Alexandria burst on Gnaeus Pompey like Aphrodite upon the world. More numerous even than Antioch or Rome, its three million people inhabited what was arguably Alexander the Great's most perfect gift to posterity. His empire had perished within a single generation, but Alexandria went on forever. Though so flat that its biggest hill, the dreamy garden of the Panaeum, was a man-made mound two hundred feet high, it seemed to Gnaeus Pompey's dazzled eyes more something constructed by the Gods than by clumsy, mortal men. Part blinding white, part a rainbow of colors, liberally dewed with trees carefully chosen for slenderness or roundness, Alexandria upon the farthest shore of Our Sea was magnificent.
And the Pharos, the great lighthouse of Pharos Island! Far taller than any other building Gnaeus Pompey had ever seen, a three-tiered hexagon faced with shimmering white marble, the Pharos was a wonder of the world. The sea around it was the color of an aquamarine, sandy-bottomed and crystal clear, for the great sewers which underlay Alexandria emptied into the waters west of the city, ensuring that their contents were carried away. What air! Balmy, caressing. See the Heptastadion, the causeway connecting Pharos Island with the mainland, marching for almost a mile in white majesty! Two arches pierced its center, each arch spacious enough to permit the passage of a big ship between the Eunostus and the Great Harbors.
There directly before him reared the great palace complex, joined at its far end to a crag climbing out of the sea that used to be a fortress and now cupped a shell-like amphitheater within its hollow. This, Gnaeus Pompey realized, was a real palace. The only one in the world. So vast that it paled the heights of Pergamum into insignificance. At first glance its many hundreds of pillars looked severely Doric, save that they owned a more ponderous girth, were far taller and were vividly painted with tiers of pictures, each one the height of a column drum; yet proper pediments sat atop them, with proper metopes, everything a truly Greek building of importance should have. Except that the Greeks built on the ground. Like the Romans, the Alexandrians had elevated their palace complex upon a stone plateau thirty steps high. Oh, and the palms! Some graceful fans, some horny and stumpy, some with fronds like feathers.
In an ecstatic daze, Gnaeus Pompey saw his ship tied up at the royal wharf, supervised the disposition of his other ships, donned the purple-bordered toga his propraetor's imperium entitled him to wear, and set off behind six crimson-clad lictors bearing the axes in their fasces to seek palace accommodation and an audience with the seventh Queen Cleopatra of Egypt.
Having ascended the throne at seventeen years of age, she was now nearing twenty.
The two years of her reign had been fraught with triumphs and perils: first the glory of skimming down Nilus in her huge gilded barge with its purple sail embroidered in gold, the native Egyptians abasing themselves before her as she stood with her nine-year-old brother/husband by her side (but one step down); in Hermonthis the bringing home of the Buchis Bull, found because the curls in his flawless long black coat grew the wrong way round, her vessel afloat in a sea of flower-decked barges, herself clad in the solemn regalia of Pharaoh but wearing only the tall white crown of Upper Egypt; the journey past ruined Thebes to the First Cataract and the island of Elephantine, to be at the first, most important Milometer on the very day when the rising waters would predict the final height of the Inundation.
Every year at the beginning of summer, Nilus mysteriously rose, broke its banks and spread a coat of thick, black mud replete with nutrition over the fields of that strange kingdom, seven hundred miles long but only four or five miles wide except for the anabranch valley of Ta-she and Lake Moeris, and the Delta. There were three kinds of Inundation: the Cubits of Surfeit, the Cubits of Plenty and the Cubits of Death. Measured in the Nilometers, a series of graduated wells dug to one side of the mighty river. It took a month for the Inundation to travel from the First Cataract to the Delta, which was why the reading of the Nilometer at Elephantine was so important: it gave warning to the rest of the kingdom what kind of Inundation it would experience that summer. By autumn Nilus was receding back within its banks, the soil deeply watered and enriched.
That first year of her reign had seen the reading low in the Cubits of Plenty, a good omen for a new monarch. Any level above thirty-three Roman feet was in the Cubits of Surfeit, which meant disastrous flooding. Any level between seventeen and thirty-two feet was in the Cubits of Plenty, which meant a good Inundation; the ideal Inundation level was twenty-seven feet. Below seventeen feet lay the Cubits of Death, when Nilus didn't rise high enough to break its banks and famine was the inevitable result.
That first year saw the real Egypt—Egypt of the river, not the Delta— seem to revive under the rule of its new Queen, who was also Pharaoh— the God on Earth who her father, King Ptolemy Auletes, had never been. The immensely powerful faction of the priests, who were native Egyptians, controlled much of the destiny of Egypt's Ptolemaic rulers, descendants of one of Alexander the Great's marshals, the first Ptolemy. Only by fulfilling the true religious criteria and earning the blessing of the priests could the King and Queen be crowned Pharaoh. For the titles of King and Queen were Macedonian, whereas the title of Pharaoh belonged to the awesome agelessness of Egypt itself. The ankh of Pharaoh was the key to more than religious sanction; it was also the key to the vast treasure vaults beneath the ground of Memphis, as they were in the custody of the priests and bore no relation to Alexandria, wherein the King and Queen lived their Macedonian-oriented lives.
But the seventh Cleopatra belonged to the priests. She had spent three years of her childhood in their custody at Memphis, spoke both formal and demotic Egyptian, and came to the throne as Pharaoh. She was the first Ptolemy of the dynasty to speak Egyptian. Being Pharaoh meant that she had complete, godlike authority from one end of Egypt to the other; it also meant that she had access, should she ever need it, to the treasure vaults. Whereas in un-Egyptian Alexandria being Pharaoh could not enhance her standing. Nor did the economy of Egypt and Alexandria depend upon the contents of the treasure vaults; the public income of the monarch was six thousand talents per year, the private income as much again. Egypt contained nothing in private ownership; it all went to the monarch and the priests.
Thus the triumphs of Cleopatra's first two years were more related to Egypt than to Alexandria, isolated to the west of the Canopic Nilus, the westernmost arm of the Delta. They also related to a mystical enclave of people who occupied the eastern Delta, the Land of Onias, separate and complete in itself and owning no allegiance to the religious beliefs of either Macedonia or Egypt. The Land of Onias was the home of the Jews who had fled from Hellenized Judaea after refusing to acknowledge a schismatic high priest, and it kept its fervent Jewishness still. It also supplied Egypt with the bulk of its army and controlled Pelusium, the other important seaport Egypt possessed upon the shores of Our Sea. And Cleopatra, who spoke both Hebrew and Aramaic fluently, was the darling of the Land of Onias.
The first peril she had handled well, the murder of the two sons of Bibulus. But her present peril was much graver. When the time came for the second Inundation of her reign, it fell in the Cubits of Death. The Nilus didn't break its banks, the muddy water did not flow across the fields, and the crops failed to poke their bright green blades above the parched ground. For the sun blazed down upon the Kingdom of Egypt every day of every year; life-giving water was the gift of Nilus, not the skies, and Pharaoh was the deified personification of the river.
When Gnaeus Pompey sailed into the Royal Harbor of Alexandria, that city was stirring ominously. It took two or three famines in a row to deprive the native Egyptians along the river of all food sources, but that was not so in Alexandria, which produced little save bureaucrats, businessmen and bonded servants. Alexandria was the quintessential middleman, unproductive of itself yet making most of the money. It manufactured fancies like astonishing glass made up of thin, multicolored strands; it turned out the world's finest scholars; it controlled the world's paper. Without being able to feed itself. That
, it expected Egypt of the Nilus to do.
The people were of several kinds: the pure Macedonian stock composing the aristocracy and jealously guarding all the highest positions in the bureaucracy; the merchants, manufacturers and other commercial persons who were a hybrid mixture of Macedonian and Egyptian; a very considerable Jewish ghetto at the eastern end of the city in Delta District, mostly artisans, craftsmen, skilled laborers and scholars; the Greek rather than Macedonian scribes and clerks who filled the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, worked as masons and sculptors, teachers and tutors—and plied the oars of both naval and merchant vessels; and even a few Roman knights. The language was Greek, the citizenship not Egyptian but Alexandrian. Only the three hundred thousand Macedonian noblemen owned the full Alexandrian citizenship, a source of complaint and bitter resentment among the other groups in the population. Save for the Romans, who sniffed at such an inferior kind of suffrage. To be Roman was to be better than anyone, including an Alexandrian.
Food was still to be had in plenty; the Queen was buying in grain and other stuffs from Cyprus, Syria and Judaea. What caused that ominous stirring was the rise in prices. Unfortunately the Alexandrians of all walks except the peaceful and inwardly turned Jews were aggressive, extremely independent and absolutely uncowed by monarchs. Time and time again they had risen and ejected this Ptolemy from the throne, replaced him or her by a different Ptolemy, then done it all over again the moment prosperity trembled or the cost of living soared.
All of which Queen Cleopatra knew as she readied herself to receive Gnaeus Pompey in audience.
Complicated by the fact that her brother/husband was now almost twelve years old, and could no longer be dismissed as a mere child. Not yet pubertal beyond those first physical tremors which preceded the massive changes still to come, the thirteenth Ptolemy was nonetheless becoming increasingly difficult to control. Mostly due to the malign influence of the two men who dominated his life, his tutor, Theodotus, and the Lord High Chamberlain, Potheinus.
They were already waiting in the audience chamber when the Queen strode in, and she did stride; to do so, she had discovered, spoke of confidence and authority, neither of which her meager bodily endowments reinforced. The little King was seated on his throne, a smaller edifice one step lower than the great ebony and gilt chair which was her own seat. Until he had proven his manhood by quickening his sister/ wife, he would not be elevated any higher. Clad in the purple tunic and cape of the Macedonian kings, he was an attractive boy in a very Macedonian way, blond, blue-eyed, more Thracian than Greek. His mother had been his father's half sister, her mother a princess of Arabian Nabataea. But the Semite didn't show at all in the thirteenth Ptolemy, whereas in Cleopatra, his half sister, it did. Her mother had been the daughter of the awesome King Mithridates of Pontus, a big, tall woman with the dark yellow hair and dark yellow eyes peculiar to the Mithridatidae. Therefore the thirteenth Ptolemy had more Semitic blood than his half sister; yet she looked the Semite.
A Tyrian purple cushion encrusted with gold and pearls enabled the Queen of Alexandria and Egypt to sit on that too-big chair and place her feet on something solid; without it, her toes could not touch the dais of purple marble.
"Is Gnaeus Pompey on his way?" she asked.
Potheinus answered. "Yes, lady."
She could never make up her mind which of the two she disliked more, Potheinus or Theodotus. The Lord High Chamberlain was the more imposing, and bore witness to the fact that eunuchs were not necessarily short, plump and effeminate. His testicles had been enucleated in his fourteenth year, a little late perhaps, and at the direction of his father, a Macedonian aristocrat with huge ambitions for his very bright son. Lord High Chamberlain was the greatest position at court and could be held only by a eunuch, a peculiar result of the crisscrossed Egyptian and Macedonian cultures; it was inflicted upon one of pure Macedonian blood because the ancient Egyptian traditions dictated it. A subtle, cruel and very dangerous man, Potheinus. Mouse-colored curls, narrow grey eyes, handsome features. He was, of course, plotting to spill her from the throne and replace her with her half sister Arsinoe, the full sister of the thirteenth Ptolemy.
Theodotus was the effeminate one, despite his intact testicles. Willowy, pale, deceptively weary. Neither a good scholar nor a true teacher, he had been a great intimate of her father, Auletes, and owed his position to that happy chance. Whatever he taught the thirteenth Ptolemy had nothing to do with history, geography, rhetoric or mathematics. He liked boys, and one of the most galling facts of Cleopatra's life was the knowledge that Theodotus would have sexually initiated her brother well before her brother was deemed old enough to consummate their marriage. I will have to take, she thought, Theodotus's leavings. If I live that long. Theodotus too wants to replace me with Arsinoe. He and Potheinus know that they cannot manipulate me. What fools they are! Don't they understand that Arsinoe is as unmanageable as I am? Yes, the war to own Egypt has begun. Will they kill me, or will I kill them? But one thing I have vowed. The day Potheinus and Theodotus die, my brother will die too. Little viper!
The audience chamber was not the throne room. In that vast conglomeration of buildings there were rooms, even palaces within the palace, for every kind of function and functionary. The throne room would have stunned a Crassus; the audience chamber was enough to stun Gnaeus Pompey. The architecture of the complex, inside as well as outside, was Greek, but Egypt had a say too, as much of the adornment fell to the lot of the priest-artists of Memphis. Thus the audience chamber walls were partially covered in gold leaf, partially in murals of a sort foreign to this Roman ambassador. Very flat and stilted, two-dimensional people, animals, palms and lotuses. There were no statues and no items of furniture other than the two thrones on the dais.
To either side of the dais stood a gigantic man so bizarre Gnaeus Pompey had only heard of such people, apart from a woman in a side show at the circus during his childhood days; though she had been very beautiful, she did not compare to these two men. They were clad in gold sandals and short leopard-skin kilts belted with jeweled gold, and had gold collars flashing with jewels about their throats. Each one gently plied a massive fan on a long gold rod, its base more jeweled gold, its breeze-making part the most wonderful feathers dyed many colors, huge and fluffy. All of which was as nothing compared to the beauty of their skins, which were black. Not brown, black. Like a black grape, thought Gnaeus Pompey, glossy yet powdered with plummy must. Tyrian purple skins! He had seen faces like theirs before on little statues; when a good Greek or Italian sculptor was lucky enough to see one, he seized upon the amazing person immediately. Hortensius had owned a statue of a boy, Lucullus the bronze bust of a man. But again, mere shadows alongside the reality of these living faces. High cheekbones, aquiline noses, very full but exquisitely delineated lips, black eyes of a peculiar liquidity. Topped by close-cropped hair so tightly curled that it had the look of the foetal goat pelt from Bactria that the Parthian kings prized so much they alone were allowed to wear it.
"Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!" gushed Potheinus, rushing forward in his purple tunic and chlamys cloak with the chain of his high estate draped athwart his shoulders. "Welcome, welcome!"
"I am not Magnus!" snapped Gnaeus Pompey, very annoyed. "I am plain Gnaeus Pompeius! Who are you, the crown prince?"
The female on the bigger, higher throne spoke in a strong, melodic voice. "That is Potheinus, our Lord High Chamberlain," she said. "We are Cleopatra, Queen of Alexandria and Egypt. In the names of Alexandria and Egypt we bid you welcome. As for you, Potheinus, if you wish to stay, step back and don't speak until you're spoken to."
Oho! thought Gnaeus Pompey. She doesn't like him. And he doesn't like taking orders from her one little bit.
"I am honored, great Queen," Gnaeus Pompey said, three lictors to either side of him. "And this, I presume, is King Ptolemy?"
"Yes," said the Queen curtly.
She weighed about as much as a wet dishcloth was Gnaeus Pompey's verdict, was probably not
five Roman feet tall when she stood up, had thin little arms and a scrawny little neck. Lovely skin, darkly olive yet transparent enough to display the blueness of the veins beneath it. Her hair was a light brown and done in a peculiar fashion, parted in a series of inch-wide bands back from brow to a bun on the nape of her neck; all he could think of was the similarly banded rind of a summer melon. She wore the white ribbon of her sovereign's diadem not across her forehead but behind the hairline, and was simply clad in the Greek style, though her robe was the finest Tyrian purple. No precious thing on her person save for her sandals, which looked as if they were never designed to be walked in, so flimsy was their gold.
The light, which poured in through unshuttered apertures high in the walls, was good enough for him to see that her face was depressingly ugly, only the single charm of youth to soften it. Wide eyes that he fancied were green-gold, or perhaps hazel. A good mouth for kissing save that it was held grimly. And a nose to rival Cato's for size, a mighty beak hooked like a Jew's. Hard to see any Macedonian in this young woman. A purely eastern type.
"It is a great honor to receive you in audience, Gnaeus Pompeius," she went on in that powerfully mellifluous voice, her Greek perfect and Attic. "We are sorry we cannot speak to you in Latin, but we have never had the opportunity to learn it. What may we do for you?"
"I imagine that even at this remotest end of Our Sea, great Queen, you are aware that Rome is engaged in a civil war. My father—who is called Magnus—has been obliged to flee from Italia in the company of Rome's legitimate government. At the moment he is in Thessalonica preparing to meet the traitor Gaius Julius Caesar."