Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one.

Thirteen hundred years separate Cleopatra from Nefertiti. The pyramids—to which Cleopatra almost certainly introduced Julius Caesar—already sported graffiti. The Sphinx had undergone a major restoration, a thousand years earlier.

Our most comprehensive sources never met Cleopatra. Plutarch was born seventy-six years after she died. (He was working at the same time as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)

To restore Cleopatra is as much to salvage the few facts as to peel away the encrusted myth and the hoary propaganda. She was a Greek woman whose history fell to men whose futures lay with Rome, the majority of them officials of the empire.

As has been noted, there were no plain, unvarnished stories in antiquity. The point was to dazzle.

Cleopatra’s was an era of outsize, intriguing personalities. At its end the greatest actors of the age exit abruptly. A world comes crashing down after them.

By modern standards too hers was a curious predicament. To make her mark, for her story to begin, this woman had to smuggle herself back into the house.

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.

But the standouts in the generations immediately preceding Cleopatra’s were—for vision, ambition, intellect—universally female.

there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.

Content arguably took second place to delivery, “for,” noted Cicero, “as reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.”

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman. But she was less a source of discomfort in Egypt than elsewhere.

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.

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.

At her side Caesar could have marveled at twenty-eight centuries of architecture. Already visitors had burgled—and scrawled graffiti over—the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.* Already by the spring of 47 one of the seven wonders of the world lay in ruins. Cleopatra’s country had been in the hospitality business long before the rest of the world so much as suspected gracious living existed.

There was good reason why Cleopatra’s subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions.

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.

the time-tested ingredients for a morning-after pill were salt, mouse excrement, honey, and resin.

The Egyptians were willing to submit to a female pharaoh, but as Berenice IV’s messy marital history made clear, a woman needed a male consort, if only as a ballerina does in a Balanchine pas de deux, as ornament rather than support.

Forty-seven years later the protean Isis would cede her place to a very different single mother, who appropriated her imagery wholesale.

The relationship was symbiotic: a god on earth, a pharaoh was as necessary to the priests theologically as were the priests to Cleopatra economically and politically. Priests functioned as lawyers and notaries, the temples as manufacturing centers, cultural institutions, economic hubs.

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.

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.

For a woman who was to be celebrated for her masterly manipulation of Rome, Cleopatra’s story would be entrusted primarily to that city’s historians; she effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room.

At some point after July—a newly eponymous month that occurred in 44 for the first time, to much gnashing of teeth at Cicero’s address—Caesarion was named pharaoh.

It did not hurt that in Rome on the first day of 42 Caesar was—in a solemn religious ceremony—declared a god.

family trinity, and the spiritual rebirth.

She established a boat shrine at Koptos, farther north; and built a small sanctuary celebrating the births of divine children behind the main temple at Hermonthis, near Luxor.

Certainly in the course of them he had learned that the populace considered it their business to prolong discord, that they built up demagogues for the pleasure of knocking them down, that they encouraged them to destroy each other.

As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. 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.”

WE MUST OFTEN SHIFT THE SAILS WHEN WE WISH TO ARRIVE IN PORT “Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.”

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.

In a semiliterate world, the imagery mattered.

To him Cleopatra sent word—as much a marvel of diplomatic craft as of cosmic staging—that Venus was arrived “to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia.” It was a very different approach from that of the girl in the hemp sack, though it yielded comparable results.

lights she had strung through the tree branches overhead.

As Antony must appear the lesser man, Cleopatra becomes a more powerful woman. She played in 41 not only to a different audience, but to a different choir.

The poet pinned messianic hopes on a child who was yet to be born, a savior who would usher in a new dawn and reign over a world of piety, peace, and plenty.

Again he exultantly passed himself off as Dionysus, his preferred form of address. He allowed Octavia—who quickly bore him a second daughter—to be hailed as Athena.

Surrounded by turreted walls and a series of square, thirty-foot towers, Jerusalem was an eminent commercial center, rich in the arts.

The Jews linked Cleopatra’s rule with a golden age and with the coming of the Messiah.

the accessories of kingship unnerved Romans even more than did autocracy itself, which they had tolerated in a more subtle version for at least a decade.

Octavian wrung the most mileage from Antony’s affair with Cleopatra. She allowed him to recycle the oldest trope: the allergy to the powerful woman was sturdier even than that to monarchy, or to the depraved East. Whether or not Cleopatra controlled Antony, she unequivocally permitted Octavian to control the narrative.

Already it was acknowledged “that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women.”

At this point her interests substantially diverged from Antony’s. He could hope for little more than a brilliant last stand. She fought to preserve a dynasty, if not a country.

“To be so long prey to fear is surely worse than the actuality we are afraid of,” Cicero had observed.

Not only was the snake a potent symbol of Egypt, where coiled cobras had adorned pharaonic brows for millennia, but snakes crawled all over Isis statues as well. They had insinuated themselves in the Dionysian cult. Iconography aside, it is easy to see what someone is trying to communicate when he pairs a lady with a snake. Alexander the Great’s mother—as murderous and maniacal a Macedonian princess who ever lived—kept serpents as pets. She used them to terrify men. Before her came Eve, Medusa, Electra, and the Erinyes; when a woman teams up with a snake, a moral storm threatens somewhere.

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.

No one profited more from Cleopatra’s death than Herod, who hosted the Romans again on their northbound trip.

Cleopatra earned a second backhanded tribute: In her wake, a golden age of women dawned in Rome. High-born wives and sisters suddenly enjoyed a role in public life. They interceded with ambassadors, counseled husbands, traveled abroad, commissioned temples and sculptures.

Augustus’s ego is embedded in the calendar, where it remains to this day, commemorating the fall of Alexandria and Rome’s reprieve from a foreign menace.