Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (46 page)

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,’
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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.

When Ptolemy found out about his sister’s conquest he was thrown into a violent tantrum. He flounced out into the streets, tossing his diadem down into the dust and screaming for his subjects to rally to his defence. The inhabitants of Alexandria were much given to rioting, and Caesar’s high-handed demands for money had already done little for his popularity. Now, when Ptolemy asked the mob to attack the Romans, it obliged enthusiastically. The hated foreigners were besieged in the palace, and so threatened did Caesar’s position become that he was obliged not only to recognise Ptolemy as joint monarch with Cleopatra, but also to cede Cyprus back to the pair of them. Even so, such concessions did little to ease him out of his embarrassing scrape. A few weeks into the siege and the rioters were joined by Ptolemy’s entire army, some twenty thousand strong. Caesar found his situation going from bad to desperate. Trapped in the hot-house of an Egyptian palace, surrounded by treacherous eunuchs and incestuous royals, he was completely cut off from the outside world. Far beyond the light cast by the flashing Pharos, the Republic was still at war with itself – yet Caesar could not get so much as a letter smuggled through to Rome.

For the next five months the terrible exploits of his previous campaigns were replayed as farce. Burning the Egyptian fleet in the harbour, the bibliophile Caesar accidentally set fire to warehouses crammed with priceless books;
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attempting to secure the Pharos, he was forced to jump ship and abandon his general’s cloak to the enemy. Despite these embarrassments, however, Caesar succeeded
in retaining control of both the palace and the harbour – and stamped his authority in other ways too. Not only did he have the scheming Pothinus put to death, but he impregnated Cleopatra, an act of king-making to trump anything achieved by Pompey. By March 47
BC
, when reinforcements finally arrived in Egypt, the Queen was visibly swelling with the proof of Caesar’s favour. Ptolemy, panicking, fled Alexandria. Weighed down by his golden armour, he drowned in the Nile – a convenient accident that left Cleopatra unchallenged on her throne. Caesar had backed a winner once again.

But at what cost? A steep one, it seemed. With his communication lines restored, Caesar was now back in touch with his agents, and the news they sent could hardly have been less promising. The Alexandrian escapade had squandered much of the advantage won at Pharsalus. In Italy Antony’s stewardship was provoking widespread resentment; in Asia King Pharnaces, Mithridates’ son, had proved himself a chip off the old block by invading Pontus; in Africa Metellus Scipio and Cato were marshalling a vast new army; in Spain Pompeians were fostering renewed unrest. North, east, south, west – war across the world. There were few places where Caesar was not desperately required. But for two more months he lingered in Egypt. With the Republic fatally riven, and the empire of the Roman people collapsing into anarchy, Caesar, the man whose restless ambition had begun the civil war, lolled by his mistress’s side.

No wonder that Cleopatra’s seductiveness should have struck many Romans as something almost demonic. To tempt a citizen famous for his energies into idleness, to lure him from the path of duty, to keep him from Rome and a destiny that seemed increasingly to have been ordained by the gods – this was a theme worthy of great and terrible poetry. And of obscene chanting too. Caesar’s libido had long been a source of hilarity to his men: ‘Lock up your
wives,’ they would sing, ‘our commander is bad news/He may be bald, but he fucks anything that moves.’
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Other jokes, inevitably, harped on the old gossip about Nicomedes. Even to men who had followed their general through unbelievable hardships, his sexual prowess spelled effeminacy. Great though Caesar had proved himself, steel-hard in body and mind, the moral codes of the Republic were unforgiving. A citizen could never afford to slip. Dirt on a toga would always show.

It was the threat of such ridicule, of course, that helped to keep a Roman a man. Custom, wrote the greatest scholar of Caesar’s day, was ‘a pattern of thought which has evolved to become a regular practice’:
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shared and accepted by all the citizens of the Republic, it had provided Rome with the surest foundation of her greatness. How different things were in Alexandria! Raised from scratch on sandbanks, the city lacked deep roots. No wonder, to Roman eyes, that it had such a harlot character. Without custom there could be no shame, and without shame anything became possible. A people whose traditions had withered would become prey to the most repellent and degrading habits. Who better illustrated this than the Ptolemies themselves? No sooner had Cleopatra seen off one sibling than she married another. The spectacle of the heavily pregnant Queen taking as her husband her ten-year-old brother was one to put any of Clodia’s exploits into the shade. Greek Cleopatra may have been, a daughter of the same culture that had provided the bedrock of a Roman’s education, but she was also fabulously, exotically alien. For a man of Caesar’s temperament, with his taste for the taboo, it must have been an enchanting combination.

Yet if Cleopatra provided him with a delicious erotic interlude, an opportunity, for a couple of months, to drop the guard expected of a Roman magistrate, Caesar was never the man to forget his own future, nor that of Rome. Pondering them, he must have been given much food for thought by what he found in Alexandria. Just like its queen, the city was a disorienting blend of the familiar and the weird. With its library and its temples, it was all very Greek – indeed, the capital of the Greek world. Sometimes, however, when the prevailing winds turned and breezes no longer bore a freshness from the sea, sand would gust through Alexandria, carried from the burning desert to the south. The Egyptian hinterland was too vast and too ancient to be entirely ignored. It made of its capital a dreamlike, hybrid place. The spacious streets were decorated not only with the clean-limbed masterpieces of Greek sculptors, but also with statuary looted from the banks of the Nile: sphinxes, gods with animal heads, pharaohs with enigmatic smiles. Just as strikingly – and, to a Roman’s eye, bizarrely – however, there were some quarters of the city in which there were no images of gods to be seen at all. As well as to Greeks and Egyptians, Alexandria was home to a vast number of Jews; more, almost certainly, than Jerusalem itself. They completely dominated one of the city’s five administrative districts, and despite having to rely on a Greek translation of the Torah, they remained in other ways defiantly unassimilated. Jews entering their synagogue, Syrians camped outside beneath a statue of Zeus, all of them in the shadow of a plundered obelisk – this was the look of cosmopolis.

And was it to be Rome’s future too? There were certainly plenty of citizens who feared so. To the Romans, the prospect of being swamped by barbarous cultures had always been a fertile source of paranoia. The ruling classes, in particular, mistrusted foreign influences because they dreaded the enfeebling of the Republic. The world’s mistress, yes, but a world city, no: this, essentially, was the
Senate’s manifesto for Rome. So it was that Jews and Babylonian astrologers were endlessly being expelled from the city. So too Egyptian gods. Even in the frantic months before Caesar crossed the Rubicon one of the consuls had found time to pick up an axe and personally start on the demolition of a temple of Isis. But the Jews and astrologers always made their ways back, and the great goddess Isis, divine mother and queen of the heavens, had far too strong a hold upon her worshippers easily to be banished from the city. The consul had been forced to lift the axe against her only because no labourers could be found to do the job. Rome was changing, lapped by tides of immigration, and there was little that the Senate could do to hold them back. New languages, new customs, new religions: these were the fruits of the Republic’s own greatness. Not for nothing did all roads now lead to Rome.

Caesar, who had always been unafraid of the unthinkable, and had anyway long been a virtual stranger to his own city, could see this with a clarity denied to most of his peers. Perhaps he had always seen it. After all, as a boy, Jews had been his neighbours, and he had offered them his family’s protection. Far from alarming him, the presence of immigrants in Rome had served merely to buttress his conceit. Now, as the victor of Pharsalus, he was in a position to patronise entire nations. Throughout the East sculptors were busy chiselling Pompey’s name from inscriptions and replacing it with Caesar’s – the Republic, naturally, being nowhere mentioned. In city after city the descendant of Venus had been hailed as a living god, and in Ephesus as the saviour of mankind, no less. This was heady stuff, even for a man of Caesar’s pitiless intelligence. He did not need to swallow such flattery whole to find it suggestive. Clearly, a role as the saviour of mankind would not easily be accommodated by the constitutional arrangements of the Republic. If Caesar wanted inspiration, then he would have to look elsewhere. No wonder, lingering in Alexandria, that he
found Cleopatra so intriguing. Dimly, distortedly, in the figure of the young Egyptian Queen, he surely caught a glimpse of a possible future for himself.

In the late spring of 47
BC
the happy couple set out on a cruise down the Nile. To do this was to journey from one world to another. After all, strange as Alexandria struck visiting Romans, it was not altogether alien. Its citizens, like the Romans themselves, were proud of their liberties. Ostensibly, Alexandria was a free city, and the relationship of the monarch to her Greek compatriots was supposed to be that of a first among equals. Civic traditions derived from classical Greece were still cherished, and however hazily they were now understood, Cleopatra could not afford to ignore them altogether. But pass beyond the limits of her capital, glide in her barge past the pyramids or the great pylons of Karnak, and she became something else entirely. The role of pharaoh was one that Cleopatra played with the utmost seriousness. She was the first Greek monarch to speak Egyptian. During the war with her brother she had turned for support not to Alexandria but to her native subjects in the provinces. She was not merely a devotee of the ancient gods, but one of them, divinity made flesh, an incarnation of the queen of the heavens herself.

First citizen of Alexandria and the new Isis: Cleopatra was both. For Caesar, there can have been nothing like taking a goddess to bed to make the scruples of the far-distant Republic appear even more parochial than they had seemed before. It was said that, had his soldiers not started complaining, he would have sailed on with his mistress all the way to Ethiopia. This was scurrilous gossip, but it hinted at a dangerous and plausible truth. Caesar was indeed embarked on a journey into uncharted realms. First, of course, there was a civil war to be won, and it was to achieve this that Caesar, at the end of May, abandoned his Nile cruise and set off with his legions on fresh endeavours and new campaigns. But after
victory what then? His time with Cleopatra had given Caesar a good deal to mull over. On the fruits of these reflections much might depend. Not only his own future, perhaps, but that of Rome and the world beyond it too.