Cleopatra: A Life Read online

  For Cleopatra the departure may have been especially fraught. She had made good on her identification with Venus and Isis; in March she was pregnant again, presumably visibly so, as the secret was out. Cicero had ample reason to follow her closely. A pregnant Cleopatra was the trophy wife who could, at a precarious juncture, complicate Rome’s future. Unlike Caesarion, this second child had been conceived on Roman soil. All of Rome knew it to be Caesar’s. What if Cleopatra bore a boy, and chose to press her case? Cicero may have worried that she could derail the succession. She was perfectly positioned to do so. It was in any event to be a season of disappointments for Cleopatra, who either miscarried in the course of her flight home or lost the baby shortly thereafter. In Rome Cicero breathed a deep sigh of relief.

  On another level Cleopatra was richly rewarded. All parties agreed that none of Caesar’s “regulations, favours, and gifts” was to be revoked. Cyprus was secure. Cleopatra would remain a friend and ally of Rome. For its part, that city braced for “an orgy of loot, arson, and massacre,” as for a likely reprise of the civil war. After the Ides a lively market opened for defamation and self-justification. There was a run on self-congratulation. Toppling kings was a Roman tradition too, which the conspirators believed they had valiantly upheld that gray spring morning. Even neutral parties happily contributed to the hostilities. As Dio notes, “There is a very large element which is anxious to see all those who have power at variance with one another, an element which consequently takes delight in their enmity and joins in plots against them.”

  Inculcated from her earliest days with the fear that Rome might dismantle her country, 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.) She could only have been pleased to put an ocean between her and the turmoil. Probably she sailed from Puteoli, along the Italian coast, through the rough and inhospitable Strait of Messina, to find herself swept across the open Mediterranean, in April. The wind was at her back. The southbound crossing was an effortless one; an aggressive captain could make the trip in less than two weeks. Within a matter of days Cleopatra traded the persistent gloom and chilly air of Europe for the opulent warmth of Egypt. In sunny Alexandria she returned to the grind of public business and private audiences, to a round of rituals and ceremonies. She would never again set foot in Rome. Nor would she ever let that city out of her sights. She had played the game cannily and correctly, more effectively than any Ptolemy before her, only to find herself back at square one, blindsided by events, sabotaged by a wholesale revision of the rules. As a near contemporary marveled: “Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs?” Cleopatra was twenty-six years old.

  IN A LIFE of barely salvaged, emotionally overblown scenes, the 44 return to Alexandria is the one that got away, also the most opera-ready. No librettist has touched it, possibly because there is no text. 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. None stood at hand that spring as she sailed toward the red-tiled rooftops of Alexandria, around the flickering lighthouse and the colossal statues of earlier Cleopatras, through the stone breakwaters and into her calm, splendidly engineered harbor. When a foreign sovereign visited, the Egyptian fleet headed out to meet him; it surely did so in full force now. No matter how she had advertised her errand at home, no matter what her actual agenda abroad, Cleopatra could hardly have envisioned this dismal conclusion. She had had a few weeks to come to terms with events and to look ahead; whether she grieved personally or not, she had cause for apprehension. Not only was there no one to intervene on her behalf in Rome, but she had now inserted herself dangerously into the blood sport that was that city’s politics. As Caesar’s only son, Caesarion was her trump card. He was also a potential liability. She was if anything in greater danger than she had been in 48, when first she had found herself caught between two ambitious foreigners fighting to the death.

  If Cleopatra knew the irritating nuisance of self-doubt, all evidence has been lost to history. What Plutarch described as her supreme confidence instead survives her, along with her superlative powers of persuasion. On a later occasion she would pass off a mission entirely botched as one expertly accomplished; it is difficult to believe that, having made her fragrant offerings on deck, she descended the gangplank in Alexandria—again a sovereign, safely returned to her admiring subjects—anything less than triumphantly.* She was free of rustic Rome, delivered from the swells of the waves and the turbulence abroad to a land that recognized her as a living goddess, every bit Venus’s equal, returned to a city where monarchy received its proper due, where a queen could hold her head high without being flailed for arrogance, where no one yelped over golden chairs or shuddered at the sight of diadems. She was, in short, back in civilization. That was particularly evident over an Egyptian summer, the season of celebrations. In its festivals too Cleopatra’s kingdom inverted the Roman order. With the fields under water, Egypt devoted itself to song, dance, and feasting. “Home is best,” went the Greek adage, and so it must have felt to Cleopatra, returning from a land that defined the word differently. “Alexandria,” Cicero had railed years earlier, “is home of all deceit and falsehood.”

  It is unclear who managed Egyptian affairs while Cleopatra was abroad—normally she would have entrusted matters to her minister of finance—but whoever he was he did so expertly. She returned to a kingdom that was prosperous and at peace, no small order given her absence or absences. There are no extant protests concerning tax collection, no evidence of the kind of revolt that had greeted her father’s return. The temples continued to flourish. Cleopatra slipped smoothly back into her role. The disturbing news came from abroad. In her exile, Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s younger sister, persisted in her designs on the throne. Reprising her coup of four years earlier, Arsinoe marshaled enough support in Ephesus to have herself proclaimed queen of Egypt. Her feat speaks both to her tenacity and to the fragility of Cleopatra’s position outside her country. The Temple of Artemis was filled with priceless treasure; Arsinoe appears to have had Roman backers as well as a family, or a faux-family, accomplice. At about this time a pretender materialized, claiming to be Ptolemy XIII, miraculously resuscitated after his Nile drowning of three years earlier. Certainly the two sisters despised each other. Arsinoe may have gone so far as to have suborned Cleopatra’s commander in Cyprus, whose loyalties wavered. It was an easy trip from Cyprus to Ephesus; the Cyprus commander was traditionally a high-ranking official. To complicate matters, Cleopatra had another brother at her side, the expendable and possibly disloyal Ptolemy XIV. “There’s a common proverb scolding people who trip twice over the same stone,” Cicero had observed, and Cleopatra—vulnerable again on two fronts—was not prone to clumsiness. At some point over the summer she arranged for the murder of Ptolemy XIV, allegedly by poison.*

  Whether the fifteen-year-old had been in league with their exiled sister or not, he was clearly unnecessary, an insult to Cleopatra’s autonomy. His murder allowed her to proclaim Caesarion her co-regent, which she did that summer. 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. With his ascension began the third of Cleopatra’s co-regencies. Hers was an original solution, also an ideal one. Caesarion became “King Ptolemy, who is as well Caesar, Father-loving, Mother-loving God.” Cleopatra had her obligatory male consort. A Roman, and a doubly divine one, sat on the Egyptian throne. And a three-year-old was unlikely to meddle in any way with his mother’s agenda.


  Not only was hers a brilliant strategic calculation—Cleopatra symbolically swathed Egypt in Caesar’s mantle, for which she could see a violent contest brewing—it was also a deft iconographical one. If Caesar had returned from Alexandria more royal than before, Cleopatra returned from Rome more godly. She vigorously embraced her role as Isis, with full emphasis on her maternal command, a novel instance of coaxing a promotion from childbearing. At festivals she appeared in her striking Isis attire. Recent events provided a powerful assist; Caesar’s assassination may have destroyed Cleopatra’s years of meticulous planning but represented a boon to the imagery. In the legend, the enemies of Osiris, Isis’s earthly partner and the supreme male divinity, savagely dismember him. Osiris leaves behind a young male heir and a devoted, quick-thinking consort. In Isis’s grief, she collects the butchered pieces, to effect his resurrection. 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.

  Publicly Cleopatra played up the role of Isis as provider of wisdom and of material and spiritual sustenance, advertising Caesarion’s presence, the family trinity, and the spiritual rebirth.* She embarked on an ambitious building program, in much of which she exploited the myth. Caesarion survives in relief on the walls of the Temple of Dendera, a vast project Cleopatra’s father had inherited. Possibly to celebrate her son’s ascension, Cleopatra had him carved, with the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, standing before her, offering incense to Isis, Horus, Osiris. It was an effective conflation of themes; she follows him as both pharaoh and mother, in one depiction shaking an Isis rattle and wearing the goddess’s traditional double-crown headdress. Her name takes precedence in the caption below; she likely inaugurated the carvings. She completed work her father had begun at Edfu, in Upper Egypt, to which she probably transferred the teams of Dendera workmen. 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. Caesarion is closely associated there with Horus, who—perhaps not incidentally—is to avenge the death of his father. Cleopatra may already have begun a massive structure dedicated to Caesar and known later as the Caesareum, above the Alexandrian harbor. It would ultimately constitute a precinct unto itself, of porticoes, libraries, chambers, groves, gateways, broadwalks, and courts, fitted with exquisite art. Her largest project was a temple of Isis in Alexandria, entirely lost today.

  On other fronts as well she was in the resurrection business. 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. Among her intimates she counted Philostratus, an orator celebrated for his spellbinding, extemporaneous performances. He may also have been her personal tutor. The only indigenous school of philosophy emerged under Cleopatra; a skeptic, Aenesidemus of Knossos, wrangled with the relativity of human perceptions and the impossibility of knowledge. Scholarly work in grammar and history enjoyed a renaissance, although the revival generated few of the dizzyingly original theoretical leaps of previous centuries. Medicine and pharmacology represented the sole exceptions. Doctors had long been attached to the Ptolemaic court, where they were influential, public-spirited statesmen, and where in Cleopatra’s reign the most eminent men in their fields wrote prolifically, on medicine and maladies, on eye and lung ailments, both as scholars and practitioners. In surgery particularly these thinkers made bold strides, producing a new body of specialized skills. The work was otherwise derivative, prone to sterility, given more to classification than to creativity. To it came the first native Alexandrian scholars. Four years Cleopatra’s junior and the son of a local saltfish seller, Didymus distinguished himself at court for his lively wit and his prodigious output. He discoursed perceptively on the lexicon, on Homer, on Demosthenes, on history, drama, and poetry. In several volumes he lobbed some satirical shots even at Cicero. It is a wonder he had time for his sovereign; maniacally productive, Didymus turned out more than 3,500 treatises and commentaries, which may explain why he could not remember what he had written and stood regularly accused of contradicting himself. These were the men with whom Cleopatra dined, with whom she lived in close contact and discussed affairs of state. The household thinker served as “intellectual stimulus or as confessor and conscience.” He was at once mentor and servant.

  Collectively the early 40s are the years that prove Cleopatra to have been far more than the sum of her supposed seductions. She made her first steps toward restoring Ptolemaic glory, again following her father’s lead, though with more quantifiable results. She supported and engaged with intellectual endeavors, as befitted her heritage. Hellenistic sovereigns were by definition cultural patrons and scholars; among Cleopatra’s forebears were plenty of murderers, also a historian, a zoologist, a playwright. Ptolemy I wrote a much-admired account of Alexander the Great. Reading backward, we are left to gauge Cleopatra’s reputation by what was falsely attributed to her. She has received extracurricular credit for a diverse body of literature, which says something of her profile. A decadent abroad, she was an able-bodied intellectual at home. She has been variously cited as an authority on magic and medicine, inseparable still for some time; on hairdressing; on cosmetics; on weights and measures. These were realms Cleopatra may well have explored, at least at the dinner table. As for medicine, she was a great patron of the Temple of Hathor, devoted to female health. She was all the same only slightly more likely to have written about baths of asses’ milk than to have invented aspirin.

  A curious cure for baldness would be credited to Cleopatra; she was said to counsel a paste of equal parts burnt mice, burnt rag, burnt horses’ teeth, bear’s grease, deer marrow, and reed bark. Mixed with honey, the salve was to be applied to the scalp, “rubbed until it sprouts.” Plutarch holds that she concocted “all sorts of deadly poisons,” with which she experimented on prisoners. “When she saw that the speedy poisons enhanced the sharpness of death by the pain they caused,” she moved on to a survey of venomous animals. These she studied systematically, daily “watching with her own eyes as they were set one upon another.” The Talmud hails her for her “great scientific curiosity” and as “very interested in the experiments of doctors and surgeons.” Given the preponderance of medical professionals at court, the progress in the field, and the lively interest demonstrated in the natural sciences by other Eastern kings—many of whom performed experiments and wrote on biology and botany—this was likely true. The rest of the Talmudic passage may be less so. It attributes to Cleopatra a set of experiments on female prisoners, “in order to determine at what point the fetus became an actual embryo.” Similarly, the medieval Gynaecia Cleopatrae is doubtless apocryphal. It includes instructions for a vaginal suppository “that I always used, and my sister Arsinoe tried.” Leaving aside the question as to whether Cleopatra and her usurping younger sister are likely to have traded contraceptive tips over years when they were more likely plotting each other’s murder, the text is problematic for having been written in Latin. Cleopatra was rumored to be especially skilled in the occult sciences, though the only alchemy she worked was in turning the fields of Egypt into gold.

  Much of Cleopatra’s supposed scholarship derives from the Arab world, where Roman propaganda did not penetrate. There she established herself as a philosopher, physician, scientist, scholar. Her name was powerfully resonant, the more so for her association with the pharmacologically inclined, miracle-working Isis. As credible as were some of the imputations, it is difficult to determine how many of the accomplishments were genuine; how many the flattering fallout of Plutarch’s account of an intellectually inclined woman, comfortable in the company of philosophers and physicians, living in enlightened times; and how much they constitute the usual assault on the composed, capable wo
man, suspect for being too good at her craft, whose talents can be attributed only to “magic arts and charms.” Dissected or not, the bodies must be buried somewhere, the cauldrons and the books of spells nearby. Cleopatra’s abilities were great, but the fertile male fancy incontestably greater.

  Her competence would be put to the test in the years following the return, when disaster followed upon disaster. The Nile did not stir over the spring of 43, and that summer failed to rise at all. It proved equally uncooperative the following year. Crops failed to a degree that defied the historical record. Throughout Egypt the misery was acute. Cleopatra eventlessly steered her kingdom through the sustained crisis, doubtless careful about tripping over familiar stones; the previous famine had been a fiasco for her. She may again have declared a state of emergency. Her people were starving. She had little choice but to open the royal granaries and distribute free wheat.* Inflation raged; Cleopatra further devalued the currency. Petitioners from two districts appeared before her for relief from venal tax collectors. Given the “general malaise” and “inspired by a hatred of evil,” she granted them exemptions. She posted notices of the amnesty widely. In the midst of the agricultural crisis came reports of odd glandular swellings and nasty black pustules; an epidemic raged either in Egypt or just beyond its borders. The prolific Dioscorides, an expert on medicinal plants, had ample material on which to base a pioneering treatise on bubonic plague.