by Stacy Schiff
Both had daringly crossed lines in their bids for power; both had let the dice fly. Both had as great a capacity for work as for play and rarely distinguished between the two. Caesar answered letters and petitions while attending games. Cleopatra engaged in games for reasons of state. Neither shrank from drama. Both were natural performers, as secure in their ability as in the conviction of their superiority. Much was expected of Cleopatra, who liked to surprise, believed in the grand geste, and did not sell herself short. Caesar put a premium on style and admired talent in all its forms; in Alexandria he was in the constant company of a deft conversationalist, linguist, and negotiator, one who shared his unusual gift for treating new acquaintances as if they were old intimates. There was ample reason on his part for close attention. Cleopatra provided a timely lesson in comportment. Having the year before been declared dictator, Caesar was enjoying his first taste of absolute power. Cleopatra moreover handled matters no woman of his acquaintance had touched. He would have been hard pressed to find a woman in all of Rome who had raised an army, lent a fleet, controlled a currency. As incandescent as was her personality, 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. Both were emerging from wars that had nothing to do with issues and everything to do with personalities. They had faced similar difficulties, with similar constituencies. Caesar was no favorite of the Roman aristocracy. Cleopatra was unloved by the Alexandrian Greeks. Their power derived from the common people. The ambitious shine especially in the company of the ambitious; Caesar and Cleopatra came together as might two heirs to legendary fortunes, larger than life and abundantly aware of their gifts, who are accustomed to thinking of themselves in the plural, or writing of themselves in the third person.
IN THE COURSE of one of Cleopatra’s banquets, Lucan imagines Caesar quizzing Egypt’s high priest. Caesar is a student of a great many subjects, a man of boundless curiosity. His love of exploration was as pronounced as his ambition. He was fascinated by Egyptian lore and culture; in Alexandria he conferred with scientists and philosophers. He has but one request. “There is nothing I would rather know,” he pleads, “than the causes of the river which lie hidden through so many ages and its unknown source.” If the priest will reveal the source of the Nile, Caesar will abandon warfare. The fervor was understandable. Few mysteries of the ancient world were as compelling; the source of the Nile was the life on Mars of its day. Lucan is the first to mention Caesar and Cleopatra’s cruise on the river, 110 years after the fact. He admired neither party and was writing verse; he has been called “the father of yellow journalism” for good reason. All the same he was working from historical sources lost to us today. He is unlikely to have invented the trip. Nor was there reason to believe the postwar cruise any less luxurious, or frantic with entertainments, than the one Shakespeare would ultimately immortalize, still five years in the future. There is better reason to assume Roman historians preferred to remember that journey and forget this one. They made no mention either of Caesar having tarried in Egypt at the war’s conclusion.* Had they not closed ranks as they did, Shakespeare might well have written Cleopatra into a different play.
There was ample precedent for a Nile trip. It was traditional to welcome a foreign dignitary with a cruise, to introduce him to the marvel that was Egypt. Two generations earlier a high official went to great lengths to ensure that a Roman senator traveling in Egypt be “received with the utmost magnificence,” showered with gifts, entrusted to expert guides, supplied with the pastries and roasted meats with which to feed the sacred crocodiles. Egypt’s miles upon miles of grain fields inevitably impressed, even as they made Roman fingers twitch. And burning curiosity aside, there were legitimate state reasons for the excursion. A new ruler traditionally inaugurated his or her reign with a ceremonial journey south. For Cleopatra this amounted to a proprietary tour of her personal estate. Everyone in Egypt worked for her; nearly every resource of the country—its fields, its game, its trees, the Nile and its crocodiles themselves—was hers. From her point of view the cruise was not so much a pleasure trip or a scientific expedition as a state obligation. With it she provided a critical display of Roman military might to her people, a display of Egyptian abundance to Rome. The people of Egypt had supplied her against her brother when she was vulnerable. With Caesar at her side, she returned to them patently invincible.
To journey from Alexandria south was to leave the Greek-speaking for the Egyptian-speaking world, to travel from wine country to beer country. Here was the culture to which Alexandrians felt themselves superior, where pharaohs were revered and priests held sway. Here Cleopatra’s divinity went unquestioned. Even without the Alexandrian pageantry, the agate and the red granite, the monumental past monumentally displayed, the landscape was a wonder. As a later traveler along the same stretch put it, “I gulped down color, like a donkey gorging on oats.” Cleopatra introduced Caesar to the world’s longest and most spectacular oasis, to the velvety green of the riverbanks, to the hard, black soil of the channel, to the land of red-purple sunsets and amethyst dawns. The two could not have neglected the obligatory stops: the pyramids, which soared above the palms to melt into the haze; the sanctuary and temples of Memphis, where Egypt’s high priest would have been on hand to receive them; the three thousand chambers, above and below ground, of the granite and limestone labyrinth; the lakeside shrine of the crocodile gods, where the beasts had been trained to open their jaws on command, and where Caesar may have been as taken by the system of locks and dams, which had reclaimed farmland; the colossi of Memnon, miraculously white against the pale apricot sand, sixty-eight feet tall and visible for miles around. Up the hill behind them, deep in the rock, lay the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. Farther south came the handsome Temple of Isis, decorated and partly built by Cleopatra’s father, set on an island among the tossing rapids at Philae.*
More miraculous yet were the accommodations, to which the taste for the colossal extended as well. The idea was to impress as much as to entertain. Cleopatra and Caesar would have left from Lake Mareotis, south of the city, where her pleasure fleet docked. That port could accommodate three-hundred-foot-long royal barges. Their bows were ivory; elaborate colonnades lined the deck, the column shafts of minutely carved cypress. Eighteen-foot gilded statues decorated stern and prow. The ship’s hardware was polished bronze, its woodwork embedded with ivory and gold. All was brilliantly painted, including the shipboard collection of royal statuary, which decorated the two floors of living and entertaining quarters. A coffered ceiling covered one banqueting room. Egyptian-style columns decorated another, carved with acanthus leaves and lotus petals in an alternating black and white pattern. Over a third stretched a purple awning, held aloft by arched beams. It was not unusual for a royal barge to include a gym, a library, shrines to Dionysus and Aphrodite, a garden, a grotto, lecture halls, a spiral staircase, a copper bath, stables, an aquarium.
Theirs was no modest procession. A midlevel bureacrat traveled with an entourage of ten, lost as he was without his secretaries and accountants, his baker, his bath attendants, his doctor, his silver steward, his arms master. Cleopatra and Caesar headed south among a swarm of Roman soldiers and Egyptian courtiers. Hospitality during their stay was incumbent on the people and a daunting assignment, especially if, as Appian asserts, a fleet of four hundred ships followed behind. Certainly a multitude of smaller vessels followed their queen’s, along a river thick with stone and wine carriers, merchant galleys, police skiffs. It was the people’s responsibility to feed and cosset their monarch, to shower gifts upon her, to entertain her retinue, to arrange transportation. This raised all sorts of lodging, security, and provisioning concerns; officials were not above advising subordinates to hide supplies in order to prevent royal requisitioning. That was perfectly reasonable given the demands; one insignificant official called for 372 suckling pigs and 200 sheep. Farmers worked day and night to p
roduce the necessary stores, to ferment beer, stockpile hay, furnish guesthouses, round up donkeys. They did so now in the thick of harvest season. With greater resources and under less complex circumstances, Cicero would be happy to bid Caesar good-bye when he entertained the general and his entourage two years later, at his country estate. He was relieved not to have to ask Caesar to drop by again when next in the neighborhood. “Once is enough,” Cicero sighed, having felt less host than quartermaster.
Up the Nile Cleopatra and Caesar sailed in their “floating palace,” the wind at their backs. On shore the date trees hung thick with fruit, the palm fronds slightly faded. Beyond the river lay a sea of golden grain; in the trees the bananas glinted yellow. The apricots, grapes, figs, and mulberries were nearly ripe. It was peach season; above their heads, the pigeons visibly paired off. Everything about the landscape before Caesar and Cleopatra reinforced the myths of Egypt’s abundance and the river’s magical faculties. Renowned throughout the ancient world, the Nile was said to flow with gold; extraordinary powers were ascribed to it. Its water was believed to boil at half the temperature of other waters. Its river creatures attained staggering proportions. Ptolemy II had sent his daughter cases of Nile water when she married into the Syrian royal family, to ensure her fertility. (She was already thirty. It worked.) Egyptian women were known for more efficient pregnancies; it took them less time to produce a baby. They were said as well to have an elevated rate of giving birth to twins, often quadruplets. Goats—which bore two kids elsewhere—were said to bear five in Egypt, pigeons to produce twelve broods rather than ten. The male skull was thought to be stronger in Egypt, where baldness (and comb-overs like Caesar’s) were rare. The Nile was believed to have spontaneously generated life; one thing Cleopatra and Caesar did not see were the river creatures of legend, half-mice, half-dirt. Nor presumably did they find serpents with grass sprouting on their backs, or people who lived under turtle shells the size of boats. What they did make out among the tufted papyrus thickets and the lotus plants were herons and storks, hippopotami and eighteen-foot-long crocodiles, an inexhaustible supply of fish, a rarity in Rome. The ancient historians were mistaken about the primordial details, wholly accurate on the subject of Egypt’s fecundity. Cleopatra’s home was the most productive agricultural land in the Mediterranean, the one in which crops appeared to plant and water themselves.
That had been true since time immemorial, an expression that in Egypt actually meant something. Even in Cleopatra’s day there was such a thing as ancient history; somehow the world was older then, thick with legend, swathed in superstition. 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. At the same time, the centuries felt closer than they do to us today. Alexander the Great was further from Cleopatra than 1776 is to our century, yet Alexander remained always vividly, urgently present. While 1,120 years separated Cleopatra from the greatest story of her time, the fall of Troy remained a steadfast point of reference. The past was at all times within reach, a nearly religious awe aimed in its direction. This was especially true in Egypt, which had a passion for history, and which for two millennia already had kept a written record. For the bulk of those years the insular, inaccessible country had changed little, its art barely at all. There was good reason why Cleopatra’s subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions. Recent events only reinforced that notion. Ptolemaic advisers had persuaded earlier boy-kings to murder their immediate families. Previous queens had fled Egypt to muster armies. Much that could be said of the conquering Romans in 47 could have been said three centuries earlier of Cleopatra’s Macedonian ancestors, a parallel by no means lost on her.
In white linen and a diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious rituals that were themselves thousands of years old. She styled herself every bit the living divinity; we do not know how her people displayed their obeisance, but they likely bowed in her presence or raised a hand in some form of salute. To those who lined up for a view, on shore and along the causeways, Caesar and Cleopatra represented not a romance but a sort of magical apparition from another world, the earthly visitation of two living gods. They made for quite a sight: the fair-haired, broad-shouldered Roman, a study in hollows and sinews, in his long purple mantle, with the dark, small-boned queen of Egypt at his side. Together they visited sacred sites, the monuments of ancient kings, the secondary palaces along the river. Together they were greeted by white-robed priests and cheering crowds. Together they sailed among farmsteads, across a landscape dotted with mud-brick towers and red terraced roofs, past luxuriant orchards and vineyards and golden fields, sphinxes half buried in sand, cliffs of rock-cut tombs. Together they battled the gnats, a seasonal gift of the low river. From a distance they announced themselves with a clatter of oars and the strumming of lyres. In their wake the bite of incense lingered in the sultry air.
Certainly the trip was a vacation compared to the weeks that had preceded it. That it was a debauched pleasure cruise, a lark, a honeymoon, was probably an idea generated by the lavish accommodations. A Roman needed look no further for depravity; by definition the Latin tongue encountered something rotten when it met the word “luxury,” which derives from the verb “to dislocate,” and which spent thousands of years conjoined with “lascivious.” According to Appian, Caesar journeyed up the Nile with Cleopatra “and enjoyed himself with her in other ways as well.” From there it was no great leap to the charge that Cleopatra had borne the Roman general off on this folly, one of her design, into the exotic heart of an exotic country, from which he had forcibly to be torn. Cleopatra—or Egypt—tended to have this effect on poor, vulnerable Romans. Her country was itself a tease and a temptation. The itinerary was presumably planned in advance and adhered to, but would not be remembered that way. By later accounts Caesar was reluctant to leave, Cleopatra reluctant to let him go. “She would have detained him even longer in Egypt or else would have set out with him at once for Rome,” was Dio’s take. Only against his will did Caesar’s men coax him back. In Suetonius’s version, Caesar has so lost his head over the Egyptian queen that he would have followed her to the Ethiopian frontier had his soldiers not threatened to mutiny. They got their way finally between the rugged cliffs south of modern-day Aswan, where the procession effected an unwieldy about-face.
Dio has Caesar waking slowly to the realization that a delay in Egypt “was neither creditable nor profitable to him” but omits any context for the lull on the river. Caesar had at the time no living children. Nor in the course of three marriages had he fathered a son. On that count Egypt upheld its legendary reputation. In swelling tribute to the fecundity of her land, the one in which flowers bloomed perpetually and wheat harvested itself, Cleopatra was that spring in her last months of pregnancy. She roundly confirmed the myth of the propagative powers of her magnificent country. The two spent somewhere between three and nine weeks on the river and turned back at the first cataract of the Nile. The current carried them gently back to the palace. From Alexandria Caesar set off for Armenia, then in a state of revolt. Late in June Cleopatra gave birth to a half-Roman child, divine on two counts, once as a Ptolemy, again as a Caesar. Here at last was something new under the sun.
IV
THE GOLDEN AGE NEVER WAS THE PRESENT AGE
Servant: “What excuses shall I make if I am away from the house for a long time?”
Andromache: “You will find no shortage of pretexts. After all, you are a woman.”
—EURIPIDES
CAESAR LEFT EGYPT on June 10, far later than he should have. Rome had been without word from him since December and was in turmoil, as he surely knew. The mails worked perfectly well. In what was as much a personal as a political favor
, he took Cleopatra’s sister—still a “sibling-loving god” in name if not demeanor—with him as a prisoner of war. To protect Cleopatra, 12,000 of the legionnaires who had followed Caesar remained in Egypt, again a gesture both personal and political. Civil unrest was in neither of their best interests. Caesar indeed appears to have been disinclined to leave Cleopatra, although it is implausible that she proposed accompanying him to Rome that summer, as Dio claims. There was almost certainly talk of a reunion before the departure, which Caesar seems to have delayed and delayed until he could do so no longer.
Two weeks later Cleopatra went into labor. We know as little of the actual birth as we do of the intimacy that preceded it.* With or without a birthing stool, a team of midwives would have stood at the ready. One received the child in a bundle of cloth, securely swaddling him. A second cut the umbilical cord with an obsidian blade. The newborn was to be amply filled with milk, to which end a royal wet nurse was engaged. The requirements for the job were no different from those for a sitter today: The nurse should be congenial and clean. She should “not be prone to anger, not talkative nor indifferent in the taking of food, but organized and sensible.” Ideally, she should also be Greek, which was to say educated. Typically she was the lucky wife of a court official; hers was a well-remunerated, prestigious post, several years in duration. To it she brought generations’ worth of wisdom. 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.