The Linguist and the Emperor (10 page)

Birds swoop down and eat up the barley. This “evil omen” would have led Alexander to abandon his plan if a soothsayer had not declared it a sign that the city would feed the world. Then the young “pharaoh” is gone: “For a longing had seized Alexander,” the ancient historian Arrian tells us, “to consult the god Amun [at the remote oasis of Siwa], for his oracle was known to be infallible.

“As far as Paraetonium [modern Mersah Matruh] he went along the coast,” Arrian continues, “a distance of sixteen hundred stades. There he turned into the interior, where the oracle was. The route is desolate; most of it is sand and waterless. Whenever a south wind blows in that country, it makes a great heap of sand on the route and obscures its marks, making it impossible to get one’s bearings . . .”

Here at the temple of Amun-Ra, the Egyptian priest and his new master enter the holy of holies where Alexander has come with three questions:

Has the murder of his father been avenged?

Will he conquer the world?

And is he himself a god?

Yes, yes, yes,
the oracle answers, sounds and signs being transmitted from a secret chamber above the shrine where a priest is hidden away, manipulating the god’s wagging head with chains. One can still crawl into the hidden chamber today.

Alexander leaves the oracle of Siwa a god bent on world-conquest. If he is a god, though, he is one who will die at the age of thirty-three in Babylon, after a prolonged drinking bout and a fever. His closest companions and generals wait at his bedside to hear who will be named the successor.

The dying man does not name any one of them, however—for his answer is like that of an oracle.

“To the strongest! Kratisto!” he whispers. (One desperate general tries to claim he has pronounced “Craterus,” his name.)

This answer sets their ambitious blood afire. His generals are strong, but none is
the stronges
t
:
none can wrest world-empire for himself alone, though each will try in the following years. Thus Alexander’s legacy is divided, with Ptolemy seizing Egypt and becoming the first of a Greek line that will end some three hundred years later with the famous Cleopatra, the seventh of her name.

She is a worthy conclusion to her dynasty: brilliant, beautiful and unscrupulous—a true Ptolemy who marries and murders both her younger brothers, as is not generally remembered, besides seducing Julius Caesar. Then, after his assassination, she backs the wrong Roman, doomed Antony, with whom she finally, genuinely, seems to have fallen in love.

But if she is a Ptolemy, she introduces an innovation: She is the first and last to have learned Egyptian. This is not for official use, but as an intellectual diversion: She knows half a dozen other languages besides. We find her in the Talmud, of all places, asking Rabbi Meir, in Aramaic, how God occupies His time.

Thus Cleopatra’s Greek gives way to Caesar’s Latin. Egypt will never again speak its own language, a fact which reflects her new condition better than any other. Her gods become mongrels: part Egyptian, part Greek, part whatever flotsam and jetsam washes onto Alexandria’s shores.

Her age-old mysticism will mingle first of all with Greek thought. Her people will live under Roman law, even coming to worship a Roman Emperor’s eunuch-lover, Antinoöus. The beautiful boy drowns himself in the Nile, a mystical suicide-sacrifice to prolong the emperor Hadrian’s life.

But this is just the beginning. For when the Roman empire becomes Christian, Egypt becomes Christian. And when the Roman empire splits, Egypt falls to its eastern half. Her peasants pray before Byzantine icons for over three hundred years—Christian monasticism will have its beginnings in Egypt. Then, except for stubborn monks practicing unimaginable feats of asceticism in the desert—stylites living exposed on pillars for twenty years at a time—Christ will be forgotten and Egypt will learn to pray—in Arabic—facing Mecca (in the seventh century,
AD
).

Throughout the nineteenth century, her intelligentsia is educated in France and into modern times, Egypt will be ruled by a dynasty of kings
—Khedives,
to give them their proper (Persian) title—who speak only Turkish or French, or English, but certainly not Arabic. That last avatar of ancient Egyptian, Coptic, survives only in a ritual form in the Egyptian Christian liturgy. Finally, in the 1960s, the last of the
Khedives,
the four-hundred-pound King Farouk, dies in exile in a Naples restaurant, surrounded by movie starlets, drinking the blood of twenty pairs of pigeons as an aphrodisiac, and calling out in Italian for oysters.

Between that strangled, gluttonous cry and Alexander the Great’s pronouncement,
To the strongest!
lie two thousand years and a babble of languages echoing all the way back to the Greek carved on the Rosetta stone. This is the real prize of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, this paean of praise for Ptolemy V Ephiphanes “Who pardoned those who had been arrested and who were in prison, and every person who had committed whatever crime long ago; Who gave grain to the god-houses yearly; Who took care to send infantry and cavalry and ships to drive back those who came to fight against Egypt from the sea coast as well as from the Great Green . . .” This near-miraculous find will help open the way to the decipherment. When the British triumph over the pathetic, dwindling troops Napoleon has left to languish in Egypt, they demand the stone as part of the French surrender.

General Menou will not agree to this. Negotiating the surrender, he gives in to almost all their terms except the “theft” of the stone. Day after day, week after week, he uses all kinds of ruses and stratagems to retain it: hiding it, denying its existence, even insisting that it is his “personal property.” When he finally fails, he weeps openly as he hands it over. The French soldiers bitterly curse and swear at the victors carting it away. At every moment, a British officer reports, he fears that they will be attacked.

This is not the end of the matter: The inscriptions on the stone have been copied. Its gray surface has been covered with boot black (for lack of printer’s ink) and pressed onto sheets of paper: the emperor’s gift to the linguist.

The British may have the stone. On the side of it they arrogantly chisel the date and the fact of their victory. Theirs, however, is a victory that will be snatched away. This is the linguist’s gift to the emperor: for when twenty-three years later, after twenty-three years of unremitting toil, Champollion finally succeeds in its decipherment, he will reclaim its glory for France.

True, by then it is a gift to a dead man, to an emperor who had perished on a small, barren island; to an ex-general whose body is laid naked on a billiard table and eviscerated as a hurried autopsy is performed.

Like the copies made of the stone, a death mask is made of the Emperor’s face: a plaster impression of his features. That famous silhouette—through the memories and ideals it conjures—will continue to command.

Chapter Seven

Deliciae Alexandriae—
The Delights of Alexandria*

Prefatory Note

*
THUS GOES THE
proverbial Latin phrase which distinguishes these pleasures from the grosser ones of Rome. For the delights of Alexandria—in which the sensual
and
the intellectual
and
the aesthetic
and
the mystical intermingle!—can never surfeit or weary.

Rome’s patricians, restless and nihilistic, became tired of their orgies and feasts and spectacles, the cruel gladiatorial contests where between fights, during intermissions, scores of criminals, captives, or slaves have their throats slit.

What do you do, after this, for an encore? Perhaps you arrange for a sensational reversal, a game where the gladiators turn on the audience, hurling their spears into the crowd in a prearranged stunt—a successful ruse, the “producer” is greatly applauded. But still there lurks the specter of boredom: for sensation repeated is as stale as yesterday’s joke.

Even Rome’s emperors sigh for the
deliciae Alexandriae.
Caesar spends his time in the city debating in its famed Museum, Cleopatra at his side. Hadrian can find no fitter memorial for his beloved eunuch-lover Antinoöus than making him a god here. And Nero consoles himself with the thought that were he ever deposed, he can become a singer on the stages of Alexandria.

In Alexandria one can enjoy the best of both the intellectual and the physical. Dinner parties take place in pools where the guests, immersed up to their chests in perfumed waters, sample exotic dishes on floating tables, listen to music, delight in neo-Platonic debate and watch theatrical events.

Greek thought mixes with exotic Hebrew and Egyptian wisdom. The Bible first appears in Greek in Alexandria, called the Septuagint, named for its seventy translators. Actors are admitted to the floating tables after performing scenes from the latest dramas and comedies. Comedies are especially suited to the Alexandrine nature, its culture being arch and sophisticated, taking pleasure, above all, in the bon mot, the mock epic, the epigram.

If Alexandria’s intellectual pursuits are serious—mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, geography, history—its art is often trivial. The intellect is supreme in Alexandria, not the imaginative or emotional faculties.

The new comedy is imported and becomes all the rage. The Greek Menander (“O life! O Menander! Which is real?” the Alexandrine poet Callimachus cries) and the Latin Terence win applause. Tragic motifs are forgotten in the laughter of a “hit” such as
The Eunuch:
a younger brother, in love with his older brother’s whore’s serving girl, pretends to be a eunuch to gain admission to the whorehouse. He waits on the girl—in a state of prolonged erotic desire—bathing her, dressing her, etc. Can the serious political comedy of Aristophanes—work from a different time, a different place, a different consciousness—or the tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides hope to compete?

Ptolemy II knows his people. They don’t want military triumphs such as Rome’s, they take no delight in cruel, gladiatorial sport. When he arranges a spectacle, it is an artful one: the god of wine, Dionysus, is carried on a huge float, a panther skin around his shoulder, grapes in his hair; jeweled crowns, fantastic creations. The artifice and wealth of the city are put on display.
This
is the milieu of Alexandria.

By the time of Napoleon’s conquest, this splendor is gone.

Alexandria’s laughter has changed to the long Islamic cry, calling the faithful to prayer.

Its great lighthouse has toppled into the sea.

Its palaces and theaters have vanished without a trace.

“
IT IS EASIER
to understand humanity in general than to understand a single human being,” La Rochefoucauld tells us—a maxim which perfectly applies to Napoleon. For the role
General
Bonaparte or
Emperor
Napoleon plays on the world stage is indeed much easier to understand than the demonic impulses and obsessions which thrust him onto that stage.

But if one truth about Napoleon the man is more striking than any other, it is this: History forms the air he breathes, the food he eats. Its examples, its ironies, its personalities form him. They are the medium through which he experiences reality.

He gazes at himself in the mirror and sees Caesar and Charlemagne and a hundred others. Even in defeat, he is Gustavus and Hannibal and Frederick Barbarossa. (“I appeal to you,” he writes to the British after Waterloo, “as Themistocles appealed to his enemies.”) He is Coriolanus and Alexander the Great not only on the battlefield, but even in the boudoir, even in affairs of the heart.

During the campaign in Egypt, Josephine is free of his oppressive presence and she no longer has to cancel assignations. (“Forgive me. I can’t come tonight. Bonaparte will be home.”) She abandons all caution and is seen everywhere with the charming Hippolyte Charles who knows how to tie his cravat so magnificently and whose jokes about Napoleon are repeated everywhere (like Napoleon, he is some eight years younger than Josephine).

But what she does not take into account is the entire Bonaparte clan. They hate her. His brothers and sisters and his mother have remained in France and are watching out for the family’s honor in true Italian style . . . though, finally, it is from a friend that he will learn of the scandal.

When he does, he weeps and rages. For a while, he is almost out of his mind with grief. He clutches Josephine’s sixteen-year-old son to him, whom he has made an aide-de-camp, ranting through the night to him about his beautiful, mercenary, sensual, faithless mother whose heavy rose perfume he always disliked and whose simplest gesture displayed more grace than that of any other woman he had ever known.

Cursing Josephine and her lover and love itself, he writes a despairing letter to his brother declaring that life no longer has meaning for him. “My passion for glory is gone. I am sick of humanity. I have no more reason to live. At twenty-nine years of age, I am worn out.” The letter is intercepted on the Mediterranean by the British and published in the London newspapers.

While it arouses spiteful laughter from one end of Europe to the other, it is impossible to read it without feeling his pain. It is as far from a “literary” letter as it is possible to be: the unpremeditated
cri du coeur
of a man who will never again be romantically vulnerable. Women will be told to be in his bed, undressed, by such and such an hour when he will either appear or not, depending on his mood.

At this moment, though, he resembles nothing more than one of the crucified cupids in some Roman temple to Isis. At this moment, he cannot imagine the future or see himself ever reconciled to Josephine. He cannot conceive of the future Napoleon who will eagerly drag Josephine’s successor to his bed, an eighteen-year-old Austrian archduchess, sleeping with her even before the marriage ceremonies. At this moment he would be shocked by the Emperor Napoleon-to-be who will dress up as a maid and playfully serve the famous Parisian courtesan Mademoiselle George breakfast after a night of pleasure. Now the innocence and devotion of the Polish beauty Countess Walewska is unthought of. At this moment when his heart is breaking, what is the metaphor which comes to his mind? Troy! “It is Troy again . . .” In the depths of despair—Agamemnon!—in the outpouring of his disillusion, he invokes ancient warriors returning to faithless wives.

For him, these figures from history are desert mirages: approached too closely, they recede and finally disappear, leaving their pursuer clutching the air. How much of what Napoleon sees in them is what he wants to see, what he needs to see? For what are they, these historical names that give him strength, that form and console and inspire and in the end destroy him?

This Napoleon cannot allow himself to ask as he marches toward Alexandria on that stormy night in July—no more than Alexander the Great, that other young conqueror of Egypt, whose example obsessed Napoleon during the Egyptian campaign, could allow it to be asked two thousand years before. For during a furious drunken argument, when one of Alexander’s companions, Clitus, a man who had fought side by side with Alexander through many battles (even having saved Alexander’s life), shouts out damning words as friends tried to drag him away: “Kings steal the glory won by the blood of others!,” a line from Euripides, Alexander runs him through with his sword.

It is a revealing moment in the psychological transformation of a “man of destiny” from any age, Alexander’s, Napoleon’s, or our own. And though one death more or less in the great struggle for the conquest of the world would not seem to matter so very much in the vast ebb and flow of history, the ancient historians (Arrian and Plutarch and Kleitarchos and Curtius) all dwell on it. It signals a crisis. It is the moment when Alexander is changed from what he was previously.

Gone is the Alexander who had reproached his court poet for boiling eels during the campaign—“Do you think, Cleisthenes, that Homer boiled eels while Agamemnon performed his great deeds?”—and who could laugh at the answer: “And do you think, O King, that Agamemnon looked into Homer’s tent to see whether he boiled eels?”

After Egypt, Alexander is for better and for worse, a god, troubled only by his need for sleep and sexual intercourse—both of which, he said, reminded him of death.

Even in the days of its degradation, this divinity is felt in the city Alexander founds on the shores of the Mediterranean. As dawn breaks over the desert and Napoleon and his savants approach the ancient port they are filled with a sense of momentousness, of historical gravity, even though the Alexandria which had once dazzled the world is no longer there.

Decayed and dusty, it is barely a city, its population decimated by yearly outbreaks of the plague and famine, now numbering less than seven thousand souls. Two thousand years earlier, three hundred thousand lived in the city proper and another seven hundred thousand in the area outside its walls. Its unpaved streets are strewn with filth and roamed by beggars and barefoot street urchins. Its palaces, libraries, temples have vanished. Even their ruins are gone, the very stones sunk beneath the earth or carted away. This Alexandria greets Napoleon’s eye.

The Mamelukes have left the port to fend for itself, instead making Cairo their base. It is not a regular army the French face when they arrive, but a crowd of ragged, desperate men, women, and children who look down on them from the city’s only defense: ancient stone walls, weakened by time and neglect, though still rising forty feet.

There is a long prologue to the assault. While Napoleon takes his time disposing his troops, crying kites circle overhead and the sun emerges in its full force, driving the weary and hungry soldiers wild with thirst. This will be a continual torment during the campaign that follows. The scorching heat is made worse by the fact that it is the season when the
khamsin
begins to blow—a strong, hot wind that sweeps in from the desert, darkening the skies with a haze of burning sand.

General Kléber, a rough, plainspoken professional soldier in his fifties, a man who is vigorous and strong, is sent with his division to the north of the city, facing Pompey’s Gate. Though now he is a “citizen” general, fighting in the name of the republic, he had earlier fought for Louis XVI and, before that, in the Austrian army for Marie-Thérèse: To him it is all the same. There is no love lost between him and Napoleon, whom he publicly refers to as “the little bugger,” whose mistakes he is quick to catalogue and whose romantic vision of glory he scorns. Napoleon overlooks this insolence since he needs the man.

Opposite Kléber’s troops, General Menou’s division takes up its position in the west. An ex-aristocrat, well educated, emotional, and high-strung, Menou is softer than Kléber, both physically and emotionally. He is also less competent. Though he too dislikes Bonaparte, he is loyal. Napoleon knows he can count on him.

Finally, there is corpulent General Bon, deliberate in his actions. In the past he has been criticized for being too slow. Bon’s division draws up to the east of the city, at the Rosetta Gate, that is, facing the direction of Rosetta, a second port some thirty miles away. Devoted to the pleasures of the table, Bon is, despite his appearance, a fearless soldier. He will stick to Napoleon throughout the eastern campaign, finally losing his life at Acre as he hurls himself into the thick of battle to stop a French retreat. Because of his size, he especially suffers from the heat. But for all his impatience to have done with the assault, he waits until Napoleon is ready.

On Napoleon’s orders a messenger approaches the city walls with a flag of truce and offers safety in exchange for surrender. The people laugh and jeer and pelt him with filth.

Undiscouraged, Napoleon orders the messenger to return and try again. This time he is met with a volley of gunfire. General Bon has the bugles sounded and the soldiers, to the “terrifying shrieks and cries coming from the walls” as an officer, Savary, will write later, rush forward into the hail of rocks and gunfire.