Cleopatra: A Life Read online

  What Cleopatra thought of the puritans—real and purported—among whom she found herself we do not know. We know well what they thought of her. 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.) The Roman definition of a good woman was an inconspicuous woman, something that defied Cleopatra’s training. In Alexandria she needed to make a spectacle of herself. Here the mandate was reversed. Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia. Roman women cast their eyes down in public, where they were silent and recessive. They did not issue the dinner invitations. They were invisible in intellectual life, represented less often in art than they were in Egypt, where female workers and female pharaohs appear in painting and sculpture, in tomb scenes and on chapel walls, trapping birds, selling goods, or making offerings to the gods.

  For a foreign sovereign the rules—like the sumptuary laws—did not entirely apply, but Cleopatra could not have felt at her ease.* As always, what kept women pure was the drudge’s life. ( Juvenal supplied the traditional formula: “Hard work, short sleep, hands chafed and hardened” from housework.) As a marriage crasher who had somehow hustled herself into Venus’s exalted company, Cleopatra unsettled Rome on any number of counts: she was female and foreign, an Eastern monarch in what still believed itself to be a king-crushing republic, a stand-in for Isis, whose cult was suspect and subversive and whose temples were notorious spots for assignations. Cleopatra confused the categories and flouted convention. Even by modern standards, she posed problems of protocol. If she was the mistress of a Roman dictator, was she mistress of the Roman world as well? No matter how she comported herself—at all times she seems to have been as deft with her image as her person—she broke every rule in the book. A queen at home, she was a courtesan out of her country. And she was something more dangerous still: a courtesan with means. Cleopatra was not merely economically independent, but richer than any man in Rome.

  Her very wealth—the same wealth that had fed Rome during the triumphs—impugned her morals. To wax eloquent on someone’s embossed silver, his sumptuous carpets, his marble statuary, was to indict him. The implications were greater for the lesser sex. “There’s nothing a woman doesn’t allow herself, nothing she considers disgusting, once she has put an emerald choker around her neck and has fastened giant pearls to her elongated ears,” went the logic. In that respect the length of her ears would do more to seal Cleopatra’s fate than that of her nose.* Even assuming she had left her best jewelry in Alexandria, she was synonymous in Rome with the “reckless extravagance” of that world. It was no less than her birthright. (A proper Roman woman considered her children her jewels.) By Roman standards, even Cleopatra’s eunuchs were rich. This meant that every unpardonable evil in the profligacy family attached itself to her. Well before she became the sorceress of legend—a reckless, careless destroyer of men—she was suspect as an extravagant Easterner, a reckless, careless destroyer of wealth. If moral turpitude began with shellfish and metastasized into purple and scarlet robes, it found its ostentatious apogee in pearls, which topped the extravagance scale in Rome. Suetonius invoked them to prove Caesar’s weakness for luxury. The story of the libertine who sacrificed a pearl to make his point was an oft-told tale, on the books long before 46 and fated to stay there, to indict others, long after. It seemed, however, tailor-made for an audacious Egyptian queen. (There are signs of confabulation as well as conflation here. Within a matter of years, Cleopatra was said to have worn “the two pearls that were the largest in the whole of history.” Pliny assigned each a value of 420 talents, which meant Cleopatra dangled the equivalent of a Mediterranean villa from each ear. The sum was the same that she had contributed to the burial of the Memphis bull.) 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.

  Neither the magic nor the excess was likely to have been much on display over the winter of 46. Cleopatra clearly frequented some fashionable addresses, though it was difficult to believe she was not often at home in Caesar’s villa, surrounded solely by her advisers and retainers. Some of those courtiers knew their way around Rome, having lobbied for her father’s notorious restoration. She lived these months in Latin; whatever her proficiency in that language, she discovered that certain concepts did not translate. Even the sense of humor was different, broad and salty in Rome where it was ironic and allusive in Alexandria. Literal-minded, the Romans took themselves seriously. Alexandrian irreverence and exuberance were in scant supply.

  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. One did not brave the gales in winter. One did so only with trepidation in the spring, once “the leaves at the top of the fig tree are as big as the footprint a crow leaves as it goes.” If Cleopatra indeed sailed home early in 45, she was again in Rome by the fall. Only an interim return to Alexandria makes sense of Suetonius’s account, in which Caesar saw Cleopatra off from Rome. He would not have a second opportunity to do so.

  To Suetonius, working from a broad collection of sources if over a century and a half later, the parting was as reluctant as the about-face on the Nile. The Roman commander “did not let her leave until he had laden her with high honours and rich gifts.” He acknowledged Caesarion as his son and “allowed her to give his name to the child.” There was no reason for him to hesitate to do so. At least in 45, Caesar’s plans could only be furthered by an Eastern heir and a living link to Alexander the Great. He was also conceding the obvious. If he had not already begun to do so, two-year-old Caesarion soon enough resembled his father in looks and manner. The acknowledgment may have been the point of the reunion; Caesarion’s recognition was easily worth any number of trips across the Mediterranean. As one historian has it—and as many have noted under similar circumstances before and since—their child “was her best card if she aimed at pinning Caesar down to a previous agreement or promise.” The nature of that promise eludes us, aside from formal recognition as a friend of Rome, which had cost Cleopatra’s father the astounding sum of 6,000 talents.

  How else to account for the extended Roman stay or stays? There was too much at stake to subscribe to sentiment over politics. Caesar had summoned Cleopatra once before; his own motives over these eighteen months are among the most probed and least understood in history. It is plausible that the two were planning some kind of future together, as many would conclude, to Caesar’s discredit. At the end of her life Cleopatra had in hand a clutch of passionate, admiring letters from Caesar, at least some of which he must have written to her between 48 and 46. Here was the historical version of that beautiful vase of poisonous snakes. It is possible that Cleopatra felt she needed to press her case personally with Caesar’s colleagues, to confirm that Egypt was to remain a friend and ally of Rome under her rule. The Senate was a less than cohesive body, invested in private agendas and by no means unanimously inclined toward Caesar’s. She knew intimately of its factions; to broaden her base of support abroad was to secure the throne at home. (Cicero’s take on official Rome was less flattering: “A more raffish assemblage never sat down in a low-grade music hall,” he huffed about a jury of his peers.) Cleopatra’s second visit would have coincided with Caesar’s a
utumn return from Spain in 45, by which time he expected to turn to a reorganization of the East. She could not afford to be left out of that conversation, if only for the sake of Cyprus, which formally belonged to her brother, and which had a tendency to resist her authority. If Cleopatra had greater plans still, they are lost to us today. Certainly it was easy to assign her spectacular, designing motives; Rome was accustomed to scheming Ptolemies. What survives instead is the cost of Cleopatra’s reunion with Caesar. It was ruinous. While she may have spent her days as quietly as Homer’s Penelope, she wound up more like a calamity-causing Helen of Troy. This was to be her illogical adventure.

  V

  MAN IS BY NATURE A POLITICAL CREATURE

  “O would that the female sex were nowhere to be found—but in my lap!”

  —EURIPIDES

  “I DON’T KNOW how a man of any sense can be happy at the present time,” Cicero had grumbled shortly before Cleopatra first set foot in Rome. After an appalling decade of war, the mood in Rome was sour, that of Cicero—its most prominent citizen, and the most articulate of its discontents—even more so. For some months the city had been in a state of “general perturbation and chaos,” as Cleopatra was well aware. Her intelligence would have been detailed. She and her courtiers enjoyed contacts at high levels of society. She could afford to neglect no feature of the political landscape. Throughout town, anxiety about the future was universal. Caesar’s civic reforms were promising, but how and when would he put the Republic back together again? Over years of war it had been turned upside down, the constitution trampled, appointments made on whim and against the law. Caesar took few steps toward restoring traditional rights and regulations. Meanwhile his powers expanded. He took charge of most elections and decided most court cases. He spent a great deal of time settling scores, rewarding supporters, auctioning off his opponents’ properties. The Senate appeared increasingly irrelevant. Some groused that they lived in a monarchy masquerading as a republic. There were three possibilities for the future, predicted an exasperated Cicero, “endless armed conflict, eventual revival after a peace, and complete annihilation.”

  When Caesar returned from Spain that fall he had annihilated the surviving Pompeians. The civil war was, Caesar announced, finally over. He settled in Rome for what was to be his longest uninterrupted stay in fourteen years. Whether it was conducted circumspectly or not, he and Cleopatra continued their affair. To many her reasons for being in Rome may have been as opaque as they are to us. She had experience with unpopularity; it would have come in handy now. She lived at a less than desirable address, on a slippery grade between superiority and slight. At the same time, it is impossible to believe that she failed to elicit brisk curiosity, if not starry-eyed admiration. She presumably continued her father’s generous gift-giving tradition; he had handed out lavish bribes and incurred great debts, equally fine reasons to seek out his daughter. She was intellectually agile, which always impressed Romans.

  Fashion paused to acknowledge her presence; Cleopatra set off a brief vogue for an elaborate hairstyle, in which rows of braids were knotted cornrow-style and caught in a bun behind the head. Rome was moreover a stratified, status-obsessed society. Rank mattered; learning mattered; money mattered. Cleopatra was a member of the elite, to whom the social mores were familiar. So far as the conversation went, a sophisticated Roman dinner was little different from a sophisticated Alexandrian dinner. A subtle and clever guest, Cleopatra would have warmed to the political gossip and to the kind of learned, leisurely discourse prized in Rome, the brand of talk that was said to improve the wine. In the definition of an erudite contemporary, the ideal dinner companion was “neither a chatterbox nor a mute.” Over the course of several late afternoon hours, he discoursed fluently on a variety of political, scientific, and artistic subjects, taking aim at the eternal questions: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Why does distance vision improve with age? Why do Jews shun pork? Cleopatra had Caesar’s favor; she could not have been friendless. (For his part, Caesar paid no heed to the tongues that wagged over her presence. “He was not at all concerned, however, about this,” Dio assures us.) At Caesar’s villa she was surrounded by distinguished intellectuals and seasoned diplomats. She was refined, generous, charismatic. Some impressions may well have been favorable. We are left, however, with the testimony of a sole witness, at once the most silver- and acid-tongued of Romans, who, it was noted, could always be counted on for “a great deal of barking.” “I detest the queen,” railed Cicero. History belongs to the eloquent.

  The great orator was at the time of Cleopatra’s visit a gray and grizzled sixty-year-old monument of a man, still handsome, the even features melting into jowls. In the thick of a furious writing spree, Cicero devoted himself over Cleopatra’s time in Rome to the composition of a host of wide-ranging philosophical works. He had the previous year divorced his wife of three decades to marry his wealthy teenaged ward, for which exchange he offered up reasons similar to those that had brought Cleopatra to Rome in the first place: “I knew no security, had no refuge from intrigue, because of the villainy of those to whom my welfare and estate should have been most precious.” To his mind the solution was obvious: “Therefore I thought it advisable to fortify myself by the loyalty of new connections against the treachery of old ones.” In other words, Cicero—a self-made man from a provincial family, who had risen to prominence on his blazing intellectual gifts and maintained his place there by ceaseless politicking—remarried for money.

  It is no more surprising that Cicero called on Cleopatra in the first place than it is that he came to lash her, with a quick and brutal tongue, for the ages. 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 was a great writer, which is to say self-absorbed, with an outsize ego and a fanatical sensitivity to slights real and imagined. The Roman John Adams, he lived his life with one eye always on posterity. He fully expected that we would be reading him two thousand years later. As accomplished a busybody as he was a master of eloquence, Cicero made it his mission to know precisely which lands every eminent man in Rome possessed, as well as where he lived and what company he frequented. Having stood at the center stage of Roman politics for three decades, he refused to be sidelined. He was irresistibly drawn to power and fame. No celebrity was going to escape his caustic clutches, especially one with an intellectual bent, a glamorous, international reputation, the resources to raise an army, and a habit of entertaining in a style that taxed the Roman vocabulary. The turnips sickened Cicero on several levels. He was a confirmed lover of luxury.

  In the misunderstanding that seemed to seal her Roman fate, Cleopatra promised Cicero either a book or a manuscript, possibly one from her library in Alexandria. In any event, she failed to deliver. Plainly she had no regard for his feelings. Those were further frayed when her emissary turned up at Cicero’s home. Cleopatra’s man wanted not Cicero, but Cicero’s highly learned best friend. There is some murkiness here—two thousand years later we are also left parsing the great orator’s silences—but from Cicero’s deep ellipses and dark hints emerges a man less offended than embarrassed. Suddenly he felt on the defensive, chagrined either that he had asked a service of Cleopatra or that he had socialized with her in the first place. He sounds as if he may have been a little too charmed. To that friend he labored to make clear that his intercourse with the queen was “of a literary kind, not unbecoming to my position—I should not mind telling them to a public meeting.” Nothing untoward had transpired; Cleopatra’s representative could back him up on this. Cicero’s dignity had however been compromised. The result was a blistering rancor. He wanted nothing more to do with the Egyptian. What could she and her representatives have been thinking? Few have paid such a lasting price for a forgotten book; for her oversight, Cleopatra earned Cicero’s eternal enmity, though it should be noted that he worked himse
lf up into a lather of indignation only after she had departed from Rome, to which she was unlikely to return. And despite his disaffection, he had clearly frequented the Egyptian queen—in society, if not at Caesar’s villa—a statement in itself.

  Bibliographic slights aside, there were plenty of reasons why Cicero should have failed to take to Cleopatra. An unreconstructed Pompeian, he had no affection for Caesar, who condescended to Cicero and failed sufficiently to appreciate his wisdoms. Cicero had had harsh words for Cleopatra’s father. He had known Auletes and thought him a poor excuse for a king; he dismissed “his Alexandrian majesty” as “royal in neither blood nor spirit.” A dyed-in-the-wool republican, Cicero had already devoted more time than he would have liked to Egyptian affairs. They had about them always a whiff of dishonor. He had in Cleopatra’s youth hoped to be named envoy to her father’s court but worried about how history, and respectable Rome, might view that posting. Cicero had as well a vexed history with women. He had long complained that his first wife had too much taste for public affairs and too little for domestic ones. Having just rid himself of one strong-minded, strong-willed woman, he had no taste for another. By contrast he was passionately, deeply devoted to his daughter, on whom he had lavished a first-rate education. She died suddenly, in childbirth, in February 45. She was not yet thirty. Cicero spent the subsequent months crippled by grief. The pain was nearly physical. He was prone to fits of weeping, which friends gently urged him to restrain.* The loss did nothing to endear to him another cultured and coolheaded young woman of his daughter’s generation, her future before her. When his new, teenaged wife proved insufficiently moved by his loss, Cicero got rid of her too, within months of the marriage.