Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

It manifested itself the time-honored way: The Roman waxed superior. His was hardly the first civilization merrily to impugn the one it aspired to be. So the pyramids—marvels of engineering and of ancient exactitude, constructed with primitive tools and equally primitive arithmetic—could be reduced to “idle and foolish ostentations of royal wealth.”

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.)

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.

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 needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.

Resentment accumulated in equal measure, although it was the Senate itself that “encouraged him and puffed him up, only to find fault with him on this very account and to spread slanderous reports how glad he was to accept them and how he behaved more haughtily as a result of them.”

Cleopatra looked on as Rome proceeded instead to demolish itself. It lurched through a dull, damp, dark year, one in which the sun refused to emerge, “never showing its ordinary radiance at its rising, and giving but a weak and feeble heat.” (The reason was probably the eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily, though—the contemporary curling irons at work—Rome preferred the political explanation closer to home.)

The timing was right; Egypt was weak with famine, Cleopatra vulnerable in the absence of her Roman legions. She later insisted that “she had not been terrified of Cassius,” but she would have been foolish not to have been.

(It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.)

Politics have long been defined as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”

Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.”

Octavia had at twenty-nine all the makings of the long-suffering political wife. She was intelligent but not independent, a mediator rather than a manipulator. While she had studied philosophy, she harbored no political ambitions. “A wonder of a woman,” she was an acknowledged beauty, graceful, fine-featured, with a glossy mane of magnificent hair.

Rarely had anyone assembled “an army more conspicuous for prowess, endurance, or youthful vigor.” Antony’s “made all Asia quiver.”

The Armenian king, Artavasdes, had encouraged Antony to invade neighboring Media (modern Azerbaijan, a land of fierce tribes and towering mountain ranges), then double-crossed him.

Cleopatra stood at the helm of the mighty power that a nervous Roman had a century earlier predicted Egypt might one day be, “if ever that kingdom found capable leaders.”

Cleopatra’s palace was certainly the most luxurious building in the Mediterranean world in 33, but it never looked as magnificent as it did from Rome that winter.

The logic was simple. The Egyptian queen had subdued Antony. Rome, Octavian warned, was next. At the end of October he declared war—on Cleopatra.

Surely the great and glorious people who had subdued the Germans, trampled the Gauls, and invaded the Britons, who had conquered Hannibal and burned Carthage, were not going to tremble before “this pestilence of a woman”?

That Cleopatra’s monument was adjacent to a temple of Isis essentially means it could have been anywhere. The most recent theory is that Antony and Cleopatra’s final resting place is twenty miles west of Alexandria, on a sun-bleached hillside in Taposiris Magna, overlooking the Mediterranean. Neither the tomb nor the mausoleum (they were almost certainly separate structures) has been found.

Cleopatra is said to have brought down the curtain on an age, although of course from the Egyptian perspective Antony too could be said to have done so. It is easy to forget he was Cleopatra’s undoing every bit as much as she was his.

THE REWRITING OF history began almost immediately. Not only did Mark Antony disappear from the record, but Actium wondrously transformed itself into a major engagement, a resounding victory, a historical turning point.

Her career also coincided with the birth of Latin literature; it was Cleopatra’s curse to inspire its great poets, happy to expound on her shame, in a language inhospitable to her and all she represented.

(Menander’s fourth-century adage—“A man who teaches a woman to write should recognize that he is providing poison to an asp”—was still being copied out by schoolchildren hundreds of years after her death.)

We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty.