nilus, of which an
illustration is given in this volume, is generally considered to be an
example of Alexandrian art. The famous “Alexandrian School,” celebrated
for its scientific work and its poetry, had existed for more than two
hundred years, and was now in its decline, though it still attempted to
continue the old Hellenic culture.[12] The school of philosophy, which
succeeded it in celebrity, was just beginning to come into prominence.
Thus the eyes of all merchants, all scientists, all men of letters, all
scholars, and all statesmen, were turned in these days to Alexandria;
and the Ptolemaic court, in spite of the degeneracy of its sovereigns,
was held in the highest esteem.
CHAPTER III.
THE BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF CLEOPATRA.
Cleopatra was the last of the regnant Ptolemaic sovereigns of Egypt,
and was the seventh Egyptian Queen of her name,[13] in her person all
the rights and privileges of that extraordinary line of Pharaohs being
vested. The Ptolemaic Dynasty was founded in the first years of the
third century before Christ by Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, one of the
Macedonian generals of Alexander the Great, who, on his master’s death,
seized the province of Egypt, and, a few years later, made himself King
of that country, establishing himself at the newly-founded city of
Alexandria on the sea-coast. For two and a half centuries the dynasty
presided over the destinies of Egypt, at first with solicitous care,
and later with startling nonchalance, until, with the death of the
great Cleopatra and her son Ptolemy XVI. (Cæsarion), the royal line
came to an end.
For the right understanding of Cleopatra’s character it must be clearly
recognised that the Ptolemies were in no way Egyptians. They were
Macedonians, as I have already said, in whose veins flowed not one
drop of Egyptian blood. Their capital city of Alexandria was, in the
main, a Mediterranean colony set down upon the sea-coast of Egypt, but
having no connection with the Delta and the Nile Valley other than the
purely commercial and official relationship which of necessity existed
between the maritime seat of Government and the provinces. The city was
Greek in character; the temples and public buildings were constructed
in the Greek manner; the art of the period was Greek; the life of
the upper classes was lived according to Greek habits; the dress of
the court and of the aristocracy was Greek; the language spoken by
them was Greek, pronounced, it is said, with the broad Macedonian
accent. It is probable that no one of the Ptolemies ever wore Egyptian
costume, except possibly for ceremonial purposes; and, in passing, it
may be remarked that the modern conventional representation of the
great Cleopatra walking about her palace clothed in splendid Egyptian
robes and wearing the vulture-headdress of the ancient queens has
no justification.[14] It is true that she is said to have attired
herself on certain occasions in a dress designed to simulate that
which was supposed by the priests of the time to have been worn by
the mother-deity Isis; but contemporaneous representations of Isis
generally show her clad in the Greek and not the Egyptian manner. And
if she ever wore the ancient dress of the Egyptian queens, it must have
been only at great religious festivals or on occasions where conformity
to obsolete habits was required by the ritual.
The relationship of the royal house to the people was very similar
to that existing at the present day between the Khedivial dynasty and
the provincial natives of Egypt. The modern Khedivial princes are
Albanians, who cannot record in their genealogy a single Egyptian
ancestor. They live in the European manner, and dress according to
the dictates of Paris and London. Similarly the Ptolemies retained
their Macedonian nationality, and Plutarch tells us that not one of
them even troubled to learn the Egyptian language. On the other hand
the Egyptians, constrained by the force of circumstances, accepted
the dynasty as the legal successor of the ancient Pharaonic line, and
assigned to the Ptolemies all the titles and dignities of their great
Pharaohs.
These Greek sovereigns, Cleopatra no less than her predecessors, were
given the titles which had been so proudly borne by Rameses the Great
and the mighty Thutmosis the Third, a thousand years and more before
their day. They were named, “Living Image of the God Amon,” “Child
of the Sun,” and “Chosen of Ptah,” just as the great Memnon and the
conquering Sesostris had been named when Egypt was the first power
in the world. In the temples throughout the land, with the exception
of those of importance at Alexandria, these Macedonian monarchs were
pictorially represented in the guise of the ancient Pharaohs, crowned
with the tall crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, the horns and feathers
of Amon upon their heads, and the royal serpent at their foreheads.
There they were seen worshipping the old gods of Egypt, prostrating
themselves in the presence of the cow Hathor, bowing before the
crocodile Sobk, burning incense at the shrine of the cat Bast, and
performing all the magical ceremonies hallowed by the usage of four
thousand years. They were shown enthroned with the gods, embraced by
Isis, saluted by Osiris, and kissed by Mout, the Mother of Heaven.
Yet it is doubtful whether in actual fact any Ptolemy at any time
identified himself in this manner with the traditional character of a
Pharaoh.
Very occasionally one of these Greek sovereigns left his city of
Alexandria to visit Egypt proper, and to travel up the Nile. At
certain cities he honoured the local temple with a visit and performed
in a perfunctory manner the prescribed ceremonies, just as a modern
sovereign lays a foundation-stone or launches a battleship. But there
is nothing to show that any member of the royal house regarded himself
as an Egyptian in the traditional sense of the word. They were careful
as a rule to placate the priesthood, and to allow them a free use of
their funds in the building and decoration of the temples; and Egyptian
national life was fostered to a very considerable extent. But in
Alexandria one might hardly have believed oneself to be in the land of
the Pharaohs, and the court was almost entirely European in character.
The Ptolemies as a family were extraordinarily callous in their
estimate of the value of human life, and the history of the dynasty is
marked throughout its whole length by a series of villainous murders.
In this respect they showed their non-Egyptian blood; for the people of
the Nile were, and now are, a kindly, pleasant folk, not predisposed
to the arts of the assassin and not by any means regardless of the
rights of their fellow-men. It may be of interest to record here
some of the murders for which the Ptolemies are responsible. Ptolemy
III., according to Justin, was murdered by his son Ptolemy IV., who
also seems to have planned at one time and another the murders of
his brother Magas, his uncle Lysimachus, his mother Berenice, and his
wife Arsinoe. Ptolemy V. is described as a cruel and violent monarch,
who seems to have indulged the habit of murdering those who offended
him. Ptolemy VII. is said by Polybius to have had the Egyptian vice of
riotousness, although on the whole averse to shedding blood. Ptolemy
VIII. murdered his young nephew, the heir to the throne, and married
the dead boy’s mother, the widowed queen Cleopatra II., who shortly
afterwards presented him with a baby, Memphites, whose paternal
parentage is doubtful. Ptolemy later, according to some accounts,
murdered this child and sent his body in pieces to the mother. He then
married his niece, Cleopatra III.; and she, on being left a widow,
appears to have murdered Cleopatra II. This Cleopatra III. bore a son
who later ascended the throne as Ptolemy XI., whom she afterwards
attempted to murder, but the tables being turned she was murdered by
him. Ptolemy X. was driven from the throne by his mother, who installed
Ptolemy XI. in his place, and was promptly murdered by the new king for
her pains. Ptolemy XII., having married his stepmother, murdered her,
and himself was murdered shortly afterwards. Ptolemy XIII., the father
of the great Cleopatra, murdered his daughter Berenice and also several
other persons.
The women of this family were even more violent than the men. Mahaffy
describes their characteristics in the following words: “Great power
and wealth, which makes an alliance with them imply the command of
large resources in men and money; mutual hatred; disregard of all ties
of family and affection; the dearest object fratricide--such pictures
of depravity as make any reasonable man pause and ask whether human
nature had deserted these women and the Hyrcanian tiger of the poet
taken its place.” In many other ways also this murderous family of
kings possessed an unenviable reputation. The first three Ptolemies
were endowed with many sterling qualities, and were conspicuous for
their talents; but the remaining monarchs of the dynasty were, for
the most part, degenerate and debauched. They were, however, patrons
of the arts and sciences, and indeed they did more for them than did
almost any other royal house in the world. Ptolemaic Alexandria was to
some extent the birthplace of the sciences of anatomy, geometry, conic
sections, hydrostatics, geography, and astronomy, while its position in
the artistic world was most important. The splendour and luxury of the
palace was far-famed, and the sovereign lived in a chronic condition
of repletion which surpassed that of any other court. When Scipio
Africanus visited Egypt he found our Cleopatra’s great-grandfather,
Ptolemy IX., who was nicknamed Physkon, “the Bloated,” fat, puffing,
and thoroughly over-fed. As Scipio walked to the palace with the
King, who, in too transparent robes, breathed heavily by his side, he
whispered to a friend that Alexandria had derived at least one benefit
from his visit--it had seen its sovereign taking a walk. Ptolemy X.,
Cleopatra’s grandfather, obtained the nickname “Lathyros,” owing,
it is said, to the resemblance of his nose to a vetch or some such
flowery and leguminous plant: a fact which certainly suggests that the
King was not a man of temperate habits. Ptolemy XI. was so bloated
by gluttony and vice that he seldom walked without crutches, though,
under the influence of wine, he was able to skip about the room freely
enough with his drunken comrades. Ptolemy XIII., Cleopatra’s father,
had such an objection to temperance that once he threatened to put the
philosopher Demetrius to death for not being intoxicated at one of his
feasts; and the unfortunate man was obliged the next day publicly to
drink himself silly in order to save his life. Such glimpses as these
show us the Ptolemies at their worst, and we are constrained to ask how
it is possible that Cleopatra, who brought the line to a termination,
could have failed to be a thoroughly bad woman. Yet, as will presently
become apparent, there is no great reason to suppose that her sins were
either many or scarlet.
Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XIII., who went by the nickname of Auletes,
“the Piper,” was a degenerate little man, who passes across Egypt’s
political stage in a condition of almost continuous inebriety. We watch
his drunken antics as he directs the Bacchic orgies in the palace; we
see him stupidly plotting and scheming to hold his tottering throne;
we hear him playing the livelong hours away upon his flute; and we
feel that his deeds would be hardly worth recording were it not for
the fact that in his reign is seen the critical development of the
political relationship between Rome and Egypt, which, towards the end
of the Ptolemaic dynasty, came to have such a complicated bearing upon
the history of both countries. After the battle of Pydna (B.C. 167)
Rome had obtained almost absolute control of the Hellenistic world,
and she soon began to lay her hands on all the commerce of the eastern
Mediterranean. Towards the close of the Ptolemaic period the great
Republic turned eager eyes towards Egypt, watching for an opportunity
to seize that wealthy land for her own enrichment.
Reference to the genealogy at the end of this volume will show
the reader that the main line of the Lagidæ came to an end on the
assassination (after a reign of nineteen days) of Ptolemy XII.
(Alexander II.), who had been raised to the throne by Roman help. The
only legitimate child of Ptolemy X. (Soter II.) was Berenice III.,
the cousin of Ptolemy XII., who had been married to him, the union,
however, producing no heir to the throne. Ptolemy X. had two sons,
the half-brothers of Berenice III., but they were both illegitimate,
the name and status of their mother being now unknown. It is possible
that they were the children of Cleopatra IV., who was divorced from
their father at his accession; or it is possible that the lady was
not of royal blood. On the death of Ptolemy XII. one of these two
young men proclaimed himself Pharaoh of Egypt, being known to us as
Ptolemy XIII., and the other announced himself as King of Cyprus, also
under the name of Ptolemy. The people of Alexandria at once accepted
Ptolemy XIII. as their king, for, whether illegitimate or not, he was
the eldest male descendant of the line, and their refusal to accept
his rule would have brought the dynasty to a close, thereby insuring
an immediate Roman occupation. Cicero speaks of the new monarch as
_nec regio genere ortus_, which implies that whoever his mother might
be, she was not a reigning queen at the time of his birth; but the
Alexandrian populace were in no mood to raise scruples in regard to his
origin, when it was apparent that he alone stood between their liberty
and the stern domination of Rome.
[Illustration:
_Alexandria Museum._]
SERAPIS.
THE CHIEF GOD OF ALEXANDRIA.]
No sooner had he ascended the throne, however, with the title of
Ptolemy (XIII.) Neos Dionysos, than the discovery was made that Ptolemy
XII., under his name of Alexander, had in his will appointed the Roman
Republic his heir, thus voluntarily bringing his dynasty to a close.
Such a course of action was not novel. It had already been followed in
the case of Pergamum, Cyrene, and Bithynia, and it seems likely that
Ptolemy XII. had taken this step in order to obtain the financial or
moral support of the Romans in regard to his accession, or for some
equally urgent reason. The Senate acknowledged the authenticity of
the will, which, of course, the party of Ptolemy XIII. had denied. It
had been suggested that the testator was not Ptolemy XII. at all, but
another Alexander, Ptolemy XI. (Alexander I.), or an obscure person
sometimes referred to as Alexander III. There is little question,
however, that the will was genuine enough; but there is considerable
doubt as to whether it was legally valid. In the first place, it was
probably written before Ptolemy XII. succeeded to the kingdom; and, in
the second place, such a will would only be valid were there no heir to
the throne; but the people of Alexandria had accepted Ptolemy XIII. as
the rightful heir. At all events the Senate, while seizing, by virtue
of the document, as much of the private fortune of the testator as they
could lay hands on, took no steps to dethrone the two new kings, either
of Egypt or Cyprus, though, on the other hand, they did not officially
recognise them.
In this attitude they were influenced also by the fact that a large
party in Rome did not wish to see the Republic further involved in
Oriental affairs, nor did they feel at the moment inclined to place in
the hands of any one man such power as would accrue to the official
who should be appointed as Governor of the new province. Egypt was
regarded as a very wealthy and important country, second only to Rome
in the extent of its power. It held the keys to the rich lands of
the south, and to Arabia and India it seemed to be one of the main
gateways. The revenues of the palace of Alexandria were quite equal to
the public income of Rome at this time; and, indeed, even at a later
date, after Pompey had so greatly augmented the yearly sum in the
Treasury, the wealth of the Egyptian Court was not far short of this
increased total.[15] Alexandria had succeeded Athens as the seat of
culture and learning, and it was now regarded as the second city of the
world. It was therefore felt that the armies and the generals sent over
the sea to this distant land might well run the risk of being absorbed
into the life of the country which they were holding, and might as it
were inevitably set up an Eastern Empire which would be a menace, and
even a terror, to Rome.
The new King of Egypt, whom we may now call by his nickname Auletes,
was much disturbed by the existence of this will, and throughout
his reign he was constantly making efforts to buy off the expected
interference of Rome. He was an unhappy and unfortunate man. All he
asked was to be allowed to enjoy the royal wealth in drunken peace,
and not to be bothered by the haunting fear that he might be turned
out of his kingdom. He was a keen enjoyer of good living, and there
was nothing that pleased him so much as the participation in one of
the orgies of Dionysos. He played the pipes with some proficiency,
and, when he was sober, it would seem that he spent many a contented
hour piping pleasantly in the sun. Yet his reign was continuously
overshadowed by this knowledge that the Romans might at any moment
dethrone him; and one pictures him often giving vent to an evening
melancholy by blowing from his little flute one of those wailing dirges
of his native land, which flutter upon the ears like the notes of a
night-bird, and drift at last upon a half-tone into silence.
In the fifth year of his reign, that is to say in B.C. 75, his
kinswoman, Selene, sent her two sons to Rome with the object of
obtaining the thrones of Egypt, Cyprus, and Syria; and Auletes must
have watched with anxiety their attempts to oust him. He knew that
they were giving bribes right and left to the Senators, in order to
effect their purpose, and he was aware that in this manner alone the
heart of the Roman Republic could be touched; yet for the time being he
avoided these methods of expending his country’s revenue, and, after
a while, he had the satisfaction of hearing that Selene had abandoned
her efforts to obtain recognition. In the thirteenth year of his reign
Pompey sent a fleet under Lentulus Marcellinus to clear the Egyptian
coast of pirates, and when Lentulus was made consul he caused the
Ptolemaic eagle and thunderbolt to be displayed upon his coins to mark
the fact that he had exercised an act of sovereignty in connection
with that country. Three years later another Roman fleet was sent
to Alexandria to impose the will of the Senate in regard to certain
disputed questions; and once more Auletes must have suffered from the
terrors of imminent dethronement.
In B.C. 65 he was again disturbed from his bibulous ease by the news
that the Romans were thinking of sending Crassus or Julius Cæsar to
annex his kingdom; but the scheme came to naught, and for a time
Auletes was left in peace. In B.C. 63 Pompey annexed Syria to the
Roman dominions, and thereupon Auletes sent him a large present of
money and military supplies in order to purchase his friendship. At the
same time he invited him to come to Egypt upon a friendly visit, but
Pompey, while accepting the King’s money, did not think it necessary to
make use of his hospitality.
At last, in B.C. 59, Auletes decided to go himself to Rome, in the hope
of obtaining, through the good offices of Pompey, or of Cæsar, who was
Consul in that year, the official recognition by the Senate of his
right to the Egyptian throne. Being so degenerate and so worthless a
personage, there was no likelihood that the Romans would confirm him
in his kingdom unless they were well paid to do so, and he therefore
took with him all the money he could lay his hands upon. In Rome, as
Mommsen says, “men had forgotten what honesty was. A person who refused
a bribe was regarded not as an upright man, but as a personal foe.”
Auletes, therefore, when he had arrived, gave huge bribes to various
Senators in order to obtain their support, and he appears to have been
most systematically fleeced by the acute magnates of Rome. When for
the moment his Egyptian resources were exhausted, he borrowed a large
sum from the great financier, Rabirius Postumus, who persuaded some
of his friends also to lend the King money. These men formed a kind
of syndicate to finance Auletes, on the understanding that if he were
confirmed in his heritage, they should each receive in return a sum
vastly greater than that which they had put in.
The visit of Auletes to Rome was made in the nick of time. The Pirate
and the Third Mithridatic wars had left the Republic in pressing need
of money, and there was much talk in regard to the advantages of
an immediate annexation of Egypt. Crassus, the tribune Rullus, and
Julius Cæsar had shown themselves anxious to take the country without
delay; and the unfortunate King of Egypt thus found himself in a most
desperate position. At last, however, a bribe of 6000 talents (about a
million and a half sterling) induced the nearly bankrupt Cæsar to give
Auletes the desired recognition, and the disgraceful transaction came
to a temporary conclusion with Cæsar’s violent forcing of his “Julian
Law concerning the King of Egypt” through the Senate, whereby Ptolemy
was named the “ally and friend of the Roman people.”
In the next year, B.C. 58, the Romans, still in need of money,
prepared to annex Cyprus, over which Ptolemy, the brother of Auletes,
was reigning. The annexation had been proposed by Publius Clodius, a
scoundrelly politician, who bore a grudge against the Cyprian Ptolemy
owing to the fact that once when Clodius was captured by pirates
Ptolemy had only offered two talents for his ransom. Ptolemy would not
now buy off the invaders as his brother had done, and in consequence
Cato landed on the island and converted it into part of the Roman
province of Cilicia. Ptolemy, with a certain royal dignity, at once
poisoned himself, preferring to die than to suffer the humiliation of
banishment from the throne which he had usurped. His treasure of 7000
talents (some £1,700,000) fell into the hands of Cato, who having,
no doubt, helped himself to a portion of the booty,[16] handed the
remainder over to the benign Senate.
No sooner had Auletes obtained the support of Rome, however, than
his own people of Alexandria, incensed by the increase of taxation
necessary for paying off his debts, and angry also at the King’s
refusal to seize Cyprus from the Romans, rose in rebellion and drove
him out of Egypt. While the wretched man was on his way to Rome, he
put in at Rhodes, where he had heard that Cato was staying, in order
to obtain some help from this celebrated Senator; and, having had few
personal dealings with Romans, he sent a royal invitation or command to
Cato to come to him. The Senator, however, who that day was suffering
from a bilious attack, and had just swallowed a dose of medicine, was
in no mind to wait upon drunken kings. He therefore sent a message to
Auletes stating that if he wished to see him he had better come to his
lodgings in the town; and the King of Egypt was thus obliged to humble
himself and to find his way to the Senator’s house. Cato did not even
rise from his seat when Auletes was ushered in; but straightway bidding
the King be seated, gave him a severe lecture on the folly of going to
Rome to plead his cause. All Egypt turned into silver, he declared,
would hardly satisfy the greed of the Romans whom he would have to
bribe, and he strongly urged him to return to Egypt and to make his
peace with his subjects. The Senator’s bilious attack, however, seems
to have cut short the interview, and Auletes, unconvinced, set sail for
Italy.
Meanwhile the King’s daughter, Berenice IV., had seized the Egyptian
throne, and was reigning serenely in her father’s place. This princess
and her sister, Cleopatra VI., who died soon afterwards, were the
only two children of Auletes’ first marriage--namely, with Cleopatra
V. There were four young children in the Palace nurseries who were
born of a second marriage, but who their mother was, or whether she
was at this time alive or dead, history does not record. Of these four
children, two afterwards succeeded to the throne as Ptolemy XIV. and
Ptolemy XV., a third was the unfortunate Princess Arsinoe, and the
fourth was the great Cleopatra VII., the heroine of the present volume,
at this time about eleven years of age, having been born in the winter
of B.C. 69-68.
Auletes having fled to Rome, approached the Senate in the manner of one
who had been unjustly evicted from an estate which he had purchased
from them. Again he bribed the leading statesmen, and again borrowed
money on all sides, though now it is probable that his Roman creditors
were less sanguine than on the previous occasion. Cæsar was absent in
Gaul at this time, and therefore was not able to be bribed. Pompey,
curiously enough, does not appear to have accepted the King’s money,
though he offered him the hospitality of his villa in the Alban
district, a fact which suggests that the idea of restoring Auletes
to his throne had made a strong appeal to the imagination of this
impressionable Roman. He had already made himself a kind of patron of
the Egyptian Court, and there can be little doubt that he hoped to
obtain from Auletes, in return for his favours, the freedom to make
use of the wealth and resources of that monarch’s enormously valuable
dominion.
The people of Alexandria, who were eagerly desirous that Auletes should
not be reinstated, now sent an embassy of a hundred persons to Rome to
lay before the Senate their case against the King; but the banished
monarch, driven by despair to any lengths, hired assassins and caused
the embassy to be attacked near Puteoli, the modern Pozzuoli, many
of them being slain. Those who survived were heavily bribed, and thus
the crime was hushed up. The leader of the deputation, the philosopher
Dion, escaped on this occasion, but was poisoned by Auletes as soon
as he arrived in Rome; and thereupon the desperate King was able to
breathe once more in peace. All might now have gone well with his
cause, and a Roman army might have been placed at his disposal had not
some political opponent discovered in the Sibylline Books an oracle
which stated that if the King of Egypt were to come begging for help he
should be aided with friendship but not with arms. Thereat, in despair,
the unfortunate Auletes quitted Rome, and took up his residence at
Ephesus, leaving in the capital an agent named Ammonios to keep him in
touch with events.
Three years later, in January B.C. 55, the King’s interests were
still being discussed, and Pompey was trying, in a desultory manner,
to assist him back to his throne; but so great were the fears of
the Senate at placing the task in the hands of any one man, that no
decision could be arrived at. It was suggested that Lentulus Spinther,
the Governor of Cilicia, should evade the Sibylline decree by leaving
Auletes at Ptolemais (Acre) and going himself to Egypt at the head
of an army; but the King no doubt saw in this an attempt by the wily
Romans simply to seize his country, and he appears to have opposed the
plan with understandable vehemence. It was then proposed that Lentulus
should take no army, but should trust to the might of the Roman name
for his purpose, thereby following the advice of the prophetic Books.
At last, however, Auletes offered the huge bribe of 10,000 talents
(nearly two and a half millions sterling) for the repurchase of his
kingdom; and, as a consequence, the Governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius,
himself a bankrupt in sore need of money, arranged to invade Egypt and
to place Auletes upon the throne in spite of the Sibylline warnings.
Gabinius, being so deeply in debt, and knowing that a large portion of
the promised sum would pass to him, was extremely eager to undertake
the war, though it is said that he feared the possibility of disaster.
He therefore pushed forward the arrangements for the campaign with all
despatch, and soon was prepared to set out across the desert to Egypt.
Meanwhile the Alexandrians had married Berenice IV. to Archelaus,
the High Priest of Komana in Cappadocia, an ambitious man of great
influence and authority, a protégé of Pompey the Great, who had been
raised to the High Priesthood by him in B.C. 64, and who at once
attempted, but without success, to obtain through him the support of
Rome. Gabinius was not long in declaring war against Archelaus, under
the pretext that he was encouraging piracy along the North African
coast, and also that he was building a fleet which might be regarded
as a menace to Rome; and soon his army was marching across the desert
from Gaza to Pelusium. The cavalry, which was sent in advance of the
main army, was commanded by Marcus Antonius, at this time a smart young
soldier whose future lay all golden before him. The frontier fortress
of Pelusium fell to his brilliant generalship, and soon the Roman
legions were marching on Alexandria. The palace soldiery now joined the
invaders, Archelaus was killed, and the city fell.
Auletes was at once restored to his throne, and Berenice IV. was put to
death. A large number of Roman infantry and Celtic and German cavalry,
of whom we shall hear again, were left in the city to preserve order,
and it would seem that for a short time Anthony remained in Alexandria.
The young Princess Cleopatra was now a girl of some fourteen years of
age, and already she is said to have attracted the Roman cavalry leader
by her youthful beauty and charm. At the east end of the Mediterranean
a girl of fourteen years is already mature, and has long arrived at
what is called a marriageable age. There is probably little importance
to be attached to this meeting, but it is not without interest as an
earnest of future events.
The Romans now began to demand payment of the various sums promised
to them by Auletes. Rabirius Postumus appears to have been one of the
largest creditors, and the only way in which the King could pay him
back was by making him Chancellor of the Exchequer, so that all taxes
might pass through his hands. Rabirius also represented the interests
of the importunate Julius Cæsar, and probably those of Gabinius. The
situation was thus not unlike that which was found in Egypt in the
’seventies, when a European Commission was appointed to handle all
public funds in order that the ruler’s private debts might be paid
off. In the case of Auletes, however, it was the leading Romans who
were his creditors, and hence we find the shadow of the great Republic
hanging over the Alexandrian court, and Rome is seen to be inextricably
mixed up with Egyptian affairs. Roman money had been lent and had to be
regained; Roman officials handled all the taxes; a Roman army occupied
the city, and the King reigned by permission of the Roman Senate to
whom his kingdom had been bequeathed.
In B.C. 54 the Alexandrians made an attempt to shake off the incubus,
and drove Rabirius out of Egypt. Roman attention was at once fixed upon
Alexandria, and it is probable that the country would have been annexed
at once had not the appalling Parthian catastrophe in the following
year, when Crassus was defeated and killed, diverted their minds to
other channels. Auletes, however, did not live long to enjoy his
dearly-bought immunity; for in the summer of B.C. 51 he passed away,
leaving behind him the four children born to him of his second marriage
with the unknown lady who was now probably dead. The famous Cleopatra,
the seventh of the name, was the eldest of this family, being, at her
father’s death, about eighteen years of age. Her sister Arsinoe, whom
she heartily disliked, was a few years younger. The third child was a
boy of ten or eleven years of age, afterwards known as Ptolemy XIV.;
and lastly, there was the child who later became Ptolemy XV., now a boy
of seven or eight.[17] Auletes, warned by his own bitter experiences,
had taken the precaution to write an explicit will in which he stated
clearly his wishes in regard to the succession. One copy of the will
was kept at Alexandria, and a second copy, duly attested and sealed,
was placed in the hands of Pompey at Rome, who had befriended the King
when he was in that city, with the request that it should be deposited
in the _ærarium_. In this will Auletes decreed that his eldest
surviving daughter and eldest surviving son should reign jointly; and
he called upon the Roman people in the name of all their gods and in
view of all their treaties made with him, to see that the terms of
his testament were carried out. He further asked the Roman people to
act as guardian to the new King, as though fearing that the boy might
be suppressed, or even put out of the way by his co-regnant sister.
At the same time he carefully urged them to make no change in the
succession, and his words have been thought to suggest that he feared
lest Cleopatra, in like manner, might be removed in favour of Arsinoe.
In a court such as that of the Ptolemies the fact that two sons and
two daughters were living at the palace at the King’s death boded ill
for the prospects of peace; and it would seem that Auletes’ knowledge
that Cleopatra and Arsinoe were not on the best of terms gave rise in
his mind to the greatest apprehension. Being aware of the domestic
history of his family, and knowing that his own hands were stained
with the blood of his daughter Berenice, whom he had murdered on his
return from exile, he must have been fully alive to the possibilities
of internecine warfare amongst his surviving children; and, being
in his old age sick of bloodshed and desiring only a bibulous peace
for himself and his descendants, he took every means in his power to
secure for them that pleasant inertia which had been denied so often to
himself.
His wish that his eighteen-year-old daughter should reign with his
ten-year-old son involved, as a matter of course, the marriage of the
sister and brother, for the Ptolomies had conformed to ancient Egyptian
customs to the extent of perpetrating when necessary a royal marriage
between a brother and sister in this manner. The custom was of very
ancient establishment in Egypt, and was based originally on the law of
female succession, which made the monarch’s eldest daughter the heiress
of the kingdom. The son who had been selected by his father to succeed
to the throne, or who aspired to the sovereignty either by right or by
might, obtained his legal warrant to the kingdom by marriage with this
heiress. When such an heiress did not exist, or when the male claimant
to the throne had no serious rivals, this rule often seems to have been
set aside; but there are few instances of its disuse when circumstances
demanded a solidification of the royal claim to the throne.
When, therefore, according to the terms of the will of Auletes, his
eldest daughter and eldest son succeeded jointly to the throne as
Cleopatra VII. and Ptolemy XIV., their formal marriage was contemplated
as a matter of course. There is no evidence of this marriage, and one
may suppose that it was postponed by Cleopatra’s desire, on the grounds
of the extreme youth of the King. Marriages at the age of eleven or
twelve years were not uncommon in ancient Egypt, but they were not
altogether acceptable to Greek minds; and the Queen could not have
found much difficulty in making this her justification for holding
the power in her own hands. The young Ptolemy XIV. was placed in the
care of the eunuch Potheinos, a man who appears to have been typical
of that class of palace intriguers with whom the historian becomes
tediously familiar. The royal tutor, Theodotos, an objectionable Greek
rhetorician, also exercised considerable influence in the court, and
a third intimate of the King was an unscrupulous soldier of Egyptian
nationality named Achillas, who commanded the troops in the palace.
These three men very soon obtained considerable power, and, acting in
the name of their young master, they managed to take a large portion of
the government into their own hands. Cleopatra, meanwhile, seems to
have suffered something of an eclipse. She was still only a young girl,
and her advisers appear to have been men of less strength of purpose
than those surrounding her brother’s person. The King being still a
minor, the bulk of the formal business of the State was performed by
the Queen; but it would seem that the real rulers of the country were
Potheinos and his friends.
Some two or three years after the death of Auletes, Marcus Calpurnius
Bibulus,[18] the pro-consular Governor of Syria, sent his two sons to
Alexandria to order the Roman troops stationed in that city to join
his army in his contemplated campaign against the Parthians. These
Alexandrian troops constituted the Army of Occupation, which had been
left in Egypt by Gabinius in B.C. 55 as a protection to Auletes. They
were for the most part, as has been said, Gallic and German cavalry,
rough men whose rude habits and bulky forms must have caused them to
be the wonder and terror of the city. These _Gabiniani milites_ had
by this time settled down in their new home, and had taken wives to
themselves from the Greek and Egyptian families of Alexandria. In
spite of the presence amongst them of a considerable body of Roman
infantry veterans who had fought under Pompey, the discipline of the
army was already much relaxed; and when the Governor of Syria’s orders
were received there was an immediate mutiny, the two unfortunate sons
of Bibulus being promptly murdered by the angry and probably drunken
soldiers. When the affair was reported to the palace, Cleopatra issued
orders for the immediate arrest of the murderers; and the army,
realising that their position as mutinous troops was untenable, handed
over the ringleaders apparently without further trouble. The prisoners
were then sent by the Queen in chains to Bibulus; but he, being
possessed of the best spirit of the old Roman aristocracy, sent back
these murderers of his two sons to her with the message that the right
of inflicting punishment in such cases belonged only to the Senate.
History does not tell us what was the ultimate fate of these men, and
the incident is not of great importance except in so far as it shows
the first recorded act of Cleopatra’s reign as being one of tactful
deliberation and fair dealing with her Roman neighbours.
Shortly after this, in the year B.C. 49, Pompey sent his son, Cnæus
Pompeius, to Egypt to procure ships and men in preparation for the
civil war which now seemed inevitable; and the Gabinian troops, feeling
that a war against Julius Cæsar offered more favourable possibilities
than a campaign against the ferocious Parthians, cheerfully responded
to the call. Fifty warships and a force of 500 men left Alexandria with
Cnæus, and eventually attached themselves to the command of Bibulus,
who was now Pompey’s admiral in the Adriatic. It is said that Cnæus
Pompeius was much attracted by Cleopatra’s beauty and charm, and that
he managed to place himself upon terms of intimacy with her; but there
is absolutely nothing to justify the suggestion that there was any
sort of serious intrigue. I am of opinion that the stories of this
nature which passed into circulation were due to the fact that the
possibility of a marriage between Cleopatra and the young Roman had
been contemplated by Alexandrian politicians. The great Pompey was
master of the Roman world, and a union with his son, on the analogy
of that between Berenice and the High Priest of Komana, was greatly to
be desired. The proposal, however, does not seem to have obtained much
support, and the matter was presently dropped.
In the following year, B.C. 48, when Cleopatra was twenty-one years
of age and her co-regnant brother fourteen, important events occurred
in Alexandria of which history has left us no direct record. It would
appear that the brother and sister quarrelled, and that the palace
divided itself into two opposing parties. The young Ptolemy, backed
by the eunuch Potheinos, the rhetorician Theodotos, and the soldier
Achillas, set himself up as sole sovereign of Egypt; and Cleopatra
was obliged to fly for her life into Syria. We have no knowledge of
these momentous events: the struggle in the palace, the days in which
the young queen walked in deadly peril, the adventurous escape, and
the flight from Egypt. We know only that when the curtain is raised
once more upon the royal drama, the young Ptolemy is King of Egypt,
and, with his army, is stationed on the eastern frontier to prevent
the incursion of his exiled sister, who has raised an expeditionary
force in Syria and is marching back to her native land to seize again
the throne which she had lost. There is something which appeals very
greatly to the imagination in the thought of this spirited young
Queen’s rapid return to the perilous scenes from which she had so
recently escaped; and the historian feels at once that he is dealing
with a powerful character in this woman who could so speedily raise
an army of mercenaries, and could dare to march back in battle array
across the desert towards the land which had cast her out.
CHAPTER IV.
THE DEATH OF POMPEY AND THE ARRIVAL OF CÆSAR IN EGYPT.
The fortress of Pelusium, near which the opposing armies of Ptolemy and
Cleopatra were arrayed, stood on low desert ground overlooking the sea,
not far east of the modern Port Said. It was the most easterly port
and stronghold of the Delta; and, being built upon the much-frequented
highroad which skirted the coast between Egypt and Syria, it formed
the Asiatic gateway of the Ptolemaic kingdom. The young Ptolemy XIV.
had stationed himself, with his advisers and his soldiers, in this
fortress, in order to oppose the entrance of his sister Cleopatra,
who, as we have already seen, had marched with a strong army back to
Egypt from Syria, whither she had fled. On September 28th, B.C. 48,
when Cleopatra’s forces, having arrived at Pelusium, were preparing
to attack the fortress, and were encamped upon the sea-coast a few
miles to the east of the town, an event occurred which was destined to
change the whole course of Egyptian history. Round the barren headland
to the west of the little port a Seleucian galley hove into sight, and
cast anchor a short distance from the shore. Upon the deck of this
vessel stood the defeated Pompey the Great and Cornelia his wife, who,
flying from the rout of Pharsalia, had come to claim the hospitality
of the Egyptian King. The young monarch appears to have been warned of
his approach, for Pompey had touched at Alexandria, and there hearing
that Ptolemy had gone to Pelusium, had probably sent a messenger to
him overland and himself had sailed round by sea. The greatest flurry
had been caused in the royal camp by the news, and for the moment the
invasion of Cleopatra and the impending battle with her forces were
quite forgotten in the excitement of the arrival of the man who for so
long had been the mighty patron of the Ptolemaic Court.
[Illustration: ÆGYPTUS
_William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh_ W. & A. K. Johnston,
Limited, Edinburgh & London
]
[Illustration:
_Rome._] [_Photograph by Anderson_
POMPEY THE GREAT]
Egypt, like all the rest of the world, had been watching with deep
interest the warfare waged between the two Roman giants, Pompey and
Cæsar, confident in the success of the former; and the messenger
of the defeated general must have brought the first authentic news
of the result of the eagerly awaited battle. The sympathies of the
Alexandrians were all on the side of the Pompeians, for the fugitive,
who now asked a return of his former favours, had always been to them
the gigantic representative of Roman patronage. They knew little,
if anything, about Cæsar, who had spent so many years in the far
north-west; but Pompey was Rome itself to them, and had always shown
himself particularly desirous of acting, when occasion arose, in their
behalf. For many years he had been, admittedly, the most powerful
personage in Rome, and the civilised world had grovelled at his feet.
Then came the inevitable quarrel with Julius Cæsar, a man who could not
tolerate the presence of a rival. Civil war broke out, and the two
armies met on the plains of Pharsalia. It is not necessary to record
here how Pompey’s patrician cavalry, in whom he confidently trusted,
was defeated by Cæsar’s hardened legions; how the foreign allies were
awed into inactivity by the spectacle of the superb contest between
Romans and Romans; how the debonnaire Pompey, realising his defeat,
passed, dazed, to his pavilion and sat there staring in front of him,
until the enemy had penetrated to his very door, when, uttering the
despairing cry, “What! even into the camp?” he galloped from the field;
and how Cæsar’s men found the enemy’s tents decked in readiness for
the celebration of their anticipated victory, the doorways hung with
garlands of myrtle, the floors spread with rich carpets, and the tables
covered with goblets of wine and dishes of food. Pompey had fled to
Larissa and thence to the sea, where he boarded a merchantman and set
sail for Mitylene. Here picking up his wife Cornelia, he made his way
to Cyprus, where he transhipped to the galley in which he crossed to
Egypt. He had expected, very naturally, to be received with courtesy
by Ptolemy, who was to be regarded as his political protégé; and he
had some undefined but cogent plans of gathering his forces together
again and giving battle a second time to his enemies. At Pharsalia he
had thought his power irrevocably destroyed, but on his way to Egypt he
learnt that Cato had rallied a considerable number of his troops, and
that his fleet, which had not come into action, was still loyal; and he
therefore hoped that with Ptolemy’s expected help he might yet regain
the mastery of the Roman world.
As soon as his approach was reported to the Egyptian King, a council
of ministers was called, in order to decide the manner in which they
should receive the fallen general. There were present at this meeting
the three scoundrelly advisers of the youthful monarch whom we have
already met: Potheinos, the eunuch, who was a kind of prime minister;
Achillas, the Egyptian, who commanded the King’s troops; and Theodotos
of Chios, the professional master of rhetoric, and tutor to Ptolemy.
These three men appear to have organised the plot by which Cleopatra
had been driven from Egypt; and, having the boy Ptolemy well under
their thumbs, they seem to have been acting with zeal in his name for
the advancement of their own fortunes. “It was, indeed, a miserable
thing,” says Plutarch, “that the fate of the great Pompey should be
left to the determinations of these three men; and that he, riding
at anchor at a distance from the shore, should be forced to wait the
sentence of this tribunal.”
Some of the councillors suggested that he should be politely requested
to seek refuge in some other country, for it was obvious that Cæsar
might deal harshly with them if they were to befriend him. Others
proposed that they should receive him and cast in their lot with him,
for it was to be supposed, and indeed such was the fact, that he still
had a very good chance of recovering from the fiasco of Pharsalia; and
there was the danger that, if they did not do so, he might accept the
assistance of their enemy Cleopatra. Theodotos, however, pointing out,
in a carefully reasoned speech, that both these courses were fraught
with danger to themselves, proposed that they should curry favour with
Cæsar by murdering their former patron, thus bringing the contest to
a close, and thereby avoiding any risk of backing the wrong horse;
“and,” he added with a smile, “a dead man cannot bite.” The councillors
readily approved this method of dealing with the difficult situation,
and they committed its execution to Achillas, who thereupon engaged the
services of a certain Roman officer named Septimius, who had once held
a command under Pompey, and another Roman centurion named Salvius. The
three men, with a few attendants, then boarded a small boat and set out
towards the galley.
When they had come alongside Septimius stood up and saluted Pompey by
his military title; and Achillas thereupon invited him to come ashore
in the smaller vessel, saying that the large galley could not make the
harbour owing to the shallow water. It was now seen that a number of
Egyptian battleships were cruising at no great distance, and that the
sandy shore was alive with troops; and Pompey, whose suspicions were
aroused, realised that he could not now turn back, but must needs place
himself in the hands of the surly-looking men who had come out to meet
him. His wife Cornelia was distraught with fears for his safety, but
he, bidding her to await events without anxiety, lowered himself into
the boat, taking with him two centurions, a freedman named Philip, and
a slave called Scythes. As he bade farewell to Cornelia he quoted to
her a couple of lines from Sophocles--
“He that once enters at a tyrant’s door
Becomes a slave, though he were free before;”
and so saying, he set out towards the shore. A deep silence fell upon
the little company as the boat passed over the murky water, which at
this time of year is beginning to be discoloured by the Nile mud
brought down by the first rush of the annual floods;[19] and in the
damp heat of an Egyptian summer day the dreary little town and the
barren colourless shore must have appeared peculiarly uninviting. In
order to break the oppressive silence Pompey turned to Septimius,
and, looking earnestly upon him, said: “Surely I am not mistaken in
believing you to have been formerly my fellow-soldier?” Septimius made
no reply, but silently nodded his head; whereupon Pompey, opening a
little book, began to read, and so continued until they had reached the
shore. As he was about to leave the boat he took hold of the hand of
his freedman Philip; but even as he did so Septimius drew his sword and
stabbed him in the back, whereupon both Salvius and Achillas attacked
him. Pompey spoke no word, but, groaning a little, hid his face with
his mantle, and fell into the bottom of the vessel, where he was
speedily done to death.
Cornelia, standing upon the deck of the galley, witnessed the murder,
and uttered so great a cry that it was heard upon the shore. Then,
seeing the murderers stoop over the body and rise again with the
severed head held aloft, she called to her ship’s captain to weigh
anchor, and in a few moments the galley was making for the open sea and
was speedily out of the range of pursuit. Pompey’s decapitated body,
stripped of all clothing, was now bundled into the water, and a short
time afterwards was washed up by the breakers upon the sands of the
beach, where it was soon surrounded by a crowd of idlers. Meanwhile
Achillas and his accomplices carried the head up to the royal camp.
The freedman Philip was not molested, and, presently making his way to
the beach, wandered to and fro along the desolate shore until all had
retired to the town. Then, going over to the body and kneeling down
beside it, he washed it with sea-water and wrapped it in his own shirt
for want of a winding-sheet. As he was searching for wood wherewith to
make some sort of funeral pyre, he met with an old Roman soldier who
had once served under the murdered general; and together these two men
carried down to the water’s edge such pieces of wreckage and fragments
of rotten wood as they could find, and placing the body upon the pile
set fire to it.
Upon the next morning one of the Pompeian generals, Lucius Lentulus,
who was bringing up the two thousand soldiers whom Pompey had gathered
together as a bodyguard, arrived in a second galley before Pelusium;
and as he was being rowed ashore he observed the still smoking remains
of the pyre. “Who is this that has found his end here?” he said, being
still in ignorance of the tragedy, and added with a sigh, “Possibly
even thou, Pompeius Magnus!” And upon stepping ashore, he too was
promptly murdered.
A few days later, on October 2nd, Julius Cæsar, in hot pursuit,
arrived at Alexandria, where he heard with genuine disgust of the
miserable death of his great enemy. Shortly afterwards Theodotos
presented himself to the conqueror, carrying with him Pompey’s head and
signet-ring; but Cæsar turned in distress from the gruesome head, and
taking only the ring in his hand, was for a moment moved to tears.[20]
He then appears to have dismissed the astonished Theodotos from his
presence like an offending slave: and it was not long before that
disillusioned personage fled for his life from Egypt. For some years,
it may be mentioned, he wandered as a vagabond through Syria and Asia
Minor; but at last, after the death of Cæsar, he was recognised by
Marcus Brutus, and, as a punishment for having instigated the murder
of the great Pompey, was crucified with every possible ignominy.
Cæsar seems to have arranged that the ashes of his rival should be
sent to his wife Cornelia, by whom they were ultimately deposited
at his country house near Alba; and he also gave orders that the
piteous head should be buried near the sea, in the grove of Nemesis,
outside the eastern walls of Alexandria, where, in the shade of the
trees, a monument was set up to him and the ground around it laid
out. Cæsar then offered his protection and friendship to all those
partisans of Pompey whom the Egyptians had imprisoned, and he expressed
his great satisfaction at being able thus to save the lives of his
fellow-countrymen.
It is not difficult to appreciate the consternation caused by
Cæsar’s attitude. Potheinos and Achillas at once realised that the
disgrace of Theodotos awaited them unless they acted with the utmost
circumspection, biding their time until, as was expected, Cæsar should
take his speedy departure, or until they might deal with this new
disturber of their peace in the same manner in which they had disposed
of the old. But Cæsar had no intention of leaving Egypt in any haste,
nor did he give them the desired opportunity of anticipating the Ides
of March. With that audacious nonchalance which so often baffled his
observers, he quietly decided to take up his residence in the Palace
upon the Lochias Promontory at Alexandria, at that moment occupied
by only two members of the Royal Family, the younger Ptolemy and
his sister Arsinoe; and, as soon as sufficient troops had arrived to
support him, he left his galley and landed at the steps of the imposing
quay. Two amalgamated legions, 3200 strong, and 800 Celtic and German
cavalry, disembarked with him, this small force having been considered
by Cæsar sufficient for the rounding up of the Pompeian fugitives, and
for the secondary purposes for which he had come to Egypt.[21]
Cæsar’s object in hastening across the Mediterranean had been,
primarily, the capture of Pompey and his colleagues, and the prevention
of a rally under the shelter of the King of Egypt’s not inconsiderable
armaments. It appears to have been his opinion that speed of pursuit
would be more effective than strength of arms, and that his undelayed
appearance at Alexandria would more simply discourage the undetermined
Egyptians from rendering assistance to their former friend than a
display of force at a later date. Fresh from the triumph of Pharsalia,
with the memory of that astounding victory to warm his spirits, he did
not anticipate any great difficulty in subjecting the Ptolemaic Court
to his will, nor in demonstrating to them that he himself, and not the
defeated Pompey, represented the authentic might of Rome. It would seem
that he expected speedily to frustrate any further resort to arms,
and to manifest his authority by acting ostentatiously in the name of
the Roman people. He himself should assume the prerogatives lately
held by Pompey, and should play the part of benevolent patron to the
court of Alexandria so admirably sustained by his fallen rival for
so many years. There were several outstanding matters in Egypt which,
on behalf of his home government, he could regulate and adjust: and
there is little doubt that he hoped by so doing to establish a despotic
reputation in that important country which would retain for him, as
apparent autocrat of Rome, a personal control of its affairs for many
years to come. In spite of all that has been said to the contrary, I am
of opinion that his return to Rome was not urgent; indeed it seems to
me that it could be postponed for a short time with advantage. Pompey
had been a great favourite with the Italians, and it was just as well
that the turmoil caused by his defeat and death should be allowed to
subside, and that the bitter memories of a sanguinary war, which had
so palpably been brought about by personal rivalry, should be somewhat
forgotten before the victor made his spectacular entry into Rome. At
this time he was not at all popular in the capital, and indeed, six
months previously he had been generally regarded as a criminal and
adventurer; while, on the other hand, Pompey had been the people’s
darling, and it would take some time for public opinion to be reversed.
When, therefore, Cæsar heard that the treacherous deeds of the Egyptian
ministers had rendered his primary action unnecessary, he determined
to enter Alexandria with some show of state, to take up his residence
there for a few weeks, and to interfere in its internal affairs for his
own advancement and for the consolidation of his power.
With this object in view his four thousand troops were landed, and he
set out in procession towards the Royal Palace, the lictors carrying
the _fasces_ and axes before him as in the consular promenades at
Rome.[22] No sooner, however, were these ominous symbols observed by
the mob than a rush was made towards them; and for a time the attitude
of the crowd became ugly and menacing. The young King and his Court
were still at Pelusium, where his army was defending the frontier from
the expected attack of Cleopatra’s invading forces; but there were in
Alexandria a certain number of troops which had been left there as a
garrison, and both amongst these men and amongst the heterogeneous
townspeople there must have been many who realised the significance of
the _fasces_. The city was full of Roman outlaws and renegades, to whom
this reminder of the length of her arm could but bring foreboding and
terror. To them Cæsar’s formal entry meant the establishment of that
law from which they had fled; while to many a merry member of the crowd
the stately procession appeared to bring to Egypt at last that dismal
shadow of Rome[23] by which it had so long been menaced. On all sides
it was declared that this state entry into the Egyptian capital was an
insult to the King’s majesty; and so, indeed, it was, though little did
that trouble Cæsar, who was well aware now of his unassailable position
in the councils of Rome.
The city was in a ferment, and for some days after Cæsar had taken
up his quarters at the Palace rioting continued in the streets, a
number of his soldiers being killed in different parts of the town. He
therefore sent post-haste to Asia Minor for reinforcements, and took
such steps as were necessary for securing his position from attack. It
is probable that he did not suppose the Alexandrians would have the
audacity to make war upon him, or attempt to drive him from the city;
but at the same time he desired to take no risks, for he seems at the
moment to have been heartily sick of warfare and slaughter. The Palace
and royal barracks in which his troops were quartered, being built
mainly upon the Lochias Promontory, were easily able to be defended
from attack by land--for, no doubt, in so turbulent a city, the royal
quarter was protected by massive walls; and at the same time the
position commanded the eastern half of the Great Harbour and the one
side of its entrance over against the Pharos Lighthouse. His ships lay
moored under the walls of the Palace; and a means of escape was thus
kept open which, if the worst came to the worst, might be used with
comparative safety upon any dark night. I think the turbulence of the
mob, therefore, did not much trouble him, and he was able to set about
the task which he desired to perform with a certain degree of quietude.
The Civil War had been a very great strain upon his nerves, and he
must have looked forward to a few weeks of actual holiday here in the
luxurious royal apartments which he had so casually appropriated.
Summer at Alexandria is in many ways a delightful time of year; and one
may therefore picture Cæsar, at all times fond of luxury and opulence,
now heartily enjoying these warm breezy days upon the beautiful Lochias
Promontory. The crisis of his life had been passed; he was now absolute
master of the Roman world; and his triumphant entry into the capital,
when, in a few weeks’ time, the passions of the mob had cooled, was
an anticipation pleasant enough to set his restless heart at ease,
while he applied himself to the agreeable little task of regulating the
affairs in Egypt. He had sent a courier to Rome announcing the death of
Pompey, but it does not seem that this messenger was told to proceed
with any great rapidity, for he did not arrive in the capital until
near the middle of November.[24]
His first action was to send messengers to Pelusium strongly urging
both Ptolemy and Cleopatra to cease their warfare, and to come to
Alexandria in order to lay their respective cases before him. He chose
to regard the settlement of the quarrel between the two sovereigns as
a particular obligation upon himself, for it was during his previous
consulship that the late monarch, Auletes, had entrusted his children
to the Roman people and had made the Republic the executors of his
will; and, moreover, that will had been confided to the care of Pompey,
whose position as patron of the Egyptian Court Cæsar was now anxious to
fill. In response to the summons Ptolemy came promptly to Alexandria,
with his minister Potheinos, arriving, I suppose, on about October 5th,
in order to ascertain what on earth Cæsar was doing in the Palace; and
meanwhile Achillas was left in command of the army at Pelusium. On
reaching Alexandria they seem to have been invited by Cæsar to take up
their residence in the Palace into which he had intruded, and which was
now patrolled by his Roman troops; and, apparently upon the advice of
the unctuous Potheinos, the two of them made themselves as pleasant as
possible to their new patron. Cæsar at once asked Ptolemy to disband
his army, but to this Potheinos would not agree, and immediately sent
word to Achillas to bring his forces to Alexandria. Cæsar, hearing of
this, obliged the young King to despatch two officers, Dioscorides and
Serapion, to order Achillas to remain at that place. These messengers,
however, were intercepted by the agents of Potheinos, one being killed
and the other wounded; and two or three days later Achillas arrived at
the capital at the head of the first batch of his army of some twenty
thousand foot and two thousand horse,[25] taking up his residence
in that part of the city unoccupied by the Romans. Cæsar thereupon
fortified his position, deciding to hold as much of the city as his
small force could defend--namely, the Palace and the Royal Area behind
it, including the Theatre, the Forum, and probably a portion of the
Street of Canopus. The Egyptian army presented a pugnacious but not
extremely formidable array,[26] consisting as it did of the Gabinian
troops, who had now become entirely expatriated, and had assumed to
some extent the habits and liberties of their adopted country; a number
of criminals and outlaws from Italy who had been enrolled as mercenary
troops; a horde of Syrian and Cilician pirates and brigands; and,
probably, a few native levies. But as Cæsar now had with him in the
Palace King Ptolemy, the little Prince Ptolemy, the Princess Arsinoe,
and the minister Potheinos, who could be regarded as hostages for his
safety, and four thousand of his war-hardened veterans, ensconced in
a fortified position and supported by a business-like little fleet
of galleys, I cannot see that he had any cause at the moment for
alarm. One serious difficulty, however, presented itself. Immediately
on arriving in Egypt he had sent orders to Cleopatra to repair to
the Palace; and his task as arbiter in the royal dispute could not
be performed until she arrived, nor could he expect to assert his
authority until her presence completed the group of interested persons
under his enforced protection. Yet she could not dare to place herself
in the hands of Achillas, nor rely upon him for a safe escort through
the lines; and thus Cæsar found himself in a dilemma.
The situation, however, was relieved by the pluck and audacity of the
young Queen. Realising that her only hope of regaining her kingdom
lay in a personal presentation of her case to the Roman arbiter,
she determined, by hook or by crook, to make her entry into the
Palace. Taking ship from Pelusium to Alexandria, probably at the end
of the first week of October, she entered a small boat when still
some distance from the city, and thus, about nightfall, slipped into
the Great Harbour, accompanied only by one friend, Apollodorus the
Sicilian. She seems to have been aware that her brother and Potheinos
were in residence at the Palace, together with a goodly number of their
own attendants and servants; but there were no means of telling how
far Cæsar controlled the situation. Being unaccustomed to the presence
of a power more autocratic than that of her own royal house, she does
not seem to have realised that Cæsar was in absolute command of the
Lochias, and that not he but Ptolemy was the guarded guest; and she
felt that in landing at the Palace quays she was running the gravest
risk of falling into the hands of her brother’s party and of being
murdered before she could reach Cæsar’s presence. This fear indeed
may well have been justified, for there is no doubt that Ptolemy and
Potheinos had considerable liberty of action within the precincts of
the Palace; and, if the rumour had spread that Cleopatra was come,
neither of them would have hesitated to put a dagger into her ribs
in the first dark corridor through which she had to pass. Waiting,
therefore, upon the still water under the walls of the Palace until
darkness had fallen, she instructed Apollodorus to roll her up in the
blankets and bedding which he had brought for her in the boat as a
protection against the night air, and around the bundle she told him to
tie a piece of rope which, I suppose, they found in the boat. She was a
very small woman, and Apollodorus apparently experienced no difficulty
in shouldering the burden as he stepped ashore. Bundles of this kind
were then, as they are now, the usual baggage of a common man in Egypt,
and were not likely to attract notice. An Alexandrian native at the
present day thus carries his worldly goods tied up in his bedding, the
mat or piece of carpet which serves him for a bedstead being wrapped
around the bundle and fastened with a rope, and in ancient times the
custom was doubtless identical. Apollodorus, who must have been a
powerful man, thus walked through the gates of the Palace with the
Queen of Egypt upon his shoulders, bearing himself as though she were
no heavier than the pots, pans, and clothing which were usually tied up
in this manner; and when challenged by the sentries he probably replied
that he was carrying the baggage to one of the soldiers of Cæsar’s
guard, and asked to be directed to his apartments.
Cæsar’s astonishment when the bundle was untied in his presence,
revealing the dishevelled little Queen, must have been unbounded;
and Plutarch tells us that he was at once “captivated by this proof
of Cleopatra’s bold wit.” One pictures her bursting with laughter at
her adventure, and speedily winning the admiration of the susceptible
Roman, who delighted almost as keenly in deeds of daring as he did
in feminine beauty. All night long they were closeted together, she
relating to him her adventures since she was driven from her kingdom,
and he listening with growing interest, and already perhaps with
awakening love. And here it will be as well to leave them while some
description is given of the appearance and character of the man who now
found himself looking forward to the ensuing days of his holiday in
Alexandria with an eagerness which it must have been difficult for him
to conceal.
CHAPTER V.
CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR.
When Cæsar thus made the acquaintance of the adventurous young Queen of
Egypt he was a man of advanced middle age. He had already celebrated
his fifty-fourth birthday, having been born on July 12, B.C. 102, and
time was beginning to mark him down. The appalling dissipations of his
youth to some extent may have added to the burden of his years; and,
though he was still active and keen beyond the common measure, his
face was heavily lined and seamed, and his muscles, I suppose, showed
something of that tension to which the suppleness of early manhood
gives place. Yet he remained graceful and full of the quality of youth,
and he carried himself with the air of one conscious of his supremacy
in the physical activities of life. He was a lightly-built man, of an
aristocratic type which is to be found indiscriminately throughout
Europe, and which nowadays, by a convention of thought, is usually
associated in the mind with the cavalry barracks or the polo-ground. He
appeared to be, and was, a perfect horseman. It is related of him that
in Gaul he bred and rode a horse which no other man in the army dared
mount; and it was his habit to demonstrate the firmness of his seat
by clasping his hands behind his back and setting the horse at full
gallop. Though by no means a small man, he must have scaled under ten
stone, and in other days and other climes he might have been mistaken
for a gentleman jockey. He was an extremely active soldier, a clever,
graceful swordsman, a powerful swimmer, and an excellent athlete. In
battle he had proved himself brave, gallant, and cool-headed; and in
his earlier years he had been regarded as a dashing young officer who
was neither restrained in the performance of striking deeds of bravery
nor averse to receiving a gallery cheer for his pains. Already at the
age of twenty-one he had won the civic crown, the Victoria Cross of
that period, for saving a soldier’s life at the storming of Mytelene.
In action he exposed himself bare-headed amongst his men, cheering them
and encouraging them by his own fine spirits; and it is related how
once he laid hands on a distraught standard-bearer who was running to
cover, turned him round, and suggested to him that he had mistaken the
direction of the enemy.
His thin, clean-shaven face, his keen dark eyes, his clear-cut
features, his hard, firm mouth with its whimsical expression, and his
somewhat pale and liverish complexion, gave him at first sight the
appearance of one who, being by nature a sportsman and a man of the
world, a fearless rider and a keen soldier, had enjoyed every moment of
an adventurous life. He was particularly well groomed and scrupulously
clean, and his scanty hair was carefully arranged over his fine, broad
head. His toga was ornamented with an unusually broad purple stripe,
and was edged with a long fringe. He loved jewellery, and on one
occasion bought a single pearl for £60,000, which he afterwards gave to
a lady of his acquaintance. Indeed, it is said that he only invaded
Britain because he had heard that fine pearls were to be obtained
there. There was thus a certain foppishness in his appearance, and a
slight suggestion of conceit and personal vanity marked his manner,
which gave the impression that he was not unaware of his good looks,
nor desirous of concealing the fact of his disreputable successes
with the fair sex. Yet he was at this time by no means an old _roué_.
His great head, the penetration of his dark eyes, and the occasional
sternness of his expression were a speedy indication that much lay
behind these inoffensive airs and graces; and all those who came into
his presence must have felt the power of his will and brain, even
though direct observation did not convey to them more than the pleasing
outlines of an elderly cavalier’s figure. Regarded in certain lights
and on certain occasions, the expression of his furrowed face showed
the imagination, the romantic vision, and the artistic culture of his
mind; but usually the qualities which were impressed upon a visitor
who conversed with him at close quarters were those of keenness,
determination, and, particularly, gentlemanliness, combined with the
rather charming confidence of a man of fashion. His manner at all times
was quiet and gracious; yet there was a certain fire, a controlled
vivacity in his movements, which revealed the creative soldier and
administrator behind the ideal aristocrat. His voice though high,
and sometimes shrill, was occasionally very pleasant to the ear; but
notwithstanding the fact that he was a wonderful orator, there was
a correctness in his choice of words which was occasionally almost
pedantic. His manner of speech was direct and straightforward, and his
honesty of purpose and loftiness of principle were not doubted save by
those who chanced to be aware of his little regard for moral integrity.
Cæsar was, in fact, an extremely unscrupulous man. I do not find
it possible to accept the opinion of his character held by most
historians, or to suppose him to have been an heroic figure who lived
and died for his lofty and patriotic principles. There was immense
good in him, and he had the unquestionable merit of being a great man
with vast ambitions for the orderly governance of the nations of the
earth; but when he threw himself with such enthusiasm into the task of
winning the heart of the harum-scarum young Queen of Egypt, it seems
to me that he was very well qualified to deceive her, and to play upon
her emotions with all the known arts and wiles of a wicked world. So
notorious was his habit of leading women astray, that when he returned
to Rome from his Gallic Wars his soldiers sang a marching song in which
the citizens were warned to protect their ladies from him lest he
should treat them as he had treated all the women of Gaul. “_Urbani,
servate uxores_,” they sang; “_Calvum moechum adducimus_.”
He had no particular religion, not much honour, and few high
principles; and in this regard all that can be said in his favour is
that he was perfectly free from cant, never pretended to be virtuous,
nor attempted to hide from his contemporaries the multitude of his
sins. As a young man he indulged in every kind of vice, and so
scandalous was his reputation for licentiousness that it was a matter
of blank astonishment to his Roman friends when, nevertheless, he
proved himself so brave and strenuous a soldier. His relationship with
the mother of Brutus, who was thought to be his own son, shows that
he prosecuted love intrigues while yet a boy. At one time he passed
through a phase of extreme effeminacy, with its attendant horrors;
and there was a period when he used to spend long hours each day in
the practice of the mysteries of the toilet, being scented and curled
and painted in the manner prescribed by the most degenerate young
men of the aristocratic classes. Indeed so effeminate was he, that
after staying with his friend Nicomedes, the King of Bithynia, he was
jestingly called Queen of Bithynia; and on another occasion in Rome a
certain wag named Octavius saluted Pompey as King and Cæsar as Queen of
Rome. His intrigues with the wives of his friends had been as frequent
as they were notorious. No good-looking woman was safe from him, least
of all those whom he had the opportunity of seeing frequently, owing
to his friendship for their husbands or other male relatives. Not
even political considerations checked his amorous inclinations, as
may be judged from the fact that he made a victim of Mucia, the wife
of Pompey, whose friendship he most eagerly desired at that time. “He
was the inevitable co-respondent in every fashionable divorce,” writes
Oman; “and when we look at the list of the ladies whose names are
linked with his, we can only wonder at the state of society in Rome
which permitted him to survive unscathed to middle age. The marvel is
that he did not end in some dark corner, with a dagger between his
ribs, long before he attained the age of thirty.” Being a brilliant
opportunist he made use of his success with women to promote his own
interests, and at one time he is said to have conducted love intrigues
with the wives of Pompey, Crassus, and Gabinius, all leaders of his
political party. Even the knowledge of the habits of the young fops of
the period, which he had acquired while emulating their mode of life,
was turned to good account by him in after years. At the battle of
Pharsalia, which had been fought but a few weeks before his arrival in
Egypt, he had told his troops who were to receive the charges of the
enemy’s patrician cavalry that they should not attempt to hamstring
the horses or strike at their legs, but should aim their blows at the
riders’ faces, “in the hopes,” as Plutarch says, “that young gentlemen
who had not known much of battles and wounds, but came, wearing their
hair long, in the flower of their age and height of their beauty, would
be more apprehensive of such blows and not care for hazarding both a
danger at present and a blemish for the future. And so it proved, for
they turned about, and covered their faces to safeguard them.”
In regard to money matters Cæsar was entirely without principle. In his
early years he borrowed vast sums on all sides, spent them recklessly,
and seldom paid his debts save with further borrowed money. While still
a young man he owed his creditors the sum of £280,000; and though most
of this had now been paid off by means of the loot from the Gallic
Wars, there had been times in his life when ruin stared him in the
face. Most of his debts were incurred in the first place in buying for
himself a high position in Roman political life, and in the second
place in paying the electioneering expenses of candidates for office
who would be likely to advance his power. He engaged the favour of the
people by giving enormous public feasts, and on one occasion twenty-two
thousand persons were entertained at his expense at a single meal.
While he was ædile he paid for three hundred and twenty gladiatorial
combats; and innumerable fêtes and shows were given by him throughout
his life, and were paid for by the tears and anguish of his conquered
enemies.
[Illustration:
_British Museum._]
JULIUS CÆSAR.]
He was one of the most ambitious men who have ever walked the stage
of life, his devouring passion for absolute power being at all times
abnormal; and he cared not one jot in what manner he obtained or
expended money so long as his career was advanced by that means.
He could not brook the thought of playing a secondary part in the
world’s affairs, and nothing short of absolute autocracy satisfied
his aspirations. While crossing the Alps on one occasion the poverty
of a small mountain village was pointed out to him, and he was heard
to remark that he would rather be first man in that little community
than second man in Rome. On another occasion he was seen to burst into
tears while reading the life of Alexander the Great, for the thought
was intolerable to him that another man should have conquered the world
at an age when he himself had done nothing of the kind. This restless
“passion after honour,” as Plutarch terms it, was not apparent in
his manner and was not noticed save by those who knew him well. He
was too gentlemanly, too well dressed, too beautifully groomed, to
give the impression of one who was seeking indefatigably for his own
advancement, and at whose heart the demons of insatiate ambition were
so continuously gnawing. “When I see his hair so carefully arranged,”
said Cicero, “and observe him adjusting it with one finger, I cannot
imagine it should enter such a man’s thoughts to subvert the Roman
State.” Yet this elegant soldier, whose manners were so quietly
aristocratic, whose charm was so delectable, would sink to any depths
of moral depravity, whether financial or otherwise, in order to
convert the world into his footstool. When he and Catullus were rival
candidates for the office of Pontifex Maximus, the latter offered him a
huge sum of money to retire from the contest; but Cæsar, spurning the
proffered bribe with indignation, replied that he was about to _borrow_
a larger sum than that in order to buy the votes for himself. At
another period of his amazing career he desired to effect the downfall
of Cicero, who was much in his way, and circumstances so fell out
that this could best be accomplished by the appointment of a certain
young scamp named Clodius as tribune. Now Clodius was the paramour
of Cæsar’s wife Pompeia, whom the Dictator had made co-respondent
in the action for divorce which he had brought against that lady;
yet, since it served his ambitious purpose, he did not now hesitate
to obtain the appointment of this amorous rogue and use him for his
infamous purposes. The story need not here be related of how Clodius
had disguised himself as a woman, and had thus obtained admission to
certain secret female rites at which Pompeia was officiating; how he
had been discovered; how he had only escaped the death penalty for his
sacrilege owing to the fact that the judges were afraid to condemn
him since he was a favourite with the mob, and afraid to acquit him
for fear of offending the nobility, and had therefore written their
verdicts so illegibly that nobody could read them; and how Pompeia
had been divorced by her husband, who had then made the famous remark
that “Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion”; but it will be apparent
that Plutarch is justified in regarding the man’s appointment to the
tribuneship as one of the most disgraceful episodes in the Dictator’s
career.
Cæsar’s first wife was named Cossutia, and was a wealthy heiress whom
he had married for her money’s sake. Having, however, fallen in love
with Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, he divorced Cossutia, and wedded
the woman of his heart, pluckily refusing to part with her when ordered
to do so for political reasons by the terrible Sulla. Cornelia died in
B.C. 68, and in the following year he married Pompeia, of whom we have
just heard, in order to strengthen his alliance with Pompey, to whom
she was related.
Cæsar’s marriage to Calpurnia, after the dismissal of Pompeia, again
showed his indifference to the moral aspect of political life.
Calpurnia was the daughter of Calpurnius Piso, the pupil and disciple
of Philodemus the Epicurean, a man whose verses in the Greek Anthology,
and whose habits of life, were as vicious and poisonous as any in
that licentious age. Cæsar at once obtained the consulship for his
disreputable father-in-law, thereby causing Cato to protest that it
was intolerable that the government should be prostituted by such
marriages, and that persons should advance one another to the highest
offices in the land by means of women. Cæsar went so far as to propose,
shortly after this, that he should divorce Calpurnia and marry Pompey’s
daughter, who would have to be divorced from her husband, Faustus
Sulla, for the purpose; and that Pompey should marry Octavia, Cæsar’s
niece, although she was at that time married to C. Marcellus, and also
would have to be divorced.
There was a startling nonchalance in Cæsar’s behaviour, a studied
callousness, which was not less apparent to his contemporaries than
to us. His wonderful ability to squander other people’s money, his
total disregard of principle, his undisguised satisfaction in political
and domestic intrigue, revealed an unconcern which must inspire
for all time the admiration of the criminal classes, and which, in
certain instances, must appeal very forcibly to the imagination of
all high-spirited persons. Who can resist the charm of the story of
his behaviour to the pirates of Pharmacusa? For thirty-eight days
he was held prisoner at that place by a band of most ferocious and
bloodthirsty Cilicians, and during that time he treated his captors
with a degree of reckless _insouciance_ unmatched in the history of
the world. When they asked him for a ransom of twenty talents (£5000)
he laughed in their faces, and said that he was worth at least fifty
(£12,500), which sum he ultimately paid over to them. He insisted upon
joining in their games, jeered at them for their barbarous habits, and
ordered them about as though they were his slaves. When he wished to
sleep he demanded that they should keep absolute silence as they sat
over their camp-fires; or, when the mood pleased him, he took part in
their sing-songs, read them his atrocious Latin verses (for he was
ever a poor poet), and abused them soundly if they did not applaud. A
hundred times a day he told them that he would have them all hanged
as soon as he was free, a pleasantry at which the pirates laughed
heartily, thinking it a merry jest; but no sooner was he released than
he raised a small force, attacked his former captors, and, taking most
of them prisoners, had them all crucified. Crucifixion is a form of
death by torture, the prolonged and frightful agony of which is not
fully appreciated at the present day, owing to a complacent familiarity
with the most notorious case of its application; but Cæsar being,
on occasion, with all his indifference, a kind-hearted man, decided
at the last moment mercifully to put an end to the agonies of his
disillusioned victims, and with a sort of considerate nonchalance he
therefore quietly cut their throats.
He was not by any means consistently a cruel man, and his kindness
and magnanimity were often demonstrated. He shed tears, it will
be remembered, upon seeing the signet-ring of his murdered enemy,
Pompey; and in Rome he ordered that unfortunate soldier’s statues to
be replaced upon the pedestals from which they had been thrown. In
warfare, however, he was often ruthless, and had recourse to wholesale
massacres which could hardly be regarded as necessary measures. At
Uxellodunum and elsewhere he caused thousands of prisoners to be
maimed by the hacking off of their right hands; and his slaughter
of the members of the Senate of the Veneti seems to have been an
unnecessary piece of brutality. His behaviour in regard to the Usipetes
and Tencteri will always remain the chief stain upon his military
reputation. After concluding peace with these unfortunate peoples, he
attacked them when they were disarmed, and killed 430,000 of them--men,
women, and children. For this barbarity Cato proposed that he should
be put in chains and delivered over to the remnant of the massacred
tribes, that they might wreak their vengeance upon him.
During his ten years’ campaigning in Gaul he took 800 towns by storm,
subdued 300 states, killed a million men, and sent another million into
slavery.[27] His cold-blooded execution of the brave Vercingetorix,
after six years of captivity, seems more cruel to us, perhaps, than it
did to his contemporaries; and it may be said in his favour that he
treated the terrified remnant of the conquered peoples with justice
and moderation. In spite of a kindly and even affable manner, his
wit was caustic and his words often terribly biting. When a certain
young man named Metellus, at that time tribune, had persistently
questioned whether Cæsar had a right to appropriate treasury funds in
the prosecution of his wars, Cæsar threatened to put him to death if
any more was heard of his dissent. “And this you know, young man,” said
he, “is more disagreeable for me to say than to do.” He associated
freely with all manner of persons, and although so obviously an
aristocrat, he was noted for his friendliness and tact in dealing with
the lower classes. During his campaigns he shared all hardships with
his men, and, consequently, was much beloved by them, in spite of their
occasional objection to the heavy work or strenuous manœuvres which he
required them to undertake. He was wont to travel in time of war at the
rate of a hundred miles a day; and when a river or stream obstructed
his progress he did not hesitate to dive straightway into the water and
swim to the opposite shore. On the march he himself usually slept in
his litter, or curled up on the floor of his chariot, and his food was
of the coarsest description. At no time, indeed, was he a gourmet; and
it is related how once he ate without a murmur some asparagus which had
been treated with something very much like an ointment in mistake for
sauce. In later life he drank no wine of any kind, an abstemiousness
which was probably forced upon him by ill-health; and he who, in his
early years, had been notorious for his dissipations and luxurious
living, was, at the time with which we are now dealing, famous for his
abstinence.
When Cæsar arrived in Alexandria he was come direct from his great
victory over Pompey at Pharsalia, and was now absolute master of the
Roman world. His brilliant campaigns in Gaul had raised him to the
highest position in the Republic, and now that Pompey was dead he was
without any appreciable rival. He carried himself with careful dignity,
and presumed--quite correctly--that all eyes were turned upon him.
He had, as Mommsen says, “a pleasing consciousness of his own manly
beauty”; and the thought of his many brilliant victories and successful
surmounting of all obstacles gave him the liveliest satisfaction. No
longer was his elegant frame shaken with sobs at the envious thought of
the exploits of Alexander the Great; but, since his insatiable ambition
still urged him to make use of his opportunities, he was for the moment
content to indulge his passion for conquest by attempting to win the
affections of the charming, omnipotent, and fabulously wealthy Queen of
Egypt.
CHAPTER VI.
CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR IN THE BESIEGED PALACE AT ALEXANDRIA.
There can be little doubt that Cæsar’s all-night interview with
Cleopatra put an entirely new complexion upon his conception of the
situation. Until the Queen’s dramatic entry into the Palace, his
main object in remaining for a short time at Alexandria, after he
had been shown the severed head of the murdered Pompey, had been to
assert his authority in that city of unrivalled commercial opulence,
and at the same time to make full use of a favourable opportunity to
rest his weary mind and body in the luxury of its royal residence and
the perfection of its sun-bathed summer days, while Rome should be
quieted down and made ready for his coming. But now a new factor had
introduced itself. He had found that the Queen of this desirable and
important country was a young woman after his own heart: a dare-devil
girl, whose manners and beauty had fired his imagination, and whose
apparent admiration for him had set him thinking of the uses to which
he might put the devotion he confidently expected to arouse. She seems
to have laid her case before him with frankness and sincerity. She had
shown him how her brother had driven her from the throne, in direct
opposition to the will of her father, who had so earnestly desired
the two of them to reign jointly and in harmony. And while she had
talked to him through the long hours of the night he had found himself
most willingly carried away by the desire to obtain her love, both
for the pleasure which it might be expected to afford him and for the
political advantage which would accrue from such an intercourse. Here
was a simple means of bringing Egypt under his control--Egypt which was
the granary of the world, the most important commercial market of the
Mediterranean, the most powerful factor in eastern politics, and the
gateway of the unconquered kingdoms of the Orient. He had made himself
lord of the West; Greece and Asia Minor were, since the late war, at
his feet; and now Alexandria, so long the support of Pompey’s faction,
should come to him with the devotion of its Queen. I do not hold with
those who suppose him to have been led like a lamb to the slaughter
by the wiles of Cleopatra, and to have succumbed to her charms in the
manner of one whose passions have confused his brain, causing him to
forget all things save only his desire. In consideration of the fact
that the young Queen was at that time, so far as we know, a woman
of blameless character, and that he, on the contrary, was a man of
the very worst possible reputation in regard to the opposite sex, it
seems, to say the least, unfair that the burden of the blame for the
subsequent events should have been assigned for all these centuries to
Cleopatra.
Before the end of that eventful night Cæsar seems to have determined to
excite the passionate love of that wild and irresponsible girl, whose
personality and political importance made a doubly powerful appeal
to him; and ere the light of dawn had entered the room his decision
to restore her to the throne, and to place her brother in the far
background, had been irrevocably made. As the sun rose he sent for King
Ptolemy, who, on entering Cæsar’s presence, must have been dismayed
to be confronted with his sister whom he had driven into exile and
against whom he had so recently been fighting at Pelusium. It would
appear that Cæsar treated him with sternness, asking him how he had
dared to go against the wishes of his father, who had entrusted their
fulfilment to the Roman people, and demanding that he should at once
make his peace with Cleopatra. At this the young man lost his temper,
and, rushing from the room, cried out to his friends and attendants who
were waiting outside that he had been betrayed and that his cause was
lost. Snatching the royal diadem from his head in his boyish rage and
chagrin, he dashed it upon the ground, and, no doubt, burst into tears.
Thereupon an uproar arose, and the numerous Alexandrians who still
remained within the Roman lines at once gathering round their King,
nearly succeeded in communicating their excitement to the royal troops
in the city, and arousing them to a concerted attack upon the Palace
by land and sea. Cæsar, however, hurried out and addressed the crowd,
promising to arrange matters to their satisfaction; and thereupon he
called a meeting at which Ptolemy and Cleopatra were both induced to
attend, and he read out to them their father’s will wherein it was
emphatically stated that they were to reign together. He reiterated his
right, as representative of the Roman people, to adjust the dispute;
and at last he appears to have effected a reconciliation between the
brother and sister. The unfortunate Ptolemy must have realised that
from that moment his ambitions and hopes were become dust and ashes,
for he would now always remain under the scrutiny of his elder sister;
and the liberty of action for which he and his ministers had plotted
and schemed was for ever gone. According to Dion Cassius, he could
already see plainly that there was an understanding between Cæsar
and his sister; and Cleopatra’s manner doubtless betrayed to him her
elation. She must have been intensely excited. A few hours previously
she had been an exile, creeping back to her own city in imminent danger
of her life; now, not only was she Queen of Egypt once more, but she
had won the esteem and, so it seemed, the heart also of the Autocrat
of the world, whose word was absolute law to the nations. One may
almost picture her making faces at her brother as they sat opposite one
another in Cæsar’s improvised court of justice, and the unhappy boy’s
distress must have been acute.
Cæsar’s dominant idea now was to control the politics of Egypt by
means of a skilled play upon the heart of Cleopatra. He did not much
care what happened to King Ptolemy or to his minister Potheinos, for
they had forfeited their right to consideration by their attempt to
set aside the wishes of Auletes, and by their disgusting behaviour
to Pompey, who, though Cæsar’s enemy, had yet been his mighty
fellow-countryman; but it was his wish as soon as possible to placate
the mob, and to endear the people of Alexandria to him, so that in
three or four weeks’ time he might leave the country in undisturbed
quiet. Now the control of Cyprus was one of the most fervent
aspirations of the city, and it seems to have occurred to Cæsar that
the presentation of the island to their royal house would be keenly
appreciated by them, and would go a long way to appease their hostile
excitement. When the Romans annexed Cyprus in B.C. 58, the Alexandrians
had risen in revolt against Auletes largely because he had made no
attempt to claim the country for himself. It had been more or less
continuously an appendage of the Egyptian crown, and its possession
was still the people’s dearest wish. Now, therefore, according to
Dion, Cæsar made a present of the island to Egypt in the names of the
two younger members of the royal house, Prince Ptolemy and Princess
Arsinoe; and though we have no records definitely to show that they
ever assumed control of their new possession, or that it ceased, at any
rate for a year or two, to be regarded as a part of the Roman province
of Cilicia, it is certain that a few years later, in B.C. 42, it had
become an Egyptian dominion and was administered by a viceroy of that
country.[28]
Having thus relieved the situation, Cæsar turned his attention to
other matters. While Auletes was in Rome, in B.C. 59, he had incurred
enormous debts in his efforts to buy the support of the Roman Senate
in re-establishing himself upon the Ptolemaic throne, and in this fact
Cæsar now saw a means both of showing his benevolence towards the
Egyptians, and of making them pay for the upkeep of his small fleet and
army at Alexandria. His claim on behalf of the creditors of Auletes
he fixed at the very moderate sum of ten million denarii (£400,000),
although it must have been realised by all that the original debts
amounted to a much higher figure than this. At the same time he made
no attempt to demand a war contribution from the Egyptians, although
their original advocacy of the cause of Pompey would have justified
him in doing so.[29] In this manner, and by the gift of Cyprus, he made
a bid for the goodwill of the Alexandrians; but, unfortunately, his
efforts in this direction were entirely frustrated by the intrigues
of Potheinos. There probably need not have been any difficulty in the
raising of £400,000; but Potheinos chose to order the King’s golden
dishes and the rich vessels in the temples to be melted down and
converted into money. He furnished the King’s own table with wooden
or earthenware plates and bowls, and caused the fact to be made known
to the townspeople, in order that they should be shown the straits to
which Cæsar’s cupidity had reduced them. Meanwhile, he supplied the
Roman soldiers with a very poor quality of corn, and told them, in
reply to their complaints, that they ought to be grateful that they
received any at all, since they had no right to it. Nor did he hesitate
to tell Cæsar that he ought not to waste his time in Alexandria, or
concern himself with the insignificant affairs of Egypt, when urgent
business should be calling him back to Rome. His manner towards the
Dictator was consistently rude and hostile, and there seems little
doubt that he was plotting against him and was keeping in touch with
Achillas.
Hostilities of a more or less sporadic nature soon broke out, and it
was not long before Cæsar made his first hit at the enemy. Hearing
that they were attempting to man their imprisoned ships, which lay
still in the western portion of the Great Harbour, and knowing that
he was not strong enough either to hold or to utilise more than a
few of them, he sent out a little force which succeeded in setting
fire to, and destroying, the whole fleet, consisting of the fifty
men-o’-war which, during the late hostilities, had been lent to Pompey,
twenty-two guardships, and thirty-eight other craft, thus leaving in
their possession only those vessels which lay in the Harbour of the
Happy Return, beyond the Heptastadium. In this conflagration some of
the buildings on the quay near the harbour appear to have been burnt,
and it would seem that some portion of the famous Alexandrian library
was destroyed; but the silence of contemporary writers upon this
literary catastrophe indicates that the loss was not great, and, to
my mind, puts out of account the statement of later authors that the
burning of the entire library occurred on that occasion. Cæsar’s next
move was to seize the Pharos Lighthouse and the eastern end of the
island upon which it was built, thus securing the entrance to the Great
Harbour, and making the passage of his ships to the open sea a manœuvre
which could be employed at any moment. At the same time he threw up
the strongest fortifications at all the vulnerable points in his land
defences, and thereby rendered himself absolutely secure from direct
assault.
He was not much troubled by the situation. It is said that he was
obliged more than once to keep awake all night in order to protect
himself against assassination; but such a contingency did not interfere
to any great extent with his enjoyments of the life in the Alexandrian
Palace. From early youth he must have been accustomed to the thought of
the assassin’s knife. His many love-affairs had made imminent each day
the possibility of sudden death, and his political and administrative
career also laid him open at all times to a murderous attack. The
jealousy of the husbands whose wives he had stolen, the vengeance of
the survivors of the massacres instigated by him, the resentment of
the politicians whose ambitions he had thwarted, and the hatred of
innumerable persons whom, in one way or another, he had offended,
placed his life in continuous jeopardy. The machinations of Potheinos,
therefore, left him undismayed, and he was able to prosecute what
was, in plain language, the seduction of the Queen of Egypt with an
undistracted mind.
Cleopatra appears to have been as strongly attracted to Cæsar
as he was to her; and although at the outset each realised the
advantage of winning the other’s heart, and regulated their actions
accordingly, there seems little doubt that, after a day or two of close
companionship, a romantic attachment of a very genuine nature had been
formed between them. In the case of Cleopatra, no doubt, her love held
all the sweetness of the first serious affair of her life, and on the
part of Cæsar there is apparent the passionate delight of a man past
his prime in the vivacity and charm of a beautiful young girl. Though
elderly, Cæsar was what a romanticist would call an ideal lover. His
keen, handsome face, his athletic and graceful figure, the fascination
of his manners, and the wonder of the deeds which he had performed,
might be calculated to win the heart of any woman; and to Cleopatra
he must have made a special appeal by reason of his reputation for
bravery and reliability on all occasions, and his present display of
_sang-froid_ and light-heartedness.
Cæsar was, at this time, in holiday mood, and the life he led at the
Palace was of the gayest description. He had cast from him the cares
of state with an ease which came of frequent practice in the art of
throwing off responsibilities; and when about October 25th he received
news from Rome that he had been made Dictator for the whole of the
coming year, 47, he was able to feel that there was no cause for
anxiety. While the unfortunate young Ptolemy sulked in the background,
Cæsar and Cleopatra openly sought one another’s company and made merry
together, it would seem, for a large part of every day. With such a
man as Cæsar, the result of this intimacy was inevitable; nor was
it to be expected that the happy-go-lucky and impetuous girl of but
twenty years of age would act with much caution or propriety under
the peculiar and exciting circumstances. It is possible that she had
already gone through the form of marriage with her co-regnant brother,
as was the custom of the Egyptian Court; but it is highly unlikely that
this was anything more than the emptiest formality, and there is no
reason to doubt that in actual fact she was, when she met Cæsar, still
unwedded. The child which in due course she presented to the Dictator
was her first-born; but had there been a previous marriage of more than
a formal nature, it is at least probable, in view of her subsequent
productivity, that she would already have been in enjoyment of the
privileges of motherhood.
The gaiety of the life in the besieged Palace, and the progress of
the romance which was there being enacted, were rudely disturbed by
two consecutive events which led at once to the outbreak of really
serious hostilities. The little Princess Arsinoe, who, like all the
women of this family, must have been endowed with great spirit and
pluck, suddenly made her escape from the Roman lines, accompanied by
her _nutritius_ Ganymedes,[30] and joined the Egyptian forces under
Achillas. The plot, organised no doubt by Ganymedes, had for its object
the raising of the Princess to the throne, while Cleopatra and her
two brothers were imprisoned in the Lochias, and no sooner had they
reached the Egyptian headquarters than they began freely to bribe all
officers and officials of importance in order to accomplish their
purpose. Achillas, however, who had his own game to play, thought it
wiser to remain loyal to his sovereign, and to attempt to rescue him
from Cæsar’s clutches. It was not long before a quarrel arose between
Ganymedes and Achillas, which ended in the prompt assassination of
the latter, whose functions were at once assumed by his murderer, the
war being thereupon prosecuted with renewed vigour. Previous to the
death of Achillas, Potheinos had been in secret communication with
him, apparently in regard to the possibility of murdering Cæsar and
effecting the escape of King Ptolemy and himself from the Palace ere
Arsinoe and Ganymedes obtained control of affairs. Information of the
plot was given to Cæsar by his barber, “a busy, listening fellow, whose
excessive timidity made him inquisitive into everything”;[31] and,
at a feast held to celebrate the reconciliation between Ptolemy and
Cleopatra, Potheinos was arrested and immediately beheaded, a death
which the poet Lucan considers to have been very much too good for him,
since it was that by which he had caused the great Pompey to die. So
far as one can now tell, Cæsar was entirely justified in putting this
wretched eunuch out of the way of further worldly mischief. He belonged
to that class of court functionary which is met with throughout
the history of the Orient, and which invariably calls forth the
denunciation of the more moral West; but it is to be remembered in his
favour that, so far as we know, he schemed as eagerly for the fortunes
of his young sovereign Ptolemy as he did for his own advancement, and
his treacherous manœuvres were directed against the menacing intrusion
of a power which was relentlessly crushing the life out of the royal
houses of the accessible world. His crime against fallen Pompey was no
more dastardly than were many other of the recorded acts of the Court
he served; and the fact that he, like his two fellow-conspirators,
Achillas and Theodotos, paid in blood and tears for the riches of the
moment, goes far to exonerate him, at this remote date, from further
execration.
The first act of the war which caused Cæsar any misgivings was the
pollution of his water supply by the enemy, and the consequent
nervousness of his men. The Royal Area obtained its drinking water
through subterranean channels communicating with the lake at the back
of the city; and no sooner had Cæsar realised that these channels might
be tampered with than he attempted to cut his way southwards, probably
along the broad street[32] which led to the Gate of the Sun and to the
Lake Harbour. Here, however, he met with a stubborn resistance, and
the loss of life might have been very great had he persisted in his
endeavour. Fortunately, however, the sinking of trial shafts within
the besieged territory led to the discovery of an abundance of good
water, the existence of which had not been suspected; and thus he was
saved from the ignominy of being ousted from the city which he had
entered in such solemn pomp, and of being forced to retire across
the Mediterranean, his self-imposed task left uncompleted, and his
ambitions for the future of Cleopatra unfulfilled.
Not long after this the welcome news was brought to him that the
Thirty-seventh Legion had crossed from Asia Minor with food supplies,
arms, and siege-instruments, and was anchored off the Egyptian coast,
being for the moment unable to reach him owing to contrary winds. Cæsar
at once sailed out to meet them, with his entire fleet, the ships being
manned only by their Rhodian crews, all the troops having been left to
hold the land defences. Effecting a junction with these reinforcements,
he returned to the harbour, easily defeated the Egyptian vessels
which had collected to the north of the Island of Pharos, and sailed
triumphantly back to his moorings below the Palace.
So confident now was he in his strength that he next sailed round the
island, and attacked the Egyptian fleet in its own harbour beyond the
Heptastadium, inflicting heavy losses upon them. He then landed on
the western end of Pharos, which was still held by the enemy, carried
the forts by storm, and effected a junction with his own men who were
stationed around the lighthouse at the eastern end. His plan was to
advance across the Heptastadium, and thus, by holding both the island
and the mole, to obtain possession of the western Harbour of the
Happy Return and ultimately to strike a wedge into the city upon that
side. But here he suffered a dangerous reverse. While he was leading
in person the attack upon the south or city end of the Heptastadium,
and his men were crowding on to it from the island and from the vessels
in the Great Harbour, the Egyptians made a spirited attack upon its
northern end, thus hemming the Romans in upon the narrow causeway, to
the consternation of those who watched the battle from the Lochias
Promontory. Fortunately vessels were at hand to take off the survivors
of this sanguinary engagement, as the enemy drove them back from either
end of the causeway; and presently they had all scrambled aboard and
were rowing at full speed across the Great Harbour. Such numbers,
however, jumped on to the deck of the vessel into which Cæsar had
entered that it capsized, and we are then presented with the dramatic
picture of the ruler of the world swimming for his life through the
quiet waters of the harbour, holding aloft in one hand a bundle of
important papers which he happened to be carrying at the moment of the
catastrophe, dragging his scarlet military cloak along by his teeth,
and at the same time constantly ducking his rather bald head under the
water to avoid the missiles which were hurled at him by the victorious
Egyptians, who must have been capering about upon the recaptured mole,
all talking and shouting at once. He was, however, soon picked up
by one of his ships; and thus he returned to the Palace, very cold
and dripping wet, and having in the end lost the cloak which was the
cherished mark of his rank. Four hundred legionaries and a number of
seamen perished in this engagement, most of them being drowned; and
now, perhaps for the first time, it began to appear to Cæsar that the
warfare which he was waging was not the amusing game he had thought
it. For at least four months he had entertained himself in the Palace,
spending his days in pottering around his perfectly secure defences and
his nights in enjoying the company of Cleopatra. Up till now he must
have been in constant receipt of news from Rome, where his affairs were
being managed by Antony, his boisterous but fairly reliable lieutenant,
and it is evident that nothing had occurred there to necessitate his
return. Far from being hemmed in within the Palace and obliged to fight
for his life, as is generally supposed to have been the case, it seems
to me that his position at all times was as open as it was secure.
He could have travelled across the Mediterranean at any moment; and,
had he thought it desirable, he could have sailed over to Italy for
a few weeks and returned to Alexandria without any great risk. His
fleet had shown itself quite capable of defending him from danger upon
the high seas, as, for example, when he had sailed out to meet the
Thirty-seventh Legion;[33] and, as on that occasion, his troops could
have been left in security in their fortified position. Supplies from
Syria were plentiful, and the Rhodian sailors, after escorting him as
far as Cyprus, could have returned to their duties at Alexandria in
order to ensure the safe and continuous arrival of these stores and
provisions.
It is thus very apparent that he had no wish to abandon the enjoyments
of his winter in the Egyptian capital, where he had become thoroughly
absorbed both in the little Queen of that country and in the problems
which were represented to him by her. He was an elderly man, and the
weight of his years caused him to feel a temporary distaste for the
restless anxieties which awaited him in Rome. His ambitions in the
Occident had been attained; and now, finding himself engaged in what,
I would suggest, was an easily managed and not at all dangerous war,
he was determined to carry the struggle through to its inevitable
end, and to find in this quite interesting and occasionally exciting
task an excuse for remaining by the side of the woman who, for the
time being, absorbed the attention of his wayward affections. Already
he was beginning to realise that the subjection of Egypt to his will
was a matter of very great political importance, as will be explained
hereafter; and he felt the keenest objection to abandoning the Queen to
her own devices, both on this account and by reason of the hold which
she had obtained upon his heart. In after years he did not look back
upon the fighting with an interest sufficient to induce him to record
its history, as he had done that of other campaigns, but he caused an
official account to be written by one of his comrades; and this author
has been at pains to show that the struggle was severe in character.
Such an interpretation of the war, however, though now unanimously
accepted, is to be received with caution, and need not be taken more
seriously than the statement that, in the first instance, Cæsar’s
prolonged stay at Alexandria was due to the Etesian winds which made
it difficult for his ships to leave the harbour. These annual winds
from the north might have delayed his return for a week or two; but it
is obvious that he had no desire to set sail; and the author of _De
Bello Alexandrino_ was doubtless permitted to cover Cæsar’s apparent
negligence of important Roman affairs by thus attributing his lengthy
absence to the strength of the enemy and to the inclemency of the Fates.
Now, however, after the ignominious defeat upon the Heptastadium, Cæsar
appears to have become fully determined to punish the Alexandrians
and to prosecute the campaign with more energy. He seems soon to have
received news that a large army was marching across the desert from
Syria to his relief, under the joint leadership of Mithridates of
Pergamum, a natural son of Mithridates the Great, the Jewish Antipater,
father of Herod, and Iamblichus, son of Sampsiceramus, a famous Arab
chieftain from Hemesa. With the advent of these forces he knew that
he would be able to crush all resistance and to impose his will upon
Egypt; and he now, therefore, took a step which clearly shows his
determination to handle affairs with sternness and ruthlessness, in
such a manner that Cleopatra should speedily become sole ruler of the
country, and thus should be in a position to lay all the might of her
kingdom in his hands.
The Princess Arsinoe had failed to make herself Queen of Egypt in spite
of the efforts of Ganymedes, and the royal army was still endeavouring
to rescue King Ptolemy and to fight under his banner. Cæsar, therefore,
determined to hand the young man over to them, knowing, as the
historian of the war admits, that there was little probability of such
an action leading to a cessation of hostilities. His avowed object
in taking this step was to give Ptolemy the opportunity of arranging
terms of peace for him; but he did not hesitate to record officially
his opinion that, in the event of a continuation of the war, it would
be far more honourable for him to be fighting against a king than
against “a crowd of sweepings of the earth and renegades.” The truth
of the matter, however, seems to me to be that Cæsar wished to rid
himself of the boy, who stood in the way of the accomplishment of his
schemes in regard to the sole sovereignty of Cleopatra; and by handing
him over to the enemy at the moment when the news of the arrival of
the army from Syria made the Egyptian downfall absolutely certain, he
insured the young man’s inevitable death or degradation. The miserable
Ptolemy must have realised this, for when Cæsar instructed him to go
over to his friends beyond the Roman lines, he burst into tears and
begged to be allowed to remain in the Palace. He knew quite well that
the Egyptians had not a chance of victory--that when once he had taken
up his residence with his own people their conqueror would treat him
as an enemy and punish him accordingly. Cæsar, however, on his part,
was aware that if in the hour of Roman victory Ptolemy was still under
his protection, it would be difficult not to carry out the terms of
the will of Auletes by making him joint-sovereign with Cleopatra. The
King’s tears and paradoxical protestations of devotion were therefore
ignored; and forthwith he was pushed out of the Palace into the
welcoming arms of the Alexandrians, the younger brother, whom Cæsar had
designed for the safely distant throne of Cyprus, being left in the
custody of the Romans alone with Cleopatra.
The relieving army from Syria soon arrived at the eastern frontier of
Egypt, and, taking Pelusium by storm, gave battle to the King’s forces
not far from the Canopic mouth of the Nile. The Egyptians were easily
defeated, and the invaders marched along the eastern edge of the Delta
towards Memphis (near the modern Cairo), just below which they crossed
the Nile to the western bank. The young Ptolemy thereupon, expecting
no mercy at Cæsar’s hands, put himself boldly at the head of such
troops as could be spared from the siege of the Palace at Alexandria,
and marched across the Delta to measure swords with Mithridates and
his allies. No sooner was he gone from the city than Cæsar, leaving a
small garrison in the Palace, sailed out of the harbour with as many
men as he could crowd into the ships at his disposal, and moved off
eastwards as though making for Canopus or Pelusium. Under cover of
darkness, however, he turned in the opposite direction, and before
dawn disembarked upon the deserted shore some miles to the west of
Alexandria. He thus out-manœuvred the Egyptian fleet with ease, and,
incidentally, demonstrated that he had been throughout the siege
perfectly free to come and go across the water as he chose. Marching
along the western border of the desert, as his friends had marched
along the eastern, he effected a junction with them at the apex of
the Delta, not far north of Memphis, and immediately turned to attack
the approaching Egyptian army. Ptolemy, on learning of their advance,
fortified himself in a strong position at the foot of a _tell_, or
mound, the Nile being upon one flank, a marsh upon the other, and a
canal in front of him; but the allies, after a two-days’ battle, turned
the position and gained a complete victory. The turning movement had
been entrusted to a certain Carfulenus, who afterwards fell at Mutina
fighting against Antony, and this officer managed to penetrate into
the Egyptian camp. At his approach Ptolemy appears to have jumped into
one of the boats which lay moored upon the Nile; but the weight of the
numbers of fugitives who followed his example sank the vessel, and
the young king was never seen alive again. It is said that his dead
body was recognised afterwards by the golden corselet which he wore,
and which, no doubt, had caused by its weight his rapid death. His
tragic end, at the age of fifteen, relieved Cæsar of the embarrassing
necessity either of pardoning him and making him joint-sovereign with
Cleopatra, according to the terms of his father’s will, or of carrying
him captive to Rome and putting him to death in the customary manner at
the close of his triumph. The boy had foreseen the fate which would be
chosen for him, when he had begged with tears to be allowed to remain
in the Palace; and his sudden submersion in the muddy waters of the
Nile must have terminated a life which of late had been intolerably
overshadowed by the knowledge that his existence was an obstacle to
Cæsar’s relentless ambitions, and by the horror of the certainty of
speedy death.
On March 27th, B.C. 47,[34] Cæsar, who had ridden on with his cavalry,
entered Alexandria in triumph, its gates being now thrown open to
him. The inhabitants dressed themselves in mourning garments, sending
deputations to him to beg for his mercy and forgiveness, and bringing
out to him the statues of their gods as a token of their entire
submission. Princess Arsinoe and Ganymedes were handed over to him as
prisoners: and in pomp he rode through the city to the Palace, where
as a conquering hero and saviour he was received into the arms of
Cleopatra.
CHAPTER VII.
THE BIRTH OF CÆSARION AND CÆSAR’S DEPARTURE FROM EGYPT.
The death of Ptolemy and the submission of Alexandria brought the war
to a definite close; and Cæsar, once more in comfortable residence
at the Palace, was enabled at last to carry out his plans for the
regulation of Egyptian affairs, with the execution of which the
campaign had so long interfered. Cleopatra’s little brother, the
younger Ptolemy, was a boy of only eleven years of age, who does
not seem to have shown such signs of marked intelligence or strong
character as would cause him to be a nuisance either to Cæsar or to his
sister; and therefore it was arranged that he should be raised to the
throne in place of his deceased brother, as nominal King and consort of
Cleopatra. Cæsar, it will be remembered, had given Cyprus to this youth
and to his sister Arsinoe; but now, since the latter was a prisoner in
disgrace and the former was not old enough to cause trouble in Egypt,
the island kingdom was not pressed upon them. To the Alexandrians,
whose campaign against him had entertained him so admirably while he
had pursued his intrigue with Cleopatra, Cæsar showed no desire to
be other than lenient, and he preferred to regard the great havoc
wrought in certain parts of their city as sufficient punishment for
their misdeeds. He granted to the Jews, however, equal rights with
the Greeks, in consideration of their assistance in the late war, a
step which must have been somewhat irritating to the majority of the
townsfolk. He then constituted a regular Roman Army of Occupation,
for the purpose of supporting Cleopatra and her little brother upon
the throne,[35] and to keep order in Alexandria and throughout the
country. This army consisted of the two legions which had been besieged
with him in the Palace, together with a third which presently arrived
from Syria; and to the command of this force Cæsar appointed an able
officer named Rufinus, who had risen by his personal merit from the
ranks, being originally one of Cæsar’s own freedmen. It is usually
stated that in handing over the command to a man of this standing and
not to a person belonging to the Senate, Cæsar was showing his disdain
for Egypt; but I am of opinion that the step was taken deliberately to
retain the control of the country entirely in his own hands, Rufinus
being, no doubt, absolutely Cæsar’s man. We do not hear what became of
the Gabinian troops who had fought against Cæsar, but it is probable
that they were drafted to legions stationed in other parts of the world.
It was now April,[36] and Cæsar had been in Egypt for more than six
months. He had originally intended to return to Rome, it would seem,
in the previous November; but his defiance by the Alexandrians, and
later the siege of the Palace, had given him a reasonable excuse for
remaining with Cleopatra. Being by nature an opportunist, he had come
during these months to interest himself keenly in Egyptian affairs,
and, as we have seen, both they and his passion for the Queen had fully
occupied his attention. The close of the war, however, did not mean to
him the termination of these interests, but rather the beginning of
the opportunity for putting his schemes into execution. He must have
been deeply impressed by the possibilities of expansive exploitation
which Egypt offered. Cleopatra, no doubt, had told him much concerning
the wonders of the land, wonders which she herself had never yet found
occasion to verify. He had heard from her, and had received visible
proof, of the wealth of the Nile Valley; and his march through the
Delta must have revealed to him the richness of the country. No man
could fail to be impressed by the spectacle of the miles upon miles
of grain fields which are to be seen in Lower Egypt; and reports had
doubtless reached him of the splendours of the upper reaches of the
Nile, where a peaceful and law-abiding population found time both to
reap three crops a year from the fertile earth, and to build huge
temples for their gods and palaces for their nobles. The yearly tax
upon corn alone in Egypt, which was paid in kind, must have amounted to
some twenty millions of bushels, the figure at which it stood in the
reign of Augustus; and this fact, if no other, must have given Cæsar
cause for much covetousness.
He had probably heard, too, of the trade with India, which was already
beginning to flourish, and which, a few years later, came to be of
the utmost importance;[37] and he had doubtless been told of the
almost fabulous lands of Ethiopia, to which Egypt was the threshold,
whence came the waters of the Nile. Egypt has always been a land of
speculation, attracting alike the interest of the financier and the
enthusiasm of the conqueror; and Cæsar’s imagination must have been
stimulated by those ambitious schemes which have fired the brains of so
many of her conquerors, just as that of the great Alexander had been
inspired three centuries before. Feeling that his work in Gaul and the
north-west was more or less completed, he may, perhaps, have considered
the expediency of carrying Roman arms into the uttermost parts of
Ethiopia; of crossing the Red Sea into Arabia; or of penetrating,
like Alexander, to India and to the marvellous kingdoms of the East.
Even so, eighteen hundred years later, Napoleon Bonaparte dreamed of
marching his army through Egypt to the lands of Hindustan; and so also
England, striving to hold her beloved India (as the prophetic Kinglake
wrote in 1844), fixed her gaze upon the Nile Valley, until, as though
by the passive force of her desire, it fell into her hands. For long
the Greeks had thought that the Nile came from the east and rose in
the hills of India; and even in the days with which we are now dealing
Egypt was regarded as the gateway of those lands. The trade-route from
Alexandria to India was yearly growing in fame. The merchants journeyed
up the Nile to the city of Koptos, and thence travelled by caravan
across the desert to the seaport of Berenice, whence they sailed with
the trade wind to Muziris, on the west coast of India, near the modern
Calicut and Mysore. It is possible that Cæsar had succumbed to the
fascination of distant conquest and exploration with which Egypt, by
reason of her geographical situation, has inspired so many minds,
and that he was allowing his thoughts to travel with the merchants
along the great routes to the East. He must always have felt that the
unconquered Parthians would cause a march across Asia to India to be
a most difficult and hazardous undertaking, and there was some doubt
whether he would be able to repeat the exploits of Alexander the Great
along that route; but here through Egypt lay a road to the Orient which
might be followed without grave risk. The merchants were wont to leave
Berenice, on the Egyptian coast, about the middle of July, when the
Dog-star rose with the Sun, reaching the west coast of India about the
middle of September;[38] and it would be strange indeed if Cæsar had
not given some consideration to the possibility of carrying his army by
that route to the lands which Alexander, of whose exploits he loved to
read, had conquered.
Abundant possibilities such as these must have filled his mind, and
may have been the partial cause of his desire to stay yet a little
while longer in this fascinating country; but there was another and a
more poignant reason which urged him to wait for a few weeks more in
Egypt. Cleopatra was about to become a mother. Seven months had passed
since those days in October when Cæsar had applied himself so eagerly
to the task of winning the love of the Queen, and of procuring her
surrender to his wishes; and now, in another few weeks, the child of
their romance would be placed in his arms. Old profligate though he
was, it seems that he saw something in the present situation different
from those in which he had found himself before. Cleopatra, by her
brilliant wit, her good spirits, her peculiar charm of manner, her
continuous courage, and her boundless optimism, had managed to retain
his love throughout these months of their close proximity; and an
appeal had been made to the more tender side of his nature which could
not be resisted. He wished to be near her in her hour of trial; and,
moreover (for in Cæsar’s actions there was always a practical as well
as a sentimental motive), it is probable that he entertained high hopes
of receiving from Cleopatra an heir to his worldly wealth and position,
who should be in due course fully legitimised. His long intercourse
with the Queen had much altered his point of view; and I think there
can be little doubt that his mind was eagerly feeling forward to new
developments and revolutionary changes in his life.
At Cleopatra’s wish he was now allowing himself to be recognised by
the Egyptians as the divine consort of the Queen, an impersonation of
the god Jupiter-Amon upon earth. Some form of marriage had taken place
between them, or, at any rate, the Egyptian people, if not the cynical
Alexandrians, had been constrained to recognise their legal union. The
approaching birth of the child had made it necessary for Cleopatra to
disclose her relationship with Cæsar, and at the same time to prove
to her subjects that she, their Queen, was not merely the mistress of
an adventurous Roman. As soon, therefore, as her brother and formal
husband Ptolemy XIV. had died, she had begun to circulate the belief
that Julius Cæsar was the great god of Egypt himself come to earth, and
that the child which was about to make its appearance was the offspring
of a divine union. Upon the walls of the temples of Egypt, notably at
Hermonthis, near Thebes, bas-reliefs were afterwards sculptured in
which Cleopatra was represented in converse with the god Amon, who
appears in human form, and in which the gods are shown assisting at
the celestial birth of the child. A mythological fiction of a similar
nature had been employed in ancient Egypt in reference to the births of
earlier sovereigns, those of Hatshepsut (B.C. 1500) and of Amenophis
III. (B.C. 1400) being two particular instances. In the known occasions
of its use, the royal parentage of the child had been open to question,
this being the reason why the story of the divine intercourse was
introduced; and thus in the case of Cleopatra the myth had become
familiar, by frequent use, to the priest-ridden minds of the Egyptians,
and was not in any way startling or original. In the later years of the
Queen’s reign events were dated as from this supernatural occurrence,
and there is preserved to us an epitaph inscribed in the “twentieth
year of (or after) the union of Cleopatra with Amon.”
Cæsar was quite willing thus to be reckoned in Egypt as a divinity.
His hero Alexander the Great in like manner had been regarded as a
deity, and had proclaimed himself the son of Amon, causing himself to
be portrayed with the ram’s horns of that god projecting from the sides
of his head. Though his belief in the gods was conspicuously absent,
Cæsar had always boasted of his divine descent, his family tracing
their genealogy to Iulus, the son of Æneas, the son of Anchises and the
goddess Venus; and there is every reason to suppose that Cleopatra had
attempted to encourage him to think of himself as being in very truth
a god upon earth. She herself ruled Egypt by divine right, and deemed
it no matter for doubt that she was the representative of the Sun-god
here below, the mediator between man and his creator. The Egyptians,
if not the Alexandrians, fell flat upon their faces when they saw her,
and hailed her as god, in the manner in which their fathers had hailed
the ancient Pharaohs. From earliest childhood she had been called a
divinity, and she was named an immortal in the temples of Egypt as
by undoubted right. Those who came into contact with her partook of
the divine affluence, and her companions were holy in the sight of
her Egyptian subjects. Cæsar, as her consort, thus became a god; and
as soon as her connection with him was made public, he assumed _ex
officio_ the nature of a divine being. We shall see presently how,
even in Rome, he came to regard himself as more than mortal, and how,
setting aside in his own favour his disbelief in the immortals, before
he died he had publicly called himself god upon earth. At the present
period of his life, however, these startling assumptions were not
clearly defined; and it is probable that he really did not know what to
think about himself. Cleopatra had fed his mind with strange thoughts,
and had so flattered his vanity, though probably without intention,
that if he could but acknowledge the existence of a better world, he
was quite prepared to believe himself in some sort of manner come from
it. She knew that she herself was supposed to be divine; she loved
Cæsar and had made him her equal; she was aware that he, too, was said
to be descended from the gods: and thus, by a tacit assumption, it
seems to me that she gradually forced upon him a sense of his divinity
which, in the succeeding years, developed into a fixed belief.
This appreciation of his divine nature, which we see growing in Cæsar’s
mind, carried with it, of course, a feeling of monarchical power, a
desire to assume the prerogatives of kingship. Cleopatra seems now
to have been naming him her consort, and in Egypt, as we have said,
he must have been recognised as her legal husband. He was already,
in a manner of speaking, King of Egypt; and the fact that he was not
officially crowned as Pharaoh must have been due entirely to his own
objection to such a proceeding. The Egyptians must now have been
perfectly willing to offer to him the throne of the Ptolemies, just
as they had accepted Archelaus, the High Priest of Komana, as consort
of Berenice IV., Cleopatra’s half-sister;[39] and in these days when
their young Queen was so soon to become a mother there must have been
a genuine and eager desire to regularise the situation by such a
marriage with Cæsar and his elevation to the throne. Nothing could be
more happy politically than the Queen’s marriage to the greatest man
in Rome, and we have already seen how there was some idea of a union
with Cnæus Pompeius in the days when that man’s father was the ruler
of the Republic. To the Egyptian mind the fact that Cæsar was already
a married man, with a wife living in Rome, was no real objection. She
had borne him no son, and therefore might be divorced in favour of a
more fruitful vine. Cleopatra herself must have been keenly desirous
to share her Egyptian throne with Cæsar, for no doubt she saw clearly
enough that, since he was already autocrat and actual Dictator of
Rome, it would not be long before they became sovereigns of the whole
Roman world. If she could persuade him, like Archelaus of Komana, to
accept the crown of the Pharaohs, there was good reason to suppose that
he would try to induce Rome to offer him the sovereignty of his own
country. The tendency towards monarchical rule in the Roman capital,
thanks largely to Pompey, was already very apparent; and both Cæsar
and Cleopatra must have realised that, if they played their game with
skill, a throne awaited them in that city at no very distant date.
Cleopatra was a keen patriot, or rather she was deeply concerned in
the advancement of her own and her dynasty’s fortunes; and it must
have been a matter of the utmost satisfaction to her to observe the
direction in which events were moving. The man whom she loved, and who
loved her, might at any moment become actual sovereign of Rome and its
dominions; and the child with which she was about to present him, if
it were a boy, would be the heir of the entire world. For years her
dynasty had feared that Rome would crush them out of existence and
absorb her kingdom into the Republic; but now there was a possibility
that Egypt, and the lands to which the Nile Valley was the gateway,
would become the equal of Rome at the head of the great amalgamation
of the nations of the earth. Egypt, it must be remembered, was still
unconquered by Rome, and was, at the time, the most wealthy and
important nation outside the Republic. All Alexandrians and Egyptians
believed themselves to be the foremost people in the world; and thus
to Cleopatra the dream that Egypt might play the leading part in an
Egypto-Roman empire was in no wise fantastic.
Her policy, then, was obvious. She must attempt to retain Cæsar’s
affection, and at the same time must nurse with care the growing
aspirations towards monarchy which were developing in his mind. She
must bind him to her so that, when the time came, she might ascend the
throne of the world by his side; and she must make apparent to him, and
keep ever present to his imagination, the fact of her own puissance and
the splendour of her royal status, so that there should be no doubt in
Cæsar’s mind that her flesh and blood, and hers alone, were fitted to
blend with his in the foundation of that single royal line which was to
rule the whole Earth.
Approaching motherhood, it would seem, had much sobered her wild
nature, and the glory of her ambitions had raised her thoughts to a
level from which she must have contemplated with disdain her early
struggles with the drowned Ptolemy, the decapitated Potheinos, the
murdered Achillas, and the outlawed Theodotos. She, Cleopatra, was
the daughter of the Sun, the sister of the Moon, and the kinswoman of
the heavenly beings; she was mated to the descendant of Venus and the
Olympian gods, and the unborn offspring of their union would be in very
truth King of Earth and Heaven.
Historians both ancient and modern are agreed that Cleopatra was a
woman of exceptional mental power. Her character, so often wayward in
expression, was as dominant as her personality was strong; and she must
have found no difficulty in making her appeal to the soaring ambitions
of the great Roman. When occasion demanded she carried herself with
dignity befitting the descendant of an ancient line of kings, and even
in her escapades the royalty of her person was at all times apparent.
The impression which she has left upon the world is that of a woman who
was always significant of the splendour of monarchy; and her influence
upon Cæsar in this regard is not to be overlooked. A man such as he
could not live for six months in close contact with a queen without
feeling to some extent the glamour of royalty. She represented monarchy
in its most absolute form, and in Egypt her word was law. The very tone
of her royal mode of life must have constituted new matter for Cæsar’s
mind to ruminate upon; and that trait in his character which led him to
abhor the thought of subordination to any living man, must have caused
him to watch the actions of an autocratic queen with frank admiration
and restless envy. Tales of the Kings of Alexandria and stories of
the ancient Pharaohs without doubt were narrated, and without doubt
took some place in Cæsar’s brain. Cleopatra’s point of view, that
of the most royal of the world’s royal houses, must, by its very
unfamiliarity, have impressed itself upon his thoughts.
Thus, little by little, under the influence of the Egyptian Queen
and in the power of his own sleepless ambitions, Cæsar began to give
serious thought to the possibilities of creating a world-empire over
which he should rule as king, founding a royal line which should sit
upon the supreme earthly throne for ages to come. Obviously it must
have occurred to him that kings must rule by right of royal blood,
and that his own blood, though noble and though said to be of divine
origin, was not such as would give his descendants unquestionable
command over the loyalty of their subjects. A man who is the descendant
of many kings has a right to royalty which the son of a conqueror,
however honourable his origin, does not possess. So thought Napoleon
when he married the Austrian princess, founding a royal house in his
country by using the royal blood of another land for the purpose.
Looking around him with this thought in view, Cæsar could not well have
chosen anybody but Cleopatra as the foundress of his line. There was
no Roman royal house extant, and therefore a Greek was the best, if not
the only, possible alternative; and the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt were
pure Macedonians, deriving their descent, by popular belief, if not in
actual fact, from the royal house of Cæsar’s hero, Alexander the Great.
He may well, then, have contemplated with enthusiasm the thought of the
future monarchs of Rome sitting by inherited right upon the ancient
throne of Macedonian Egypt; and Cleopatra on her part was no doubt
inspired by the idea of future Pharaohs, blood of her blood and bone of
her bone, ruling Rome by hereditary authority.
Cleopatra of necessity had to find a husband. Already she had postponed
her marriage beyond the age at which such an event should take place;
and any union with her co-regnant brother could but be of a formal
nature. Cæsar now had come into her life, capturing her youthful
affections and causing himself to be the parent of her child; and it is
but natural to suppose that she would endeavour by every means in her
power to make him her lifelong consort, thus adding to her own royal
stock the worthiest blood of Rome. There can be no doubt that whether
or not she might succeed in making Cæsar himself Pharaoh of Egypt, she
intended to hand on the Egyptian throne to her child and his, adding
to the name of Ptolemy that of the family of the Cæsars. Thus it may
be said, though my assumption at first seems startling, that the Roman
Empire to a large extent owes its existence to the Egyptian Queen, for
the monarchy was in many respects the child of the union of Cæsar and
Cleopatra.
These as yet undefined ambitions and hopes found a very real and
material expression in Cæsar’s eagerness to know whether the expected
babe would be a girl, or a son and heir; and it seems likely that his
determination to remain in Egypt was largely due to his unwillingness
to depart before that question was answered. This, and the paternal
responsibility which perhaps for the first time in his sordid life he
had ever felt, led him to postpone his return to Rome. He seems to have
entertained feelings of the greatest tenderness towards the Queen,
whom he was beginning to regard as his wife; and he was, no doubt,
anxious to be near her during the ordeal through which the young and
delicately-built girl had, for the first time, to pass. It has been
the custom for historians to attribute Cæsar’s prolonged residence in
Egypt, after the termination of the war and the settlement of Egyptian
affairs, to the sensuous allurements of Cleopatra, who is supposed
to have held him captive by the arts of love and by the voluptuous
attractions of her person; but here a natural fact of life has been
overlooked. A woman who is about to render to mankind the great service
of her sex, has neither the ability nor the desire to arouse the
feverish emotions of her lover. Her condition calls forth from him the
more gentle aspects of his affection. His responsibility is expressed
in consideration, in interest, in sympathy, and in a kind of gratitude;
but it is palpably absurd to suppose that a mere passion, such as that
by which Cæsar is thought to have been animated, could at this time
have influenced his actions. If love of any kind held him in Egypt,
it was the love of a husband for his wife, the devotion of a man who
was about to become a parent to the woman who would presently pay toll
to Nature in response to his incitement. Actually, as we have seen,
there was something more than love to keep him in Egypt; there was
ambition, headlong aspiration, the intoxication of a conqueror turning
his mind to new conquests, and the supreme interest of a would-be king
constructing a throne which should be occupied not only by himself but
by the descendants of his own flesh and blood for all time.[40]
[Illustration:
_British Museum._] [_Photograph by Macbeth._
CLEOPATRA.]
While waiting for the desired event Cæsar could not remain inactive
in the Palace at Alexandria. He desired to ascertain for himself the
resources of the land which was to be considered as his wife’s dowry;
and he therefore determined to conduct a peaceful expedition up the
Nile with this subject in view. The royal _dahabiyeh_ or house-boat
was therefore made ready for himself and Cleopatra, whose condition
might be expected to benefit by the idle and yet interesting life upon
the river; and orders were given both to his own legionaries and to a
considerable number of Cleopatra’s troops to prepare themselves for
embarkation upon a fleet of four hundred Nile vessels. The number of
ships suggests that there were several thousand soldiers employed in
the expedition; and it appears to have been Cæsar’s intention to
penetrate far into the Sudan.[41] The royal vessel, or _thalamegos_,
as it was called by the Greeks, was of immense size, and was propelled
by many banks of oars.[42] It contained colonnaded courts, banqueting
saloons, sitting-rooms, bedrooms, shrines dedicated to Venus and to
Dionysos, and a grotto or “winter garden.” The wood employed was cedar
and cypress, and the decorations were executed in paint and gold-leaf.
The furniture was Greek, with the exception of that in one dining-hall,
which was decorated in the Egyptian style.[43] The rest of the fleet
consisted, no doubt, of galleys and ordinary native transports and
store-ships.
From the city of Alexandria the fleet passed into the nearest branch
of the Nile, and so travelled southwards to Memphis, where Cleopatra
perhaps obtained her first sight of the great Pyramids and the Sphinx.
Thebes, the ancient capital, at that period much fallen into decay,
was probably reached in about three weeks’ time; and Cæsar must have
been duly impressed by the splendid temples and monuments upon both
banks of the Nile. Possibly it was at his suggestion that Cleopatra
caused the great obelisk of one of her distant predecessors to be
moved from the temple of Luxor at Thebes and to be transported down
to Alexandria, where it was erected not far from the Forum,[44] an
inscription recording its re-erection being engraved at the base. The
journey was continued probably as far as Aswan and the First Cataract,
which may have been reached some four or five weeks after the departure
from Alexandria; and it would seem that Cæsar here turned his face to
the north once more. Suetonius states that he was anxious to proceed
farther up the Nile, but that his troops were restive and inclined
to be mutinous, a fact which is not surprising, since the labour of
dragging the vessels up the cataract would have been immense, and
the hot south winds which often blow in the spring would have added
considerably to the difficulties. The temperature at this time of year
may rise suddenly from the pleasant degree of an Egyptian winter to
that of the height of intolerable summer, and so remain for four or
five days.
Be this as it may, Cæsar turned about, having satisfied himself as
to the wealth and fertility of the country, and, no doubt, having
obtained as much information as possible from the natives in regard to
the trade-routes which led from the Nile to Berenice and India, or to
Meroe, Napata, and the Kingdom of Ethiopia. The expedition arrived at
Alexandria probably some nine or ten weeks after its departure from
that city--that is to say, at the end of the month of June; and it
would seem that in the first week of July Cleopatra’s confinement took
place.
The child proved to be a boy; and the delighted father thus found
himself the parent of a son and heir who was at once accepted by the
Egyptians as the legitimate child of the union of their Queen with the
god Amon, who had appeared in the form of Cæsar. He was named Cæsar,
or more familiarly Cæsarion, a Greek diminutive of the same word; but
officially, of course, he was known also as Ptolemy, and ultimately
was the sixteenth and last of that name. A bilingual inscription now
preserved at Turin refers to him as “Ptolemy, who is also called
Cæsar,” this being often seen in Egyptian inscriptions in the words
_Ptolemys zed nef Kysares_, “Ptolemy called Cæsar.”
The Dictator waited no longer in Egypt. For the last few months he had
put Roman politics from his thoughts and had not even troubled to write
any despatches to the home Government.[45] But now he had to create
the world-monarchy of which his winter with Cleopatra had led him to
dream; and first there were campaigns to be fought on the borders of
the Mediterranean; there was Parthia to be subdued; and finally India
was to be invaded and conquered. Then, when all the known world had
become dependent upon him, and only Egypt and her tributaries were
still outside Roman dominion, he would, by one bold stroke, announce
his marriage to the Queen of that country, incorporate her lands and
her vast wealth with those of Rome, and declare himself sole monarch of
the earth. It was a splendid ambition, worthy of a great man; and, as
we shall presently see, there can be very little question that these
glorious dreams would have been converted into actual realities had
not his enemies murdered him on the eve of their realisation. Modern
historians are unanimous in declaring that Cæsar had wasted his time
in Egypt, and had devoted to a love intrigue the weeks and months
which ought to have been spent in regulating the affairs of the world.
Actually, however, these nine months, far from being wasted, were
spent in the very creation of the Roman Empire. True, Cæsar’s schemes
were frustrated by the knives of his assassins; but, as will be seen in
the sequel, his plans were carried on by Cleopatra with the assistance
of Antony, and finally were put into execution by Octavian.
As Cæsar sailed out of the Great Harbour of Alexandria he must have
turned his keen grey eyes with peculiar interest upon the splendid
buildings of the Palace, which towered in front of the city, upon the
Lochias Promontory; and that quiet, whimsical expression must have
played around his close-shut lips as he thought of the change that
had been wrought in his mental attitude by the months spent amidst
its royal luxuries. Enthusiasm for the work which lay before him must
have burnt like a fire within him; but stamped upon his brain there
must have been the picture of a darkened room in which the wild,
happy-go-lucky, little Queen of Egypt, now so subdued and so gentle,
lay clasping to her breast the new-born Cæsar, the sole heir to the
kingdom of the whole world.
CHAPTER VIII.
CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR IN ROME.
Cæsar’s movements during the year after his departure from Egypt do
not, for the purpose of this narrative, require to be recorded in
detail. From Alexandria, which he may have left at about the middle
of the first week in July, he sailed in a fast-going galley across
the 500 miles of open sea to Antioch, arriving at that city a few
days before the middle of that month.[46] There he spent a day or two
in regulating the affairs of the country, and presently sailed on to
Ephesus, some 600 miles from Antioch, which he probably reached at
the end of the third week of July. At Antioch he heard that one of
his generals, Domitius Calvinus, had been defeated by Pharnakes, the
son of Mithridates the Great, and had been driven out of Pontus, and
it seems that he at once sent three legions to the aid of the beaten
troops with orders to await in north-western Galatia or Cappadocia for
his coming. After a day or two at Ephesus, Cæsar travelled with extreme
rapidity to the rendezvous, taking with him only a thousand cavalry;
and arriving at Zela, 500 miles from Ephesus, on or before August
2nd, at once defeated the rebels. It had been his custom in Gaul to
travel by himself at the rate of a hundred miles a day, and even with
a heavily laden army he covered over forty miles a day, as for example
in his march from Rome to Spain, which he accomplished in twenty-seven
days, and he may thus have joined his main army and commenced his
preparations for the battle of Zela as early as the last days of July.
The crushing defeat which he inflicted on the enemy so shortly after
taking over the command was thus a feat of which he might justly be
proud, and it so tickled his vanity that in writing to a friend of his
in Rome, named Amantius, he described the campaign in the three famous
words, _Veni, vidi, vici_, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” which so
clearly indicate that he was beginning to regard himself as a sort of
swift-footed, irresistible demigod.
Thence he sailed at last for Italy, and reached Rome at the end of
September, almost exactly a year after his arrival in Egypt. He
remained in Rome not more than two and a half months, and about the
middle of December he set out for North Africa, where Cato, Scipio,
and other fugitive friends of Pompey had established a provisional
government with the assistance of Juba, King of Numidia, and were
gathering their forces. Arriving at Hadrumetum on December 28th, he
at once began the war, which soon ended in the entire defeat and
extermination of the enemy at Thapsus on April 6th. Of the famous
Pompeian leaders, Faustus Sulla, Lucius Africanus, and Lucius Julius
Cæsar were put to death; and Lucius Manlius Torquatus, Marcus Petreius,
Scipio, and Cato committed suicide; while, according to Plutarch, some
fifty thousand men were slain in the rout. Arriving once more in Rome
on July 25th, B.C. 46, Cæsar at once began to prepare for his Triumph
which was to take place in the following month; and it would seem that
he had already sent messengers to Cleopatra, who had spent a quiet year
of maternal interests in Alexandria, to tell her to come with their
baby to Rome.
According to Dion, the Queen arrived shortly _after_ the Triumph,
but several modern writers[47] are of opinion that she reached the
capital in time for that event. I am disposed to think that she made
the journey to Italy in company with the Egyptian prisoners who were
to be displayed in the procession, Princess Arsinoe, the eunuch
Ganymedes,[48] and others, whom Cæsar probably sent for in the late
spring of this year soon after the battle of Thapsus. Cleopatra
could not have been averse to witnessing the Triumph, for she must
have regarded the late warfare in Alexandria not so much as a Roman
campaign against the Egyptians as an Egypto-Roman suppression of an
Alexandrian insurrection. The serious part of the campaign could be
interpreted as having been waged by Cæsar on behalf of herself and
her brother, Ptolemy XIV., against the rebels Achillas and Ganymedes,
and later against this same Ptolemy who had gone over to the enemy;
and the victory might thus be celebrated both by her and by her Roman
champion. It would therefore be fitting that she should be a spectator
of the degradation of Arsinoe and Ganymedes; and her presence in Rome
at this time would obviously be desirable to her as indicating that she
and her country had suffered no defeat. Cæsar, on his part, must have
desired her presence that she might witness the dramatic demonstration
of his power and popularity. He had just been made Dictator for the
third time, and this appointment no doubt led him to feel the security
of his position and the imminence of that rise to monarchical power
in which Cleopatra and their son were to play so essential a part.
He was beginning to regard himself as above criticism; and his two
great victories, in Pontus and Numidia, following upon his nine months
of regal life in Egypt, had somewhat turned his head, so that he no
longer considered the advisability of delaying his future consort’s
introduction to the people of Rome. He had yet much to accomplish
before he could ascend with her the throne of the world, but there can
be no question whatsoever that he now desired Cleopatra to begin to
make herself known in the capital; and, this being so, it seems to me
to be highly probable that he would wish her to refute, by her presence
as a witness of his Triumph, any suggestion that she herself was to be
included in that conquered Egypt[49] about which he was so continuously
boasting.
The Queen of Egypt’s arrival in Rome must have caused something of a
sensation. Cartloads of baggage, and numerous agitated eunuchs and
slaves doubtless heralded her approach and followed in her train. Her
little brother, Ptolemy XV., now eleven or twelve years of age, whom
she had probably feared to leave alone in Alexandria lest he should
follow the family tradition and declare himself sole monarch, had been
forced to accompany her, and now added considerably to the commotion of
her arrival. The one-year-old heir of the Cæsars and of the Ptolemies,
surrounded by guards and fussing nurses, must, however, have been the
cynosure of all eyes; for every Roman guessed its parentage, knowing
as they did the peculiarities of their Dictator. Cleopatra and her
suite were accommodated in Cæsar’s _transtiberini horti_, where a
charming house stood amidst beautiful gardens on the right bank of
the Tiber, near the site of the modern Villa Panfili; and it is to be
presumed that his legal wife Calpurnia was left as mistress of another
establishment within the city.
Cæsar’s attitude towards Cleopatra at this time is not easily defined.
It is not to be presumed that he was still very deeply in love with
her; for natures such as his are totally incapable of continued
devotion. During his residence in North Africa in the winter or early
spring, he had been much attracted by Eunoe, the wife of Bogud, King
of Mauretania, and had consoled himself for the temporary loss of
Cleopatra by making her his mistress. Yet the Queen of Egypt still
exercised a very considerable influence over him; and when she came to
Rome it may be supposed that in his transpontine villa they resumed
with some satisfaction the intimate life which they had enjoyed in the
Alexandrian Palace. The first infatuation was over, however, and both
Cæsar and Cleopatra must have felt that the basis of their relationship
was now a business agreement designed for their mutual benefit. In all
but name they were married, and it was the fixed intention of both that
their marriage should presently be recognised in Rome as it already
had been in Egypt. Cæsar, I suppose, took keen pleasure in the company
of the witty, vivacious, and regal girl; and he was extremely happy to
see her lodged in his villa, whither he could repair at any time of
the day or night to enjoy her brilliant and refreshing society. Their
baby son, too, was a source of interest and enjoyment to him. He was
now fourteen months old, and his likeness to Cæsar, so pronounced in
after years, must already have been apparent. Suetonius states that the
boy came to resemble his father very closely, and both in looks and in
manners, notably in his walk, showed very clearly his origin. These
resemblances, already able to be observed, must have delighted Cæsar,
who took such careful pride in his own appearance and personality;
and they must have formed a bond between himself and Cleopatra as
nearly permanent as anything could be in his progressive and impatient
nature. The Queen, on her part, probably still took extreme pleasure
in the companionship of the great Dictator, who represented an ideal
both of manhood and of social charm. She must have loved the fertility
of his mind, the autocratic power of his will, and the energy of his
personality; and though premature age and ill-health were beginning
to diminish his aptitude for the _rôle_ of ardent swain, she found in
him, no doubt, a lovable friend and husband, and one with whom the
intimacies of daily comradeship were a cause of genuine happiness. They
were as well suited to one another as two ambitious characters could
be; and, moreover, they were irrevocably bound to one another by the
memory of past passion not yet altogether in abeyance, by the sympathy
of mutual understanding, by the identity of their worldly interests,
and by the responsibilities of correlative parentage.
The arrival of Cleopatra in Rome of course caused a scandal, to which
Cæsar showed his usual nonchalant indifference. People were sorry for
the Dictator’s legal wife Calpurnia, who, since her marriage in B.C.
59, had been left so much alone by her husband; and they were shocked
by the open manner in which the members of the Cæsarian party paid
court to the Queen. I find no evidence to justify the modern belief[50]
that Roman society was at the time annoyed at the introduction of an
_eastern_ lady into its midst;[51] for everybody must have known that
Cleopatra had not one drop of Egyptian blood in her veins, and must
have realised that she was a pure Macedonian Greek, ruling over a city
which was the centre of Greek culture and civilisation. But at the same
time there is evidence to show that the Romans did not like her. Cicero
wrote that he detested her;[52] and Dion says that the people pitied
Princess Arsinoe, her sister, whose degradation was a consequence of
Cleopatra’s success with Cæsar. On the whole, however, her advent did
not cause as much stir as might have been expected, for she seems to
have acted with tactful moderation in the capital, and to have avoided
all ostentation.
The Triumph which Cæsar celebrated in August for the amusement of
Rome and for his own enjoyment was fourfold in character, and lasted
for four days. Upon the first day Cæsar passed through the streets of
Rome in the _rôle_ of conqueror of Gaul, and when darkness had fallen
ascended the Capitol by torchlight, forty elephants carrying numerous
torch-bearers to right and left of his chariot. The unfortunate
Vercingetorix, who had been held prisoner for six miserable years,
was executed at the conclusion of this impressive parade--an act
of cold-blooded cruelty to an honourable foe (who had voluntarily
surrendered to Cæsar to save his countrymen from further punishment)
which, at the time, may have been excused on the ground that such
executions were customary at the end of a Triumph. Upon the second day
the conquest of the Dictator’s Egyptian enemies was celebrated, and
the Princess Arsinoe was led through the streets in chains, together,
it would seem, with Ganymedes, the latter perhaps being executed at
the close of the performance, and the former being spared as a sort
of compliment to Cleopatra’s royal house. In this procession images
of Achillas and Potheinos were carried along, and were greeted by the
populace with pleasant jeers; while a statue representing the famous
old Nilus, and a model of Pharos, the wonder of the world, reminded
the spectators of the importance of the country now under Roman
protection. African animals strange to Rome, such as the giraffe,
were led along in the procession, and other wonders from Egypt and
Ethiopia were displayed for the delight of the populace. On the third
day the conquest of Pontus was demonstrated, and a large tablet with
the arrogant words _Veni, Vidi, Vici_ painted upon it was carried
before the conqueror. Finally, on the fourth day the victories in North
Africa were celebrated. In this last procession Cæsar caused some
offence by exhibiting captured Roman arms; for the campaign had been
fought against Romans of the Pompeian party, a fact which at first he
had attempted to disguise by stating that the Triumph was celebrated
over King Juba of Numidia, who had sided with the enemy. Still graver
offence was caused, however, when it was seen that vulgar caricatures
of Cato and other of Cæsar’s personal enemies were exhibited in the
procession; and the populace must have questioned whether such a jest
at the expense of honourable Romans whose bodies were hardly yet cold
in their graves was in perfect taste. It would seem indeed that Cæsar’s
judgment in such matters had become somewhat warped during this last
year of military and administrative success, and that he had begun
to despise those who were opposed to him as though they could be but
misguided fools. In this attitude one sees, perhaps, something of
that same quality which led him blandly to accept in Egypt a sort of
divinity as by personal right, and which persuaded him to aim always
towards absolutism; for a man is in no wise normal who considers
himself a being meet for worship and his enemy an object fit only for
derision.
There seems, in fact, little doubt that Cæsar was not now in a normal
condition of mind. For some years he had been subject to epileptic
seizures, and now the distressing malady was growing more pronounced
and the seizures were of more frequent occurrence. At the battle of
Thapsus he is said to have been taken ill in this manner; and on
other occasions he was attacked while in discharge of his duties.
Such a physical condition may be accountable for much of his growing
eccentricity, and, particularly, one may attribute to it his increasing
faith in his semi-divine powers. Lombroso goes so far as to say that
epilepsy is almost an essential factor in the personality of one
who believes himself to be a Son of God or Messenger of the Deity.
Akhnaton, the great religious reformer of Ancient Egypt, suffered from
epilepsy; the Prophet Mohammed, to put it bluntly, had fits; and many
other religious reformers suffered in like manner. One cannot tell
what hallucinations and strange manifestations were experienced by
Cæsar under the influence of this malady; but one may be sure that to
Cleopatra they were clear indications of his close relationship to the
gods, and that in explanation she did not fail to remind him both of
his divine descent and her own inherited divinity, in which, as her
consort, he participated.
Towards the end of September Cæsar caused a sensation in Rome by
an act which shows clearly enough his attitude in this regard. He
consecrated a magnificent temple in honour of Venus Genetrix, his
divine ancestress; and there, in the splendour of its marble sanctuary,
he placed a statue of Cleopatra, which had been executed during
the previous weeks by the famous Roman sculptor, Archesilaus.[53]
The significance of this act has been overlooked by modern
historians. In placing in this shrine of Venus, at the time of its
inauguration, a figure of the Queen of Egypt, who in her own country
was the representative of Isis-Aphrodite upon earth,[54] Cæsar was
demonstrating the divinity of Cleopatra, and was telling the people,
as it were in everlasting phrases of stone, that the royal girl who
now honoured his villa on the banks of the Tiber was no less than a
manifestation of Venus herself. It will presently be seen how, in
after years, Cleopatra went to meet Antony decked in the character of
Venus, and how she was then and on other occasions hailed by the crowd
as the goddess come down to earth; and we shall see how her mausoleum
actually formed part of the temple of that goddess. Both at this date
and in later times she was identified indiscriminately with Isis,
with Venus-Hathor, and with Venus-Aphrodite; and even after her death
the tradition so far survived that one of her famous pearl earrings
was cut into two parts, and, in this form, ultimately ornamented the
ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome. Coins dating from
this period have been found upon which Cleopatra is represented as
Aphrodite, carrying in her arms the baby Cæsarion, who is supposed to
be Eros. Cæsar was always boasting about the connection of his house
with this goddess; and now the placing of this statue of Cleopatra
in his new temple is, I think, to be interpreted as signifying that
he wished the Roman people to regard the Queen as a “young goddess,”
which was the title given to her by the Greeks and Egyptians in her own
country.
It is not altogether certain that Cæsar himself was actually beginning
to regard Cleopatra in this light, though the increasing frequency of
his epileptic attacks, and his consequent hallucinations, may have
now made such an attitude possible even in the case of so hardened a
sceptic as was the Dictator in former years. It seems more reasonable
to suppose that he was at this time attempting to appeal to the
imagination of the people in anticipation of the great _coup_ which he
was about to execute; and that, with this object in view, he allowed
himself to be carried along by a kind of enthusiastic self-deception.
He applied no serious analysis to his opinions in this regard; but,
by means of a thoughtless vanity, he seems to have given rein to an
undefined conviction, very suitable to his great purpose, that he
himself was more than human, and that Cleopatra was not altogether
a woman of mortal flesh and blood. Even so Alexander the Great had
partially deluded himself when, on the one hand, he named himself
the son of Jupiter-Ammon, and, on the other, was careful, once when
wounded, to point out that ordinary mortal blood flowed from his veins.
And so, too, Napoleon Bonaparte, during his invasion of Egypt, declared
that he was the Prophet of God, and, in after years, was willing to
describe to a friend, as it were in jest, his vision of himself as the
founder of a new Faith.
The inauguration of Cæsar’s new temple, which was, one may say, the
shrine of Cleopatra, was accompanied by amazing festivities, and the
excitable population of this great city seemed, so to speak, to go
mad with enthusiasm. Great gladiatorial shows were organised, and a
miniature sea-fight upon an artificial lake was enacted for the public
entertainment. The majority of the mob was ready enough to accept
without comment the exalted position of the statue of Cleopatra. At
this time in Rome they were very partial to new and foreign deities,
celestial or in the flesh; and actually the worship of the Egyptian
goddess Isis, with whom Cleopatra, as Venus, was so closely connected,
had taken firm hold of their imagination. For the last few years the
religion of Isis had been extremely popular with the lower classes
in Rome; and when, in B.C. 58, a law which had been made forbidding
foreign temples to be located within a certain area of the city,
necessitated the destruction of a temple of Isis, not one man could
be found who would touch the sacred building, and at last the Consul,
Lucius Paullus, was obliged to tuck up his toga and set to work upon
the demolition of the edifice with his own hands. Thus, this inaugural
ceremony, so lavishly organised by Cæsar, was a marked success; and
in spite of the indignation of Cicero, the statue of Cleopatra took
its permanent place, with popular consent, in the sanctuary of Venus.
No expense was spared on this or on any other occasion to please the
people; and at one time twenty-two thousand persons partook of a
sumptuous meal at Cæsar’s expense. Such a courting of the people was,
indeed, necessary at this time; for although the Dictator was at the
moment practically omnipotent, and though there was talk of securing
him in his office for a term of ten years, his party had not that
solidity which was to be desired of it. Antony, the right-hand man of
the Cæsarians, was, at the time, in some disgrace owing to a quarrel
with his master; and there were rumours that he wished to revenge
himself by assassinating Cæsar. It was already becoming clear that the
Pompeian party, in spite of Pharsalia and Thapsus, was not yet dead,
and still waited to receive its death-blow. Some of the Dictator’s
actions had given considerable offence, and there were certain people
in Rome who made use of every opportunity to denounce him, and to offer
their praise to the memory of his enemy Cato, whose tragic death after
the battle of Thapsus, and the vilification of whose memory in the
recent Triumph, had caused such a painful impression. Cicero wrote an
encomium upon this unfortunate man, to which Cæsar, in self-defence,
replied by publishing his Anti-Cato, which was marked by a tone of
bitter and even venomous animosity. All manner of unpleasant remarks
were being made in better-class circles in regard to Cleopatra; and
when the Dictator publicly admitted the parentage of their child, and
authorised him to bear the name of Cæsar, it began to be whispered that
his legal marriage to the Queen was imminent.
The mixed population of Rome delighted in political strife, and
though Cæsar’s position seemed unassailable, there were always large
numbers of persons ready to make sporadic attacks upon it. There was
at this time constant rioting in the Forum, and an almost continuous
restlessness was to be observed in the streets and public places. In
the theatres topical allusions were received with frantic applause;[55]
and even in the Senate disturbances were not infrequent. The people
had always to be humoured, and Cæsar was obliged at all times to play
to the gallery. Fortunately for him he possessed in the highest degree
the art of self-advertisement;[56] and his charm of manner, together
with his striking and handsome appearance, made the desired appeal to
the popular fancy. His relationship to Cleopatra stood, on the whole,
in his favour amongst the lower classes, who had hailed him with coarse
delight as the terror of the women of Gaul; and the fact that she was
a foreigner mattered not in the least to the heterogeneous population
of Rome. They themselves were largely a composition of the nations of
the earth; and that Cæsar’s mistress, and probable future wife, was a
Greek, was to them in no wise a matter for comment. In any theatre in
Rome at that date one might sit amidst an audience of foreigners to
hear a drama given (at Cæsar’s expense, by the way) in language such as
Greek, Phœnician, Hebrew, Syrian, or Spanish. To them Cleopatra must
have appeared as a wonderful woman, closely related to the gods, come
from a famous city across the waters to enjoy the society of their own
half-godlike Dictator; and they were quite prepared to accept her as a
pleasant and romantic adjunct to the political situation.
Among the many reforms which Cæsar now introduced there was one which
was the direct outcome of his visit to Egypt. For some time the
irregularities of the calendar had been causing much inconvenience,
and the Dictator, very probably at the Queen of Egypt’s suggestion,
now decided to invite some of Cleopatra’s court astronomers to Rome in
order that they might establish a new system based upon the Egyptian
calendar of Eudoxus. Sosigenes was at that time the most celebrated
astronomer in Alexandria, and it was to him, perhaps at Cleopatra’s
advice, that Cæsar now turned. After very careful study it was decided
that the present year, B.C. 46, should be extended to fifteen months,
or 445 days, in order that the nominal date might be brought round to
correspond with the actual season. The so-called Julian calendar, which
was thus established, is that upon which our present system is based;
and it is not without interest to recollect that but for Cleopatra some
entirely different set of months would now be used throughout the world.
Cæsar’s mind at this time was full of his plans for the conquest of
the East. In B.C. 65 Pompey had brought to Rome many details regarding
the overland route to the Orient. This route started from the Port
of Phasis on the Black Sea, ascended the river of that name to its
source in Iberia, passed over to the valley of the river Cyrus (Kur),
and so came to the coast of the Caspian Sea. Crossing the water the
route thence led along the river Oxus, which at that time flowed into
the Caspian, to its source, and thus through Cashmir into India.
There must then have been some talk of carrying the eagles along this
highway to the Orient; and while Cæsar was in Egypt it seems probable,
as we have seen, that he had studied the question of leading Roman
arms thither by the great Egyptian trade route. Though this latter
road to the wonderful Orient, however, must have seemed to him, after
consideration, to be very suitable as a channel for the despatch of
reinforcements, he appears to have favoured the land route across Asia
for his original invasion. This approach to the East was blocked by
the Parthians, and Cæsar now announced his intention of conducting a
campaign against these people. There is no evidence to show that he
desired to follow Alexander’s steps beyond Parthia into India, but I
am of opinion that such was his intention. In view of the facts that
the exploits of Alexander the Great had been studied by him, that he
publicly declared his wish to rival them, that he must have heard
from Pompey of the overland route to India with which the Romans had
become acquainted during the war against Mithridates, that his love
of distant conquest and exploration was inordinate, that he had spent
some months in studying conditions in Egypt--a country which was in
those days full of talk of India and of the new trade with the Orient,
that after leaving Egypt he began at once to prepare for a campaign
against the one nation which obstructed the overland route to the
East, that no other part of the known world, save poverty-stricken
Germania, remained to be brought by conquest under Roman sway, that
India offered possibilities of untold wealth, and that Cleopatra
herself ultimately made an attempt to reach those far countries,--the
inference seems to me to be clear that Cæsar’s designs upon Parthia
were only preliminary to a contemplated invasion of the East. The
riches of those distant lands were already the talk of the age, and
within the lifetime of young men of this period streams of Indian
merchandise, comprising diamonds, precious stones, silks, spices, and
scents, began to pour into Rome and were sold each year, according
to the somewhat exaggerated account of Pliny, for some forty million
pounds sterling.[57] Could Cæsar, the world’s greatest spendthrift, the
world’s most eager plunderer, have resisted the temptation of making a
bid for the loot which lay behind Parthia? Does the fact that he said
nothing of such an intention preclude the possibility that thoughts
of this kind now filled his mind, and formed a topic of conversation
between him and the adventurous Cleopatra, the Ruler of the gateway of
the Orient, who herself sent Cæsar’s son to India, as we shall see in
due course? Napoleon, when he invaded Egypt in 1798, said very little
about his contemplated attack upon India; but it was none the less
dominant in his mind for that. Egypt and Parthia in conjunction formed
the basis of any attempt to capture the Orient: Egypt with its route
across the seas, and Parthia with its highroad overland. Are we really
to suppose that Cæsar did waste his time in Egypt, or was he then
studying the same problem which now directed his attention to Parthia?
By means of his partnership with Cleopatra he had secured one of the
routes to India; and the merchants of Alexandria, if not his own great
imagination, must have made clear to him the value of his possession
in that regard; for ever since the discovery of the over-sea route to
the East that value has been recognised. The Venetian Sanuto in later
years told his compatriots of the effect on India which would follow
from the conquest of the Nile Valley; the Comte Daru said that the
possession of Egypt meant the opening up of India; Leibnitz told Louis
XIV. of France that an invasion of Egypt would result in the capture
of the Indian highroad; the Duc de Choiseul made a similar declaration
to Louis XV.; Napoleon stated in his ‘Memoirs’ that his object in
attacking Egypt was to lead an army of 60,000 men to India; and at the
present day England holds the Nile Valley as being the gateway of her
distant possessions. On the other side of the picture we see at the
present time the attempts of Russia to establish her power in Northern
Persia and Afghanistan, where once the Parthians of old held sway,
in order to be ready for that day when English power in India shall
decline. Was Cæsar, then, straining every nerve only for the possession
of the two gateways of the Orient, or did his gaze penetrate through
those gateways to the vast wealth of the kingdoms beyond? I am disposed
to see him walking with Cleopatra in the gardens of the villa by the
Tiber, just as Napoleon paced the parks of Passeriano, “frequently
betraying by his exclamations the gigantic thoughts of his unlimited
ambition,” as Lacroix tells us of the French conqueror.
Such dreams, however, were rudely interrupted by the news that the
Pompeian party had gathered its forces in Spain; and Cæsar was obliged
to turn his attention to that part of the world. In the winter of
B.C. 46, therefore, he set out for the south-west, impatient at the
delay which the new campaign necessitated in his great schemes. He was
in no mood to brook any opposition in Rome, and before leaving the
capital he arranged that he should be made Consul without a colleague
for the ensuing year B.C. 45, as well as Dictator, thus giving himself
absolutely autocratic power. On his way to Spain he sent a despatch
to Rome, appointed eight _praefecti urbi_ with full powers to act in
his name, thus establishing a form of cabinet government which should
entirely over-ride the wishes of the Senate and of the people; and in
this manner he secured the political situation to his own advantage.
Naturally there was a very great outcry against this high-handed
action; but Cæsar was far too deeply occupied by his vast schemes, and
far too annoyed by this Spanish interruption of his course towards the
great goal of his ambitions, to pay much attention to the outraged
feelings of his political opponents.
The enemy in Spain were led by the two sons of the great Pompey,
but at the battle of Munda, fought on March 17, B.C. 45, they were
entirely defeated with a loss of some thirty thousand men. The elder
of the two leaders, Cnæus Pompeius, who was said to have once been a
suitor for Cleopatra’s heart, was killed shortly after the battle, but
the younger, Sextus, escaped. Cæsar then returned to Rome, being met
outside the capital by Antony, with whom he was reconciled; and in the
early summer he celebrated his Triumph. In this he offended a number
of persons, owing to the fact that his victory had been won over his
fellow-countrymen, whose defeat, therefore, ought not to have been
the cause of more than a silent satisfaction. After Pharsalia Cæsar
had celebrated no triumph, since Romans had there fought Romans; and,
indeed, as Plutarch says, “he had seemed rather to be ashamed of the
action than to expect honour from it.” But now he had come to feel
that he himself was Rome, and that his enemies were not simply opposed
to his party but were in arms against the State.
Knowing now that the Pompeians were at last crushed, Cæsar decided to
attempt to appease any ill-feeling directed against himself by the
friends of the fallen party; and for this purpose he caused the statues
of Pompey the Great, which had been removed from their pedestals, to
be replaced; and furthermore, he pardoned, and even gave office to,
several leaders of the Pompeian party, notably to Brutus and Cassius,
who afterwards were ranked amongst his murderers. He then settled
down in Rome to prepare for his campaign in the East, and, in the
meantime, to put into execution the many administrative reforms which
were maturing in his restless brain. It appears that he lived for the
most part of this time in the house of which his wife Calpurnia was
mistress; but there can be little doubt that he was a constant visitor
at his transpontine villa, and that he spent all his spare hours there
in the society of Cleopatra, who remained in Rome until his death.
CHAPTER IX.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EGYPTO-ROMAN MONARCHY.
The people of Rome now began to heap honours upon Cæsar, and the
government which he had established did not fail to justify its
existence by voting him to a position of irrevocable power. He was made
Consul for ten years, and there was talk of decreeing him Dictator
for life. The Senate became simply an instrument for the execution
of his commands; and so little did the members concern themselves
with the framing of new laws at home, or with the details of foreign
administration, that Cicero is able to complain that in his official
capacity he had received the thanks of Oriental potentates whose names
he had never seen before, for their elevation to thrones of kingdoms
of which he had never heard. Cæsar’s interests were world-wide, and
the Government in Rome carried out his wishes in the manner in which
an ignorant Board of Directors of a company with foreign interests
follows the advice of its travelling manager. He had lived for such
long periods in foreign countries, his campaigns had carried him over
so much of the known world’s surface, that Rome appeared to him to be
nothing more than the headquarters of his administration, and not a
very convenient centre at that. His intimacy with Cleopatra, moreover,
had widened his outlook, and had very materially assisted him to become
an arbiter of universal interests. Distant cities, such as Alexandria,
were no longer to him the capitals of foreign lands, but were the seats
of local governments within his own dominions; and the throne towards
which he was climbing was set at an elevation from which the nations of
the whole earth could be observed.
In accepting as his own business the concerns of so many lands, he
was assuming responsibilities the weight of which no man could bear;
yet his dislike of receiving advice, and his uncontrolled vanity, led
him to resent all interference, nor would he admit that the strain
was too great for his weakened physique. Intimate friends of the
Dictator, such as Balbus and Oppius, observed that he was daily growing
more irritable, more self-opinionated; and the least suggestion of a
decentralisation of his powers caused him increasing annoyance. He
wished always to hold the threads of the entire world’s concerns in his
own hands. Now he was discussing the future of North African Carthage
and of Grecian Corinth, to which places he desired to send out Roman
colonists; now he was regulating the affairs of Syria and Asia Minor;
and now he was absorbed in the agrarian problems of Italy. There were
times when the weight of universal affairs pressed so heavily upon him
that he would exclaim that he had lived long enough; and in such moods,
when his friends warned him of the possibility of his assassination, he
would reply that death was not such a terrible matter, nor a disaster
which could come to him more than once. The frequency of his epileptic
seizures was a cause of constant distress to him, and his gaunt,
almost haggard, appearance must have indicated to his friends that the
strain was becoming unbearable. Yet ever his ambitions held him to his
self-imposed task; and always his piercing eyes were set upon that goal
of all his schemes, the monarchy of the earth.
People were now beginning to discuss openly the subject of his
elevation to the throne. It was freely stated that he proposed to
make himself King and Cleopatra Queen, and, further, that he intended
to transfer the seat of his government to Alexandria, or some other
eastern city. The site of Rome was not ideal. It was too far from the
sea ever to be a first-rate centre of commerce; nor had it any natural
sources of wealth in the neighbourhood. The streets, which were narrow
and crookedly built, were liable to be flooded at certain seasons by
the swift-flowing Tiber.[58] Pestilence and sickness were rife amongst
the congested quarters of the city; and in the middle ages, as Mommsen
has pointed out, “one German army after another melted away under
its walls and left it mysteriously victorious.” After the battle of
Actium, Augustus wished to change the capital to some other quarter
of the globe, as, for example, to Byzantium; and it is very possible
that the idea originated with Cæsar. At the period with which we are
now dealing Rome was far less magnificent than it became a few years
later, and it must have compared unfavourably with Alexandria and other
cities. Its streets ascended and descended, twisted this way and that,
in an amazing manner; and so narrow were they that Cæsar was obliged
to pass a law prohibiting waggons from being driven along them in the
daytime, all porterage being performed by men or beasts of burden.
The great public buildings and palaces of the rich rose from amidst
the encroaching jumble of small houses like exotic plants hemmed in
by a mass of overgrown weeds; and Cæsar must often have given envious
thought to Alexandria with its great Street of Canopus and its Royal
Area.
Those who study the lives of Cleopatra and Cæsar in conjunction cannot
fail to ask themselves how far the Queen influenced the Dictator’s
thoughts at this time. During these last years of his life--the
years which mark his greatness and give him his unique place in
history--Cleopatra was living in the closest intimacy with him; and, so
far as we know, there was not another man or woman in the world who had
such ample opportunities for playing an influential part in his career.
If Cleopatra was interested, as we know she was, in the welfare of her
country and her royal house, or in the career of herself and Cæsar, or
in the destiny of their son, it is palpably impossible to suppose that
she did not discuss matters of statecraft with the man who was, in all
but name, her husband. At a future date Cleopatra was strong enough to
play one of the big political _rôles_ in history, dealing with kingdoms
and armies as the ordinary woman deals with a house and servants; and
in the light of the knowledge of her character as it is unfolded to
us in the years after the Dictator’s death, it is not reasonable to
suppose that in Rome she kept aloof from all his schemes and plans,
deeming herself capable of holding the attention of the master of the
world’s activities by the entertainments of the boudoir and the arts
of the bedchamber. Her individuality does not dominate the last years
of the Roman Republic, merely because of the profligacy of her life
with Antony and the tragedy of their death, but because her personality
was so irresistible that it influenced in no small degree the affairs
of the world. I am of opinion that Cleopatra’s name would have been
stamped upon the history of this period even though the events which
culminated at Actium had never occurred. The romantic tragedy of her
connection with Antony has captured the popular taste, and has diverted
the attention of historians from the facts of her earlier years. There
is a tendency completely to overlook the influence which she exercised
in the politics of Rome during the last years of Cæsar’s life.[59] The
eyes of historians are concentrated upon the Alexandrian drama, and the
tale of Cleopatra’s life in the Dictator’s villa is overlooked. Yet who
will be so bold as to state that a Queen, whose fortunes were linked
by Cæsar with his own at the height of his power, left no mark upon
the events of that time? When Cleopatra came to Rome her outlook upon
life must have been in striking contrast to that of the Romans. The
republic was still the accepted form of government, and as yet there
was no definite movement towards monarchism. The hereditary emperors
of the future were hardly dreamed of, and the kings of the far past
were nigh forgotten. Now, although it may be supposed that Cleopatra,
by contact with the world, had adopted a moderately rational view of
her status, yet there can be no doubt that the sense of her royal
and divine personality was far from dormant in her. Her education and
upbringing, as I have already said, and now the adulation of Cæsar,
must have influenced her mind, so that the knowledge of her royalty was
at all times almost her predominant characteristic; and it would be
strange indeed if the Dictator’s thoughts had been proof against the
insinuating influence of this atmosphere in which he chose to spend a
great portion of his time. Did Rome herself supply Cæsar’s stimulus,
Rome which had not known monarchy for four hundred and fifty years?
But admitting that Rome was ripe for monarchy, and that circumstances
to some extent forced Cæsar towards that form of government, can we
declare that the Dictator would, of his own accord, have embraced
sovereignty and even divinity so rapidly had his consort not been a
Queen and a goddess?
During the last months of his life--namely, from his return to Rome in
the early summer after the Spanish campaign to his assassination in
the following March--Cæsar vigorously pressed forward his schemes in
regard to the monarchy. Originally, it would seem, he had intended to
complete his eastern conquests before making any attempt to obtain the
throne; but now the long delay in his preparations for the Parthian
campaign had produced a feeling of impatience which could no longer be
controlled. Moreover, his attention had been called to an old prophecy
which stated that the Parthians would not be conquered until a _King_
of Rome made war upon them; and Cæsar was sufficiently acute, if not
sufficiently superstitious, to be influenced to an appreciable extent
by such a declaration. Little by little, therefore, he assumed the
prerogatives of kingship, daily adding to the royal character of his
appearance, and daily assuming more autocratic and monarchical powers.
It was not long before he caused himself to be given the
hereditary title of Imperator, a word which meant at that time
“Commander-in-chief,” and had no royal significance, though the fact
that it was made hereditary gave it a new significance. It is to be
observed that the persons who framed the decree must have realised
that the son to whom the title would descend would probably be that
baby Cæsar who now ruled the nurseries of the villa beside the Tiber;
for there can be little doubt that the Dictator’s legitimate marriage
to Cleopatra at the first opportune moment was confidently expected
by his supporters; and we are thus presented with the novel spectacle
of enthusiastic Roman statesmen offering the hereditary office of
Imperator to the future King of Egypt. There can surely be no clearer
indication than this that the people of Rome took no exception to
Cleopatra’s foreign blood,[60] nor thought of her in any way as an
Oriental. The attitude of the majority of modern historians suggests
that they picture the Dictator at this time as living with some sort
of African woman whom he had brought back with him from Egypt; but I
must repeat that I am convinced that in actual fact the Romans regarded
Cleopatra as a royal Greek lady whose capital city of Alexandria was
the rival of the Eternal City in wealth, magnificence, and culture,
bearing to Rome, to some extent, the relationship which New York bears
to London. It was rumoured at this time that a law was about to be
introduced by one of the tribunes of the people which would enable
Cæsar, if necessary, to have two wives--Calpurnia and Cleopatra--and
that the new wife need not be a Roman. The people could have felt no
misgivings at the thought of Cleopatra’s son being Cæsar’s heir; for
already they knew well enough that Cæsar was to be King of Rome, and by
his marriage with Cleopatra they realised that he was adding to Rome’s
dominions without force of arms the one great kingdom of the civilised
world which was still independent, and was securing for his heirs
upon the Roman throne the honourable appendage of the oldest crown in
existence, and the vast fortune which went with it. In later years,
when Cleopatra as the consort of Antony had become a public enemy,
there was much talk of an East-Mediterranean peril, and the Queen came
to represent Oriental splendour as opposed to Occidental simplicity;
but at the time with which we are now dealing this attitude was
entirely undeveloped, and Cleopatra was regarded as the most suitable
mother for that son of Cæsar who should one day inherit his honours and
his titles.
[Illustration:
_Vatican_] [_Photograph by Anderson._
JULIUS CÆSAR.]
At about this date the baby actually became uncrowned King of Egypt,
for Cleopatra’s young brother, Ptolemy XV., mysteriously passes from
the records of history, and is heard of no more. Whether Cleopatra
and Cæsar caused him to be murdered as standing in the way of their
ambitions, or whether he died a natural death, will now never be
known. He comes into the story of these eventful days like a shadow,
and like a shadow he disappears; and all that we know concerning his
end is derived from Josephus,[61] who states that he was poisoned
by his sister. Such an accusation, however, is only to be expected,
and would certainly have been made had the boy died of a sudden
illness. It is therefore not just to Cleopatra to burden her memory
with the crime; and all that one may now say is that, while the death
of the unfortunate young King may be attributed to Cleopatra without
improbability, there is really no reason to suppose that she had
anything to do with it.
Cæsar now caused a statue of himself to be erected in the Capitol
as the eighth royal figure there, the previous seven being those of
the old Kings of Rome. Soon he began to appear in public clad in the
embroidered dress of the ancient monarchs of Alba; and he caused
his head to appear in true monarchical manner upon the Roman coins.
A throne of gold was provided for him to sit upon in his official
capacity in the Senate and on his tribunal; and in his hand he now
carried a sceptre of ivory, while upon his head was a chaplet of gold
in the form of a laurel-wreath. A consecrated chariot, like the sacred
chariot of the Kings of Egypt, was provided for his conveyance at
public ceremonies, and a kind of royal bodyguard of senators and nobles
was offered to him. He was given the right, moreover, of being buried
inside the city walls, just as Alexander the Great had been laid to
rest within the Royal Area at Alexandria. These marks of kingship,
when observed in conjunction with the hereditary title of Imperator
which had been conferred upon him, and the lifelong Dictatorship which
was about to be offered to him, are indications that the goal was now
very near at hand; and both Cæsar and Cleopatra must have lived at the
time in a state of continuous excitement and expectation. Everybody
knew what was in the air, and Cicero went so far as to write a long
letter to Cæsar urging him not to make himself King, but he was advised
not to send it. The ex-Consul Lucius Aurelius Cotta inserted the thin
edge of the wedge by proposing that Cæsar should be made King of the
Roman dominions _outside_ Italy; but the suggestion was not taken up
with much enthusiasm. Cæsar himself seems to have been undecided as to
whether he should postpone the great event until after the Parthian war
or not, and the settlement of this question must have given rise to the
most anxious discussions.
There was no longer need for the Dictator to hide his intentions with
any great care; and as a preliminary measure he did not hesitate to
proclaim to the public his belief in the divinity of his person. He
caused his image to be carried in the _Pompa circenis_ amongst those of
the immortal gods. A temple dedicated to Jupiter-Julius was decreed,
and a statue in his likeness was set up in the temple of Quirinus,
inscribed with the words, “To the Immortal God.” A college of priestly
_Luperci_, of whom we shall presently learn more, was established in
his honour; and _flamines_ were created as priests of his godhead,
an institution which reminds one of the manner in which the Pharaoh
of Egypt was worshipped by a body of priests. A bed of state was
provided for him within the chief temples of Rome. In the formulæ of
the political oaths in which Jupiter and the Penates of the Roman
people had been named, the _Genius_ of Cæsar was now called upon, just
as in Egypt the _Ka_, or genius, of the sovereign was invoked. “The old
national faith,” says Mommsen, “became the instrument of a Cæsarian
papacy”; and indeed it may be said that it became the instrument
actually of a supreme Cæsarian deification.
By the end of the year B.C. 45 and the beginning of B.C. 44 there
was no longer any doubt in the minds of the Roman people that Cæsar
intended presently to ascend the throne; and the only question asked
was as to whether the event would take place before or after the
Eastern campaign. Some time before February 15th he was made Dictator
for life; and this, regarded in conjunction with the homage now paid to
his person, and the hereditary nature of his title of Imperator, made
the margin between his present status and that of kingship exceedingly
narrow. It is probable that Cæsar was not determined to introduce
the old title of “King,” although he affected the dress and insignia
of those who had been “kings” of Rome. It is more likely that he was
seeking some new monarchical title; and when, on one occasion, he
declared “I am Cæsar, and no ‘King,’” he may already have decided to
elevate his personal name to the significance of the royal title which
it ultimately became, and still in this twentieth century continues to
be.[62]
His arrogance was daily becoming more pronounced, and his ambition
was now “swell’d so much that it did almost stretch the sides o’ the
world.”[63] He severely rebuked Pontius Aquila, one of the Tribunes,
for not rising when he passed in front of the Tribunician seats; and
for some time afterwards he used to qualify any declaration which he
made in casual conversation by the sneering words, “By Pontius Aquila’s
kind permission.” Once, when a deputation of Senators came to him to
confer new honours upon him, he, on the other hand, received them
without rising from his seat; and he was now wont to keep his closest
friends waiting in an anteroom for an audience, a fact of which Cicero
bitterly complains. When his authority was questioned he invariably
lost his temper, and would swear in the most horrible manner. “Men
ought to look upon what I say as _law_,” he is reported by Titus
Ampius to have said; and, indeed, there were very few persons who had
the hardihood not to do so. On a certain occasion it was discovered
that some enthusiast had placed a royal diadem upon the head of one
of his statues, and, very correctly, the two Tribunes caused it to be
removed. This so infuriated Cæsar, who declared the official act to
be a deliberate insult, that he determined to punish the two men at
the first convenient opportunity. On January 26th of the new year this
opportunity presented itself. As he was walking through the streets
some persons in the crowd hailed him as King, whereupon these zealous
officials ordered them to be arrested and flung into prison. Cæsar at
once raised an appalling storm, the result of which was that the two
Tribunes were expelled from the Senate.
Cleopatra’s attitude could not well fail to be influenced by that of
the Dictator; and it is probable that she gave some offence by an
occasional haughtiness of manner. Her Egyptian chamberlains and court
officials must also have annoyed the Romans by failing to disguise
their Alexandrian vanity; and there can be little doubt that many of
Cæsar’s friends began to regard the menage at the transpontine villa
with growing dislike. A letter written by Cicero to his friend Atticus
is an interesting commentary upon the situation. It seems that the
great writer had been favoured by Cleopatra with the promise of a gift
suitable to his standing, probably in return for some service which he
had rendered her. “I detest the Queen,” he writes, “and the voucher
for her promises, Hammonios, knows that I have good cause for saying
so. What she promised, indeed, were all things of the learned sort
and suitable to my character, such as I could avow even in a public
meeting. As for Sara (pion),[64] besides finding him an unprincipled
rascal, I also found him inclined to give himself airs towards me.
I only saw him once at my house; and when I asked him politely what
I could do for him, he said that he had come in hopes of seeing
Atticus. The Queen’s insolence, too, when she was living in Cæsar’s
trans-tiberine villa,[65] I cannot recall without a pang. So I will not
have anything to do with that lot.”
The ill-feeling towards Cæsar, which was very decidedly on the
increase, is sufficient to account for the growing unpopularity of
Cleopatra; but it is possible that it was somewhat accentuated by a
slight jealousy which must have been felt by the Romans owing to the
Dictator’s partiality for things Egyptian. Not only did it appear to
Cæsar’s friends that he was modelling his future throne upon that of
the Ptolemies and was asserting his divinity in the Ptolemaic manner;
not only had he been thought to desire Alexandria as the capital of the
Empire; but also he was employing large numbers of Egyptians in the
execution of his schemes. Egyptian astronomers had reformed the Roman
calendar; the Roman mint was being improved by Alexandrian coiners;
the whole of his financial arrangements, it would seem, were entrusted
to Alexandrians;[66] while many of his public entertainments, as, for
example, the naval displays enacted at the inauguration of the Temple
of Venus, were conducted by Egyptians. Cæsar’s object in thus using
Cleopatra’s subjects must have been due, to some extent, to his desire
to familiarise his countrymen with those industrious Alexandrians who
were to play so important a part in the construction of the new Roman
Empire.
The great schemes and projects which were now placed before the Senate
by Cæsar must have startled that institution very considerably. Almost
every day some new proposal was formulated or some new law drafted.
At one time the diverting of the Tiber from its course occupied the
Dictator’s attention; at another time he was arranging to cut a canal
through the Isthmus of Corinth. Now he was planning the construction
of a road over the Apennines; and now he was deep in schemes for the
creation of a vast port at Ostia. Plans of great public buildings to
be erected at Alexandria or in Rome were being submitted to him; or,
again, he was arranging for the establishment of public libraries in
various parts of the capital. Meanwhile the preparations for the
Parthian war must have occupied the greater part of his time; for the
campaign was to be of a vast character. So sure was he that it would
last for three years or more that he framed a law by virtue of which
the magistrates and public officials for the next three years should
be appointed before his departure. He thereby insured the tranquillity
of Rome during his prolonged absence in the east, thus leaving himself
free to carry his arms into remote lands where communication with the
capital might be almost impossible. When we recollect that Cæsar’s
recent campaigns had all been of but a few months or weeks duration,
and that the words _veni, vidi, vici_ now represented his mature
belief in his own capabilities, these plans for a three years’ absence
from Rome seem to me to indicate clearly that he had no intention of
confining himself to the conquest of Parthia, but desired to follow in
Alexander’s footsteps to India, and thence to return to Rome laden with
the loot of that vast country. He must have pictured himself entering
the capital at the end of the war as the conqueror of the East, and
there could have been no doubt in his mind that the delighted populace
would then accept with enthusiasm his claim to the throne of the world.
As the weeks went by Cæsar’s plans in regard to the monarchy became
more clearly defined. He does not now seem to have considered it very
wise to press forward the assumption of the sovereignty previous to
the Parthian war, since his long absence immediately following his
elevation to the throne might prove prejudicial to the new office.
Moreover, a strong feeling had developed against his contemplated
assumption of royalty, and Cæsar must have been aware that he could
not put his plans into execution without considerable opposition.
Plutarch tells us that “his desire of being King had brought upon
him the most apparent and mortal hatred,--a fact which proved the
most plausible pretence to those who had been his secret enemies all
along.” Much adverse comment had been made with reference to his not
rising to receive the Senatorial deputation; and indeed he felt it
necessary to make excuses for his action, saying that his old illness
was upon him at the time. A report was spread that he himself would
have been willing to rise, but that Balbus had said to him, “Will you
not remember you are Cæsar and claim the honour due to your merit?”
and it was further related that when the Dictator had realised the
offence he had given, he had bared his throat to his friends, and had
told them that he was ready to lay down his life if the public were
angry with him. Incidents such as this showed that the time was not yet
wholly favourable for his _coup_; and reluctantly Cæsar was obliged to
consider its postponement. On the other hand, there was something to
be said in favour of immediate action, and he must have been more or
less prepared to accept the kingship if it were urged upon him before
he set out for the East. The position of Cleopatra, however, must have
caused him some anxiety. Without her and their baby son the creation of
an hereditary monarchy would be superfluous. His own wife Calpurnia did
not seem able to furnish him with an heir, and there was certainly no
other woman in Rome who could be expected to act the part of Queen with
any degree of success, even if she were proficient in the production
of sons and heirs. Yet how, on the instant, was he to rid himself of
Calpurnia and marry Cleopatra without offending public taste? If he
were to accept the kingship at once and make Cleopatra his wife, was
she capable of sustaining with success the _rôle_ of Queen of Rome
in solitude for three years while he was away at the wars? Would it
not be much wiser to send her back to Egypt for this period, there to
await his return, and then to marry her and to ascend the throne at one
and the same instant? During his absence in the East Calpurnia might
conveniently meet with a sudden and fatal illness, and no man would
dare to attribute her death to his and the apothecary’s ingenuity.
The will which he now made, or confirmed, in view of his departure,
shows clearly that his desire for the monarchy was incompatible with
his present marital conditions. Without a Queen and a son and heir
there could be little point in creating a throne, since already he
had been made absolute autocrat for his lifetime; for unless the
office was to be handed on without dispute to his son Cæsarion,
there was no advantage in striving for an immediate elevation to
the kingship. By his will, therefore, which was made in view of his
possible death before he had ascended his future throne, he simply
divided his property, giving part of it to the nation and part to his
relations, his favourite nephew, Octavian, receiving a considerable
share. A codicil was added, appointing a large number of guardians
for any offspring which might possibly be born to him by Calpurnia
after his departure; but so little interest did he take in this remote
contingency that he seems to have made no financial provision for such
an infant. There was no need to leave money to Cleopatra or to her
child, since she herself was fabulously wealthy. This will was, no
doubt, intended to be destroyed if he were raised to the throne before
his departure, and it was afterwards believed that he actually wrote
another testament in favour of Cæsarion, which was to be used if a
crown were offered to him; but if, as now seemed probable, that event
were postponed until his return, the dividing of his property would be
the best settlement for his affairs should he die while away in the
East. So long as he remained uncrowned there was no occasion to refer
either to Cleopatra or to Cæsarion in his testamentary wishes; for if
he died in Parthia or India, still as Dictator, his hopes of founding a
dynasty, his plans for his marriage to the Queen of Egypt, his scheme
for training up Cæsarion to follow in his footsteps, indeed all his
worldly ambitions, would have to be bundled into oblivion. Cæsar was
not a man who cared much for the interests of other people; and, in
the case of Cleopatra, he was quite prepared to leave her to fight for
herself in Egypt, were he himself to be removed to those celestial
spheres wherein he would have no further use for her. His passion for
her appears now to have cooled; and though he must still have enjoyed
her society, and, to a considerable extent, must have been open to her
influence, her chief attraction for him in these latter days lay in the
recognition of her suitability to ascend the new throne by his side.
She, on her part, no doubt retained much of her old affection for him;
and, in spite of his increasing irritability and eccentricity, she
seems to have offered him the generous devotion of a warm-hearted young
woman for a great and heroic old man.
Cæsar, indeed, was old before his time. The famous portrait of him,
now preserved in the Louvre, shows him to have been haggard and worn.
He was still under sixty years of age, but all semblance of youth
had gone from him, and the burden of his years and of his illness
weighed heavily upon his spare frame. His indomitable spirit, and the
keen enthusiasm of his nature, held him to his appointed tasks; but
it is very doubtful whether his constitution could now have borne the
hardships of the campaign which lay before him. His ill-health must
have caused Cleopatra the gravest anxiety, for all her hopes were
centred upon him, and upon that day when he should make her Queen of
the Earth. The fact that he was now considering the postponement of the
creation of the monarchy until after the Parthian war must have been a
heavy blow to her, for there was good reason to fear lest his strength
should give out ere his task could be completed. For three years and
more she had worked with Cæsar at the laying of the foundations of
their throne; and now, partly owing to the undesirability of leaving
Rome for so long a period immediately after accepting the crown, partly
owing to the difficulty in regard to Calpurnia, and partly owing to
the hostility of a large number of prominent persons to the idea of
monarchy, Cæsar was postponing for three years that _coup_ which
seemed to her not only to mean the realisation of all her personal and
dynastic ambitions, but actually to be the only means by which she
could save Egypt from absorption into the Roman dominions or preserve
a throne of any kind for her son. In the Second Philippic Cicero says
of Cæsar that “after planning for many years his way to royal power,
with great labour and with many dangers, he had effected his design. By
public exhibitions, by monumental buildings, by bribes and by feasts,
he had conciliated the unreflecting multitude. He had bound to himself
his own friends by favours, his opponents by a show of clemency;” and
yet, when in sight of his goal, he hesitated, believing it better to
wait to be carried up to the throne by that wave of popular enthusiasm
which assuredly would burst over Rome when he should lead back from
the East his triumphant, loot-laden legionaries, and should exhibit
in golden chains in the streets of the capital the captive kings of
the fabulous Orient. The delay must have been almost intolerable to
Cleopatra; and it may have been due to some arrangement made by her
with the Dictator and Antony, who now must have been a constant visitor
at Cæsar’s villa, that an event took place which brought to a head the
question of the date of the establishment of the monarchy.
On February 15th the annual festival of the Lupercalia was celebrated
in Rome; and upon this day all the populace, patrician and plebeian,
were _en fête_. The Romans of Cæsar’s time do not seem to have
known what was the origin of this festival, nor what was the real
significance of the rites therein performed. They understood that
upon this day they paid their respects to the god Lupercus; and, in a
vague manner, they identified this obscure deity with Faunus, or with
Pan, in his capacity as a producer of fertility and fecundity in all
nature. Two young men were selected from the honourable order known as
the College of the Luperci, and upon this day these two men opened the
proceedings by sacrificing a goat and a dog. They were then “blooded,”
and the ritual prescribed that as soon as this was done they should
both laugh. They next cut the skins of the victims into long strips or
thongs, known as _februa_; and, using these as whips, they proceeded to
run around the city, striking at every woman with whom they came into
contact. A thwack from the _februa_ was believed to produce fertility,
and any woman who desired to become a mother would expose herself to
the blows which the two men were vigorously delivering on all sides.
By reason of this strange old custom the day was known as the _Dies
februatus_;[67] and from this is derived the name of the month of
February in which the festival took place.
It seems to me certain that this ceremony was originally related to the
Egyptian rites in connection with the god of fecundity, Min-Amon, the
Pan of the Nile Valley. This god is usually represented holding in his
hand a whip, perhaps consisting originally of jackal-skins tied to a
stick;[68] and it has lately been proved that the hieroglyph for the
Egyptian word indicating the reproduction of species[69] is composed
simply of these three jackal-skins tied together, that is to say the
_februa_. We know practically nothing of the ceremonies performed in
Egypt in regard to the _februa_, but there is no reason to doubt that
the rites were fundamentally similar to those of the Roman Lupercalia.
The dog which was sacrificed in Rome had probably taken the place of
the Egyptian jackal; and the goat is perhaps to be connected with the
Egyptian ram which was sacred to Amon or Min-Amon.
Now it is very possible that in Alexandria Cleopatra and also Cæsar
had become well acquainted with the Egyptian equivalent of the Roman
Lupercalia, and it may be suggested, tentatively, that since Cæsar
was regarded in that country as the god Amon who had given fertility
to the Queen, he may, in Egypt, have been identified in some sort
of manner with these rites. One may certainly imagine Cleopatra
pointing out to Cæsar the similarity between the two ceremonies,
and suggesting to him that he was, or had acted in the manner of, a
kind of Lupercus. He had practically identified Cleopatra with Venus
Genetrix, the goddess of fertility; and he may well have attributed
to himself the faculties of that corresponding god who carried on in
Rome the traditions of the Egyptian Min, to whom already Cæsar had been
so closely allied by the priests of the Nile. The Dictator certainly
took great interest in the festival of the Lupercalia in Rome, for
he reorganised the proceedings, and actually founded an order known
as the _Luperci Julii_, a fact which could be regarded as indicating
a definite identification of himself with Lupercus. Indeed, if he
was identified with Min-Amon in Egypt, and if, as I have suggested,
Min-Amon is originally connected with the Lupercalia celebrations, it
may be supposed that Cæsar really assumed by right the position of
divine head of this order. Knowing the Dictator to have been so careful
an opportunist, one is almost tempted to suggest that he found in this
identification an excuse and a justification for his behaviour to the
many women to whom he had lost his heart; or perhaps it were better
to say that his unscrupulous attitude towards the opposite sex, and
the successful manner in which, as with Cleopatra, he had succeeded in
reproducing his kind, appeared to fit him constitutionally for this
particular godhead.
Whether or no Cæsar, in the intolerable arrogance of his last years,
was now actually naming himself the fruitful Lupercus in Rome as he
was the fecund Amon in Egypt, it is a fact that upon this occurrence of
the festival in the year B.C. 44 he was presiding over the ceremonies,
while his lieutenant Antony was enacting the part of one of the two
holders of the _februa_. On this day Cæsar, pale and emaciated, was
seated in the Forum upon a golden throne, dressed in a splendid robe,
in order to witness the celebrations, when suddenly the burly Antony,
hot from his run, bounded into view, striking to right and left with
the _februa_, and indulging, no doubt, in the horse-play which he
always so much enjoyed. An excited and boisterous crowd followed him,
and it is probable that both he and his companions thereupon did homage
to the majestic figure of the Dictator, hailing him as Lupercus and
king of the festivities. Profiting by the enthusiasm of the moment, and
acting according to arrangements previously made with Cleopatra or with
Cæsar himself, Antony now stepped forward and held out to the Dictator
a royal diadem wreathed with laurels, at the same time offering him the
kingship of Rome. Cæsar, as we have seen, had already been publicly
hailed as a god upon earth, and now Antony seems to have addressed him
in his Lupercalian character, begging him to accept this terrestrial
throne as already he had received the throne of the heavens. No sooner
had he spoken than a shout of approval was raised by a number of
Cæsarians who had been posted in different parts of the Forum for this
purpose; but, to Cæsar’s dismay, the cheers were not taken up by the
crowd, who, indeed, appear to have indulged in a little quiet booing;
and the Dictator was thus obliged to refuse the proffered crown with a
somewhat half-hearted show of disdain. This action was received with
general applause, and the temper of the crowd was clearly demonstrated.
Again Antony held the diadem towards him, and again the isolated and
very artificial cheers of his supporters were heard. Thereupon Cæsar,
accepting the situation with as good a grace as possible, definitely
refused to receive it; and at this the applause once more broke forth.
He then gave orders that the diadem should be carried into the Capitol,
and that a note should be inscribed in the official calendar stating
that on this day the people had offered him the crown and that he had
refused it. It seems probable that Antony, appreciating the false step
which had been made, now rounded off the incident in as merry a manner
as possible, beginning once more to strike about him with his magical
whip, and leading the crowd out of the Forum with the same noise and
horse-play with which they had entered it.
The chances now in regard to the immediate assumption of the kingship
became more remote. Cæsar intended to set out for Parthia in about a
month’s time; and it must have been apparent to him that his hopes
of a throne would probably have to be set aside until the coming war
was at an end. In regard to Cleopatra nothing remained for him to do,
therefore, but to bid her prepare to return to Egypt, there to await
until the Orient was conquered; and during the next few weeks it seems
that the disappointed and troubled Queen engaged herself in making
preparation for her departure. Suetonius tells us that Cæsar loaded her
with presents and honours in these last days of their companionship;
and doubtless he encouraged her as best he could with the recitation of
his great hopes and ambitions for the future. There was still a chance
that the monarchy would be created before the war, for there was
some talk that Antony and his friends would offer the crown once more
to Cæsar upon the Calends of March;[70] but Cleopatra could not have
dared to hope too eagerly for this event in view of the failure at the
Lupercalia. To the Queen, who had expected by this time to be seated
upon the Roman throne, his reassuring words can have been poor comfort;
and an atmosphere of gloomy foreboding must have settled upon her as
she directed the packing of her goods and chattels and prepared herself
and her baby for the long journey across the Mediterranean to her now
uneventful kingdom of Egypt.
CHAPTER X.
THE DEATH OF CÆSAR AND THE RETURN OF CLEOPATRA TO EGYPT.
There can be little reason for doubt that Antony, who is to play so
important a part in the subsequent pages of this history, saw Cleopatra
in Rome on several occasions. After his reconciliation to Cæsar in
the early summer of B.C. 45, he must have been a constant visitor at
the Dictator’s villa; and, as we shall presently see, his espousal of
Cleopatra’s cause in regard to Cæsar’s will suggests that her charm had
not been overlooked by him. It is said, as we have seen, that he had
met her, and had already been attracted by her, ten years previously,
when he entered Alexandria with Gabinius in order to establish her
father Auletes upon his rickety throne. He was a man of impulsive
and changeable character, and it is difficult to determine his exact
attitude towards Cæsar at this time. While the Dictator was in Egypt
Antony had been placed in charge of his affairs in Rome, but owing to
a quarrel between the two men, Cæsar, on his return from Alexandria,
had dismissed him from his service. Very naturally Antony had felt
considerable animosity to the Dictator on this account, and it was even
rumoured, as has been said, that he desired to assassinate him. After
the Spanish war, however, the quarrel was forgotten; and, as we have
just seen, it was Antony who had offered him the crown at the festival
of the Lupercalia. In spite of this, Cæsar does not seem to have
trusted him fully, although he now appears to have been recognised as
the most ardent supporter of the Cæsarian party.
Cæsar had never excelled as a judge of men. Although unquestionably a
genius and a man of supreme mental powers, the Dictator was ever open
to flattery; and he collected around him a number of satellites who
had won their way into his favour by blandishments and by countenance
of their master’s many eccentricities. Balbus and Oppius, Cæsar’s two
most intimate attendants, were men of mediocre standing; and Publius
Cornelius Dolabella, who now comes into some prominence, was a young
adventurer, whose desire for personal gain must have been concealed
with difficulty. This personage, although only five-and-twenty years of
age, had been appointed by Cæsar to the consulship which would become
vacant upon his own departure for the East, a move that must have given
grave offence to Antony; for Dolabella, a few years previously, had
fallen in love with Antony’s wife, Antonia, who had consequently been
divorced, the outraged husband thereafter finding consolation in the
marriage to his present wife Fulvia. The various favours conferred
by Cæsar on this young scamp must therefore have caused considerable
irritation to Antony; and it is not easy to suppose that the latter’s
apparent devotion to the cause of the Dictator was altogether genuine.
Indeed, the rumour once more passed into circulation that Antony nursed
designs upon Cæsar’s life, this time, strange to say, in conjunction
with Dolabella. On hearing this report the Dictator remarked that he
“did not fear such fat, luxurious men as these two, but rather the
pale, lean fellows.”
Of the latter type was Cassius, a sour, fanatical soldier and
politician, who had fought against Cæsar at Pharsalia, and had been
freely pardoned by him afterwards. From early youth Cassius entertained
a particular hatred of any form of autocracy; and it is related of
him that when at school the boy Faustus, the son of the famous Sulla,
had boasted of his father’s autocratic powers, Cassius had promptly
punched his head. Cæsar’s attempts to obtain the throne excited this
man’s ferocity, and he was probably the originator of the plot which
terminated the Dictator’s life. The plot was hatched in February
B.C. 44, and, when Cassius and his friends had prevailed upon the
influential and studious Marcus Brutus to join them, it rapidly
developed into a widespread conspiracy. “I don’t like Cassius,” Cæsar
was once heard to remark; “he looks so pale. What can he be aiming at?”
For Brutus, however, the Dictator entertained the greatest affection
and esteem, and there was a time when he regarded him as his probable
successor in office. One cannot view without distress, even after
the passage of so many centuries, the devotion of the irritable
old autocrat to this scholarly and promising young man who was now
plotting against him; for, in spite of his manifold faults, Cæsar
ever remains a character which all men esteem and with which all must
largely sympathise. On one occasion somebody warned him that Brutus
was plotting against him, to which the Dictator replied, “What, do you
think Brutus will not wait out the appointed time of this little body
of mine?” It is probable that Cæsar thought it not at all unlikely
that Brutus was his own son, for his mother, Servilia, as early as
the year of his birth, and for long afterwards, had been on such
terms of intimacy with Cæsar as would justify this belief. Brutus,
on the other hand, thought himself to be the son of Servilia’s legal
husband, and through him claimed descent from the famous Junius Brutus
who had expelled the Tarquins. Servilia was the sister of Cato, whose
suicide had followed his defeat by Cæsar in North Africa, and Porcia,
the wife of Brutus, was Cato’s daughter. It might have been supposed,
therefore, that Brutus would have felt considerable antipathy towards
the Dictator, more especially after the publication of his venomous
Anti-Cato. There was, however, equally reasonable cause for Brutus
to have sympathised with Cæsar, for his supposed father had been put
to death by Pompey, an execution which Cæsar had, as it were, been
instrumental in avenging. As a matter of fact, Brutus was a young man
who lived upon high principles, as a cow does upon grass; and such
family incidents as the seduction of his mother, or the destruction of
his mother’s brother and his wife’s father, or the bloodthirsty warfare
between his father’s executioner and his father-in-law’s enemy and
calumniator, were not permitted to influence his righteous brain. In
his early years he had, very naturally, refused on principle to speak
to Pompey, but when the civil war broke out he set aside all those
petty feelings of dislike which, in memory of his legal father, he had
entertained towards the Pompeian faction, and, on principle, he ranged
himself upon that side in the conflict, believing it to be the juster
cause. Pompey is said to have been so surprised at the arrival of this
good young man in his camp, whither nobody had asked him to come,
and where nobody particularly desired his presence, that he stood up
and embraced him as though he were a lost lamb come back to the fold.
Then followed the battle of Pharsalia, and Brutus had been obliged to
fly for his life. He need not, however, have feared for his safety,
for Cæsar had given the strictest orders that nobody was to hurt him
either in the battle or in the subsequent chase of the fugitives. From
Larissa, whither he had fled, he wrote, on principle, to Cæsar, stating
that he was prepared to surrender; and the Dictator, in memory, it is
said, of many a pleasant hour with Servilia, at once pardoned him and
heaped honours upon him. Brutus, then, on principle, laid information
against Pompey, telling Cæsar whither he had fled; and thus it came
about that the Dictator arrived in Egypt on that October morning of
which we have read.
Brutus was an intellectual young man, whose writings and orations
were filled with maxims and pithy axioms. He had, however, a certain
vivacity and fire; and once when Cæsar had listened, a trifle
bewildered, to one of his vigorous speeches, the Dictator was heard
to remark, “I don’t know what this young man means, but, whatever
he means, he means it vehemently.” He believed himself to be, and
indeed was, very firm and just, and he had schooled himself to resist
flattery, ignoring all requests made to him by such means. He was wont
to declare that a man who, in mature years, could not say “no” to
his friends, must have been very badly behaved in the flower of his
youth. Cassius, who was the brother-in-law of Brutus, deemed it very
advisable to introduce this exemplary young man into the conspiracy,
and he therefore invited him, as a preliminary measure, to be present
in the Senate on the Calends of March, when it was rumoured that Cæsar
would be made king. Brutus replied that he would most certainly absent
himself on that day. Nothing daunted, Cassius asked him what he would
do supposing Cæsar insisted on his being present. “In that case,”
said Brutus, in the most approved style, “it will be my business not
to keep silent, but to stand up boldly, and die for the liberty of my
country.” Such being his views, it was apparent that there would be no
difficulty in persuading him, on principle, to assist in the murder
of Cæsar, who had, it is true, spared his life in Pharsalia, but who
was, nevertheless, an enemy of the People. The conspirators, therefore,
dropped pieces of paper on the official chair whereon he sat, inscribed
with such words as “Wake up, Brutus,” or “You are not a true Brutus”;
and on the statue of Junius Brutus they scribbled sentences, such as
“O that we had a Brutus now!” or “O that Brutus were alive!” In this
way the young man’s feelings were played upon, and, after a few days of
solemn thought, he came to the conclusion that it was his painful duty,
on principle, to bring Cæsar’s life to a close.
By March 1st the conspirators numbered in their ranks some sixty
or eighty senators, mostly friends of the Dictator, and had Cæsar
attempted then to proclaim himself king he would at once have been
assassinated. There were too many rumours current of plots against
him, however, to permit him to take this step, and so the days passed
in uneventfulness. He had planned to leave Rome for the East on March
17th, and it was thought possible that his last visit to the Senate on
March 15th, or his departure from the capital, would be the occasion
of a demonstration in his favour which would lead to his being offered
the crown as a parting gift. The conspirators therefore decided to make
an end of Cæsar on March 15th, the Ides of March, upon which date he
would probably come for the last time to the Senate as Dictator.
Brutus, of course, was terribly troubled as the day drew near. He was
at heart a good and honourable man, but the weakness of his character,
combined with his intense desire to act in a high-principled manner,
led him often to appear to be a turncoat. Actually his motives were
patriotic and noble, but he must have asked himself many a time whether
what he believed to be his duty to his country was to be regarded
as entirely abrogating what he _knew_ to be his duty to his devoted
patron. The tumult in his mind caused him at night to toss and turn in
his sleep in a fever of unrest, and his wife, Porcia, observing his
distress, implored him to confide his troubles to her. Brutus thereupon
told her of the conspiracy, and thereby risked the necks of all his
comrades.
A curious gloom seems to have fallen upon Rome at this time, and an
atmosphere of foreboding, due perhaps to rumours that a plot was afoot,
descended upon the actors in this unforgettable drama. Cæsar went about
his preparations for the Oriental campaign in his usual business-like
manner, and raised money for the war with his wonted unscrupulousness
and acuteness; but it does not require any pressure upon the historical
imagination to observe the depression which he now felt and which must
have been shared by his associates. The majority of the conspirators
were his friends and fellow-workers--men, many of them, whom he had
pardoned for past offences during the Civil War and had raised to
positions of trust in his administration. At this time he appears to
have been living with Calpurnia in his city residence, and so busy
was he with his arrangements that he could not have found time to pay
many visits to Cleopatra.[71] The Queen must therefore have remained
in a state of distressing suspense. The Calends of March, at which
date the proclamation of the monarchy had been expected, had passed;
and now the Dictator could have held out to her but one last hope of
the realisation of their joint ambition previous to his departure.
Cæsar must have told her that, as far as the three-year-old Cæsarion
was concerned, she could expect nothing until the throne had been
created; for, obviously, this was no time in which to leave a baby as
his heir. His nephew Octavian, an active and energetic young man, would
have to succeed him in office if he were to die before he had obtained
the crown, and his vast property would have to be distributed. The
Dictator must have remembered the fact of the murder of the young son
of Alexander the Great soon after his father’s death, and he could have
had no desire that his own boy should be slaughtered in like manner by
his rapacious guardians. Yet Cleopatra still delayed her departure,
in the hope that the great event would take place on March 15th, so
that at any rate she might return to Egypt in the knowledge that her
position as Cæsar’s wife was secured.
The prevailing depression acted strangely upon people’s nerves, and
stories began to spread of ominous premonitions of trouble, and
menacing signs and wonders. There were unaccountable lights in the
heavens, and awful noises at dead of night. Somebody said that he had
seen a number of phantoms, in the guise of men, fighting with one
another, and that they were all aglow as though they were red-hot; and
upon another occasion it was noticed that numerous strange birds of
ill omen had alighted in the Forum. Once, when Cæsar was sacrificing,
the heart of the victim was found to be missing, an omen of the worst
significance; and at other times the daily auguries were observed to be
extremely inauspicious. An old soothsayer, who may have got wind of the
plot, warned the Dictator to beware of the Ides of March; but Cæsar,
whose courage was always phenomenal, did not allow the prediction to
alter his movements.
Upon the evening of March 14th, the day before the dreaded Ides, Cæsar
supped with his friend Marcus Lepidus, and as he was signing some
letters which had been brought to him for approval the conversation
happened to turn upon the subject of death, and the question was asked
as to what kind of ending was to be preferred. The Dictator, quickly
looking up from his papers, said decisively, “A sudden one!” the
significance of which remark was to be realised by his friends a few
hours later. That night, Plutarch tells us, as Cæsar lay upon his bed,
suddenly, as though by a tremendous gust of wind, all the doors and
windows of his house flew open, letting in the brilliant light of the
moon. Calpurnia lay asleep by his side, but he noticed that she was
uttering inarticulate words and was sobbing as though in the deepest
distress; and upon being awakened she said that she had thought in her
dreams that he was murdered. Cæsar must have realised that such a
dream was probably due to her fears as to the truth of the soothsayer’s
prophecy; but, at the same time, her earnest request to him not to
leave his house on the following day made a considerable impression
upon him.
In the morning the conspirators collected in that part of the
governmental buildings where the Senate was to meet that day. The place
chosen was a pillared portico adjoining the theatre, having at the
back a deep recess in which stood a statue of Pompey.[72] Some of the
men were public officials whose business it was to act as magistrates
and to hear cases which had been brought to them for judgment; and it
is said that not one of them betrayed by his manner any nervousness
or lack of interest in these public concerns. In the case of Brutus
this was particularly noticeable; and it is related that upon one of
the plaintiffs before him refusing to stand to his award and declaring
that he would appeal to Cæsar, Brutus calmly remarked, “Cæsar does not
hinder me, nor will he hinder me, from acting according to the laws.”
This composure, however, began to desert them when it was found that
the Dictator was delaying his departure from his house. The report
spread that he had decided not to come to the Senate that day, and
it was soon realised that this might be interpreted as meaning that
he had discovered the plot. Their agitation was such that at length
they sent a certain Decimus Brutus Albinus, a very trusted friend of
the Dictator, to Cæsar’s house to urge him to make haste. Decimus
found him just preparing to postpone the meeting of the Senate, his
feelings having been worked upon by Calpurnia’s fears, and also by
the fact that he had received a report from the augurs stating that
the sacrifices for the day had been inauspicious. In this dilemma
Decimus made a statement to Cæsar, the truth of which is now not able
to be ascertained. He told the Dictator that the Senate had decided
unanimously to confer upon him that day the title of King of all the
Roman Dominions outside Italy, and to authorise him to wear a royal
diadem in any place on land or sea except in Italy.[73] He added that
Cæsar should not give the Senate so fair a justification for saying
that he had put a slight upon them by adjourning the meeting on so
important an occasion owing to the bad dreams of a woman.
At this piece of news Cæsar must have been filled with triumphant
excitement. The wished-for moment had come. At last he was to be made
king, and the dominions to be delivered over to him were obviously
but the first instalment of the vaster gift which assuredly he would
receive in due course. The doubt and the gloom of the last few weeks in
a moment were banished, for this day he would be monarch of an empire
such as had never before been seen. What did it matter that in Rome
itself he would be but Dictator? He would establish his royal capital
elsewhere: in Alexandria, perhaps, or on the site of Troy. He would
be able at once to marry Cleopatra and to incorporate her dominions
with his own. Calpurnia might remain for the present the wife of the
childless Dictator in Rome, and his nephew Octavian might be his
official heir; but outside his fatherland, Queen Cleopatra should be
his consort, and his own little son should be his heir and successor.
The incongruities of the situation would so soon be felt that Rome
would speedily acknowledge him king in Italy as well as out of it.
Probably he had often discussed with Cleopatra the possibilities of
this solution of the problem, for the idea of making him king outside
Italy had been proposed some weeks previously;[74] and he must now have
thought how amused and delighted the Queen would be by this unexpected
decision of the Senate to adopt the rather absurd scheme. As soon as
he had married the Sovereign of Egypt and had made Alexandria one of
his capitals, his dominions would indeed be an Egypto-Roman Empire; and
when at length Rome should invite him to reign also within Italy, the
situation would suggest rather that Egypt had incorporated Rome than
that Rome had absorbed Egypt. How that would tickle Cleopatra, whose
dynasty had for so long feared extinction at the hands of the Romans!
Rising to his feet, and taking Decimus by the hand, Cæsar set out at
once for the Senate, his forebodings banished and his ambitious old
brain full of confidence and hope. On his way through the street two
persons, one a servant and the other a teacher of logic, made attempts
to acquaint him with his danger; and the soothsayer who had urged him
to beware of the Ides of March once more repeated his warning. But
Cæsar was now in no mood to abandon the prospective excitements of
the day; and the risk of assassination may, indeed, have been to him
the very element which delighted him, for he was ever inspired by the
presence of danger.
Meanwhile the conspirators paced the Portico of Pompey in painful
anxiety, fearing every moment to hear that the plot had been
discovered. It must have been apparent to them that there were persons
outside the conspiracy who knew of their designs; and when a certain
Popilius Laena, a senator, not of their number, whispered to Brutus and
Cassius that the secret was out, but that he wished them success, their
feelings must have been hard to conceal. Then came news that Porcia had
fallen into an hysterical frenzy caused by her suspense; and Brutus
must have feared that in this condition she would reveal the plot.
At length, however, Cæsar was seen to be approaching; but their
consequent relief was at once checked when it was observed that
Popilius Laena, who had said that he knew all, entered into deep and
earnest conversation with the Dictator. The conversation, however,
proved to be of no consequence, and Cæsar presently walked on into the
Curia where the Senate was to meet. A certain Trebonius was now set
to detain Antony in conversation outside the doorway; for it had been
decided that, although the latter was Cæsar’s right-hand man, he should
not be murdered, but that, after the assassination, he should be won
over to the side of the so-called patriots by fair words.
When Cæsar entered the building the whole Senate rose to their feet in
respectful salutation. The Dictator having taken his seat, one of the
conspirators, named Tullius Cimber, approached him ostensibly with the
purpose of petitioning him to pardon his exiled brother. The others at
once gathered round, pressing so close upon him that Cæsar was obliged
to order them to stand back. Then, perhaps suspecting their design,
he sprang suddenly to his feet, whereupon Tullius caught hold of his
toga and pulled it from him, thus leaving his spare frame covered only
by a light tunic. Instantly a senator named Casca, whom the Dictator
had just honoured with promotion, struck him in the shoulder with his
dagger, whereupon Cæsar, grappling with him, cried out in a loud voice,
“You villain, Casca! what are you doing?” A moment later, Casca’s
brother stabbed him in the side. Cassius, whose life Cæsar had spared
after Pharsalia, struck him in the face; Bucolianus drove a knife
between his shoulder-blades, and Decimus Brutus, who so recently had
encouraged him to come to the Senate, wounded him in the groin. Cæsar
fought for his life like a wild animal.[75] He struck out to right and
left with his _stilus_, and, streaming with blood, managed to break his
way through the circle of knives to the pedestal of the statue of his
old enemy Pompey. He had just grasped Casca once more by the arm, when
suddenly perceiving his beloved Marcus Brutus coming at him with dagger
drawn, he gasped out, “You, too, Brutus--_my son_!” and fell, dying,
upon the ground.[76] Instantly the pack of murderers was upon him,
slashing and stabbing at his prostrate form, wounding one another in
their excitement, and nigh tumbling over him where he lay in a pool of
blood.
As soon as all signs of life had left the body, the conspirators turned
to face the Senate; but, to their surprise, they found the members
rushing madly from the building. Brutus had prepared a speech to make
to them as soon as the murder should be accomplished; but in a few
moments nobody was left in the Curia for him to address. He and his
companions, therefore, were at a loss to know what to do; but at length
they issued forth from the building, somewhat nervously brandishing
their daggers and shouting catch-words about Liberty and the Republic.
At their approach everybody fled to their homes; and Antony, fearing
that he, too, would be murdered, disguised himself and hurried by
side-streets to his house. They therefore took up their position in
the Capitol, and there remained until a deputation of senators induced
them to come down to the Forum. Here, standing in the rostra, Brutus
addressed the crowd, who were fairly well-disposed towards him; but
when another speaker, Cinna, made bitter accusations against the dead
man, the people chased the conspirators back once more to the Capitol,
where they spent the night.
When darkness had fallen and the tumult had subsided, Antony made his
way to the Forum, whither, he had heard, the body of Cæsar had been
carried; and here, in the light of the moon, he looked once more upon
the face of his arrogant old master. Here, too, he met Calpurnia, and,
apparently at her request, took charge of all the Dictator’s documents
and valuables.
Upon the next day, at Antony’s suggestion, a general amnesty was
proclaimed, and matters were amicably discussed. It was then decided
that Cæsar’s will should be opened, but the contents must have been
a surprise to both parties. The dead man bequeathed to every Roman
citizen 300 _sesterces_, giving also to the Roman people his vast
estates and gardens on the other side of the Tiber, where Cleopatra
was, at the time, residing. Three-quarters of the remainder of his
estate was bequeathed to Octavian, and the other quarter was divided
between his two nephews, Lucius Pinarius and Quintus Pedius. In a
codicil he added that Octavian should be his official heir; and he
named several guardians for his son, should one be born to him after
his death.
The dead body lay in state in the Forum for some five days, while
the ferment in the city continued to rage unabated. The funeral was
at length fixed for March 20th,[77] and towards evening Antony went
to the Forum, where he found the crowd wailing and lamenting around
the corpse, the soldiers clashing their shields together, and the
women uttering their plaintive cries. Antony at once began to sing
a dirge-like hymn in praise of Cæsar; pausing in his song every few
moments to stretch his hands towards the corpse and to break into loud
weeping. In these intervals the crowd took up the funeral chant, and
gave vent to their emotional distress in the melancholy music customary
at the obsequies of the dead, reciting monotonously a verse of Accius
which ran, “I saved those who have given me death.” Presently Antony
held up on a spear’s point the robes pierced by so many dagger-thrusts;
and standing beside this gruesome relic of the crime, he pronounced his
famous funeral oration over the body of the murdered Dictator. When he
had told the people of Cæsar’s gifts to them, and had worked upon their
feelings by exhibiting thus the blood-stained garments, the mob broke
into a frenzy of rage against the conspirators, vowing vengeance upon
one and all. Somebody recalled the speech made by Cinna on a previous
day, and immediately howls were raised for that orator’s blood. A
minor poet, also called Cinna, happened to be standing in the crowd;
and when a friend of his had addressed him by that hated name, the
people in the immediate vicinity thought that he must be the villain
for whose life the mob was shouting. They therefore caught hold of the
unfortunate man, and, without further inquiries, tore him limb from
limb. They then seized benches, tables, and all available woodwork; and
there, in the midst of the public and sacred buildings, they erected a
huge pyre, upon the top of which they placed the Dictator’s body, laid
out upon a sheet of purple and gold. Torches were applied and speedily
the flames arose, illuminating the savage faces of the crowd around the
pyre, and casting grotesque shadows upon the gleaming walls and pillars
of the adjoining buildings, while the volume of the smoke hid from
view the moon now rising above the surrounding roofs and pediments.
Soon the mutilated body disappeared from sight into the heart of the
fire; and thereupon the spectators, plucking flaming brands from the
blaze, dashed down the streets, with the purpose of burning the houses
of the conspirators. The funeral pyre continued to smoulder all night
long, and it must have been many hours before quiet was restored in the
city. The passions of the mob were appeased next day by the general
co-operation of all those concerned in public affairs, and the Senate
passed what was known as an Act of Oblivion in regard to all that had
occurred. Brutus, Cassius, and the chief conspirators, were assigned
to positions of importance in the provinces far away from Rome; and
the affairs of the capital were left, for the most part, in the hands
of Antony. On March 18th, three days after Cæsar’s death, Antony and
Lepidus calmly invited Brutus and Cassius to a great dinner-party, and
so, for the moment, peace was restored.
Meanwhile, Cleopatra’s state of mind must have been appalling. Not only
had she lost her dearest friend and former lover, but, with his death,
she had lost the vast kingdom which he had promised her. No longer was
she presumptive Queen of the Earth, but now, in a moment, she was once
more simply sovereign of Egypt, seated upon an unfirm throne. Moreover,
she must have fancied that her own life was in danger, as well as that
of the little Cæsar. The contents of the Dictator’s will must have been
a further shock to her, although she probably already knew their tenor;
and she must have thought with bitterness of the difference that even
one day more might have made to her in this regard. It was perhaps true
that the Senate had been about to offer him the throne of the provinces
on the fatal Ides; and in that case Cæsar would most certainly have
altered his will to meet the new situation, if indeed he had not
already done so, as some say. There was reason to suppose that such a
will, in favour of Cæsarion, had actually been made,[78] but if this
were so, it was nowhere to be found, and had perhaps been destroyed
by Calpurnia. What was she to do? When would Octavian appear to claim
such property and honours as Cæsar had bequeathed to him? Should she at
once proclaim her baby son as the rightful heir, or should she fly the
country?
In this dilemma there seems to me to be no doubt that she must have
consulted with Antony, the one man who had firmly grasped the tangled
strings of the situation, and must have implored him to support
the claims of her son. If the public would not admit that Cæsarion
was Cæsar’s son, then the boy would, without doubt, pass into
insignificance, and ultimately be deprived, in all probability, even
of his Egyptian throne. If, on the other hand, with Antony’s support,
he were officially recognised to be the Dictator’s child, then there
was a good chance that the somewhat unprepossessing Octavian might be
pushed aside for ever. Cæsar had taken a fancy to this obscure nephew
of his during the Spanish War. The young man, although still weak after
a severe illness, had set out to join the Dictator in Spain with a
promptitude which had won his admiration. He had suffered shipwreck,
and had ultimately made his way to his uncle’s camp by roads infested
with the enemy, and thereafter had fought by his side. He was now
following his studies in Apollonia, and intended to join Cæsar on his
way to the East. If he could be prevented from coming to Rome the game
would be in the Queen’s hands; and I am of opinion that she must now
have approached Antony with some such suggestion for the solution of
the difficulty. Antony, on his part, probably realised that with the
establishment of Octavian in Cæsar’s seat his own power would vanish;
but that, were he to support the baby Cæsarion, he himself would remain
the all-powerful regent for many years to come. He might even take the
dead man’s place as Cleopatra’s husband, and climb to the throne by
means of the right of his stepson.[79]
It would seem, therefore, that he persuaded Cleopatra to remain for the
present in Rome; and not long afterwards he declared in the Senate that
the little Cæsarion had been acknowledged by Cæsar to be his rightful
son. This was denied at once by Oppius, who favoured the claims of
Octavian, and ultimately this personage took the trouble to write a
short book to refute Antony’s statement.
The young Dolabella now seized the consulship in Rome, and, being on
bad terms with Antony, at once showed his hostility to the friends of
the late Dictator by various acts of violence against them. Cæsar,
before his death, had assigned the province of Syria to Dolabella and
that of Macedonia to Antony; but now the Senate, in order to rid Rome
of the troublesome presence of the Dictator’s murderers, had given
Macedonia and Syria to Marcus Brutus and Cassius, and these two men
were now collecting troops with which to enter their dominions in
safety. There was thus a political reason for Antony and Dolabella to
join forces; and presently we find the two of them working together for
the overthrow of Brutus and Cassius.
Into these troubled scenes in Rome the news presently penetrated of the
approach of the young Octavian, now nearly nineteen years of age, who
was coming to claim his rights; and thereupon the city, setting aside
the question of the conspirators, formed itself into two factions, the
one supporting the newcomer, the other upholding Antony’s attitude.
It is usually stated by historians that Antony was fighting solely in
his own interests, being desirous of ousting Octavian and assuming the
dignities of Cæsar by force of arms. If this be so, why did he make
a point of declaring in the Senate that Cæsarion was the Dictator’s
child? With what claims upon the public did he oppose those of Octavian
if not by the supporting of Cæsar’s son? We shall see that in after
years he always claimed the Roman throne _on behalf_ of the child
Cæsarion; and I find it difficult to suppose that that attitude was not
already assumed, to some extent, by him.
There now began to be grave fears of the immediate outbreak of civil
war; and so threatening was the situation that Cleopatra was advised
to leave Rome and to return to Egypt with her son, there to await the
outcome of the struggle. It is probable, indeed, that Antony urged her
to return to her own country in order to raise troops and ships for his
cause. Be this as it may, the Queen left Rome a few days before April
15th, upon which date Cicero wrote to Atticus, from Sinuessa, not far
from Rome, commenting on the news that she had fled.
As she sailed over the Mediterranean back to Egypt her mind must have
been besieged by a hundred schemes and plans for the future. The
despair which she had experienced, after the death of the Dictator,
at the demolition of all her vast hopes, may now have given place to
a spirited desire to begin the fight once more. Cæsar was dead, but
his great personality would live again in his little son, whom Antony,
she believed, would champion, since in doing so he would further his
own ambitions. The legions left at Alexandria by the Dictator would,
no doubt, stand by her; and she would bring all the might and all the
wealth of Egypt against the power of Octavian. The coming warfare would
be waged by her for the creation of that throne for the establishment
of which Cæsar had indeed given his life; and her arms would be
directed against that form of democratic government which the Dictator,
perhaps at her instance, had endeavoured to overthrow, but which a man
of Octavian’s character, she supposed, would be contented to support.
Her mighty Cæsar would look down from his place amidst the stars to
direct her, and to lead their son to the goal of their ambitions;
for now he was in very truth a god amongst the gods. Recently during
seven days a comet had been seen blazing in the sky, and all men had
been convinced that this was the soul of the murdered Dictator rushing
headlong to heaven. Even now a strange haze hung over the sun, as
though the light of that celestial body were dimmed by the approach of
the Divine Cæsar. Before the Queen left Rome she had heard the priests
and public officials name him God in very truth; and maybe she had
already seen his statues embellished by the star of divinity which was
set upon his brow after his death. Surely now he would not desert her,
his Queen and his fellow-divinity; nor would he suffer their royal
son to pass into obscurity. From his exalted heights he would defend
her with his thunderbolts, and come down to her aid upon the wings of
the wind. Thus there was no cause for her to despair; and with that
wonderful optimism which seems to have characterised her nature, she
now set her active brain to thoughts of the future, turning her mature
intellect to the duties which lay before her. When Cæsar had met her in
Egypt she had been an irresponsible girl. Now she was a keen-brained
woman, endowed with the fire and the pluck of her audacious dynasty,
and prepared to fight her way with all their unscrupulous energy to the
summit of her ambitions. And, moreover, now she held the trump card in
her hands in the person of her little boy, who was by all natural laws
the rightful heir to the throne of the earth.
PART II.
CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY