Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [25]
When Caesar arrived at Alexandria with a handful of troops in 48 B.C., a boy king, Ptolemy XIII, had succeeded to the throne. One of the conventions that the Macedonian Ptolemies picked up from their Egyptian predecessors was for pharaohs to marry their sisters. A habit of incest could in the long run be genetically damaging, but it had the great advantage of keeping power strictly within the family.
Ptolemy XIII was only eleven years old and not in a position to exercise power. He wedded his sister Cleopatra, who was twenty-one or twenty-two, clever, ambitious, and eager to take the reins. The court hierarchy in the palace at Alexandria was not so keen. They preferred to run the country themselves; the queen was driven out, and the pharaoh married another of his sisters, Arsinoe. Civil strife beckoned.
Caesar offered his impartial adjudication, and Cleopatra realized she needed to make her way into his presence through a ring of troops loyal to her brother if she was to influence his verdict. Together with a friend from Sicily, a merchant called Apollodorus, she embarked on a small boat and landed at the royal harbor when it was getting dark. She stretched herself out full-length inside a bed-linen sack; Apollodorus tied up the bag and carried it indoors to Caesar (in another version of the story she wrapped herself inside a carpet). According to Plutarch, “this little trick of Cleopatra’s, which first showed her provocative impudence, is said to have been the first thing about her which captivated Caesar.”
Caesar soon announced his judgment. Cleopatra and her brother were to reign jointly, with equal rights; while appearing equitable, in practice this shifted the balance of power from the latter to the former. Her opponents called in the royal army—an experienced force of twenty thousand soldiers—which laid siege to Caesar in the royal palace at Alexandria.
Eventually, long-expected reinforcements arrived, and on March 27 Caesar destroyed the royal army in a set-piece battle at the delta of the river Nile. The pharaoh boarded a boat to make his getaway, but the vessel was overturned by panicking soldiers trying to clamber aboard from the water. The hapless boy drowned.
It might have been supposed that, having extricated himself from a very difficult situation brought on by arrogance and carelessness, the dictator of Rome would immediately leave Egypt to conclude the civil war at home and establish his rule on a permanent basis. Nothing of the kind occurred.
Caesar, the fifty-two-year-old womanizer, had fallen for Cleopatra and they began an affair. The queen was attractive, although perhaps not conventionally beautiful. Plutarch reports:
As far as they say, her beauty was not in and for itself incomparable, nor such as to strike the person who was just looking at her; but her conversation had an irresistible charm; and from the one side her appearance, together with the seduction of her speech, from the other her character, which pervaded her actions in an inexplicable way when meeting people, was utterly spell-binding. The sound of her voice was sweet when she talked.
Her appearance on coins of the period ranges from the witchlike to the radiant but does little to confirm this account of a woman whose charm was at its most powerful when she was moving or talking. However, the eyes and lips of a fine marble bust in the Berlin State Museum, which has been identified as being a portrait of her, reveal a fresh, sensuous willfulness.
The queen was very much more than a pretty face. She was highly intelligent and must have received a good education, for she was fluent in many languages, among them Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syrian, the languages of the Medes (who lived in Babylonia, or today’s Iraq) and Parthians, and (above all) Egyptian. In an interesting aside, which reveals how seriously Cleopatra took her role as queen, Plutarch notes: “Many rulers of Egypt before her had never even troubled to learn the Egyptian language, and some of them had even given up their native Macedonian