A History of the World (26 page)

Caesar duly ‘succumbed to the charm of further intercourse with her’, and when brother Ptolemy arrived the next morning he discovered to his chagrin that his twenty-one-year-old sister had given Caesar something he couldn’t.

The romantic legend has the soldier falling helplessly in love with the Egyptian seductress. Yet we don’t know that Cleopatra had any earlier affairs, nor any later romance until her famous final one with Mark Antony. Cleopatra’s kingdom was on the verge of final collapse. It contained some of the greatest treasures of human culture, but was virtually bankrupt and at the mercy of that efficient killing-machine known as Rome. Was there any future for Ptolemaic Egypt, except under the protection of the superpower of the age? Julius Caesar, with his clipped propaganda-prose, his million-plus victims, his utter cynicism about the religion of his own people, could hardly have been a less likely saviour. This was a country that had sided with his enemy, that was temptingly valuable and whose elite (those scented, Dionysus-worshipping, pleasure-loving Greeks) all true Romans had been brought up to regard as decadent and worthless.

Something had to be done. Cleopatra did it. Now, having made her bed, she lay on it. A vicious local war broke out in Alexandria, where Caesar had too few troops to control the uprising and street fighting. He came close to death. Part of the famous library was destroyed. Cleopatra stuck with him until Roman legions arrived to free them. In return she became effective ruler, and enjoyed a Nile boat cruise before bearing Caesar his only son. He, far from being infatuated to
distraction, was busy studying his long-planned reform of the calendar. It was an Alexandrine who suggested to him the solution of a 365-day year, with an extra day every fourth year. Meanwhile, Cleopatra provided her own protection. In case anyone missed the point, she named the boy Caesarion.

How overwhelmed by love was the conqueror? Not entirely, perhaps. When Caesar marched off to continue the civil war against his enemies, now including Pompey’s vengeful son and old political foes like Cato, he left some troops behind, just to keep an eye on Cleopatra.

She built a temple dedicated to his worship. In their different ways, both Caesar and Cleopatra were aspiring to the status of god-people. She was associating herself with the ancient cult of Isis, and her son with Horus. As Caesar piled victory upon victory, Rome capitulated and voted him ever more lavish honours. The pagan city, so brilliant by now in its literature and architecture, treated him as a man to be worshipped, and declared him dictator for a decade to come. A triumph even greater than Pompey’s was declared, and another grandiose programme of rebuilding was begun as the spoils of Caesar’s murderous civil wars poured in. The Roman abasement before him knew no limits. Caesar introduced some reforms, but made no attempt to stop what had become Caesar-worship. His house was decked out like a temple. His chariot was erected opposite Jupiter’s. Cleopatra was there to watch both the bloodthirsty games put on in his honour and the growing Caesar cult; and to make sure that Caesar did not repudiate their child.

For her there was the chance, at least, of a radically remade politics in which these two god-people, she and Caesar, would jointly rule the known world. Caesar may have had the same dream, though he was not a dreamy type. He put her statue in the temple of his alleged goddess ancestress, Venus Genetrix. The Roman mob started to mutter that he intended to marry Cleopatra and shift his capital to decadent Alexandria. He had to keep working to manipulate and manoeuvre through the highways and byways of the politics of Rome, of course, but Caesar’s attitude to religion seems always to have been cynical. It was a prop to power, a useful lever, taking many forms.

In different ways both Caesar and Cleopatra were harking back to
a familiar old Hellenistic world in which successful rulers, such as Alexander, claimed divinity. Religion and worldly power had always stood together, priests and kings side by side, since the known world came into being. Caesar in triumph painted his face divine red, like Jupiter’s statue, and was again declared dictator, this time for life. In fact, he turned out to have antagonized a lethal coalition of offended aristocrats and pro-republican conservatives, who would assassinate him in 44
BC
, perhaps to make sure yet another planned war against the Parthians did not make him invulnerable.

The time came. After Caesar, arriving for a meeting of the Senate, had been set upon by half a dozen plotters, then stabbed to death, twenty-three wounds were found on his body. His last act had been to cover his face so that his death agony could not be seen. With perfect dramatic placing, he was left lying in blood near the statue of his great ally and then his enemy, Pompey.

Caesar had helped finish off a republic which, for all its faults, had lasted more than four hundred years. Its notions of citizenship and its rejection of monarchy had given the world something important. Caesar had not found a way of ruling this heterogeneous and sophisticated society, but his republican assassins had underestimated the popularity of a rich, god-mimicking strongman. They too were soon dead, while the association of divinity and worldly rule grew ever stronger in the Roman world. Its first true emperor, Caesar Augustus, was deified on his death by the Senate. Hardy soldier-farmers, in a tough republic, had mutated into rich imperial politicians, and now into servants to emperors.

Soon Cleopatra would be dead too, the last of the pharaohs. Caesar’s death had eventually spawned another round of civil war, which by then must have seemed interminable to the citizens of Rome, but it was in fact about to end. Octavian, who had been declared Caesar’s adopted son, fought Mark Antony, his beloved general, for the ultimate prize. There was little to choose between them in their view of the dying republican dream, or in their absolute appetite for power. If Octavian, later Augustus, would be declared a god, Mark Antony apparently believed he was descended from Hercules. Cleopatra struggled to avoid taking sides until she felt sure she could tell who would win, but was eventually summoned by Mark Antony to Tarsus to explain herself. In the tightest of tight spots once again, she
replayed an old tune, appearing not swathed in a rug this time, but in a golden barge.

Shakespeare’s devastatingly beautiful description – the best known – follows, quite closely, that of Plutarch, who elsewhere emphasizes that he knew people who knew people in Cleopatra’s world. The queen, he says, sailed

Who would say no? Not Mark Antony, possessing divine blood himself, and at this time the seeming winner of the Roman world’s struggle for supremacy.

The pair returned to winter in Egypt, allegedly for a feast of lovemaking and self-indulgence, during which Cleopatra usefully became pregnant again, this time with twins. She would call them after the sun and moon, Alexander-Helios or
Alexander Sun
and Cleopatra-Selene or
Cleopatra Moon
, infant gods who might also rule the world. Mark Antony then began a political reorganization of the Middle East, giving his lover back old territories, though not Judah, which remained with Herod. He next turned to destroy a new irritant for the Romans, the fast-riding, sharp-shooting interlopers on the Asian plains called Parthians, whom Caesar had also intended to attack. An Iranian tribal people who had developed their own empire and who traded with both the Mediterranean and the Han Chinese, the Parthians had developed more powerful bows and a form of mobile warfare against which the Roman legions seemed powerless.

Mark Antony was not the first great general to set off and then have to retreat, leaving behind tens of thousands of casualties. But his defeat by the Parthians weakened him at a time when his rival Octavian was on the rise in the West. It ended the dream of a new and even bigger ‘Asian Roman Empire’, or indeed any prospect of a neat division of the Mediterranean between the rival warlords. Few things in history happen neatly. Antony was to win a later great victory over the
Armenians, which was celebrated with Cleopatra in Alexandria. Antony was declared the living god Dionysus; and Cleopatra, ‘Queen of Kings’ and ‘the youngest goddess’.

Octavian was quick to whip up Roman hostility to this threatening swagger: he read Antony’s will to the Senate, in which he confirmed his preference for Alexandria over Rome. War was declared. Senators divided their loyalties. Legions prepared to march.

It ended with one of ancient history’s least dramatic, if most important, battles. It was a sea battle, at Actium off the west coast of Greece, in 31
BC
. Cleopatra commanded her own fleet in person, but when she and Mark Antony were faced with trying to break through Octavian’s blockade, she panicked and led her warships into the open sea and home to Egypt. Antony was perhaps already likely to lose. His men had been weakened by malaria, his huge five-rank oared ships could not gain enough speed to ram effectively, and one of his generals had gone over to Octavian with his secret battle plans. At any rate, this last major sea battle of classical times ended almost before it had begun, when Mark Antony, seeing Cleopatra leave, followed her with just a few of his own ships.

After this, their cause was doomed. Octavian marched on Alexandria as the lovers enjoyed a final orgy. Mark Antony stabbed himself and died at Cleopatra’s feet. She tried to negotiate with Octavian on her son Caesarion’s behalf, but when it became clear that Octavian intended to parade her in his Roman triumph, she too decided to kill herself to avoid such ignominy. (Her sister had been paraded by Caesar at his triumph, but the mob had taken pity on her and Caesar had spared her. Later, Cleopatra had her murdered anyway; this was not the death of a romantic martyr.) Thanks to an image carried at Octavian’s celebrations, showing Cleopatra killed by a cobra, the legend is that she committed suicide by placing an asp – a smaller, more credible serpent – on her breast, having had it smuggled to her in a basket of figs. Perhaps. Or maybe she simply used a reliable poison. She was not quite forty years old. Her death did not save Caesarion, who was caught and executed.

The Roman Peace

So ended not only Cleopatra’s strategy vis-à-vis Mark Antony, but her original dream of uniting the worlds of Egypt, Greece and Rome in the person of an ultimate god-king. Octavian declared himself Caesar Augustus, and with Rome exhausted from civil war he was able to initiate a long spell of imperial peace. Edward Gibbon, the great English historian, famously described what followed as a happy period in human history, when the Roman Empire

His book (published between 1776 and 1788), which opens with this analysis, was concerned with why such an era of human happiness should have ended; he called it
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.

His answer was the rise of Christianity, which we will come to. Most modern historians would shrink from blaming the followers of Jesus for the collapse of the Roman world. Another part of the answer was given in Gibbon’s opening words, where he spoke of ‘the
image
of a free constitution’ and the Senate
appearing
to have authority. After his final victory, in 27
BC
, Octavian restored the outward form of republican government, while reserving for himself the powers Julius Caesar had claimed, becoming warlord, dictator and head of the official religion. Yet he was a shrewd ruler as well as a lucky one. After some early campaigns, pushing upwards into central Europe and down towards Arabia, he more or less halted the Roman lust for expansion to concentrate on a programme of civic revival. Much of what we think of today as the glories of Rome – the grand buildings, the immaculately kept roads, the conquerors’ peace and the lavish materialism of city life – derives from the peace established by Augustus. His rule was really a monarchy, with the trappings of republicanism, and it would soon harden into full-fig imperialism.

The weakness of such a system is the possibility of mad or bad kings. Rome would suffer from plenty of those, notably in Augustus’ family, after he handed over power to one of his daughter’s husbands, Tiberius. They included such horrors as Caligula, who was mad, and Nero, who was certainly bad. There followed ‘the year of the four emperors’, after which a rough tax collector’s son, Vespasian, grabbed power. His son was killed, and a senator called Nerva returned to the old practice of adopting the best-seeming candidate as the emperor-designate – a good Roman compromise between politics and kingship that produced a run of strong emperors, first Trajan, of Arch and Column fame, whose conquests reached the Persian Gulf; and then Hadrian, of the famous Wall.

Life seemed so secure that the next emperor, Antoninus Pius, could rule for nearly a quarter of a century without leaving Italy, or going within hundreds of miles of the legions. He did, however, experience the problems of ‘too much’ in this early display-and-consumer society, when one of his circus festivals featuring giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, crocodiles and tigers cost so much he had to debase the currency to fund it. Then came Marcus Aurelius, another fighting emperor better known today for his fine meditations on life and duty, from the Stoic viewpoint. His son was a weak and unpopular figure who was killed young, ushering in another period of strife and uncertainty.