Cleopatra: A Life

by Stacy Schiff

  Had she wanted to, Cleopatra could have availed herself of volumes of advice on contraception and abortion, some of it surprisingly effective. Nothing better revealed the conflicting tides of science and myth, enlightenment and ignorance, between which she lived than the literature on birth control. For each valid idea of Cleopatra’s age there was an equally outlandish belief. Hippocrates’ three-hundred-year-old recipe for inducing miscarriage—jump up and down, neatly touching your heels to your buttocks seven times—made some of the first-century measures look perfectly reasonable. A spider’s egg, attached to the body with deer hide before sunrise, could prevent conception for twelve months. This was no stranger (or more effective) than attaching a cat liver to one’s left foot, but then it was also asserted that a sneeze during sex worked wonders. In Cleopatra’s day crocodile dung was famed for its contraceptive powers, as was a concoction of mule’s kidney and eunuch’s urine. Generally the literature on abortifacients was more extensive than that on contraceptives; the time-tested ingredients for a morning-after pill were salt, mouse excrement, honey, and resin. Long after Cleopatra, it was asserted that the smell of a freshly extinguished lamp induced miscarriage. At the same time, some of the popular herbal remedies of Cleopatra’s age proved effective. White poplar, juniper berries, and giant fennel have qualified contraceptive powers. Others—vinegar, alum, and olive oil—remained in use until recently. Early diaphragms existed, of wool moistened with honey and oil. All offered better results than the rhythm method, of dubious benefit to a people who believed that a woman was at her most fertile around the time of menstruation.

  As it happened, nothing could better have suited twenty-two-year-old Cleopatra’s political agenda than motherhood. And no single act could have secured her future better than bearing Julius Caesar’s child. There were a few awkwardnesses, beginning with the fact that each of the new parents was married to someone else. (Technically speaking, Cleopatra had been both widowed and remarried in the course of the pregnancy.) From the Egyptian point of view, Caesar was an imperfect father on two counts: he was neither a Ptolemy nor royal. And from the Roman point of view, there was no advantage whatsoever in broadcasting his paternity, an embarrassment at best. From Cleopatra’s perspective, no diplomatic measure could have been as effective as this entirely private one. She had been too preoccupied with her own survival to have given much thought to succession, but she could now expect to be spared the fate of Alexander the Great, who died without an heir. The splendid Ptolemaic dynasty would survive her. Moreover, the child was a boy. 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. With Caesarion—or little Caesar, as the Alexandrians nicknamed Ptolemy XV Caesar—on her lap, Cleopatra had no difficulty ruling as a female king. Even before he began to babble, Caesarion accomplished a masterly feat. He rendered his feckless uncle wholly irrelevant. Whether Ptolemy XIV realized it or not, his older sister had gained control both of the imagery and the government.

  Best of all, Cleopatra’s timing was impeccable; she indeed seems to have had help—or great good luck—in producing children precisely when it was most advantageous to do so. Caesarion’s birth coincided almost exactly with the early summer rise of the Nile, which psychologically, iconographically, and financially ushered in the season of plenty. Daily anticipation gave way to celebration as the Nile grew turbid and mossy green, then swelled steadily, from south to north. Basket after basket filled with grapes, figs, and melons. The honey flowed abundantly. Cleopatra celebrated the annual feast of Isis at this time, an important, ritual-heavy date on the Egyptian calendar. The tears of that all-powerful goddess were said to account for the rise of the river. Cleopatra’s subjects offered her (compulsory) gifts on the holiday, a practice that set off a frenzied competition among her courtiers. Boats arrived at the palace from every corner of Egypt, loaded with fruits and flowers. Caesarion’s birth drove home Cleopatra’s association with Isis, but on that count Cleopatra took her cue from her most illustrious ancestors, who for 250 years had identified with that ancient goddess. In an age of general longing, she ranked as the greatest deity of the day. She enjoyed nearly unlimited powers: Isis had invented the alphabet (both Egyptian and Greek), separated earth from sky, set the sun and the moon on their way. Fiercely but compassionately, she plucked order from chaos. She was tender and comforting, also the mistress of war, thunderbolts, the sea. She cured the sick and raised the dead. She presided over love affairs, invented marriage, regulated pregnancies, inspired the love that binds children to parents, smiled on domestic life. She dispensed mercy, salvation, redemption. She is the consummate earth mother, also—like most mothers—something of a canny, omnicompetent, behind-the-scenes magician.

  Isis appealed equally to both of Cleopatra’s constituencies, offering as she did a versatile conflation of two cultures. In a land where many answered to different names in Greek and Egyptian, the goddess served as nation builder and religious icon. Demeter, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite combined in her person. Her temples dotted Alexandria; her terra-cotta statuette graced most homes. A commanding woman with a distinctly sensual aura, she was a less comfortable presence abroad. Already that powerful enchantress had flustered the more martial Roman world, to which Alexandrian traders had exported her cult. Caesar had himself barred Isis priests from entering Rome. As early as 80 BC, an Isis temple had stood in that city, on the Capitoline Hill. It was destroyed and rebuilt, a history that repeated itself at regular intervals over the course of Cleopatra’s lifetime. Such was the popularity of Isis that when the order to dismantle her temples was issued in 50, no workman would pick up an ax to do so. A consul was obliged to strip off his toga and minister the first blows himself.

  It is difficult to determine which came first, whether Isis accounted for the supremacy of women in Egypt, or whether the Ptolemaic queens reinforced her eminence.* Certainly she introduced an equality of the sexes. In some accounts, Isis grants women the same strength as men. She was in any event a perfect boon to Cleopatra. To celebrate Caesarion’s birth, the new mother ordered coins struck on which he is depicted as Horus, Isis’s infant son. (The imagery was conveniently bilingual. It read just as easily as Aphrodite with Eros.) Future events would only reinforce Cleopatra’s identification with Isis, into whose role she would step more fully and literally than had any previous Ptolemy. On ceremonial occasions she assumed her guise, appearing in a full, finely pleated linen mantle of iridescent stripes, fringed at the bottom, tightly wrapped from right hip to left shoulder and knotted between the breasts. Under it she wore a snug Greek sheath, or chiton. Corkscrew curls fell around her neck. On her head she wore a diadem or, on religious occasions, a traditional pharaonic crown of feathers, solar disk, and cow’s horns. Forty-seven years later the protean Isis would cede her place to a very different single mother, who appropriated her imagery wholesale.

  Motherhood not only enhanced Cleopatra’s authority—in her day the Egyptian queen was more earth mother than femme fatale—but solidified her links with the native priests, to whom she granted significant privileges. In this she continued the work of her father. Even while abroad he had distinguished himself as a prolific builder of temples and had cultivated his relations with the Egyptian clergy. They were central to order amid the native populace, also intimately engaged with matters of state. As the temples stood at the center of both religious and commercial life, there was an interpenetration of the Greek bureaucracy and the Egyptian hierarchy. The minister of finance might equally supervise the feeding of the sacred animals. The priest in charge of cult revenues for special occasions might double as a reed merchant. Those with weighty titles at the Temple of Memphis held equally weighty titles in the world of commerce and occupied privileged positions at Cleopatra’s court. 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. You might visit one to work up a contract, or consult a doctor, or borrow a sack of grain. A temple could grant refuge within its walls, a right Cleopatra extended in 46 to an Isis shrine, toward the end of her reign to a synagogue in the southern delta. (It may have represented her half of a bargain. The Jews of the region were fine soldiers; Cleopatra needed an army at the time.) In principle, no one granted asylum could be driven or dragged away. It was where you withdrew when you had had the temerity to organize a strike. The temples lent money, even, on occasion, to Ptolemies.

  It was as well the priests’ responsibility to monitor every mood of the Nile, with which Egypt’s fortunes literally rose and fell. The river could deliver bountiful riches or considerable disaster. A flood of twenty-four feet induced delirium. Twenty-one feet brought good cheer. Eighteen feet—a season in which the blue-gray sludge clung to the riverbanks and sullenly refused to extend itself over the land—signaled a season of trouble. Such had been the case the previous year, when the Nile appeared to have been as out of joint as the times. As Cleopatra had observed on her clandestine trip to Alexandria, the flood of 48 was disastrous. In the end it measured only seven and a half feet, the lowest rise on record. (With the drought the Egyptian economy had ground to a halt, another reason anti-Roman recruits had been easy to come by that fall.) The river dictated intimate family relations as much as it did national policy. One son signed an agreement with his mother: he was to supply her with specific quantities of wheat, oil, and salt unless the river fell beneath a certain level, at which point she was to do his housekeeping. Many temples had Nilotic measuring columns, monitored secretly and obsessively by their priests. Daily they compared those figures to the previous year’s. From them Cleopatra’s officials could assess harvests and calculate taxes. Given the mania for measures and comparative data, it makes sense that geometry came of age in Egypt.

  The fixation on past performances accounted for the embrace of history as well, although that discipline was less exact. Feeding the people was paramount, a mandate on which Cleopatra prided herself. She depicted herself as the Lady of Abundance for good reason; she stood between her subjects and hunger. Given the rigors of the system, they could manage no reserves. In a crisis Cleopatra had no choice but to authorize distributions from crown warehouses. “There was no famine during my reign” was a popular and gratifying phrase for a monarch to inscribe on his or her temples. Ancient propaganda served the same ends as its modern counterpart, however. There appears to have been little correlation between the alimentary reality and that sunny assertion, as often as not patently false.

  BY THE MIDDLE of 47 Cleopatra was free of conspiring court officials and relieved of all antagonistic family members. Civil disturbance was at a minimum. She had her hands full all the same. “Anyone familiar with the wearying work required of kings by all those letters they must read or write would not bother even to pick up a diadem from the ground,” an earlier Hellenistic monarch had groaned. And he had no experience of lush Ptolemaic bureaucracy, the natural fruit of an administration-proud, papyrus-rich culture with a planned and centralized economy and an unaccountable passion for records and censuses. The Greek historian Diodorus outlined another first-century sovereign’s schedule, some version of which would have been Cleopatra’s as well. After being awakened, she waded through sheafs of dispatches from every quarter. Her advisers briefed her on affairs of state. She corresponded with high priests and fellow sovereigns. If they were well, if their public and private affairs proceeded satisfactorily, then—went the formulaic greeting—she was well. She handed down decisions. She dictated memorandums to various scribes and signed off—sometimes with a single, powerful word meaning, “Let it be done”—on others. Only later was she bathed and dressed, perfumed and made up, after which she offered smoky sacrifices to the gods. At some appointed afternoon hour she received callers, on state, temple, and judicial business. Those audiences could be stultifying; they had lulled an earlier Ptolemy to sleep. Cleopatra’s responsibilities very nearly rivaled those of Isis: She not only dispensed justice, commanded the army and navy, regulated the economy, negotiated with foreign powers, and presided over the temples, but determined the prices of raw materials and supervised the sowing schedules, the distribution of seed, the condition of Egypt’s canals, the food supply. She was magistrate, high priest, queen, and goddess. She was also—on a day-to-day basis and far more frequently—chief executive officer. She headed both the secular and the religious bureaucracies. She was Egypt’s merchant in chief. The crush of state business consumed most of her day. And as that early, weary Hellenistic monarch had acknowledged, absolute power consumes absolutely.

  A vast, entrenched bureaucracy answered to Cleopatra. On the local level regional clerks and subclerks, village heads, scribes, tax collectors, and police did her bidding. On the national level a chief finance and interior minister, her dioiketes, oversaw the functioning of the state, with a horde of subordinates. Close at hand Cleopatra employed personal secretaries, writers of memorandums, an inner circle of advisers, foreign ministers, philosophers. Both Greeks and Greek-speaking Egyptians held those privileged positions, which came with resonant, familial-sounding titles: if you were particularly powerful, you figured among the Order of First Friends, or the Order of Successors. Some of those advisers Cleopatra had known and trusted since her childhood; she retained them from her father’s regime. With several—the dioiketes, for example—she was in constant contact. She reviewed her secretary’s official journal daily.

  The administration made for a cumbersome, many-levered piece of machinery. It was founded on two assumptions. It was Cleopatra’s role to tax the people, the people’s role to fill her coffers. To that end her forebears had inserted controls into every level of every industry; a larger skein of governmental red tape was nowhere to be found. (Caesar could only have been astonished. Rome was at the time bureaucracy-free.) Cleopatra’s harvests were the greatest in the Mediterranean world. With them she fed her people, and from them she derived her power. Her officials consequently monitored their every aspect. They distributed the seed. Its equivalent was to be returned at harvesttime. The farmer took a royal oath to do what he said he would do with his planting. You filled your ship only after swearing that you would deliver your goods “unadultered and without delay.” Under Cleopatra and as a consequence of the decades of unrest, shippers traveled with sealed samples, in the company of armed guards. A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily—with wheat, barley, lentils—to feed Alexandria alone.

  The same punctilious oversight extended to every corner of the economy. The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history. No matter who farmed it—Egyptian peasant, Greek settler, temple priest—most land was royal land. As such Cleopatra’s functionaries determined and monitored its use. Only with government permission could you fell a tree, breed pigs, turn your barley field into an olive garden. All was scrupulously designed for the sake of the record-keeping, profit-surveying bureaucrat rather than for the convenience of the cultivator or the benefit of the crop. You faced prosecution (as did one overly enterprising woman) if you planted palms without permission. The beekeeper could not move his hives from one administrative district to another, as doing so confused the authorities. No one left his village during the agricultural season. Neither did his farm animals. All land was surveyed, all livestock inventoried, the latter at the height of the flood season, when it could not be hidden. Looms were checked to make sure that none was idle and thread counts correct. It was illegal for a private individual to own an oil press or anything resembling one. Officials spent a great deal of time shutting down clandestine operations. (Temples alone were exempt from this
rule for two months of every year, at the end of which they, too, were shut down.) The brewer operated only with a license and received his barley—from which he pledged to make beer—from the state. Once he had sold his goods he submitted his profits to the crown, which deducted the costs of raw materials and rents from his income. Cleopatra was thereby assured both of a market for her barley and of profits on the brewer’s sales. Her officials audited all revenues carefully, to verify that the mulberries and willows and acacia were planted at the proper time, to survey the maintenance of every canal. In the process, they were especially and frequently exhorted to disseminate throughout Egypt the reassuring message that “nobody is allowed to do what he wishes, but that everything is arranged for the best.”

  Unparalleled in its sophistication, the system was hugely effective and, for Cleopatra, hugely lucrative. The greatest of Egypt’s industries—wheat, glass, papyrus, linen, oils, and unguents—essentially constituted royal monopolies. On those commodities Cleopatra profited doubly. The sale of oil to the crown was taxed at nearly 50 percent. Cleopatra then resold the oil at a profit, in some cases as great as 300 percent. Cleopatra’s subjects paid a salt tax, a dike tax, a pasture tax; generally if an item could be named, it was taxed. Owners of baths, which were private concerns, owed the state a third of their revenue. Professional fishermen surrendered 25 percent of their catch, vintners 16 percent of their tonnage. Cleopatra operated several wool and textile factories of her own, with a staff of slave girls. She must have seemed divine in her omniscience. A Ptolemy “knew each day what each of his subjects was worth and what most of them were doing.”

  It was a system that called out for abuse, which call was answered. Ptolemaic fiscal policy occupied a vast hierarchy of people, from the dioiketes to managers and submanagers and treasurers and secretaries and accountants. Each stood as ready to arbitrate conflicts as to enrich himself. The opportunities for misconduct were boundless. Their traces survive the glories of Alexandria itself, glories the Ptolemaic machine made possible. Ultimately Cleopatra’s officials produced as much resentment as they did graft. As they were themselves often farmers or industrialists, private and public business easily bled into each other. The interests of the general managers and the crown failed to coincide. Those of the government and its customs agents—ever poised to slap a duty on a pillow, a jar of honey, a goatskin bathing costume—never did. Officials at different levels disagreed. And in the thick of the overlapping, otiose bureaucracy, personal opportunities were rarely lost. As the Ptolemaic scholar Dorothy Thompson has pointed out, Cleopatra’s family devoted a great deal of time to defining the good official. He should be vigilant, upright, a beacon of goodwill. He should steer clear of dubious company. He was to investigate all complaints, guard against extortion, and—in his tours of inspection—“cheer everybody up and to put them in better spirits.” He was also largely a fiction. “We may conclude that it was almost impossible for our good official not to be bad,” Thompson avers, upon a survey of the evidence. The temptation was too great, the pay low or nonexistent, the system too hidebound.*