Part 11
She gave herself to Julius Cæsar; bore him a son; left her kingdom and joined him in Rome, where Cicero and others paid her court in Cæsar's gardens, wondering, perhaps, if she was to become their titular queen. In contemporary documents Cæsar is called "the savior and benefactor of the inhabitable world"; and during the last year of his life he was busied with projects of universal empire. He meant to add the districts not yet Roman to his realm, to subdue the Getæ, the Scythians, and the Parthians. Why was not Egypt, the richest prize of all, included in the list of his intended conquests? It was the country which he had tried over twenty years earlier to secure as his own province. But that was before he had met Cleopatra. That he left it out of the military programme on which he was engaged at the time of his murder shows, I think, that Cleopatra's solution of the Egyptian question was likely to be his also.
Ten years later Alexandria witnessed an extraordinary spectacle.[79] On a stage plated with silver two thrones of gold stood, and on them sat side by side Antony as Dionysus and Cleopatra as Isis. At their feet sat Cæsarion, Cleopatra's son by Cæsar, and on a level with him Alexander, her oldest son by Antony, in Persian costume and with the tiara of the Persian kings. Lower down sat Alexander's twin sister, Cleopatra Selene, and at her side her younger brother, Philadelphus, in Macedonian costume and with the headgear of the kings of Macedon. The significance of the tableau Antony himself explained: Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, Cyprus, and Coele-Syria, was henceforth 'queen of queens'; her son, Cæsarion, 'king of kings.' Alexander was declared king of Armenia and of the states lying between the Euphrates and India, Philadelphus, of Syria and all the lands between the Euphrates and the Hellespont, Cleopatra Selene, queen of Libya including Cyrene. It was the restoration of the ancient empire of the Ptolemies, and in Antony "captured Italy" was symbolized. The Alexandrian siren had regained what her ancestors had lost; and, had the Roman whom she had enthralled only proved equal to the task of maintaining his initial ascendency in Italy, she might, indeed, have fulfilled her boast and administered justice on the Capitol. But Antony went down to defeat at Actium and the young Augustus came to Egypt, like the comrades of Ulysses to the shore of the tempters, with his ears stuffed with wax.
Pascal[80] says: _Le nez de Cléopâtre: s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé._ But Pascal speaks as a philosopher. He probably did not know that Cleopatra had a prominent nose. He was certainly ignorant that her death made little or no difference in the constitutional position of Egypt. In a sense Augustus was simply the executor of the great queen's policy; for, after his reorganization of the Roman empire was completed, "it is," as Mommsen[81] says, "quite as correct to say that the kings of Egypt ruled in Rome as that the prince of the Roman people reigned in the valley of the Nile." Be that as it may, the empire of the Ptolemies could not have been recalled from the past even by the magic of a woman's beauty; for, as we shall see when we come to look at the second period of its history, the death it had died was a natural one. It had but experienced the fate to which its constitution made it prone. It was beset from its birth with incurable weaknesses.
None the less it made a brave show during the first century of its existence; and during the reign of its second monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), its capital, Alexandria, was the London of the ancient world. Its only rival in trade and commerce was its neighbor to the west, Carthage. The golden age of the Ptolemies coincides with the one epoch in the history of the world in which Africa was the leader in business enterprise, in money power, in naval strength, in luxury, in science, and, till the real test came, in political prestige and influence. The commercial aristocracy of Carthage and the enlightened despots of Alexandria had the Mediterranean divided between them. West of Sicily lay a Carthaginian lake, into which foreign ships entered at their own peril; east of it, the chief harbors in the whole circuit from Cyrene to Corcyra, as well as the islands which lay in the area thus inclosed, the Ptolemies aimed to secure. Possession of the sea between Egypt and the Græco-Macedonian world and of the coasts which it washed and the islands which it surrounded, was the main object of the foreign policy of the early Ptolemies.
The founder of the dynasty was a brave soldier, but a cautious general. Again and again he withdrew from Asia before a land attack and put his main reliance upon the natural defenses of Egypt. He was no sailor at all; yet he became an admiral, and as the result of three great maritime expeditions (308-306, 295-294, 288-287 B.C.), he handed over to his unwarlike son the essential body of the possessions of the family outside of Egypt. The founder of the dynasty was at the same time the founder of the empire.
The Solomon of the Ptolemies, Philadelphus, is addressed by Theocritus,[82] a Sicilian poet who had recently come to Alexandria looking for a patron, in the following adulatory strains:--
"Lo he hath seen three hundred towns arise, Three thousand, yea three myriad; and o'er all He rules, the prince of heroes, Ptolemy. Claims half Phoenicia, and half Araby, Syria and Libya, and the Æthiops murk; Sways the Pamphylian and Cilician braves, The Lycian and the Carian trained to war, And all the isles; for never fleet like his Rode upon ocean: land and sea alike And sounding rivers hail King Ptolemy."
The hero of these lines had just brought a war against his brother in Cyrene and his rival in Asia to a successful termination (273 B.C.); and, except for a probable interval of four years (253-249 B.C.), the invincible fleet which he then possessed ruled the sea till his death. But he was anything but a warrior king. During his whole life he never commanded an army or a fleet in person. Like Augustus Cæsar, with whom he has been compared, he had a delicate constitution which unfitted him for the rough and tumble of war. He had a lively intelligence, which was carefully cultivated, and, like the Emperor Hadrian, an insatiable thirst for novelties. A new book, an old painting, a strange animal, a useful invention, alike aroused his curiosity. One amazing woman--his own sister--swept him from his self-indulgent moorings. She made herself his wife--as any Egyptian woman might do with her brother--and, though she was his queen for six years at most (275-270 B.C.), when she was over forty and he over thirty-two, he followed her policy and cherished her memory for many long years.
That her _acta_ might not be invalid he had her deified after her death, and that he might still be her consort, he had himself elevated at the same time to her side as the first self-constituted god-king since Alexander.
A sensualist by instinct, he surrounded himself in Alexandria with everything that appealed to his variegated lusts.[83] The women whom he took into his harem after his sister's death were given palaces and race-horses, public statues,--in costumes which were not always modest,--and even divine honors. Splendid new quarters were laid out in Alexandria, and public works erected there and elsewhere in his realm. The capital thronged with scientific, literary, and musical celebrities, attracted by the endowments and collections of the Museum, the richness of the library, the profusion of festivals, and the liberality of the king, who wished Alexandria to become to the new world what Athens had been to the old.
Yet despite all these manifold gratifications, life palled on the much-experienced monarch. He turned from the doctors to the quacks, and, shrinking from pain and death, experimented with draughts that were alleged to confer immortality: a strange act for one who was already a god! While suffering agony from the gout, he envied the lot of the fellahs, whom he saw from his window stretched out on the sand in the sun eating their simple meal. "Ye poor," he is said to have once exclaimed, "would that I had been one of you."
"From behind the rich curtains of his palace," as his stout adversary, Antigonus of Macedon,[84] phrased it, Ptolemy Philadelphus played cautiously and adroitly the great game of international politics. His emissaries, laden with gifts and money, were to be found at every capital from the Ganges to the Tiber. "Mighty kings" and "great cities," Theocritus tells us,[85] were in his pay; and in the harbor of Alexandria many great battleships lay ready to give emphasis to diplomacy, to support the agents whom his gold had brought into action.
By these means, too, he kept open the roads which led across the sea from all directions to Alexandria; shut off, by a fringe of Egyptian possessions, the great continental empire of the Seleucids from access to the Mediterranean; and kept Greece so persistently in insurrection against its suzerain, Macedon, that he was able to ward off all danger from that quarter.
He enlarged his inherited empire by seizing Ionia when Eumenes I of Pergamum threw off the suzerainty of the Seleucids and shattered their authority in Asia Minor (263-261 B.C.); but the gains he then made he had to abandon during the upheaval which accompanied the revolt of his "son" in Ephesus (259-255 B.C.), and he suffered still further losses in Asia during the war he waged thereafter (253-249 B.C.), with Macedon and Syria combined. These, however, his son, Euergetes, at the opening of his reign (246-242 B.C.), regained, and he acquired districts in Ionia and the Hellespont besides; and the position which he thereby secured he held till his death twenty years later. On the sea, however, he showed himself less persistent than his father. Philadelphus had lost control of the Ægean when beaten at Cos in 253 B.C. by Antigonus of Macedon, but had not rested till he had regained it four years later, when the league of the Islanders, which was the immediate bone of contention, came again under the authority of his admirals. Euergetes suffered a crushing naval defeat in 242 B.C. off the island of Andros at the hands of the "veteran" Antigonus; whereupon he let the Cyclades go altogether. That was not the only sequel, however; for in consequence of the large outlay for little gain entailed in building and keeping in readiness the huge battleships then employed, and perhaps also in consequence of the failure of the Carthaginians, despite great naval expense and preparations, to hold the sea against the improvised fleets of Rome in the First Punic War (which had just ended), the third Ptolemy, like the Barcid government in Carthage, abandoned the policy of maintaining a fleet strong enough to drive all enemies from their respective parts of the Mediterranean. It was a great mistake in each case. When at the end of the third century B.C. Macedon and Syria, the traditional and long-suffering enemies of Egypt, were in a position to renew their joint struggle with the Ptolemies, the far-spread Ptolemaic empire fell together like a house of cards, and Rome alone saved the dynasty from complete destruction.
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A variety of motives actuated the early Ptolemies in their struggle for foreign dominions. Pride of possession was among them, of course. The court poet Callimachus[86] struck a responsive chord when, in his poem on the death of Arsinoë, the sister-wife of Philadelphus, he has the sad news flashed from beacon point to beacon point till it reaches Lemnos at the outer edge of the empire. National honor is a strong motive for action, but it is commonly stirred by the fear of losing something possessed rather than by the hope of acquiring something new. Hence we must look deeper for the reasons which led cautious statesmen like the first two Ptolemies to place round Egypt its girdle of power.
The motive suggested by Polybius[87] is quite different. It was with regard to possible movements on the part of the monarchs of Syria, Asia Minor, Thrace, and Macedon that the Ptolemies held, as he says, "the most important towns, places, and harbors along the whole coast" of the eastern Mediterranean. And there can be no doubt that he is right in attributing this rather malicious aim to them. They were, doubtless, great intriguers. But to Polybius, looking on from without, from one of the districts which had been affected by the close proximity of Egyptian garrisons and naval stations, the connection of these posts with the foreign policy of the Ptolemies was apt to obtrude itself to the exclusion of everything else. Nowadays historians are prone to a similar onesidedness because of the close attention they give to economic factors. They are quite right when they stress the importance of Ptolemaic naval power and of the vantage-points held in Europe and Asia for the development of Alexandrian commerce. The lighthouse which Ptolemy erected at the mouth of the Nile at a cost of a million dollars (eight hundred talents) was not only one of the seven wonders of the world: it was a messenger of good will to the trading vessels which came from all the dependencies with or without cargoes, to get for Greek consumption the varied products of the Alexandrian factories, the Egyptian grain-fields, and the Nile-borne traffic of Arabia, India, Somaliland, and Ethiopia. What the lighthouse symbolizes, the growth of Alexandria to half a million in a hundred years proves: the magnitude of the commerce which the transmarine possessions of Egypt stimulated, when they did not originate it.
Where the economic historians are wrong, however, is in doing what Polybius did. _He_ made the imperial policy of the early Ptolemies primarily foreign; _they_ make it primarily commercial. The truth is that it was dictated also by the plain necessities of the domestic situation. Let us see what that was.
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The first Ptolemy had stepped into the place of the Pharaohs on Alexander the Great's death. The only right he cared to acknowledge for the obedience of the Egyptians was the right of conquest. As for them, we may be sure that just as they created the myth that Alexander was not really Philip's child, but a son begotten from Olympias by either Nectanebus, the last native Pharaoh, or Ammon, the great god himself who had taken the form of Nectanebus for the purpose; and just as they in later times represented Cæsar and Antony as Ammon reincarnate, that Cleopatra's bastard children might be legitimate Pharaohs: so, too, they applied to Ptolemy the fiction by which for thousands of years they had been wont to bridge over the gaps in the genealogy of their kings.[88]
The bridge was necessary, however; for, in their thinking, the gods, who had once lived among men, on withdrawing to the divine abodes, had left one of their number to rule over the world--which, of course, was Egypt. From him all their kings were descended. The Pharaoh was, accordingly, the only god who resided upon the earth, and, as such, fittingly the mediator between men and the great gods and goddesses of the upper and nether world.[89] The Pharaoh was, therefore, both the god-king and the chief priest. The whole land and people of Egypt were his property. Without his presence and ministrations the earth would literally languish and grow barren, and the men, women, and children would perish. Egypt was, accordingly, bound to have a legitimate Pharaoh. Ptolemy could be made Ammon's offspring as easily as Alexander the Great; but how it was done we do not know.
On his arrival in Egypt, Ptolemy found there two other states in addition to that of the Egyptians. These were the old Greek city of Naucratis and the new city of Alexandria. A third arose when he himself founded Ptolemais to be to Upper Egypt what Alexandria was to Lower Egypt--the centre and rallying point of Hellenic interests. To these three city-states he added a multitude of others in and about the Mediterranean when he acquired for his house its foreign dominions. The convenient thing for these to do was to bind themselves to him by the Gordian knot of religious worship; and, as Ptolemy Soter, or the Savior, he was in fact enrolled in the circle of deities recognized by the several cities. In Alexandria we may be sure that its founder, Alexander the Great, had been accorded divine honors from the beginning, and that after his death the citizens appointed each year a priest of Alexander, just as they had been in the habit of doing while he was alive, and just as they appointed one for Zeus or Apollo. However, at some date between 311 and 289 B.C., perhaps on his assumption of the regal title in 306 B.C., Ptolemy took into his own hands the administration of his capital, and thenceforth appointed personally the priest of the city-god Alexander, who became therewith an imperial god. To this cult Philadelphus did not add that of his parents, "the savior gods," when he had them officially deified at their death (283 B.C.); but he did add to it that of his deceased queen and of himself when in 270 B.C. he inaugurated the worship of "the brother gods." His example was followed by each succeeding pair of rulers to the end of the dynasty, except that the savior gods were inserted by the fourth Ptolemy in their proper place after Alexander. So that central among the gods of the capital of the empire stood ultimately the long series of the departed rulers and at its head the living king and queen.
Outside the capital, in the city-states of the realm, as later on in the provinces subject to the Roman emperors, the reigning monarchs were alone the recipients of divine honors. The living Ptolemy, by recognizing the divinity of his predecessors, assumed responsibility for the validity of all their _acta_. They had issued their mandates (_prostagmata_) as gods; so long as they remained gods their mandates must be obeyed. The cities, on the other hand, had no concern except to legalize the orders issued to them by their living rulers, once their living rulers had legalized and thus become responsible for all orders issued by the dead. At Rome the memory of certain emperors was damned, and their acts rescinded. That was possible there because the emperor was theoretically only an officer of the Roman people. One means employed to invalidate the _acta_ of deposed rulers was to refuse to have them among their gods after their death. The Alexandrians had no such discretion. After about 306 B.C. they were subjects themselves, not masters, of the Ptolemies. In their city it was the living Ptolemy who willed his own deification, and he could withhold divine honors from his predecessor only when, as in the solitary case of the founder of the dynasty, the monarch neglected to have himself created a god during his lifetime. Since his wish was decisive, it is not surprising that he had the members of his family, his wife, sisters, children, and concubines, elevated to Olympus along with himself. Curiously enough, however, Philadelphus and his four immediate successors, while demanding that their subjects should worship them as deities, treated themselves simply as kings, and carefully refrained from describing themselves as gods even in their public communications. The fact seems to be that only by accepting the Egyptian theory of a divine incarnation could the Ptolemies find a theological ground for constituting themselves gods. This concession to native thinking the proud early members of the dynasty refused, however, to make, preferring to challenge by their own self-denial the divine honors which they required from others. With this view accords the further fact that the first Ptolemy deliberately to court a native support for his throne--Euergetes II--was also the first to sign his edicts as θεὁϛ, or "god."
While it is true that no great empire ever existed without a constitutional fiction, it is also true that it never endured on a fiction alone. The Macedonian soldiers whom Ptolemy found in Egypt and those whom he brought with him and sent for later were essential for the maintenance of his government. So long as the son of Alexander the Great lived, and, indeed, for four years longer (till 306 B.C.), Ptolemy was simply their general. Then he became their king, and to legitimatize this practical usurpation, the legend arose that he was not really the son of Lagos, but the son of Philip. It is to the honor of Ptolemy that he had nothing to do with this libel on the good name of his mother, and preferred rather to be an illegitimate king than an illegitimate son. Besides, it was only necessary to go back a generation or two to attach the line of Ptolemy to that of the ancient "Zeus-born" kings of Macedon. The wife of Lagos had belonged, in fact, to the royal family, as the Ptolemies took good care to observe.
The Ptolemaic empire was, accordingly, based on three concurrent theories, one for the native Egyptians, one for the Greek city-states and one for the Macedonians.
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Appian of Alexandria,[90] writing about two hundred years after the death of Cleopatra, cites the royal registers as authority for his report that Philadelphus kept, for land operations 200,000 foot, 40,000 cavalry, and arms for 300,000 men; in addition, 300 war elephants and 2000 war chariots; for naval warfare, 2000 transports, 1500 battleships with three to five banks of rowers, and oars and rigging for twice that number. He had also, according to the same authority, 800 royal barges with gilt poops and beaks, and in his treasury a reserve of 740,000 Egyptian talents, or $890,000,000.
That the reserve as given amounts to three times the value of the gold and silver in the United States treasury shows that the enumeration belongs only in the history yet to be written of the absurdities of statistics. More credible estimates of the Egyptian army place it at 80,800 under the second Ptolemy and (exclusive of natives, who then numbered 26,000) 49,700 under the fourth Ptolemy.[91] These are very large totals. It will help to solve many questions of Ptolemaic policy to observe where the soldiers came from.
But first we may notice that they could not come from the natives; for their most important duty was to hold them in subjection. There were so many people to keep down! Alexandria itself had a large native quarter. The other two Greek cities in the land were but alien flecks in the midst of a great multitude. Up and down the valley lay the native hamlets, to the number of 33,333 according to Theocritus, teeming with the seven million people whom Egypt then sustained. Alexander the Great may have dreamed of Hellenizing these masses; Ptolemy, however, had no such thought, as is shown conclusively by the fact that under his dynasty and, indeed, for at least two centuries after its fall, Naucratis, and probably also Ptolemais, forbade by law marriages between their citizens and the natives.[92]
The sole landowner in Egypt was the king. The entire valley of the Nile was literally his personal estate.