The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt / A Study in the Origin of the Roman Empire

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

It was now April,[36] and Cæsar had been in Egypt for more than six months. He had originally intended to return to Rome, it would seem, in the previous November; but his defiance by the Alexandrians, and later the siege of the Palace, had given him a reasonable excuse for remaining with Cleopatra. Being by nature an opportunist, he had come during these months to interest himself keenly in Egyptian affairs, and, as we have seen, both they and his passion for the Queen had fully occupied his attention. The close of the war, however, did not mean to him the termination of these interests, but rather the beginning of the opportunity for putting his schemes into execution. He must have been deeply impressed by the possibilities of expansive exploitation which Egypt offered. Cleopatra, no doubt, had told him much concerning the wonders of the land, wonders which she herself had never yet found occasion to verify. He had heard from her, and had received visible proof, of the wealth of the Nile Valley; and his march through the Delta must have revealed to him the richness of the country. No man could fail to be impressed by the spectacle of the miles upon miles of grain fields which are to be seen in Lower Egypt; and reports had doubtless reached him of the splendours of the upper reaches of the Nile, where a peaceful and law-abiding population found time both to reap three crops a year from the fertile earth, and to build huge temples for their gods and palaces for their nobles. The yearly tax upon corn alone in Egypt, which was paid in kind, must have amounted to some twenty millions of bushels, the figure at which it stood in the reign of Augustus; and this fact, if no other, must have given Cæsar cause for much covetousness.

He had probably heard, too, of the trade with India, which was already beginning to flourish, and which, a few years later, came to be of the utmost importance;[37] and he had doubtless been told of the almost fabulous lands of Ethiopia, to which Egypt was the threshold, whence came the waters of the Nile. Egypt has always been a land of speculation, attracting alike the interest of the financier and the enthusiasm of the conqueror; and Cæsar’s imagination must have been stimulated by those ambitious schemes which have fired the brains of so many of her conquerors, just as that of the great Alexander had been inspired three centuries before. Feeling that his work in Gaul and the north-west was more or less completed, he may, perhaps, have considered the expediency of carrying Roman arms into the uttermost parts of Ethiopia; of crossing the Red Sea into Arabia; or of penetrating, like Alexander, to India and to the marvellous kingdoms of the East. Even so, eighteen hundred years later, Napoleon Bonaparte dreamed of marching his army through Egypt to the lands of Hindustan; and so also England, striving to hold her beloved India (as the prophetic Kinglake wrote in 1844), fixed her gaze upon the Nile Valley, until, as though by the passive force of her desire, it fell into her hands. For long the Greeks had thought that the Nile came from the east and rose in the hills of India; and even in the days with which we are now dealing Egypt was regarded as the gateway of those lands. The trade-route from Alexandria to India was yearly growing in fame. The merchants journeyed up the Nile to the city of Koptos, and thence travelled by caravan across the desert to the seaport of Berenice, whence they sailed with the trade wind to Muziris, on the west coast of India, near the modern Calicut and Mysore. It is possible that Cæsar had succumbed to the fascination of distant conquest and exploration with which Egypt, by reason of her geographical situation, has inspired so many minds, and that he was allowing his thoughts to travel with the merchants along the great routes to the East. He must always have felt that the unconquered Parthians would cause a march across Asia to India to be a most difficult and hazardous undertaking, and there was some doubt whether he would be able to repeat the exploits of Alexander the Great along that route; but here through Egypt lay a road to the Orient which might be followed without grave risk. The merchants were wont to leave Berenice, on the Egyptian coast, about the middle of July, when the Dog-star rose with the Sun, reaching the west coast of India about the middle of September;[38] and it would be strange indeed if Cæsar had not given some consideration to the possibility of carrying his army by that route to the lands which Alexander, of whose exploits he loved to read, had conquered.

Abundant possibilities such as these must have filled his mind, and may have been the partial cause of his desire to stay yet a little while longer in this fascinating country; but there was another and a more poignant reason which urged him to wait for a few weeks more in Egypt. Cleopatra was about to become a mother. Seven months had passed since those days in October when Cæsar had applied himself so eagerly to the task of winning the love of the Queen, and of procuring her surrender to his wishes; and now, in another few weeks, the child of their romance would be placed in his arms. Old profligate though he was, it seems that he saw something in the present situation different from those in which he had found himself before. Cleopatra, by her brilliant wit, her good spirits, her peculiar charm of manner, her continuous courage, and her boundless optimism, had managed to retain his love throughout these months of their close proximity; and an appeal had been made to the more tender side of his nature which could not be resisted. He wished to be near her in her hour of trial; and, moreover (for in Cæsar’s actions there was always a practical as well as a sentimental motive), it is probable that he entertained high hopes of receiving from Cleopatra an heir to his worldly wealth and position, who should be in due course fully legitimised. His long intercourse with the Queen had much altered his point of view; and I think there can be little doubt that his mind was eagerly feeling forward to new developments and revolutionary changes in his life.

At Cleopatra’s wish he was now allowing himself to be recognised by the Egyptians as the divine consort of the Queen, an impersonation of the god Jupiter-Amon upon earth. Some form of marriage had taken place between them, or, at any rate, the Egyptian people, if not the cynical Alexandrians, had been constrained to recognise their legal union. The approaching birth of the child had made it necessary for Cleopatra to disclose her relationship with Cæsar, and at the same time to prove to her subjects that she, their Queen, was not merely the mistress of an adventurous Roman. As soon, therefore, as her brother and formal husband Ptolemy XIV. had died, she had begun to circulate the belief that Julius Cæsar was the great god of Egypt himself come to earth, and that the child which was about to make its appearance was the offspring of a divine union. Upon the walls of the temples of Egypt, notably at Hermonthis, near Thebes, bas-reliefs were afterwards sculptured in which Cleopatra was represented in converse with the god Amon, who appears in human form, and in which the gods are shown assisting at the celestial birth of the child. A mythological fiction of a similar nature had been employed in ancient Egypt in reference to the births of earlier sovereigns, those of Hatshepsut (B.C. 1500) and of Amenophis III. (B.C. 1400) being two particular instances. In the known occasions of its use, the royal parentage of the child had been open to question, this being the reason why the story of the divine intercourse was introduced; and thus in the case of Cleopatra the myth had become familiar, by frequent use, to the priest-ridden minds of the Egyptians, and was not in any way startling or original. In the later years of the Queen’s reign events were dated as from this supernatural occurrence, and there is preserved to us an epitaph inscribed in the “twentieth year of (or after) the union of Cleopatra with Amon.”

Cæsar was quite willing thus to be reckoned in Egypt as a divinity. His hero Alexander the Great in like manner had been regarded as a deity, and had proclaimed himself the son of Amon, causing himself to be portrayed with the ram’s horns of that god projecting from the sides of his head. Though his belief in the gods was conspicuously absent, Cæsar had always boasted of his divine descent, his family tracing their genealogy to Iulus, the son of Æneas, the son of Anchises and the goddess Venus; and there is every reason to suppose that Cleopatra had attempted to encourage him to think of himself as being in very truth a god upon earth. She herself ruled Egypt by divine right, and deemed it no matter for doubt that she was the representative of the Sun-god here below, the mediator between man and his creator. The Egyptians, if not the Alexandrians, fell flat upon their faces when they saw her, and hailed her as god, in the manner in which their fathers had hailed the ancient Pharaohs. From earliest childhood she had been called a divinity, and she was named an immortal in the temples of Egypt as by undoubted right. Those who came into contact with her partook of the divine affluence, and her companions were holy in the sight of her Egyptian subjects. Cæsar, as her consort, thus became a god; and as soon as her connection with him was made public, he assumed ex officio the nature of a divine being. We shall see presently how, even in Rome, he came to regard himself as more than mortal, and how, setting aside in his own favour his disbelief in the immortals, before he died he had publicly called himself god upon earth. At the present period of his life, however, these startling assumptions were not clearly defined; and it is probable that he really did not know what to think about himself. Cleopatra had fed his mind with strange thoughts, and had so flattered his vanity, though probably without intention, that if he could but acknowledge the existence of a better world, he was quite prepared to believe himself in some sort of manner come from it. She knew that she herself was supposed to be divine; she loved Cæsar and had made him her equal; she was aware that he, too, was said to be descended from the gods: and thus, by a tacit assumption, it seems to me that she gradually forced upon him a sense of his divinity which, in the succeeding years, developed into a fixed belief.

This appreciation of his divine nature, which we see growing in Cæsar’s mind, carried with it, of course, a feeling of monarchical power, a desire to assume the prerogatives of kingship. Cleopatra seems now to have been naming him her consort, and in Egypt, as we have said, he must have been recognised as her legal husband. He was already, in a manner of speaking, King of Egypt; and the fact that he was not officially crowned as Pharaoh must have been due entirely to his own objection to such a proceeding. The Egyptians must now have been perfectly willing to offer to him the throne of the Ptolemies, just as they had accepted Archelaus, the High Priest of Komana, as consort of Berenice IV., Cleopatra’s half-sister;[39] and in these days when their young Queen was so soon to become a mother there must have been a genuine and eager desire to regularise the situation by such a marriage with Cæsar and his elevation to the throne. Nothing could be more happy politically than the Queen’s marriage to the greatest man in Rome, and we have already seen how there was some idea of a union with Cnæus Pompeius in the days when that man’s father was the ruler of the Republic. To the Egyptian mind the fact that Cæsar was already a married man, with a wife living in Rome, was no real objection. She had borne him no son, and therefore might be divorced in favour of a more fruitful vine. Cleopatra herself must have been keenly desirous to share her Egyptian throne with Cæsar, for no doubt she saw clearly enough that, since he was already autocrat and actual Dictator of Rome, it would not be long before they became sovereigns of the whole Roman world. If she could persuade him, like Archelaus of Komana, to accept the crown of the Pharaohs, there was good reason to suppose that he would try to induce Rome to offer him the sovereignty of his own country. The tendency towards monarchical rule in the Roman capital, thanks largely to Pompey, was already very apparent; and both Cæsar and Cleopatra must have realised that, if they played their game with skill, a throne awaited them in that city at no very distant date.

Cleopatra was a keen patriot, or rather she was deeply concerned in the advancement of her own and her dynasty’s fortunes; and it must have been a matter of the utmost satisfaction to her to observe the direction in which events were moving. The man whom she loved, and who loved her, might at any moment become actual sovereign of Rome and its dominions; and the child with which she was about to present him, if it were a boy, would be the heir of the entire world. For years her dynasty had feared that Rome would crush them out of existence and absorb her kingdom into the Republic; but now there was a possibility that Egypt, and the lands to which the Nile Valley was the gateway, would become the equal of Rome at the head of the great amalgamation of the nations of the earth. Egypt, it must be remembered, was still unconquered by Rome, and was, at the time, the most wealthy and important nation outside the Republic. All Alexandrians and Egyptians believed themselves to be the foremost people in the world; and thus to Cleopatra the dream that Egypt might play the leading part in an Egypto-Roman empire was in no wise fantastic.

Her policy, then, was obvious. She must attempt to retain Cæsar’s affection, and at the same time must nurse with care the growing aspirations towards monarchy which were developing in his mind. She must bind him to her so that, when the time came, she might ascend the throne of the world by his side; and she must make apparent to him, and keep ever present to his imagination, the fact of her own puissance and the splendour of her royal status, so that there should be no doubt in Cæsar’s mind that her flesh and blood, and hers alone, were fitted to blend with his in the foundation of that single royal line which was to rule the whole Earth.

Approaching motherhood, it would seem, had much sobered her wild nature, and the glory of her ambitions had raised her thoughts to a level from which she must have contemplated with disdain her early struggles with the drowned Ptolemy, the decapitated Potheinos, the murdered Achillas, and the outlawed Theodotos. She, Cleopatra, was the daughter of the Sun, the sister of the Moon, and the kinswoman of the heavenly beings; she was mated to the descendant of Venus and the Olympian gods, and the unborn offspring of their union would be in very truth King of Earth and Heaven.

Historians both ancient and modern are agreed that Cleopatra was a woman of exceptional mental power. Her character, so often wayward in expression, was as dominant as her personality was strong; and she must have found no difficulty in making her appeal to the soaring ambitions of the great Roman. When occasion demanded she carried herself with dignity befitting the descendant of an ancient line of kings, and even in her escapades the royalty of her person was at all times apparent. The impression which she has left upon the world is that of a woman who was always significant of the splendour of monarchy; and her influence upon Cæsar in this regard is not to be overlooked. A man such as he could not live for six months in close contact with a queen without feeling to some extent the glamour of royalty. She represented monarchy in its most absolute form, and in Egypt her word was law. The very tone of her royal mode of life must have constituted new matter for Cæsar’s mind to ruminate upon; and that trait in his character which led him to abhor the thought of subordination to any living man, must have caused him to watch the actions of an autocratic queen with frank admiration and restless envy. Tales of the Kings of Alexandria and stories of the ancient Pharaohs without doubt were narrated, and without doubt took some place in Cæsar’s brain. Cleopatra’s point of view, that of the most royal of the world’s royal houses, must, by its very unfamiliarity, have impressed itself upon his thoughts.