Cleopatra (18 page)

Caesar returned to Italy in the summer of 45, battle weary and suffering from worryingly frequent attacks of epilepsy. On 13 September, having bypassed Rome in favour of his private Lavicum estate (Monte Compatri, in Latium), he wrote a will which was to be lodged with the Vestal Virgins for safe-keeping. The will stipulated that a guardian was to be provided for any son and heir still to be born to him; an indication, perhaps, that Caesar and Calpurnia were still hoping to conceive a child together, or that Caesar was contemplating divorce and remarriage. Should he fail to father an heir, three-quarters of his estate was to pass to his great-nephew Gaius Octavius (Octavian), whom he adopted posthumously as his son. The remainder of his estate was to be shared between his nephew Quintus Pedius and his great-nephew Lucius Pinarius. His natural son Ptolemy Caesar was not mentioned. He could not have been. Roman law forbade bequests to foreigners.

A letter written by Cicero on 15 April 44 informs us that Cleopatra left Rome within a month of Caesar’s assassination: ‘I see nothing to object to in the flight of the queen.’
¹⁹
A letter written a few weeks later discusses the recent miscarriage suffered by Tertulla (Tertia), wife of
Cassius, before adding the cryptic comment, ‘I am hoping that it is true about the queen and about that Caesar [Caesarion?] of hers.’
²⁰
It seems that Cicero was hoping that Cleopatra, too, might miscarry. Freed from the constraints of a June 47 birth date for Caesarion, it is possible to use this letter to argue that Cleopatra’s son was a posthumous child born soon after Caesar’s death. But this interpretation would also suggest that Caesarion’s conception occurred during Caesar’s lengthy 46–5 Spanish campaign; Caesarion must therefore have been fathered by either Ptolemy XIV or someone else entirely.
²¹
The fact that contemporary Romans, who of course knew exactly when Caesarion was born, never mention a dating discrepancy when discussing Caesarion’s paternity is a strong if indirect indication that Caesarion was not conceived in Caesar’s absence. A far better interpretation of the letter is that Cicero is referring to a later pregnancy. If this is the case, we must assume that this second pregnancy ended in an early miscarriage as there is no record of a second child born to Cleopatra and Caesar.
²²

Cleopatra and her entourage returned to Alexandria. A papyrus dated to 26 July 44 confirms that Ptolemy XIV was still alive in July; he was, however, dead before the end of August. With no other heir to the throne, the three-year-old Caesarion became Ptolemy XV Theos Philopator Philometor (the Father-Loving, Mother-Loving God).

C
aesarion’s birth was a triumph. It gave Cleopatra a new purpose – the preservation of her throne for her child and his descendants – and, as both dynastic and Ptolemaic tradition allowed mothers to rule on behalf of their infant sons, it freed her from the irksome obligation to remain married to a male co-regent. It is perhaps no
coincidence that Ptolemy XIV died as soon as it became apparent that Caesarion’s future lay in Egypt rather than in Rome, and Josephus, for one, has no doubt that the young king was murdered: ‘She was also by nature very covetous, and stuck at no wickedness. She had already poisoned her brother, because she knew that he was to be king of Egypt, and this when he was but fifteen years old …’
²

Josephus, consistently anti-Cleopatra and prone to sweeping statements, offers no proof in support of his allegation. But, biased though they are, his remarks do carry a certain ring of truth. It is tempting to develop a dramatic reconstruction – the young and inexperienced Ptolemy left behind in Alexandria while his sister makes a second diplomatic trip to Rome; Ptolemy discovering that, with Caesar dead, the people were prepared to support his solo rule; Ptolemy considering marriage with the deposed and still-popular Arsinoë IV; Ptolemy succumbing to temptation and declaring himself king; Cleopatra returning sooner than expected and dealing swiftly with the crisis. However, it is important to remember that the estimated average life expectancy for men who survived infancy in Ptolemaic Egypt was only thirty-three. To die at just fifteen years of age was sad, but it was by no means unusual.

Ptolemy XV Caesar, king of Egypt, was to play a major part in his mother’s propaganda. With a son by her side, Cleopatra VII could abandon any thought she might have had of adopting the role of a female king and could develop instead a powerful new identity as a semi-divine mother: an identity that had the huge advantage of being instantly recognisable to both her Egyptian and her Greek subjects. Divinity was nothing new. Cleopatra had become a goddess towards the end of her father’s reign, when she had been united with her brothers and sister as the New Sibling-Loving Gods. But now she was to be specifically identified with Egypt’s most famous single mother, the goddess Isis.

From the very dawn of the dynastic age, religion had been used to
protect the position of the royal family. The belief in the king’s ability to ward off
isfet
(chaos) by maintaining
maat
(an untranslatable concept which is best understood as a combination of ‘rightness’, justice, truth and the status quo) ensured that, although individual kings were occasionally removed from power, there was never any real attempt to abolish the monarchy. This overwhelming need to preserve
maat
encouraged a slow, conservative approach to life. Experimentation was seen as dangerous and unnecessary – it might upset the gods and bring chaos – and it was both safer and more comforting to stick to the tried and tested ways. This conservatism is particularly obvious in official art, which, to the non-specialist, shows surprisingly little development from the beginning of the Old Kingdom until the end of the Ptolemaic age.

Maat
the concept was personified in the form of Maat the goddess, the beautiful, truthful daughter of the sun god Re. Many dynastic scenes show kings standing with Maat, or offering a miniature squatting image of Maat to much larger gods. As both Maat and the queen consort were companions of the king, it was perhaps inevitable that their roles and appearances would become confused. Only the single feather of truth worn on her head distinguished Maat from the living queen. Official Egyptian art was never spontaneous, and this confusion was far from accidental. As the dynastic age progressed, Egypt’s queens developed a high public profile, an array of secular and religious titles, and a wide range of headdresses incorporating divine symbols such as the vulture crown, the double or multiple uraeus, the cow horns of Hathor, the solar disc associated with the sun gods and the tall, twin plumes associated with the gods Amen, Montu and Min. With both Hathor and Isis sporting near-identical headdresses, the blurring of the boundary between the mortal and the immortal intensified.

While the Egyptians compared their queens to goddesses, many early Egyptologists saw them as breeding machines and little else. An
increasing awareness of the complexities of Egyptian thought over the past century has confirmed that the consort was in fact an essential feminine part of the complex theology of kingship.
³
Yes, the consort was expected to produce a son and heir, but this was by no means essential. If necessary, an heir could be found in the harem, or could be adopted from an elite family. It was far more important that the consort be politically astute and theologically acceptable. She was expected to rule the country in her husband’s absence, and to participate in religious rituals that demanded a female celebrant. She might even, in the absence of an heir, be expected to rule Egypt as a female king. As the spouse of a semi-divine being, and the potential mother of a demigod, the dynastic consort was herself considered a source of religious and political power.

Egypt’s first ‘goddesses’ appear before her first kings and queens. Prehistoric cemeteries have yielded bone and ivory female figurines whose obvious pubic regions and breasts indicate that they are to be associated with sexuality, fertility and, perhaps, rebirth. Near-contemporary pottery is decorated with scenes of daily life and life beyond death. Water and boats feature prominently: there are animals, birds, men and boats sailing on rivers of wavy lines. Occasionally in these scenes we see a plump, obviously female figure accompanied by smaller-scale men. This woman is paralleled by small terracotta female figurines that, with simple, bird-like faces but well-defined breasts and hips, perform a strange dance with their arms curved above their heads. The faceless females belong to an age before writing. We cannot name them, but it seems that we are looking at Egypt’s original mother goddesses.

By 3100 we have both a royal name and a recognisable goddess. The Narmer Palette is a large slate votive palette recording the victories of a king whose two-symbol name is represented by the hieroglyphic signs of the catfish and the chisel:
N’r Mr
.
⁴
The palette displays scenes of royal dominance and celebrates the triumph of order over
chaos. On one face Narmer, wearing the white crown of southern Egypt, raises a club to smite an enemy who cringes at his feet. On the reverse Narmer, now wearing the red crown, marches with a troop of soldiers. Before him lie five decapitated victims of war, their heads placed neatly between their legs. Below, in a separate scene, Narmer takes the form of a bull to gore an enemy. Gazing down on both sides of the palette is the face of the cow goddess Bat, an ancient version of the mother goddess Hathor.

Egypt’s gods started life as independent totemic local deities. Soon they were linked by an intricate mythology designed to explain the otherwise inexplicable: matters that today we explain by science. To address the fundamental need for understanding, to explain creation and death, each priesthood devised a mythology featuring their own particular god. Hathor, Lady of Perfume, was celebrated as the daughter of the sun god Re; an uninhibited goddess of motherhood, music, love and drunkenness. In some tales she assumed the role of the Golden One to accompany Re on his daily journey across the sky. In others she was the gentle cow who suckled the king of Egypt. At Memphis she was the Mistress of the Sycamore, who sustained the dead with food and drink; at Thebes she became the compassionate Mistress of the West, who cared for the dying sun. But when she was roused, mild-mannered Hathor transformed into Sekhmet, the Powerful One. Sekhmet, an uncompromising lion-headed goddess who breathed fire and was armed with plagues and pestilence, was the protector of Egypt’s kings. From the reign of Narmer onwards, the cult of Hathor grew in importance until it became Egypt’s dominant female-based cult.

Isis, several centuries younger than Hathor, is first named as a protective goddess, ‘the Great Isis’, in the 5th Dynasty Pyramid texts, where she appears as one of the nine original gods (the Ennead) of Heliopolis. Her name, Aset in the original Egyptian, is represented by the sign of a throne, and Isis herself often appears with a small throne
sign topping her crown. Alternatively Isis could be identified with the cobra or uraeus worn on the royal brow. This obvious connection between the goddess and kingship, both living and dead, would persist as long as the cult of Isis survived. As the dynastic age progressed, Isis grew in status and power, absorbing the roles, traditions and accessories of other Egyptian goddesses, including the once-dominant Hathor, so that by the start of the Ptolemaic age Hathor and Isis were virtually indistinguishable in appearance. Both were beautiful women who wore the tall cow horn and solar disc headdress, and both carried the sistrum or sacred rattle whose rhythms could stimulate the gods.

Outside Egypt the cult of Isis was spread by the sailors, merchants and travellers who regularly sailed around the eastern Mediterranean, using the Greek island of Delos, home to a flourishing cult of Isis, as a trading post. Herodotus, writing in
c
. 450, was tolerably familiar with the goddess: