by Stacy Schiff
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. Seduced by opulence and pedigree, he had lingered in Oriental courts before, to his lifelong embarrassment. Few charges disconcerted him as did the accusation that he had prolonged his stay in what is today northern Turkey because of his affair with the king of Bithynia. Caesar was of illustrious birth, a gifted orator, and a dashing officer, but those distinctions were meaningless compared to a woman who, however inventively, descended from Alexander, who was in Egypt not only royal but divine. Caesar was very nearly deified in the last years of his life. Cleopatra was born a goddess.
And her looks? While the Romans who preserved her story assure us of Cleopatra’s wanton ways, her feminine wiles, her ruthless ambition, and her sexual depravity, few raved about her beauty. That was not for lack of adjectives. Sublime women enter the historical record. Herod’s wife was one. Alexander the Great’s mother was another. The Sixth Dynasty queen thought to have built the third pyramid was, as Cleopatra would have known, “braver than all the men of her time, the most beautiful of all the women, fair-skinned with red cheeks.” Arsinoe II—the thrice-married third-century intriguer—was stunning. Beauty had unsettled the world before; the Helen allusion was there for the asking, but only one Latin poet picked up on it, primarily to emphasize Cleopatra’s bad behavior. Plutarch clearly notes that her beauty “was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it.” It was rather the “contact of her presence, if you lived with her, that was irresistible.” Her personality and manner, he insists, were no less than “bewitching.” Time has done better than fail to wither in Cleopatra’s case; it has improved upon her allure. She came into her looks only years later. By the third century AD she would be described as “striking,” exquisite in appearance. By the Middle Ages, she was “famous for nothing but her beauty.”
As no stone portrait of her has yet proved authentic, André Malraux’s quip remains partly true: “Nefertiti is a face without a queen; Cleopatra is a queen without a face.” All the same a few matters can be resolved. It would have been surprising had she been anything other than small and lithe, although the men in the family tended toward fat, if not full-fledged obesity. Even allowing for the authoritarian message she intended to broadcast and for cut-rate engraving, coin portraits support Plutarch’s claim that she was by no means a conventional beauty. She sported a smaller version of her father’s hooked nose (common enough that there is a word for it in Greek), full lips, a sharp, prominent chin, a high brow. Her eyes were wide and sunken. While there were fair-haired, fair-skinned Ptolemies, Cleopatra VII was very likely not among them. It is difficult to believe that the world could have nattered on about “that Egyptian woman” had she been blond. The word “honey-skinned” recurs in descriptions of her relatives and would presumably have applied to her as well, despite the inexactitudes surrounding her mother and paternal grandmother. There was certainly Persian blood in the family, but even an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies. She was not dark-skinned.
Certainly her face did nothing to undermine her redoubtable charm, her easy humor, or her silken powers of persuasion; Caesar was particular about appearances. For him there were other considerations as well. It had long been clear that the way into Pompey’s heart was through flattery, the way into Caesar’s through bribery. He spent freely and beyond his budget. One mistress’s pearl cost the equivalent of what 1,200 professional soldiers earned in a year. After more than a decade of warfare, he had an army to pay. Cleopatra’s father had left an outstanding debt, which Caesar spoke of recouping on his arrival. He would forgive half, which left an astronomical balance of some 3,000 talents. He had extravagant expenses and extravagant tastes, but Egypt had, Caesar knew, a treasury to match. The captivating young woman before him—who spoke so effectively, laughed so easily, hailed from an ancient, accomplished culture, moved amid an opulence that would set his countrymen’s teeth on edge, and had so artfully outfoxed an army—was one of the two richest people in the world.
On his return to the palace the other was horrified to discover his sister with Caesar. He stormed out, to throw a temper tantrum in the street.
III
CLEOPATRA CAPTURES THE OLD MAN BY MAGIC
“A woman who is generous with her money is to be praised; not so, if she is generous with her person.”
—QUINTILIAN
VERY LITTLE ABOUT the first century BC was original; mostly it distinguished itself for its compulsive recycling of familiar themes. So it was that when a fiery wisp of a girl presented herself before an adroit, much older man of the world, credit for the seduction fell to her. For some time already that brand of encounter had occasioned the clucking of tongues, as it would for several millennia. In truth it is unclear who seduced whom, just as it is unclear how quickly Caesar and Cleopatra fell into each other’s arms. A great deal was at stake on both sides. Plutarch has the indomitable general helpless before the beguiling twenty-one-year-old. He is in two swift steps “captivated” by her ruse and “overcome” by her charm: Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered, a sequence of events that does not necessarily add up in her favor. In his account—it may well derive from Plutarch’s, which preceded it by a good century—Dio too acknowledges Cleopatra’s power to subjugate a man twice her age. His Caesar is instantly and entirely enslaved. Dio allows, however, for a hint of complicity on the part of the Roman, known to harbor a fondness for the opposite sex “to such an extent that he had his intrigues with ever so many other women—with all, doubtless, who chanced to come his way.” This is to grant Caesar something of a role rather than to leave him defenseless in the hands of a devious, disarming siren. Dio offers too a more elaborate staging. In the palace Cleopatra has time to primp. She appears “in the most majestic and at the same time pity-inspiring guise,” a rather tall order. His Caesar is a convert “upon seeing her and hearing her speak a few words,” words that Cleopatra surely chose with great care. She had never before met the Roman general and had little idea what to expect. She would have known only that—in a worst-case scenario—it was preferable to be taken prisoner by Julius Caesar than by her own brother.*
By all accounts Cleopatra came easily to some sort of accommodation with Caesar, who was soon enough acting “as advocate for the very woman whose judge he had previously assumed to be.” The seduction may have taken some time, or at least longer than the one night of legend; we have no proof that the relationship was immediately sexual. By the clear light of day—if not necessarily the morning after the unorthodox, showstopping arrival—Caesar proposed a reconciliation between Cleopatra and Ptolemy, “on the condition that she should rule as his colleague in the kingdom.” This was by no means what her brother’s advisers were expecting. They had the upper hand. They assumed that they had signed a pact with Caesar on the beach at Pelusium. Nor were they banking on Cleopatra’s unaccountable appearance in the palace. Young Ptolemy was if anything more surprised to find her there than Caesar had been. Furious to have been outwitted, he resorted to behavior that suggested he very much needed a consort: He burst into tears. In his rage he flew through the gates and into the crowd outside. Amid his subjects, he tore the white ribbon from his head and cast it to the ground, wailing that his sister had betrayed him. Caesar’s men seized and returned him to the palace, where he remained under house arrest. It took them longer to quiet the violence in the street, much encouraged in the weeks to come by Pothinus, the eunuch, who had led
the move to depose Cleopatra. Her glorious career would have ended here had she not secured Caesar’s favor. Assaulted as he was by both land and sea, Caesar might have ended his here as well. He believed he was settling a family vendetta, did not understand that, with two bedraggled and depleted legions, he had incited a full-scale rebellion. Nor does Cleopatra appear to have enlightened him as to her lack of support among the Alexandrians.
Apprehensive, Caesar arranged to appear before the people. From a safe place—it seems to have been an upper-story balcony, or a window of the palace—he “promised to do for them whatever they wished.” Here the well-honed rhetorical skills came in handy. Cleopatra may have briefed Caesar on how to appease the Alexandrians but he needed no tutor to deliver a clear, compelling oration, one he typically punctuated with vigorous hand gestures. He was an acknowledged genius in that realm, a pitch-perfect speaker and a lapidary stylist, unsurpassed in the “ability to inflame the minds of his hearers and to turn them in whatever direction the case demands.” He made no reference later to his alarm, focusing instead on his negotiation with Ptolemy and asserting that he was himself “particularly anxious to play the part of friend and arbitrator.” He appeared to succeed. Ptolemy agreed to a reconciliation, no great concession as he knew that his advisers would fight on regardless. They were at that moment secretly summoning the Ptolemaic army back to Alexandria.
Caesar thereafter convoked a formal assembly, to which both siblings accompanied him. In his high nasal tones, he read aloud Auletes’ will. Their father, he pointed out, had plainly directed Cleopatra and her brother to live together and rule in common, under Roman guardianship. Caesar thereby bestowed the kingdom on them. It is impossible not to see Cleopatra’s hand in what came next. To prove his goodwill (or, as Dio saw it, to calm an explosive crowd), Caesar went further. He bestowed the island of Cyprus on Cleopatra’s two remaining siblings, seventeen-year-old Arsinoe and twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIV. The gesture was significant. The pearl of the Ptolemaic possessions, Cyprus commanded the Egyptian coast. It supplied the Egyptian kings with timber and afforded them a near monopoly on copper. Cyprus also represented a sore spot in Ptolemaic history. Cleopatra’s uncle had ruled the island until a decade earlier, when Rome had demanded exorbitant sums from him. He chose poison over payment. His property was collected and carted off to Rome, where it was paraded through the streets. In Alexandria his older brother, Cleopatra’s father, had stood by silently, for which craven behavior his subjects had furiously expelled him from Egypt. Cleopatra was eleven at the time. She was unlikely to have forgotten either the humiliation or the revolt.
Caesar succeeded in calming the populace but failed to defuse hostilities so far as Pothinus was concerned. The ex-tutor lost no time in stirring up Achillas’s men. The Roman proposal, he assured them, was a sham. Did they not happen to glimpse Cleopatra’s long, lovely arm behind it? There is some kind of perverse testimony to be read in the fact that Pothinus—who knew her well, intimately if indeed he had taught her—feared the young woman as much as he did the seasoned Roman. He swore that Caesar “had given the kingdom ostensibly to both the children merely to quiet the people.” As soon as he could, he would transfer it to Cleopatra alone. A second danger lurked as well, as indicative of Cleopatra’s resolve as of Ptolemy’s lack of it. What if—while confined with him in the palace—that devious woman managed to seduce her brother? The people would never oppose a royal couple, even one sanctioned by an unpopular Roman. All would then be lost, insisted Pothinus. He devised a plan, which he evidently shared with too many of his coconspirators. At the banquet held to celebrate the reconciliation, Caesar’s barber—there was a reason barbershops served as post offices in Ptolemaic Egypt—made a startling discovery. That “busy, listening fellow,” ever inquisitive, learned that Pothinus and Achillas meant to poison Caesar. While they were at it, they plotted Cleopatra’s murder as well. Caesar was not surprised: He had been sleeping sporadically and at odd hours to protect himself against assassination attempts. Cleopatra too must have found the nights uneasy, no matter how vigilant her guards.
Caesar ordered a man to dispense with the eunuch, which was done. For his part Achillas focused more intently on what was to become, in Plutarch’s understated estimation, “a troublesome and embarrassing war.” Caesar had four thousand men, hardly fresh or in any shape to feel invincible. Achillas’s force was five times as great and marching toward Alexandria. And no matter what hints Cleopatra may have offered, Caesar had an insufficient grasp of the depths of Ptolemaic guile. Under the young king’s name, Caesar dispatched two emissaries with a peace proposal. They were men of stature and experience. Both had served effectively under Cleopatra’s father; Caesar had very likely met them earlier in Rome. Achillas—whom Caesar acknowledged to be “a man of remarkable nerve”—read the overture for the weaker hand it was. He murdered the ambassadors before they could so much as deliver their message.
With the arrival of Egyptian troops in the city, Achillas attempted to break into Caesar’s quarters. Frantically, under cover of darkness, the Romans fortified the palace with entrenchments and a ten-foot wall. Caesar might well be blockaded, but he did not care to fight against his will. He knew that Achillas was recruiting auxiliary troops in every corner of the country. Meanwhile the Alexandrians established vast munitions factories throughout the city; the wealthy outfitted and paid their adult slaves to fight the Romans. Skirmishes erupted daily. Mostly Caesar worried about water, of which he had little, and food, of which he had none. Already Pothinus had pressed the point by delivering musty grain. As ever, the successful general was the gifted logician; it was essential that Caesar neither be separated from nor vulnerable to Lake Mareotis, south of the city and its second port. That brilliant blue freshwater lake connected Alexandria by canals to Egypt’s interior; it was as rich and important as the two Mediterranean harbors. On the psychological front there were additional considerations. Caesar did everything he could to court the young king, as he understood “that the royal name had great authority with his people.” To all who would listen he broadcast regular reminders that the war was not Ptolemy’s but that of his rogue advisers. The protests fell on deaf ears.
While Caesar tended to supply lines and fortifications, a second plot hatched in the palace, where the atmosphere must already have been strained, at least among the feuding siblings. Arsinoe too had a clever tutor. That eunuch now arranged her escape. His coup suggests either that Cleopatra was negligent (highly improbable under the circumstances), preoccupied with her brother and her own survival, or astutely double-crossed. It is unlikely that she underestimated her seventeen-year-old sister. Arsinoe burned with ambition; she was not the kind of girl who inspired complacency. She clearly had no great faith in Cleopatra, which sentiment she had presumably kept to herself for weeks.* Outside the palace walls she was more vocal. She was a Ptolemy not in thrall to a foreigner, precisely what the Alexandrians preferred. They declared her queen—every sister had now had a turn—and rallied exuberantly behind her. Arsinoe assumed her position at Achillas’s side, at the head of the army. In her rooms at the palace, Cleopatra had further reason to believe it wiser to trust a Roman than a member of her own family. This, too, was old news by 48 BC. “One loyal friend,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.”
IN THE YEAR of Cleopatra’s birth, Mithradates the Great, the Pontic king, suggested an alliance to his neighbor, the king of the Parthians.† For decades Mithradates had hurled insults and ultimatums at Rome, which he felt was systematically gobbling up the world. The scourge was now coming their way, he warned, and “no laws, human or divine, prevent them from seizing and destroying allies and friends, those near them and those far off, weak or powerful, and from considering every government which does not serve them, especially monarchies, as their enemies.” Did it not make sense to band together? He was unwilling to follow in the mincing steps of Cleopatra’s father. Auletes was “averting hostilities from day to day by the
payment of money,” Mithradates scoffed; the Egyptian king might think himself cunning but was only delaying the inevitable. The Romans pocketed his funds but offered no guarantees. They had no respect for kings. They betrayed even their friends. They would destroy humanity or perish in the process. Over the next two decades they indeed proceeded to dismantle large portions of the vast Ptolemaic Empire, events Cleopatra must have followed closely. Cyrene, Crete, Syria, Cyprus, were long gone. The kingdom she would inherit was barely larger than it had been when Ptolemy I had installed himself on the throne two centuries earlier. Egypt had lost its “fence of client states”; Roman lands now surrounded it on all sides.