Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

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

He magnified Cleopatra to hyperbolic proportions so as to do the same with his victory—and so as to smuggle his real enemy, his former brother-in-law, out of the picture. 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.

(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.)

Many queens have risen from obscurity, but Cleopatra is the only one to have emerged on the world stage from inside a sturdy sack, the kind of bag into which one customarily stuffed rolls of papyrus or transported a small fortune in gold.

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

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.

If all the wisdoms of the ancient world could be said to have been collected in one place, that place was Alexandria. Cleopatra was its direct beneficiary. She knew that the moon had an effect on tides, that the Earth was spherical. She knew of the existence of the equator, the value of pi, the latitude of Marseilles, the behavior of linear perspective, the utility of a lightning conductor. She knew that one could sail from Spain to India, a voyage that was not to be made for another 1,500 years, though she herself would consider making it, in reverse.

The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself.

Both Cleopatra and Caesar manifested the intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them apart from their peers, insofar as either had peers.

The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history. No matter who farmed it—Egyptian peasant, Greek settler, temple priest—most land was royal land.

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.

As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

“No one dances while he is sober,” offered Cicero, the greatest of Roman killjoys, “unless he happens to be a lunatic.”

He was a great writer, which is to say self-absorbed, with an outsize ego and a fanatical sensitivity to slights real and imagined.

In the annals of indelible entrances—the wooden horse into Troy; Christ into Jerusalem; Benjamin Franklin into Philadelphia; Henry IV, Charles Lindbergh, Charles de Gaulle, into Paris; Howard Carter into King Tut’s tomb; the Beatles onto Ed Sullivan’s stage—Cleopatra’s alone lifts off the page in iridescent color, amid inexhaustible, expensive clouds of incense, a sensational, simultaneous assault on every sense.

Cleopatra took to Antony’s humor with earthy gusto: “Perceiving that his raillery was broad and gross, and savored more of the soldier than the courtier, she rejoined in the same taste, and fell into it at once, without any sort of reluctance or reserve.” Having established herself as a sovereign, having flaunted her wealth, she assumed the role of boon companion. It is unlikely that anyone in her entourage had ever seen this particular Cleopatra before.

Fulvia was wealthy and well connected, as shrewd and courageous as she was beautiful. For her Antony had thrown over his long-term mistress, the most popular actress in Rome. Nor was Fulvia one to stay home and spin wool. Rather “she wished to rule a ruler and command a commander.”