THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPT

PART I.

CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR

CHAPTER VII.

THE BIRTH OF CAESARION AND CAESAR’S DEPARTURE FROM EGYPT.

The death of Ptolemy and the submission of Alexandria brought the war to a definite close; and Caesar, once more in comfortable residence at the Palace, was enabled at last to carry out his plans for the regulation of Egyptian affairs, with the execution of which the campaign had so long interfered. Cleopatra’s little brother, the younger Ptolemy, was a boy of only eleven years of age, who does not seem to have shown such signs of marked intelligence or strong character as would cause him to be a nuisance either to Caesar or to his sister; and therefore it was arranged that he should be raised to the throne in place of his deceased brother, as nominal King and consort of Cleopatra. Caesar, it will be remembered, had given Cyprus to this youth and to his sister Arsinoe; but now, since the latter was a prisoner in disgrace and the former was not old enough to cause trouble in Egypt, the island kingdom was not pressed upon them. To the Alexandrians, whose campaign against him had entertained him so admirably while he had pursued his intrigue with Cleopatra, Caesar showed no desire to be other than lenient, and he preferred to regard the great havoc wrought in certain parts of their city as sufficient punishment for their misdeeds. He granted to the Jews, however, equal rights with the Greeks, in consideration of their assistance in the late war, a step which must have been somewhat irritating to the majority of the townsfolk. He then constituted a regular Roman Army of Occupation, for the purpose of supporting Cleopatra and her little brother upon the throne,¹ and to keep order in Alexandria and throughout the country. This army consisted of the two legions which had been besieged with him in the Palace, together with a third which presently arrived from Syria; and to the command of this force Caesar appointed an able officer named Rufinus, who had risen by his personal merit from the ranks, being originally one of Caesar’s own freedmen. It is usually stated that in handing over the command to a man of this standing and not to a person belonging to the Senate, Caesar was showing his disdain for Egypt; but I am of opinion that the step was taken deliberately to retain the control of the country entirely in his own hands, Rufinus being, no doubt, absolutely Caesar’s man. We do not hear what became of the Gabinian troops who had fought against Caesar, but it is probable that they were drafted to legions stationed in other parts of the world.

It was now April, and Caesar 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 Caesar 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; 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 Caesar’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 traderoute 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 Caesar 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; and it would be strange indeed if Caesar 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 Caesar 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 Caesar’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 Caesar, 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 Caesar 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 (BC. 1500) and of Amenophis III (b BC 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.”

Caesar 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, Caesar had always boasted of his divine descent, his family tracing their genealogy to lulus, the son of Aeneas, 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. Caesar, 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 Casear 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 Caesar’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; 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 Caesar 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 Cnaeus Pompeius in the days when that man’s father was the ruler of the Republic. To the Egyptian mind the fact that Caesar 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 Caesar, 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 Caesar 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 Caesar’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 Caesar’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 Caesar 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 Caesar’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 Caesar’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.

Thus, little by little, under the influence of the Egyptian Queen and in the power of his own sleepless ambitions, Caesar began to give serious thought to the possibilities of creating a world-empire over which he should rule as king, founding a royal line which should sit upon the supreme earthly throne for ages to come. Obviously it must have occurred to him that kings must rule by right of royal blood, and that his own blood, though noble and though said to be of divine origin, was not such as would give his descendants unquestionable command over the loyalty of their subjects. A man who is the descendant of many kings has a right to royalty which the son of a conqueror, however honourable his origin, does not possess. So thought Napoleon when he married the Austrian princess, founding a royal house in his country by using the royal blood of another land for the purpose. Looking around him with this thought in view, Caesar could not well have chosen anybody but Cleopatra as the foundress of his line. There was no Roman royal house extant, and therefore a Greek was the best, if not the only, possible alternative; and the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt were pure Macedonians, deriving their descent, by popular belief, if not in actual fact, from the royal house of Caesar’s hero, Alexander the Great. He may well, then, have contemplated with enthusiasm the thought of the future monarchs of Rome sitting by inherited right upon the ancient throne of Macedonian Egypt; and Cleopatra on her part was no doubt inspired by the idea of future Pharaohs, blood of her blood and bone of her bone, ruling Rome by hereditary authority.

Cleopatra of necessity had to find a husband. Already she had postponed her marriage beyond the age at which such an event should take place; and any union with her co-regnant brother could but be of a formal nature. Caesar now had come into her life, capturing her youthful affections and causing himself to be the parent of her child; and it is but natural to suppose that she would endeavour by every means in her power to make him her lifelong consort, thus adding to her own royal stock the worthiest blood of Rome. There can be no doubt that whether or not she might succeed in making Caesar himself Pharaoh of Egypt, she intended to hand on the Egyptian throne to her child and his, adding to the name of Ptolemy that of the family of the Caesars. Thus it may be said, though my assumption at first seems startling, that the Roman Empire to a large extent owes its existence to the Egyptian Queen, for the monarchy was in many respects the child of the union of Caesar and Cleopatra.

These as yet undefined ambitions and hopes found a very real and material expression in Caesar’s eagerness to know whether the expected babe would be a girl, or a son and heir; and it seems likely that his determination to remain in Egypt was largely due to his unwillingness to depart before that question was answered. This, and the paternal responsibility which perhaps for the first time in his sordid life he had ever felt, led him to postpone his return to Rome. He seems to have entertained feelings of the greatest tenderness towards the Queen, whom he was beginning to regard as his wife; and he was, no doubt, anxious to be near her during the ordeal through which the young and delicately-built girl had, for the first time, to pass. It has been the custom for historians to attribute Caesar’s prolonged residence in Egypt, after the termination of the war and the settlement of Egyptian affairs, to the sensuous allurements of Cleopatra, who is supposed to have held him captive by the arts of love and by the voluptuous attractions of her person; but here a natural fact of life has been overlooked. A woman who is about to render to mankind the great service of her sex, has neither the ability nor the desire to arouse the feverish emotions of her lover. Her condition calls forth from him the more gentle aspects of his affection. His responsibility is expressed in consideration, in interest, in sympathy, and in a kind of gratitude; but it is palpably absurd to suppose that a mere passion, such as that by which Caesar is thought to have been animated, could at this time have influenced his actions. If love of any kind held him in Egypt, it was the love of a husband for his wife, the devotion of a man who was about to become a parent to the woman who would presently pay toll to Nature in response to his incitement. Actually, as we have seen, there was something more than love to keep him in Egypt; there was ambition, headlong aspiration, the intoxication of a conqueror turning his mind to new conquests, and the supreme interest of a would-be king constructing a throne which should be occupied not only by himself but by the descendants of his own flesh and blood for all time.

While waiting for the desired event Caesar could not remain inactive in the Palace at Alexandria. He desired to ascertain for himself the resources of the land which was to be considered as his wife’s dowry; and he therefore determined to conduct a peaceful expedition up the Nile with this subject in view. The royal dahabiyeh or house-boat was therefore made ready for himself and Cleopatra, whose condition might be expected to benefit by the idle and yet interesting life upon the river; and orders were given both to his own legionaries and to a considerable number of Cleopatra’s troops to prepare themselves for embarkation upon a fleet of four hundred Nile vessels. The number of ships suggests that there were several thousand soldiers employed in the expedition; and it appears to have been Caesar’s intention to penetrate far into the Sudan. The royal vessel, or thalamegos, as it was called by the Greeks, was of immense size, and was propelled by many banks of oars. It contained colonnaded courts, banqueting saloons, sitting-rooms, bedrooms, shrines dedicated to Venus and to Dionysos, and a grotto or “winter garden.” The wood employed was cedar and cypress, and the decorations were executed in paint and gold-leaf. The furniture was Greek, with the exception of that in one dining-hall, which was decorated in the Egyptian style. The rest of the fleet consisted, no doubt, of galleys and ordinary native transports and store-ships.

From the city of Alexandria the fleet passed into the nearest branch of the Nile, and so travelled southwards to Memphis, where Cleopatra perhaps obtained her first sight of the great Pyramids and the Sphinx. Thebes, the ancient capital, at that period much fallen into decay, was probably reached in about three weeks’ time; and Caesar must have been duly impressed by the splendid temples and monuments upon both banks of the Nile. Possibly it was at his suggestion that Cleopatra caused the great obelisk of one of her distant predecessors to be moved from the temple of Luxor at Thebes and to be transported down to Alexandria, where it was erected not far from the Forum,⁴ an inscription recording its re-erection being engraved at the base. The journey was continued probably as far as Aswan and the First Cataract, which may have been reached some four or five weeks after the departure from Alexandria; and it would seem that Caesar here turned his face to the north once more. Suetonius states that he was anxious to proceed farther up the Nile, but that his troops were restive and inclined to be mutinous, a fact which is not surprising, since the labour of dragging the vessels up the cataract would have been immense, and the hot south winds which often blow in the spring would have added considerably to the difficulties. The temperature at this time of year may rise suddenly from the pleasant degree of an Egyptian winter to that of the height of intolerable summer, and so remain for four or five days.

Be this as it may, Caesar turned about, having satisfied himself as to the wealth and fertility of the country, and, no doubt, having obtained as much information as possible from the natives in regard to the trade-routes which led from the Nile to Berenice and India, or to Meroe, Napata, and the Kingdom of Ethiopia. The expedition arrived at Alexandria probably some nine or ten weeks after its departure from that city—that is to say, at the end of the month of June; and it would seem that in the first week of July Cleopatra’s confinement took place.

The child proved to be a boy; and the delighted father thus found himself the parent of a son and heir who was at once accepted by the Egyptians as the legitimate child of the union of their Queen with the god Amon, who had appeared in the form of Caesar. He was named Caesar, or more familiarly Caesarion, a Greek diminutive of the same word; but officially, of course, he was known also as Ptolemy, and ultimately was the sixteenth and last of that name. A bilingual inscription now preserved at Turin refers to him as “Ptolemy, who is also called Caesar,” this being often seen in Egyptian inscriptions in the words Ptolemys zed nef Kysares, “Ptolemy called Caesar.”

The Dictator waited no longer in Egypt. For the last few months he had put Roman politics from his thoughts and had not even troubled to write any despatches to the home Government. But now he had to create the world-monarchy of which his winter with Cleopatra had led him to dream; and first there were campaigns to be fought on the borders of the Mediterranean; there was Parthia to be subdued; and finally India was to be invaded and conquered. Then, when all the known world had become dependent upon him, and only Egypt and her tributaries were still outside Roman dominion, he would, by one bold stroke, announce his marriage to the Queen of that country, incorporate her lands and her vast wealth with those of Rome, and declare himself sole monarch of the earth. It was a splendid ambition, worthy of a great man; and, as we shall presently see, there can be very little question that these glorious dreams would have been converted into actual realities had not his enemies murdered him on the eve of their realisation. Modern historians are unanimous in declaring that Caesar had wasted his time in Egypt, and had devoted to a love intrigue the weeks and months which ought to have been spent in regulating the affairs of the world. Actually, however, these nine months, far from being wasted, were spent in the very creation of the Roman Empire. True, Caesar’s schemes were frustrated by the knives of his assassins; but, as will be seen in the sequel, his plans were carried on by Cleopatra with the assistance of Antony, and finally were put into execution by Octavian.

As Caesar sailed out of the Great Harbour of Alexandria he must have turned his keen grey eyes with peculiar interest upon the splendid buildings of the Palace, which towered in front of the city, upon the Lochias Promontory; and that quiet, whimsical expression must have played around his close-shut lips as he thought of the change that had been wrought in his mental attitude by the months spent amidst its royal luxuries. Enthusiasm for the work which lay before him must have burnt like a fire within him; but stamped upon his brain there must have been the picture of a darkened room in which the wild, happy-go-lucky, little Queen of Egypt, now so subdued and so gentle, lay clasping to her breast the new-born Caesar, the sole heir to the kingdom of the whole world.

CHAPTER VIII.

CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR IN ROME.