Cleopatra The Famous Women Series by Colin Falconer
Introduction "the most complete woman ever to have existed, the most womanly woman and the most queenly queen, a person to be wondered at, to whom the poets have been able to add nothing, and whom dreamers find always at the end of their dreams." - Théophile Gautier, 1845. In the years leading up to the birth of Christ, the Mediterranean was virtually a province of Rome. Roman rule extended from Britain to Judea, Syria to Carthage. Governors were appointed to some of these conquered territories, in others native princes and satraps ruled only through the patronage of their Roman overlords. The wealthiest and most important of these client nations was Egypt. Egypt’s capital, Alexandria was named after Alexander the Great, the legendary Macedonian general who had defeated the Pharaohs in 332 BC. He had installed one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter, as its ruler. To gain popular support Ptolemy had himself named the Pharaoh’s successor. He and his descendants took on many Egyptian traditions, intermarrying as the Pharaohs had done, participating in Egyptian religious life and having themselves portrayed on public monuments in Egyptian style and dress. Hellenistic culture only thrived in Alexandria itself. The Ptolemies established their own dynasty, ruling not only the vast wealth of Egypt, but also Syria, Cyrenaica and Cyprus. But in the intervening centuries, much of this empire was lost to Rome. By 51 BC the country was riven by internecine feuding and corruption, and the Ptolemies hold on power had become increasingly tenuous. This was the world Cleopatra – the seventh Cleopatra, but the only princess of that name that we remember – was born to.
PART I First there was this ... Darkness, cold stone under her fingertips, torches flickering in the down draught of the tunnels. She heard their cold and sinuous coilings as they retreated from the torchlight. There were hundreds of them, countless deaths sliding upon and under, eyes glinting like garnet chips. The executioner's storehouse. An asp flicked its tongue in agitation. Its bite caused agonising pain. The affected limb swelled to twice its size, and the victim would retch uncontrollably, then lose control of bladder and bowels. An ugly death, reserved for criminals. And there, its slender body banded with yellow and brown, was a hooded cobra; the divine symbol of Upper Egypt, the royal emblem of pharaoh and Ptolemy alike. The Greeks called it basilisk, or little king. In the Book of the Dead she was the symbol for everlasting life. Its bite was just as deadly but painless. Its victim fell quickly into a deep sleep and departed in a sigh of breath. Its fangs left two small marks, but that was all, death and dignity were granted together. It was the way her father had chosen for her older sister, Berenice. He put his mouth to her ear; she felt the wiry hairs of his beard tickle her face. "This is the world you have inherited," he whispered. "Every palace is filled with snakes, twice as deadly as these. You will live among vipers all your life so you must learn to use your venom as wisely but strike without hesitation when you must. Do you understand?" "I understand," Cleopatra answered. She was ten years old.
Chapter One the Brucheion Palace Alexandria-by-Egypt the Egyptian month of Phamenoth, 51 BC Her father; Ptolemy XII, the Piper, the Bastard. With his final breath she heard the slithering of cold bodies and the baring of fangs. She stood by the bed, transfixed. Help me, she wanted to say. I am not ready for this. His eyes were closed, his lips composed in a beatific smile; the parting with life had been gentle. Her father, yet not him. Without the tension of life, he looked only vaguely like himself. He had called himself the New Dionysius, the Saviour who would rescue the East from the tyranny of Rome. He had the Bacchic ivy leaf tattooed on his body and was initiated into the secrets of wine and music and abandon. They had laughed at him behind his back, called him The Piper because of his fondness for the Rites of Pan, others just called him The Bastard and sneered at his efforts to stall the Romans. I am on my own now, she thought. For the last few months I have ruled as his co-regent, but now, with his passing, the knives will be out. From this day on and to all the world I am Cleopatra the Seventh, Queen of the Two Lands, Upper and Lower Egypt, Philopater Philomatris, Father-Loving Nation-Loving God. But that is just words. The truth is, I am eighteen years old, just a girl, without experience, without help, and without friends. And everyone around me wants me dead. She kissed the Piper's hand for the last time, laid it cold on his chest. I promise you this father. I will save Egypt, as you had designed, and I will avenge you for every little joke they enjoyed at your expense. *** "I have given orders for him to be borne to the Monument," someone said. "He will lie there along with his ancestors and Alexander." She turned around, was confronted with a great slab of Macedonian lard with oiled ringlets and too many lapis and carnelian rings on his fat fingers. He wore that unctuous expression all Greek secretaries seemed to acquire with their robes of office. He was Privy Councillor to the House of Adoration, one of her father's closest advisers. She imagined his ambitions did not end there.
"That is for me to command, Pothinus." "It is proper. I seek only to lighten your burden at this hour of grief." "Of course. I did not doubt your intention." The serpents had already slithered from their hibernation. They will give orders which they know I will not rescind, and so already they chip away at my power, even before my father's body is cold. Don’t expect time to grieve. There will not be any. *** The Regency Council filed in, her younger brother Ptolemy shoved ahead of them, like a prisoner. Look at him; arms no thicker than spear shafts, and a face like spanked child. They had dressed him in the chlamys of a man, although he was yet to sprout a beard. What am I to do with him? Pothinus has filled his head with mischief, no doubt. She indicated a gilded chair on the dais and Ptolemy sat down beside her. The Regency Council were at a gilded bench below her. There was Pothinus, of course, head of the Council and officially Ptolemy's tropheus, his Foster-Father; beside him Theodotos, Ptolemy's tutor, another functionary she would trust only after he was dead and his head thrown to the fish; and Achillas, an Egyptian and Captain of the Royal Guard, still loyal to her - for the present. Look at them; a dusty scholar, a bully two generations out of the field and a shrill-voiced fat man with nothing between his legs but scallops of fat. Her dioiketes, Hephaestion, her prime minister of the moment, was also there, she could smell his perfume. He was almost as lovely as her sister, ArsinoÍ. And last of all Antiochus, still a child in a short white tunic, a look of pale apprehension on his face. Not a soul in the room she trusted. She looked up at the fretted gold ceiling, at the fresco of the god Dionysus surrounded by his adoring maenads. She imagined her father's face behind the flowing beard and she asked him: did you really love me more than my brothers and sisters or was this yet another game you played? She returned her attention to the court; all of them, even the few Egyptians among them, dressed in Greek chlamys, loose-fitting gowns fitted at the shoulder with a gold clasp; only the chief priests of Isis and Serapis with their shaved heads and white linen robes did not follow the custom. Further away, clustered in knots around the Great Hall of Pillars were her officers from her Household Guard, a few Gauls and Germans of the Roman contingent and a handful of wealthy Syrians, Jews and Egyptians. Immensely tall Nubians from her private bodyguard, naked and gleaming, were posted around the perimeter of the court, clutching ceremonial spears. All of them waited to see what she would do. Her first big test.
The formalities were dispensed with. Pothinus was eager to be down to business. "We must move quickly to arrange your marriage to your brother, Ptolemy," he said. "It will allay the fears of the population. And we must have an orderly succession so that we do not arouse the interest of the Romans." "You think the succession has not been orderly, Brother?" she said, using the honorific that was his due his lofty position at court. "Indeed it has, Majesty. I merely point out the wishes of the people. It is imperative you uphold the tradition without delay." The tradition; the pharoanic practice that had been adopted by the Ptolemies of royal brother marrying royal sister, a sop to the priests and the fellahin - the masses. Her father had married his own sister and Cleopatra's two older sisters, now dead, had issued from that union. Such barbarity was supposed to ensure the purity of the royal line. But this was not the Council's purpose here today. What they wanted to do was emasculate the new queen. "When our father became ill," she began, the royal prerogative of speech sitting uncomfortably with her, " he arranged for our coronation as his co-regent to ensure an orderly line of succession. In our view the wishes of the people and the needs of state have already been served." The smile did not leave Pothinus' face. "You do not intend to rule without a king, surely?" "Ptolemy is not a foreign prince come courting. You are not hoping for issue from our loins, are you Brother?" Even Ptolemy blanched at this. She felt a little better for having asserted herself. "Pothinus said I should be king," Ptolemy blurted out. Did he, indeed? "You are still a boy," she snapped at him. "That is why these men have appointed themselves your Council." He scowled, his eyes on the floor. The argument went back and forth, couched in the polite language of the court. She had no intention of giving ground and they could not force her to do so, outside of outright rebellion. They would not risk that with the Romans waiting any opportunity to intervene. "It was your father's wish," Theodotus was saying. She smiled to cover her anger, something her father had taught her to do. "He did not express such a wish to us." It is your wish, Theodotus, she thought. If I were to marry Ptolemy, I would become his queen and subordinate to him, and therefore subordinate to you and the rest of the Regency Council. Do you think me just a green girl you can bully into giving up the power to which I was born? "Surely your accession was but a temporary measure?" Theodotus said. "Do you presume to question your queen?" To her relief, Theodotus subsided like the lamb he was, head bobbing. A long silence followed, as she stared them down; all but Pothinus, who glared back at her from beneath heavy-lidded eyes.
It was Hephaestion who broke the tension. "There is another matter," he said. She felt herself relax. To her own astonishment she had won this first encounter. "Rome is on the brink of war, once more,” Haephaestion said. “Julius Caesar vies with Magnus Pompey for power. He has defied his own Senate and thrown Pompey and his armies out of Italy. Pompey has sent to us for our help in the conflict." This was no real surprise. Pompey had been her father's ally and The Piper owed his throne to him. Now the Roman was calling in his markers. "We must ignore this request," Pothinus said. "Ignore it?" she said. "And how will that benefit us?" "We are not slaves to the Romans. Should this Caesar gain victory we will only provoke him by supporting his enemy." "And if Magnus Pompey should prevail?" Pothinus did not answer her. Already, her first decision on foreign policy. But this was not a difficult one to make. She already knew her own mind on this, and for years she had been impatient to have her say. Her father had called her opinions unschooled; she had thought him too timid. "My father owes this Julius Caesar nine talents of gold," she said to them. "If he wins he will be here to claim it. You still wish to see Magnus Pompey defeated, Brother?" "Pompey asks for sixty ships and three hundred soldiers." "Then we shall give them to him." "The people will say you are a slave to the Romans!" Cleopatra stared at him. So, that is the rumour you intend to spread about me. At least you did me the honour of letting me hear it first. "They will say many things about me before I am dead." Pothinus gave her a look: it said, oh, you really think it will be that long before you join your father in Alexander's Monument? "Do as we command," she said. She stood up and swept from the room. *** Alone at last in her private apartments, she sat down, her limbs trembling with anger and nervous exhaustion. She was as lonely as she had ever felt in her life. She would pray to Isis for strength. Despite all the training her father had given her, she did not feel like a queen. She was an impostor, impossibly young, impossibly green. She ruled Egypt but nothing was really hers; not even this room. The thick Capaddocian carpets and the carnelian encrusted chairs were her father’s choice.
She heard a noise behind her and she started. But it was just Mardian, her tropheus, her tutor since childhood. The closest thing she had to a friend. He was fat, as many eunuchs were, his blue chlamys as voluminous as the royal pavilion and his face as crumpled as a discarded gown. "That Pothinus," he said. "He has the intelligence of a roof lintel." "Will they stand against me, Mardian?" "While Achillas is on your side they cannot move against you." She brooded on this. "You have little support here in the city. The people disapproved of your father's policies towards Rome. They will not like yours any better. Nothing short of war will please the mob." "How can we stand against the Romans unless we have an army to match theirs? I am just being practical." "Pothinus and the rest are out to line their pockets. Every merchant and middleman in the bazaar would rather have a milksop like Ptolemy on the throne and under the thumb." She closed her eyes. "I have no support, I run a nation of shopkeepers and slaves who riot in the streets if the sun goes behind a cloud, The Romans are breathing down our necks looking for just one excuse to ransack our Treasury. What am I to do?" Why had her father died so soon? A few more years as his co-regent and she might have consolidated her hold on the throne. But that was not quite true; while her brothers lived she would never be queen in her own right, her claims would always be subordinate to theirs. She stared out of the window. Such a beautiful nest for vipers, this glorious white city, the Brilliant City as the Romans called it. Gypsum-plastered palaces glittered in the spring sunshine all along the sumptuous curves of the Lochias peninsula, right down to the Royal Harbour. An arched causeway divided it from the Harbour of Good Return to the west. Behind the forests of masts, the warehouses creaked with the wealth of Egypt; ivory trunks piled up like cypress logs, pearls tossed in jute sacks like pine nuts, tottering bales of silks and muslins, great mountains of henna and cardamom and cinnamon. The world’s treasure chest right there. A fresh salt breeze whipped the silk hangings, ghosts dancing her father's last revel. But we are more than money; our capital is the foremost city in the world for learning. The famous Library contains more than seven hundred thousand volumen, cylindrical scrolls with treatises on mathematics and philosophy, medicine and astronomy, anatomy and geography. Our Museion boasts some of the finest scholars in the world, salaried by the state, their knowledge at our royal disposal. Our own Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth, by comparing the length of shadows at midday in Alexandria and at Aswan.
Aristarchos demonstrated that the earth went round the sun, and Euclid created the first school of mathematic. Even Alexander would be astonished that this city had brought his name such glory. But there were no more Alexanders left to defend her now, her architecture or her culture; just the rabble of pirates, escaped slaves and outlaws Achillas called an army, ruled by a clique of Greeks, Syrians and Jews whose idea of a good dinner was to poison all their guests. The metropolis consisted of excitable Greeks and Egyptians whose only loyalty was to their purses and whose first reaction to any crisis was to storm the palace. They were all utterly indifferent to that other Egypt that brought them all their wealth, a hinterland of peasants who prayed to crocodiles and still believed their overlords were pharaohs. And yet, and yet, she loved this country and this city; it was her birthright and her destiny. She would not shrink from it. I will show you Pothinus, I will show you father, I will show you Alexander, how a true queen acts and lives and breathes. End of Excerpt
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About the Author
Find Colin Falconer at: https://colinfalconer.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @colin_falconer
Born in north London, Colin Falconer worked for many years in TV and radio and freelanced for many of Australia's leading newspapers and magazines. He has been a novelist for the last twenty years, with his work published widely in the UK, US and Europe. His books have been translated into seventeen languages.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of fictional characters to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Revised edition copyright Š 2011 by Colin Falconer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Find Colin Falconer at http://www.colinfalconer.net Colin Falconer's blog at: http://colin-falconer.blogspot.com/ or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/colin_falconer http://twitter.com/#!/colin_falconer