by M. J. Trow
It may seem strange that all modern accounts of Cleopatra make great play of this tradition, but it is a reminder of the huge importance of religion in the ancient world and of tradition. Elizabeth II of England was crowned in Westminster Abbey in AD 1952 and went through essentially the same coronation ceremony that her ancestors had for 1,000 years.
Many historians, too, make great play of the fact that Cleopatra’s reign marks the end of the Ptolemies and that what we are looking at is a dynasty in decline. There is some comparison with the reign of Nicholas II in Russia in the early twentieth century. His family, the Romanovs, had, like the Ptolemies, ruled their country for three centuries. There was also an air of ‘foreignness’ about them – Nicholas was Russian but his wife was not and the pair wrote letters and diary entries in English. Nicholas Romanov was the richest man in the world until AD 1917, as was Cleopatra before 31. What destroyed Nicholas was his inability to cope with demands for change from within. What destroyed Cleopatra was Rome. But there was nothing inevitable about either case.
The immediate problem for Cleopatra in 51 was her brother Ptolemy XIII. They may have married soon after Auletes’ death, although there is no record of it and if it happened it could only have been to prevent any sense of rivalry between ‘her’ court and ‘his’. Then, as now, one of the first priorities of a monarch was to provide an heir so that the dynasty can continue. At eighteen, Cleopatra was of eminently marriageable age; Ptolemy, of course, was still too young. It may have been simply a matter of his age or it may have been a conscious ploy on her part, but until 49 Ptolemy is invisible. In a stela from the Faiyum Delta, she appears as a man, in the typical straight-legged profile of Egyptian pharaohs, wearing the crown of the two lands, apparently proclaiming her as sole ruler. It is only the inscription that makes it clear who this is. Experts are divided over the importance of this evidence. Is it a deliberate statement by Cleopatra, doing a man’s job despite her female body (and in this sense she echoes the female pharaoh Hatsheput in the New Kingdom) or was this simply a piece of artwork made for Auletes which had a new inscription added?
Cleopatra intended to impress from day one, whether it be her own Alexandrians, the people of Upper Egypt, toiling away in the flood plain of the Nile, or the Romans edging ever nearer to her mouth-wateringly rich kingdom. And dress was all important. In Alexandria she wore her (possibly auburn) hair in a melon bun with a simple gold diadem and an expensive but not over-gaudy dress of Greek design. In this attire she would have found favour even with the Roman matrons surrounding Pompey and Caesar who were starchy in the extreme. When she took the title Neos Dionysus (the New Dionysus) from her father, underlying her closeness to him and her deep religiosity, Cleopatra wore white under a striking black robe as worn by the priesthood. For the Egyptians she went completely over the top with the help of her wardrobe mistress, Charmion. She wore the tight-fitting sheath dress (which, although sexy and elegant must have been very difficult to walk in) and a colourful splash of precious stones and vulture feathers. It was a conscious effort to appear at one with the gods and the ancient pharaohs. As the goddess Isis (which the Egyptians still called Aset during Cleopatra’s reign), she appeared in her full royal regalia with the red and white crowns of Lower and Upper Egypt with the rearing cobra (uraeus) in gold on her forehead.
In an age before widespread literacy and instant telecommunication, it was important that Cleopatra show herself to her people as often as possible. In a sense that was made easy by the geography of Egypt. It was the Nile and the dedication of the Buchis bull on 22 March 52 was part of a river journey designed to impress and reassure Egyptians of all classes.
Built into this river journey – and the later one she made with Caesar – was the physical existence and symbolic idea of her barge. There is no clear contemporary description of it. Shakespeare’s famous image of gold burning on water comes from Plutarch who was writing two centuries after Cleopatra, but it is entirely in keeping with the floating palace of the queen. It may have been 300 feet long with a cypress wood hull decorated with ivory, gold and silver. It had awnings and carved statues on the deck, shrines to the gods like Isis and Dionysus, and perhaps even a library, a gymnasium, a lecture hall and an aquarium. It was the setting for her seduction of Mark Antony and may even, in modified form, have taken part in the naval battle of Actium. Smaller boats clustered around it, bearing priests and local officials, at every step of the way.
We know that she attended the ceremony of the Apis bull at Memphis, Egypt’s ancient capital, in 49 and paid 412 silver coins, as well as providing food for the animal’s extensive priesthood. She may have been overdoing her relationship with her Egyptian subjects at the expense of the Alexandrians and that could have been a mistake due to her youth. There had been revolts from time to time along the Nile, against taxation and bad harvests, but the clear and present danger came from the multicultural city in Cleopatra’s own backyard. Alexandria’s population had a reputation for unrest and thought little, as we have seen, of dragging unpopular rulers to the Gymnasion for a good slaughtering. By the autumn of 50, it was clear that brother Ptolemy felt he had been kept in the shadows long enough. He was still only twelve but his three principal advisers – Potheinos, his nurse; Theodotus, his tutor, and Achillas, his general – were itching to usurp Cleopatra and began by grabbing the all-important grain supplies to Alexandria. Decrees were now issued in the joint names of Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra and the order of the names was lost on no one. This was ‘Year One’ for him and Cleopatra must have realized that her resources were far from limitless. Auletes had died broke, having paid so much blood money to Rome, and the floods along the Nile in 51–50 had led to poor harvests and harsh taxation. This probably explains Cleopatra’s open and ostentatious wooing of the priests. Keep the priests happy and, by and large, the people were happy too. Twelve hundred miles away, things weren’t going too well for Rome either.
In the summer of 52 news reached Rome that Caesar had won a crushing victory at Alesia in Gaul. Plutarch estimated that the general ‘fought pitched battles at various times with three million men, of whom he destroyed one million in the actual fighting and took another million prisoners’.39 The Romans were notorious liars when it came to propaganda figures, but there is no doubt that Alesia was the high or low point (depending on our point of view) of slaughter that was both unnecessary and deliberately provoked by Caesar. His opponents in the senate (and they were many) mostly saw this as yet another example of the blood-craze of a warmonger. His supporters, however, wanted him to return to a triumph (for which the Plebs cheered heartily) and to become consul again. If that should happen, with the heaven-storming legions at his back, nothing could stop him.
Cato, as usual, stood firmly behind the increasingly obsolete standards of republicanism. So did Cicero. Caesar spent some of his loot money bribing senators back home. ‘By now,’ wrote Petronius years later under the emperor Nero, ‘the conquering Roman had the whole world in his hand, the sea, the land, the course of the stars. But still he wanted more.’40 The generic ‘conquering Roman’ could apply equally to Caesar and to Pompey and at first, when Pompey was called upon to take his former friend and son-in-law down a peg or two, he took to his bed with a convenient illness. But the clash was coming – of that there was no doubt.
In December 50 the consul Gaius Marcellus, with a large crowd of senators and the usual morbidly curious mob, went to see Pompey in his villa in the Alban Hills. Gaius Marcellus told him to march against Caesar, and Pompey accepted. On behalf of Caesar, the Tribune of the Plebs, Mark Antony, read out the general’s letter to the senate. It spoke of peace, harmony and the good of Rome but few people were listening and Metellus Scipio demanded that Caesar give up his legions or be declared an outlaw. Only two senators opposed the bill and although Antony vetoed it, the moment had come.
Martial law was declared on 7 January 49 with Pompey’s legions from Capua patrolling the streets. Antony and the two loyal senators
fled, apparently disguised as slaves, to Ravenna where Caesar was camped with the 13th Legion. With the kind of panache that the Duke of Wellington exhibited at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball shortly before Waterloo in AD 1815, Caesar had a bath and went to a banquet before riding to join his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, an unimportant little stream swollen by the winter rains, in the north of Italy.
We do not know exactly when or how Ptolemy XIII’s coup against his sister took place. It is likely to have been in the spring of 49 and by the summer Ptolemy was regarded as Egypt’s sole ruler. The eunuch nurse Potheinos gave himself the title of minister of finance and the fickle Alexandrians seemed happy with that for the time being.
Cleopatra was on the run, but only from Alexandria. Her assiduous courtship of Upper Egypt now paid off. She reached Thebes and crossed the desert to the Red Sea. With her was a sizeable army under the highly efficient general Callimachos and she established a rival court to Ptolemy’s at Askalon near Gaza. Speaking fluent Aramaic and Hebrew as she did, she was able to talk politics directly to local officials without the services of an interpreter. Even allowing for the fact that the area had long been loyal to the Ptolemies, the men who flocked to her now were in effect being asked to take sides in a civil war in which they had no direct interest and to choose between siblings of the same house. In getting an army together at all, Cleopatra was achieving the impossible and she coolly had coins struck at Askalon. Her portrait on these shows the twenty-year-old as a younger, only slightly female version of her father, with large eyes, a hooked nose and firm, resolute mouth. She would need all her resolution in the months ahead.
With hindsight, Pompey made a wrong call to abandon Rome. The Rubicon, minor irritant as it was geographically to an experienced army used to handling dangerous river-crossings, was the sacred boundary between Gaul and Roman Italy. It was also a line in the sand. Technically, Caesar’s advancing legions could have halted at any time, but the crossing of the Rubicon was a symbolic act, a declaration of war, and it duly entered the Latin and later the English language as a point from which there could be no going back.
Caesar trotted south with the 13th at his back, marching in double time, leaving his remaining four legions to catch up when they could. His speed wrong-footed Pompey who effectively told Rome it was on its own and marched his legions south. Tom Holland says, ‘Pompey, of course, could argue that there were sound military reasons for the surrender of the capital – and so there were’,41 but it is difficult to think of any. Rome could be taken militarily by any army with ballistae (missiles) to smash its walls but the Gauls and even the great Hannibal had both failed years before and it would be four centuries before Alaric the Visigoth sacked the place. Much more importantly, Rome was the symbol of the Republic – leave it in an enemy’s hands, even a Roman enemy, and there would be no Republic. And there was a fifty-fifty chance that Caesar’s legions, loyal to him though they were, might refuse to march on their own homes.
Terrified citizens, if they were rich enough, fled south. Only a tiny handful of senators remained, leaving the city defenceless, not only against Caesar, but against the mob who must have realized that the rule of law had collapsed. Domitius Ahenobarbus tried to rally troops against Caesar at Corfinium, but his inexperienced troops ran at the sight of Caesar’s grim calligae42 and Ahenobarbus was brought before Caesar. The rebel was spared, as was the town; a stroke of genius from Caesar because all the towns in Italy, including Rome itself, knew there would be no destruction, no crucifixions, if they surrendered to him.
Pompey reached Brundisium, the port in the south-east, and commandeered any sailing boat he could to get his men off the peninsula, bound for Greece. The fast-marching Caesar caught him there and bombarded his ramparts with slingshots and heavy artillery. Even so, he could not close the harbour and Pompey and his entire command slipped away into the night. With various senators with him and others scattered as far away from Rome as they felt safe, the defender of the Republic (as he billed himself now) holed up in Thessalonica to await events. He invited various client kings to his side. The Galatians arrived under Deiotarus, the Cappadocians under Ariobarzanes, the Commagenians led by Antiochus. He couldn’t know it yet, but with these auxiliaries, his army outnumbered Caesar’s two to one.
Pompey may have had a plan to starve Rome out by cutting off food supplies from the provinces, but if so, it was not feasible. He had loyal legions in Spain, so effectively he controlled east and west but in the days of slow and limited communication, coordinating those disparate troops to strangle Caesar in the centre was never likely to work.
When Caesar reached Rome, few people turned up to hear his public proclamations. He was not greeted as a conquering hero and the tribune Caecilius Metellus tried to stop him from entering the treasury in the town’s temple of Saturn. Faced with death, Metellus backed down, but now there could be no pretence. Caesar had crossed the Rubicon and the Tiber. He had brought troops into the sacred city, had occupied the heart of Rome itself and had grabbed its valuables. He was a dictator in all but name.
Leaving the cavalry commander Marcus Lepidus to govern the city in his absence, Caesar sailed for Spain in the summer of 49 and smashed Pompey’s three legions there before Pompey knew what was happening. With Caesar in Spain, Pompey could have landed in Italy and probably retaken the city (Lepidus would have been no threat) but he seems to have been struck by a deadly lethargy and no one in military history moved as fast as Caesar.
Elsewhere, his supporters fared less well. Gaius Scribonius Curio, once anti-Caesar but now won over to his side by cash, was one of the two senators who had voted against both Caesar and Pompey retaining their commands. He occupied Sicily for Caesar and crossed to Africa. Here he faced Pompey’s general Publius Attius Varus and King Juba of Numidia. His legions were wiped out in the Bagrades Valley and he died with them. Marcus Caelius Rufus was no safer in Rome itself. He tried to raise the people on behalf of Pompey, having had his legislative ideas turned down by the senate, and was killed in the violence that followed.
Early in 48, with storms battering the Adriatic, Caesar eluded Pompey’s numerically superior fleet and reached Greece. Here, in a grim winter, his troops were in danger of starving and the calligae were forced to make bread from grass. There were alarms and excursions, with the odd head-on clash, but Pompey was not anxious to meet Caesar in the field and in terms of their reputation, Caesar probably had the upper hand. ‘This man’, he had come to realize, ‘does not know how to win wars.’43
At Dyrrachium (in today’s Albania) in July, a siege stalemate ended in Caesar getting a bloody nose. Again, we cannot rely on the numbers involved, but Caesar’s casualties are said to have been 1,000, Pompey’s far fewer. Caesar withdrew into northern Greece and Pompey should have turned the retreat into a rout or taken this second opportunity to sail for Rome. He did neither, but faced Caesar again at Pharsalus on 9 August.
Caesar may have had 22,000 infantry, but Pompey had 45,000 and his cavalry outnumbered Caesar’s by seven to one. It was this horsed advantage that Pompey planned to capitalize on, especially as the field at Pharsalus was broad and flat, excellent cavalry country. We have to remember that nearly half of Pompey’s troops, perhaps more, were auxiliaries, not trained in the Roman style and certainly lacking Caesar’s legions’ recent gruelling experience in Gaul. Pompey’s second in command, Titus Labienus, attacked with his cavalry on his left flank, intending to demoralize Caesar’s flimsy cavalry force and then hit the centre from the flank. Caesar, of course, had anticipated this and placed six cohorts in the triple-acies (three-line) formation behind his cavalry. As predicted, the dictator’s horsemen broke in the face of a headlong charge, but Caesar’s hidden infantry advanced, using their javelins as spears, and Pompey’s cavalry broke up, allowing Caesar to hit his centre in exactly the same way that his enemy had planned.
Quickly stripping a cohort from the rear line of each legion, Caesar effectively created a fourth line which cra
shed forward through the front lines to shatter Pompey’s centre. We have noted already the dubious casualty figures written for posterity, often by much later writers; Caesar claimed to have only 200 casualties as opposed to Pompey’s 15,000. A further 24,000 were captured and no less than nine legionary eagles were taken. Even if the figures themselves were exaggerated, the results were self-evident. Pompey had lost and his army was destroyed. His wife, Cornelia, may have rallied her husband with a positive pep talk as various commentators contend, but he had no army left to renew the war. Or did he?
We do not know whether Pompey had summoned Ptolemy and Cleopatra to join him at Thessalonica. On balance it seems unlikely because Egypt was a ‘friend and ally’ of Rome, not technically a client kingdom, and they owed no such military obligation. At this point, of course, we have a bizarre situation. Both nations were waging civil war. Egypt may have been beholden to Rome, but which Rome: Caesar’s or Pompey’s? And if Pompey was asking for help, to whom did he turn – Cleopatra or Ptolemy?
