The Queen of Cosmopolis
The coastline of the Nile Delta had always been treacherous. Low-lying and featureless, it offered nothing to help a sailor find his way. Even so, navigators who approached Egypt were not entirely bereft of guidance. At night, far distant from its shore, a dot of light flickered low in the southern sky. By day it could be seen for what it was: not a star, but a great lantern, set upon a tower, visible from miles out to sea. This was the Pharos, not only the tallest building ever built by the Greeks, but also, thanks to its endless recycling on tourist trinkets, the most instantly recognisable. A triumph of vision and engineering, the great lighthouse served as the perfect symbol for what it advertised: megalopolis – the most stupendous place on earth.
Even Roman visitors had to acknowledge that Alexandria was something special. When Caesar, three days after Pompey’s murder, sailed past the island on which the Pharos stood, he was arriving at a city larger,* more cosmopolitan and certainly far more beautiful than his own. If Rome, shabby and labyrinthine, stood as a monument to the rugged virtues of the Republic, then Alexandria bore witness to what a king could achieve. But not just any king. The tomb of Alexander the Great still stood talisman-like in the city he had founded, and the street plan, a gridded lattice lined with gleaming colonnades, was recognisably the same as that mapped out three centuries earlier by the conquering Macedonian, to the roar of the lonely sea. Now, where once there had been nothing except for sand and wheeling marsh birds, there stretched a landscape of exquisite artificiality. Here was the first city ever to have numbered addresses. Its banks oiled the commerce of East and West alike, its freight terminals churned with the trade of the world. Its celebrated library boasted seven hundred thousand scrolls and had been built in pursuit of a sublime fantasy: that every book ever written might be gathered in one place. There were even slot machines and automatic doors. Everything in Alexandria was a superlative. No wonder that Cicero, who regarded anywhere that was not Rome as ‘squalid obscurity’,13 should have made an exception for the one city that rivalled his own as the centre of the world. ‘Yes,’ he confessed, ‘I dream, and have long dreamed, of seeing Alexandria.’14
He was not the only Roman to be haunted by fantasies of the city. Egypt was a land of unrivalled fertility, and the proconsul who conquered Alexandria would have the bread-basket of the Mediterranean in his hands. This was a prospect that had long served to poison the already venomous swirl of Roman politics, breeding endless machinations and bribery scandals – yet no one, not even Crassus, not even Pompey, had succeeded in securing an Egyptian command. By unwritten consent, a prize so dazzling was a prize too far. In the view of most citizens it was safer and just as profitable to leave the ruling dynasty to administer the costs of its own exploitation. A succession of monarchs had played the role of the Republic’s poodle to perfection: secure enough to squeeze their subjects dry on behalf of their patrons, weak enough never to present the slightest threat to Rome. On such a humiliating basis was the last independent kingdom of the Greeks, originally founded by a general of Alexander and once the greatest power in the East, permitted to limp along.
But the kings of Egypt were nothing if not survivors. The Ptolemy who had watched Pompey being butchered in the surf was the namesake of a long line of monarchs who had always been prepared to swallow any indignity and perpetrate any outrage to keep a hold on power. To the greed, viciousness and sensuality that had characterised all the Greek dynasties in the East, the Ptolemies had added their own refinement, derived from Egypt’s pharaonic past: habitual incest. The effects of their inbreeding could be seen not only in the murderous quality of the Ptolemies’ palace intrigues, but also in a decadence exceptional even by the standards of contemporary royalty. The Romans openly regarded the Ptolemies as monstrosities, and saw it as their republican duty to rub this in at every opportunity. If the king were gross and effete, then visiting proconsuls would take delight in forcing him to lumber through the streets of Alexandria, wobbling in his diaphanous robes as he sweated to keep up. Other Romans found more vivid ways of expressing their scorn. Cato, called upon by a Ptolemy while he was administering Cyprus, had greeted the King of Egypt amid the after-effects of a laxative, and spent the entire audience sitting on the lavatory.
So it was that Caesar, arriving in the middle of a dynastic death-struggle with barely four thousand men, more than made up in prejudices what he lacked in troops. The contemptibility of the Ptolemies was confirmed for him from the moment he stepped ashore. There, a welcoming gift on the harbour quay, was Pompey’s pickled head. Caesar wept: no matter how relieved he may secretly have felt at the removal of his adversary, he was disgusted by his son-in-law’s fate, and even more so when he discovered the full background to the crime.
For Pompey the Great, it emerged, had been the victim of a sinister backstairs cabal, comprising Ptolemy’s chief ministers, a eunuch, a mercenary and an academic. Nothing, to Caesar’s mind, could have been more offensively un-Roman. Yet the brains behind the crime, Pothinus, the eunuch, was presuming on his gratitude, and confidently expecting him to back the King in the war against his sister. Instead, trapped in Alexandria by adverse winds, Caesar immediately started behaving as though he were a king himself. Needing somewhere to stay, he naturally chose the royal palace, a vast, fortified complex of buildings that over the centuries had spread and spread, until it now covered almost a third of the city – another of Alexandria’s superlatives. From this stronghold Caesar began to issue exorbitant financial demands, and announced, graciously, that he was prepared to settle the civil war between Ptolemy and his sister – not as a partisan, but as a referee. He ordered both siblings to disband their armies and meet him in Alexandria. Ptolemy, without disbanding so much as a soldier, was persuaded by Pothinus to return to the palace. Meanwhile, his sister, Cleopatra, with no free passage to the capital, remained stranded beyond Ptolemy’s lines.
But then, one evening, through the deepening shadows of an Alexandrian twilight, a small boat sneaked up to a jetty beside the palace. A single Sicilian merchant clambered out, carrying on his shoulder a carpet in a bag. Once this had been smuggled into Caesar’s presence it was unrolled to reveal the unexpected, but bewitching, sight of Cleopatra. Caesar, as the Queen had gambled he would be, was delighted by this coup de théâtre. Making an impression had never been a problem for her. While she may not have been the beauty of legend – she appears, from her coins at least, to have been somewhat scrawny and hook-nosed – her resources of seductiveness were infinite. ‘Her sex appeal, together with the charm of her conversation, and the charisma evident in everything she said or did, made her, quite simply, irresistible,’15 wrote Plutarch. Who, looking at Cleopatra’s track-record, can doubt it? Not that she was given to sleeping around; far from it. Her favours were the most exclusive in the world. Power, for Cleopatra, was the only aphrodisiac. The female of the Ptolemaic species had always been deadlier than the male: intelligent, ruthless, ambitious, strong-willed. Now, in the person of Cleopatra, all these fierce qualities met and were distilled. As such, she was exactly Caesar’s type: after more than a decade of soldiering, intelligent female company must have come as a rare pleasure. Of course, it also helped that Cleopatra was only twenty-one. Caesar bedded her that very night.