In the middle of the battle the Egyptian galleys sailed out through Antony's front, but, instead of engaging the enemy, made off, with canvas crowded, to the south. Immediately afterwards Antony in his single ship left the battle and followed in their wake. According to the traditional view, derived from Plutarch, it was, on Cleopatra's part, an act of black treachery — she saw that the battle was going against Antony and deserted his cause, whilst she might still hope to make favourable terms with the victor and, on Antony's part, an act of mad infatuation — when he saw Cleopatra p380departing, his passion for her made him fling every other consideration to the winds. Modern writers argue from the account of the battle given by Dio Cassius,º that the evasion was really a plan concerted beforehand between Antony and the queen. Antony saw that the position of his land army had become hopeless, that the one chance was for him to break away to the open sea with what naval force he could, and regain Egypt, where he might have breathing-space and get together a fresh power.
If he nourished such hopes, the event proved them vain. Antony and Cleopatra re-entered the harbour of Alexandria, the sixty galleys garlanded as if for a great victory, in order to deceive the people till their troops had again got possession of the city. They resumed the old life of revelry, but under the felt imminence of doom. The club of the "Inimitable Livers" was changed into the club of the Synapothanoumenoi, "Those who are going to die together." The forces of Antony in the neighbouring countries — in the Cyrenaica, in Syria — declared for Caesar. Wild plans were discussed — landing with a force in Spain and raising the West against Caesar, seeking refuge in the recesses of the south, in Ethiopia, in the elephant country far up the Red Sea.
Cleopatra actually got so far as to have a number of vessels transported from the Mediterranean across the Isthmus of Suez for the flight up the Red Sea; but the Roman governor of Syria, who had deserted the cause of Antony for that of Caesar, induced the Nabataeans of Petra to fall upon the ships and burn them, so frustrating the adventurous plan. One thing which the story seems incidentally to show is that the canal made by Ptolemy II, connecting the Nile with the Red Sea, was impassable for larger vessels, or had been allowed by later kings to fall out of repair, possibly, as Mahaffy suggests, because they found the route up the Nile to Coptos, and thence by land over the desert to Berenice or Myos Hormos, more practical and safer than the route which went all the way by the Red Sea.
In 30 B.C. Caesar Octavianus entered Egypt with his army from Syria. The frontier which had been an impassable barrier to Perdiccas and Antigonus had this time offered small difficulties. Antony had no trustworthy force with which to defend it. Caesar took Pelusium; it was believed that the Ptolemaic commandant, Seleucus, made no real opposition. When Caesar's army lay outside Alexandria, the queen barricaded p381herself with a quantity of treasure and with her two women — Charmion, her manicurist, and Iras,26 her hair-dresser — in a solidly built monument somewhere in Alexandria, and gave Antony to understand that she had committed suicide. Then Antony thrust his sword into his body, but bungled it, and was drawn up, badly wounded, into the monument by Cleopatra and her women. What happened inside the monument could never, of course, be known, except by what Cleopatra and her women chose afterwards to say. When the Romans broke into the monument, they found Antony's corpse. Plutarch gives a pathetic account of the last words of the lovers, but one must remember that Cleopatra's chances of making good terms with Caesar might seem to be increased, if Antony were got out of the way, and that she had apparently tried by a trick to induce him to take his own life.
Caesar made his entry as conqueror into Alexandria on August 1, 30 B.C. He had an interview with the queen, who had now returned from the monument to the palace of the Ptolemies. It was afterwards said that Cleopatra, in her fortieth year, tried to repeat a third time her success in captivating the ruler of the Roman world, but failed against the cold prudence of the young Caesar, though Octavian was no saint. But that may well be later invention, when legend worked up the story of Cleopatra according to the established idea of her as the magnificent harlot. All we can say for certain is that when these two came into contact, it was a case of two deep actors each trying to impose upon the other. That Caesar desired to exhibit the notorious Queen to the Roman crowd, led a captive behind his triumphal chariot, is likely enough, and that for this reason he tried to prevent her from killing herself. Her end must always be enveloped in mystery. All that is certain is that she was discovered one day dead in her royal robes — perhaps the garb she wore as the New Isis. The story which became established within a few weeks27 in Rome was that she had had an asp, or two p382asps,28 secretly conveyed to her, and caused herself to be bitten. Iras too, the story said, was found dead at her mistress' feet, and Charmion at the point of death. No snake was ever seen, but it was said that some small marks discovered upon the queen's body proved the manner of her death. Later on, her body-physician, Olympus, published an account of her last days, and from this book the story, as we have it, may, in most of its details, be derived. But one cannot know whether Olympus wrote to tell the truth, or to make a dramatic narrative, or to please the Romans.29
There was still a boy of seventeen alive, who bore combined the great names of Ptolemy and Caesar — the heir by his mother of Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, and the one acknowledged son of Julius Caesar. He had already the status of king of Egypt, Ptolemy XIV. Before Cleopatra's death, he had been sent with his Greek tutor to escape to Berenice on the Red Sea coast. The man who bore the name of Caesar by right of adoption sent messengers after the pair, decoyed them back to Alexandria — whether by the tutor's p383treachery or stupidity we cannot say — and then quickly put his inconvenient cousin to death. So the history of the Ptolemies which begins with the only acknowledged son of Alexander the Great, murdered in his thirteenth year, ends with the only acknowledged son of Julius Caesar, murdered in his eighteenth year, whilst they seem both to have a far-off analogue in the only legitimate son of the third great conqueror, in the Aiglon, who died in what was practically captivity in his twenty-second year.
Cleopatra's three children by Antony — Alexander surnamed the Sun, Cleopatra surnamed the Moon, and Ptolemy Philadelphus — were sent to Italy, to be brought up by Octavia, who took the children of any wife of Antony under her wing. Cleopatra the Moon was married, when she grew up, to the Numidian prince Juba, who not only had a good Greek education but obtained note in his time as a voluminous writer in Greek with a mass of uncritical bookish erudition. The Romans made him king of Mauretania (Morocco) when the throne of that country fell vacant, so that, from 25 B.C. p384till about the birth of Christ, there was a queen Cleopatra reigning at the opposite end of the North African seaboard to Egypt. Dio (LI.15.6) says that Octavian "gave Alexander and Ptolemy to Juba and Cleopatra," which probably does mean that Cleopatra took her two brothers with her to Morocco.30 The son of Juba and Cleopatra, called Ptolemy, succeeded to the throne of Mauretania, probably in 23 A.D., but he fell a victim to the jealousy of Caligula in 40 A.D. because he had worn a purple mantle more conspicuous than the Emperor's in the amphitheatre at Rome. Caligula sent him into exile and had him assassinated on the road. The last king Ptolemy known to history left no issue. Though he was king, not of Egypt, but of Morocco, and on his father's side a Numidian, his name bore witness to the fact that through his mother he was a descendant of the Macedonian chief who three hundred years before his birth had embarked on the astounding adventure of founding a Greek kingdom in the wonderland of the Nile. Of Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, after they were given to Juba and Cleopatra we hear no more. If they grew up and left issue, they were lost in the crowd of the obscure. Probably when king Ptolemy fell murdered by the roadside, the Ptolemaic stem ceased to have any branch in the world.
Egypt, after Ptolemy Caesar had been killed by Octavianus Caesar in 30 B.C., became a province of the Roman Empire. It reverted, that is to say, to the position it had had for a few years in the empire of Alexander the Great, the position from which it had been raised again for the last three hundred years, to the status of an independent kingdom — though a kingdom under an alien dynasty — by Ptolemy I. It became a province, though, in one way, unlike any other, inasmuch as Octavianus Caesar, known after January 27 B.C. as Augustus, took the rich country as his personal estate and forbade any member of the senatorial order to set foot in it without his special leave. The place of the kings of the house of Ptolemy was taken by the Roman Emperors, usually far away in Italy, though the natives continued for another three hundred years to portray upon their temple-walls their foreign rulers in the semblance of Egyptian kings offering homage to the old divinities of the land.
The Author's Notes:
1 That Cleopatra VI had any native Egyptian blood is exceedingly improbable. The Seleucid blood in her veins was Macedonian, with a slight Persian admixture, not Syrian. On the suppositions, all doubtful, (1) that the mother of Ptolemy Auletes was a pure Greek, (2) that his wife Tryphaena was his whole sister, (3) that Cleopatra was the daughter of Tryphaena, the proportion of elements in Cleopatra's blood would be — Greek, 32; Macedonian, 27; Persian, 5.
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2 Strack, p212.
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6 Klio, X (1910), p55.
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7 OGI 190.
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8 See Bouché-Leclercq's note, II p199. Birt still believes that the great Library itself was destroyed in 46 B.C. ("Kritik und Hermeneutik,"º in I. von Müller's Handbuch, p339).
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9 This is now proved by Oxy. XIV No. 1629.
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10 Sir F. Petrie holds that, from the point of view of the native Egyptians, it was quite correct for their queen to marry the man who at any time was de facto ruler of Egypt.
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12 Oxy. XIV No. 1629.
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13 Porphyry says he died in the fourth year of his reign (= the eighth year of Cleopatra), i.e. 45‑44 B.C.
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15 Annales (1908), p241.
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16 Dittenberger (OGI No. 194) follows the conjecture of Franz, "in the tenth year [of Cleopatra], which is also the second year [of Ptolemy Caesar], i.e. 43‑42 B.C." But when later on we find a system of double dating, it is the sixteenth year of Cleopatra (37‑36 B.C.) which corresponds with the first year of the other series, and the inscription of Heracleopolis has simply year 11. Strack, who takes the view that the series with lower numbers is that of the regnal years of Ptolemy Caesar, supposes that while Cleopatra made Ptolemy Caesar co‑king (Mitherrscher) in 44, in his dead uncle's room, she did not make him joint-king (Sammtherrscher) till 36 B.C., from which date his regnal years were reckoned. That seems a distinction without a difference. Letronne, in the article to which Dittenberger refers (Journal des Savants, 1842, p717), hardly bears out the view in support of which Dittenberger cites it. Letronne's view was that the series with lower numbers in the dating represented the regnal years of Mark Antony, as king of Egypt; but Strack is probably right in his contention that Antony never was king of Egypt. Letronne supposed that Ptolemy Caesar (associated with his mother in 44 B.C.) had no distinct regnal years of his own, and that there had therefore been no double date in the broken-off part of the Turin stele. Porphyry says that in the double dating both series were regnal years of Cleopatra — one her regnal years as queen of Egypt, the other her regnal years as queen of Chalcis in Syria, which she acquired in 36 B.C. This is probably correct. The double dates appear only on coins struck in Berytus, not on Egyptian coins, and in Syria and Phoenicia Cleopatra's years might well be reckoned from the time when her rule in these regions began, as well as from her accession to the throne of Egypt (Svoronos, p469). If the famine mentioned in the Turin stele is the famine of 44 and 43 B.C., Ptolemy Caesar must already, when he was four years old, have had the status of king. Bouché-Leclercq's attempt in vol. II to combine the view of Letronne with that of Porphyry, he himself revokes in vol. IV.
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17 Published by Lefebvre in Mélanges Holleaux (1913), pp103 ff.
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18 The nomes, probably, of Lower Egypt.
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19 Lefebvre translates, applying the principle to the local officials, "par haine et dessein d'assouvir en une fois sur eux bonsº leur rancune"; but this surely is wrong; μισοπονηρία is "righteous indignation."
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20 One of the best-known odes of Horace (II.3) is addressed to him. The poet urges him to indulgeº freely in the pleasures of life. "Horace aurait pu mieux placer ses conseils" (Bouché-Leclercq).
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23 An inscription put up in honour of Antonius "his god" by a member of this fraternity (OGI, No. 195).
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24 There is this slight justification for the representation of Cleopatra on the modern stage as an Egyptian. Yet it was on state occasions apparently, not in ordinary life, that she wore Egyptian dress, and that not as a woman, but as representing a goddess who was at this time widely venerated in the Greek world, as well as in Egypt.
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25 A Roman officer in Egypt, probably a "praefectus fabrum" in this year (32 B.C.), visited Philae with a number of Greek friends and left a memorial of himself and them on the walls (OGI, No. 196).
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26 The name of Charmion is unquestionably Greek, connected with χάρμη, "joy." But what of Iras (Εἴρας)? If Pape (Griech. Eigenname) is right in connecting it with εἶρος, "wool," and saying that it means "wool-head," one might conjecture that Iras was a negro slave-girl. But it may be questioned whether the name has anything to do with εἶρος, or, if it has, whether it means "wool-head," or whether it is Greek at all. It might be short for Irene as Lucas for Lucanus.
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29 Professor Nöldeke (Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländ. Gesellsch., 1885, p349) has argued that the official Roman version of the death of Cleopatra is incredible on the following grounds: (1) Cleopatra is said to have chosen death by an asp-bite, because she had ascertained that this mode of death was the most painless possible, whereas death by asp-bite involves, for a short time at any rate, very great pain. (2) The bite of an asp produces discoloration, going much beyond a few small local marks. (3) A snake, when it has once ejected its poison in a bite, does not secrete more poison till after a considerable interval of time; if, therefore, Cleopatra's two attendants died together with her by asp-bite, we have to suppose that at least three asps were employed, though no snake was ever found. Professor Nöldeke concludes that Cleopatra was really put to death by Octavian, and the asp story concocted by the Romans and circulated as the official explanation of her end. This is certainly possible; we should have then to suppose that when Olympus described in his book how Cleopatra had been bent on suicide and had examined various ways of death, he was writing what the Roman government wished written. Yet Professor Nöldeke's objections to the common story are not sound. With regard to the third one, although Galen (De Ther. ad Pisonem) asserts that Charmion and Iras died by snake-bite, no one was present to see, and nothing in Plutarch's story forbids our supposing that they had taken poison at the same time that the queen had caused herself to be bitten by the asp. With regard to (1) and (2), Professor Nöldeke's assertions are at variance with the facts.
Professor Sydney Smith, the Principal Medico-Legal Expert to the Egyptian Government, has kindly supplied me with the most authoritative information which can be had on these points. The (p383)principal poisonous snakes in Egypt are the cobra (Naja Hajae), the horned viper (Cerastes), and the common viper (Echis). In viper-bites there is usually considerable burning pain at the site of the puncture, with swelling and oozing of blood, but in cobra-bites there is comparatively little local pain, discoloration, or swelling. "In fact, it is difficult on post-mortem examination to find the bite. Death may occur in about half an hour from respiratory failure associated with general paralysis." The cobra is the most common of all the poisonous snakes, "and its bite is much more likely to cause a fatal issue than that of the viper, which causes a mortality of about 20 per cent." The only difficulty Professor Smith sees in the story is that it is not likely, he thinks, that a cobra could be hidden in a basket of figs.
This difficulty does not seem to me insurmountable, since we are not told how large the basket was; I have seen snake-charmers carry about cobras in baskets of quite a moderate size. Poetic fitness would suggest that the queen of Egypt should choose the cobra, the royal snake of the Pharaohs, as the minister of her death. Aspis is the regular word in Greek for a cobra; the aspis in Nicander seems to be a cobra, and the royal crown with the cobra was called in Greek ἀσπιδοειδής (Canopus Decree). The name given in many modern books to the royal Egyptian snake, uraeus, is found only in Horapollon (about 500 A.D.), by whom it is given as a transcript in Greek of the Egyptian name ("uro," "king," in Coptic);a it has nothing to do with the Greek adjective οὐραιος, and is not found in any Greek or Latin authors. Galen says that in Alexandria criminals whom it was desired to put to death in the most merciful way had a cobra applied to their chest, and that he himself had witnessed executions of this kind; death was very rapid (De Ther. ad Pisonem, 7)
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30 Bouché-Leclercq in his note (II p364) seems to have overlooked Dio's statement; the affirmation of R. de la Blanchère would not rest solely upon the doubtful evidence of some coins.
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