by Stacy Schiff
THE REWRITING OF history began almost immediately. Not only did Mark Antony disappear from the record, but Actium wondrously transformed itself into a major engagement, a resounding victory, a historical turning point. It went from an end to a beginning. Augustus had rescued the country from great peril. He had resolved the civil war and restored world peace after a century of unrest. Time began anew. To read the official historians, it is as if with his return the Italian peninsula burst—after a crippling, ashen century of violence—into Technicolor, as if the crops sat suddenly upright, plump and golden, in the fields. “Validity was restored to the laws, authority to the courts, and dignity to the senate,” proclaims Velleius, very nearly cataloguing the duties with which Caesar had been meant to contend in 46. Augustus’s ego is embedded in the calendar, where it remains to this day, commemorating the fall of Alexandria and Rome’s reprieve from a foreign menace.* Calendars of the time acknowledge the date as one on which he freed Rome “from a most grievous danger.”
Cleopatra was particularly ill served; the turncoats wrote the history, Dellius, Plancus, and Nicolaus of Damascus first among them. The years after Actium were a time of extravagant praise and lavish mythmaking. Her career also coincided with the birth of Latin literature; it was Cleopatra’s curse to inspire its great poets, happy to expound on her shame, in a language inhospitable to her and all she represented. Horace wrote exuberantly of Actium. The first to celebrate Octavian’s splendid victory, he did so while Cleopatra was still frantically fortifying Alexandria. He celebrates her defeat before it has occurred. Virgil and Propertius were on hand for the Egyptian triumph, by which time both the asp and Cleopatra’s pernicious influence were already set in stone. In every reckoning Antony is made to flee Actium on Cleopatra’s account. She helpfully illuminated one of Propertius’s favorite points: a man in love is a helpless man, shamefully subservient to his mistress. It is as if Octavian delivers Rome from that ill as well. He has restored the natural order of things: men ruled women, and Rome ruled the world. On both counts, Cleopatra was crucial to the story. Virgil composed the Aeneid in the decade after Cleopatra’s death; he put snakes in her wake even at Actium. She had no hope of faring well in a work read aloud both to Augustus and Octavia, as were portions of that epic poem. For the rest, her story would be shaped by a Roman she met once, in the last week of her life, who elevated her to a perilous adversary, at which altitude thick mists and obscuring myths settled comfortably around her. She counts among the losers whom history remembers, but for the wrong reasons.* The mythmakers all aligned on one side. For the next century, the Oriental influence and the emancipation of women would keep the satirists in business.
Since Cleopatra’s death her fortunes have waxed and waned as dramatically as they did in her lifetime. Her power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar’s murderers had noted, “How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!” It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest. Against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence—in her ropes of pearls—there should, at least, be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent. (Menander’s fourth-century adage—“A man who teaches a woman to write should recognize that he is providing poison to an asp”—was still being copied out by schoolchildren hundreds of years after her death.) It also makes a better story. Propertius sets the tone. Cleopatra was for him a wanton seductress, “the whore queen,” later “a woman of insatiable sexuality and insatiable avarice” (Dio), a carnal sinner (Dante), “the whore of the eastern kings” (Boccaccio), a poster child for unlawful love (Dryden).* Propertius has her fornicating with her slaves. A first-century Roman would assert (falsely) that “ancient writers repeatedly speak of Cleopatra’s insatiable libido.” In one ancient account she is so insatiable that “she often played the prostitute.” (She is also both so beautiful and toxic that “many men bought nights with her at the price of their lives.”) In the estimation of one nineteenth-century woman, she was “a dazzling piece of witchcraft.” Florence Nightingale referred to her as “that disgusting Cleopatra.” Offering her the movie role, Cecil B. DeMille is said to have asked Claudette Colbert, “How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?” Cleopatra stars even in a 1928 book called Sinners Down the Centuries. In the match between the lady and the legend there is no contest.
The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same “wily and suspicious” marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality to the mix. For some time she haunted the ancient imagination, primarily as a cautionary tale. Under Augustus the institution of marriage took on a new luster, a development that boded poorly for Cleopatra, the destabilizing, domineering home wrecker.
She elicited scorn and envy in equal and equally distorting measure; her story is constructed as much of male fear as fantasy. From Plutarch descends history’s greatest love story, though Cleopatra’s life was neither as lurid nor as romantic as has been made out. And she became a femme fatale twice over. For Actium to be the battle to beat all battles, she had to be the “wild queen” plotting Rome’s destruction. For Antony to have succumbed to something other than a fellow Roman, Cleopatra had to be a disarming seductress “who had already ruined him and would make his ruin still more complete.” It can be difficult to say where vengeance ends and homage begins. Her power was immediately enhanced because—for one man’s historical purposes—she needed to have reduced another to abject slavery. It is true that she was a dutiful, father-loving daughter, a patriot and protector, an early nationalist, a symbol of courage, a wise ruler with nerves of steel, a master at self-presentation. It is not true that she built the lighthouse of Alexandria, could manufacture gold, was the ideal woman (Gautier), a martyr to love (Chaucer), “a silly little girl” (Shaw), the mother of Christ. A seventh-century Coptic bishop termed her “the most illustrious and wise of women,” greater than the kings who preceded her. On a good day Cleopatra is said to have died for love, which is not exactly true either. Ultimately everyone from Michelangelo to Gérôme, from Corneille to Brecht, got a crack at her. The Renaissance was obsessed with her, the Romantics yet more so. She sent even Shakespeare over the top, eliciting from him his greatest female role, his richest poetry, a full, Antony-less last act, and, in the estimation of one critic, a rollicking tribute to guilt-free middle-aged adultery. Shakespeare may be as much to blame for our having lost sight of Cleopatra VII as the Alexandrian humidity, Roman propaganda, and Elizabeth Taylor’s limpid lilac eyes.
A center of intellectual jousting and philosophical marathons, Alexandria did not immediately surrender its vitality. It continued as the brain of the Mediterranean world for another century or so. Then it began to dematerialize. With it went legal autonomy for women; the days of suing your father-in-law for the return of your dowry when your (insolvent) husband ran off and had a baby with another woman were over. After a fifth-century earthquake, Cleopatra’s palace slid into the Mediterranean. The lighthouse, the library, the museum, have all vanished. The Alexandrian harbor bears no relation to its Hellenistic proportions. The Nile itself has changed course. The city has sunk more than twenty fee
t. Even the coast of Actium—which Cleopatra must practically have memorized—has changed. Her Alexandria has long been almost entirely invisible, either underwater or buried beneath a teeming city that has largely forgotten its Hellenistic chapter. Ptolemaic culture evaporated as well. A great deal that Cleopatra knew would be forgotten for fifteen hundred years. A very different kind of woman, the Virgin Mary, would subsume Isis as entirely as Elizabeth Taylor has subsumed Cleopatra.
Our fascination with Cleopatra has only increased as a result; she is all the more mythic for her disappearance. The holes in the story keep us under her spell. And she continues to unsettle. All the issues that disrupt the dinner table, that go to our heads like snake venom, combine in her person. Two thousand years after she taunted Octavian with a very costly bonfire, nothing enthralls so much as excessive good fortune and devastating catastrophe. We still fight the battle of East and West, still lurch as uneasily as did Cicero between indulgence and restraint. Sex and power continue to combust in spectacular ways. Female ambition, accomplishment, authority, trouble us as they did the Romans, for whom Cleopatra was more a monster than a marvel, but undeniably a little of both.
Two thousand years of bad press and overheated prose, of film and opera, cannot conceal the fact that Cleopatra was a remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank. Her career began with one brazen act of defiance and ended with another. “What woman, what ancient succession of men, was so great?” demands the anonymous author of a fragmentary Latin poem, which positions her as the principal player of the age. Boldly and bodily, she inserted herself into world politics, with wide-reaching consequences. She convinced her people that a twilight was a dawn and—with all her might—struggled to make it so. In a desperate situation, she improvised wildly, then improvised afresh, for some a definition of genius. There was a glamour and a grandeur to her story well before either Octavian or Shakespeare got his hands on it. Hers was an exhilarating presence; before she sent Plutarch many pages out of his way she had the same effect on his countrymen. From our first glimpse of her to the last, she dazzles for her ability to set the scene. To the end she was mistress of herself, astute, spirited, inconceivably rich, pampered yet ambitious.
In her adult life Cleopatra would have met few people she considered her equal. To the Romans she was a stubborn, supreme exception to every rule. She remains largely incomparable: She had plenty of predecessors, few successors. With her, the age of empresses essentially came to an end. In two thousand years only one or two other women could be said to have wielded unrestricted authority over so vast a realm. Cleopatra remains nearly alone at the all-male table, in possession of a hand both flush and flawed. She got a very good deal right, and one crucial thing wrong. It is impossible to fathom how she could have felt at the end of the summer of 30, as Octavian closed in, as it became more and more clear that there were to be no further reversals of fortune, no more brilliantly salvaged futures, that she and Egypt were this time plainly lost. “What is it to lose your country—a great suffering?” a queen asks her son in Euripides. “The greatest, even worse than people say,” he replies. The fear and fury must have shattered Cleopatra as she realized she was to become the woman “who destroyed the Egyptian monarchy,” as a third-century AD chronicler has it. For her monumental loss there were no consolations, including—assuming she believed in one—a brilliant afterlife.
Acknowledgments
“I HAVE THUS endeavored to sum up the evidence upon the case, as fairly as I can, and the result seems to be that the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty as to what was the truth,” Boswell concludes of Richard Savage, proffering hope to generations of biographers. A number of scholars substantially reduced the Hellenistic vibrations, fielding questions that ranged from the elementary to the outlandish to the unanswerable. For their time, wisdom, and patient good humor I am grateful to Roger S. Bagnall, Mary Beard, Larissa Bonfante, the late Lionel Casson, Mostafa El-Abbadi, Bruce W. Frier, Norma Goldman, Mona Haggag, O. E. Kaper, Andrew Meadows, William M. Murray, David O’Connor, Sarah B. Pomeroy, John Swanson, Dorothy J. Thompson, and Branko van Oppen. I owe Roger Bagnall additional thanks for his close reading of the manuscript; any remaining inaccuracies are my own.
For help with and in Alexandria I am indebted to: Terry Garcia, Jean-Claude Golvin, Nimet Habachy, Walla Hafez, Mona Haggag, Zahi Hawass, Kate Hughes, Hisham Hussein, William La Riche, Mohamed Abdel Maksoud, Magda Saleh, and Marion Wood. Jack A. Josephson, Shelby White, and the American Numismatic Society’s Rick Witschonke kindly helped to locate or identify images.
It is a pleasure finally to acknowledge my admiration for the matchless Michael Pietsch, publisher extraordinaire, and for his colleagues at Little, Brown. At every stage they have set the gold standard. In particular I owe thanks to Mario Pulice, Vanessa Kehren, Liz Garriga, Tracy Williams, Heather Fain, Heather Rizzo, and Betsy Uhrig. Jayne Yaffe Kemp read these pages sensitively and copyedited ruthlessly. It has been a privilege to work with Eric Simonoff, whose enthusiasm for this project has at times exceeded even my own. At William Morris I am grateful as well to Jessica Almon for shepherding book and author along.
For research and translation assistance I owe debts to Karina Attar, Matthew J. Boylan, Raffaella Cribiore, Kate Daloz, Sebastian Heath, Inger Kuin, the indefatigable Tom Puchniak, and Claudia Rader. At the New York Society Library Brandi Tambasco worked her customary interlibrary loan magic. I am grateful as well to the staff of the University of Alberta’s Rutherford Library and to the New York Public Library, as much a monument to civilization as was the ancient library of Alexandria.
For sound advice, kind words, and caffeine I have leaned on many indulgent friends but most heavily upon Wendy Belzberg, Lis Bensley, Alex Mayes Birnbaum, Judy Casson, Byron Dobell, Anne Eisenberg, Benita and Colin Eisler, Ellen Feldman, Patti Foster, Harry Frankfurt, Azza Kararah, Mitch Katz, Souad Kriska, Carmen Marino, Mameve and Howard Medwed, Helen Rosenthal, Andrea Versenyi, Meg Wolitzer, and Strauss Zelnick. Elinor Lipman remains the most discerning, generous, and articulate of first readers. On every level she has enhanced these pages and their author’s life. I would be lost without her.
For miracle-working—a category that includes producing a pencil out of thin air, comparing two-thousand-year-old currencies, scuba diving in the Alexandrian harbor, and equably sharing an address with a writer—I owe an incalculable debt to Marc de La Bruyère. He makes the last line easiest, as none of the preceding ones would have been written without him.
Illustration Credits
Endpapers: Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY
Watercolor of the Canopic Way: Jean-Claude Golvin
Watercolor of Alexandria: Jean-Claude Golvin
The world as Cleopatra knew it: Cram’s 1895 Universal Atlas
Possible Cleopatra, in Parian marble: Sandro Vannini / Corbis
Possible Cleopatra, with tight chignon: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY
Possible Cleopatra, without a diadem: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Possible Cleopatra, with pronounced cheekbones: © Hellenic Republic / Ministry of Culture / Delos Museum
Women playing knucklebones: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Girl with writing tablet: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Ptolemy Auletes: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum
Ivory game piece depicting Ptolemy XIV: Bibliothèque nationale de France
Likely Caesarion, in granite: Araldo de Luca
Granite Cleopatra as Isis: © Musée royal de Mariemont
Bust of Ptolemy Philadelphus: Jack A. Josephson
Basalt statue of Cleopatra: Image courtesy of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, San Jose, California
Likely Alexander Helios: Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Cleopatra stela: Louvre, Paris, France / Lauros / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
Bust of Caesar: Scala / Art Resource, NY
Buchis bull stela: Cairo, Egyptian Museum
Chalcedony intaglio of Caesar: Bibliothèque nationale de France
Bust of Mark Antony: akg-images
Red jasper intaglio of Mark Antony: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Bronze Cyprus coin: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Bronze Alexandria coin: Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow
Silver Antioch tetradrachm: Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society
Silver Ascalon tetradrachm: By courtesy of The Fan Museum, Greenwich, London
Gold ring with Ptolemaic queen: V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum
Blue glass intaglio: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Temple of Hathor at Dendera: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Bust of Cicero: Galleria degli Uffizi, Alinari / The Bridgeman Art Library
Statue of Octavian: National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Bust of Octavia: The Granger Collection / GetStock.com
Hellenistic mosaic: © Bibliotheca Alexandria Antiquities Museum, photo by Mohamed Nafea
Gold, stone, and glass earrings: Art Resource, NY
Crocodile denarius: TopFoto / GetStock.com
Notes
THE DEAD ENDS and missing pieces in Cleopatra’s story have worked a paradoxical effect; they have kept us relentlessly coming back for more. To centuries of literature on the last queen of Egypt add a recent surge in fine Hellenistic scholarship; a catalogue of the secondary sources would easily amount to a fat volume of its own. I have opted not to write it. Where much material has been distilled into little, chapter headnotes indicate central texts. Volumes that have shaped the narrative as a whole—the ones I have pulled most frequently from the shelf—appear in the selected bibliography. Those texts are cited here by author’s last name and publication date. Primary sources and periodicals appear exclusively below. Footnotes offer an occasional elaboration on a theme.