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Cleopatra
Makers of History
CLEOPATRA
BY
JACOB ABBOTT
[Illustration: CLEOPATRA.]
PREFACE
Of all the beautiful women of history, none has left us such
convincing proofs of her charms as Cleopatra, for the tide of Rome's
destiny, and, therefore, that of the world, turned aside because of
her beauty. Julius Caesar, whose legions trampled the conquered world
from Canopus to the Thames, capitulated to her, and Mark Antony threw
a fleet, an empire and his own honor to the winds to follow her to his
destruction. Disarmed at last before the frigid Octavius, she found
her peerless body measured by the cold eye of her captor only for the
triumphal procession, and the friendly asp alone spared her Rome's
crowning ignominy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE VALLEY OF THE NILE
II. THE PTOLEMIES
III. ALEXANDRIA
IV. CLEOPATRA'S FATHER
V. ACCESSION TO THE THRONE
VI. CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR
VII. THE ALEXANDRINE WAR
VIII. CLEOPATRA A QUEEN
IX. THE BATTLE OF PHILIPPI
X. CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY
XI. THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM
XII. THE END OF CLEOPATRA
ILLUSTRATIONS
CLEOPATRA
MEETING OF CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY
CLEOPATRA TESTING THE POISON UPON THE SLAVES
[Illustration: Map--'Scene of CLEOPATRA'S HISTORY']
CHAPTER I.
THE VALLEY OF THE NILE.
The parentage and birth of Cleopatra.--Cleopatra's residence in
Egypt.--Physical aspect of Egypt.--The eagle's wings and
science.--Physical peculiarities of Egypt connected with the laws of
rain.--General laws of rain.--Causes which modify the quantity of
rain.--Striking contrasts.--Rainless regions.--Great rainless region
of Asia and Africa.--The Andes.--Map of the rainless region.--Valley
of the Nile.--The Red Sea.--The oases.--Siweh.--Mountains of the
Moon.--The River Nile.--Incessant rains.--Inundation of the
Nile.--Course of the river.--Subsidence of the waters.--Luxuriant
vegetation.--Absence of forests.--Great antiquity of Egypt.--Her
monuments.--The Delta of the Nile.--The Delta as seen from the
sea.--Pelusiac mouth of the Nile.--The Canopic mouth.--Ancient
Egypt.--The Pyramids.--Conquests of the Persians and Macedonians.--The
Ptolemies.--Founding of Alexandria.--The Pharos.
The story of Cleopatra is a story of crime. It is a narrative of the
course and the consequences of unlawful love. In her strange and
romantic history we see this passion portrayed with the most complete
and graphic fidelity in all its influences and effects; its
uncontrollable impulses, its intoxicating joys, its reckless and mad
career, and the dreadful remorse and ultimate despair and ruin in
which it always and inevitably ends.
Cleopatra was by birth an Egyptian; by ancestry and descent she was a
Greek. Thus, while Alexandria and the Delta of the Nile formed the
scene of the most important events and incidents of her history, it
was the blood of Macedon which flowed in her veins. Her character and
action are marked by the genius, the courage, the originality, and the
impulsiveness pertaining to the stock from which she sprung. The
events of her history, on the other hand, and the peculiar character
of her adventures, her sufferings, and her sins, were determined by
the circumstances with which she was surrounded, and the influences
which were brought to bear upon her in the soft and voluptuous clime
where the scenes of her early life were laid.
Egypt has always been considered as physically the most remarkable
country on the globe. It is a long and narrow valley of verdure and
fruitfulness, completely insulated from the rest of the habitable
world. It is more completely insulated, in fact, than any literal
island could be, inasmuch as deserts are more impassable than seas.
The very existence of Egypt is a most extraordinary phenomenon. If we
could but soar with the wings of an eagle into the air, and look down
upon the scene, so as to observe the operation of that grand and yet
simple process by which this long and wonderful valley, teeming so
profusely with animal and vegetable life, has been formed, and is
annually revivified and renewed, in the midst of surrounding wastes of
silence, desolation, and death, we should gaze upon it with
never-ceasing admiration and pleasure. We have not the wings of the
eagle, but the generalizations of science furnish us with a sort of
substitute for them.
The long series of patient, careful, and sagacious observations, which
have been continued now for two thousand years, bring us results, by
means of which, through our powers of mental conception, we may take a
comprehensive survey of the whole scene, analogous, in some respects,
to that which direct and actual vision would afford us, if we could
look down upon it from the eagle's point of view. It is, however,
somewhat humiliating to our pride of intellect to reflect that
long-continued philosophical investigations and learned scientific
research are, in such a case as this, after all, in some sense, only a
sort of substitute for wings. A human mind connected with a pair of
eagle's wings would have solved the mystery of Egypt in a week;
whereas science, philosophy, and research, confined to the surface of
the ground, have been occupied for twenty centuries in accomplishing
the undertaking.
It is found at last that both the existence of Egypt itself, and its
strange insulation in the midst of boundless tracts of dry and barren
sand, depend upon certain remarkable results of the general laws of
rain. The water which is taken up by the atmosphere from the surface
of the sea and of the land by evaporation, falls again, under certain
circumstances, in showers of rain, the frequency and copiousness of
which vary very much in different portions of the earth. As a general
principle, rains are much more frequent and abundant near the equator
than in temperate climes, and they grow less and less so as we
approach the poles. This might naturally have been expected; for,
under the burning sun of the equator, the evaporation of water must
necessarily go on with immensely greater rapidity than in the colder
zones, and all the water which is taken up must, of course, again come
down.
It is not, however, wholly by the latitude of the region in which the
evaporation takes place that the quantity of rain which falls from the
atmosphere is determined; for the condition on which the falling back,
in rain, of the water which has been taken up by evaporation mainly
depends, is the cooling of the atmospheric stratum which contains it;
and this effect is produced in very various ways, and many different
causes operate to modify it. Sometimes the stratum is cooled by being
wafted over ranges of mountains, sometimes by encountering and
becoming mingled with cooler currents of air; and sometimes, again, by
being driven in winds toward a higher, and, consequently, cooler
latitude. If, on the other hand, air moves from cold mountains toward
warm and sunny plains, or from higher latitudes to lower, or if, among
the various currents into which it falls, it becomes mixed with air
warmer than itself, its capacity for containing vapor in solution is
increased, and, consequently, instead of releasing its hold upon the
waters which it has already in possession, it becomes thirsty for
more. It moves over a country, under these circumstances, as a warm
and drying wind. Under a reverse of circumstances it would have formed
drifting mists, or, perhaps, even copious showers of rain.
It will be evident, from these considerations, that the frequency of
the showers, and the quantity of the rain which will fall, in the
various regions respectively which the surface of the earth presents,
must depend on the combined influence of many causes, such as the
warmth of the climate, the proximity and the direction of mountains
and of seas, the character of the prevailing winds, and the reflecting
qualities of the soil. These and other similar causes, it is found,
do, in fact, produce a vast difference in the quantity of rain which
falls in different regions. In the northern part of South America,
where the land is bordered on every hand by vast tropical seas, which
load the hot and thirsty air with vapor, and where the mighty
Cordillera of the Andes rears its icy summits to chill and precipitate
the vapors again, a quantity of rain amounting to more than ten feet
in perpendicular height falls in a year. At St. Petersburg, on the
other hand, the quantity thus falling in a year is but little more
than one foot. The immense deluge which pours down from the clouds in
South America would, if the water were to remain where it fell, wholly
submerge and inundate the country. As it is, in flowing off through
the valleys to the sea, the united torrents form the greatest river on
the globe--the Amazon; and the vegetation, stimulated by the heat, and
nourished by the abundant and incessant supplies of moisture, becomes
so rank, and loads the earth with such an entangled and matted mass of
trunks, and stems, and twining wreaths and vines, that man is almost
excluded from the scene. The boundless forests become a vast and
almost impenetrable jungle, abandoned to wild beasts, noxious
reptiles, and huge and ferocious birds of prey.
Of course, the district of St. Petersburg, with its icy winter, its
low and powerless sun, and its twelve inches of annual rain, must
necessarily present, in all its phenomena of vegetable and animal
life, a striking contrast to the exuberant prolificness of New
Grenada. It is, however, after all, not absolutely the opposite
extreme. There are certain regions on the surface of the earth that
are actually rainless; and it is these which present us with the true
and real contrast to the luxuriant vegetation and teeming life of the
country of the Amazon. In these rainless regions all is necessarily
silence, desolation, and death. No plant can grow; no animal can live.
Man, too, is forever and hopelessly excluded. If the exuberant
abundance of animal and vegetable life shut him out, in some measure,
from regions which an excess of heat and moisture render too prolific,
the total absence of them still more effectually forbids him a home in
these. They become, therefore, vast wastes of dry and barren sands in
which no root can find nourishment, and of dreary rocks to which not
even a lichen can cling.
The most extensive and remarkable rainless region on the earth is a
vast tract extending through the interior and northern part of Africa,
and the southwestern part of Asia. The Red Sea penetrates into this
tract from the south, and thus breaks the outline and continuity of
its form, without, however, altering, or essentially modifying its
character. It divides it, however, and to the different portions which
this division forms, different names have been given. The Asiatic
portion is called Arabia Deserta; the African tract has received the
name of Sahara; while between these two, in the neighborhood of Egypt,
the barren region is called simply _the desert_. The whole tract is
marked, however, throughout, with one all-pervading character: the
absence of vegetable, and, consequently, of animal life, on account of
the absence of rain. The rising of a range of lofty mountains in the
center of it, to produce a precipitation of moisture from the air,
would probably transform the whole of the vast waste into as verdant,
and fertile, and populous a region as any on the globe.
[Illustration: VALLEY OF THE NILE]
As it is, there are no such mountains. The whole tract is nearly
level, and so little elevated above the sea, that, at the distance of
many hundred miles in the interior, the land rises only to the height
of a few hundred feet above the surface of the Mediterranean; whereas
in New Grenada, at less than one hundred miles from the sea, the chain
of the Andes rises to elevations of from ten to fifteen thousand feet.
Such an ascent as that of a few hundred feet in hundreds of miles
would be wholly imperceptible to any ordinary mode of observation; and
the great rainless region, accordingly, of Africa and Asia is, as it
appears to the traveler, one vast plain, a thousand miles wide and
five thousand miles long, with only one considerable interruption to
the dead monotony which reigns, with that exception, every where over
the immense expanse of silence and solitude. The single interval of
fruitfulness and life is the valley of the Nile.
There are, however, in fact, three interruptions to the continuity of
this plain, though only one of them constitutes any considerable
interruption to its barrenness. They are all of them valleys,
extending from north to south, and lying side by side. The most
easterly of these valleys is so deep that the waters of the ocean flow
into it from the south, forming a long and narrow inlet called the Red
Sea. As this inlet communicates freely with the ocean, it is always
nearly of the same level, and as the evaporation from it is not
sufficient to produce rain, it does not even fertilize its own shores.
Its presence varies the dreary scenery of the landscape, it is true,
by giving us surging waters to look upon instead of driving sands; but
this is all. With the exception of the spectacle of an English steamer
passing, at weary intervals, over its dreary expanse, and some
moldering remains of ancient cities on its eastern shore, it affords
scarcely any indications of life. It does very little, therefore, to
relieve the monotonous aspect of solitude and desolation which reigns
over the region into which it has intruded.
The most westerly of the three valleys to which we have alluded is
only a slight depression of the surface of the land marked by a line
of _oases_. The depression is not sufficient to admit the waters of
the Mediterranean, nor are there any rains over any portion of the
valley which it forms sufficient to make it the bed of a stream.
Springs issue, however, here and there, in several places, from the
ground, and, percolating through the sands along the valley, give
fertility to little dells, long and narrow, which, by the contrast
that they form with the surrounding desolation, seem to the traveler
to possess the verdure and beauty of Paradise. There is a line of
these oases extending along this westerly depression, and some of them
are of considerable extent. The oasis of Siweh, on which stood the
far-famed temple of Jupiter Ammon, was many miles in extent, and was
said to have contained in ancient times a population of eight thousand
souls. Thus, while the most easterly of the three valleys which we
have named was sunk so low as to admit the ocean to flow freely into
it, the most westerly was so slightly depressed that it gained only a
circumscribed and limited fertility through the springs, which, in the
lowest portions of it, oozed from the ground. The third valley--the
central one--remains now to be described.
The reader will observe, by referring once more to the map, that south
of the great rainless region of which we are speaking, there lie
groups and ranges of mountains in Abyssinia, called the Mountains of
the Moon. These mountains are near the equator, and the relation which
they sustain to the surrounding seas, and to currents of wind which
blow in that quarter of the world, is such, that they bring down from
the atmosphere, especially in certain seasons of the year, vast and
continual torrents of rain. The water which thus falls drenches the
mountain sides and deluges the valleys. There is a great portion of it
which can not flow to the southward or eastward toward the sea, as the
whole country consists, in those directions, of continuous tracts of
elevated land. The rush of water thus turns to the northward, and,
pressing on across the desert through the great central valley which
we have referred to above, it finds an outlet, at last, in the
Mediterranean, at a point two thousand miles distant from the place
where the immense condenser drew it from the skies. The river thus
created is the Nile. It is formed, in a word, by the surplus waters of
a district inundated with rains, in their progress across a rainless
desert, seeking the sea.
If the surplus of water upon the Abyssinian mountains had been
constant and uniform, the stream, in its passage across the desert,
would have communicated very little fertility to the barren sands
which it traversed. The immediate banks of the river would have,
perhaps, been fringed with verdure, but the influence of the
irrigation would have extended no farther than the water itself could
have reached, by percolation through the sand. But the flow of the
water is not thus uniform and steady. In a certain season of the year
the rains are incessant, and they descend with such abundance and
profusion as almost to inundate the districts where they fall. Immense
torrents stream down the mountain sides; the valleys are deluged;
plains turn into morasses, and morasses into lakes. In a word, the
country becomes half submerged, and the accumulated mass of waters
would rush with great force and violence down the central valley of
the desert, which forms their only outlet, if the passage were narrow,
and if it made any considerable descent in its course to the sea. It
is, however, not narrow, and the descent is very small. The depression
in the surface of the desert, through which the water flows, is from
five to ten miles wide, and, though it is nearly two thousand miles
from the rainy district across the desert to the sea, the country for
the whole distance is almost level. There is only sufficient descent,
especially for the last thousand miles, to determine a very gentle
current to the northward in the waters of the stream.
Under these circumstances, the immense quantity of water which falls
in the rainy district in these inundating tropical showers, expands
over the whole valley, and forms for a time an immense lake, extending
in length across the whole breadth of the desert. This lake is, of
course, from five to ten miles wide, and a thousand miles long. The
water in it is shallow and turbid, and it has a gentle current toward
the north. The rains, at length, in a great measure cease; but it
requires some months for the water to run off and leave the valley
dry. As soon as it is gone, there springs up from the whole surface of
the ground which has been thus submerged a most rank and luxuriant
vegetation.
This vegetation, now wholly regulated and controlled by the hand of
man, must have been, in its original and primeval state, of a very
peculiar character. It must have consisted of such plants only as
could exist under the condition of having the soil in Which they grew
laid, for a quarter of the year, wholly under water. This
circumstance, probably, prevented the valley of the Nile from having
been, like other fertile tracts of land, encumbered, in its native
state, with forests. For the same reason, wild beasts could never have
haunted it. There were no forests to shelter them, and no refuge or
retreat for them but the dry and barren desert, during the period of
the annual inundations. This most extraordinary valley seems thus to
have been formed and preserved by Nature herself for the special
possession of man. She herself seems to have held it in reserve for
him from the very morning of creation, refusing admission into it to
every plant and every animal that might hinder or disturb his
occupancy and control. And if he were to abandon it now for a thousand
years, and then return to it once more, he would find it just as he
left it, ready for his immediate possession. There would be no wild
beasts that he must first expel, and no tangled forests would have
sprung up, that his ax must first remove. Nature is the husbandman who
keeps this garden of the world in order, and the means and machinery
by which she operates are the grand evaporating surfaces of the seas,
the beams of the tropical sun, the lofty summits of the Abyssinian
Mountains, and, as the product and result of all this instrumentality,
great periodical inundations of summer rain.
For these or some other reasons Egypt has been occupied by man from
the most remote antiquity. The oldest records of the human race, made
three thousand years ago, speak of Egypt as ancient then, when they
were written. Not only is Tradition silent, but even Fable herself
does not attempt to tell the story of the origin of her population.
Here stand the oldest and most enduring monuments that human power has
ever been able to raise. It is, however, somewhat humiliating to the
pride of the race to reflect that the loftiest and proudest, as well
as the most permanent and stable of all the works which man has ever
accomplished, are but the incidents and adjuncts of a thin stratum of
alluvial fertility, left upon the sands by the subsiding waters of
summer showers.
The most important portion of the alluvion of the Nile is the northern
portion, where the valley widens and opens toward the sea, forming a
triangular plain of about one hundred miles in length on each of the
sides, over which the waters of the river flow in a great number of
separate creeks and channels. The whole area forms a vast meadow,
intersected every where with slow-flowing streams of water, and
presenting on its surface the most enchanting pictures of fertility,
abundance, and beauty. This region is called the Delta of the Nile.
The sea upon the coast is shallow, and the fertile country formed by
the deposits of the river seems to have projected somewhat beyond the
line of the coast; although, as the land has not advanced perceptibly
for the last eighteen hundred years, it may be somewhat doubtful
whether the whole of the apparent protrusion is not due to the natural
conformation of the coast, rather than to any changes made by the
action of the river.
The Delta of the Nile is so level itself, and so little raised above
the level of the Mediterranean, that the land seems almost a
continuation of the same surface with the sea, only, instead of blue
waters topped with white-crested waves, we have broad tracts of waving
grain, and gentle swells of land crowned with hamlets and villages. In
approaching the coast, the navigator has no distant view of all this
verdure and beauty. It lies so low that it continues beneath the
horizon until the ship is close upon the shore. The first landmarks,
in fact, which the seaman makes, are the tops of trees growing
apparently out of the water, or the summit of an obelisk, or the
capital of a pillar, marking the site of some ancient and dilapidated
city.
The most easterly of the channels by which the waters of the river
find their way through the Delta to the sea, is called, as it will be
seen marked upon the map, the Pelusiac branch. It forms almost the
boundary of the fertile region of the Delta on the eastern side. There
was an ancient city named Pelusium near the mouth of it. This was, of
course, the first Egyptian city reached by those who arrived by land
from the eastward, traveling along the shores of the Mediterranean
Sea. On account of its thus marking the eastern frontier of the
country, it became a point of great importance, and is often mentioned
in the histories of ancient times.
The westernmost mouth of the Nile, on the other hand, was called the
Canopic mouth. The distance along the coast from the Canopic mouth to
Pelusium was about a hundred miles. The outline of the coast was
formerly, as it still continues to be, very irregular, and the water
shallow. Extended banks of sand protruded into the sea, and the sea
itself, as if in retaliation, formed innumerable creeks, and inlets,
and lagoons in the land. Along this irregular and uncertain boundary
the waters of the Nile and the surges of the Mediterranean kept up an
eternal war, with energies so nearly equal, that now, after the lapse
of eighteen hundred years since the state of the contest began to be
recorded, neither side has been found to have gained any perceptible
advantage over the other. The river brings the sands down, and the sea
drives them incessantly back, keeping the whole line of the shore in
such a condition as to make it extremely dangerous and difficult of
access to man.
It will be obvious, from this description of the valley of the Nile,
that it formed a country which in ancient times isolated and secluded,
in a very striking manner, from all the rest of the world. It was
wholly shut in by deserts, on every side, by land; and the shoals, and
sand-bars, and other dangers of navigation which marked the line of
the coast, seemed to forbid approach by sea. Here it remained for many
ages, under the rule of its own native ancient kings. Its population
was peaceful and industrious. Its scholars were famed throughout the
world for their learning, their science, and their philosophy.
It was in these ages, before other nations had intruded upon its
peaceful seclusion, that the Pyramids were built, and the enormous
monoliths carved, and those vast temples reared whose ruined columns
are now the wonder of mankind. During these remote ages, too, Egypt
was, as now, the land of perpetual fertility and abundance. There
would always be corn in Egypt, wherever else famine might rage. The
neighboring nations and tribes in Arabia, Palestine, and Syria, found
their way to it, accordingly, across the deserts on the eastern side,
when driven by want, and thus opened a way of communication. At length
the Persian monarchs, after extending their empire westward to the
Mediterranean, found access by the same road to Pelusium, and thence
overran and conquered the country. At last, about two hundred and
fifty years before the time of Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, when he
subverted the Persian empire, took possession of Egypt, and annexed
it, among the other Persian provinces, to his own dominions. At the
division of Alexander's empire, after his death, Egypt fell to one of
his generals, named Ptolemy. Ptolemy made it his kingdom, and left it,
at his death, to his heirs. A long line of sovereigns succeeded him,
known in history as the dynasty of the Ptolemies--Greek princes,
reigning over an Egyptian realm. Cleopatra was the daughter of the
eleventh in the line.
The capital of the Ptolemies was Alexandria. Until the time of
Alexander's conquest, Egypt had no sea-port. There were several
landing-places along the coast, but no proper harbor. In fact Egypt
had then so little commercial intercourse with the rest of the world,
that she scarcely needed any. Alexander's engineers, however, in
exploring the shore, found a point not far from the Canopic mouth of
the Nile where the water was deep, and where there was an anchorage
ground protected by an island. Alexander founded a city there, which
he called by his own name. He perfected the harbor by artificial
excavations and embankments. A lofty light-house was reared, which
formed a landmark by day, and exhibited a blazing star by night to
guide the galleys of the Mediterranean in. A canal was made to connect
the port with the Nile, and warehouses were erected to contain the
stores of merchandise. In a word, Alexandria became at once a great
commercial capital. It was the seat, for several centuries, of the
magnificent government of the Ptolemies; and so well was its situation
chosen for the purposes intended, that it still continues, after the
lapse of twenty centuries of revolution and change, one of the
principal emporiums of the commerce of the East.