Cleopatra: A Life

by Stacy Schiff

  The list of abuses was impressive. Royal functionaries appropriated lands, requisitioned houses, pocketed monies, confiscated boats, ordered arbitrary arrests, levied illicit taxes. They devised sophisticated extortion rackets. They preyed equally on Greeks and on Egyptians, on temple officials and peasants. Cleopatra intervened regularly between her people and her overzealous officials; even the highest placed among them earned royal rebukes. At one juncture the chief embalmer of bulls complained of harassment. A delegation of farmers appeared before Cleopatra in the spring of 41 to protest a form of double taxation, from which she exempted them in future. Amid the massive flow of papyrus—of reports, petitions, instructions, commands—figured frequent protests and reprimands. Especially over the first years of Cleopatra’s reign a volume of grievances poured in. Insubordination, incompetence, and dishonesty may have plagued her at home as well, among the palace doorkeepers, huntsmen, equerries, wine pourers, seamstresses, and servants of the bedchamber.

  Even those complaints that did not make their way to Cleopatra in person appealed to her good intentions, her wisdom, her commitment to justice. Like Isis, she was seen as the beneficent guardian of her subjects, as much in her earthly role as in her divine one. Egyptians invoked her name aloud when they suffered indignities or when they sought redress. And though she had plenty of representatives—an official sorted through petitions—there was nothing to prevent an aggrieved party from approaching Cleopatra directly. They did so in droves. The wise queen granted a general amnesty before she moved about the country for audits or religious festivals; to fail to do so was to be greeted by a thousand plaintiffs. The operative philosophy seemed to be: when in doubt, write (or have the village scribe write) a petition. Every brand of misdemeanor and melodrama came Cleopatra’s way. Cooks ran off. Workers organized strikes, dodged customs, delivered fraudulent goods. Guards went unpaid. Prostitutes spit on prospective clients. Women attacked the pregnant wives of their ex-husbands. Government officials stole pigs and seized dovecotes. Gangs assaulted tax collectors. Loans went bad. There were tomb robbers and irrigation problems and careless shepherds, doctored bills and wrongful arrests. Bath attendants routinely insulted patrons and made off with their clothing. The infirm father complained of his neglectful daughter. The licensed lentil seller—an honest taxpayer—bleated that the pumpkin roasters encroached on his market: they “come early in the morning, sit down near me and my lentils, and sell the pumpkin, giving me no chance of selling lentils.” Surely he could prevail upon the authorities for additional time to pay his rent? So prevalent were tax disputes that Ptolemy II had centuries earlier forbidden lawyers to represent clients in such cases. Exempt as they were from manual labor, must the temple keepers of sacred cats really assist with the harvest? They petitioned.

  Cleopatra met regularly with another irritant. When a woman accidentally emptied her chamber pot on a passerby and in the ensuing wrangle tore his cloak to shreds and spat in his face, it was fair to assume that ethnic differences were at stake. The same was true when a bath attendant emptied a jug of hot water on a customer and, alleged the customer, “scalded my belly and my left thigh down to the knee, so that my life was in danger.” In a country administered primarily by Greeks and worked primarily by Egyptians, resentment inevitably simmered below the surface. (The spitter and bath attendant were Egyptian, their victims Greek. Probably there were fewer than 500,000 Greeks in the country, the majority of them in Alexandria.) For all its frantic syncretism, for all of Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism—to address an Alexandrian was to address an Ethiopian or a Scythian, a Libyan or a Cilician—two parallel cultures remained in place. Nowhere was that more pronounced than in the legal system. A contract in Greek was subject to Greek law, an Egyptian contract to Egyptian law. Similarly, an Egyptian woman enjoyed rights not available to her Greek counterpart, answerable always to her guardian. The regulations applied differently. An Egyptian who attempted to depart from Alexandria without a pass sacrificed one third of his property. The Greek who did so paid a fine. In certain ways the two cultures remained separate, just as certain habits—as Cleopatra and Caesar were to discover—resisted transplant. A Greek cabbage inexplicably lost all flavor when grown in Egyptian soil.

  The economy Auletes handed down to his daughter was moreover in tatters. “When we inherited the Republic from our forebears, it was like a beautiful painting whose colors were fading with age,” Cicero had moaned a few years earlier. The same was only more true of Cleopatra’s Egypt, its glory days firmly behind it. Auletes owed his unpopularity in large part to the onerous taxes he had levied to pay his Roman bill. Cleopatra settled the bill but was left with a depleted treasury. (When word of her father’s death reached Rome, the first questions were: who rules Egypt now, and how do I get my money?) By one account Auletes had as well dissipated the family’s accumulated fortune. How did Cleopatra fare? In economic affairs she took a determined hand, immediately devaluing the currency by a third. She issued no new gold coins and debased the silver, as her father had done shortly before his death. For the most part hers was a bronze age. She instituted large-scale production in that metal, which had been halted for some time. And she ushered in a great innovation: Cleopatra introduced coins of different denominations to Egypt. For the first time the markings determined the value of a coin. Regardless of its weight, it was to be accepted at face value, a great profit to her.

  From there the juries divide as to Cleopatra’s financial well-being. When called upon later to offer assistance to Rome, she did not reach deeply into her coffers, proof to some that she was financially constrained. She had a valid reason to prove less than forthcoming, however. She did not intend to comport herself as a Roman puppet. It was argued that Auletes did not have the money to raise a mercenary army in 58, when Cyprus cost him his throne. Somehow Cleopatra had the funds to do so a decade later, when she had been in power for only two years and her brother staged his coup. She stabilized the economy and set the country on a steady course. As the number of her later political suitors implies, she still had significant private treasure. Villages in Upper Egypt prospered. The arts flourished as well. Under Cleopatra the Alexandrians—their cultural appetite newly whetted—turned out masterpieces of a quality and quantity that had not been seen for a century. The splendid alabaster carvings and gold-laced glass that survive her by no means suggest a bankrupt regime.

  How wealthy was she? Into her coffers went approximately half of what Egypt produced. Her annual cash revenue was probably between 12,000 and 15,000 silver talents. That was an astronomical sum of money for any sovereign, in the words of one modern historian “the equivalent of all of the hedge fund managers of yesteryear rolled into one.” (Inflation was an issue throughout the century, but it affected Cleopatra’s silver less than her bronze currency.) The most lavish of lavish burials cost 1 talent, the prize a king tossed out at a palace drinking contest. A half-talent was a crushing fine to an Egyptian villager. A priest in Cleopatra’s day—his post was a coveted one—made 15 talents yearly. That was a princely sum; it was the bail Ptolemy III had posted when he had “borrowed” the official versions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from Athens—and which he sacrificed when he opted not to return those priceless texts. Pirates set a staggering 20-talent ransom on the head of the young Julius Caesar, who, being Caesar, protested that he was worth at least 50. Given a choice between a 50-talent fine and prison, you opted for jail. You could build two impressive monuments for a much-loved mistress for 200 talents. Cleopatra’s costs were high, her first years a trial given the uncooperative Nile. But by the most stringent of definitions—that of Rome’s wealthiest citizen—she was fabulously well-off. Crassus claimed that no one was truly rich if he could not afford to maintain an army.*

  On the level of internal affairs Cleopatra managed uncommonly well. Evidently she handled the flood of petitions effectively. She enjoyed the support of the people. Her reign is notable for the absence of revolts in Upper Egypt, suddenly qu
iet as it had not been for a century and a half. By the summer of 46, she had reason to believe her kingdom on an even keel, its productivity assured. The Nile rose steadily. She began to issue instructions to trusted chamberlains, to navy officials, to her son’s nurses. They assembled a collection of towels, tableware, kitchen utensils, lamps, sheets, rugs, and cushions. With one-year-old Caesarion and a large retinue, Cleopatra prepared to sail to Rome. She took with her secretaries, copyists, messengers, bodyguards, and her brother-husband as well; a wise Ptolemy did not leave a blood relative behind. Whether she traveled for reasons of state or affairs of the heart—or to introduce Caesar to the infant son he had not yet met—is unclear. She may have been waiting for word from Caesar, who had been away from Rome for nearly three years. His return from North Africa, where he brilliantly defeated Pompey’s remaining supporters, coincides neatly with Cleopatra’s arrival. Two things are abundantly clear. She could not have left Egypt were she not firmly in control of the country. And she would not have dared to set foot in Rome had Julius Caesar not wanted her there.

  CLEOPATRA WOULD NOT have undertaken her first trip across the Mediterranean lightly. The voyage was risky at the best of times; on a similar crossing, Herod would be shipwrecked. Josephus, the Jewish-Roman historian who wrote so venomously of Cleopatra, spent a night some years later swimming in the Mediterranean. We have hints that Cleopatra was a nervous sailor. She traveled too both as an institution and an individual, with physicians and philosophers, eunuchs, advisers, seamstresses, cooks, and with a full staff for Caesarion. With her went sumptuous gifts: jars of Nile water, shimmering fabrics, cinnamon, tapestries, alabaster pots of fragrance, gold beakers, mosaics, leopards. She had an image to uphold and every reason to advertise Egypt’s wealth. That fall a giraffe made its first appearance in Rome, to electrifying effect. It may well have sailed north with Cleopatra. (The description-defying creature was “like a camel in all respects”—except for its spots, its soaring height, its legs, and its neck.) Presumably Cleopatra made the crossing in a naval galley, most likely a slender, square-rigged, 120-foot trireme, of which there were many in her fleet. A galley was a swift ship, with a crew of about 170 rowers and room for a small group of passengers in the stern. The retinue and gifts followed behind.

  However she billed the crossing at home it was by no means a pleasure trip. A Hellenistic monarch ventured abroad with a purpose rather than on a whim.* Nor did Cleopatra slip out of the city quietly, as her father had done. The assembled flotilla made for an extraordinary sight, one that had not greeted Alexandria for at least a generation. There was nothing remotely discreet or economical about it. Crowds gathered on shore to admire the spectacle and to send off their queen, with music and with cheers, amid spicy-sweet clouds of frankincense. Aboard ship she would have heard the commotion until those faces, the spindly palms, the rocky coast, the colossi, the gold roof of the Serapeum, and finally the lighthouse itself faded from view. It is unlikely that Cleopatra had ever before seen that limestone tower with its reflective mirrors from the windward side. Only after a good four hours at sea did the massive statue of Poseidon at its top dissolve completely in the silvery haze.

  Before her lay a trip of two thousand miles. At best she could expect to be at sea for a good month. At worst the passage was closer to ten weeks. Rome lay directly northwest of Alexandria, which invited a continual struggle against the prevailing wind. Rather than venturing across the Mediterranean, a naval galley sailed east and north before heading west. It put into port nightly. Space for provisions was limited, and the crew could neither sleep nor eat aboard ship. Villages received advance word of a fleet’s arrival; their inhabitants turned out in crowds at the harbor, with water and foodstuffs. In this arduous way Cleopatra journeyed up the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, along the southern shore of Asia Minor, north of Rhodes and Crete, across the Ionian Sea. Beyond Sicily a horizon spread itself out and became the Italian peninsula. She likely traced its western coast, up the gentle Tyrrhenian Sea, gliding along a wild shoreline newly dotted with opulent stone villas. Over the next decade those terraced estates would multiply with such speed that it would be said that the fish felt cramped. Beyond Pompeii she would have enjoyed a view of the bustling port and fine harbor of Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli), where the massive Egyptian grain ships docked. In the harbor she made smoky offerings to the gods, in gratitude for her safe arrival; if Isis was not carved into the prow of Cleopatra’s ship, the goddess of navigation stood somewhere on deck. A gangplank ultimately delivered Cleopatra to Europe. From Puteoli she made the three-day trek overland to Rome, by cushioned litter or carriage, along sand and gravel roads, a rough, dusty drive under intense heat. It was in Cleopatra’s case also a conspicuous one. A Roman official on a tour of inspection in Asia Minor traveled with “two chariots, a carriage, a litter, horses, numerous slaves, and, besides, a monkey on a little car, and a number of wild asses.” And he was an unknown. In the East, baggage trains of two hundred wagons and several thousand courtiers were not unheard of.

  At the outskirts of Rome a fragrant dusting of cassis, myrrh, and cinnamon hung in the air. Modest tombs and colossal mausoleums lined both sides of the road, as did shrines to Mercury, the patron saint of travelers. If they had not done so already, Caesar’s representatives met Cleopatra outside the city walls and directed her, across a wooden bridge, to his large country estate, on the west bank of the Tiber. With assistance, Cleopatra settled on the southeastern part of the Janiculum Hill, a fine address if by no means as prestigious as those across town, on the opposite hill. In Caesar’s villa she found herself surrounded by an extensive collection of painting and sculpture, a colonnaded court, and a mile-long, lushly planted garden, lavish by Roman standards, which to an Egyptian queen was fairly meaningless. By contrast she enjoyed a clear view of the city below. Through the pines and cypresses Cleopatra looked out over the yellowish Tiber to the outlying hills and the red-tile rooftops of Rome, a metropolis that consisted for the most part of a jumble of twisting lanes and densely packed tenements. Rome had recently overtaken Alexandria in population; in 46 it was home to nearly 1 million people. On all other levels it qualified as a provincial backwater. It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room. As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia. In Alexandria, the glorious past was very much in evidence. Rome’s glorious future was from Cleopatra’s quarters nowhere visible. It was just still possible to mistake which was the Old World and which the New.

  There is every indication that Cleopatra kept a low profile, or as low as she could keep under her unusual circumstances: “For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar’s own house, so that he too derived an ill reputation on account of both of them,” chides Dio. As everyone knew, Caesar lived in the center of town, near the Forum, with his wife, Calpurnia. Cleopatra’s influence and that of her country were all the same much felt, directly and indirectly. On his return Caesar had begun to institute a number of reforms drawn from his Egyptian stay, during which he had evidently studied innovation as attentively as tradition. Most conspicuously, he went to work on the Roman calendar, which by 46 had crept three months ahead of the season. For some time a Roman year had consisted of 355 days, to which the authorities added an extra month irregularly, when doing so suited their purposes. As Plutarch has it, “Only the priests could say the time, and they, at their pleasure, without giving any notice, slipped in the intercalary month.” The result was a thorough mess; at one juncture, Cicero did not know what year he was living in. Caesar adopted the Egyptian calendar of twelve thirty-day months, with an additional five-day period at the end of the year, subsequently deemed “the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in human history.” He adopted as well the twelve-hour division between night and day that he had known in Alexandria. Generally speaking, time was a vaguer,
more elastic notion in Rome, where it was subject to perpetual debate.* Cleopatra’s astronomers and mathematicians assisted in Caesar’s planning. The result was a bold correction in 46, “the last year of muddled reckoning” and one of 445 days, the extra weeks inserted between November and December.

  The Egyptian episode had exerted a profound influence on Caesar; the only question in the eighteen months to come would be to what degree it had done so. His admiration for Cleopatra’s kingdom can be read plainly in his reforms. He laid the foundations for a public library, to make the works of Greek and Latin literature widely available. He engaged an eminent scholar—he counted among those Caesar had spared in battle not once but twice—to assemble that collection. The Alexandrian obsession with accounting proved contagious: Caesar commissioned an official census. (It would reveal that his rivalry with Pompey had ravaged the city. The civil war had substantially thinned Rome’s population.) The sophisticated locks and dikes of Egypt left an impression; Caesar proposed draining the unhealthy marshes in central Italy, so as to reclaim prime farmland. Why not engineer a canal from the Adriatic to the Tiber, to facilitate trade? Caesar planned to reengineer the harbor at Ostia, still a minor port, obstructed by rocks and shoals. An Alexandrian-style causeway would open the town to great fleets. He extended citizenship to anyone in Rome who taught the liberal arts or who practiced medicine, “to make them more desirous of living in the city and to induce others to resort to it.” He suggested stripping the city of some of its lesser sculpture, which after Alexandria looked decidedly shabby; it was difficult for anyone to come into contact with Ptolemaic Egypt and not contract a case of extravagance. Like Cleopatra herself, not all of Caesar’s imports were welcome or entirely logical. Just after her arrival, he recognized the cult of Dionysus, a Greek of even more dubious heritage and questionable habits than the exceedingly rich Egyptian queen. On nearly every front Caesar demonstrated prodigious activity, the maniacal capacity for work that had for years distinguished him from his rivals.