THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPT

PART I.

CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR

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 Caesar. 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.

The topographical position of Alexandria, selected by its illustrious founder, seems to have been chosen on account of its detachment from Egypt proper. The city was erected upon a strip of land having the Mediterranean on the one side and the Mareotic lake on the other. It was thus cut off from the hinterland far more effectively even than was Carthage by its semicircle of hills. Alexander had intended to make the city a purely Greek settlement, the port at which the Greeks should land their goods for distribution throughout Egypt, and whence the produce of the abundant Nile should be shipped to the north and west. He selected a remote corner of the Delta for his site, with the plain intention of holding his city at once free of, and in dominion over, Egypt; and so precisely was the location suited to his purpose that until this day Alexandria is in little more than name a city of the Egyptians. Even at the present time, when an excellent system of express railway trains connects Alexandria with Cairo and Upper Egypt, there are many well-to-do inhabitants who have not seen more that ten miles of Egyptian landscape; and the vast majority have never been within sight of the Pyramids. The wealthy foreigners settled in Alexandria often know nothing whatsoever about Egypt, and Cairo itself is beyond their ken. The Greeks, Levantines, and Jews, who now, as in ancient days, form a very large part of the population of Alexandria, would shed bitter tears of gloomy foreboding were they called upon to penetrate into the Egypt which the tourists and the officials know and love. The middle-class Egyptians of Alexandria are rarely tempted to enter Egypt proper, and even those who have inherited a few acres of land in the interior are often unwilling to visit their property.

Egypt as we know it is a terra incognita to the Alexandrian. The towering cliffs of the desert, the wide Nile, the rainless skies, the amazing brilliance of the stars, the ruins of ancient temples, the great pyramids, the decorated tombs, the clustered mud-huts of the villages in the shade of the dom-palms and the sycamores, the creaking sakkiehs or water-wheels, the gracefully worked shadufs or water-hoists, all these are unknown to the inhabitants of Alexandria. They have never seen the hot deserts and the white camel-tracks over the hills, they have not looked upon the Nile tumbling over the granite rocks of the cataracts, nor have they watched the broad expanse of the inundation. That peculiar, undefined aspect and feeling which is associated with the thought of Egypt in the minds of visitors and residents does not tincture the impression of the Alexandrians. They have not felt the subtle influence of the land of the Pharaohs: they are sons of the Mediterranean, not children of the Nile.

The climate of Alexandria is very different from that of the interior of the Delta, and bears no similarity to that of Upper Egypt. At Thebes the winter days are warm and brilliantly sunny, the nights often extremely cold. The summer climate is intensely hot, and there are times when the resident might there believe himself an inhabitant of the infernal regions. The temperature in and around Cairo is more moderate, and the summer is tolerable, though by no means pleasant. In Alexandria, however, the summer is cool and temperate. There is perhaps no climate in the entire world so perfect as that of Alexandria in the early summer. The days are cloudless, breezy, and brilliant; the nights cool and even cold. In August and September it is somewhat damp, and therefore unpleasant; but it is never very hot, and the conditions of life are almost precisely those of southern Europe.

The winter days on the sea-coast are often cold and rainy, the climate being not unlike that of Italy at the same time of year. People must needs wear thick clothing, and must study the barometer before taking their promenades. While Thebes, and even the Pyramids, bask in more or less continual sunshine, the city of Alexandria is lashed by intermittent rainstorms, and the salt sea-wind buffets the pedestrians as it screams down the paved streets. The peculiar texture of the true Egyptian atmosphere is not felt in Alexandria: the air is that of Marseilles, of Naples, or of the Piraeus.

In summer-time the sweating official of the south makes his way seaward in the spirit of one who leaves the tropics for northern shores. He enters the northbound express on some stifling evening in June, the amazing heat still radiating from the frowning cliffs of the desert, and striking up into his eyes from the parched earth around the station. He lies tossing and panting in his berth while the electric fans beat down the hot air upon him, until the more temperate midnight permits him to fall into a restless sleep. In the morning he arrives at Cairo, where the moisture runs more freely from his face by reason of the greater humidity, though now the startling intensity of the heat is not felt. Anon he travels through the Delta towards the north, still mopping his brow as the morning sun bursts into the carriage. But suddenly, a few miles from the coast, a change is felt. For the first time, perhaps for many weeks, he feels cool: he wishes his clothes were not so thin. He packs up his helmet and dons a straw hat. Arriving at Alexandria, he is amused to find that he actually feels chilly. He no longer dreads to move abroad in the sun at high noon, but, waving aside the importunate carriage-drivers, he walks briskly to his hotel. He does not sit in a darkened room with windows tightly shut against the heat, but pulls the chair out on to the verandah to take the air; and at night he does not lie stark naked on his bed in the garden, cursing the imagined heat of the stars and the moon, and praying for the mercy of sleep; but, like a white man in his own land, he tucks himself up under a blanket in the cool bedroom, and awakes lively and refreshed.

A European may live the year round at Alexandria, and may express a preference for the summer. The wives and children of English officials not infrequently remain there throughout the warmer months, not from necessity but from choice; and there are many persons of northern blood who are happy to call it their home. In Cairo such families rarely remain during the summer, unless under compulsion, while in Upper Egypt there is hardly a white woman in the land between May and October. Egypt is considered by them to be solely a winter residence, and the official is of opinion that he pays toll to fortune for the pleasures of the winter season by the perils and torments of the summer months. Even the middle and upper class Egyptians themselves, recruited, as they generally are in official circles, from Cairo, suffer terribly from the heat in the south often more so, indeed, than the English; and I myself on more than one occasion have had to abandon a summer day s ride owing to the prostration of one of the native staff.

The Egyptian of Alexandria and the north looks with scorn upon the inhabitants of the upper country. The southerner, on the other hand, has no epithet of contempt more biting than that of  Alexandrian. To the hardy peasant of the Thebaid the term means all that  scalliwag denotes to us. The northern Egyptian, unmindful of the relationship of a kettle to a saucepan, calls the southerner  black in disdainful tones. A certain Alexandrian Egyptian of undiluted native stock, who was an official in a southern district, told me that he found life very dull in his provincial capital, surrounded as he was by  all these confounded niggers. And if the Egyptians of Alexandria are thus estranged from those who constitute the backbone of the Egyptian nation, it will be understood how great is the gulf between the Greeks or other foreign residents in that city and the bulk of the people of the Nile.

I am quite sure that Cleopatra spoke of the Egyptians of the interior as  confounded niggers. Her interests and sympathies, like those of her city, were directed across the Mediterranean. She held no more intimate relationship to Egypt than does the London millionaire to the African gold-mines which he owns. Alexandria at the present day still preserves the European character with which it was endowed by Alexander and the Ptolemies; or perhaps it were more correct to say that it has once more assumed that character. There are large quarters of the city, of course, which are native in style and appearance, but, viewed as a whole, it suggests to the eye rather an Italian than an Egyptian seaport. It has extremely little in common with the Egyptian metropolis and other cities of the Nile; and we are aware that there was no greater similarity in ancient times. The very flowers and trees are different. In Upper Egypt the gardens have a somewhat artificial beauty, for the grace of the land is more dependent upon the composition of cliffs, river, and fields. There are few wild-flowers, and little natural grass. In the gardens the flowers are evident importations, while the lawns have to be sown every autumn, and do not survive the summer. But in Alexandria there is always a blaze of flowers, and one notes with surprise the English hollyhocks, foxgloves, and stocks growing side by side with the plants of southern Europe. In the fields of Mariout, over against Alexandria, the wild-flowers in spring are those of the hills of Greece. Touched by the cool breeze from the sea, one walks over ground scarlet and gold with poppies and daisies; there bloom asphodel and iris; and the ranunculus grows to the size of a tulip. There is a daintiness in these fields and gardens wholly un-Egyptian, completely different from the more permanent grace of the south. One feels that Pharaoh walked not in fields of asphodel, that Amon had no dominion here amidst the poppies by the sea. One is transplanted in imagination to Greece and to Italy, and the knowledge becomes the more apparent that Cleopatra and her city were an integral part of European life, only slightly touched by the very finger-tips of the Orient.

The coast of Egypt rises so little above the level of the Mediterranean that the land cannot be seen by those approaching it from across the sea, until but a few miles separate them from the surf which breaks upon the sand and rocks of that barren shore. The mountains of other East-Mediterranean countries: Greece, Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, and Syria, rising out of the blue waters, served as landmarks for the mariners of ancient days, and were discernible upon the horizon for many long hours before wind Or oars carried the vessels in under their lee. But the Egyptian coast offered no such assistance to the captains of sea-going galleys, and they were often obliged to approach closely to the treacherous shore before their exact whereabouts became apparent to them. The city of Alexandria was largely hidden from view by the long, low island of Pharos, which lay in front of it and which was little dissimilar in appearance from the mainland. Two promontories of land projected from the coast opposite either end of the island; and, these being lengthened by the building of breakwaters, the straits between Pharos Island and the mainland were converted into an excellent harbour, both it and the main part of the city being screened from the open sea. There was one tremendous landmark, however, which served to direct all vessels to their destination, namely, the far-famed Pharos lighthouse, standing upon the east end of the island, and overshadowing the main entrance to the port. It had been built during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus by Sostratus of Cnidus two hundred years and more before the days of Cleopatra, and it ranked as one of the wonders of the world. It was constructed of white marble, and rose to a height of 400 ells, or 590 feet. By day it stood like a pillar of alabaster, gleaming against the leaden haze of the sky; and from nightfall until dawn there shone from its summit a powerful beacon-light which could be seen, it is said, for 300 stadia, i.e., 34 miles, across the waters.

The harbour was divided into two almost equal parts by a great embankment, known as the Heptastadium, which joined the city to the island. This was cut at either end by a passage or waterway leading from one harbour to the other, but these two passages were bridged over, and thus a clear causeway was formed, seven stadia, or 1400 yards, in length. To the west of this embankment lay the Harbour of Eunostos, or the Happy Return, which was entered from behind the western extremity of Pharos Island; while to the east of the embankment lay the Great Harbour, the entrance to which passed between the enormous lighthouse and the Diabathra, or breakwater, built out from the promontory known as Lochias. This entrance was dangerous, owing to the narrowness of the fairway and to the presence of rocks, against which the rolling waves of the Mediterranean, driven by the prevalent winds of the north, beat with almost continuous violence.

A vessel entering the port of Alexandria from this side was steered towards the great lighthouse, around the foot of which the waves leapt and broke in showers of white foam. Skirting the dark rocks at the base of this marble wonder, the vessel slipped through the passage into the still entrance of the harbour, leaving the breakwater on the left hand. Here, on a windless day, one might look down to the sand and the rocks at the bottom of the sea, so clear and transparent was the water and so able to be penetrated by the strong light of the sun. Seaweed of unaccustomed hues covered the sunken rocks over which the vessels floated; and anemones, like great flowers, could be seen swaying in the gentle motion of the undercurrents. Passing on into the deeper water of the harbour, in which the sleek dolphins arose and dived in rhythmic succession, the traveller saw before him such an array of palaces and public buildings as could be found nowhere else in the world. There stood, on his left hand, the Royal Palace, which was spread over the Lochias Promontory and extended round towards the west. Here, beside a little island known as Antirrhodos, itself the site of a royal pavilion, lay the Royal Harbour, where flights of broad steps descended into the azure water, which at this point was so deep that the largest galleys might moor against the quays. Along the edge of the mainland, overlooking the Great Harbour, stood a series of magnificent buildings which must have deeply impressed all those who were approaching the city across the water. Here stood the imposing Museum, which was actually a part of another palace, and which formed a kind of institute for the study of the sciences, presided over by a priest appointed by the sovereign. The buildings seem to have consisted of a large hall wherein the professors took their meals; a series of arcades in which these men of learning walked and talked; a hall, or assembly rooms, in which their lectures were held; and, at the north end, close to the sea, the famous library, at this time containing more than half a million scrolls. On rising ground between the Museum and the Lochias Promontory stood the Theatre, wherein those who occupied the higher seats might look beyond the stage to the island of Antirrhodos, behind which the incoming galleys rode upon the blue waters in the shadow of Pharos. At the back of the Theatre, on still higher ground, the Paneum, or Temple of Pan, had been erected. This is described by Strabo as  an artificial mound of the shape of a fircone, resembling a pile of rock, to the top of which there is an ascent by a spiral path, from whose summit may be seen the whole city lying all around and beneath it. To the west of this mound stood the Gymnasium, a superb building, the porticos of which alone exceeded a stadium, or 200 yards, in length. The Courts of Justice, surrounded by groves and gardens, adjoined the Gymnasium. Close to the harbour, to the west of the Theatre, was the Forum; and in front of it, on the quay, stood a temple of Neptune. To the west of this, near the Museum, there was an enclosure called Serna, in which stood the tombs of the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt, built around the famous Mausoleum wherein the bones of Alexander the Great rested in a sarcophagus of alabaster.

These buildings, all able to be seen from the harbour, formed the quarter of the city known as the Regia, Brucheion, or Royal Area. Here the white stone structures reflected in the mirror of the harbour, the statues and monuments, the trees and brilliant flower gardens, the flights of marble steps passing down to the sea, the broad streets and public places, must have formed a scene of magnificence not surpassed at that time in the whole world. Nor would the traveller, upon stepping ashore from his vessel, be disappointed in his expectations as he roamed the streets of the town. Passing through the Forum he would come out upon the great thoroughfare, more than three miles long, which cut right through the length of the city in a straight line, from the Gate of the Necropolis, at the western end, behind the Harbour of the Happy Return, to the Gate of Canopus, at the eastern extremity, some distance behind the Lochias Promontory. This magnificent boulevard, known as the Street of Canopus, or the Meson Pedion, was flanked on either side by colonnades, and was 100 feet in breadth. On its north side would be seen the Museum, the Serna, the palaces, and the gardens; on the south side the Gymnasium with its long porticos, the Paneum towering up against the sky, and numerous temples and public places. Were the traveller to walk eastwards along this street he would pass through the Jewish quarter, adorned by many synagogues and national buildings, through the Gate of Canopus, built in the city walls, and so out on to open ground, where stood the Hippodromos or Racecourse, and several public buildings. Here the sun-baked soil was sandy, the rocks glaring white, and but little turf was to be seen. A few palms, bent southward by the sea wind, and here and there a cluster of acacias, gave shade to pedestrians; while between the road and the sea the Grove of Nemesis offered a pleasant foreground to the sandy beach and the blue expanse of the Mediterranean beyond. Near by stood the little settlement of Eleusis, which was given over to festivities and merry-making. Here there were several restaurants and houses of entertainment which are said to have commanded beautiful views; but so noisy was the fun supplied, and so dissolute the manners of those who frequented the place, that better-class Alexandrians were inclined to avoid it. At a distance of some three miles from Alexandria stood the suburb of Nicopolis, where numerous villas, themselves  not less than a city, says Strabo, had been erected along the sea-front, and the sands in summertime were crowded with bathers. Farther eastwards the continuation of the Street of Canopus passed on to the town of that name and Egypt proper.

Returning within the city walls and walking westwards along the Street of Canopus, the visitor would pass once more through the Regia and thence through the Egyptian quarter known as Rhakotis, to the western boundary. This quarter, being immediately behind the commercial harbour, was partly occupied by warehouses and ships' offices, and was always a very busy district of the town. Here there was an inner harbour called Cibotos, or the Ark, where there were extensive docks; and from this a canal passed, under the Street of Canopus, to the lake at the back of the city. On a rocky hill behind the Rhakotis quarter stood the magnificent Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, which was approached by a broad street running at right angles to the Street of Canopus, which it bisected at a point not far west of the Museum, being a continuation of the Heptastadium. The temple is said to have been surpassed in grandeur by no other building in the world except the Capitol at Rome; and, standing as it did at a considerable elevation, it must have towered above the hubbub and the denser atmosphere of the streets and houses at its foot, as though to receive the purification of the untainted wind of the sea. Behind the temple, on the open rocky ground outside the city walls, stood the Stadium; and away towards the west the Necropolis was spread out, with its numerous gardens and mausoleums. Still farther westward there were numerous villas and gardens; and it may be that the wonderful flowers which at the present day grow wild upon this ground are actually the descendants of those introduced and cultivated by the Greeks of the days of Cleopatra.

Along the entire length of the back walls of the city lay the Lake of Mareotis, which cut off Alexandria from the Egyptian Delta, and across this stretch of water vast numbers of vessels brought the produce of Egypt to the capital. The lake harbour and docks were built around an inlet which penetrated some considerable distance into the heart of the city not far to the east of the Paneum, and from them a great colonnaded thoroughfare, as wide as the Street of Canopus, which it crossed at right angles, passed through the city to the Great Harbour, being terminated at the south end by the Gate of the Sun, and at the north end by the Gate of the Moon. These lake docks are said to have been richer and more important even than the maritime docks on the opposite side of the town; for over the lake the traffic of vessels coming by river and canal from all parts of Egypt was always greater than the shipping across the Mediterranean. The shores of this inland sea were exuberantly fertile. A certain amount of papyrus grew at the edges of the lake, considerable stretches  of water being covered by the densely - growing reeds. The Alexandrians were wont to use the plantations for their picnics, penetrating in small boats into the thickest part of the reeds, where they were overshadowed by the leaves, which, also, they used as dishes and drinking vessels. Extensive vineyards and fruit gardens flourished at the edge of the water; and there are said to have been eight islands which rose from the placid surface of the lake and were covered by luxuriant gardens.

Strabo tells us that Alexandria contained extremely beautiful public parks and grounds, and abounded with magnificent buildings of all kinds. The whole city was intersected by roads wide enough for the passage of chariots; and, as has been said, the three main streets, those leading to the Gate of Canopus, to the Serapeum, and to the Lake Harbour, were particularly noteworthy both for their breadth and length. Indeed, in the Fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, one of the characters complains most bitterly of the excessive length of the Alexandrian streets. The kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, for nearly three centuries, had expended vast sums in the beautification of their capital, and at the period with which we are now dealing it had become the rival of Rome in magnificence and luxury. The novelist, Achilles Tatius, writing some centuries later, when many of the Ptolemaic edifices had been replaced by Roman constructions perhaps of less merit, cried, as he beheld the city,  We are vanquished, mine eyes ; and there is every reason to suppose that his words were no unlicensed exaggeration. In the brilliant sunshine of the majority of Egyptian days, the stately palaces, temples, and public buildings which reflected themselves in the waters of the harbour, or cast their shadows across the magnificent Street of Canopus, must have dazzled the eyes of the spectator and brought wonder into his heart.

The inhabitants of the city were not altogether worthy of their splendid home. In modern times the people of Alexandria exhibit much the same conglomeration of nationalities as they did in ancient days; but the distinguishing line between Egyptians and Europeans is now more sharply defined than it was in the reign of Cleopatra, owing to the fact that the former are mostly Mohammedans and the latter Christians, no marriage being permitted between them. In Ptolemaic times only the Jews of Alexandria stood outside the circle of international marriages which was gradually forming the people of the city into a single type; for they alone practised that conventional exclusiveness which indicated a strong religious conviction. The Greek element, always predominant in the city, was mainly Macedonian; but in the period we are now studying so many intermarriages with Egyptians had taken place that in the case of a large number of families the stock was much mixed. There must have been, of course, a certain number of aristocratic houses, descended from the Macedonian soldiers and officials who had come to Egypt with Alexander the Great and the first Ptolemy, whose blood had been kept pure; and we hear of such persons boasting of their nationality, though the ruin of their fatherland and its subservience to Rome had left them little of which to be proud. In like manner there must have been many pure Egyptian families, no less proud of their nationality than were the Macedonians. The majority of educated people could now speak both the Greek and Egyptian tongues, and all official  decrees and proclamations were published in both languages. Many Greeks assumed Egyptian names in addition to their own; and it is probable that there were at this date Egyptians who, in like manner, adopted Greek names.

Besides Greeks and Egyptians, there were numerous Italians, Cretans, Phoenicians, Cilicians, Cypriots, Persians, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, and persons of other nationalities, who had, to some extent, intermarried with Alexandrian families, thus producing a stock which must have been much like that to be found in the city at the present day and now termed Levantine. Some of these had come to Alexandria originally as respectable merchants and traders; others were sailors, and, indeed, pirates; yet others were escaped slaves, outlaws, criminals, and debtors who were allowed to enter Alexandria on condition that they served in the army; while not a few were soldiers of fortune who had been enrolled in the forces of Egypt. There was a standing army of these mercenaries in Alexandria, and Polybius, writing of the days of Cleopatra's great-grandfather, Ptolemy IX, speaks of them as being oppressive and dissolute, desiring to rule rather than to obey. A further introduction of foreign blood was due to the presence of the Gabinian Army of Occupation, the members of which had settled down in Alexandria and had married Alexandrian women. These soldiers were largely drawn from Germany and Gaul; and though there had not yet been time for them to do more than add a horde of halfcast children to the medley, their own presence in the city contributed strikingly to the cosmopolitan character of the streets. This barbaric force, with its Roman officers, must have been in constant rivalry with the so-called Macedonian Household Troops which guarded the palace; but when Cleopatra came to the throne the latter force had already been freely recruited from all the riff-raff of the world, and was in no way a match for the northerners.

The aristocracy of Alexandria probably consisted of the cosmopolitan officers of the mercenaries and Household Troops, the Roman officers of the Gabinian army, the Macedonian courtiers, the Greek and Egyptian officials, and numerous families of wealthy Europeans, Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians. The professors and scholars of the Museum constituted a class of their own, much patronised by the court, but probably not often accepted by the aristocracy of the city for any other reason than that of their learning. The mob was mainly composed of Greeks of mixed breed, together with a large number of Egyptians of somewhat impure stock; and a more noisy, turbulent, and excitable crowd could not be found in all the world, not even in riotous Rome. The Greeks and Jews were constantly annoying one another, but the Greeks and Egyptians seem to have fraternised to a very considerable extent, for there was not so wide a gulf between them as might be imagined. The Egyptians of Alexandria, and, indeed, of all the Delta, were often no darker-skinned than the Greeks. Both peoples were noisy and excitable, vain and ostentatious, smart and clever. They did not quarrel upon religious matters, for the Egyptian gods were easily able to be identified with those of Greece, and the chief deity of Alexandria, Serapis, was here worshipped by both nations in common. In the domain of art they had no cause for dissensions, for the individual art of Egypt was practically dead, and that of Greece had been accepted by cultivated Egyptians as the correct expression of the refinement in which they desired to live. Both peoples were industrious, and eager in the pursuit of wealth, and both were able to set their labours aside with ease, and to turn their whole attention to the amusements which the luxurious city provided. Polybius speaks of the Egyptians as being smart and civilised; and of the Alexandrian Greeks he writes that they were a poor lot, though he seems to have preferred them to the Egyptians.

The people of Alexandria were passionately fond of the theatre. In the words of Dion Chrysostom, who, however, speaks of the citizens of a century later than Cleopatra,  the whole town lived for excitement, and when the manifestation of Apis (the sacred bull) took place, all Alexandria went fairly mad with musical entertainments and horse-races. When doing their ordinary work they were apparently sane, but the instant they entered the theatre or the racecourse they appeared as if possessed by some intoxicating drug, so that they no longer knew nor cared what they said or did. And this was the case even with women and children, so that when the show was over, and the first madness past, all the streets and byways were seething with excitement for days, like the swell after a storm. The Emperor Hadrian says of them:  I have found them wholly light, wavering, and flying after every breath of a report.... They are seditious, vain, and spiteful, though as a body wealthy and prosperous. The impudent wit of the young Graeco-Egyptian dandy was proverbial, and must always have constituted a cause of offence to those whose public positions laid them open to attack. No sooner did a statesman assume office, or a king come to the throne, than he was given some scurrilous nickname by the wags of the city, which stuck to him throughout the remainder of his life. Thus, to quote a few examples, Ptolemy IX was called  Bloated, Ptolemy X  Vetch, Ptolemy XIII  Piper ; Seleucus they named  Pickled-fish Pedlar,  and in later times Vespasian was named  Scullion.  All forms of ridicule appealed to them, and many are the tales told in this regard. Thus, when King Agrippa passed through the city on his way to his insecure throne, these young Alexandrians dressed up an unfortunate madman whom they had found in the streets, put a paper crown upon his head and a reed in his hand, and led him through the town, hailing him as King of the Jews: and this in spite of the fact that Agrippa was the friend of Caligula, their Emperor. Against Vespasian they told with delight the story of how he had bothered one of his friends for the payment of a trifling loan of six obols, and somebody made up a song in which the fact was recorded. They ridiculed Caracalla in the same manner, laughing at him for dressing himself like Alexander the Great, although his stature was below the average; but in this case they had not reckoned with their man, whose revenge upon them was an act no less frightful than the total extermination of all the well-to-do young men of the city, they being collected together under a false pretence and butchered in cold blood., These Alexandrians were famous for the witty and scathing verses which they composed upon topical subjects; and a later historian speaks of this proficiency of theirs  in making songs and epigrams against their rulers. Such ditties were carried from Egypt to Rome, and were sung in the Italian capital, just as nowadays the latest American air is hummed and whistled in the streets of London. Indeed, in Rome the wit of Alexandria was very generally appreciated; and, a few years later, one hears of Alexandrian comedians causing Roman audiences to rock with laughter.

The Emperor Hadrian, as we have seen, speaks of the AIexandrians as being spiteful; and, no doubt, a great deal of their vaunted wit had that character. The young Graeco-Egyptian was inordinately vain and self-satisfied; and no critic so soon adopts a spiteful tone as he who has thought himself above criticism. The conceit of these smart young men was very noticeable, and is frequently referred to by early writers. They appear to have been much devoted to the study of their personal appearance; and if one may judge by the habits of the upper-class Egyptians and Levantines of present-day Alexandria, many of them must have been intolerable fops. The luxury of their houses was probably far greater than that in Roman life at this date, and they had studied the culinary arts in an objectionably thorough manner. Dion Chrysostom says the Alexandrians of his day thought of little else but food and horse-racing. Both Greeks and Egyptians in Alexandria had the reputation of being fickle and easily influenced by the moment's emotion.  I should be wasting many words in vain,  says the author of De Bello Alexandrino,  if I were to defend the Alexandrians from the charges of deceit and levity of mind... There can be no doubt that the race is most prone to treachery. They had few traditions, no feelings of patriotism, and not much political interest. They did not make any study of themselves, nor write histories of their city: they lived for the moment, and if the Government of the hour were distasteful to them they revolted against it with startling rapidity. The city was constantly being disturbed by street rioting, and there was no great regard for human life.

The population of Alexandria is said to have been about 300,000 during the later years of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which was not much less than that of Rome before the Civil War, and twice the Roman number after that sanguinary struggle. In spite of its reputation for frivolity it was very largely a business city, and a goodly portion of its citizens were animated by a lively commercial spirit which quite outclassed that of the Italian capital in enterprise and bustle. This, of course, was a Greek and not an Egyptian characteristic, for the latter are notoriously unenterprising and conservative in their methods, while the Greeks, to this day, are admirable merchants and business men. Alexandria was the most important corn-market of the world, and for this reason was always envied by Rome. Incidentally I may remark that proportionally far more corn was consumed in Cleopatra s time than in our own; and Caesar once speaks of the endurance of his soldiers in submitting to eat meat owing to the scarcity of corn. The city was also engaged in many other forms of commerce, and in the reign of Cleopatra it was recognised as the greatest trading centre in the world. Here East and West met in the busy marketplaces; and at the time with which we are dealing the eyes of all men were beginning to be turned to this city as being the terminus of the new trade-route to India, along which such rich merchandise was already being conveyed.

It was at the same time the chief seat of Greek learning, and regarded itself also as the leading authority on matters of art, a point which must have been open to dispute. The great figure of Nilus, of which an illustration is given in this volume, is generally considered to be an example of Alexandrian art. The famous  Alexandrian School, celebrated for its scientific work and its poetry, had existed for more than two hundred years, and was now in its decline, though it still attempted to continue the old Hellenic culture. The school of philosophy, which succeeded it in celebrity, was just beginning to come into prominence. Thus the eyes of all merchants, all scientists, all men of letters, all scholars, and all statesmen, were turned in these days to Alexandria; and the Ptolemaic court, in spite of the degeneracy of its sovereigns, was held in the highest esteem.

CHAPTER III.

THE BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF CLEOPATRA.

ALEXANDRIA: CLEOPATRA’S CITY

We may perhaps most conveniently pause at this stage to consider what was the possession which Cleopatra, like her father before her, strove with all the curious diplomatic resources of the weak struggling against the strong to preserve from the Roman grasp; to consider, in fact, the character of this land of Egypt, with its capital Alexandria, which alone of the countries then accounted civilised awaited to be absorbed by the earth-hunger of Rome.

No saying of Herodotus is better known than that which he quotes from Hecataeus about Egypt being “the gift of the river” Nile, and the truth of the remark is clear to us when we reflect that the region known as the Delta, or Lower Egypt, is merely a gigantic deposit of soil brought from the interior of Africa by the waters of the river. It is familiar, too, that upon the Nile depends the whole existence of life in Egypt. This has been recognised from the earliest times down to to-day, with its great barrage-construction which has inflicted so much pain on the archaeologists. The Nile, then, has always been everything to Egypt.

But, given the Nile, Egypt was from of old entirely self-supporting, and able, moreover, to supply the other countries around the Mediterranean Sea with vast quantities from her superfluity. Wheat, barley, maize, flax, cattle-fodder, indigo, henna, oils, and all kinds of fruit and vegetables were only a few of the items which could be produced in such plenty as to leave a most profitable export trade after the home demand had been satisfied. The manufacturers of paper, of fabrics of all varieties, of embroideries, of glassware, of furniture, of ivory and metal ornaments, of enamels and jewelry, likewise were in a position to supply the outside world abundantly. Even the bad government of the later Ptolemies could not damage the marvellous fecundity and wealth of Egypt. A despotic and minutely inquisitorial system of taxation ground down the inhabitants, but still the land continued to yield apparently inexhaustible riches. So much were Egypt and money considered by the Romans convertible terms that, as we have seen, the aristocracy feared to put it in the power of any one of their number to handle the affairs of Egypt. And so great were the revenues flowing into the royal coffers that, apart from the very exceptional case of Auletes, we never hear of a member of the Lagid house, male or female, being in need of ready money.

The people who inhabited this extraordinarily fertile country were the most industrious of the ancient world. In their effort to satisfy what M. Bouche-Leclercq well calls the devouring appetite of those awful and venerable beings, the gods, the kings, the priests, and the dead who occupied for them the realm of the ideal, they could find as little time for rest as the modern Chinese peasantry. Like the latter, also, and for much the same causes, the Egyptian natives, though of peculiarly persistent racial type and profoundly attached to the traditions of their country, were little animated by a sense of national unity and prone to indulge in feuds of village against village and district against district. From the point of view of a foreign dynasty this is an admirable temperament in subjects, and the Lagidae early recognised that the easiest way to rule the Egyptians was not by attempting to Hellenise them, but by leaving them, to a large extent, under the system of provincial government to which they had for centuries been accustomed, only organising more thoroughly the tax-collecting machinery so as to extract the utmost possible amount of money in order to pay for the luxury of royalty and the upkeep of a mercenary army. The ancient Egyptian theory which made the whole country the royal domain was very easy of acceptance by the Ptolemies, and the long suffering fellaheen were too accustomed to dynastic changes to see any reason for combating a theory because Macedonians had replaced on the throne native families, Hyksos, Ethiopians, Assyrians, and Persians. Until taxation became so heavy as to leave the fellah without even the means of maintaining life for himself and his family, he did not feel inclined to revolt.

As for the Egyptians of higher rank than the peasantry, the old feudal nobility had been swept away by the hand of time, aided by the wars which had ended the rule of the last native dynasties. The rich men devoted themselves to the amassing of more wealth and asserted themselves very seldom. Numbers of them attached themselves to the Court, as we see in the histories of Ptolemy Auletes and his children, and lived the same kind of lives as their Greek competitors and colleagues in office. That vast body the priesthood, which continued to attract so many of the well-born, was skilfully conciliated by all the Ptolemies, good or bad, and proved one of their most serviceable instruments in the peaceful direction of the country. Cleopatra herself, as much as any of her ancestors, took care to keep on good terms with the ministers of the gods whose chief representative on earth, little as she might personally care about them, her position made her in the eyes of the bulk of her subjects.

The first Ptolemies had some idea of putting Greek leaven in the Egyptian lump, as was shown by their establishment in various districts of colonies of veterans from their army and by the foundation of at least one town in Upper Egypt, Ptolemais, which shared with the long preMacedonian town of Naukratis, on the Canopic Nile, the privileges of a true Greek polis. But the idea was abandoned by their successors, and the Greek infusion had no very great effect on the seven millions who inhabited the Egypt of Ptolemaic days. After a time the Greek settlers began to intermarry with the native women, and then, as usual, the children tended to assimilate themselves with their mothers’ race, while retaining their Greek names and certain outward appearances of their paternal descent.

There was, therefore, no great cleavage between a Greek or Macedonian Egypt and the Egypt of the natives, for the reason that the native element was both more absorbent and immensely larger than the Greek. But there was a distinct cleavage between the provinces and the capital. Alexandria, beginning its life as a city mainly Macedonian Greek, with a native Egyptian population quartered in Rhakotis, its western half, and in the island suburb of Pharos, and a colony of Jews expressly introduced by Alexander the Great, grew with the passage of time at once more cosmopolitan and more individual in its character. The Jewish community, as everywhere else in the world, maintained its separate existence, while steadily increasing in numbers through immigration. The native element, which was probably about a third of the total free population of over three hundred thousand under the later Lagidae, had from the foundation of Alexandria tended to blend itself with the larger Greek element, partly no doubt on account of the absence of special rights for Egyptians in the city; whereas the Greeks had certain exemptions from taxation, including perhaps the poll-tax which extended over the provinces, and the Jews had, according to Josephus, equal rights with the Greeks. It was an advantage for the Egyptians living in Alexandria to become outwardly Hellenised, to speak Greek as well as their own tongue—all laws, decrees, etc., being issued in both languages—and to intermarry with the descendants of the Greek settlers. But while sinking their separate nationality in Alexandria, the native inhabitants (and again particularly the women) had the satisfaction of profoundly affecting the ultimate character of the citizens.

The great mass of the population early began to lose its Macedonian colour, subjected not only to this influence of the Greek-speaking or rather bilingual Egyptians living in its midst, but also to that of the countless mercenaries whom the Ptolemies enrolled in their armies from all parts of Greece, from Syria, Gaul, and Italy, from anywhere in fact where men were to be found who liked the life of a hired soldier in a rich country. Added to these strains in the population was the blood introduced by the settlers attracted by business to the leading commercial city of the world—Palestinian Jews, Arabs, Phoenicians, Levantines of all sorts, Persians, and doubtless a few Indians also. For the connection between Hindustan and Alexandria had never been broken off since the days when the second Ptolemy sent his ambassador to the court of Bindusara, King of Magadha, and Bindusara’s great son Asoka in turn despatched his Buddhist missionaries westward, to have a profound effect, it is suspected, on the growth of monastic life first in Egypt and later, through Egypt, in European lands.

The type which evolved itself out of these many elements was very distinct from either the Greek or the Egyptian. The Alexandrians were a people keen in the pursuit of wealth, yet intensely pleasure-loving; loose in their morals; quick-witted and humorous, with a somewhat bitter humour, yet deeply superstitious; excitable, turbulent, and easily moved to cruel violence. The story told by Diodorus Siculus, who visited Egypt not long before Cleopatra’s reign began, has often been referred to by modem writers, but will perhaps bear repetition. Speaking of the Egyptian attitude of mind toward animals, Diodorus says:

“Such is the religious veneration impressed upon the hearts of men toward these creatures, and so obstinately is every one bent to adore and worship them, that even at the time when the Romans were about making a league with Ptolemy, and all the people made it their great business to caress and show all civility and kindness imaginable to them that came out of Italy, and through fear strove all they could that no occasion might in the least be given to disoblige them or be the cause of a war; yet it so happened that upon a cat being killed by a Roman, the people in a tumult ran to his lodging, and neither the princes sent by the king to dissuade them nor the fear of the Romans could deliver the person from the rage of the people, though he did it against his will. And this I relate not by hearsay but was myself an eyewitness of it at the time of my travels in Egypt.”

It speaks well for the foresight of Alexander, the founder, and of Ptolemy Soter, the first Lagid ruler of Alexandria, that they refrained from granting to the city the privileges of a Greek polis. The difficulty of handling the Alexandrian populace was amply experienced by the later kings, and it is impossible to imagine how any of them could have succeeded in their task, had their subjects in the capital possessed the autonomous powers which were safely left to Naukratis and granted to Ptolemais. The old Macedonian right of general assembly, of which traces are to be seen in Alexandrian history under the Ptolemies, clearly gave the sovereigns more trouble, in the sphere of municipal politics, than they desired.

The home of this composite and turbulent population was decidedly the most imposing city of the ancient world, and well adapted to become that everlasting inspiration to its inhabitants which Athens, according to Perikles, was to hers; partly owing to the magnificence of its architecture, half Greek, half Egyptian, and partly to the symmetrical planning which marks some-modern towns in Europe and America, but has-never been common either in the past or the present. Although it does not appear that Alexander the Great chose an entirely virgin site, rather extending Alexandria north-eastward along the coast from an old Egyptian township or collection of villages known as Raqertit (the Greek Rhakotis), nevertheless he laid out his name-city in a very bold manner. Diodorus speaks of its outline being that of a Macedonian military cloak. Such conceits pleased the ancient mind. As a matter of fact, the shape of Alexandria was roughly oblong, as dictated by the lie of the land whereon it was built. Situated on a strip-of shore running from north-east to south-west between the Mediterranean Sea and the freshwater Lake Mareotis, the city was about three miles long by one mile and a half at its greatest breadth. Through its centre there cut the majestic avenue known as the Meson Pedion or Canopic Way, as long as the city itself, one hundred feet wide, and flanked with marble colonnades on either side. The other main streets all crossed this avenue at right-angles, chief amongst them being that which led from the Moon gate, near the Royal Harbour and Palace, to the Sun gate, close to the junction of the stream from Mareotis to the sea and the canal leading to that branch of the Nile on which stood the rich and sacred city of Canopus. Like the Canopic Way, this shorter street was also one hundred feet wide and colonnaded on both sides. Toward the western end of the city another of these cross-streets connected with the Heptastadion, the mole of which we have spoken in Chapter IV, which gave access to the island of Pharos. At the eastern extremity of this island stood the famous octagonal lighthouse of white marble, three hundred and sixty-five feet high, erected by Ptolemy Philadelphos in 283 BC and not finally destroyed until an earthquake threw it down at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century AD. It is said that on a calm and bright day a few remains of this tower can even now be seen under the water in Alexandria harbour.

On the right of the lighthouse and the Heptastadion lay the Great Harbour, with its entrance narrowed by the reefs that ran out toward Pharos from the promontory on which stood the Royal Palace and the Temple of Isis Lochias. On the left was the more exposed harbour of Eunostos, with its small inner basin called the Kibotos or “coffer,” into which discharged the stream from the lake. The two breaks in the Heptastadion afforded a passage between the Eunostos and Great Harbours, the Old and New Ports. The whole harbour-frontage, from the Palace to the Kibotos, was occupied by wharves and docks, naval and commercial, by warehouses, and by great public buildings such as the Emporion or Exchange. In the midst stood the temple of Poseidon, all of marble, with its stately Greek pediment facing the harbour mouth a mile away.

To return to the city proper, Alexandria was divided into two main quarters, the Brucheion and Rhakotis. The former, the Royal City, as distinct from the rest as the Vatican from non-papal Rome, the Kremlin from Moscow, or the Forbidden City from Peking, was what gave Alexandria its reputation as one of the wonders of the world. The pride of all the Ptolemies in succession, of whom not even the worst failed to add something to its beauties, a temple, a mansion, a garden, an obelisk, or a statue, it was in Cleopatra’s day at the height of its splendour. “ We are vanquished, mine eyes,” wrote Achilles Tatius, the erotic novelist, five centuries later; and he saw Alexandria when many of the Ptolemaic buildings had fallen in ruins, if the Romans had added others to the sum. The most imposing sight must have been the Royal Palace, about which unhappily we know little except that it occupied the most northerly point of the Brucheion, jutting out into the sea on Cape Lochias. To its right stood the Temple of Isis, to its left lay the Royal Harbour, which Caesar had occupied on his arrival, and the Arsenal. ’South of it came the Theatre, which had been the Roman headquarters during the siege.’ South-east, the Gymnasium, with its great park, its porticoes and buildings, in which so many •stirring scenes in the history of the Lagidae had been witnessed and in which Cleopatra, Antony, and Octavian were all to play memorable parts. :South-west, the world-famous Library, with its four hundred thousand (or, according to other accounts, seven hundred thousand) books ; the Serna or Mausoleum of Alexander, with the hero’s body in a coffin originally golden, but in late Ptolemaic days of glass, and with its side-chapels devoted to the cult of the deceased Ptolemies themselves; and the Museum, the “Cage of the Muses,” a great University, combined with a monastery and a home for literary and scientific men, where lived, dined, lectured, philosophised and wrote, all at the public expense, such men as Theocritus, Callimachus, Herondas, Apollonius, Lycophron, Aratus, and Archimedes. Around these vast buildings lay the temples of the gods, the houses of the rich, and the gardens, public and private, which the climate of Egypt kept beautiful all the year round with a profusion of flowers, shrubs, and trees, indigenous and imported.

Under the shelter of the Brucheion was the Jewish quarter with its own synagogues and halls, wherein its ethnarch, assisted by a Sanhedrin, administered justice among the members of an exclusive community, to whom the Lagidae, with the exceptions of the fourth and ninth Ptolemies and of Cleopatra herself, showed marked favour.

In the south-western section of Alexandria, Rhakotis, amid the houses of the poorer Alexandrians, the outstanding features were the Serapeion, better known under its Latinised name of Serapeum, and the Paneion; and some of the authorities also place the Stadium in this part of the city. The Serapeum was the principal temple of Serapis, now already the patron god of Alexandria and of Egypt, and soon about to extend his conquests. Lying south of the Canopic Way and west of the avenue which met the Heptastadion, this temple dominated all around it with its altitude of over one hundred feet and its vast mass of Syenitic red granite, led up to by a spiral stairway of a hundred steps. Attached to it was a library (an overflow from the great Library in the Brucheion), which suffered destruction at the hands of the Christian bishop Theophilus in the Fourth Century a.d., some two hundred and sixty years before the Mohammedans, by burning the main building, finally wiped out all traces of the literary zeal of Alexandria. The Paneion, north of the Canopic Way, was an artificially constructed hill, still higher than the Serapeum and commanding a view all over the native city, over the embalmers’ quarter and the Egyptian necropolis outside the western gate, and over the harbour of Eunostos and the open sea beyond.

Throughout the whole of this wonderful city, nothing was more remarkable than the profusion of temples, both the graceful Greek type with its dazzling marble front and columns and the heavier Egyptian building of red or grey granite, walled in all round from profane eyes. If the Alexandrians were superstitious, as we have said, they had at least the excuse that their rulers encouraged them by the erection of so many temples to the gods of Greece and of Egypt, separately, or identified. Moreover, the advent of the Macedonians tended to deform the native religion, already a blend of a number of beliefs. To the early Greek travellers in the land Egypt had appeared a welter of strange and bestial gods. They saw all around them the rams of Amon and Khnumu, the bulls of Ra, Apis, and Mentu, Hathor’s cow, the goat of Osiris, the hawk of Horus, the ibis and the baboon of Thoth, the jackal of Anubis, the lioness or cat of Bastit (Pasht), Sebek’s crocodile, and, even stranger, the divine hippopotamus, vulture, cobra, scarabbeetle, and frog. Failing, not unnaturally, to appreciate the symbolism of so puzzling a religion and refused any help by the priests, they sought their explanations from the common folk, who knew as little as themselves and accepted the whole crowd of animals as fetishes, while they revelled in magic and in the excitement with which the great festivals provided them. When Macedonian rule was established over Egypt, the religion had decayed greatly since the time of Herodotus, the priestly colleges had grown less learned, and the mob more addicted to the mere outward cult of the old divinities. The Ptolemies, not comprehending the native worship, endeavoured to adapt it to their political purposes by continuing the process, which Alexander had begun, of identifying the Egyptian gods with the inhabitants of Olympus. The task was hard and the result bewildering, and when the Egyptian and Greek subjects of the Lagidae came to accept this “bastard pantheon” their worship of it was of no elevated character. For so strange a collection of deities only superstition could be an adequate homage.

Seeing the need of some more worthy religious bond between the two great peoples of his Empire, the statesmanlike founder of the royal dynasty took the bold step of setting up a new god. He did not depart entirely from the system of identification. He took the Greek Zeus in his aspect of Hades, the god of the dead (fetching, according to the story, a statue from a famous temple at Sinope on the shores of the Black Sea), and introduced him to Egypt as identical with an already existing god from Memphis, called Serapis or Sarapis ; that is, Osir-Hapi or Osor-Apis, an amalgamation of Osiris and the Apis bull, deified after his death, and become an incarnation of Ptah. This strange compound deity did credit to the statecraft of Ptolemy Soter. With the royal support, his worship made its way rapidly among Egyptians and Greeks alike. With his most famous temples at Alexandria and Canopus, Serapis grew to be the national god of Egypt. Under the Ptolemies he penetrated to Greece, after Cleopatra’s fall to Rome, where at the beginning of the Third Century AD he had a temple on the Quirinal; and in the Capitoline Museum at Rome today there is an altar with an inscription belonging to the end of that century, dedicating it to Jupiter Optimus Maximus Sol Serapis. But for the growth of Christianity, Serapis might even have spread his conquests further and become the god of a continent, a fortune which actually befell the great female divinity of Egypt, Isis.