Alexandria: A History and a Guide

by E. M. Forster

It was indeed a national rising against the Romans and ably conducted. Five stages (see Map. p. [98]).

(1). Siege of the Palace.—This was succeeding by land but failed by sea, when Caesar, making a sudden excursion down the docks of the Eastern Harbour, set fire to the Alexandrian fleet. The flames spread to the Mouseion and the Library (“Mother” Library) was burnt. An attempt to contaminate the palace water supply also failed; when the Alexandrians pumped salt water into the conduit, the besieged Romans bored wells in the Palace enclosure.

(2). First Naval Engagement.—Caesar’s reinforcements had begun to arrive, and a heavy east wind had carried them past the entrance of his harbour. He went out to tow them in, and the Alexandrians issued from their own harbour—the Western—to intercept him. They failed.

(3). Second Naval Engagement and loss of the Island of Pharos.—Issuing from his harbour, Caesar rounded Ras-el-Tin and deployed outside the line of reefs that stretch from it to Agame and guard the entrance to the Western Harbour. The Alexandrians waited inside. Dashing through the entrance he pressed them against the quays of Rhakotis and defeated them. Now he could attack the Island on both sides. On the following day it fell and he made it his headquarters, thus changing the strategy of the war.

(4). Battle of the Dyke.—Caesar now blocked up the arches that penetrated the Heptastadion so that the Alexandrians could not manœuvre from harbour to harbour. Then he tried to force his way into the town. He employed too many troops, and landing in his rear the Alexandrians threw him into confusion. He himself had to jump from the dyke and swim to a boat. Victory. They recaptured the whole of the Heptastadion and reopened its arches.

(5). Battle by the Nile.—The war was after all decided outside Alexandria. More reinforcements were coming to Caesar down the Canopic mouth of the Nile and the Alexandrians marched out to intercept them there. The young Ptolemy XIV was their general now. He was defeated and drowned, his army was destroyed, and Caesar returned in triumph to its city and to Cleopatra.

Cleopatra’s fortune now seemed assured. Having married her younger brother (as Ptolemy XV) she went for a trip with Caesar up the Nile to show him its antiquities. The Egyptians detested her as their betrayer but she was indifferent. She bore Caesar a son and followed him to Rome, there to display her insolence. She was at the height of her beauty and power when the blow fell. On the Ides of March, B.C. 44, Caesar was murdered. She had chosen the wrong lover after all.

Back in Alexandria again, she watched the second duel—that between Mark Antony and Caesar’s murderers. She helped neither party, and when Antony won he summoned her to explain her neutrality. She came, not in a carpet but in a gilded barge, and her life henceforward belongs less to history than to poetry. It is almost impossible to think of the later Cleopatra as an ordinary person. She has joined the company of Helen and Iseult. Yet her character remained the same. Voluptuous but watchful, she treated her new lover as she had treated her old. She never bored him, and since grossness means monotony she sharpened his mind to those more delicate delights, where sense verges into spirit. Her infinite variety lay in that. She was the last of a secluded and subtle race, she was a flower that Alexandria had taken three hundred years to produce and that eternity cannot wither, and she unfolded herself to a simple but intelligent Roman soldier.

Alexandria, now reconciled to her fate and protected by the legions of Antony, became the capital of the Eastern world. The Western belonged to Octavian, Caesar’s nephew, and a third duel was inevitable. It was postponed for some years, during which Antony acquired and deserted a Roman wife, and Cleopatra bore him several children. Her son by Julius Caesar was crowned as Ptolemy XVI, with the additional title of King of Kings. Antony himself became a God, and she built a temple to him, afterwards called the Caesareum, and adorned by two ancient obelisks (Cleopatra’s Needles). This period of happiness and splendour ended in the naval disaster of Actium in the Adriatic, where Octavian defeated their combined fleets. The defeat was hastened by Cleopatra’s cowardice. At the decisive moment she fled with sixty ships, actually breaking her way through Antony’s line from the rear, and throwing it into confusion. He followed her to Alexandria, and there, when the recriminations had ceased, they resumed their life of pleasures that were both shadowed and sharpened by the approach of death. They made no attempt to oppose the pursuing Octavian. Instead, they formed a Suicide Club, and Antony, to imitate the misanthrope Timon, built a hermitage in the Western Harbour which he called Timonium. Nor was religion silent. The god Hercules, whom he loved and who loved him, was heard passing away from Alexandria one night in exquisite music and song.

Arrival of Octavian. He is one of the most odious of the world’s successful men and to his cold mind the career of Cleopatra could appear as nothing but a vulgar debauch. Vice, in his opinion, should be furtive. At his approach, Antony after resisting outside the Canopic Gate (at “Caesar’s Camp”) retreated into the city and fell upon his sword. He was carried, dying, to Cleopatra, who had retired into their tomb, and their story now rises to the immortality of art. Shakespeare drew his inspiration from Plutarch, who was himself inspired, and it is difficult through their joint emotion to realise the actual facts. The asp, for example, the asp is not a certainty. It was never known how Cleopatra died. She was captured and taken to Octavian, with whom even in Antony’s life-time she had been intriguing, for the courtesan in her persisted. She appeared this time not in a carpet nor yet in a barge, but upon a sofa, in the seductive negligence of grief. The good young man was shocked. Realising that he intended to lead her in his triumph at Rome, realising too that she was now thirty-nine years old, she killed herself. She was buried in the tomb with Antony; and her ladies Charmion and Iras, who died with her, guarded its doors as statues of bronze. Alexandria became the capital of a Roman Province.