As Rome moved into Egypt, Egyptian culture started to invade Rome. Egyptian artefacts were suddenly all the rage and, in a move guaranteed to confuse the archaeologists of the future, the Romans started to import both genuine and fake Egyptian antiquities. Now sphinxes and obelisks stood, slightly self-consciously, alongside the statues of noble Romans that adorned the public squares. In the Field of Mars in Rome, a Late Period Egyptian obelisk even served as the gnomon for a gigantic sundial:
Augustus [Octavian] used the obelisk in the Campus Martius in a remarkable way: to cast a shadow and so mark out the length of the days and nights. An area was paved in proportion to the height of the monolith in such a way that the shadow at noon on the shortest day would reach to the edge of the pavement. As the shadow shrank and expanded, it was measured by bronze rods fixed in the pavement.10
Cleopatra’s treasure – now Octavian’s treasure – was taken to Rome, where it was used to finance Octavian’s political career. The statue of Victory that Octavian erected in the new Senate House was decorated with Egyptian spoils, as were the Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva and, appropriately perhaps, the temple of the Divine Julius. For Dio, this made a fitting end to a turbulent tale:
Thus Cleopatra, though defeated and captured, was nevertheless glorified, inasmuch as her adornments repose as dedications in our temples and she herself is seen in gold in the shrine of Venus.11
CHAPTER NINE
History Becomes Legend
Cleopatra had a jazz band
In her castle on the Nile
Every night she gave a jazz dance
In her queer Egyptian style …
J. Morgan and J. Coogan, ‘Cleopatra Had a Jazz Band’1
Three hundred years after her death, Cleopatra-Isis was still being worshipped at Philae. Her image would remain on Egypt’s coins for decades and on her temple walls for thousands of years. But this version of Cleopatra the queen and wise mother goddess was confined to Egypt. In the wider Mediterranean world the well-oiled Roman propaganda machine continued to manipulate public opinion against Cleopatra long after the battle of Actium.
Octavian was determined that his own personal history should be recorded for posterity in a way that justified his not always heroic actions and confirmed his god-given right to rule; a difficult matter for a self-proclaimed republican to explain. To achieve this, he not only published his own autobiography, he edited, and in some cases burned, Rome’s official records. Much of his propaganda – the ephemeral jokes, graffiti, pamphlets, private letters and public speeches – has of course been lost. But enough remains to allow us an understanding of the corruption of Cleopatra’s memory.
As Cleopatra had played a key role in Octavian’s struggle to power, her story was allowed to survive as an integral part of his. But it was to be diminished into just two episodes: her relationship with Julius Caesar and, more particularly, her relationship with Mark Antony. Caesar, the adoptive father who gave Octavian his right to rule, was to be remembered with respect as a brave and upright man who manipulated an immoral foreign woman for his own ends. Antony, Octavian’s rival, was to be remembered with a mixture of pity and contempt as a brave but fatally weak man hopelessly ensnared in the coils of an immoral foreign woman. Cleopatra, stripped of any political validity, was to be remembered as that immoral foreign woman. Almost overnight she became the most frightening of Roman stereotypes: an unnatural female. A woman who worshipped crude gods, dominated men, slept with her brothers and gave birth to bastards. A woman foolish enough to think that she might one day rule Rome, and devious enough to lure a decent man away from his hearth and home. This version of Cleopatra is, of course, the precise opposite of the chaste and loyal Roman wife, typified by the wronged Octavia and the virtuous Livia, just as Cleopatra’s exotic eastern land is the louche feminine counterpoint to upright, uptight, essentially masculine Rome. As public enemy number one, Cleopatra was extremely useful to Octavian, who not unnaturally preferred to be remembered fighting misguided foreigners rather than decent fellow Romans.
The most vivid near-contemporary interpretation of Cleopatra is a fictional account. When, in 29, Publius Vergilius Maro started work on his twelve-volume Aeneid, he determined to create a modern epic in the style of Homer’s Odyssey (Books 16) and Iliad (Books 712) that would both glorify Rome and celebrate Octavian’s rule. Aeneas, son of the goddess Venus and founder of Rome, was to be equated with Octavian, descendant of Venus and of Aeneas and founder of the Roman Empire. Underpinning the first part of The Aeneid is the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas. The eponymous hero, fleeing by boat from devastated Troy, is desperate to reach his ancestral homeland but runs into a storm and washes ashore on the North African coast. Here he meets Dido, founder and queen of Carthage, who is compelled by the gods to fall in love with him. The two go through a form of marriage, which Dido recognises as legally binding but Aeneas, it soon transpires, does not. Happy in their love for each other, they forget the outside world. But Aeneas is a strong moral character, obedient to the will of the gods. Faced with the choice between pleasure and duty he chooses duty, and deserts the queen:
‘I know, O queen, you can list a multitude of kindnesses you have done me. I shall never deny them and never be sorry to remember Dido while I remember myself, while my spirit still governs this body. Much could be said. I shall say only a little. It was never my intention to be deceitful or run away without your knowing, and do not pretend that it was. Nor have I ever offered you marriage or entered into that contract with you.’2
Furious and despairing, Dido curses her former lover, then commits suicide rather than face life alone.
Parallels with the stories of Julius Caesar (a strong man who put duty above pleasure) and of Antony (a lesser man than Aeneas/Caesar/Octavian who was tempted by a foreign queen and found wanting) are obvious. Dido, a woman who willingly enters into a pseudo-marriage and who is ultimately destroyed by her own guilt, is to be equated with Cleopatra. Virgil is, however, relatively sympathetic to Dido, whose life has been deliberately destroyed by the gods. Less sympathetic to Cleopatra is his anachronistic reference to Aeneas’s intricate shield, forged by Vulcan, which features Octavian’s victory at the battle of Actium:
On the other side, with the wealth of the barbarian world and warriors in all kinds of different armour, came Antony … With him sailed Egypt and the power of the East from as far as distant Bactria, and there bringing up the rear was the greatest outrage of all, his Egyptian wife! … The queen summoned her warships by rattling her Egyptian timbrels – she was not yet seeing the two snakes there at her back – while Anubis barked and all manner of monstrous gods levelled their weapons at Neptune and Venus and Minerva.3
Faced with such a glorious image, Virgil’s readers might perhaps forget just how weak Octavian’s military record actually was.
The subversive Augustan poet Sextus Propertius writes longingly of his feisty mistress Cynthia. He, like Mark Antony, has been ensnared and to a certain extent emasculated by a powerful woman, and he is not afraid of admitting it. Answering the question, ‘Why do you wonder if a woman controls my life?’ he lists examples of famous, unnaturally dominating women, including the Amazon Penthesilea, Omphale, queen of Lydia, Semiramis and, of course, Cleopatra, ‘the whore queen of Canopus’. Later he provides a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tribute to Octavian and the battle of Actium. Clearly Propertius is aware of the irony of a Roman man celebrating a great victory over a mere woman, but, like Virgil before him, he sensibly sees no need to labour this delicate point.4 In this he is joined by his contemporary Horace, who is happy to reduce Cleopatra to the status of a madwoman drunk on power, yet who also gives a surprisingly sympathetic account of her death: ‘fiercer she was in the death she chose, as though she did not wish to cease being queen’.5 By restoring some of Cleopatra’s dignity, Horace actually makes her a more credible and worthy foe for Octavian.
Rome’s historians, writing later than the poets, preserve a more rounded imp
ression of Cleopatra. She is seductive and unnatural, yes, but we also catch glimpses of an educated, even intelligent woman. But history, in Rome, was not the strict discipline that it is (or should be) today. Sparse historical ‘facts’ were woven into a coherent narrative with large helpings of personal opinion and guesswork. Stories were selected in order to make a moral or political point. And, of course, the Roman historians concentrated on Cleopatra’s interaction with the Roman world while ignoring her life in Egypt. The two most influential of Cleopatra’s ‘biographers’ are Plutarch and Dio; from their works come the Cleopatras described by later classical authors. The Roman writer Suetonius (The Divine Julius and The Divine Augustus) and the somewhat unreliable Alexandrian Greek Appian (The Civil Wars) add further to Cleopatra’s tale.
Maestrius Plutarchus (Plutarch), a Greek from Chaironeia in Boeotia, wrote his Parallel Lives in c. AD 100, using the not always successful device of ‘parallels’ to allow a comparison between the moral strengths and weaknesses of his Greek and Roman subjects. Among those he studied were Pompey the Great (paired with the Spartan king Agesilaus), Julius Caesar (paired with Alexander the Great) and Mark Antony (paired with Demetrios Poliorcetes of Macedon, son of Antigonos ‘the One-Eyed’). Cleopatra’s story was, of necessity, interwoven with theirs. Although it is claimed that Plutarch had access to the memoirs (now lost) of Cleopatra’s physician Olympus, and that his grandfather had a friend who knew Cleopatra’s cook, his sources remain hidden. His methodology, however, is made clear from the outset:
… it is not histories that I am writing, but lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities. Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.6
The Lives were popular with Plutarch’s fellow Romans, and popular again in medieval times and the Renaissance, when they inspired a whole host of authors and artists. Plutarch’s Cleopatra is a confusing creature; he seems unable to make up his mind whether she is essentially good or essentially bad, although he is certain that she is manipulative, and that she has been the ruin of at least one good Roman.
The Greek historian and Roman senator Cassius Dio Cocceianus wrote his highly readable, action-packed eighty-volume Roman History in the years between AD 200 and 222. He tells us that he spent a decade researching his magnum opus, and that he consulted all the important references. These, most unfortunately, go unnamed, but almost certainly included the works of the historians Livy and Polybius. Cleopatra’s story stretches from Book 42 – Julius Caesar in Egypt – to her suicide in Book 51. Dio’s Cleopatra is an erotically powerful, manipulative woman with a fatal allure. Naturally, Antony is unable to resist her. The two deaths are followed by a brief but damning character assessment. Antony is a contradiction: brave yet foolish, both generous and harsh, ‘characterised equally by greatness of soul and by servility of mind’, while Cleopatra:
… was of insatiable passion and insatiable avarice; she was swayed often by laudable ambition, but overweening effrontery. By love she gained the title Queen of the Egyptians, and when she hoped by the same means to win also that of Queen of the Romans, she failed of this, and lost the other besides. She captivated the two greatest Romans of her day, and because of the third she destroyed herself.7
Plutarch and Dio were non-Roman by birth, yet they were happy to transmit the official Roman worldview. The historian Josephus, or Joseph son of Matthias (c. AD 37–100), had a Jewish education and saw things from a slightly different perspective. Josephus had stood against the Romans in the Jewish–Roman war of AD 66–73. Having failed to commit suicide with his fellow soldiers, he was captured by Vespasian’s forces and changed his allegiance. Now a loyal Roman citizen, Titus Flavius Josephus settled in Rome, where, in receipt of generous public funds, he published a series of works, each intent on proving that he was both a good Roman and a good Jew. His two-volume Against Apion was published in response to an anti-Jewish outburst by the Greek grammarian Apion of Alexandria. Book 2 includes a highly idiosyncratic outline of Ptolemaic history that, of course, includes an unflattering portrait of Cleopatra, who, in Josephus’s eyes, commits the double offence of being both anti-Roman and anti-Jewish:
… This man [Apion] also makes mention of Cleopatra, the last queen of Alexandria, and abuses us, [the Jews], because she was ungrateful to us; whereas he ought to have reproved her, who indulged herself with all kinds of injustices and wicked practices, both with regard to her nearest relations and husbands who had loved her, and, indeed, in general with regard to all the Romans and those emperors that were her benefactor … she destroyed the gods of her country and the sepulchres of her progenitors, and while she had received her kingdom from the first Caesar, she had the impudence to rebel against his son [Octavian] …8
In AD 640 Egypt fell to the Islamic forces led by the Arab general Amr Ibn-al-As. Almost immediately, Muslim Egypt became isolated from the Christian world. For over a thousand years, until the sixteenth-century Ottoman conquest, western scholars continued to study ancient Egypt second-hand via the only sources available to them: the classical authors and the Bible. Meanwhile, in Egypt, a separate and very different historical tradition was evolving. Medieval Arabic scholars had access to Coptic (Christian), classical, Jewish and Arabic texts, including the Egyptian history written by the seventh-century Coptic Bishop John of Nikiou, which includes a sympathetic account of the good Queen Cleopatra, wife of Julius Caesar.9 Most importantly, they also had first-hand access to the ancient monuments, and to the scholars and storytellers who preserved Egypt’s oral heritage. From this invaluable information the Arab historians were able to develop a parallel understanding of Egypt’s past which included a very different version of Cleopatra from that recognised in the West. The traveller and historian Al-Masudi (died c. 956) introduces us to the eastern Cleopatra, who variously appears as Qilopatra, Kilapatra or Aklaupatr:
… She was a sage, a philosopher, who elevated the ranks of scholars and enjoyed their company. She also wrote books on medicine, charms and cosmetics in addition to many other books ascribed to her which are known to those who practice medicine.10
This Cleopatra is the ‘virtuous scholar’ mentioned in Chapter 1 (pages 32–3): a public benefactor who protects her people and presides over academic seminars, where she displays an impressive knowledge of mathematics, science and philosophy. She is credited with the authorship of a series of books ranging from cosmetics (an important and by no means female-orientated science in Egypt) through gynaecology to coins, weights and measures.
As a detailed account of Cleopatra’s reign, the Arab history is in many ways flawed: Bishop John believed, for example, that Cleopatra built both the Heptastadion linking Pharos to the mainland and the canal which brought fresh water to Alexandria; others believed that she built the Pharos lighthouse. But looking beneath these specifics, and allowing for the fact that the historians may well have confused the lives of several Ptolemaic queens, plus other scholarly women, it does confirm that the lingering memory of Cleopatra within Egypt was a positive and appreciative one – a memory which focused on her political and administrative achievements rather than her love life. Unfortunately, the works of the Arabic historians, written in Arabic and until recently not widely available in translation, have been to a large extent overlooked by western Egyptologists.
Meanwhile, in the West, the Roman version of Cleopatra continued to evolve, reflecting contemporary images and ideals of womanhood. She became a beauty rather than a monster and, as beauty was unthinkingly equated wi
th goodness, her story became that of an unconventional life redeemed by loyalty to a man. At the same time, her firm association with a snake led to a hazy identification with the Biblical Eve. The Christian Church, of course, forbade suicide. But in a world accustomed to stories of Christian martyrs finding redemption through suffering and death, Cleopatra’s story was an acceptable variant. In 1380 Geoffrey Chaucer included the legend of Cleopatra the martyr in his Legend of Good Women, and her transformation into a virtuous queen who lived only for the love of a man was complete.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, translated into French by Jacques Amyot (1559), then from the French into English by Sir Thomas North (1579, 1595, 1603), served as the inspiration behind William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (c. 1600), Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606) and Coriolanus (c. 1607). The parallels between Plutarch and Antony and Cleopatra are obvious. Plutarch says
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