Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Yet everyone would have recognised the victor in his elaborate gold chariot, dressed in purple cloak and red leather parade boots with the gold crown of Jupiter held over his head by a slave. Although it was also the slave’s role to repeatedly whisper in Caesar’s ear the traditional words ‘Remember, you are a mortal’, to counteract the mass adulation, he must have started to have his doubts as the deafening shouts and cheers bordered on worship.

  Alongside a marching band of oboe and zither players the army added their own form of tribute, ‘chanting ribald songs as they were privileged to do, this was one of them — ‘ “Gaul was brought to shame by Caesar, by King Nicomedes he. Here comes Caesar, wreathed in Triumph for his Gallic victory,” ‘a very public allusion to their leader’s alleged homosexual affair earlier in his career. Presumably none too happy with the serenade, Caesar’s mood cannot have been improved when the axle of his chariot suddenly broke, a terrible omen as a result of which he was obliged to climb the steps to the Temple of Jupiter (Zeus) on top of the Capitoline Hill on his knees in an ancient rite of supplication. He ascended the hill once more that evening ‘between two lines of elephants, 40 in all, which acted as his torch-bearers’ and accompanied him home in grand procession. The Gallic triumph then ended with the traditional execution of the enemy leader, in this case brave Vercingetorix the Gaul, strangled after six years in captivity.

  Victory against Egypt, or more correctly against Ptolemy XIII, his advisers and the Alexandrians, was the theme of Caesar’s second Triumph, in which a parade of floats carried huge models of the pyramids, the famous Pharos lighthouse with a beacon of impressively lifelike flames and a great reclining statue of the Nile as a male god. The crowds also cheered large paintings of the deaths of Pompeius’ murderers Potheinos and Achillas, but the appearance of Arsinoe in her golden chains at the Triumph’s big finish visibly upset them. No doubt remembering the fate of Vercingetorix, the crowd grew so uneasy that Caesar displayed his famous clemency to win them back and exiled her to Artemis’ sanctuary at Ephesus. The destination hinted at the involvement of her half-sister Cleopatra, who herself seems to have lived there in exile some ten years earlier.

  For Triumph number three, humour was employed in scenes showing Mithridates’ son Pharnaces running away from Caesar, the accompanying placard proclaiming, Veni, vidi, vici’ — Came. Saw. Conquered — in a repetition of his message to the Senate to indicate his victory and emphasising the tremendous speed with which the battle had been won. In the final Triumph for ‘Africa’, relating to his most recent victory at Thapsus against Pompeius’ supporters, the defeated and now deceased king Juba I was represented by his four-year-old son Prince Juba while Pompeius’ Roman allies appeared in gruesome paintings showing each one commiting suicide. Although Caesar refrained from actually naming them, the sight of Cato disembowelling himself, Pompeius’s father-in-law throwing himself into the sea and Petreius being stabbed was an unwelcome and very public reminder to some in the Senate that Caesar’s main opponents had been fellow Romans. Yet, regardless of their feelings about the endless twists and turns of a power struggle raging among an elite minority, Caesar’s fourfold Triumph had been a great success with the masses who were completely won over by a whole series of lavish entertainments.

  After military prizes had been awarded to Caesar’s supporters, including his sister Julia’s puny but precocious sixteen-year-old grandson Gaius Octavius (Octavian), the sons of client kings from Asia Minor and Bithynia performed sword dances. Among dramatic performances was a piece by the leading dramatist Decimus Laberius who made political digs at Caesar in his plays, this time ad-libbing ‘see how easily an old man slips’ and ‘the man who many fear must also fear many himself. Caesar feigned his usual public indifference and presented him with five thousand gold pieces for the performance.

  For racing fans, horse racing at the newly extended Circus track was followed by chariot racing, the most popular sport in the ancient world, much loved by Cleopatra’s predecessor Berenike II whose own horses had won the chariot race at the Nemean Games in Greece. It was a sport that the Romans loved too, and some celebrity charioteers generated such strong emotions that when one famous exponent was cremated, a distraught fan threw himself on the pyre.

  Three days of athletic events were staged on the Campus Marti us, the Field of Mars, followed by gladiatorial contests which, before the creation of Rome’s first arena in 29 BC, were held here or in the Forum itself. Originally a means of displaying aristocratic valour, they had by now degenerated into ever more gory displays sponsored by public figures as a means of gaining support from the masses. After being entertained by fights to the death, the public could visit the refreshment stalls and souvenir sellers offering engraved beakers or terracotta figurines of favourite fighters. Some women were so enamoured that they would pay congratulatory visits after a successful show. Gladiators were famed for their sexual potency, and even senators’ wives were known to give up everything to elope with such a man, for, even scarred and disfigured, ‘he was a gladiator!’ Even if their favourite was killed and his body dragged away by slaves dressed as the Roman god Mercury or Egypt’s Anubis, the blood spilled was in great demand for its healing and aphrodisiac powers; even the spear which had killed him was used in ceremonies of birth and marriage.

  Influenced by the various cultures absorbed into Rome’s growing empire, gladiatorial styles ranged from the heavily armed ‘myrmillo’, generally pitted against the ‘retiarus’ net-thrower with his trident, to the ‘essedarii’ who fought from chariots and whom Caesar himself is thought to have introduced from Britain. There were even female gladiators dressed as Amazons, some of whom seem to have been devotees of Isis and Anubis; although their behaviour was criticised by those who asked ‘what modesty can be looked for in some helmeted hoyden, a renegade from her sex, who thrives on masculine violence’, they nevertheless had a popular following.

  Certainly Caesar’s 320 pairs of silver-clad gladiators proved a huge hit, as did a pair of Roman nobles who fought to the death in the Forum. There were also the ‘bestiari’ animal fighters, the North African Telegenii using their crescent-shaped goads to provoke a succession of exotic wild animals including 400 lions and giraffes sent over from Africa Nova’s new governor.

  With Caesar dedicating the proceedings to the memory of his daughter Julia in the manner of funeral games, the shows culminated in a pitched battle fought between two armies each made up of five hundred infantry, thirty cavalry and twenty elephants, the central part of the Circus’ chariot track removed to allow the armies to advance toward each other and fight. The grand finale was a spectacular naval engagement between multi-oared Egyptian and Tyrian ships floating on an artificial lake created especially for the occasion.

  Clearly inspired by his time with Cleopatra in Egypt, where lavish display had long been used to win over the masses, Caesar had the whole of Rome’s city centre decorated with lengths of Gallic linen, silk from Cos and, apparently, the cotton (‘carbasus’) first brought back from India by Alexander. All were made into spectacular awnings stretching from his mansion down the Sacred Way, over the entire Forum and right up to the Capitol in ‘a display recorded to have been thought more wonderful even than the show of gladiators which he gave’. Again inspired by the large dining pavilions of Alexander and the Ptolemies, Caesar used costly fabrics to cover an area where no fewer than twenty-two thousand couches were laid out for the crowds to enjoy a free banquet of various meats and thousands of costly sea eels provided by the fish farms of his wealthy cousin, all washed down with the finest Falernian wine.

  Unsurprisingly, news of such events brought vast numbers of people to Rome. Many were forced ‘to sleep in tents pitched along the streets or roads, or on rooftops’, and the pressure of such crowds inevitably inflicted casualties. Two senators were among those crushed to death during the stampede to reach these unmissable spectacles.

  Rome had certainly seen nothing like it, and with his carefully desi
gned events making Caesar ‘an overnight celebrity’ backed by the mob, his unrivalled power as Dictator rendered the Senate virtually impotent. Although Cicero made a series of fulsome speeches praising the returning hero’s great achievements while hinting that he should nevertheless restore the Republic as soon as possible, Caesar had other plans. To implement them fully would need the help of his ally Cleopatra of Egypt. And to this end he summoned her to Rome, where she would live for almost two years.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 7

  Caesar’s Palace: Cleopatra in Europe

  As Cleopatra prepared for her state visit to Rome, she spent the spring of 46 BC organising government. She would be accompanied overseas by her co-ruler brother Ptolemy XIV, maintaining the facade of a traditional dual monarchy while preventing any takeover bid in her absence. The day-to-day administration would be overseen by her most trusted officials, her minister for current affairs, Theon, and possibly a finance minister named Seleucus. Kallimachos of Thebes would retain control of the south as governor, and her royal cousin Pasherenptah III would continue to oversee matters from Memphis.

  The continuity of the latter’s priestly dynasty would soon be guaranteed by the birth of his long-awaited son following prayers to Imhotep. New mother Taimhotep was able to report that ‘he was born in regnal year 6, day 15 of Epiphi [15th July 46 BC], in the 8th hour of the day under the majesty of the Sovereign, Lady of the Two Lands, Cleopatra. The child’s appearance was like that of the son of Ptah and there was jubilation over him by the people of Memphis. He was called Pedubastis and all rejoiced over him.’

  Yet, as all offered their heartfelt thanks to Isis the Great, her living counterpart had already left Egypt for Europe in the early summer, taking her one-year-old son Caesarion, and a great retinue of servants as well as her thirteen-year-old brother. This was possibly Ptolemy XIV’s first voyage across the Mediterranean, the Egyptians’ ‘Great Green’, ‘the sea of the Greeks’ and the Romans’ ‘Mare Nostrum’, ‘our sea’.

  Resembling the legendary sea-going vessels of her Ptolemaic predecessors, Cleopatra’s great ship of state, necessarily of different design from her river-going vessel, may well have replicated the proportions of the ocean liner built by the fourth Ptolemy. At a time when the average Athenian trireme with three banks of oars and sails was around 120 feet long, this royal ship was 420 feet long, had forty banks of oars and was constructed from the same amount of imported timber as fifty trireme-type vessels. It was nevertheless ‘extraordinarily well proportioned — wonderful also was the adornment of the vessel besides; for it had figures at stern and bow not less than 18 feet high, and every available space was elaborately covered with encaustic painting; the entire surface where the oars projected, down to the keel, had a pattern of ivy leaves and Bacchic wands’ of Dionysos.

  It was launched ‘by a crowd to the accompaniment of shouts and trumpets’, and the same pomp and ceremony no doubt marked the departure of Cleopatra’s entourage on a sea crossing previously undertaken by several of her predecessors, from feuding brothers Ptolemies VI and VIII to Sulla’s protege Prince Ptolemy XI and her own father Auletes, with whom Cleopatra seems to have travelled some twelve years earlier.

  The direct journey between Alexandria and Rome’s main seaport which was then Puteoli took less than a fortnight, while the Alexandria mailboat could do the crossing in a single week. Cleopatra’s great ship, however, would have travelled at a more stately pace, first reaching Italy’s south-west coast and the fertile region of Campania. Lying as it did on the main trade route with Alexandria, and first settled by Greek traders in the eighth century BC, the region had a hybrid Greco-Italian culture suffused with Egyptian influences. Isis herself was worshipped in temples with sacred pools to replicate the Nile, and the ‘Navigium Isidis’ or Voyage of Isis festival was celebrated every March with oil lamps shaped like the ship of Isis. But it was the real thing that now sailed into the Bay of Neapolis (Naples), passing Mount Vesuvius’ vine-clad slopes. Former Greek trading colonies such as Pompeii, taken over by Rome, had been transformed into fashionable resorts on a coastline dubbed ‘the Colony of Venus’, playground for Rome’s rich and famous where Sulla, Cicero and Caesar all had holiday homes. Sailing on past Neapolis, another former Greek colony with a strong Isis following, Cleopatra finally reached Puteoli, Rome’s main seaport until the first century AD. Here she disembarked to a suitably lavish reception laid on by an official delegation sent out by Caesar, if not by Caesar himself.

  After perhaps visiting Puteoli’s long-established temple of Isis to give thanks for her safe crossing, Cleopatra would have made her onward journey to Rome along the famous Appian Way by carriage. The lack of springs would presumably have been offset by a plentiful supply of cushions, while fine linen drapes would have kept out the potentially fatal mosquitoes of the Pontine marshes. En route, Cleopatra is likely to have visited the temple of Isis-Fortuna built into the side of Monte Ginestro at Palestrina, a place of pilgrimage both for women wanting children and for those who had recently given birth. Life-giving spring water gushed up within the temple’s man-made grotto in the same way that the Nile’s floodwaters lapped the polished silver pavements of Egypt’s carefully sited temples. In thanks for the birth of Caesarion, Cleopatra may well have embellished the place probably visited as a teenager, commissioning the great mosaic of her kingdom across its submerged floor. Based on parts of the mosaic that have survived, supplemented by drawings of areas damaged in the seventeenth century, it portrays the full length of the Nile bordered by its many temples. It has recently been suggested that the mosaic commemorated her Nile cruise with Caesar, and may even have once portrayed Cleopatra herself in part of the scene which originally depicted trumpeters heralding the arrival of a Ptolemaic royal disembarking from a ship under a large red parasol with long gold fringing. And since Roman military figures awaited the royal arrival beneath a temple awning while drinking wine at some sort of festival, it is just possible that the Palestrina mosaic may once have constituted the equivalent of Cleopatra and Caesar’s wedding photograph.

  Cleopatra’s entourage finally reached the city walls of Rome where a kind of early park-and-ride scheme instituted by Caesar ‘decreed that from sunrise until dusk, no transport, cart wagon or chariot of any form would be allowed within the precincts of Rome.’ With ‘no exceptions to this order’, Cleopatra must have arrived after dark or more likely proceeded by litter, a mode of transport as popular for the Roman elite as it was for the pharaoh of Egypt, who used it in Rome to see and be seen beneath the shade of her royal canopy.

  As invited heads of state, Cleopatra and her co-ruler Ptolemy XIV were formally received by Caesar and awarded the official title ‘reges socii et amici populi Romani’, ‘friend and ally of the Roman people’. This was the same title that Auletes had worked so hard to achieve some thirteen years earlier, and for which privilege he had been forced to pay so dearly. His daughter was given both ‘high titles and rich presents’, likely to have included the large pearls that Caesar is known to have given previous lovers such as Servilia, whose gift was reportedly ‘worth 60,000 gold pieces’, around one and a half million denarii. So how much more must Caesar have presented to Cleopatra as mother of his only living child, whom he could now see for the first time?

  Perhaps he gave her some of the freshwater pearls from Britain, or the great pearls which had once been part of the Ptolemies’ royal treasury, sent to Kos for safekeeping where they were seized by Mithridates of Pontus, then by Pompeius, whose lavish Triumph of 61 BC was famed for the sheer number of pearls on display. It would certainly have been appropriate if Caesar chose to right past wrongs by returning property seized by Pompeius to its rightful owner.

  Following the bestowing of these honours, Caesar housed Cleopatra and her royal party in his grand villa on the Janiculum Hill in the fashionable Trastevere district on the west bank of the Tiber. Enjoying spectacular views across the city, the villa, set in its own parkland extending
down to the river, was one of the first things seen by those entering Rome after arriving by sea. Its landscaped grounds were no doubt influenced by Greek culture, since many Romans ‘do not think they have a real villa unless it rings with many resounding Greek names’ and the groves and walkways of Aristotle’s Temple of the Nymphs in Macedonia where Alexander had studied were particularly admired. Alexandrian technology now allowed gardens once designed around natural springs to be created anywhere they were required, from the Nile-style water gardens, ridiculed by Cicero’s set, to bronze and marble figures such as the ubiquitous boy on a dolphin, gushing their waters into pools offish and water lilies, which were sometimes used when dining alfresco to keep drinks and food trays cool.

  Reclining beneath shady pergolas and awnings, Cleopatra must surely have enjoyed the great expanses of gardens at her disposal — gardens described as being filled with colourful spreads of lilies, narcissi and oleander, beds of white, pink and red roses and highly scented purple, yellow and white violets. These were laid out between evergreen hedges of laurel, myrtle and box clipped neatly into ornamental shapes. There would also have been fig trees, mulberry bushes and no doubt that novelty the cherry, brought back from Pontus in 74 BC, among the exotic plunder. Fashionable antique statuary was placed in the most appropriate positions within the gardens of the wealthy, with statues of Artemis as Great Hunter set in woodland areas modelled on the ‘paradeisos’ game parks of Alexander’s Successors, populated by the same shrill, strutting peacocks imported from India along with more mundane creatures reared in artificial fishpools, warrens and dovecotes. Usually placed in the sunniest spot to enhance his connection with the Greek sun god Helios, Artemis’ brother Apollo was another favourite garden figure, and Caesar’s relative Julia, mother of Marcus Antonius, was said to worship before a shrine of Apollo in her garden.