… he incurred the greatest censure from all because of his passion for Cleopatra – not now the passion he had displayed in Egypt (for that was a matter of hearsay), but that which was displayed in Rome itself. For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar’s own house, so that he too derived an ill repute on account of both of them. He was not at all concerned, however, about this, but actually enrolled them among the friends and allies of the Roman people.16
Cicero, a dedicated republican, met Cleopatra at this time and despised her for her arrogance (superbia). In a letter written to his great friend Atticus on 13 June 44, he made his feelings clear:
I hate the queen! And the man who vouches for her promises, Ammonius, knows I have good reason to do so; although the gifts she promised me were of a literary nature and not beneath my dignity – the sort I should not have minded proclaiming in public …. The queen’s insolence, when she was living in Caesar’s house in the gardens beyond the Tiber, I cannot recall without indignation. So no dealings with that lot. They seem to think I have not only no spirit, but no feelings at all.17
This extended Roman visit is yet another hazy period in Cleopatra’s life. We can confirm from contemporary records that a visit did take place, but cannot be certain that an entire unbroken eighteen months were spent in Rome. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Caesar, having only just restored stability to Egypt, would wish to risk Cleopatra’s precarious hold on her throne, while Cleopatra’s own family history showed that neglecting Alexandria to holiday in Rome was a very bad idea indeed. It may therefore be that there were two entirely separate visits to Rome: an initial diplomatic mission with Ptolemy XIV to gain official recognition as a ‘friend and ally’, and a second visit a year later, with or without Ptolemy, to discuss the future of Egypt and Cyprus.18
The Egyptian royal party may well have been present to witness Caesar’s dedication of a golden statue of Cleopatra in the Forum temple of Venus Genetrix (Venus the Mother). The story of this statue is recorded by Appian, who adds that it still stands in the temple as he writes in the second century AD. This superficially unlikely tale makes far more sense if we imagine Caesar dedicating a statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis to stand beside Venus. Within Egypt Cleopatra was strongly linked with Isis, who was in turn equated with the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, and she regularly dressed as the goddess. The dedication of a statue of Isis modelled on Cleopatra may not have been considered offensive to the people of Rome. The dedication of a statue of a living foreigner, on the other hand, would have caused huge public resentment. While it was acceptable, and even encouraged, for foreigners to recognise living Romans as divine beings, the Romans themselves did not worship living gods. Or did they? Caesar had always claimed descent from Venus, the divine mother of Aeneas. In 46 he had been publicly acknowledged as a demigod. In 45 his image was allowed to process with the images of the gods, and a temple statue was inscribed ‘to the Invincible God’. There were sacrifices on his birthday, annual vows for his continuing good health, a new temple-style pediment fronting his house and a new title, ‘Jupiter Julius’. It is quite clear that towards the end of his life Caesar, like Alexander the Great before him, was starting to investigate the intriguing question of his own divinity. At the same time, he was experimenting with the idea of kingship: his coy double refusal of a royal diadem tied with a laurel wreath, offered by Mark Antony during the February 44 Lupercalia (an ancient festival celebrated to purify the city of Rome), had fooled no one. Diadems continued to appear on Caesar’s statues, and Caesar himself continued to sit on a golden throne. Both aberrations were to be blamed fairly and squarely on the corrupting influence of the divine queen Cleopatra. Cicero’s private letters suggest that Cleopatra was unpopular in Rome, although as he self-avowedly disliked the queen he cannot be considered a disinterested witness. Any unpopularity is unlikely to have arisen because Cleopatra tempted Caesar with sexual favours as, to a certain extent, it was expected that a great man would keep a suitably prestigious mistress. Cleopatra was unpopular because she was perceived as leading Caesar into dangerous Hellenistic ways. It was far easier to blame Cleopatra for Caesar’s flirting with the trappings of royalty and divinity than it was to blame Caesar himself.
Caesar returned to Italy in the summer of 45, battle weary and suffering from worryingly frequent attacks of epilepsy. On 13 September, having bypassed Rome in favour of his private Lavicum estate (Monte Compatri, in Latium), he wrote a will which was to be lodged with the Vestal Virgins for safe-keeping. The will stipulated that a guardian was to be provided for any son and heir still to be born to him; an indication, perhaps, that Caesar and Calpurnia were still hoping to conceive a child together, or that Caesar was contemplating divorce and remarriage. Should he fail to father an heir, three-quarters of his estate was to pass to his great-nephew Gaius Octavius (Octavian), whom he adopted posthumously as his son. The remainder of his estate was to be shared between his nephew Quintus Pedius and his great-nephew Lucius Pinarius. His natural son Ptolemy Caesar was not mentioned. He could not have been. Roman law forbade bequests to foreigners.
A letter written by Cicero on 15 April 44 informs us that Cleopatra left Rome within a month of Caesar’s assassination: ‘I see nothing to object to in the flight of the queen.’19 A letter written a few weeks later discusses the recent miscarriage suffered by Tertulla (Tertia), wife of Cassius, before adding the cryptic comment, ‘I am hoping that it is true about the queen and about that Caesar [Caesarion?] of hers.’20 It seems that Cicero was hoping that Cleopatra, too, might miscarry. Freed from the constraints of a June 47 birth date for Caesarion, it is possible to use this letter to argue that Cleopatra’s son was a posthumous child born soon after Caesar’s death. But this interpretation would also suggest that Caesarion’s conception occurred during Caesar’s lengthy 46–5 Spanish campaign; Caesarion must therefore have been fathered by either Ptolemy XIV or someone else entirely.21 The fact that contemporary Romans, who of course knew exactly when Caesarion was born, never mention a dating discrepancy when discussing Caesarion’s paternity is a strong if indirect indication that Caesarion was not conceived in Caesar’s absence. A far better interpretation of the letter is that Cicero is referring to a later pregnancy. If this is the case, we must assume that this second pregnancy ended in an early miscarriage as there is no record of a second child born to Cleopatra and Caesar.22
Cleopatra and her entourage returned to Alexandria. A papyrus dated to 26 July 44 confirms that Ptolemy XIV was still alive in July; he was, however, dead before the end of August. With no other heir to the throne, the three-year-old Caesarion became Ptolemy XV Theos Philopator Philometor (the Father-Loving, Mother-Loving God).
CHAPTER FIVE
The New Isis
There existed at Armant till the year 1861 an extremely interesting temple built by Cleopatra the Great in honour of the birth of her son Caesarion. This was completely demolished between the years 1861 and 1863 and the materials were taken and used in the construction of a sugar factory; but prior to that date, it had been visited and described by many travellers, and fortunately a number of drawings, plans and photographs of it were taken by them. We are engaged upon a reconstruction of this temple for publication and we should be very grateful for any help which your readers may be able to give us, to make this as complete as possible.
Robert Mond and Oliver Myers, Geographical Journal1
Caesarion’s birth was a triumph. It gave Cleopatra a new purpose – the preservation of her throne for her child and his descendants – and, as both dynastic and Ptolemaic tradition allowed mothers to rule on behalf of their infant sons, it freed her from the irksome obligation to remain married to a male co-regent. It is perhaps no coincidence that Ptolemy XIV died as soon as it became apparent that Caesarion’s future lay in Egypt rather than in Rome, and Josephus, for one, has no doubt that the young king was murdered: ‘She was also by nature very covetous, and stuck at no wickedness. She had already poisoned her
brother, because she knew that he was to be king of Egypt, and this when he was but fifteen years old …’2
Josephus, consistently anti-Cleopatra and prone to sweeping statements, offers no proof in support of his allegation. But, biased though they are, his remarks do carry a certain ring of truth. It is tempting to develop a dramatic reconstruction – the young and inexperienced Ptolemy left behind in Alexandria while his sister makes a second diplomatic trip to Rome; Ptolemy discovering that, with Caesar dead, the people were prepared to support his solo rule; Ptolemy considering marriage with the deposed and still-popular Arsinoë IV; Ptolemy succumbing to temptation and declaring himself king; Cleopatra returning sooner than expected and dealing swiftly with the crisis. However, it is important to remember that the estimated average life expectancy for men who survived infancy in Ptolemaic Egypt was only thirty-three. To die at just fifteen years of age was sad, but it was by no means unusual.
Ptolemy XV Caesar, king of Egypt, was to play a major part in his mother’s propaganda. With a son by her side, Cleopatra VII could abandon any thought she might have had of adopting the role of a female king and could develop instead a powerful new identity as a semi-divine mother: an identity that had the huge advantage of being instantly recognisable to both her Egyptian and her Greek subjects. Divinity was nothing new. Cleopatra had become a goddess towards the end of her father’s reign, when she had been united with her brothers and sister as the New Sibling-Loving Gods. But now she was to be specifically identified with Egypt’s most famous single mother, the goddess Isis.
From the very dawn of the dynastic age, religion had been used to protect the position of the royal family. The belief in the king’s ability to ward off isfet (chaos) by maintaining maat (an untranslatable concept which is best understood as a combination of ‘rightness’, justice, truth and the status quo) ensured that, although individual kings were occasionally removed from power, there was never any real attempt to abolish the monarchy. This overwhelming need to preserve maat encouraged a slow, conservative approach to life. Experimentation was seen as dangerous and unnecessary – it might upset the gods and bring chaos – and it was both safer and more comforting to stick to the tried and tested ways. This conservatism is particularly obvious in official art, which, to the non-specialist, shows surprisingly little development from the beginning of the Old Kingdom until the end of the Ptolemaic age.
Maat the concept was personified in the form of Maat the goddess, the beautiful, truthful daughter of the sun god Re. Many dynastic scenes show kings standing with Maat, or offering a miniature squatting image of Maat to much larger gods. As both Maat and the queen consort were companions of the king, it was perhaps inevitable that their roles and appearances would become confused. Only the single feather of truth worn on her head distinguished Maat from the living queen. Official Egyptian art was never spontaneous, and this confusion was far from accidental. As the dynastic age progressed, Egypt’s queens developed a high public profile, an array of secular and religious titles, and a wide range of headdresses incorporating divine symbols such as the vulture crown, the double or multiple uraeus, the cow horns of Hathor, the solar disc associated with the sun gods and the tall, twin plumes associated with the gods Amen, Montu and Min. With both Hathor and Isis sporting near-identical headdresses, the blurring of the boundary between the mortal and the immortal intensified.
While the Egyptians compared their queens to goddesses, many early Egyptologists saw them as breeding machines and little else. An increasing awareness of the complexities of Egyptian thought over the past century has confirmed that the consort was in fact an essential feminine part of the complex theology of kingship.3 Yes, the consort was expected to produce a son and heir, but this was by no means essential. If necessary, an heir could be found in the harem, or could be adopted from an elite family. It was far more important that the consort be politically astute and theologically acceptable. She was expected to rule the country in her husband’s absence, and to participate in religious rituals that demanded a female celebrant. She might even, in the absence of an heir, be expected to rule Egypt as a female king. As the spouse of a semi-divine being, and the potential mother of a demigod, the dynastic consort was herself considered a source of religious and political power.
Egypt’s first ‘goddesses’ appear before her first kings and queens. Prehistoric cemeteries have yielded bone and ivory female figurines whose obvious pubic regions and breasts indicate that they are to be associated with sexuality, fertility and, perhaps, rebirth. Near-contemporary pottery is decorated with scenes of daily life and life beyond death. Water and boats feature prominently: there are animals, birds, men and boats sailing on rivers of wavy lines. Occasionally in these scenes we see a plump, obviously female figure accompanied by smaller-scale men. This woman is paralleled by small terracotta female figurines that, with simple, bird-like faces but well-defined breasts and hips, perform a strange dance with their arms curved above their heads. The faceless females belong to an age before writing. We cannot name them, but it seems that we are looking at Egypt’s original mother goddesses.
By 3100 we have both a royal name and a recognisable goddess. The Narmer Palette is a large slate votive palette recording the victories of a king whose two-symbol name is represented by the hieroglyphic signs of the catfish and the chisel: N’r Mr.4 The palette displays scenes of royal dominance and celebrates the triumph of order over chaos. On one face Narmer, wearing the white crown of southern Egypt, raises a club to smite an enemy who cringes at his feet. On the reverse Narmer, now wearing the red crown, marches with a troop of soldiers. Before him lie five decapitated victims of war, their heads placed neatly between their legs. Below, in a separate scene, Narmer takes the form of a bull to gore an enemy. Gazing down on both sides of the palette is the face of the cow goddess Bat, an ancient version of the mother goddess Hathor.
Egypt’s gods started life as independent totemic local deities. Soon they were linked by an intricate mythology designed to explain the otherwise inexplicable: matters that today we explain by science. To address the fundamental need for understanding, to explain creation and death, each priesthood devised a mythology featuring their own particular god. Hathor, Lady of Perfume, was celebrated as the daughter of the sun god Re; an uninhibited goddess of motherhood, music, love and drunkenness. In some tales she assumed the role of the Golden One to accompany Re on his daily journey across the sky. In others she was the gentle cow who suckled the king of Egypt. At Memphis she was the Mistress of the Sycamore, who sustained the dead with food and drink; at Thebes she became the compassionate Mistress of the West, who cared for the dying sun. But when she was roused, mild-mannered Hathor transformed into Sekhmet, the Powerful One. Sekhmet, an uncompromising lion-headed goddess who breathed fire and was armed with plagues and pestilence, was the protector of Egypt’s kings. From the reign of Narmer onwards, the cult of Hathor grew in importance until it became Egypt’s dominant female-based cult.
Isis, several centuries younger than Hathor, is first named as a protective goddess, ‘the Great Isis’, in the 5th Dynasty Pyramid texts, where she appears as one of the nine original gods (the Ennead) of Heliopolis. Her name, Aset in the original Egyptian, is represented by the sign of a throne, and Isis herself often appears with a small throne sign topping her crown. Alternatively Isis could be identified with the cobra or uraeus worn on the royal brow. This obvious connection between the goddess and kingship, both living and dead, would persist as long as the cult of Isis survived. As the dynastic age progressed, Isis grew in status and power, absorbing the roles, traditions and accessories of other Egyptian goddesses, including the once-dominant Hathor, so that by the start of the Ptolemaic age Hathor and Isis were virtually indistinguishable in appearance. Both were beautiful women who wore the tall cow horn and solar disc headdress, and both carried the sistrum or sacred rattle whose rhythms could stimulate the gods.
Outside Egypt the cult of Isis was spread by the sailors, merchants
and travellers who regularly sailed around the eastern Mediterranean, using the Greek island of Delos, home to a flourishing cult of Isis, as a trading post. Herodotus, writing in c. 450, was tolerably familiar with the goddess:
All Egyptians use bulls and bull-calves for sacrifice, if they have passed the test for ‘cleanness’; but they are forbidden to sacrifice heifers, on the ground that they are sacred to Isis. The statue of Isis shows a female figure with cow’s horns, like the Greek representations of Io…5
Just as she had absorbed Hathor, Isis gradually assimilated the attributes and appearance of several Greek goddesses. The earth mother Demeter, the wise Athene, the sister-consort Hera, the virgin huntress Artemis and, most particularly, the beautiful and loving Aphrodite all donated aspects of their mythology, allowing Isis to develop into a versatile, powerful, universal goddess with an appeal strong enough to make her, in the first century AD, a serious rival to the growing cult of Christianity.6 The first apparent reference to a cult of Isis in mainland Greece comes from Piraeus, the port of Athens, and pre-dates Alexander’s arrival in Egypt. The next, more firmly established reference dates to the second century BC. In Rome, the first temple to Isis was raised on the Capitoline Hill in c. 80. It was destroyed almost immediately, then quickly replaced. Successive temples were destroyed (and subsequently rebuilt) in 58, 53, 50 and 48 and in AD 19. Meanwhile, the official Roman attitude to Isis was both cautious and inconsistent. Julius Caesar refused the priesthood of Isis permission to enter Rome, yet the triumvirate permitted a sanctuary dedicated to the gods of Egypt, Isis included, in 43.
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