Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs.

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.

With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century.

she hailed from the intoxicating land of sex and excess. It is not difficult to understand why Caesar became history, Cleopatra a legend.

The end result is a nineteenth-century British life of Napoleon or a twentieth-century history of America, were it to have been written by Chairman Mao.

She was a Greek woman whose history fell to men whose futures lay with Rome, the majority of them officials of the empire.

Cleopatra was not necessarily beautiful, but her wealth—and her palace—left a Roman gasping.

(The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks played no role.)

Pompey had been a particular friend of her father’s. A brilliant general, Pompey had for decades piled up victories, on land and sea, subduing nation after nation, in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Both Cleopatra and her estranged brother, Ptolemy XIII, were in his debt.

What that “harlot queen” was unlikely to have had when she materialized before Caesar in October 48 was any sexual experience whatever.

Alexander played as active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him.

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.

Amid the Macedonian aristocracy there was ample precedent for murdering your sibling, none for marrying her. Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies carried the practice to an extreme.

Over the generations the family indulged in what has been termed “an orgy of pillage and murder,” lurid even by colorful Macedonian standards.

The two quarreled; Ptolemy killed their fourteen-year-old son, chopped him into pieces, and delivered a chest of mutilated limbs to the palace gates on the eve of her birthday. She retaliated by publicly displaying the body parts. The Alexandrians went wild with rage. The greater astonishment was what came next. Just over a decade later, the couple reconciled.

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.

Even without a regnant mother, Cleopatra could look to any number of female forebears who built temples, raised fleets, waged military campaigns, and, with their consorts, governed Egypt. Arguably she had more powerful female role models than any other queen in history.

Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.

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.

She played with terra-cotta dolls and dollhouses and tea sets and miniature furniture, with dice and rocking horses and knucklebones and pet mice, though we will never know what she did with her dolls and whether, like Indira Gandhi, she engaged them in insurrections and battles.

Even before she graduated to sentences, even before she learned to read, the love affair with Homer began. “Homer was not a man, but a god,” figured among the early penmanship lessons, as did the first cantos of the Iliad.

Alexander the Great was believed to have slept always with a copy of Homer under his pillow; any cultivated Greek, Cleopatra included, could recite some part of the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart.

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.

“The better one gets to know Greek,” went the wisdom, “the more a scoundrel one becomes.” It was the tongue of high art and low morals, the dialect of sex manuals, a language “with fingers of its own.”

For centuries both before and after Cleopatra the most impressive thing a doctor could say was that he had trained in Alexandria. It was where you hoped your children’s tutor had studied.

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.

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.”

“One loyal friend,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.”

For the Romans Cleopatra’s country remained a perennial nuisance, in the words of a modern historian “a loss if destroyed, a risk to annex, a problem to govern.”

It is possible that, as his eldest surviving daughter, Cleopatra served briefly as his co-regent in his final months, certain that—unlike so many of her ancestors, including Auletes himself—she was actively groomed for the throne.

Had her father in his lifetime married her to Caesar (an impossibility on any number of counts), she would have been seen altogether differently. What unsettled those who wrote her history was her independence of mind, the enterprising spirit.

Cleopatra was every bit Caesar’s equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.

The ancient historians were mistaken about the primordial details, wholly accurate on the subject of Egypt’s fecundity. Cleopatra’s home was the most productive agricultural land in the Mediterranean, the one in which crops appeared to plant and water themselves.

Servant: “What excuses shall I make if I am away from the house for a long time?” Andromache: “You will find no shortage of pretexts. After all, you are a woman.” —EURIPIDES

With Caesarion—or little Caesar, as the Alexandrians nicknamed Ptolemy XV Caesar—on her lap, Cleopatra had no difficulty ruling as a female king. Even before he began to babble, Caesarion accomplished a masterly feat. He rendered his feckless uncle wholly irrelevant.

Such was the popularity of Isis that when the order to dismantle her temples was issued in 50, no workman would pick up an ax to do so. A consul was obliged to strip off his toga and minister the first blows himself.

It is difficult to determine which came first, whether Isis accounted for the supremacy of women in Egypt, or whether the Ptolemaic queens reinforced her eminence.* Certainly she introduced an equality of the sexes.

Motherhood not only enhanced Cleopatra’s authority—in her day the Egyptian queen was more earth mother than femme fatale—but solidified her links with the native priests, to whom she granted significant privileges. In this she continued the work of her father. Even while abroad he had distinguished himself as a prolific builder of temples and had cultivated his relations with the Egyptian clergy.

Many temples had Nilotic measuring columns, monitored secretly and obsessively by their priests. Daily they compared those figures to the previous year’s. From them Cleopatra’s officials could assess harvests and calculate taxes.

She was magistrate, high priest, queen, and goddess. She was also—on a day-to-day basis and far more frequently—chief executive officer. She headed both the secular and the religious bureaucracies. She was Egypt’s merchant in chief.

A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily—with wheat, barley, lentils—to feed Alexandria alone.

The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history.

Unparalleled in its sophistication, the system was hugely effective and, for Cleopatra, hugely lucrative. The greatest of Egypt’s industries—wheat, glass, papyrus, linen, oils, and unguents—essentially constituted royal monopolies.

Royal functionaries appropriated lands, requisitioned houses, pocketed monies, confiscated boats, ordered arbitrary arrests, levied illicit taxes. They devised sophisticated extortion rackets. They preyed equally on Greeks and on Egyptians, on temple officials and peasants.

So prevalent were tax disputes that Ptolemy II had centuries earlier forbidden lawyers to represent clients in such cases.

In certain ways the two cultures remained separate, just as certain habits—as Cleopatra and Caesar were to discover—resisted transplant. A Greek cabbage inexplicably lost all flavor when grown in Egyptian soil.

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.

Rome had recently overtaken Alexandria in population; in 46 it was home to nearly 1 million people. On all other levels it qualified as a provincial backwater. It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room.

The more exotic the prisoner the better; Caesar’s African procession—the last of the performances of 46—included the five-year-old African prince who, in an odd twist of events, was to marry Cleopatra’s daughter.*

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.”*