Cleopatra was in many ways a refined and cultured woman. Her linguistic powers indicate a certain studiousness; and at the same time she seems to have been a patron of the arts. It is recorded that she made Antony present to the city of Alexandria the library which once belonged to Pergamum, consisting of 200,000 volumes; and Cicero seems to record the fact that she interested herself in obtaining certain books for him from Alexandria. She inherited from her family a temperament naturally artistic; and there is no reason to suppose that she failed to carry on the high tradition of her house in this regard. She was a patron also of the sciences, and Photinus, the mathematician, who wrote both on arithmetic and geometry, published a book actually under her name, called the ‘Canon of Cleopatra.’ The famous physician Dioscorides was, it would seem, the friend and attendant of the Queen; and the books which he wrote at her court have been read throughout the ages. Sosigenes, the astronomer, was also, perhaps, a friend of Cleopatra, and it may have been through her good offices that he was introduced to Cæsar, with whom he collaborated in the reformation of the calendar. The evidence is very inconsiderable in regard to the Queen’s personal attitude towards the arts and sciences, but sufficient may be gleaned to give some support to the suggestion that she did not fall below the standard set by her forefathers. One feels that her interest in such matters is assured by the fact that she held for so long the devotion of such a man of letters as Julius Cæsar. There is little doubt that she was capable of showing great seriousness of mind when occasion demanded, and that her demeanour, so frequently tumultuous, was often thoughtful and quiet.
At the same time, however, one must suppose that she viewed her life with a light heart, having, save towards the end, a greater familiarity with laughter than with tears. She was at all times ready to make merry or jest, and a humorous adventure seems to have made a special appeal to her. With Antony, as we shall see, she was wont to wander around the city at night-time, knocking at people’s doors in the darkness and running away when they were opened. It is related how once when Antony was fishing in the sea, she made a diver descend into the water to attach to his line a salted fish, which he drew to the surface amidst the greatest merriment. One gathers from the early writers that her conversation was usually sparkling and gay; and it would seem that there was often an infectious frivolity in her manner which made her society most exhilarating.
She was eminently a woman whom men might love, for she was active, high-spirited, plucky, and dashing. To use a popular phrase, she was always “game” for an adventure. Her courageous return to Egypt after she had been driven into exile by her brother, is an indication of her brave spirit; and the daring manner in which she first obtained her introduction to Cæsar, causing herself to be carried into the palace on a man’s back, is a convincing instance of that audacious courage which makes so strong an appeal on her behalf to the imagination. Florus, who was no friend of the Queen’s, speaks of her as being “free from all womanly fear.”
We now come to the question as to whether she was cruel by nature. It must be admitted that she caused the assassination of her sister Arsinoe, and ordered the execution of others who were, at that time, plotting against her. But it must be remembered that political murders of this kind were a custom—nay, a habit—of the period; and, moreover, the fact that the Queen of Egypt used her rough soldiers for the purpose does not differentiate the act from that of Good Queen Bess who employed a Lord Chief Justice and an axe. The early demise of Ptolemy XV., her brother, is attributable as much to Cæsar as to Cleopatra, if, indeed, he did not die a natural death. The execution of King Artavasdes of Armenia was a political act of no great significance. And the single remaining charge of cruelty which may be brought against the Queen, namely, that she tested the efficacy of various poisons on the persons of condemned criminals, need not be regarded as indicating callousness on her part; for it mattered little to the condemned prisoner what manner of sudden death he should die, but, on the other hand, the discovery of a pleasant solution to the quandary of her own life was a point of capital importance to herself. When we recall the painful record of callous murders which were perpetrated during the reigns of her predecessors, we cannot attribute to Cleopatra any extraordinary degree of heartlessness, nor can we say that she showed herself to be as cruel as were other members of her family. She lived in a ruthless age; and, on the whole, her behaviour was tolerant and good-natured.
In religious matters she was not, like so many persons of that period, a disbeliever in the power of the gods. She had a strong pagan belief in the close association of divinity and royalty, and she seems to have accepted without question the hereditary assurance of her own celestial affiliation. She was wont to dress herself on gala occasions in the robes of Isis or Aphrodite, and to act the part of a goddess incarnate upon earth, assuming not divine powers but divine rights. She regarded herself as being closely in communion with the virile gods of Egypt and Greece; and when signs and wonders were pointed out to her by her astrologers, or when she noted good or ill omens in the occurrences around her, she was particularly prone to giving them full recognition as being communications from her heavenly kin. Her behaviour at the battle of Actium is often said to have been due to her consciousness of the warnings which she had received by means of such portents; and on other occasions in her life her actions were ordered by these means. It is related by Josephus that she violated the temples of Egypt in order to obtain money to carry on the war against Rome, and that no place was so holy or so infamous that she would not attempt to strip it of its treasures when she was pressed for gold. If this be true, it may be argued in the Queen’s defence that the possessions of the gods were considered by her to be, as it were, her own property, as the representative of heaven upon earth, and in this case they were the more especially at her disposal since they were to be converted into money for the glory of Egypt. As a matter of fact, it is probable that in the last emergencies of her reign, the Queen’s agents obtained supplies wherever they found them, and, if Cleopatra was consulted at all, she was far too distracted to give the matter very serious thought.
It is not necessary here to inquire further into the character of the Queen. Her personality, as I see it, will become apparent in the following record of her tragic life. It is essential to remember that, though her faults were many, she was not what is usually called bad. She was a brilliant, charming, and beautiful woman; perhaps not over-scrupulous and yet not altogether unprincipled; ready, no doubt, to make use of her charms, but not an immoral character. As the historian pictures her figure moving lightly through the mazes of her life, now surrounded by her armies in the thick of battle; now sailing up the moonlit Nile in her royal barge with Cæsar beside her; now tenderly playing in the nursery with her babies; now presiding brilliantly at the gorgeous feasts in the Alexandrian palace; now racing in disguise down the side-streets of her capital, choking with suppressed laughter; now speeding across the Mediterranean to her doom; and now, all haggard and forlorn, holding the deadly asp to her body,—he cannot fail to fall himself under the spell of that enchantment by which the face of the world was changed. He finds that he is dealing not with a daughter of Satan, who, from her lair in the East, stretches out her hand to entrap Rome’s heroes, but with mighty Cæsar’s wife and widow, fighting for Cæsar’s child; with Antony’s faithful consort, striving, as will be shown, to unite Egypt and Rome in one vast empire. He sees her not as the crowned courtesan of the Orient, but as the excellent royal lady, who by her wits and graces held captive the two greatest men of her time in the bonds of a union which in Egypt was equivalent to a legal marriage. He sees before him once more the small, graceful figure, whose beauty compels, whose voice entices, and in whose face (it may be by the kindly obliterations of time) there is no apparent evil; and the unprejudiced historian must find himself hard put to it to say whether his sympathies are ranged on the side of Cleopatra or on that of her Roman rival in the great struggle for the mastery of the whole earth which is recorded in the following pages.
CHAPTER II.
THE CITY OF ALEXANDRIA.
No study of the life of Cleopatra can be of true value unless the position of the city of Alexandria, her capital, in relationship to Egypt on the one hand and to Greece and Rome on the other, is fully understood and appreciated. The reader must remember, and bear continually in mind, that Alexandria was at that time, and still is, more closely connected in many ways with the Mediterranean kingdoms than with Egypt proper. It bore, geographically, no closer relation to the Nile valley than Carthage bore to the interior of North Africa. Indeed, to some extent it is legitimate in considering Alexandria to allow the thoughts to find a parallel in the relationship of Philadelphia to the interior of America in the seventeenth century or of Bombay to India in the eighteenth century, for in these cases we see a foreign settlement, representative of a progressive civilisation, largely dependent on transmarine shipping for its prosperity, set down on the coast of a country whose habits are obsolete. It is almost as incorrect to class the Alexandrian Queen Cleopatra as a native Egyptian as it would be to imagine William Penn as a Red Indian or Warren Hastings as a Hindoo. Cleopatra in Alexandria was cut off from Egypt. There is no evidence that she ever even saw the Sphinx, and it would seem that the single journey up the Nile of which the history of her reign gives us any record was undertaken by her solely at the desire of Cæsar. Bearing this fact in mind, I do not think it is desirable for me to refer at any length to the affairs, or to the manners and customs, of Egypt proper in this volume; and it will be observed that, in order to avoid giving to events here recorded an Egyptian character which in reality they did not possess in any very noticeable degree, I have refrained from introducing any account of the people who lived in the great country behind Alexandria over which Cleopatra reigned.