It seems she already knew. Approaching the city’s eastern Canopic Gate, he was met by a great procession of ‘Sacred Emblems’, divine figures, the statues of gods and royal ancestors carried on the shoulders of their priests. Chief amongst them no doubt was the Living Isis, resplendent in her carrying chair as she came out of her royal city to meet her conquering hero.
During the great ceremonies of thanksgiving for their victory, Cleopatra and Caesar must have visited the Soma, as much a place of pilgrimage for him as it was for her. As Alexander’s living successor, and now sole pharaoh, she would have paid homage to his guardian spirit (daimon) within his mummified body; and with the couple’s shared dream of re-establishing his empire now a real possibility, the dynastic ramifications of the child she was carrying would not have been lost on either of them.
After leaving offerings, perhaps in Caesar’s case his rings and one of his purple cloaks in the manner of later Roman leaders, he seems to have used the opportunity to conduct proper funerary rites for his former son-in-law Pompeius. His embalmed head was now buried in the Nemeseion, a tomb within the grove of Nemesis by Alexandria’s newly extended eastern city wall. Then, to thank his Jewish allies including those in the city who had remained loyal throughout the fighting, ‘Julius Caesar made a pillar of brass for the Jews at Alexandria and declared publicly that they were citizens of Alexandria’, confirming traditional rights which had been undermined following their support for certain rulers in previous royal feuds.
Peace restored, Caesar resumed his official role, but, despite four months of civil war and against all Roman expectations, he did not absorb Egypt into the Roman empire. This would have meant installing a governor who might well take power for himself, and since Cleopatra was his most trustworthy ally he once more implemented Auletes’ will, explaining that ‘the elder of the two boys — the late king — being now no more, Caesar assigned the kingdom to the younger one and to Kleopatra, the elder of the two daughters who had remained his loyal adherent’. So substituting one Ptolemy for another, twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIV became Kleopatra’s nominal co-ruler, the couple assuming the title ‘Theoi Philopatores Philadelphoi’, ‘the Father-loving, Sibling-loving Gods’ — although her name once again took precedence.
Nevertheless, formal co-rulership with her youngest brother does not seem to have prevented Cleopatra from marrying Caesar ‘according to Egyptian rites’. According to the earliest Arabic source, Caesar ‘fell in love with her, married her and had a son with her’; a chalcedony gem bearing Caesar’s image, his laurel wreath embellished with a festive flower garland, was perhaps made to commemorate such a happy event.
Because Caesar was still married to Calpurnia, his polygamous marriage to Cleopatra was unrecognised in Roman law — as, indeed, was marriage between a Roman citizen and a foreigner. This explains why Roman sources refer to Cleopatra as Caesar’s ‘mistress’ rather than his ‘wife’. Although this is something that most modern historians still choose to follow, it ignores the fact that Egyptian marriage was traditionally little more than cohabitation.
Since the status of the two people involved in this particular case must surely have required the gods to formalise their union, a visit to their respective cult centres at sites throughout Egypt could only be undertaken with a journey along Egypt’s main highway, the Nile. And according to the ancient sources, this is indeed a journey which Cleopatra and Caesar undertook.
PART THREE
Chapter 5
The River of Life: the Progress down the Nile
Although it is certain that Cleopatra and Caesar embarked on a Nile cruise following their victory in the Alexandrian War, historians have long been divided about its duration. Some claim that it ‘could have been scarcely more than a day trip’, or at best a week, while others believe they cruised south for several months. The Roman historian Appian added that details of their cruise ‘are related more particularly in my Egyptian history’, which although sadly lost, does suggest a journey of considerable duration.
It would certainly not have been the first such riverborne progress made by the Ptolemies, who had often used the journey as a means of maintaining their profile among their Egyptian subjects — to suppress unrest or celebrate a victory, marriage or birth. Ptolemy IV and Arsinoe III had travelled upriver to celebrate military success in 217 BC, while the first Cleopatra and her husband had sailed as far south as Philae in 186 BC to announce their defeat of rebels and the safe delivery of a son. Cleopatra’s own grandfather, Ptolemy IX Chickpea, had similarly traveled the length of the country to perform sacred rites in the deep south, and her father, Auletes, had cruised ‘through the whole country, and back to Memphis where he attended the performance of religious festivities and was on that occasion escorted by his nobles, his wives, and his royal children.’
Now Caesar too ‘ascended the Nile with 400 ships, exploring the country in company with Cleopatra and generally enjoying himself with her,’ although rather more than a simple holiday, their cruise would have been something like a waterborne Triumph to celebrate the successful outcome of the recent hostilities. With their huge military escort of warships and troop carriers displaying the full extent of Rome’s military powers, it was also a means for Cleopatra to show off her antique land to Caesar, who would finally see for himself the vast resources at his disposal through the good offices of his good lady. Now that she was visibly back in power and victorious alongside the world’s most powerful man, who was clearly her partner, Cleopatra’s pregnant state had completed her transformation into Living Isis. She was now the quintessential mother goddess carrying her successor as she sailed upon the waters, and her presence among her people would be the means of ensuring the successful flood they all so desperately needed.
As repair work began on the war-torn land-based palace the victorious couple would have embarked at the royals’ private harbour on to Cleopatra’s great ship of state, a home from home. Most likely a version of the famous ‘thalamegos’ ship constructed for Ptolemy IV, this graceful two-level floating palace some 300 feet long was surrounded by its own gardens and walkways and fitted out in the most sumptuous manner. Ancient accounts described an upper storey with windows and balconies housing ‘saloons for dining parties, with berths, and with all the other conveniences of living’. Large enough to hold twenty counches, its main dining room was panelled in fragrant cedarwood adorned with inlays of gold and ivory, below a coffered ceiling of gilded and sculpted wood supported by columns of finest cypress. Another of the dining rooms was fitted out in Indian marble, and there was even a novelty ‘ancient Egypt’-themed dining room with traditional-style columns which ‘bulged as they ascended, and the drums differed, one being black and the other white, placed alternately. Some of their capitals were circular, resembling rose blossoms slightly opened, . . . calyxes of water-lilies and the fruit of freshly-budded date-palms.’
That such luxurious craft really existed is borne out by similarly lavish facilities discovered aboard a pair of first-century AD pleasure boats, each around seventy metres (230 feet) long originally moored on Lake Nemi in the Alban Hills south-east of Rome. The Italian dictator Mussolini, also an amateur archaeologist, described these ‘immense and superb vessels with rooms and gardens and fountains, ornamented with marbles and precious metals and rare woods, all shining with gold and purple’ which he recovered from the bottom of the lake on his orders. Further kitted out with mosaic flooring, bathing facilities and areas for the cults of Isis and Artemis, the craft were clearly influenced by the Ptolemies, several of whom — including Cleopatra and her father — had apparently once resided in this very region.
With a rotunda-shaped shrine housing a marble statue of Aphrodite-Isis, the Ptolemies’ state vessel also housed a columned chamber of Dionysos large enough to hold thirteen couches before a jewel-studded gold recess housing portrait statues of the royal family in finest Parian marble. On the upper deck, an open-air dining room and seating area covered by purple an
d gold-spangled awnings provided the optimum vantage point from which to view and be viewed — perfect for those warm evenings on the Nile. Above rose the great mast to a height of more than 100 feet, supporting the dyed linen sail decorated perhaps in the manner of previous pharaohs, who used patterns of stars and their names and titles as a means of heralding their arrival by river. Alexander and his generals certainly favoured brightly dyed sails and ensigns; the Ptolemies’ purple topsail was a particular trademark of Cleopatra, and her alter-ego Isis Pharia, the inventor of sails, was the image adorning the ensign of many a royal boat.
Unfurling the purple sails to catch the northerly winds, Cleopatra’s captain, traditionally known as the ‘Director of the Royal Ship’, maneouvred her state vessel through the causeway’s swing bridge to reach the smaller Kibotos (‘coffer’) harbour. There they were joined by Caesar’s four-hundred-strong naval escort to travel down the 12-mile-long canal which cut through the centre of Alexandria’s native Egyptian quarter, Rhakotis. Planned by Alexander and built by Ptolemy I, the route nevertheless became known as ‘Cleopatra’s Canal’ in memory of the monarch who used it on her regular journeys between her Greek city and Egyptian kingdom.
Then the ships passed into the open water of Lake Mareotis, whose small islands of brightly planted pleasure gardens were a favourite haunt of Alexandrians on days off. The banks, fringed with groves of cultivated papyrus, housed waterside villas whose vineyards produced high-quality wine, exported as far afield as Italy and France. Perhaps Caesar and Cleopatra picked up some of it for the journey ahead. As the vast flotilla finally reached the Nile itself, it travelled south down the Canopic branch towards the old trading colony of Naukratis some 45 miles inland, continuing on past Terenuthis whose fine temple to Hathor-Termuthis combined powers serpentine and bovine within a single goddess. The Delta’s flat landscape now spread out green as far as the eye could see. Cleopatra and Caesar would have seen the same endless fields of lush crops watered by shadufs, patient donkeys trotting along beneath impossible loads, women carrying their burdens on their heads and groups of small children waving excitedly from the banks, that the tourist sees today — a timeless landscape changed only by the mosques of Islam and the modern world’s electric supplies.
Possibly docking at Khem, the Greek Letopolis, near the southern apex of the Delta, Cleopatra is likely to have met with its hereditary priests. Related by marriage to the Memphite clergy, and close supporters of her father who had given their high priest the title ‘god’s beloved and friend of the King’, the Letopolis clergy would be useful allies in Cleopatra’s plans for the future. On the opposite bank lay Heliopolis, ancient Iunu, cult centre of the sun god Ra whose power had supported the monarchy since the Pyramid Age. First stop for Roman tourists after Alexandria, the ancient city sited on a great mound surrounded by the lakes and waterways of the Nile had been sacked by the Persians in 342 BC. It was now something of an ancient reclamation yard: the Ptolemies had taken away sections of its statuary and gold-tipped obelisks to embellish their new city on the coast.
Yet much of the city’s vast sun temple had remained intact. It was the place where Ptolemy II had set up colossal granite figures of himself and his sister-wife Arsinoe II, perhaps in exchange for the obelisk he took. Both they and their successors continued to honour the temple’s sacred Mnevis bull, described by one ancient Greek tourist as ‘the Ox Mneuis kept in a sanctuary as a god’. Travelling around Egypt with a particularly useless guide he had picked up in Alexandria, he dismissed the temple’s multi-columned halls and vast expanses of decorated wall as ‘a display of vain toil with nothing pleasing or picturesque about it’. Yet its elaborate precincts were also the pre-eminent place to worship the sun god in the incense-fuelled rites which had been held three times a day for the previous three thousand years. The presence of a gold-clad Cleopatra as the sun god’s own child would have added a powerful extra dimension to the solar-based proceedings.
The sun god himself sank down into the western horizon each evening to do battle with the forces of darkness before appearing renewed the following dawn. Cleopatra and Caesar would have followed him when crossing over the Nile to the west bank, traditional land of the dead and the world’s most familiar tombs at Giza — one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the highlight of every tourist itinerary then as now. The Ptolemies had kept back the drifting sands from the pyramids and their guardian Sphinx, whose paws, covered in the Greek and Latin graffiti of numerous travellers, revealed that Roman officials came to pay homage to the Sphinx and were ‘pleased with the Pyramids’, which presumably impressed Caesar as much as they had Alexander.
As the couple sailed on, the outlines of many more pyramids became visible along the high desert escarpment all the way to Sakkara. Here the oldest of all such monuments had been created more than two thousand years earlier by the great sage Imhotep, subsequently deified and adopted into the family of the creator god Ptah. The Greeks worshipped him as Imouthes, whose hymns announced that ‘every person who is Greek shall worship the son of Ptah, Imouthes’. Along with Thoth and Isis, pre-eminent deities of wisdom, he was worshipped within the Imensthotieion temple down the valley in Memphis, the most important destination for any royal progress south.
At the time of Cleopatra’s visit with Caesar Memphis was described as ‘large and populous, ranks next after Alexandria, and is made up of mixed races like those who have settled together at Alexandria. Lakes stretch before the city and palaces’ which had been greatly embellished in the second century BC when the Ptolemies had made Memphis their temporary capital. Since its clergy were among her most trusted advisers, Cleopatra must have undergone a full-blown coronation or formal renewal of her powers here at the hands of her powerful relative Pasherenptah III, who had similarly crowned her father, Auletes, some four years after he had actually become king. Cleopatra’s pregnancy, fulfilling her title ‘Mother of the God’, made it imperative to surround her unborn child with all the magical protection that Egypt’s gods could bestow.
The presence of Nea Isis, literally ‘Isis Incarnate’, at the very place within Ptah’s complex where the goddess was said to have passed from among mankind would have been tremendously significant for the Egyptians. And while Ptah was the traditional god of the city, Isis was his female equivalent, worshipped as the ever-fertile ‘Cow of Memphis’ in rites so famous that Roman poets could talk of ‘the altars where incense is offered to the sacred Cow of Memphis’. Even the Greek traveller who had been unmoved by Heliopolis fulsomely described how ‘the bull Apis is kept in a sort of sanctuary, regarded as a god. His forehead and certain other parts of his body are marked with white, but the rest is black, and it is by these marks that they always choose the bull suitable for the succession after the death of the one holding the honour. Before his sanctuary lies a court, in which there is another sanctuary allocated to the bull’s mother’, where she and Apis were brought out to meet their adoring public at a set time each day.
The way the animals behaved before their visitors was interpreted by the priests. The Greek philosopher Eudoxus of Knidus, for instance, had visited ‘the bull with the beautiful horns’ and ‘standing sideways by him, it licked his robe’, a gesture interpreted by the priest to mean that the philosopher would be famous but short-lived. Entertainment for these creatures was supplied by the temple’s musicians, singers and dancing dwarves — the importance of keeping them happy reflected their role as bringers of fertility, and their golden stalls were sited close to the temple’s sacred lake where priests monitored the rise and fall of the annual flood levels. Although repeated attempts to encourage the waters to rise over previous years had proved unsuccessful, the lowest-ever level being recorded during Cleopatra’s exile the previous year, her return as the ultimate fertility figure meant that her powers could be combined with those of the bull to invoke the full force of the flood and so bring fertility to a land still in crisis.
From judicious use of moonlight to the head
y fumes of incense, the Ptolemaic clergy had begun to draw on increasingly cryptic sources of magic as a means of manipulating the world around them. After summoning up Greek, Persian, Jewish and Babylonian gods and spirits with exaggerated ‘popping and hissing noises’ and tongue-twisting texts read out from the walls around them, they incinerated magical figures in the temple furnace. One ancient account claimed that the Memphis furnace had been used for alchemy, the means of trying to turn base metal into gold as perfected by Cleopatra and her circle of priest-philosophers. Monarch and clergy had certainly attempted to transform the mundane into the spectacular by working their secret magic for the good of Egypt.
Pasherenptah III would presumably have hosted the same kind of formal state banquet for Caesar and Cleopatra that he had previously given for Auletes and his entourage, recalling them all ‘sitting at meal and spending a pleasant time while assisting at festivals of all the gods and goddesses’. They would have dined on gold and silver tableware specially commissioned from the metalworkers of Memphis in the kind of surroundings described as ‘elegant and decorated,’ with ‘its floor decorated with genuine lapis and genuine turquoise. There was a great deal of furniture in it, which was covered with royal linen, and there were numerous gold cups on the sideboard . . . incense was put on the brazier, and perfume was brought.’
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