No study of the life of Cleopatra can be of true value unless the position of the city of Alexandria, her capital, in relationship to Egypt on the one hand and to Greece and Rome on the other, is fully understood and appreciated. The reader must remember, and bear continually in mind, that Alexandria was at that time, and still is, more closely connected in many ways with the Mediterranean kingdoms than with Egypt proper. It bore, geographically, no closer relation to the Nile valley than Carthage bore to the interior of North Africa. Indeed, to some extent it is legitimate in considering Alexandria to allow the thoughts to find a parallel in the relationship of Philadelphia to the interior of America in the seventeenth century or of Bombay to India in the eighteenth century, for in these cases we see a foreign settlement, representative of a progressive civilisation, largely dependent on transmarine shipping for its prosperity, set down on the coast of a country whose habits are obsolete. It is almost as incorrect to class the Alexandrian Queen Cleopatra as a native Egyptian as it would be to imagine William Penn as a Red Indian or Warren Hastings as a Hindoo. Cleopatra in Alexandria was cut off from Egypt. There is no evidence that she ever even saw the Sphinx, and it would seem that the single journey up the Nile of which the history of her reign gives us any record was undertaken by her solely at the desire of Cæsar. Bearing this fact in mind, I do not think it is desirable for me to refer at any length to the affairs, or to the manners and customs, of Egypt proper in this volume; and it will be observed that, in order to avoid giving to events here recorded an Egyptian character which in reality they did not possess in any very noticeable degree, I have refrained from introducing any account of the people who lived in the great country behind Alexandria over which Cleopatra reigned.
The topographical position of Alexandria, selected by its illustrious founder, seems to have been chosen on account of its detachment from Egypt proper. The city was erected upon a strip of land having the Mediterranean on the one side and the Mareotic lake on the other. It was thus cut off from the hinterland far more effectively even than was Carthage by its semicircle of hills. Alexander had intended to make the city a purely Greek settlement, the port at which the Greeks should land their goods for distribution throughout Egypt, and whence the produce of the abundant Nile should be shipped to the north and west. He selected a remote corner of the Delta for his site, with the plain intention of holding his city at once free of, and in dominion over, Egypt; and so precisely was the location suited to his purpose that until this day Alexandria is in little more than name a city of the Egyptians. Even at the present time, when an excellent system of express railway trains connects Alexandria with Cairo and Upper Egypt, there are many well-to-do inhabitants who have not seen more that ten miles of Egyptian landscape; and the vast majority have never been within sight of the Pyramids. The wealthy foreigners settled in Alexandria often know nothing whatsoever about Egypt, and Cairo itself is beyond their ken. The Greeks, Levantines, and Jews, who now, as in ancient days, form a very large part of the population of Alexandria, would shed bitter tears of gloomy foreboding were they called upon to penetrate into the Egypt which the tourists and the officials know and love. The middle-class Egyptians of Alexandria are rarely tempted to enter Egypt proper, and even those who have inherited a few acres of land in the interior are often unwilling to visit their property.