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[Illustration: SCENE OF CLEOPATRA'S HISTORY]
HISTORY OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPT.
by
JACOB ABBOTT.
With Engravings.
New York:
Harper & Brothers, Publishers.
1854.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight
hundred and fifty-one, by
Harper & Brothers,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of
New York.
PREFACE.
In selecting the subjects for the successive volumes of this series, it
has been the object of the author to look for the names of those great
personages whose histories constitute useful, and not merely entertaining,
knowledge. There are certain names which are familiar, as names, to all
mankind; and every person who seeks for any degree of mental cultivation,
feels desirous of informing himself of the leading outlines of their
history, that he may know, in brief, what it was in their characters or
their doings which has given them so widely-extended a fame. This
knowledge, which it seems incumbent on every one to obtain in respect to
such personages as Hannibal, Alexander, Cæsar, Cleopatra, Darius, Xerxes,
Alfred, William the Conqueror, Queen Elizabeth, and Mary, queen of Scots,
it is the design and object of these volumes to communicate, in a
faithful, and, at the same time, if possible, in an attractive manner.
Consequently, great historical names alone are selected; and it has been
the writer's aim to present the prominent and leading traits in their
characters, and all the important events in their lives, in a bold and
free manner, and yet in the plain and simple language which is so
obviously required in works which aim at permanent and practical
usefulness.
CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
I. THE VALLEY OF THE NILE 13
II. THE PTOLEMIES 35
III. ALEXANDRIA 61
IV. CLEOPATRA'S FATHER 87
V. ACCESSION TO THE THRONE 112
VI. CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR 132
VII. THE ALEXANDRINE WAR 157
VIII. CLEOPATRA A QUEEN 181
IX. THE BATTLE OF PHILIPPI 200
X. CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY 225
XI. THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM 256
XII. THE END OF CLEOPATRA 286
ENGRAVINGS.
Page
MAP, SCENE OF CLEOPATRA'S HISTORY _Frontispiece._
MAP, THE RAINLESS REGION 21
MAP, THE DELTA OF THE NILE 29
THE BIRTH-DAY PRESENT 50
ANTONY CROSSING THE DESERT 107
CLEOPATRA ENTERING THE PALACE OF CÆSAR 135
VIEW OF ALEXANDRIA 162
CLEOPATRA'S SISTER IN THE TRIUMPHAL PROCESSION 190
THE ENTERTAINMENTS AT TARSUS 242
THE RAISING OF ANTONY TO THE UPPER WINDOW OF
THE TOMB 303
CLEOPATRA.
CHAPTER I.
THE VALLEY OF THE NILE.
The story of Cleopatra is a story of crime. It is a narrative of the
course and the consequences of unlawful love. In her strange and romantic
history we see this passion portrayed with the most complete and graphic
fidelity in all its influences and effects; its uncontrollable impulses,
its intoxicating joys, its reckless and mad career, and the dreadful
remorse and ultimate despair and ruin in which it always and inevitably
ends.
* * * * *
Cleopatra was by birth an Egyptian; by ancestry and descent she was a
Greek. Thus, while Alexandria and the delta of the Nile formed the scene
of the most important events and incidents of her history, it was the
blood of Macedon which flowed in her veins. Her character and action are
marked by the genius, the courage, the originality, and the impulsiveness
pertaining to the stock from which she sprung. The events of her history,
on the other hand, and the peculiar character of her adventures, her
sufferings, and her sins, were determined by the circumstances with which
she was surrounded, and the influences which were brought to bear upon her
in the soft and voluptuous clime where the scenes of her early life were
laid.
Egypt has always been considered as physically the most remarkable country
on the globe. It is a long and narrow valley of verdure and fruitfulness,
completely insulated from the rest of the habitable world. It is more
completely insulated, in fact, than any literal island could be, inasmuch
as deserts are more impassable than seas. The very existence of Egypt is a
most extraordinary phenomenon. If we could but soar with the wings of an
eagle into the air, and look down upon the scene, so as to observe the
operation of that grand and yet simple process by which this long and
wonderful valley, teeming so profusely with animal and vegetable life, has
been formed, and is annually revivified and renewed, in the midst of
surrounding wastes of silence, desolation, and death, we should gaze upon
it with never-ceasing admiration and pleasure. We have not the wings of
the eagle, but the generalizations of science furnish us with a sort of
substitute for them. The long series of patient, careful, and sagacious
observations, which have been continued now for two thousand years, bring
us results, by means of which, through our powers of mental conception, we
may take a comprehensive survey of the whole scene, analogous, in some
respects, to that which direct and actual vision would afford us, if we
could look down upon it from the eagle's point of view. It is, however,
somewhat humiliating to our pride of intellect to reflect that
long-continued philosophical investigations and learned scientific
research are, in such a case as this, after all, in some sense, only a
sort of substitute for wings. A human mind connected with a pair of
eagle's wings would have solved the mystery of Egypt in a week; whereas
science, philosophy, and research, confined to the surface of the ground,
have been occupied for twenty centuries in accomplishing the undertaking.
It is found at last that both the existence of Egypt itself, and its
strange insulation in the midst of boundless tracts of dry and barren
sand, depend upon certain remarkable results of the general laws of rain.
The water which is taken up by the atmosphere from the surface of the sea
and of the land by evaporation, falls again, under certain circumstances,
in showers of rain, the frequency and copiousness of which vary very much
in different portions of the earth. As a general principle, rains are much
more frequent and abundant near the equator than in temperate climes, and
they grow less and less so as we approach the poles. This might naturally
have been expected; for, under the burning sun of the equator, the
evaporation of water must necessarily go on with immensely greater
rapidity than in the colder zones, and all the water which is taken up
must, of course, again come down.
It is not, however, wholly by the latitude of the region in which the
evaporation takes place that the quantity of rain which falls from the
atmosphere is determined; for the condition on which the falling back, in
rain, of the water which has been taken up by evaporation mainly depends,
is the cooling of the atmospheric stratum which contains it; and this
effect is produced in very various ways, and many different causes operate
to modify it. Sometimes the stratum is cooled by being wafted over ranges
of mountains; sometimes by encountering and becoming mingled with cooler
currents of air; and sometimes, again, by being driven in winds toward a
higher, and, consequently, cooler latitude. If, on the other hand, air
moves from cold mountains toward warm and sunny plains, or from higher
latitudes to lower, or if, among the various currents into which it falls,
it becomes mixed with air warmer than itself, its capacity for containing
vapor in solution is increased, and, consequently, instead of releasing
its hold upon the waters which it has already in possession, it becomes
thirsty for more. It moves over a country, under these circumstances, as a
warm and drying wind. Under a reverse of circumstances it would have
formed drifting mists, or, perhaps, even copious showers of rain.
It will be evident, from these considerations, that the frequency of the
showers, and the quantity of the rain which will fall, in the various
regions respectively which the surface of the earth presents, must depend
on the combined influence of many causes, such as the warmth of the
climate, the proximity and the direction of mountains and of seas, the
character of the prevailing winds, and the reflecting qualities of the
soil. These and other similar causes, it is found, do, in fact, produce a
vast difference in the quantity of rain which falls in different regions.
In the northern part of South America, where the land is bordered on every
hand by vast tropical seas, which load the hot and thirsty air with vapor,
and where the mighty Cordillera of the Andes rears its icy summits to
chill and precipitate the vapors again, a quantity of rain amounting to
more than ten feet in perpendicular height falls in a year. At St.
Petersburg, on the other hand, the quantity thus falling in a year is but
little more than one foot. The immense deluge which pours down from the
clouds in South America would, if the water were to remain where it fell,
wholly submerge and inundate the country. As it is, in flowing off through
the valleys to the sea, the united torrents form the greatest river on the
globe--the Amazon; and the vegetation, stimulated by the heat, and
nourished by the abundant and incessant supplies of moisture, becomes so
rank, and loads the earth with such an entangled and matted mass of
trunks, and stems, and twining wreaths and vines, that man is almost
excluded from the scene. The boundless forests become a vast and almost
impenetrable jungle, abandoned to wild beasts, noxious reptiles, and huge
and ferocious birds of prey.
Of course, the district of St. Petersburg, with its icy winter, its low
and powerless sun, and its twelve inches of annual rain, must necessarily
present, in all its phenomena of vegetable and animal life, a striking
contrast to the exuberant prolificness of New Grenada. It is, however,
after all, not absolutely the opposite extreme. There are certain regions
on the surface of the earth that are actually rainless; and it is these
which present us with the true and real contrast to the luxuriant
vegetation and teeming life of the country of the Amazon. In these
rainless regions all is necessarily silence, desolation, and death. No
plant can grow; no animal can live. Man, too, is forever and hopelessly
excluded. If the exuberant abundance of animal and vegetable life shut him
out, in some measure, from regions which an excess of heat and moisture
render too prolific, the total absence of them still more effectually
forbids him a home in these. They become, therefore, vast wastes of dry
and barren sands in which no root can find nourishment, and of dreary
rocks to which not even a lichen can cling.
The most extensive and remarkable rainless region on the earth is a vast
tract extending through the interior and northern part of Africa, and the
southwestern part of Asia. The Red Sea penetrates into this tract from the
south, and thus breaks the outline and continuity of its form, without,
however, altering, or essentially modifying its character. It divides it,
however, and to the different portions which this division forms,
different names have been given. The Asiatic portion is called Arabia
Deserta; the African tract has received the name of Sahara; while between
these two, in the neighborhood of Egypt, the barren region is called
simply _the desert_. The whole tract is marked, however, throughout, with
one all-pervading character: the absence of vegetable, and, consequently,
of animal life, on account of the absence of rain. The rising of a range
of lofty mountains in the center of it, to produce a precipitation of
moisture from the air, would probably transform the whole of the vast
waste into as verdant, and fertile, and populous a region I as any on the
globe.
[Illustration: VALLEY OF THE NILE]
As it is, there are no such mountains. The whole tract is nearly level,
and so little elevated above the sea, that, at the distance of many
hundred miles in the interior, the land rises only to the height of a few
hundred feet above the surface of the Mediterranean; whereas in New
Grenada, at less than one hundred miles from the sea, the chain of the
Andes rises to elevations of from ten to fifteen thousand feet. Such an
ascent as that of a few hundred feet in hundreds of miles would be wholly
imperceptible to any ordinary mode of observation; and the great rainless
region, accordingly, of Africa and Asia is, as it appears to the traveler,
one vast plain, a thousand miles wide and five thousand miles long, with
only one considerable interruption to the dead monotony which reigns, with
that exception, every where over the immense expanse of silence and
solitude. The single interval of fruitfulness and life is the valley of
the Nile.
There are, however, in fact, three interruptions to the continuity of this
plain, though only one of them constitutes any considerable interruption
to its barrenness. They are all of them valleys, extending from north to
south, and lying side by side. The most easterly of these valleys is so
deep that the waters of the ocean flow into it from the south, forming a
long and narrow inlet called the Red Sea. As this inlet communicates
freely with the ocean, it is always nearly of the same level, and as the
evaporation from it is not sufficient to produce rain, it does not even
fertilize its own shores. Its presence varies the dreary scenery of the
landscape, it is true, by giving us surging waters to look upon instead of
driving sands; but this is all. With the exception of the spectacle of an
English steamer passing, at weary intervals, over its dreary expanse, and
some moldering remains of ancient cities on its eastern shore, it affords
scarcely any indications of life. It does very little, therefore, to
relieve the monotonous aspect of solitude and desolation which reigns
over the region into which it has intruded.
The most westerly of the three valleys to which we have alluded is only a
slight depression of the surface of the land marked by a line of _oases_.
The depression is not sufficient to admit the waters of the Mediterranean,
nor are there any rains over any portion of the valley which it forms
sufficient to make it the bed of a stream. Springs issue, however, here
and there, in several places, from the ground, and, percolating through
the sands along the valley, give fertility to little dells, long and
narrow, which, by the contrast that they form with the surrounding
desolation, seem to the traveler to possess the verdure and beauty of
Paradise. There is a line of these oases extending along this westerly
depression, and some of them are of considerable extent. The oasis of
Siweh, on which stood the far-famed temple of Jupiter Ammon, was many
miles in extent, and was said to have contained in ancient times a
population of eight thousand souls. Thus, while the most easterly of the
three valleys which we have named was sunk so low as to admit the ocean to
flow freely into it, the most westerly was so slightly depressed that it
gained only a circumscribed and limited fertility through the springs,
which, in the lowest portions of it, oozed from the ground. The third
valley--the central one--remains now to be described.
The reader will observe, by referring once more to the map, that south of
the great rainless region of which we are speaking, there lie groups and
ranges of mountains in Abyssinia, called the Mountains of the Moon. These
mountains are near the equator, and the relation which they sustain to the
surrounding seas, and to currents of wind which blow in that quarter of
the world, is such, that they bring down from the atmosphere, especially
in certain seasons of the year, vast and continual torrents of rain. The
water which thus falls drenches the mountain sides and deluges the
valleys. There is a great portion of it which can not flow to the
southward or eastward toward the sea, as the whole country consists, in
those directions, of continuous tracts of elevated land. The rush of water
thus turns to the northward, and, pressing on across the desert through
the great central valley which we have referred to above, it finds an
outlet, at last, in the Mediterranean, at a point two thousand miles
distant from the place where the immense condenser drew it from the
skies. The river thus created is the Nile. It is formed, in a word, by the
surplus waters of a district inundated with rains, in their progress
across a rainless desert, seeking the sea.
If the surplus of water upon the Abyssinian mountains had been constant
and uniform, the stream, in its passage across the desert, would have
communicated very little fertility to the barren sands which it traversed.
The immediate banks of the river would have, perhaps, been fringed with
verdure, but the influence of the irrigation would have extended no
further than the water itself could have reached, by percolation through
the sand. But the flow of the water is not thus uniform and steady. In a
certain season of the year the rains are incessant, and they descend with
such abundance and profusion as almost to inundate the districts where
they fall. Immense torrents stream down the mountain sides; the valleys
are deluged; plains turn into morasses, and morasses into lakes. In a
word, the country becomes half submerged, and the accumulated mass of
waters would rush with great force and violence down the central valley of
the desert, which forms their only outlet, if the passage were narrow, and
if it made any considerable descent in its course to the sea. It is,
however, not narrow, and the descent is very small. The depression in the
surface of the desert, through which the water flows, is from five to ten
miles wide, and, though it is nearly two thousand miles from the rainy
district across the desert to the sea, the country for the whole distance
is almost level. There is only sufficient descent, especially for the last
thousand miles, to determine a very gentle current to the northward in the
waters of the stream.
Under these circumstances, the immense quantity of water which falls in
the rainy district in these inundating tropical showers, expands over the
whole valley, and forms for a time an immense lake, extending in length
across the whole breadth of the desert. This lake is, of course, from five
to ten miles wide, and a thousand miles long. The water in it is shallow
and turbid, and it has a gentle current toward the north. The rains, at
length, in a great measure cease; but it requires some months for the
water to run off and leave the valley dry. As soon as it is gone, there
springs up from the whole surface of the ground which has been thus
submerged a most rank and luxuriant vegetation.
This vegetation, now wholly regulated and controlled by the hand of man,
must have been, in its original and primeval state, of a very peculiar
character. It must have consisted of such plants only as could exist under
the condition of having the soil in which they grew laid, for a quarter of
the year, wholly under water. This circumstance, probably, prevented the
valley of the Nile from having been, like other fertile tracts of land,
encumbered, in its native state, with forests. For the same reason, wild
beasts could never have haunted it. There were no forests to shelter them,
and no refuge or retreat for them but the dry and barren desert, during
the period of the annual inundations. This most extraordinary valley seems
thus to have been formed and preserved by Nature herself for the special
possession of man. She herself seems to have held it in reserve for him
from the very morning of creation, refusing admission into it to every
plant and every animal that might hinder or disturb his occupancy and
control. And if he were to abandon it now for a thousand years, and then
return to it once more, he would find it just as he left it, ready for his
immediate possession. There would be no wild beasts that he must first
expel, and no tangled forests would have sprung up, that his ax must
first remove. Nature is the husbandman who keeps this garden of the world
in order, and the means and machinery by which she operates are the grand
evaporating surfaces of the seas, the beams of the tropical sun, the lofty
summits of the Abyssinian mountains, and, as the product and result of all
this instrumentality, great periodical inundations of summer rain.
For these or some other reasons Egypt has been occupied by man from the
most remote antiquity. The oldest records of the human race, made three
thousand years ago, speak of Egypt as ancient then, when they were
written. Not only is Tradition silent, but even Fable herself does not
attempt to tell the story of the origin of her population. Here stand the
oldest and most enduring monuments that human power has ever been able to
raise. It is, however, somewhat humiliating to the pride of the race to
reflect that the loftiest and proudest, as well as the most permanent and
stable of all the works which man has ever accomplished, are but the
incidents and adjuncts of a thin stratum of alluvial fertility, left upon
the sands by the subsiding waters of summer showers.
The most important portion of the alluvion of the Nile is the northern
portion, where the valley widens and opens toward the sea, forming a
triangular plain of about one hundred miles in length on each of the
sides, over which the waters of the river flow in a great number of
separate creeks and channels. The whole area forms a vast meadow,
intersected every where with slow-flowing streams of water, and presenting
on its surface the most enchanting pictures of fertility, abundance, and
beauty. This region is called the Delta of the Nile.
[Illustration: DELTA OF THE NILE]
The sea upon the coast is shallow, and the fertile country formed by the
deposits of the river seems to have projected somewhat beyond the line of
the coast; although, as the land has not advanced perceptibly for the last
eighteen hundred years, it may be somewhat doubtful whether the whole of
the apparent protrusion is not due to the natural conformation of the
coast, rather than to any changes made by the action of the river.
The Delta of the Nile is so level itself, and so little raised above the
level of the Mediterranean, that the land seems almost a continuation of
the same surface with the sea, only, instead of blue waters topped with
white-crested waves, we have broad tracts of waving grain, and gentle
swells of land crowned with hamlets and villages. In approaching the
coast, the navigator has no distant view of all this verdure and beauty.
It lies so low that it continues beneath the horizon until the ship is
close upon the shore. The first landmarks, in fact, which the seaman
makes, are the tops of trees growing apparently out of the water, or the
summit of an obelisk, or the capital of a pillar, marking the site of some
ancient and dilapidated city.
The most easterly of the channels by which the waters of the river find
their way through the Delta to the sea, is called, as it will be seen
marked upon the map, the Pelusiac branch. It forms almost the boundary of
the fertile region of the Delta on the eastern side. There was an ancient
city named Pelusium near the mouth of it. This was, of course, the first
Egyptian city reached by those who arrived by land from the eastward,
traveling along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. On account of its
thus marking the eastern frontier of the country, it became a point of
great importance, and is often mentioned in the histories of ancient
times.
The westernmost mouth of the Nile, on the other hand, was called the
Canopic mouth. The distance along the coast from the Canopic mouth to
Pelusium was about a hundred miles. The outline of the coast was formerly,
as it still continues to be, very irregular, and the water shallow.
Extended banks of sand protruded into the sea, and the sea itself, as if
in retaliation, formed innumerable creeks, and inlets, and lagoons in the
land. Along this irregular and uncertain boundary the waters of the Nile
and the surges of the Mediterranean kept up an eternal war, with energies
so nearly equal, that now, after the lapse of eighteen hundred years
since the state of the contest began to be recorded, neither side has been
found to have gained any perceptible advantage over the other. The river
brings the sands down, and the sea drives them incessantly back, keeping
the whole line of the shore in such a condition as to make it extremely
dangerous and difficult of access to man.
It will be obvious, from this description of the valley of the Nile, that
it formed a country which was in ancient times isolated and secluded, in a
very striking manner, from all the rest of the world. It was wholly shut
in by deserts, on every side, by land; and the shoals, and sand-bars, and
other dangers of navigation which marked the line of the coast, seemed to
forbid approach by sea. Here it remained for many ages, under the rule of
its own native ancient kings. Its population was peaceful and industrious.
Its scholars were famed throughout the world for their learning, their
science, and their philosophy. It was in these ages, before other nations
had intruded upon its peaceful seclusion, that the Pyramids were built,
and the enormous monoliths carved, and those vast temples reared whose
ruined columns are now the wonder of mankind. During these remote ages,
too, Egypt was, as now, the land of perpetual fertility and abundance.
There would always be corn in Egypt, wherever else famine might rage. The
neighboring nations and tribes in Arabia, Palestine, and Syria, found
their way to it, accordingly, across the deserts on the eastern side, when
driven by want, and thus opened a way of communication. At length the
Persian monarchs, after extending their empire westward to the
Mediterranean, found access by the same road to Pelusium, and thence
overran and conquered the country. At last, about two hundred and fifty
years before the time of Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, when he subverted
the Persian empire, took possession of Egypt, and annexed it, among the
other Persian provinces, to his own dominions. At the division of
Alexander's empire, after his death, Egypt fell to one of his generals,
named Ptolemy. Ptolemy made it his kingdom, and left it, at his death, to
his heirs. A long line of sovereigns succeeded him, known in history as
the dynasty of the Ptolemies--Greek princes, reigning over an Egyptian
realm. Cleopatra was the daughter of the eleventh in the line.
The capital of the Ptolemies was Alexandria. Until the time of Alexander's
conquest, Egypt had no sea-port. There were several landing-places along
the coast, but no proper harbor. In fact, Egypt had then so little
commercial intercourse with the rest of the world, that she scarcely
needed any. Alexander's engineers, however, in exploring the shore, found
a point not far from the Canopic mouth of the Nile where the water was
deep, and where there was an anchorage ground protected by an island.
Alexander founded a city there, which he called by his own name. He
perfected the harbor by artificial excavations and embankments. A lofty
light-house was reared, which formed a landmark by day, and exhibited a
blazing star by night to guide the galleys of the Mediterranean in. A
canal was made to connect the port with the Nile, and warehouses were
erected to contain the stores of merchandise. In a word, Alexandria became
at once a great commercial capital. It was the seat, for several
centuries, of the magnificent government of the Ptolemies; and so well was
its situation chosen for the purposes intended, that it still continues,
after the lapse of twenty centuries of revolution and change, one of the
principal emporiums of the commerce of the East.