CLEOPATRA THE GREAT

 

Whatever view we may take of the moral character of Cleopatra—and we have a wide choice of writers whom we may follow if we please, from the time of Josephus, who held her to be a monster, to that of the modem Adolf Stahr, who boldly defends her virtue—we are bound to see in her a very commanding figure; indeed, the most commanding female figure of antiquity. History has recognised this by bestowing on her an epithet which it most rarely accords to women sovereigns and calling her “Cleopatra the Great.” If in part the title serves to distinguish her from the five previous bearers of her name in the family of the Lagidae, it also records a judgment on her importance in the world. Still, as in the case of men rulers there are numerous reasons, some on close examination curiously inadequate, why greatness has been thrust upon certain people, so, too, with women there is no fixed standard by which claims to the name of “The Great” are adjudicated. It is not, therefore, entirely superfluous to ask whether the last Queen of Egypt is or is not entitled to be called great.

It must be admitted that Cleopatra is a peculiarly difficult subject for a just verdict, because of the nature of the evidence concerning her life. The witnesses are plentiful, but there is not one amongst them who can be described as a good witness. None of them came to her case with an unbiassed mind or even resolved to mention any facts in her favour, which might mitigate the general harshness of their account of her. Julius Caesar is all but silent about her, having his mouth closed for a reason to himself very sufficient. Of the later Latin writers, the historians are all (with the exception of Suetonius, if we can call him an historian) so concerned to glorify Augustus, and through him his successors, that it is out of the question for them to see any merit in the consort of Antony. It is the same, or rather worse, with the poets, to whom to see the personages of history in plain black and white and in no intermediate shades was almost a condition of continuing to exist as poets. Even that stranded Republican, Lucan, had no fair word for Cleopatra, the corrupter of Antony. Moreover, to all of these writers, as Romans, she was an Egyptian, the stranger for whom the Roman half-brick was never wanting.

As for the Greeks, we never find in them any sympathy inspired by the Macedonian descent of Cassius is as much under the spell of the Caesarian tradition as any of his Latin contemporaries. Appian, a poor and undiscriminating historian, has little of value to say about Cleopatra. Plutarch, more impartial than others between the two great parties which destroyed the Republic in their struggle, readily sacrifices her in his attempt to be just toward Antony.

There remains Josephus, who perhaps hated Cleopatra as sincerely as any of the Roman poets pretended to hate her. Now it is a noteworthy fact that, of the four Lagidae who have come down to posterity as the most criminal of their family, Ptolemy IV Philopator, Ptolemy IX Physkon, Ptolemy XIII Auletes, and Cleopatra VI, the two first-named and Cleopatra are all known to have been anti-Jewish, Philopator and Physkon consistently so and Cleopatra at least occasionally. Whatever else we may think about Josephus, we -must admit him to have been a patriotic Jew, and we cannot therefore blame him for taking into account in his judgment of the Lagidae their behaviour toward his countrymen. When there comes, however, a necessity for estimating the probability of unsupported statements of Josephus concerning one of these anti-Jewish Macedonian rulers of Egypt, we must obviously be sceptical. And unfortunately the general character of Josephus’s history is such as to leave us without any confidence in what he says, unless we know from other sources that he is telling the truth. To repeat what has been said in an earlier chapter, no one has a right to condemn the worst of queens, even as bad a woman as the partisans of Octavian represented Cleopatra to be, on the statements of a writer who could make a hero of Herod the Great and display such inability as does Josephus to look on any character or event without the narrowest raceprejudice.

While, then, there is not a single witness in Cleopatra’s favour, there are very clear reasons why all, Romans, Greeks, and Jews alike, should have been biassed against her. It is still possible that she was a great woman, and not merely a great monster such as the old writers, for political or personal reasons, united to make her out to be. The only evidence which can be adduced, however, must be sought among the testimonies of her enemies, and it is very natural that the task of defending her has attracted very few, and has then proved beyond their powers. To build a defence out of the speeches of the prosecutor and the statements of those whom he calls in his support is too difficult for the intellect of a Quixote. At the best he can save a few rags—mostly, perhaps, of Coan silk in Cleopatra’s case— wherewith to veil his client from the censorious gaze of the jury.

Cleopatra was the final product of a very corrupt and extremely wealthy royal family ruling over the richest country in the ancient world, a country doomed from before her birth to fall a prey to the insatiable hunger of the one great military nation remaining in that world. From early years she was brought in contact with some of the most unscrupulous representatives of the conquering race, and shown that, if she was to play any part in her ancestral kingdom’s history, she must play it in company with them. From her father’s example in Egypt she saw how a man of her house could preserve a throne in dealing with such people, from her uncle’s example in Cyprus how a throne could be lost by a man. She was a woman, and, while profiting by her father’s and uncle’s examples, must allow for the modifying effect of sex in handling the situation. Had she not been a Lagid princess, she might have declined the task and left it to her brother Ptolemy, four years her junior, when he should attain his majority. But the descendant of other ambitious Cleopatras and the sister of the fourth Berenike could not stand aside from the affairs of State. She was prepared to face the family difficulties, and, so far from wishing to shelter herself behind her brother, she tried to prevent him from exerting the influence which was legally his. In the brief first period of her co-regency with Ptolemy XIV, she was soon placed in the position of having to decide how to treat one of those Romans whose presence in Alexandria boded so little good to Egypt. She received Cnaeus Pompeius the younger as an ambassador come to ask a favour of her queenship, and also, if report did not wrong her, as a lover.

Her attitude to Cnaeus Pompeius was typical of her conduct toward the Romans throughout her life. Whatever else these dreaded foreigners might be, they were at least emphatically men. To meet their aggressive virility Cleopatra used the only possible defence: her own femininity. She never neglected the parental weapon of bribery, combined by her as by Auletes himself with an occasional assassination, when it seemed safe to employ the assassin’s aid; but it was on her sex that she relied when she desired to effect a great stroke.

As a woman she was decidedly well equipped to fight against even such trained conquerors of women as the Roman public men of her day. She united good looks with natural intelligence and a versatile education. Something has already been said in the Third Chapter of this book with reference to these points, but we may now return to them again.

As regards her beauty, there is no general agreement among ancient authors, we have seen, and Dion Cassius’s description of her as most exceedingly beautiful of women is discounted by Plutarch’s far more guarded and sober phrases. 

We have, to check what the old writers say, a fair number of well-authenticated representations of Cleopatra, if the many statues of her which existed in her lifetime have altogether vanished. There is a well-known bust executed in fine limestone, purchased by the British Museum in 1879, which so resembles the head on the coins as to be almost certainly assignable to Cleopatra. The strongly aquiline nose is a remarkable feature in the bust, as on the coins, of which there are more than a dozen whose genuineness is not disputed. Further, there are the Egyptian sculptures of Cleopatra at Dendera, and there were those at Erment, some fortunately portrayed for us in the volumes of Lepsius, though the originals are gone.

The Egyptian sculptures we must dismiss as valueless, however interesting. Cleopatra at Dendera is almost identical in features, wig, and headdress (except for Cleopatra’s surmounting horns and solar disk) with the painting at Deir El-Bahari of Queen Ahmes, mother of the great Hatshepsut. So, whether or not the Dendera representation shows that Cleopatra ever, on State occasions, put on the elaborately plaited wig of the older Egyptian queens, it certainly does not give us any guide as to Cleopatra’s features. We only see a conventional type of head perpetuated by the influence of the Egyptian priestly sculptors. As for the Erment pictures, it is evident that there is no attempt at portraiture in them. Cleopatra is barely distinguishable except by costume from Isis, Nephthys, Hathor, or the other goddesses present at the divine birth.

We come to the coins, and here we should feel more satisfied if there were a greater uniformity between the various profiles. We may perhaps abandon the features shown on the silver coin struck at Askalon in B.c. 50, as they are too like the features on the Askalon coins of Ptolemy Auletes (themselves dissimilar from those on the other coins of Auletes) and of Ptolemy XIV, and we may therefore be dealing again with a conventional type. Even if we leave out the Askalon Cleopatra, however, we are obliged to admit that the designers of her coins saw Cleopatra in very different lights, and that some of them must have been very poor artists, almost caricaturists indeed. Neglecting the worst productions, and comparing some of the best coins and the British Museum bust, we may arrive at some sort of idea how the charmer of Caesar and of Antony looked, though we have no clue to her colouring or the shade of her hair. It can hardly be necessary to point out again that there is no warrant for speaking of her as a “gipsy”; quite possibly she was fair-haired like her ancestor Ptolemy Philadelphos, according to the seventeenth Idyll of Theocritus. All that we can feel certain about is that she had not a short nose. As M. Henry Houssaye amusingly says, “ Pascal’s remark is well known : ‘Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the globe might have been changed.’ Pascal was not a numismatist. Otherwise he would have written :  ‘Had Cleopatra’s nose been longer!’.

An examination of the nearest approaches which we have to likenesses of Cleopatra makes us decidedly inclined to accept Plutarch’s statement about her beauty being “not altogether beyond comparison, nor such that no one could look upon her without being struck by it.” That she made the best of it we can readily believe, and legend credits her with the invention of baths which rivalled in effect the fountain of youth, and the use of many wonderful unguents, for the compounding of which Egypt was famous in antiquity—such as that mentioned by Pliny, which, cost £16 a pound, was imperceptible to the person anointed with it, but excited desire in others. The episode of her struggles with Herod over the Jericho gardens, and with the Nabathaean Arabs for similar treasures which she coveted from them, is the best testimony which we have to her love of all that pleases the organ of smell.

Cleopatra’s merely sensual appeal, however, was clearly excelled by the charm which lay in her general manner, “ the peculiar character which was evident in all that she said or did,” as Plutarch writes. Her sweet-toned voice was employed not only to captivate by its sound, but . to also reveal the quick intelligence and the widely educated mind. We are compelled to take for granted her verbal powers, for the few actual examples of her wit which have been preserved do not appear, to the modern reader at least, at all brilliant. The memoir-writer who treasures up the sayings of notable people with whom he comes in contact was indeed rare in the ancient world, and was wont to devote his attention to the philosophers rather than to the wits. We must be content, therefore, with the knowledge that Julius Caesar and Antony were both fascinated with her ability to amuse them as well as make love to them and surround them with luxury, and must not ask to be shown a picture of Cleopatra, as it were, in action. We know enough, however, from this very fact of her conquest of Caesar and Antony, not to mention any lesser folk, to see that it was her wonderful adaptability which gave Cleopatra her victories. If her tongue was like a many-stringed instrument, capable of being turned to any language that she pleased, still more was this the case with her mind. She failed, as we have seen, to make a favourable impression upon Ahenobarbus and on other Roman senators who joined Antony at Ephesus early in the year 32; but from the beginning her attitude toward them was one of defiance. She did not desire their presence in Antony’s camp, and wished for nothing better than to drive them away again to Rome.

It is Cleopatra’s genius for cajolery, coupled with the readiness attributed to her by the admirers of her two chief enemies, Octavian and Herod, to accept any man as a lover, that gained for her in history the unenviable reputation of a crowned courtesan. The charge is impossible to rebut for the reason already given, that the only testimonies which we have are those of the witnesses for the prosecution. We can only say, by way of comment on the accusation, that she can certainly be proved to have had two lovers, one of whom was credited with the intention of ‘ making her his wife, while the other actually did so after a fashion—or, according to some, with full legal ceremonies as early as 36 BC. With regard to a third lover, Cnaeus Pompeius, Plutarch seems to accept the intrigue; but if it ever existed it must have been of very brief duration, as the young man only visited Alexandria to fetch military support for his father. As for Dellius, what is more likely than that this unpleasant personage himself spread the tale after he had deserted Antony? Concerning Josephus’s account of Cleopatra’s unsuccessful attempt on the virtue (!) of Herod, nothing need be added to what has already been said.

On the most favourable construction, Cleopatra’s story, viewed from one point only, amounts to this. When she was seventeen or eighteen she took as her husband, in accordance with the terms of her father’s will and the Egyptian royal custom, her eleven-year-old brother Ptolemy XIV, with whom she was to share the throne. A quarrel broke out between her and her brother’s advisers, and three years later she fled for her life. There appeared upon the scene Julius Caesar, the greatest man of the greatest nation of the day. He was fifty-four years of age, and had a reputation for gallantry in all senses of the word. Cleopatra contrived an interview with him, and at once won him to her cause, while surrendering to him her person. Caesar succeeded in establishing her on the throne, after a battle in which her husband was killed. He allowed her charms to detain him in Egypt far longer than was good for his reputation, but ultimately left after giving her as a nominal second husband her remaining brother Ptolemy XV, who was only ten or eleven. When he had completed his campaigns, he summoned her to him at Rome, whither she came with Ptolemy and with Caesarion, the son whom she bore to Caesar after he had left her in Egypt. It was reported that the Dictator was actually about -to make her his wife when he was assassinated, leaving her to escape back to Egypt. In the meantime Ptolemy XV disappeared, we know not how, and left Cleopatra doubly widowed.

There is a gap in the story now until Antony appears in the East after avenging Caesar’s murder at Philippi. The Triumvir, at the age of forty-two, had an even more notorious reputation . than the man to whose position he had in part succeeded. When he called Cleopatra to him there was but one result to be expected. Cleopatra yielded again, as she had yielded to Caesar, at the price of securing her kingdom. From this time onward, although their connection was broken off for a period of more than three years, she set herself to mould Antony to her will, and to increase that realm which, at the beginning of her reign, she appeared likely not merely to fail to keep intact, but even to lose altogether. There are reasons for thinking that she tried topersuade Antony to sever his connection with Rome entirely so that he might become King of a greater Egypt, with her as his heiress-wife. Antony could not bring himself to renounce his birthright as a Roman citizen, and therefore obviously could not accept the kingship of Egypt. He continued to attempt to combine two incompatible careers, those of a Roman Imperator , and of an Oriental monarch without a crown.

He made Cleopatra his wife, however, as far as he could, in view of the fact that he had another wife at Rome, and at last went so far as to repudiate Octavia for her sake. Cleopatra had apparently attained her object. Then came Actium and the invasion of Egypt, and with the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra the story comes to an end.

The Queen of Egypt, it will be readily admitted, was no earlier Catherine the Great, unless we go beyond the plain outlines of this story and accept her enemies’ attribution to her of many other lovers, most of whose names they have not troubled to record—recognising that for their purpose the anonymous charge is the safest. But if we adhere to statements which can be proved, we find Cleopatra allying herself with two men who seemed to her to have the destinies of the world in their control. Both of her great intrigues ’ were fraught with profound political results for Egypt. We do not, therefore, see her guided by sensual motives, but rather using her senses as the instruments of her brain.

It remains to ask whether her heart was at all touched in the two affairs which her clever head turned to such purpose. With regard to her connection with the Dictator Caesar it is very difficult to pronounce. Cleopatra met Caesar when she was twenty-one and he was thirty-three years older. Her very life was at stake unless she could win him to her. She made a daring attempt ' and succeeded so far as to obtain an influence over him which no other woman had managed to gain, thereby unwittingly contributing to his fall. What effect he produced upon her we have no means of judging ; for there is not a single sentence of evidence upon the subject, as might have been expected, all the early writers being careless or ignorant of any feelings which she might possess. After his death she endeavoured to help the Caesarian cause, as she was quite justified in pointing out to Antony. Moreover, she remained attached to their son Caesarion, though we are unable to analyse what kind of regard for the father entered into the mother’s love for the child. Cleopatra cannot but have admired so astonishing a genius as Caesar, and she must also have felt gratitude toward him, especially as his bewitchment by her was such a signal tribute to her charms. But policy so obviously bound her to him that there is at least no necessity to imagine that she reciprocated the passion which the Dictator felt for her.

In the case of Antony we are better provided with evidence. The connection lasted longer— twelve years as compared with three—and the classical writers felt no constraint in discussing it w’ith a freedom which they avoided where Caesar was involved. They made out of Antopy’s infatuation a great romance, and they were perfectly right in doing so. It was a great romance, and the more romantic for being a true one. Where we may be permitted to differ from them is in not accepting the hypotheses that in the affair the love was entirely on one side, and that Cleopatra, having entered upon her relationship with Anthony because she believed that he was the man whom she must put in the place of Caesar as her saviour from the menace of Rome, cared so little for him that she was quite ready to betray him to his enemies when she saw that he could not save her. It was to the advantage of Octavian that matters should be represented thus. Antony, in so far as he was a Roman and once the brother-in-law of Octavian, must be shown as the victim of “the Egyptian,” the sufferer from her poisonous philtres. And, inasmuch as Octavian had endeavoured to purchase from her Antony’s betrayal with promises which he never meant to keep, she must be shown as offering to be the traitor to one whom she had from the first only deluded with a pretence of love. Octavian became Augustus the Roman Emperor, and his version of the story was naturally that which prevailed.

We must admit that Cleopatra was attracted to Antony and determined to attach him to her because she saw in him the proper partner in the scheme, which Caesar’s murder had temporarily ruined, of preserving Egypt from the grasp of Rome. This is no reason, however, for supposing that he who inspired a lasting affection in two such dissimilar women as Fulvia and Octavia should have been incapable of arousing a passion in Cleopatra also. Had Antony been successful at Actium and (were it conceivable) become Emperor of the world known to the Romans, we should no doubt read of Cleopatra as his faithful and loving wife. That she was faithful to him in defeat ought to be a better proof of her love. And was she not faithful? Her death should testify to this. She did not die with him, it is true. She did not even kill herself in the tomb before she was captured, being stopped by Proculeius. She waited some days before having recourse to the famous asp. But she was a mother and loved her children, for whom she hoped to secure terms from the conqueror. When she failed to extract any terms, she put an end to her life, having first done honour to the coffin of Antony. And Octavian had her buried with her lover, not unmoved, it would seem, by the pathos of their deaths.

But Antony accused her of treachery to him—when he was so incapable of judging aright that he seems a totally different man from the Antony who attempted to take up Caesar’s inheritance. The wild utterances prompted by a diseased brain ¹ surely do not deserve serious attention. Cleopatra had indeed betrayed him, but not with the petty treachery which would sell a broken and ruined man to a foe who was in any case certain to capture him alive or dead. She had betrayed Antony the Roman when she made him enter into her project of saving and aggrandising Egypt at the expense of Rome. She betrayed him because * she was a bold stateswoman and he a soldier of fortune whose ability to cut himself off from his early associations she had overrated. When she saw on the arrival of the Roman senators at Ephesus that his country still had a powerful hold over him, she recognised that her schemes were threatened with disaster. The outcome of her reflections on this desperate position was the plan which there was an attempt to carry out at Actium. The escape from Actium must have seemed to Cleopatra the only means by which she might keep both Egypt and Antony for herself. The plan was a bad one, as it was bound to be, being a solution of an impossible problem. . But at any rate we find no sign that she tried to sell Antony in order to buy off the punishment for her mistakes. She returned with him to Egypt and there with him waited to see what fate would bring. When all his forces failed him, she followed him to the grave. If we hold that she had no love for him, can we suggest what other course she should have taken, had she loved him ?

Cleopatra has sometimes been compared with a tigress. The comparison is not without its aptness. And no one denies that tigresses have the capacity for love of their mates.

A tigress, too, is said to be ready to fight to the last on behalf of her cubs. Cleopatra displayed no quality which arouses our sympathy more than her maternal love. We cannot pretend to know how she brought up her children, but we have the witness of writers very hostile to her that she exhibited always the greatest solicitude, first for Caesarion alone, and then for him and her two sons and daughter by Antony, that Egypt should be preserved as their inheritance. After Caesar’s assassination and her return to Alexandria her anxiety was that both Egypt and Rome should recognise Caesarion as her associate on the throne of the Ptolemies. She persuaded Egypt by such devices as those whose record was placed on the walls of the temple at Erment. Rome’s consent she bought, it would appear, in return for the assistance which she tried to give to Dolabella. When she obtained her ascendancy over Antony she had no difficulty in procuring from him most generous treatment for Caesarion as well as for the children whom she bore to himself. And at the end we see her desperately struggling to save her young family from the fate threatened them at the hands of Octavian, bargaining with him at the risk of being denounced to Antony as willing to sacrifice him, and enduring her own life as long as she entertained any hopes of a compromise. Judged from the standpoint of a mother, Cleopatra does not deserve to be ranked among the bad women of history. There is some satisfaction in thinking she did not live to see the cruel end of her beloved Caesarion.

The case is very difficult when we look at her relations with her brothers and sister. The traditions of Oriental despotism were not violated by the Lagidae, and the custom of brother-and-sister marriage very often introduced an additional horror. The union of Ptolemy Philadelphos with Arsinoe II was followed by good results, but usually the “ divine marriage ” led to unhappiness. Cleopatra’s wedding of her two brothers, although owing to the youth of both boys, even at the time of their deaths, the transaction was possibly formal, turned out very ill. With Ptolemy XIV she was soon on terms of bitter enmity, while the mystery of the disappearance of Ptolemy XV reflects grave suspicions upon her. With regard to her sister Arsinoe, there is no doubt whatever that Cleopatra dealt with her ferociously, and well merited the title of her murderess. Both the Ptolemies and Arsinoe only appeared to Cleopatra in the light of obstacles to her enjoyment of power, and like so many a Sultan and Sultana she can be credited with no scruples where a rival of her own blood was concerned.

Cleopatra exhibited, in fact, all the cruelty which accompanies great craft in rulers, Western as well as Eastern. When we have the certainty of her behaviour toward Arsinoe and toward Artavasdes, King of Armenia, we need not trouble to ask whether the tale of her experiments into the action of poisons on the persons of condemned criminals at Alexandria is true. The dislike which the Alexandrians so frequently manifested of her was no doubt inspired by such ruthlessness as she showed after her return from Actium. They were a troublesome people, and -she ruled them as the most tyrannical of her predecessors had ruled them before her, that is by terrorism, mitigated only by the display of a gorgeous pomp which kept in a good humour those on whom her wrath did not fall. To show a sign of hesitation might have given her Alexandrian subjects the idea that she feared them ; and, to do her justice, it must be admitted that she was singularly devoid of fear. The only lack of courage with which she can be charged was during the campaign of Actium. She is alleged to have been dispirited by a series of bad omens before the fighting began, and to have been a victim of fright in the battle itself. As for omens, she had good reason to be discouraged by what occurred when Antony set up his headquarters in Asia Minor in 30 b.c., for by the arrival at Ephesus of Antony’s Roman supporters, and their attempt to drive her away from the man whom they hailed as deliverer of the Republic, all her ambitions were threatened with absolute ruin. With regard to the sea-fight, while the supposition of a sudden panic on the part of Cleopatra fits in best with the ascertainable facts, there are points on which, could we be enlightened, we should be in a better position to judge. We do not even know, for instance, whether Cleopatra was a good sailor ! We hear of her being prostrated by rough weather when she set sail from Alexandria to the assistance of Dolabella in Syria. At any rate, she quickly regained her courage after the flight from Actium. During the last months in Egypt, of all her party and Antony's she best played the man, down to that day when, in the words of her very grudging critic Florus, “ free from all womanly fear she yielded up her last breath.”

The almost complete absence of Egyptian records concerning Cleopatra’s reign is for no reason more to be regretted than because without them we cannot with any certainty estimate in what light she appeared to the mass of her subjects. With the Alexandrians, we know, she was unpopular. But we hear of no native risings against her authority. The inclination of the Egyptians to revolt against their Macedonian rulers had no doubt been checked by the merciless suppression of the Theban rebellion by Ptolemy Lathyros in 67 BC, when he razed to the ground Thebes, the old Pharaohs’ “Horizon on Earth, the Eye of the Universal Lord,” and scattered its inhabitants among villages. Yet there was a rebellion in the South, in the nomes of the Said, in the early days of the Roman occupation of Egypt, which Strabo attributes to discontent at the heavy taxation. Under Cleopatra, as under her father Auletes, taxation was very heavy; but there were no risings known to us against either Auletes or Cleopatra. Father and daughter seem to have acted alike in their home policy. While their exactions of money to fill the royal purse were grievous, they left the provincials otherwise very much to themselves, under the administration of the local officials, and they provided for the worship of the native gods. Auletes and Cleopatra were both temple-builders, as has already been said, and evidence of their wise attempts to keep a hold over the Egyptians by a pious expenditure of some of the money ground out of them remains to this day.

Unhappily the most important new work of Cleopatra’s reign exists no more. The temple she erected at Hermonthis, a mammisi or “ birthhouse ” dedicated to Isis, mother of Horus, in commemoration of her own bringing-forth of Caesarion, suffered the fate described in an earlier chapter, and is represented only by a few stones at the modern Erment. We can no longer see, therefore, the actual reliefs representing in so curious a way the priestly story of the parentage of Cleopatra’s firstborn, nor the picture of Cleopatra herself adoring the sacred bull of Hermonthis, which was identified with the god Mentu. A similar fate has befallen her buildings at Koptos. At Dendera, the ancient Tentyra, the great temple of Hathor fortunately remains, one of the most magnificent and most perfectly preserved examples of Egyptian architecture, having even its roof over it. Cleopatra probably had little to do with the building of the temple, to which her father had added some crypts; but her decorations are much in evidence on its walls. One of the most striking of these is a relief, on the outer wall, of herself and Caesarion offering worship and incense to Isis and to Horus. Within this temple is a small chapel at the west end, in which Cleopatra may have stood on a few solemn occasions in her reign. It is the “ Dwelling of Hathor,” the innermost shrine of the goddess whom the Greeks identified with Aphrodite, in which was kept her golden sistrum, and to which only the sovereign might be admitted.

In the reliefs Cleopatra appears with the headdresses of both Hathor and Isis, who blended to a large extent in the legends of Horus, son of the Great Mother. With Cleopatra’s identification with Isis we are already familiar. It was a common role for the queens of the Lagid house to adopt, it would appear; and the ambitious and utterly unscrupulous Cleopatra III to some extent anticipated her namesake’s assumption of the epithet Nea Isis by calling herself Nikephoros (“Bringer of Victory”) and Dikaiosyne (“Justice”), both of them titles of Isis.

Plutarch, when he writes of the Alexandrian triumph, says that “ Cleopatra now, as on other occasions when she went out publicly, wore the dress sacred to Isis, different from her ordinary dress, and she was called the New Isis,” the natural inference from which would be that she encouraged the cult of herself as Isis from this time. Coins of an earlier date, however, show her already with the attributes of the goddess.

It is difficult to say what was the precise import of this identification with Isis, which was paralleled among the male Lagidae by the fourth and thirteenth Ptolemies calling themselves Dionysos—as did Antony when he began to become Egyptianised. The ruling sovereign of Egypt was by reason of his or her office divine; but it must have pleased her subjects to see Cleopatra , equate herself with the “ great mother of the gods,” wearing the plain straight skirt and the monstrous head-dress of the goddess, or she would hardly have ventured to do so. Not until her last desperate days do we hear of her flouting the religious susceptibilities of Egypt ; and even then we do not know that she may not be maligned by Dion when he makes her rob the temples of their treasures, “not sparing even the holiest shrines.” For the bulk of her reign at least, we see her careful to keep on her side the hearts of the devout.

Taken as a whole, Cleopatra’s domestic policy in Egypt, though financially burdensome, does not seem to have been otherwise oppressive, like that of many of her predecessors. Outside Alexandria complaint against her did not become fierce. Where she ruined her country was with her foreign policy. But, on the other hand, it might be said that by this same foreign policy V she gave Egypt at least seventeen years more of independent existence than there was any reason to hope for when Julius Caesar set foot in Alexandria. Dealing with only Ptolemy XIV, Potheinos, and Achillas, Caesar would hardly have left Egypt in b.c. 47 a self-governing state. Such it still was, however, until the middle of the year 30, thanks to the influence of Cleopatra first over Caesar and then over Antony.

Cleopatra died a failure. She failed because, as has been pointed out above, the problem which she attempted to solve was incapable of solution. She had been seeking how, with the aid of a man who could not forget that he was a Roman, she might build up Egypt into an empire strong enough to resist the encroachments of Rome. Herself an Orientalised Greek, queen of a nation mostly alien to her in blood, she did not realise the power of the name of Rome over even the most lawless of her offspring. Antony only threw off his Roman citizenship in the madness of Actium, where he lost his manhood too. Already grown helpless to think for himself, he became unfit to supply the force to be guided by Cleopatra’s brain, and so left her kingdom, which she had made also his, an easy prey to Octavian.

But if Cleopatra failed, yet for a while, between Tarentum and Actium, she came very near to success. And in any case, whether her ambitions were frustrated because she chose her instrument unwisely or because there was "no instrument capable of doing the work which she required of it, there were in her scheme a breadth and a magnificence which make it impossible for us to be blind to her fine statecraft or to deny her right to the traditional title of Cleopatra the Great.

 

THE END