The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  At the time of Cleopatra’s birth in 69, Greatest of Craftsmen Pasherenptah had more cause than most of his ancestors to support the regime. Succeeding to the high priesthood at the age of fifteen, he had dutifully crowned Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, as one of his first official acts. He remained a member of the king’s trusted inner circle, and could boast with only a touch of hyperbole of having been “born Egypt’s sovereign.”1 For the forty years after Cleopatra’s birth, the fortunes of the two individuals, Pasherenptah and Cleopatra, would be closely intertwined. Priest and princess—their lives and fates chart the final chapter in the long history of ancient Egypt.

  From the moment of her birth, Cleopatra was regarded as a semi-divine being. Her royal father had been hailed as the “new Dionysus” (or, for his Egyptian subjects, the “young Osiris”), and the long-standing royal cult of the Ptolemies had effectively made him a god on earth. The Egyptian clergy—with Pasherenptah as their cheerleader—saw no difficulty in accepting and supporting the divinity of the first family, since it had been one of the central tenets of pharaonic religion since the dawn of history. But the reign of Ptolemy XII was no golden age—quite the reverse. Instead of growing rich from agricultural bounty and foreign trade, Ptolemy XII presided over an abrupt and precipitous decline in the nation’s fortunes.

  It all came down to protection money. Egypt had long ceased to be a major power in the eastern Mediterranean. Of the once extensive Ptolemaic lands, only Cyprus remained within the fold, ruled by Ptolemy’s brother. The Mediterranean had a new power, Rome, determined to extend the frontiers of its nascent empire. In the face of such a ruthless and well-armed opponent, nations had only two options: resist and be eliminated, or collaborate. Ptolemaic Cyrenaica had already fallen to the Romans in 75, and Ptolemy had no intention of letting Egypt go the same way. Getting into bed with the enemy was the lesser of two evils. For its part, Rome was like a lion on the hunt: it could sense weakness in its quarry, and lost no time in moving in for the kill. The legal will of Ptolemy X, which had seemed to promise the Nile Valley to Rome, provided the Romans with the perfect excuse for extorting revenues from what was still the richest country in the region. For its part, Egypt had no choice. It was a question of pay up, or else.

  When Princess Cleopatra was a mere toddler of four years, this stark reality came into sharp focus. Far away in the Roman senate, the republic’s political leaders, as competitive and disputatious as ever, began to use Egypt as a tool to further their own ambitions. In 65, Crassus proposed the formal annexation of the Nile Valley as a Roman province, a move vigorously opposed by Cicero as detrimental to the stability of the republic. Temporarily thwarted, the hawks on the Capitoline Hill turned their attention instead toward an easier prey, the Seleucid Kingdom of western Asia. At a stroke, the Ptolemies’ old rival in the Near East was liquidated by the armies of Pompey the Great and absorbed into the Roman realm. Anxious to back a winner, Ptolemy XII responded to this momentous development by sending eight thousand cavalry to support Pompey’s further expansion into Palestine. No matter that his extravagant gesture of goodwill exhausted the crown revenues, forcing tax rises and cuts in public expenditure, and stirring up a minor revolt. Keeping on the right side of Rome was now the number one priority, irrespective of the domestic repercussions. Pompey looked on with customary Roman hauteur, refusing even to help Ptolemy put down the insurrection that the tax rises provoked.

  Egypt should have learned its lesson from this unhappy episode, but its naive foreign policy seemed to have a momentum of its own. As the country became progressively indebted to its bullyboy “protector,” the Egyptian population came to hate the Romans and everything associated with them. It did not augur well for the Ptolemaic Dynasty.

  To make matters worse, Rome had two rival strongmen. Buying off Pompey was not enough, since Julius Caesar was equally powerful. The devil had two faces; both needed appeasing. When in 59 Caesar threatened to raise “the Egyptian question” once more in the senate, Ptolemy resorted to his favored strategy. He paid protection money equal to half of Egypt’s annual revenue, in return for official recognition as king of Egypt and a “friend and fellow of the Roman people” (amicus et socius populi Romani). Not that it did him much good. Barely a year later, as Ptolemy celebrated the marriage of his close confidant the high priest Pasherenptah to a fourteen-year-old bride, his newfound “friends” went ahead and annexed Cyprus, driving its king (Ptolemy’s brother) to commit suicide. Joy thus turned to sorrow within a matter of months, but Ptolemy kept quiet, for fear of angering Rome. The pharaoh was now bankrupt morally as well as financially.

  It was all too much for the proud and passionate citizens of Alexandria, who rose up and ousted their craven king, forcing him into exile. A dejected Ptolemy went first to Rhodes, to kowtow before the Roman magistrate who had just accepted the Cypriot surrender. In the ultimate humiliation, Ptolemy was ushered in to see Marcus Porcius Cato while the latter was on the toilet after a particularly effective dose of laxative. In the days of old, the pharaoh had been accustomed to grinding foreigners underfoot; now he was less significant than a barbarian’s bowel movements. There was no farther to fall.

  Yet, far from seeking a way out of its imperiled position, the Ptolemaic Dynasty continued to behave as before, ever the author of its own ruin. In Alexandria, the throne was offered first to Ptolemy’s wife and then, after her untimely death, to Ptolemy’s eldest daughter, Berenike. A woman ruling alone was anathema to the Greeks, so attempts began immediately to find her a suitable husband. But Berenike was as recalcitrant and bloodthirsty as her ancestors. The first suitor died en route; the second was stopped at the border by the Romans; the third made it to Alexandria but was strangled after a few days when his bride-to-be declared herself fatally unimpressed.

  From Rhodes, Ptolemy wound his way to Ephesus and thence to Rome, arriving in 57 and staying for two years. During that time, he acted the archetypal dictator-in-exile, ordering the liquidation of his domestic opponents while living it up in foreign villas. Eventually, he clinched the deal he had come for. In exchange for a sum of ten thousand talents—equal to Egypt’s entire annual income, and borrowed from a banker named Rabirius, who could scarcely believe his fortune—Ptolemy would be restored to his throne by Gabinius, the Roman governor of Syria. On April 15, 55, with Gabinius’s army at his side, Ptolemy marched into Alexandria, reclaimed his kingdom, executed his daughter Berenike, and named Rabirius as his new finance minister.

  Egypt was not just in Rome’s pocket; it was now effectively a provincial branch of the Roman central bank. For Ptolemy XII, restoration equaled utter humiliation.

  FRIENDS, ROMANS, COUNTRYMEN

  DURING HIS TWO YEARS OF ENFORCED EXILE IN ROME, PTOLEMY XII seems to have received comfort and reassurance from a particularly beloved companion. There is evidence that he took one of his daughters with him on his travels to Rhodes, Ephesus, and Rome, and while her identity cannot be proven with certainty, Cleopatra is the most likely candidate. For the princess had just turned eleven at the time of her father’s ousting—old enough to travel, young enough to be allowed out of Egypt without posing a threat to her elder sister Berenike. If Cleopatra did indeed spend her preteen years in Rome, she learned valuable lessons from the experience. No Ptolemaic ruler could afford to pander entirely to Roman wishes, but nor could Roman might be ignored. Keeping one’s throne while preserving national sovereignty required the deftest of footwork on the narrowest of tightropes. Cleopatra would soon find herself walking it alone.

  Soon after his return from Rome, Ptolemy moved to shore up his position among the priesthood and the native population at large. Since the time of Narmer, kings had burnished their credentials and bolstered their authority by beautifying the gods’ shrines and going on tours of inspection. Nearly three millennia later, Ptolemy XII saw no reason to depart from accustomed practice. He therefore ordered construction to commence on a vast new temple to the goddess Hathor, at Iunet, in Upper Egypt; the
foundation stone was duly laid on July 16, 54. At the same time, Ptolemy carried out an official visit to Memphis, accompanied by the leading representative of the native aristocracy—Pasherenptah, high priest of Ptah. Both acts were a deliberate show of traditional pharaonic power, and Ptolemy took a further step to secure his dynasty by appointing Cleopatra as his formal co-regent in 52. After nearly three decades on an uneasy throne, perhaps he sensed his days were numbered. On March 7, 51, a solar eclipse over Egypt was widely interpreted as a portent of doom. A few days later, Ptolemy XII was dead, and Cleopatra was proclaimed ruler of Egypt. She was just seventeen.

  In accordance with her father’s will, she shared the throne with the elder of her two brothers (the ten-year-old Ptolemy XIII), while Rome was appointed as their official protector. Like most of the Ptolemies’ previous dynastic arrangements, it was a disaster in the making. At first, Cleopatra tried to go it alone, sidelining her co-regent brother and ruling single-handedly for the first eighteen months of their reign. But a series of natural and political disasters soon turned the public mood against her. In the summer of 50, an unusually low inundation led to crop failure and widespread food shortages. Cleopatra had to enact emergency legislation to prevent outright famine. A pharaoh’s first and foremost responsibility was to placate the gods and ensure the continued prosperity of Egypt; for the gods to have deserted Cleopatra so early in her reign was a profoundly worrying development. She compounded her growing unpopularity by bowing to a request to deport some fugitives who had fled Syria after murdering the sons of the Roman governor. By sending them back to their deaths, she confirmed the native Egyptians’ worst fears about Rome’s unstoppable rise. The tide of opinion now began to turn rapidly against Cleopatra and in favor of her brother.

  In the midst of all this domestic turmoil, Cleopatra also had to contend with unwelcome developments abroad. Rome’s two military strongmen, Pompey and Caesar, were now embroiled in a bitter civil war. To pay back old debts, Cleopatra sided with Pompey (whose close ally, Gabinius, had restored Ptolemy XII to his throne). But even an alliance with a foreign warlord could not protect her from the wrath of her own people. In the early months of 48, like her father before her, Cleopatra was forced into exile. However, instead of going with cap in hand to Rome, she decided to raise an army closer to home, in her still-loyal province of Palestine. By the late summer, two opposing armies—one backing Cleopatra, the other her brother—faced each other in the eastern Nile delta.

  Bronze coin of Cleopatra WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  Ptolemy XIII, who had already won recognition by Rome as sole pharaoh, must have felt the more confident of the two siblings. But when Pompey fled to Egypt on August 9, 48, after suffering a crushing defeat by Caesar in Greece, Ptolemy’s confidence turned to recklessness. He watched nonchalantly from the harborside at Alexandria as Pompey was ferried ashore and promptly stabbed to death by one of Pompey’s own officers (now in Ptolemy’s pay), before he could even set foot on Egyptian soil. If Ptolemy had thought that killing Caesar’s sworn enemy would win him friends, he was sorely mistaken. When Caesar himself arrived in Alexandria four days later, to be presented with Pompey’s severed and pickled head, he reacted furiously to this savage treatment of a fellow Roman general. He marched straight to the royal palace, set up residence, and summoned Ptolemy XIII to meet him. Sensing the importance of the moment—with Pompey dead, Caesar was now the undoubted ruler of Rome—Cleopatra seized her chance. Evading detection by her brother’s guards, she made her way to Alexandria and smuggled herself into the palace to join the audience with Caesar.

  In the humid heat of a mid-August day, in the royal quarter of Alexandria, the legendary meeting took place—the twenty-one-year-old Ptolemaic queen and the fifty-two-year-old Roman general. With her long, aquiline nose and pointed chin, she was not particularly attractive by modern standards. Battle-worn and weather-beaten, he was hardly in the prime of life. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and power is a proven aphrodisiac. The chemistry worked.

  To the disgust and disbelief of Ptolemy XIII and his supporters, Caesar threw his weight behind Cleopatra and her claim to the throne of Egypt. Ptolemy’s army besieged the palace while his Alexandrine allies proclaimed Cleopatra’s younger sister Arsinoe queen in her place. Events then moved swiftly. In March 47, Roman reinforcements arrived to liberate Caesar and Cleopatra from their palace prison. Fierce fighting ensued, during which Ptolemy was drowned in the Nile. With her rival out of the way, Cleopatra was restored to the throne with her eleven-year-old brother (yet another Ptolemy) as her co-regent, and Cyprus was returned to Egypt as a further gesture of support by Rome. Arsinoe was taken captive and deported to Italy.

  Caesar and Cleopatra sailed up the Nile to celebrate their triumph—although the accompanying flotilla of four hundred Roman troopships hardly gave the Egyptian populace much cause for celebration. Cleopatra had won, but Egypt had lost. The three Roman legions now stationed permanently in the Nile Valley were a testament to that. As Caesar remarked in his later account, he

  thought it beneficial to the smooth running and renown of our empire that the king and queen [Ptolemy XIV and Cleopatra] should be protected by our troops, as long as they remained faithful to us; but if they were ungrateful, they could be brought back into line by those same troops.2

  An occupying army was not Caesar’s only legacy to Egypt. In the summer of 47, after he had left to continue his campaigning, Cleopatra gave birth to a boy. In no doubt about his paternity, she named him Ptolemy Caesar. At her command, the Cyprus mint issued special commemorative coins to celebrate the arrival of the royal baby. Decorated with the double cornucopia, they proclaimed the abundance and promise of the Romano-Egyptian union.

  Another birth to different parents, a year later, was the cause of equal celebration and thanksgiving. This time, both father and mother were present to share the joy. The happy parents were the high priest Pasherenptah and his wife of twelve years, Taimhotep. Their delight at the birth of a son was all the greater because of the anguish that had preceded it. In the early years of their marriage, Taimhotep had born her husband three healthy children, but they had all been daughters. In ancient Egypt, every man wished for a male heir, the more so when he was the high priest of Ptah and the hereditary holder of an office that had been in his family for eleven generations. By the time he turned forty-three, Pasherenptah must have begun to wonder if he would die without a successor. In desperation, his wife turned to the trusty native gods—in particular, to Imhotep. The courtier of Netjerikhet who had lived twenty-six centuries earlier, at the dawn of the Pyramid Age, and whose crowning achievement, the Step Pyramid, still rose majestically on the Memphite skyline, was worshipped throughout Egypt as a god of wisdom, magic, and medicine. His cult was especially strong in Memphis, and Taimhotep herself, as a daughter of the city, carried his name. If any of the gods would answer the couple’s prayers for a son, surely Imhotep would. So, Taimhotep “prayed together with the High Priest to the majesty of the god great in wonders, effective in deeds, who gives a son to him who has none: Imhotep, son of Ptah.”3 Wondrously, the prayer was answered. Imhotep appeared to her in a dream, promising her a son if she would arrange for his Memphite shrine to be beautified—you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. It helped that Taimhotep’s husband was perhaps the most influential man in Memphis and head of the local priesthood. The builders, painters, and decorators must have completed their work in record time. On July 15, 46, at around two o’clock in the afternoon, Taimhotep gave birth to the longed-for son. “There was jubilation over him by the people of Memphis. He was given the name Imhotep and was also called Padibastet. Everyone rejoiced over him.”4

  For Taimhotep, the birth of a son was the culmination of her wifely duties. For Cleopatra, her son’s birth had a deeper, religious significance. To mark the birth of her Caesarion, “little Caesar,” the queen consecrated a roof shrine at Iunet, a temple dedicated, appropriately, to the ancient mother goddess Hathor. At
Iuny (Greek Hermonthis), she built a “birth house” to celebrate the institution of divine procreation. In Ptolemais and Alexandria, the two great Greek cities of Egypt, she actively promoted the cult of Isis, already one of the most popular Egyptian deities and now a goddess with whom Cleopatra felt a special affinity. For, in popular belief, Isis was a divine mother and protector, caring for her worshippers as she did for her infant son Horus. It was not difficult to draw the parallels. The royal propaganda of the time encouraged the association, and statues deliberately blended the iconography of Isis with the features of Cleopatra. Goddess and queen were becoming one.

  Cleopatra certainly had more credibility as an Egyptian deity than her forebears, since, unlike every previous Ptolemy, she seems to have taken the trouble to learn the native language. She evidently considered Egypt to be her home, and took pains to honor the traditional cults. She adopted a feminine version of the earliest and purest expression of divine kingship, the Horus title, and at least some of her Egyptian subjects viewed her as a fully legitimate pharaoh. All the stranger, then, that at the height of her popularity she should have left Egypt to travel to Rome as Caesar’s guest when he finally returned home from campaigning in 46. For two years, she stayed in his estate across the Tiber. The relationship between them was the subject of much gossip, not least when Caesar dedicated a gold statue of Cleopatra in the Roman shrine of Venus Genetrix. His subsequent preparation of a bill, to be put before the senate, to allow him to marry (bigamously) outside Italy, have children with a foreign wife, and create a second capital city seemed to confirm the Romans’ worst fears: under the malign influence of an oriental queen, their war hero was going native.