Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

The siren call of the East long predated Cleopatra, but no matter; she hailed from the intoxicating land of sex and excess. It is not difficult to understand why Caesar became history, Cleopatra a legend.

Our view is further obscured by the fact that the Romans who told Cleopatra’s story very nearly knew their ancient history too well. Repeatedly it seeps into their accounts. Like Mark Twain in the overwhelming, overstuffed Vatican, we sometimes prefer the copies to the original. So did the classical authors. They conflated accounts, refurbishing old tales. They saddled Cleopatra with the vices of other miscreants. History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy. In the ancient texts the villains always wear a particularly vulgar purple, eat too much roasted peacock, douse themselves in rare unguents, melt down pearls.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

The holes in the record present one hazard, what we have constructed around them another. Affairs of state have fallen away, leaving us with affairs of the heart. A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance; fluent in nine languages; silver-tongued and charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems the joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors. She is left to put a vintage label on something we have always known existed: potent female sexuality. And her timing was lousy. Not only was her history written by her enemies, but it was her misfortune to have been on everyone’s minds just as Latin poetry came into its own. She survives literarily in a language hostile to her. The fictions have only proliferated. George Bernard Shaw lists among his sources for Caesar and Cleopatra his own imagination. Plenty of historians have deferred to Shakespeare, which is understandable but a little like taking George C. Scott’s word for Patton’s.

Cleopatra discovered that the chances of being murdered by someone who owed you a favor were every bit as good as the chances of being murdered by a member of your immediate family.

BEHIND EVERY GREAT fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptolemies were fabulously rich.

As a consequence, no one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She hailed instead from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olympias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander the Great. The rest were atrocities.

In every respect the equals of their brothers and husbands, Cleopatra’s female predecessors knew their worth. They came increasingly to assert themselves. The Ptolemies did future historians no favors in terms of nomenclature; all the royal women were Arsinoes, Berenices, or Cleopatras. They are more easily identified by their grisly misdeeds than their names, although tradition proved immutable on both counts: various Cleopatras, Berenices, and Arsinoes poisoned husbands, murdered brothers, and outlawed all mention of their mothers—afterward offering up splendid monuments to those relatives’ memories.

Over the generations the family indulged in what has been termed “an orgy of pillage and murder,” lurid even by colorful Macedonian standards. It was not an easy clan in which to distinguish oneself, but Ptolemy IV did, at the height of the empire. In the late third century he murdered his uncle, brother, and mother. Courtiers saved him from poisoning his wife by doing so themselves, once she had produced an heir. Over and over mothers sent troops against sons. Sisters waged war against brothers. Cleopatra’s great-grandmother fought one civil war against her parents, a second against her children. No one suffered as acutely as the inscribers of monuments, left to contend with near-simultaneous inaugurations and assassinations and with the vexed matter of dates, as the calendar started again with each new regime, at which time a ruler typically changed his title as well. Plenty of hieroglyph-cutting ground to a halt while dynastic feuds resolved themselves. Early on, Berenice II’s mother borrowed Berenice’s foreign-born husband, for which double duty Berenice supervised his murder. (She met the same end.) Equally notable among the women was Cleopatra’s great-great-aunt, Cleopatra III, the second-century queen. She was both the wife and niece of Ptolemy VIII. He raped her when she was an adolescent, at which time he was simultaneously married to her mother. The two quarreled; Ptolemy killed their fourteen-year-old son, chopped him into pieces, and delivered a chest of mutila...

The young woman holed up with Julius Caesar in the besieged palace of Alexandria was, then, neither Egyptian, nor, historically speaking, a pharaoh, nor necessarily related to Alexander the Great, nor even fully a Ptolemy, though she was as nearly as can be ascertained on all sides a Macedonian aristocrat. Her name, like her heritage, was entirely and proudly Macedonian; “Cleopatra” means “Glory of Her Fatherland” in Greek.* She was not even Cleopatra VII, as she would be remembered. Given the tortured family history, it made sense that someone, somewhere, simply lost count.

It was no wonder that Herodotus should have asserted, in an account Cleopatra would have known well, that Egyptian women ventured into the markets while the men sat at home tending their looms. We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus’s further assertion that Egypt was a country in which “the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.”

SHE WAS BORN in 69 BC, the second of three daughters. Two brothers followed, to each of which Cleopatra would, in succession, be briefly joined in marriage. While there was never a particularly safe time to be born a Ptolemy, the first century may have been among the worst. All five siblings met violent ends. Among them Cleopatra distinguishes herself for having alone dictated the circumstances of her demise, no small accomplishment and, in Roman terms, a distinction of some weight. The very fact that she was still alive at the time of Caesar’s arrival was testimony to her character. She had clearly been conspiring for a year or more, energetically for months, nearly around the clock over the late summer weeks. Equally significant was the fact that she would outlive her siblings by decades. Neither brother survived adolescence.

The culture was oral. Cleopatra knew how to talk. Even her detractors gave her high marks for verbal dexterity. Her “sparkling eyes” are never mentioned without equal tribute to her eloquence and charisma. She was naturally suited to declaim, with a rich, velvety voice, a commanding presence, and gifts both for appraising and accommodating her audience. On that count she had advantages Caesar did not. As much as Alexandria belonged to the Greek world, it happened to be located in Africa. At the same time, it was in but not of Egypt. One journeyed between the two as today one journeys from Manhattan to America, though with a swap of languages in the ancient case. From the start Cleopatra was accustomed to playing to dual audiences. Her family ruled a country that even in the ancient world astonished with its antiquity. Its language was the oldest on record. That language was also formal and clumsy, with a particularly difficult script. (The script was demotic. Hieroglyphs were used purely for ceremonial occasions; even the literate could decipher them only in part. Cleopatra was unlikely to have been able to read them easily.)

To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.

While girls were by no means universally educated, they headed off to schools, entered poetry competitions, became scholars. More than a few well-born first-century daughters—including those not being groomed for thrones—went far in their studies, if not all the way to rigorous rhetorical training. Pompey’s daughter had a fine tutor and recited Homer for her father. In his expert opinion, Cicero’s daughter was “extremely learned.” Brutus’s mother was equally well versed in her Latin and Greek poets. Alexandria had its share of female mathematicians, doctors, painters, and poets. This did not mean such women were above suspicion. As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman. But she was less a source of discomfort in Egypt than elsewhere.*

The library was the pride of the civilized world, a legend in its lifetime. By Cleopatra’s day it was no longer in its prime, its work having devolved from original studies to the kind of manic classifying and cataloguing that gave us the seven wonders of the world. (One bibliographical masterwork catalogued “Those Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning,” with alphabetical lists of their writings, divided by subject. The study swelled to 120 volumes.) The institution continued all the same to attract the great minds of the Mediterranean. Its patron saint was Aristotle, whose school and library stood as its model, and who had—not incidentally—taught both Alexander the Great and his childhood friend, Ptolemy I. It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry. If all the wisdoms of the ancient world could be said to have been collected in one place, that place was Alexandria.

For a man like Caesar, then, highly cultivated, in thrall to Alexander the Great and who claimed descent from Venus, all roads—mythical, historical, intellectual—led to Alexandria. Like Cleopatra his education was first-rate, his curiosity voracious. He knew his poets. He was an omnivorous reader. Though the Romans were said to have no taste for personal luxury, Caesar was, as in so many matters, the exception. Even on campaign he was an insatiable collector of mosaic, marble, and gems. His invasion of Britain had been written down to his fondness for freshwater pearls. Seduced by opulence and pedigree, he had lingered in Oriental courts before, to his lifelong embarrassment. Few charges disconcerted him as did the accusation that he had prolonged his stay in what is today northern Turkey because of his affair with the king of Bithynia. Caesar was of illustrious birth, a gifted orator, and a dashing officer, but those distinctions were meaningless compared to a woman who, however inventively, descended from Alexander, who was in Egypt not only royal but divine. Caesar was very nearly deified in the last years of his life. Cleopatra was born a goddess.

As no stone portrait of her has yet proved authentic, André Malraux’s quip remains partly true: “Nefertiti is a face without a queen; Cleopatra is a queen without a face.”

Auletes’ reunion with his second daughter was presumably of a different flavor. In light of her sister’s overreaching, thirteen-year-old Cleopatra was now first in line to the throne. Already she had absorbed a great deal in addition to the training in declamation, rhetoric, and philosophy. Her political education could be said to have been completed in 56; she would draw heavily on this chapter a decade later. To be pharaoh was good. To be a friend and ally of Rome was better. The question was not how to resist that power, like Mithradates, who had made a career of goading, defying, and massacring Romans, but how best to manipulate it.

You could argue that Caesar had no particular affection for Cleopatra, that the two only happened to find themselves on the same side of a baffling war, but it would be easier to argue that she had no affection for him.

To one guest a palace dinner itself appeared as a fortune rather than a meal. He gaped at “a silver platter covered with heavy gold plate, and large enough to hold a huge roast piglet lying on its back and displaying its belly, which was full of many delicious items; for inside it were roast thrushes, ducks, and an immense quantity of warblers, as well as egg yolks, oysters, and scallops.” Geese were standard fare on the prodigal menus, along with peacocks, oysters, sea urchins, sturgeon, and red mullet, the delicacies of the Mediterranean world. (Spoons were rare, forks unknown. One ate with one’s fingers.) Sweet wines—the best came from Syria and Ionia—were spiced with honey or pomegranate. We have no trace of the wardrobe in which Cleopatra presided over these festivities, though we know that she wore plenty of pearls, the diamonds of the day.

Cleopatra went into labor. We know as little of the actual birth as we do of the intimacy that preceded it.* With or without a birthing stool, a team of midwives would have stood at the ready. One received the child in a bundle of cloth, securely swaddling him. A second cut the umbilical cord with an obsidian blade. The newborn was to be amply filled with milk, to which end a royal wet nurse was engaged. The requirements for the job were no different from those for a sitter today: The nurse should be congenial and clean. She should “not be prone to anger, not talkative nor indifferent in the taking of food, but organized and sensible.” Ideally, she should also be Greek, which was to say educated. Typically she was the lucky wife of a court official; hers was a well-remunerated, prestigious post, several years in duration. To it she brought generations’ worth of wisdom. Teething trouble? The standard cure was to feed the child a fried mouse. Excessive crying? A paste of fly dirt and poppy could be counted on to silence the most miserable of infants.

Had she wanted to, Cleopatra could have availed herself of volumes of advice on contraception and abortion, some of it surprisingly effective. Nothing better revealed the conflicting tides of science and myth, enlightenment and ignorance, between which she lived than the literature on birth control. For each valid idea of Cleopatra’s age there was an equally outlandish belief. Hippocrates’ three-hundred-year-old recipe for inducing miscarriage—jump up and down, neatly touching your heels to your buttocks seven times—made some of the first-century measures look perfectly reasonable. A spider’s egg, attached to the body with deer hide before sunrise, could prevent conception for twelve months. This was no stranger (or more effective) than attaching a cat liver to one’s left foot, but then it was also asserted that a sneeze during sex worked wonders. In Cleopatra’s day crocodile dung was famed for its contraceptive powers, as was a concoction of mule’s kidney and eunuch’s urine. Generally the literature on abortifacients was more extensive than that on contraceptives; the time-tested ingredients for a morning-after pill were salt, mouse excrement, honey, and resin. Long after Cleopatra, it was asserted that the smell of a freshly extinguished lamp induced miscarriage. At the same time, some of the popular herbal remedies of Cleopatra’s age proved effective. White poplar, juniper berries, and giant fennel have qualified contraceptive powers. Others—vinegar, alum, and olive oil...

Best of all, Cleopatra’s timing was impeccable; she indeed seems to have had help—or great good luck—in producing children precisely when it was most advantageous to do so. Caesarion’s birth coincided almost exactly with the early summer rise of the Nile, which psychologically, iconographically, and financially ushered in the season of plenty. Daily anticipation gave way to celebration as the Nile grew turbid and mossy green, then swelled steadily, from south to north. Basket after basket filled with grapes, figs, and melons. The honey flowed abundantly. Cleopatra celebrated the annual feast of Isis at this time, an important, ritual-heavy date on the Egyptian calendar. The tears of that all-powerful goddess were said to account for the rise of the river. Cleopatra’s subjects offered her (compulsory) gifts on the holiday, a practice that set off a frenzied competition among her courtiers. Boats arrived at the palace from every corner of Egypt, loaded with fruits and flowers.

Feeding the people was paramount, a mandate on which Cleopatra prided herself. She depicted herself as the Lady of Abundance for good reason; she stood between her subjects and hunger. Given the rigors of the system, they could manage no reserves. In a crisis Cleopatra had no choice but to authorize distributions from crown warehouses. “There was no famine during my reign” was a popular and gratifying phrase for a monarch to inscribe on his or her temples. Ancient propaganda served the same ends as its modern counterpart, however. There appears to have been little correlation between the alimentary reality and that sunny assertion, as often as not patently false.

The economy Auletes handed down to his daughter was moreover in tatters. “When we inherited the Republic from our forebears, it was like a beautiful painting whose colors were fading with age,” Cicero had moaned a few years earlier. The same was only more true of Cleopatra’s Egypt, its glory days firmly behind it. Auletes owed his unpopularity in large part to the onerous taxes he had levied to pay his Roman bill. Cleopatra settled the bill but was left with a depleted treasury. (When word of her father’s death reached Rome, the first questions were: who rules Egypt now, and how do I get my money?) By one account Auletes had as well dissipated the family’s accumulated fortune. How did Cleopatra fare? In economic affairs she took a determined hand, immediately devaluing the currency by a third. She issued no new gold coins and debased the silver, as her father had done shortly before his death. For the most part hers was a bronze age. She instituted large-scale production in that metal, which had been halted for some time. And she ushered in a great innovation: Cleopatra introduced coins of different denominations to Egypt. For the first time the markings determined the value of a coin. Regardless of its weight, it was to be accepted at face value, a great profit to her.

As everyone knew, Caesar lived in the center of town, near the Forum, with his wife, Calpurnia. Cleopatra’s influence and that of her country were all the same much felt, directly and indirectly. On his return Caesar had begun to institute a number of reforms drawn from his Egyptian stay, during which he had evidently studied innovation as attentively as tradition. Most conspicuously, he went to work on the Roman calendar, which by 46 had crept three months ahead of the season. For some time a Roman year had consisted of 355 days, to which the authorities added an extra month irregularly, when doing so suited their purposes. As Plutarch has it, “Only the priests could say the time, and they, at their pleasure, without giving any notice, slipped in the intercalary month.” The result was a thorough mess; at one juncture, Cicero did not know what year he was living in. Caesar adopted the Egyptian calendar of twelve thirty-day months, with an additional five-day period at the end of the year, subsequently deemed “the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in human history.” He adopted as well the twelve-hour division between night and day that he had known in Alexandria. Generally speaking, time was a vaguer, more elastic notion in Rome, where it was subject to perpetual debate.* Cleopatra’s astronomers and mathematicians assisted in Caesar’s planning. The result was a bold correction in 46, “the last year of muddled reckoning” and one of 445 days, the extra weeks insert...

As it happened, glamorous guests were as problematic as glamorous prisoners. It is difficult to say which Ptolemy ultimately caused the Romans the greater discomfort: the royal prisoner whom Caesar degraded in the streets, or the foreign queen with whom he consorted at his villa. Soon enough Arsinoe would be banished, dispatched across the Aegean to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, a gleaming, white marble wonder of the world. Her older sister spent the winter on the less fashionable side of the Tiber. She was without word from Alexandria, as the sailing season was over, to reopen only in March. She would be for some time too without Caesar, who left Rome abruptly, early in November. He was off to Spain, for a final campaign against the Pompeians. Cleopatra had known difficult postings before—the desert of the western Sinai comes most readily to mind—but for all the beauty of the Janiculum villa and its panoramic view, this one was less than comfortable. Her welcome was not universally cordial. Rome was chilly, and wet. Latin did not come easily to a Greek speaker; Cleopatra was at a linguistic disadvantage. And in a city where women enjoyed the same legal rights as infants or chickens, the posting called upon a whole new set of skills. For good reason 46 may have felt to Cleopatra like the longest year in history, as—on account of the attenuated calendar—indeed it was.

While little about Cleopatra evoked affection abroad, all elicited curiosity. This would have imposed certain restrictions on her movements. It is difficult to believe she appeared often in unmannerly Rome. More likely Caesar visited her in his villa, which he could not have done discreetly. Ptolemies had been Roman houseguests before—Auletes had lodged with Pompey—but the relationship was dissimilar. It was next to impossible for either Caesar or Cleopatra to have done anything secretly; a curtained litter hurtled through the streets by a team of burly Syrians tended to attract attention. (Auletes had traveled about on the shoulders of eight men and with an escort of a hundred swordsmen. There is little reason to believe that his daughter interpreted pomp differently. Certainly she moved about Rome only with bodyguards, advisers, and attendants.) A great man did not travel without his scarlet cloak and retinue; by late 45, Caesar had moreover taken to parading about in red calf-high boots. And by all accounts Rome was a city in which the stones themselves seemed to talk.

Cleopatra may or may not have fully grasped the irregularity of Caesar’s tribute; gold statues were not new to her. She would in his villa have acutely felt the oddities of the situation. The very palette of Rome was different. She was accustomed to ocean views, invigorating sea breezes, to sparkling white walls and a cloudless Alexandrian sky. There was no glinting turquoise Mediterranean out her window, no purple light at the end of the day. Nor was there any rapturous architecture. Rome was monochromatic next to the blaze of color to which Cleopatra was accustomed. All was wood and plaster. Music pervaded every aspect of Alexandrian life, where the flutes and lyres, rattles and drums, were everywhere. Only reluctantly did the Romans admit such frivolities to their culture. One apologized for one’s ability to dance or play the flute well. “No one dances while he is sober,” offered Cicero, the greatest of Roman killjoys, “unless he happens to be a lunatic.”*

What Cleopatra thought of the puritans—real and purported—among whom she found herself we do not know. We know well what they thought of her. Marriage, and women, were done differently in Rome, where female authority was a meaningless concept. (Similarly, for a man to be called effeminate was the worst insult.) The Roman definition of a good woman was an inconspicuous woman, something that defied Cleopatra’s training. In Alexandria she needed to make a spectacle of herself. Here the mandate was reversed. Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia. Roman women cast their eyes down in public, where they were silent and recessive. They did not issue the dinner invitations. They were invisible in intellectual life, represented less often in art than they were in Egypt, where female workers and female pharaohs appear in painting and sculpture, in tomb scenes and on chapel walls, trapping birds, selling goods, or making offerings to the gods.

If moral turpitude began with shellfish and metastasized into purple and scarlet robes, it found its ostentatious apogee in pearls, which topped the extravagance scale in Rome. Suetonius invoked them to prove Caesar’s weakness for luxury. The story of the libertine who sacrificed a pearl to make his point was an oft-told tale, on the books long before 46 and fated to stay there, to indict others, long after. It seemed, however, tailor-made for an audacious Egyptian queen. (There are signs of confabulation as well as conflation here. Within a matter of years, Cleopatra was said to have worn “the two pearls that were the largest in the whole of history.” Pliny assigned each a value of 420 talents, which meant Cleopatra dangled the equivalent of a Mediterranean villa from each ear. The sum was the same that she had contributed to the burial of the Memphis bull.) Who else could have been so frivolous, so wanton, so ready to enchant a man that she would pluck a pearl from her lobe, dissolve it in vinegar, and swallow it, to beguile a man with magic and excess?* Such was the story that would circulate later about Cleopatra.

Caesar’s civic reforms were promising, but how and when would he put the Republic back together again? Over years of war it had been turned upside down, the constitution trampled, appointments made on whim and against the law. Caesar took few steps toward restoring traditional rights and regulations. Meanwhile his powers expanded. He took charge of most elections and decided most court cases. He spent a great deal of time settling scores, rewarding supporters, auctioning off his opponents’ properties. The Senate appeared increasingly irrelevant. Some groused that they lived in a monarchy masquerading as a republic. There were three possibilities for the future, predicted an exasperated Cicero, “endless armed conflict, eventual revival after a peace, and complete annihilation.”

It is no more surprising that Cicero called on Cleopatra in the first place than it is that he came to lash her, with a quick and brutal tongue, for the ages. Generally the great Cicero had two modes: fawning and captious. He could apply both equally well to the same individual; he was perfectly capable of maligning a man one day and swearing eternal devotion to him the next. He was a great writer, which is to say self-absorbed, with an outsize ego and a fanatical sensitivity to slights real and imagined.

Certainly Cleopatra contributed to Caesar’s downfall, although there is no evidence of imperial design on her part or on his, no treachery, or for that matter, any blinding, fatal passion. How much of a role she played is debatable. For all her persuasive talents, she was unlikely to have been much involved in domestic politics in any meaningful way. Were she and Caesar considering a joint monarchy? Possibly, but no evidence remains. Sometimes a business trip is just a business trip. Suetonius recognized the lot of the unadorned historical account, destined to be improved upon by “silly folk, who will try to use the curling-irons on his narrative.” The polymathic Nicolaus of Damascus, who tutored Cleopatra’s children, was the first to implicate Cleopatra. A century later Lucan was happy to follow that lead, neatly rolling her dual offenses against Caesar into a single line: “She aroused his greed.” Those assertions made for a better narrative than did the plain fact that Caesar had plenty of enemies for plenty of reasons, few of which had anything to do with either Egyptian queens or the Roman constitution. Even the reworking of the calendar had earned him enmity, as he had inadvertently curtailed the appointments of men in power. Those who had reason to be grateful to Caesar resented their debts. Others agonized over wartime losses. Some hoped only to upset the system. “And so,” conceded one contemporary, “every kind of man combined against him: great and small, friend an...

Not only was hers a brilliant strategic calculation—Cleopatra symbolically swathed Egypt in Caesar’s mantle, for which she could see a violent contest brewing—it was also a deft iconographical one. If Caesar had returned from Alexandria more royal than before, Cleopatra returned from Rome more godly. She vigorously embraced her role as Isis, with full emphasis on her maternal command, a novel instance of coaxing a promotion from childbearing. At festivals she appeared in her striking Isis attire. Recent events provided a powerful assist; Caesar’s assassination may have destroyed Cleopatra’s years of meticulous planning but represented a boon to the imagery. In the legend, the enemies of Osiris, Isis’s earthly partner and the supreme male divinity, savagely dismember him. Osiris leaves behind a young male heir and a devoted, quick-thinking consort. In Isis’s grief, she collects the butchered pieces, to effect his resurrection. The Ides of March handily buttressed the tale; Cleopatra emerged stronger for her loss, the great wife of a martyred deity. It did not hurt that in Rome on the first day of 42 Caesar was—in a solemn religious ceremony—declared a god.

A curious cure for baldness would be credited to Cleopatra; she was said to counsel a paste of equal parts burnt mice, burnt rag, burnt horses’ teeth, bear’s grease, deer marrow, and reed bark. Mixed with honey, the salve was to be applied to the scalp, “rubbed until it sprouts.” Plutarch holds that she concocted “all sorts of deadly poisons,” with which she experimented on prisoners. “When she saw that the speedy poisons enhanced the sharpness of death by the pain they caused,” she moved on to a survey of venomous animals. These she studied systematically, daily “watching with her own eyes as they were set one upon another.” The Talmud hails her for her “great scientific curiosity” and as “very interested in the experiments of doctors and surgeons.” Given the preponderance of medical professionals at court, the progress in the field, and the lively interest demonstrated in the natural sciences by other Eastern kings—many of whom performed experiments and wrote on biology and botany—this was likely true.

Sometimes it indeed seemed as if there were only ten women in Rome. And in Cicero’s view, Mark Antony had slept with every one of them.

Politics have long been defined as “the systematic organization of hatreds.” Certainly nothing better described Rome in the years following the Ides, when enmity rather than issues divided Caesar’s assassins, Caesar’s heirs, and the last of the Pompeians, each of whom, it seemed, had an army, an agenda, and ambitions of his own. Among the bumper crop of personal vendettas, none was more savage than that of Cicero and Mark Antony. The bad blood went back decades. Antony’s father had died when he was ten, leaving so many debts that Antony had declined his inheritance. His stepfather, a celebrated orator, had been sentenced to death on Cicero’s orders. From his father, Mark Antony inherited a joyful, capricious temperament. He was given to sulks and sprees. His mother—by all accounts a force of nature—appeared to have fostered in her reckless son a taste for competent, strong-minded women. Without them Antony arguably would have self-destructed well before March 44. Already his personal life was something of a catastrophe. He cemented the family reputation for insolvency while still in his teens. His sterling military reputation was eclipsed only by his fame as a reveler; he left tutors half-dead in his carousing wake. He was given to good living, great parties, bad women. He was generous to a fault, always easier when the house you are rashly giving away is not yours in the first place. What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: “He was a spendthrift of mon...

Octavian inevitably went from being “the boy” to “my young friend” to “this extraordinary youngster” to “that heaven-sent young man,” on whom Rome’s hopes rested. Also as Cicero ranted, Antony gained a partner in crime. Summoning every speck of evidence, rumor, and innuendo, Cicero included Fulvia, Antony’s wife of three years, in his rabid denunciations. Fulvia had participated equally in doling out appointments, auctioning off provinces, embezzling state funds, asserted Cicero. He indicted her for her greed, her ambition, her cruelty, her guile. He charged Antony with the worst crime that could be leveled against Caesar’s former lieutenant: Mark Antony, he bellowed, “would prefer to answer to a most audacious woman than the Senate and Roman people.” With his have-you-no-decency offensive Cicero settled an invaluable inheritance on Octavian, who would avail himself of each and every line, without once crediting the best ghostwriter in history.

EVEN AFTER DELLIUS’S visit, even after the specific instructions, Cleopatra stalled. She had ample reason to do so. The situation was volatile, the stakes immense. Having adroitly maneuvered her way through years of reckless Roman infighting and backstabbing, she had no intention of making a false step now. Dellius had not pressed for explanations but she owed them all the same. She had remained above the fray when the Caesarians needed her. She had issued no declarations of neutrality. Intentionally or not, she had backed her lover’s murderer. She had little choice but to offer an accounting. As a client queen, as a friend and ally of Rome, she also had little choice but to cultivate and mollify Mark Antony. While she may well have preferred to steer clear of him—she had a perfectly good idea what he wanted—Antony controlled the East. Egypt fell under his purview. He was moreover the much-lauded hero of Philippi, where he had seemed uncannily to have been everywhere and accomplished everything at once.

Confident though she may have been, contemptuous though she may have appeared, Cleopatra left nothing in her preparations to chance. It was as if she knew she was playing not only to Mark Antony but far beyond him as well. Certainly she had heard of the elaborate scenes that had greeted Antony elsewhere. Incense and entertainment had followed him across the continent. In Ephesus the women of the town had met him dressed as bacchantes, the men as fauns and satyrs. Singing his Dionysian praises, they had led him into the city, full of ivy-wrapped wands, resonant with pipes and flutes and harps and shouts of acclaim. The invitations poured in; all Asia paid tribute and vied for his favor. From Dellius as from others, Cleopatra would have known she was entering a sort of sweepstakes for Antony’s attention. She seemed determined to conjure a display so stunning it would propel Plutarch to Shakespearean heights, as it would elicit from Shakespeare his richest poetry. And she succeeded.

We know that Antony pined for Cleopatra months later, though she wound up with all the credit for the affair. As one of her sworn enemies asserted, she did not fall in love with Antony but “brought him to fall in love with her.” In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventurer and the adventuress. There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia. The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can at least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. So Cleopatra has Antony under her thumb, poised to obey her every wish, “not only because of his intimacy with her,” as Josephus has it, “but also because of being under the influence of drugs.” To claim as much is to acknowledge her power, also to insult her intelligence.

In light of what came later, Mark Antony’s Egyptian visit was assumed to have been Cleopatra’s idea and Cleopatra’s doing. Ingeniously, seductively, or magically, she spirited him away. “He suffered her to hurry him off to Alexandria,” as Plutarch has it. It was of course equally possible that Antony invited himself. He was after all doing what he was meant to do: reshaping the East and raising money. He could advance no further in his Parthian plans without Egyptian funds. He may have felt this was his best chance of securing the monies that a clever queen had promised but not yet delivered. Asia had proved poorer than anyone had realized. Egypt was rich. There was legitimate reason to survey a client kingdom, especially one that would prove an ideal base for an Eastern campaign; Antony would need a powerful fleet, something Cleopatra could provide. The alternative was forever untangling provincial affairs, which played neither to Antony’s strengths nor interests.

There are cities in which to spend a fortune and cities in which to make one; only in the rare great city can one accomplish both. Such was Cleopatra’s Alexandria, a scholarly paradise with a quick business pulse and a languorous resort culture, where the Greek penchant for commerce met the Egyptian mania for hospitality, a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons, with the hustle of heterodoxy and the aroma of opportunity thick in the air. Even the people-watching was best there.

Appian has Antony exclusively in the company of Cleopatra, “to whom his sojourn in Alexandria was wholly devoted.” He sees in her a poor influence. Antony “was often disarmed by Cleopatra, subdued by her spells, and persuaded to drop from his hands great undertakings and necessary campaigns, only to roam about and play with her on the sea-shores.” More likely the opposite was true. And while Cleopatra focused exclusively and intently on her guest, she did so without sacrificing her competitive spirit, her sense of humor, or her agenda. Here are the two on an Alexandrian afternoon, relaxing on the river or on Lake Mareotis in a fishing boat, surrounded by attendants. Mark Antony is frustrated. He commands whole armies but on this occasion somehow cannot coax a single fish from the teeming, famously fertile Egyptian waters. He is all the more mortified as Cleopatra stands beside him. Romance or no, to prove so incompetent in her presence is a torture. Antony does what any self-respecting angler would: Secretly he orders his servants to dive into the water and fasten a series of precaught fish to his hook. One after another he reels these catches in, a little too triumphantly, a little too regularly; he is an impulsive man with something to prove, never particularly good at limits. Cleopatra rarely misses a trick and does not miss this one. She feigns admiration. Her lover is a most dexterous man! Later that afternoon she sings his praises to her friends, whom she invites to ...

If Cleopatra treated Antony like a schoolboy on holiday, that was precisely how he appeared in Rome, to which he turned his back over these convivial months. He celebrated his forty-third birthday in Alexandria and yet distinguished himself mostly for his capers and caprices, ironic given that his original charge against Octavian was that he was a mere boy. (Few accusations stung a Roman more deeply. This one so riled Octavian that he would pass a law prohibiting anyone from referring to him as such.) Where Cleopatra failed to urge Antony toward his public responsibilities, dire dispatches that arrived at the end of the winter did.

Fulvia’s death was arguably her most pacific act. It opened the way for a reconciliation between Octavian and Antony, “now rid of an interfering woman whose jealousy of Cleopatra had made her fan the flames of such a serious war.” As it was easy to write an absurd and costly war down to a woman’s machinations, so it was easy to write off an accord to her demise, the more so as no one was inclined to fight in the first place.

Cleopatra was arguably doing more to unite East and West than had anyone since Alexander the Great. The sun and the moon figured in the Parthian king’s title; Cleopatra may have been sending him a message. Surely there was no better way to inaugurate a golden age than with a sun god. We know nothing of Antony’s reaction to the news but Octavian’s would have been yet more interesting. In some roundabout way, Cleopatra had seen to it that the two men were, by way of her children, again related. She did not have to broadcast word of the sensational births. News that the enterprising queen of Egypt had borne a son named Alexander—whose father was Mark Antony and whose half brother was a child of Caesar—constituted a banner headline in 39 BC. It was enough to make Cleopatra, to borrow a much later phrase, an object of gossip for the whole world.

Cleopatra could only have looked forward to celebrating the new dawn in Alexandria. Having sacrificed all after the Ides of March, she had not only regained a foothold but fared better this time around. Their pride in the newly established empire aside, how did her subjects take to her close collaboration with a second Roman? There is no trace of scandal. Her people remained focused on the practical implications of Cleopatra’s diplomacy. “It seems to me,” an eminent scholar has suggested, “that the loves and births of a female pharaoh struck them as divine matters, and that they questioned their queen only when her tax collectors pressed too stringently.” She had cleverly solved a political puzzle. The lack of resistance at home may indicate as well that she was not unduly generous with Mark Antony. She may have agreed to pay for his legions, but that Cleopatra could afford without oppressive levies on her people. Nor was there reason to believe Antony’s territorial dispositions set off alarms in Rome. They were part of a consistent foreign policy. They enriched the coffers and secured the frontiers. In Egypt, Cleopatra’s popularity could only have been at an all-time high.