The Rest Is History - 196. Julius Caesar & Cleopatra

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Join Tom and Dominic for the second episode of this four part mini-series on Cleopatra, where they discuss her relationship with Julius Caesar and the role this relationship played in the politics of Rome.  The release schedule of the remaining two episodes of the series is 'Antony & Cleopatra' (Thursday 16th June) and 'Cleopatra's Downfall' (Monday 20th June). However, members of The Rest Is History Club get all episodes RIGHT NOW, so head to restishistorypod.com to sign up. Editor: James Hodgson Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her. But converse with her had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character, which was somehow diffused about her behaviour towards others, had something stimulating about it. There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice,

and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased. So that is the historian Plutarch talking about Cleopatra VII, the subject of this miniseries. And Tom, that's one of the only real descriptions that we have of Cleopatra's appearance and personality. It's not just sort of propagandistic invective. And we have a question from Dr. Dan the Bandage Man, one of our listeners, asking about Cleopatra's beauty, because of course she's probably the best known character in history for her looks. Yeah. But,

but what's the truth there? Do you think this is, do you think she, I mean, Plutarch says she wasn't particularly beautiful. So the story, I mean, the image,

the image of her, certainly in the 19th century, she, she, she becomes the toast of kind of symbolists and decadence. And she's cast as this kind of exquisitely beautiful, predatory vampire-ess who kills courtiers. She sleeps with a man every night and then kills him in the morning, all this kind of stuff. And the assumption

is that she's very, very sexual and she's very, very beautiful. And actually, I think neither of those things are true. She seems to have been, I mean, not particularly stunningly beautiful. If you look at the coins, she has quite a kind of hawk nose. And I mean, she doesn't look absolutely stunning. And as Plutarch describes her, her fascination seems to lie not in her looks so much as in her character and i think that that you know it's the um age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety that you get in the in shakespeare's portrayal of her and there's this wonderful um description that ena barbus who is anthony's sidekick henna barbus domitius henna barbus the original um and he he's trying to

explain to someone what it is about Cleopatra that makes her so compelling. And he says, I saw her once hop 40 paces through the public street, and having lost her breath, she spoke and panted that she did make defect perfection. And I think that brilliantly gets something that's there in Plutarch. The sense that there is a kind of fascination that's not dependent on you know conventional beauty it's just that she is a very very compelling person and and i think that as we you know we'll explore on the question of is she a massively sexual person as far as she as we know she only ever slept with two men yeah and both

those men happen to be the most powerful men in the world but they're both they're both much older men and much more powerful men they're both romans and she knows how to you know she she tailors her present herself presentation yes to to suit what she knows about their respective characters do you think even though i mean as we said in our first episode everything we we know about, well, almost everything that's written down in narrative form about Cleopatra comes from the Romans and comes from her enemies. Despite that, don't you agree that you can,

sort of bleeding out between the gaps, you get a sense of the charisma? Absolutely. So Plutarch, he talks about, I think it's his grandfather, knew someone who worked at the court of Cleopatra. That's right, Philotas, I think his name was. A medical student. Yes. And he talks about how they have banquets all the time. They're constantly cooking in the kitchens. And this is simply so that Cleopatra and Antony can have a banquet whenever they want. But you do get the sense there of a living tradition. The romance and the power and the charisma of Cleopatra has kind of survived to be something

to be repeated down the generations and to be reported by Plutarch 100, 150 years after. I'm so glad you mentioned that because I think that's such a lovely story because so many of the Roman histories, there's a sense of them adhering to formulae and propagandistic formulae. And that bit when Plutarch says, my grandfather knew somebody called Philotas who was then a medical student

and went to the kitchens and all that. I mean, it's so contemporary actually, isn't it? It's such a lovely detail and it's all about the luxury. Yeah. Isn't it? It's such a lovely detail. And it's all about the luxury of Cleopatra's court. And I think it means that when Plutarch says that she had this charisma and this power, you feel that those are authentic reports that have been handed down. And she must have had that power.

Yeah. Simply because of what she'd done. You know, the extraordinary scale of her career. And she's very, very clever as well. So Plutarch says that she spoke, is it nine languages? Something like that, yeah. Of which I think Latin, interestingly, is not one. The Ethiopians, the Troglodytes, the Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, and Parthians. And Plutarch then says, it is said that she knew the speech

many other peoples also although the kings of egypt before her had not even made an effort to learn the native language yeah so she's the first to speak speak egyptian egyptian the only explanation for that presumably is that she's clever i mean she's living in surrounded by the library and the museum and all these scholars and but I think she also, we're talking about this at the end of the previous episode. She is a young woman in a man's world. And she is recognizing that if she can cast herself as the image of the goddess Isis, the goddess who presides over the Nile, who presides over the rhythms of life in this ancient country, then she will be able to draw on wellsprings of loyalty that her forebears camped out in Alexandria, this alien Greek city kind of attached to Egypt, had never been able to do. And that is exactly what happens.

She makes incredible play with it. Let's get, so she succeeded. We ended the last episode really with her succession. She becomes pharaoh or joint pharaoh with her brother Ptolemy XIII in 51 BC. And you promised us lots of geopolitical context because we're getting into the Roman Civil War, the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. She has all kinds of problems in her kind of in-tray. So the level of the nile is a big issue whether there's going to be enough rain yeah i mean the level of taxation um her father has

devalued the drachma as part of his way of kind of trying to pay off all these debts and stuff so she's also got the issue which you alluded to before of her brother and her brother's ministers conspiring against her and trying to sort of force her out so sort of how does how does she deal with all this this this i mean it's a mess isn't it her father's courtiers clearly think that uh both of them should be puppets it's evident that cleopatra is not going to to play this part uh and so there are two in particular there's a guy called achillas who is a military man yeah and there's a guy called pathillas, who is a military man. Yeah. And there's a guy called Pothinus, who regular listeners to the show will be pleased to know is a eunuch. Well, he's, so he's the man who you see, if ever you watch a program like Cleopatra, you know, he's always the man.

We don't know what he looked like. We don't know anything like that. But casting directors, without fail, say, get the fattest man in the agency. Shave his head. Yes. And make him really sinister and simpering and effeminate. And he, Pothinus, is always played that way isn't he yes absolutely um so cleopatra basically gets forced out of alexandria and she goes off with her her younger sister asinue to try and raise troops in in syria and

she comes down to uh to sinai and she kind of raises tribes there. And so there's a town called Pelusium, which is basically guards. It's the gateway to Egypt. And Cleopatra is lurking beyond Pelusium with her forces. And her brother Ptolemy XIII is under the thumb of all these various sinister ministers in Alexandria. And so it looks as though Egypt is going to erupt into civil war. But she's blocked there, by the way just yeah she's blocked she's blocked by the army because in the previous episode we talked about that guy aulus gabinius who had recapped and his men are still there aren't they the gabinians they're mercenaries and sort of they they're supposedly to some of

them are germans and some of them are norsemen. And they've just been sort of hanging around in Egypt, sort of wenching, falling out of taverns, attacking people in the street, just making a nuisance of themselves. They're like the sort of 1970s football hooligans on tour. And the Egyptians can't get rid of them. And they are serving in Ptolemy's army. And they're basically blocking the way of Pelusia so she can't get past into Egypt. So that's the situation in Egypt. It's kind of

incipient civil war, but that is very much a sideshow for what meanwhile is going on in the broader Mediterranean, which is that Julius Caesar has crossed the Rubicon. And if you want the background to that, we've done two episodes on the buildup to Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Pompey has taken command of what he sees as the kind of the constitutional legitimate role. He stands at the head of the vast majority of the Senate. They have fled Rome. They've crossed the Adriatic. They've gone to Greece. Caesar has made sure of Spain. He's made sure of Italy. He then crosses with his fleet to Greece. He's vastly outnumbered. He ends up meeting with Pompey's armies at a place called Pharsalus. And against the odds, he beats Pompey. Why does he beat Pompey, Tom, just very quickly?

He's a better general. He's a cleverer, subtler general. Pompey is overconfident. And Caesar is at the head of men who have been following him for years and years, who've had absolute confidence in him, whose morale is sky high, who believe that they can do anything. Pompey is very much kind of resting on his laurels. He's drawing on a reputation that by this point is a decade and more old, and he doesn't have the legions to hand. So this had been pointed out to him in the buildup to the Rubicon, and Pompey had said, well, I just have to stamp my foot and legions will emerge from out of the soil of Italy. But it didn't work like that. Caesar's legions are just too proficient. Caesar is too, you know, they're too battle honed. And so Pompey loses, he flees the battlefield, and he then has to decide, well,

what am I going to do? And because he is the great conqueror of the East, he is the man who had brought much of the Near East under Roman power, who has kings across the Near East as his clients, he assumes that he can draw on them. And so he thinks, well, who is the richest? Who is the most useful of these royal clients? It's the king of Egypt. So he decides he will go to Egypt. He will go to Alexandria.

He will throw his weight around. He will pull rank and he will get enough money to raise money, to raise troops to go and have another crack at Caesar. So that's not a bad strategy when you think about it, is it? He's lost Pharsalus, but he knows that the Egyptians owe him because he'd always been very close to Auletes, Cleopatra's father. He knows that Egypt is torn apart by this incipient civil war. So he can kind of go in as the strongman. And basically, he knows there's a

boy king yeah so pompey just kind of thinks well this is this is great unfortunately he is the strong man he sees himself as a strong man it never crosses his mind that the fact that he's lost means that suddenly his image is no longer that of a strong man but of an absolute loser so there's this famous scene isn't there where um so Ptolemy XIII, the boy king, Cleopatra's still out there in the sort of the edge of the doctor. Beyond the Elysium, yeah. The boy king's ministers, they have this meeting and they say, what are we going to do? Pompey's coming. And supposedly there's a guy who's his tutor, Theodotus of Chios, I think it is, Tom, who I describe in my book as an oily man.

Not dealing in stereotypes. No, well, he behaves in a very, I don't know anything about Chios. I mean, they may be very unoily for all I know, but he behaves in a very oily way because he basically says, well, you know, if we accept Pompey, we make ourselves Julius Caesar's enemies, and Pompey will just boss us around and be a pain. If we turn him away, he will be our enemy. And if he then wins, we're in a mess. And he says, and the quote is, there's only one way to please Caesar and have nothing to fear from Pompey. And he says, and that is, welcome Pompey and kill him. For as we all know, dead men don't bite, which is such a fantastic line.

And then there's this incredible scene, isn't there, where Pompey, who is, as you say, this ancient war hero, he pitches up on his boat. They send a little fishing boat to greet him. The fishing boat has Achillas on, who is Ptolemy's commander, and an old associate of Pompey's called Lucius Septimius, who sort of says, well, he doesn't say anything at first, and Pompey says to him, don't I recognize you?

You didn't used to be an old comrade of mine. Septimius says yes, and they sail back towards the coast. Pompey's got his speech with him that he's going to read to Ptolemy XIII, this sort of speech of welcome. And it's while he's reading it, I think, that they begin to pull their knives out of the scabbards. And then just as they're approaching the shore, as he can see the boy king on the beach,

surrounded by the oily tutor, the fleshy eunuch and all these these other stereotypes all these other characters they cut pompey's head off what a twist what a twist do you think that's do you think pompey was hard done by there tom i think he had it coming you think he had it coming well i know who else thought i tell you who else thought he had it coming um with the jews because pompe because Pompey had captured Jerusalem and the temple. And of course, no non-Jew was allowed to go into the temple. But Pompey went in and he went right into the Holy of Holies. And the Jews said that from that point on, everything started going wrong for him. out that he'd been uh he'd been beheaded um jewish poets hailed this as um the victory of god over the

pride of the dragon and said of pompey that he had failed to recognize that god alone is great well so you can see how this this stuff reverberates you know and is interpreted in all kinds of different ways by different peoples um you know this is huge huge stuff uh and of course the the people with whom it reverberates most of all are the romans yeah and specifically julius caesar who's come with a very very light force they're not a large number of men at all in pursuit and he turns up uh in alexandria and he is presented with pompey's head on a kind of silver salver and caesar caesar affects to weep i mean maybe he did we don't know so here's the fascinating thing so caesar has come in pursuit of pompey he gets to alexandria

you know this this sort of strange semi-colony i guess or semi-detached colony or whatever you want to call it on the fringe of the roman sort of the roman imperium but you know the greater city in the world i mean it's larger at this point than Rome. The richest city, exactly. The richest city in the world. So Caesar arrives. It's the first time he's been to Alexandria. This Greek city. He gets off his boat. All these people are there. They say, here's the head of your enemy. We've cut it off for you.

And, yeah, famously, Tom, he starts crying and says, oh, what a terrible shame that he was a Roman. But he's obviously secretly incredibly relieved. Do you think, or do you think, so how seriously does Caesar take this business, this ideological business of he's a Roman, how dare you cut his head off? I think that he feels genuine grief because the men had been close. I think that as a Roman, he thinks it's outrageous that as great a figure as Pompey has been dispatched by people you may well describe as fleshy and oily. I mean,

because those are absolutely the terms in which Romans regard sinister kind of Hellenistic Greeks. Tom, I think beheading people on boats is poor form. I'm not going to apologise for dissing Theodotus. You know, the shrewdest political player, one of the shrewdest who's ever lived, of course he understands that this is a godsend because Pompey has been removed, you know, cleared from the chessboard and he's not responsible. Well, Tom, here's the thing.

You talk about Caesar's shrewdness. So Julius Caesar, we talked about him in the Rubicon podcasts. He's this incredibly experienced, shrewd, cunning, ruthless commander. And now he does something quite odd. So he takes his small forces, you said, and he basically says, let's go to the palace quarter. Let's occupy the palace quarter and establish ourselves there. Even though the Alexandrian crowd are absolutely furious to see him, and clearly the mood of the city is very much against him. And he sort of barricades himself into this sort of compound. Why?

Well, not only that, but he behaves absolutely as a kind of plenipotentiary. He summons both Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra into his presence, and he is going to decide which of them should rule and what the ordering of Egypt should be. And I think the reason that he does this, well, he needs the money. He also has a civil war. He has a civil war to continue fighting. You know, he's defeated Pompey, but there are plenty of people out there who want to continue the fight against him. So Egypt is very rich and he wants to do what Romans have always done, which is to screw money out of, you know, their hapless underlings. And Caesar claims to be owed money back from, you know, from the days when Ptolemy Aelites, Cleopatra's father, had been handing out bribes in Rome.

Caesar had scooped up a lot and he claimed to be owed even more. So I think that's the reason. The question is, why does he do this when he has so few people at his back? And I think it's just that he's overconfident. And I think that the corollary of that, I think that he takes the Roman stereotyping of Egyptians, literally. He thinks these are effeminate, sinister, decadent, inbred, corrupt people who are simply not worthy of... I don't even need to show them the respect of worrying about what they might do. So, you know, these are not Gauls. He's Vladimir Putin on the night of the 25th of February. Yes. And the truth is that, you know, Caesar fights an enormous number of campaigns

over the course of his career. What happens in Alexandria? He comes closest to being defeated and destroyed, closer than at any point in his career that's a brilliant story in itself we'll get to in a second but cleopatra we left her she's got her little army they're out sort of by the delta desperate to get past pelusium this fortress and this army to alexandria and they can't she can't get there he's summoned her but she can't get there. Now, Tom, let's take a break and find out what she does and whether or not it involves a carpet. Let's do that. Okay. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening,

bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com That's therestisentertainment.com It was night in Alexandria. Darkness had fallen over the greatest city on earth, a black veil of baleful silence. Soldiers patrolled the walls of the palace, spears in hand. It was the late summer of 48 BC, and Alexandria was a city on edge, a powder keg waiting for a spark. In the inky waters of the harbour, a battered little fishing boat rounded the corner and eased towards the shore. Keeping clear of the beam from the great

lighthouse, the oarsman pulled into the quayside. Working swiftly, he made fast to the jetty, before clambering up the ladder. A bulky bundle on his back. A carpet sack in the darkness it was impossible to be sure so tom holland that was a reading from a fantastic uh children's history of cleopatra which the listeners will not need me to recommend because they've already bought it adventures in time cleopatra queen of the nile by myself but tom uh is Cleopatra in that bag? Well, so we left her, didn't we? At the head of her ragbag of Syrian mercenaries and tribesmen from the Sinai Desert at Pelusium. And Caesar has summoned her and Cleopatra knows that she has to get to Caesar somehow. And so we have this story that's told in Plutarch, although not, interestingly, in Cassius Dio, who's a later historian of this period, actually a historian

of the whole of Rome, but he writes about this period. And he does not include this story. So that might raise eyebrows, but I think it's true. Plutarch is nearer in time. And the reason I think it's true is that it's true to Cleopatra's character and it's true to Caesar's character. It's the theatricality of it that is the key, isn't it? So the tradition is that presumably Cleopatra kind of goes down. She sneaks past. She goes down the Nile. She brought up the Nile to Alexandria and then smuggled in, in what is traditionally described as a carpet.

But that's a 19th century translation of Plutarch. It wasn't a carpet. It's probably a linen bag or something. A kind of bag for carrying bed linen or maybe even a matting bed roll, something like that. But the story is that this gets brought into Caesar's presence and Cleopatra kind of emerges either from the role or from the bag or whatever. And people have said, well, this wouldn't have happened because

she was incredibly conscious of her dignity. She would never introduce herself like this. And that's true. Of course, Cleopatra has an incredible sense of her dignity, but more than that, she has an understanding of what makes people she wants to impress tick. And she will have studied Caesar and she will have appreciated that he's an intelligent man with a taste for the kind of stunt that she's about to pull. And I think that it's evident that Caesar immediately takes Cleopatra's side. In his long years of adventure, Julius Caesar had seen many things, but this was something beyond even his experience. The woman smiled.

Greetings, Commander, she said sweetly. I am Cleopatra. Brilliant, Dominic. I'm sure it was exactly like that. I mean, the problem is that Caesar himself, so in the commentaries that Caesar writes and that are then after his murder written up by his lieutenants, Caesar barely mentions Cleopatra. Shocking.

Just as he doesn't mention crossing the Rubicon either in his commentaries. There are certain things that he doesn't want to draw attention to and he doesn't want to draw attention to his relationship with Cleopatra. Equally, of course, Cleopatra does because very, very rapidly Cleopatra gets pregnant. And we can only assume that this is absolutely deliberate on the parts of both of them. Well, let's just pause a second. She's about 21. He is 52.

So that's quite an age gap. But is it, I mean, it's obviously not a love affair, but it's, you know she's 21 she's presumably reasonably attractive at least um you know plutarch in his description he doesn't say he says she's not a mess that astoundingly beautiful but he doesn't say you know she's not going to drive you running out of the room um julius caesar has an eye for the ladies anyway doesn't he's notorious for it he's a he's he's a he's a sort of bad boy yeah so and she knows so he's the first man that she's he's her first boyfriend as it were um and she's not approaching this as this sort of i mean there's this line that her brother's ministers put about that she's captured the old man by magic but she

must know exactly i mean she's doing this old man by magic but she must know exactly i mean she's doing this politically right it's not a romance i think i think that they must they must there must have been an attraction between them they obviously both liked each other yeah and in a way the whole kind of coming out of a sack stunt is cleopatra's tribute to to what a you know what an amusing and and smart guy ca Caesar is. So I think there's absolutely that dimension. But both of them have a kind of mutuality of interests because Caesar suddenly realizes that he's surrounded by a howling mob. And so Achillas, Ptolemy XIII general is on the outside, Pothinus is inside. But he realizes that probably the best bet is to get rid of Ptolemy XIII, put Cleopatra as a puppet. And if he can

get Cleopatra pregnant and establish a dynasty, then that's brilliant because that gets around the whole problem of what his relationship to Egypt should be because if if his son is really egypt then obviously that's great i mean that cuts through the whole gordian knot of what the constitutional proprieties should be for a republican general though of course that's a problem in rome isn't it caesar's married already to calpurnia it will be but i don't think that that unduly worries him because there are many different ways of kind of spinning this. Equally for Cleopatra, she has clearly decided that Caesar is, you know, is going to, is the guy to back. She doesn't really have any option but to do that.

And if she can establish a dynastic link to the guy who may well end up ruling Rome, then obviously that's brilliant for her. And of course, her primary object at this point is to get rid of her brother. So we're in late 48 BC. Pompey's dead. They are in the sort of palace quarter of Alexandria. It's this sort of walled compound, I guess, or at least they've put up barricades or something. Yes, it serves as a fortress. To stop the population breaking in and Achillas' army. And then, I mean, you said earlier this really interesting thing, that this is the closest that Julius Caesar comes in his entire military career to disaster because he's got the small force. They're besieged because the siege goes on for basically,

it's about six months or so, isn't it? Yeah, and he's stuck there and he doesn't know what's going on in the broader strategic sphere of the Mediterranean. I mean, he's got all those enemies out there. It's a disaster for him. And at one point, he has to burn his own fleet to stop the enemy getting hold of it. And in the course of that, they accidentally burn down part of the Great Library. I mean, this is one of the...

Yeah, hugely. Or is this an urban myth, Tom? Historians are divided about this, aren't they? It's much, much debated. I think we should do an episode on the Library of Alexandria. It's an incredibly much debated. I think we should do an episode on the library of Alexandria. It's an incredibly complicated, but fascinating story.

Yeah. And the mysteries that surround it are part of the fascination. but it's possible anyway, that part of it was destroyed. Yeah. Um, then, and this incredibly convoluted story.

So at one point they're there in the palace, the Caesar, there's Ptolemy the 13th. There is Cleopatra. Pothinus. Yes. And there is her youngest sister. Ophidus. Yes. And there is her younger sister, Arsinoe. Yes, who's a baggage. Well, she's a teenager, isn't she?

She must be about 18 or 19. Yeah, she's terrible. But is she, though, Tom? So what Arsinoe does, Arsinoe basically breaks out of the palace with her tutor, who's called Ganymede. And they then go and join the rioters. And she sets herself up as a rival, doesn't she? She's obviously incredibly jealous of her. She is the Prince Harry of that family.

She's the Princess Margaret. She's the Princess Margaret. Right. Well, anyway. They're all awful. They're all murderous. I always kind of think of her as the archetype of the awful little sister, who's kind of jealous of the high achieving elder sister, resentful and jealous and always trying to kind of stab her in the back and ruin things for her.

So she's got out. But then Ptolemy, he says, let me go and talk to them. You know, and he says to Julius Caesar, I've learned so much from you. I think you're such a tremendous fellow. I really respect you. Please let me go outside and reason with the rioters. And he goes out to reason with them, but then he sort of turns around and says, I hate you. And he joins them as well. So now it's just Caesar and Cleopatra left in the palace. But Caesar's executed Pothinus. Yes, he's executed Pothinus with his men. And they're trapped and everybody is against them. And there's all these strange stories about they poison the water supply or they put salt or something in the water.

Caesar loses his Red General's cloak. Yeah, Caesar goes out to do some stuff in the harbour and is almost caught and killed. And actually, he's bailed out, isn't he, by a relief army. I mean, he doesn't actually win the day. Yeah, but led by a kind of Greek potentate, Mithridates of Pergamon. Right. You know, mildly humiliating, but Caesar doesn't care. Because essentially, that enables him to redeem the situation. And Ptolemy XIII ends up drowned. And Cleopatra is now kind of secure so she then marries her youngest brother

who becomes Ptolemy the 14th as if we hadn't got enough Ptolemies already another one another one um and Caesar and Cleopatra go on a barge it said and they kind of go on a trip down the Nile well this is number so we've had the carpet and this is probably the next great set piece in the sort of Hollywood version of Cleopatra's life, isn't it? So they go on this cruise, one of probably history's most famous cruise. Yeah, probably, yeah. So they go on this sort of Nile cruise,

and they look at the pyramids and inspect wildlife. And actually, historians have always said, what on earth is Julius Caesar doing? He's meant to be fighting a civil war. And he's sort of gone off on this pleasure barge up the Nile. So what do you think is going on there, Tom? I think that Caesar is buying into Cleopatra's idea of a dynasty that will be properly rooted in the affections of the Egyptians. Yeah. And I think he's playing his part in that. So Cleopatra going down the Nile, which is the source of life in Egypt.

And she is claiming to be the goddess who manifests herself, the giver of life, the giver of fertility. That's what she's doing. She's presenting herself to her people as an authentically Egyptian pharaoh. So Caesar is buying into that. And this is why he can't mention it in his commentaries, because basically he's recognized in these kind of dynastic links that he can have with Cleopatra, that it's a form of power that is not available to any other Roman, simply because of his circumstances. So I think that's what he's doing. It's something he

absolutely wants to keep quiet. He's not going to trumpet it in Rome because no one would approve. But if his son comes to be accepted as a pharaoh ruling in association with her mother, then that is a massive, massive asset for Caesar. And so he establishes that. And then having done that, he sails off,

comes, sees, conquers. This is, you know, Veni, Vidi, Vici. This is- Because he goes off to Asia Minor, doesn't he? Yeah, and then having done that he sails off comes sees conquers uh this is you know veni vidivici this is because he goes off to asia minor doesn't yeah and gets that then he he defeats all his various republican enemies he goes back to rome um and he celebrates various triumphs and among these triumphs is he celebrates an egyptian triumph and in the triumph he leads cleopatra's younger sister yeah the young arsinoe. And this isn't popular. The Roman people don't like seeing her led in chains. Yeah, because they cheer her or they applaud her or something. They applaud her, yeah.

And Cleopatra is now unchallenged. She has a much younger brother who is now her husband, Ptolemy the 14th. She has given birth in June 47 to a son who she calls Ptolemy Caesar. So it's completely upfront that this is Julius. Caesar doesn't acknowledge the child, but the name is the giveaway. But Caesar does invite her to Rome. So she comes to rome with her husband who is also her brother yeah and it's all very very un-roman so caesar puts them up doesn't he in his estate in osnabrück across the tiber yeah um and is she there tom do you think

to see because historians are not quite sure the dates but do you think she was there to see his triumphs do you think would that be interesting to isn't it? It's interesting to know if, whether she put Caesar up to having her sister. Yeah. I mean, so I've seen a way, does she, she gets spared and I think gets settled at Ephesus,

isn't it? After the, after the triumph, but Cleopatra certainly, she kind of beds down and is very grand dame and Cicero, the great orator, great kind of intellectual she he's terribly resentful of her so alexandria is actually the only place that cicero said he wanted

to visit apart from rome is that so you know he was a he he said alexandria is the one place i want to visit but he goes to see claire patra and gets snubbed by her and so he's he's very he well he obviously there's some source isn't there where he writes he says i hate the queen i hate her um do you know what you want to do you want to know how our top children's book describes cicero from cleopatra's point of view yeah i'd love to hear that yeah a jowly toad-faced man smooth and silver-tongued but monstrously vain and pompous yeah well nothing wrong with being monstrously vain rain and pompous so so clay patras there with cesarean her son her young son and her brother who is her husband it's all it's all

very odd and they come and go a little bit don't they tom in the next couple of years are they sort of she's there in 46 bc and then she's there again when you know we're jumping ahead when caesar finally gets the really does get the boot she is and and then she has she when, you know, we're jumping ahead, when Caesar finally gets the, really does get the boot. She is. And then she has, she basically, you know, Rome is obviously no place for her. Yeah. After her protector is dead.

And so she flees back to Alexandria. So there's obviously during this whole period, Caesar has won the civil war. There is this sort of mounting tension in Rome, the sense that he's going to set himself up as a king and all this sort of business. He's too powerful. He's too domineering. And do you think her presence is part of that? Yeah, I do. So no one's quite sure what Caesar's going to do. I don't think Caesar knows what he's

going to do. So he's planning to go on an attack path here, which is the great empire, the only real kind of empire that survives as a rival to Rome. And I think he's going there basically because he's not quite sure what to do. But it's evident, I think, that the kind of dynastic model of rulership that the Ptolemies represent, the kind of Hellenistic tradition of monarchical rule is of interest to Caesar. He knows that the Romans would never accept it because it's a republic and the name king is absolutely dirty to them. But I think it's kind of hovering there as something that he is tempted to make play with. And I think that Cleopatra's presence in Rome is a kind of marker of that. And to that extent, encourages the assassins who end

up murdering him on the the eyes of march which is why cleopatra has no stake at all in staying in rome after caesar murdered and when he's when he's dead she you know she goes skedaddling back to alexandria as fast as she can go so back she goes to alexandria when she kills ptolemy the yeah the 14th so that's him gone and now she's ruling with Caesarian, who is, what, three or something? So why does she kill her brother? That's a really, I mean, that's the most, in all her career, that's probably the single most ruthless and sort of jarring thing that she does.

She kills her. It's not jarring. It's absolutely. Or jarring to modern sensibilities, Tom. I mean, murdering your brother is. You know, her ambition is to, and not just to rule, but to reconstitute the Ptolemaic Empire, to take it back to its former state of greatness.

She can't do that if she has a kind of little brother breathing down her neck, because that little brother will become the thing of rivals to her. So the equivalents of people like ekelas and pathenus yeah we'll take we'll we'll use him as a cipher to strike back at her and whereas whereas her her own son obviously will be massively under her thumb and of course she's going to get rid of the situation in rome makes it all the more imperative to do that because her protector in rome is dead yeah the roman world is slipping into civil war so the presence of an alternative you know is she can't afford to have him hanging around i mean i said it was jarring it's not jarring to anybody

who knows the history of the ptolemaic dynasty because obviously the lesson of ptolemaic history is you you do it and you're right to do it yeah cleopatra killed him and she was right to kill him yeah it was the only sane thing to do it was the only thing because of course she is back in egypt but meanwhile as in her early the early years of her reign so now the context for what she is doing in egypt is set by the the threat of civil war in rome and by extension the whole of the mediterranean and that is the context for what i think should be episode three. I think we should halt now. And episode three, we should look at what happens with the civil war between Caesar's assassins and Caesar's avengers and the Roman leaders who emerged from that and what their

relationship to Cleopatra is. Excellent. So if you're part of the Rest is History Club, you can go straight to episode three right now. If you're not, you can either sign up at restishistorypod.com or you'll have to wait until whenever it is that we release episode three um but uh we will see you then for more cleopatra based action bye-bye bye-bye Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

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