There are many sources which bring to life not only Ptolemy V but the entire Greek Egypt of this epoch. There are many pictures of that violent, incestuous, intellectual, pleasure-loving dynasty, the Ptolemies, who by the time of the decree have degenerated. They are nothing like the hardy, practical Ptolemy I, the dynasty’s founder.
For by 196 BC, it is late not only in Egyptian history but late even in the history of her Greek conquerors who—despite being born in Egypt for century after century—continue to speak only Greek and to be known by Greek, not Egyptian names—Ptolemy Epiphanes, Eucharistos (praised), Ptolemy Euergetes (performer of good deeds), Ptolemy Philadelphus (brother/sister loving)—and even by Greek nicknames—Auletes (flute player), Physcon (fatty), Lathyrus (chickpea), etc. Greek titles have replaced the ti-tles of the previous dynasty—which was also foreign—Persian—and which also used foreign languages on its inscriptions (Darius’ Nile–Red Sea canal, for example, is commemorated in quadralinguals: Persian, Elamite, Babylonian, the languages of the Persian empire, and Egyptian).
For the Greeks are not the first to conquer Egypt: by 196 BC, defeat has followed defeat. The Persians had arrived first (in 525 BC), humbling and oppressing the people, defiling the temples and mocking the gods whose gold and silver images they steal. They kill the sacred animals and desecrate the tombs: Unrolling the mummies of those pharaohs they can find, Herodotus reports, they crush their bones, burning what will burn and tossing the rest onto dung heaps. The all-important irrigation ditches are allowed to silt up, priests are degraded and starving people raise their hands at broken altars.
For a brief interval, the Egyptians rise up and drive out the foreigners (380 BC), establishing the thirtieth dynasty, which struggles to revive the ancient glory.
That is soon over. By 343 BC the Persians have returned in force. The last pharaoh of Egyptian blood, Nectanebo II, flees to the far reaches of the south where he lives in seclusion, devoting the rest of his life to magic and esoteric meditations. He can be seen on temple friezes, naked and bald, holding bowls of incense as he kneels before “the coffins of the unborn gods” and offering up unheard prayers for Egypt.
Or perhaps they are heard after all. Perhaps Egypt’s salvation paradoxically lies in its destruction. Like an overripe fruit, it must fall from the tree and burst open, its seed scattering to the winds, its wisdom taking new forms. To be sure, this is the Egypt that Alexander the Great conquers with his Greeks in 332 BC: a fallen, pillaged land.
He is greeted as a liberator. Memphis opens its gates to him with joy, priests anoint him with the sacred oils and adorn him with the god Amun’s ram-horns (on coins, they can be seen beneath his thick Greek curls). He is declared pharaoh. But for the short time Alexander remains in Egypt, he is a Greek pharaoh—or rather, a Macedonian bearing Greek ideals: for he is from that rugged land just to the north of Greece. He is a Macedonian who has been formed by his tutor Aristotle and the epics of Homer.
Unlike the Persians before him, Alexander scrupulously honors Egypt’s gods. Yet at the same time he forcibly turns her center of being from the inward-looking life of the Nile valley to the shores of the Mediterranean where he founds Alexandria, a city that will not only become Egypt’s new capital but a cosmo-polis, a city of the world.
It is a city—no, more an idea than a city—that will astonish the ancient world. Here, while its power-mad kings and queens get caught up in endless, remorseless struggles, while royal blood flows in streams from the palace by the sea, Euclid will formulate the principles of geometry. The polymath Erastothenes (in 276 BC), assuming that the world is round, and basing his calculations on nothing more than the angles of shadows cast by the sun, will determine the circumference of the earth accurate to within fifty miles.
The kings themselves—Ptolemy VIII, for example—will turn to intellectual speculation. At the end of a sixty-eight-year reign, Ptolemy VIII holds forth on natural history, of which he is a keen observer if the surviving fragments of his many-volumed work are any indication. He writes a treatise on political wisdom as well, of which he must have possessed an uncommon measure. For he was able to patch up his quarrel with his wife Cleopatra II (it had plunged the country into civil war). And though he had previously taken his revenge on her by murdering their son Memphites, his reign ends in peace and contentment, his two wives, Cleopatra II, the mother, and Cleopatra III, her daughter (from another brother), by his side.
Here at Alexandria, amid crime and cerebration, fires seem to scorch the skies: the seventy-foot-high Pharos—huge mirrors magnifying its light—will guide ships into the harbor for more than a thousand years, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
The greatest library that the world has ever known draws scholars and poets from the ends of the earth. Its Museum, home of the muses, attracts scientists and historians (and clever priests who study the principles of hydrostatics and the properties of magnets to create “miracles” in their temples: singing statues and gods who fly through the air).
Here, later, the Christian heretic Arius and the orthodox Athansius will struggle to define Christ’s nature, homoiousian, like God’s; or homoousian, the same as God’s; debating over the diphthong with a ferocious hatred and a violence, and a brilliance unsurpassed in Church history. They take turns fleeing to the desert to save their lives until Arius dies on the streets of the city during a prolonged epileptic fit.
All of this is yet to be: When Alexander first sees “the city” it is a spit of land jutting out into the sea and forming a double harbor. Envisioning its possibilities, the newly victorious conqueror comes ashore and strides east and west and north and south, marking boundaries, indicating where walls are to rise with such swift decision, such impetuosity, that his men can find nothing with which to mark the new city lines but a sack of barley they scatter in his Promethean footsteps.
Birds swoop down and eat up the barley. This “evil omen” would have led Alexander to abandon his plan if a soothsayer had not declared it a sign that the city would feed the world. Then the young “pharaoh” is gone: “For a longing had seized Alexander,” the ancient historian Arrian tells us, “to consult the god Amun [at the remote oasis of Siwa], for his oracle was known to be infallible.
“As far as Paraetonium [modern Mersah Matruh] he went along the coast,” Arrian continues, “a distance of sixteen hundred stades. There he turned into the interior, where the oracle was. The route is desolate; most of it is sand and waterless. Whenever a south wind blows in that country, it makes a great heap of sand on the route and obscures its marks, making it impossible to get one’s bearings . . .”
Here at the temple of Amun-Ra, the Egyptian priest and his new master enter the holy of holies where Alexander has come with three questions:
Has the murder of his father been avenged?
Will he conquer the world?
And is he himself a god?
Yes, yes, yes, the oracle answers, sounds and signs being transmitted from a secret chamber above the shrine where a priest is hidden away, manipulating the god’s wagging head with chains. One can still crawl into the hidden chamber today.
Alexander leaves the oracle of Siwa a god bent on world-conquest. If he is a god, though, he is one who will die at the age of thirty-three in Babylon, after a prolonged drinking bout and a fever. His closest companions and generals wait at his bedside to hear who will be named the successor.
The dying man does not name any one of them, however—for his answer is like that of an oracle.
“To the strongest! Kratisto!” he whispers. (One desperate general tries to claim he has pronounced “Craterus,” his name.)
This answer sets their ambitious blood afire. His generals are strong, but none is the strongest: none can wrest world-empire for himself alone, though each will try in the following years. Thus Alexander’s legacy is divided, with Ptolemy seizing Egypt and becoming the first of a Greek line that will end some three hundred years later with the famous Cleopatra, the seventh of
her name.
She is a worthy conclusion to her dynasty: brilliant, beautiful and unscrupulous—a true Ptolemy who marries and murders both her younger brothers, as is not generally remembered, besides seducing Julius Caesar. Then, after his assassination, she backs the wrong Roman, doomed Antony, with whom she finally, genuinely, seems to have fallen in love.
But if she is a Ptolemy, she introduces an innovation: She is the first and last to have learned Egyptian. This is not for official use, but as an intellectual diversion: She knows half a dozen other languages besides. We find her in the Talmud, of all places, asking Rabbi Meir, in Aramaic, how God occupies His time.
Thus Cleopatra’s Greek gives way to Caesar’s Latin. Egypt will never again speak its own language, a fact which reflects her new condition better than any other. Her gods become mongrels: part Egyptian, part Greek, part whatever flotsam and jetsam washes onto Alexandria’s shores.
Her age-old mysticism will mingle first of all with Greek thought. Her people will live under Roman law, even coming to worship a Roman Emperor’s eunuch-lover, Antinoöus. The beautiful boy drowns himself in the Nile, a mystical suicide-sacrifice to prolong the emperor Hadrian’s life.
But this is just the beginning. For when the Roman empire becomes Christian, Egypt becomes Christian. And when the Roman empire splits, Egypt falls to its eastern half. Her peasants pray before Byzantine icons for over three hundred years—Christian monasticism will have its beginnings in Egypt. Then, except for stubborn monks practicing unimaginable feats of asceticism in the desert—stylites living exposed on pillars for twenty years at a time—Christ will be forgotten and Egypt will learn to pray—in Arabic—facing Mecca (in the seventh century, AD).
Throughout the nineteenth century, her intelligentsia is educated in France and into modern times, Egypt will be ruled by a dynasty of kings—Khedives, to give them their proper (Persian) title—who speak only Turkish or French, or English, but certainly not Arabic. That last avatar of ancient Egyptian, Coptic, survives only in a ritual form in the Egyptian Christian liturgy. Finally, in the 1960s, the last of the Khedives, the four-hundred-pound King Farouk, dies in exile in a Naples restaurant, surrounded by movie starlets, drinking the blood of twenty pairs of pigeons as an aphrodisiac, and calling out in Italian for oysters.
Between that strangled, gluttonous cry and Alexander the Great’s pronouncement, To the strongest! lie two thousand years and a babble of languages echoing all the way back to the Greek carved on the Rosetta stone. This is the real prize of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, this paean of praise for Ptolemy V Ephiphanes “Who pardoned those who had been arrested and who were in prison, and every person who had committed whatever crime long ago; Who gave grain to the god-houses yearly; Who took care to send infantry and cavalry and ships to drive back those who came to fight against Egypt from the sea coast as well as from the Great Green . . .” This near-miraculous find will help open the way to the decipherment. When the British triumph over the pathetic, dwindling troops Napoleon has left to languish in Egypt, they demand the stone as part of the French surrender.
General Menou will not agree to this. Negotiating the surrender, he gives in to almost all their terms except the “theft” of the stone. Day after day, week after week, he uses all kinds of ruses and stratagems to retain it: hiding it, denying its existence, even insisting that it is his “personal property.” When he finally fails, he weeps openly as he hands it over. The French soldiers bitterly curse and swear at the victors carting it away. At every moment, a British officer reports, he fears that they will be attacked.
This is not the end of the matter: The inscriptions on the stone have been copied. Its gray surface has been covered with boot black (for lack of printer’s ink) and pressed onto sheets of paper: the emperor’s gift to the linguist.
The British may have the stone. On the side of it they arrogantly chisel the date and the fact of their victory. Theirs, however, is a victory that will be snatched away. This is the linguist’s gift to the emperor: for when twenty-three years later, after twenty-three years of unremitting toil, Champollion finally succeeds in its decipherment, he will reclaim its glory for France.
True, by then it is a gift to a dead man, to an emperor who had perished on a small, barren island; to an ex-general whose body is laid naked on a billiard table and eviscerated as a hurried autopsy is performed.
Like the copies made of the stone, a death mask is made of the Emperor’s face: a plaster impression of his features. That famous silhouette—through the memories and ideals it conjures—will continue to command.
Chapter Seven
Deliciae Alexandriae—The Delights of Alexandria*
Prefatory Note
*THUS GOES THE proverbial Latin phrase which distinguishes these pleasures from the grosser ones of Rome. For the delights of Alexandria—in which the sensual and the intellectual and the aesthetic and the mystical intermingle!—can never surfeit or weary.
Rome’s patricians, restless and nihilistic, became tired of their orgies and feasts and spectacles, the cruel gladiatorial contests where between fights, during intermissions, scores of criminals, captives, or slaves have their throats slit.
What do you do, after this, for an encore? Perhaps you arrange for a sensational reversal, a game where the gladiators turn on the audience, hurling their spears into the crowd in a prearranged stunt—a successful ruse, the “producer” is greatly applauded. But still there lurks the specter of boredom: for sensation repeated is as stale as yesterday’s joke.
Even Rome’s emperors sigh for the deliciae Alexandriae. Caesar spends his time in the city debating in its famed Museum, Cleopatra at his side. Hadrian can find no fitter memorial for his beloved eunuch-lover Antinoöus than making him a god here. And Nero consoles himself with the thought that were he ever deposed, he can become a singer on the stages of Alexandria.
In Alexandria one can enjoy the best of both the intellectual and the physical. Dinner parties take place in pools where the guests, immersed up to their chests in perfumed waters, sample exotic dishes on floating tables, listen to music, delight in neo-Platonic debate and watch theatrical events.
Greek thought mixes with exotic Hebrew and Egyptian wisdom. The Bible first appears in Greek in Alexandria, called the Septuagint, named for its seventy translators. Actors are admitted to the floating tables after performing scenes from the latest dramas and comedies. Comedies are especially suited to the Alexandrine nature, its culture being arch and sophisticated, taking pleasure, above all, in the bon mot, the mock epic, the epigram.
If Alexandria’s intellectual pursuits are serious—mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, geography, history—its art is often trivial. The intellect is supreme in Alexandria, not the imaginative or emotional faculties.
The new comedy is imported and becomes all the rage. The Greek Menander (“O life! O Menander! Which is real?” the Alexandrine poet Callimachus cries) and the Latin Terence win applause. Tragic motifs are forgotten in the laughter of a “hit” such as The Eunuch: a younger brother, in love with his older brother’s whore’s serving girl, pretends to be a eunuch to gain admission to the whorehouse. He waits on the girl—in a state of prolonged erotic desire—bathing her, dressing her, etc. Can the serious political comedy of Aristophanes—work from a different time, a different place, a different consciousness—or the tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides hope to compete?
Ptolemy II knows his people. They don’t want military triumphs such as Rome’s, they take no delight in cruel, gladiatorial sport. When he arranges a spectacle, it is an artful one: the god of wine, Dionysus, is carried on a huge float, a panther skin around his shoulder, grapes in his hair; jeweled crowns, fantastic creations. The artifice and wealth of the city are put on display. This is the milieu of Alexandria.
By the time of Napoleon’s conquest, this splendor is gone.
Alexandria’s laughter has changed to the long Islamic cry, calling the faithful to prayer.
Its great lig
hthouse has toppled into the sea.
Its palaces and theaters have vanished without a trace.
“IT IS EASIER to understand humanity in general than to understand a single human being,” La Rochefoucauld tells us—a maxim which perfectly applies to Napoleon. For the role General Bonaparte or Emperor Napoleon plays on the world stage is indeed much easier to understand than the demonic impulses and obsessions which thrust him onto that stage.
But if one truth about Napoleon the man is more striking than any other, it is this: History forms the air he breathes, the food he eats. Its examples, its ironies, its personalities form him. They are the medium through which he experiences reality.
He gazes at himself in the mirror and sees Caesar and Charlemagne and a hundred others. Even in defeat, he is Gustavus and Hannibal and Frederick Barbarossa. (“I appeal to you,” he writes to the British after Waterloo, “as Themistocles appealed to his enemies.”) He is Coriolanus and Alexander the Great not only on the battlefield, but even in the boudoir, even in affairs of the heart.
During the campaign in Egypt, Josephine is free of his oppressive presence and she no longer has to cancel assignations. (“Forgive me. I can’t come tonight. Bonaparte will be home.”) She abandons all caution and is seen everywhere with the charming Hippolyte Charles who knows how to tie his cravat so magnificently and whose jokes about Napoleon are repeated everywhere (like Napoleon, he is some eight years younger than Josephine).
The Linguist and the Emperor Page 9
