Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (8 page)

After that came a giant V sign, not an expression of abuse but the
rough shape of Africa. Attached to the north-eastern coastline is a smaller V, representing the shape of the Nile as it spreads
out from Cairo, west to Alexandria, east to Suez. A third V stands as code for the only girl’s name in the book.

V, like Maurice, was there from the very beginning of this story, one of the few primary-school friends who remained a friend
as we moved on. She was one of those clever girls whom the less clever boys most resented, one of those against whom the sons
of missile designers designed missiles of wishful thinking. She was difficult, abrasive, often mocking, sexy, I suppose in
retrospect, although I did not much suppose so then. Like Maurice, she was influential only from time to time. But hers were
important times.

There is also a large W, marked out in blue. Mr W was a teacher, as unorthodox in his way as Mr G but more useful, the kind
that Miss Leake expected from Brentwood School, tall, classical, scholarly, athletic, the son of a 1948 Olympian. He had a
thin face filled with powerful stubble, a long blazer that on his junior pupils would have reached the floor, and a passion
for libraries, the Greek and Latin languages, and fast running. He was a man of sibilantly hissed views – on classical and
political controversies – all of them the more fiercely and freely expressed the further he could distance himself from authority.

Mr W was the first to set out for me what soon became one of the strongest of the reasons for writing about Cleopatra: that
the queen was important because Alexandria was important. She and her city have hung together for 2000 years. She is the face
on ancient coins – and on film-posters, sanitary ware, cigarettes and T-shirts here too. If picturing Cleopatra was helpful
for understanding Alexandria, that was fine with Mr W. He was the first man who told me anything
about her that was more than a name, a clay sculpture, a space-traveller’s friend or a fictional fantasy.

Mr W taught sprinting and the high jump as well as classics. On track and field I was the opposite of what an athletics trainer
should want, running fastest and jumping highest at the beginning of the season when everyone else was awaking, then falling
back through the ranks as other competitors improved. Training made me worse, certainly comparatively worse, but such was
Mr W’s hostility to progressive ideas of all kinds that my lack of progress was almost a vindication, something attracting
only a few hisses of disgust and occasional wry words of praise.

The best-known W-hiss was rarely heard on the athletics field, being one of ritual abuse against those misguidedly studying
German instead of Greek, especially when they failed to leave his classroom fast enough in what were known as ‘split-periods’.
Greeks vs Germans constituted one of many much-loved lines of difference in a school that could turn any difference at all
into sport, theatrical competition and other forms of barely repressed violence. In that respect it was not so unlike Alexandria,
having few ideals beyond respect for power and the encouragement of only such creativity as was properly approved.

Brentwood was about twenty miles of Essex road away from my Rothmans–Marconi estate. These were miles that I travelled in
a bright green bus, in that first winter through the thickest snow, the iciest for centuries. The fish froze in the school
ponds. Dead birds clogged the drains. The Sixth Form weather club, which had its own wood-slatted measuring cage by the cricket
pavilion, recorded twenty degrees of frost. The kindlier teachers told us that it would not always be like this.

The daily effort of arrival and return was deemed a privilege. The school offered free places to boys from many distant parts
of the county whose minds might benefit from a classical education and whose tolerance for bus travel was high. It educated
some proficient classicists (who could use their journeys to learn almost any quantity of grammar), as well as some even more
proficient footballers and sons of footballers, all of us crammed into a string of brick buildings along enormous tracts of
fields, ponds, white-marked pitches and unmarked wilderness.

Cleopatra’s family, the Ptolemaic autocrats of Egypt, were in the 1960s only at the edge of classical studies. Lessons in
Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism were the core. As Mr W explained in one of his bloody-minded moods, there was something
strange in that priority. In the hanging-around times of spring athletics he argued that Alexandria was much more important
as well as more useful than Athens, that the much-vaunted Athenian democrats of the fifth century had destroyed themselves
by their ideals, that Alexander’s little-studied, non-democratic Greeks had been the successful exporters of reason and beauty
around the world.

Democracy was a word overused and little understood. Its syllables were Greek but that did not mean there had ever been a
Greek democracy, not one that we would recognise as such today. Cicero’s Republican Romans, so beloved by the head of the
classics department, had quickly been replaced by Rome’s emperors, the first of whom gained decisive victories, as well as
much of their ideas, inspiration and money, here in Alexandria. Some of Mr W’s views, I later found, had been much more crisply
expressed by Oscar Wilde. But the first exposure to an old thought is a wonderful thing.

Consider, for a start, he said, King Ptolemy I. That is what we call him now. Ptolemy the Saviour was what he called himself.

There is a scuffle underneath the broken French street lights by the cafe door. Socratis’s driver has arrived. So has a large
brown dog. So have two policemen with the logo ‘Tourist and Antiquities’ on their uniforms, policemen employed to manage foreigners,
the least alarming of the many forces that keep law and order around the bus station.

Rather than coming in to collect me, the driver looks through the windows and walks towards the next door along the street.
I am hoping to go to Pompey’s Pillar, one of the biggest ancient sites on my map, one of the sites of Cleopatra’s library,
probably the longest-occupied site in the whole of the city. Perhaps he is going to be or bring my guide.

The driver stops where I can still see him. He waits outside beside a bower of naked cherubs and a poster of two men in sunglasses
advertising suits. His dog disappears first. The policemen follow. They could be with or against each other, all on the same
side or all on different sides. Finally the driver is gone. There is tinny laughter, the clump, clump, clump of yelping and
tumbling down basement stairs; then silence.

I could go to Pompey’s Pillar on my own. I have the directions. But it seems more polite to wait.

There was only one occasion when I hit another boy so hard his eyes bled. I never did anything like it again.

The trouble came when Mr W first lined up every new boy to see who could run the fastest. The result was not supposed to be
in doubt. Those who were good at football were also good at cricket and tennis
and running. A sportsman was a sportsman. There was no more to be said.

I did not want to run. Maurice was beside me. He did not want to run either. We were in the centre of the line, the worst
place to be unnoticed. On either side stretched a stream of aertex shorts and shirts in varying shades of white.

To the horror of the football captain, no one else’s progress over the playing field dash was faster than mine. For the last
twenty yards I could see and feel that I was in front. Perhaps I appeared triumphant. Certainly a red-headed centre-forward
took his defeat badly. He hit me and I, inexperienced in the art of hitting, smashed the bridge of his nose – and the septum
too, as I recall the shouted word whose meaning I did not know.

There ensued a series of unpleasant scenes. I was shocked that I could cause such damage to the division between someone’s
nostrils. I was shocked that I could want to. Mr W made a case for self-defence. Maurice said that he was always getting hit,
that everyone was always hurting or getting hurt. I have never hit anyone since. I try hard not to raise even my voice. I
do not like being in a cafe when something violent is happening in the basement next door. There are yelps from man and dog
– and unpleasant laughter.

In 1963 there was no immediate result of my nose-smashing except that for a few months I was left alone. The running track
became a refuge. While running, I could repeat dates and verbs and spellings and all the many things that needed to be repeated.

In the rough-book, under the sign of the W, is a list of a dozen men called Ptolemy. Theirs is a story that a good teacher
makes seem simple even though its truth is not simple at all. This gene pool is
swamp. But the misidentifications, missing links and murdered nieces can all come later. At this stage of the Cleopatra story
there is nothing wrong with a little simplicity. Just consider, as Mr W used to say, the man who became King Ptolemy I.

He was a new boy on the block. When Alexander the Great first ordered the building of Alexandria, the man who would be its
first king was miles away. While Alexander was defining his city boundaries – making long lines of barley in the ground that
marsh birds, to the horror of the soothsayers, as quickly stripped away – there was no Ptolemy in Egypt.

When Alexander died in Babylon in 323
BC
, after eleven years of founding many Alexandrias throughout the greatest empire then known, the first Ptolemy was just one
of the Macedonian generals. He was also the son of Alexander’s father’s mistress. He had a nose like the beak of an eagle.

He also showed himself to be eagle-eyed. With Alexander dead he saw the main chance and grabbed it. If Egypt was to become
his personal inheritance, he needed some proof that this was the will of the gods, the fates, the dead king himself or whatever
else had wishes which might help him. Like a master conjuror, he seized what he said was Alexander’s body – and then he brought
it to the city that he said was his share of the spoils. It was a spectacular coup.

Alexander had predicted an Olympic festival of backstabbing after his death. And so it came about. The generals fought among
themselves and Ptolemy was one of the biggest winners. Ptolemy saved himself, saved his Alexandria (who now remembers any
of the other Alexandrias?) and saved a civilisation too. Did he genuinely save Alexander’s body? Maybe. But whatever the body
in the casket, it was a magnificent symbol of power.

Many came here to see it. Some say that it might now be in St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, Alexandria’s most revered bones
being mistaken in 828 for those of St Mark himself, taken away when the Venetians thought that they were getting the relics
of their favourite evangelist. Alexander’s tomb has long been sought here as though it were the Holy Grail. It has never been
found except by fraudsters of various faiths and none.

When Ptolemy placed his eagle-standard in Alexandria he won himself an extraordinary prize. Egypt may not have been as wealthy
in the fourth century
BC
as a thousand years before; but it was a miraculously constant generator of wealth. Those who measured the flood waters were
the first bureaucrats to be able to predict accurately what tax they could expect the next year. Little was more important
than that.

No conqueror could carry away the power of the Nile to fertilise and feed. None could destroy the faith of the people in the
gods they held responsible for their magic river and the Pharaoh who was the living embodiment of those gods. In three thousand
years there had been wars and invasion but also a stability exorbitant in length and scale that allowed the building of monuments,
unmatched before or since, to prove just how exceptional it had been. Egyptian rulers had sometimes held sway far beyond Egypt’s
borders. To be king here meant much more than being a king of Egypt alone. But the Nile was always the spine that supported
the whole.

Ptolemy’s son and successor, Ptolemy II, was obsessive in concentrating the written wisdom of the Greek world alongside that
of the Egyptian ancients. He brought books and writers to a library that would in one place, his own place, be there to answer
every question that could ever be asked. This Ptolemy Philadelphus, the brotherly
lover, developed a long Alexandrian marriage between learning acquired elsewhere and a people who classified that learning.
He sought the secrets of medicine and encouraged doctors who dissected the living and the dead.

Experimental science did not follow as future historians thought it could and should have done. The second Ptolemy did not
find as many deep thinkers as he found exploiters and showmen. Perhaps he did not seek them. He did not build pyramids. He
did set new standards for the organisation of knowledge and theatrical illusion. When he commanded a street carnival, one
of the floats was a wine skin made from thousands of dead leopards, 30,000 gallons of wine, drawn by 600 men, with drinking
fountains at the sides for those who walked and watched. Or that was how his sycophantic fantasists wanted it to seem.

Ptolemy III, Euergetes, the Good-doer, was most famed for his queen, Berenice, whose first husband had been his mother’s lover.
When a lock of her hair disappeared from an altar, the librarian and poet Callimachus dutifully found it in the stars, noting
in his verse the neatly coiffed shape of the new constellation in the sky and how, down on earth, the sun set over a favourite
obelisk.

Century by century one Ptolemy dissolved into another, marrying and murdering, taxing and exempting from tax, as dynasts do.
An emergency tax deal between Ptolemy V, Epiphanes, Man of Light, and the priests of Memphis became the text of what we call
the Rosetta Stone, one of many concessions, like Cleopatra’s
ginestho
decree, aimed at buying support, maintaining calm, spreading happiness and discouraging insurrection.

The Ptolemies of Alexandria sponsored poetry but not poetry that changed politics. They preferred revolutionary Greek examples
from
the past. Fifth-century Athens was famed for tragedy, sixth-century Lesbos for poets. Alcaeus of Lesbos had famously rallied
his fellow islanders with ‘
nun kre methusthen
” (‘now is the time for drinking’) when an especially hated autocrat was ejected from power in the town of Mytilene.