Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Darius had even left behind his mother, his sister, to whom he was married as was Persian custom, and their children, whom Alexander treated with every courtesy; however, he declined Darius’ offer of an alliance in exchange for returning them. He also decided against pursuing the enemy into the Persian heartlands, preferring to secure the eastern Mediterranean where Egypt was still under Persian control and would be able to mount a counter-attack. So he would need to capture the Phoenician coast and Egypt before he could even consider marching east. Although most Phoenician cities along the coast of modern Syria and Palestine were keen to be rid of Persian control, Tyre required a six-month assault with siege engines, catapults and ship-borne battering rams, while similar siege further south at Gaza produced some 16 tons of frankincense and myrrh amongst the spoils.

  When a second envoy from Darius offered him all Asia Minor west of the Euphrates, his daughter’s hand in marriage and 10,000 talents, Alexander pointed out that he already held the lands and the money and could marry the princess regardless of her father’s permission. Knowing that it would also take Darius considerable time to form a new army, Alexander felt sufficiently secure to press on south into Egypt where he remained a full six months. Yet this was no eccentric diversion. His time here was crucial to both his strategic and commercial plans, since a strong coastal base was vital for communications across the Mediterranean and would allow him to take over the seaborne trade previously controlled by Phoenicia.

  So as his closest friend Hephaistion and the navy tracked him along the coast, Alexander covered the 130 miles of desert between Gaza and the Egyptian border in a week. Late in October 332 BC he marched into the fortified frontier town of Pelusion (Pelusium), but found no resistance: Egypt’s Persian governor simply handed over the treasury. Ordering his fleet to follow him by sailing south down the eastern branch of the Delta, Alexander set out at the head of his troops, passing through a landscape of temples and tombs not built to human scale. Yet for all its mystique, Egypt was not an unfamiliar place. Raised with his mother’s tales of exotic gods, Alexander, like many of his fellow countrymen, was well versed in the works of previous Greek travellers whose writings were the guidebooks for subsequent generations.

  After passing the ruins of the first Greek mercenary camps the Macedonians came to Bubastis, Egyptian Per-Baster or ‘house of Bastet’ the cat goddess, whose female devotees drank, danced and shook their sistrum rattles in fertility rites shared with the goddess Isis. Beyond lay Iunu, the Greek Heliopolis or City of the Sun. Although much of this once magnificent city had been destroyed a decade earlier by the Persians when reasserting their control, toppling its granite obelisks which now lay scorched and fallen, much of the massive temple beyond seems to have escaped unscathed. Within its multiple-columned interior dating back to the Pyramid Age, the primeval creator sun god Ra had been worshipped three times daily for the last three thousand years and his soul was still present within his sacred Mnevis bull.

  Crossing over the Nile to the west and the land of the dead, the Macedonian army reached the most famous wonders of the ancient world, the great pyramids of Giza, still covered in their shining white limestone. Alexander was so impressed by these two-thousand-year-old monuments that he declared he would erect one over his father’s tomb back home ‘to match the greatest of the pyramids of Egypt’. But Giza was only the beginning of a pyramid field which stretched for many miles, and as his troops pressed on south past the pyramids and sun temples of Abusir they could see the pyramids of Sakkara perched high on the desert escarpment above their final destination, Egypt’s traditional capital, Memphis.

  Amid scenes resembling VE day, Alexander marched into the great city and received a rapturous reception. Hailed as saviour and liberator by the Egyptians after two periods of Persian domination when an absent king had exploited their wealth, demonstrated scant respect for tradition and put down rebellion with ever harsher measures, he was a tangible, visible king doing all he could to demonstrate his respect for them and their country. Even rumoured to be descended from the gods themselves, Alexander was legitimate pharaoh of Egypt simply by right of conquest and was officially recognised as such by the city’s high priest, Maatranefer. As Egypt’s highest native aristocrat, the hereditary high priest of Memphis was the country’s spiritual leader whose close relationship with the monarchy brought true stability to the land. It was an alliance that wise kings were careful to promote, for, as Plato himself had noted, ‘in Egypt, it is not possible for a king to rule without the help of the priests’.

  Their power base at Memphis was the cult centre of the creator god Ptah, whose vast temple was filled with the images of pharaohs still worshipped at the site alongside Imhotep, architect of Egypt’s first pyramid. Honoured by the Greeks as Imouthes, whose reputation for wisdom equalled that of Egypt’s own goddess Isis, she was also regarded as the mother of the Apis bull and worshipped as the sacred Cow of Memphis. Both cow and bull were housed in a golden stall within the temple and honoured with a constant stream of offerings while musicians and dancing dwarves performed before them.

  Keen to pay his own respects just like the last native king, Nectanebo II, Alexander would have been equally keen to honour each of the bull’s predecessors who at death became one with Osiris, god of the Underworld. As Osiris-Apis, or Serapis, already a popular god in Alexander’s day, each successive bull had been mummified and interred within a vast network of catacomb tombs known as the Serapaion (Serapeum), which lay beneath the sands of Sakkara high above the city. In order to reach it, pilgrims such as Alexander had to follow its 2-km-long sphinx-lined causeway as it left the city and the lush green valley to rise up the cliffside to the dusty desert above. Yet Sakkara was no silent graveyard. Its pyramids, tombs and chapels were surrounded by elements of the funerary trade as far as the eye could see. Groups of foreign tourists mingled with trinket sellers hawking their wares as theagoi or ‘bearers of the gods’ trundled past with carts of small-scale animal mummies en route to burial, and the droning of funerary priests was intermittently drowned out by the wailing of professional female mourners, tugging their hair and beating their chests in time-honoured fashion.

  Passing the earliest of the pyramids created by the divine Imhotep, the long causeway wound on beyond clusters of smaller pyramids and long streets of tombs until finally reaching the Serapeum. As bright sunlight gave way to the gloom of its subterranean chambers, great galleries stretching out 100 metres into the darkness incorporated huge recesses within which the sacred bulls were interred inside great granite sarcophagi. Each one was adorned with jewellery and flowers, and the walls were covered with the prayers of kings and commoners paying homage to the collective souls of Apis.

  Yet bulls’ tombs were not the only ones here, and, in the grand tradition of royals buried deep within temple courtyards after the decline of the Valley of the Kings, the precincts of the Serapeum that had been so magnificently embellished under the last native dynasty contained the sepulchre of Nectanebo II, its last native king. Empty and unused after of his flight into exile in 343 BC, his green stone sarcophagus inscribed with finely wrought images of the sun god Ra in the Underworld stood in the centre of the burial chamber as a poignant reminder of Egypt’s lost glories.

  Now confirmed as Nectanebo IPs successor, Alexander was determined to initiate a new golden age, and on 14 November 332 BC ‘in the Throne Chamber of the Temple of Ptah’ was formally named pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt. Crowning him with the combined white and red crowns of the two respective regions, the high priest Maa-tranefer proclaimed him ‘Horus, the strong ruler who seizes the lands of the foreigners’. He was also given the name ‘Meryamun Setepenra’, ‘beloved of Amun and the chosen one of Ra’, written in hieroglyphs enclosed within a pair of protective oval cartouches. As ‘chosen one of Ra’ he became part of a tradition stretching back to the Pyramid Age, while the epithet ‘beloved of Amun’, the great state god identified with the Greek Zeus, reinforced his belief that hi
s own divinity was more than wishful propaganda. The coronation was followed by Macedonian-style feasting and drinking, Greek games and literary contests featuring leading performers from across the Greek world. Then Alexander took up residence in the palace at Memphis, becoming ‘the one in the great house’ or ‘perwer’, from which the term ‘pharaoh’ derives.

  Over the following two months he formulated his military and economic plans. Holding meetings with native priests and academics to discuss Egypt’s laws and customs. He was, like every pharaoh before him, the country’s nominal high priest, and set out plans to build and embellish temples dedicated to Egypt’s traditional gods. He also took time to study native beliefs and even attended lectures by the Egyptian philosopher Psammon. This respect for native tradition was revealed by the chance survival of one of the papyrus notices posted up around Memphis by Alexander’s officer Peukestas, which states ‘By order of Peukestas: no one is to pass. The chamber is that of a priest.’

  In January 331 BC, Alexander set out from Memphis to find possible locations for a new commercial site and sailed north down the western branch of the Nile to the old Greek trading colony of Naukratis. Deciding that the landlocked site offered little scope for development, he pressed on 45 miles further to the Mediterranean coast and reached Per-gwati, the Greek Canopus, where Osiris was worshipped as a human-headed jar believed to contain pieces of his dismembered body. Although the narrow strip of hilly land between the sea and Lake Mareotis to the south housed little more than a few fishing communities, Alexander recognised this part of Egypt’s windswept coast from the description given by Homer, remembering that ‘there is an island called Pharos in the rolling seas off the mouth of the Nile, a day’s sail out for a well-found vessel with a roaring wind astern. In this island is a sheltered cove where sailors come to draw their water from a well and can launch their boats on an even keel into the deep sea.’

  With the constant north-west wind, Zephyros, blowing in fresh from the Mediterranean Pharos was regarded as a sacred site, home to Poseidon’s protege Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea. It was here that the Greek king Menelaus had been stranded on his way home from the Trojan War until Proteus’ daughter Eidothee had helped him set sail before disappearing beneath the waves. And now Alexander himself had a similarly spiritual encounter when an old man appeared to him in a dream, reciting Homer’s very lines. When Alexander viewed the site on waking he declared Homer to have been not only a great poet but also a knowledgeable and far-seeing architect.

  For the stretch of land before him resembled ‘the top of a bull’s head with two straight peninsular horns jutting out into the open sea just beyond the two ends of the island’. Alexander was ‘at once struck by the excellence of the site, and convinced that if a city were built upon it, it would prosper. Such was his enthusiasm that he could not wait to begin the work; he himself designed the general layout of the new town, indicating the position of the market square, the number of temples to be built and which gods they should serve — the gods of Greece and the Egyptian Isis — and the precise limits of its outer defences.’

  Alexander also envisaged a great library, a fitting creation for a city founded on a literary quote, and five districts named after Greek letters: the Alpha district to be set around a great central crossroads, Beta the ‘Basileia’ or ‘palace quarter’, and Gamma, Delta and Epsilon housing the city’s mixed population. Supplied with an underground system of pipes and cisterns to bring in fresh water, the city was arranged around a grid pattern of roads which would funnel the sea breezes between buildings to provide cool air in summer, taking advantage of a climate likened to the French Riviera, ‘generally sunny, but sometimes rather cold and rainy in winter, and not intolerably hot in summer, there being an almost continuous northern breeze from the sea’.

  As Alexander paced rapidly up and down the shoreline, his cloak flapping behind him as he built the city in his mind, his architect Deinokrates followed along its invisible roads and avenues with increasing difficulty until it was suggested that the dark ground should be marked out using barley meal from the soldiers’ rations. When a large snake suddenly appeared in their midst, Alexander’s advisers identified it as the city’s guardian spirit or ‘Agathos Daimon’; then an eagle spotted overhead and sacred to Zeus was likewise regarded as auspicious. But then a great flock of seabirds suddenly descended and ate all trace of the fledgling city, and Alexander’s fears were only allayed when his trusted seer Aristander pronounced that the city would flourish and provide abundant resources to nourish its people.

  Named Alexandria after its founder, it would soon become the most famous and successful of the seventy or so settlements he founded throughout his growing empire, each created along traditional Greek lines and populated with a mixture of pensioned-off Macedonian troops, Greek settlers and people from the local region. Although Alexandria also attracted thousands of immigrants from all parts of the ancient world, it would always stand apart as ‘Alexandria ad Aegyptum’, ‘Alexandria-adjacent-to-Egypt’, and people would speak of making the journey ‘from Alexandria to Egypt’.

  After sending Aristotle’s nephew Kallisthenes down to Aswan in the far south to investigate his uncle’s revolutionary theory that the Nile flood was not sent forth by a subterranean god but caused by rains further south, Alexander himself decided to travel west to the remote oasis of Siwa to consult the oracle of Zeus-Ammon, the Libyan form of Amun. Set deep in the Sahara some 400 miles west of Thebes, the renowned oracle was believed to be an offshoot of Amun’s temple at Karnak, created at the same time as Zeus’s oracle at Olympias’ home town of Dodona in Epirus. With a reputation for infallibility, Siwa’s distant oracle had once been visited by a delegation from Nectanebo II whom Alexander was keen to emulate, and although he never revealed the precise reason for his own visit, the question of his own divinity was still at the forefront of his mind. On a more practical note, he may also have been testing the viability of ancient caravan routes which passed through Siwa and neighbouring oases to link central Africa to his new city on the coast, whose future success would presumably have been another question to put to the god.

  So in late January 331 BC Alexander set out west along the coastal road and, after receiving envoys from the Greek colony of Cyrene (modern Libya), his small group turned south into the Sahara. After a sudden violent sandstorm obliterated the track and disorientated their native guides, disaster was only averted when two black ravens miraculously appeared and led them to safety. Although his likely half-brother Ptolemy later recalled that their saviours had been snakes rather than birds, Alexander’s apparent ability to summon such guardians must have reinforced rumours that he might just be the son of a god he claimed to be.

  As the first pharaoh ever to complete the journey in person, Alexander emerged from the desert and made straight for the temple of Amnion high on a rocky outcrop. He was met by its high priest, greeting him in faltering Greek, ‘O, paidion’, ‘Oh, my son’, but mispronounced ‘O, pat dios’, ‘Oh, son of god’, a linguistic slip which no doubt delighted his visitor. Then, amid clouds of incense, the veiled image of Ammon, resembling a ‘phallic-looking mummy . . . draped in cloths and jewels’, was brought out into the light and carried around the temple forecourt before returning to the darkness of its inner sanctuary, followed by Alexander.

  When he finally emerged into the daylight some time later and was asked what had transpired, he would only say that he had been given ‘the answer which his heart desired’. Presumably discussing the nature of his divine paternity, he was adamant he would only reveal the secret to his mother on his return to Macedonia; but when asked if his father’s murder had been avenged, ‘the high priest commanded him to speak more guardedly, since his father was not a mortal’. Although such notions tend to be dismissed as little more than self-delusion, Alexander’s belief that he really was the son of a god was quite acceptable in the ancient world where the line between mortal and divine was at best blurred and where millions
worshipped as gods those who had once been human, and in some cases still were.

  Whatever the answers had been, Alexander was sufficiently satisfied to present rich offerings to the oracle. After returning to Memphis he ordered new shrines for the god’s divine image in his main cult centre, Thebes, as well as commissioning a granite shrine at Karnak temple and a limestone version at Luxor. He also drew inspiration from earlier pharaohs by incorporating the horns of Amun’s sacred creature, the ram, into his own royal regalia, and when the city of Mytilene offered him divine honours, he was portrayed on their coinage with the horns curling through his hair. The legend of the all-conquering ‘Two-horned One’ was born.

  When finalising his plans for Egypt’s government in his absence Alexander decided against placing power in the hands of one man. Instead, he followed Aristotle’s advice that a king must hold an even balance between all parties by appointing a committee of Egyptians, Macedonians and Persians to rule along traditional lines, headed by Kleomenes of Naukratis as governor. And now, having secured Egypt and the entire eastern Mediterranean, Alexander could finally set out in pursuit of Darius.

  Leaving Egypt in the spring of 331 BC a changed man and living god, he pursued and defeated Darius for the third and final time later that year. At the age of only twenty-five, Alexander, King of Macedonia, Hegemon of Greece, Overlord of Asia Minor and Pharaoh of Egypt had now become Great King of the Persian Empire by right of conquest, and married Darius’ beautiful daughter. He had also become the richest man in the world by inheriting 180,000 talents, around 375 tonnes of gold, much of which he transformed into coinage and changed the entire world economy forever.

  As trade flourished across a vast network of new markets, Greek culture arrived in the wake of a campaign route stretching a further 11,000 miles. Over the next eight years Alexander travelled east from Babylon and through Persia to Afghanistan (ancient Sogdia), where he acquired another wife. He and his men then crossed the snows of the Hindu Kush to reach India’s monsoon lands where he fought against rajahs and their fearsome war elephants, celebrating his victories by adopting the elephant-skin headdress. Declaring himself an invincible god, he returned west via the blazing deserts of Gedrosia (southern parts of Pakistan and Iran), navigating routes through the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf to arrive back in Babylon where he began to plan his next campaign into Arabia, then on across North Africa to the Straits of Gibraltar and into the unknown.