The Search for Cleopatra: The True Story of History's Most Intriguing Woman
208
The Search for Cleopatra: The True Story of History's Most Intriguing Woman
208Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Rome cast Cleopatra as a threat to the order of its own crumbling republic. To them, she represented decadence, corruption, and temptation. Yet as Foss shows with clarity and insight, Cleopatra played her hand in the only manner she could. Determined that her kingdom survive, she was prepared to do whatever it took to retain power, and very nearly achieved dominance of the whole of the eastern Mediterranean world. When she finally surrendered her ambitions, it was with a larger-than-life flare that has since inspired ancient chroniclers. Fully-illustrated, and impeccably documented, The Search for Cleopatra sets before us the most absorbing figure of the ancient world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611453331 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2011 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ASENSE OF THE PAST
Laborious collections of facts, gathered with ingenuity and great effort and judged with difficulty, make up our written histories. Out of this slow accumulation we build our picture of the past. But it is the picture not so much the evidence that we need, for our imagination seems to be primarily visual And in our pictures what we most like – perhaps what we must have – is not some absolute of historical truth founded on a mountain of small certain facts. In any case, that is hardly possible, given the partial and much-erased record of history. Rather, we want a vision for the mind that reveals itself in drama, passion, elemental conflict, emblematic events that become the basis for mythologies.
Imagine a woman of sufficient interest to throw future ages into a labyrinth of dreams. Imagine her in all the variety and grace and appeal of mature womanhood taken to its utmost possibility, with the mind and a body to captivate a caesar, a world-conqueror, an emperor. Did such a person exist, or was she only a figment of the imagination?
History has suggested to us that there was such a woman, formed in the flesh and blood of an Egyptian queen of the first century BC. This woman – Cleopatra VII of the house of Ptolemy – has appeared to later generations to contain all the rare elements of a woman of dreams. She captivated not one caesar but two, and made another one – the greatest of the three – tremble so that one of his Romans wrote that Rome, the city of conquerors, had feared only two people: Hannibal and Cleopatra.
Who was this woman Cleopatra?
In June 323 BC, when Alexander the Great died suddenly in Babylon after a short but meteoric life of conquest, his Macedonian generals scrambled for the remains of his empire. The general Ptolemy, a tough and proven soldier who was also, in the manner of so many men of the mountains, shrewd, obstinate and wily, knew that he desired two things: the body of Alexander and the land of Egypt.
For a man of good judgement these two objects of desire went together; it was at the Egyptian oasis of Siwah that the oracle of Amon had saluted Alexander as the son of the god. Thus there began in Egypt the second and more remarkable career of Alexander the Great, which turned him from a successful conqueror – an ordinary piece of mortality – into a blazing star of mythology a cult-hero and a god whose image became the possession of the world. Even today we see the embers of his fiery trail laid across the mind of humanity. A modern historian, following in the footsteps of Alexander, writes:
We saw his story retold by Greek and Turkish shadow-players, and by Tadjik bards. We saw one of the last of the travelling one-man shows in Iran, complete with painted backdrop showing the death of the Persian king, Darius, in epic style. We heard about Greek medicine from the doctors of Multan in north-east Pakistan, who claim descent from Alexander's physicians; we sat in a felt yurt on the Turkmen steppe to hear the story of his devil's horns and his two-week sex romp with an Amazon queen.
Ptolemy wanted Egypt, the richest of all Alexander's conquests, and he knew that the possession of Alexander's corpse would give him the venerated body of a vivid new god and a talisman of extraordinary power in the ancient land. After discussions in Babylon, Ptolemy became satrap of Egypt, though there was doubt whether Alexander should be entombed at Siwah or in the Macedonian homeland at Aegae. Ptolemy hurried to take up his territory. Then while Perdiccas, the foremost of Alexander's generals, was engaged elsewhere, Ptolemy waylaid the funeral procession and took the hero's corpse to Memphis. Here, in the old capital of Lower Egypt, the body stayed until a fitting tomb – the Sema – was prepared in Alexander's own city of Alexandria. Within two years Perdiccas, who saw too late that he had been out-manoeuvred, attacked Egypt, but without success. In 321 BC he was stopped at the Nile. His invaders became the first of many enemies to the rule of the Ptolemies whose corpses were fed to the crocodiles of the river.
Now Ptolemy was securely confirmed as satrap of Egypt, and he had in his hands the body of the god Alexander and the god's magnificent new city of Alexandria. A state-cult was founded for Alexander, with its own priesthood. In 305 BC Ptolemy felt strong enough in his new land to transform himself from satrap to king. He took on the customary role of the pharaoh and assumed all the ancient rights and privileges of that great title. He became Ptolemy I Soter. Soter meant Saviour, and in taking that honorific title he claimed to be the man who had rescued Egypt from the hated rule of the Persians, he who had (as it was written in the hieroglyphics of a stele) restored to Horus, the god of Egypt, 'from this day forth forever, all its villages, all its towns, all its people, all its fields.'
In a hundred years or so of artful and successful rule, the first three Ptolemies had bound their family into a close-knit dynasty, and had bound that dynasty into the fabric and the being of Egypt. Quite consciously the house of Ptolemy kept the kingship confined within an incestuous family group. In a period of three hundred years two names alone sufficed for the successive kings. The male rulers were called Ptolemy, and sometimes, almost by way of an aside to bring forth great memories, also Alexander. Their co-rulers, the powerful and ruthless queens of the dynasty, were called Berenice or Arsinoe or Cleopatra – nothing else. The kings advertised themselves to their people with such titles as Soter (Saviour) and Euergetes (Benefactor) and Epiphanes (Shown-by-God). They and their queens were called Philadelphus (Brother or Sister-loving) or Philopator (Father-loving) or Philometor (Mother-loving). These titles were too often more than rhetoric, indicating a real marriage between brother and sister or between parent and child. This habit of incest, for which there was perhaps some slight precedent in Egyptian history scandalized the Greeks. But the Ptolemies, those pragmatic ruffians from the highlands of Macedonia, though Greek-speaking and of Greek culture themselves, saw only a dynastic advantage in incest. They were far from their homeland and their regal actions were not subject to review from their Greek peers.
In three centuries of intermittent in-breeding there is no clear evidence that the family degenerated excessively as a result. The Ptolemy men ran to fat. They lost the hardiness and mental toughness of pasturalists from the hills, and the later kings became idle, artistic and a little decadent. But that is a familiar course in realms that have become rich, lazy and somnolent. The Ptolemy queens, on the contrary remained sharp-witted, competent and energetic. However, it is possible that Cleopatra VII, the most brilliant of those queens, gained some of her exceptional qualities from an infusion of new blood. The identity of neither her mother nor her grandmother is known for certain. On the maternal side, she sprang from concubines rather than queens.
It was a bold step to root the family inheritance on incest. But it was a move of greater wisdom, carefully carried through by the first three Ptolemy kings, to assimilate as much as possible the government by this alien Macedonian Greek ruling house into the long-standing, stable traditions of Egyptian life and practice.
In the ancient world Greeks and Egyptians were no strangers to each other. Both were seafaring people. Trade and culture had been intermixed between them for a long time. The histories of Herodotus, from the fifth century BC, showed how much was known about Egypt, and with what keen intellectual curiosity (the mark of ancient Greece!) the Greeks investigated all aspects of the civilization of the colossus of the Near East. Among many wonders, two things were easy to note: the longevity and resilience of pharaonic civilization; and the wealth and productive power of the land, owed in large part to the gifts of the Nile. And shrewd minds – there was no shortage of those among Greeks – also saw that the two things were closely connected.
The wealth of Egypt was obvious. Time and again, when the prodigal Nile had performed its yearly miracle of flood and soil-enrichment, the price of Egyptian wheat in the Athenian market was able to undercut the price of the local produce, despite transportation costs and a middleman's profit. Wheat and barley were the staples of Egyptian agriculture, which produced in good years a large surplus for export. But the fine silt of the Nile under a warm sun was capable of supporting almost any harvest, and the variety of things grown in Egypt with success was extraordinary. Vines, olives, figs, dates, walnuts, beans, peas, lentils, cabbage, radish, onions and garlic, all did very well. Spices included mustard, cumin and fenugreek. Oil was pressed from linseed, safflower, sesame and croton. There were nuts of many kinds, and the fruits of a warm climate such as apricots, peaches and quinces. From the stock of barley, large amounts of beer were brewed and thankfully drunk on hot harvest days.
Nor was there a shortage of pasturage for the animals. Draught oxen did the heavy work, ploughing the shallow furrow or turning the waterwheels of the irrigation system on which the success of agriculture depended. On large estates, in the south and at the desert edge, camels were used, as awkward and bad-tempered here as elsewhere. 'You can hear from your brother', a letter-writer complains, 'how everyone here suffered on account of those camels from Coptos.' Bulls had a special place in a society that held them to be sacred. They, too, were not easy to handle. 'Those damn bulls of yours', runs the same letter, 'are running wild, and they've landed me in court several times, thanks to you.' Ubiquitous donkeys carried the peasants and the lighter loads. The housewife was likely to have her chickens and a dovecote. Pigs snuffled in courtyards (the Greeks were fond of pork and bacon but the animal was unclean to the Egyptians). Sheep and goats in large numbers gave meat and wool and milk and cheese.
The bulk of the produce, certainly the surplus for export, came from the large estates of the king, the nobles and the temple priesthood, in the Nile delta or in the Fayum where the early Ptolemies drained part of Lake Moeris, to extend the good land on which they could settle their Greek followers or reward mercenary soldiers with landholdings. But the pattern of production and commerce developed in Egypt over several millennia was complex and varied, and the aim of the Ptolemies was not to change it but to refine it and develop it further. Production extended well beyond the dominating great estates whose prime purpose was to enrich the king. The sub-lessee, the smallholder, the cultivator of a domestic plot, the entrepreneur, the official with a sideline in agriculture and business, all played an important part in the accumulation of Egyptian wealth. So long as the main current of labour flowed to the king – to the state – it was permissible that some of the flow should run into the winding channels of individual enterprise.
Beyond all systems of landholding and production lay the annual problem of the Nile. The success or failure of almost all agriculture depended on the control and distribution of the river-waters – on the rise and fall of the river. In June, the waters began to swell around the First Cataract in the far south. The flood proceeded down the river to the delta, and then began slowly to fall, starting in September. On this simple rhythm the life of the country depended. 'When two sources of the Nile have been closed up,' said an ancient inscription, 'plants will wither and life will retreat from the living.' Anxiously, the river was watched and measured, with large scales cut into the stone at various points on the bank. The readings were collected and collated, for the balance between dearth and plenty was very fine, as a Roman historian observed:
Seven metres is an average rise. Less does not irrigate all the available land, and more holds back the sowing by too muchwetness; with less the soil is parched, with more it is water-logged. Each district takes a careful note of both extremes. In a rise of five and a half metres one sees the spectre of famine, and even in six metres hunger is felt. But six and a half metres brings good cheer, six and threequarters confidence, and seven metres delight. The largest rise to date was eight metres, and the smallest a little over two metres, in the year of Pharsalus, as if the river by portents was trying to warn of the murder of Pompey.
The yearly drama of the vast river, stretching some thousand kilometres from the First Cataract to the sea, only unfolded slowly. Different parts of the land v/ere affected at different times. To control the water and make it work for the benefit of the whole land needed a co-ordinated effort to plan and measure and inform, to build and maintain canals, dykes and ditches, to work waterwheels and sluices, to dam or to let flow All this required central direction, a large bureaucracy of administrators, and a large workforce to be deployed at will under the king, who in the theory of the state was the only autocratic authority that the country possessed. Whether the centralized bureaucracy and planned economy of Egypt grew out of the people's need to control the river, or whether the control of the Nile resulted from the already established forms of pharaonic society, is a question shrouded by its antiquity. But the plain fact was that the system worked. It took no great intelligence to see its success in the long waving green of the cornfields, in vineyards and olive groves, in stands of date palms, in the grape-hung trellises of country houses, in the orchards of ripe fruit. Men saw it even more in the grain warehouses waiting to discharge their surplus into the ships of all the Mediterranean, in the pomp of palaces, and in temples and monuments that dwarfed the scale of all other man-made objects. They knew that this was success.
In the early years of his reign, Ptolemy I Soter saw that the impressive bureaucratic structure in Egypt had suffered under the maladministration of the Persians. The river system had been neglected and agriculture was in decline. Trade was in the hands of foreigners, mainly Greeks and Phoenicians. Industry was hardly maintained, except by the priests of the temples. Power was shifting away from the kingship into the temple complexes. Ptolemy I, and more particularly his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus, set out to re-establish and re-interpret the old autocratic system even more stringently than before, enforcing bureaucratic efficiency with military severity.
The Ptolemaic king [a leading historian has written] has to be thought of as a landowner and a farmer on a huge scale, one whose estate was the whole land of Egypt. All the officials were his personal servants, the army an instrument of his will, raised from the men who had plots of land assigned to them out of his territory on the condition of rendering him military service.
Ptolemy I was a soldier and his experience of men and affairs came from the campaign of Alexander; under the first Ptolemaic kings 'there was no sharp distinction between the military and the civil career, and the staff of the king bore an almost purely military character'.
The king was the ultimate beneficiary of all activity of whatever kind within the state. For the early Ptolemies, the boast of Louis XIV of France was nothing but the truth: 'The State, it is me.' The whole land was plotted and divided into highly regulated administrative districts, and administration was in the hands of a large centralized bureaucracy whose chief officers, usually eunuchs, were royal placeholders. The underlying principle of all government was the enrichment of the king. And though the ruler naturally delegated his authority, the people did not forget that the authority was his, nor did they hesitate to remind him that the ultimate responsibility was his also. A conscientious Ptolemy was a busy man. He was bombarded with petitions from even the meanest of his subjects. An historian, leafing through the evidence of the papyri, noted the following causes of complaint:
Someone has killed the pigs of an allotment holder; a provision merchant has made a fraudulent delivery; joint tenants are squabbling about the partition of a field; a careless attendant has scalded a woman in a public bath house; a prostitute spat on a man when he turned her offer down.
All this was presented to the king for adjudication, and a myriad of other things had to be looked into as well Quite typically, in 99 BC the chief embalmer of the divine bulls Apis and Mnevis finds the insolence of officialdom too much to bear. He writes to the king, demanding a royal command, to be pinned on his door, that he should be left alone. The command is duly prepared and signed and sent. No wonder a good king was a weary man. It was said that one of the Seleucid monarchs, who operated in Syria a similar but less grandiose system, cried out in distress. 'If only the people knew', he lamented, 'what weary work it is to write and read so many letters, they would not even bother to pick up a diadem from the ground.' But the efficient running of the Ptolemaic state, both in theory and practice, demanded the constant care of the king.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Search For Cleopatra"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Michael Foss.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Colour Plates 6
The Reigns of the Ptolemies 7
1 A Sense of the Past 9
2 Preparation of a Queen 32
3 The Shadow of Rome 56
4 Caesar and Cleopatra 70
5 Breathing Space 99
6 Antony and Cleopatra 117
7 Actium and the Course of History 150
Acknowledgements 188
Index 189
List of Maps
Ancient Egypt during the Ptolemies 8
Plan of Alexandria during Cleopatra's time 37
The eastern Mediterranean during the first century BC 59
Battle of Actium 159