Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

AMONG THE MOST famous women to have lived, Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt for twenty-two years. She lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at eighteen, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time.

At the height of her power she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands. She had a child with a married man, three more with another. She died at thirty-nine, a generation before the birth of Christ.

She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age, as an excitable rival king was reminded when he called, during her stay at his court, for her assassination.

Cleopatra’s father had thrown in his lot with Pompey the Great, the brilliant Roman general on whom good fortune seemed eternally to shine. He became the family patron. He also entered into a civil war against Julius Caesar just as, across the Mediterranean, Cleopatra ascended to the throne. In the summer of 48 BC Caesar dealt Pompey a crushing defeat in central Greece; Pompey fled to Egypt, to be stabbed and decapitated on an Egyptian beach. Cleopatra was twenty-one.

We do not know if Cleopatra loved either Antony or Caesar, but we do know that she got each to do her bidding.

George Bernard Shaw lists among his sources for Caesar and Cleopatra his own imagination.

Cleopatra’s Egypt produced no fine historian. One can only read accordingly. The sources may be flawed, but they are the only sources we have. There is no universal agreement on most of the basic details of her life, no consensus on who her mother was, how long Cleopatra lived in Rome, how often she was pregnant, whether she and Antony married, what transpired at the battle that sealed her fate, how she died.

(The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra.

She never knew anyone named Octavian. The man who vanquished and deposed her, prompted her suicide, and largely packaged her for posterity was born Gaius Octavius. By the time he entered Cleopatra’s life in a meaningful way he called himself Gaius Julius Caesar, after his illustrious great-uncle, her lover, who adopted him in his will. We know him today as Augustus, a title he assumed only three years after Cleopatra’s death. He appears here as Octavian, two Caesars remaining, as ever, one too many.

Alexandria is flatter today than it was in Cleopatra’s lifetime. It is oblivious to its ancient street plan; it no longer gleams white. The Nile is nearly two miles farther east. The dust, the sultry sea air, Alexandria’s melting purple sunsets, are unchanged. Human nature remains remarkably consistent, the physics of history immutable. Firsthand accounts continue to diverge wildly.* For well over two thousand years, a myth has been able to outrun and outlive a fact.

Except where noted, all dates are BC.

Celebrated as much for his speed as for his intuition, Julius Caesar was not an easy man to surprise. He was forever arriving before expected and in advance of the messengers sent to announce him.

In another realm the young Egyptian queen had little in common with the “love-sated man already past his prime.” (Caesar was fifty-two.) His amorous conquests were as legendary and as varied as his military feats.

BEHIND EVERY GREAT fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptolemies were fabulously rich. They were descended not from the Egyptian pharaohs whose place they assumed but from the scrappy, hard-living Macedonians (tough terrain breeds tough men, Herodotus had already warned) who produced Alexander the Great. Within months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy—the most enterprising of his generals, his official taster, a childhood intimate, and by some accounts a distant relative—had laid claim to Egypt.

Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander the Great’s body. It had been headed for Macedonia. Would it not be far more useful, reasoned young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral cortege, in Egypt, ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had founded only decades earlier?

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.

Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world.

They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. 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...

The Nile further reversed the laws of nature by swelling in summer and subsiding in winter; the Egyptians harvested their fields in April and sowed them in November. Even planting was inverted: the Egyptian first sowed, then plowed, to cover the seed in loose earth. This made perfect sense in the kind of aberrant kingdom where one kneaded dough with one’s feet and wrote from right to left.

From a distance Alexandria blinded, a sumptuous suffusion of gleaming marble, over which presided its towering lighthouse. Its celebrated skyline was reproduced on lamps, mosaics, tiles. The city’s architecture announced its magpie ethos, forged of a frantic accretion of cultures. In this greatest of Mediterranean ports, papyrus fronds topped Ionic columns.

Oversize sphinxes and falcons lined the paths to Greek temples. Crocodile gods in Roman dress decorated Doric tombs. “Built in the finest situation in the world,” Alexandria stood sentry over a land of fabled riches and fantastic creatures, a favorite enigma to the Roman world. To a man like Julius Caesar, who for all his travels had never before set foot in Egypt, few of its astonishments would have been as great as the quick-witted young woman who had emerged from the traveler’s sack.

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. No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra’s world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer’s work was the Bible of the day.

He was the “prince of literature”; his 15,693 lines provided the moral, political, historical, and religious context, the great deeds and the ruling principles, the intellectual atlas and moral compass. The educated man cited him, paraphrased him, alluded to him. It was entirely fair to say that children like Cleopatra were—as a near contemporary had it—“nursed in their learning by Homer, and swaddled in his verses.” 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.

Cleopatra knew her Aesop’s fables,

Cleopatra tackled none of those texts on her own. She read aloud, or was read to by teachers or servants.

Silent reading was less common, in public or private.

TO CAESAR, THEN, Cleopatra was in some ways profoundly familiar. She was also a living link to Alexander the Great, the exquisite product of a highly refined civilization, heir to a dazzling intellectual tradition. Alexandrians had been studying astronomy when Rome was little more than a village. What was reborn with the Renaissance was on many fronts the Alexandria that Cleopatra’s forebears had built.

Ancient sources indicate that the great library included 500,000 scrolls, which would appear to be a hopeless exaggeration; 100,000 may be closer to the truth. In any event the collection dwarfed all prior libraries and included every volume written in Greek.

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.

Caesar may well have stayed to that end. A stable Egypt was as critical to his plans as to Cleopatra’s. Nearly alone in the Mediterranean, Egypt produced more grain than it consumed. Cleopatra could single-handedly feed Rome. The reverse was also true; she could starve that city if she cared to. For that reason Caesar was disinclined to install a countryman in Alexandria. A reliable non-Roman was the best solution. It is clear that Caesar trusted Cleopatra

Cleopatra’s home was the most productive agricultural land in the Mediterranean, the one in which crops appeared to plant and water themselves.

Alexander the Great was further from Cleopatra than 1776 is to our century, yet Alexander remained always vividly, urgently present. While 1,120 years separated Cleopatra from the greatest story of her time, the fall of Troy remained a steadfast point of reference. The past was at all times within reach, a nearly religious awe aimed in its direction. This was especially true in Egypt, which had a passion for history, and which for two millennia already had kept a written

The greatest of Egypt’s industries—wheat, glass, papyrus, linen, oils, and unguents—essentially constituted royal monopolies.

Presumably Cleopatra made the crossing in a naval galley, most likely a slender, square-rigged, 120-foot trireme, of which there were many in her fleet. A galley was a swift ship, with a crew of about 170 rowers and room for a small group of passengers in the stern. The retinue and gifts followed behind.

CLEOPATRA HAD IN Rome the problem of any celebrity abroad: she knew few people, but everyone knew her. Her presence loomed large,

When spring rolled around and the sea reopened, Cleopatra may have sailed home, to return to Rome later in the year. Two consecutive visits seem more likely than a single extended one; she could hardly have justified an eighteen-month absence, no matter how confident she felt of her authority in Egypt. That would have entailed a grueling amount of travel, though the southbound trip was a less taxing one. Assuming she returned to Alexandria in 45, she set out in late March or early April, by which time the northeasterly squalls had abated, the thunder and lightning off the coast of Egypt with them.

“The arrogance of the Queen herself when she was living on the estate across the Tiber makes my blood boil to recall,” Cicero fumed in mid-44.

During Cleopatra’s stay, Caesar comported himself as the man who had won 302 battles, who had fought the Gauls no fewer than thirty times, who “was impossible to terrify and was victorious at the end of every campaign.” On the other hand, he was ill inclined to compromise. He ignored tradition. He behaved too much like a military commander, too little like a politician. The flames of discontent broke out regularly, ably fanned by Cicero and any number of other ex-Pompeians.

In February 44, Caesar was named dictator for life. Further privileges rained down on him. He was to wear triumphal dress and to occupy a raised ivory and gold chair, suspiciously like a throne. His image was to grace Roman coins, a first for a living Roman.

UNTIL 44 BC, the Ides of March were best known as a springtime frolic, an occasion for serious drinking, like so many others on the Roman calendar. A celebration of the ancient goddess of ends and beginnings, the Ides amounted to a sort of raucous, reeling New Year’s. Bands of revelers picnicked into the night along the banks of the Tiber, where they camped in makeshift huts under a full moon. It was a festival often indelibly recalled nine months later. In 44 the day dawned overcast; toward the end of the cloudy morning, Caesar set off by litter for the Senate, to finalize arrangements for his absence. The young and distinguished Publius Cornelius Dolabella hoped to be named consul in his place, as did Mark Antony, Dolabella’s rival in Caesar’s affections.

The Senate assembled that day in one of the large chambers adjoining Pompey’s theater. All rose as Caesar entered, a laurel wreath on his head; at about eleven o’clock, he settled into his new golden chair. He was quickly surrounded by colleagues, many of them devoted friends. One extended a petition, which occasioned a flurry of importuning and kissing of hands. Caesar moved to dismiss the request, at which his petitioner—interrupting him in midsentence—reached out to yank Caesar’s toga roughly from his shoulder. It was the predetermined signal. With it the group closed in, baring daggers. Caesar twisted away from the initial knife, which only grazed him, but found himself powerless against the rain of blows that followed.

Every conspirator had agreed to participate in the attack and did so, stabbing wildly at Caesar’s face, his thighs, his chest, and, occasionally, at one another. Caesar attempted to wrestle away, turning his sinewy neck “from one to another of them with furious cries like a wild beast.” He managed finally to emit a single groan and to muffle his face in the fabric of his robe—precisely as Pompey had done off the coast of Egypt—before sinking to the floor. By the time his assailants rushed to the chamber doors, Caesar lay crumpled on the ground in a soggy purple heap, skewered twenty-three times, his clothing “bloodstained and cut to ribbons.” Their togas and senatorial shoes splattered in blood, the murderer...

In the meeting hall Caesar’s body lay alone and untended for several hours, drenched in blood. No one dared touch it. Only late in the afternoon did three slave boys carry it away, amid hysterical weeping and mourning, from doorways and rooftops.

it is unlikely that the news affected anyone as profoundly as Cleopatra. No matter how it registered on a personal level, Caesar’s death represented a catastrophic political blow. She had lost her champion. Her situation was now insecure at best. The anxiety was great. Were his friends and relatives also to be murdered? Certainly Mark Antony—by rank the next in command—assumed so. Disguised as a servant, he went into hiding. When he resurfaced it was with a breastplate under his tunic. Those involved in the attack changed their clothes and vanished, as did their defenders. (Cicero approved of the murder but played no part in it. He fled as well.) Given Caesar’s anticipated departure, Cleopatra may well have been on the verge of leaving Rome by mid-March. She could by no means have anticipated this finale, however.

Cleopatra was twenty-six years old.

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.

Under Cleopatra, Alexandria enjoyed a robust intellectual revival. Gathering a coterie of thinkers around her, Cleopatra reconstituted a Greek intelligentsia in the city, to which she had no difficulty luring scholars.

Antony replied to Cleopatra’s greeting with a dinner invitation. What happened next was revealing of both parties and the kind of behavior Cicero had deplored in each. Antony was a little too amenable, Cleopatra decidedly high-handed. It was the mark of status to give the first dinner; she insisted that he come to her, with whatever friends he desired.

Eventually Mark Antony reciprocated, inviting Cleopatra to a feast of his own.