Cleopatra the Great (36 page)

The timing was somewhat unfortunate, however, for the news coincided with sudden military crises in both East and West to threaten all that Antonius had so far achieved. Despite accusations that, trapped in a state of inertia that the Romans regarded as an Egyptian vice, he had simply been ‘squandering and fooling away in enjoyments that most costly of all valuables, time', Antonius nevertheless reacted swiftly to the news, leaving his pregnant lover whom he would not see again for more than three years.

Although Cleopatra all but disappeared from the Roman records during this period, Egyptian sources reveal the way she maintained control over her expanded kingdom and growing family. In 40
BC,
her eleventh regnal year, priestly records at Sakkara reveal that the mother-of-Apis cow, which had died while she had been at Tarsus, was buried following its lengthy mummification process in the Iseum vaults high on the desert plateau of Sakkara. In her pregnant state embodying the divine spirit of the sacred cow, another aspect of Isis, Cleopatra no doubt paid a state visit and made suitable offerings to the great goddess for the protection of her unborn offspring.

Yet the divine cow was not the only passing at Memphis that year, which also saw the death of the forty-nine-year-old high priest Pasherenptah III. As he posthumously stated in his funerary inscription, ‘it came to pass under the majesty, the sovereign, Lady of the Two Lands, Cleopatra and her son Caesarion, in regnal year 11, 15th Epep, the day on which I landed forever. I was placed in the West and all the rites for my august mummy were carried out for me'. His elaborate seventy-day mummification was followed by interment beside his wife, Taimhotep in the Sakkara necropolis.

He was succeeded by their only son, Petubastis III, born after his parents had invoked Imhotep in their attempts to have a son to continue the priestly line. The boy had been born in Cleopatra's sixth regnal year (46-45
BC
), the same year as Caesarion. So at the tender age of seven young Petubastis became High Priest of Memphis, his position within the Egyptian administration neatly balancing that of the equally youthful pharaoh Caesarion. Presumably he was installed by Cleopatra and Caesarion at the same type of grand ceremonials in Alexandria which had marked his father's elevation to office, and the youthful priest's basalt statue was set up in the city's great Serapeum as a clear mark of royal favour.

Keen to keep a close watch on matters beyond Egypt too, Cleopatra had been following Antonius' progress after he had left Alexandria for Tyre to tackle the Parthians and their new allies, the remaining Roman Republicans. Having invaded Asia Minor to take Cilicia and Caria, the Parthians had simultaneously invaded Syria, seized Antioch and driven Antonius' client king, Herod, from Judaea. Yet they were only part of Antonius' troubles.

During his absence impregnating the irresistible ruler of Egypt, his wife Fulvia, perhaps in a misguided attempt to regain her husband's attention, had joined forces with his remaining brother Lucius to take on Octavian. They wanted to exploit the chaos he had caused throughout Italy by trying to evict landowners in order to settle some of his many thousand veteran troops. When Lucius set out north to try and join up with Antonius' men in Gaul, Octavian had sent out his secret weapon, his colleague Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who managed to surround the famously balding Lucius inside the town of Perugia. His men fired volleys of specially made sling shots inscribed, ‘Lucius Antonius, you're dead, baldy. Victory of Gaius Caesar [Octavian]'. Other slogans revealed that their target was Fulvia's genitals — crude threats inspired by Octavian's poem about his battle against a woman whose only feminine attribute was her anatomy.

Indeed, when Lucius' male allies had all deserted him, the indefatigable Fulvia raised a private army of veterans until, meeting with little success, Lucius surrendered. As a consul and Antonius' brother he was pardoned and sent to Spain as governor, although the unfortunate citizens of Perugia were not so lucky and their town was given over to Octavian's soldiers to plunder. Unfortunately the cremation of one of the inhabitants accidentally set fire to the town and destroyed the booty, whereupon Octavian took three hundred leading citizens, some of whom he knew personally, and telling them ‘you must die', on the Ides of March 40
BC
had each one sacrificed on an altar dedicated to the deified Julius Caesar.

Having firmly established himself in the West, Octavian also reached an understanding with Pompeius' remaining son Sextus, self-styled King of the Seas, who wore a blue cloak as son of Neptune-Poseidon. He was made ruler of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica by the Senate on condition that he kept Rome's grain supply flowing from the province of North Africa. Octavian broke off his unconsummated union with Fulvia's daughter Claudia, which had originally sealed the Triumvirate, and instead married Scribonia, an aunt of Sextus' wife. And although somewhat older than her twenty-four-year-old husband, Scribonia soon became pregnant.

Given the disastrous consequences of her political intervention, Fulvia broke down and in failing health fled to Athens with her sons Antyllus and Iullus and Antonius' mother, Julia. In the spring of 40
BC,
in the midst of the Parthian crisis, a furious Antonius arrived from Tyre for a stormy meeting, hearing the full story before leaving Fulvia and his family in Greece while he went to deal with Octavian in Italy.

Although Octavian's troops would not let him land, Antonius besieged Brundisium (Brindisi) even though neither army wanted to fight fellow soldiers. After much negotiation, Octavian and Antonius decided to reconcile their differences, drawing up the treaty of Brundisium which was signed in September that year. Both men would share Italy as a common recruitment ground, and with Octavian receiving Gaul, Spain, Dalmatia and Sardinia and Lepidus retaining Africa Nova, Antonius kept everything from Macedonia to the Euphrates.

Following Fulvia's death in Greece Antonius was once more a single man, so the treaty was sealed by his diplomatic marriage to Octavian's recently widowed older sister Octavia. The standard ten-month mourning period ensuring the paternity of any child born during that period was waived by the Senate to allow this particular marriage of convenience to take place. As the vital lynchpin in the balance of power between Octavian and Antonius, Octavia was an interesting character. Likely to have been far more devious than history likes to imagine when setting her virtues against Cleopatra's apparent vices, she was of similar age to Cleopatra, a patron of intellectuals and already the mother of several children. She is also generally described as beautiful, even if her coin images sometimes give a contradictory impression, and with a bun, a nodus topknot over her forehead and soft tendrils left loose about her neck her brother's supporters waxed lyrical about her hair which was praised for being natural, presumably in contrast to Cleopatra's more artfully crafted appearance.

About the time that Octavia married Antonius in Rome, where Octavian's wife Scribonia was about to give birth to Octavian's only child Julia, Cleopatra herself went into labour. In October 40
BC
she gave birth to a daughter and a son. The unusual occurrence of twins was quite a feat, although she was not the first royal Ptolemy to produce dual offspring or even the first Cleopatra to do so, since Cleopatra Tryphaena, eldest daughter of Ptolemy Physkon and his niece Cleopatra III, had produced twin boys for the Seleucid king Antiochos Grypus. A second occurrence of twins among the first-century
BC
Egyptian elite also supports the idea that another of Physkon's daughters, Princess Berenike, had indeed married into the Egyptian family of the high priests of Memphis, since the princess' twenty-four-year-old great-granddaughter Berenike, eldest daughter of Taimhotep and the high priest Pasherenptah III, also produced twins, a boy and girl who seem to have died soon afterwards along with their mother.

With mixed-sex twins more rare than same-sex ones, Cleopatra's achievement was particularly special since ‘live twin births will have been fewer and survival through infancy of one or both lower still'. And although the ancient Egyptians did not practice the infanticide of Egypt's Greek population and parts of modern Egypt where girls in mixed-sex pairs are sometimes ‘not fed', this was certainly not the fate of Cleopatra's twin children.

Greatly cherished on a dynastic as well as a maternal level, the archetypal mixed-sex twins were the creator deities Shu and Tefhut, parents of twins Geb and Nut, who in turn gave birth to quads or two pairs of twins, Isis and Nephthys, ‘the divine sister pair', and their brothers Osiris and Seth. Yet actual twin births were highly unusual, and their mysterious nature bestowed special status on them; the twin architects Suty and Hor said of each other, ‘he came from the womb with me the same day'. Some also believe that their contemporaries, co-rulers Akhenaten and Nefertiti, were also biological twins — they were certainly portrayed as the twin gods Shu and Tefnut. During the Ptolemaic period when same-sex twins Castor and Pollux were associates of Isis, Ptolemy II had a mistress named Didyme, ‘the twin'. The female twins Taues and Taous worked as ‘didymai' when representing Isis and Nephthys in Apis rites at Sakkara during the reign of Ptolemy VI, whose title ‘twin of the living Apis' revealed the prestigious nature of twin status.

As Cleopatra considered the many layers of symbolism associated with her two special children, she knew their names would be of paramount importance. So she named them after Alexander and his sister Cleopatra. The additional epithets Helios and Selene, Sun and Moon, the heavenly bodies whom the Greeks regarded as twins, also supported Cleopatra's identification with the Divine Mother Isis who was said to have given birth to the sun.

It is unthinkable that Cleopatra did not mark this particularly impressive achievement in some way. A little-known sandstone statue group
(dyad)
from Dendera portraying ‘two deities whose exact identity is not certain' quite possibly represents Cleopatra's new offspring, a boy and a girl who are shown embracing. The boy's sidelock of hair is topped by the sun disc and the girl's coiffure is adorned by the lunar crescent, while the amulet-like eyes of Horus on each crown bestow vital protection. They are both surrounded by the great coils of two protective serpents, the spirits of Isis and Serapis, who guarded Alexandria and all members of the royal house, and the back of the sculpture is spangled with stars.

Yet their celestial names and attributes were also guided by the prophecies of the Sibylline Oracle which had already revealed that Rome would be defeated by the East, led by a mistress who would usher in a golden age of love and reconciliation. This united empire of East and West would be ruled over by a divine boy whose coming would be announced by a star. A further prophecy known as ‘the Battle of the Stars' claimed that the Bull, identified with Dionysos-Antonius, would kill Capricorn, the badge of Octavian, whereupon ‘the Virgin changed the fate of her Twins in the constellation of the Ram' — an ambiguous passage which may well have been interpreted as a reference to Isis-Cleopatra, her new twin children and Alexander as the ‘sacred ram of Amun'. As revealed by the great Zodiac ceiling that she created at Dendera, Cleopatra and her astrologers used such prophecies and oracles as a means of manipulating the present and anticipating the future. The practice was highlighted by the earliest horoscope found in Egypt, dated precisely to 4 May 38
BC
: the name ‘Per-at', ‘female pharaoh', was followed by a technical listing of ‘Sun: Taurus 4: Jupiter in Cancer. Moon: Capricorn 20 and a half. . .'.

While Cleopatra's royal astrologers were busy predicting the future for herself and her children, she used the same methods to keep informed of matters in Rome, where astrology was also used to predict births, marriages and deaths. Antonius himself seems to have had some interest in such matters, and an Egyptian astrologer was part of his retinue in Rome. But while predicting a glorious future for Antonius, he also warned that his spirit would always be overshadowed by that of Octavian, from whom he was advised to keep a distance — the astrologer was perhaps in Cleopatra's pay as a means of interpreting the stars to her own advantage while keeping a connection between them.

Cleopatra and Antonius are certainly known to have corresponded, for it was later said that ‘he had frequently at the public audience of kings and princes received amorous messages written in tablets made of onyx and crystal, and read them openly'. Although the letters contents were never divulged, their ‘amorous' nature presumably reflected Cleopatra's state of mind, and although almost every word in classical literature dealing with love and passion was penned by men, a rare female perspective is provided by one Egyptian woman writing to her husband, ‘you must know that I did not see the sun because you are out of my sight; for I have no other sun but you'. Even more dramatically, the lyrics of a popular Ptolemaic song conveyed feelings of abandonment, claiming that ‘pain grips me whenever I remember how he used to kiss me, all the while treacherously intending to desert me . . . beloved stars and Mistress Night, my partner in passion, now escort me once again to him toward who Aphrodite drives me, I who am betrayed . . . Be warned — I have an unconquerable will when I am enraged, when I remember I will sleep alone.'

It may even be the case that Cleopatra employed magic to influence Antonius during their long separation; her alter-ego Isis was certainly well known as Mistress of Magic ‘who arose in the beginning as Magician', and spells of the time often begin, ‘I call upon thee Lady Isis, with thy many names and many forms.' These might include Aphrodite, Venus, Demeter and Hekate, a moon deity from Thrace, and with spells often performed facing the moon as Isis' celestial symbol, magical equipment included sinuous, long bronze wands in the form of cobras, bronze divination bowls and amulets, and charms inscribed with a combination of hieroglyphs, Greek letters and Hebrew formulae.